Tefuga by Peter Dickinson Page A

least as far as Birnin Soko. Its only truly town-like feature was the fine tree-lined avenue that cut through the architectural mess and ended at the twin towers of the Old Town Gate. Beneath the trees spread Kiti Market, a drifting crowd of men and women between rows of stalls selling the usual hotchpotch—ingredients for traditional dyes, cassette players and radios, plastic kitchen­ware, magical drugs, brass trinkets, cheap imported cotton, cans of oil, the locally abundant fish already reeking with the heat under a maze of flies. The only variation from the standard African market was a queue of patients waiting at the W.H.O. clinic for treatment for river-blindness contracted in the spray of the rapids; also, perhaps, the absence of tourist-ware. It was the apparently least successful traders who gave the market its sense of being a timeless custom rather than a transitory commercial convenience—an old woman sitting beside a basket of dark orange beans, a child from the hinterland with nothing but a single kid to sell.
    At the entrance to the avenue the police had set up a roadblock, partly to extract unofficial tolls on the excuse of inspecting permits, and partly for the pleasure of browbeating, and occasionally just beating, those who came. Two policemen manned the block. Both carried guns, though one wore jeans instead of his uniform trousers. Another four drank beer with their friends under an awning commandeered from a nearby stall. The men on the block waved the Landrover to a halt. The one on Jackland’s side rested the muzzle of his gun on the door.
    â€œWhere you steal this truck, now,” he shouted.
    He was fairly drunk, the road-block being a self-financing binge that ran from Christmas through the New Year. Miss Boyaba’s presence may have stimulated an extra show of aggressiveness, but he seemed not to have noticed Major Kadu.
    â€œThis was the problem I was talking about, Major,” said Jackland, completely ignoring the soldier. “I wonder if you could make, ah, representations.”
    The Major hesitated. This was another example of Jackland’s characteristic behaviour, too deliberate to be described merely as tactlessness, the streak of the gambler that led him to take risks over personal relationships and to play what were almost practical jokes on the moral level, though he would have been far more cautious about, and less amused by, purely physical dangers and pratfalls. The policeman rattled his gun-barrel on the metal of the door. The Major put his cap on and stood up.
    It was an odd movement, but sandwiched as he was between Jackland and Miss Boyaba he may have felt it was the only means by which he could assert his presence. Certainly it achieved that effect. The arrival of a car driven by a European and the bellowing of the policeman at it had already attracted mild interest along the nearer stalls. The sudden emergence of an Army officer, standing aloft and holding the top of the windscreen with one hand as if he were the central figure on some grand parade, produced an actual gasp, silence, a few murmurs, and then a single hoarse shout, clearly of welcome, from somewhere at the back of the crowd. The shout was taken up in several places and became a general bay, attracting attention from further and further down the avenue. Standing as he was, the Major could be seen from the furthest end. The shouting grew. Even the river-blind turned inquisitive milky eyes to try and stare, as though their saviour had come who would heal them at a touch. The crowd began to move in, but those nearest the truck stood their ground, not knowing any more than the Major what was expected of them.
    Meanwhile in this, say, twenty seconds, the policeman had fallen back a pace allowing Jackland to open the door and get out, and the men under the awning had jumped up, gathering equipment and uniform and at the same time trying to shoo their cronies out of sight. Their corporal lined