Chaga

‘Faraway.’

‘Well, it is not illegal,’ Faraway said to Tembo.

‘Neither is it totally legal.’

‘All right. I will apologize to her. It is the beer, it is the warmth of the night, it is the excellent company of my good friends, it is the superlative food!’

This he shouted in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Gaby McAslan, believe me, you need this man. He can help you get what you want. I know where he is to be found, I can take you to him, introduce you. We are the same tribe, we are blood.’

8

Gaby carried the Ethiopic Gospel box carefully on her knees as the taxi driver swerved to avoid a crater in the road. In Kenya you could tell the drunk drivers. They were the ones driving straight down the roads. The box was a beautiful thing, the best in the shop. It had been made with the eyes and hands of faith. The side panels were illuminated with the four evangelists. On the top was a wide-eyed St George slaying a dragon that did not look as if it had put up much resistance. Gaby had balked at the price – half a month’s wages – but Faraway had insisted that nothing less than the best would be acceptable to Haran.

‘That is where a lot of big businessmen go wrong,’ he told her as the taxi negotiated the late-night downtown traffic. ‘They think they can buy a cheap Somali fake knocked up yesterday in a sweat-shop in Mogadishu, stuff it full of hundred shilling notes, or diamonds, or cocaine, and Haran will eat out of their hands. Such men receive the reward their small souls deserve. Haran, he is an aesthete. A connoisseur. A most spiritual man.’

He practised a strange form of magendo. Haran did collect Ethiopic scripture cases, with suitable inducements inside. He would receive the donation and beg to be excused a moment while he compared the case with his large, probably unparalleled collection. If he returned with the reliquary saying that he regretted that he was already in possession of one similar, you knew that for unspecified reasons your petition had failed. If he returned empty-handed and told you your donation was a grace to his collection, you knew that you had become a client of his posse. Either way, the cash inducement inside would be gone.

‘It is really a question of whether he likes you or not,’ Faraway said. The taxi swept past the huddled mounds of Nairobi’s street-sleepers, piled in doorways, wrapped in cardboard and tattered blankets and laid out like victims of a small holocaust along the sidewalks. ‘And he will like you. He likes beautiful, intelligent women. Women like him. I do not know why, given what happened to him.’

‘And you just have to tell me, don’t you?’

‘It was the khat,’ Faraway said, ignoring Gaby. ‘Everyone knows that bad things can happen if you chew too much, but we never thought it would be anything like that. It began back in Kisumu when he was just starting out. He used the khat leaves to help him concentrate: he was working with up to five simultaneous screens of information. No one had ever seen anyone chew that much khat. People used to warn him that no good would come of it, and staying up, staring at screens day and night. They were right.

‘He was smitten with a plague of orgasms.’

The taxi abruptly veered where there was no pothole. The driver had a sudden coughing fit. Gaby caught sight of his astonished eyes in the rearview mirror.

‘He could not help it. At home, at work, on the bus, out with friends, anywhere, any time: bam! An orgasm. Thirty, forty a day. The doctors had never seen anything like it. They had all kinds of explanations, but everyone knew it was too much khat. But in case you think that this is the greatest thing that could happen to a man, something terrible happened. After three months at forty orgasms a day, they suddenly stopped. Just like that. Gone! Since that day, he has never had another. Not in five years. He cannot even get it hard any more. Complete impotence. The doctors are as baffled as they were by the plague of orgasms. But I think that it is because every man has a certain number of orgasms in him, like bullets in a gun, and he can either fire them like a hunting rifle, at one target at a time, or spray them around like a machine gun. Haran used up his lifetime of orgasms in one big go.

‘And you, you no good damn rude boy!’ Faraway leaned forward and poked the driver in the shoulder. ‘Stop listening to the conversations of your betters and drive this heap of rust. That is what we are paying you for, not to see your ugly face grinning away in the mirror.’

Gaby McAslan wished Faraway had not told her that story. It would make everything so much harder, having to deal with a man who had been cursed with a plague of orgasms.

‘What is this Cascade Club anyway?’ she asked.

‘You will find out soon,’ Faraway said. ‘We are here.’

It betrayed no secrets from the outside: a big off-street retail block fronted by an Asian supermarket, a CD store and a haberdasher’s. Blue neon waterfalls framed a door from which a bouncer in an ankle-length leather coat and the biggest Afro haircut Gaby had ever seen scrutinized the street. There was no name, no flashing sign, just the tumbling neon waterfalls. The doorman stopped two middle-aged white men in fashionable hacking jackets, riding breeches and boots.

‘Boys’ night Thursday and Sunday,’ Gaby heard him say. He and Faraway traded fives and bantered in Swahili. Gaby wrapped the black lace shawl she had brought for the cool of the morning more tightly around the scripture box. Faraway slipped the doorman a fistful of shillings and ushered Gaby up the steep stairs behind the door.

‘Faraway, am I imagining it, or can I actually hear a waterfall?’

Faraway grinned his irresistible grin and opened the zebra-skin door at the top of the stairs.

The Cascade Club was built on two levels. The upper level where the bar, dance floor and tables were situated was a wide balcony that extended all around the hollow interior of the retail block. Patrons were crowded three deep at the bar. All the tables were occupied. The clientele was almost exclusively female. Barboys in gold lame pouches, boots and bow ties moved dextrously between bar and kitchens. There was a lot of champagne being drunk. Some of the boys had cash poked down the fronts of their posing pouches. They smiled a little too hard.

The biggest crowd had gathered around the balcony rails, looking down into the lower section. It was down there, in the pit of the Cascade Club, that the action was to be found.

Floodlights gleamed from the pristine white tiles on floor and walls. The cages were black iron with dramatic chrome spikes. Some of the men inside were white. One was Native American. All had big muscles, no body hair and were naked. They clung to the spiked bars and arched their backs and shook out their long hair and pretended to be in that hybrid state of ecstasy and despair pornographers think is the pinnacle of sex as the high- pressure hoses played over them. Some ran from one wall of their cages to the other, like wild animals. Some crouched on all fours, trying to hide away from the water. Some rattled the bars and roared back at the roaring jets. Some were bound hand and foot in a variety of dramatic bondage devices.

Behind the splash-guards the women shrieked and laughed as they swung the hoses across the caged models. One of the men had had an erection; three different women targeted it with their jets. Every so often a stream of water would slacken and collapse. Then the woman behind the triggers would hunt in her purse for more tokens and if she had none, reluctantly hand over her weapon to the woman waiting behind the spray barrier while she hurried to the change booth with her credit card. Some of the women were soaked through, expensive cocktail dresses clinging to their bodies, hairstyles plastered flat, earrings dripping. They laughed hysterically.

Faraway joined a fascinated Gaby at the rail. He had brought pina coladas. ‘Compliments of the management,’ he said. ‘There are automatic cut-outs on the hoses to stop them trying to shoot up on to the balcony. They can do what they like to the boys, or each other.’

‘I can see why Haran bought into this place,’ Gaby said, sipping her thick, semeny cocktail and thinking Freudian thoughts about water jets and a man who had used up a lifetime of orgasms in three months.

Wails of disappointment rose from the tiled pit. The hoses were all failing at once. No quantity of tokens would restart them. Muscular scene-shifters in wet-suits with the tops pulled down and tied around the waist