3
The rhythmic knocking woke her. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap.
Gaby came out of sleep with a start. Purple twilight filled the room. She did not know if it was evening or morning twilight. She did not know what room this was in which she found herself, or how she was in a very big bed covered with a sticky sheet. She did not know why it was so hot.
She fumbled out of bed and gingerly opened the door. On the old-fashioned carpet stood her suitcase. She looked left, she looked right. There was no sign of who had put it here and knocked her into wakefulness, and it was a very long corridor. She quickly stepped outside and retrieved the case. The baggage labels were exceedingly interesting. While she had slept her suitcase had been to Mauritius and back.
4
Gaby McAslan came out of jet lag wanting a drink. Food would have been good, but you met more valuable people in hotel bars than restaurants. Hemingway kitsch. Zebra skins on the walls, sad antelope heads begging sympathy. Spears and shields and photographs of great white hunters and their memsahibs squatting on the running-boards of ancient Bentleys, dead things at their feet. Wicker tables and chairs of course. Black staff, white clients. Feeling conspicuous in fashionable silk blouse, jodhpurs and riding boots, Gaby McAslan approached the bar. A short, solid woman with shoulder-length dull blonde hair sat on a stool talking with the barman. She wore a sleeveless plaid shirt, combat cut-offs and biker boots. She looked the only other professional in a room of Chaga hangers-on.
‘Excuse me, what do people drink around here?’ she asked the barman.
‘They drink this,’ the blonde woman said. She pushed a bottle along the bar. It had an elephant on the label. ‘Only beer with picture of factory on bottle. Old joke.’ She spoke with a pronounced Slavic accent. ‘I get you one. Moses.’
The barman flipped up a dew-dropped bottle and uncapped it with his teeth.
They clinked bottles.
‘Big cocks and vodka,’ the blonde woman said.
The beer tasted nothing at all like elephant piss. Drinking from the bottle. Less than twenty-four hours in the place, and you are already sinning against T.P.’s catechism.
‘You have funny accent,’ said the woman. ‘Know most English accents, but yours…’
‘Northern Ireland.
‘Norren iron,’ the small woman said, making it sound almost Japanese.
‘Russian?’ Gaby ventured.
‘Fuck, no!’ the small woman exploded. She ripped open her plaid shirt. Underneath was a much-washed muscle-top with a picture of an ugly jet aircraft taking off and something in Cyrillic. ‘Siberian. Proud of it. Never forget.’
‘I had a close encounter with one of your comrades coming into Kenyatta airport,’ Gaby said.
The Siberian woman sneered.
‘Bloody 142s. Need five kays to get down and another ten to get up. Boring boring boring. Only thing you can do on 142 is drink whole damn flight.’ She patted the aircraft on her T-shirt: a stubby, high-wing, T-tail jet with a big engine mounted over each wing-root. ‘An72 F. Now that is airplane. Take them anyplace. Anyplace at all. This town full of old white hunter wankers; talk all about old days when they go all over place in Cessnas. Cessnas. Toy airplanes. Model kits with engines. I tell you anywhere you take pissy Cessna, I take An72; proper airplane.’
‘You fly.’
The Siberian woman smiled with a mixture of pride and modesty that Gaby recognized and admired. She had time for people who did their work, however lofty or low, proudly and well. It was a small sacrament, like those monks who served God by washing dishes. Dishonesty she despised; those who bought and sold, or were parasitic on others, and did not create. Only people who
‘Gaby McAslan.’
The blonde woman stuck on the surname glottal several times.
‘Well, I am pleased to meet you, however you say your name. I am Oksana Mikhailovna Telyanina, of Irkutsk.’
The barman lined up two more elephants. They clinked bottles and drank to Siberian/Ulster friendship. She drinks and dresses like a gay man, Gaby thought.
‘You are here for Chaga, yes? Of course, everyone is here for Chaga, one way or other. Tourist or worker?’
‘Worker. I’m with Sky Net. Start tomorrow.’
‘Good people. Jake Aarons, he is good man. Good man. Big waste. Ah, they are all good. Better than fucking UNECTA – well, Administration who tell us where we can and cannot fly.’
‘Death to administrators.’
‘And accountants. Up against wall, boom boom boom.’
They drank to the mass liquidation of the administrative and accounting classes. The empty bottles lined up along the bar. Glass elephants on parade.
‘What do you think it is?’ Gaby asked, ‘the Chaga?’
The little Siberian woman shrugged expressively.
‘You mean, another planet? I don’t know. Easy to talk about other planets, other worlds out in cosmos, make stories about them, make movies when they are far away. When you can see it, touch it, walk through it – fly over it – is harder to believe. Too close, understand? Maybe is one big big movie set. Industrial Light and Magic, all that. I tell you, right here in this place, is very hard to believe in aliens and other worlds, yes? Oh, meant to say, I love your hair.’ She gently stroked Gaby’s hair.
‘Blood of the Celts flows in me,’ Gaby said, touched.
‘Blood of Finno-Ugarics flows in me. Well, my father’s side, generation or so back. Mighty people, long before damn Russians. Proud people. Look.’ She pulled down the ragged neck of her Sibirsk T-shirt to reveal a tattoo of two intertwined circles on her right breast. ‘Apprentice shaman. Or should it be sha-woman?’
‘Sha-person? No shit?’
‘No shit, Gahbee UmmicAzlan. Father had no sons, so passed on mysteries to eldest daughter. Me. Oksana Mikhailovna. Already, I can fly. No problem! In time, I will heal the sick, see into human hearts, speak with voice of forest, take on spirits and shapes of animals. See.’ She moved the stretched neckline. The left breast bore a wolf-mask tattoo. ‘Maybe is why I cannot believe in aliens, other planets, colonization, all that. I know earth is still strong, can still surprise us. Most of all here in Africa, where everything is born. Ah! Moses! You are great man. What you doing afterwards?’ The great Moses set them up and kept setting them up and the two women kept drinking them and they talked men and money and football and tried to teach each other mouthfuls of Finno-Ugaric and Irish which of course ended in beer spitting and laughing because they only taught each other to say dirty things.
‘Go to bed, Gaby McAslan,’ Oksana Telyanina said as the line of bottles reached the end of the bar. ‘You have big day tomorrow: new city, new job, new workmates. Need sleep. Me too. Have to fly tomorrow, early.’
‘After all this?’
Oksana turned her right forearm up. She tapped a swelling under her wrist.
‘Diffusion pump. Cleans it out of blood as fast as I drink it. Piss pure alcohol. Tomorrow I fly to Ruwenzori
