Ian McDonald - Chaga

Her semester project on UNECTA as agent of Western industrial neo-colonialism earned her a summer placement with SkyNet Multimedia News. It was the first step southward to the plains of East Africa. That summer she determined that she would give SkyNet no possible grounds for declining her a job when she graduated in a year’s time. She grew pale and vampirish while the rest of her class flourished in sunny climates. She cultivated relationships, not all of which ended in bed. She shook hands. She did lunches. In the end, she succeeded.

Her father and Reb came to the graduation. First of all her year, she went up to collect her degree. When her father jokingly referred to her ruthlessness, she was startled. She had never thought of herself so. She was a frustrated visionary. The next day she moved into the glass-walled menagerie of SkyNet’s London office, among the architectural wet-dreams of Docklands. It was a Junior Compiler’s post in the Economics division, but it was another step south.

The Chaga continued advancing outward at fifty metres a day. Gaby charted its progress on a big map of Africa on the wall of her flat. She stuck photographs round the map: elephants with the snows of Kilimanjaro behind them; aerial views of the great disc of coloured mosaic dropped onto the dun landscapes of northern Tanzania. Neither friends nor her brief lovers were allowed to see her little shrine to the Chaga. It was not that she feared them thinking she was sad, it was that it was hers and hers alone. Others would profane it.

Beneath the towers of London she manoeuvred, she manipulated, she percolated up through the dense hierarchy of Sky Net like ground water rising in an Artesian basin. Opportunities opened; promotions appeared: she let them go. They were too easy, she was not ready. There was still the possibility of failure. That would have killed her. She would move only when victory was assured, though every day’s wait was a tap of the needle another millimetre deeper under her thumb-nail.

Six hundred and forty taps. Six hundred and forty silent chokes of frustration. And because she had honoured her star, it honoured her. The position was a junior one: had it not been in the Nairobi Station it would have been a demotion and she would have been fatally over-qualified. It was the third step, the sideways step that took you over seas and mountains and deserts to the land of heart’s desire.

She put in her application, called in all her overdue markers and went home to Ireland. The answer was there on the Watchhouse’s computers as she came in through the door to be greeted by leaping, wagging black Paddy and weeping, hugging Reb and Hannah.

She had a week to get visas, injections, do research, pack bags, buy a new wardrobe and book tickets. Her father uprated her Kenya Airways booking to executive class.

‘If you’re not coming back, then you must go in style,’ he said. ‘It is better to travel first class than to arrive.’ Then he turned away quickly so that Gaby would not be embarrassed to see how he felt about that.

He gave her a present at the departure gate. It was wrapped in dark blue paper patterned with stars and moons and ringed planets.

‘Open it when you’re airborne,’ he ordered, then hugged her and kissed her in a burly, beardy way and pushed her through the security check. When the little feederjet had levelled off and Northern Ireland was an edge of white foam on black rocks, she unwrapped the present. It was a minidisc viewcamera; a beautiful little thing, solar-charged, top of the range. Stuffed underneath it was a Manchester United scarf. It can get cold at 2000 metres, even on the Equator, said the note. Love Reb.

The rhythmic knocking woke her. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap. Tap-ta-ta-tap tap tap.

Gaby came out of sleep with a start. Purple twilight filled the room. She did not know if it was evening or morning twilight. She did not know what room this was in which she found herself, or how she was in a very big bed covered with a sticky sheet. She did not know why it was so hot.

She fumbled out of bed and gingerly opened the door. On the old-fashioned carpet stood her suitcase. She looked left, she looked right. There was no sign of who had put it here and knocked her into wakefulness, and it was a very long corridor. She quickly stepped outside and retrieved the case. The baggage labels were exceedingly interesting. While she had slept her suitcase had been to Mauritius and back.

Gaby McAslan came out of jet lag wanting a drink. Food would have been good, but you met more valuable people in hotel bars than restaurants. Hemingway kitsch. Zebra skins on the walls, sad antelope heads begging sympathy. Spears and shields and photographs of great white hunters and their memsahibs squatting on the running-boards of ancient Bentleys, dead things at their feet. Wicker tables and chairs of course. Black staff, white clients. Feeling conspicuous in fashionable silk blouse, jodhpurs and riding boots, Gaby McAslan approached the bar. A short, solid woman with shoulder-length dull blonde hair sat on a stool talking with the barman. She wore a sleeveless plaid shirt, combat cut-offs and biker boots. She looked the only other professional in a room of Chaga hangers-on.

‘Excuse me, what do people drink around here?’ she asked the barman.

‘They drink this,’ the blonde woman said. She pushed a bottle along the bar. It had an elephant on the label. ‘Only beer with picture of factory on bottle. Old joke.’ She spoke with a pronounced Slavic accent. ‘I get you one. Moses.’

The barman flipped up a dew-dropped bottle and uncapped it with his teeth.

‘Slainte agus saol,’ Gaby said to her new drinking companion.

They clinked bottles.

‘Big cocks and vodka,’ the blonde woman said.

The beer tasted nothing at all like elephant piss. Drinking from the bottle. Less than twenty-four hours in the place, and you are already sinning against T.P.’s catechism.

‘You have funny accent,’ said the woman. ‘Know most English accents, but yours…’

‘Northern Ireland. Norren iron, in the local dialect.’

‘Norren iron,’ the small woman said, making it sound almost Japanese.

‘Russian?’ Gaby ventured.

‘Fuck, no!’ the small woman exploded. She ripped open her plaid shirt. Underneath was a much-washed muscle-top with a picture of an ugly jet aircraft taking off and something in Cyrillic. ‘Siberian. Proud of it. Never forget.’

Sibirsk, that was what was written on the T-shirt. Part of your research, Gaby McAslan. First generation Aeroflot offspring. They have the air transport franchise for UNECTA. They almost turned you into a five hundred kilometre per hour fireball this morning.

‘I had a close encounter with one of your comrades coming into Kenyatta airport,’ Gaby said.

The Siberian woman sneered.

‘Bloody 142s. Need five kays to get down and another ten to get up. Boring boring boring. Only thing you can do on 142 is drink whole damn flight.’ She patted the aircraft on her T-shirt: a stubby, high-wing, T-tail jet with a big engine mounted over each wing-root. ‘An72 F. Now that is airplane. Take them anyplace. Anyplace at all. This town full of old white hunter wankers; talk all about old days when they go all over place in Cessnas. Cessnas. Toy airplanes. Model kits with engines. I tell you anywhere you take pissy Cessna, I take An72; proper airplane.’

‘You fly.’

The Siberian woman smiled with a mixture of pride and modesty that Gaby recognized and admired. She had time for people who did their work, however lofty or low, proudly and well. It was a small sacrament, like those monks who served God by washing dishes. Dishonesty she despised; those who bought and sold, or were parasitic on others, and did not create. Only people who did something were truly human. Gaby felt herself warming to this Siberian flier.