High
Page 40
Chapter Forty
The valiant TV cameraman had long since succumbed to the combined assailants of choking white smoke and steaming, red-hot lava but, nevertheless, the media moguls had still maintained a seamless coverage of the explosive events occurring in Central Africa to their network of enthralled armchair thrill-seekers by the rapid deployment of a team of helicopter-bound picture-takers, who were succeeding in conveying the continued battle of Man against Nature where their colleague on the ground had been forced to give up. The ‘copters buzzed and fizzed around the massive skyscraper like flies around a putrefying corpse. From the air it was only too obvious that there could only be one winner in the contest for supremacy: the steady, unhurried progression of the moving wall of black magma down the volcano’s slope, through the outskirts of the town, obliterating everything with which it came in contact, rolling onwards, unswervingly, towards its ultimate confrontation with the skyward-reaching tower, signalling a massive intent of destruction. It was not a question of if, merely a question of when.
To its credit, the Tower of Black Power stood up nobly in the face of such a powerful adversary, concrete embodiment of the sweat and belief of the many thousands of men who had laboured to build it as a symbol of a life denied: now a life never to be. Like their dreams, everything would soon be reduced to ash. Reports were coming in that a major Hollywood celebrity had been killed during the course of the eruption, but these remained unconfirmed, despite increasingly sensationalist speculation and wide-eyed, frantic reporting.
Having cancelled all other engagements that he had had for that day, when it became apparent that the drama unfolding in Goma was going to be both prolonged and of paramount importance to him, Jake Carver finally felt that he could relax. He had been glued to the television screen almost continuously since the first sign that a volcanic eruption was taking place and he wasn’t going to miss the grand finale when the great blanket of advancing hot magma must inevitably bring the building, which by its very standing represented a death sentence for him, tumbling down.
The helicopters had departed from their vantage point directly above the stricken city streets as the amount of airborne debris increased, although their onboard cameras’ superior zooms successfully shortened the distance, disguising the scale of the retreat. Rocks the size of cars were propelled from the crater’s depths into the air, looking miniscule in the scale of the overall explosion; hot boulders sizzled, like coals on a barbecue, as they landed in the lake, leaving only a trail of steam behind them. The heat was palpable. Carver imagined the sides of the TV set melting, collapsing inwards, the picture disintegrating, folding up like paper in a furnace. There was sweat on his own brow, partly as a result of the hours of tension he had suffered; partly in response to the images he was witnessing. He could really do with a cool beer. It was a privileged, bourgeois response in the face of tragedy one - or more - removed, but hey! he had never professed to be a new Bob Geldolf. There was a Coors in the chilled compartment with his name on it, if only he could peel himself away from the gruesomely captivating images. It was the doorbell that decided him. An hour ago and he would have cursed and ignored the urgent peel; now he would answer it on the way back from the kitchen. Kill two birds with one stone, as it were.
The beer was precisely where he remembered it was, and he felt the icy coolness of the glass bottle with anticipated pleasure; droplets of water running down the side of the glass in imitation of the sweat which continued to course from his own forehead and down the side of his nose. He flipped off the bottle’s cap on a wall-mounted opener, and left the little metal crown where it fell, rocking, like a top, on the linoleum floor. The door buzzer sounded again. It would be his secretary - most likely - something that couldn’t wait at the office: perhaps it had been a mistake to buy an apartment quite so accessible to his place of work.
Carver took a long swig of the cold beer, and opened the front door. The woman standing in the corridor was not familiar to him. Carver’s first reaction was one of surprise as to why the doorman had permitted her entry at all: she did not look the type of person typically to frequent such an exclusive zip code. Her hair was short and spiky and the kind of blonde that only comes out of a tin, and there was a hardness in her eyes, the look of someone who has been sleeping rough for a long period or someone desensitised to emotion. She had a smear of something that resembled white lard drooling from the corner of her mouth too: altogether unappetising. Carver’s first reaction was to remain his last reaction too: he never saw the gun that she held; couldn’t even have been able to testify, in the millisecond that he might have had to register the fact, that the bullet even hurt, or that he felt it at all, in fact; he didn’t hear the beer bottle smash as it fell on the floor; he didn’t see the stain of red blood slowly soaking deeper into the thick pile of his newly laid white carpet; and he wasn’t aware that his woman caller had stepped over his body in order to enter his apartment and turn off the television set, or that at the very moment that the bright pixels on the screen turned to black, the vestigial image was that of the Tower of Black Power finally crumbling in on itself.
••••••••••
The sight of two men running across an airport runway would not normally have elicited great interest, any number of emergencies can spring up unexpectedly during the course of a busy day at the airport that would necessitate such an eventuality: security alerts; general maintenance of distance markers; sometimes taxiway cleaning to remove vestiges of rubber from the runway; checks on wind and weather monitoring equipment; even the removal of straying animals and off-limit birds. What appeared different, though, about the current two trespassers was the slightly incongruous clothing they were wearing, revealing them not to be authorised runway personnel, and also the rather comical nature - viewed as it was from some considerable distance by an interested crowd of onlookers who had gathered at the airport spectator gantry - of what appeared to be a chase between the two men.
The lead figure, willowy of frame and clearly impeded by what appeared to be a heavy, silver case that he carried clasped firmly to his chest, was nevertheless covering the tarmac at a not inconsiderable pace, but was obviously being slowly but surely overhauled by his pursuer, a tall, black man in a dark suit, who was seen to be shouting and gesticulating violently as he ran. That the case-carrier would be caught seemed to be little in doubt unless he was prepared to drop his heavy booty, but this, equally apparently, he seemed unwilling to do.
Why Martin felt such a compulsion to hang on to Drisdale’s suitcase, the man himself would not have been able to give an entirely satisfactory answer, beyond the fact of being in the grip of a primitive instinct that told him that something which was clearly of so much value to someone else was not something to be parted from lightly. What had initiated the current chase had been a heated confrontation between the two men in the baggage storage area; the reunion of Garnet Wendelson’s principal servants had not been an amicable one.
Still Martin had been having difficulty trying to reconcile his restored memories and in the interim had reverted to the officious worker: “You are not allowed in here. Passengers must remain in the baggage reclaim lounge.”
“Give me my bag,” Drisdale had stormed, lunging forward in an attempt to regain his rightful property.
Martin had taken a step backwards, stumbling over the metal prongs of a forklift truck as he had done so. His fellow workers had all vacated the storage area: the baggage successfully dispatched, their job was done until the next flight landed. Devoid of allies, and startled by Drisdale’s aggressive tone, Martin had regressed to mumbling the speech that he had planned to give at the Mancala rally until Medea’s bullet had so rudely interrupted his oration. Barely audible, the words had spilled into one long, unpunctuated sentence. “And it is Higher We who follows the path of truth and who will dispose the false prophet Ghiliba open your eyes and do not be deceived by hollow promises
and...”
“Ghiliba! What do you know of Ghiliba?” The mention of the familiar name had temporarily halted Drisdale’s pursuit of his luggage.
“Look up to the skies see the beauty flying above you the sleek silver wings the elegant lines watch the streams of vapour...”
Drisdale had been standing over Martin and, bending down, had lifted him bodily from where he had tumbled. “I am Ghiliba,” Drisdale had raged, shaking Martin’s limp body. “I created him. I created everything.”
The manhandling had knocked some lucidity back into Martin, and the word ‘Ghiliba’ had begun to register as something more than an automatically learned cue. He had broken himself free of Drisdale’s grip. “No. I met Ghiliba. He was a giant man, in a flowing robe. He said that he was a prophet.”
Drisdale had smiled, amused by Martin’s display of naivety; delighted by the success of his business strategy. “There were a hundred Ghilibas. All in my pay. They were my agents, nothing more, nothing less. A giant in robes? Arab features, perhaps? It sounds as though you must have met Digby Hussain. A good company man. He was given responsibility for the coastal area of south west Africa, as I recall. Brought in a lot of... what should I call them? Pilgrims? Recruits.” Drisdale had shook his head, slowly. “A sad loss.”
“What do you mean?” Martin had asked.
“Oh, he died. A couple of weeks back, I heard about it. He had bought a villa somewhere on the Florida coast with the wages I paid him, if I remember correctly. Drugs overdose it was; ended up floating face down in his own swimming pool. I guess it is what he would have wanted. He always wanted a taste of the high life.”
“But he seemed so...”
“Committed?”
“Yes.”
“As I say, he was good at his job.”
Martin had thought back to the prophetic words of his own divination. “So he was the false prophet,” he had said quietly to himself.
Drisdale had heard Martin, replying, “Same description could be said about me. About you, too, I think.”
The accusation had stung Martin harder than he could have imagined: in many ways it was not the words themselves that were so wounding, more the sudden realisation of how he had been so long duped. “No,” he had shouted: he would not allow his own faith to be labelled together with the artificially manufactured religion of Mancala. As well as his integrity, Martin still had possession of the solid, silver case. At the same time that he had voiced his words of denial, he had thrust the container violently towards Drisdale, causing that man in turn to stumble and fall awkwardly, and had then taken off, at top speed, racing around the obstacle course of wooden pallets and temporary shelving which furnished the baggage storage area, still grimly clasping his opponent’s suitcase, determined to reach the doorway which gained access to the airport runway and the objects of his own veneration, his beloved passenger jets. There he was sure that he would find both solace and sanctuary. His faith would not desert him in his hour of need.
And so it was that the two men had found themselves in close pursuit across the wide open spaces of the main runway of Entebbe Airport. It was early evening, but still very light, and the tropical heat and sticky humidity of the day appeared as though it was going to be translated into an equally sweltering and uncomfortably close night. Martin was gasping in great lungfulls of air from exertion in the high temperature and, where the metallic case was pressed tight against his chest, he could feel great pools of sweat adhering his shirt to his torso. Drisdale looked no less flustered: his suit was not ideally suited to the outside conditions; he would have been far more at home in the air conditioned comfort of a smart hotel suite, which is precisely where he would have been now, had it not been for this unexpected detour from his closely planned schedule.
“Give me that case,” Drisdale shouted as he ran. “I’m going to kill you when I catch you.”
Martin glanced behind him, little doubting the veracity of his pursuer’s words: Drisdale’s face was twisted into a grotesque mask of exhaustion and vengeful hatred. The lawyer’s anger, though, was clearly the stronger driving force since, in his desire to reap revenge on the fleeing baggage handler, he appeared to have discovered a renewed turn of speed, and it was obvious that Martin would soon be overtaken. Like a cornered deer, Martin momentarily froze, looking wildly around him, desperate for some means of escape. Some distance ahead of him still, parked - contrary to airport regulations he noted - was one of the electric-propelled cars which pulled the long, flat trailers which were used for loading and unloading luggage between the aircraft and the terminus building. If only he could reach that car, he could make a graceful exit, leaving his would-be assailant standing helpless on the runway - the keys were always left in the ignition of these service vehicles, he knew, so that authorised personnel could use them at any time. Martin mentally judged the distance between him and his means of escape and between him and his dark-suited Nemesis. The math* did not add up. He had one of two options: either drop the precious case and, unburdened, escape on the electric car, or stand his ground and slug it out, here and now, with the bigger, stronger, angrier man. Martin dropped the case and ran.
Drisdale had already noticed the luggage transporter parked ahead, and second-guessing Martin’s intentions had already altered the course of his pursuit such that he would have been able to cut off his adversary long before he ever reached the electric car. Now though, seeing his twelfth, and final, suitcase lying abandoned on the hot tarmac of the runway, and knowing the value of its contents, Drisdale changed his plan again: the sensible businessman replacing the vengeful action man. He could always have Martin Meek dealt with at a later date, and by someone better equipped for the job than he was himself, now it was important just to recover his property, and get on with the job in hand. Drisdale slowed his pace to a dignified walk: there was no need to run now, the idiot Meek was not going to be returning in a hurry. He extracted a neatly folded, white linen handkerchief - monogrammed, should anyone on the viewing gantry have had sufficiently powerful binoculars to have been able to see it - from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brow, shaking the cloth before returning it from where it came. He tugged at the ends of his jacket sleeves, trying to straighten out the material: he detested looking scruffy. There was a small stain on the knee of his left trouser leg where he had fallen over in the baggage store: it was a nuisance, but there was nothing he could do about it. He continued walking towards the deserted case, which looked like a package suspected of containing an explosive device, alone and friendless, given a wide berth by friend and foe alike. Drisdale, alone, was the only man bold enough to approach. The mental conversations were going on in his head: stand back everyone, this is a job for Leyton Drisdale. He was beside the suitcase now: it had a large dent in one corner where it had been discarded so summarily to the unyielding embrace of the hard runway surface, but otherwise it was intact: the locks were not damaged, which was the crucial thing; that madman Meek had evidently not been able to prize it open, if that had been his intention. Drisdale glanced up, to observe the progress of the object of his contempt: the lanky man had retreated as far as the squat, electric buggy but then, rather than driving off to put himself beyond retribution’s reach, he had stopped beside the vehicle, and was now waving and signalling in Drisdale’s direction, in a manner which could only be described as eccentric. The man was clearly deranged: Drisdale continued to watch, mystified, as Martin hopped up and down like a man possessed, occasionally stopping this activity in order to cup his hands to his mouth, evidently trying to shout something to Drisdale, although the words themselves were lost in all the surrounding noise. Now he was pointing wildly: what was the man’s problem? Was he still attempting to provoke Drisdale even now?
It was only at the very last second, when greater than his puzzlement at Martin’s continued bizarre behaviour became his rational querying for the reason behind the sudden, deaf
ening decibel levels, that Drisdale looked up in the direction indicated by Martin’s pointed finger, and saw the incoming Air France 737 from Paris via Abidjan, undercarriage lowered, ready to land.
Bent double, holding his head in his hands, himself almost deafened by his close proximity to the approaching ‘plane’s massive jet engines, Martin mouthed a silent prayer to the God of the Higher We.
When Martin next looked up, of Drisdale there was not the smallest trace. One strange spectacle though was the apparent sight of a shower of dollar bills from the skies: Drisdale’s silver case had been spilled open by the impact of the incoming aircraft and its contents blown up into the air by the powerful trailing currents. Stranger still than the sight of money from the heavens was the sudden appearance of a ragtag bunch of humanoid forms seeping out of every conceivable nook and cranny of the airport terminus building, emerging from their hiding places like rats from their holes, spilling onto the runway like a shadowy heat haze, the mass of bodies keeping low to the ground such that they were barely discernible from their immediate surroundings. The Entebbe Terminal Baggers were seizing their moment: such rich Offerings from the Spinning Altar were a prize worth risking their concealment for. In rapid time, the last bank note had been plucked from the skies, and the underground army of scavengers had returned from whence they had emerged.
••••••••••
The fire danced and flickered in sympathetic rhythm to the music, little sparks of blazing ash breaking off from the main conflagration and spiralling upwards, eventually disappearing in the gloom of the cloudy, night sky. The music was provided by a portable CD player; a hypnotically repetitive, acid drum beat, to the sound of which a strangely attired group of about twenty individuals danced and chanted. The Terminal Baggers were enjoying an outdoor festival of celebration on a little used section of the airfield, and were showing their gratitude to the almighty provider.
With echoes of a tribal ritual, the men and women, some dressed in loose clothes, others practically naked, their skin painted in a variety of garish hues, circled the raging fire endlessly, sometimes bending low towards the earth, sometimes reaching up towards the heavens, each exhibiting their own ecstasy in their own personal way.
In the centre of the circle of dancing humanity, standing so close to the fire such that the flames played at his limbs, looking almost like a saint waiting patiently on a pyre, stood Martin Meek, the grubby bandage still wrapped around his head, his eyes firmly closed, listening to the multitude of happy voices. This was where he belonged. This was his prophecy fulfilled. Here he was the God of the Unseen.
He opened his arms wide to accept the adoration.
End Notes
1. 11th September 2001
2. Arnold Metz, the mime artist.
3. Battery Park, the southern tip of Manhattan.
4. Fear of high places.
5. Fear of looking up at high places.
6. Fear of high objects.
7. A classic example of a poem written during Davies’ Wallpaper period, so called, because the early lines of verse are typically short, like experimental brush strokes, the later lines expansive, as though to cover the whole available white space.
8. The internal, spiral gallery of the Guggenheim Museum.
9. A play on words on the surname of the architect of the Guggenheim Museum, Frank Lloyd Wright.
10. A phrase Wright coined to describe a perfect American egalitarian state.
11. A reference to Ms. Davies and her companion Monotone. Garnet’s carer is conspicuously overlooked.
12. A term of endearment for Garnet Wendelson.
13. A visionary skyscraper, proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright to be built in Chicago, which, if it had ever been constructed, at 528 floors and 1730 metres, would have surpassed the height of all competition both then and ever since.
14. Opponent is the Terminal Baggers’ term for a member of airport security.
15. Luggage.
16. Baggage carousel.
17. Hand luggage.
18. Renounced their faith in the Terminal Baggers.
19. Generally used to mean hard currency, but a catchall term to include any possessions not originating from the baggage carousel.
20. Baggage handlers.
21. For the record, Shakra - real name Samantha Tennent - was sentenced to two years imprisonment for theft the following month and the whole Terminal Baggers’ network at Stansted was disbanded when an improved video-surveillance system was introduced at the airport.
22. Our lawyers have asked us to point out that the Safe Skies Co-operative are not recognised health practitioners, and as such, the advice that they advocate should only be followed at the passengers' own risk.
23. Wendelson was actually a billionaire by this stage, but the alliterative inaccuracy was favoured by the journalist.
24. The most complete surviving version of the original Epic is derived from twelve stone tablets, discovered among the ruins of the great library in Nineveh, after it had been destroyed by the Persians in 612 BC.
25. A prize exhibit within the Mosque was a display of 605 pages of the Koran written over the course of several years using 37 pints of Saddam’s own blood.
26. The Buddy was the name of the first magazine devoted to Korean homosexual life and culture, publishing its first issue in March 1998. Subsequently, the term ‘Buddy’ was adopted as a semi-derogatory slang word for any male homosexual in both Koreas.
27. The Cape of Good Hope was originally named by the Portuguese navigator Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 who called it Cabo Tormentoso - the Cape of Storms. It was later renamed Cabo da Bõa Esperança - Cape of Good Hope - by John II of Portugal.
28. Agulhas is a Portuguese word meaning ‘needles’. It was said that the needle on a compass placed at Cape Agulhas would point directly north.
29. Mancala is a game similar to backgammon, played on a rectangular board with two rows of six hollows. At the start of a game, into each hollow are placed four counters. Moves are then made by taking all of the counters from one hollow and then dropping them one by one in consecutive hollows in a counterclockwise direction. A player scores by capturing counters.
30. The aptly named St. Martin of Tours is venerated as the patron saint of innkeepers, grape growers, and protector of all drinkers.
31. Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. The Tardis was the name given to the machine in which Dr Who travelled in the famous BBC TV series, which ran from 1963 to 1989.
32. The Caprivi Strip is a long, fertile panhandle of land, in the northeast corner of Namibia where that country borders Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Botswana. It was named after the German chancellor Leo Graf von Caprivi, who was ceded the territory by the British.
33. Formerly Zaire; previously Belgian Congo. The name of the country was changed to the Democratic Republic of Congo by Laurent Kibala when he overthrew the then leader Joseph Mobutu in 1997.
34. If former Soviet republics had been allowed in this game it would have permitted the inclusion of Kazakhstan, Tadzhikistan, Azerbaijan and under some spellings Kyrgyzstan.
35. The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles.
36. A reference to the heavyweight boxing contest held in Kinshasa, Zaire on 30th October 1974 between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman.
37. Also Kabul (Afghanistan); Kampala (Uganda); Kingston (Jamaica); Kuwait City (Kuwait); Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia); Kathmandu (Nepal); Koror (Palau); Kingstown (St. Vincent & Grenadines); Kigali (Rwanda); Khartoum (Sudan); Kiev (Ukraine).
38. World trade organisation.
39. A group represented by the leaders of the USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Japan and Canada.
40. Master Sergeant.
41. Le Syndrome d'immunodéficience acquise. AIDS.
42. The okapi, a large ungulate and forest-dwelling relative of the giraffe, was first discovered in the Ituri Forest in 1901, an
d remains one of the most recently discovered ‘large’ animals. Reports of creatures originating from a pre-historic time also abound in this region, although their continued existence remains unproved.
43. New York Stock Exchange.
44. Approximately translated from Luganda to mean “as batty as a flying squirrel.”
45. Fear of flying, also known as aerophobia.
46. Despite his English origins, this seemed more a ‘math’ than a ‘mathematics’ type situation to Martin.