Whoever Fears the Sea Justin Fox (books for 8th graders .txt) 📖

Could get yourself into lotsa trouble. Why’d you want to go up there? You looking for buried treasure or something?’

‘I suppose so, in a funny sort of way.’

‘You ever read Treasure Island?’

‘Yes, as a kid, it was one of my favourites. Long John Silver, Billy Bones —’

‘The Black Dog, Captain Flint, Blackbeard —’

‘X marks the spot, shiver me timbers, fifteen men on a dead man’s chest —’

‘Yo, ho, ho, your money or your wife, ha-ha-ha. Jolly fucking rogering.’

 

CHAPTER 17

 

USA is big terrorism! The graffito, painted in red on the wall behind Kijani, greeted Paul the next morning.

In the breakfast room, guests learnt that America had launched first strikes on Afghanistan during the night. A table of American tourists was overly polite and a little embarrassed, as though one of them had peed in their bed and everyone knew. Almost everyone. One tourist — big as a house and dripping with gold jewellery — loudly and lengthily berated the waiter for not bringing the coffee at the same time as her toast. On today of all days, you should hold your fat tongue, thought Paul.

‘I’ve just phoned the police in Lamu,’ Pierre said, coming over to pour his tea. ‘Just to check that the mullahs aren’t getting restless or anything. All seems quiet, so there’s nothing to worry about.’

Paul didn’t think there would be. The world’s political waves were much dissipated by the time they reached these shores. After all, this was Lamu.

But now, further down the lane, here was another: Fuck USA + Israel + Britain world terrorism.

A shadowy figure watching him from the end of the street ducked into a side alley. Paul kept seeing him: a man in a brown shirt and black kikoi, who appeared to be following him. At first he found it mildly amusing, intriguing even, but now he felt a little worried. If things turned ugly in the Gulf, Westerners could become targets, even in a peaceful place like Lamu.

At Ali’s hole-in-the-wall kiosk, the proprietor had placed a television on a crate in the alley and brought from home a sofa and some chairs, which he lined up along the opposite wall. There was just enough space between television and audience for a fully laden garbage truck — in the shape of a donkey with rubbish baskets on each flank — to squeeze past. Paul stopped to watch a live CNN broadcast from Islamabad. Ali, round, gregarious and bespectacled, immediately cleared a place for him. Paul declined.

‘No, no, no, you are my guest,’ said Ali, ushering him to the sofa. ‘Big troubles, eh?’

‘Asante,’ said Paul. ‘Yes, big troubles.’

‘It has begun,’ said Ali, crossing his arms and frowning.

The proprietor offered Paul a cold drink, as a guest, not from the shop.

The television beamed images from another world. Black specks drew vapour trails across a porcelain sky. The camera zoomed in to show waves of aircraft sowing their seeds from high in the stratosphere. Barren mountainsides exploded into dust. There were images of C-17 cargo planes dropping thousands of ‘culturally neutral’ food pouches. Vitamin-fortified rice cakes from heaven. A talking head from the Pentagon held up a dollar bill and pointed to the image on the back. ‘Our eagle clutches an olive branch in its right claw and arrows in its left,’ he said. ‘Food aid and firepower in tandem, that’s our mission. The United States wants to send two messages to the world simultaneously. We want to show that we are on the side of good.’

A report crossed live to the bridge of the USS Kitty Hawk, where troops were being airlifted into battle. An embedded journalist on the flight deck was saying something about a marine amphibious task force being prepared. Meanwhile, a thousand light-infantry troops of the 10th Mountain Division were shown winging their way to Uzbekistan. To Paul, much of this had all the reality of a computer game. He spent the morning glued to the television, then took a breather for lunch and to digest the images of destruction he’d been witnessing.

Over the ensuing days, the alley kiosk would be a regular port of call. Sometimes it was just him, Ali and the CNN or Al Jazeera presenter. At other times, there’d be a throng of viewers, often just out of mosque and hungry for news. The opinions expressed around the television were close to his own.

In the days to come, the ideological positions became blurred as bombs failed to be as surgical as promised. Anti-American heckling grew louder round the fringes of the group. Ali, however, tried to maintain a tight and moderate ship. When one teenager rode past on his donkey, fist in the air, chanting: ‘Bin-la-din! Bin-la-din!’, he was shouted down and told to piss off.

Paul felt strangely at ease: here he was, on a tropical island, ensconced in front of an outdoor television set with a group of Muslim men watching high drama unfold across the ocean. He saw night skies streaked with green tracer fire, Muslim shells groping for Christian B-2s. Advancing Northern Alliance tanks lumbered creakily into frame, bound for Mazar-i-Sharif. Smart bombs and propaganda leaflets rained down on Kabul and their smooth-talking host, Mike Chinoy, tried to make sense of it all from far Peshawar. That little screen, in that particular context, felt surreal. There was, too, the vertigo of peering over the edge into a dark chasm.

He watched students in Lahore burning the stars and stripes. There were demonstrations against Westerners in Indonesia, Palestine and Pakistan … and also in Mombasa. An effigy of Bush stuck on a pole was set on fire, to the delight of a chanting crowd. All the while, Ali kept serving cardamom-flavoured coffee for the viewers and chatting about Lamu things.

CNN had the biggest news story of the young century and was milking it to the full. Each credit sequence showed