Chaga

sniper. Only the golden arches stood from a shelled-out McDonald’s; the mortar duel had shifted focus to a Roman Catholic Church. Pitched battles were fought for strategically significant and heavily defended gas stations.

But for old ties, Sugardaddy would not have spared Gaby the pickni and crew. He was General Sugardaddy now, of the Starehe Centre Division, with heavy and light mechanized units and infantry under his command. His orders were to spearhead the push all the way to terminum, clearing everything from his path to establish free access to the Chaga. They were half-way there already. In the night, the Starehe Division had exterminated the Soca Boys, but the Ebonettes had dug in at the end of the Murang’a Road and were resisting forcefully. The generals of the Right and Left Divisions, whose task it was to protect the flanks, were sending what troops they could spare to aid the assault, but they were coming under heavy attack from the United Christian Front to the west and the Nyayo Alliance to the east. Terminum brought the enemy fifty metres closer every day.

While his lieutenants ordered a pickni and assembled a crew, General Sugardaddy filled out the four and a half years since Unit 12. Rose was up at the front. She did not breed Chaga dogs any more. She had command of a mechanized scouting unit. M’zee was three years gone into the Chaga.

Sugardaddy had always thought that the old man’s heart’s true home was in that other world. He had heard that M’zee was working with the new immigrants in the Black Simba towns that were growing up ten, fifteen kilometres beyond terminum. A great nation was building in there. Perhaps M’zee’s was the greater work, in the end. Moran was dead. They had hanged him for Bushbaby’s murder. On the anniversary of the hanging, Rose went to the grave, squatted and pissed on it. And he, Sugardaddy, the king of cool, was a warrior. There were only a few now who remembered him by that name, fewer who dared to use it. He wished he could go back to the years when he was that name. He was not sure he liked to be a general, and feared.

Gaby wondered if General Sir Patrick Lilley was ever visited by such doubts.

‘Since you must tell the world something, tell it the truth about us,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘It is not for greed or power or territory that we fight. It is so we can open a way to the Chaga, and hold it open so that all the people who wish to go, or have nowhere else to go, may go safely. It is our future we are fighting for. Our nation.’

Then he drove off to war in his personal pickni. Gaby never saw him again.

But it is still killing, she had wanted to say to him. There is no end to killing and the excuses men make for it. I have seen a dozen tiny wars like yours, General Sugardaddy, and heard the reasons men have made for them, and they are as convincing and as false as yours. The true reason is that men make war because men love it. The Chaga builders come eight hundred light years to learn what it is to be human and the bad news from Planet Earth is that men kill because it gets them wet.

Mojo the driver was taking the pickni into the city centre now. He did it because he could. No one would stop him. No one would even look twice at him. He could drive up and down Moi Avenue, past all the other Tacticals who, anywhere else, would blow your lungs out of your back, but not here, because even carrion dogs need somewhere to sniff and lick each other’s asses. He wanted to show off to the white bitch and her piece of meat that the Black Simbas earned respect from the street. He played lecherous bumper tag with a Lambretta scooter on which two young women were riding. He would crawl up beside them, touch his tongue to his upper lip, pass. They would dart past on the inside and wrinkle their noses at him. He finally put them behind him in the traffic on City Hall Way. Beside him, Gaby watched a young beggar on a trolley push his way long the gutter. His design was resourceful – a fruit box screwed to a skateboard. Without warning, he pushed himself out in front of the pickni.

‘The beggar!’ Gaby shrieked. Mojo floored the brakes. The kid on the skateboard disappeared under the hood ornament that had once been one of those plastic lions rampant that the middle-class with no taste put on their gate posts. ‘Oh Christ, you’ve hit him.’

The kid’s face rose over the top of the radiator grille. He was standing on his two feet. He was smiling. In his hands was a pump action shotgun. He threw himself flat on the hood, blew both barrels through the windscreen. Noise. Glass. Blood. Gaby screamed, thinking she was dead. The blood and meat sprayed over her right side were not hers.

The skateboard kid rolled off the hood to cover. A Lambretta engine squealed. There were two shotgun blasts from the back of the pickni. The scooter dashed past. The girl on the back had produced a pistol grip shotgun from her backpack. She reloaded as her driver turned the scooter for another pass. The Lambretta circled the pickni, pumping shot after shot after shot into the gun position. The rear window streamed blood on both sides. Missaluba extricated her Kalashnikov from the footwell and threw open the door. The Lambretta driver kicked it closed as she sped past. Missaluba barely avoided losing fingers and face.

A big blue Plymouth convertible drew up alongside. In it were men with Afro haircuts and big guns. The driver and passenger covered Missaluba while the men in the back seat jumped out and hauled her down on to the concrete. The skateboard kid and the shotgun girl from the Lambretta pulled Mojo’s faceless body out of the truck and dragged Gaby over the blood-slick vinyl and shoved her into the rear seat of the Plymouth. A man in the skinniest tank top Gaby had ever seen frisked her. He tutted and shook his head at the calibre of her ammunition, like a Christian Brother teacher finding a vibrator in a schoolbag. Disapproving, but impressed. Missaluba and Faraway were kneeling by the side of the pickni. The skateboard kid and the Lambretta girl pressed shotgun muzzles to the backs of their skulls.

‘Take her,’ said the front seat passenger, a bald-headed man with a drooping moustache, round shades and a long leather coat. The Lambretta girl kicked Missaluba in the kidneys and quickly cuffed her hands with plastic cable grip. She went into the trunk of the big blue Plymouth.

‘What about him?’ the skateboard kid asked. He wanted to shoot Faraway. He wanted to shoot him very much. He wanted to blow his head up like an exploded melon, spraying red flesh and black seeds of wisdom.

‘Leave him,’ the leather coat said. ‘He is tribe. We go. Now.’

The skateboard kid flipped up his board, caught it with one hand and jumped into the back of the car beside Gaby. The Plymouth smoked away from the shattered pickni. There was blood, glass, and shotgun cartridges all over City Hall Way, and Faraway standing in the middle of them in his bright orange colour-of-the-day jacket. The Lambretta picked up its passenger and wove off through the traffic.

The man with the bald head and the drooping moustache in the leather coat turned in his seat to Gaby.

‘Good morning Ms McAslan. Sheriff Haran’s regards, and he wishes you to come with us discuss your account.’

60

They took her up the front stairs. At some time a bullet had killed one of the neon waterfalls flanking the door. The bouncer did not stand outside any more, but scrutinized the street from a metal slit.

The balcony bar smelled of sweat, stale cigarettes and the high-end tang that remains when the characteristic chemicals of expensive perfumes neutralize each other. The main ceiling lights were on. You could see the cigarette burns on the carpet. Down in the white tiled pit, rows of shower heads sprayed steaming water over twenty naked men languidly soaping each other. Gaby wondered, as she always had, where the Cascade Club bought its water.

Haran was on his throne in his glass-floored office at the top of the stairs marked ‘private’ in two languages. Leathercoat and the Skateboard Kid sat Gaby in a chair facing him and stood by the door. They did not think she might try to escape. They just wanted to look scary. Haran had one of them give her a moist wipe to clean the blood and brain off her face. When her condition no longer nauseated him, he spoke.

‘I’m disappointed. Really. I have to hear from others that you are back in my country. Gaby, I would have thought you would have called on your old friend and ally before now.’

‘You killed those Black Simbas. You fucking murdered them. They never stood a chance.’

Haran sat back in his ebony throne and contemplated the woman before him.

‘We are at war, Gaby. You yourself have realized this, by choosing sides.’