by Andrew Brown
Then one day, several weeks into their purgatory, he came home, looked at his waiting couch, the blankets not folded or tidied since he had risen that morning, and took a decision. It wasn’t the outcome of careful deliberation, but a vengeful statement of intent. He had to do something, to extract his existence from the fog of Jane’s indiscretion.
‘I’m going to Sudan to finish my research,’ he announced to Jane when she returned from work, or wherever she had been.
He said it without actually articulating the thought in his own mind first, and once it was expressed it started to take shape as a motivated position. The content of the statement didn’t really matter. It was the announcement itself that was important, a statement of purpose. He might have said ‘Fuck you, you bitch, you’ve destroyed my life’, but it wasn’t in his nature.
‘That damn professor from Khartoum was right,’ he added. ‘The research cannot be completed – ethically and with truth – until I’ve been there. And I can’t bear that bloody couch any longer.’
Jane looked at him with more interest than he had seen in years. But her response was characteristically acerbic: ‘You pretend it’s about truth and science. But you’re as ambitious as anyone else. This research is your ticket to status, Gabriel. But going to Sudan is madness. You know nothing about the place. It’s just one barbaric tribe trying to kill another over a missing goat. They’re still on the US terrorist list. You’ll be buried in a shallow grave long before you find that ridiculous herb.’
The comment enraged him. It wasn’t the deceit, or the inherent xenophobia in her statement. It wasn’t the lack of apology or humility. It was that little barb – the reference to Arabidopsis as a herb – that finally caused his anger to erupt. It was an unforgivable transgression and Jane had known it the moment she saw his face colour in response.
‘You horrible little whore,’ he said, slamming the door as he left.
* * *
Before he could give the matter any further thought, Gabriel found himself being herded through the abominable conflation of humanity that was Heathrow Terminal 5. Out-sized women with clipped voices barked instructions at him, directing him from the bowels of the terminal building to the bright check-in booths. His water bottle had been confiscated without further explanation by an officious teenager with yellow teeth and a name tag identifying him as a ‘security assistant’ called Clint. A pair of nail clippers was whisked out of his overnight toiletry bag and tossed into a plastic bucket, clattering against a variety of similarly confiscated shiny implements. Then he was scrutinised at customs clearance as if he were trying to come into the country, on a passport from some unknown dictatorship in West Africa.
‘Sudan, sir?’ A long, unblinking look from a frog-mouthed person of indeterminate gender and intelligence. ‘Purpose of travel?’
‘Scientific research’ was met with a blank gaze. ‘Tourism, then,’ Gabriel offered, wondering if it sounded suspicious to change the reason for travel so quickly. But the answer placated his interrogator. Some tapping of computer keys proceeded, and then the dull gaze was back on him.
‘You aware there’s a travel warning?’
‘Yes, yes. That’s the North, I’m going to Juba. To South Sudan. They’re two different countries now.’ Gabriel sighed and tried to keep his patience. The official was still glaring at him when Gabriel realised that his passport was lying on the narrow counter in front of him, waiting for him to pick it up. ‘Thank you,’ he said, snatching at it. A nod of the amphibious head and an eyebrow raised for the next person to approach. This then was the brave new world of counter-terrorism: into battle sans water bottles or nail clippers.
The post-security boarding area was similarly frenetic and he was grateful when he finally found refuge in his window seat near the rear of the enormous Boeing, collapsing into his designated spot, sweaty and out of breath.
His comfort was short lived though. No sooner had he extricated his seatbelt from under his buttock than a strange-smelling young woman plonked herself next to him. Her unwashed hair had clumped into matted bundles, some sprouting upwards and outwards, others longer and hanging like courgettes from her scalp. A particularly dense dreadlock knocked against his shoulder as the distinctly un-Jamaican woman threw herself about. Gabriel had half a mind to ask the neat airhostess for a paper wipe to make sure that there was no resultant oil on his shirt. Her odour was both herbaceous and earthy, like hessian sacks or fresh hay, with a hint of cowpat. Her top was flouncy and more revealing than was respectable, the smooth curve of breast abundantly visible. She didn’t appear to be wearing any form of brassiere, the shadow of nipple beneath the Indian cotton more generous than Gabriel preferred.
The aisle seat was still empty when the pilot announced their imminent departure and Gabriel was annoyed to note that his new companion didn’t take the opportunity to move and put some personal space between them. He was on the point of suggesting it when she turned her attention to him.
‘Hey man,’ she announced, pointing out her chest intimidatingly. Gabriel hoped she did not notice him cower. ‘I’m Carrie. Cool that we’ll be partners on this journey.’
So cool, thought Gabriel sourly, although the breast situation had now captured his attention. Carrie turned out to be a twenty-two-yearold Canadian with a diploma in sustainable agriculture – whatever that meant – who had volunteered to plant veggie gardens in north Kenya using human excrement as compost. Gabriel tried to hide his copy of the Annals of Botany in the seat pocket in front of him but the hawk-eye soon spotted it. With oohs and aahs she learnt that her companion was in fact a real botanist, and her effusion quadrupled.
‘Oh my word, have you seen the latest results on human waste as a growth stimulant for veggies? It’s just amazing that we pour this nutritional gold into the sea to kill whatever we haven’t already plundered.’
Gabriel flinched at the image of his daily stool as ‘nutritional gold’ but said nothing, hunkering down for what was obviously going to be a long and tiring flight.
‘Of course, it’s optimal to use … waste from vegetarians, well vegans actually, because the heavy metals and hormone additives are absent and generally it’s far more beneficial. But do you think we can get people to understand that, well …’
Gabriel tried to detach his thoughts from the notion of the ungrateful poor of Kenya producing substandard excrement due to an insistence on eating whatever was available, with no regard for the sensibilities of shit-farmers from Ontario. But the woman persisted. No, he had not experimented with faeces in his work. No, he did not regard such research as vital to the sustainability of the planet. So what was it that he actually did?
He answered by rote rather than consideration: ‘I work on genetically modified crop production involving—’
He could get no further. Stupidly, he hadn’t anticipated the effect of his answer on the crystal-worshipper seated next to him. The dreadlocks flapped, all but slapping him across the face, and the breasts hmphed and jiggled in outrage. Oh no, no that is not good, that is so not cool, what are you thinking, you are the Devil incarnate, do you burn children for warmth at night, you Antichrist of hell. The madness alongside him spewed and ranted and protested and quoted endless reams of apocalypse testified to by gurus with Indian names that were perfectly foreign to him. Apparently GM stood for ‘global moguls’ or perhaps ‘mongrels’ and it was to be the death of everyone in the world, by means as yet uncertain but as surely as beef would putrefy your brain and poultry would grow men mammaries.
‘Do you know that they fed rats GM corn for a month and they all developed rashes all over their bodies?’
‘It sounds terrible,’ he replied, trying not to sound patronising, but then could not resist adding: ‘Though if you kept me in a laboratory and fed me carbohydrates all day I might also get a bit itchy.’
Carrie gave him a withering look. ‘Everyone thinks the world will end in a big explosion. They’re wrong, it’s not war that’s going to wipe the planet out. It�
�s a little “oops” and the clatter of a Petri dish on a laboratory floor.’
Gabriel had to give her some credit for the image, but he refused to be drawn out from his defensive shell. Faced with an increasingly stony wall of unresponsiveness, after a few pips and squirts, she gradually subsided like a cooling volcano, until she was reduced to an occasional shake of the head and a self-absorbed mutter. Once Gabriel was sure the worst was over, he pulled out the Annals and started paging deliberately, looking for the article with the most obvious technical tables and illustrations. But his thoughts wandered far from the results of chromosome mutation in peas conducted by the University of Wisconsin. Though he rejected Carrie-the-poo-farmer’s onslaught out of hand, he remained troubled by her impression of him. She made him feel old, ensnared in the past. She pouted her succulent lips and pointed her brassiereless chest out into the world, young and fabulous, while he sat alongside her, the dried husk of a once sentient being studying his parchment. Leaving Paddington Station on the Heathrow Express he had caught the face of his father in a homeless drunk on the platform; he imagined the same ugliness in his own face now, tired and drawn in the pressurised cabin.
Finally, his companion lost all interest in him and took out a sleek iPad. She connected up a pair of pink earphones and started watching some cheap-looking soap opera. From what Gabriel could see, most of the activity took place in a tiny apartment in some over-dense American city, with characters entering and leaving at regular intervals. The young woman gave snorting little laughs under her breath, distracting him and enticing him to turn to look at her screen, staring unknowingly as the storyline unfolded for her.
Once supper was over – a nondescript assortment of melted cheese and carbohydrates – the lights were turned off. His fellow traveller bedded down like a contented bear, her unwashed locks providing her with more comfort than Gabriel’s inflated travel pillow, curved like a mutated bean around his neck. After a while he gave up his attempt at sleep and looked around him more carefully. Carrie had slumped over the barrier formed by the arm rest and her beige airline blanket had spilt across him. The interior of the plane looked more like a crime scene than a mode of transport, food cartons, blankets, headsets scattered across the unmoving bodies, collapsed over one another in apparent mortality. The flight was dominated by Africans, apart from an incongruous group of Buddhists in matching light-grey flannel outfits who had somehow all managed to fall asleep while remaining perfectly upright. It was quiet now, save for the rumble of the engines and the slight vibration that one got from travelling at a thousand miles an hour through a vacuum. Outside, Gabriel could see the end of the wing, lit up by a flashing strobe light; apart from that it was dead black and still. The interior of the plane was half-lit, one or two passengers reading with their lights on. It felt secure, and yet quite dangerous, like a hospital ward at night.
The surreality of his situation dawned on him: a young hippy asleep on his shoulder, a plane full of strangers, and he, a botanist from Bristol, on his way to Sudan. What did he really know about the place? Of course, he read the news and had studied its climate and flora, but the people remained a mystery to him. He felt, for the first time, a bolt of concern for his safety. If he was honest with himself, he didn’t really like travelling to the Third World. He found the cities, and their inhabitants, chaotic, dirty and simple. But his recent personal turmoil had shown him that his understanding of the place he regarded as home was flawed in its own way. His night remained restless and uncomfortable; he had never had the ability to sleep on planes and he was, at the best of times, a reluctant traveller.
Before dawn broke, just the glimmer of light at the furthest edge of the earth’s curvature, the lights were unceremoniously switched on and breakfast was announced. Gabriel felt nauseous and picked at a solidified roll but could not bring himself to lift the tinfoil lid that kept the congealed eggs and other horrors at bay. Carrie appeared to wake up from a deep fog, yawning and rubbing and gesticulating with far more exuberance than the situation warranted. By the time they had touched down, the vast savannah still awaiting the dawn, he had more than had his fill of his neighbour.
‘Good luck with the poo farming,’ he said, unable to contain his grumpiness as they finally exited the plane.
‘Yeah right, thanks. Good luck with destroying the planet, old man.’
* * *
Nairobi made little impact on Gabriel initially, probably as a result of his fatigue and the early-morning half-light as the yellow Toyota taxi drove him through the already congested streets. He was aware of the oddity of longhorn cattle being herded along the island in the middle of a highway, the arbitrary traffic rules and the diesel fumes, but it was little different to Delhi (where he had attended a conference on radiative CO2 forcing) or Rio de Janeiro (carbon sequestration) or Mexico City (radiational cooling). He was struck, perhaps more than anything else, by the unusual trees that lined the sides of the road and squashed up against each other in the islands – thorn trees with flat tops and luminous yellow-green smooth bark, large-leafed trees that hung heavily upon one another, and a sapling with upturned cupped yellow blossoms that reminded him of a Chanukah candle.
They passed a large park with rolling lawns and neatly demarcated pathways. People were sitting on benches or lying on the grass, figures dotted across the park as far as the eye could see. The city didn’t look too Third World, he noted optimistically. The park was well kept and well used – even at this early hour. Not too different from some of the Bristol city parks.
‘Uhuru Park,’ the driver commented, before advising him that he was offering a safari trip to see the gnus migrating. ‘Now is the right time,’ he proclaimed definitively, as if Gabriel should impulsively abandon his travel plans and head for the Masai Mara before the drama was over. He persisted for a block and a half of grinding traffic, before Gabriel managed to persuade him that he wasn’t a candidate for an informal trip into the hinterland in a rickety taxi cab. Once they reached the hotel he thanked the man, who smiled with wildly crooked teeth.
‘Uhuru Park is nice during the day,’ he said. ‘Just don’t take photographs of the homeless people sleeping there; the police will take your camera away.’ With another riotous smile he drove off, leaving Gabriel cringing at his error.
The rooms in the Nairobi Safari Club were underwhelming, given the ostentation promised by the gold-balustraded foyer, complete with the hides of unfortunate zebra and buck. The safari theme continued throughout the lobby and lifts – woven tapestries depicting savannah scenes hung about like drying skins at the abattoir – but was jettisoned once you stepped inside the insalubrious rooms. At least they provided a clean-sheeted bed, Gabriel thought, although the mattress was on the thin side. He collapsed and slept for several hours, waking confused by the noise of traffic blaring through the open windows from Kenyatta Boulevard close by.
He spent the afternoon pleasantly enough, browsing in the Stanley Bookshop on Kaunda Street. Each book had been quaintly covered in plastic and was put on individual display, rather like an expensive perfume. After that, Gabriel visited the more chaotic Book Point on Moi Avenue, where the attempt at Dewey Decimal Classification indicated some fundamental fault lines. He was, however, mildly surprised at the wealth of books about Africa and its various ailments, all examining the underlying reasons for the hardships its people faced. Gabriel knew little about the origins of postcolonial collapse. He had always assumed states failed because of some inherent deficiency. He bought a slim book titled The Scramble for African Oil by an American professor of international relations and diplomacy, simply because the word Sudan appeared in the blurb on the back cover. He had no idea whether he would read it, but buying it made him feel as if the day in Nairobi had been worthwhile.
As he was picking his way along the uneven sidewalk on Moi Avenue, a man with blue-black skin and red-flushed eyes accosted him, holding on to his wrist with a warm hand. He had strange lumps on his face and all the teeth between his
canines were missing, giving him a gaping look when he spoke.
‘Where are you from? Are you from Europe, you look English, are you British perhaps?’ His English was impeccable, pronounced with perfectly formed vowels and consonants, but his ravaged face belied any education.
‘Bristol,’ Gabriel answered, breaking free and hoping the obtuse reference to his home town would silence the man.
‘I do not know Bristol. But I have heard about Birmingham. I hear there are race riots there again. Your government is trying to pass those laws to make immigration hard for us.’ He paused as if waiting for Gabriel to defend his country or to ask him about his own origins. When no reply was forthcoming, he continued: ‘It is the same with Australia. It is everywhere. I am from Sudan, from a village in the east. We escaped death by a whisper, by a whisper, sir.’ At that, he rolled up his sleeve to show his arm, deep weals and scar tissue marking his skin nearly to the bone. Then he pointed to the yaw of his mouth, the empty gums moist and discoloured. ‘We struggled to get here, to Kenya, to safety, yet here we are still treated like animals.’
Gabriel nodded, trying to prevent the man from gripping his forearm again. People were walking around them, paying them no attention. There was something not credible about the man, the language usage, the knowledge of current affairs; it all conflicted with his ragtag clothes, bloodshot eyes and personal urgency.
‘But we are hungry. That is our problem, sir. My family have no food. And you have money to give us, to help us. You need to give us something, not money, we can go together to the shop over there’ – he pointed across Moi Avenue – ‘and we can buy rice for my family.’
Gabriel felt disappointed, perhaps, that the conversation, one-sided as it had been, had inevitably been directed towards this point, confirming his initial suspicions. He sighed and pulled out his wallet, turning slightly away from the man so that he wouldn’t see the wad of notes sticking out of the top. He gave him a two-hundred-shilling note and put his wallet away. The man looked down, his jaw agape, and flapped the note about unashamedly.
