Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq, Peru, Pakistan. Do you think the world has forgotten that off-the-record, on-the- camera comment about leaving the bloody wogs to sort it out for themselves? Not the people in those burned-out villages and bombed-out towns, who you refused to protect because it might mean your little boy soldiers being shot at. Not the people in this hall, this country. We are all wogs; and we sort it out for ourselves. When I go onto those streets, it will not with your blue-helmeted nannies. It will be with people I and the street respect. It will be with the Black Simbas.
‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ General Sir Patrick Lilley said. ‘Nice to see so many familiar faces. Before we get on to the allocations, the usual update.’ He talks like the Last Englishman, Gaby thought. ‘Terminum of the Nyandarua symb is officially fixed today as a line of latitude Map Reference one degree twelve minutes twenty-three seconds south. Program your GPS locators accordingly. The usual
‘Users of the Nairobi localnet of the East African teleport have been experiencing transmission breaks and data errors. We have discovered that this had been caused by the intrusion of symb organic circuitry into the optical fibre network. The Nyandarua symb seems to be integrating itself with the East African teleport. We are unable to predict the long-term consequences of this; should it pose a threat to security, we will have to seek government approval to isolate the Nairobi localnet. For the meantime, I’m afraid we’ll all just have to tolerate the interruptions and drop-outs.’
Gaby wondered his beret did not slide off his head at such an angle. Hat pins, that’s your secret, isn’t it, Sir Paddy?
‘Now, to the chief business of this press conference. I will be calling the agencies that have filed for exit visas in alphabetical order. Would those called please have their documents certified by my aide.’ Who was a fox terrier bitch. Gaby studied the faces of those who waited to hear their names called by General Sir Paddy. All were black. Most had the look of terrified resignation to the inevitable Gaby had once seen on a wildebeest pulled down by the nose and disembowelled by a pack of hyenas.
General Sir Paddy called SkyNet down, section by section. Gaby watched T.P. collect his way out of Kenya. She heard a name she did not recognize and was most surprised to see Faraway go cantering down the steps. Then she heard her own name and went down to pick up the papers and the plastic badge with her photograph on it from the fox terrier bitch. General Sir Paddy was into Transworld Television by the time Gaby had regained her seat. It was only there, seeing the hands clutching their visas and identity badges, that she realized.
‘Where’s Tembo’s? What about Tembo?’ Nobody could look at her. She yelled down at the podium. ‘What the fuck about Tembo?’ General Sir Paddy paused in his reading of the names to frown at this loud, ill-mannered, rebellious Irishwoman.
‘T.P., you have to do something. He’s got a wife and kids, for God’s sake. He’s like family, like my favourite uncle. You owe him, T.P.’
‘There’s nothing I can do, Gaby. My hands are tied on this one. Believe me, this guts me as much as it does you.’
‘I’ve heard that before, T.P.’ She made to go down to confront General Sir Lilley on his podium. T.P. Costello grasped her and spun her around with unguessed strength.
‘Get on Sir Paddy’s tits, and you fuck it up for all of us. We walk a very fine line here.’
‘Four and a half years, and you’re still feeding me the same brown-nose shit,’ Gaby said. ‘When are you ever going to realize that we don’t need these people? Faraway, Tembo, I need you. And your family, Tembo. And the keys to the Landcruiser, T.P.’
‘Where are you taking them?’
‘To get on the tits of whatever agency decides these things, until they give me the result I want.’
57
The UNHCR sent her to the OAU offices. The OAU sent her to the UNHCR but she told them they had sent her here so they suggested she try the IRC. The IRC said it could not do this thing and sent her to the EU Embassy. The EU Embassy looked at her as if she were dog shit on the mat and told her to go to the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Office on Harambee Avenue. This was a purely internal affair, Harambee Avenue decided and sent her to the Home Affairs and National Heritage Office on Moi Avenue, where seven hundred Rastafarian pilgrims in red, gold and green, who had come to join the great exodus to the Holy Mount Zion in Africa, were camped with their children and the goats they purchased from refugees glad to part with them for hard currency. Harassed UNHCR staff in white and blue bulletproof vests were trying to move them on to the buses that would take them up the Westlands Gate to be processed through. The hard currency goats cropped the sparse grass central reservations and nibbled the tips of the smog-blighted yuccas.
As this process was going to take some time and little After-the-Rains had started to cry and Gaby’s temper was fraying, Tembo suggested a short-cut through service alleys that would take them out at the other end of Moi Avenue. There were dead bodies in the alleys behind Nairobi’s golden towers. They were swollen and waxy with gas and rot. Gaby could not avoid driving over some. She made herself listen to After-the-Rains and not the crack and pop of bursting flesh.
It was as bad as the Rastafarians outside the Home Affairs Office. Five hundred people were trying to push through the revolving doors. Policemen shaded themselves under the thorn trees, unable to take effective action. On Faraway’s suggestion, Gaby turned out microphone, camera and camera crew.
‘Could you help us get in there?’
The policemen eagerly gave up their lounging and cleared a path to the door. They managed to do it smiling to the camera. This was a pity; the camera was not running.
They fought their way to a counter clerk who sent them to a superior who referred them to an executive officer on the fifth floor in an office with a desk, a chair, a PDU and eighty cardboard document boxes who said that all press accreditation was being handled by the UN and sent them to East Africa Command Headquarters on Chiromo Road.
There was not a shop left open on all of Haile Selassie Avenue. Those that had not been looted and burned-out were shuttered. In the expensive shops, that sold watches and jewellery and other negotiables, the steel security curtains had been smashed in by ram raiders. The front end of a Suzuki 4x4 projected from the front of Sharma and Sons, Discount Jewellers. Traders had set up pitches on the sidewalks: a trestle table spread with CDs and discplayers; a plastic fertilizer sack split and opened on the ground on which bottles of Volvic mineral water were piled in little ziggurats. A man with a rifle at his side sold car batteries from the porch of the Christian Publishing Office. In the back row of seats the children were crying. Mrs Tembo held them in her arms.
‘Hush now, babies,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’
Gaby’s identity card and DF108 were inspected at five different checkpoints on the approach to East Africa Military Command. The soldiers turned out all the passengers to take up the seats to make sure they were not carrying explosives before they would open the barrier to the visitors car park. Gaby left Faraway as a deterrent to thieves and marched Tembo, Mrs Tembo, Sarah, Etambele and After-the-Rains into the reception area and demanded to see someone with the authority to issue an exit visa to Sky Net’s most valuable news gatherer and his family. After forty minutes, an adjutant was sufficiently under-busy to come and tell the civilians that they were in the wrong section of East Africa Military Command. This was East Africa Military Strategic Command. They needed East Africa Military Logistics Command, which had taken over the Church Army Training Centre on Jogoo Road.
Landhries Road had been sealed off with a barricade of wrecked cars where a doodlebug had come down on the Country Bus Station. Detour signs hand-painted on the rusted doors directed traffic along Pumwani Road. The slums had grown bigger in four and a half years; down to and over the Nairobi River. Slums never grow any smaller. They are bad when they are lived in, but worse in decay. Many of the shanties had collapsed or slumped into the river, which was a swamp of plastic, scrap metal, wood and dead things.
There was a road block up at the top of Kericho Road. Two Nissan pick-ups with anti-aircraft guns bolted into the truck bodies –
