Then the doctor did something that made her gasp and tear at the leather straps. He had not needed to do that thing either.

They took her to the next sector, which was a dead white room with a white table and two white chairs in it. Gaby was placed on one chair. After a time, the door slid open and the man she called the anti-Shepard entered and sat across the table from her. He was dressed in a beige linen Nehru suit. The badge clipped to his breast pocket identified him as Russel Shuler, with Access All Levels.

Gaby placed her hands on the white table and stared at the space between them. After the birthing chair, she could not look Russel Shuler in the eyes. She could not look anyone in the eyes. ‘Interview commenced twenty eighteen, October second, two thousand and eight,’ he said to the air. ‘Preliminary debriefing of Ms Gaby McAslan.’

Gaby looked up.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’

‘I’m sorry. Smoking isn’t permitted in this unit.’

‘In that case I want to see the European Union Ambassador. My treatment here contravenes the UN’s own charter on human rights.’

The man called Russel Shuler sighed and asked her to tell him everything that had happened to her in the Chaga.

‘You shot Rose’s Dog,’ Gaby said. ‘How is Bushbaby?’

Russel Shuler frowned, then identified the street name.

‘Ah. Yes. Her. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she died in theatre.’

Gaby closed her eyes and imagined turning the table over, picking up the white chair and smashing blindly about her until everything was in as many pieces as she was.

‘We’ll be charging the man, the one who calls himself Moran, with murder, of course.’

‘Get me the EU Ambassador,’ Gaby McAslan said quietly.

The man sighed, which was the signal for two big men in medical whites to come and take Gaby down the curving white corridor to a windowless white room with a steel toilet in one corner, a hygiene cubicle in the other, a bed as far away from the toilet as possible, a television screen on one wall and a television camera on the other. The door sealed seamlessly into the wall, as had that other door in that other white room in Tsavo West.

‘I want Shepard, get me Shepard,’ Gaby screamed until she could barely force the words from her vocal cords. Then she tore off the paper robe, ripped it into shreds and stuffed them down the steel John. She made a nest out of the bedding, folded herself into a foetal position in the middle of it and cried herself into dreams of running down curving white corridors after the ever-retreating figures of Bushbaby and Dog until they came to a brink and fell into simmering magma and Gaby could do nothing to save them because her head had been shaved and her hands tied with her hair.

She woke with a cry. The door was open.

‘Shepard?’ she said.

Three figures were silhouetted against the white corridor. They wore surgical scrubs. Between them was a birthing chair on castors.

‘You don’t need to do this,’ Gaby said as they put their machines into her and sucked their syringes of fluid out of her. ‘You don’t have to do this. You have no right to do this. No right. No right. No right.’

There was something in the needle they had given her for she slept without dreams after that, and when she next woke, it was because the door had opened again and it was Shepard standing there. Her heart leaped. She lived again. The joy burned through the sleep and the chemicals and in the clarity she saw that it was not Shepard, but his evil twin, come with a white sweatshirt and a pair of white drawstring pants because he was not brave enough to sit across a table from a naked woman.

This was the pattern of time in Unit 12. Door opening and either Russel Shuler or the birthing chair; door closing; numb, foetal sleep; well-prepared food that could have been dog shit for all that Gaby tasted of it, fiddling with the television controls, staring at twenty-year old re-runs on Voice of Kenya of Remington Steele or Oprah Winfrey. From time to time she realized that behind that screen should be news channels: CNNs, SkyNets, Foxes. Instead, she found herself looking forward to the Venus de Milo beauty cream ad. One fix was enough to have her rocking back and forth for hours in her nest of quilts, quietly singing ‘Venus de Milo, Venus de Beauty.’ It made her stop wanting a cigarette. She wanted a cigarette more than she wanted out of this white room, with its shower cubicle and steel pissoir and camera eye watching her rocking gently in her nest, singing. Sometimes she thought that whatever they gave her in the needle must be very good, that she worried so little about wanting out of Unit 12. It was life. She would adapt. She was doing very well already. Russel told her so in his debriefing sessions. But a cigarette would be perfect.

And then she would wake in the dim night light and feel the full weight of Unit 12 press down on her and she would know that the stuff had worn off, because she could recall where and what and who she was, and what had been done to her, and how long it would go on for, because they had absolute power here. Then she would beat her fists bloody on the place where the door had disappeared until the white scrubs came and she would wake wondering what she had done to her hands that they were bandaged, but not too worried, because it was almost time for Santa Barbara.

And she woke.

And there were two silhouettes in the door.

‘Ms McAslan?’ said the nearer of the dark figures. Gaby frowned in her nest of quilts. The figure spoke in a Kenyan accent. ‘May I come in?’

Gaby nodded. The figure entered. He was a tall, very black black man in a pale brown suit. His tie was very neatly knotted. He carried a briefcase. He set the case on Gaby’s bed. She backed away from it into the corner.

‘My name is Johnson Ambani,’ he said. ‘I am a lawyer. I am very happy to find you in passably good health, Ms McAslan. Could you please sign this document?’ He spread two pages on his briefcase and marked where she should sign with black Xs. He offered Gaby his stainless steel ball-pen. She stared at it as if she had been offered a snake.

‘What am I signing?’

‘Documents seconding you as consultant to the National Assembly Ministerial Special Enquiry into human rights violations on Kenyan and foreign nationals by the United Nations,’ said the second figure, a big, broad black man. In silhouette his ear-lobes were loops of stretched flesh.

‘Dr Dan?’ Gaby said, in a voice she had not used since she was six.

‘In person, Ms McAslan,’ Dr Daniel Oloitip said. ‘Now, if you would have the world see what is being hidden in this place, you will sign the papers Mr Ambani, my legal advisor, has prepared for you.’

Questions could wait. Not long, for they were very huge questions, even under the chemical smog in her head, but long enough to scribble Gaby McAslan at the black Xs without reading the print. Johnson Ambani fastened a plastic badge on Gaby’s soiled white sweatshirt. It had her SkyNet pass photograph on it and read National Assembly Ministerial Commission of Enquiry: Special Consultant.

Her hair was long and beautiful in the photograph.

‘Dr Dan,’ she said. ‘Could someone get me a cigarette?’

48

The curving white corridor was full of black men and women in dull suits. They followed Dr Dan like the tide the moon as he swept past all the white doors that were identical but for the numbers on them. Barefoot and vertiginous from the tranquillizers, Gaby kept at Dr Dan’s shoulder by momentum alone.

‘Things move slowly in this country, and they go by devious routes, but they get there,’ the big politician said. ‘Two years I have been pressing for a government enquiry into this place, but all happens in God’s time.’

‘You knew?’ Her brain had been lagged with roof insulation.

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