Chaga

‘There are no aliens,’ Tembo said a little impatiently. He was accustomed to his friend’s boasting, he did not like to see him massage his big male ego at the dinner table, in front of guests and family.

‘If they could put an entire ecology into something the size of a small matatu, I am sure there is room for a couple of aliens in the ash tray,’ Faraway said, undeterred. Mrs Tembo’s cooking succeeded in silencing him.

The children were made ready for bed while coffee brewed. They came to say goodnight. Faraway tousled their hair and hugged them beerily. Tembo kissed them. Gaby showed them photographs she had brought of her sisters and dogs and father.

‘This is the house where I grew up, and here we all are in front of it. This was taken the day I left to go to London to learn to be a reporter.’

‘Did your mother take the photograph?’ Sarah asked.

‘No, it was my father’s lady friend. My mother died a long time ago, when I was quite young,’ Gaby said, and then folded the photographs quickly away before they let loose things that had no proper place here among hosts and friends. ‘Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bugs bite,’ she said to the children. They giggled appreciatively.

Gaby’s offer to help with the dishes was politely but firmly turned down.

‘It is woman’s work, and tonight you are a honorary man,’ Tembo said.

You guys have a lot to learn about feminism, Gaby thought as coffee came round. And you girls too. Faraway produced Russian cigarettes. Gaby took one.

‘I did not know you smoked.’

‘Only after dinner.’

‘I smoke after sex,’ he said.

Gaby was listening to the sound of the mother in the bedroom singing her children to sleep with a song a thousand years old. It made her feel very close to and very far from home at the same time. The candles burned low in the tin lanterns. The traffic noise lessened. The honorary men talked work, about Jake Aarons, whom they all liked, and Abigail Santini, whom no one liked, and T.P. Costello, whom everyone liked but Gaby, because she said he did not like her. Tembo stared at his coffee grounds as if trying to divine the future from them, then said, ‘There is shadow on his memory. I do not know it all, it was back before I joined SkyNet, when he was East African station chief for Irish News Services. There was a woman, an Irish woman, like you. She disappeared into the Chaga. That is all I know, but I think you remind him of things he would sooner forget, Gaby.’

She smoked another Russian cigarette and listened to the rattle of insect wings against the lantern glass.

‘Did he love her, Tembo?’

‘He has not said so.’

‘He loved her. So that’s why he won’t put me in front of a camera.’

‘Is that what you really want?’

Gaby’s frustration blew up in her like the candle flames when the night wind blew across the eaves and through the lanterns’ ventilation slits.

‘What I want is to do something. Make something of my own, that I have experienced with my own senses. Not someone else’s report, someone else’s technical brief, someone else’s image or experience. Not someone else’s stories about cabinet ministers disappearing and reappearing under the name of “Mr Shit”, or weddings in country churches that turn into tribal warfare because someone can’t stop farting during the marriage vows.’

‘Those are good stories, Gaby,’ Faraway said.

‘Yes, they are good stories, but they aren’t my stories. They come to me; I want to go and get them. It doesn’t have to be video reportage; just as long as it means me acting for once and not reacting.’ She took another of Faraway’s cigarettes and lit from a candle lantern. ‘It’s like an old story my dad made up for me when I was wee. There was one of our cats – we had five – who used to stare up the chimney all the time. My dad told me that he was waiting for the night when a voice would come down the chimney saying, “The King of the Cats is dead! the King of the Cats is dead!” On that night, when that voice came, he would leap up, say, “Then I am King of the Cats!” and run up the chimney and over the rooftops to claim his crown. That was why he was looking up the chimney all the time, waiting for the call.

‘I feel like that stupid cat.’

Faraway exhaled a plume of smoke and looked long at Tembo before speaking.

‘What if I were to say that the King of the Cats is a personal friend of mine?’

‘Be careful, my friend,’ Tembo said.

‘To get stories, you need to know what is going on before anyone else, friend Gaby. To know what is going on before anyone else, you need good information. I know a man – we are the same tribe, almost the same village – who deals in that kind of information: hard to get, useful. Valuable.’

‘Are we talking about the Sheriffs?’ Gaby asked.

Every day on her way in to the office she saw people in their hundreds crowd the dirt streets of the slums around the soft, silent Mercedes of the software brokers as they did their day’s hiring. The first time she had seen it she had stopped and opened her visioncam as the cars disappeared beneath the surge of bodies, hands snatching for the slips of paper with the password for the day of whatever western life insurance or savings and loan company needed data processors. The informational superhighway had promised so much to Africa, and delivered only the daily scramble to do the world’s paperwork because an African data processor cost less than a European or East Asian. The combination of the primeval and the technological had disturbed Gaby. She had watched the hired minibuses arrive to take the few away to the warehouses and enough money for a week’s food, if they worked hard. The others had returned to their homes and children. This was the public face of the East African Teleport. It was no wonder that so many turned away from it, seeing a better, or at least more glamorous future with its private face: the posses. You saw the kids everywhere, the boys in flares and long-collared shirts and platform soles, the girls in leatherette and nylon. They looked cool, they looked street, but they were merely the runners, the dealers, the minders and enforcers. The Sheriffs, known to most only by their titles, held the power, but they were no more the posses than their boys and girls. The true posse, like the True Church, was invisible, spiritual, virtual. It was the boy in Pumwani whose teenage sister sells herself on the street to pay for the deck and connection charges that will buy them both a way up and out. It was the girl living on the houseboat on Lake Victoria with a mother who tells her she is useless and a father who fucks her and grandparents who sit around all day staring at her and nine siblings who eat her food and push her out of her space, the one who dreams of some day pulling on the leather jacket and sliding on the RayBans and becoming a Name in a nameless city. It was the Likoni ferry-man who comes home every night to hang out on the cybernetic street corner until the dawn comes up out of India, high-fiving with dudes you meet only in dreams; it was the woman whose children have all been lost to religion, crack or HIV IV who finds a bigger market-place in which to sell her goods and swap gossip. It was all of these, bound together in a virtual community – the posse – under the patronage and protection of their Sheriff.

‘We are talking the Sheriff of Sheriffs,’ Faraway said.

‘Mombi would disagree with you,’ Tembo said. His wife appeared with fresh coffee. She looked suspicious: seditious talk on her verandah.

‘Mombi’s girls look better on the street, no one would disagree with that, but she has no breeding, no pedigree in this thing. Look how she made her money: cybersex salons. Haran is class, Haran is Sheriff of Sheriffs.’

‘Haran is a bad man and a damn rude boy,’ Tembo’s wife said with unexpected vehemence. ‘He is no good to anyone, none of them are, worthless posses.’

‘Anything you want,’ Faraway whispered confidentially to Gaby. ‘Haran can get it for you. And he does not deal in cash. He is a gentlemen, my friend Haran. He does you a favour, you do him a favour, some day, when he needs it. Maybe never.’

‘The devil is a gentleman too,’ said Mrs Tembo. ‘Very polite. He does you a favour, and then one day the favour he asks back is your immortal soul.’

‘Woman, you are prejudiced and computer illiterate,’ Faraway said. ‘You insult him, you insult all Luo. Who do you think brought Net technology and the information revolution to this poor country? Luo, that is who. Woman, you should be thanking Haran, not cursing him.’

She scowled and returned to the kitchen.