‘I suppose so, you don’t mean my mother, like, my mum, you mean the kind of inner mother, the sort of psychic mother thing, the inner parent, the earth mother and all that Freudian stuff.’
The big gummy smile returned to Olumide’s face. ‘That is indeed what I mean Gavin Meckler, all that Freudian stuff if you like to think of it that way.’
He laughed and had a little coughing fit. Then he continued, ‘The men like you stopped fighting. They just stopped fighting and were finally able to help the women make the world better. No more praying to an angry God, no more beliefs in revenge, no more allegiance to family, to clan, tribe, race, colour of skin. Men had no more need to struggle for domination. There was nothing to dominate other than the sexual phallus.’ Again Olumide pronounced the word ‘dominate’ very slowly, making it sound like a swear word of profound offensiveness.
‘That is when men could really become the father. They could love their children without anger; the boy child grew to be a better man because he had the clear love of his father, the girl child grew up to be a less needy woman because she had the clear love of her father. The father is external. The father does not really exist at a primordial level, so contact with the father is essential because for thousands of years people had replaced the hole left by the father with the insanity of a God belief. As there is a mother inside us, we don’t need a mother to care for us when we are not children, but there is no father inside us, having a father care for us makes us whole. My father cared for me, my mother loved me but my father cared for me. That is how I became the man you see now, one hundred and forty one years later. A long, long time, and that is why you have been brought to see me Gavin Meckler, I want you to see what has happened since your time. Oh yes, we have the ships, the cities and technology, yes we have boundless energy to make our day-to-day lives more comfortable, we have the abundance of our technology. I know you admire that, but I want you to know and admire our men. They know how to live with each other, with women, not by shouting and fighting and raping, but by doing much harder things like raising their children, like growing and preparing food but most importantly by being truly loving, and truly able to receive love.’
22
Riding the Nyumbu
I must have sat alone under that softly billowing canopy in the mysterious courtyard for a few hours after Olumide been helped away by the women we’d been sitting with. I watched him walk slowly across the courtyard and through a distant door; that movement alone must have taken twenty minutes, he was very frail on his scrawny old legs.
I felt exhausted just sitting still but without question I felt different after speaking with him. I felt older and calmer, but of course I was still full of questions. I could completely see how men had been trapped by their anger. I could understand how they could be trapped by their need for release through a woman and how that release would never truly be achieved. However, I couldn’t see all women as being benign, patient, caring and in some way superior to the male. I kept thinking about Beth and how aggravating she could be, and how short-sighted and belligerent, and how many of her opinions I found to be a bit cruel and judgemental. After all, in my old home that no longer existed either in London or Gardenia, I was the lazy atheist who tried not to judge people. Beth was the rigid Christian who went to church and judged everyone she met. She was a woman who believed in a ridiculous God, I was a man who didn’t. So much of what Olumide had said to me didn’t add up, most of the men I knew were atheist and many of the women were infected with religious madness.
I was the one trying to change the world and she was the one who wanted the world to stay as she imagined it might have been back in about 1850. I kept remembering women I’d met who were stupid, aggressive, loud, cruel and selfish, the women who lived for shopping and the frippery of fashion. Women who read abysmal gossip rags and bitched about how fat some half-baked celebrity had become. I’d met women who watched appalling television shows about appalling people behaving atrociously and then said such mind-rot was harmless fun. How could those women possibly be superior to some of the men I’d known back in the so called ‘dark times’? I’d met incredibly kind, far-sighted men who cared deeply about their children, the earth and the suffering of others; they didn’t go around shouting and shooting people because of some God-based nonsense.
I also knew however, that much of what Olumide had told me had a resonance I could not deny. I knew I had felt anger for most of my life, I kept it inside and tried not to express it, anger seemed like such a self-defeating emotion and when I got angry, as I had done with Pete in his store when I confronted him about the fate of the Yuneec, it always seemed to backfire on me and make me feel bad.
As the light faded and the temperature finally started to drop, I looked around the empty courtyard and saw a light coming through a nearby doorway. I stood up and stretched, I stretched for a long time because my legs felt dead. I had been sitting on a cushion on the floor for hours, something I don’t think I’d ever done before in my life.
I walked slowly towards the doorway, went inside to find yet another very long corridor. Light was coming from a doorway on the left, I peered in. There was Nkoyo sitting in a chair facing me.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’
I couldn’t really speak, I didn’t know what to say. I felt I was being observed, tested maybe but I didn’t know why.
‘We will rest here tonight,’ said Nkoyo. ‘We have a long day ahead of us tomorrow.’
I followed Nkoyo out of the room and along the cool corridor, up some wide stairs and into large room with a huge bed in the centre. I lay down without further thought and fell asleep.
I awoke early, light just starting to come in through the wide-open window. I lay back and pondered on the nature of the building. No glass in the windows and yet it was cool. The way the window was set back into the building was the first thing that intrigued me, it became clear that the walls of this structure were more than two meters thick, so the window opening was essentially a little like the mouth of a cave.
I wondered about things like mosquitos. It certainly didn’t seem like I’d been bitten in the night but I had slept in the tropics in the past and knew those pesky little fellows seemed to love landing on me.
I slid out of the bed and walked toward the window, leant out as far as I could and noticed a breeze blowing across my body. I craned my head around and there was an opening in the structure of the wall, I raised my hand and felt cool air blowing gently from the slit. I assumed this must have something to do with keeping out bugs; my hand tingled slightly as I kept it in the breeze. The window looked down on the empty courtyard I had sat in with Olumide and on seeing it his words returned to my head uninvited: ‘The mother is first, the son only follows.’
That notion was so at odds with the world I had grown up in. It sounded a bit spiritual and hippy dippy, things I’d always despised, and yet it didn’t feel hippy dippy when Olumide had said it. I wasn’t sure I could change and fit in with this new regime. It made me angry, it seemed to deny all the positive things men had done for thousands of years; the blood sacrifice, the effort they had put into technology, medicine, philosophy and building a better world. Surely all that couldn’t just be thrown away because these blokes from history had been living under the sexual phallus, it was driving me mad thinking about it, it was doing all the things Olumide Smith had told me I should not do. Be angry, blame other people, shout and fight and smash stuff up.
‘Be calm,’ said Nkoyo from behind me. I turned and looked at her. She was standing in the entrance to the room looking nothing short of ravishing.
‘Oh, morning,’ I said. Then I felt a wave of anger flow through me. I couldn’t even sit around and mull things over; these bloody people were all over me like a rash.
‘Yes, of course you can have private thoughts,’ she said calmly as if
it should be obvious. ‘It’s fine Gavin. Live with your questions, they’re not wrong.’
The anger left me as completely as a bowel movement. Nkoyo knew what I was feeling, she understood it and the anger was excreted.
‘It’s going to be hard for you to adjust,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to adjust, I want to go home,’ I replied, limply. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I think this is amazing, your world is amazing but I don’t belong here, I shouldn’t be here, it’s all too…’
I didn’t know what it was all too, it was all too something, I knew that. I didn’t really like the world I was discovering, there was something more regimented and harsher than the world I had seen in Gardenia.
‘We should bathe before we set off,’ she said as she walked out of the room. I was wearing a cloth wrapped about my waist but I found my somehow freshly laundered Kanzu neatly folded on a beautiful wooden box by the bed and followed her.
We bathed on separate sides of the pool, my eyes remaining firmly shut when I rinsed off the delightful washing oil foamy stuff and then we left the compound. I saw no one else inside and I have no idea how long we stayed there, how my Kanzu came to be washed or really anything else. It all just happened and I don’t think I paid for any of it. I hadn’t shaken hands with anyone since I got off the Yin Qui.
The entrance back out onto the jungle street was wide open, as far as I could make out there were no doors. If there are no doors there is no need to keep people out; if there is no need for that then I assumed things like the fear of theft or violence had been removed from this highly developed society.
We walked for about half an hour through the densely shaded pathways. This time there were far more people about, long rows of children walking together towards what I assumed would be schools, many tall African women with wonderful headgear, at one stage a group of laughing men carrying long planks of wood on their shoulders. I noted they were laughing because it looked odd, it seemed they had a task in hand and yet it looked like they were playing a game. One of the men was walking in front of a box that seemed to follow him like a dog, a floating box sliding along behind him. I was staring so intently at this contraption that I momentarily lost sight of Nkoyo, then noticed she had turned down a narrow path to the right and following I found myself in a small café type of a place.
It’s hard to describe it as a café; it looked more like an open air jungle kitchen with many African people sitting around peeling fruit with big knives. There was a great deal of intense chatter going on among the diners and I suddenly became aware of music. Really nice African music that seemed somehow familiar, there was actual music coming from speakers somewhere. I couldn’t see any sign of them but I could definitely hear music.
‘Let’s have some breakfast before we get the Nyumbu,’ said Nkoyo sitting at an empty space at one of the big tables, an enormous man the other side stood up and gestured to me to sit down. When I say enormous I don’t mean fat, I just mean massive, he must have been over two meters tall and he was built like the proverbial brick outhouse, he looked like a larger-than-life, pumped-up rugger player.
I thanked him and took the seat. Nkoyo nodded at the enormous man and then handed me a fairly lethal-looking knife. On the table there was a wonderful array of fresh fruit, bananas, oranges, pineapples, persimmon, pomegranate, papaya, a selection of berries and quite a few odd-shaped fruits I wasn’t familiar with. It was just piled up on the table between us. The enormous man put a wooden bowl in front of me, patted me gently on the shoulder with his truly vast hand and said, ‘Tuck in, Mr Meckler,’ his voice was so deep I felt my body shudder slightly.
He moved away and I couldn’t help watching his progress. His stride was almost comical it was so big.
‘Blimey,’ I muttered, smiling at Nkoyo.
‘Impressive isn’t he?’ she said. ‘But he is a nogam.’
‘Is that a tribal thing?’ I asked. I watched this huge man shoulder a box the size of a compact car and carry it into the building we were sitting next to.
‘No,’ said Nkoyo with her delightful laugh ‘A nogam, it’s a slang term I suppose, it means he’s sterile.’
This information came as a shock to me. This enormous powerhouse of a man looked so healthy it wasn’t funny, and yet he was sterile.
‘How d’you know, have you met him before?’
‘No,’ said Nkoyo flatly. ‘It’s just his type always are, he’s not impotent, he’s just sterile, he cannot father a child.’
‘But, is he a kind of clone or something, did he come out of a laboratory?’
Nkoyo’s smile was delicious, ‘No,’ she said, ‘he came out of his mother, but the seed that started him was from a laboratory. You can see that there is nothing wrong with the seed, he is a very healthy man, he will possibly live even longer than Olumide, all the signs are, barring accidents, that he’ll live for about two hundred years.’
Nkoyo handed me some delicious slices of warm mango. I couldn’t talk or even think for a moment as I consumed the divine fruits in front of me. I was very clumsy with the knife and relied on Nkoyo to cut up my breakfast.
As we got up to leave I asked Nkoyo about paying for our breakfast. ‘I haven’t shaken hands with anyone,’ I said.
‘It’s okay, the kidonge system is a lot more sophisticated in Lagos, I paid for your breakfast but it is kind of you to be concerned.’
We walked through the shrubbery back onto the path. ‘So what you’re saying is in some ways London is a bit behind technologically, Africa is more advanced?’
‘You will see,’ said Nkoyo enigmatically.
She turned left past an enormous tree and through a dark entrance in a building, I followed her, making my way through a crowd of people coming out.
We descended a wide, brightly lit set of stairs and I knew this was a Nyumbu station. In many ways it was like the car stations in London, only even bigger. On one side of the huge underground atrium was a glass wall, on the other a series of stalls selling coffee, small cakes and many metal containers which I knew contained fruit juices. I felt a strong gust of cool air and noticed on the other side of the glass wall an enormous machine slide into view. A white transportation system, I can’t describe it better, yes, a train, but bigger, faster and with no obvious linkage between carriages. It was just one enormously long tube, a massive, seamless subterranean worm. The glass doors which I had hitherto not been able to make out slid open with the speed and silence I’d started to expect, immediately this happened the already crowded station became jammed with people, hundreds of them emerged and made me feel petite and vulnerable. This wasn’t because they were aggressive or incautious, they were just enormous, mostly over two meters tall, full of noise and clamour, laughter, shouts, waving, some running, some carrying enormous bags on their backs and of course, mostly but not exclusively women.
I felt Nkoyo’s hand grab mine and she worked her way through the throng and on-board the giant white worm.
As we stepped on-board I felt the familiar slump in my stomach, not much, just a hint of emptiness.
‘This is a Nyumbu,’ she said proudly. ‘The fastest mass transit system in the world.’
I walked along behind Nkoyo and saw that the interior was fitted with stand-up containment areas a little like the ones I’d been strapped into in the Gardenian pods. Nkoyo guided me into one of them, it wasn’t a seat as such; it was a shaped unit that seemed to adjust to my body size as I stood in it.
‘Don’t be alarmed, the acceleration and deceleration is quite extreme but the seats keep you from harm.’
I was about to say something when my body was encased in a tight kind of bandage. A mechanism gripped my head, it wasn’t painful, it was obviously padded in some way, but it restricted what I could see.
Then I felt the machine move, I didn’t have any warning, I just felt truly spectac
ular, fighter jet-level acceleration. There was a low sound of movement. I noticed the odd little creak sound as the acceleration just kept on increasing. There was a couple of minutes when it seemed to die away; there was a tiny sense of movement but almost too subtle to register, then an equally violent and sudden deceleration for about the same time.
Before I could even begin to understand what was going on the restraints came off, my head was freed and the small capsule thing I’d been standing in gently tipped me forward. Nkoyo was standing beside me.
‘Wow, that was fairly awesome,’ I said. I was about to ask her about it but of course I already knew. We’d got up to 1,700 kph, travelling along an electrically charged maglev track buried 60 meters below the surface of the city. We had travelled in a near vacuum and thereby avoided going through the speed of sound. We had covered a little over 723 kilometres in just a few minutes.
As we made our way through yet more crowds, I sensed a different atmosphere; for a start the crowds around me were almost exclusively women, there were a few enormous African men carrying even more enormous bags on their backs, but women made up ninety per cent of the people around me. I was also more aware of their gaze; everyone within my field of vision was staring at me.
‘It’s fine, Gavin,’ said Nkoyo. ‘You are of great interest but there is nothing to be concerned about. We will shortly be in a quiet place for a while.’
I made my way up another wide flight of stairs and emerged into a vast open square dotted with huge trees. The sun was bright and the sky was a crystal clear blue. I was utterly bedazzled by the spectacle, so much colour and vibrancy in the clothing of the women all around me, and then I turned and saw the town hall.
To call a building of this scale a town hall made a nineteenth-century town hall, the like of which once stood proudly in places like Leeds or Manchester, look like a timber outhouse. This place was massive; it was Ridley-Scott-1980s-sci-fi-opening-shot-of-a-blockbuster-movie colossal. Essentially a pyramid, the base of which covered many square miles. It was possibly a mile high. It made me dizzy to look up at it. The best description I can think of is a man-made mountain, I could see there were definitely clouds passing well below the pinnacle of this monster construction.
News from the Squares Page 23
