Mombasa Road Retravelled Read online

? KJ Griffin 2015

  Guy Fawkes Day

  a novel by KJ Griffin

  Guy Fawkes Day by KJ Griffin

  Copyright ? 2015 KJ Griffin. All rights reserved.

  ISBN 9781311465580

  No part of this book should shall be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

  Other Books by KJ Griffin

  Other books by KJ Griffin, apart from the sequel (Part 2 of Guy Fawkes Day) include:

  Guy Fawkes Day (2015)

  The Sword of the Republic (coming soon)

  Acknowledgements

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The author would like to thank Hotel et Al Consultancy for its lifelong inspiration. Thanks also to Susanni Jamieson, Penny Casey and Gina Waters for reading original drafts and providing valued feedback.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  'Have you been to Kenya before, Mr Wood?'

  The immigration officer at Nairobi's Jomo Kenyatta Airport is thin and angular, probing the pages of my passport with bony, intrusive fingers. A sharp orange suit and sweaty eyes, flashing now and then from behind thin, rimless glasses all complete a picture of dog-hungry authority.

  'Yes,' I sigh wearily, and the heaviness in my voice is not just from the overnight flight, 'but that was twenty years ago.'

  'And this is your son?' he continues, glancing away from our passports to focus on Little Stevie. 'Can you look this way please, Mr Steven Wood?'

  Which sounds ominous. I glance behind. It is. Very ominous.

  For my six-foot son is hiding his face in his hands, which can mean only one thing. There's trouble brewing with Little Stevie and anything I can do to stop the forthcoming outburst is not going to help in the slightest. Believe me, I should know!

  But I had better go through the motions anyway, however pointless they may be. After all, isn't air travel all about doing futile things, like reading up on the plastic lifeboat they tell you will pop out of the fuselage when your jet nosedives into the mid-Atlantic from 30,000 feet? In the spirit of the circumstances, I might as well push some of this jet-set inanity to the limit. So here goes:

  'Look up, son! This man wants to see your face.'

  'Ipswich 4, Sheffield Wednesday 1,' Little Stevie shouts out trenchantly by way of reply, and as he broadcasts the scores, he pulls his sweatshirt right up and over his face, cocooning himself in an airtight bubble away from this transit-hub world full of hassle and questions.

  'Sorry, mate, my son doesn't want to look at you,' I shrug, unable to resist a little smirk at this smart young man with a head so neatly shaven it merely accentuates the angular protrusion of his glasses.

  'Nothing more I can do, I'm afraid,' I continue. 'He just gets like that sometimes, you see.'

  Authority disparaged is a humiliating moment for any system creature and obviously a complete novelty for our fellow here, whose job title in today's world, I suspect, might be something like 'immigration consultant' and whose job description no doubt pays heady lip service to 'facilitating outcomes'.

  So our thin-faced 'facilitator' stops in his tracks and is palpably wondering how he will ever get an'outcome' out of this pair of mongrels standing in front of him.

  Gaunt fingers pick over our passports once again, as if the documents themselves will provide clues about the exceptional weirdness of their holders. They don't of course, because not even the Yanks, let alone we Brits, are crazy enough to have inserted talking data chips into passports that reveal the last time the bearer placed the wrong kind of plastic in his recycling bin or drove five miles an hour over the limit in a controlled speeding zone. So without the benefit of technology to guide him, our fellow here simply reads Little Stevie's name out aloud one final time, slowly and sonorously enunciating every syllable like he's reading off a twelve-digit bar code that refuses to cooperate with the scanner.

  What a joke! As if all that officiating is going to do any good. And when it predictably doesn't, Mr Rimless Glasses resorts to some good, old-fashioned hectoring instead:

  'Look this way, please, Mr Steven Wood! I am ordering you, Sir, and you must obey my order!'

  It's said with the sort of venom I don't remember in Kenyan officialdom. Sign of the times, I guess. I think I preferred the old shifty sort that picked their noses in front of you and asked obliquely for bribes.

  But Little Stevie isn't going to budge an inch, so the young bureaucrat turns to me instead, seemingly now a beaten man.

  'But I must see your son's face, Mr Wood,' he protests, 'or I can't welcome you to Kenya.'

  I can't resist another smirk, partly at the sudden shift in this guy's tone, partly knowing what will surely happen next when Little Stevie really gets going. Maybe I'd better clarify the situation:

  'My son won't look at you, mate, because you're wearing a dark red tie in an orange suit, you see, and today's a match day. In fact, red's bad for Little Stevie most days, let alone a match day, and today it's even worse because Barnsley play in red and we've got a whole wad of cash on Ipswich to beat those red-breasted Tykes at three o'clock this afternoon UK time at Portman Road.'

  'Can't see red on match days, Dad!' Little Stevie blandly asserts, like he's reciting a self-evident, universally-acknowledged truth, and as he does so he finally lets the sweatshirt drop just a touch from his face.

  But it's only a darting glance at the source of the red threat, and suspicions confirmed, Little Stevie spins sharply away from his first Kenyan face, doing a squinty stare at the false ceiling up above instead.

  'This boy must be crazy!' the young official thunders, way too spitefully for my liking.

  He's in trouble too now, for 'crazy' is off limits to me at all times and from anybody's lips:

  'Crazy? Crazy, you say?' I snarl, pushing my face up close towards the counter. 'Oh no, you're wrong there, mister. Maybe my son's got some funny habits; maybe he doesn't like looking at certain kinds of strangers square in the eyes, but the one thing he certainly ain't is crazy.

  And I reach over to pat Little Stevie on the shoulder:

  'How can this boy be called crazy, eh, when he's got the best bloody football betting system in the whole world? Six wins from seven games this month alone. I'd say that's class, not crazy, mate.'

  Next, right on cue, Little Stevie reels out his distress dialogue:

  'Hey, crazy boy! Why don't you talk, you fucking spaz? Go on say something, Rain Man. Look at him covering his face with his hands. You fucking weirdo! You walking freak show!'

  It's all delivered in Little Stevie's best robotic drone and the ensuing expression on the young official's face is everything I could have hoped for.

  In his bewilderment, this smart young apparatchik looks from Little Stevie to me for answers, and I take my m
alicious time before supplying any, enjoying the feel of officialdom outraged.

  Behind me I can feel my fellow passengers growing as restless as a bunch of away fans shut in the visitors' enclosure at Glanford Park after losing 4-0 in Scunthorpe on a freezing January afternoon amid fog patches thick enough to foist lane closures on any stretch of the return motorway they damn well feel like smothering.

  I'd love to laugh but I mustn't, for this is a situation that will very soon spiral out of control. Trust me, I've been here before with Little Stevie all too often. Despite the amusement factor, I'll have to help out here right away, before we are put on the next flight back to Heathrow:

  'It's all right, mate, he's not talking to you personally,' I concede. 'That's what the bastards at school used to say to my son before I took him out. He gets that off his chest every time he's stressed, like the way you're stressing him big time right now.'

  Which seems to have swung it.

  Truly flummoxed, our fellow searches for words that don't come, then instinctively realizes he's up against a couple of world-class nutters, so what's the use anyway? A further gaze behind us at the long line of normal people queuing for his 'immigration outcomes' helps this young man of new Africa reach a snap decision, which he records with two angry stamps into our passports:

  'I am giving you four weeks in Kenya, Mr Brian and Mr Steven Wood.'

  That won't be anywhere near long enough, but this is neither the time nor place to barter, so I collect our passports and have to grab Little Stevie's arm in case he crashes into the plastic partitioning, so strong is his determination to avoid eye contact with this evil genie of harsh words, who is toting a hideous tie of flaming, Barnsley red against our tried-and-tested blue.

  But once we're clear of immigration, the realization suddenly hits me: This is it: I'm finally back in Kenya after all these years! And yes, the adrenalin is starting to make the pulse quicken even in this forty-something-and-the-rest wreck of the man who swaggered around here twenty years back in those riotous times after my little brother was murdered. But that's all another story now. It got written down in another book by another bloke, a book that got binned and forgotten way back because it wasn't talking about all the things people like to read about Africa: you know, whites falling in love with whites on big game safaris or test driving the latest Land Rover Discovery from Cairo to Cape Town, with air-freight shortcuts around all the Kalashnikov corridors.

  And now that the buzz of being back has really got me going, I glance around the luggage hall and for the first time since leaving London I really do notice my fellow passengers: I mean, just look at them!

  At precisely the right spot by the baggage carousel, exactly where it spits out the luggage, stands a collection of UN staff or aid worker types back to fatten themselves up some more on the poverty they regulate.

  In second position, with suits and mobiles already pinging, lurk a couple of dodgy looking businessmen and some banker-looking types. Bankers? Sorry guys, but didn't I pass you lot coming in when I left in the early nineties? Thought you bankers were supposed to have got Africa sorted by know, eliminating disease, poverty and corruption with your structural adjustment programmes, your export processing zones and your free trade schemes to stuff Tesco's shelves with cheap mange tout and petits pois! Now don't tell me your crap hasn't worked yet? Buggered it up here too, did you?

  I'm feeling like just striding over and abusing the bastards out loud, but right now our battered rucksacks make a late lunge onto the carousel and start head-butting the bankers' Samsonite sets like angry anarchists outside an IMF conference.

  So my attention wanders and we scoop and go, joining the queue for customs without further incident: well, not exactly, but then I'm used to dealing with the repercussions of Little Stevie's vocalised reflections: Why's that man so fat, Dad? He should do running like we do. Or: Was Kenya so full of black people when you were here in the days after Uncle Steve was shot?

  'Colours don't make people, Little Stevie,' I sigh to him, 'like your condition doesn't define you. It's what's inside people that counts, son. Anyway, don't forget your mum was African too.'

  'Mum came from Ethiopia,' Little Stevie regurgitates blandly.

  He's got standard lines like this that get blurted out at certain trigger words, like punching 5 into the automated menu in a call centre queue twenty minutes after you first started puzzling over all the options that have nothing whatsoever to do with your predicament never fails to get you: We're sorry, but all our operators are busy now. Please call back again later when call volumes are reduced. And then the line goes dead.

  So poor old Mum always gets this nondescript little epithet, nothing more, nothing less, and I've long wished I'd said something more original way back when Little Stevie was six or seven and I thought it time for him to understand that most kids, even kids with his condition, also have a mum. Mum came from Ethiopia! Well so did locust plagues, world-class famines and mass-murdering Mengistu, not to mention the car crash the killed her on a return trip to Addis when Little Stevie was just eighteen months old. Not a very informative bloody epitaph for the woman that carried him for nine months.

  We get our baggage long after most and so get picked on at customs by a large lady with short plaited hair, who pokes at our backpacks with podgy fingers and a sweaty grin which conceals latent avarice. Apart from the biking gear, however, she's soon bored and at last we break out of the terminal, where I'm soon gulping down lungfuls of that primal African air that tastes heady with red dust and heat. The melee of taxi touts and chancers that used to besiege the unaccompanied traveller is sadly sane and sanitised; I almost miss the thieving gits!

  And look, here's Kiwi John stepping out from behind the security barrier to greet us. My dear old mate from the days of merry mayhem has still got his greasy pony tail hanging limp and lacklustre over a dirty collar and is even shorter than I remember. Kiwi John's actually younger than me, but years of Kenyan sun plus whatever else they fried him in back in New Zealand before he came to Africa have turned the wizened wrinkles of his face into Grand Canyons for bungee-jumping droplets of sweat, one of which goes white-water rafting down the chasm-like creases round his mouth and plops onto the stone floor right in front of us.

  We clasp each other's arms and pat shoulders. Little Stevie looks on shiftily at the two of us, then without warning goes straight into Distress Mode, which he usually does when too many new situations all pounce on him at once.

  The onset of Distress Mode is instantaneous and deeply alarming to all but me, kicking off with a couple of loudly chirruped mole rat noises, before Little Stevie throws himself to the ground, spread-eagling himself right in the middle of everyone's feet with a professional's eye for causing maximum aggravation. And once he's thrashed his legs in the air for a few seconds and chirruped a crescendoing arpeggio of mole rat trills, he sits abruptly up and rummages around in his backpack for one of his comfort books.

  'Comfort books?' Kiwi John asks dubiously, when I point them out.

  'Yea, they help my boy get through these stressy moments,' I wink. 'There's an ancient grubby football manual with a picture of Ronaldo on the front, the one he's got his hands on now. It's packed with pages of stats on all the major European leagues, which he's added to in his own spidery hand time and time again. But in times of serious crisis, mate, when Little Stevie's world is under attack from agents of the Evil Empire, there's also a yellow exercise book in which he's compiled all his favourite astronomical data. Believe me, it looks as exciting inside as the charts from the Financial Times - and the paper has almost turned the same orange colour. So the comfort books always give you a clue, you see: Ronaldo is trouble, but the yellow exercise book with the star shit inside is real Yellow Peril.'

  Kiwi John seems to find all this highly amusing, though I bet he doesn't really know who Ronaldo is:

  'So right now we're only on Ronaldo,' I add, 'but seeing as the Stepover King himself has nearly brought
the whole exit to a standstill, I think I had better do something soon, before there's a riot right here on our first day.'

  Kiwi John grabs my arm:

  'No leave him, Brian. Let Little Stevie decide when he's ready.'

  So we stay where we are for a while longer and chat, and though Kiwi John is confident that Little Stevie will come round in his own time, I should and do know better.

  The businessmen are trying to slalom round Little Stevie now, their trolleys bristling with steel-edged Samsonite. With one eye on the floor, I keep on chatting to Kiwi John like he's my long-lost brother, which in a way he is, so just to make matters worse Little Stevie switches to Yellow Peril without any warning and for further effect gives this current breakdown into Big Distress Mode the old moaning, head-banging treatment too:

  'Regulus, alpha Leonis. Right ascension ten hours, eight minutes, twenty-two seconds. Declination plus eleven degrees, fifty-eight minutes and two seconds. Distance from earth: eighty-five light years.'

  In no time there's pandemonium breaking loose all around us and one large African lady in particular is starting to lose her cool, evidently deeming this to be neither the place nor the occasion for a full recital of the right ascensions, declinations and distances from Earth in light years of the visible stars in the constellation of Leo. Ungrateful bitch; she could have had it a lot worse in Eridanus or Scorpio, for it takes my son a nearly a good quarter of an hour to get through all the rambling star data in those unwieldy, snaking great hunks of sky.

  And while this spiteful lady figures out how to deal with an unresponsive Little Stevie, Kiwi John and I stand grinning side by side like covert conspirators who would love to leave him there for a while longer and really irritate the hell out of these self-important alpha predator types, but finally Kiwi John himself takes the initiative and bends down in front of Little Stevie, offering him an oil-stained, calloused wreck of a hand, which, to my surprise, Little Stevie accepts quite readily, as if he'd been waiting for that and only that all along.

  'Heard a lot about you, Little Stevie,' my old mate mutters quietly. 'I knew your uncle Steve too before he was shot. Did you know your dad named you after your poor old uncle?'

  And that's all it takes. Little Stevie nods slyly at Kiwi John, gets to his feet and scrunches the comfort books up one at a time, thrusting them into the top zip pocket of his rucksack before trotting out his standard Uncle Steve line:

  'Uncle Steve was Dad's younger brother. He used to live in Kenya and he was shot riding his motorbike on the Mombasa road.'

  Once again, I'm left wishing I'd done my poor brother more justice back then when my seven-year-old son was finally starting to talk in more than monosyllables, but just as quickly a less automative connection must race across Little Stevie's mind and he finally looks Kiwi John in the eyes:

  'Dad said you have a motorbike I could ride? After the Ipswich game, I mean.'

  Kiwi John and I roll our eyes upwards and share a grin.

  'Sure thing, Little Stevie. And I've got everything you two need for your football matches all rigged up back home in Langata, mate. You and your dad can get BBC Five Live online and keep up with all your Pommy football scores. The games don't start till six Kenyan time, mind.'

  The banter that follows is lost on Little Stevie, but Kiwi John and I revel in a long round of mutual ribbing and piss-taking, which takes us all the way out of the arrivals section and across a couple of car parks, till we reach my mate's old Land Cruiser. His is one of the earliest versions of the model, before Toyota upgraded the design to cope with shopping trips in and out of West London, and still we're winding each other up while we throw our rucksacks in the open truck behind and Kiwi John drives us out of the airport perimeter and into the heat and light of the Athi plains.

  I growl at the explosion of development all along this section of the Mombasa road. The empty plains bordering the highway have now been completely swallowed by concrete all the way into downtown Nairobi. And on both sides of the road it's that curious African construction technique that makes buildings look worn and chipped before they're even upright. What's more, it seems the finishing touch on every Kenyan architect's blueprint was an old Isuzu truck with a broken chassis, now dumped like twisted commemoration plaques across the courtyard of each of these new industrial units.

  Kiwi John lets me get things off my chest. I'm sure he knew he'd be in for a few minor rants before I get acclimatised to the benefits turbo capitalism and runaway population growth have brought to modern Kenya.

  I turn round and look at Little Stevie sitting behind me. His eyes are busy too and he's taking it all in very intently. I don't ask anything, but I know that if I did, my son would already be able to tell me the three most commonly spotted vehicles on a Kenyan road, or the most frequent background colour on the advertising hoardings we've passed. More likely than all of that, however, is the certainty that Little Stevie will already have set the countdown feature on his digital watch to kick-off time at Portman Road. So I smile to myself and turn to Kiwi John.

  'Is she ready?' I ask.

  My old mate takes an eye off the traffic to wink at me.

  'Looking more beautiful than ever, mate. Sweet and sexy. Ready for action.'