White Lies - Dexter Petley

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Pokot stools, Karamajong finger knives, Turkana beads and Masai blankets, her kanzus, kikois and her paintings of Lake Baringo. She changed into a floor-length tie-dyed jellaba and gave me a kikoi to wear while she made us fried-egg sandwiches and told me about Austen. She’d met him in Soho in the fifties when he was a young linguist, half-starved and selling poetry pamphlets outside cafes.

      Zanna sold hand-made clothes down Portobello Road and modelled for unknown painters or stashed things for spivs and thugs and Jewish booksellers. She had boxes of photographs of half-starved young men in black rollnecks, gathered like poets outside new coffee bars. Everyone was called Johnny and they were all geniuses, all dead too. Drink, suicide, drugs, starvation, Jack the Knife. When Francis Bacon was starving, Zanna would give him ten bob for a painting. She’d scrape the paint off and sell the canvas down Bayswater to slumming toffs.

      —No one wanted one with the fuckin paint still on it, darlin.

      Then Austen got a job teaching English in Kenya, so Zanna joined him as his ‘disguise’. By now the photos were Kodakolor with white borders: Austen turned half native, half Africa bum in his shorts and elephant-hide bush-boots, tea cloth headdress, elder’s staff, ten beers a night. In the sixties Austen joined the BBC East Africa Monitoring Unit and they married. He boozed with prostitutes, hunted elephants, camped in lion country and trout fished the Berkshires. The photographs were black and white again: Austen’s boot on a dead elephant. Zanna running the camp kitchen. A Sikh mechanic holding a blunderbuss beside the zebra-striped Land Rover.

      Soon Austen’s prostitutes moved in. Illiterate Kikuyu girls who spent his money on school fees for cousins, seed for their shambas, booze, cloth and witch doctors. Zanna painted watercolours and took African lovers, but her life there became a tour of duty whittled down to three months a year, just enough time to extricate Austen from another hoax, disaster or nightmare.

      The magazine cutting about Joy was in a box with bundles of aerogrammes hammered into stencils by Austen’s typing and his latest photos of dogs, ducks and parched scrub. Austen had come across Joy on one of his walks in Pokotland and suggested Viva do an article. Joy, the 29-year-old American missionary helping children pan for gold so they could pay their school fees. Joy, living in a bush village in cattle-raiding country, running the school and a women’s self-help group. She rode a motorcycle, wasn’t married, and Zanna said she was ‘ever so nice’ but wasn’t really a ‘missionary’.

      I always told people that my own African past was typical and insignificant. A year in Sudan as a teacher, ten months of it on strike, after which I’d been sacked and drifted along the overland trail of East Africa in my late twenties, trying to find something I could do naturally with little effort, a bit of stringing in Uganda maybe, but always failing to make the breakthrough.

      I was thirty then, stuck in London a whole year, incoherent about why I felt drawn back to Africa. Zanna’s Africa was a corrupt and dangerous playground which had turned Austen into a reckless adventurer who believed he was indestructible. But he was just a middle-aged man glutting on sex and booze with Kikuyu tarts in native dives.

      It was dawn when Zanna suggested we went to bed, even if I wasn’t her type. Sex was silent, in the dark made by thick drapes and blankets tacked over the windows. Next day I found the set of clothes Austen kept for his annual week in London. Thornproof suit, impeccable Crombie, shiny brogues. I put them on and wore them for weeks, riding Zanna’s black wartime bicycle about town, getting oil on the turnups. I spent her money on an Aeroflot ticket to Nairobi, then thought about what I’d say when I walked into Amolem and asked for Joy.

      

      All Aeroflot flights went to Moscow back in those days. We landed in minus sixteen, got shunted through a terminal behind glass walls and three hundred abandoned boarding gates. Six iron-curtain travellers huddled in the distance with their brown-paper baskets and stringbags. Every gate was blocked by ground staff with guns, boy recruits in military serge, the icy stare of cold raw shaves.

      Our passports were taken and replaced by flimsy red cards. We wouldn’t be flying on to Nairobi that day and they didn’t know when. No plane, bad weather.

      The clapped-out airport bus smoked like a burning tyre. It was a mobile coldstore and the driver wore white wellingtons. Hotel reception was like check-in at the morgue. We were all Nairobi bound, all frozen stiff and starting to notice each other for the first time, the pack shuffling into suits. The men had no hand luggage, just the clothes on their backs and the duty-free. The women were mostly mothers with babies, bundles of plastic bags and nappies. The husbands swapped business cards. They all had import/export shops but business was only so-so, which was why we were all flying the cheapest airline in the world.

      —This is my Mombasa number …

      —This is my Bombay address …

      The English lads were bragging.

      —Nah, bit of Swahili and they drop at your feet. All you have to say is hapana mzuri and you get the lot for nothing …

      No one edged my way till I was at the desk. It was clear I had to share a room with the bloke behind me.

      —I’m Frogget, he said.

      —I don’t really want to share, I said.

      —No trouble. Fuckin shoot through, I will.

      He swung a key fob the size of a wooden tennis ball.

      —Stops yer puttin it in yer fuckin mouth, dunnit.

      He tried it in the lock, upside down. He reeked of Gatwick bars and two-dollar vodkas on the Tupolev over.

      —I’ll kick the fuckin door in if this key don’t fit. It’s the way I like to do things, you know, no nonsense, drive it out. That’s me. Drive it right out I do.

      He threw open the door and swung his plastic bag with the 200 Marlboro on to the first bed and walked straight back out to find the bar. The room was two beds wide, the big triple-glazed window was a glass sandwich and wouldn’t close. Net curtains swayed more from heavy filth than wind. Beyond the steps below, there was a perfect surface of untrodden snow. Pine trees lined the road a hundred yards away. Cement trucks and heavy tippers drove by in the dusk which fell like bonfire smoke. The air was pitted with diesel fume and sludge and the airport was lit up by yellow-fever floods. Against the snow a soldier, a gun and a dog.

      I fell asleep and woke with a stiff neck from the sub-zero draft to find Frogget rummaging in his carrier bag.

      —Run out of fags didn I. Aint you avin tea?

      —Where?

      —Downstairs, in that canteen.

      Frogget tore the wrapping off his box and threw it on the bed, lit one up and left in a puff of smoke. I took the lift downstairs to the canteen and sat on my own in one corner, scratching my dry hair and smoking on a parched throat. A few curled slices of black bread see-sawed on the tablecloth if I touched it. The mothers crowded at the kitchen door for warm baby milk, the men laughed in the bar and the canteen was silent. A Russian waitress brought a plate to my table, picked up the bread, put it on the new plate and brushed crumbs on to the floor.

      —Ticket, she said.

      —What ticket?

      —Meal ticket.

      —I haven’t got one.

      —Reception.

      She took the bread away so I walked down the marble stairs to reception. A soldier opened the outer door and snow blew in. He brushed it off his greatcoat, stamped his boots and lit up a cigarette. I got the meal ticket and went back to the canteen and the waitress by the tea urn said:

      —Sit over there, with your friends.

      I joined the only two I recognised from the flight.

      —You come for the shit sandwiches? I’m Ray, he’s Steve, pleased to meet you.

      —Norman, I said.

      —How far you going Norman?

      —Nairobi.

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