Dizzy Worms

by Michael Holman

  Pearson shrugged off his disappointment. He was home.

  The mid-morning sun poured into the room.

  He started to dial for a taxi to take him to Harrods. But then he wondered: was it really necessary to spend the day at the bar, whatever he had promised? Surely there were more pressing matters to attend to?

  Pearson dialled a familiar number. Harrods could wait.

  9

  Digby’s response to the accident on the way in from the airport had been immediate, instinctive and foolhardy. Before Aloysius could stop him, he had unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door of the now-stationary taxi. Just as he emerged, three things happened simultaneously.

  The boy, who had been lying inert in front of the car, sprang up and ran off as Digby approached, swerving and jinking between the cars like a young gazelle; another boy, who had hitherto gone unnoticed, thrust an arm into the car and would have succeeded in making off with Digby’s briefcase had not Aloysius intervened; and most distressing of all, Dolly took advantage of the distraction, left the car, and investigated the surroundings.

  By the time Digby had registered her absence, she had crossed the road and seemed preoccupied by the sights, sounds and smells of Africa. A distraught Digby could only watch as his companion reached a spot on the edge of a sprawling collection of plastic shelters and corrugated iron shanties, where she faced the oncoming traffic calmly and with equanimity.

  “Oh no! Come back! Dolly! Dolly!” cried Digby.

  Looking back, he blamed himself. Had he stayed in the car, instead of following his instinct and dashing to the assistance of the boy who had been “hit” by the taxi, Dolly would still be safe.

  Aloysius beckoned urgently from the car.

  “Suh, suh, return to taxi. Please! They are bang-bang boys.”

  Although Digby had no idea what Aloysius was talking about, the concern in his voice was unmistakable.

  For a few moments Digby was caught in two minds.

  “Dolly! Dolly!”

  His cries were in vain.

  Dolly sauntered first to the traffic island, stopped briefly under the shade of a msasa tree, and then entered a maze of shacks and shanties.

  Digby made a last despairing plea.

  “Dolly, Dolly, come back.”

  His protective male instinct took over, and he was about to run after her when Aloysius intervened.

  “Dangerous, very dangerous . . . Get back in the car. We are too close to that place, Kireba. Come, we will talk to Charity Mupanga and perhaps she will send one of her Mboya Boys to

  help find Dolly.”

  “Mboya Boys?” asked Digby, puzzled.

  “The street boys who help Mrs Charity,” explained Aloysius. “Some play football, and they are not bad boys. But others . . .” He shook his head. “They make much trouble.”

  “Oh God,” said Digby. “I’ll take help from anybody. I’ll never get over this.”

  He took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at his sweating face.

  Aloysius remained baffled. His passenger’s distress seemed disproportionate to the loss.

  After all, Digby’s briefcase was safe.

  He would question Digby further – but first things first: to lose one passenger was regrettable; to lose Digby as well would invite the ridicule of his fellow drivers, and the Englishman was looking restless . . .

  “Take me to Harrods,” said Digby, and Aloysius was happy to comply.

  A few minutes later the traffic eased, and the taxi pulled up alongside a densely packed slum, crammed into a space the size of a dozen football fields.

  “Kireba,” said Aloysius, and switched off the engine. “Harrods,” he gestured. “Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot).”

  It was said that if you sat at Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) for long enough, most of Kireba’s movers and shakers would eventually put in an appearance, such was its popularity.

  For some customers, it was a club, a place to which they could direct mail – on the rare occasions they received a letter; to others it was an informal crèche; for many, it was a school where the illiterate could attend evening classes organised by the Ladies Sewing Circle; and for the street children of Kireba it was a precious sanctuary in a cruel and nasty world . . . but above all, Harrods was an eating house, where the food was good, nourishing and keenly priced.

  One of the three containers, all formerly used on freight ships between Africa and Europe, now served as a kitchen, with a gas stove and charcoal braziers. It also housed a noisy fridge, run off an extended electricity cable, which was plugged in at the nearby clinic – indeed, Kireba’s only clinic – run by Charity’s cousin, Mercy.

  A boy was sweeping out the second container which served as the indoor eating area. A hand-written sign advertised the next meeting of the Sewing Circle, as dull and boring a topic as Charity and Mildred could devise – thus guaranteed to keep men away, while their womenfolk discussed the pressing issues of the day.

  The third container served as a bar, with crates of Tusker beer and sodas stored at the back and a wooden counter running its length.

  The area between the two outer arms of the E had been covered in concrete, finished off with a red polish, and was shaded by a striped blue and red canvas awning, courtesy of an international soft drinks company. Under the awning were a couple of dozen white plastic tables and chairs, and a wooden trellis, covered with purple bougainvillea, provided additional shade.

  Charity had chosen the location wisely. The bar stood at the point where the slum’s muddy track, dubbed “Uhuru Avenue” by the locals, was crossed by the railway track, the dividing line between the city and Kireba, and Harrods provided a meeting place for two worlds.

  Strictly speaking, the name of the bar was not Harrods, and had not been officially called Harrods for the past year. At the end of a nasty dispute, Charity had been obliged to rename it Tangwenya’s International Bar (and Nightspot); a change forced on Charity by London lawyers who had forcefully pointed out that only the London duka they represented had the right to use the name “Harrods”.

  In vain, Charity, with the help of Edward Furniver, had pointed out that the bar had been named after her father, the late Harrods Tangwenya. She had gone to some lengths to explain to the lawyers in London how it was that her father had chosen the name “Harrods”, rather than use his birth name, Mwaí Gichuru Tangwenya.

  Did the lawyers not realise that their colonial kinfolk had a weakness, one which survived to this day? They could not speak the local language! Nor were they willing to learn. They could not even pronounce the names of the people, much to the astonishment of the citizens of Kuwisha, who invariably spoke three or four languages, plus English.

  This posed serious problems for young people seeking a job. Unless you had a Christian name like Joseph or Charity, or adopted the name of commercial brand, like Willard, after the potato crisps, which could be remembered and pronounced by the British, you had little chance of success.

  She told them how her father, just before his interview for a job as gardener at the British High Commission, had spotted a green bag marked “Harrods”; and had chosen that as his British name – and had got the job!

  Alas, the hard-hearted men from London were indifferent to this remarkable achievement, by an extraordinary man, to whom Charity had paid tribute by calling her bar “Harrods”. Instead they had insisted that this was unacceptable, and after a combination of faxes and misunderstandings, the bar had become – officially, at least – “Tangwenya’s”.

  Not that it made any practical difference: regular customers continued to call it “Harrods”, and new customers soon found themselves doing the same.

  Digby got out of the car and surveyed the scene while Aloysius locked the taxi, double-checking each door. He then joined him standing alongside the cab, and sniffed the air.

  It seemed thick with a variety of smells, ranging from the aroma of roasting maize to those that had a more fund
amental origin.

  Digby followed suit. “Fruity,” he said, “rather fruity.”

  Aloysius was reluctant to contradict him, but nevertheless, his passenger was wrong, plain wrong. It was the unmistakable smell of shit. For a few seconds Aloysius wondered whether he should say as much, and then decided to compromise.

  “It is very bad fruit, suh.”

  A rumble of thunder suggested the weather was about to change.

  Aloysius sniffed the air: “Smell – rain is coming.”

  He pointed to bundles of white clouds in the blue sky, gathering on the horizon. If he was right, by afternoon they would turn grey, and then purple-black, as full with rain as a tick engorged with blood. With any luck, as the day darkened, thunder would roll and jagged shafts of lightning would pierce the heavens, and plump drops would bring relief from the heat.

  Digby consulted the business card Pearson had given him the night before. He was in the right place, there was no doubt about that. He braced himself to acknowledge failure and seek Charity Mupanga’s help. What an ignominious start to his visit to Africa. It was not supposed to have begun like this . . .

  “Harrods. We have to walk now.”

  Aloysius was getting impatient. What was more, he was getting hungry, and he could smell something frying, chicken he guessed. He licked his lips.

  “It’s not far, but be careful.”

  Aloysius gestured, as if making a point.

  “There, Harrods. And the lady you can see, by the bowls where they are washing, talking to an old woman, that is the owner, Mrs Charity Mupanga and the old woman is her friend Mildred Kigali. And that white man, over there, by the market ladies, writing things in his notebook, that is Furniver, her very good friend . . .” – he gave Digby a meaningful look – “who runs the Kireba bank. Her street boys are Titus Ntoto and Cyrus Rutere. She lets them sleep in the bar.”

  He shook his head disapprovingly. If he had anything to do with it, he would round up all street boys and dump them in the country, hundreds of miles away. But they had their uses. He conceded that.

  “Maybe they can help you find Dolly. Let us go and meet Mrs Charity.”

  Trailed by Aloysius, Digby made his way cautiously across the rubbish-strewn wasteland that lay between him and the bar.

  Progress was painfully slow. Every now and then he paused, and looked around, checked the card that Pearson had given him, and looked up at the sprawl of hovels spread out before him, an expression of bemusement on his face.

  He re-read the scrawled message:

  Charity,

  I’m back! On holiday.

  Please give Digby a dough ball.

  See you at Harrods.

  Best, Cecil

  Digby stepped gingerly over a black, filthy rivulet that ran diagonally across the slum. He continued the hazardous journey across the intervening wasteland, regularly used by residents to dump their “flying toilets” – plastic bags into which they were obliged to evacuate given the absence of regular toilet facilities.

  As Digby tried to take in the sights, his attention wandered, and his foot encountered a plastic bag that made a squelching noise.

  “Take care, suh, take care, toilet, flying toilet.”

  Aloysius’ warning came too late. Digby’s foot had squeezed the bag like a tube of toothpaste. He looked down at the sludge that emerged, jerking his head back as a dreadful smell reached his nostrils.

  “It is shit, suh.”

  Digby refused to be fazed. This, after all, was Africa.

  He nudged a bulging plastic bag, one of many that had been dumped in a pile, with the toe of his shoe.

  “Be careful,” said Aloysius. “That is what we call a flying toilet. It is full of waste matter.”

  “Flying toilet? What a jolly good name.”

  The bar was straight ahead, and both men looked forward to slaking their thirst on a hot day.

  “Try the mango juice, or passion fruit juice, with a handful of roasted peanuts,” Pearson had told Digby when he handed over the card at Heathrow. “Or an ice cold Tusker beer. If you order two, you get a free helping of roasted potato skins. Just ask for ‘bitings’.”

  These options had been set out on a blackboard, outside the bar, where a woman whom Digby assumed was Charity Mupanga was chalking up the rest of the menu for the new day, tailor-made for the pockets as well as the palates of her varied clientele.

  By now Digby and Aloysius were close enough to make out, beneath the grime of smoke and dust, the vague outline of the bar’s name.

  The first word was impossible to read, obscured as it was by soot, left behind when the slum had been put to the torch during the election rioting; but the rest emerged as “International Bar” and then continued around the corner. Clearly the signwriter had miscalculated the space available, and after getting as far as “Bar”, had added the two last words “and Nightspot”. But for reasons best known to himself, he had placed them in brackets. And while it seemed a trifle odd to new patrons, habitués accepted the display without a second glance.

  One day, soon, Charity promised herself, she would get the sign repainted.

  A boy of indeterminate age, with stick-like legs and a bulging belly, glue tube hanging from his neck, looked up, registered the presence of a stranger, and returned to his task of peeling potatoes. A second boy squatted next to one of the containers, using a nail brush to scrub his hands.

  Aloysius, whose stomach was now rumbling, gave a broad hint.

  “The pig’s feet, suh, are very good, especially at breakfast. Boiled or baked. Myself, I prefer them baked because the skin gets crisp and they are most tasty. But if you only have little money you can buy chicken necks, the cheapest and the best in town. Or perhaps”, he said, failing to elicit a response from Digby, “you would prefer one of those maize cobs.”

  He pointed at a brazier where a couple of youngsters were roasting cobs of tender green maize, the kernels turning yellowbrown after a few minutes.

  “But the best”, said Aloysius, licking his lips, “is the soup of avocados, made with some lemon and some sauce from a recipe that came from the late Bishop Mupanga’s mother.” At this point Aloysius crossed himself elaborately.

  “If you are very, very poor you can buy for a few ngwee, a good serving of maize-meal, with groundnut relish.”

  “What’s relish?” asked Digby.

  “Like gravy, suh.”

  As the two men drew closer to Charity, apron wrapped around her stout frame, they could hear her humming to herself as she went about her tasks. A skinny lad assisted her in stacking the dishes.

  “Fine,” said Charity Mupanga, complimenting the boy on whatever task he had performed. “Fine. Take a dough ball.”

  Digby watched, fascinated, as the boy, with the concentration of a diamond cutter confronted by a particularly challenging rough gem, studied the four dough balls. Sitting in a pool of syrup, they were set out on a plate on the wooden kitchen table.

  “He has washed his hands,” observed Aloysius proudly. “Everyone in that kitchen has washed their hands, so you can eat without your stomach giving trouble afterwards. Never do they touch dough balls or any food with hands that have been unwashed. Never.”

  The lad bit his lower lip, and scowled in concentration. Finally he made up his mind, and carefully lifted with a kitchen spoon the dough ball he had selected, placed it on a piece of newspaper, and spooned over it an extra dollop of the syrup – vanilla-flavoured, judging by the smell.

  The boy scampered off, clutching the carefully wrapped dough ball. Meanwhile, the white man in his late forties, wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt, wandered apparently aimlessly between the nearby rows of market traders, who sat on their haunches with their goods laid out before them. He was making notes, it seemed, and occasionally his voice carried to Digby and Aloysius – queries about price and quantity of the produce on display. Onions were cut into quarters, single tomatoes into halves, next to small pyramids of salt, or sugar. Every n
ow and then he would pause over a bar of washing soap or a mound of detergent, and scribble in the notebook he was carrying . . .

  “I do not know why he does that,” said Aloysius. “But if you ask him, perhaps he will tell you.”

  A Prince Buster song, a favourite of the street boys, thumped away:

  Enjoy yourself,

  It’s later than you think!

  Enjoy yourself,

  While you still in the pink!

  But the noise did not seem to bother the customers making calls from a makeshift phone booth not far from the bar.

  Every now and then, clients got up from the tables, or emerged from the cool interior of the bar, to use the rudimentary long-drop toilet, marked “For customers ONLY”, washing their hands afterwards in a bowl of water, soap provided.

  “Mrs Mupanga will talk about toilets for sure,” said Aloysius. “She talks often about toilets. She told me that the plans for these new Zimbabwe machines, clever toilets that know how to kill flies, might arrive today. Or tomorrow. Come, you must have some tea.”

  Charity, who by now had spotted the pair, thought about calling out, and telling the visitor to take what might seem the long way round, but was a route that would save his shoes. She decided against it. She had nothing against foreigners. However, the young man could find out for himself, she thought.

  She turned to the blackboard, and began humming a tune. The notes seemed familiar to Digby, and after a moment or two he recognised a hymn, one that took him back to school days and church services.

  What a friend we have in Jesus . . .

  On impulse, he joined in:

  . . . all our sins and griefs to bear!

  What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer!

  O what peace we often forfeit, O what needless pain we bear,

  All because we do not carry everything to God in prayer.

  Charity put down the plates she was carrying, and turned to face him, hands on her hips, head cocked to one side.