Debatable Space (19 page)

Our job was to coordinate the global initiative to redress decades of political and economic chaos in Africa. We ran research
projects, we funded irrigation schemes, we turned deserts into farms, and turned badly run farms into finely honed money-making
machines. It was the most important job in the world; we were saving an entire continent.

And it was, and is, the greatest of all Earth’s continents. For me, Africa is Eden. It is pure wilderness; its animals and
its indigenous people seem to me to evoke the beginning of time. My heart was captured by the place, and all it symbolised.

I remember the first time I went on safari, when I was in my late nineties. We drove out into the savannah, the sun beat down
on us, and my skin prickled with excitement. I was with a party of Americans, our guide was a white Kenyan who was tall, square-jawed,
and came from military stock. And the aim of the safari was to “shoot” – i.e. take digital photographs of – as many lions
and leopards and cheetahs as we could find. This was a cut-price Big Game Camera Safari, and my fellow holidaymakers were
a nightmare. They whinged, they whined, they believed in a vengeful God with a soft spot for Midwesterners, and they had canteens
full of Coca-Cola instead of water. And eventually, I lost patience with them all, and wandered off by myself. I found a waterhole
where an impala was drinking its fill. I walked up close, then closer still. For some reason the animal wasn’t in any way
afraid of me. I was close enough to see the veins in its eyes, and smell its fur. So I hunkered down beside it and drank from
the same watering hole, cupping the water in my hands and slurping it.

“Fucking idiot!” screamed my guide from behind me, and the impala ran off. I got up slowly, carefully, as the guide berated
me with language that would make a docker blush for having gone off unaccompanied. I said nothing, I just walked back with
him to the jeep. He continued to berate me during the whole journey home. Some of his comments were fair, but some were cruel,
and undeserved, and patronising, and sexist, and just plain rude. I was tempted to karate-strike the bastard, but I refrained.
And to be honest, I wasn’t much bothered by what he said. I was lost in that moment – me, hunkered down, drinking next to
the impala, at one with the animal kingdom.

Then I flew home and sued the travel company for sexual harassment, winning back the entire cost of my trip. I had, of course,
taken a tape recording of the abuse meted out to me, which made for entertaining listening. But though I took my revenge,
I took little pleasure in it. I preferred to think back and savour the memory; a moment of total peace. Drinking at the watering
hole.

And so, many years later, I still felt Africa was in my blood. It was my adoptive country. And besides, I needed a cause,
a mission. Palestine was at peace now. Iraq was a capitalist beacon state. Northern Ireland had a stunningly popular government
ruled by a coalition of Catholics, Protestants and Muslims. Africa was the last of the great causes.

And I was the last of the great idealists. Or so I felt. And in pursuit of my dream to save a continent, I was ruthless, determined
and guileful. I blackmailed, bribed, told lies, and shamed people into helping me. I was by now a great amateur psychologist,
and knew a million devious ways to make my requests and needs the first priority in the hearts and minds of those in power.
And for many years, I was convinced I was doing something marvellous. I honestly thought that we were really making a difference.

But slowly, the truth dawned: the work we did was largely futile. Our “new communities” were glorified refugee camps, and
had the pernicious side effect of making native Africans dependent on Western i.e. white largesse. Our grand economic schemes
kept foundering because of the appalling corruption of everyone, high and low, important and inconsequential. And appalling
illnesses continued to sweep away entire generations – as HIV/AIDS was cured, it was replaced with contagious osteoporosis,
and that in turn was replaced by the deadliest disease of all, the Immuno-Suppressant Plague that killed literally tens upon
tens of millions of Africans in the most appalling manner possible.

And so for a while, I became bitter and frustrated. I surrendered to the belief that the entire continent was doomed, cursed
by God.

But then I thought a little harder. I began to ask myself some fundamental questions. Such as, why are things so very bad
here? And how come everyone is corrupt? And why the hell, in an era where the majority of people are much healthier than ever
before, is this one continent literally plagued? Because, bizarrely, the Immuno-Suppressant Plague killed only black Africans
living in Africa below the age of eighteen. How weird was
that
?

So I researched more widely. I read novels and newspapers. I listened to pop records. I quizzed my staff when they were off
duty, and drunk. I began going into bars, picking up men, flirting with them, and then asking them about politics. I got groped,
a lot, and several times got myself in very delicate and dangerous situations. And I started to get a whiff of something very,
very bad indeed.

I started going to the hospitals, talking to the Plague victims. One time I spent a week with a fourteen-year-old girl called
Annie who had the Plague. I watched as she literally lost all her skin. It fell off her in thick sheets. This was the way
the disease worked – it made the body’s skin allergic to the body’s flesh. Then later I sang her lullabies, and told her stories
in her native dialect. I drifted off to sleep for a while, and when I woke, I stared with horror. A fly was crawling over
her skinless face, its tiny wretched feet touching her exposed blood vessels and ligaments. I was too frightened to swat it,
in case I hurt the child; so I had to watch until it crawled, finally, on to the pillow. Then I crushed it in my hand.

For twelve long hours I watched her die, and blessed her soul as it parted from her body. And I thought;
this cannot be natural
.

So I analysed her blood works, carefully read the toxicology reports, and surfed websites on my laptop. And after months of
intensive private research, I was sure of my ground. Finally, I knew the truth.

The IS Plague was not in fact a natural mutation, it was lab-generated. Furthermore, it was
patented
. I hacked into an entire directory in the US Patents website where under the innocuous title New Millennial Infective Agents
I found patents for genetic creations which included the Plague and a wide variety of biological weapons sufficient to end
all life on Earth.

The patents were made out to a wide variety of companies – RGM, Intolam, Ryacino, Cortexo – but further web investigation
revealed that all these companies were satellite companies of one big US biochemical company, Future Dreams.

And this über-company turned out to be the sole manufacturer and copyright owner of the drugs which were halting the spread
of the IS Plague. The girl lying on the bed, groaning and wailing in despair, was hooked up to a drip feeding her morphine
and immuno-boosters made and sold by Future Dreams. Her antibody-stimulating medication was a product of Future Dreams ingenuity.
My charity was spending massively in attempts to alleviate the plague – in Europe alone, we raised €9 billion to “save Africa
from this deadly scourge”. This money didn’t go to Africans to spend or eat, it wasn’t used to buy land or equipment, it was
spent on expensive medication to save African children from a disease bioengineered and patented by the same company that
made the medicines we bought at such vast expense.

Was this, I wondered, some strange mischance? A weird coincidence?

Or was it entirely deliberate? Would an American corporation blight and poison an entire continent in order to boost profits
by then selling palliatives and antidotes? Poison the patient, then charge the patient for the taxi which takes them to hospital
. . .

I went to a bar to let these findings seep in. I spent several hours talking to a barfly, and a female barkeep. And finally,
feeling drunk and sorry for myself, I floated my paranoid theory about the American drugs companies – that they had deliberately
infected Africa with the Plague. The barkeep, Emilia, laughed. The barfly, Prakash, looked sad. Both agreed it was possible.
Maybe, just
possible
.

We had another drink.

And another drink.

And after a while, and after a lot of digressive rambling anecdotes, they admitted that what I had said was true. And everyone
knew
that it was true… The poisoned knew they were being poisoned. But they understood also that if they complained, no one
would listen.

Africa was dying. A hundred thousand children a week were shedding their skins. Ninety per cent died; the rest were hospitalised
for life. The antidotes and vaccines were now being distributed, at vast expense; but the wastage of life was appalling. Soon,
Africa would have lost a large part of a whole generation of children. It was becoming a continent of ageing men and women
who worked three or four or five jobs a week to buy the drugs to lessen the pain of their dying infants and teenagers. The
rumours about what was happening were widespread, though entirely underground. And as a result, cynicism was universal. Despair,
alcoholism and drug abuse were the national status quo.

But no one hated the American companies. No one tried to stop what was happening. An entire continent cheerfully accepted
its doom. Life was regarded as a sick punishment dreamed up by a hate-filled God.

My African girl died in the hospital in blinding agony, and was never ever granted an insight into what life could
really
be like. She missed fun, life, love, babies, everything.

I got angry. I went home and raged to Peter’s nannies. And I drifted off to sleep with Peter cradled next to me, lulled by
the sound of the nanny sleeping in the neighbouring bed (conveniently placed for her nightly feeds.) And as I tried to sleep,
I wept, and my tears woke my baby. And he cried. And I suckled him with my dry breasts, first one, then the other, neither
yielding milk, until his crying became too intense, and the nanny gently prised him off me.

Then the next morning, as I was brushing my hair, I felt a hot flush on my cheek. A handful of hair came away in my hands.
My cheeks were burning now, and so I looked at myself in the mirror. I was clinically livid, a red swelling balloon. As I
watched, my forehead rippled, I was seized by a terrible terrible itch. When I gently touched my face with the tip of my finger,
the entire top layer of face skin peeled away in a single piece. I could see my veins now, my skinless face was a red raw
horror, my eyeballs throbbed huge.

I managed to call the hospital before the flesh peeled off my fingers too. An ambulance arrived, two hours later, and I was
helped stumbling into the back. The skin of my fingertips was left behind on the door of the ambulance. A tube was inserted
in my throat, and for a moment I felt my tongue was going to fall off.

The ride was bumpy, and terrifying. I was choking, forced to breathe through a tube. I was convinced I was dying. I couldn’t
believe my bad luck. After cheating death once, I had run out of credit and I was going to die in appalling agony.

At the hospital, I was put in a sealed oxygen tent, to keep out contamination from the outside world. The rest of my skin
peeled off me in thick sheets, apart from a few patches on my back and the inside of my arms. Doctors came by, stared in at
me in horror, then left muttering. I was alone with my thoughts. And I realised what was happening.

They had got to me. They must have been alerted to my investigation, probably through a routine check of web users, and my
name must have been flagged as a threat to their security. The journey from regarding me as a potential distant threat to
deciding to eliminate me with biotoxins was staggeringly brief.

And now I was dying of the dreaded Immuno-Suppressant Plague. It went against the epidemiology of the disease, which was normally
both race- and age-specific, usually targeting black children between eight and sixteen. But this mutant version of the plague
was now going to kill me, soon, and horribly.

How did they poison me? A dart fired into my flesh as I walked down the street? A contaminant placed in my air conditioning?
I worried away at this as the doctors went to work. They expected me to suffer massive and irretrievable heart failure, because
of the enormous extra pressure being put on my system by the trauma of auto-flaying. That was the commonest cause of death
in such cases.

But my new heart was sound as a bell. I lived through the night, though no one thought I would. Then the doctors were convinced
I would die of infections, because of my non-existent immunity – the major effect of this Syndrome. And in fact I contracted
eleven different infections; seven of them were hospital superbugs which were passed on by a sloppy nurse who handled the
oxygen tent on the inside before assembling it. Any one of these infections could have been fatal. I survived them all.

By this time every last piece of my skin had gone. I felt raw and boiled and the movement of air on my skin was like sandpaper.
But I dug deep into my reserves of rage and determination. After a week I had survived pneumonia and TB. My liver failed but
I made them transplant a new one. No one expected me to live through the operation but I did. I was clinically dead for about
a minute at one point, but my heart pounded back to life of its own accord. Slowly, against all the odds, I pulled through.

After a few weeks’ recuperation, with no further side effects, the doctors began to accept that a miracle had taken place.

Then, at my insistence, an experimental polythene spray-on seal was used to coat my entire skinless body, to isolate my flesh
from outside contaminants – a thin and invisible plastic coating over my ligaments and nerves.

With this in place, I started to exercise, to prevent my joints seizing up and becoming paralysed. I used a slow t’ai chi
workout to keep my body limber. It was, I know, a frightening sight, this slow-moving Zen-imbued flayed corpse doing her daily
kata. But I kept to my routine religiously.