Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  Lucy, tall and lean as well as fair, had made her career with WorldFeed since her early twenties. She had been pursued ever since her arrival in Kuwisha nearly three years ago by a succession of admirers – journalists, diplomats and aid workers. But if there was a male who had a claim to Lucy’s heart, it was Shango – reason enough for every contender for her hand to loathe the malevolent, yellow-eyed creature, invariably draped around her pink-toenailed feet, growling at whatever man who happened to be her current suitor. Some of Lucy’s would-be partners had been driven to desperate measures. It was rumoured that Pearson’s predecessor had tried to poison Shango, but the resilient animal had recovered, nursed back to health by a loving Lucy. Since then the cunning beast would accept food from no hand other than hers.

  The house which doubled as WorldFeed’s east African headquarters was a comparatively safe redoubt in a crime-plagued city, thanks to the twenty-four-hour-a-day presence of security guards at each and every gate, and the live-in domestic staff: gardeners who tended the rolling green lawns, and a house steward who would hand down the job to his son, having first taught him how to water the gin, dilute the whisky, run the kitchen, and continue the long-running feud against the night security guard, who came from Somalia.

  The term “live-in” was not strictly correct, however. The “domestics”, as most expatriates called them, never stayed in the main house. They lived near, or adjacent to, the homes of their employers, often in a single room, at the end of the garden, tucked discreetly behind a short row of banana trees. The more fortunate ones had a toilet and shower attached, but most domestics had to make do with an outside tap.

  Pearson parked on the gravel frontage, and greeted the gardener, who had snapped to attention and thrown a mock salute. The journalist was a familiar visitor, and the object of much ribald gossip among the staff, along the lines of did-he-or-didn’t-he succeed in pressing his case.

  “Not a chance,” sniffed the head steward, and he was right. Lucy Gomball felt much the same way about her many suitors and their sexual demands as President Nduka felt about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and the reforms they tried to impose on Kuwisha: they were regarded as unwelcome intrusions on sovereignty, and invariably a messy business.

  Both Lucy and the president realised they probably had to comply in the end, but had decided that it was best to hold out as long as possible. Even then, they were reluctant to complete the process. More often than not, they defaulted before the conclusion, only to start again after a decent interval, which allowed both sides to recover lost face.

  Cecil Pearson sighed. Mug of coffee in hand and lust in his heart, he was sitting at the kitchen table in Lucy’s home. He had as much success with Lucy as the IMF and the Bank were having with Kuwisha. And he was no nearer to resolving their relationship: neither he nor Lucy was sure whether they wanted it to survive his imminent departure from the country.

  Perhaps there would be a chance for a heart-to-heart exchange later in the day. He took a sip of coffee, and ran a professional eye over the press release she had prepared.

  “The people of Kireba are at serious and immediate risk from cholera following the unprecedented and unseasonal floods that have hit the region. At least 30 – mainly children – have died. Not only Kireba residents are threatened. Their neighbours in the city itself are vulnerable. Without a prompt and generous response from the international community the situation will deteriorate rapidly.”

  It was dramatic, but not too specific. “At risk” and “vulnerable” could mean anything. For Cecil however, attuned to the needs of the Financial News, the plight of Kireba was marginal. He had to concede that cholera gave the story an edge that had previously been lacking. But the real news, as far as he and his paper were concerned, was the visit of Hardwick Hardwicke and the World Bank team.

  It was still too early for Lucy to start ringing around the foreign press corps, and she listened tolerantly to Cecil’s explanations of the budgetary fiddles and irregularities the Bank would have to investigate. The subject seemed to give him the intellectual equivalent of an erection, but left her cold and indifferent.

  Cecil tried to explain his excitement.

  “It’s really important, Luce . . .”

  It was not a good start. Lucy disliked any abbreviation of her name, and she had told Cecil so. But time was short, and she let it pass.

  “If I’m right about the overspending, they’ll miss the first quarter target by at least ten per cent. But the agreement with the IMF makes it quite clear: the deficit has to be reduced to at least three per cent of GDP . . .”

  In this mood the man was unstoppable. Mounted on his favourite hobbyhorse, he could ride it indefinitely. There was only one thing for it, decided Lucy. She got up from her desk and sat alongside him on the couch, the emergency appeal in one hand, pen in the other.

  “What do you think of the changes I made,” she asked.

  Lucy leant forward, as desirable as she was deferential, maximising her cleavage beneath the soft cotton fabric of her WorldFeed T-shirt:

  “Is there anything you’d like to insert?”

  The combination of Lucy’s breasts and Kuwisha’s budget anomalies was too much for Cecil. He stifled a groan as his flesh began to succumb, and his mind struggled to engage with Kuwisha’s impending financial crisis.

  Just as he was about to make an advance, there was the sound of gravel crunching as a car drew up outside the front door.

  “The hacks are here,” Lucy said brightly, getting up from the couch.

  “Be a sweetheart, and make more coffee.”

  WorldFeed’s exciting news had spread through Kuwisha’s foreign press corps as quickly as diarrhoea in a refugee camp. Journalists began drifting in. Some left as soon as they got the press release; some lounged around, gossiping; others needed a fill, which Lucy provided.

  Pearson looked on with admiration as he watched an old hand in the aid business go to work. She really was wonderfully persuasive. So vivid was her description of the cases of cholera in Kireba and the implications for Kuwisha that even experienced journalists began to feel a twinge of sympathy. And when she gave the latest death toll, carefully distinguishing between WorldFeed estimates and government figures, any doubters were won over.

  All conceded that it was indeed a decent story. What was more, it would be cheap and easy to cover. Above all, it was a feel-good story – one that brought together foreign correspondents and aid workers, diplomats and politicians, all happy to focus their energies and talents on an event that gave a purpose in their lives.

  While Cecil ferried coffee to his colleagues, Lucy went through the list of resident foreign correspondents, the phone tucked between ear and shoulder to keep her hands free, a pen in the one and a notepad in the other.

  She had begun with the news agencies, ringing the bureau chiefs at their homes: Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Press, followed by the BBC, and CNN. Then came the main British papers: Guardian, Telegraph, Times, Independent. Finally she cajoled the UK Sunday papers and the US outlets: the Sunday Times, Observer, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time and Newsweek.

  Lucy managed, effortlessly, to make each correspondent feel they had been singled out for special treatment. Each put down the phone with a warm glow of professional pride, for she had hinted that they had been among the first to be told that the cholera outbreak was now official, a tribute to their remarkable track record of objectivity, commitment, and compassion.

  It was not an easy day for the correspondents, for there was tough competition for their attention: news of a refugee crisis in Congo had just broken. A chartered flight was due to fly out with the first batch of food parcels mid-afternoon to Kisangani. Renewed fighting between Ugandan and Rwandan soldiers had led to the breakdown of the latest peace pact. If the aid agencies were to be believed, residents were being slaughtered by the score.

  The United Nations refugee programme was offering places on a cha
rter flight to the city, which would give the journalists the opportunity to report on the horrors at first hand.

  “Bastards,” muttered Lucy, as one call ended. But it was not clear to Pearson whether she was referring to the perpetrators of the killings in Kisangani, the UN agency that was offering the flights, or the journalists who decided to take the charter rather than cover the Kireba cholera story.

  She pulled out all the stops.

  Everything any hack could desire would be laid on, she promised. The outing would begin at the clinic in Kireba, where with notebooks in hand, the stench of excrement in their nostrils, and photo-opportunities galore, and escorted by the duty members of the Mboya Boys football team, they would blaze a fact-finding trail through the slum.

  Those for whom Lucy’s original press statement did not provide sufficient grist for their mill could turn for inspiration to three backgrounders: analyses written by the WorldFeed staff, usually distributed on a non-attributable basis. One set out the history of cholera in Kuwisha; another calculated that Kuwisha’s external debt repayments was the equivalent of building five new hospitals a year – omitting to point out that this was an entirely notional calculation, as the country had not paid its debt for years; while a third inveighed against the folly of privatising state-owned water companies – although failing to point that the state service was so bad that people already paid independent suppliers for clean water.

  A lazy hack, or a busy hack, or an ignorant but cunning hack, could, with a modicum of judicious subbing, either turn them into a thoughtful three-part series on a health crisis in the region, or use them as the core of an authoritative 800-word profile of Kuwisha.

  And like the best of tour representatives, Lucy’s tone had an impressive range, sometimes the jovial and jocular, switching easily to the disciplinarian, a firm but patient nurse or a headmistress demonstrating that she would not tolerate the slackers in the Lower Fourth.

  Some of the writers who had early deadlines began tapping away on their laptops, then and there, as they sat around Lucy’s kitchen table. They were preparing their colour pieces, which would be moving accounts of the horrors in Kireba. If they were to make the first editions, they would have to file their stories by lunch at the latest. There was no time to lose. The guts of the story were in the briefing papers after all. And it was no problem to provide vivid well-written accounts of squalor and death, for this was their stock in trade. But they had to put at least a foot in the slum, or stay silent when after-dinner conversation turned to comparisons of Soweto and Kireba. Facts were not necessarily sacred, but woe betide the hack who was caught out faking a dateline.

  Hunched over their computer keyboards, the hacks worked their magic.

  “A hidden holocaust . . .” said the Daily Telegraph, as if to himself. He had been among the first to arrive and looked like being the last to leave.

  Lucy was in mid-phone call, but she was too old a hand to be caught. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Pearson smirking.

  “Hold on a mo . . .”

  She cupped her hand over the mouthpiece, and gave the Telegraph a cool blue look.

  “Who says?”

  “Well, not WorldFeed, of course . . .”

  The Telegraph’s voice trailed off in the hope that Lucy would contradict him, but she remained silent.

  “NGOs?” he offered.

  “Foreign or local?”

  “Come on Lucy . . . it has to be foreign, preferably British.”

  Lucy would not budge.

  “Nope.”

  “So no ‘Hidden holocaust, say WorldFeed?’ ”

  “Nope.”

  “What about potential holocaust? Be a sport.”

  “I’ll phone you back,” Lucy told her caller, replaced the phone, and gave the Telegraph her full attention.

  “No. Not according to World Feed, not according to British NGOs. Find someone else for your source. We made arses of ourselves in Congo a few years ago by overplaying the refugee story, and you were one of the buggers who encouraged us,” said Lucy.

  “It was your fault . . .” he began.

  Lucy decided to put him in his place.

  “I know you think that aid agencies just shovel up the shit as we follow the elephant. God knows, we don’t do a perfect job, or even a good job, and sometimes we do a downright bad job, for all sorts of reasons.

  “But just look at the damage done by those bloody hulking elephants, tramping across Africa.

  “You can still see where they fought. Moscow and Washington, battling each other during the cold war; and now it is just one bloody enormous elephant, but doing as much damage as a herd. And the more damage the elephant does, the more cleaning up we have to do. But don’t blame us. Blame the elephants! Blame the idiots in charge of the bloody circus.”

  Lucy drew breath: “At least we are not the clowns,” she said contemptuously.

  The room fell silent.

  The Daily Mail stringer broke the ice:

  “About the holocaust line, Lucy . . . could we say ‘scores dead, hundreds in peril’?”

  “Fears mount, scores at risk. Best I can do,” she said briskly.

  “. . . Official death toll climbing, hundreds at risk, warned Lucy Gomball, WF res rep?”

  “Fine,” said Lucy.

  “Hadn’t finished,” said the Telegraph. “Hundreds at risk, warned Lucy Gomball, WF res rep. Quote: Kireba is a timebomb . . .”

  “For God’s sake,” said Lucy, “can’t you get the bloody World Bank to say that?”

  There was no time to lose. The first meeting between the World Bank team and officials from Kuwisha’s ministry of finance was later that morning. Just as Hardwicke and Fingers were due to leave their hotel rooms for State House, the phone in the living room of their suite rang.

  Fingers listened impatiently as the Telegraph ran through a list of questions. They were easy enough to handle – Lucy had already briefed him on the cholera story, and Hardwicke had agreed to put in an appearance at the Kireba clinic.

  He covered the mouthpiece of the phone, and called out to Hardwicke.

  “Can we live with ‘Kireba is a timebomb, say World Bank officials’?”

  “As long as it is ‘officials’ – but no names, no names . . . we’re going to be late. Let’s go,” said Hardwicke.

  “No names,” echoed Fingers down the phone line.

  “The boss does not like that language. Not constructive. And put it in context . . . Hardwick Hardwicke, new World Bank president, his first visit to the region etcetera, will tour Kireba tomorrow, opportunity to inspect progress on new road and the pilot housing scheme. Clean water, roof over head, warm place to sleep, dry place to crap, etc. Otherwise Kireba will become a timebomb. OK . . . Yes . . . it’s a quote . . . no, certainly not from me, by a World Bank official.”

  Fingers was about to put the phone down, but his professional instincts intervened.

  “And if I see any reference to the Bank and ‘dry places to crap’, let me make one thing clear: neither you nor anyone from your paper will be invited on the Mauritius freebie.”

  He slammed the phone down.

  “What a wanker! God save us. Timebomb. I ask you . . . it went off years ago. He wouldn’t know if a bomb exploded under his arse, let alone if it exploded in Kireba.”

  Hardly had he replaced the receiver when the phone rang again. This time it was Pearson, fretting about the state of the talks. Since he was the only journalist in town that gave a fig for the outcome, and wrote for the only paper that would report the story, Fingers went to great lengths to reassure him.

  “Give me your mobile number, and I’ll ring you, Cecil . . . promise.”

  He grabbed his jacket and his toothpicks, and followed Hardwicke out of the room.

  15

  “He who hears the hyena bark will be attacked by the leopard”

  A few hours later Fingers was looking back on what had been a long and trying morning. He sat in his hotel room and a
ttempted to draw up a press statement that would express Hardwicke’s strong feelings, while remaining within the bounds of convention.

  “Kuwisha’s formidable challenges,” he wrote, “are matched only by its huge potential.”

  Every now and then, thought Fingers, you had to tell it like it is. And that sentence, by God, said everything. Fingers lit up a cigarillo, took a deep draw, and studied the words on the screen. No. He wouldn’t get away with that. Anyway, it was unprofessional. Fingers took a second draw, and looked gloomily out of the window, with its view of the city’s Anglican Cathedral.

  The first sign of the trouble that was to come had been the warmth of the president’s greeting earlier that day, when Hardwicke and the rest of the World Bank team arrived at State House. It continued to go downhill from there.

  Even Hardwicke acknowledged that they had seriously underestimated the man, and there was no comfort in the fact that they were far from the first to do so.

  Fingers pulled out from the file on his desk Pearson’s profile of the president, written for the Financial News’ special report on Kuwisha.

  Dr Josiah Nduka, the self-proclaimed Ngwazi or Conqueror of All Hens, had begun his political career as plain Josiah Nduka, named by his devoutly Christian parents after the Biblical character that had provided the name of the mission school at which their son was educated.

  The longer he stayed in office, the more frequently Nduka’s official portrait appeared; and the longer his title, the harsher his regime became. His face appeared on the bank notes, looking thirty years younger than he was; he never appeared in public without Homburg and dark glasses, flywhisk in one hand, in the other an ornately carved ebony walking stick on which a snake curled from the top to the bottom. According to the profile, he had imposed a mixture of Victorian values with a dash of voodoo, and while it was not a formula which had any success on the economic front, it had left the people of Kuwisha in his thrall.

  He never ceased to remind them that he had enjoyed a classical education, having won an open scholarship to Kuwisha’s leading school in the days when it was modelled on Eton, and prepared its pupils for an Oxbridge education – although in the president’s case, he chose to go to Edinburgh, claiming that he preferred the city’s climate.