Mrs Kivebulaya’s ‘And Finally’ stories had won Gaby critical appreciation, grudging acknowledgement by T.P. Costello and a place at a table in the Thorn Tree Bar of the New Stanley Hotel, where the real journalists went to drink, but those were not the thing for which she had come to Africa. That thing was still denied her. She worked in the Chaga every day, in the gigabytes of images, documents, reports, simulations stored in archives. She knew all that was humanly knowable about the air-reefs, the pseudo-corals, the hand-trees, the things that looked like marine radiolaria for which no one had yet invented a name; except how they felt, how they smelled, how they tasted. She felt trapped beneath Nairobi’s smog layer while her star burned bright in the south. Tembo and Faraway could not understand her impatience. ‘It will wait,’ they said. ‘It is not going anywhere. Well, actually it is, and in the best direction, towards you.’
Tembo’s children arrived on either side of Gaby with dishes of chicken.
‘You are to have the gizzard,’ said Sarah, the older one. Both were beautiful and serious and funny. ‘It is always kept for the guest of honour.’
Gaby looked at Faraway to see if he had put his extended nieces up to a joke on the poor ignorant m’zungu. If so, he was playing it mightily deadpan.
‘Actually, I don’t know what a chicken gizzard looks like,’ she said. ‘In my country we don’t eat them.’ Etambele, the younger girl, whose name meant ‘Early Evening, Just After Tea-Time’, which was the exact time she was born, looked amazed and whispered something to Sarah.
‘My sister wants to know if your hair is real,’ Sarah said.
‘Etambele, don’t ask rude questions about our guest,’ her mother said. She was a small, silent woman, very beautiful in traditional dress, but peripheral to this men’s world of news and affairs and events.
‘I know how I could find out,’ Faraway said, which was as much as he could get away with in the company of a Christian family.
‘It’s real,’ Gaby said to the staring sisters. ‘It goes all the way down my back. I haven’t had it cut in seven years, which is older than you are, Etambele.’ The girls went round-eyed in astonishment. Gaby let them touch her hair. They giggled and fled to fetch the sweet potatoes.
Chicken gizzard was very much better than she had feared.
‘UNECTA is re-evaluating its security position,’ Tembo said. ‘They are getting scared about the refugee problem. Sooner or later, someone will decide to disbelieve what UNECTA is telling them about the Chaga, and reckon it is a better chance than the squatter camps. That is why they are thinking about military patrols inside the Chaga.’
‘That is not because of the refugees,’ Faraway said. ‘That is because they are afraid of what the safari squads might find.’
‘Safari squads?’ Gaby asked.
‘They operate out of the Tacticals, the gangs that rule the townships,’ Faraway said. ‘They go in, they find things, they bring them out. They laugh in the face of United Nations quarantines. That is why they want to put soldiers into the Chaga, to stop them. If the United Nations can show that those who go in deep never return, then people in the squatter camps will say better Pumwani than the Chaga. It will work for a time. But the day will come when the people start to say, better the Chaga than Pumwani. It has to come, my friend. It has to come. The United Nations cannot stop the Chaga, neither can it evacuate ten million people.’
‘More, by then,’ Tembo said.
‘What will you do, Tembo?’ Gaby asked, seeing his wife in her beautiful dress, seeing his children on their too-high seats with their too-big cutlery.
‘I will trust SkyNet to look after us.’
‘You trust SkyNet, I will trust myself,’ Faraway said. The beers were making him outspoken.
‘You’d take your chances with the Chaga?’
‘M’zungu, in the end everyone will have to take their chances with the Chaga. Maybe even you. Just because the packages have all come down within three hundred kilometres of the Equator does not mean they always will. The very next one could come down in Paris, or New York, or even Ireland. And why does everyone assume that the Chaga is confined to the tropics? Maybe it will just keep growing, out of Africa, across the desert, across Europe, over the pole until there is nothing left, only Chaga, and we are all swinging from the trees and playing knucklebones with the aliens.’
‘Faraway, please, you are scaring the children,’ Tembo’s wife said softly, but firmly.
‘If there are aliens,’ Tembo said.
‘My friend here has a theological problem with intelligences from other worlds,’ Faraway said. Mrs Tembo and the children had cleared away the main course dishes. A hiss of seething oil and the smell of deep-frying finger-bananas from the kitchen louvres meant dessert. ‘Given that God created the aliens behind the Chaga, the question is, were they created in a state of grace, or are they fallen creatures, like us? If they are angels, then they run the risk of falling, should they come into contact with sinners like us. Me, I like the idea of being responsible for the fall of an angel. If they are already fallen, then do they have a means of salvation, or must we evangelize them?’
‘A Chaga Messiah?’ Gaby asked. The bananas arrived, piled high on serving plates, sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon.
‘There are no aliens,’ Tembo said a little impatiently. He was accustomed to his friend’s boasting, he did not like to see him massage his big male ego at the dinner table, in front of guests and family.
‘If they could put an entire ecology into something the size of a small matatu, I am sure there is room for a couple of aliens in the ash tray,’ Faraway said, undeterred. Mrs Tembo’s cooking succeeded in silencing him.
The children were made ready for bed while coffee brewed. They came to say goodnight. Faraway tousled their hair and hugged them beerily. Tembo kissed them. Gaby showed them photographs she had brought of her sisters and dogs and father.
‘This is the house where I grew up, and here we all are in front of it. This was taken the day I left to go to London to learn to be a reporter.’
‘Did your mother take the photograph?’ Sarah asked.
‘No, it was my father’s lady friend. My mother died a long time ago, when I was quite young,’ Gaby said, and then folded the photographs quickly away before they let loose things that had no proper place here among hosts and friends. ‘Good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bugs bite,’ she said to the children. They giggled appreciatively.
Gaby’s offer to help with the dishes was politely but firmly turned down.
‘It is woman’s work, and tonight you are a honorary man,’ Tembo said.
You guys have a lot to learn about feminism, Gaby thought as coffee came round. And you girls too. Faraway produced Russian cigarettes. Gaby took one.
‘I did not know you smoked.’
‘Only after dinner.’
‘I smoke after sex,’ he said.
Gaby was listening to the sound of the mother in the bedroom singing her children to sleep with a song a thousand years old. It made her feel very close to and very far from home at the same time. The candles burned low in the tin lanterns. The traffic noise lessened. The honorary men talked work, about Jake Aarons, whom they all liked, and Abigail Santini, whom no one liked, and T.P. Costello, whom everyone liked but Gaby, because she said he did not like her. Tembo stared at his coffee grounds as if trying to divine the future from them, then said, ‘There is shadow on his memory. I do not know it all, it was back before I joined SkyNet, when he was East African station chief for Irish News Services. There was a woman, an Irish woman, like you. She disappeared into the Chaga. That is all I know, but I think you remind him of things he would sooner forget, Gaby.’