Tendeléo’s Story Page 6

  We too made and dissolved our alliances. We had an arrangement with Mombi, who had just bloodily ended an agreement with Haran, one of the big sheriffs, to make a secret deal with the Black Simbas, who intended to be a power in the new order after the Chaga. The silly, vain Soca Boys had been swept away in one night by the Simbas East Starehe Division. Custom matatus and football managers’ coats were no match for Russian APCs and light-scatter combat-suits. Brother Dust’s associations were precarious; the posses had wealth and influence but no power. Despite our AK47s and street cool uniforms—in the last days, everyone had a uniform—even the Soca Boys could have taken us out. We were criminals, not warriors.

  Limuru, Tigani, Kiambu, in the north. Athi River, Matathia, Embakasi to the south. The Chaga advanced a house here, a school there, half a church, a quarter of a street. Fifty metres every day. Never slower, never faster. When the Supreme Commander East African Protection Force announced terminum at Ngara, I made my move. In my Dust Girl uniform of street-length, zebra-stripe PVC coat over short-shorts, I took a taxi to the Embassy of the United States of America. The driver detoured through Riverside.

  ‘Glider come down on Limuru Road,’ the driver explained. The gliders scared me, hanging like great plastic bats from the hatching towers, waiting to drop, spread their wings and sail across the city sowing Chaga spores. To me they were dark death on wings. I have too many Old Testament images still in me. The army took out many on the towers, the helicopters the ones in the air, but some always made it down. Nairobi was being eaten away from within.

  Riverside had been rich once. I saw a tank up-ended in a swimming pool, a tennis court strewn with swollen bodies in purple combats. Chaga camouflage. Beyond the trees I saw fans of lilac land-coral.

  I told the driver to wait outside the Embassy. The grounds were jammed with trucks. Chains of soldiers and staff were loading them with crates and machinery. The black marine knew me by now.

  ‘You’re going?’ I asked.

  ‘Certainly are, ma’am,’ the marine said. I handed him my gun. He nodded me through. People pushed through the corridors under piles of paper and boxes marked Property of the United States Government. Everywhere I heard shredders. I found the right office. The spikey-haired man, whose name was Knutson, was piling cardboard boxes on his desk.

  ‘We’re not open for business.’

  ‘I’m not here to trade,’ I said. I told him what I was here for. He looked at me as if I had said that the world was made of wool, or the Chaga had reversed direction. So I cleared a space on his desk and laid out the photographs I had brought.

  ‘Please tell me, because I don’t understand this attraction,’ I said. ‘Is it that, when they are that young, you cannot tell the boys from the girls? Or is it the tightness?’

  ‘Fuck you. You’ll never get these public.’

  ‘They already are. If the Diplomatic Corps Personnel Section does not receive a password every week, the file will download.’

  If there had been a weapon to hand, I think Knutson would have killed me where I stood.

  ‘I shouldn’t have expected any more from a woman who sells her cunt to aliens.’

  ‘We are all prostitutes, Mr. Knutson. So?’

  ‘Wait there. To get out you need to be chipped.’ In the few moments he was out of the room I studied the face of the President on the wall. I was familiar with Presidential features; is it something in the nature of the office, I wondered, that gives them all the same look? Knutson returned with a metal and plastic device like a large hypodermic. ‘Name, address, Social Security Number.’ I gave them to him. He tapped tiny keys on the side of the device, then he seized my wrist, pressed the nozzle against forearm. There was click, I felt a sharp pain but I did not cry out.

  ‘Congratulations, you’re an employee of US Military Intelligence. I hope that fucking hurt.’

  ‘Yes it did.’ Blood oozed down my wrist. ‘I need three more. These are the names.’

  Beside the grainy snaps of Knutson on the bed with the naked children, I laid out my family. Knutson thrust the chip gun at me.

  ‘Here. Take it. Take the fucking thing. They’ll never miss it, not in all this. It’s easy to use, just dial it in there. And those.’

  I scooped up the photographs and slid them with the chip gun into my inside pocket. The freedom chip throbbed under my skin as I walked through the corridors full of people and paper into the light.

  Back at the club I paid the driver in gold. It and cocaine were the only universally acceptable street currencies. I had been converting my roll to Kruger rands for some months now. The rate was not good. I jogged up the stairs to the club, and into slaughter.

  Bullets had been poured into the dark room. The bar was shattered glass, stinking of alcohol. The tables were spilled and splintered. The chairs were overturned, smashed. Bodies lay among them, the club men, sprawled inelegantly. The carpet was sticky was blood. Flies buzzed over the dead. I saw the Dust Girls, my sisters, scattered across the floor, hair and bare skin and animal prints drenched with blood. I moved among them. I thought of zebras on the high plains, hunted down by lions, limbs and muscle and skin torn apart. The stench of blood is an awful thing. You never get it out of you. I saw Brother Dust on his back against the stage. Someone had emptied a clip of automatic fire into his face.

  Our alliances were ended.

  A noise; I turned. I drew my gun. I saw it in my hand, and the dead lying with their guns in their hands. I ran from the club. I ran down the stairs onto the street. I was a mad thing, screaming at the people in the street, my gun in hand, my coat flying out behind me. I ran as fast as I could. I ran for home, I ran for Jogoo Road. I ran for the people I had left there. Nothing could stop me. Nothing dared, with my gun in my hand. I would go home and I would take them away from this insanity. The last thing the United Nations will ever do for us is fly us out of here, I would tell them. We will fly somewhere we do not need guns or camps or charity, where we will again be what we were. In my coat and stupid boots, I ran, past the plastic city at the old country bus terminal, around the metal barricades on Landhies Road, across the waste ground past the Lusaka Road roundabout where two buses were burning. I ran out into Jogoo Road.

  There were people right across the road. Many many people, with vehicles, white UN vehicles. And soldiers, a lot of soldiers. I could not see Church Army. I slammed into the back of the crowd, I threw people out of my way, hammered at them with the side of my gun.

  ‘Get out of my way, I have to get to my family!’

  Hands seized me, spun me around. A Kenyan Army soldier held me by the shoulders.

  ‘You cannot get through.’

  ‘My family lives here. The Church Army Centre, I need to see them.’

  ‘No one goes through. There is no Church Army.’

  ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’

  ‘A glider came down.’

  I tore away from him, fought my way through the crowd until I came to the cordon of soldiers. A hundred metres down the road was a line of hummers and APCs. A hundred yards beyond them, the alien infection. The glider had crashed into the accommodation block. I could still make out the vile bat-shape among the crust of fungus and sponge spreading across the white plaster. Ribs of Chaga-coral had burst the tin roof of the teaching hall, the shacks were a stew of dissolving plastic and translucent bubbles that burst in a cloud of brown dust. Where the dust touched, fresh bubbles grew. The chapel had vanished under a web of red veins. Even Jogoo road was blistered by yellow flowers and blue barrel-like objects. Fingers of the hexagonal Chaga moss were reaching towards the road block. As I watched, one of the thorn trees outside the centre collapsed into the sewer and sent up a cloud of buzzing silver mites.

  ‘Where are the people?’ I asked a soldier.

  ‘Decontamination,’ he said.

  ‘My family was in there!’ I screamed at him. He looked away. I shouted at the crowd. I shouted my father’s name, my mother’s name, Little Egg’s,
my own name. I pushed through the people, trying to look at the faces. Too many people, too many faces. The soldiers were looking at me. They were talking on radios, I was disturbing them. At any moment they might arrest me. More likely, they would take me to a quiet place and put a bullet in the back of my skull. Too many people, too many faces. I put the gun away, ducked down, slipped between the legs to the back of the crowd. Decontamination. A UN word, that. Headquarters would have records of the contaminated. Chiromo Road. I would need transport. I came out of the crowd and started to run again. I ran up Jogoo Road, past the sports stadium, around the roundabout on to Landhies Road. There were still a few civilian cars on the street. I ran up the middle of the road, pointing my gun at every car that came towards me.

  ‘Take me to Chiromo Road!’ I shouted. The drivers would veer away, or hoot and swear. Some even aimed at me. I sidestepped them, I was too fast for them. ‘Chiromo Road, or I will kill you!’ Tacticals laughed and yelled as they swept past in their picknis. Not one stopped. Everyone had seen too many guns.

  There was a Kenyan Army convoy on Pumwani Road, so I cut up through the cardboard cities into Kariokor. As long as I kept the Nairobi River, a swamp of refuse and sewage, to my left, I would eventually come out on to Ngara Road. The shanty people fled from the striped demon with the big gun.

  ‘Get out of my way!’ I shouted. And then, all at once, the alley people disobeyed me. They stood stock still. They looked up.

  I felt it before I saw it. Its shadow was cold on my skin. I stopped running. I too looked up and it swooped down on me. That is what I thought, how I felt—this thing had been sent from the heart of the Chaga to me alone. The glider was bigger than I had imagined, and much much darker. It swept over me. I was paralysed with dread, then I remembered what I held in my hand. I lifted my gun and fired at the dark bat-thing. I fired and fired and fired until all I heard was a stiff click. I stood, shaking, as the glider vanished behind the plastic shanty roofs. I stood, staring at my hand holding the gun. Then the tiniest yellow buds appeared around the edge of the cylinder. The buds unfolded into crystals, and the crystals spread across the black, oiled metal like scale. More buds came out of the muzzle and grew back down the barrel. Crystals swelled up and choked the cocked hammer.

  I dropped the gun like a snake. I tore at my hair, my clothes, I scrubbed at my skin. My clothes were already beginning to change. My zebra-striped coat was blistering. I pulled out the chip injector. It was a mess of yellow crystals and flowers. I could not hope to save them now. I threw it away from me. The photographs of Knutson with the children fell to the earth. They bubbled up and went to dust. I tore at my coat; it came apart in my fingers into tatters of plastic and spores. I ran. The heel of one knee-boot gave way. I fell, rolled, recovered, and stripped the foolish things off me. All around me, the people of Kariokor were running, ripping at their skin and their clothes with their fingers. I ran with them, crying with fear. I let them lead me. My finery came apart around me. I ran naked, I did not care. I had nothing now. Everything had been taken from me, everything but the chip in my arm. On every side the plastic and wood shanties sent up shoots and stalks of Chaga.

  We crashed up against the UN emergency cordon at Kariokor Market. Wicker shields pushed us back; rungu clubs went up, came down. People fell, clutching smashed skulls. I threw myself at the army line.

  ‘Let me through!’

  I thrust my arm between the riot shields.

  ‘I’m chipped! I’m chipped!’

  Rungus rose before my face.

  ‘UN pass! I’m chipped!’

  The rungus came down, and something whirled them away. A white man’s voice shouted.

  ‘Jesus fuck, she is! Get her out of there! Quick!’

  The shield wall parted, hands seized me, pulled me through.

  ‘Get something on her!’

  A combat jacket fell on my shoulders. I was taken away very fast through the lines of soldiers to a white hummer with a red cross on the side. A white man with a red cross vest sat me on the back step and ran a scanner over my forearm. The wound was livid now, throbbing.

  ‘Tendeléo Bi. US Embassy Intelligence Liaison. Okay Tendeléo Bi, I’ve no idea what you were doing in there, but it’s decontam for you.’

  A second soldier—an officer, I guessed—had come back to the hummer.

  ‘No time. Civs have to be out by twenty three hundred.’

  The medic puffed his cheeks.

  ‘This is not procedure…’

  ‘Procedure?’ the officer said. ‘With a whole fucking city coming apart around us? But I guarantee you this, the Americans will go fucking ballistic if we fuck with one of their spooks. A surface scrub’ll do…’

  They took me over to a big boxy truck with a biohazard symbol on the side. It was parked well away from the other vehicles. I was shivering from shock. I made no complaint as they shaved all hair from my body. Someone gently took away the army jacket and showed me where to stand. Three men unrolled high-pressure hoses from the side of the truck and worked me from lop to bottom. The water was cold, and hard enough to be painful. My skin burned. I twisted and turned to try to keep it away from my nipples and the tender parts of my body. On the third scrub, I realised what they were doing, and remembered.

  ‘Take me to decontam!’ I shouted. ‘I want to go to decontam! My family’s there, don’t you realise?’ The men would not listen to me. I do not think they even knew it was a young woman’s body they were hosing down. No one listened to me. I was dried with hot air guns, given some loose fatigues to wear, then put in the back of a diplomatic hummer that drove very fast through the streets to the airport. We did not go to the terminal building. There, I might have broken and run. We went through the wire gates, and straight to the open back of a big Russian transport plane. A line of people was going up the ramp into the cavern of its belly. Most of them were white, many had children, and all were laden with bags and goods. All were refugees, too…like me.

  ‘My family is back there, I have to get them,’ I told the man with the security scanner at the foot of the ramp.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ he said as he checked off my Judas chip against the official database. ‘That’s you. Good luck.’ I went up the metal ramp into the plane. A Russian woman in uniform found me a seat in the middle block, far from any window. Once I was belted in I sat trembling until I heard the ramp close and the engines start up. Then I knew I could do nothing, and the shaking stopped. I felt the plane bounce over the concrete and turn on to the runway. I hoped a terrible hope: that something would go wrong and the plane would crash and I would die. Because I needed to die. I had destroyed the thing I meant to save and saved the thing that was worthless. Then the engines powered up and we made our run and though I could see only the backs of seats and the grey metal curve of the big cabin, I knew when we left the ground because I felt my bond with Kenya break and my home fall away beneath me as the plane took me into exile.

  I pause now in my story now, for where it goes now is best told by another voice.

  MY name is Sean. It’s an Irish name. I’m not Irish. No bit of Irish in me, as you can probably see. My mum liked the name. Irish stuff was fashionable, thirty years ago. My telling probably won’t do justice to Tendeléo’s story; I apologise. My gift’s numbers. Allegedly. I’m a reluctant accountant. I do what I do well, I just don’t have a gut feel for it. That’s why my company gave me all the odd jobs. One of them was this African-Caribbean-World restaurant just off Canal Street. It was called I-Nation—the menu changed every week, the ambience was great and the music was mighty. The first time I wore a suit there, Wynton the owner took the piss so much I never dressed up for them again. I’d sit at a table and poke at his VAT returns and find myself nodding to the drum and bass. Wynton would try out new grooves on me and I’d give them thumbs up or thumbs down. Then he’d fix me coffee with this liqueur he imported from Jamaica and that was the afternoon gone. It seemed a shame to invoice him.

  One d
ay Wynton said to me, ‘You should come to our evening sessions. Good music. Not this fucking bang bang bang. Not fucking deejays. Real music. Live music.’

  However, my mates liked fucking deejays and bang bang bang so I went to I-Nation on my own. There was a queue but the door staff nodded me right in. I got a seat at the bar and a Special Coffee, compliments of the house. The set had already begun, the floor was heaving. That band knew how to get a place moving. After the dance set ended, the lead guitarist gestured offstage. A girl got up behind the mic. I recognised her—she waitressed in the afternoons. She was a small, quiet girl, kind of unnoticeable, apart from her hair which stuck out in spikes like it was growing back after a Number Nought cut with the razor.

  She got up behind that mic and smiled apologetically. Then she began to sing, and I wondered how I had never thought her unnoticeable. It was a slow, quiet song. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, her voice said it all: loss and hurt and lost love. Bass and rhythm felt out the depth and damage in every syllable. She was five foot nothing and looked like she would break in half if you blew on her, but her voice had a stone edge that said, I’ve been where I’m singing about. Time stopped, she held a note then gently let it go. I-Nation was silent for a moment. Then it exploded. The girl bobbed shyly and went down through the cheering and whistling. Two minutes later she was back at work, clearing glasses. I could not take my eyes off her. You can fall in love in five minutes. It’s not hard at all.

  When she came to take my glass, all I could say was, ‘that was…great.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  And that was it. How I met Ten, said three shit words to her, and fell in love.

  I never could pronounce her name. On the afternoons when the bar was quiet and we talked over my table she would shake her head at my mangling the vowel sounds.