Grazing The Long Acre (10 page)

They stood by the car. Johnny put the sidelights on dim, so he could see her face a little.

Boondock episodes were always incredibly charged: vows of eternal friendship, exchange of instant pictures that would be kept for a few months, until they lost all meaning. This one had only been more spectacular, the configuration was the same. Johnny told himself his picture was already fading in her purse. But he wanted to give her something real.

“How’s Donny?”

She shook her head. Don’t ask.

“About that ride…”

She thought he was joking. “Another time,” she said. “You get back and send us some reinforcement. I don’t ask what form it’s going to take, you guys know best. But make it soon, okay ?”

He settled Bella in the backseat, with her beloved plastic tilt-rotor and her herbal bunny-pillow. He got into the car, opened the window wide.

“Cambridge, there’s nothing for you in that town. Don’t go back. Get in, come with us. I can fix everything.”

He’d thought it out—in a split second. He could hack the problems involved: what’s gilded youthfulness for? His mistake was that he’d forgotten, for a moment, who he was supposed to be. In the dim light he saw her eyes narrow.

“Me? Leave the cadre? Wait a minute. Why shouldn’t I go back?”

He stared over the dash, “I’m an eejay ma’am. I don’t take sides. I just made the tape that just went on the news.”

At no point had she told him he mustn’t make live transmission. It had occured to him (the Wizard of Oz) that she might not know what he was doing. The 360 looked unimpressive. But he was a journalist, and she didn’t ask. The coralline plant could have survived. The legal status of pirated coralline wasn’t sewn up completely. There were ways, angles: there were lawyers on the side of the people. Johnny had been helping, getting them publicity. It wasn’t his fault that violence had then exploded, on prime time news. It would have taken the police no time to get a precise fix. They were entitled to deal swift and hard, with armed conspiracy involving information technology. They would be here soon…No one should get hurt. If there was any one around the derelict pool after the final warning they’d stun gas the site and haul the bodies out before they burned the plant.

“Okay.” She gripped the rim of the window. “Okay, fine. You faked your unionist rap. You took your pictures, and sent them straight to the bastards in power. Okay, I was a fool. I can accept that. But you think I’d come with you? I don’t want to escape from here. I want ‘here’ to escape from being the way it is. I thought a guy who was in the Union was someone I could trust. But you were only interested in getting a story. Well fuck you, Mr Eejay. Let them do their worst. You can’t shut us out forever. Shit—the arrogance. Any day now, there’s going to be a revolution. And you’re going to find yourself sitting right in the middle, Mr Fucking Neutral Observer.”

“That’s where I belong,” said Johnny. “I’m a journalist.”

Cambridge looked down at him, as from a great height.

He saw the blighted skin, every mark picked out by the upward light. The contempt in smart, clear eyes. She would have liked to be an eejay. Maybe she had the makings, who could tell. Johnny did not go for the idea, though it was widely accepted, that there were no genes left out here worth worrying about.

“Violence is never going to solve anything.”

She curled her lip. “What kind of violence? The bureaucratic kind or the personal kind? I don’t make that distinction.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” said the desk clerk. “No. You’re not sorry, Johnny.” She let go of the rim and walked away.

Johnny drove around lumpy roads, helpless, until the computer suddenly recovered its bearings and he was on his way home. He thought about the cold fenland town which he had visited once. (It would be a mistake to let anyone out here know you’d actually left the continent, that would be too much). He thought about the European solution to the big problem. No citadels there. The countryside was empty. Everyone lived in the cities, cheek by jowl. In England the wasted people were called the poor. You stepped over them as you went into your hotel. He didn’t believe it was any worse to let them have their own world, with its own rules. He thought about the Phylloxera beetle. He hadn’t finished that story. How the plague came back in the next century, and laid California’s vines to waste…because people forgot to take care: because greed drowned the warnings. It isn’t the coralline, he thought. The technology is helpless to save the world. It’s what goes on between people that fucks things up.

Johnny truly was in the union, which made him a radical and dangerous character, inside. But you can be opposed to some of the laws, and still believe in law and order. You can be on the side of the Indians, and still think it’s a bad idea to sell them guns and firewater. He wished he could explain. One day the citadel of civilization would spread out the way it used to, and cover the whole continent. But that would not get a chance to happen if you let the wolves into the sleigh. You couldn’t let yourself be distracted by the fact that the wolves had human faces. He couldn’t regret his decisions. But he was glad, as the road jolted away, that his mask had slipped at the end. It would have been worse to leave Cambridge believing that she’d met her urban-guerrilla saviour. He had given her something real after all: a creep to despise. Maybe it evened the balance, a little.

He drove, and the pain eased. The boondocks episode began to fade in the accustomed, dreamlike way. And Bella, asleep in the back, felt ever more like his talisman, his salvation, as he scurried for the sheltering walls.

IDENTIFYING THE PROJECT

Tunguska: In June, 1908, there was an extraordinary explosion somewhere in or over Siberia. That night in London you could read a newspaper by the light of the fireball. There were no consequences. The location of the crater was not even determined until twenty years later, after the intervention of a World War and a revolution. But in our time we are ready for Tunguska. It can happen to us immediately. We have the technology. We have the anticipation: what they call in my country the longing, the hiraeth. I am a freelance journalist. My name is Anna Jones Morgan Davis. I begged, argued, lied, pleaded for two days and nights solid, after I found out about the expedition to the site. I left home possessed by one iron determination: to be there when the object was identified.

The transit lounge of the desert airport was a breeze block garage with glass doors and a sand scoured wooden floor. Johnny Guglioli and I were pursued there by a skinny and very dark little man in a khaki uniform too heavy for the climate. Whenever he managed to catch Johnny’s eye he hissed softly and made a wistful, obscene gesture: rubbing his thumb against two fingers. A broken digital clock hung as if half-strangled from an exposed cable above the shuttered coffee bar. A single monitor screen, fixed to one of the concrete roof beams, showed the quivering green word ‘departures,’ and nothing more. Parties of Africans sat about the floor. I hadn’t had a chance to change into protective disguise, so the men reacted instantly to my appearance.

In one of the rows of seats a lone white woman traveller lay sleeping, stretched over her battered flight bag along three black plastic spoon-shapes. A cracked panama had slipped from her sun-browned face.

Johnny and I were in trouble. Johnny was American, but had come back from somewhere to London for the trip. For our separate reasons we’d missed the first leg of the official journey. We had expected to join the expedition here, for a special charter to the capital of the country that lay to the south. Our destination was in there somewhere, beyond the desert and the great river. But we had missed the plane. Perhaps we had missed the plane…The real trouble was that Johnny would not bribe, because bribery and corruption were the root causes of so much of Africa’s misery.

The hall was devoid of information sources. The little man, whose hissing and hovering was making Johnny look like a girl alone at a late-night bus stop, had already told us what he was going to tell.

“I’ll ask one of the women,” I said.

But she spoke no French or English or didn’t want to get involved. Faces around her gazed stonily out of the archipelago of dark robes and peeping finery. A woman made an unintelligible comment in a tone of deep contempt: the natives were hostile.

We tried to remain calm.

Johnny stretched and pressed his hands behind his head, raising the fan of eel-brown hair that was overheating his neck. He looked, momentarily, like a hostage getting ready to be shot.

“Embarkation for Planet X: colonist class. Isn’t it weird how these places always manage to make you believe there’s no air outside. That’s futurism for you, comes from the cultural phase our world was in when the standard concept of ‘airport’ was laid down. I mean, look at those chairs.”

“I suppose they might be more comfortable in a lower gravity.”

I had bumped into Johnny by chance at Gatwick. Our paths had crossed several times before, in our small world; and we’d always enjoyed each other’s company. Johnny Guglioli was a young American (USA citizen, I mean) of a highly recognisable type: shrewd, naive, well-informed and passionate about the world’s ills and the possibility of curing them. His writing had a strangeness that worried people a little, even after it had been toned down by his editors, and his selfless arrogance infuriated many. But I respected Johnny. He could be absurdly didactic. But loud or brash, his eyes never lost the uneasiness of those children of Utopia, good Americans, who have woken up and found themselves—well, here, where the rest of us live.

For that bruised puzzlement in the face of what people call normality I could forgive him a good deal. I could forgive him—almost—this disaster.

In any more hopeful location I’d have walked out of the airport and found myself a bus. But there was nothing outside the dusty glass doors, in the place where Johnny said we couldn’t breathe: only a few dead thorn bushes, the red track from the airport building and an endless waste of sand.

Aircon fans roared in a mind-deadening way and without any noticeable effect on the heat. I wondered how many of the Africans here had been awake that night. I wished I knew how the hell to deal with Johnny, whose button black eyes had gone blank with stubborn virtue…though it would break his heart to miss this gig. I was tortured by the suspicion that somewhere close there was a VIP lounge where the rest of the expedition were sipping cold drinks.

“Shall we try the Virgin desk again?”

The lone white woman sat up, yawned, and said, “Oh, hallo Anna. So you’re in this too? How are the kids?”

She smiled dazzlingly. “I suppose you’re another Snark hunt.

I hadn’t recognised her. Awake her face shed years, its expert makeup lighting up like magic.

“Johnny Guglioli,” I said. “Braemar Wilson.” And took a mental step backwards. The smile was clearly meant for Johnny alone.

I’d known Brae for a long time, known her before she adopted that nomme de guerre. The last time I’d seen her in an airport, her heels had been three inches high. Her dewy complexion had never seen the sun, and apart from the essential smart briefcase, her luggage was none of her business. But she was equally immaculate in this role. Wherever did she get those shorts? They were perfect.

“Braemar Wilson as in the pop-soc vids?”

“The same. Though I’m almost ashamed to admit it, in such company. I’ve read your work, Johnny. If I told you how much I admire you, I’d sound like a groupie.”

It was the name, she’d once told me, on the gate of the miserable little house she’d been renting after her divorce. Some redundant housewives start up phone-a-birthday-cake businesses. Mrs Wilson had become, in a very few years, a household name in the burgeoning ‘infotainment’ market. Her girlish deprecation irritated me. She had no reason to defer to young Johnny. The ground she covered was hack, but not the treatment.

“Hell no!” cried Johnny. “I want to be the groupie. That ‘Death and the Human Family’ thing! It was terrific!”

There was a break for mutually appraising laughter—in which Brae warned me, by withholding eye contact, not to presume on our long acquaintance in any way. I wouldn’t have dreamed of it.

“Maybe you can tell us what’s going on.” Johnny affected a casual tone. “Did we really miss our ride, or are these guys just teasing?”

“Oh, it’s gone all right. A late change: I feel less paranoid now I know you two didn’t get the news either.”

She examined us.

“What’s the problem? You transferred to the scheduled flight, didn’t you? Or what are you doing in here?”

Johnny’s lightly tan-screened face turned brick colour.

“The flight’s full. We’re fucking grounded.”

Braemar looked at our little man, who was still making his obscene gesture. She enveloped the whole situation in a smile so tender and so knowing that Johnny had to ignore it.

“What’s my reward, Johnny, if I get you back on stream?”

Having ignored the smile he was able to laugh: to groan with theatrical sincerity. “Name it! My life is yours to command!”

So that’s how it’s done, I thought.

She never asked us for money, then or later. She simply took our coupons away, and brought them back turned into boarding passes. I have no idea how Johnny imagined that this was achieved, or if he was just plain faking too.

The hotel was a huge tower, a landmark of the French-planned city centre. The taxi driver had called it ”l’Iceber”: it looked as far out of place and as rotten as might be expected at this latitude. We could see from the outside whole swaths of yellow-stained decay, sinister great fissures in the white slabs, broken windows.

There was no phone and no drinking water in my room so I had to come down again. I found the coffee shop and bought a bottle of local beer. There was no one about. Brae and Johnny were maybe sleeping, maybe (I surmised grumpily) improving their acquaintance somewhere. The rest of our gang was on a sightseeing tour and there seemed to be no other guests. Miraculously, I got through to Wales on a cardphone in the lobby. Unfortunately it wasn’t my husband or my wife who picked up the handset. It was Jacko, Sybil’s child but my darling.

“Is Daddy there, Jacky? Or your Mummy? Go and fetch someone, Sweetheart.”

“Mummyanna.” He sighed heavily, and broke the connection. I couldn’t get through again.

Outside in the desolate boulevard young women sat selling vegetables. In front of one of them, three tiny aubergines lay in the dust, another had a withered pimento and a bunch of weeds. There were no customers. Africa looked like a dead insect, a carcase sucked dry and blown away by the wind. It was too late. No one would ever know what city might have stood here: alien to me, efficient, rich in the storied culture of a bloody and complex past.

People come to my country to see the castles.

In my business I am always dealing with the forward-echo, that phenomenon which is supposedly forbidden in our continuum. But things do affect the world before they happen, I know it. I’m always piecing together footage which is significant because of some event further down the line. I was caught in one of those moments now. Because I couldn’t talk to my family it seemed as if the world was about to end. I wished Johnny and I had stayed back in the desert, trying to do right.

There was a banquet that night in the Leonid Breshnev suite: a bowl of tinned grapefruit segments with a cherry at every place. One of my neighbours was another journalist, a silly Japanese woman. On the other I found a Major Derek Whynton, military observer for NATO: a chiselled-profile, blue-eyed, very British type. I was foolish enough to remark—between the grapefruit and the fried grasscutter- that I’d thought the evidence was conclusively against the kind of activity he’d be interested in. I triggered an interminable lecture, and worse. Some men will take absolutely anything for a sexual invitation—and of course this was Africa, where you can’t be too careful. In the middle of the monitoring-industry PR he smiled archly, laid a hand on my knee and asked me if I was married.

“Yes, twice.”

He angled himself so he could count my rings, and blenched visibly.

“Two husbands?” He sounded seriously alarmed.

“One husband, two wives.”

The major was relieved, but mildly disgusted. “Polygamy, eh? That’s a remarkable regression. I don’t mean to be offensive, but it seems odd that any modern young woman can accept that arrangement.”

“If that was the arrangement, I wouldn’t accept it.”

There was a big darn at my place. I studied it, intensely bored. A clean white tablecloth is a lovely thing. But when a thing gets to be more trouble than it is worth you throw it out. Or put it in a museum. There is no human artefact so sacred it deserves to stay in circulation forever.

At least I’d got rid of the hand. Major Derek marked me down as emergency rations, only slightly less dodgy than the local whores. He discovered he had to hurry away somewhere, between the ice cream and the speeches.

Spiky electric candlebra hung low over the crowd, like spiders in ambush. Some bulbs were brilliant, some dark, making a broken pattern that was repeated as if continuously by the glass doors to the roof terrace. It looked as if something out there was eating up the stars in random mouthfuls.

Johnny was at the bar, with Brae. She wore a pricey little khaki number, Islamically modest. Johnny probably thought it was her old school uniform. She was regaling him with bad-taste stories about the African notables. Johnny didn’t mind this too much. They were only politicians.

“What about that guy Obofun Ade—in the white with the kind of hippie embroidery?”

Nigerian pharmaceuticals billionaire, vocal backer of the West Africa Federation Initiative. The African contigent at this gathering was alarming: almost as if something really important had happened.

“A lot of what Ade says makes sense…”

“True enough. But you know where the money comes from?” “Cheap neuro-drugs, undercutting the fat-cat multinationals-” “They say his family’s plant is based on kidnapped streetkids.”

 “Aaah…”

 “Rows of them. Kept alive in vats…”

 “Aaah, Brae…”

I was listening before they saw me, they were being loud.

“I don’t want to hear any more of your dirty jokes. You’ll get us thrown out.”

“Jokes?” said Brae. Her eyes slid contemptuously around the colourful gathering, her fingers tightened around her glass. I could see the indigo shade in her unpolished nails: a sign that Johnny was unlikely to read. “Who’s joking? They were always like it. ‘As we neared the city we passed several human sacrifices, live women slaves gagged and pegged on their backs to the ground, the abdominal wall being cut in the form of a cross and the uninjured gut hanging out. These poor women were allowed to die like this in the sun…Sacrificed human beings were lying in the path and bush—even in the King’s compound the sight and stench of them was awful. Dead and mutilated bodies seemed to be everywhere—by God! may I never see such sights again!…’ Benin, 1897. I memorise a lot of stuff. It’s handy to have it on tap when I’m recording. That’s from The Diary of a Surgeon with the Benin Punitive Expedition. The Benin were losing a war of worlds at the time and I suppose they still are: in which situation these people seem to think that anything goes.”

I suppose I looked unhappy. Brae smiled at me serenely, with a warning in her eyes. Johnny decided to ignore this last weird assault on his liberal conscience.

“Hi Anna. Having fun?”

I was annoyed over his defection, especially since I had the impression, even more clearly than at the desert airport, that Brae was wishing that I would vanish. So I just shrugged.