She knew the look.
‘All right. We’ll do it again. Got the camp framed? I’ll give you a mark.’
‘One moment please. There seems to be a problem with the white balance.’
‘I knew it. You haven’t the first idea about that camera, have you? We should have waited for Tembo to come back. I don’t know why he trusted you with it.’
‘You trusted him with your Nissan.’
‘That’s different. He has to get the boy. I can’t go: the only white woman in fifty miles? What kind of relation is he anyway?’
‘Wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin.’
‘Blood is much thicker than water in this country.’
‘But not so thick as money. And remember, I am only doing this because you promised to let me see you with no clothes on. Five minutes. In the middle of my living room.’
‘You can’t possibly hold me to that; come on, it was five o’clock in the morning, I would have promised anything.’
Faraway grinned behind the eyepiece as the lens closed in and pulled out into a wide-angle.
‘You have always known that what I want most in the world is to undress you and then
‘Shut your gob and we’ll go for another take.’
The bastard helicopter came back. It turned high in the air and swooped down low across the camp from its station to the east. Children hid from the hammer of its blades. Women pulled sheets over their heads to protect them from the dust. Lop-eared goats plunged and kicked on their hide tethers; a shit-smeared cow broke loose and careered between the huddles of people. Men in frayed shorts, faded T-shirts and baseball caps with the names of fertilizer companies on the front shooed it away with outspread arms. The helicopter hovered a moment over the refugees, delighting in the chaos it created, then put its down nose and slid up over the low hill where Gaby and Faraway did their fourth take of the news report. Dry brown grass raged and stormed. Dust flew up in a suffocating cloud. Faraway fought with the velcro closures on the camera hood. Gaby watched her prompt notes fly away from her. Combing her hair from her face, she could clearly see the pilot in the forward cockpit raise a forefinger in an obscene gesture. Gaby screamed curses into the roar of rotors shredding air. The helicopter banked again and slid away north along the line of the road in search of others to intimidate.
‘You will have your revenge,’ Faraway said. He was videoing cut-away footage of the camp. ‘Here it comes.’ A line of dust moved across the plain: an electric blue Nissan ATV, driving as fast as the mass of people permitted. ‘I am thinking,’ he continued, following it with his lens out of the camp and up the hill, ‘that maybe this is a thing worth doing after all. Maybe this will work and we will all be Leonard and Bernstein and have our faces on the television and not behind it.’
‘Woodward and Bernstein,’ Gaby corrected. She knew his cool by now. Anything that would earn him fame and face, especially among the easy women he met in Friday night jit-clubs, he would follow with the same phallic determination that he followed those same women home to their beds. Once vanity got him started, he was kept moving by a deeply uncool, unstreet sentimentality about the world’s unfairness. Tembo had required a different tack. Righteousness roused him. He was small, but mighty for justice. As Gaby had unrolled her story, Tembo had fetched the equipment her plan required and threw his overnight ready bag into the back of the ATV. His wife had gone about her early morning tasks with the patient resignation of African women who know that they carry the whole world on their backs.
The first person Gaby had confided in was Miriam Sondhai. She needed the blessing of the sacerdotal woman.
The Somali woman had been slow to answer. It was her way, Gaby had learned. Only when a thing had permeated into her like the rain into dry earth, found its level and risen again to the surface would she speak. That evening after her run she had come out with a book to sit with Gaby on the side of the verandah that caught the best late sun. Gaby had smoked and worked at her laptop, preparing scripts. Suddenly, Miriam had put down the book and said,
‘You must do this.’ The fossil water had risen. Gaby set down her laptop. ‘You see, they rocketed the hospital for an hour and a half before the troops came in. American Apaches, that was the name of the helicopters. They said the war-lords were using it as a headquarters. They were selling the drugs from the pharmacy for arms. Always drugs, for Americans. It is their great Satan. They should fear their own love of weapons, that makes them build things like Apache attack helicopters and anti-personnel rockets. I saw them hit one of the nurses as she ran across the compound looking for cover. The way they work is to explode into thousands of flechettes. It shredded the skin and flesh from her bones. I was nine years old and I saw a woman turned into a skeleton.
‘My father got as many as he could down to the lower levels, but there were many who could not be moved; in traction, or hooked to machinery, or premature babies in incubators. Some of the nurses stayed with them all through the aerial and ground assaults. The ground troops were Pakistanis. They had UN blue helmets, they had been sent to keep the peace between the tribal factions. They came through every ward, emptied every bed. They pulled people off life-support machines, they tipped babies out of incubators. They went into the theatres and took the operating equipment. They were the ones looted the pharmacy of all its drugs. Any medical equipment they could move, they took. They loaded it into white army trucks with United Nations painted on the side. They said the trucks were for prisoners but they were not the kind of truck that could hold people securely. They came knowing what they wanted. They had it all planned. I firmly believe they made up the story about the war-lords using my father’s hospital as a base as an excuse to loot it, and so the Americans, because they are so afraid of drugs, would rocket the hospital for an hour.
‘We saw it on the satellite news months later. President Zulfikar was pinning medals to the officers who had led the raid. They all looked very clean and very smart and they stood very upright, as Pakistani soldiers do, but what the satellite news did not tell was that the medals were not for service with the UN peacekeeping forces in Somalia, but for their generous donation of ten incubators, three life-support units, two dialysis machines, an X-ray lab and a complete operating theatre to the new Benazir Bhutto hospital in Islamabad.
‘The hospital did not get the drugs. The soldiers split what they had stolen and sold it to the Americans. Some of the deaths among the UN peacekeepers were from accidental overdoses on medical-grade opiates.’
Gaby’s cigarette had burned down into a drooping curl of ash.
‘This is why you must do it,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is a bad thing when the military is a parasite on its own nation, but it is much worse when someone else’s army is parasitical on your nation, and with the blessing of the organization that is supposed to restrain the strong and protect the weak. You must do this, Gaby.’
She had her blessing. Hers was holy work. But she wished her motivations were as clean as Miriam’s expectations.
Tembo drove the ATV like a maniac. The boy he had brought was tall and thin and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for a band that had broken up long ago. His hair was shaved so short it looked painted. He radiated that angelic, androgynous beauty peculiar to young African men and women. His name was William. He did not say very much more than that, except that he wanted his money now, thank you.
Gaby drilled him while Tembo wired him with the minicam in the strap of his shoulder bag and fitted the mikes and relay gear. In the back of the ATV, Faraway tuned receivers and monitors and gave encouraging thumbs-ups.
‘It’s simple,’ Gaby said. ‘You go in, you walk around, you see anything that looks like soldiers taking
‘Two hundred metres.’ His voice was soft and sexless too, a man/woman whisper.
‘We’ll be in the four by four, close by at all times. If there’s any trouble, we’ll pull you out, but I really don’t think there will be. Go in, get your stuff, come back, and you’ll get your face on satellite television. You’ll be a big star, just like Jackie Chan. Jean-Claude van Damme. A hero.’
Tembo looked at Gaby in a way that said that such was poor currency for the soul of his wife’s sister-in-
