Please Do Not Disturb Page 4

  Click!

  ‘Your friends have no respect for me, Sean.’

  ‘Come on, Stell, it’s not like that. They were just embarrassed . . .’

  ‘These men have all looked at me differently in the past, now they’re hypocrites.’

  ‘Let’s not get into that right now, Stell.’

  ‘You don’t defend me. I need respecting. I’m a member of this club too.’

  ‘Well, technically, you’re not actually a member.’

  ‘What did you say to me?’

  ‘Nothing, dear. Just calm down. Christ’s sake, Stell. Don’t do that, don’t hurt me.’

  ‘I was happier as a whore. You’re nothing but a bitch! A misery! You’re the only whore here today!’

  Click!

  Hope

  Before the palace was finished, the Mirage was the most extravagant building in Bwalo. Though it wasn’t long before even Tafumo’s palace was put in its place. A year into the job, I accompanied Tafumo to a Commonwealth dinner in London. Josef was so proud. He carved me a good-luck charm: a London bus painted ochre. He kissed me and I told him off for his itchy moustache. Tafumo had grown one so all the men had followed suit.

  We flew in Tafumo’s Jumbo with his mbumba, his one hundred dancing girls. I’d never been on a plane. The girls were used to it, these village girls, plucked from fields, wrapped in chitenges, dancing around the world in his honour. As the engines roared I searched the girls’ faces for fear. Was it supposed to sound like it was exploding? They looked bored as the earth released us, the plane pulled up, and Bwalo shrank below.

  We stayed at the Ritz, where a tailor came to measure Tafumo for a suit. The same suit he insisted on wearing today, his body lost inside it like a buckled coat hanger. Back then, he was an ebony giant: hard, powerful, stretching the suit to perfect tautness. But the trip soon soured. Tafumo was denied a private meeting with the Queen. He sulked; I administered Valium. Then Tafumo’s lady-in-waiting, Mama Angelina, fell sick and was unable to attend the state dinner. No one knew who I was, so I was the natural replacement. I remember being so thrilled and anxious as I put on my best dress.

  When the limousine sliced through the wet night, I was overpowered by déjà vu. Though I’d never seen Buckingham Palace, I simultaneously knew I recognised it. Stepping out, I realised where I’d seen it: Tafumo had modelled his palace on the Queen’s, erecting a quarter-sized Buckingham Palace in the middle of Bwalo.

  The inside of the Queen’s palace was magnificent. Everything and everyone shone with splendour. And my own dress, the most expensive I owned – which moments before had seemed so extravagant – was magically transformed into a bright embarrassment of cheap, homemade rags. Chandeliers lent the guests a rich glow and it was there, sitting in that majestic hall, that Tafumo’s palace was reduced to a glorified doll’s house, a failed imitation of grandeur. Until my teens I’d never left my village and when I did my nursing degree in the capital, I believed it was the greatest city in the world. Yet here I sat in a city many times bigger than my whole country.

  I heard dignitaries from across the world speak in the same accent as the Queen. I remained mute, not wanting my African accent to escape my mouth, to embarrass me, to shame Tafumo. But I had my first seditious thought that night: that even Tafumo’s power paled when held up against the might of this woman who once ruled the world. But where I was awestruck, Tafumo was agitated; he drank heavily, sulked, and eventually fell into conversation with an aide to the Sultan of Brunei.

  The aide was a confident, boastful man, who said, ‘Goodness, these things are so dull. The Queen waffling on about the importance of the Commonwealth in modern times. Rada-rada-rada, blah-blah-blah.’

  Tafumo nodded, happy to have found another man disgruntled with the Queen.

  And seeing he had Tafumo’s support, the aide continued, ‘When actually, as I’m sure you are more than aware, ruling an empire really isn’t so hard. One need only look at this German lady, bewigged and bejowled, to see that it is all about the power of pomp. It’s so simple really. Sustain the traditions of your people to sustain the support of them.’

  I never thought it possible but Tafumo was actually intimidated. He clearly wanted to impress the aide, when he replied, ‘Couldn’t agree more. In Bwalo, no man is allowed to grow his hair. Hippies come and we shave their heads at the airport.’

  ‘Splendid,’ said the aide, smiling. ‘In Brunei it’s forbidden for a layperson to wear yellow, for this is the colour of our royal family and is their exclusive entitlement.’

  ‘I banned miniskirts,’ Tafumo said, ‘to retain the chastity of women,’ and the aide volleyed back, ‘We banned alcohol and karaoke. Keeps the Chinese in their place.’

  Watching these powerful men acting like schoolboys, reducing the rights of their people to pawns in a game of one-upmanship, sickened me. It was the first time I’d considered Tafumo’s laws. He always spun the line about retaining the chastity of African women but now I saw what a fool I’d been to believe it. Around us hung portraits of mustachioed men in long sleeves and trousers, women trussed up like peacocks. My ancestors were bare-breasted and naked to man and God. Tafumo wasn’t upholding his African code, it came from his other side: it was the code of the colonists.

  I was so happy to return to Bwalo. To be free of that strange and cold kingdom. When the aeroplane door breathed open, I was wrapped in a gentle hug of heat. Home again. I had bought Josef a toy black cab and when he opened it, he smiled and then parked both the cab and the ochre bus together on our bookshelf. And that night, for the first time, I didn’t have to cook. Josef had hired a lady called Ruby. We were doing well in the world. After all the limp British vegetables and soggy grey fish, Ruby cooked a chambo and its fresh pearly eyes filled me with such happiness. As we ate, I told Josef all about the palace dinner and he joked, ‘Well from now on I shall have to call you the Queen of Bwalo.’

  I giggled and then tried to explain the conversation between the Sultan’s aide and Tafumo. But in my tipsy state I failed to articulate what I found annoying and I stopped when I sensed Josef’s mood had fallen out of harmony with mine. He spoke to me with an authoritative voice, one I imagined he used in lectures, telling me never to spread silly stories about our great King. When I smiled and told him to calm down, he told me to shut up. Like that: Shut up! Then he stood, towering over me, and like heat off a fire I felt his violence. When I asked, ‘What’s wrong, Josef?’ he didn’t reply but slumped back down beside me. When he eventually cooled, we worked our way back to a good mood, but in time I saw this moment was just the surface of something deeper.

  Our fragile love was further tested by our failure to have a child. I secretly checked myself with a specialist and there were no obvious problems. When I begged Josef to get himself checked he screamed that I was a chimbwira, barren, scolding me for daring to question his mighty virility. Few monuments are as unmovable as the ego of a Bwalo man. I shouted back at him, I wanted a reaction and I got one. This time he punched me and through my throbbing lips I screamed, ‘How dare you, how dare you.’ But worse than the punch was the fact he showed no remorse, acting as if I deserved it.

  I prayed to God to bless us with a child, greedily demanding more than I’d already received. No child came. Eventually Josef forced me to see a sing’anga, who offered vile potions, which I fed to the sink, and mumbo-jumbo about a man with many faces. Besides his faith in Jesus and his education, Josef still believed in magic, spirits and mfiti. For all his shiny English shoes he never quite scrubbed off the village dust. Hindsight makes a fool of us. Josef’s promotions, our new house, our new wealth: it wasn’t luck, it wasn’t God, we weren’t blessed: it was Tafumo. It was always Tafumo.

  Jack

  Trying to keep up with Fantastic, I felt my backpack grow heavier with every step. My shoulders ached under the weight of it, even though it was no more than a few pounds. Worse than the sensation of weight was the feeling of loneliness gnawing at my guts. Every time
I made a bad call I felt like this. Like I was the only person left in the world, like my wife Sally was a million miles away and I would never, no matter how much I tried, make it back to her. The feeling started the night before I left to come here. The moment I lied to Sally about taking a trip to Bwalo to see an old friend, an Irish guy I used to know. I don’t think she believed me even for a second. And after the lie, Sal and I had dinner, the two of us sitting in front of the screaming television, eating in silence like a couple of strangers. I jumped slightly when Fantastic hissed at me and raised his hand. We crouched low and Fantastic’s eyes flared as he pointed his finger out across the land. I saw nothing but scrubland with a few baobab trees squatting like lumps of badly poured concrete. I was prepared to see a line of heavily armed soldiers marching towards us. Instead I saw eddies twisting in the distance, the wind’s hot breath blurring and rubbing out reality, and then my heart jumped. Off to the right, emerging from a dense patch of tall grass, marched a parade of elephants, a baby wedged protectively between a bull and his mother. Fantastic looked back at me and smiled. We stayed low, watching the beasts plod gently past. Once they were gone, Fantastic lost his smile, and said, ‘We go.’ As we walked on, the day started to fade, dusk dimmed to something blacker, and I felt a slight panic that we were lost. I grabbed my torch but it gave only a few feet of illumination before the blackness gobbled up the weak beam of light.

  Josef

  My desk was smeared. I brought my eye level with the desktop, so I could stare across the polished surface: smeared. I was safe for now. When they got sloppy – when they no longer cared that I knew they were after me – that was when I would have to act. For now I assumed it was just David being over-zealous. I took out my folder and put it on the desk. It had grown fat over the years, with men I knew and some I didn’t. I waited, I thought a long time before I did what I did next. I turned to Levi’s page and on it wrote: ‘Levi Manda, University Dean, execution by Jeko, under executive order of Tafumo.’

  Each word was like a pinprick through which a mighty pressure escaped. But the relief didn’t last. A swoon of fatigue turned my pen to lead and it fell from my fingers. Someone knocked on my door. I watched the weary motion of my hands, moving as if through molasses, dropping my folder into the drawer. The knocking grew more insistent. My hands acted like anchors, dragging me off my chair. I slid to the floor where, with immense effort, I pushed the drawer shut by butting my head against it, before collapsing.

  Hands scooped me up by the armpits. I couldn’t see him but knew from his muttering that it was Essop. Thank God it wasn’t David or one of my staff who’d found me like this.

  ‘Gently, gently,’ he said, and when he lowered me into my chair, the room fell back into focus and there was Essop saying, ‘Drink some water. Should I call an ambulance?’

  ‘No, no,’ I said, sipping the water. ‘I’m fine, fine.’

  He sat across from me, his face pinched with concern. ‘Josef. You’re pale as a ghost.’

  Essop was framed by the office window, light blurring the edges of him, producing a hazy, dreamy quality. He looked, for a moment, demonic; his glasses like blank eye sockets in a dark skull. But as my vision focused my old friend formed, as if by magic, before my eyes: there he sat, smiling, concerned and slightly flustered. He was an odd-looking man. As Tafumo’s translator, Essop was well paid yet he looked and lived like a poor man, like an impoverished teacher who’d stumbled out of a lecture, in his embarrassing tweed suit and silly kipper tie. Though bald, he let his side hair grow long and messy, so his scalp shone like an egg in a wool nest. And long after the fashion had passed and most of us had shaved off our moustaches, Essop’s grew grey as soot. Long after we’d moved to the best areas in town, Essop remained in his small house in a bad area. Long after we’d replaced our old cars, Essop still drove around in his wobbly Peugeot which, when parked at the palace, looked like a joke car next to all of our gleaming Mercedes. Essop was infuriatingly naive. Of course, we all started naive, us country boys born in villages so far from the capital. But while the rest of us worked tirelessly to replace naivety with education, Essop never quite washed it off. It clung to him like a stink.

  When I asked how the palace was, he said, ‘Humming with excitement,’ in a genuine voice, but I caught a sceptical smile flicker below his moustache.

  Pulling something from his jacket, he looked fondly at it, before handing it over. ‘This’ll make you feel old. A photograph of young men from ancient times. I’d completely forgotten that your hair used to shoot up like a black wave. You look like a young Kaunda.’

  ‘At least I still have hair.’

  Essop touched his baldness as tenderly as one would touch a wound. I stared at a photograph of five people sitting at a wicker table heavy with ashtrays and beers. The only woman in the photograph was Hope, my Hope, with eyes so wide some nights I felt I was falling into them, an expression so innocent it made me want to shape the world to resemble what she dreamed it should be. Next to her sat Boma in a ridiculous gingham jumpsuit, swigging beer, that dense skull of his never penetrated by a complicated thought. Essop was half out of the frame but even a fraction gave him away: his face fixed in the repose of a man flinching at a world he expected would hurt him. Among the faces was a smiling ghost: Levi. Normally I glanced at photographs but this one stole my attention so entirely, tore me so deeply into the past, that I was shocked when Essop said, ‘Keep it.’

  Staring at the other ghost, the slim face of Patrick Goya, I whispered, ‘Any word on Patrick?’

  Essop looked flustered and said, ‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

  A wave of fatigue washed over me, sapping me so thoroughly that I wanted to lay my head on the desk and sleep. The world slipped out of focus but I didn’t want to take my sing’anga drops in front of Essop; it was bad enough he had found me on the floor like a sick dog, weak and pathetic. Instead I allowed my tongue to fish in the crevice of my rotten tooth, probing the nerve to give me a refreshing shot of pain and energy.

  When I winced, Essop asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ and, touching my cheek, I admitted, ‘One of my teeth is causing me problems.’

  Ever the good friend, he wrote down a name and number, ‘You must get that seen to, here’s my dentist, he’s good. Dear Josef, you are falling apart.’

  Then Essop fell silent, he looked nervous, embarrassed, until he finally said, ‘My friend. I don’t wish to place more pressure on you but listen. There has been . . . talk.’

  ‘About Patrick?’

  ‘No. About you, Josef. I don’t normally listen to gossip, bored palace staff and jealous ministers, but people are questioning your . . . authority . . . your . . . judgement. From within your own Ministry.’

  ‘Thanks, Essop, but I’m aware of my staff testing my authority. The young are programmed to overthrow the old.’

  ‘Mututomera iphere, kusal’ injumbura,’ Essop said.

  ‘Kill the old, let the young remain.’

  ‘You remember your Ngoni,’ he said, smiling. ‘Your tribe always had the best sayings. My favourite remains: we always look for the devil in the wrong place.’

  ‘Spoken like a sad academic,’ I quipped and saw that I’d upset Essop just a little. He was a sensitive soul and to cheer him up I continued our game, saying, ‘The child is father of the man,’ to which he immediately replied, ‘Too easy. The child is a man wrapped in his mother’s womb.’

  ‘No point crying over spilt milk?’

  ‘Don’t waste my time. Madzi akatayika sawoleka. Don’t fret the loss of waters.’

  ‘A stitch in time?’

  ‘Pang’onopang’ono ndi mtolo. Little by little you make a bundle. You are never going to beat me at this game, Josef. I am the greatest at this and always will be. How about the Cameroonian one I heard the other day. She’s like a road: pretty but crooked?’

  I held up my hands in surrender. ‘You win. I can’t imagine an English version for that one.’

  We b
oth laughed together for a moment and it reminded me of how close we had once been and how, of late, we had been drifting apart.

  So I said, ‘Look, Essop, come to my place on Friday for sundowners. It’s been too long between drinks.’

  He grinned as if a great burden had been lifted from him: he had said what he had come to say. Then he shook my hand and made his way to the door, blinking like a mole behind his huge glasses. ‘Lovely. Lovely. Yes, that will be lovely. Until then, my friend.’

  Sean

  My day started badly but it got worse. Though I did have a laugh when I popped my head into Stu’s office, and there on the wall, huge in size, grotesque in taste, was a painting of Horst. To prove he was the great hunter, he’d clearly briefed the artist to include many a mounted head. So, like a bizarre family reunion, grumpy Uncle Buffalo, elegant Aunt Kudu and the excitable springbok cousins all jostled to get into the frame. Eugene sat in the foreground with a face so simple a kid could capture it with a crayon. The only risk was avoiding caricature, for Horst resembled a Hogarth slob and the artist had dodged this issue by scaffolding Horst’s face on a fictional jawline. He stared out of the frame, disappointed at a world that failed to take him as seriously as he took himself.