The Constant Gardener (36 page)

The back of the fuselage was stuffed with sacks of precious miraa, a permitted, mildly narcotic plant adored by northern tribesmen. Its woody scent was gradually filling the plane. In front of her sat four casehardened aid workers, two men, two women. Maybe the miraa was theirs. She envied their gritty, carefree air, their threadbare clothes and unwashed dedication. And realized with a pinch of self-reproach that they were her age. She wished she could break the habits of learned humility, of drawing her heels together whenever she shook hands with her betters, a practice instilled in her by nuns. She peeked inside her box and identified two plantain sandwiches, an apple, a bar of chocolate and a box of passionfruit juice. She had barely slept and she was famished, but her sense of decorum forbade her to eat a sandwich before takeoff. Last night her phone had rung nonstop from the moment she returned to her flat as her friends one by one vented their outrage and disbelief at the news that Arnold was a wanted man. Her position in the High Commission required her to play the elder stateswoman to them all. At midnight, though she was dead tired, she attempted to take a step from which she could not retreat; one that, if it had succeeded, would have rescued her from the no-man's-land where she had been hiding like a recluse for the last three weeks. She had delved in the old brass pot where she kept odds and ends and extracted from it a slip of paper she had secreted there. This is where you ring us, Ghita, if you decide you want to talk to us again. If we're not there, leave a message and one of us will always get back to you within the hour, I promise. An aggressive male African voice answered her and she hoped she had the wrong number.

“I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please.”

“What's your name?”

“I want to speak to Rob or Lesley. Is either of them there?”

“Who are you? Give me your name and state your business immediately.”

“I'd like to speak to Rob or Lesley, please.”

As the phone was slammed down on her she accepted without drama that she was, as she had suspected, alone. Henceforth no Tessa, no Arnold, no wise Lesley from Scotland Yard could spare her the responsibility for her actions. Her parents, though she adored them, were not a solution. Her father the lawyer would listen to her testimony and declare that on the one hand this, but then again on the other hand that, and ask her what objective proof she had for these very serious allegations. Her mother the doctor would say you're overheating, darling, come home and have a bit of R and R. With this thought uppermost in her bleary head she had opened up her laptop, which she did not doubt would also be cram-full of cries of pain and indignation about Arnold. But no sooner had she gone on-line than the screen popped and dwindled to nothing. She went through her procedures—in vain. She phoned a couple of friends only to establish that their machines were unaffected.

“Wow, Ghita, maybe you've picked up one of these crazy viruses from the Philippines or wherever those cyberfreaks hang out!” one of her friends had cried enviously, as if Ghita had been singled out for special attention.

Maybe she had, she agreed, and slept badly from worrying about the e-mails she had lost, the Ping-Pong chats she'd had with Tessa that she had never printed out because she preferred rereading them onscreen, they were more vivid that way, more Tessa.

The Beechcraft had still not taken off so Ghita, as was her habit, gave herself over to the larger questions of life, while studiously avoiding the largest of them all, which was what am I doing here and why? A couple of years ago in England—in my Era Before Tessa, as she secretly called it—she had agonized about the injuries, real and imagined, that she endured every day for being AngloIndian. She saw herself as an unsavable hybrid, half black girl in search of God, half white woman superior to lesser breeds without the law. Waking and sleeping, she had demanded to know where she belonged in a white man's world, and how and where she should invest her ambitions and her humanity, and whether she should continue to study dance and music at the London college she was attending after Exeter or, in the image of her adoptive parents, follow her other star and enter one of the professions.

Which explains how one morning she found herself, almost on an impulse, sitting an examination for Her Majesty's Foreign Service, which, unsurprisingly since she had never given a thought to politics, she duly failed, but with the advice that she should reapply in two years' time. And somehow the very decision to sit the exam, though unsuccessful, released the reasoning behind it, which was that she was more at ease with herself joining the system than staying apart from it and achieving little beyond the partial gratification of her artistic impulses.

And it was at this point, visiting her parents in Tanzania, that she decided, again on impulse, to apply for local employment by the British High Commission, and to look for advancement once she was accepted. And if she had not done this she would never have met Tessa. She would never, as she thought of it now, have put herself in the firing line where she was determined to remain, fighting for the things she was determined to be loyal to—even if, boiled down, they made pretty simplistic reading: truth, tolerance, justice, a sense of life's beauty and a near-violent rejection of their opposites—but, above all, an inherited belief, derived from both her parents and entrenched by Tessa, that the system itself must be forced to reflect these virtues, or it had no business to exist. Which brought her back to the largest question of them all. She had loved Tessa, she had loved Bluhm, she loved Justin still and, if she was truthful, a little more than was proper or comfortable or whatever the word was. And the fact that she was working for the system did not oblige her to accept the system's lies, as she had heard them only yesterday from Woodrow's mouth. On the contrary, it obliged her to reject them, and put the system back where it belonged, which was on the side of truth. Which explained to Ghita's total satisfaction what she was doing here and why. “Better to be inside the system and fighting it,” her father—an iconoclast in other ways—would say, “than outside the system, howling at it.”

And Tessa, which was the wonderful thing, had said exactly the same.

The Beechcraft shook itself like an old dog and lurched forward, bumping laboriously into the air. Through her tiny window Ghita saw all Africa spread itself below her: slum cities, herds of running zebras, the flower farms of Lake Naivasha, the Aberdares, Mount Kenya faintly painted on the far horizon. And joining them like a sea, the endless tracts of misted brown bush scribbled over with pocks of green. The plane entered rain cloud, a brown dusk filled the cabin. Scorching sunlight replaced it, and was accompanied by an almighty explosion from somewhere out to Ghita's left. Without warning the plane rolled on its side. Lunch boxes, rucksacks and Ghita's travel bag skeltered across the gangway to a chorus of alarm bells and sirens and a flashing of red lights. Nobody spoke except for one old African man, who let out a peal of laughter and bellowed, “We love you, Lord, and don't you go forgettin' that,” to the relief and nervous merriment of the other passengers. The plane had still not righted itself. The engine note dropped to a murmur. The African copilot with side-whiskers had found a handbook and was consulting a checklist while Ghita tried to read it over his shoulder. The rawhide captain turned in his seat to address his craven passengers. His sloped, leathern mouth matched the angle of the plane's wings.

“As you may have noticed, ladies and gentlemen, one engine has cracked up,” he said drily. “Which means we're going to have to go back to Wilson and pick up another of these things.”

And I'm not afraid, Ghita noted, pleased with herself. Until Tessa died, things like this happened to other people. Now they're happening to me, and I can handle them.

Four hours later, she was standing on the tarmac at Lokichoggio.

•      •      •

“You Ghita?” an Australian girl yelled over the roar of engines and other people's shouted greetings. “I'm Judith. Hi!”

She was tall and red-cheeked and happy and wore a man's curly brown trilby and a T-shirt proclaiming the United Tea Services of Ceylon. They embraced, spontaneous friends in a wild roaring place. White U.n. cargo planes were taking off and landing, white lorries shunted and thundered, and the sun was a furnace, and the heat of it leaped up at her from the runway and the fumes of aircraft fuel shimmered in her eyes and dazzled her. With Judith to guide her, she squeezed herself into the back of a jeep amid sacks of mail to sit beside a sweating Chinese man in a dog collar and a black suit. Jeeps hurtled past them in the opposite direction, pursued by a convoy of white lorries headed for the cargo planes.

“She was a real nice lady!” Judith shouted from the passenger seat in front of her. “Very dedicated!” She was evidently talking about Tessa. “Why would anybody want to arrest Arnold? They're just plain stupid! Arnold wouldn't squash a fly. You're booked three nights, right? Only we got a bunch of nutritionists coming in from Uganda!”

Judith is here to feed the living not the dead, thought Ghita as the jeep clattered through a gateway and joined a strip of hard road. They drove past a camp followers' shantytown of bars, stalls and a facetious notice saying Piccadilly This Way. Tranquil brown hills rose ahead of them. Ghita said she'd love to walk up there. Judith said if she did she'd never come back.

“Animals?”

“P.”

They approached the camp. On a patch of red dust beside the main gates, children were playing basketball with a white food bag nailed to a wooden post. Judith led Ghita to reception to collect her pass. Signing the book, Ghita leafed casually back, only to have it fall open at the page she was pretending not to look for:

Tessa Abbott, PO box, Nairobi, Tukul 28.

A. Bluhm, Medecins de l'Univers, Tukul 29.

And the same date.

“The press boys had a ball,” Judith was saying enthusiastically. “Reuben charged them fifty U.s. a shot, cash. Eight hundred bucks total, that's eight hundred sets of drawing books and coloring crayons. Reuben reckons that'll produce two Dinka van Goghs, two Dinka Rembrandts and one Dinka Andy Warhol.”

Reuben the legendary camp organizer, Ghita remembered. Congolese. Friend of Arnold's.

They were walking down a wide avenue of tulip trees, their fiery red trumpets brilliant against overhead cables and white-painted tukuls with thatched roofs. A lank Englishman like a prep-school master rode sedately past them on an old-fashioned policeman's pushbike. Seeing Judith he rang his bell and gave her a lovely wave.

“Showers and honey boxes across the road from you, first session tomorrow eight A.m. sharp, meet in the doorway to hut thirty-two,” Judith announced, as she showed Ghita to her quarters. “Mosquito spray beside your bed, use the net if you're wise. Care to mosey down to the club around sunset for a beer before dinner?”

Ghita would.

“Well, look out for yourself. Some of the boys are pretty hungry when they come back from the field.”

Ghita tried to sound casual. “Oh by the by, there's a woman called Sarah,” she said. “She was some kind of a friend of Tessa's. I wondered whether she was around so that I could say hullo to her.”

She unpacked her things and, armed with her sponge bag and towel, set out bravely across the avenue. Rain had fallen, damping the din from the airfield. The dangerous hills had turned black and olive. The air smelled of gasoline and spices. She showered, returned to her tukul and sat herself before her work notes at a rickety table where, sweating helplessly, she lost herself in the intricacies of Aid SelfSufficiency.

•      •      •

Loki's clubhouse was a spreading tree with a long thatched roof under it, a drinks bar with a mural of jungle fauna and a video projector that threw fuzzy images of a longdead soccer match onto a plastered wall while the sound system belted out African dance music. Shrieks of delighted recognition pierced the evening air as aid workers from distant places rediscovered each other in different languages, embraced, touched faces and walked arm in arm. This should be my spiritual home, she thought wistfully. These are my rainbow people. Their classlessness, their racelessness, their zeal, their youth are mine. Sign up for Loki and tune in to saintliness! Bum around in aeroplanes, enjoy a romantic self-image and the adrenalin of danger! Get your sex out of a tap and a nomadic life that keeps you clear of entanglements! No dreary office work and always a bit of grass to smoke along the way! Glory and boys when I come out of the field, money and more boys waiting for me on my R and R! Who needs more?

I do.

I need to understand why this mess was necessary in the first place. And why it's necessary now. I need to have the courage to say after Tessa at her most vituperative: “Loki sucks. It has no more right to exist than the Berlin Wall. It's a monument to the failure of diplomacy. What the hell's the point of running a Rolls-Royce ambulance service when our politicians do nothing to prevent the accidents?”

Night fell in a second. Yellow strip lights replaced the sun, the birds stopped chattering, then resumed their conversations at a more acceptable level. She was seated at a long table and Judith was sitting three down from her with her arm round an anthropologist from Stockholm, and Ghita was thinking that she hadn't felt like this since she was a new girl at convent school, except that at convent school you didn't drink beer or have half a dozen personable young men of all the world's nations at your table, and half a dozen pairs of male eyes assessing your sexual weight and availability. She was listening to tales of places she had never heard of, and exploits so hair-raising she was convinced she would never qualify to share them, and she was doing her best to appear knowledgeable and only distantly impressed. The spokesman of the moment was a surefire Yankee from New Jersey whose name was Hank the Hawk. According to Judith, he was a onetime boxer and loan shark who had embraced aid work as an alternative to a life of crime. He was holding forth about the warring factions of the Nile area: how the SPLE had temporarily kissed the asses of the SPLM; how the SSIM were beating the shit out of another set of letters, butchering their menfolk, stealing their women and cattle and generally making their contribution to the couple of million dead already notched up by Sudan's brainless civil wars. And Ghita was sipping her beer and doing her best to smile along with Hank the Hawk because his monologue seemed to be addressed exclusively at her as the newcomer and his next conquest. She was therefore grateful when a plump African woman of indeterminate age wearing shorts and sneakers and a London costermonger's peaked cap appeared out of the darkness, clapped her on the shoulder and yelled, “I'm Sudan Sarah, honey, so you got to be Ghita. Nobody told me you were so pretty. Come and have a cup of tea, dear.” And without further ceremony marched her through a maze of offices to a tukul like a beach hut on stilts, with a single bed, a refrigerator and a bookcase filled with matching volumes of classical English literature from Chaucer to James Joyce.