Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  “Love the smell of rain,” he had said. “Rather like a really good cigar.”

  The comment had attracted a scornful response from Charity.

  “When rain comes, Furniver, you can smell the rain coming. Smells like a cigarette? Poof!”

  She had wrinkled her own broad nose, part in distaste, part in derision. As far as Charity was concerned, cigars and cigarettes were interchangeable, a distinction without a difference.

  “Cigarette! Cigarette! That is foolish talk. It is the smell of rain, and that is that. In this country we smell the rain, like this . . .” Charity’s nostrils flared as she sniffed loudly, defiantly and conclusively:

  “Anyway, Furniver, smoking cigarettes is bad for you.”

  David Shikuku Mupanga – “Bishop of the battered, Shepherd of the shattered,” as his flock liked to call him – delivered some memorable sermons in his time. There was one in particular, reprinted by a local newspaper, and which Charity kept in her purse. But this morning she recalled not a sermon, but a family prayer which David had composed for their children, now young adults – David Junior, a talented musician who was currently touring Britain with his band, and his sister, Blessing, who was well on her way to becoming an accountant.

  She knew it by heart. Charity recited aloud the prayer’s opening couplet:

  “When you rise, each day, at dawn,

  Praise the Lord for this fresh morn”.

  As David had acknowledged with a chuckle, the rhyme went downhill from there. Nevertheless, when David Junior and Blessing were at home, they made a point of reciting the lines over breakfast. The prayer, written before Aids began to take its toll, reflected both the Bishop’s Christian faith, and his concern about the dangerous driving that cost Kuwisha thousands of lives each year. Charity now taught the doggerel to the Mboya Boys she took under her wing, hoping that its common-sense values would help them in their troubled and brutish lives:

  “When you rise, each day, at dawn,

  Praise the Lord for this fresh morn.

  And keep in mind these lessons few,

  This way you will your soul renew:

  Look both ways crossing street,

  Or else you could your Maker meet:

  Don’t overtake on corners blind,

  Keep sharp lookout for who’s behind!

  Wear your seatbelt, check your tyres;

  Tell the truth, for God shuns liars.

  And on the potholed road of life,

  Respect the vows of man and wife.

  Now clean your teeth, wash your face!

  May you stay safe in our Lord’s embrace.”

  For a minute or two Charity closed her eyes. The lines, banal though they were, always made them prick with tears. Whenever she said the prayer, aloud or under her breath, she felt that David was beside her: as her bishop and spiritual adviser, her friend and supporter, and above all, her husband and the abiding love of her life.

  She had made the right choice to come and live in Kireba. David would certainly have approved. He had never felt at home in the suburban house that came with his bishopric. Eyebrows had been raised when, after his death, she told the church committee which discussed her future that she planned to open a bar and restaurant in the slum.

  “It is not proper,” declared the committee chairman.

  Charity had got angry.

  “Who will pension me?” she asked. Anyway, she said, she would be satisfied if she could provide wholesome food at fair prices. And unlike her friends Mildred and David Kigali, leading members of their fundamentalist Christian sect, she saw nothing wrong with beer in moderation.

  And what better way to help the street children, teaching them hygiene, giving them food in return for working at Harrods, and cheering them on from the sidelines in her capacity as deputy president of the Mboya Boys Football Club?

  Charity gazed across the valley and noticed, with an impatient “Tsk”, that the track which the residents called Uhuru Avenue, in ironic tribute to the official Uhuru Avenue that ran through the centre of the city, had yet again become a black stream of filth, spreading into homes.

  She was sure that the outbreak of diarrhoea in Kireba pointed to cholera. The weak and the vulnerable were being hit first. Babies, toddlers, and old folk were dying. Cousin Mercy’s estimate, based in part on the cases reported to the clinic, and partly on the tales recounted around the tables at Harrods, was at least thirty fatalities, and rising. The results of the laboratory test were expected that morning.

  Appeals for help had been ignored. Worse than that, they had been hushed up by the government, because ministers feared that the tourist trade, Kuwisha’s lifeblood, would suffer should word get out.

  She watched in horror, nose wrinkled in disgust, as the evil-smelling black tide lapped at the doorways of the shanty homes, sliding past some and embracing others, like a sinuous python engulfing its quarry with effortless power. Snakes! Charity loathed snakes . . .

  4

  “Rotten bananas make the strongest beer”

  “Cholera!” cried Lucy Gomball, East Africa representative of the Oxford-based aid agency WorldFeed, doing a blue-jeaned, barefooted, pink-toed jig of excitement around her kitchen table.

  “Cholera!” she cried again, her husky voice rising a pitch.

  Lucy’s suspicions had been confirmed. The test had proved positive. The specimen had been sent from the Kireba clinic for analysis at a private laboratory. The suggestion had come from Mercy, had been organised by Lucy, and the costs covered by WorldFeed. It had paid off handsomely.

  “I knew it! I knew it! Well done, Mercy, oh well done. I’ll phone Cecil right away. Yeeesss!”

  She punched the air in celebration.

  Lucy did another circuit of the table, slim hips swaying to the music of a local radio station as she punched out Cecil Pearson’s number on her mobile phone.

  From the moment she had awoken that morning and switched on the short-wave radio next to her bed, she had just known it was going to be a good day. In Mogadishu and Mombasa, from Dar es Salaam to Dodoma, from Kisumu to Kampala, correspondents for the BBC’s Africa Service were reporting the grim news that lifted her spirits and made her heart beat faster. The unseasonal rain that followed the prolonged drought had turned into a deluge. Dried-up creeks had become rivers. Usually placid rivers had turned into raging torrents, stained ochre by the rich soil of Kuwisha, carried east on the journey to the warm blue waters of the Indian Ocean.

  The rain had poured down overnight, drumming on the corrugated iron roof of Lucy’s bungalow, keeping her awake until the early hours of the morning. There was no rain elsewhere in the world quite like it. The huge tepid drops, as big as large peas, had hammered the run-down capital. It brought to life the old saw: “How do you make chaos in Kuwisha? Just add water.”

  The drains simply could not cope with the normal rains, let alone with this extraordinary storm. Yesterday the city’s traffic jams, bad at the best of times, lasted well beyond the rush hour as drivers inched their way along the flooded streets, fearful that they and their car would all but disappear into potholes as wide as a bathtub and nearly as deep. To make matters worse, vandals had yet again smashed the traffic lights at one of the main intersections.

  Telephone lines collapsed, and power cables went down, depriving swathes of the city of electricity. Sewers overflowed, adding to the trials of those who were forced to leave their cars and wade to safety. Roads that were all but impassable at the best of times, unless encountered in one of the many four-wheel-drive vehicles with which Kuwisha was richly blessed, had been washed away, along with the several bridges on the trunk route to the country’s main port.

  Each year Kuwisha experienced what was tactfully called “a food deficit”. Each year international donors duly rallied round to ensure that the country, once held up as an African model of economic development, did not go hungry.

  This time, everyone agreed, this time it was different. The drought had been bad enough
. But the floods that followed had destroyed the sparse crops that had managed to survive the drought. Food would have to be imported on an unprecedented scale, and distributed on a transport system that had all but collapsed. And now, hard on the heels of the floods, like a jackal at a kill, came the scourge of cholera.

  Lucy had been long enough in the field to have become as shrewd a judge of what made good copy as any journalist. “Floods threaten thousands” was not bad. But confirmation that this dreadful disease had taken root in the slum that was home to half a million, in the heart of Kuwisha’s capital. Now that really was a decent story! She could just see the headline: “Cholera hits Kireba”.

  “Come on, Cecil, you lazy sod, get up,” she muttered impatiently, pausing in mid-jig to put a band around her long fair hair, and to take a sip of the Kuwisha coffee she had prepared just before Mercy called.

  “Answer the phone.”

  The knocking seemed to become a hammering, and Cecil Pearson stirred. Shadrack Gachara, his diminutive house steward of uncertain age, gave a final thud on the bedroom door as he brought in the early morning tray of tea.

  Two spoons of Kuwisha’s best leaves, brewed in a brown china pot, were accompanied by a small jug of milk, covered by a bead-fringed circle of muslin. Placed alongside this was a small bowl of sugar of indeterminate colour, neither white nor brown, and a teacup and saucer. On the side of the cup was the faded coat of arms of the Outspan, the capital’s gracious old hotel, now running to seed – but a favourite haunt of Pearson’s.

  The downpour that had added to misery in Kireba had rattled the tin roof of the 1930s bungalow where the young journalist lived. He had had a restless night. His departure from Kuwisha was imminent, his relationship with Lucy Gomball unresolved, and his obsession with the role of the World Bank in Kuwisha unrelieved. Fiction and reality had merged and blurred in Pearson’s dreams as he tossed and turned in his untidy bedroom. He was physically secure in his comfortable picturesque home, protected from intruders by the padlocked steel gates at the top of the wooden staircase that led from the ground floor; emotionally, he was going through a turbulent period.

  In his overnight fantasies, the names of Josiah Nduka, Kuwisha’s 75-year-old president, and Hardwick Hardwicke, appeared in the headlines of a local financial magazine, which inexplicably had a picture of a pouting Lucy Gomball on the cover. Yet at first sight, the magazine’s contents read like an International Monetary Fund report.

  But when Pearson, deep in the grips of a nightmare, looked more closely, phrases were confused and jumbled. “Confidential budgetary irregularities” and estimates of “donors’ exceptional spending” spilled over into the columns setting out the exchange rate of the ngwee, Kuwisha’s ever-weakening currency.

  Shadrack’s knock had come just as he was being asked by Hardwick Hardwicke to explain the relationship between the state subsidy of dairy products, the rate of inflation and the value of the ngwee. Pearson lay bathed in sweat as his steward padded across the room, gnarled and calloused feet clicking on the polished teak tiles, and pulled the curtains to let in the early morning light. It was well after seven, and the rain had paused. The sun blazed in, making Pearson blink as he reached down for the cup. Shadrack flinched slightly as he got a whiff of stale breath. He cleared his throat:

  “He who treads in hyena dung will not smell the lion.”

  The steward waited expectantly. Cecil groaned. He rued the day he had responded to Shadrack’s infuriating habit of offering impenetrable African proverbs on random occasions. Pearson’s retaliatory stock of English lore had soon been exhausted, and anyway, “A stitch in time saves nine” seemed mundane in comparison with the exotic nuggets of the accumulated wisdom of the peasantry of Kuwisha offered by his steward.

  Pearson now passed some of the long hours spent in ministers’ waiting rooms and in airport lounges making up new proverbs – although he told the sceptical Shadrack that he had gathered them in the course of his travels.

  “He who hears the hyena’s bark lives in fear of the leopard,” he mumbled.

  Shadrack looked at him suspiciously. As Cecil stretched out an arm to switch on the bedside radio, he caught a disbelieving expression on his steward’s face. Both men suspected the other of making up the proverbs. Neither was prepared to say so.

  “Mr Punabantu left a message last night. He says to ring him about the interview with the President.” Shadrack’s tone was one of deep disapproval, which lightened when he continued: “And Miss Rucy is calling,” as he bent down to gather the clothes Pearson had dropped on the floor the night before.

  Like many of the citizens of Kuwisha, Shadrack found it difficult to pronounce words with an L, and tended to transpose an R.

  Cecil shot up. The president’s press secretary had managed to get hold of him late the night before. The interview was on. But why would Lucy call at this hour, unless it was important. He wrapped a towel around his waist, and went to the phone in the hall, taking the cup of tea with him.

  “Cecil? What took you so long? Guess what? Mercy’s been able to confirm it. Cholera! Cholera, Cecil! Official.”

  “That’s splendid, just marvellous,” replied Pearson, genuinely pleased for her. “How many dead?”

  “At least eleven, and absolutely oodles more to come. Might reach thirty.”

  He pursed his lip, and shook his head. Fond as he was of Lucy, this was a time for frank talking.

  “It’s not enough. Not really. Need quite a few more for a decent story. ’Though cholera is a jolly good start,” he added judiciously. “But we really need more bodies . . . still not a story for the Financial News.”

  “Of course there’ll be more, Cecil. I promise.” Lucy pouted down the line. “Promise. Bags more. And you’ve got a marvellous peg, with Hardwicke due to visit the place . . .”

  She was pleading now, at her most flirtatious.

  “Just think . . . ‘Aid agency officials warn that scores will die in cholera outbreak . . . worst toll since independence’ . . . as long as you don’t quote me by name.”

  His silence spoke volumes. She was now close to getting her man. Lucy snorted with delight. He was almost hooked.

  “Don’t you dare quote me . . . let’s meet at Harrods. We can pop in to the clinic, arrange a photograph, talk to Mercy. I’ll ring her on her mobile, ask her to tell Charity we’re coming round.”

  Pearson replaced the old-fashioned Bakelite receiver, gulped his tea, and got dressed. He looked around the bungalow that had been his home for the past three years, surrounded by the removal company’s tea chests, packed to the brim with his possessions. They were due for collection later that day.

  Like Charity Mupanga, he had to decide on an affair of the heart. Should he make clear to Lucy that he wanted her to join him on his next posting? But what would he say if she invited him to join her wherever WorldFeed decided she should go next? What if it were Bujumbura, or Kigali, or one of the other African capitals where WorldFeed had set up an ever-expanding permanent presence? He was fond of Lucy, there was no doubt in his mind about it. But was he that fond?

  Pearson decided to brave the floods and call in at his office in the centre of town, on his way to meet Lucy at Harrods. He parked his car, a battered Land Rover which he had bought to replace the Subaru stolen soon after his arrival in Kuwisha. He composed the opening lines of a cholera news story as he walked across the red-tiled lobby of Cambridge House, a grey, grubby, squat five-floor building in the city centre. The notice board, which warned “Danger – Slippery Surface” had been taken out for its daily airing, and a cleaner was making desultory movements with a mop, which he dipped every now and then into a bucket of dirty water.

  The Asian proprietor of a general goods shop across the road was observing Pearson closely. He was, Pearson assumed, part of that nervous and vulnerable community’s early warning system. Any excitement, any unusual activity among the journalists who used Cambridge House as their headquarters, was carefully noted. Bad news
would spread like an African bush fire with the wind behind it, running down Mobutu Sese Seko Street with its Indian-owned curio shops and foreign exchange bureaux and car hire companies. When appropriate, action was taken. Currencies were bought and sold, usually leading to a further weakening in the rate for the ngwee on the city’s black market.

  Pearson took the lift to the second floor, and turned into the passage leading to the Financial News office. As he made his way down the gloomy corridor, he encountered the familiar combination of smells: rancid cooking oil from the canteen, stale cigarettes, the sickly sweet odour of the men’s urinal, mixed with the sharp aroma of disinfectant.

  The door of the Japan Television News Agency was locked and bolted as usual. No doubt the bureau chief was yet again out of the country, pursuing a story everyone else had forgotten about. It sometimes seemed to Pearson that when the agency’s bureau chief arrived on the scene, you could be sure that the story was over. But there was something admirable, even heroic, about the patient, polite, dogged determination with which his colleague pursued the news that was invariably out of date.

  A press conference was getting under way in the canteen, before an audience of the building’s messengers, the Kuwisha office managers of the dozen or so foreign press bureaux, and the retinue of assorted hangers-on that accompanied the politicians who put in regular appearances.

  Apart from the veteran Associated Press correspondent, the only representative of the world’s media was a fresh-faced girl in her early twenties who was writing down every word that came from the platform.

  Pearson was about to pass by, but paused when he saw who was speaking: Newman Kibwana, the leader of the Official Front for the Restoration of Democracy, the breakaway faction of the Front for the Restoration of Democracy.

  Wagging his finger, thumping the table, the dapper young lawyer was getting into his stride:

  “I have evidence of plotting and confusions. Dark corner meetings are taking place . . .”