T.P. Costello had reserved a block of seats half-way down the centre aisle.
‘Missed you at the Thorn Tree last night,’ he said to Gaby.
‘Better things to do,’ she said, unable to hide the grin.
‘Tell me you’re not banging Faraway.’
‘I’m banging Faraway. And for your information, he bangs exceedingly loud, and long.’
‘Slut.’
She did not tell him about the sensory deprivation thing with the blindfold and the white noise, because he would have misunderstood. It was partly for the totality of skin on skin. The rest of it was to shut out the constantly hovering helicopters and the bursts of gunfire from the streets and the distant thud of the artillery up in the northern bourgeois districts, futilely shelling the edge of the Chaga. To shut it out and forget that Shepard was out there on those streets she did not know any more. To pretend, in the silence and the blindness, that this body under her was any body, this skin any skin, any colour she wished.
The conference hall fell silent. A tall, sandy-haired white man in desert camouflage fatigues had taken the place behind the lectern. He studied his notes, pushed his glasses up his nose and surveyed the rows of news people. Gaby thought of wire-haired fox terriers. General Sir Patrick Lilley. Sandhurst Class of ‘85. Active service in 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 caveats about wandering onto the wrong side apply.
‘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.