The Fallen (2 page)

The Czech Airways plane had landed safely, the landing gear was fine, the light was broken – but you never forget something like that. 

Ping.  The seatbelt sign went off.  Wendy, moving quickly for a lady of her size, unlatched her belts, stood up and grabbed her bag from the overhead locker in one seamless, well-practiced motion. 

“Duty calls!” she said, “Nice meeting you Ted!” Then she was off down the aisle, most likely to a pristinely white and air-conditioned SUV, complete with a deferential chauffer.

At a more leisurely pace, Tim traversed the anarchic airport, dodging the desperate porters who forced themselves upon you before demanding $5 dollars for lifting your bags five meters. 

At Dire Dawa Arrivals a restless crowd of loved ones, taxi drivers and greeters surged forward as passengers exited the baggage hall.  Sarah loved to watch arrivals as families and couples tearfully reunited, quoting
Love Actually
she said it proved there was still love left in the world.  Tim scanned the cardboard signs among the sea of Ethiopian faces, half of them yelling, “Yes! Mister! You want taxi!? Yes?”

Then he heard a deep and familiar voice. “Timothy Smith – Welcome!” The warm Cameroonian tones restored a sense of calm in his travel-worn mind.

Asefa was smiling, holding a cardboard sign, with ‘
His Royal Highness, Timothy Smith – Welcome Back!
’ hurriedly scrawled in large biro letters.

“Nice touch you bastard,” said Tim, motioning to the sign before hugging his friend.

Asefa smiled and gave him a hard slap on the back.  “Hey knew you couldn’t stay out of Africa long Timmy.  OK, holiday’s over, time for work, lets saddle up – you white people are so fucking lazy!”

Asefa slung Tim’s duffle over his shoulder and they headed out to the car.  

Tim laughed when he saw it.  “Hey nice cream SUV.”

“Yes, I wanted to get something different, white SUV’s are so 2005; you English are so behind the times – that is why we had to send our Naomi Campbell to punch some sense into you!” Asefa climbed into the driver’s seat and revved the turbo-diesel engine.

Tim got in beside him.  “Good to see you man.  And by the way, Naomi Campbell
is
English;
you can’t claim her.”  He was happy to be back, like he was coming home, not leaving it again.  He’d always liked Africa, ever since he was a boy growing up in Johannesburg.  His dad had been one of the few white ANC supporters and they’d had to leave South Africa in a hurry a day before Tim’s eighth birthday.  After a whirlwind tour of Europe they’d finally settled in the UK, where his mother had grown up.  He’d taken her name, Smith, after a bout of bullying about his father’s more Afrikaans one – Volkstannanburg – a move he still felt secretly ashamed of.

The SUV bumped along the potholed road at a surprising speed.  He was always impressed with Asefa’s ability to drive fast under terrible conditions - rogue goats and fatalist pedestrians; two-thousand miles from the Green Cross Code – how damn hard is it to look before you step out?  Most of the local drivers simply put their foot down; an icon of Jesus taped to their window, their holy airbag.  Use of the horn was invaluable and frequent.  Asefa seemed to have no problem navigating this living maze. 

“Where we headed?” Tim asked, “The office?”

Asefa hunched down behind the steering wheel, doing his familiar impression of a boggle-eyed manservant.  “Waass tha meester boss man, you’s wanna we go office now? You’s got it boss sir!”

“Hey I thought you got a promotion last year, so that technically makes you the boss, boss!”

Asefa straightened up and gave a deep chuckle.  “Well I guess it does!  You’ve been spending too long at Head Office counting chocolate teapots in that rainy country of yours.  Out here’s where the action is man.  We’re heading to the office – I’ve got a stack of project proposals we need to go through before we head out to the mine tomorrow.”

“Jesus, I thought slavery had been abolished.  Can’t a guy get a break after a ten hour flight?”

“No rest for the wicked Timmy.  See what I mean, you whiteys… sooo lazy!”

The sun had gone down by the time the car came to a stop outside the walled Development Institute compound.  The guard outside stood to attention, dressed in a makeshift uniform consisting of surplus from German, French, Italian and British police forces, with a US fire chief’s badge pinned to his overcoat for good measure.  The guard gave them a military salute as they entered the compound.  Asefa saluted back, Tim gave a nod and a slightly belated, very English sounding, “Hello.”

Inside, the compound, ringed with razor wire, was dark and foreboding.  Office hours were clearly over for the local staff.  Asefa unlocked the elaborately decorated door to the building; a grotesque pink Pakistani wedding cake of a house, the bedrooms of which had been converted into offices and meeting rooms.  Before being acquired by the Institute, it had been owned by a wealthy man whose business interests were as dubious as his taste in architecture.  Nobody honest got rich in this country.  

“My office is upstairs now,” said Asefa as they walked inside.

“Yeah, I get it, bigger office for the big boss man right?”

They climbed the stairs, turning on lights as they went. 

“Here we are.” Asefa opened the door to what had been the Institute’s main meeting room.

“Shit they must love you if they gave you this…”

But before Tim could finish his friend had flicked on the lights, illuminating a packed room and a meeting table piled with food and beers, framed by an impressive banner that read ‘Welcum Bak Tim!’  

“Surprise!” yelled a chorus of vaguely familiar faces.  The local staff had turned out in force and there were a couple of new white faces too.

Pushing Asefa, Tim laughed.  “Your new office aay?”

“Yes, and here is the first project proposal you must urgently work on.” Asefa smiled, passing Tim a cold beer.

Tim sighed and took a long drink.  “It’s good to be back.”

Chapter 7

The small Sudanese Airlines twin-engine plane skidded to a halt on the runway.  Sarah stepped down onto the red clay and lit a cigarette.  She thought Tim made a big deal of his Czech Airways ‘near death experience’, but flying across developing nations on light aircraft with minimal maintenance budgets made her crave nicotine.  Juba, the tiny ‘capital’ of newly autonomous South Sudan, was a festering dust bowl.  Not much more than an airstrip and a cluster of buildings.  Many of the local men wore the only outfit they owned, remnants of jungle fatigues issued to them for a desert war years earlier.  Shuffling down what in any other town would be

Main Street, many still carried the AK-47s they had been given to kill their fellow countrymen. The guns looked like they had lasted better than the men or their clothes.  Many people simply sat on the street, red-eyed staring into nothing and chewing Khat, the desert drug that sprung from Somali culture into regions where its traditional social controls no longer existed.  She had once asked to try some but had been told by her smiling guide, “No way Miss Sarah, it would be like giving coffee to a baby.”

The cigarette tasted good.  She wondered if its little white tip improved air quality or if the tar intake negated the filtering of local dust, essentially dried shit particles blown from the open sewers, mixed with a hint of dead street-dog carcass if you were lucky.  She hoped the hotel would have air-conditioning, which offered some protection, but she knew it wouldn’t.  Accommodation here was beyond basic.  A tent in the grounds of the ‘best’ hotel in town, pitched next to the slow flowing trickle of the river cost you $100 dollars a night.  The only exception was the US Embassy, a slightly smaller, yet otherwise identical clone of the new US fortress Embassies that had sprung up across the globe since the war of terror began.  It even had a goddamn pool.  But only the hallowed few were allowed to use it and she was not one of them.  Nor did she want to be.  No pool access equalled slightly more moral superiority in her mind in this barren landscape.  She could work on her tan elsewhere.

A group of late twenty-something singletons got off the plane and pushed past her, two guys and a girl.  She could almost hear them thinking, ‘Let the well-paid adventure-shagfest begin.’

The guy turned back, checking out her potential. “Hey, excuse me, do you know where the best place to get a cold beer is around here?”

She thought he looked like he had all the makings of a late forty-something divorced NGO alcoholic, perpetually on the run from his life.  But the thought of a cold beer… “There’s a place down the street, the Black, White and Blues bar.  But I hope you brought your savings, a beer will cost you ten bucks.”

“Ten dollars US? Fuck-balls; although the way I feel right now I’d pay double that. You want to join us? I’m Jay by the way and this is Emily and Paul,” he said, motioning to the others who looked anxious to get out of the airport and start drinking.

She paused for a moment then picked up her suitcase.  “Why not?  I think I’ve got time for a night cap.”

Chapter 8

The Black, White and Blues was a special venue, despite the prices; through contrived design and the passing of time, it looked like a movie set.  Bent Kalashnikov rifles hung on the walls, alongside vinyl records, piano keys and photos from colonial pasts, where white-uniformed officers in pith helmets stood in front of pristine offices long forgotten.  Ceiling fans blew hot dust but clean napkins were provided to wipe clean the lip of your bottle.  The place was variously filled with development workers, private contractors,
diplomats
on their first foreign posting and local big men who flashed their money at the bar.  The owner, Max, was a man with a history as varied as the wall hangings.  Sarah wondered why Max had chosen to settle here, ‘But why anywhere else?’ she thought.  There were few places in the world where you could sell a bottle of cheap beer for $10, tax free if you knew the right people; if they drank at your bar.  Max was doing well for himself but Sarah felt sorry for the man – no kids she had heard of, no family – people said he hadn’t left town since the place opened fifteen years ago.  The Black, White and Blues was his purgatory for choices he had chosen to forget.

Sarah sat at a corner booth with Emily and Paul while Jay went to the bar.  

“So you’ve been to Juba before?” said Emily.  She sounded Canadian, not long out of a Masters no doubt in Gender, Development, Human Rights, Security Studies or another favourite of the experience generation.

“Too many times,” Sarah replied.  She didn’t want to sound tired and cynical but she could tell that in three words she already was.  She attempted to pull out of the dive, trying to sound upbeat while lighting another cigarette.  “Juba’s an interesting place - is this your first time overseas?”

“We just met on the plane,” said Paul, sounding unashamedly well bred, “Emily’s just finished her Masters in Toronto and I was interning at WaterHope in London.  Personally I’m just glad to be out of the office, if I had to look at bloody Outlook for one more bloody day I think I would have drowned myself.  Anyway, now we’re all here, and I would say cheers to that if I had a beer - I’ll drink anything as long as it’s not bloody water.”

Jay arrived with eight beers. “Eighty dollars well spent – but it’s someone else’s round next,” he said as he set them down.  “To new friends and new experiences.”

Everyone clinked bottles and downed large portions of their first bottle.  Jay was an American Fulbright Scholar who had come on a year’s photography scholarship; which meant he had eleven months to fuck around and one month of taking a thousand photos of African children, ideally with flies on their faces and circling vultures.  She
was
getting cynical.

“Damn that’s good,” said Emily, “I think we’ll be just fine here.”

Sarah wondered if Tim had made it OK; he was the master of cynicism, something she both hated and admired at the same time.  Unlike her, he had always managed to sugar coat his cynicism with humour so it was palatable for others; so it didn’t taste like black medicine.  He said it was cathartic and kept him sane, but of late the sugar coating had started to wear a little thin.  Compassion fatigue - even Tim’s cynical cloak had failed to protect him, but in that thought she wanted to hold him in her arms and shield him from the world for just a moment.

Jay held up one of his conspicuously-retro cameras.  “Say cheese.”  He shook out a Polaroid photo of the three of them, beers held in salute.  “One for the wall here I think,” he said, pinning it up.

Sarah looked around the room and then up at the faded colonial pictures on the wall.  Yes they were in some kind of era too, one that would also seem distant and fleeting, when for a brief period the more well-off members of mankind tried to trot the globe and fix it at the same time.  It was all a bit of a joke, a drop in an ocean that was about to dry up. 

She drew on her cigarette and finished her beer.  “Sorry kids, it’s time for me to hit the hay, got a busy day tomorrow.  Jay, I’ll get you next time, don’t worry it’s a small town.”

She didn’t want to be a buzz kill but knew that’s what she’d be if she stayed any longer.  Let them have their fun.  The three raised their bottles and smiled as she got up to leave.  They weren’t a bad bunch and couldn’t be flawed for being youthful and wanting to change the world for the better.   She’d been them once, but who was she now?  She worried she was less like the person Tim loved and wished she could wish away her worldliness.  Ignorance is bliss?  She remembered running through the fields near her parent’s house as a child, happy and innocent.  Was knowledge complicity?  She couldn’t even buy a pair of gloves in Marks & Spencer anymore without wondering if she’d just been complicit in some global deal with the devil involving children sewing in a slave pit in a tax-free zone somewhere in backwaters of Vietnam;
tiny hands, tiny stitches; sew you dogs
; cue cracking of whips.  She hated that feeling; that it was all somehow tainted, really tainted.  One day she hoped she could again buy her Marks & Spencer gloves in peace.