2

“Fatboy!”

The sun was still burning the dew off the grass when the call from Lovemore Mboga emerged from within State House, seat of government in the East African state of Kuwisha.

“Fatboy!”

Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, the disgraced kitchen toto, stirred, his head full of dreams, still in the thrall of the last of his store of Mtoko Gold, the best bhang the country grew.

“Faatboy!”

The mocking summons left the colonnaded, colonial mansion, white as a wedding cake, once the residence of the British governor, drifted across the ninth green of the State House golf course, between the strutting peacocks, and beyond. It slid like a snake, through the flowerbeds, around the purple bougainvillaea and red hibiscus, sidling along the unkempt rows of cabbage and gone-to-seed lettuce, in what was once a well-maintained kitchen garden.

Finally the call, sustained in its journey by a brisk breeze, crossed the overgrown path which led to a long-abandoned boathouse on the banks of a green, weed-infested dam that once was the home of the Kuwisha Sailing Club. It slipped through a gap in the sheets of corrugated iron and old plastic bags with which, in happier days, the boy had constructed his den, and burrowed into his ears.

“Faaatboy!”

Mlambo squeezed his fingers deeper into his ears.

They failed to stop the insult from reaching its destination, deep inside the soul of Ferdinand Mlambo. Given the chance, there it would thrive and grow fat, like a tapeworm in a cow.

No-one, least of all Mlambo, would dispute the fact that he was a big boy. He had always been big for his age, even before becoming the senior kitchen toto soon after he turned 13, when the privilege of office entitled him to feed on unlimited scraps from the State House kitchen.

He was large, certainly, with a massive butumba that served as a counterweight to his substantial belly, both resting on thick thighs, which made him such a formidable figure on the football pitch. Indeed, his eligibility for the Mboya Boys Under-15 football team had been regularly challenged by opponents, sceptical that someone of his girth and height could qualify. And of course there had been some boys who dared to call him mafuta, or “lard guts”. That was stopped easily enough, for when he won the fights that ensued he sat on his opponent’s head, until he heard a muffled cry for mercy.

But to suggest that Mlambo was fat was simply not true . . . well built, certainly, stout possibly, even a little overweight. But fat? Never!

His limbs twitched, as if kicking phantom footballs. Mlambo reluctantly began to surface into the reality of his new life.

His offence had been unforgivable. He accepted that. He should never have agreed to conceal a tape recorder in the life president’s study on behalf of that English journalist, who hoped it would provide a recording of a compromising exchange between President Nduka and the opposition leader. Loyalty to the president had to be absolute.

It was no defence, he realised, to explain that the leader of the Mboya Boys’ street gang, who was also the captain of your football team, had threatened to tell the dreaded mungiki thugs that you were uncircumcised. And what those mungiki did with a rusty nail . . . Mlambo’s testicles shrivelled at the mere thought of it.

“Faatboy! . . . Faaatboy!”

Once more came the summons, with that sneering, contemptuous tone for which Lovemore Mboga, the State House chief steward, was renowned.

Ferdinand Mlambo tried to ignore his tormentor. Stretched out on an old mattress, bartered in return for favours to the deputy housekeeper, he pulled a stained grey blanket around his ears and thought about his dear departed grandmother. How he missed the warm untroubled nights, spent curled up under the huge table in the State House kitchen, deep in a nest of old newspapers, like a large dormouse.

Now he lay restless in his garden shed, alone and vulnerable to the evil spirits that prowled the night, making noises that could quite easily be mistaken for the sound of the wind whistling through the cracks and crevices in his makeshift sanctuary.

“Let him Fatboy me. I will not answer.”

Mlambo still felt light-headed from the night before, when he had over-indulged, and had smoked too much Mtoko Gold. Indeed, he had smoked so much that he was finding it hard to distinguish fact from fantasy.

There was one way to find out.

He felt under the mattress, scrabbling for the trophies he was almost certain he had carried home from the monthly meeting of the Kireba Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle. For a few seconds, he was filled with doubt. Could he have imagined the events at Harrods International Bar (and Nightspot)?

Suddenly his fingers encountered something long and thin, like a bicycle spoke but with a filed, pointed end.

“Ouch! Ayna!”

He sucked his thumb, sat bolt upright, and lifted the corner of the mattress, revealing two grey knitting needles.

Mlambo’s eyes widened, and his stomach tightened.

Needles? Knitting needles, number nine size?

If the needles were there, then . . . he had not been dreaming!

His terrifying encounter with a tokolosh, that mischievous and malicious creature, southern Africa’s fabled equivalent of an Irish leprechaun, ever-present yet seldom spotted, was no creation of the bhang he had been smoking. He, Ferdinand Mlambo, had seen it, with its hideous face, bathed in a curious blue light. Indeed, he had heard it give out a blood-curdling moan as it advanced on his hiding place, next to Harrods, where a meeting of the Kireba Ladies’ Sewing Circle had been in full swing.

The events of the day before, surely the worst day in his fourteen-year life, were all coming back to him . . .

The calling ceased. Perhaps Mboga had simply been rubbing salt into the wound. Perhaps it was a reminder that Mlambo was obliged to attend the weekly State House staff meeting that Friday. Whatever lay behind the taunt, Ferdinand Mlambo embraced his bitterness, like a broody hen nursing an egg, reliving that grim morning twenty-four hours before, when he had been summoned to Mboga’s pantry.

It was there, in that cool, dimly-lit room, with the unexplained aroma of vanilla, shelves running from ceiling to floor, big enough to accommodate a desk which was part of the original State House furniture going back to the 1930s, when it began life as the residence of the British governor, that he heard his punishment.

From behind the desk, Lovemore Mboga, sporting the ruling party’s flaming torch emblem in the lapel of his green jacket, informed the boy of his fate with all the solemnity of a judge in the colonial era delivering sentence on a “cheeky” native who had dared challenge the European administration.

Mboga himself had come up with the ingenious and cruel punishment he set out with unseemly relish.

The steward began quietly.

“Don’t worry, Mlambo. I am not going to sack you,” he said.

Mlambo had looked up in astonishment.

“Sacking is too good for you. Instead, you are demoted. You are now a small boy.”

Mlambo winced.

To be demoted to a non-job, a job with no status, at the very bottom of the ladder, was punishment indeed. He would be subject to the beck and call of people whom he considered nonentities, sent out to buy lunch for the State House telephonists, to collect a chicken for the messenger . . . even to buy cigarettes for the pantry boy, a lad he despised. It would be an endless cycle of daily humiliation.

He had no option but to accept the blow. If he stayed, his life was hell; but if he left, the life on the streets that awaited him was at least as bad. As Mlambo tried to explain to Mboga, it was his fear of mungiki, Kuwisha’s fast-growing street gang of nihilistic thugs, which had overcome his loyalty to the president.

He would have done better to stay silent, for the steward immediately turned this confession to advantage.

“Perhaps I should change my mind . . .” Mboga mused, “maybe give you to mungiki as a present . . .”

He appeared to consider his proposal, lips pursed, and looking over and beyond the boy at the end of his desk.

“Perhaps, perhaps . . . Remember, boy, those mungiki, they are everywhere.”

Then Mboga got down to business.

“Your friend Mupanga . . .”

Mlambo stiffened.

Charity Mupanga was one of the few people outside his family who had shown him any kindness.

“She is a troublemaker, a dissident, even,” Mboga continued.

Mlambo wanted to protest, but fear had frozen his tongue.

It was true that Charity Mupanga was no supporter of President Nduka. She made little secret of her contempt for the man whom many believed had contrived the death of her husband David, Kuwisha’s much loved bishop, some four years earlier. And as the deputy president of the Mboya Boys United Football Club, as well as running the best bar and eating house in Kireba, while providing a refuge for the city’s growing army of street children, she was a person to reckon with.

But to call her a dissident was going too far. Frightened though he was, Mlambo tried to speak in Charity Mupanga’s defence.

“Shut your face,” snapped Mboga. “She is holding dark corner meetings every month. You know this. Every month.”

He looked suspiciously at the boy.

“They call it the Christian Ladies’ Sewing Circle.”

Mboga then spelt out his demand: Mlambo was to become an informer, that creature which had been encouraged during the colonial era and flourished after independence. Reporting back on Charity and her friends was to be the boy’s first task.

As Mboga detailed the new duty, setting out everything he would expect, from information about the meetings of the Sewing Circle to Charity’s relationship with that Englishman Furniver, Mlambo felt himself swaying on his feet, close to fainting.

But the worst was yet to come, a final turn of the screw, devised and applied by Mboga himself, a man whose influence went well beyond that of a State House steward, powerful job though it was. According to the gossip, he was almost certainly a senior member of Kuwisha’s Central Intelligence Organisation.

Mboga stood up.

“Ferdinand Mlambo, I call you by that name for the last time. I am giving you a new name. Your old name is finished. I have caught it already.”

His hand reached behind Mlambo’s left ear as he spoke, as if plucking something out of the air.

“Your old name is now dead, finished,” he said with relish. “It is ready to travel with me, now.”

He thrust his clenched fist into a small cardboard box which had been sitting on his desk, and withdrew his hand while closing the top, as if an insect or a small bird was now trapped inside. Mlambo watched, horrified and wide-eyed, as Mboga wrapped the box, about the size of two packets of Sportsman cigarettes, in a copy of the previous day’s paper, and carefully bound it with twine.

“I will bury it near my home,” said Mboga, “and my dogs will piss on it, so the name of Ferdinand Mlambo, which is already dead, will rot.”

The boy was dumbstruck.

To subject Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, great-grandson of the famous Mzilikazi Mlambo of Zimbabwe, who had fought for his country’s liberation during the first chimurenga in the 1890s, to such inhuman treatment went well beyond the bounds of decency.

Then the full implications of losing his name sank in. Without a complete and proper name, would his late grandmother be able to find him? And would his earlier ancestors, including his great-grandfather, be available for advice and counselling? A shiver of terror went through the boy’s frame, and his insides turned to jelly.

Mboga looked with contempt at the quivering youth, standing at attention before him.

“Now, repeat your new name. It is Fatboy. You are now called Fatboy, only.”

Mboga was relentless.

“Repeat after me: ‘I am a piece of nothing. I am Fatboy,’ ” said Mboga. “Fatboy, just Fatboy. Fatboy! Forever!”

The chief steward sneered.

“I will see you Friday morning, ten sharp, at the staff meeting. I expect many people. We will meet on the lawn. And I will announce that Ferdinand Mlambo is finished. Only Fatboy is left . . . and you can give your report on that Mupanga woman. Now go! Go, go! You dog shit! Go!”

Mlambo had fled from Lovemore Mboga, his bare feet feeling the cool polished corridors of State House for the last time, past the vases with the aroma of fresh cut flowers, through the kitchen where the presidential tea-tray was stored. No longer would he be entrusted with the task of preparing the mid-morning glass of hot water and honey for the Ngwazi, the Life President, the Cock that Conquered all the Hens, Dr Josiah Nduka.

It was the worst day in his young life. He had lost more than his name. He had been deprived of his identity, his very sense of being. He, the former State House senior kitchen toto, Ferdinand Mlambo, had been reduced to a single word, offensive beyond measure.

Fatboy.

Ferdinand Mlambo’s dismissal as kitchen toto at State House, albeit the senior kitchen toto, might not seem a matter of great import. Yet only an ignorant outsider could come to this conclusion.

To have a job, any job, enjoying a monthly income, was rare in a country where only a comparative handful out of half a million school leavers who came onto the market each year ended up with work and regular pay. To be the senior State House kitchen toto was more than a job. It offered status, clout and influence.

Indeed, it could be said that Mlambo was the most influential and powerful 14-year-old, soon to be 15, in the land.

He was not merely on the staff of the president. He was part of the president, and he enjoyed making the most of this privileged position.

When, for example, at any one of the many police check-points on roads leading out of the city, he was asked his name, and just what job he did, he would reply with the spurious modesty that he had cultivated, combining timing and tone to perfection.

“My name?”

He would pause, looking at his feet, and rub a toe in the ochre earth of Kuwisha, for all the world like a shy, illiterate up-country oaf.

“Er . . . Mlambo, Ferdinand Mlambo . . .”

“And what do you do, boy? Are you a loafer? Or are you useless?”

Mlambo would wait for the laughter that accompanied such jibes to die down. Then would come his reply, said so quietly that the words were barely audible: “Kitchen toto.”

Then after a further pause, he would casually add another word, like an afterthought, almost mumbling, so sometimes the listener would not quite catch what he had said.

“What? What?”

“Senior . . . kitchen toto.”

And in case there was any doubt, he would utter two final, magic words: “Senior kitchen toto . . . State House.”

The sharp intake of breath that invariably followed, a mix of fear and envy, was a response that gave Mlambo much pleasure. It acknowledged that this was a youngster with prospects, a boy who could do favours, a boy who could be useful – not just part of the minister, but part of the president!

To work at State House in any capacity at all was remarkable. Indeed, there was a living to be earned by simply knowing someone at State House, ensuring that in return for a few ngwee, a letter to an official would be delivered, or a message would reach its destination. Even the kitchen toto’s humble duties, which ranged from shining the silver for State House banquets, to acting as the president’s food taster, and serving as the supplier of bhang to the State House staff could be turned to advantage.

Now this influence and power had gone, as worthless as ashes.

For he was just Fatboy – and unless he, Ferdinand Mlambo, did something about it, he would be Fatboy forever.

Perhaps it was the salty taste of his blood as he sucked his punctured thumb that set him thinking; possibly it was the influence of the knitting needles themselves, no longer mere needles but instruments of revenge; or the benevolent intervention of the spirit of his grandmother, who, contrary to his initial fears, soon managed to contact her favourite grandson that played a part; not to mention the fact that Mlambo was a cunning young man . . .

But whatever it was, something had triggered a chain of thought in the boy’s head. And the thought turned into a plan. And if the plan were to be put into practice, Ferdinand Mhango Mlambo, senior kitchen toto (retired) would recover his name and ensure the public humiliation of Lovemore Mboga, chief steward at State House.

All he needed was a little help from his friends.