‘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 pickni. The Black Simbas had lent Gaby a driver, a body-guard and a tail-gunner. The tail-gunner stood in the back, sweeping the avenues of middle-class villas with the swivel-mounted heavy machine gun. He called himself Cool K., and wore expensive wrap-round shades. The bodyguard was called Missaluba. She resented having to mind the m’zungu woman and her tame black cock. She wanted to be in the action up at Parklands. The driver was called Mojo. He drove frighteningly fast, because he had been told he was too old for the fighting up at Parklands.
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. Picknis chased each other along the tree-shaded avenues. The white plaster rendering of doctors’ and accountants’ bungalows was chipped away by bullets. Heavy armour manoeuvred through the gardens, bringing down trees, crushing children’s slides and climbing frames, cracking patios and terraces. Bodies floated in the swimming pools. Slit trenches had been dug across City Park. A primary school burned, set alight by skirmishers trying to dislodge a 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.