Читать книгу White Lies - Dexter Petley - Страница 10

Austen met me at the airport in his 1956 Land Rover and we left Ray, Steve and Frogget arguing with porters in the airport bar. Straight off Austen said:

—So you’re Zan’s boyfriend are you, bloke? Well, she said I’ve got to keep you away from all those Kuke dolly birds at the Starlight Club, ha!

A crate of Guinness rattled in the back along with two sacks of maize, two hens tied by the legs and debes of paraffin and water.

—They’re for Wanja, he shouted over the engine as we rattled across potholes towards the Ngong Hills.

—Zan tell you about Wanja, bloke?

—What do you mean?

—I think she’s gone mad. Bloody worrying, bloke.

—Zanna?

—No, ha. Wanja. Round the bloody bend. Those fucking Tanzanian witch doctors. She puts bloody lipstick round her eyes and mutters to herself all day. Found her walking round the shamba last night, starkers. Says there’s a devil in her stomach. Wanjiku’s running the place now. She’s only twelve. Can’t go to school in case her mother burns the place down.

It was probably the drought turned Wanja mad because a wind like a blowtorch scorched across the shadeless plain. The Ngong Hills looked desolate in the clear air.

—Lions still up there, bloke.

This was Masai country parcelled up and sold to Kikuyus who didn’t already have an ancestral plot in the bush. Narrow strips of land still shadeless between rough homesteads. Umbrella thorn and clumps of candelabra where Masai cattle grazed on the unenclosed land. Grey-black cotton-soil sloped up to the hills patrolled by kites and eagles.

In Austen’s compound the rainwater tanks were empty and the earth was cracked. Wanja was in the shamba tying strips of cloth and ribbon to withered stalks. She wore an anorak despite the heat, hair uncombed and dusty. An ex-prostitute Austen had ‘rescued’ from the tourist bars, now she was singing a Kikuyu hymn as a big old white drake with goiters and sores stumbled round her.

Austen told her he’d got the chickens but she just stared and shrugged. He untied them and they ran round the compound. Wanjiku looked like a mission-school house-girl with dusty knees, short white socks and grey cotton frock. No one knew the identity of her father, just that he was one of Wanja’s Johns from the Starlite days. Wanjiku curtsied and helped us unload the truck. There was a gas fridge in the storeroom and I guzzled cold water from glass bottles.

—Don’t forget to boil the water first, bloke. Comes from a standpipe in the village.

It tasted of flouride and Wanjiku’s teeth were stained from it. Inside, the hut was baking because there was no ceiling under the pitched tin roof. Austen said there were love birds nesting up there once, but the chatter drove him nuts so he’d chased them away. Wanjiku started sweeping the bare concrete floor round the tatty sofa and dusted Austen’s desk which rocked against the shiplap walls. There were stacks of blue flimsy foolscap, a huge grey typewriter, a paraffin lamp, some rare books on a single shelf reserved for Africana.

I dozed in a corner all afternoon while Austen was away. Wanjiku crept about, peeled potatoes, filled the paraffin lamps. The roof clanked and the smell of baked creosote fumes gave me a headache. The sunset didn’t linger into evening and Wanjiku lit the oil lamps and put the potatoes on the bottled gas stove. Austen came back with two oil drums full of water and I helped him drain them into one of the rainwater tanks which were sunk underground. I said I needed a shave and a wash.

—Piss on the saplings, bloke, and waste-water on the paw-paw tree.

Wanja came in to eat the fluffy boiled potatoes and bean stew with fragments of goat’s leg. She started singing Kikuyu hymns and Wanjiku joined in.

—The Spirit of Zion Church, Austen said. I could throttle the fucker who put that up. Just a tin duka with a cross on it by the water tap. I say we go out bloke. Bring a sweater, it gets chilly.

He really wanted to take me to the Starlite or the Pub, but he was being protective because he said Zanna wouldn’t approve.

—First day, bloke. Take it easy, ha.

We headed out through Masai country and came to the Craze which was supposed to be an out-of-town nightspot and hotel. The bar was empty and there was one white couple on the disco floor, dancing like it was a game of blind man’s buff. Me and Austen sat on twirly iron chairs with red, heart-shaped, leather upholstery. On the menu was chips, fried eggs, fried bread and baked beans: sixteen bob. There was tomato sauce on the table and waiters in red jackets lined up to shake our hands. When the white couple saw us they came straight over and the disco was turned off. They were brother and sister, the bloke a slightly younger version of Austen, tanned and wiry with a clipped voice like he’d been shouting at natives all his life. The moustache was 1901. He was repatriating himself, that’s what he said. Eleven years in Zambia. He banged his fist on the table.

—Why should I bother with that man? Eh? Tell me that.

—Who? Kaunda? Austen said.

—Of course. The man’s a fool. KK’s done nothing in eleven years. Just sacrificed his socialist ideals for a kilo of fucking sugar.

He was just as bitter about the Craze too. He’d wanted a last fling, a stop-over in whore country, but these Indian bastards had conned him into staying at the Craze. They’d offered transport and said these out-of-town weekend nightspots were trendy with the new middle-class African and enlightened Europeans. His sister had come out to meet him for the week and they were flying back together. She wore an orange kaftan and kept saying: it’s alright Robert, it’s cool.

She got the disco turned back on. The light show was a bloke shaking a coloured bulb in each hand like maracas. The four of us danced till Austen said it was fuckin ridiculous and we left.

Wanjiku came running out the shack when we pulled up. As Austen switched the engine off we could hear a commotion, a wailing and crying in the distance. It was too dark to see my hands. I could make out a dim glow here and there half a mile off.

—Where’s Wanja? Austen said.

—Oh Austen, Wanjiku said and started crying. She say to tell you she has gone to Tanzania.

—Shit and derision! What’s going on up there?

—I do not know.

Austen locked me in the shack with Wanjiku and gave me an airgun. He let the Ridgeback loose and set off on foot with a panga. I blew the lamps out but what with the fear, the jet lag, the heat and the sudden change of diet, my guts gave out. I had five seconds to get to the long drop only we were locked in. I could’ve gone through the window but the dog would’ve shredded me. Austen came back and found me washing my trousers in a bucket and needing somewhere to stash the soiled pages of yesterday’s Daily Nation.

—Bloody drunkard, mshenzi. Not you bloke. Up there. Josphat bloody Githinji. Chang’aa gang war. Four women with kids after Githinji’s son start stoning old Mama Githinji. Whole family’s running all over the shamba yelling like dogs. God! The police car’s outside the bar. Two police, dead drunk, say they’re not assigned.

He wanted to sit and talk now, to map out my career, to get me stringing for the BBC Africa Service. Him and Zanna had all the contacts. I didn’t booze back then, or talk much. I just listened and gulped down Austen’s Roosters, short lethal fags made of uncured tobacco with no filters. Austen shuttled between the sofa and the crate of Export Guinness in the storeroom, small bottles brewed under licence in Kenya. One flick of his well-worn Swiss Army knife and the bottle tops rattled to the floor. One Rooster, one Guinness, six or seven swigs a bottle till he became louder and maudlin while Wanjiku slept soundly on a mat on the kitchen floor.

Everywhere I suggested going for a story he said was too dangerous.

—Stay out of Uganda for the moment bloke. The Ministry of Defence just announced it: guerillas gonna resume bombing campaign in Kampala.

So I flicked through the Daily Nation. Teenage girls at Lamu jailed for idleness.

—Trouble there too, bloke. Three hour shootout between bandits and police. Killed two of ’em and arrested the truck driver. Indian smugglers. Three hundred and forty elephant tusks. God! Right fucking shambles this Wildlife bloody Army. Kenyatta’s bloody wife still flies about in an army helicopter massacring zebra with a machine gun.

I said I’d just hitch out to Naivasha then. A dispute between neighbours had turned into the serial buggering of chickens by rival gangs in Kakamega. Austen said I couldn’t sell a story like that so why didn’t I go interview a dentist about flouride in the water. And if Wanja came back I could ask her about skin-lightening creams. He said all the prostitutes used them to make their skin go pale. He reckoned it was the mercury in the cream that had turned Wanja mad.

My idea was different. I wanted to visit Joy and do a story on gold panning and cattle rustling. But I wanted to be something first, get the red dirt on my boots and find some connection for myself. Maybe my character would form itself in parallel to the story I found. I didn’t tell him those bits, and I didn’t ask him about Joy either, but I didn’t have to wait long before he mentioned her:

—Hey bloke, I’ve got it. You must go and see this woman Joy up in Amolem …

I could’ve asked him what she was like but he was ratted on Guinness now and I wanted to preserve her welcome like it was a real memory, not a guess or a hope.

The Rooster smoke was coming out his ears as he banged the chair and shouted:

—D’you know what that cunt Mengistu does to the Ethiopian people? Charges the fuckers he shoots for the bullets.

I wasn’t interested enough to listen now. I was picturing Joy in her long months between visitors, the airmail envelopes crisp and yellow and filling with insect pepper, her despair if a guitar string snapped, sewing up the holes in her mosquito net with raffia, listening in the night for cattle raids and aeroplanes, snakes and shooting stars … Listening out for me.

—Hey bloke, Austen said. Zanna give you that bloody jacket for Schick?

It was in the bottom of my pack, a heavyweight camouflaged Barbour which I’d agreed to deliver, new and oily.

—Christ almighty, Austen said when I gave it to him. Bloke’s gonna wear that down the Starlite? Mad bastard.

—Who is this Schick? I said.

—You don’t wanna know bloke. Man should wear a Keep Away sign round his neck.

It took seven bottles of Guinness before Austen was pissed enough to go to sleep.

Next day I set off for Naivasha, fifty miles north, reaching Dagoretti by clapped-out bus. For the settlers of Karen/Nairobi, Dagoretti was where Africa began, with the last white homestead in sight of the township.

The streets stank of raw sewage and barefoot women carried bundles of firewood. Kids queued for water with twenty-litre cooking-oil tins. There were mud houses in the lanes, roofs made of flattened tin cans, doors from packing cases. There were barber shops in the market square and radio repair shops, charcoal sellers, bars and cafes. Women in brilliant white dresses walked home from church.

A few kids followed me up the long hill towards Kikuyu.

—Hey you. Mzungu. Liverpool, Liverpool. Where are you going?

At the top there was open pasture rising to a coffee grove. A gutted white mansion behind the spiked muigoya hedge. A boy was collecting the leaves in a basket so his family could wipe their arses.

—Good morning sir, he said. Have you come to live?

—No, I said, and he was crestfallen.

There were buses and taxis in the shabby township. I asked the boy which bus for Naivasha.

—Hey you, he said. You stay here and eat paw-paw. You go that way and those thugs there are the bad men. They will steal your bag.

—I must go to Naivasha, I said.

It was the middle of the afternoon and the township men were already drunk. Over the road, two North Yemenites were getting into a Datsun Cherry. I guessed they didn’t live out here so I waved and ran across.

—Salaam.

They greeted me back, we shook hands. They wore brown nylon and smelled of tea rose, their teeth were brown and one of them smoked an imported cigarette.

—Which road are you taking? I said.

—The road to there.

The driver pointed out of town.

—Away? I said.

—Yes, away from here.

—Will you take me?

—Welcome, they said.

They’d been chewing mirrah and were cake-eyed, judging by the pile of stalks on the floor in the back of the car. They asked the usual questions, like was I a tourist? A German? Why did I go to Kikuyu Junction? For the girls? The beer? Had I read the Koran?

In situations like those I usually kept it quiet, head down. I’d met too many travellers on the overland route who turned up the volume and tried to make the cross-over. They chewed the mirrah, grooved on the Koran, in for the ride like pocket Kerouacs, but it always turned bad.

If I was undecided about being in Africa anyway, it was best to keep to dignity, respect, and manners. That was my travelling creed. It avoided confrontation.

My gift, my real talent, was to go through life invisibly. I could be the only white man seen for twenty years but still dilute any interest in my existence. Other travellers were like the Pied Piper or the UN turning up with a lorry-load of aid. The whole district flocks out the bush to see and touch them.

It was my first real day back in Kenya. Since I’d last passed through a couple of years back, an attempted coup had sharpened security. Now I had a year’s open ticket, eighty dollars cash, and a couple of hundred shillings bummed off Austen till the end of the week. Khalid was a careful driver; his friend translated the Day-Glo quotes from the Koran on the fringed pendants hanging round the inside of the car. But we were only three miles out of Kikuyu Junction when Khalid said:

—Police. Alhamdulillahi.

It was a roadblock five hundred yards ahead, a blue Land Rover with light flashing, spikes across the road, rifles in the air. Without a second’s pause, Khalid opened the glovebox, took out two small packets and tossed them onto the back seat beside me.

—I give you one hundred United States dollars for putting these into your pocket and for the talking. In English. No Swahili. Is very important. English. The police are scared of good English. I know this for ten years I live in Kenya.

I put them in my pocket because Khalid’s logic was impeccable. There was no risk to me, whatever happened. I wouldn’t be beaten up, jailed or face extortion, but they would. If the police searched me I’d tell the truth and be believed. The point was, we all wanted to get to Naivasha and this was the best solution. I needed a hundred dollars and they knew it.

The police waved us down. I leaned out.

—Jambo, the policeman said.

—Good afternoon, I said. How are you?

I didn’t give him a chance to answer. He tried to lean in and take a look. He stank of millet beer too.

—How are you? he said.

—Very well, thank you. What’s the problem? I’m taking my two friends to Naivasha to have tea with my mother. We’re already late.

—Okay, he said. Go to Naivasha.

—Thank you. Goodbye.

The Yemenites were deadpan for a mile then praised Allah the Merciful. I handed back the packets and didn’t ask what they contained and they didn’t tell me. I saw one contained foreign exchange because they paid me from it, one hundred and fifty dollars US, a bonus of fifty.

—You, lucky charm, Khalid said.

—You could be professional, Jamal said.

—Will you do it again, one day? For us?

I knew exaggerating my own immunity would be dangerous, only the money was a good reason to consider it and I’d be free of Austen’s political hand-me-downs. I still needed a source of foreign exchange to act as a reserve against local shillings. And I’d been given a value by these two Yemenites, the threads of self-definition, the first contour in my personality. I felt anonymous, but anonymity didn’t just mean blending in with the wananchi. And it wasn’t only my skin colour which was opposite, it was my polarity. I always seemed to be travelling or just flowing in the opposite direction to everyone else. I emanated this lack of interest, this laissez-faire. It could’ve made me the perfect smuggler, if I wanted to be one. But my vocation was to drift. I could wait five days sitting on my rucksack at the bus station in Dar es Salaam for the bus to Zambia. Or five hours for my rice and beans in the New World Eating Bar in Wethefuckarwe. I didn’t need profit to eat githeri, just five bob here, five bob there.

So what else made me the perfect smuggler’s lucky charm? I could fake a plummy accent which wouldn’t fool anyone in London but could strike notes of authority in Africa. I failed to interest people, even prostitutes and beggar boys ignored me. And I knew every border, road, dive and dodge in East Africa, or would do soon enough. I could multiply the briefest details into facts, like my whole being was a vacuum that sucked in single experiences rapidly and completely, expanding them by intuition. In this way, places I’d never visited were familiar; places arrived at never confused or disoriented me. Yes, I was ready to accept I was the perfect smuggler’s lucky charm.

I wrote my name on a piece of paper with Austen’s PO box number. I said I’d do it again if they needed me, as lucky charm, that is. There’d be no compromise in that. Then Khalid said:

—You want to sell your passport? One hundred dollars?

—Yes, I said, why not.

—Hey man, Jamal said. You know Mr Schick? You do good business with Schick because he want lucky charm …

Three weeks and one expensive fever later I went to pick up some new passport photos in downtown Nairobi. Embassy Jagger, photographer. His studio was a tin hut behind the market place, beside a ten-foot pile of rotting fruit skins. His choice of backdrop was either a grey sheet or plastic shower curtain. It wasn’t my face on the photos. It looked like a carrier bag drying on the line, or a police identikit. I stared at the likenesses again for some sign of recognition. It was like he’d lost the film, or the camera hadn’t worked so he’d taken a negative of a long thin Luo’s face from his drawer, overexposed the print and tinted up the grey. My big lips and flat nose, fluked eyes, pocks and a scar. My first ever photograph, hence the fear, pride and perplexity.

I sat in the New Protein Best World Cafe and forged Austen’s signature on the back of the photographs then rushed to the High Commission to report my passport stolen and apply for another.

—Must we always have to tell people we close at 11.30 when it says so on the door!

—I need a fuckin passport.

He wouldn’t even let me leave the photographs.

I was meeting Schick for the first time at three, against all Austen’s advice. Schick needed a ‘passenger’ for a run into Uganda and I’d had a good recommendation from the Yemenites.

I thought I could kill some time in the park so I ran across to the traffic island, sprinting with the crowd as the buses heaved down. A packet fell from someone’s back pocket and bounced on the ground. A split second and the haze and clutter of legs left it behind. I was at the back. My instinct was to scoop, lift and keep going in one movement like nothing had happened and no one had noticed. But my balance was barged sideways by a man who fell on the packet, a fluke snatch which made us both lose momentum. By the time we’d saved our skins and backtracked out the road and onto the island, the crowd had left us and we were alone.

He was grubbier than me in his cockeyed cowboy boots and twenty-eight-inch flares with the linings dragging on the ground. His wide-lapelled pin-striped jacket was ripped to shreds and had red plastic pockets sewn on to the old ones. The stiffeners in the butterfly collars of his flower shirt were slipping out like false finger nails. His teeth were brown. His eyes bloody pink.

—Run after him, I said.

The crowd began to disperse on the other side. The man hesitated, holding the brick-shaped envelope. I could see a five bob note through its cellophane window, then slowly he began to slide the packet under his shirt. We were now alone on the traffic island in Kenyatta Avenue. Two hundred Kenyans were gathering each side for the next rush across. They must’ve all been watching us. People shouted at me from bus windows.

—Hey mzungu, hey you …

But I’d become detached by those photographs, or disfigured by malaria. I didn’t feel mzungu. I was snide, doing business with my companion. There was no doubt we were trapped in some kind of companionship now, so much so that he sensed my greed. He noticed the tear in my trousers, the grey smelly jacket. I didn’t have any socks on. A ponytail lanked out from under my crooked straw hat. I didn’t even have a rucksack, just carried my passport photographs in my hand like any Kenyan.

—Run after him, I said, scanning the crowds. Not for the owner of the packet, but to see who was looking at us, and how soon we would be swallowed up in the next wave.

—Give it back …

I pointed to a man running against the lights, dodging his way across. I was covering myself, that’s all. My companion didn’t move. The packet was secure under his shirt and his hands were free. The lights changed. He was of course entitled to test me out. As the surge began, he simply stepped into the road without looking back. The crowd behind me caught up and I was swept towards him. At the kerb I made a lunge at his shirt. It ripped in my hand.

—Give that money back, I said.

But he knew what I meant and I was powerless to deny it. I was saying give it back to me.

—No, man, five-five. Look, there is ten thousand shillings in it.

The packet was exposed through his ripped shirt. It was written on. 10,000/-.

I was disappointed. It wasn’t enough. It was only one month’s rent on a Karen bungalow, or four more months bumming round Kenya. The price of a guard dog or twenty dinners at the International Casino. For my companion it meant capital, profit, or months of the good life down the Baboo Night Club in River Road. If he kept the whole ten thousand it was a year’s salary.

The man I thought had dropped the money was running back. Perhaps he remembered the feeling of it falling out. I knew it wasn’t his money, that it was a payroll, that they’d call the police and he’d be beaten up. He ran past so I set off after him, shouting, ducking traffic as the lights changed. Across the Uhuru Road he went, until a council gardener shouted for him to stop. I grabbed his hand, started pulling him back to Kenyatta.

—You’ve had your money stolen. Back pocket …

He was wearing a bottle-green corduroy jacket. Round face, short, squat, out of breath. He slipped his hand into his jacket and showed me a green wage packet.

—Not me, he said. This is all I have.

I walked back to the traffic lights.

—Pssst. Pssst. The silly cunt thought I hadn’t seen him standing there. Even the Nairobi City Council gardeners were leaning on their tools watching the two thieves meet up again.

—Psst. You ran after the wrong man, he said. You, a fool, shouting like that you get me killed. Now we go. Split five-five. Five thousand you, five thousand me. Aieee you fool. Say sorry.

—Sorry.

—That is okay. We are friends.

He clutched the money through his clothes. I suppose he’d earned custodial rights, but my self-evaluation was declining. I’d overacted the part. I’d take a thousand bob now just to get gone. But why should he have the nine thousand?

—Where you going? I asked.

—Walk, he say. Look for place.

He was fiddling with the packet now and pulled out the chit.

—Look. Ten thousand shillings.

It said Kenya Transport Co. Mombasa 6,000/-. Nairobi 4,000/-. I could take my half to the Transport office and get the loser off the hook but I wanted to go to Tanzania one day. I wanted to give Austen five hundred bob. I had to pay three hundred shillings for my new passport. I found myself telling all this to my new friend, so he didn’t think I’d betray him. I showed him more holes in my clothes and said I couldn’t pay the doctor for some medicine and didn’t even have any underpants. He said soon I would have a lot of money.

We walked to Club 1900. He hesitated.

—No way, I said and walked on.

He caught me up and started to jibber.

—It is our lucky day. One time, before, I found nine thousand dollars in Mombasa and bought a Volvo. Five thousand shillings, it is nothing to me. This is true, I have eighty thousand shillings on me.

He started to look ridiculous, a parody of suspicion, tracing and retracing his steps, peering off the road at any path or hideout. We were down among the wholesale shops, the dry goods, the Asian importers and office suppliers. Old Nairobi, low colonial stores, shoe shops, seamstresses, the smell of cotton and leather and printers’ ink. Cool, tidy, dusty shops with atriums and balconies where gentle but highly strung Patels sat at colossal rolltop desks looking down into the shop below. I’d begun to go there to change my currency, just paltry sums like a ten-dollar bill, but I was always invited to draw up a chair under the ceiling fan to drink a Pepsi and to listen to their gripes about police harassment, bent customs officers, greedy relatives in St Leonards.

—Give me twenty steps, he said. I am turning off this road on the corner.

He pointed to a rubbish patch, a wasteland with paths that crisscrossed between the ditches and the warehouses. It was lunchtime. Workers lounged in groups, Asian shopgirls smoking and drinking tea, messengers in flipflops chucking mango skins in the gutter. They all watched as I waited for my signal. It came from a ridge a hundred yards away. He beckoned, like he was digging a hole with one hand, before squatting under banana fronds. A hundred people saw me pick my way over to the sewage drain.

—Were you seen? he says.

I felt sick. I’d used up a whole day’s energy and shouldn’t have been slagging on an empty stomach after two weeks throwing up chloroquine. My legs were too weak to squat and I got the shakes. He was waving the packet in the air.

—Your lucky day. My lucky day. Which day you born?

He gave me the chit. I was born yesterday.

—You destroy it. Tear it up.

I struck a match but he blew it out.

—No, just tear.

I tore it up and wanted to ditch it where it would be carried away on the flowing scum.

—Now just put it down, he said.

As I sprinkled the fragments he wanted me to squat. The notes were half eased from the envelope when I saw a man come over the ridge.

—There are some people, I said.

Now the man in the green cord jacket smiled at me.

—They’ve followed us, I said.

—Ah, he said. They are the police. Just sit here.

The man in the cord jacket smiled at me again

and came across to shake hands.

—How are you? he said. We go to the police now.

I got up and followed him across the ditch and got wet feet. I was ushered under another banana bush with more urgency now. This was it, a beating, and I’d nothing to bribe them with except perhaps my jacket. We all squatted. Were the police already under the banana bush? I couldn’t see the shopgirls any more. My companion showed them the money.

—Here, all of it. We are not taking any of it. It is all here.

—The cheque, the man in the green cord jacket said. The chit. Where is this?

He turned to me:

—Did you have any outside money?

We were both searched. Why was I so silent? There was no chit. Only my photographs which they handed round, then gave back. In my half-delirium I thought: why couldn’t they see they were of him? Why couldn’t they see I’d stolen his face.

—This man, my companion was saying. He didn’t know. He is nothing to do with it.

They looked at me.

—That’s right, I said, pointing to the man in the green cord jacket. Ask this man.

He said: this is true.

A policeman took me aside.

—I’m sick, I said. It was all I could say but it worked.

—You go now. If you come to the police station this man will change his story and blame everything on you. That officer likes your pen.

I gave him my metal Parker ballpoint and wondered, what would Joy think of me now?