Chaga

‘Do you know what they saw up there that made them fall over laughing? A sliver of red chilli pepper. That demon-woman! When I was asleep she had cut a tiny little slice of chilli and pushed it up my f tuba. Orifices! Devil! It was a week before I could walk straight, let alone piss with pleasure. It is funny now, but at the time, I tell you, my friends, this Faraway was never so frightened. I thought I would die. Really, truly.’

‘Of course, you have learned nothing from the experience,’ Tembo said.

Faraway grinned his huge grin. ‘I have learned never to leave chillis sitting around my home, and that is a very wise lesson for anyone.’

‘What happened to the strange woman?’ Gaby asked.

‘I saw her at clubs a few times, dancing with some other man, but she never came near me and I never went near her. Then I heard from a friend of a friend that she had died. She was playing a game in a hotel room with two men and a gun, but I do not know if it was an accident or on purpose. My friend of a friend said he thought there was a video, but the police were keeping it to sell around. But I never saw it. It is sad that her strange journey had to end that way.’

‘The most frightening moment of my life was caused by a pair of football shorts,’ Tembo said. Gaby hiccuped with laughter, but Faraway did not and he knew Tembo like a lover. ‘I was on the St Matthew’s Church in Shikondi’s under-18 football team, but my parents were poor and could not afford to buy me the team strip all at once. So for doing well in my exams I got the shirt, and for my birthday I got the socks and boots and when an uncle became a pastor and gave everyone gifts to celebrate the event, I got the shorts. Because they were poor, they bought things that would last: the shorts were the very newest man-made fibre that would never wear out whatever you did to it. This made me think. You could throw these shorts on the rubbish heap and they would never rot away to nothing. They would always be a pair of football shorts. I would grow up, and get work, and marry if God blessed me, and have children, and the football shorts would not have changed. I would grow old, my children would marry and have children, and, if God blessed me, those children would have children, and the blue shorts, small size would not change. I would die, and be buried, and decay to bones and hair and still not one of those artificial fibres would have rotted. And then I stopped thinking about football shorts and thought about me. This would happen. It was not an idea, a maybe, an if. It was a certainty. These football shorts were a measure of my life. This me, that wore football strip and played for St Matthew’s Under-18, would one day breathe out and not breathe in again, would go cold and dark inside, would stop thinking and seeing and hearing and feeling, and stop being. It could not be escaped or got around. The most I could hope would be to delay it. I saw this, and it scared me like nothing has ever scared me. And I would have to go alone. No one I knew could go with me, or go before me and come back and tell me what was on the other side. I would go alone, and blind. That is why I found Jesus. Because he was the only one could go with me, who had been there, and seen what it was like, and could tell me what would happen. Because I need someone I can call to in the dark night when my wife and my children are sleeping and the fear of it wakes me up like something very very cold in my heart.’

Tembo looked up and out at the dusty horizon. He stood up. He stared. He shielded his eyes with his hand and peered. Gaby imagined it was Jesus he saw, coming across the dry land toward this borderland between worlds.

‘There,’ Tembo said. He pointed to the south-east. ‘There! See!’

Gaby stood up and followed the line of his finger and saw the thing he saw. It was a wink of silver in the sky, a tiny heliograph of light that the eye lost as soon as it had found it. The cloud and the plains and the heat- haze together destroyed all notions of distance: the thing could have been miles away or hovering at the end of Tembo’s finger. But it was growing bigger, and assuming a definite outline. Tembo started to wave his arms. Faraway leaped up and down in an unconscious parody of the Masai jumping dance. The thing was big, the thing was approaching from a very great distance. The thing was near.

Then Gaby knew she had caught too much sun, for the thing coming toward her out of the south east was nothing other than a classic B-movie sci-fi 1950s McCarthy-paranoia Flying Saucer. A big white flying saucer, with UNECTA written in blue on its belly.

21

It was when she was sure, absolutely sure, that the metal door was never going to open again that it did and the black woman with the French accent came into the cell with a cup of coffee with UNECTAfrique: Go: West! on the side of it and a pile of clothes. She was not wearing the isolation suit. The stuffs she had sucked out of Gaby in the night had passed their tests.

‘Do you have to watch me?’ Gaby McAslan asked, naked, sunburned, scratched and scraped and needled and furious with the high and hot anger that is really fear after her night’s imprisonment in the decontamination unit at Tsavo West.

The magic of the flying saucer had failed close up. It takes a very strong magic to work at fingertip distance. It had just been a tired old logging dirigible with Sibirsk shining through the hasty UN white paintjob, with a world-weary crew-woman who had led them up the cargo ramp and then locked them in a windowless cargo bay because she and her comrades were afraid of catching terrible and disgusting Chaga-diseases off these flotsam of the edgelands. And when they had come down a guessed thirty minutes later – no one’s watch was working -there had been no more than a glimpse of brilliant sunlight reflecting from the curve of the canopy above them as they were taken by the faceless figures in baggy white medical isolation suits across the landing grid with the mountain-and-crescents symbol of UNECTA painted on it, and down a flight of iron stairs into the fluorescent-lit corridors that smelled of hospital and thrice-breathed air. Gaby McAslan’s Tsavo West was a dead white cell with a door that melded into the wall when the woman with the French accent left. Before she went, the woman had explained that Gaby had been exposed to possible contamination by alien organisms; that she and the others, who were in adjacent cells, were undergoing the standard observation and decontamination procedure before they could be permitted into the Tsavo West biosphere.

All night, as Gaby McAslan sat on her bed with her back to the eye of the lens, her knees hugged to her chest and her hair drawn around her like a cloak, she feared for the disc, and what would happen to her if the process of sterilization extended to the footage from Merueshi stored on it. She worried and watched the digits on the clock on the opposite wall click out the length of time UNECTA reckoned it might take for a new and virulent strain of Chaga-meme to melt an Irishwoman into a blob of plastic. One thousand and five clicks, that was how many. And then just as she had forgotten where the memory of the door was, the wall opened and let in air that did not smell of dread and body odour.

‘Admit it, you get some lesbo-sado-dominatrix thrill out of locking naked women in cells,’ Gaby said, pulling on the borrowed underwear, the jeans which belonged to a shorter-legged woman, and the sweatshirt. ‘Jesus, AC Milan. Is this the best you can do?’

‘Your friends are in the restaurant down on two,’ her erstwhile captor said. Gaby almost ran as she followed the woman’s directions along the corridor of featureless doors to the external elevator. Open air. The daylight was blinding. The little chain-drive at the bottom started to whir. Gaby McAslan was lowered down the face of a six-storey office block. She had a chance for a leisurely look at this place to which she had been brought. Across the twenty-yard gap in front of her rose a second, taller unit; a ramshackle affair that looked like dozens of portable cabins piled on top of each other and fastened together with gantries and swathes of power cable. UNECTAfrique was painted on its white flank in blue letters thirty feet high. Twenty yards beyond this second pile rose a third, smaller unit that was all heavy engineering plant, solar arrays and satellite dishes. It was connected to the main block by air-bridges and walkways and curving umbilical lines, as the main block was to the one down which she was moving. But the most extraordinary feature of this miniature city on the high plains was that each of the units stood on leviathan-tracked vehicles, like the monster flat-beds that carried pre-HOTOL space shuttles from the assembly buildings to the launch pad.

Gaby hit the emergency stop button. The elevator platform jerked to a halt. It was not a trick of the elevator, everything was vibrating. If she focused at a point on the ground, she could just discern the motion, slow as the minute hand of one of her Swatchs. The tractors, the units, the moored dirigible, with everything in and on them, were moving backward in perfect synchronization with the advance of the Chaga across the Serengeti plain.