Chaga

‘I do not think you are going to get much satisfaction from your insurers,’ Tembo said ruefully.

They were saying these little things because none of them dared think about the big things. At terminum. Angry Azerbaijanis behind them. Sixty kilometres of semi-desert on either side. No food. No water. No means of communication.

‘Shit! The disc!’

Tembo seized the camera and ran as fast as he could out of the Chaga into the virgin savannah. Gaby saw the flexible disc heliograph in the sun, Tembo unbutton his pants and then Faraway asked her to please spare his friend’s dignity.

‘Just pray his digestion is good today,’ he said.

The camera he brought back was a purulent mass of lichens and pseudo-fungi. Gaby winced at the SkyNet sticker on the side as responsibility went in and opened up inside her like the Gae Bolga of her childhood legends, the belly spear that unfolded a thousand barbs and tore out your guts. Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele had waved their father off that morning and Gaby McAslan could not bear the responsibility that they might never be waving him home again. They could die out here, or be vanished by the UN, like Peter Werther, which is worse than dying to those who wait outside. She had put them all into this place and did not have an idea how to get them out.

‘Could we walk?’ she asked plaintively.

‘You tell us where, we will walk,’ Faraway said. ‘After all, it is only sixty kilometres.’

‘We have no water,’ Tembo said. ‘And Gaby would burn before she went ten kilometres. Also, we have no weapons.’

‘There are lions?’ Gaby asked.

‘Leopards are more common around the edges of the Chaga. But the biggest danger is from gangs of bandits who pick over the abandoned villages. We would be safer in the hands of the Azeris than the scavengers.’

Gaby wrapped her bare arms around her knees. Her shoulders were already starting to feel hot. The Chaga had risen to ankle height. Terminum was several metres north of them.

‘So what do you suggest we do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.

Tembo looked at her, the land, the Chaga, the sky.

‘I suggest we set fire to the car.’

‘The hell with that. I worked damn hard for this car.’

‘It is lost, Gaby. The column of smoke will be visible from a very great distance. UNECTA has Chaga Watch balloons every few kilometres. They would call in an airborne patrol.’

‘And if the military see it first? Or these scavengers?’

‘They are cowards,’ William said forcefully. ‘They would not dare go into the Chaga, soldiers or scavengers.’

Gaby watched the interior of her car break out into pin-head sized scarlet blisters.

‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Torch it.’ It was only a car. The Chaga could have it. The Chaga could have the clothes on her body and leave her naked and sunburned, as long as the disc Tembo had hidden in his rectum remained inviolate.

The men opened the doors. The red beads had swollen into orange puffballs that burst into clouds of peppery dust as Gaby rummaged in the back for her spare diesel can. The metal had resisted the spores, though the cap had wedged tight around a crust of saffron crystals. Faraway wrenched it off and gave Gaby the honour of liberally anointing her own car with fuel. Before the Chaga could devour the diesel, she lit a length of tattered handkerchief with her cigarette lighter and dropped it on the driver’s seat.

The car went up in a satisfying blossom of flame. The refugees started the short walk back to Kenya. By the time they found a place comfortably far from terminum to sit and wait the ATV was burning nicely in a gobble of fire and carcinogenic black thermoplastic smoke. Gaby watched it burn. Tembo had been right. It was lost to her already, but it is one thing to have it taken from you and another to have to give it away with your own hands.

‘How long do you think?’ she asked.

Tembo shrugged. The smoke coiled into a neat twister that leaned across the edgelands towards the east.

How much burning is there in one Nissan All Terrain Vehicle? Gaby thought, watching the paint blister and flake. She thought about fire, and she thought about fear, and in her extremity she saw the land beyond Scared, a calm and watered plain where you can watch twenty-five thousand pounds worth of car burn with equanimity, even serenity, because you understand that there is no point being scared any more because it cannot help you.

‘Do you want to play a game?’ she asked the men. ‘Kill the time. How about “I Spy”? I Spy with my little eye, something beginning with…’ She quested around for a mystery object.

‘“C”,’ Faraway said and that was the end of that game.

‘All right then, what’s the most frightened you’ve ever been?’ Without waiting for the men to agree to her time-killer, Gaby told about the time in her first year in London when she had been alone down in a tube station at midnight and a white boy with a Stanley knife had taken her money off her, and her cards, and her disc-player, and her expensive shoes though they neither fitted nor suited him and then told her he was going to cut long scars that would never heal properly across her cheeks and lips and forehead and breasts if she did not go down on her knees and suck his cock behind the defunct phonecard machine on the westbound platform and who ran off leaving her things when the last train came in a gust of electricity and hot air. She had gathered up all her things and when she got off at her stop, dumped the money and the cards and the disc-player and the expensive shoes and walked barefoot to her flat. They were polluted now. They were diseased. They would never lose the taint.

‘The most scared I have ever been,’ William whispered, ‘is going into the town with your camera in my bag. I felt that everyone could see it but had agreed not to tell me. I felt like I had a disease, or another face in the back of my head that was pulling ridiculous expressions and sticking its tongue out at people, but I could never see. When that white officer wanted to look into my bag, I did not know what to do. Every thought flew from my head. It is very frightening when you know that you must do something to save yourself but you cannot think what. But what is strange is that it was the most frightening thing I can remember, but it was also the most exciting, like all the people who could see into me and knew what I was really doing were jealous and wanted to do it too. Does this make sense?’

‘It does to me,’ Gaby said.

‘The most scared I ever was was the morning I woke up convinced I had Slim,’ Faraway said. ‘I met the woman in a club. She was a strange woman on a strange journey from somewhere to somewhere that went by way of me for a night. She had long ridged scars all over her arms and the backs of her hands. Scarification, you understand? But she was not of a tribe that thinks that sort of thing is beautiful. She had an interest in orifices. She loved to push things into body openings. There was a thing she would do with a champagne bottle. She could uncork one with her lower muscles. For a woman who can do a trick like that, I will buy as much champagne as she wants, provided it is that cheap stuff from India. She liked to do things with the corks, and the wire cages too. Ah! My poor foreskin! And other parts too. But it was worth it, for she made fiki-fiki like a animal, like something in heat.

‘When I woke in the morning I could not remember very much but there was a terrible burning pain in my f’tuba. And when I pissed, man! I thought I was going to die. It was pissing fire. What had this demon woman done to me? Of course, she was not there to ask. They never are, the women who are real demons. But the pain did not go away, and I thought it was some dreadful disease, maybe even Slim, and that no matter how many bottle of champagne she could uncork with her magic lips, it was not worth the death of the incomparable Faraway. That made me really afraid, so I went to my doctor because I thought that if I did have Slim, then it would be better to know so everyone could have a big party and tell me what a grand fellow I was before I died. So, the doctor looked up my dick with a fibreoptic thing and he falls over laughing and when he can talk again, he calls in his nurse, and she looks up my dick and falls over laughing and the next thing I know the room is full of doctors and consultants and nurses and porters and people who just heard a noise going on and wondered what they were missing, all looking up my dick and falling over laughing.