Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Gaby turned in at the sign for the Jadini Beach Hotel. A plastic shingle informed her that it was in fact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At a checkpoint hastily assembled from an oil drum filled with sand and a bent metal pole on a pivot, Gaby showed her press card and asked where to go for an application for a Form DF108. The policemen directed her along a road that went round the back of the tennis courts, past the water-sports store and the pool chlorination plant to the staff accommodation block where the department that handled DF108 applications was housed.

  There was another checkpoint behind the tennis courts. Gaby showed the man her press card. The man refused to swing up his bent metal pole and let her pass. Access to this department for foreigners required a form DF108.

  ‘I am trying to get an application for a DF108. I can’t unless you let me in.’

  ‘I am sorry. I cannot let you in without a DF108. Have you tried your consular office?’

  ‘They sent me here.’

  ‘This is most irregular.’

  ‘Will this make it regular?’ She held up two hundred shilling notes.

  ‘Attempting to bribe a government official is a serious offence,’ the man said.

  ‘Look, you stupid man, all I need is two minutes. If you won’t let me past, then you go and get me one.’

  ‘Desert my post in the time of my country’s need?’

  ‘If you say “it’s more than my job’s worth”, you can add assaulting a government official to your charge sheet,’ Gaby McAslan said. A black Mercedes came crunching down the sand road and stopped at the other side of the barrier. The driver sounded his horn.

  ‘You will have to go away and apply through proper channels,’ the government official said. ‘Do not waste my time.’ The government car sounded its horn again. The official lifted his pole and saluted as the Mercedes came through. Gaby considered darting through the gap but the pole came down so fast it bounced on its welded pivot. The black car stopped alongside the Sky Net RAV. A mirrored window hummed down. A big sweaty black face looked out.

  ‘You should be impressed that in these corrupt times there are still people conscientious about their jobs, Ms McAslan,’ the man said.

  ‘Dr Dan!’

  The politician summoned the government official.

  ‘The m’zungu is with me,’ Dr Dan said. Gaby thought she heard the official say yes, minister. The Mercedes turned among the palm trees. Gaby followed it through the barrier. The official was saluting again.

  ~ * ~

  ‘I thought you were dead,’ Gaby said. The tables around the pool had all been occupied by men in suits with PDUs and cases of papers, but the presence of Dr Dan cleared any number of civil servants and brought waiters swarming. ‘Politically or actually.’

  ‘Whisky, yes?’ Dr Dan signed the bar chitty. The glasses were etched with the coat of arms of the Republic of Kenya. ‘I almost was. Both ways. When they could not kill me politically, they tried other means. It has a long and honourable history in our country. But I do not die so easily. This much— ‘ he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart’—is as good as million miles. But now we have a new President and a new order. And a new Foreign Minister.’ He stirred his drink with his plastic giraffe. The years have been soft to him, Gaby thought. He is bigger, slower, heavier, but it is the weight of wisdom and power and slow-stalking cunning.

  ‘Foreign Minister,’ she said. ‘That’s how T.P. was able to get me back into the country after four and a half years in the wilderness.’

  ‘I could not help you when you needed me last. It was the least I could do - I do not know why there has been a problem with the DF108. But there will be no problem now. I have thought much about you, over the years.’

  ‘I’ve thought about this place every single day I was covering those wars. One bloody stupid little ethnic slaughter-fest after another. Freeze the ass off you in Siberia this time of year. Mother Russia’s fucked, but won’t lie back and submit to the inevitable.’

  ‘Mother Kenya too.’

  ‘What’s it like up in Nairobi?’

  ‘They say it is well established in the northern suburbs. The Tacticals are coming out of their townships to fight each other and the security forces. The UN pretend they are implementing an evacuation plan, but there are too many people, and there is no law, no order, and not everyone wants to be evacuated anyway.’

  ‘Are they really letting them go?’

  A group of secretaries were cooling their legs in the pool as they ate their lunches. They kicked up the water, laughing.

  ‘They say a thousand a day pass through the Westlands gate alone,’ Dr Dan said. ‘Of course, they cannot control entry to it, any more than they could ever control any other part of it. Who knows how many tens of thousands cross terminum unauthorized? They tattoo them, did you know that? The UN soldiers on the gates have tattoo guns. They are instant, painless, so I am told. Once you are marked and pass through the gate, you may not return on pain of being shot.’

  ‘What symbol do they use?’

  ‘A letter E, on the back of the hand. It stands for “Exile”. It should have been a C

  ‘For “Chaga”?’

  ‘For “Citizen”.’

  ‘They need you, Dr Dan,’ Gaby said. ‘They need your vision and bloody-mindedness to build a proper nation.’

  ‘Thank you, Ms McAslan. Do you recall when we first met, on the night flight from London, that I regretted that the Chaga would not give us time to build a nation? Five years on, I can see that the Chaga is giving us the time, and the space, and the resources, to build the Kenya we should have built. A fine nation, an African nation; that is not some continuation of Western colonialism in another form, with Western legal and political and educational systems, Western values and morals. In the Chaga we can find African solutions to African problems - maybe we will find out in there that what we thought were our problems are those we have been given by the West. We can do a frightening thing: we can build a new Africa that does not owe the West anything, that does not need what the West has to sell us, that has resources and capabilities the West can only envy.’ Dr Dan looked out across the pool and the palms that led down to the beach, and to the grey hulls of the warships beyond the white water of the reef. ‘Those gunboats, that they say are there to protect us: they are no different from those letter Es the United Nations tattoos on the hands of the exiles. They are afraid of us. They are afraid of what we could become, when the nations of the New Africa become the most powerful on earth. You asked me for my vision: I have shown it to you. I hope you are content with what you see. Ah!’ A civil servant in a Hawaiian shirt and creased chino pants gave Dr Dan an envelope. ‘Excellent. Thank you.’ He handed the envelope to Gaby.

  ‘Your DF108.’

  ‘You don’t know what this means, Dr Dan.’

  ‘A friend for the new nation, I hope. Oh. I almost forgot to mention. An old friend of yours has come back to Kenya.’

  ‘Oksana Telyanina?’

  Dr Dan frowned, not recognizing the name.

  ‘No. Dr Shepard.’

  ~ * ~

  55

  She flew up on an early flight in a cavernous Antonov heavy lifter. Faraway was with her. They were the only civilians. Their seats were in the middle of the centre block, far from the windows. She would not be able to see the Chaga. Gaby tried instead to get some of the soldiers to talk about their anticipation of the withdrawal from Nairobi but they were young and this was their first time out of their mother countries and they had been told to be suspicious of journalists by frightening noncommissioned officers. Gaby ended up sleeping most of the flight on Faraway’s shoulder. The white boy soldiers wondered what a white woman was doing with a black man. The black boy soldiers wondered why a black man did not find his own kind good enough for him.

  T.P. Costello was waiting in arrivals, like that first time when everything was fresh and clean and thrilling and could not go wrong. He did not seem to Gaby to have changed his clot
hes in four and a half years. Within those clothes, his flesh had softened and slumped, his chin descended, his hairline ascended. But irredeemably a boiled owl.

  ‘What the hell kept you?’ he asked, because he knew she knew it was expected of him. ‘The UN’s announced its withdrawal from Nairobi. Three days and it’s open city.’

  Everything that points backwards points forwards. Old Land-cruiser in the car park. New fluorescent orange zebra stripes.

  ‘People with big guns kept mistaking the SkyNet globe for the UN logo,’ T.P. explained.

  Old catechism, new rubric. T.P. handed Gaby a sleeveless jacket the same colour as the car’s stripes. ‘Colour-of-the-day for the press corps. Don’t look at it like that, these have saved the lives of several folk you know.’ He took a canvas bag from a pocket and dropped into Gaby’s hand. She almost let it slip through her fingers; it was extraordinarily heavy.

  ‘What have you got in here.’

  ‘Krugerrands. You’ll need negotiables. Forget dollars, forget Deutschmarks, forget yen; gold is the only universally convertible currency on the streets. And something to keep it, and you, safe.’

  He handed her a .45 revolver. Gaby’s little frozen wars had taught her how to handle weapons, though she detested their feel against her skin. She broke the piece. It was loaded.

  ‘These are Black Rhinos.’

  ‘You put them down, you don’t want them getting back up again.’

  ‘Where am I supposed to keep this? In my hand bag?’

  In the back seat, Faraway laughed priapically, thinking of suggestions.

  ‘Goes without saying that you can’t get accommodation in this burg for love nor money,’ T.P. said, following the directions of the MPs with white gloves toward the exit checkpoint. ‘Even your old friend Mrs Kivebulaya’s guesthouse is like a sardine tin.’

  ‘Gaby will be staying with me,’ Faraway said. T.P. greeted the disclosure in purse-lipped silence as the soldiers waved the Landcruiser through onto the city road.

  In four and a half years since she last drove along this road the squatter towns had grown to enclose the airport on all sides. Cardboard shacks slumped against the perimeter wire, used the backs of warehouses and hangars as lean-to walls. The pall of eternal blue wood smoke hung over the plastic roofs, interspersed by the occasional dense plume where a shanty was burning. The women carried their burdens of sticks and plastic basins of washing on their heads. The men sat on their heels and watched the women work. The children, with flies around their eyes and their fingers in their mouths, looked at the aeroplanes taking off over their heads. Everything was the same, but it was different. The spirit had changed. The people in the alleys, or sitting by the side of the road selling their piles of Sprite cans and karma bracelets, seemed listless and apathetic. The life had gone out of them, leaving them transparent and desiccated. Gaby understood. They were the tidewater people; the flotsam left beached now the others had all gone out on the waters; to the coast, to the new transit camps in the east and far north, to the Chaga. Of those who remained some were too scared to go. Some were too poor to go. Some did not wish to go, but would wait with what they had until the Chaga came and made them decide where to go. They would not wait long. Gaby saw the hostile skyline of coral fingers and hand-trees rising in isolated stands above the shanty rooftops. A mile to the north, a copse of Loolturesh balloons hovered over the encircling slums.

  For some this was enough to overcome their fear or their poverty or their inertia. By car, by bus, by truck, by matatu, by moped taxi or ox cart or hand cart or donkey, by bicycle, by foot, they would take their things and their lives on to the road. The outbound lanes of the airport highway were a slow procession of the dispossessed, fifty feet wide, ten miles long, grinding along between lines of guarding soldiers.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘I said, have you heard that Shepard’s back?’ T.P. asked.

  ‘I’ve heard.’ She wanted it to sound like it meant no more to her than the return of some other journalist she respected but knew only through his work. She wanted it to sound like that to Faraway. Shepard had never written to her, never tried to contact her, to give her a chance to explain or apologize or say can we start again. So why did her heart kick her every time she heard his name and thought of him back in this dying city? Because she loved him. She did not love Faraway. She had given him sex for his loyalty and friendship and goodness, but not love. They had all been right, all the ones who had said she was a monster. ‘So, what’s he been doing?’

  ‘Over in Uganda and Zaire mostly, getting his hands dirty. UNECTA didn’t want to lose him, so they demoted him to fronting a trans-terminum research team working out of Kilembe. Getting a lot of respect: most of those patent new-gene food staples the agribusiness corporations have cut from Chaga sources come out of work done by Shepard’s team. Then last week they find his replacement as UNECTAfrique Peripatetic Executive, Conrad Laurens the Bouncing Belgian, dead in a bedroom in the Intercontinental with three Chinese babes. So Shepard gets called back to help with the great Going Out Of Business Sale. They’ve gutted what’s left of Ol Tukai - the thing ran out of fuel so they left it beached in the middle of a drive-in cinema. Chaga’s taking the thing to pieces now.’

  The Landcruiser slammed into an emergency brake. T.P.’s knuckles were white on the wheel. Both feet were flat to the floor. He threw the wheel and missed by inches the UN truck that had stopped dead in the middle of the highway. Gaby untangled herself from the back of T.P.’s seat, opened her mouth to yell at him, and saw it.

  It was coming in across the shanty town from the north, far off the glide path of any aircraft, and low, very low. Too low for safety. It was big, and it was coming fast. If it did not hit the road, it would not be by much. If the truck had not stopped, it would have been hit. The thing passed overhead in a rush of air. It seemed to hang over the Landcruiser. Gaby could feel the cool shadow of its wings. There was something of the bat in it, and something of the hang-glider or microlyte, she thought, but also the predatory streamlines of a multi-role combat aircraft.

  God, but it was big.

  The people on the far side of the highway threw themselves flat as the thing seemed to dive at them. It puffed gas. Its wings warped. For all its size, it was as light as a leaf. It lifted up above the shanties at the edge of the road, gained a few hundred feet of altitude and banked.

  The sudden hammer of helicopter rotors was almost shocking. The machine came up from behind a ridge to the south of the road: a Hind B assault helicopter. It scraped the tin can chimney tops, pulled a high-gee turn and went after the intruder.

  Everyone was standing up now, watching the helicopter close with the flying thing. There was a burst of chain gun fire and everyone cheered. Another, more cheering. A third and the great bat-glider-jet came apart in a dozen spinning pieces that smashed into the shanty town. Gaby saw shards of wing and tail and streamlined fuselage go cartwheeling up into the air together with sheets of corrugated metal and pieces of wood and shredded plastic.

  But the squatter town people on the highway were cheering like it was a carnival, or the Pope had come. Gaby got out of the car and looked toward the crash site, shading her eyes with her hands. The helicopter wheeled in triumph and came across the airport road in a storm of dust and turbine roar.

  ‘I didn’t think they’d be that big,’ she said.

  ‘Do a hell of a lot of damage when they hit, but it’s only the poor of the parish so the UN doesn’t worry,’ T.P. said, standing beside her. Soldiers were running up the shanty-town dirt streets, fanning out in a search pattern. ‘Their job is to keep the access to the airport open, that’s all. That’s the closest one’s got in weeks. They’re losing their touch, but at least the helicopter downed it before the payload became active. They’re like crop-dusters, spraying Chaga-spores all over the damn place.

  ‘You think the doodlebugs are impressive, you should see the Hatching Towers. Dozens of the things, up on the edge of terminum, about
three hundred feet high. The doodlebugs grow in pods at the top. They hatch, stretch their wings - just like butterflies, I can show you the footage - and then drop off the tit and glide away. The Kenyan army - what hasn’t deserted yet - is up there blasting away at them with artillery. Of course the Chaga grows them back as fast as they blow them away, but they’re at least slowing them up. The helicopters usually get what’s left. I’m surprised they let one get this close to the airport. One hit there and the whole UN program is fucked.’