Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  But even if alcoholic drinks had been on sale, few of the women could afford it, even at the keen prices set by Charity. Instead the ladies began their sessions fortified by mugs of strong tea, sweetened with dollops of condensed milk, or a glass of fresh fruit juice accompanied by a few bowls of fried and salted potato skins, all laid on by Charity at cost.

  Everyone was happy: husbands were satisfied that they knew where their wives were and what they were doing, and after a few initial checks, the Special Branch stopped monitoring the circle, and left it to get on with matters, discouraged by the reference to sewing, and the absence of alcohol.

  And if there was any doubt about the boring, esoteric nature of the subject supposedly for discussion, it was there for all to read, posted outside the bar. This month’s topic was pinned to Harrods’ notice-board.

  Laboriously set out in hand, Mildred Kigali had used a blue ballpoint pen for the text and a red pen for the underlining. The result was indeed impressive:

  Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle (Kireba branch)

  NEXT MEETING

  FRIDAY at 7

  “INFLATION: THE CURSE OF A NATION”

  Speaker: William Otamu, Governor, Bank of Kuwisha

  ALL WELLCOME

  NB Subscriptions will be collected at door

  STRICT

  NO PAYMENT NO ADMISSION

  BY ORDER

  MILDRED KIGALI

  CHAIRWOMAN

  It was the first time a man had been invited to address the circle, and Mildred had sought an explanation.

  “It was Furniver’s suggestion. But Otamu is a very boring speaker. No man will come to listen to him, especially if there is no beer, and if he has to pay, and there are so many women,” Charity replied.

  And so when Otamu was summoned to Washington for emergency talks with the IMF, Furniver immediately did the decent thing.

  “Look here, my dear, I know a fair bit about inflation and the velocity of money,” he reassured her. “I don’t even need to prepare notes, I can rattle it off at a moment’s notice. But just to be on the safe side, I will go to my office right now, and tap something out. What time is kick-off?”

  “Fine,” said Charity. “Seven exact.”

  Odd, thought Furniver. It seemed to him that she had been more relieved than disappointed when he had told her that the governor had pulled out. And she was less than appreciative when Furniver had insisted on standing in.

  Odd, damned odd.

  All of this did nothing to ease his mind on the subject of the Lambs. He would have to raise his concerns with Charity . . . and the sooner the better.

  9

  Mildred Kigali put down the cloth she was using to wipe the early morning dew off the table-tops at Harrods, and pulled up her long green skirt a couple of discreet inches, revealing smart white tennis shoes at the end of lean, muscled legs. She flexed her knees, and did a couple of tentative dance steps, shifting and swaying from foot to foot.

  For a few glorious moments last night she had felt like a teenager again. Not that she would like to be a teenager in this day and age. But as she had led the assembled ladies in an impromptu conga, weaving its way through the bar, knitting needle in each hand, their sharp tips covered with two small pawpaws, the impulse of youth had coursed through her veins.

  Indeed, such had been the impact of her performance, she had been asked to repeat it at the next meeting . . . well, not asked exactly, but when she had suggested she might do it again, no-one had objected.

  Her moves became more confident and she drifted into nostalgia, remembering the first time she had spotted Didymus Kigali, the handsome young man who was to become her husband. She began to sing – or at least, she made a sound that was mainly a low pitched hum, with the occasional word emerging.

  Like Charity, Mildred Kigali had risen especially early, for there was much work to do. Usually the clearing up after the monthly meeting of the Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle was done by a handful of volunteers at the end of the meeting itself. But the appearance of the tokolosh had meant that the session had ended in disarray and the ladies who usually lent a hand had scattered.

  Perhaps her young friend Charity, so sceptical about the existence of a creature that could assume whatever shape that their need required, though more often than not they took the form of a goat or a donkey, would now think again. After all, it had been spotted by Edward Furniver, a European!

  Mildred continued to shuffle and sing. Soon she was back at her childhood home, in the village where she had been born, soon after the great floods of 1925. One memory stood out above all others. On a sultry hot morning, soon after the start of World War Two, she had seen her father for the last time.

  She would never forget the day the men of her village, volunteers all, had gathered to board the trucks that would take them to the training depots, where they would prepare to fight for Britain.

  Her father had led them, led a singing column that waved goodbye to wives and children left behind. Amongst those children was a boy who looked straight ahead, and saluted the departing men, holding his hand in place until the trucks had moved out of sight, down the track that led to the tarred road and the city that lay beyond.

  Mildred had moved closer to the boy, and he had been surprised by this forward behaviour.

  Mildred, still in her teens, plucked up her courage.

  “What is your name?”

  “Didymus Kigali.”

  It had been a long time ago.

  So long ago that the wild animals had roamed free. Today her home village was a town, and the animals had all but disappeared, hunted for their flesh, for their tusks, or for sport. Mildred seldom visited her birthplace. The hut in which she had been brought up had gone, along with the village mango trees, and she found that going back was painful and disturbing.

  But she had never forgotten the song of the villagers on that day, the song she sang at Harrods that morning, as the sun’s early rays began to take the chill off the morning air.

  Mildred Kigali started her chores.

  She began, as always, by wiping away the chalked contents of the blackboard menu, propped up on an easel, which was also used during the weekly literacy classes. A list of wholesome dishes had been set out below the hand-painted sign at the top: “Good Food, Best Prices!”

  The menu had started with pumpkin and corn soup, then there were “bitings” of thick potato skins, fried in chicken fat and lightly salted; and goat stew and cabbage; also the ever popular ugali and beans (“groundnut relish, or gravy, extra”); and the bill of fare ended with Charity’s famous dough balls (“sugar extra”) and “frut juice” – mango, passion fruit or orange.

  For a few seconds Mildred Kigali was confused. Something was amiss. Was it spelled frute juce? Or frut juice? Neither seemed quite right. Those Mboya Boys! They were in charge of chalking up the menu each day. Despite Charity’s efforts to teach the street children the three Rs, there was at least one spelling mistake in the menu each day. “Frut juice” indeed. Sometimes she suspected that the spelling mistake was not a mistake at all, but a deliberate error, just to get a rise out of an old lady.

  Mildred grunted. Someone had scrawled “Nduka is a thief” at the bottom of the board, and because she shared the sentiments about President Josiah Nduka, it was the last of the marks she rubbed off. But it was not proper, a president should be respected . . . even if you did not agree with all the things he did.

  “Eh-heh,” said a voice in her head: “What if he has lost the right to your respect because he chops, because he is corrupt?”

  Mildred Kigali had reached an age when certain things distressed her. In particular, people no longer understood the difference between right and wrong. Her old friend Charity should be tougher and stricter with the Mboya Boys. Instead she spoilt them.

  “It is a slipping slope,” Mildred had warned, more than once.

  Mildred also felt duty bound to keep a close eye on Charity Mupanga’s relation
ship with the English man in charge of Kireba’s community bank. She did not disapprove of the budding friendship between the two. But it was well known that all men were driven by base needs, interested only in what Mildred called “steamies”, the invariable outcome of “hanky-hanky”.

  If only Charity and Furniver would acknowledge their share of the sins of mankind and seek redemption through the Church of the Blessed Lamb. As for Charity’s late husband, the Anglican bishop of Central Kuwisha, surely he should have an influence that extended beyond the grave?

  Not that being an Anglican bishop meant anything these days. She had followed the debate about homosexual marriages on the BBC World Service, broadcast in FM from the radio that sat on the top shelf, behind the bar. She shook her head indignantly. Marrying one man to another man! Whatever next? Man and goat? It was, she felt, the sort of moral aberration that had confirmed the decision of Didymus Kigali to leave the Anglican Church several years earlier. The couple now sought everlasting life in the capacious but stern bosom of the Church of the Blessed Lamb, Kuwisha’s fastest growing sect, which defended old values and warned of the eternal damnation that awaited those who denied the Light of the Lord.

  “Mildred!”

  There was a tone of urgency in the call that came from Charity, who had arrived a few minutes earlier, still rubbing her eyes and yawning.

  “Mildred!”

  “Coming, coming . . .”

  10

  “I suppose,” said Cecil Pearson, Kuwisha-based Africa correspondent of the London Financial News, standing in front of Punabantu’s desk as if before the headmaster, “I suppose you are going to deport me.”

  “Why on earth would we deport you? Why would we do that?”

  The press secretary to President Nduka seemed genuinely taken aback.

  “Investigate your tax returns, yes. Check your foreign exchange dealings, certainly. We might even ask your steward and your gardener whether you contribute on their behalf to the national security fund, as every employer is obliged to do.”

  As Puna almost certainly knew, there was not a journalist in town who had not broken all these laws.

  “But deport you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Why should we do you a favour? Before you know it, you would be an ‘award winning journalist’ – that’s the phrase, isn’t it, ‘award winning’?”

  He shuddered. “And then you’d be giving lectures in London, addressing Amnesty . . . no telling where it would end.”

  Matters had moved with extraordinary speed.

  A couple of days earlier, Pearson had been on the BA flight to London, awaiting take-off, relishing the prospect of disclosing the contents of a secretly tape recorded session between the leader of the opposition and President Nduka, in the president’s office.

  Minutes before the cabin doors were shut, Pearson had been marched off the plane by a senior Central Intelligence Organisation official, and both men had sat in the airport office as the tape was replayed.

  Quite how it was that, instead of hearing President Nduka attempt to bribe the country’s opposition leader, they listened to Edward Furniver reading a story to his god-children. Pearson could not understand.

  But even the notorious CIO needed more than circumstantial evidence to put a British journalist on trial for what could well be his life. And after two nights in a filthy prison cell the Africa correspondent for the London Financial News had been driven to State House, where he found himself standing in the office of Jonathan Punabantu.

  Punabantu looked positively agitated.

  “Deport you?” he asked again.

  He shook his head. “Of course not. In fact, you’re welcome to stay for a few days. Probably get another interview with the Old Man. He’s very keen on this debt-for-rhino swap. You know about it? Top of the donor agenda . . . the meeting starts today.”

  Pearson had heard rumours that such a swap was in the offing. Here was Puna, all but confirming it. The journalist in him took over, and he began composing an intro to a news story, in his head: “Africa’s threatened rhino population will benefit from an unprecedented debt relief deal between Kuwisha and its external creditors.”

  Not a bad lead, he thought. The next paragraph all but wrote itself:

  “Underwritten by the World Bank and backed by the international aid agency WorldFeed, the scheme links an increase in the country’s depleted game stock to the write-off of external debt. If the pilot programme in Kuwisha proves successful, it will be offered to all of Africa’s highly indebted poorest countries.”

  Not bad at all. Certainly a story worth staying on for for an extra few days, before returning to London for a stint on the Financial News foreign desk. His time in Africa had spoiled him. Try as he may, he could not get excited by editing stories on vehicle emission control regulations issued by Brussels, or the latest flat-bed knitting machine directive from the Ministry of Industry.

  Was there a catch in the offer, wondered Pearson. The mood in the presidential press secretary’s office at State House certainly remained a bit frosty.

  Punabantu studied the nervous young man.

  Pearson, blood caked around the head wound where a rioting student’s stone had hit him three nights ago, started to feel dizzy. The room began to tilt, and Pearson concentrated his gaze on a Christmas tree, complete with angels, which occupied a corner of the office.

  “Be sure, Mr Cecil Pearson, we know your tricks. You have been lucky, very, very lucky. The tape you were listening to when security picked you up on the plane was the wrong one.

  “But” – Jonathan Punabantu wagged his finger vigorously – “now we know you. This time, we watch you. Maybe, you are a spy, someone Joshua Nkomo, you know, the big man who fought Ian Smith of Rhodesia, used to call ‘a journalist plus’?”

  Pearson said nothing.

  “I hope you have been well treated?”

  Looking back over the events of the past couple of days, Pearson had to concede that no-one had actually laid a finger on him. But he had been more frightened than he cared to admit. In fact the experience had been ghastly. And when the Central Intelligence officers had come to question him, they made some nasty threats.

  He described some of the more upsetting suggestions to Puna.

  The press secretary made noises of sympathy.

  “Dreadful, quite dreadful. The things they can do with a plastic bag and buckets of water. Will you be making a formal complaint, then?”

  Pearson shook his head.

  For the next couple of minutes Punabantu leafed through a file, which Pearson assumed was his.

  Every now and then, the man smiled, or clicked his tongue and looked up disapprovingly at Pearson, who was still standing in front of the desk. At last, he said: “Sit down, sit down. You really are a lucky man . . .”

  Pearson lowered himself into one of the office green leather armchairs, bought in the 1950s from London’s Reform Club by the British colonial governor of Kuwisha.

  Punabantu put the file to one side.

  “So, Pearson. You didn’t take the president’s advice.”

  Puna could only be referring to the interview with President Nduka granted not long before his airport arrest.

  “What advice was that?”

  “To keep your nose out of Kuwisha’s business.”

  “He invited me to come back, for God’s sake. Said I could write my book here. Even said I would be welcome. In fact, suggested I shouldn’t leave . . . instead of behaving like a typical expat, going home after a three-year contract is up . . .”

  The words tumbled out, and to his dismay, Pearson felt close to tears.

  Puna shrugged.

  “Pearson,” he said, “you are too clever” – the word “clever” was seldom used in a complimentary sense in Kuwisha. It was redolent of contempt, leavened only by grudging respect for sheer cunning.

  “When you asked me at the end of your audience with HE whether he was talking about domestic poli
tics, I said he was.”

  Pearson nodded.

  “Yes, of course I remember. So what?”

  “So you were warned, but still went ahead.”

  Puna stood, came round his desk and dropped into an armchair opposite the journalist.

  “It was a warning to all dissidents, foreign and local. He spoke about lions that attack bravely from the front, yes?”

  Pearson nodded.

  “And leopards that are more dangerous because they are snakes and attack from behind . . . yes?”

  For a moment Pearson was baffled . . . lions, leopards, now snakes. Then he realised that the press secretary was talking about sneaks.

  Puna wasn’t finished.

  “Well, Mr Cecil Pearson, whose father so admired Cecil John Rhodes, are you like a leopard? Or perhaps the president was too kind. I myself think that you and your kind are like vultures. Not killing, but watching, always watching.”

  The press secretary stood up, sucked in his paunch, stuck his head forward, elongated his neck, and flapped his arms. For a moment he had become one of the scavenging birds that descended on the city each day.

  He resumed his seat.

  There was a knock on the door, and a steward came in with a tray which he set down on the table between them, and then backed out, deferentially.

  “Help yourself . . . scones made in the State House kitchen,” said Puna.

  On the tray was a pot of tea kept hot by a cosy with a print of Anne Hathaway’s cottage, two teacups and saucers, slices of lemon, a bowl of sugar and a jug of milk, with the flies kept at bay by a beaded muslin cover. In the middle, protected by this array of crockery, stood a silver cake holder piled high with scones, while a bowl alongside had strawberry jam and butter.

  Pearson could not help noticing that the butter, individually wrapped in foil, was from Denmark and the jam, sealed in little tubs, was from Holland.

  “Yes,” said Puna, following his guest’s gaze, “we have many cows and grow strawberries on the Nyali plateau. But you know why we import these things, Pearson, my friend?”