Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  Mboga stood up.

  “Ferdinand Mlambo, I call you by that name for the last time. I am giving you a new name. Your old name is finished. I have caught it already.”

  His hand reached behind Mlambo’s left ear as he spoke, as if plucking something out of the air.

  “Your old name is now dead, finished,” he said with relish. “It is ready to travel with me, now.”

  He thrust his clenched fist into a small cardboard box which had been sitting on his desk, and withdrew his hand while closing the top, as if an insect or a small bird was now trapped inside. Mlambo watched, horrified and wide-eyed, as Mboga wrapped the box, about the size of two packets of Sportsman cigarettes, in a copy of the previous day’s paper, and carefully bound it with twine.

  “I will bury it near my home,” said Mboga, “and my dogs will piss on it, so the name of Ferdinand Mlambo, which is already dead, will rot.”

  The boy was dumbstruck.

  To subject Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, great-grandson of the famous Mzilikazi Mlambo of Zimbabwe, who had fought for his country’s liberation during the first chimurenga in the 1890s, to such inhuman treatment went well beyond the bounds of decency.

  Then the full implications of losing his name sank in. Without a complete and proper name, would his late grandmother be able to find him? And would his earlier ancestors, including his great-grandfather, be available for advice and counselling? A shiver of terror went through the boy’s frame, and his insides turned to jelly.

  Mboga looked with contempt at the quivering youth, standing at attention before him.

  “Now, repeat your new name. It is Fatboy. You are now called Fatboy, only.”

  Mboga was relentless.

  “Repeat after me: ‘I am a piece of nothing. I am Fatboy,’ ” said Mboga. “Fatboy, just Fatboy. Fatboy! Forever!”

  The chief steward sneered.

  “I will see you Friday morning, ten sharp, at the staff meeting. I expect many people. We will meet on the lawn. And I will announce that Ferdinand Mlambo is finished. Only Fatboy is left . . . and you can give your report on that Mupanga woman. Now go! Go, go! You dog shit! Go!”

  Mlambo had fled from Lovemore Mboga, his bare feet feeling the cool polished corridors of State House for the last time, past the vases with the aroma of fresh cut flowers, through the kitchen where the presidential tea-tray was stored. No longer would he be entrusted with the task of preparing the mid-morning glass of hot water and honey for the Ngwazi, the Life President, the Cock that Conquered all the Hens, Dr Josiah Nduka.

  It was the worst day in his young life. He had lost more than his name. He had been deprived of his identity, his very sense of being. He, the former State House senior kitchen toto, Ferdinand Mlambo, had been reduced to a single word, offensive beyond measure.

  Fatboy.

  Ferdinand Mlambo’s dismissal as kitchen toto at State House, albeit the senior kitchen toto, might not seem a matter of great import. Yet only an ignorant outsider could come to this conclusion.

  To have a job, any job, enjoying a monthly income, was rare in a country where only a comparative handful out of half a million school leavers who came onto the market each year ended up with work and regular pay. To be the senior State House kitchen toto was more than a job. It offered status, clout and influence.

  Indeed, it could be said that Mlambo was the most influential and powerful 14-year-old, soon to be 15, in the land.

  He was not merely on the staff of the president. He was part of the president, and he enjoyed making the most of this privileged position.

  When, for example, at any one of the many police check-points on roads leading out of the city, he was asked his name, and just what job he did, he would reply with the spurious modesty that he had cultivated, combining timing and tone to perfection.

  “My name?”

  He would pause, looking at his feet, and rub a toe in the ochre earth of Kuwisha, for all the world like a shy, illiterate up-country oaf.

  “Er . . . Mlambo, Ferdinand Mlambo . . .”

  “And what do you do, boy? Are you a loafer? Or are you useless?”

  Mlambo would wait for the laughter that accompanied such jibes to die down. Then would come his reply, said so quietly that the words were barely audible: “Kitchen toto.”

  Then after a further pause, he would casually add another word, like an afterthought, almost mumbling, so sometimes the listener would not quite catch what he had said.

  “What? What?”

  “Senior . . . kitchen toto.”

  And in case there was any doubt, he would utter two final, magic words: “Senior kitchen toto . . . State House.”

  The sharp intake of breath that invariably followed, a mix of fear and envy, was a response that gave Mlambo much pleasure. It acknowledged that this was a youngster with prospects, a boy who could do favours, a boy who could be useful – not just part of the minister, but part of the president!

  To work at State House in any capacity at all was remarkable. Indeed, there was a living to be earned by simply knowing someone at State House, ensuring that in return for a few ngwee, a letter to an official would be delivered, or a message would reach its destination. Even the kitchen toto’s humble duties, which ranged from shining the silver for State House banquets, to acting as the president’s food taster, and serving as the supplier of bhang to the State House staff could be turned to advantage.

  Now this influence and power had gone, as worthless as ashes.

  For he was just Fatboy – and unless he, Ferdinand Mlambo, did something about it, he would be Fatboy forever.

  Perhaps it was the salty taste of his blood as he sucked his punctured thumb that set him thinking; possibly it was the influence of the knitting needles themselves, no longer mere needles but instruments of revenge; or the benevolent intervention of the spirit of his grandmother, who, contrary to his initial fears, soon managed to contact her favourite grandson that played a part; not to mention the fact that Mlambo was a cunning young man . . .

  But whatever it was, something had triggered a chain of thought in the boy’s head. And the thought turned into a plan. And if the plan were to be put into practice, Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, senior kitchen toto (retired) would recover his name and ensure the public humiliation of Lovemore Mboga, chief steward at State House.

  All he needed was a little help from his friends.

  3

  The first pink traces of dawn over Kireba turned into the glowing orange ball that would in a few minutes become the wondrous African sun. The proud owner and proprietor of Kuwisha’s top meeting place took stock of her world, and gave thanks to her Maker.

  Charity put aside all the excited talk about the event that had caused such a tumult the night before. She no more believed in the existence of a tokolosh than an Irish woman believed in leprechauns. It could wait.

  There were more important matters on her mind, and it was that special time of the day when she tried to put aside trivia, and counted her blessings.

  It seemed right that she should begin with a silent prayer for her special friendship with Furniver, the retired investment banker from England, who had been running the Kireba savings co-operative for some four years. It was a friendship that, provided her suspicions could be laid to rest, seemed set to become a loving, lasting companionship that would see them spending their autumn years on Charity’s coffee-growing shamba, a two-hour drive from the city.

  It had been Edward’s idea to lay the brick patio under her feet. Not for the first time, he had had to scrape something particularly unpleasant off his shoes in the wake of one of Kuwisha’s magnificent rainstorms, which made even the shortest of journeys from his modest flat above the bank’s office more than usually hazardous. For nearly four years he had lived in the flat, which he had helped build – the only brick building in the slum, apart from the small clinic.

  At first she had been against the patio. The bar was doing well, but bricks cost money. So what if there was mu
d?

  “You live in Kuwisha, in Kireba. There is always mud in Kireba, English,” she had said, calling him by the nickname she used when she was feeling particularly fond of the man who was insinuating himself into her life, slowly and surely filling the gap left by the death of her husband in a car accident.

  It had been Edward who backed her loan application for money to buy the containers that were to make up Harrods; and it had been Edward who supported her in the battle with the Anglican hierarchy, who had bitterly opposed her plans for the bar.

  “You are the widow of a bishop,” the chairman of the Anglican management board had remonstrated. “How can you run a drinking house?”

  “It will be a place for eating good food, and meeting, and talking, and teaching street children,” Charity had replied, and stalked out of the study in his comfortable home. She hadn’t been back since.

  Charity looked at Furniver sternly.

  “In Kuwisha, when it rains, there is always mud. That is life,” she concluded sternly.

  “Mud I can take,” Furniver retorted, “but not what they do to it in Kireba.”

  She tried another tack.

  Both of them would have to be on hand to supervise the work; this would mean sacrificing one of their precious weekends at her shamba, high in the hills beyond the city, Charity pointed out.

  Furniver was undeterred.

  He had called for volunteers from the Kireba football club, the Mboya Boys. With their help – at a rate negotiated by the team captain, Titus Ntoto, of one sugared dough ball per boy, per four-hour shift, and freshly-cooked by Charity – the patio had been finished in two days.

  The sun was now emerging. In a few minutes she would have to put water on the gas ring for the first of the day’s rounds of soup: pumpkin and groundnut soup, with a dash of Worcester sauce. So tasty!

  The wound from the loss some four years earlier of her dear David, Bishop of Central Kuwisha, was healing. There was still a scar on her soul, but the raw pain had eased. And Harrods was not only making enough money to supplement her tiny pension from the Church; it was evolving into what Charity had always envisaged, notwithstanding the doubts and disapproval of many of David’s fellow clerics.

  Harrods had become part community centre, part crèche, part refuge for the city’s street children who could earn a dish of nourishing food in return for doing basic chores.

  Soon it would be time to start work – but not before she also gave thanks for the fact that she had a warm home to go to, or at least a room that she rented from cousin Mercy, staff nurse at the only clinic that served the densely packed slum of half a million souls. What was more, she slept on a proper mattress, free of bed lice, on a bed frame with each leg standing in a tin of water, which kept cockroaches and other goggas at bay. She also had clean clothes on her back, and she had wholesome food in her belly. Above all she had dear friends around her.

  Charity massaged her calves in preparation for the day ahead. Running a bar as busy as Harrods was tough. At the end of the day, her feet ached, and there was the odd twinge in her back. But at 40-something she was in remarkably good shape. To enjoy good health was to have drawn a winning ticket in the lottery of life.

  She sat down at one of the bar’s white plastic tables, a stop-gap until the wooden replacements she had ordered from Philimon Ogata, the nearby coffin-maker, were ready. Ogata, who had recently lost his wife to Aids, was not short of business, but he had a favour to return. For weeks after Agatha Ogata had died, Philimon had eaten regularly at Harrods, and making the new tables was his way of saying “thank you” for Charity’s support.

  She offered a brief prayer for the soul of Agatha, and gave thanks for the fact that the two of them had reconciled before the argumentative lady had taken the hand of Jesus, as Philimon had put it. And only then did Charity allow herself to return to her worries about Edward Furniver.

  Even to harbour the tiniest suspicion, rather than confront him, made her feel uncomfortable. What was it that David had said?

  “Embrace the sinner and denounce the sin.”

  That worked when she dealt with an Mboya Boy who sneaked a suck of condensed milk from a freshly opened tin, or who stole sugar from the storeroom next to the bar. It was not so easy when the sin and the sinner were in parasitical embrace, and the sin had captured the very soul.

  Furniver would not be the first European to succumb to the combination of African sun and cheap drink. Before too long, thirst for liquor became insatiable, and the beer at sundown was less a social occasion and more a vital daily ritual. Then it became compulsive. All too often the drinker turned to violence, taking out frustration on his wife – just ask Didymus Kigali, who had seen many a white madam in distress!

  A pattern to Furniver’s consumption was emerging. Brief absences during the day, usually to the toilet, were becoming more frequent, and he would return, smelling slightly of changa, and looking a bit unkempt.

  The last report from Boniface Rugiru was especially disturbing. Furniver having a drink with that old settler at the Thumaiga Club was acceptable – that was in the open, and men enjoyed buying each other a beer, or a glass of gin. But when drinking it became furtive, or secretive, then one should get worried . . . and if Boniface was right, Furniver had been drinking in the Gents!

  Customers were starting to drop in. One had the Kuwisha Independent newspaper, and was looking for other readers who would be willing to share the price.

  Charity noticed that it had a column by one of her favourite journalists.

  “Is your man a drinker?” it began, but there was no time to read it now. More customers were arriving, and their time was precious.

  One old-timer cleared his lungs with a long, deep cough and was about to spit the result onto the patio floor, but caught Charity’s disapproving eye. He decided against it and instead propelled the gob of phlegm over the purple bougainvillaea hedge that she had planted in honour of Samora Machel, the founding president of Mozambique.

  “Grow flowers,” Samora had urged his people. “Just because we are poor, it does not mean we do not enjoy beauty.”

  A couple of Mboya Boys waved as they passed by, carrying plastic bags dripping with the juice of rotten fruit, collected before dawn that morning, on their daily rummage through the refuse dump outside the city’s central market. She knew full well that the fruit – mangoes, pineapples, bananas – would become part of that fierce, raw alcoholic brew called changa. She knew that. But the wave from the boys, who usually treated all adults as enemies, lifted her spirits and gave her hope. Suddenly she remembered.

  Avocados. She was out of avocados, and avocado soup was on the menu that night. With a thick slice of bread included in the price, it was a bargain. Demand would be high.

  “Boy!” she called. “Duty boy! Urgent for duty boy . . .”

  It was going to be another busy day.

  “Yes indeed, life is good,” said Charity Mupanga, “life is OK.”

  4

  The contrast between the clear, blue and sunny December sky above Kuwisha and the freezing, grey and grimy blanket that enveloped London could hardly have been more striking.

  In the gleaming steel and glass building on the banks of the Thames, morning news conference at Britain’s biggest-selling tabloid, the Clarion, had been interrupted by the arrival of an exclusive set of photographs, bought that very morning from a Heathrow mortuary attendant.

  The body, the third in two weeks to have been found on the main approach to Heathrow, had apparently fallen to earth when the undercarriage of an incoming flight from East Africa had opened.

  Thanks to a hand-made postcard found in a pouch strapped to his midriff, it was possible to learn something about the boy. On the one side was a picture of a mango, cut from a local magazine and glued to a piece of cardboard cut from a cereal packet; on the other, in large capital letters, was written: “FROM YOUR FREND”.

  The card was addressed to: “Mr Titus and Mr Cyrus, Harrods Internati
onal Bar (and Nightspot), Kuwisha.”

  “That’s enough to go on,” said the editor, impatient to get to the nub of the story. There were more pressing concerns. The first was whether the picture of the corpse, estimated age between 12 and 15, should be run on page one or on page three, where it could replace the usual picture of a near-naked girl.

  Meanwhile discussion was stimulated by a question from the pictures editor.

  “Could we have a reconstruction, you know, not with the body itself, obviously, but a stand-in, you know . . . where the body was found, or curled up in the undercarriage?”

  It was, the editor conceded, a very good idea. There might be one problem, however.

  “Do we have his clothes?”

  The editor’s personal assistant was sent to check on the availability of the clothes the dead boy had been wearing, and reported back.

  “He wants another £100 for the kit. Says the boy was wearing an Arsenal shirt. About ten years old, but he said it would clean up nicely. Worth a few bob. Collector’s item.”

  If there was one thing the editor could not abide, it was a source that became greedy.

  “He can sod off . . . bloody body-snatcher.”

  For a few minutes conference debated the merits of dressing a stand-in in a pair of tattered shorts and an Arsenal football club shirt, but integrity won the day.

  “What if we were to dress him in the wrong strip?” asked a young man in his early thirties who was leaning against the office door, looking down the blouse of a woman in front of him. “Fans would be sure to spot it,” he continued. “We’d be a bloody laughing stock!”

  It was an intervention typical of the paper’s up-and-coming columnist who had recently been given his own thirteen-part TV series. Geoffrey Japer knew his football.

  His point was taken and the idea abandoned.