Chaga

‘Came to see you,’ Gaby said. Came to tell you I was sorry, that I was wrong and bad and cruel and hurt you because I was hurt and that I wanted it all back the way it was when it was right and good and dirty; that she did not say.

Shepard hesitated. He is going to change the subject, Gaby thought.

He changed the subject.

‘Was it bad, afterwards?’

‘Yes. At the end, very bad. It was killing, all killing; killing for the sake of killing. They threw everything they had at the Simba Corridor, but the Black Simbas held it open for two months. Half a million people went up it into the Chaga before they pulled it in after them. Faraway – do you remember him? The tall Luo with the dirty mind – he stayed with me until the very end.’

‘I remember him,’ Shepard said. The look on his face was that of a man taken by his memories to a place he does not wish to go.

‘When they started shelling the airport and the UN stopped the relief flights and it was really scary, he got me out. We managed to put a call through to the coast before the net crashed; then he drove me cross-country at night, through the skirmish lines, to a place where they could put down a plane to pick me up. Do you remember Oksana Telyanina?’

‘Was she the one who was some kind of mystic; a shaman, was that it?’

She was the one said she could put an An72 down anywhere, Gaby thought, and she could. After the night of bouncing across the hostile bush, never knowing when they were going to run into another armed scouting party and whether they would run out Krugerrands before they ran out of people they had to bribe; it had been incomparable glory to see that ugly, beautiful jet coming out of the dawn light, down on to that dirt road, and the red dust pluming out behind it. It took more than natural power to fly like that. It took more than natural friendship to grant a favour like that.

‘And Faraway?’ Shepard asked.

‘He stayed behind.’ She saw him, with the dawn light full on him, standing on the hood of the 4x4, waving ecstatically as Dostoinsuvo made her take-off run. Smiling. He had been smiling, even at the end. ‘But he’s all right. He’s doing good. He’s some kind of mover and shaker in the new nation. When the East African teleport came back on line – the Green Net, they call it – he got in touch with me. The thing’s up to handling data transmission. Some folk get love letters. Faraway sends me lust faxes.’

‘I can’t imagine what it’s like in there,’ Shepard said. ‘That sounds strange coming from someone who’s seen as much and been as deep as any other human. It’s the tourist thing, nice to visit, but I can’t imagine living there.’

‘They say there are hundreds – thousands – of independent, self-sufficient communities all across what used to be the White Highlands. If you don’t find what you want in the place you’re at, you take a few like-minded friends, find a spot that suits you and the thing will grow you a customized village. The Ten Thousand Tribes is the current sound-bite.’

‘But we lost Nairobi. Tsavo, Amboseli, the Mara. Kilimanjaro, Kirinyaga, the Rift Valley. All gone. I miss them. I’m not certain that what we’ve been given in exchange compensates. How long before Mombasa goes?’

‘It’s got a couple of years.’ And Kikambala, and the banda there, and the beach where your children played, and the reef where they swam, when it was as good as it could ever get. You are not talking about the Chaga taking things away. You are talking about time, and change. You are talking about death. She knew that if she did not say them now, the things would go unspoken forever, and it would be as dead for them as if he had thrown her note away and never come to the Starview Lodge.

She laid her hands on the table, palms up. They were trembling.

‘Shepard, I’m sorry. I hurt you. I was crass, insensitive, selfish, treacherous, crazy; I was a hundred different sins that night, all of them deadly.’

‘You found the one wound, and you went right for it.’

‘I always do. It’s a talent of mine. It makes me good at football and terrible at relationships. I can’t help it, I probably won’t ever be able to stop it, pressing them where it hurts most. But I don’t do it deliberately. Shit, Shepard, it only works on people I love.’

‘Like now?’

‘Does this hurt?’

‘Does it ever not?’

‘How long is ever?’

‘Four years and nine months and I forget the days.’

‘Oh shit,’ Gaby McAslan said. ‘I think I’m going to have to cry now and my mascara will smudge and everyone will know. Did you really think of me all that time, Shepard? You can lie to me about this. I won’t mind, but try and make it sound convincing.’

‘Who’s lying?’ Shepard said.

‘Liar,’ Gaby whispered. ‘Do you forgive me?’

‘Long ago.’

‘Then why the fuck,’ Gaby said, in a voice so low it could hardly be heard over the rising wind, ‘did it take you four years nine months and you forget the days to tell me?’

‘A thousand stupidities. A thousand mistrusts. A thousand fears. Men are emotional cowards.’

‘You were scared? Of me?’

He said nothing. Fair comment, she thought.

‘That’s a pretty lame excuse, Shepard.’

‘What’s yours?’

‘I didn’t know if you would talk to me, let alone forgive me.’

‘Me, forgive you? But when I saw you that instant in Nairobi, in the Kenyatta tower…’

‘When I came looking for you.’

‘Exactly.’

They looked at each other over the table. The wind from out of Africa set the candle flames bickering in their glass jars and bamboo blinds billowing.

‘Do you remember in old Tom and Jerry cartoons when Spike the dog used to do something dumb?’ Gaby asked.

‘And his head would turn into a braying jackass’s?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Hee haw hee haw.’

‘I am going to cry now,’ Gaby McAslan announced.

While they made fools of themselves and each other, the voices from the telescope deck had grown louder, as had the noise from the main bar, which had gradually filled until all you could see were people’s backs pressed against the glass. Suddenly someone discovered there was an outside, and the doors slid open and the people inside poured out outside. They rushed to the rail. They seemed to be expecting an event.

‘Robert A. Heinlein’s coming down early because of the storm.’ Shepard had to raise his voice. As he spoke, miles of runway lights went on across the lagoon. Pentagrams and hexagrams of power, section by section. A hush fell over the space-watchers. ‘Is there some place quieter we could go?’ Shepard asked. ‘Someone’s bound to recognize my hair-style and want to talk to me about space.’

‘There’s my room,’ Gaby said. ‘It’s down by the pool. No one goes there, it’s not on the space side of the hotel. We don’t have to go into my room; we can just sit around the pool if you like.’

They agreed to sit on the edge of the pool with their feet in the water. Gaby listened to the stratospheric rumble of the chase planes up on the edge of the storm, hunting the in-coming shuttle with battle radar.

‘How can you contemplate this?’ she asked. She watched the circles of ripples spread out from her gently moving ankles and interfere with each other.

‘They say it’s just like a bus with wings.’

‘That pulls four gees, with five hundred tons of high explosive up its ass.’

‘If you got the chance, you’d do it too.’

Without a second thought, she said to herself.