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You can see the mad scramble. A whole building with no sprinklers. The fire engines can reach only the fourth floor.How many ministers and members of the Central Committee would love Dædalus Mumba then? Rescue our high-living and very spoilt sons and daughters, Dædalus, please! And then Lusaka would see an amazing sight, eh? In the style of angels, I’d ferry these gyrating brats. But, instead of delivering them straight, bypass the anxious arms of their overstuffed parents, set them down perhaps in the dustiest shanty, from that distance watch the tall tower consumed by fire, and Studio 22, the disco in the skies, puff up like a cherry. Ha, and we’d all sit there, awaiting the flotilla of their parents’ Mercedes, and the greetings of the shanty-dwellers, roused at midnight, demanding water, salt, sugar, soap, cooking oil. Whatever else is short right now. A return to subsidies on the mealie meal. A stand against the IMF. Even the import and re-distribution of new leather belts so that, very co-operatively, they would have something to tighten. Preferably around the midriffs of those coming for sons and daughters. See the fat squeezed over, like melting lard, splashing inside imported shirts. And, oh yes, do you think we’re finally getting some service in this place?
2: The contingent
    Of all things, he had been a Commonwealth Scholar in New Zealand. She fingered one of the books he had brought back, had carried on his travels. He wasn’t carrying it now, so he’d have to come back again to claim the book, claim her. An old book, published in 1973, the New Zealand poet Murray Edmond, and the characters of the book were the same characters he had known. A painter named Gordon, who wore Chairman Mao dungarees. Kathryn, clearly Italian, occupation unknown, who read other people’s newspapers, smoked people’s cigarettes. And there was a nice line:
    The sun is coming up
    & 3000 jets are in the air.
    Ah, she thought, no jets of sun in the Oxford winter. Just the same low sky. Dreaming spires could almost puncture sky if clouds camedown, oh, perhaps… measuring from her window, another inch or two. Well, she felt simply desolate. Ten days since sun last appeared. And it hadn’t even rained properly. Just this greyness and some mediocre drizzle. Sky, we’d like some dramatics, please. If you can’t manage a thunderstorm, we’d like you to retire to Ireland. We want either sun, or the certainty of wearing raincoats or not. We, who are simply desolate, do not wish to feel simple – caught in your drizzles.
    Anyway, it was now time to go out. She’d wear her coat, half-wondered whether she should sail out on her bike, umbrella held aloft in the Amsterdam style. Not that she needed to be present at the lab. The gels would not yet be dried. But, after lunch, Rosa’s friends would telephone, and the contingent of them, New Zealand exiles, assorted Africanists, even some Africans, would gossip and, since this was the item of the week, would invariably discuss Walker’s proposal to Dianna. Lists of incompatibility. He was using her. She was using him. He might think she’s made in heaven, but it can’t last. And I’m sure, Dianna thought, cycling away, I’m pretty devastating in bed.
    Walker Lee-Tembo occupied one of those underground pedigrees, known not at all to the general public – not, anyway, to Dianna’s parents – but known to a specialist group, its admirers and its acolytes. He probably wasn’t known, thought Dianna, but his distinctions are. And they probably aren’t even distinctions. Just offshoots of his glamour, and his glamour, which probably centred on nothing more than his smile, had carried him into many affections. Many people, by virtue of having imparted a kindness or admiration to him, thought they held rights to him. Now these people, drawn from the various stations of Walker’s life, manufacturers of his legend, readers of his single short book, saw their nurtured young man proposing