Siberian woman had told Gaby. And the Elephant Bar had become the Last Chance Saloon for subcultures from all over the planet who had decided that the Chaga was their best future. Their paisley-patterned buses and dead trans-Saharan Land-rovers were piled five high in the yard across the road. Changes; even for Oksana Telyanina. Better English. Shorter hair: a quarter of an inch all over. More tattoos: her totemic tree of enlightenment had sprouted branches across her upper torso; tangling a hundred tiny iconic tattoos in its twigs. Brutal animal-print fashions that seemed to Gaby to symbolize the easy weapons and sacramental violence of Nairobi before the fall.
‘Do they know who did it yet?’ Oksana asked. They were at a table on the verandah, overlooking the rows of An72Fs. These and a few army helicopters on the far side of the field were all that were left; since Kenyatta had been closed to commercial traffic, all the big jets had moved there.
‘The Americans are trying to tell us it was some Islamic fundamentalist group, but with them its always either Islamic fundamentalists or drugs. I was there, I saw it; it was some Tactical cartel showing its rivals the UN can’t push it around. They’re getting bolder, stronger. More savage. Fifteen dead, last count.’
‘If you want to stay at my house, you know where the key is,’ Oksana said. ‘At least you will be safe, this is a protected area.’
‘Until the UN leave. Thanks, but I’m with someone else.’
‘Who?’
‘Faraway.’
Oksana tried to look wise, which is not easily done when you have only a quarter of an inch of blonde stubble on your head. For a moment Gaby thought that she might be one of the kick-boxing women in the ring tonight.
‘And is he as good as the reputation he puts out about himself?’
‘He’s keen, he’s clever, he’ll try anything, he’s got great stamina, but he lacks, ah, finesse.’
Oksana spluttered in her beer.
‘Candidate for Serbski Jeb?’
Gaby suppressed a shiver. The bondage game had gone sour for her after the birthing chair in Unit 12. Be blind, be deaf, be reduced to taste, smell, touch, but be free. She would not take or give control in sex again.
‘He’s in love with me enough.’
‘But you’re not with him.’
‘He deserves it, but I’m not in love with him at all. It’s a bad habit I’ve picked up, sleeping with friends. I convince myself that they understand, but they always take it the wrong way and hurt gets done. It’s not love, I try to tell them; it’s touching. It’s feeling good with another. It’s wanting to wake up in the morning with another body in the bed. It’s needing something to touch me, otherwise nothing will ever touch me again. Look at me; I’m heading for thirty. I’ve got grey hairs, my metabolism’s shot to hell – once I did all my best work on a diet of alcohol, nicotine and chocolate, now I even look at food and it teleports itself into my belly – it’s a toss-up which hits the ground first, my tits or my ass, and my lifestyle won’t let me settle, let alone have anything approaching an adult relationship. So I sleep with my friends, because I can trust them and need their bodies beside me in the morning, and they all fall in love with me and come apart when they find me in bed with some other friend.
‘I want to have an grown-up’s relationship of edginess and compromise and having to sacrifice get things in return you never asked for and hoping that it’ll still be there beside me in the morning to touch when the hair has all gone grey and the tits have hit the ground. I want to have things demanded of me. I want to have to work at loving. I want to stop being free.’
‘You want Shepard,’ Oksana said. A girl waiter in boxing gear brought more beer. It was not Tusker, you could not get any of the good Kenyan beers any more, but it was cold, and at least you could imagine an elephant sauntering across the runway. ‘Big cocks and vodka!’
Gaby returned the toast.
‘I saw him today at the bombing. He didn’t see me. It was like four and a half years rolled up and disappeared. I want him, I’ve never stopped wanting him, but I’m scared that if I find him, he won’t accept my apology, or me.’
‘It is all circles, like I told you last time we met in this place,’ Oksana said. ‘If it is taken from us, it will be returned to us some time. But to find your way back, you must first set out.’
‘Do you get this stuff off the insides of Christmas crackers?’ Gaby said meanly. Then, knowing she had been hurtful, she said, ‘You told me you had the gift of seeing into hearts. Look into my heart; tell me how it all fits together in there, because I don’t know any more.’
Oksana pulled her chair around to the other side of the table, leaned forward and looked into Gaby’s eyes. The Siberian woman’s eyes were blue; Lake Baikal blue, that is the deepest blue in the world, and in a blink that was not a blink, Gaby saw the ten thousand years of tundra ice that lay behind them and empowered them. It was no shit. It had never been shit. The power was real.
‘You want me to do it for you,’ Oksana said. A helicopter lifted from the far side of the airfield and passed noisily over the bar. ‘I cannot be the one who lays the way. You want him to forgive you, but you fear he will not, or cannot, because it is the hope that he will, and can love you again, that is the star that has guided your life. You have changed stars, Gaby, and you do not know that yet. You are still following the old star, and it leads you away. To follow this new star is to take the risk that it will fail, and your strength and trust with it. You see me and you wonder if I am another one of these people who cannot help be drawn to you and love you, and you are afraid of these people because you cannot stop yourself loving them a little. Even Faraway, who you say you do not love; you fear hurting him. You love him. You love me, but you are afraid of how I might reply to that. You must not be afraid of me. I love you, purely, and impurely, but my place is at your side and not underneath you and whatever you decide, I will honour.’
‘I don’t deserve you, Oksana,’ Gaby said. ‘I don’t deserve Faraway, any of you.’
‘We do not always get what we deserve. You see that?’ Oksana pointed at the dark horizon, away from the glow of the city. Gaby understood; she was pointing to a dim star among the constellations of the southern hemisphere: the BDO, three months from Earth. ‘If anything means that we do not get what we deserve, that does. The Chaga out there does. It is ours, if we have the courage to go into it, and take hold of it. Come on. It’s getting cold out here, and they have just started the first bout.’
Inside the bar, the spectators were ten-deep around the ring. A Giriama woman with scarification ridges beaded across her chin and brows was kicking the living shit out of a hauntingly beautiful Indian girl with long black hair tied back in a pony tail. The men cheered and howled and laid their collars and Deutsch-marks and Krugerrands down.
59
She was cruising south of terminum in the shadow of the hatching towers with Faraway in a Black Simba
It was day Minus One. The Kenyan Army had fallen back in the night to positions among the Ngara and Northern Ring Roads, defending the downtown district. The United Nations were a ribbon of white and blue stretched for ten miles along the airport road. This was the first day for many weeks that you did not hear the helicopters hovering over you. They were all gone to guard the link to the airport. The northern suburbs had been abandoned and the Tacticals were dividing it up between themselves.
