Kirinya, page 26
‘Whoa,’ said The Man. ‘Well maybe I am and maybe I am not, but what I have successfully done, girl, is get you angry enough right now to cut my jones off with that knife. But you’re not mean enough and that is good for you, else I would have to take it off you ungently, child. And if you ain’t that mean, you not a Simba, you a fucking liability.’
Ren scowled at him, beaten down. The Man sat back and observed her with spiritless black eyes. Ren squirmed, imagining Man fingers exploring under her shorts and camouflage T-shirt, probing, testing, enjoying.
‘She was at Soroti,’ ATR said in the silence.
‘You do not need to remind me of that, corporal,’ said The Man. ‘I’ll have some more of that coffee, I think.’ Blue went into the kitchen to bang the pot against the water pump. Fish, dogs and guests stink after three days. He was getting pissed off with Ren sleeping on his verandah bench-bed. It was the same bench-bed on which he had fucked ATR with Ren riding her frontal lobes. Sometimes Ren suspected he knew, that was why he was could not speak civilly to her. It was not. It was a personal space thing. The home was a bedroom and a wash-room and a kitchen-living room on the ground floor of a heaving project, but it was his place, the first he had ever had, and it was all right for him to invite women into it, but not so right for those women to invite other women. Girls. White girls who wanted to be Black Simbas.
‘She saw her friend die,’ ATR would hiss at Blue in the shower, hoping that the rush of water would cover her words. It didn’t. ‘She felt her die.’
Felt, was still feeling. In the cold night, on the wooden bed, under the warm quilt and the big stars the neighbours would sing or fight and the street dogs bark and the early early traffic hurtle past on its way to God knows where, she would wake with a jerk and a cry from dreams of dying. The white light. She had ridden into the light, and learned the truth. God, faith, obedience, the mystic; Oksana’s belief of enduring return through the tree of life, all were delusions. Ren had been taken to the edge of the white light further than any who ever returned. She had seen the endless dark that lay on the far side. Beyond this life was no other.
The Man studied her with his black little eyes and drank a full cup of the new coffee before speaking.
‘You know, I am doing you a favour. Really. Kids like you, you come to me, say, Man, make me a Black Simba, give me an AK47, send me out to fight for the nation. Yeah. They all as ballsy as you, child. They don’t last ten seconds in combat. I seen younger’n you, no faces, no heads. Only reason I ain’t sending you back home with a red ass is Rains here says you’s a talent. Eye-so-path. Now, tell me, child, why a rare talent like that wants to go running out waving a gun getting her titties blown outa her back? ’S a damn fool don’t even know her own value. Damn fool.’
‘What are you saying?’ Ren had spent too much of her life on water not to know when a prey was hooked.
‘What I am saying, child: happen if it were up to me, I’d say no to you child in any shape or form or colour or talent, but the sole reason I am bothered on such a fine morning to come to a shithole like this, drink this fucking coffee—no harm, friend, but this is the most shit coffee I have tasted in weeks—and even pretend to take you seriously, white, is because happen my superior officer, that mighty fine woman Rose, remembers your mother from way back—way back—and owes her a long-outstandin’ favour.’
‘Gab?’
‘You have such disrespect for your lovin’ mother you call her by her Christian name?’
‘I don’t want anything from her. Nothing from her. Nothing to do with her.’
‘Well that is a sad shame, child, because it just so happens there is a, hm, special project, yes, I suppose that’s what you’d call it, that requires the unique talents of eye-so-paths, and I was just goin’ to tell you you were in.’
He has you, Ren thought. The bastard has hooked and played and landed you and you are lying on your side, gasping up at the big blue sky, waiting for the gaff.
‘What project?’
The Man whipped the fruit knife out of the table and offered it to Ren.
‘I am sorry it’s not as hygienic as I would wish, but sure kids your age have turbocharged immune systems.’
‘You need a link?’
‘Child, would I want to be linked with you? Some of your blood, in this here receptacle, will suffice.’
It felt a strange violation, the faces watching over the fruit rinds and bowls of ugali as she made the slash across the palm, squeezed the blood like juice into the cell base container. The Man capped the jar as Ren winced and willed the wound shut. He slipped the carrier into his pocket and stood up. He looked at the sky.
‘Congratulations. You a Black Simba now. Special Forces. Don’t that sound mighty fine, white? Don’t get all blown up with piss and pride. What you is, is a doggie-soldier. Everyone’s better’n you. This child here, my good friend corporal Rains, she is your shadow. She be looking after you. More’n that, she is now your superior officer. Needless to say, but what the hell, I enjoy saying it: if you ever, ever fuck her, or me, or any of the good people you will meet, up the ass, I will find you, and I will cut your cunt out.’
He took the bloody knife and carved a heart-shaped plug out of the half paw-paw on the table. He dropped the soft meat in Ren’s lap.
‘Good day to you now.’
47
Gaby’s videodiary: Busowa Resettlement Camp
Day three. They’re still coming. Women mostly, they hover nervously at the door, unsure if they are allowed to come in, and I wave them in and they sit on the ground in front of me and they talk death and loss and pain and the most Christ-awful stuff you can imagine, and it just goes down into my camera like a shopping list. Three thousand one hundred and seven people died at Soroti, and all I can think is, my daughter is missing.
This is the sort of confession you only make to video cameras.
I try and make myself feel it, I tell myself Groomsport, the place I grew up, fifteen hundred people. Imagine two Groomsports dying all at once. Everyone dead in their homes and gardens, in the street, in the shops, the bars, on the boats in the harbours, throwing sticks for their dogs on the beach, on the swings at the sea front, eating fucking ice creams, walking on the Point. Now knife them through the heart twice.
Won’t work. Serena is out there in twelve million people, alone, and I can’t do a thing to help.
The women all speak very softly, almost ashamed to have lived. Later, when the auxbrains start to form—I don’t think they have any idea what the Ogun relief staff are talking about, all they know is that they survived—I’ll want pictures downloaded. Soft, persuasive, incredibly damaged voices are not enough. As the details of the massacre unfold, the magnitude of the lie the North is telling itself grows. If you have to lie, lie big. The story that it was a pitched battle between rival tribal factions holds. There is no contrary evidence. No one can get on to the site to corroborate stories. No one knows about the anti-personnel missiles, or the American attack helicopters. Or that the only white survivor is my fifteen-year-old daughter. They come and they tell me about their men and their sons and their daughters who died up there and I tell myself, for God’s sake, what is the difference? They’ve lost, you’ve lost, why the fuck don’t you feel? Why don’t you cry? What is the difference? The difference is, they know their daughters are dead. I don’t know anything, except she’s gone.
Yeah, of course Faraway knows the city better than me, he’s got the contacts, and Sarah’s doing what she can, and I was as much use as tits on a boar back there, but I am this far from hitching a ride on the first pujo or truck to Kirinya. If it wasn’t for the fact that he’d miss the really important call, he’d have shut his mobile off. You don’t have kids, Faraway. You don’t know what it’s like.
Four days bust-up diplomat hunts for cleaned-up junkie’s runaway massacre survivor daughter. I’d love to know what my horoscope said for this week.
Then another voice says maybe the reason you feel nothing is because you’re hard. Maybe that’s why you gave it up, you saw too much and you grew a shell around you and in the end you found that you were trapped in it, like a hermit crab grown too big and too fat and too complacent. Like a hermit crab, the only thing you could do was crawl right out of it and scuttle naked along the beach. Into a new shell. Jesus, is this all I add up to? Trading shells? There’s something old and maybe a bit too comfortable about this work. I slip into it mighty easily; it’s a good feeling, having something to do, having a camera to talk to, having a life; but have I just popped back under the old hard Gaby McAslan SkyNet News shell? Around and around and around she goes, where she ends up nobody knows. One big shell game. Find the lady.
Find the fucking lady. Jesus, Serena, where are you?
I’m going to blow these goddam candles out. I’ve confessed enough to a camera for one night.
The sound was too soft for a cough, too deliberate to be animal or accident.
Gaby hesitated over the video camera switch. ‘Hello?’
The woman’s eyes caught the candlelight.
‘Excuse me, madam, they said you want people to talk to you. Would this be all right?’ She spoke Great Lakes French: a Tutsi, Gaby reckoned from her features. A people familiar with genocides.
‘Yeah, sure,’ Gaby said in her implant French. She sat on the dusty land-coral floor of the round-house, arranged her dresses around her. ‘Don’t worry about the camera, just talk to me. Tell me whatever you want.’
‘May I ask, why do you want to know this, madam?’ the Tutsi woman asked.
‘So I can prove to the people in the North who did this. Who really did it.’
‘Ah,’ the woman said gently, rocking forward. ‘Then you will need this.’ She reached into her fabric folds, drew a glittering thing. For an instant Gaby reached for her gun, thinking she had been drawn on. She had. The woman held out ten centimetres of bright diamond blade.
‘Please.’
Gaby took the barbed thing gingerly. It still wickedly nicked her.
‘Jesus,’ she whispered, turning it slowly to catch the light. ‘Where did you get this?’
‘From my son’s face,’ the woman said.
The pool of smooth mud quivered. Ripples ran across its surface. With the slow magnificence of a geological process, Mombi emerged. Rather, Gaby thought among the cycads and hothouse blooms, congealed, like a golem.
The mud-woman took a long time between blinks. Fat drips of slurry ran down the continental shelf of her breasts.
‘You are looking good, Gaby,’ said the girl in the shiny blue shorts and bra top. Ignore her, Anansi the smooth criminal had said. Talk directly to Mombi.
‘I’m not sure I can return the compliment, Mombi.’
‘I have put on a bit since I last saw you.’ Slab jowls quivered, the woman in the pool was chuckling. Her face was so fat it skewed familiar expression into alien. A smile, or sudden pain? ‘Did your friend tell you that I killed Haran with my own hand?’
‘No, she forgot that.’
‘When you remember everything, you forget that others do not,’ Mombi said.
Piling memories like calories on to your body, Gaby thought. Bingeing on data. The word of God that animates the clay golem. She took the package from inside her silk jacket, knelt, unfolded the scarf. She held the blade up in a corner of chiffon.
‘Do you know what this is?’
‘Dangerous,’ said the voice-girl in blue.
‘Yes. Very. It killed three thousand people in Soroti last week. Including my friend the forgetful Oksana Telyanina. Do you know what it’s made from?’
Mombi screwed up her tiny, beautiful eyes.
‘I would guess nanoweave diamond.’
‘You would guess correct. Now, can you tell me how the Bugandan Royal Army happen to get their hands on nanoweave diamond?’
‘Gaby, you are an old friend and I owe you a long-standing debt, but it would be unwise to presume too much on the strength of it.’
‘Three thousand one hundred and seven dead.’
‘It is obviously your personal loss confusing you into thinking that we have something to do with this. High quality designer produce, that is our business.’
‘Oh, I believe it. Yes. But others may not be as, ah, fastidious as you.’
‘This was not manufactured in the South.’
‘You’re very sure of that.’
‘The thing about an empire is that it must be well run, and have good information. Something you Harambee should be mindful of.’
Gaby sat down cross-legged. She stabbed the blade into the short turf.
‘I agree with you. I don’t think this was made here, or anywhere in Africa, or even Australasia or South America. But the buckies that built it were. Like you said about running an empire: the Emperor has to know what’s going on, or his head’s on a spear. Mombi, who’s running designer fullerenes into the North?’
The thing in the pool heaved, sent honey-brown ripples lapping at Gaby’s toes.
‘You may have heard that I am still engaged in hostilities with the Black Simbas.’
‘Twenty shootings in as many days is hardly what you’d call discreet. I thought it was a territorial thing. They’re running fullerenes?’
‘Your information is not as complete as you assume.’
‘Weapons systems fullerenes? To the North? To the NLAs, UNPROFOR, the Americans? Mombi, come on, give me something I can believe.’
‘Mistake, Gaby. There are no such things as weapons systems fullerenes. There are just molecules, moving other molecules around. They have no will, no sense of purpose. No conscience. Just molecules moving molecules. Once they are out there, they can make them do whatever they want.’
‘But the Simbas, Mombi…’
‘Everything changes, Gaby. Are you thinking of going after them?’
‘I’m just asking questions.’
‘It’s who you are asking them for. Gaby, I would strongly advise you against this.’
‘I need to know, I need to get every step in place, one after the other, like stones in a river. Otherwise we don’t get to the other side.’
Mombi quivered. Gaby read it as a shrug. It cast up a small mud storm.
‘Very well. If you are insistent upon this foolish course, at least allow me to extend you protection.’
‘I don’t need your protection.’
‘You most of all, Gaby.’ Mombi moved into the deep centre of the pool, slowly submerging. The interview was over. Gaby pulled her weapon out of the fake soil.
‘Leave it.’
The voice-girl—Gaby remembered Anansi had called her Rewa—stood over her. She knelt down, picked up the blade in the light scarf. Their eyes met. A sudden shiver chilled Gaby. The eyes were as dull and blank as mud. The red-linered lips said, ‘Gaby, I gave the Siberian woman another message to give to you. I wonder if she forgot it too.’
‘What was that?’
‘Ask Gaby: how long will she keep her spear hooded?’
‘She told me that.’
‘What was your answer?’
‘My answer was, I have no spear.’
Neither Mombi nor Rewa gave a reply. Bubbles rose and burst in the honey-mud lake.
The Russian wars had made Gaby wise to BVMs. The glint of a hub-cap, the tilt of a wing mirror, the lane-shift three cars behind you, a cigarette butt under your window, the echo on the telephone, the moment’s hesitation in the PDU link. Black Van Moments.
They’re coming for you.
Mandé the Shit was that invaluable but infuriating journalist’s source, not an informant but a corroborator. You leaned on him, and he told you what else you could trust with your weight. All truths came in with the deliveries to his bespoke Afro-Asian foodery among the trunks of the great banyan tree, and you could eat them and they would not give you the shits. But he had his Italian suits updated weekly from Milan and he was addicted to needless cosmetic dentistry and he was irredeemably The Shit. Gaby was always careful to call him Mandy. The right and wrong doctor.
‘The thing about Mombi is, she does not lie,’ he said. ‘If she says a thing, it is so. For good or ill.’
‘From you, I believe the Black Simbas are smuggling nanotechnology to the North.’ Gaby rolled the cardamom-studded banana up in the chapatti. The waiter uncapped her beer bottle with his teeth. Someone deserving of instant canonisation had at last worked out how to replicate decent Tusker. In her memory, Doctor Scullabus’s Prescription tasted like engine oil. ‘Believe, but don’t understand.’
‘Did Mombi say where?’
‘Do you know where?’
‘I’ve heard rumours.’
‘That’s what I pay you for.’
‘I’ve heard the supply line ends in India. Bangalore.’
Cyber-navel of the planet. All webs node in Mother India.
‘What do they want in India?’
Mandy the Shit spread his hands in that gesture Gaby hated so much she wanted to hit him.
‘This I do know, if Mombi says go carefully with the Simbas, this also you can trust.’
‘I’ll be careful,’ Gaby said. ‘I’ve got too big a tab here not to.’
Then, as the mopedcab lurched out in front of an overloaded matatu, she glimpsed in one of the many wing mirrors the too-timely pull-out of the too-smart car parked at the end of the street. BVM.
‘Go left here.’ Gaby tapped the driver on the shoulder, pointed down a roofed-in alley thronged with pedestrians.
‘This is not the way I would go to get to the New Thorn Tree,’ said the girl rider.
‘But it’s the way I would,’ Gaby said. Follow me down this, faked-from-Japan. The mopedcab honked its way through a busy cloth market of brightly swathed stalls, bulbous, aromatic vats that spun the fibres into fabrics and solar powered looms. First there had been the boys playing football a little too seriously outside Faraway’s house. Second, the echo on her handshake at Henry’s. Third, the over-conscientious pet-buyer in the Embu bird market. And now the well-timed car.
You could call it paranoia. She liked to think of it as pattern recognition.
