Last Orders at Harrods Read online

  LAST ORDERS AT HARRODS

  “It is not easy to write a novel which combines humour with an understanding of the serious issues facing contemporary Africa. In this delightful novel, Michael Holman, a writer who has for many years commented on African affairs to a world-wide readership, has produced a book which is not only an entertaining and amusing read but also a profound comment on the political and economic landscape of Africa. The style is engaging, the characters lively, and the end result is a superb novel born of years of engagement with Africa.”

  Alexander McCall Smith, author of

  The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency

  “Charity Mupanga is an African heroine in the spirit of Alexander McCall Smith’s Precious Ramotswe – big hearted, township-wise and self-reliant.”

  Peter Godwin, author of

  Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa

  “In this satirical feast, Holman hits his mark every time as he exposes the humbug and also humanity of life in modern Africa. With a Dickensian cast of characters in the troubled nation of Kuwisha, and a plot worthy of Waugh, this is a cracking fictional debut. Full of humour, home truths – and anger simmering beneath it all – this is a book that must be read.”

  Aidan Hartley, author of

  Zanzibar Chest

  First published in

  Great Britain in 2005 by

  Polygon, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  Newington Road

  Edinburgh

  EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Michael Holman, 2005

  Lyrics of ‘So Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think’

  by Prince Buster are reproduced by permission of Trojan Records

  The moral rights of Michael Holman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85790-222-1

  Print ISBN: 978-1-904598-32-0

  Version 1.0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  To Michela Wrong:

  my turn . . .

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  This novel would never have been started, let alone finished, but for Professor Andrew Lees in London, and Professors Pierre Pollak and Louis-Alim Benabid and their team, at the University Hospital, Grenoble, who gave me a new lease of life; the loving care of Gabrielle Stubbs; and the persistence of Patti Waldmeir, who put me on the road to Grenoble. I am indebted to Sandy McCall Smith for his generous advice and support. I am grateful for the warm hospitality provided by John Goldson, Simon Mungai and colleagues at Crater Lake Camp, Naivasha, Kenya, where the writing of Harrods began; and for the encouragement of Ann Grant, and the kindness of her staff at the Residences, Pretoria and Cape Town, where the writing continued. Without Julian Harty’s patient help, it might well have ended there, for my computer problems would have overwhelmed me. My heartfelt thanks to Neville Moir at Polygon for his support from the start, and to Caroline Oakley. Andrew Gowers, editor of the Financial Times, has generously allowed me to draw on articles originally published in the FT. And I greatly appreciated the expertise of Rye Barcott and Salim Mohamed, president and manager respectively of the Nairobi street childrens association, Carolina for Kibera, Inc. ([email protected]).

  The land of Kuwisha and all the characters in this novel are figments of my imagination. Nearly everything else is true.

  The proverbs at the head of each chapter have been collected over the years by the author. They reflect an African country’s time-honoured wisdom. Most should strike an immediate chord with the reader. Some may nevertheless seem obscure, so an explanation and interpretation are offered in an appendix.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  EPILOGUE

  APPENDIX: THE PROVERBS OF KUWISHA

  PROLOGUE

  “The long grass is safe only for short men”

  “‘Dawson urged the ageing Dakota lower over the mangrove swamp . . .’”

  The security officer in charge of the final departure checkpoint at Kuwisha’s international airport had almost finished going through Cecil Pearson’s green canvas holdall. Wearing the dark glasses that are the ubiquitous uniform of his profession in Africa, the man was now reading aloud from the last of the half dozen notebooks he had set aside for closer inspection, frowning as he did so. He read the sentence a second time, louder and slower, in a tone of scorn and mounting incredulity:

  “‘Dawson urged the ageing Dakota lower over the mangrove swamp . . .”’

  The official looked up at Pearson, his expression of calculated indifference changing to outright hostility, and returned to his scrutiny of the offending notebook. He looked up again at the anxious journalist, who was perspiring slightly in his outfit of crumpled linen jacket and freshly ironed jeans, and read on:

  “An ancient hunger stirred in the young pilot’s loins . . .”

  Nose wrinkled in exaggerated distaste, the man grimaced.

  “Not very good, Mr Pearson, not good at all.”

  The contents of Cecil’s intestines had turned to what seemed like ice water in nervous anticipation of the scrutiny that he was certain he would have to undergo on his departure from Kuwisha. He must have been mad to have teamed up with that malodorous, glue-sniffing street urchin, crazy to have embarked on a hare-brained scheme to scupper President Nduka’s reelection chances.

  Before leaving for the airport that evening Pearson had gone through his notebooks thoroughly, expunging names and telephone numbers, just in case they fell into the hands of Kuwisha’s Central Intelligence Organisation. Perhaps he should have posted everything to London. But he could not possibly have anticipated this public examination, the sheer humiliation of having the opening lines from the draft of his novel subjected to the appraisal of the intelligence agency’s duty airport officer.

  The official, in his mid-forties, wore a nondescript black jacket with the flaming torch insignia of Kuwisha’s ruling party in its lapel, and a shiny green nylon tie. What set him apart, what conveyed a sinister authority, were those wrap-around dark glasses. Slowly, carefully, deliberately, he took them off, and replaced them with a pair of reading spectacles, which he pushed firmly onto the bridge of his nose. It was as if, thought Pearson, the man had removed a badge of office, and adopted the role of literary critic. He seemed almost vulnerable without the opaque shades, a tortoise without its shell. His right eye had a white crescent encroaching on the pupil, the product of years of exposure to the African dust and the continent’s harsh sun.

  He glanced quizzically at the fair-haired passenger in his mid-thirties who was standing before him, and returned to his examination of the grubby notebook, battered by travel, creased by constant referral and stained by the juice that had leaked from a clutch of mangoes packed for the j
ourney to London.

  Pearson took a quick look over his shoulder. He was dismayed to see that the queue for the security check was lengthening, and the nearest passengers could hear every word of the exchange. As he sought to explain the lines he had jotted down in the notebooks, his sense of intellectual discomfort grew.

  “It’s the opening sentence of a novel I’m trying to write,” he said defensively.

  “In fact, it is not even my own introduction. It’s a sort of in-joke, by a friend of mine, another journalist. He works for the New York Times . . .”

  It was quite true. The two of them had been bandying around the sentence for years, and Pearson thought it would be fun to use it as the start of a book. But as he began his explanation, he realised that it seemed juvenile and implausible, and his voice tailed off. The officer looked at him contemptuously.

  “Don’t lie to me, Mr Pearson. Be a man! A total man! Never lie! A writer must take responsibility for his own work. This is no damn good, no bloody good at all.”

  On a continent where bad language was rare, the mild expletives shocked Pearson. The officer snapped the notebook shut, and placed it back in the holdall.

  “No bloody good at all,” he repeated, raising his voice and replacing the round-rimmed reading spectacles with his sinister dark glasses. He beckoned the next passenger who was grinning broadly, enjoying Cecil’s discomfiture. The official irritably motioned in the direction of the stairs leading to the airport apron, where the British Airways 747 was waiting to take Pearson and other passengers flying to London from the East African state of Kuwisha.

  “Go!” he ordered, “Go!”

  Cecil was about to protest and then thought the better of it. Picking up his holdall, he walked on and handed over his boarding card at the departure lounge desk.

  “Hi there,” said the stewardess, inspecting the ticket. Pearson winced at the studied and spurious informality. Thank goodness only his surname was on the ticket. The day was coming when the use of initials would be a thing of the past. First names would be registered in a computer, and both would then be printed on the boarding card.

  ‘Hi there,’ was bad enough. ‘Hi there, Cecil’ would be the last straw.

  Such an exchange brought out the Young Fogey in him. He traced this conservative bent to an early age, when endless teasing about his first name – his father had been a great admirer of Cecil John Rhodes – had encouraged him to grow a thick skin. Yet for all his irritation, his overwhelming emotion was one of growing relief as he walked the last carpeted yards to safety. Pearson knew he had been foolish, but it had been in a good cause. And he was, thank God, getting away with it. He turned left as he boarded the plane, and headed for the business class section.

  Before he sat down, he removed the cassette from his jacket pocket, and took the tiny tape recorder and earphones out of his holdall.

  If the contents were as revealing as he suspected, his career was about to get a huge boost. It could well be the splash, the paper’s top story. He toyed with possible headlines: “Kuwisha’s leader forced to pull out of poll.” It would surely put him in the running for the foreign correspondent of the year. He played with the magic words: “award winning journalist.” Perhaps there was a book in it.

  But first he had to check that the tape was audible.

  He took the cassette, inserted it in the recorder, and pressed the playback button.

  Now came the test. Pearson closed his eyes, gulped down the glass of fresh orange juice brought by a cabin steward, and waited for the reassuring sound of the aircraft door thudding shut. What he was about to listen to could, he felt certain, help shape Kuwisha’s future . . .

  It had been a tough couple of days. His head, bandaged where the rioter’s stone had left a deep cut and a painful bump, was starting to throb again. The words of the security officer seemed to reverberate in his ears:

  “No damn good, Mr Pearson, no bloody good at all.”

  1

  ‘He who follows the warthog’s trail risks meeting the lion’

  Dawn was breaking over Kuwisha.

  Not even the damage wrought by the torrential rains, especially heavy overnight, was enough to distract Charity Mupanga from her ritual, or to spoil the pleasure she took in this time of the day.

  The owner and manager of Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) stood under its blue and white striped awning, next to the blackboard menu topped with its proud promise, “Good Food, Best Prices”, and looked out over Kireba, East Africa’s biggest slum. Charity yawned, stretched, yawned again, chewed vigorously on the short stick that served as a toothbrush, and smoothed down her green apron. She gave a grunt of irritation as her hand encountered the slip of paper she had thrust into her pocket the night before. A registered letter from England awaited collection. Almost certainly it was from those cheeky London lawyers.

  She thrust out her bosom, and prepared to meet another day.

  Business had been brisk the night before. Customers had lingered, waiting for a break in the unnaturally heavy rains before heading home. Charity had decided not to risk the muddy, unlit track to the modest two-room brick house that was Kireba’s only clinic and which she shared with cousin Mercy, its senior nurse. Instead she had spent the night on a mattress kept behind the bar for that purpose, pestered by persistent mosquitoes.

  A whiff of wood smoke from the first fire drifted past, as fragrant and evocative as the fresh-ground coffee for which Kuwisha was famous. Soon it would be replaced by more fundamental smells. Early morning greetings carried across the valley in the clear air, accompanied by the clinks from the tinsmiths as they hammered discarded cans into buckets, saucepans, mugs and paraffin lamps. The bells of the bread-sellers rang out, mixing with the cries of the vegetable hawkers, as they headed into the city, carts piled high with lettuce, cabbage, maize cobs, slim green beans, and clusters of scrubbed red carrots, as shiny as the faces of children after their morning wash. From the middle distance came the growing growl of traffic and the blare of hooters.

  They were all comforting, familiar sounds. And when the sun shone and the air was warm, and the people of Kireba were allowed to go about their business, unmolested by the police and without the harassment of politicians or greedy landlords, the clamour of the slum was to Charity’s ears like the buzz of busy bees.

  But on that morning, any laughter had been drowned by the heavy rain, and Charity detected the beginnings of a sullen, discordant murmur. Water, water, everywhere: and if you lived in Kireba there was not a drop to drink without risking some debilitating, potentially fatal, intestinal infection.

  Residents were well used to fending for themselves. But few could recall such a combination of natural disaster and government indifference. There was even talk of a protest march to State House, which was within their sight – or would have been, but for protective rows of eucalyptus trees behind a high security wall and an electrified fence.

  The floods were not the only reason for the unsettled mood in Kireba. The slum was alive; indeed, if the growing number of people living there was a yardstick, it was thriving. Yet the city around it, on which Kireba residents depended for work, seemed to be dying. Banks and supermarkets, cinemas and big companies were moving out of the city centre to the suburbs. Once fine hotels were looking seedy. Restaurants were closing down. At night only security guards and street children were left behind, in charge of barren canyons of drab buildings and potholed roads.

  But none of these worries could be allowed to interfere with Charity Mupanga’s daily commune with her Maker. She gave her head a quick, sharp shake, like a boxer ending the break between rounds.

  “Keep your thumb up,” she muttered, and breathed deeply. She began to count her blessings. And the first of these blessings was the glorious daily dawn that Kuwisha shared with the rest of Africa, the period when the colours of the land were bathed in translucent light, when the chirruping and cooing of birds carried softly through the morning air, and the continent
was at ease. The jagged outlines of the shanty town’s tin shelters were still in soft focus, and the handful of cooking fires that had been lit by the early risers twinkled benignly. Reality had yet to emerge.

  It was the time when she felt most strongly the soothing presence of her late husband, David Shikuku Mupanga, Anglican bishop of central Kuwisha, who had died in a car crash five years earlier. It seemed entirely proper to her that she used this special time of the day to share with David her feelings for Edward Furniver, manager of Kireba’s savings society, and to seek the advice of her dear companion. The feelings were becoming stronger and deeper, although she found it hard to express them. But for the first time since David’s death the prospect of a new, permanent relationship did not make her feel disloyal to his dear memory.

  As Kireba awoke, so the sound of people stirring punctuated the silence. And as they prepared for a new day, Charity soaked in the music she never tired of: the music of laughter, of whistling, of singing, each with its own scales and melodies. The singing in particular lifted her heart, and put her worries into perspective, and for a few precious minutes the intrusive London lawyers were put aside: joy and tragedy alike seemed to provoke an instinctive all-embracing response, and the peoples of Kireba, of Kuwisha and beyond opened their hearts with unselfconscious grace.

  Africa sang like other parts of the world breathed.

  2

  “Do not trust a jackal that fails to howl at the moon”

  It was said that if you sat at Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot) for long enough, most of Kireba’s movers and shakers would eventually put in an appearance, such was its popularity.

  The bar stood at the point where the slum’s muddy track, dubbed ‘Uhuru Avenue’ by the locals, was crossed by the railway line. The location could hardly have been better. The railway was the dividing line between the city and Kireba, and Harrods provided a meeting place for two worlds. Charity had selected the site wisely.