Borderline (36 page)

Soon she would be getting out with a bag in each hand, assuming she could actually lift them. They weighed almost thirty kilos each. Soon she would be walking through the valley of the shadow of death, fearing all evil.

‘How long have we been here?’ Frida asked.

Halenius looked at his watch. ‘Almost a quarter of an hour.’

Annika couldn’t breathe. ‘I have to get out,’ she said.

‘You have to—’

She slid the door open and stepped out on to the muddy ground. ‘I won’t go far.’

The gates were made of chicken-mesh and held together by a rope.

Stepping round the puddles, she ducked under the rope and made her way into the cemetery. The silence felt more dense immediately. The noise of Langata Road faded away. A plane flew past at low altitude.

You could fly dead bodies home, she knew that. Did you have to call your travel agent, or did the body count as cargo? Maybe the embassy would know, or a funeral director.

It had almost stopped raining.

Where would she have to leave the money? Behind a wooden cross? In an open grave?

To her left, behind a barbed-wire fence, there was a field of fresh graves, the earth still brown and the crosses white. Further on there were more graves, covered with grass; some of the crosses had fallen over.

She couldn’t see any natural place to leave two black sports bags with red logos. They would stand out too much – people would be curious and would investigate. She looked around carefully.

To her right was an official building, a little grey concrete house with a rusty metal roof and wrought-iron bars over the windows, with the words ‘Mugumoini Ward’ above the door. There was something familiar about it. The door in the middle of the longest wall had a window on each side, symmetrically arranged. Two chimneys emerged through the tin roof.

Lyckebo, she thought. Her grandmother’s house, near Hosjön. A classic Swedish two-room cottage.

The door opened and three women stepped out, staring at her. They might have walked out of one of the building-blocks of Swedish construction history, but they couldn’t see anything familiar in her: they just saw someone who didn’t belong and was staring far too hard.

A funeral was taking place in the middle of the green part of the cemetery. A group of people were gathered round a grave she couldn’t see. A man was talking through a crackling loudspeaker. He sounded devout.

She stood still and listened. The man’s voice rose and sank. Several of the mourners were carrying large umbrellas.

She looked back towards the gate and saw the silhouettes of Frida and Halenius in the car. They were sitting still; neither seemed to be speaking.

Further away in the cemetery were some larger graves, little mausoleums made of tin or bricks. Maybe it would be possible to hide the sports bags there.

She walked up to the first. Red-tiled roof, ornate, perforated wrought-iron sides, painted turquoise, a white-tiled grave.

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

The man had been born in 1933, and died in 2005. There was a faded photograph of him. Annika thought he was smiling. Red earth had blown in across the white tiles. He had lived to seventy-two. He must have been much loved, and well-off, to have warranted such an elaborate resting-place.

When she turned to move on she saw that she was standing on an empty plastic bottle. It was embedded in the ground, half covered by earth, and made a clicking sound as she lifted her right foot. Next to the grave were signs of a large fire, charred wood and bits of rubbish, pink plastic, checked fabric and an old tyre.

Halenius hadn’t moved.

She quite liked cemeteries. She ought to visit Grandma more often.

She crouched between two graves. Charles had died at twelve years old. There was a photograph of Lucy on her memorial cross, but the picture had faded so badly that only the outline of her hair was visible. Faceless Lucy, the weeds growing tall on her grave.

She turned her face to the wind. Would Charles and Lucy have chosen to be born, if they had had the choice? She wished she could have asked them because they’d done the whole journey now and returned. They knew the answer.

Grandma would undoubtedly have said yes. She had enjoyed life. She found joy in little things, picking mushrooms, lighting candles and watching variety shows on television.

And what about her?

She took a deep breath as images swirled past. Grandma pulling her out of the water after she had gone through the ice on Hultsjön when she was seven (she was only checking if it was safe). Grandma fetching a ladder when she had climbed to the top of the larch at the corner of the cottage and didn’t dare climb down. Grandma encouraging her to apply to the College of Journalism, even though no one in the family had ever been to university: ‘How do you know you can’t do it, if you don’t even try?’

Annika gulped. So if she was standing by the door leading to this earthly life and was asked if she wanted to give it a try, what would she say? ‘No, I think it looks a bit too hard’? Would she, for the first and only time, refrain from doing something unfamiliar and possibly difficult just because it seemed a bit uncomfortable?

She let her head fall back and gazed up at the rainclouds.

So, she had made her decision.

She had chosen to come. Perhaps that was what made the difference. Perhaps you didn’t come if you didn’t sign up voluntarily. Charles and Lucy had also wanted to come.

She peered towards Langata Road, and her eyes fell on a grave that was still brown, a beloved wife, mother and grandmother. ‘Sunrise: 1960. Sunset: 2011.
May the Lord rest her in peace.
’

Sunrise. Sunset. So beautiful.

Her photograph was still very clear. She had curly hair and was wearing a big white hat.

‘Annika!’

She froze to ice and looked back towards the gate. Halenius had got out of the car and was waving at her.

The funeral was still going on, but the crackling loudspeaker had fallen silent.

Another plane flew past at low altitude.

She ran towards the gate. ‘What?’ she said breathlessly.

‘Not here,’ Halenius said. ‘We need to get going.’

She was gasping for breath as adrenalin surged inside her. ‘What’s happened?’

‘New orders, by text. We have to go past the Life Spring Chapel and leave the money on the plateau above Kibera. Jump in.’

The atmosphere in the car was electric. Frida was chewing her bottom lip, and her eyes were darting about behind her sunglasses. She was talking about places and possible roads as she fiddled with the gear-stick: ‘There’s a Life Spring Chapel by the airport, but that’s on the other side of the city. They might mean the turning circle above Mashimoni, behind the Ngong Forest road, right by the river …’

Annika turned to look back towards the cemetery. The vegetation had taken over the fence next to where they were parked, wrapping the rust and barbed wire with green leaves and tendrils, but through the foliage she could see the mourners closing their umbrellas and moving towards the far exit.

Why had they got new orders? Had she done something wrong? Did the kidnapper have an observer among the mourners?

Frida put the car in gear and it shot forward. The people in the cemetery disappeared behind the greenery.

They turned into a smaller road and the tarmac came to an end. Frida slowed down. Soon they were rattling forward at five kilometres an hour, moving at the same speed as donkey-carts and men on heavily laden bicycles.

Annika was sitting in the middle of the seat, as far away from the doors as possible.

Buildings close to the car, cracked clay and tin, rubbish trampled into the ground alongside the unpaved road, a goat eating on top of a mountain of garbage.

They had one point one million dollars in the car, on the floor by her feet: was it obvious from the outside? What would happen if the people on the other side of the windows knew?

A man selling waxed cloths slid past, women with children on their backs. Eyes following them along the pitted mud road.

Then the car was shaken by a sudden bang. Annika jerked, grabbed the seat and Frida braked.

‘What happened?’ Annika said. ‘What was that?’

Frida pulled the handbrake on, took off her sunglasses and looked at Halenius, wide-eyed.

‘Do exactly what you would have done if we weren’t in the car,’ he said quietly.

Frida took a few quick breaths, opened the door, got out and shouted, ‘
Acha! Msipige mawe!
’

Faces moved in the dust and Annika leaned instinctively towards Halenius. ‘What’s she doing?’

‘Telling them not to throw stones at the car.’

Frida got back in, took the handbrake off and put the car in gear. Her top lip was glowing with sweat. Annika checked that the back doors were locked.

To their left a valley opened up and she followed the greenery with her eyes. On the horizon she could see how it changed and turned brown: a stone landscape? A moon crater? An endless plain of mud?

She heard herself gasp. Kibera, one of the most densely populated places on the planet, one of the continent’s largest slums, shacks made of tin and mud as far as she could see, open sewers and garbage, a carpet of different shades of brown from here to eternity. She tried to say something but found no words.

‘Mashimoni is down there,’ Frida said, driving into a turning circle a couple of dozen metres above a dried-up riverbed. She stopped, switched off the engine and pulled the handbrake on again.

They sat in silence for a minute or so.

‘Did they say where I had to leave the money?’

Halenius shook his head.

The monotonous landscape stretched as far as she could see on both sides. Washing hanging on lines. Smoke rising between the roofs. There were people everywhere. On the other side of the valley, mobile-phone masts reached towards the clouds.

‘I’m not going to have to go down there, am I?’ she said, nodding towards the warren of tin shacks.

‘I don’t know,’ Halenius said.

Minutes passed.

She picked up the video-camera and filmed through the window. People walked past them on their way down to the slum.

‘Can I open my window?’

‘I think we can probably get out now,’ Halenius said, opening his door and stepping out.

Annika and Frida followed suit.

They were standing on something resembling the Lion King’s cliff, a plateau high above the savannah. They could hear voices as a faint rumble.

‘There aren’t as many people living here as everyone used to think,’ Halenius said. ‘They used to say two million, but now they think it’s more like a few hundred thousand.’

She’d read about it and seen it on television and in films.
The Constant Gardener
had been set here, although she hadn’t known it at the time.

Halenius’s mobile buzzed.

He read the text with bloodshot eyes, and Annika stopped breathing.

It didn’t matter where, as long as it was over soon. She could carry the bags over the riverbed and among the shacks, passing women in colourful clothes and boys in grey school uniforms. She could throw them into a container full of rubbish or leave them in a grocery shop. She was ready.

‘The ransom is to be dropped at the entrance to Langata Women’s Prison.’

Annika blinked. She didn’t understand.

‘That’s not far from the cemetery,’ Frida said.

‘So we’re heading back the way we came?’ Halenius said.

They got back into the car and Frida started the engine. Annika hardly managed to get the door shut before Frida reversed and hit a pothole. Annika’s head hit the roof.

‘Sorry,’ Frida said, glancing back.

She doesn’t like me, Annika found herself thinking. She doesn’t want me here. She’d rather be alone with Halenius.

Could that be right? Was that why she had agreed to help with this crazy task? If it was true, how long had she felt like that? Since she used to share a room with Angela Sisulu? Had she lain awake in the next bed, listening?

And what about now? Did she understand? Did she know? Could she see through them?

They were driving down dusty streets with shops the size of cupboards. A glazier’s, a mosque, a slaughterhouse. The car bounced and lurched. Annika used her hands to keep herself upright and protect her head from the worst of it.

Frida slowed when they reached an area of gravel at the end of the road in front of something that looked a bit like a carport, and an iron gate painted in the gaudy colours of Kenya, green, black, yellow and red, with a sign above it.
Langata Women’s Maximum Security Prison
. The sun was reluctant to show itself. It was very quiet.

Annika glanced around her. Was she really supposed to leave the money here? Or was this just another false lead?

She wound the window down. The complex didn’t seem terrifying, just tragic. Barbed wire to the right, a residential area of new four-storey blocks to the left.

Frida nodded towards the visitors’ entrance. ‘I’ve got a friend in there,’ she said. ‘She had a good job, flight assistant, but a dodgy way of earning a bit extra, smuggling heroin. She had half a kilo on her when they caught her. She’s served ten years of a fourteen-year sentence.’

Halenius was staring at his mobile.

‘Do you think this is the place?’ Annika asked.

Frida got out of the car and went to the security booth to say hello.

‘Are you going to stay here?’ Halenius asked.

Annika nodded.

He got out of the car and shut the door. A young woman with two small children was sitting beside a tin shack with three walls. A hand-painted sign saying
Visitors’ Waiting Lodge
revealed that they were there to see someone. Annika raised the camera and filmed them. They were dressed in colourful clothes – how did they manage to look so neatly pressed? A woman in red jeans and a white top walked over the gravel and in through the entrance, pulling a large suitcase behind her. Was she moving in? What had she done? Annika followed her through the lens.

A gust of wind blew into the car, bringing with it a smell of rubber and sour milk. She lowered the camera and shut her eyes against the wind. A man was talking through a loudspeaker somewhere, but she couldn’t make out the words or even the language. A car went past. The sun came out and hit her eyelids, and her vision became warm and red.