Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘What do you want me to do? Run a story?’

  ‘That would put him in more danger, I am afraid,’ said the bearded student. ‘His only chance is to get away with his family, go south to Mozambique where he will be safe to carry on the struggle. There is a boat he can catch from Mombasa; unfortunately, these days, no one goes anywhere without magendo.’ He rubbed fingers against thumb, the universal gesture of black money. ‘He needs five thousand shillings to get his family out. Only five thousand shillings for a new life.’

  ‘We would not ask you for that much,’ said a flat-nosed, very black man who had not spoken before. ‘Five hundred shillings would be a good start. It would get him and his family to Mombasa.’

  Gaby stopped on the street. The eight men stopped with her and stood in a circle around her. They felt very big, very close. She knew, they knew, it was a scam. But nobody said so.

  ‘I don’t have that much,’ she lied, twitching her toes in her left boot.

  ‘That does not matter,’ said Flat Nose. ‘You have traveller’s cheques?’

  ‘No,’ she lied again. ‘Not on me. Back at the hotel.’

  ‘A credit card, then. You are a journalist, you will have a credit card. You can get money out of a cash machine. There is one not far. We will take you to it.’

  There is a fatal passivity in being conned, Gaby realized. You know it is happening, yet you go along with it, you play it to the end, because it is the only way to make it stop. They know you will pay them their five hundred shillings to be free of them and they will go back to their street corner and tell the same tale to the next mark who comes along asking the way to Tom M’boya Street. It would not have been so bad if they had simply cut the straps of her bag and roared off on a moped. That would have been an opportunity seen and taken in an instant; there would have been nothing personal about it, not like this slow, drawing out of your trust and then gang-raping it.

  There was a dispenser she could use. As they had said, it was not far. She fumbled her card out of her bag. A white man in Chinos and a faded denim shirt was coming down the street. She did not want him to see the final sting. He was looking at her. He adjusted her course toward her. He was smiling at her. Beaming.

  ‘Honey! There you are!’

  The stranger swept her off her feet and kissed her hard on the mouth.

  ‘When you didn’t turn up, I came looking. I know how easy it is to get lost in this town.’ He had an American accent. He seized Gaby’s hand and drew her away from the hustlers. ‘Excuse me, guys, hope you don’t mind, it’s just we’re running a little late.’

  He did not let go of Gaby’s hand until they were around two corners.

  ‘Jesus. Whoever you are, thank you.’

  ‘Was it the Rwandan refugee story?’ the American asked. He was averagely tall, averagely built, averagely handsome. His accent was averagely mid-Western. But his eyes had the same blue twinkle that had made Paul Newman Gaby’s first true love, and that redeemed all the averages into superlatives.

  Gaby could still taste his kiss.

  ‘It was the student-on-the-run-from-the-government story. How did you know?’

  ‘They got me too. Fresh off the plane and they scammed me for a hundred dollars. I was so ashamed I couldn’t admit it to anyone for a month.’

  Gaby shuddered as if they had laid hands on her body. She could understand such shame.

  ‘All I did was ask the way the Tom M’boya Street. I reckoned they looked safer than the boys in funny outfits.’

  ‘Like something from an old blaxploitation movie?’ Gaby nodded. ‘Should have asked them. They’re watekni; they might have flirted a bit but they wouldn’t have tried to fleece you. The Sheriffs insist on good manners in their posse members.’

  ‘Watekni?’

  ‘Semi-legal hacker gangs. Information brokers. Cyberpunk caste. They take Shaft as role model, but they’re sound enough. Tom M’boya Street.’ They had walked a hundred metres and two right turns. Gaby could see the intersection where she had been picked up by the hustlers. It was less than half a block away.

  ‘Where abouts?’ asked the American.

  ‘Right here.’ They were at the door of SkyNet News. She put her card back in her bag and found her identity pass. When she looked up, the American in the Chinos and denim shirt had vanished as utterly as if he had never existed. Paul Newman as angel?

  She did not even know his name.

  Gaby McAslan fastened her identity to her shirt and trotted up the steps. She was only ten minutes late.

  ~ * ~

  6

  Videodiary entry: March 20 2008

  Pan around a very large room filled with desks, workstations and people. The camera is stopped down for interior fluorescents: the windows blaze with light. If there was such a thing as smell-o-vision, there would be a strong aroma of coffee. Over the high level of ambient noise, Gaby McAslan’s voice can be heard.

  Well, this is it, Pa. Top of the world. Well, seventh floor, SkyNet News Nairobi, English Language section. Germans are next to the window, Scandinavians are back against the wall, which is kind of glum but satisfies their national characteristic. That glassed in office-ette is where Great White Chief T.P. Costello presides over us all. He’s supposed to be lovable and hugable and everyone’s big daddy: can’t say I’ve found that yet. Maybe he’s still pissed at me for being late on my first day, but professional instincts tell me it’s something more, though I don’t know what I’ve done to offend him.

  The camera moves to a tall, dark-haired white man in his middle years. He is thin, his face is all planes and angles, his hair is suspiciously less grey than it should be, but it may be due to the personal energy that shines out of him even when he is sitting on a desk drinking coffee. He is smartly dressed. On the window ledge behind him is a row of unattractive trophies and awards. He notices Gaby surreptitiously videoing him, visibly straightens, smartens and waggles his fingers: hello camera.

  This man of course needs no introduction, being the one and only Jake Aarons, SkyNet’s chief East Africa correspondent and darling of a million late-evening news special reports. Please note that, video-evidence to the contrary, he does in fact exist from the waist down. Apparently there is a cute little Somali boy who can personally testify to this same fact, but one shouldn’t repeat office bitchery. Sexual peccadilloes aside, he gets the angles on the news that no one else gets: no one, however seems to get angles on him, which I suspect is how he likes it. Something of a man of mystery, our Jake, despite - or is it because of? - his very public persona. OK, Jake, you can stop posing for the camera now.

  An olive-skinned woman in her late thirty somethings is leaning over a researcher’s desk. Her hair is Latin black, as are her eyes. There is something predatory in the way she dominates the researcher’s space. She is expensively and smartly dressed, too expensively and smartly for Nairobi. She wears perhaps too much silver.

  Abigail Santini. On-line features editrix, and my boss. She does not like me. That’s all right, because I don’t like her, and it’s always refreshing to be mutual about these things. At least I have good reasons not to like her. One: she insists on being called ‘Abby’ and there is not room in this office for two names ending in ‘aby’. Two: she enjoys the power of executive authority with none of the creative responsibilities of those she lords it over. Three: she looks good, and damn well knows it, and has Mediterranean features that tan beautifully and never freckle, burn and then peel, and has a classic aquiline nose of the type that built the glory that was Rome and not the snub thing of a race whose idea of civilization was stealing each other’s cattle. Now you can see why I don’t like her. What I can’t understand is why she shouldn’t like me.

  The eye of the lens comes to rest on two black men at a video editing suite drinking coffee. One is small, wiry, bearded; he is sitting on a chair. The other is so extraordinarily tall you can tell it even though he is sitting on the edge of the desk. It is quite obvious that they are of di
fferent tribes, different races, and are the closest of friends. The tall one sees Gaby’s lens on him and waggles his tongue and makes a phallic gesture with his fist.

  My heroes. My buddies. My adopted family. Tembo and Faraway. Cameraman and communications engineer. SkyNet’s Number One team. They grew up within five miles of each other up in the north near Lake Victoria, but Tembo is Luhya and Faraway is Luo. This apparently is important. Something to do with Bantus as opposed to Nilo-Hamitics.

  Faraway’s name is self-explanatory. Even among a race of basketball players he is exceptional. Tembo means ‘elephant’ in Swahili. Memory like an elephant? I ask. No, hung like an elephant, Faraway tells me with great delight. No wonder he’s never been able to steal Tembo’s wife away from him, he says. Faraway is a career flirt. He has turned sexual harassment into high art. His life is ruled by the politics of cool and, he says, his dick. He cannot meet a woman without trying to talk her into his bed. Neither they, or he, take him seriously. That he occasionally succeeds surprises him most of all. He tells me I am a demon-woman sent from hell to tempt him into unspeakable sin because of my red hair and green eyes. There is only one way he knows to exorcise the demon in me, he says, which involves pelvis-pumping and a lascivious grin. Dream on, Faraway.

  On the other hand, Tembo is good livin’, as we say back home. He’s a born-again Christian. He directs the choir in St Stephen’s church. It’s good enough to make an atheist believe in God, Faraway says, with genuine pride in his friend. He has two wee girls so gorgeous you’d want to eat them; he shows his photographs at the drop of a hat. In his lunch-hour he’s always editing videos he’s shot of them.

  For some reason they have decided to teach me to be African. Unlike most of the people here, they think I have the capacity. Maybe it’s because one of the first things I did here was put my name down for the SkyNet football team - only four whites and no women. Tembo is a useful left winger, and Faraway, by virtue of his height, is goalkeeper, which he might actually be good at if he stopped showing off and chatting up women spectators long enough to actually stop a ball. Problem is they can’t decide whether I should be a Luhya African or a Luo African.

  I get my real lessons in how to be African at my new lodgings. The barman at the PanAfric recommended it: Mrs Kivebulaya, the proprietrix, is a cousin of a cousin of something of his, and likes Irish girls. And what’s more, it’s just up the hill on First N’Gong Avenue. I didn’t think I could settle in something that calls itself the Episcopalian Guesthouse, but Mrs Kivebulaya runs a trim ship. OK, so I rode up in the taxi with that night’s dinner - a goat - tied up in the back seat, but there’s a pool, the gardens are quiet and good to work in, though missionaries speak a completely different kind of English to mine, one full of bishops and rural deaneries and Theological Education by Extension.

  It’s the little, trivial things that I miss most about home. Things like buying sanitary towels, or proper chocolate that hasn’t gone musty in old-fashioned purple foil wrappers. Diet Coke, in cans, not bottles where you pay more for the deposit on the bottle than its contents. Rock’n’roll. For the first ten minutes Kenyan radio sounds like the Greatest Thing You’ve Ever Heard, and then after that you’d kill to be able to sing along to the ‘Mama Mia, Let Me Go’ bit of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Late-night shopping. In a mall. I miss a horizon. I don’t like feeling I’m in the middle of a vast tract of high, flat land. I want terrain. Like the sea around the Watchhouse; even if you couldn’t see it, you always knew it was there. I want landmarks. Is this homesickness?

  Mrs Kivebulaya does her best to make me feel at home -hospitality is her mission from God; I can agree with that - with cosy chats and the best coffee you have ever tasted at the table in the garden where I like to work. She worships with coffee and banana cake. Her most important contribution to my happy and successful integration into a new land, new culture and new job are the tales of the bizarre and wonderful that seem to be everyday life here in Kenya. Yesterday she told me about a friend of a relative of an acquaintance of hers who is a complete rude boy and a glue sniffer. Seems he broke into the Yellow Imp Glue Factory on Jogoo Road for the biggest high of his career, leaned too far over a vat and fell in. Overcome by fumes he climbed out, lay down on the floor to recover and passed out. Next morning the staff found him stuck fast to the floor and had to cut him free with a power saw. This morning over breakfast she told me about a group of Christians returning from a rally by canoe across Lake Victoria. They encountered a boatload of rude boys out for a pleasure cruise with their girlfriends, who jeered at them and told them they were no good Christians, they had no faith, going in canoes, why, they should walk on the lake like their God. Valiantly responding to the challenge, fifteen leaped up and stepped over the side. ‘They sank like stones,’ Mrs K. said, rocking with laughter, which reminds you of a sailing ship in heavy weather. ‘They were pulling bodies out of the water for days. Six were never accounted for, but there are a lot of crocodiles in Lake Victoria.’ There seems to be no end to her supply of stories of the bizarre and wonderful. Which is a good thing, as I’ve just sold them to T.P. as an idea for a series of humorous (or just plain surreal) end-of-news fillers: ‘And Finally’ tales from the Nairobi Station. It may not be much, but it’s another step closer to the Chaga. Oops. Captain on the bridge. Better make as if I’m writing up these text overlays of Jake’s interview with UNECTA’s Chief of Operations.

  ~ * ~

  7

  ‘It’s the hardest thing in the world to get a good picture of,’ said Tembo, passing the bowl of irio. As part of his Africanization lessons, he had invited Gaby to dinner with his family at their house out by Limuru. As extended Uncle to Sarah and Etambele, Tembo’s daughters, Faraway had of course been invited too.

  It was a good house in a good neighbourhood. SkyNet paid its senior cameramen well. It had a verandah, this was where they ate. Moths fluttered around the tin candle-lanterns. The dark garden twittered with night insects. Screening trees muted the traffic; the air was warm and smelled of Africa, which is not one smell but many smells: woodsmoke and red earth and fruit and shit and night-blooming flowers, but is more than the sum of all the things that make it up, as the perfume of a woman is more than the perfume of the scent she puts on.

  Faraway uncapped a beer and passed the bottle to Gaby.

  ‘I do not just mean the actual physical difficulties,’ Tembo continued.

  ‘Like bribing your way past the soldiers,’ Faraway said heathenly.

  ‘Like the way it attacks plastics, which means your camera breaking out in flowers if you do not wrap it up carefully. But that is only part of it. It is just a hard thing to get a good image of. For a start, under the canopy there is very little light; and then, what do you video? It looks the same wherever you point the camera. And there are things in there so different from what we understand as living that we find it hard to comprehend them. We cannot see them like we see a tree and know what it is and what it does, what the bits we cannot see will look like. Everything is different: what is it the people at Ol Tukai have worked out? They have catalogued over fifteen thousand different species in the Chaga. And of course, every time you go back, they have changed into something else.’

  Mrs Kivebulaya’s ‘And Finally’ stories had won Gaby critical appreciation, grudging acknowledgement by T.P. Costello and a place at a table in the Thorn Tree Bar of the New Stanley Hotel, where the real journalists went to drink, but those were not the thing for which she had come to Africa. That thing was still denied her. She worked in the Chaga every day, in the gigabytes of images, documents, reports, simulations stored in archives. She knew all that was humanly knowable about the air-reefs, the pseudo-corals, the hand-trees, the things that looked like marine radiolaria for which no one had yet invented a name; except how they felt, how they smelled, how they tasted. She felt trapped beneath Nairobi’s smog layer while her star burned bright in the south. Tembo and Faraway could not understand her impatience. ‘It will wait,�
�� they said. ‘It is not going anywhere. Well, actually it is, and in the best direction, towards you.’

  Tembo’s children arrived on either side of Gaby with dishes of chicken.

  ‘You are to have the gizzard,’ said Sarah, the older one. Both were beautiful and serious and funny. ‘It is always kept for the guest of honour.’

  Gaby looked at Faraway to see if he had put his extended nieces up to a joke on the poor ignorant m’zungu. If so, he was playing it mightily deadpan.

  ‘Actually, I don’t know what a chicken gizzard looks like,’ she said. ‘In my country we don’t eat them.’ Etambele, the younger girl, whose name meant ‘Early Evening, Just After Tea-Time’, which was the exact time she was born, looked amazed and whispered something to Sarah.

  ‘My sister wants to know if your hair is real,’ Sarah said.