‘Shepard…’
‘Thanks, Gaby. I knew I could trust you.’
The door slammed on any comment she might have made.
34
Gaby’s videodiary:
August 27 2008
I have died and gone to hell.
People think journalism is hard. Journalism is running about getting chased by Azeri soldiers and slapped in isolation units and having to tell the finance company why you set fire to the very expensive 4x4 they lent you the money to buy and being lifted off the street by posseboys and gatecrashing society parties and living under the iron whim of T.P. Costello and flying off at a moment’s notice to the end of the world and never getting enough sleep but always having to look good for the cameras and too much coffee and never enough sex and regular mealtimes, what are regular mealtimes? cigarettes are mealtimes. Journalism is wee buns. Parenthood is hard. And long. And thankless. And comes without an off switch, a pause button, a rewind or a volume control.
This is my bedroom at the UNECTA beach house at Kikambala. Outside, the humidity is about ninety three per cent, the temperature in the same figures, the wind is rustling the palms, the surf is crashing in the reef and whatever things creep around in the night are creeping around in the night. Including some seriously big black millipedes with red legs. This is me hiding inside my mosquito nets. Not from mosquitos. Or seriously big black millipedes with red legs, though if one gets into this room, I’ll need institutionalizing. I’m hiding from Shepard’s children. They are the spawn of Satan.
I’m just going to have a cigarette.
Where to begin? Rehearsing it in arrivals at Kenyatta. Hi, you’re Fraser and Aaron, right? Your Dad’s really sorry he can’t be here to meet you, so he’s asked me to look after you and take you down to Mombasa and make sure you have a lovely time. My name’s Gaby. I’m your Dad’s live-in lover. Went over it and over it and over it as the flight data went from due to landed to in terminal until I had it by heart and they came through the door from immigration and I couldn’t remember a single word. My name: that was about all they got. They’ve probably worked out what I am.
Adulthood edits out the trivial but significant details of being a kid, like needing to go to the jax all the time and being continuously hungry and the fact that time passes more slowly for children than for adults. I should have made sure they went in the airport. I should have bought them brunch in the cafeteria. I should not have shoved them, jet-lagged, into the Landcruiser and been past Athi River before they realized what continent they were on, let alone who I was and where I was taking them.
Cigarette two. That bad.
I tried my best. Honest, Shepard. I tried to talk to them, which is not that easy when at any moment some refugee’s goat might leap under your wheels, or a refugee’s child, or just a refugee. Whatever I said, it was the wrong thing. Good flight? They told me all about how the stewardess had seen they were two boys on their own and taken them up to the flight deck to see the pilots fly the plane. My best friend is a pilot for UNECTA, I say. Her name is Oksana, she flies one of those Antonovs, you know? Really good friend; how about some time I take you to see her and maybe she’ll take us up on a flight and you can see how she flies the plane, wouldn’t that be great, no?
Silence.
Overkill.
I try television. I try video games. I try books, comics, movies, music, the environment. I die the death. They’ve no idea what I’m banging on about. You forget how much of what you thought was your childhood is made up of capitalist product placements and pop cultural ephemera that don’t translate from country to country, let alone generation to generation. Who was it said Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language? It’s going to be the longest five hours a girl ever spent in a 4x4.
Down past Kathekani the road comes within a mile of terminum. They’re trying to keep the main links to the coast open as long as possible while Kenyan army engineers cut a temporary earth road ten miles to the north- east, but it’s mighty hairy. Tourists and sightseers all over the place like ants on a picnic wait to see Tsavo West cross the road, and maybe a peek at the Chaga. All the campervans and tents and buses, it’s like Ayers Rock, or the Glastonbury festival.
‘This is Tsavo West,’ I say to the kids, like I had produced it out of my hat. And it’s mighty impressive, looming over the city of tents and campervans and all the people who have come to watch it. ‘Your Dad used to run this place.’
‘We know,’ says Fraser. ‘He was Research Director.’
‘We know,’ says Aaron. ‘He took us here a lot of times. We know all the people there.’
Try then to impress the guys by high-fiving with the SkyNet crew down to film the crossing. Added newsworthiness is provided by a matatu driver trying to avoid the traffic jam on the road and taking a short cut under the back left track of Tractor One. There are still folk alive in the tangle of metal: they’re bringing heavy cutting gear up from Voi by helicopter. Tsavo West has a million dollars of virtual reality manipulator system, but can’t pull a casualty out of a wreck.
I’ll swear on whatever you like I saw Keanu Reeves in the crowd with this season’s babe-on-the-side in mandatory khaki and cute boots. I try to point him out to the boys but Aaron’s looking at the wrong person and Fraser says Keanu Reeves is a nush. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad. I am certainly not going to do anything so uncool as ask.
After that, I think the only words spoken until Mombasa, when I had to ask them how to get to the Nyali bridge, were, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’ And that several times. Why did God give males bladders the size of peanuts?
Of course they know the turn off the main road at Kikambala, and which fork of the sand track through the palm trees takes you to the banda. The boys run up the steps like it’s Home Sweet Home and I unglue my knickers from the seat to which they’ve stuck and heave myself into the banda wanting drink smoke bath and ten years of solitary confinement, don’t they give you that for child murder? and the boys are in the kitchen looking at me with that dismissive yet accusing curl of the lip children instinctively know crucifies adults with assumed guilt and saying they’re hungry where’s the food?
The food? I say. The food?
So it’s off on foot up the beach for half a mile clambering over fallen palms and saying no politely but firmly to the shell and curio sellers to this place the boys know called the Kikambala Continental Dining Rooms where the fish is off the seafood is off the omelettes are off the salad might be off but the steak definitely is and the only thing that’s on is the curry which, astonishingly, comes complete with chapattis, chutneys, pilau rice, vegetable sambal, dhal and something so hot I still have the blisters on my gums and is the equivalent of a dollar fifty per head. I order cokes but Fraser says that when they’re on holiday Dad treats them like men and they have beer. By now I’ve learned not to argue with them, so it’s Heinekens all round. And they’re big enough to put themselves to bed, thank you very much.
Shepard, I need you! I am lighting cigarette number three, hiding in my mosquito nets, talking to this dumb viewcam praying
The door opened. Gaby leaped up, stuck her head out of the mosquito net.
‘Aaron?’
He was wearing beach shorts, multi-coloured flip-flops and a most cute little Japanese bamboo pattern yukata.
‘Gaby, is there something wrong with us?’ He spoke like a miniature Shepard. Inflections, expressions, accent. Jimmy Stewart, the next generation.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Everything you say sounds angry.’
