biggest high of his career, leaned too far over a vat and fell in. Overcome by fumes he climbed out, lay down on the floor to recover and passed out. Next morning the staff found him stuck fast to the floor and had to cut him free with a power saw. This morning over breakfast she told me about a group of Christians returning from a rally by canoe across Lake Victoria. They encountered a boatload of rude boys out for a pleasure cruise with their girlfriends, who jeered at them and told them they were no good Christians, they had no faith, going in canoes, why, they should walk on the lake like their God. Valiantly responding to the challenge, fifteen leaped up and stepped over the side. ‘They sank like stones,’ Mrs K. said, rocking with laughter, which reminds you of a sailing ship in heavy weather. ‘They were pulling bodies out of the water for days. Six were never accounted for, but there are a lot of crocodiles in Lake Victoria.’ There seems to be no end to her supply of stories of the bizarre and wonderful. Which is a good thing, as I’ve just sold them to T.P. as an idea for a series of humorous (or just plain surreal) end-of-news fillers: ‘And Finally’ tales from the Nairobi Station. It may not be much, but it’s another step closer to the Chaga. Oops. Captain on the bridge. Better make as if I’m writing up these text overlays of Jake’s interview with UNECTA’s Chief of Operations.
7
‘It’s the hardest thing in the world to get a good picture of,’ said Tembo, passing the bowl of irio. As part of his Africanization lessons, he had invited Gaby to dinner with his family at their house out by Limuru. As extended Uncle to Sarah and Etambele, Tembo’s daughters, Faraway had of course been invited too.
It was a good house in a good neighbourhood. SkyNet paid its senior cameramen well. It had a verandah, this was where they ate. Moths fluttered around the tin candle-lanterns. The dark garden twittered with night insects. Screening trees muted the traffic; the air was warm and smelled of Africa, which is not one smell but many smells: woodsmoke and red earth and fruit and shit and night-blooming flowers, but is more than the sum of all the things that make it up, as the perfume of a woman is more than the perfume of the scent she puts on.
Faraway uncapped a beer and passed the bottle to Gaby.
‘I do not just mean the actual physical difficulties,’ Tembo continued.
‘Like bribing your way past the soldiers,’ Faraway said heathenly.
‘Like the way it attacks plastics, which means your camera breaking out in flowers if you do not wrap it up carefully. But that is only part of it. It is just a hard thing to get a good image of. For a start, under the canopy there is very little light; and then, what do you video? It looks the same wherever you point the camera. And there are things in there so different from what we understand as
Mrs Kivebulaya’s ‘And Finally’ stories had won Gaby critical appreciation, grudging acknowledgement by T.P. Costello and a place at a table in the Thorn Tree Bar of the New Stanley Hotel, where the real journalists went to drink, but those were not the thing for which she had come to Africa. That thing was still denied her. She worked in the Chaga every day, in the gigabytes of images, documents, reports, simulations stored in archives. She knew all that was humanly knowable about the air-reefs, the pseudo-corals, the hand-trees, the things that looked like marine radiolaria for which no one had yet invented a name; except how they felt, how they smelled, how they tasted. She felt trapped beneath Nairobi’s smog layer while her star burned bright in the south. Tembo and Faraway could not understand her impatience. ‘It will wait,’ they said. ‘It is not going anywhere. Well, actually it is, and in the best direction, towards you.’
Tembo’s children arrived on either side of Gaby with dishes of chicken.
‘You are to have the gizzard,’ said Sarah, the older one. Both were beautiful and serious and funny. ‘It is always kept for the guest of honour.’
Gaby looked at Faraway to see if he had put his extended nieces up to a joke on the poor ignorant
‘Actually, I don’t know what a chicken gizzard looks like,’ she said. ‘In my country we don’t eat them.’ Etambele, the younger girl, whose name meant ‘Early Evening, Just After Tea-Time’, which was the exact time she was born, looked amazed and whispered something to Sarah.
‘My sister wants to know if your hair is real,’ Sarah said.
‘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?’
‘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.