The Fallen Read online

  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.

  The hot air dried her contact lenses as she stepped outside. The sullen guard of the bar looked up at her and then looked down again, squatting and resting on his rifle. He had given up trying to warn drunken westerners not to walk the streets alone after dark.

  She made it back to her hotel, the one she always stayed at, The Lion Den. She had joked with Tim that someone had obviously left out the ‘s’ from Lion’s when they painted the sign and he had said that even if they had spelled it correctly, it wasn’t a great choice of name for a cosy B&B. She laughed to herself as she remembered their conversation and wished he was with her now. It always felt like home whenever they were together, even when they weren’t speaking.

  She locked the door to her room, took out the key and jammed a chair under the door handle; it was a nice place but she was still a woman travelling alone and who knew what lions might be lurking in the den. Better to be safe than sorry Tim would say and she had learned the hard way to believe him. She got under her mosquito net and lay back on the bed, setting her phone to wake her up at ten, a late start but it was going to be a long day.

  Chapter 9

  “Wake up Timmy”

  Tim rubbed his eyes. “Wha…?”

  “Wake up.” Asefa’s voice boomed in his aching head. For a moment he thought he had woken up in his own bed and that Sarah would be next to him, but Asefa was not in England…? Waking up in a strange place never sat well with him and never seemed to get any easier. He looked around to see he was in the sparsely decorated spare bedroom of the Development Institute guesthouse, the residential section of their Dire Dawa office compound. How many beers had they drunk last night?

  “OK, OK you fucker – I’m awake. What time is it?”

  “Five-thirty. You want to go to this copper mine and do some work or stay in bed and have me fan you with palm leaves? This is not Wolverhampton County Council and we are not on flexi-time woman. In Africa we start early to beat the Sun; but I know you grey boys back in London don’t have to worry about that. Ha. Here drink your coffee man and get dressed.”

  Asefa handed him a sweet and strong Ethiopian coffee and some bread, which he took and gnawed on like a sleepy child. “OK I’ll be ready in ten. I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Asefa was definitely a morning person. So was he, but a seven A.M. not a five A.M. morning person. Like most women he’d known, Sarah was not a morning person. Tim would get up at the weekend and have some alone time before throwing a cup of tea and a bacon roll into the bedroom, like a couple of edible grenades to wake a sleeping dragon.

  Tim threw on his clothes and well-worn hiking boots, stuffed his water bottles and the rest of his gear into his pack and brushed his teeth, being careful not to get any tap water in his mouth. Does fluoride on a toothbrush kill waterborne diseases if you brush long enough? Today wouldn’t be the day to try it out; a thousand feet down a copper mine and not a bathroom in sight. He didn’t think the miners would be too pleased if he soiled their tunnels fitted with improvised and barely functioning ventilation.

  He walked out to the cream Landcruiser and got in next to Asefa.

  “Not too much off-roading Asefa. And I get to pick the music.”

  “No, driver decides and driver wants Zangaliwah!” Asefa laughed and put on his Cameroonian tunes. Well, when in Rome, he thought.

  He had met Asefa in Sudan ten years earlier. They’d shared a compound working for the International Committee for Migration. Asefa was the gregarious Cameroonian who kept everyone’s spirits up, often with spirits created in his improvised moonshine kit. His homebrew wasn’t bad and the Sudanese government’s ban on alcohol made it all the more drinkable. It was a great time – he’d been young, he loved the work, he was out there meeting people, meeting women, making a difference. The organization was on a shoestring budget, which meant little oversight and maximum flexibility to do the type of work you wanted; without the endless report writing big money brings. He’d taken the poorest village in the area and turned it into the most prosperous, just using the things people had around them. It even started to go a little to his head, and it was Sarah who told him he was in danger of becoming the next Davenport, from Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. That was how they met. She was travelling through doing assessments of the refugee camps in the region for the International Rescue Alliance and she had crashed for a week at their guesthouse. He had fancied her and hated her in equal measure, in part because she immediately called him on a heap of bullshit that he was beginning to form into his own personal throne. But the next time she’d come through, they’d gotten drunk together on Cameroonian moonshine and danced like drunken monkeys to Zangaliwah in the African moonlight. You become fast friends in the field. When he next went to the Capital, Khartoum, he sought her out; partly because he wanted to, and partly because Asefa said he was ‘too much of a lady-boy white-boy to look up that beautiful NGO woman who was totally out of your league’.

  They’d met for a ‘quick catch-up’; tea, baklava and shisha at a little Moroccan place down a side street, but it had turned into an all-afternoon affair and then they had wound up at some Embassy party with unlimited alcohol via a diplomatic bag. By the end of the night they were together. They hadn’t been apart, except geographically, since. He hoped she made it OK to Juba, he always worried about her when she went away on her trips, even though she was at least as worldly as he was.

  The car bumped along the road. Asefa was singing along to Zangaliwah, rather well; he had a back up career right there if he ever decided to stop helping poor people and start helping himself. Asefa was a remarkably cheerful and optimistic fellow for someone who had seen so much tragedy in his life. His first child had died from malaria when she was four and six months later his wife died from complications while pregnant with his second child. That was before Tim had met him, since then both Asefa’s parents had passed away and his sister – his last remaining relative - had disappeared while working as a nurse with the UN in Congo. Asefa had gone to the war torn country and spent six months trying to find her, calling in every favour and spending everything he had saved. Some said they thought the Lord’s Resistance Army took her, but Asefa liked to believe that her car had gone off the road on some remote jungle pass and she died quickly. The hard part for him was coming to terms with the fact that he’d never know what really happened. That must have been the case for so many in Africa, never really knowing what happened to family, friends or loved ones that got separated by famine, drought or war. Little government, few records and poor communications could make tracking down the missing or the dead a life’s work; at some point you have to dec
ide to give up and live.

  “How long until we get there Asefa?”

  “If you were driving, three hours. At Asefa speed, make that two – we’ll be down the mine before nine.” Asefa pushed the peddle to the floor and the dust cloud behind them grew larger. “Don’t worry, no people on these roads. Just slithering black mambas – and they can eat my black wheels.”

  Chapter 10

  The coffee at S.E.T.I. was weak but hot. Hat Creek Radio Observatory, his home away from home. The array of disks that spanned the horizon turned a thousandth of a degree to scan a hugely different expanse of cosmos for any hint of a radio signal that might indicate intelligence beyond the Earth. Machines bleeped and packages of data were sent out and retrieved from the myriad of networked home computers, laptops, licit and illicit corporate servers, all sifting through gigabytes of space noise as part of the S.E.T.I@Home project. Five hundred thousand silicone minds whirring away as one; the processing power of a planet.

  Brian reached for his coffee. He had joined the programme starry-eyed and straight out of M.I.T. – the geek equivalent of a Hooters waitress landing a supporting role in Dallas – The Movie. But eight years and two thousand days and nights later he had experienced nothing but a blip here, a beep there and one unfortunate piece of static that he had got everyone very, very excited about, then very disappointed and slightly angry about. He hadn’t invented S.E.T.I@Home, Marius had – damn his German techno wizardry. But to Marius’ credit it was a damn fine idea. Now the disappointment of not hearing anything from space could be spread across the entire planet and not just the entire office.