relationship.’
Haran’s messenger gestured for Mrs Kivebulaya to take the slip of paper between his fingers and give it to the white woman.
Gaby unfolded the paper. Her optically engineered pupils dilated.
On the paper was the exact location of one Mr Peter Werther. He was to be found in a New Millennium Traveller camp not thirty miles from this table. Which was a gesture of exceeding goodwill, because for the past five years the world had been of the opinion that Mr Peter Werther was a knot of rotting skin and bleached hair and grinning bone up among the snows of Kilimanjaro.
10
In Africa there are still roads that bless the driver. The road that runs from Nairobi to Nakuru is one. It climbs up through the affluent dark green suburbs of Nairobi, then the going gets steeper and it begins to wind between Kikuyu shambas of tall yellow maize and sugar cane. People walk along the cracked red edges of it with bundles of cane on their heads, or green and yellow cans of margarine and Milo. Green and yellow, too, are the matatus that whine up and down the hairpin bends, so overloaded you wonder that they can move. Up and up it goes and just when you think it will never stop and you will drive straight into the ankle of God it passes through a narrow, heavily wooded pass and the road seems to vanish. There is nothing in front of you but blue air and, a thousand feet below, the dry, sun-scorched plain of the mighty East African Rift Valley. The road clings to the contours of the hills, descending in a leisurely, African way to the valley floor and the lakes that in season are pink with a million flamingos, the Nyandarua to your right, to your left the sleeping volcanic mounds of Opuru and Longonot. And you are blessed.
On such a road you fold the top down on your SkyNet Vitara and you drive with your elbow on the top of the door and you turn the radio up and you sing and you let the wind blow back your long, red hair.
They came to the little home-made wooden bus-shelter on the very edge and stopped to look at the Rift Valley. Gaby walked to the brink, where the land fell sheer to the Kedong plain. This was a big country, a country not hedged and walled and fielded and bounded and owned, as Ireland was. This country was strong and independent and resisted the constraints of humans; it went on and on, over the horizon forever, where their small concerns ended. For the first time Gaby felt she was in Africa. Nairobi had frustrated and baffled and seduced her with its capital city extremes, sophistications, brutalities, but a city is not a country. A city is designed to walk tall in. This land reduced humans and their lives and their cars and their ribbons of dusty road to insignificance, and because you were nothing, you could dare to declare yourself, be that same bright, indivisible atom of being Gaby had felt that night beneath the summer stars on Ballymacormick Point.
Two little boys had set up a stall beside the bus-stop. The women bought charcoal-roasted maize and fresh prickly pears. The little boys were too surprised by the sight of white women to haggle over the price. Because she liked them, Gaby gave them each a ten-shilling note, which she knew was more than they made in a week. She hoped they would not get in trouble explaining to their parents where so much money came from.
The Travellers’ camp was only a few miles beyond the viewpoint, down a long dirt road that turned off the track to the Safariland Lodge and meandered along the shore of Lake Naivasha. Their wagons were pitched in the shelter of a stand of flame trees. Some were propped up on clinker blocks, wheels removed; a final surrender to the fuel shortages. These would never migrate along the world-lines again. A beautiful hand-painted wooden arch stood over the entrance to the settlement.
What the sun said was
Tents and awnings billowed limply in the slow, hot air. Windchimes set on ornamental door-posts barely tinkled. Japanese fish-kites hung open-mouthed, stirring their streamer tails. Stranger fruit hung from the branches of the flame trees: things like cracked leather cocoons bound with steel wire. There were three of them, each about five feet long. They turned slowly anti-clockwise to Coriolis force. A lone generator chugged; most of the camp’s power came from silent solar panels. All the vans had small steerable dishes on their roofs: the economics of techno-nomadism was that the information revolution had made it not only a desirable life-style, but a necessary one. You followed the sun and lived the lifestyle in harmony with the planet until one day the fuel ran out and left you stranded in the heat and drought of Africa’s Rift Valley. With the Chaga approaching.
The Kilimanjaro Event had made East Africa the social navel of the planet. International Bright and Beautiful, and those who clung around them hoping that brightness and beauty were contagious, followed the planetary media circus to the plains in the shadow of the mountain. Most had moved on when Africa and things African slipped out of fashion. Some remained. They found room for their humanity to resonate in Africa’s great spaces. They made their camps under the big sky and settled into sun-warmed introversion and the evolution of white-boy ethnicity. The men of What the Sun Said were bearded and sat about with their hands dangling loosely over their knees, watching what was watchable. The women, naked to the navel, carried their babies slung at their waists and intimidated Gaby with the firm upturn of their breasts. Children in beads, feathers and zinc oxide war-paint on noses and cheekbones came running to greet the visitors. Their skins were tanned hard brown, there were flies around the corners of their eyes and mouths.
‘Are you the people come to talk to Peter?’ they asked. ‘We’re here to take you to him. Come on.’ They pulled Gaby and Ute along. Pied Piper in reverse. In one of the big, billowing saffron tents someone was playing a thumb-piano. The children brought the two women to a white awning roped to the side of a dilapidated country bus.
‘Here he is, here he is!’ the children clamoured. ‘Peter! They’re here! We’ve got them!’
‘Leave the talking to me,’ Gaby whispered to Ute Bonhorst.
The bus door opened. Peter Werther emerged.
This was what a man come back from the heart of darkness looked like. His face was tanned that dark brown peculiar to Teutons gone native. His hair was blond, long and worn in the community style; shaved at the sides, plaited at the back. Pale stubble made him look younger than Gaby knew him to be. He had the palest eyebrows she had ever seen. He did not affect the white-boy ethnic chic of the Sun-Saiders. He was dressed in a relaxed linen suit over a simple white T-shirt. No jewellery. No tattoos or ritual scarifications or body-piercing. His only idiosyncrasy was a leather biker’s glove on his left hand.
He greeted them with his right hand. Ute made the introductions in German.
‘Gaby McAslan. I know your work,’ Peter Werther said. His English was comfortable, softly accented with south German. ‘We get all the on-line services here: SkyNet, CNN Direct, News International Online. I liked your story about the genitals thief very much.’
‘I’m hoping to branch out.’ A swirl of warm wind set the black pods hanging from the trees swaying into Gaby’s peripheral vision.
‘They are into rebirthing,’ Peter Werther said, observing Gaby’s distraction. ‘Spiritual metamorphosis.’
‘There are people in those things?’
‘In sensory deprivation. They let them out after three, four days. The thing seems to be that they don’t tell you how long they are going to leave you hanging, or even if they are going to come back at all. Face the fear and pass through is the experience. I think that after three days upside down in this heat, you will believe anything you are told about yourself. There are always willing volunteers, and not just from the community.’
Ute had unfolded the camcorder and was videoing the cocoons.
‘Background,’ she explained.
‘Can we talk?’ Gaby asked Peter Werther. A fly darted at him and abruptly veered away, as if repelled.
‘Sure. That is why I have asked you to come here. But private, yes? They are private, personal things I
