The Constant Gardener

— They live in misery and so do their wives.

— No sex education is offered to gay men, even in the midst of Kenya's long-denied AIDS epidemic.

— Sections of Kenyan society are forced to live in a state of deceit. Doctors, lawyers, businessmen, priests and even politicians go in terror of blackmail and arrest.

— A self-perpetuating cycle of corruption and oppression is created, dragging our society still deeper into the mire.

Here the article stops. Why?

And why in heaven's name do you file an incomplete polemical piece about gay rights under Arnold and lock it away with a password?

Justin wakes to Guido's presence at his shoulder. He has returned from his peregrinations and is leaning forward, peering at the screen in puzzlement.

"It's time I drove you to school," Justin says.

"We don't need to go yet! We've got another ten minutes! Who's Arnold? Is he gay? What do gay guys do? My mom goes crazy if I ask her."

"We're leaving now. We could get stuck behind a tractor."

"Look. Let me open her mailbox. OK? Somebody could have written to her. Maybe Arnold did. Don't you want to see in her mailbox? Maybe she sent you a message you haven't read. So I open the mailbox? Yes?"

Justin gently puts his hand on Guido's shoulder. "You'll be fine. Nobody's going to laugh at you. Everybody stays away from school now and then. That doesn't make you an invalid. It makes you normal. We'll look in her mailbox when you come back."

* * *

The drive to Guido's school and back took Justin a long hour, and in that time he permitted himself no flights of fancy or premature speculation. When he regained the oil room he headed not for the laptop but for the pile of papers given him by Lesley in the van outside the cinema. Moving with greater confidence than he had brought to the laptop, he sorted his way to a photocopy of a clumsily handwritten letter on lined paper that had caught his eye during one of his first skirmishing raids. It was undated. It had "come to notice," according to the attached minute initialed by Rob, between the pages of a medical encyclopedia that the two officers had found lying on the kitchen floor of Bluhm's apartment, slung there by frustrated burglars. The writing paper faded and old. The envelope addressed to the PO box of Bluhm's NGO. Postmark the old Arab slaving island of Lamu.

My own dear darling Arni,

I don't never forget our love or your embraices and goodness to me your dear friend. What a luck and bliss for me that you honeur our beautiful island for your holiday! I got to say thank you but it is to god I thank for your generos love and gifts and now the knoledge that will come to me in my studies thanks to you, plus motorbike. For you my darling man I work day and night, always glad in my heart to know that my darling is with me every step, holding and loving me.

And the signature? Justin, like Rob before him, struggled to decipher it. The style of the letter, as Rob's minute pointed out, suggested an Arabic hand, the writing being long and low with wellcompleted roundels. The signature, done with a flourish, appeared to possess a consonant at either end and a vowel between: Pip? Pet? Pat? Dot? It was useless to guess. For all anyone could tell, it was actually an Arabic signature.

But was the writer a woman or a man? Would an uneducated Arab woman from Lamu really write so boldly? Would she ride a motorbike?

Crossing the room to the pine desk Justin placed himself in front of the laptop but, instead of calling up Arnold again, sat staring at the blank screen.

* * *

"So who does Arnold love, actually?" he is asking her, with feigned casualness, as they lie side by side on the bed one hot Sunday evening in Nairobi. Arnold and Tessa have returned the same morning from their first field trip together. Tessa has declared it one of the experiences of her life.

"Arnold loves the whole human race," she replies languidly. "Bar none."

"Does he sleep with the whole human race?"

"He may. I haven't asked him. Do you want me to?"

"No. I don't think so. I thought I might ask him myself."

"That won't be necessary."

"Sure?"

"Certain sure."

And kisses him. And kisses him again. Till she kisses him back to life.

"And don't ever ask me that question again," she tells him, as an afterthought, as she lies with her face in the angle of his shoulder, and her limbs sprawled across his. "Let's just say Arnold lost his heart in Mombasa." And she draws herself into him, head down and shoulders rigid.

* * *

In Mombasa?