‘It is good to have you back,’ Faraway said. ‘At least, I am glad to have had the chance to find out that it is red down there too.’
Gaby sat on the bed beside him and kissed him. He held the kiss, moved her hand toward his swelling penis.
‘Things to do, Faraway. Got to go down to Diani Beach and grease a few palms to get this security clearance. Three days wasted, sitting around on my ass, while Nairobi vanishes.’
‘I would not say wasted,’ Faraway said. ‘And it was not always your ass you were sitting on. Come on, I want to do this thing again.’ He picked up the Walkman headphones and the pair of black tights. Static hissed through the Walkman earphones: the radio had been tuned to white noise. ‘Devil! When you put the phones on and blindfold me, so that I cannot see, cannot hear; only feel, only touch, it is like I am nothing but an enormous penis. Miles and miles of
‘That’s what it’s meant to do. Tactile enhancement through sensory deprivation.’
‘Where do you learn such tricks?’ Faraway folded his hands behind his head and watched her dress.
‘Do I have to be taught them?’
‘I always said you were a devil woman. You have corrupted my soul. I am damned.’
‘You are an idle bastard. Station Managers are meant to have clearances sorted out in advance.’
‘Deputy Station Manager. I was promoted beyond my competence. I tried to warn them, but it is the curse of bureaucracies. Listen, woman; while you are buying drinks for civil servants in beach bars, this idle bastard will be trying to arrange transport for us to Nairobi, liaising with the new regional headquarters in Zanzibar, and explaining to T.P. Costello why his special assignment reporter is still stuck in Mombasa. Such hard work deserves a reward, if not an apology. Tonight.’ He held up the black tights and the Walkman headphones. Gaby hit him with a pillow. She took his car keys.
In the line for the ferry she realized that the slit on the sarong skirt showed far too much thigh to the ticket boys and the lace-up boots were clearly the work of a frustrated foot fetishist, but the animal skin print fashion tickled the primeval hunter-gatherer in the back of her brain. Faraway had assured her it was this season’s fashion as he outfitted her in the dollar shops along Moi Avenue with replacements for the heavy winter clothing she had brought from her cold northern civil war. Faraway’s idea of fashion was something that allowed him to look at a woman’s legs. Gaby slid the dark glasses up her nose as she drove down onto the ferry. Not even time for an eye- job. Actually, she thought, the shades were cooler.
Hot climate clothes. Hot climate car. Hot climate music on the radio, that sounded good, that sounded right. It had never sounded like that anywhere else she had heard Kenyan music. Tropical fruits had been like that too: when you got over laughing at the price, you found they never tasted as good as they had when you bought them from Kariokor market or a wooden stall by a roadside bus stop. And the fabrics and the fashions and the furnishings only looked right under equatorial light. But even the wrongness of those things had been enough to bring her back to the place where they were right. Smells especially. Wood smoke. Charcoal. Shit and diesel. Tropical fruit. Dry earth, cow dung. Blacktop after rain. Night-blooming flowers. Instant Africa. You never leave it, because it never leaves you. Africa is in the heart. That is why you have sex with Faraway. He has always been the faithful one, the one who sent funny, rude letters and presents on your birthday, that found you wherever in the world you had been sent. He was the one who came all the way to London on the chance that it might be more than just friendship, but London had not been the place for that, nor Ireland, where you took him to show him to the people and places you drew your power from – he had complained all the time about how cold it was, how cold. However special, those had not been the places. This was. The heat made it right. The light made it right. The smells and sights and sensuousness of the ancient Arab island city made it right. Kenya was the place where friends could transform into lovers, with no regrets.
She hoped.
The road south was a ten mile parking lot of UN military hardware. Soldiers whistled and cheered at the white woman in the open top car speeding past. She knew better than to make obscene gestures at them. What Faraway had heard about them shooting foragers was evidently a rumour. Everywhere were women with bundles of firewood on their heads. Maybe the men thought the soldiers would not shoot women. Maybe no one shot anyone, but the men had told the women that story anyway because they were lazy. The hotel signs on the left side of the road all carried addenda: Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Marketing under the Golden Beach Hotel; Ministry of Finance riveted over the Diani Reef Hotel board; Ministry of Education swinging under the Trade Winds sign. Gaby dodged scooter couriers with cardboard boxes of state documents perched perilously on the back. The Kenyan government had not been in its new home long enough to set up a computer network, and the word around town was that it was already looking for a place to move to when Mombasa fell. It would all fall in the end. SkyNet could relocate to Zanzibar, but a government cannot run out of nation to govern.
Gaby turned in at the sign for the Jadini Beach Hotel. A plastic shingle informed her that it was in fact the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. At a checkpoint hastily assembled from an oil drum filled with sand and a bent metal pole on a pivot, Gaby showed her press card and asked where to go for an application for a Form DF108. The policemen directed her along a road that went round the back of the tennis courts, past the water-sports store and the pool chlorination plant to the staff accommodation block where the department that handled DF108 applications was housed.
There was another checkpoint behind the tennis courts. Gaby showed the man her press card. The man refused to swing up his bent metal pole and let her pass. Access to this department for foreigners required a form DF108.
‘I am trying to get an application for a DF108. I can’t unless you let me in.’
‘I am sorry. I cannot let you in without a DF108. Have you tried your consular office?’
‘They sent me here.’
‘This is most irregular.’
‘Will this make it regular?’ She held up two hundred shilling notes.
‘Attempting to bribe a government official is a serious offence,’ the man said.
‘Look, you stupid man, all I need is two minutes. If you won’t let me past, then you go and get me one.’
‘Desert my post in the time of my country’s need?’
‘If you say “it’s more than my job’s worth”, you can add assaulting a government official to your charge sheet,’ Gaby McAslan said. A black Mercedes came crunching down the sand road and stopped at the other side of the barrier. The driver sounded his horn.
‘You will have to go away and apply through proper channels,’ the government official said. ‘Do not waste my time.’ The government car sounded its horn again. The official lifted his pole and saluted as the Mercedes came through. Gaby considered darting through the gap but the pole came down so fast it bounced on its welded pivot. The black car stopped alongside the Sky Net RAV. A mirrored window hummed down. A big sweaty black face looked out.
‘You should be impressed that in these corrupt times there are still people conscientious about their jobs, Ms McAslan,’ the man said.
‘Dr Dan!’
The politician summoned the government official.
‘The
‘I thought you were dead,’ Gaby said. The tables around the pool had all been occupied by men in suits with PDUs and cases of papers, but the presence of Dr Dan cleared any number of civil servants and brought waiters swarming. ‘Politically or actually.’
‘Whisky, yes?’ Dr Dan signed the bar chitty. The glasses were etched with the coat of arms of the Republic of Kenya. ‘I almost was. Both ways. When they could not kill me politically, they tried other means. It has a long and honourable history in our country. But I do not die so easily. This much— ‘ he held thumb and forefinger an inch apart’—is as good as million miles. But now we have a new President and a new order. And a new Foreign Minister.’ He stirred his drink with his plastic giraffe. The years have been soft to him, Gaby thought. He is bigger, slower, heavier, but it is the weight of wisdom and power and slow-stalking cunning.
