Please Do Not Disturb Page 2

  Searching for it, I listed the possibilities: Stella arrested, again; Stella found in a ditch, again; Stella reminding me she hated me, again. So it was a surprise to hear, ‘Sean? Gav here from the Telegraph. Remember me?’

  ‘The man who hates semicolons.’

  ‘That’s me. Do you know Truth? Pop singer, performing at this Big Day thing.’

  ‘No. But I already hate his name.’

  ‘Could you do a piece? The hook is big stars taking big cheques from bad men. He’s staying at some place called the Mirage.’

  Years back I started saying no to guys like Gav, believing my grand self to be so much more than a mere hack. I was an author no less! And my next book was just around the corner; a corner, it transpired, that looped and met itself in an impotent circle. Over time the fog of my pride lifted enough that I could see these calls would soon dry up. Then where was I? Neither author, nor hack, just some soaked teacher in a country you couldn’t even call forgotten for the fact no one had heard of it in the first place. So I said, ‘Sure, Mr Semicolon, I’ll do it,’ jotted down the details and said goodbye.

  When I returned to the stoop I was greeted by the rising sun. Magnificent. Scientists say one sun services the earth but the poet in me believes this is different to other suns. How could that pale blob smearing the Celtic sky be the same as this majestic African orb? The sun was low, rolling up the drive towards me, a wild eye glancing through the wire fence, firing up the bald lawn and free-range weeds. Stella sacked the gardener; lazy apparently. But when the jacaranda pods started rattling in the wind, I knew those black tongues were sounding the end of my peace. For the third and final malevolence was upon me.

  Out of the sun she stumbled, first as a silhouette but as she closed in, blocking light, she took shape, fattening, hips swelling, hair spreading like a storm, here she came: my Stella, blasted from the core of the sun with the sole purpose of making my life a living hell. We started mean and loud, just where we left off.

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’ I said and she sneered, ‘Out of my way, old man,’ shoving past me like I was a mangy dog.

  Holding up her pills, I yelled, ‘And what’s this?’ resisting the impulse to tack Ah-ha! to the end.

  When she screamed, ‘None of your business!’ I balked. ‘It bloody is my business! We agreed we weren’t throwing kids into this tidy mess we’ve made for ourselves.’

  She stared at me as if concocting a curse. I braced myself for blood-curdling screams, ejaculations of bees from her gaping mouth – the crickets hit a dramatic pitch – but no bees came, no blood, no screams. She just looked right through me, like I wasn’t even worth the curse, kissed her teeth – tss! – then stormed into the bedroom, cranking up the radio loud enough to wake the gods: ‘Today the King honoured our football team, the Tafumo Tigers, with new Bata Bata boots . . .’

  Stella didn’t take long to sleep off whatever poison she’d punished herself with the night before. Then she’d be out polluting the house with her mood. So I went to my study and grabbed a new Dictaphone I’d bought with some daft notion of recording Bwalo’s oral history for yet another book I’d never write. I’d forever been promising it to Charlie and right now, this very minute and not a moment later, was the time to fulfil that promise. And maybe, once I’d done that, and since I was there and all, I’d treat myself to a wee nip to fortify the day.

  Escaping Stella was, as always, grand. Riding through the fresh morning, exploding bugs punctuating my visor, the brightly painted Mirage rising up before me like the sweet hope of a bad day about to turn good.

  When I entered the lobby a real scene was playing out: a fella sprawled across the zebra skin, like he’d squashed the animal flat, and people prancing all around him. Goodness, someone in a worse state than me. He got up, dazed, hitched his arm over Stu and off they staggered like drunks. When I gave Charlie the Dictaphone, I enquired about the fainting man and Charlie assured me that the man was a celebrity. And sure enough, there was something faintly familiar about the fella.

  Josef

  Someone had touched my desk. I felt it before I saw it, before I sat, before I checked. No fingerprints on the polished surface but, like the first wince of indigestion, I knew something was wrong. Patrick said his office had been tampered with. My diary still sat in the centre; three pens beside it like bright exclamations – black, red, blue – and my lamp bent low to the page as if reading with its dusty glass eye. I opened the drawer, pushed the false bottom and there – in the drawer within the drawer – was my folder.

  I turned to Levi’s page, bible-thin from a time of carbon copies – everything in duplicate – those oily pages, black as the back of a mirror, upon which our pens impressed grey words. Levi’s original page was burned but I had kept the shadow page. A staple, rusted red as an ant’s pincer, clipped Levi’s photograph to the delicate paper. Looking like a boy, gone so young and so long ago, my memory forever tried to file him under ancient history. I returned my folder to the drawer.

  We all assumed Tafumo’s promise of democracy was genuine. Even Tafumo – before the heady whiff of adulation, before stepping off the plane to be greeted like a god – believed his promise. Levi tried to hold him to it. It was the first time we saw Tafumo’s rage, not loud or obvious but condescending, like a disappointed father: ‘My people aren’t ready for democracy. Too naive. Until they’re ready, everything I say is law.’

  Vanishing is harder now. Digital spirits are more indelible than paper ghosts. There was a time when they could wipe a man clean out of existence, everything burned, exported, expunged, friends, family, property, even his spirit. The sing’anga say spirits can’t survive unless someone remembers you. I remember you, Levi.

  Jack

  With the blade too wide to penetrate the crooked smile of the keyhole, I jemmied it, slipped, and sliced open a tidy flap on my thumb. Sally always said that after each mess-up I returned, shaking my head in disbelief, saying the same thing. How did this happen? Said she’d write it on my gravestone: How did this happen? And if she knew where I was right now, she’d put me straight in the grave herself. So why? Why, even as my guts churned like a sack of snakes, had I said, ‘Sure, I’m in’? Everything was wrong about it. Even the amount of money was higher than normal, and though that should have scared me off instead it sucked me in. Everything about it stank to high heaven. He’d called out of the blue. And last night I’d gone to the bar. Couldn’t miss him; only white guy in a black bar. I’d couriered for him before; small stuff, weed, documents, black-market money, back when I lived in Bwalo. He’d aged badly in the passing years, got pale, fat. Though it was almost dawn, the bar was still humming, guys with arses hanging out of their tatty trousers drinking cartons of the dark local brew.

  A woman bothered us and he waved her away. ‘Piss off, men at work.’ Then he whispered, ‘Steer clear of the pussy, Jack. Girls full up with the AIDS. Most expensive fuck you’ll have. You’ll pay with your life but, before you die, your dick’ll drop off.’ When he finished laughing, he asked, ‘Now, Jack, what do you know about gold?’

  ‘I know Sally can’t get enough of the stuff.’

  ‘Yah. Well I want to extract it. But in Bwalo they’ve bullshit regulations preventing me extracting it with a process involving potassium cyanide.’

  ‘Cyanide? I thought I was moving documents.’

  ‘Calm down. Not cyanide: potassium cyanide. Totally different. Don’t worry, the stuff’s inert, safe as houses. Worst that’ll happen is they slap you with a fine, which I’ll pay. All very low-grade illegal. And I’ve got the best guide, he’ll be with you every step.’

  ‘Why not get him to take the stuff?’

  ‘Because you can’t trust a kaffir to do a white man’s job.’

  Right then, that was the moment – to stand, to smile, to say goodbye – and I said, ‘Sure, I’m in.’ He handed me a case and an envelope and said, ‘First payment and a map. Drop-off is at a safari lodge. Start back here at eight. Don’
t mess it up, eh. I trust you.’

  When I returned my guide was there. The bar was closed and the area was littered with sodden cartons of Chibuku. My guide told me his name was ‘Fantastic’. I smiled. He didn’t smile back but looked me up and down, checking my fitness, reviewing if I was capable of keeping up, his eyes gliding over my backpack as he said, ‘We go.’

  As we walked through the bush, my brain kept wandering back to the bar and I realised the scale was wrong. What I was carrying was a few ounces at best. I knew guys involved with chemical extraction in the Copperbelt and it was industrial scale, barrels of the stuff coming in on the back of Bedford trucks.

  So soon as Fantastic said he needed to scout up ahead, soon as the sound of his footsteps faded, I pulled it out and placed my nose against the briefcase. Cyanide would reek of almonds. But there was no smell, just the dry stink of dust: the smell of Africa.

  That was when I dug my blade into the cheap fliplocks and sliced open my thumb. I began thumping the lock with the handle of my knife, cracking it again and again until the first latch popped. The second gave easily. When I heard the crunch of footsteps getting louder and closer, I yanked open the case and peeked inside: it was empty.

  Charlie

  Click!

  ‘Mrs Horst, did you know when a hippo poos it spins its tail like a propeller so the poo flies all over the place in a poo circle? Isn’t that amazing?’

  ‘What do you want, Charlie?’

  ‘Mum said I should interview you because you’d be fascinating.’

  ‘Fiona said that? Really? OK. Just make it snappy.’

  ‘What do you do for a living, Mrs Horst?’

  ‘I major in drinking, minor in smoking.’

  ‘And what were you like as a child?’

  ‘I was a princess. Generations back we were royalty, blue bloods. My father, God rest his soul, was filthy rich, worked in diamonds in South Africa. We had servants galore, my chariot was a Mercedes, my house was a castle that kept the riff-raff out.’

  ‘And what do you think of the Big Day?’

  ‘The Big Day is just another stinking day in this burnt-out excuse for a country . . . Bamboo! Alias! Hey, whisky! No ice! Quicksharp!’

  Click!

  Hope

  Having checked his pulse and temperature, I sat and waited. Waiting is what we do. We’ve not left the palace for nearly a year. Watching him sleep I saw that I needed to shave his head again: a week’s growth, a grey patina, rested like a dusting of icing sugar. We’ve grown old together. Seemed to happen in an instant. Years leapfrogging days, time crowding in with invisible fury, memory slippery as mud. Though, like the deepest carving, some memories remain clear as the day they were cut.

  After independence, as the palace was being built, men crawling like ants over scaffolding, Josef and I got married. We had just moved into our first house, on the university campus. I spent hours in the market fussing over rugs that had to have the green and gold of our new flag. That mattered: my national pride revealed even in the weave of my rugs. It normally took years to be granted a campus house but we had been blessed. I believed Jesus had bestowed this gift upon us. We were good people, faithful people, and God was pleased with us. I see now that innocence is a form of blindness.

  I suppose, even then, I knew that part of our luck was due to Josef. He’d played a small role in our independence, a junior member of the uMunthu Party. Together with his university colleagues, Essop, Boma, Patrick and Levi, he’d campaigned, demonstrated, and brought Tafumo to power.

  But before the wedding, Josef was on edge. Had he already fallen out of love with me? He became flustered when I’d asked if he’d like the missionary who educated him, a man he spoke about with great reverence, to marry us. Josef and I had met at church, I thought it would be good to include his teacher and mentor, but Josef said sharply, ‘No.’

  The joy of the day was a delicate thing I couldn’t quite reach, forever a fingertip away. Something about Josef’s manner, his strained smile. All morning I’d struggled against a curious detachment, so much the centre of attention that I felt I was outside looking in. So the moment it happened, I was just as much relieved as excited. The reason Josef had been on edge was nothing to do with our love; it was because he’d arranged a surprise. The arrival of the bride was not the main event at my wedding.

  Spilling from the cool church into the heat of the day, we chatted excitedly, released from the formality of the service, shining with sweat and happiness, when everyone suddenly stopped talking. For a Rolls-Royce was gliding down the silvery road. And next to me my Josef was smiling that knowing smile of his. His little secret was out. The source of his unease revealed. The King attended our wedding. Surely such fairy tales can’t be true I thought, as Tafumo kissed me and presented me with a gift: an ebony carving, black as smoke, of mother, father and child delicately intertwined. After Tafumo was swamped by guests, I went and kissed Josef. ‘So that’s why you’ve been acting strangely, Mr Songa,’ and he grinned, ‘I’m full of little secrets, Mrs Songa.’

  After our marriage fell apart, my mind travelled back to that day, to the start, the wedding. The bad seed planted so long before, maybe further back than I’ll ever know. My mind ceaselessly digging at that day, sifting through to that one image, a split-second moment that returned again and again and never came right. Naturally, on the day itself, this unease was muffled below a sort of manic happiness. A blur of small talk and big speeches washed down with a glut of food and wine. I was so proud of our new home that I’d insisted on holding the reception there even though I knew it was far too small. As with most Bwalo weddings more people turned up than were invited.

  Josef’s guests, and this should have concerned me more than it did, were few. As an orphan, he had no family. He had colleagues, fellow uMunthu members, but not a soul came from whatever life he’d had before he arrived at the capital. The bulk of the guests were my large, loud family, my snob of a mother fawning over the King. And Tafumo himself – had he noticed my rugs shining with the trim of our new flag? – sitting in my own house, looking bemused. Not a bright or brazen King but a muted presence swarmed by wild-coloured chitenges, a green-gold storm engulfing the dark-suited epicentre. Having just started at the palace, and being just one of many nurses, I hadn’t yet met him. He was forty, a fit man with little need for nurses. So I, like all around me, pretended not to stare at the god at my table. He behaved like any man; politely talking to those that dared talk to him, expertly brushing off my mortifying mother. And I truly felt as if I was at the centre of the world, working in the palace, married to one of the brave men who risked his life to free our nation. There I sat, at the head table, a stretch away from the King, sitting at the very heart of history. Pride before the fall.

  Though at the time we believed we were at the forefront of life and society, looking back at the one remaining photograph that Essop took, I cringe at how childish, how backward and somehow homemade we seemed, acting the adults we had not yet become. My outfit was an unflattering nightmare of eighties puffery, an enormous creamy scone of a dress, my face and hands peeking from the layers like raisins. And even though it was the early eighties, Josef and his friends were stuck very much in fashion of the seventies; a decade Africa remains reluctant to abandon. Josef’s neck is lassoed by a thick pink tie that hangs like a tongue down his custard-yellow shirt. Essop is in a flared checked suit and young Boma appears to be wearing a straw cowboy hat.

  But at the time we all believed we were at the very cutting edge of fashion, society, politics and history itself. And in all the excitement of the day, it wasn’t until we were seated at our reception dinner that I realised Levi was absent. Petulant bride that I was, I grabbed Josef, demanding, ‘Where is Levi?’

  I had hosted many dinners with Levi, cooked for innumerable meetings of the uMunthu at the house, while they prepared for the return of Tafumo. Even the King himself was here. I insisted that Josef call Levi and ask him to explain himself. T
he dining room was so noisy and smoky, Boma sweating through his shirt, singing some silly song, Essop chuckling, but through all the noise and smoke and space, Josef’s face floated towards me, his eyes cast down, staring at the phone. When he returned I said, ‘Well? What’s the story?’ and Josef muttered, ‘He’s not answering.’ I remained annoyed, put out that Levi hadn’t shown up, hadn’t even had the decency to call.

  Very late that night, long after the King had left and most of the guests were gone, we drank with Josef’s close friends. As we sipped our wine, I realised that this was the first time that all of us, except Levi, had sat together since independence. For months before Tafumo’s return, they had met, most nights, at this wicker table, planning protests and preparing to overthrow the British. Yet since Tafumo had come to power, these men hadn’t yet gathered to celebrate the role they played in freeing our country. So, in a brief moment of silence, when Boma had stopped singing, I raised my glass and looked closely at each of them – Essop, Boma, Patrick and Josef – and said, ‘A toast. To my brave uMunthu men.’ Glancing at one another slouched in their chairs, they briefly emerged from their stupor.

  Essop jumped up and forced everyone to sit in the order we had once sat for a photograph he’d taken at the last uMunthu meeting before independence. Shuffling us, ‘Come, come, this is a historic reunion,’ he balanced his camera on a chair, fiddling with the timer, running back into shot. Josef grabbed my waist, something desperate in the clinch, as Boma raised his bottle and we all sang, ‘Kwacha!’

  And it was not long after that I noticed Josef and Essop together. Even now I see the image so clearly: the two of them under the jacaranda tree, Josef so tall next to Essop, touching Essop’s back as one might comfort a child.