Please Do Not Disturb Read online

  Charlie

  Click . . .

  ‘Mr Horst, did you know marabou storks pee on their own legs to cool off?’

  ‘Charlie, I’m busy as a bugger so . . .’

  ‘Mum said you would be really interesting to talk to.’

  ‘She said that? Really? OK, well, if Fiona said so.’

  ‘Mr Horst, what was your dad like?’

  ‘Mean. He raised us boys like livestock. If I was slow, I got a boot up the arse. If I cried, he’d boot me in the arse again for being sissy.’

  ‘He sounds horrid.’

  ‘No, no. He made me what I am today.’

  ‘What are you today?’

  ‘I’m a success, Charlie, a bloody great success.’

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

  ‘I think it’s going to make me a very rich man.’

  Click . . .

  Josef

  I opened my file to Patrick’s page. It was thick stock. His photo not stapled like Levi’s, but printed on the page. When he vanished last week we were ordered to destroy Patrick’s paperwork but, as always, I held on to a page. One page per man. Patrick knew. Again and again he asked, Am I blacklisted? Ministers believed in a blacklist of those fallen from favour. A childish notion. The problem wasn’t being on a list; the problem was no longer being on any list.

  Leaning low I returned the folder to the bottom drawer, slid the false bottom over, and when I sat back up I felt blood rinse my gums and I winced. For days a vibration had been building, humming an insistent note, my sweet tooth playing a childish tune. And before I was fully conscious of it, my tongue plucked the raw nerve and I grimaced, waiting for the shrill pain to fade.

  I left my office and asked my secretary, ‘Beatrice, has anyone been to see me?’ She replied, ‘Mr Jeko,’ and I snapped, ‘Well why didn’t you tell me!’

  The fear on her face was all the reply I required; Jeko had instructed her not to. When I asked if he had left a note, she shrugged helplessly. Jeko didn’t leave notes. I suspected he was illiterate. Dressed like an accountant, he ran Tafumo’s secret police, the Young Pioneers, with disquieting efficiency. He was lighter skinned than me, his bald head the pale brown of an avocado stone. His almost featureless face personified the system he ran. He wasn’t just bald but without eyebrows or eyelashes, as if even they were surplus to requirement. I was momentarily overpowered by an image of Jeko’s gloved hand wiping the surface of my desk, the slits of his nostrils flaring.

  Walking the short distance to the Ministry of Communication, Broadcast and Tourism, planes pass overhead; the world was arriving. The passengers would barely register this grey cube. Five levels up and – like a dark reflection – five sunk below. Entering it was like being beamed from a dusty African university to a shiny Zurich corporation. With leather chairs and acres of silver servers, it was strikingly modern. It wasn’t always like this. It began as an amateurish affair. A few women plunging wires in and out of a giant wooden operator station. They didn’t record back then. Just listened. And if negative words crossed the wire, they pulled the plug. In those early days, those simpler times, I didn’t know when I informed on Levi that he’d vanish. I was naive.

  What, I wonder, was my excuse now? After Levi, I took over his position as University Dean and, to begin with at least, I fought hard for funding, which I rarely received. Of course, by the late eighties, when I was appointed Minister of Communication, no financial request was ever denied. Tafumo had no interest in the education of his people, only in their surveillance: he wanted always to be the sophisticated father of simple children. This building was empty when I became minister; we had no opposition, no enemy. I never thought we’d fill it. Not in my lifetime anyway. Yet now as I walked its corridors, lined with miles of manila folders full of secrets and lies, I listened to the hypnotic rhythm of my footsteps and someone called out, ‘Sefu?’

  I pitched forward, hands hitting the wall to break my fall, as I tried to steal breath back into my lungs. Sefu. An old name. Little sword. Like pulling a tiny weed only to yank a large tangle of roots, the name dragged many memories in its wake. Long ago I secreted Sefu inside the sheath of Josef. Now, it seemed, time was turning me inside out.

  I shouted, ‘Hello?’ and jumped when the word returned, ‘Hello?’ Scared of my own echo. I scuffed my shoe, making a schu sound: Sefu? I tried to smile, to shrug it off, but wasn’t convinced by my own nonchalance. Diagnosing them as panic attacks, my GP prescribed useless pills. But this wasn’t panic. I was being overwhelmed by weakness, emerging from these episodes as if from brutal exertion. Thankfully, my sing’anga gave me real muti. And when I sipped from the bottle the dark drops revived me. I slowly made my way to the Listening Room. The ancient operator station had long ago been replaced with cubicles manned by men in headphones. It looked dull as any call centre. Only no one was talking here. They were listening and transcribing our unofficial history.

  I sat in the meeting room and looked down the line of identical cubicles, giant cells multiplying across the floor. Closing my eyes, I listened to the light splashing of people typing. So much of what we heard was useless, gossip and lies; endless currents of chatter through which we had to sift. What we heard was rarely significant, it was the whispers we missed that mattered most. By the nineties, my job title had expanded to Minister of Communication, Broadcast, Education and Tourism. African governments specialise in long job titles and in Bwalo people joked that the longer your job title the bigger your Mercedes. I imagined my title to be a snake gobbling up departments. A title so long it barely fitted on my business card. Behind my back, other ministers called me the Minister of Everything, but in truth, I always felt more like the Minister of Nothing. The real work of Tourism, Education and Broadcast was delegated to my deputy ministers, and in fact all I did was listen. I was the Minister of Whispers and Lies, listening to the nation’s secrets; listening to what Tafumo’s simple citizens were saying about him.

  I remembered my first British High Commissioner. They came and went, these bored men posted like unwanted letters around the empire. They had their differences – some were fatter than others; some couldn’t hold their gin – but each, to a man, failed to grasp how Bwalo really worked. My first Commissioner was as ugly as he was dull. And when the gin loosened his tongue, he said, ‘I know who you really are, Josef. They call you Minister of Everything, or God. All-seeing, all-hearing and all of that. Second oldest profession, the oldest being whores. Spies and sluts make the world go around. But I was briefed by our MI5 bods who said your service sorely lacks technology and sophistication. That it is a far cry from our own impressive British secret service.’

  What the fool failed to realise was that our service was a human one, of flesh and souls not wires and microchips, and that even as he sat condescending me, the servant filling his glass was one of mine, the maids searching through his things were mine, and they all formed a fraction of a devoted army spread across Bwalo and beyond. Not that they ever heard an interesting thing he said. He was a consummate ambassador in that sense: he never said anything worth repeating.

  His MI5 briefing also omitted a key point: our service was a facsimile of his. For a simple reason: the British actually created the Bwalo service. After we gained independence, the British were paranoid about communist infestation. We were wedged – crushed – between communist states. With Zambia to the west and Mozambique to the east, we were the final domino – the last stronghold – to be toppled. And so MI5 actually came and taught us. They gave us training, shared intelligence and equipment. MI5 was the midwife of the Bwalo secret service. Like some zealous nanny unable to accept her charges were grown, the British simply couldn’t leave their lost empire alone.

  At the end he winked, sealing a gentleman’s agreement, ‘We’ll work well together. We want the same thing, old boy.’ This man actually believed we were the same: that we thought, felt and desired the same. He supposed his empire hadn’t just spread syphilis but also
its psyche. Yet the distance between us – a metre of mahogany desk – may as well have been miles. For any man who believes all men are alike has never spent time in Bwalo. His crumbling empire mind, soaked in gin, couldn’t grasp how raw a nation we were. How many would die for Tafumo, believed him to be God, how we cherished principles about which he had long ago grown complacent.

  My reminiscence was broken by a knock on the door. And, as if my thoughts on fanaticism had manifested into a man, David limped into the room. He worked hard to mask the twist in his spine – a remnant of the deforming hand of polio – stretching the kink to excruciating straightness, the pain of which left his young face lined with agony. Today he wore his black suit; he seemed to own only two, which I assumed was due to some sort of self-imposed austerity.

  As my right-hand man, David also had a rather cumbersome job title as Deputy Minister of Communication, Data and Information. He handed me a folder and I flicked through the banned websites and transcripts. The Commissioner had been right in one sense: back then our technology was limited. But since then, the global defence market has let us purchase whatever we need to listen to whomever we want, creeping like rising damp into homes, businesses, even to the edge of people’s minds. But technology’s advance assists subversion as much as surveillance. If we have it, they have it. When the world was paper we held it back. But the relentless proliferation of the digital world means the termites are chewing the dam closer to collapse.

  When I started here everything was physical. Newpapers, magazines and books were either banned outright or incriminating articles and salacious images were blacked out with marker pens or cut out; long tables of men with pens and scissors blacking out articles and slicing out flesh. When we banned a song, we would physically scratch it off the vinyl, scarring the soft wax, so that one song on the album would never play. But the tangible world is now long deceased, haunting the ether, streaming in, weightless and dangerous as an idea. Utterly impossible to stop. You might as well try to catch the wind. My eager young deputy, David, loves the new world, this coded realm, where every action leaves a stain, where we can trace every conversation, text, purchase and search. He’s too young to appreciate one day that same slime will be traced back to the soles of our shoes.

  Pulling out a transcript, David explained, ‘I’ve an account from a Watcher near the border in the north, a bar owner, said he saw a man who fits the description of Horst – the owner of the Mirage – swapping goods with another man. In itself it’s minor but this morning the Listeners got this from the new bug on Horst’s portrait in the hotel office. One of the men is Horst himself. We’re checking with Ed now, trying to get verification on the second man. He’s a recent arrival into the country, a man called Willem. Something about the conversation is not quite right.’

  Eugene Horst: Cost a bomb but I’m happy with the painting . . .

  Willem: Sure captures all of you. You got a little excess baggage since . . .

  Eugene Horst: Bullshit. Marlene has me on this prehistoric diet.

  Willem: You chewing through a dinosaur a day?

  Eugene Horst: Still a bloody joker. So, how’s Scotland?

  Willem: Miserable. Left our big house in Zim to live in some semi-detached shithole with shared walls. I’m in Scotland sharing my walls and here, even in mud huts, even the poorest bambo in Bwalo has his own walls.

  Eugene Horst: You’re starting to whine like a pom. So you play golf? First tee is tough, eh?

  Willem: Not too bad.

  Eugene Horst: Sure?

  Willem: Sure.

  Closing the file, I said, ‘Don’t waste time on this, David. It’s nothing. White men talk golf until boredom himself begs for a change of subject.’

  With undisguised contempt, David stood up and limped out, and as he swept past, I caught a whiff of bad meat.

  Charlie

  Everyone at the bar was dressed in their best clothes because of the rumours that celebrities had arrived. I knew they hadn’t but Dad told me not to tell anyone because he said the rumours were good for business. In fact, Dad was the one spreading the rumours.

  Solomon, Aaron and I sat in the frangipani tree at the end of the pool where the hotel stopped and the golf course started.

  Aaron looked at my new Dictaphone and said, ‘But this machine is magic, Charlie.’

  Aaron was my nanny’s son. He lived in the kaya, the servants’ compound at the foot of the golf course. His toys were made of wood and wire, so he never got to see cool stuff like this. It was probably one of the coolest toys I’d ever seen too.

  Solomon just shrugged and said, ‘My dad has one just like this, but better.’

  Solomon said that about everything. His dad worked for the government and drove a Mercedes like Tafumo. Dad told me to always be nice to Solomon. And when Mum said, you always be nice to everyone, Dad explained, that’s what I meant, dear. But then Dad whispered to me, just be extra nice to Solomon.

  Earlier in the afternoon, I’d snuck up behind Mrs Horst and her best friend Debs. Their backs were squeezed through the deckchair slats like sausage fat. It was so gross. Every single day Mrs Horst and Debs lay by the pool, sizzling in the sun, yacking away. Mum called them the Ministry of Information, because they knew everything about everyone. So I’d crept up and left my Dictaphone recording under them.

  Before I hit play, I said, ‘Listen, guys, there are so many cool new words.’

  Click!

  ‘Bastard crickets, what’s to be so fucking chirpy about?’

  ‘You got a bout of Bwalo fever, girl? Need a shopping trip to the Cape, only cure for the fever. Is that that girl from that film about the crash where they ate each other?’

  ‘Jesus, check Eugene flirting with them. Pathetic. I’d that dream again . . .’

  ‘Oh yah, the hunky gardener riding you like black tar . . .’

  ‘Not that one! The one where I kill Eugene.’

  ‘To hell with the shopping trip, Marl, you need a divorce.’

  ‘Who wants a dried old prune like me?’

  ‘You’re in good shape . . . for your age. Talk to me, Marl, I’m listening.’

  ‘Why, so you can tell my business to everyone in this tiny fucking town.’

  ‘I never, Marl!’

  ‘All right relax. Look at Sean there, pissed as a newt before lunchtime.’

  ‘Man’s got a face like a punched testicle. Shame, yah. That’s what you get for going native. I hear his fiancée was a lady of the night before he made an honest woman of her.’

  ‘Nothing honest about that woman. Fuck this, eh. I’m off. There’s no famous people here except that creepy hobbit guy.’

  ‘I’ll call you if Clooney comes.’

  ‘Yah, yah, pigs will fly. See you for sundowners.’

  ‘Ebony or ivory today?’

  ‘Cheeky bitch.’

  Click!

  For a moment, we all just stared at each other.

  Then Aaron said, ‘I think we should definitely not be listening to this. This is bad trouble, Charlie.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ Solomon shouted. ‘What do you know, Aaron, you know nothing.’

  I took a bottle top from my pocket. Then, on the tree branch, near the old words – BUGGER, CRAP, SHITSILU – I scraped the new word: TESTACULS.

  Solomon smiled and said, ‘We need a whole forest to carve out all their curses.’

  ‘This is bad,’ muttered Aaron and Solomon snapped, ‘You don’t know anything about anything, you are just ignorant.’

  ‘Well, I know a new word too,’ Aaron said defensively, and Solomon and I looked at him suspiciously. Solomon didn’t like other people knowing anything he didn’t and he whispered to me, ‘He doesn’t know anything, he’s just stupid.’

  ‘I do know a word,’ Aaron said. ‘About what they were saying about Sean’s wife. My mum spelt it out to Ed, so I wouldn’t be understanding it.’

  I said, ‘They’re always spelling things, it’s so annoying!’

  Aaron
nodded. ‘Yes. It’s a strange word, not a Chichewa word. Mum uses English words if she really does not want me to be understanding her.’

  I offered Aaron the bottle top and said, ‘Well if they spelt it out then can you remember how to spell it?’ Aaron hesitated, as if he was scared of the word, and Solomon taunted, ‘Yah, they don’t teach you to spell at your rubbish falling-down school.’

  Aaron snatched the top and carved: W O R.

  White sap bled into the letters and I said, ‘What’s a wor?’

  When no one replied, I jumped off the tree and said, ‘I’m going to ask.’

  Aaron shouted, ‘No, Charlie,’ and Solomon said, ‘Just shut up, ignorant Aaron.’

  I walked up to Stella and shouted over the noise, ‘Hey, Stella. Are you a wor?’

  Lots of people, who’d been chatting, suddenly stopped talking, turned, and stared.

  Mrs Horst leant down and whispered into my ear, ‘Say it with an H, sweetie.’

  I said, ‘Whore?’

  Dad said time never stops but sometimes it pauses. That’s what happened. Everything paused. Then, as if time was trying to catch up with itself, everything moved really fast. Stella looked like a dog had farted in her mouth; people were laughing behind their hands; Mum was dragging me into the lobby where, with arms folded, she shouted, ‘Who told you that word?’

  ‘I’ll never reveal my sources, Mum.’

  ‘What? Look, right, Charlie, you can’t say these things.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  ‘Because she’s a wor?’

  ‘It’s whore.’

  ‘Whore.’

  ‘Stop saying it, Charlie!’

  ‘Not even correctly?’

  ‘Especially not correctly. Not till you’re old enough.’

  ‘But you told me to always ask questions.’

  ‘That’s true . . . just come to me first. Ask your dad or . . . no, ask me first. Got it? Don’t just blurt it out. Now it’s way too late for you to be up, so go to bed!’

  After a sharp kiss, Mum turned me towards home, and gave me a gentle push. She rushed back to the bar and I started to walk home. But as I passed Dad’s office, I heard shouting. So I went inside and tiptoed over to the window, where I spied out to the car park. From my low position, Stella’s legs vanished in pillars up the darkness of her dress, as Sean’s feet shuffled about like a boxer. I placed the Dictaphone on the windowsill and lay low, so they wouldn’t see me. I was trying to listen when I heard the slip-slap of flip-flops and when I looked up my nanny, Innocence, stood over me, hands on her hips. Avoiding her eyes, I looked down at her toes, hoping she didn’t know what Aaron had told me about Stella. But I bet she did. Innocence knew everything, even more than Mum. When she said, ‘Master, bed now!’ I left the Dictaphone running on the windowsill, and weaved past Innocence, who flip-flopped me all the way to bed.