"And you think three shots is all we get?"
"Look, I'm not a lexicon, OK? I'm not a handbook. What I don't know, I don't say. It could be three. It could be ten. I've got to go to school. Maybe you should call the helpline."
"Think. After Guido, what's her favorite thing?"
Guido's face at last emerges from his hands. "Y. Who do you think? Justin!"
"She wouldn't do that."
"Why not?"
"Because it's her kingdom, not mine."
"You're just guessing! You're ridiculous. Try Justin. I'm right, I know I am!"
"Look. After Justin, what's her next favorite thing?"
"I wasn't married to her. OK? You were!"
Justin thinks Arnold, then Wanza. He tries Ghita, entering the I as a 1. Nothing happens. He emits a nervous scoffing sound that says this childish game is beneath him, but this is because his mind is stretching in all directions and he doesn't know which to follow. He thinks of Garth her dead father, and Garth her dead son, and rules them both out on aesthetic and emotional grounds. He thinks of Tessa but she is not an egomaniac. He thinks ARNO1D and ARN0LD and ARN01D but Tessa would not be so crass as to block Arnold's file with a password saying Arnold. He flirts with Maria, which was her mother's name, then with Mustafa, then Hammond, but none presses itself upon him as a code name or password. He looks down into her grave and watches the yellow freesias on the lid of her coffin disappear under the red soil. He sees Mustafa standing in the Woodrows' kitchen, clutching his basket. He sees himself in his straw hat tending them in the garden in Nairobi and again here in Elba. He enters the word freesia, typing the I as 1. Seven asterisks appear but nothing happens. He enters the same word again, typing the S as 5.
"Will it still have me?" he asks softly.
"I'm twelve years old, Justin! Twelve!" He relents a little. "You got maybe one more try. Then it's curtains. I resign, OK? It's her laptop. Yours. Leave me out of this."
He enters freesia a third time, leaving the S as 5 but turning the 1 back to an I, and finds himself staring at an unfinished polemical essay. With the aid of his yellow freesias he has invaded the file called Arnold and met a tract on human rights. Guido is dancing round the room.
"We got it! I told you! We're fantastic! She's fantastic!"
* * *
Why are Africa's Gays Forced to Stay in the Closet?
Hear the comfortable words of that great arbiter of public decency, President Daniel
Arap Moi:
"Words like lesbianism and homosexuality do not exist in African languages."-Moi, 1995.
"Homosexuality is against African norms and religions and even in religion it is considered a great sin." — Moi, 1998.
Unsurprisingly, Kenya's Criminal Code obediently agrees with Moi one hundred percent. Sections 162–165 lay down a term of FIVE TO FOURTEEN YEARS' IMPRISONMENT for "Carnal Knowledge Against the Order of Nature." The law goes further:
— Kenyan law defines any sexual relations between men as a CRIMINAL ACT.
— It hasn't even heard of sexual relations between women.
What is the SOCIAL CONSEQUENCE of this antediluvian attitude?
— Gay men marry or carry on affairs with women in order to conceal their sexuality.
— They live in misery and so do their wives.
— No sex education is offered to gay men, even in the midst of Kenya's long-denied AIDS epidemic.
— Sections of Kenyan society are forced to live in a state of deceit. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, priests and even politicians go in terror of blackmail and arrest.
— A self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and oppression is created, dragging our society still deeper into the mire.
Here the article stops. Why?
And why in heaven's name do you file an incomplete polemical piece about gay rights under Arnold and lock it away with a password?
Justin wakes to Guido's presence at his shoulder. He has returned from his peregrinations and is leaning forward, peering at the screen in puzzlement.
"It's time I drove you to school," Justin says.
"We don't need to go yet! We've got another ten minutes! Who's Arnold? Is he gay? What do gay guys do? My mom goes crazy if I ask her."
"We're leaving now. We could get stuck behind a tractor."
"Look. Let me open her mailbox. OK? Somebody could have written to her. Maybe Arnold did. Don't you want to see in her mailbox? Maybe she sent you a message you haven't read. So I open the mailbox? Yes?"
Justin gently puts his hand on Guido's shoulder. "You'll be fine. Nobody's going to laugh at you. Everybody stays away from school now and then. That doesn't make you an invalid. It makes you normal. We'll look in her mailbox when you come back."
* * *
The drive to Guido's school and back took Justin a long hour, and in that time he permitted himself no flights of fancy or premature speculation. When he regained the oil room he headed not for the laptop but for the pile of papers given him by Lesley in the van outside the cinema. Moving with greater confidence than he had brought to the laptop, he sorted his way to a photocopy of a clumsily handwritten letter on lined paper that had caught his eye during one of his first skirmishing raids. It was undated. It had "come to notice," according to the attached minute initialed by Rob, between the pages of a medical encyclopedia that the two officers had found lying on the kitchen floor of Bluhm's apartment, slung there by frustrated burglars. The writing paper faded and old. The envelope addressed to the PO box of Bluhm's NGO. Postmark the old Arab slaving island of Lamu.
My own dear darling Arni,
I don't never forget our love or your embraices and goodness to me your dear friend. What a luck and bliss for me that you honeur our beautiful island for your holiday! I got to say thank you but it is to god I thank for your generos love and gifts and now the knoledge that will come to me in my studies thanks to you, plus motorbike. For you my darling man I work day and night, always glad in my heart to know that my darling is with me every step, holding and loving me.
And the signature? Justin, like Rob before him, struggled to decipher it. The style of the letter, as Rob's minute pointed out, suggested an Arabic hand, the writing being long and low with wellcompleted roundels. The signature, done with a flourish, appeared to possess a consonant at either end and a vowel between: Pip? Pet? Pat? Dot? It was useless to guess. For all anyone could tell, it was actually an Arabic signature.
But was the writer a woman or a man? Would an uneducated Arab woman from Lamu really write so boldly? Would she ride a motorbike?
Crossing the room to the pine desk Justin placed himself in front of the laptop but, instead of calling up Arnold again, sat staring at the blank screen.
* * *
"So who does Arnold love, actually?" he is asking her, with feigned casualness, as they lie side by side on the bed one hot Sunday evening in Nairobi. Arnold and Tessa have returned the same morning from their first field trip together. Tessa has declared it one of the experiences of her life.
"Arnold loves the whole human race," she replies languidly. "Bar none."
"Does he sleep with the whole human race?"
"He may. I haven't asked him. Do you want me to?"
"No. I don't think so. I thought I might ask him myself."
"That won't be necessary."
"Sure?"
"Certain sure."
And kisses him. And kisses him again. Till she kisses him back to life.