by Gavin Chait
‘What will you do differently?’
‘I won’t know until I get there,’ she grinned. ‘I was weaned on this stuff, Hollis. I’m an aid brat. My parents dragged me to every major conflict. I’ve had ringside seats. You’re right about my industry’s hypocrisy. We’ve had a grand time enjoying the poverty porn without achieving anything. I don’t know what I’ll do, but if Europe won’t let the seekers in, then I want to make sure they have a reason to build new lives wherever they end up.’
‘Well, if there is anything we can do, you know where I am.’
She took his right hand in hers and squeezed it. ‘Thank you, Hollis, I might need that.’
‘Where do you go now?’ he asked.
‘Senegal,’ she said.
‘The place of the genii,’ he said, smiling.
‘What’s that?’
‘When we first flew our main printer into Saint-Louis, it wouldn’t work. The thing is designed to survive a direct missile blast. There was nothing wrong with it, but it sat there like a chunk of stone. We were told it was because we had not introduced ourselves to the genii, or explained our mission, or made any of the appropriate offerings.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We put the printer in the middle of a local football stadium, invited every drummer we could find and threw a massive festival that you could hear halfway across the country. Suddenly, towards the end of the ceremony, with the printer covered in milk and oil and goodness knows what else, it started working.’
‘That’s hilarious,’ she said, laughing.
‘Maybe,’ he said, nodding. ‘Simon seems to take the genii seriously. Every new farm gets its own ceremony.’ He smiled once more. ‘How’s your French?’
‘Terrible. I’ve got this app that’s supposed to help . . .’ She was momentarily distracted as a muscular young man in a tight white T-shirt stood and waved to friends as he left. Hollis followed her gaze and grinned.
‘Boyfriend-looks,’ he said.
‘Meaning?’ she asked, laughing.
‘Well, there are two types of good-looking man. There’s the one you want to be, and the one you want to have sex with. That lad’s the boyfriend type.’
‘Which one’s Simon?’
‘The man you want to be,’ he laughed. ‘And I genuinely worry about when you two meet. You’re exactly his type. All that youthful athletic sex appeal.’
‘Hey,’ she said, slapping him on the arm. ‘Tell me about you guys. I tried looking you up, but you’re cyphers. I can’t find pictures of you two. Even this building: lots of offices, a rather discreet private hospital, and you guys only seem to use the top floor.’
‘I use the top floor,’ he said. ‘Simon lives on the Thames, when he’s here. Wealth can buy a great deal of anonymity. There are more than enough people wanting to be in the public eye without needing to be entertained by a crippled man struggling out of bed in the morning.’
‘Can’t it be fixed? I would have thought?’
‘It’s not a money problem,’ he said, sadly. ‘The nature of my injury and current medical techniques –’ smiling ‘– I’m told I will probably walk again in the next ten years.’
‘How did it happen?’ She hesitated, ‘If you’re comfortable telling me?’
‘You would have been a child, I think,’ he said, his eyes distant. ‘England wasn’t a kind place back then. Everything felt like it was in monochrome and about the only thing that gave life colour was that I’d never been so in love.’
It was the year the old Thames Advance Barrier had finally failed, and Wet London had flooded for good. The year England had lost the Ashes for the twelfth year in a row, and the Conservative Party had won their fourth consecutive election on a platform of nationalism and ‘traditional’ values.
‘Traditional, in their case, meant bringing back hanging, and conscription for all school-leaving boys. Our year would be the first to go into the army, but first we had to be suitably indoctrinated.
‘Once a week, we would march across the Millennium Bridge and up and down on the grass outside the Tate. All the old men would salute us. All the old women would clap. None of these people had ever been to war. I have no idea what they thought they were cheering. It was madness.
‘There were a group of us: Simon, Zhi, Tiémoko, Trevor and myself. Scholarship boys, immigrants, minorities. Outsiders amongst the sons of the elite. Trevor and I became lovers, and Simon was the first person we told.’ His eyes clouded. ‘Do you remember what it was like being a teenager, and being with your closest friends and just – laughing – all the time? That was us.
‘We knew what England was becoming, but it felt so remote. Amongst all these privileged children, we thought we could make fun of it.
‘One afternoon, when we were supposed to be marching, it was pouring. We thought the school might flood again. They led all the boys, almost a thousand of us, into the hall. There was a teacher who led the cadets. Mattison. Scrawny, ugly man. Always smelled of gin and cherry pipe tobacco. His clothes seemed to drag on him. The same diarrhoea-green trousers which hung over his knees, like he was carrying lead weights around in his pockets.
‘He started ranting at us. About the Poles and the Muslims and the Blacks. How they were all out to get us, the white English, and that it was our duty to defend the realm. I remember him saying, “When you see that foreigner outside your house, they’re waiting. When you’re not there, they’re going to rape your mother, rape your sister and kill your dog.” Out of one of his pockets, he dragged this fat steel chain. At the end was a bunch of keys as big as your fist. “See these keys? No kike can steal these keys without me noticing!”’
Hollis looked at his hands, flat on the table, damp. He rubbed them together, like a caress.
‘I thought it was funny. Dug Trevor and Simon in the ribs, and we laughed about it, but then we looked around. Every one of the other boys was sitting there with this look of such frightening intensity. You knew they believed it too.
‘That’s the scary thing, isn’t it? Only once the demagogues reveal themselves do you discover how many of the people around you are similarly possessed with hatred.
‘Mattison was there to tell us about a compulsory camp all the form six boys had to go on. We were going to learn how to shoot, and get to play toy soldiers in the countryside. A few weeks later, two big military trucks waited outside the gates for us. Trevor and I ended up in the one, and Simon in the other. We drove out of London to the green belt, on to some farm and then along dirt roads.
‘It was raining, and the ground was muddy and slippery. The soldiers organizing things were probably only a year older than us. They decided to race across one of the fields.
‘They overrode the controls. I don’t think any of them really knew how to drive.’
Hollis coughed, his eyes blurred. Shakiso sat quietly, saying nothing, her jaw clenched.
‘Our truck hit a hole, or a rock. No one was ever sure. It flipped. There was only a canvas deck over us. Boys thrown everywhere. A few of us trapped underneath and dragged.
‘When I woke up, I couldn’t move. I started screaming. A boy whispered in my ear, “Stay still, please, stay still.” There were three of them holding me down, one of them with my head so tightly in his hands. Simon had stabilized me and organized these boys to hold me steady. I couldn’t see him or anything but the sky raining down on me.
‘Trevor was badly hurt. His heart stopped, and Simon was trying to resuscitate him. It took an hour for the paramedics to arrive. A shortage of vehicles. Simon never stopped. The medics had to drag him off. I heard him screaming at them.
‘They –’ wiping his eyes ‘– Trevor . . .
‘I was in hospital for weeks. Simon was there every day. We had journalists come through, politicians. We never really understood what was happening, dealing with our own grief. Outside, everything was changing.
‘Twelve boys died, thirty hospitalized. Four, like me, maimed for life. Hundreds of th
ousands gathered in the streets outside parliament and near the hospital. I could see their candles all through the night from the hospital window. I remember them singing and how strange it felt to know they were singing for me and the others in wards nearby.
‘And it was one of those moments where a small thing catalyzes something hidden and unseen that was probably changing all along. It permitted those who didn’t support the bigotry to find each other. You can say what you like about the pettiness of the English, they do love their children. People took a look at the future they were choosing and stepped back from the edge.’
Shakiso had spent most of her childhood outside Europe. ‘I never knew what happened. I mean, I know the government fell and the Liberals came in. Ten years later, England joined Germany in the Federation. It seemed like one of those “and then a miracle happened” things, but I never really paid attention in class.’
‘I take something from that. Trevor died and the country became a slightly kinder place. I am grateful to be alive. But Simon,’ he shook his head, ‘I don’t think he has ever forgiven.’
11
‘If ever an epic saga is written about my life, they’ll call this part the Ballad of the Nodder and the Leaner,’ thought Shakiso, as she gritted her teeth and tried to imagine somewhere cooler, more spacious, and less a concentrated miasma of humanity.
On her left was the young man she had named the Leaner. He had fallen asleep the moment he sat down and was now moistly ensconced on her shoulder. He was wearing a black vest of abstract vintage and his skin stuck uncomfortably to hers.
On her right was another young man. The Nodder had been kind enough to lean against the wall of the bus, but he was wearing a peak cap clad in very shiny, very heavy stainless steel. His head traced the arc of an ancient typewriter, back and forth, the brim clouting her on the head and neck with every carriage-return.
If she could extricate her arms, she was giving serious consideration to knocking that cap out the open window.
Tuft glared at her miserably. She was crouched inside a cage that must have originally been used to contain a set of incontinent piglets. She had also been muzzled and licked at it in frustration.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ Shakiso said. ‘I tried to get you to stay in London, but you had a hissy fit.’
She had arrived in Dakar the previous evening and promptly got subsumed – despite most vehicles on the road being automated – inside an enormous traffic jam, which everyone had decided to have a huge discussion about, their shouting voices accompanied by the percussion of banging drums and clanging metal.
Several flatbed trucks had pushed through, bedecked in people all howling over amplifiers while surrounded by drummers and singers. Children clung to the sides, hurling sweets and leaflets at anyone nearby. Her taxi had ended up plastered in posters indicating her robust support for every last one of the candidates.
The sleepy looking concierge at the hotel had said, ‘It is the elections,’ as if that explained everything. She was too tired to do more than nod.
She had a vague recollection that her room may, or may not, have had a sea view. It certainly had a rancid sea smell.
Her wake-up call had been at three a.m., and she was at the long-distance bus station an hour later.
With Tuft on a leash, and her small backpack securely in place, she had barged through the bedlam. She could have arranged for a driver from Ballou, their main seeker camp on the border, to meet her, but she had wanted to get a sense of the country as quickly as possible. She also had no intention of letting the camp know she was on her way. Best she see the place as it was, without them primping it up for the boss.
Each bus was as battered as the last, windowless and treadless, yet each uniquely painted in bright patterns which wove and danced across their corrugated and corroding metal body panels.
Within moments she had been picked up by a grey-bearded man wearing a black kufi skull-cap and a pair of thick plastic spectacles cloudy with dirt and polishing.
‘You go to Bakel?’
‘Nearby, yes. How full is your bus?’
None of the vehicles would leave until they could no longer cram another paying customer inside. At that time of morning, it should not take long to fill, but she had no wish to end up waiting for hours if she could find one leaving immediately.
‘Only three more. Your cat must go on the roof,’ he had said. They followed his arm as he had pointed. Three goats were already tied there on top of bursting square blocks of merchandise, standing upright and facing forward. The goats were terrified into silence.
‘No way; she goes inside with me.’
The man had made a dismissive waving motion with his hands followed by a clucking noise, and then shouted, ‘Yela, yela, bring that,’ pointing at a cage. ‘You put her in this, you go inside.’ Dismissing her with another gesture.
She had squeezed herself into the last remaining seat at the front, propping a seething Tuft on top of a stack of suitcases, while luggage, chickens and the last few passengers had mashed themselves inside. Looking over her shoulder, she had seen a young man in a diving mask, snorkel and shower cap quietly reading. He had noticed her and looked up, staring open-mouthed at the unusual sight of a strawberry-blonde white woman on a bus.
The man in the black kufi skull-cap had returned, pushing a young girl into a space near the sliding door where she sat grinning at Shakiso. She had thumped the red button on the small dashboard. A klaxon had wailed and the last stragglers hurled themselves inside. She had waved at the ambivalent black kufi skull-cap, turned the key to start the bus, and promptly folded herself inside a blanket and went to sleep as the vehicle eased its way out of the rank.
They had turned right on to the street, up on to the kerb, and had come to a cantankerous stop.
Immediately, two men had lifted away a panel at the front of the bus, dropped it on to the pavement with a clatter. Heads had popped out the windows as passengers yelled encouragement or passed comment.
An elderly man, his back bent and his eyes behind thick magnifying lenses, had wobbled out of the building, a boy carrying a wooden seat and a bag of tools alongside him. As others had held lights, he had begun to desolder a panel from the circuitry inside, a gas-operated micro-soldering iron bunched in one hand, a multimeter pen in the other. He had pulled the panel loose, stared at it in disdain and thrown it into his tool bag, muttering as he sorted through similar panels as burned and scarred as the original.
Children carrying bags of roasted peanuts had shouted up at passengers who pointed their cards out to indicate their interest. The children called out and a man in a religious thobe had rushed over. He held a cash receiver and passengers had tapped their cards, the children promptly handing them their purchases. The man had rushed off with his cash receiver, back into the taxi rank.
Shakiso had watched in amused horror as, finally satisfied, the old man had begun to solder another circuit panel into the bus. He grabbed a can of something and sprayed it over the circuitry. The bus had jolted and begun to idle. Heads had returned inside as the body panel was tied back in place.
The old man had hobbled off, his chair and tools following behind him, towards another bus which had shuddered to a halt just behind theirs.
Their bus had pulled into the traffic and headed out of the city.
Several hours went by during which they eventually reached the outskirts of the city, and she tried breathing through her ears as she pondered hurling the Nodder out the window along with his cap.
Sunrise added a new torture. She had deliberately chosen the front seat so she could have a full view of the road and landscape. Now the sun was burning straight into her. She squeezed her hands into her bag, stuck under the seat between her legs, and fed her rims up to her face. She slotted polarized sunglass lenses in place. Mercifully, they cut the glare.
Somewhere over the wind-roar coming through the windows she thought she could hear the traumatized bleating of the
goats on the roof.
It was still two weeks before the rains were due to arrive, and the long dry was at its peak. Dust hung like a heat haze. The ground glowed unbroken with inedible glass-dry bleached grassland. Bent dusky trees, interspersed with haunting baobabs, were scattered over the grey-red-brown blankness of the plains.
Every twenty minutes or so they passed through villages huddled beneath carefully tended trees, each with its small mosque, each with its own cobbled-together shaded tunnel or arch, under which hundreds of goats stood exhausted, their hips and shoulders angular under gaunt skin. Each cluster of houses tended irrigated plots fed by solar-powered water pumps and a mesh of greying drip-feed pipes running over the surface.
Improbably piled along the tree-cooled roadside within each village were heaps of watermelons attended by tiny old women seated beneath enormous branded umbrellas.
Goods convoys heaving with green beans, carrots, cherry tomatoes and vast trays of salad leaves went scorching past. Some were refrigerated, and Shakiso could only guess at the contents and wonder how much of anything made it to its destination.
‘Is this being imported?’ she asked the Nodder, now mercifully awake and controlling the steel menace on his head. He stared at her blankly.
‘He does not speak English,’ said the Leaner, rousing himself and stretching. He looked her up and down. ‘You flew in from Europe?’ he asked.
She nodded.
‘You would have come down over Saint-Louis. Did you look out over the ocean?’
She nodded again, confused.
‘Did you see the floating city? All the boats surrounding those big plastic domes under the water?’
Startled recognition. She had seen that and was wondering what they were up to.
The Leaner looked proud. ‘They are farming there all year round. It does not get too hot under the waves. My brother grows strawberries for your English cream. I was growing lettuce and tomatoes.’
‘Where does the water come from? You can’t grow that in salt,’ she said.