Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Etambele, don’t ask rude questions about our guest,’ her mother said. She was a small, silent woman, very beautiful in traditional dress, but peripheral to this men’s world of news and affairs and events.

  ‘I know how I could find out,’ Faraway said, which was as much as he could get away with in the company of a Christian family.

  ‘It’s real,’ Gaby said to the staring sisters. ‘It goes all the way down my back. I haven’t had it cut in seven years, which is older than you are, Etambele.’ The girls went round-eyed in astonishment. Gaby let them touch her hair. They giggled and fled to fetch the sweet potatoes.

  Chicken gizzard was very much better than she had feared.

  ‘UNECTA is re-evaluating its security position,’ Tembo said. ‘They are getting scared about the refugee problem. Sooner or later, someone will decide to disbelieve what UNECTA is telling them about the Chaga, and reckon it is a better chance than the squatter camps. That is why they are thinking about military patrols inside the Chaga.’

  ‘That is not because of the refugees,’ Faraway said. ‘That is because they are afraid of what the safari squads might find.’

  ‘Safari squads?’ Gaby asked.

  ‘They operate out of the Tacticals, the gangs that rule the townships,’ Faraway said. ‘They go in, they find things, they bring them out. They laugh in the face of United Nations quarantines. That is why they want to put soldiers into the Chaga, to stop them. If the United Nations can show that those who go in deep never return, then people in the squatter camps will say better Pumwani than the Chaga. It will work for a time. But the day will come when the people start to say, better the Chaga than Pumwani. It has to come, my friend. It has to come. The United Nations cannot stop the Chaga, neither can it evacuate ten million people.’

  ‘More, by then,’ Tembo said.

  ‘What will you do, Tembo?’ Gaby asked, seeing his wife in her beautiful dress, seeing his children on their too-high seats with their too-big cutlery.

  ‘I will trust SkyNet to look after us.’

  ‘You trust SkyNet, I will trust myself,’ Faraway said. The beers were making him outspoken.

  ‘You’d take your chances with the Chaga?’

  ‘M’zungu, in the end everyone will have to take their chances with the Chaga. Maybe even you. Just because the packages have all come down within three hundred kilometres of the Equator does not mean they always will. The very next one could come down in Paris, or New York, or even Ireland. And why does everyone assume that the Chaga is confined to the tropics? Maybe it will just keep growing, out of Africa, across the desert, across Europe, over the pole until there is nothing left, only Chaga, and we are all swinging from the trees and playing knucklebones with the aliens.’

  ‘Faraway, please, you are scaring the children,’ Tembo’s wife said softly, but firmly.

  ‘If there are aliens,’ Tembo said.

  ‘My friend here has a theological problem with intelligences from other worlds,’ Faraway said. Mrs Tembo and the children had cleared away the main course dishes. A hiss of seething oil and the smell of deep-frying finger-bananas from the kitchen louvres meant dessert. ‘Given that God created the aliens behind the Chaga, the question is, were they created in a state of grace, or are they fallen creatures, like us? If they are angels, then they run the risk of falling, should they come into contact with sinners like us. Me, I like the idea of being responsible for the fall of an angel. If they are already fallen, then do they have a means of salvation, or must we evangelize them?’

  ‘A Chaga Messiah?’ Gaby asked. The bananas arrived, piled high on serving plates, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.

  ‘There are no aliens,’ Tembo said a little impatiently. He was accustomed to his friend’s boasting, he did not like to see him massage his big male ego at the dinner table, in front of guests and family.

  ‘If they could put an entire ecology into something the size of a small matatu, I am sure there is room for a couple of aliens in the ash tray,’ Faraway said, undeterred. Mrs Tembo’s cooking succeeded in silencing him.

  The children were made ready for bed while coffee brewed. They came to say goodnight. Faraway tousled their hair and hugged them beerily. Tembo kissed them. Gaby showed them photographs she had brought of her sisters and dogs and father.

  ‘This is the house where I grew up, and here we all are in front of it. This was taken the day I left to go to London to learn to be a reporter.’

  ‘Did your mother take the photograph?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘No, it was my father’s lady friend. My mother died a long time ago, when I was quite young,’ Gaby said, and then folded the photographs quickly away before they let loose things that had no proper place here among hosts and friends. ‘Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bugs bite,’ she said to the children. They giggled appreciatively.

  Gaby’s offer to help with the dishes was politely but firmly turned down.

  ‘It is woman’s work, and tonight you are a honorary man,’ Tembo said.

  You guys have a lot to learn about feminism, Gaby thought as coffee came round. And you girls too. Faraway produced Russian cigarettes. Gaby took one.

  ‘I did not know you smoked.’

  ‘Only after dinner.’

  ‘I smoke after sex,’ he said.

  Gaby was listening to the sound of the mother in the bedroom singing her children to sleep with a song a thousand years old. It made her feel very close to and very far from home at the same time. The candles burned low in the tin lanterns. The traffic noise lessened. The honorary men talked work, about Jake Aarons, whom they all liked, and Abigail Santini, whom no one liked, and T.P. Costello, whom everyone liked but Gaby, because she said he did not like her. Tembo stared at his coffee grounds as if trying to divine the future from them, then said, ‘There is shadow on his memory. I do not know it all, it was back before I joined SkyNet, when he was East African station chief for Irish News Services. There was a woman, an Irish woman, like you. She disappeared into the Chaga. That is all I know, but I think you remind him of things he would sooner forget, Gaby.’

  She smoked another Russian cigarette and listened to the rattle of insect wings against the lantern glass.

  ‘Did he love her, Tembo?’

  ‘He has not said so.’

  ‘He loved her. So that’s why he won’t put me in front of a camera.’

  ‘Is that what you really want?’

  Gaby’s frustration blew up in her like the candle flames when the night wind blew across the eaves and through the lanterns’ ventilation slits.

  ‘What I want is to do something. Make something of my own, that I have experienced with my own senses. Not someone else’s report, someone else’s technical brief, someone else’s image or experience. Not someone else’s stories about cabinet ministers disappearing and reappearing under the name of “Mr Shit”, or weddings in country churches that turn into tribal warfare because someone can’t stop farting during the marriage vows.’

  ‘Those are good stories, Gaby,’ Faraway said.

  ‘Yes, they are good stories, but they aren’t my stories. They come to me; I want to go and get them. It doesn’t have to be video reportage; just as long as it means me acting for once and not reacting.’ She took another of Faraway’s cigarettes and lit from a candle lantern. ‘It’s like an old story my dad made up for me when I was wee. There was one of our cats - we had five -who used to stare up the chimney all the time. My dad told me that he was waiting for the night when a voice would come down the chimney saying, “The King of the Cats is dead! the King of the Cats is dead!” On that night, when that voice came, he would leap up, say, “Then I am King of the Cats!” and run up the chimney and over the rooftops to claim his crown. That was why he was looking up the chimney all the time, waiting for the call.

  ‘I feel like that stupid cat.’

  Faraway exhaled a plume of smoke and looked long at Tembo before speaking.

  ‘What if I were to s
ay that the King of the Cats is a personal friend of mine?’

  ‘Be careful, my friend,’ Tembo said.

  ‘To get stories, you need to know what is going on before anyone else, friend Gaby. To know what is going on before anyone else, you need good information. I know a man - we are the same tribe, almost the same village - who deals in that kind of information: hard to get, useful. Valuable.’

  ‘Are we talking about the Sheriffs?’ Gaby asked.

  Every day on her way in to the office she saw people in their hundreds crowd the dirt streets of the slums around the soft, silent Mercedes of the software brokers as they did their day’s hiring. The first time she had seen it she had stopped and opened her visioncam as the cars disappeared beneath the surge of bodies, hands snatching for the slips of paper with the password for the day of whatever western life insurance or savings and loan company needed data processors. The informational superhighway had promised so much to Africa, and delivered only the daily scramble to do the world’s paperwork because an African data processor cost less than a European or East Asian. The combination of the primeval and the technological had disturbed Gaby. She had watched the hired minibuses arrive to take the few away to the warehouses and enough money for a week’s food, if they worked hard. The others had returned to their homes and children. This was the public face of the East African Teleport. It was no wonder that so many turned away from it, seeing a better, or at least more glamorous future with its private face: the posses. You saw the kids everywhere, the boys in flares and long-collared shirts and platform soles, the girls in leatherette and nylon. They looked cool, they looked street, but they were merely the runners, the dealers, the minders and enforcers. The Sheriffs, known to most only by their titles, held the power, but they were no more the posses than their boys and girls. The true posse, like the True Church, was invisible, spiritual, virtual. It was the boy in Pumwani whose teenage sister sells herself on the street to pay for the deck and connection charges that will buy them both a way up and out. It was the girl living on the houseboat on Lake Victoria with a mother who tells her she is useless and a father who fucks her and grandparents who sit around all day staring at her and nine siblings who eat her food and push her out of her space, the one who dreams of some day pulling on the leather jacket and sliding on the RayBans and becoming a Name in a nameless city. It was the Likoni ferry-man who comes home every night to hang out on the cybernetic street corner until the dawn comes up out of India, high-fiving with dudes you meet only in dreams; it was the woman whose children have all been lost to religion, crack or HIV IV who finds a bigger market-place in which to sell her goods and swap gossip. It was all of these, bound together in a virtual community - the posse - under the patronage and protection of their Sheriff.

  ‘We are talking the Sheriff of Sheriffs,’ Faraway said.

  ‘Mombi would disagree with you,’ Tembo said. His wife appeared with fresh coffee. She looked suspicious: seditious talk on her verandah.

  ‘Mombi’s girls look better on the street, no one would disagree with that, but she has no breeding, no pedigree in this thing. Look how she made her money: cybersex salons. Haran is class, Haran is Sheriff of Sheriffs.’

  ‘Haran is a bad man and a damn rude boy,’ Tembo’s wife said with unexpected vehemence. ‘He is no good to anyone, none of them are, worthless posses.’

  ‘Anything you want,’ Faraway whispered confidentially to Gaby. ‘Haran can get it for you. And he does not deal in cash. He is a gentlemen, my friend Haran. He does you a favour, you do him a favour, some day, when he needs it. Maybe never.’

  ‘The devil is a gentleman too,’ said Mrs Tembo. ‘Very polite. He does you a favour, and then one day the favour he asks back is your immortal soul.’

  ‘Woman, you are prejudiced and computer illiterate,’ Faraway said. ‘You insult him, you insult all Luo. Who do you think brought Net technology and the information revolution to this poor country? Luo, that is who. Woman, you should be thanking Haran, not cursing him.’

  She scowled and returned to the kitchen.

  ‘Faraway.’

  ‘Well, it is not illegal,’ Faraway said to Tembo.

  ‘Neither is it totally legal.’

  ‘All right. I will apologize to her. It is the beer, it is the warmth of the night, it is the excellent company of my good friends, it is the superlative food!’

  This he shouted in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Gaby McAslan, believe me, you need this man. He can help you get what you want. I know where he is to be found, I can take you to him, introduce you. We are the same tribe, we are blood.’

  ~ * ~

  8

  Gaby carried the Ethiopic Gospel box carefully on her knees as the taxi driver swerved to avoid a crater in the road. In Kenya you could tell the drunk drivers. They were the ones driving straight down the roads. The box was a beautiful thing, the best in the shop. It had been made with the eyes and hands of faith. The side panels were illuminated with the four evangelists. On the top was a wide-eyed St George slaying a dragon that did not look as if it had put up much resistance. Gaby had balked at the price - half a month’s wages - but Faraway had insisted that nothing less than the best would be acceptable to Haran.

  ‘That is where a lot of big businessmen go wrong,’ he told her as the taxi negotiated the late-night downtown traffic. ‘They think they can buy a cheap Somali fake knocked up yesterday in a sweat-shop in Mogadishu, stuff it full of hundred shilling notes, or diamonds, or cocaine, and Haran will eat out of their hands. Such men receive the reward their small souls deserve. Haran, he is an aesthete. A connoisseur. A most spiritual man.’

  He practised a strange form of magendo. Haran did collect Ethiopic scripture cases, with suitable inducements inside. He would receive the donation and beg to be excused a moment while he compared the case with his large, probably unparalleled collection. If he returned with the reliquary saying that he regretted that he was already in possession of one similar, you knew that for unspecified reasons your petition had failed. If he returned empty-handed and told you your donation was a grace to his collection, you knew that you had become a client of his posse. Either way, the cash inducement inside would be gone.

  ‘It is really a question of whether he likes you or not,’ Faraway said. The taxi swept past the huddled mounds of Nairobi’s street-sleepers, piled in doorways, wrapped in cardboard and tattered blankets and laid out like victims of a small holocaust along the sidewalks. ‘And he will like you. He likes beautiful, intelligent women. Women like him. I do not know why, given what happened to him.’

  ‘And you just have to tell me, don’t you?’

  ‘It was the khat,’ Faraway said, ignoring Gaby. ‘Everyone knows that bad things can happen if you chew too much, but we never thought it would be anything like that. It began back in Kisumu when he was just starting out. He used the khat leaves to help him concentrate: he was working with up to five simultaneous screens of information. No one had ever seen anyone chew that much khat. People used to warn him that no good would come of it, and staying up, staring at screens day and night. They were right.

  ‘He was smitten with a plague of orgasms.’

  The taxi abruptly veered where there was no pothole. The driver had a sudden coughing fit. Gaby caught sight of his astonished eyes in the rearview mirror.

  ‘He could not help it. At home, at work, on the bus, out with friends, anywhere, any time: bam! An orgasm. Thirty, forty a day. The doctors had never seen anything like it. They had all kinds of explanations, but everyone knew it was too much khat. But in case you think that this is the greatest thing that could happen to a man, something terrible happened. After three months at forty orgasms a day, they suddenly stopped. Just like that. Gone! Since that day, he has never had another. Not in five years. He cannot even get it hard any more. Complete impotence. The doctors are as baffled as they were by the plague of orgasms. But I think that it is because every man has a certain number of orgasms in him, like bullets
in a gun, and he can either fire them like a hunting rifle, at one target at a time, or spray them around like a machine gun. Haran used up his lifetime of orgasms in one big go.

  ‘And you, you no good damn rude boy!’ Faraway leaned forward and poked the driver in the shoulder. ‘Stop listening to the conversations of your betters and drive this heap of rust. That is what we are paying you for, not to see your ugly face grinning away in the mirror.’

  Gaby McAslan wished Faraway had not told her that story. It would make everything so much harder, having to deal with a man who had been cursed with a plague of orgasms.

  ‘What is this Cascade Club anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘You will find out soon,’ Faraway said. ‘We are here.’

  It betrayed no secrets from the outside: a big off-street retail block fronted by an Asian supermarket, a CD store and a haberdasher’s. Blue neon waterfalls framed a door from which a bouncer in an ankle-length leather coat and the biggest Afro haircut Gaby had ever seen scrutinized the street. There was no name, no flashing sign, just the tumbling neon waterfalls. The doorman stopped two middle-aged white men in fashionable hacking jackets, riding breeches and boots.