Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  Forty minutes later, it was finished. But the lift it had given to his spirits was short-lived, and they subsided as he left the world of Stripey the cat.

  The phone rang in the room next door, and kept ringing. Furniver decided not to answer it. He dreaded a call from that aggressive London lawyer, Rupert Fanshawe, due to fly in that day – or was it the next? He was stuck in the office until an Mboya boy gave the all-clear.

  He had no intention of deserting the Kireba People’s Co-operative Bank, and far more important, he would never leave Charity.

  He wondered whether he had said the right thing to her. He had no doubt about the law. Charity would indeed lose. But should he not have stood alongside her and defied the edict from London? Common sense might be on their side, but the law was an ass . . .

  All in all, he decided, they were both in a hole and the letter he was about to type would make that hole deeper. Sitting at his office computer, tapping out the hand written draft of Charity’s broadside against the London lawyers, Edward Furniver experienced a dark night of the soul. He was not a man inclined to melancholy or depression, but for an hour or two he succumbed to despair, and in doing so committed what Bishop David Mupanga regarded as a cardinal sin. Furniver was close to throwing in the towel: not because of the correspondence with the London lawyers, painful a process as that was proving; not because Kireba was an especially sad place that day, mired in filth and seemingly without hope; not because the latest BBC World Service bulletins brought grim news from around the continent; and not because he had embarrased his steward, whom he had come to respect and admire as an honest and decent man. It was none of these things and all of them. A bleak mood of utter despair engulfed him, and for a while, theatened to overcome him.

  He knew it was irrational to feel so gloomy, what with Charity’s invitation to stay overnight at the shamba. But try as he may, he could not shake free of a growing conviction that the future of Harrods was in the balance. Indeed, the more he studied the correspondence, the more likely it seemed that the bar would have to close. If the case ever reached the courts, Charity was certain to lose; and should costs be awarded against her the bill would be crippling.

  And the more he thought about it, the more he blamed himself for their predicament. The temptation to end his sorrows became well-nigh overwhelming.

  Titus Ntoto, back from escort duty, and Cyrus Rutere sat under a table at Harrods, which they had turned into a den, by draping four tablecloths down each side. They looked at the huge pile of ngwee in awe. The tape recorder had been sold barely a hundred yards from the bar in a matter of minutes, and Ntoto, who had first extracted the tape and concealed it in his trousers, was boasting about how he had managed to recover the machine from Furniver’s briefcase.

  Rutere, however, was not as impressed as the situation warranted. Ntoto finished explaining how he had ended up with the recorder:

  “When Mrs Charity saw the one I was trying to hide,” he continued patiently, “she thought it was Furniver’s, and put it in his case. You saw that. So when I got the briefcase, I just took it back.”

  Rutere persisted.

  “Yes, but I have a question, Ntoto. Does not Furniver keep his own machine in his briefcase?”

  Ntoto nodded.

  “And Pearson’s machine and Furniver’s machine are the same, exact, yes?”

  Again Ntoto nodded.

  Rutere paused: “So there must have been two exact same machines in the briefcase. Then how do you know you have the right one?”

  It was a good question, and Ntoto did not have an answer to hand. It did not really matter, and nor did either boy really care, as they gazed in wonder at the pile of ngwee which seemed to transform itself into an enormous mound of sugared dough balls.

  22

  “Never boil the batongo beans before the pots are ready”

  The World Bank visit to Kireba had been in danger of being cancelled, but the rain held off, and Podmore parked near the clinic. Hardwicke and the rest of his team were already there, and the World Bank president was talking about the importance of “ownership” to a group of dignitaries.

  Stepping delicately through the debris left by the flood, Podmore joined the band of VIPs. He spotted Guchu, positioned himself within a few yards of the Mayor, and waited for an opportunity to broach the delicate subject of the maize contract. Alas for Podmore. He had underestimated the calibre of the Mayor, a tough veteran of city hall politics. Not for nothing did he enjoy the confidence of President Nduka. Far from looking uncomfortable, or trying to avoid the anxious British diplomat, he pre-empted Podmore and put on a thoroughly professional performance.

  “Podsman!” cried Willifred Guchu.

  “Podsman! Here, Podsman!”

  The mayor extended his arm with the palm of his hand facing down, and fluttered his fingers.

  “Come, come.”

  Hopes of a discreet unofficial exchange were rapidly being replaced by fears of a diplomatic incident.

  “Podmore, British High Commission,” said Podmore, trying to be cool, while staying courteous. “I’m glad we have met at last. I’ve been trying . . .”

  That was as far as he got. To his dismay, Guchu embraced him with enthusiasm. Then he shook hands, and to Podmore’s intense discomfort, did not let go. Instead he hauled the unhappy diplomat in front of a local cameraman. To Podmore’s further discomfort, the mayor, whom Podmore had not met before, called him “my brother” several times.

  “This is my good friend, my brother,” the mayor announced to no-one in particular.

  “Podsman, a great friend of the president, and a great friend of Kuwisha,” he announced to the twenty or so diplomats looking on. A round of modest clapping, led by Guchu’s entourage, followed.

  “A loyal friend, and a generous friend.”

  He beamed.

  Podmore tried to wriggle free, but the mayor’s grip on his hand tightened, and he had little choice but to stand shoulder to shoulder with the man who had become synonymous with sleaze in Kuwisha. Guchu seemed to be enjoying himself.

  “Britain has been our friend for many, many years. I know that Podson, a very senior British diplomat who I respect and love, like a brother . . .” He embraced the sweating diplomat.

  “I am sure he will help Kuwisha at this time of great need. I know that the president is very grateful that old friends like Britain will be the first to help us.”

  The cameras flashed.

  “Oh God,” thought Podmore, “I’ll be in the papers tomorrow.”

  He suddenly felt faint, and slightly nauseous.

  For the first time in their encounter, Mayor Guchu looked directly into Podmore’s eyes, put his hands on the diplomat’s shoulders, and pulled him into a bear hug as the cameras clicked once again.

  “Thank you, Mr David Podmore,” he said quietly.

  And Mayor Willifred Guchu winked, patted the unhappy diplomat on the back, and turned his attention to Hardwicke.

  “Mr President,” he beamed, “the people of Kireba welcome you to their homes.”

  Hardwicke’s tight programme allowed a brief photo call at Cousin Mercy’s clinic and twenty-five minutes for a visit to the model housing unit, under construction on a fenced half-acre site in the northern section of Kireba. Lucy was rather pleased with the press turnout, brief though their appearance would be. About half of the resident foreign corps had opted to fly to Kisangani, and the rest had accepted Lucy’s invitation to combine an investigation into the outbreak of cholera with coverage of Hardwicke’s visit to the pilot housing project.

  After assembling at the Outspan, where they wisely left their cars, they went by taxis to Harrods in high spirits, dressed in the conventional outfit of a foreign correspondent in Africa. Dark glasses were either pushed back over hair that was unfashionably long, or sat atop shaven skulls that hinted at a military background; a long sleeved shirt, either washed-out khaki or faded blue, the top three buttons undone, revealing a white T-shirt; cuffs wer
e turned up a fold, and an elephant-hair bracelet adorned the wrist; and for the photographers a safari waistcoat, with at least four pockets and a stitched-on bandoleer for film cartridges, completed the uniform.

  Trousers were almost invariably khaki and capacious, with zippered pockets at knee level and just below the waist, and more at the back. All the journalists carried what seemed to be bulky, over-sized briefcases, heavily padded, to which their eyes frequently returned, as nervous as a mother keeping watch on a young child. Well they might be, for the computer and trappings that the bags contained were not simply a means of filing their stories. It was their lifeline, their link to Reuters and Associated Press and Agence France Presse, the news agencies whose staff are anonymous contributors to every newspaper, and whose information underpins the stories that their newspaper colleagues will compile.

  As long as they had the computer, the world was their oyster. It was a magic carpet on which they swooped down on Africa’s trouble spots, and landed at the blurred front lines of conflicts across the continent, from Sierra Leone to Angola, from urban rioting to slum violence. Truly life was wonderful, for they were the world’s first generation of virtual reality journalists.

  Some of the writers who had early deadlines had already filed their stories, but nevertheless turned up for a few minutes, if only to pop into the clinic, and to check that Hardwick Hardwicke had actually made it to the housing scheme. But none of the hacks stayed through the entire event. Had they done so, they would have witnessed an extraordinary confrontation . . .

  Tension in Kireba had been building up for some days. Unfamiliar faces were appearing, following up demands for rent, payment of trading licences, or collecting council tax – demands that were waived if the occupier made clear that their political allegiance was the same as that of the burly intruders, who invariably supported the ruling party.

  Hardwicke’s visit had triggered an unusual demonstration outside the housing project. On one side stood a group of protestors, bearing aloft neatly lettered placards condemning globalisation, and attacking agriculture subsidies in Europe, and calling for fair prices for Kuwisha’s tea and coffee.

  On the other side stood a group supporting much the same causes, bearing placards with similar slogans, but with a particularly rough-and-ready look to their banners and posters.

  The two lots of protestors, each about fifty strong, eyed each other balefully as Hardwicke and his entourage entered the show house. As the minutes passed, the residents of Kireba, gathered at a respectful distance from the fenced-off plot, began to get restless.

  “Skellums!” cried an old man, waving his walking stick angrily in the direction of the neatly dressed demonstrators, and the rest of the crowd muttered in agreement. They had not been fooled. It was the carefully stencilled placards that gave the skellums away, not to mention the lack of spontaneity and their smart-dressed appearance.

  No-one had any doubt that the unusually well turned out bunch was sponsored by State House, in an attempt to leave Hardwicke with the impression that the government’s poor record in implementing trade reforms was the result of domestic opposition. But the demonstrators Nduka’s agents had assembled were no rent-a-crowd mob, recruited from the streets. They were members of the para-military General Service Unit, earning a few extra ngwee in bonuses before the Uhuru Day holiday.

  The other group of demonstrators had begun gathering outside Harrods, where they had scribbled their slogans on scraps of cardboard using a black felt-tipped pen that was passed around.

  They were driven by several motives. They felt passionately that it could not be right that their coffee, which was sold to international buyers for so little, cost so much in its final liquid form in the coffee shops of Europe and North America. Someone was making money, and it was not the farmers of Kuwisha. But the chance to demonstrate was also an excuse to let off accumulated frustrations, including their resentment at the government’s cover-up of the current cholera outbreak.

  Hardwicke and his team were ignorant of these tensions. Instead they were preoccupied by a claim that plans for the model house they were about to visit included, of all things, a swimming pool.

  The World Bank president was introduced by Mayor Guchu to a team of officials lined up inside the half-built house. The session then began, kicked off by Guchu with an appeal for more money.

  Hardwicke’s opening question was brief. He pointed to a curious kidney-shaped hole in the ground.

  “Tell me, Mayor, what is that?” he asked.

  “A swimming pool,” said Mayor Guchu, and guffawed.

  Guchu patted his guest on the back with one hand, and with the other the mayor wiped his forehead with a large white handkerchief. Alerted by this prearranged signal, one of the project staff approached the two men, unrolled a section of the blueprint which he laid out on a table in front of them, and said to Guchu in Swahili:

  “Is it time?”

  “Go ahead” said the mayor, smiling at Hardwicke.

  “Thank you, suh,” said the official, bowing and scraping.

  His briefing began, competent and unremarkable until he reached a point prearranged with mayor Guchu. He placed his finger on the blueprint, next to a kidney shaped outline marked in large capitals: “SEPTIC TANK”.

  “The diameter of the waste pipes may be too narrow, Mr Mayor. Should we delay for checking, or go ahead?”

  Guchu looked perplexed, as if lost in the calculations of sewerage flow and outlet pipes.

  “We will have to have a site meeting. But later,” he said.

  “I wish it was a swimming pool,” he added, wiping the sweat from his brow. A thought seemed to strike him:

  “Perhaps the scheme should have a swimming pool for the youth of Kireba. As it is, they play in the dam, and get bilharzia.”

  He looked impudently at Hardwicke.

  “Would the World Bank help?”

  Hardwicke, already running late, stalked off to his next appointment, his angry reply lost in the cry of pain that suddenly rang out . . .

  Were it not for a small, bored boy, the tensions between the two groups of demonstrators might have been contained. As it happened, a pebble whistled through the air, propelled from the boy’s catapult, in the direction of the demonstrators. The boy ducked behind Harrods and reloaded.

  “Eweh!” shouted Charity, furious that the bar’s traditional impartiality had been abused. She dropped the bucket of peas she had been shelling, pounced on the urchin, and hauled him behind the fridge. With a salvo of Swahili she chastised him, declaring him banned from Harrods for four weeks -but not before he had managed to let off another round with his catapult. It was this pebble that thwacked the rump of the plain-clothed officer in charge of the thirty-strong state security unit that was at the core of the phoney demo.

  The target had just been using his mobile phone to ring his wife. Live chickens were cheaper in Kireba than anywhere else. Such were the bargain prices he had bought two, and was ringing home to boast of his purchase.

  His call was answered by his teenage daughter.

  “Tell your mama that it’s quiet in Kireba, and I’m coming back.”

  “Wait” said the girl, and handed the phone to her mother.

  “It’s quiet in Kireba, and I’m on my way back,” her father repeated.

  It was a crackly line, and he had decided that the good news about the chickens would have to wait until he got home.

  “What?”

  “It’s quiet in Kireba,” he bellowed, “I’m on my way back.”

  It was at this point that the pebble hit home, triggering what would go down in Kuwisha’s history as the World Bank coup.

  All that could be heard down the phone was a shriek of pain, and then ominous silence, for the phone cut off as it was dropped.

  After grilling her daughter, who was now howling her head off, the alarmed mother managed to piece together a message that warranted use of the emergency number of the officer commanding the general s
ervices unit. There could, they agreed, be no doubt about the plea for help that had come from the heart of the slum:

  “There’s a riot in Kireba, I’m coming under attack.”

  In fact the damage to the officer was more to his dignity than his person. But in a fit of rage, the officer responded in the only way he knew – he ordered his men to use maximum force.

  “Globalisation Hurts the Poor” took a swing at “Fair Trade not Aid”, and “End European Subsidies” lashed out at “Down with IMF”. Heavily outnumbered as other residents joined in, the State House force beat a reasonably orderly retreat in the face of what seemed the collective outrage of Kireba. Fortunately for the State House protestors, the anger of their opponents was not channelled against a single target.

  First there were scores to settle in Kireba itself.

  Rent payers turned on landlords, the people from the west of Kuwisha fought the people of the east, and the people of the south got stuck into the people of the north. Only when these local disputes were settled did they close ranks against the common, hated enemy: the army, the para-military units and the police, who by then had deployed in a protective perimeter around the city’s central business district.

  It was as if the riots complemented the storms that had been rolling over Kuwisha, the man-made equivalent of the huge purple-black clouds that burst open over the land, to the accompaniment of rolls of thunder and bolts of lightning. The violence that ensued, like the rain, did not discriminate. Round-eyed children scampered for cover, and dogs disappeared, both driven by an instinct for survival.

  And when the mob drew closer, the sound of its anger grew. It was like the noise of an old steam locomotive, as it pulled out of the station, gathering momentum with long drawn-out huffs and puffs, giving newcomers the chance to catch up and clamber aboard. They joined a cross-section of humanity, some there by choice, others who discovered too late that they had caught the wrong train, and were being carried away to an unknown destination.