The Telescopic Philanthropist

This story, written several years ago, is published to commemorate the recent passing of Camila Batmanghelidjh.

Whilst acknowledging the violence that publication of this story does to the dictum that one should not speak ill of the dead, I have to remain true to my enduring conviction that there was something distinctly “off” about Ms. Batmangelidjh. Readers acquainted with the works of Dickens will recognise some affinities with the character of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.

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“Look, lovey,” says Drusilla Kaftanjellyby, sincerity baked into that doughy expanse of brow, “you can understand nothing of the complex issues around this emergency until you have squatted in the dust with the locals, and eaten their simple food. Which of course,” she adds with immense satisfaction, “I have.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe eyes with perplexity the voluminous Kaftanjellyby form, swathed in its cornucopia of capes and curtains and shawls, and finds himself quite unable to scour from his sensorium the image of this behemoth squatting in the dirt upon those immense hams. The she-beast in question, peeping coquettishly from underneath her turban, continues undaunted:

“Or unless you are as a bare minimum in some way ethnic. Which of course,” she adds, “I am,” displaying thereat the marks of a contentment most sublime.

Mr Marsh-Marlowe, profusely sweating, apologetically murders two or three of the arthropods copulating on his milkwhite thigh, then picks again at the scabs crusting between his sandalled toes.

“You should get that looked at, lovey” says Drusilla cheerfully, “before the maggots hatch. We have an absolute peach of a ju-ju man. Draws them out with hemp twine, don’t you know. Delightful old boy. Accepts payment in potted meats.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe awaits politely the addition of the phrase “which I am” to be uttered in the transports of ego-directional complacency. But the moment never comes.

The rumble of artillery, borne on a sudden and pestiferous gale from the delta, now laps against the bungalow’s veranda. The house-boy, crouching by the laundry bucket in the shade of the banana palm, mutters some imprecation peculiar to his dialect, then crosses himself.

“Dreadful old Leopold,” sighs Drusilla, “shelling those beastly coltan miners again. More clients in the next day or two, inevitably. Sometimes with us it’s quite literally the feeding of the five thousand. Nonetheless,” and she vents a chuckle, “we manage. I don’t know how we do it, but we manage.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe extracts from a pocket of his khaki shorts a filthy handkerchief, with this article dabs his sodden brow, then in a reedy soprano volunteers,

“I wonder whether, Mrs Kaftanjellyby, you have been apprised as to the reason for my presence here.”

Drusilla snorts contemptuously.

“Bloody bean-counter. Agency said they were sending you. Try as I might, I cannot make them appreciate the vital necessity of a diet which is fully organic, especially when a famine has taken hold and people are at their most vulnerable. Don’t blame me that it’s not cheap. Bloody corporations. The agency’s budget only stretches so far at Waitrose. I call it stingy. I wouldn’t want all those deaths on my conscience.”

“Ms. Kaftanjellyby, if I may just …”

“No, Mr Marsh-Marlowe, I didn’t invite you but you came anyway, and now you’ve come you’re damn well going to hear me out. I’m sure the agency meant well when they sent me all that maize, but it simply won’t do. Toxic GMO filth laden with pesticides and chemicals.”

“But Ms. Kaftanjellyby,” says Mr Marsh-Marlowe despairingly, “It’s not what you think. I’m not …”

But Drusilla is having none of it.

“Try, for once in your life, Mr Marsh-Marlowe, to resist that hegemonic urge of yours to mansplain everything to the little lady. ”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe gazes in befuddlement at the vast bulk of the little lady, and keeps his counsel. Evidently satisfied that the threat of mansplaining has for the present receded, Drusilla takes up the thread anew.

“You can have no idea, no idea at all, of the trouble occasioned by that shipment of maize. These are desperate people at the end of their tether. There were hundreds of them, literally beating down the doors of the warehouse. Poor old Leopold ended up having to shoot quite a few, you know. They’d gone utterly feral.”

As if on cue, another foetid gale rattles the palms, bringing with it the sound of popping.

“Mortars,” announces Drusilla blithely, “eighty-one millimetre. Leopold must have got a couple of APC’s onto the causeway.”

Pauses for an instant to allow the digestion of this aperçu, she adds, then:

“Can’t send’em out onto the mudflats, of course. They’d sink.”

A silence. Not notably companionable. Mr Marsh-Marlowe, stunned, fiddles with his scabs. The house-boy wearily hauls from the bucket a selection of Drusilla’s sarongs, and spreads them forth to be baked upon the red earth.

Another pop as Drusilla delivers of its cork a bottle. Russian champagne.

“Not mortars this time,” says she very jovially slopping liquid into a pair of grubby schooners, “bit sickly-sweet this stuff, but you get used to it. Biodynamic johnnies dropped it off to say ta muchly for burning the warehouse. Oh well, yam sing as the chinkies say.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe sips with distaste foretold the fizz. Drusilla knocks back two glasses in swift succession.

“Oddly refreshing,” she opines, smacking her lips, “now then, let’s see about lunch. Hope you don’t mind, but I make a point of eating with the ’fugees. Showing solidarity, you know. Bit of a drive, I’m afraid.”

They pick their way through wilting heat and drifting garbage up the street, to the compound fenced with rusting corrugated iron. At their approach, the gate swings open on protesting hinges. The thin and ragged militiaman, his Kalashnikov propped against the wall, lounges on the spavined couch outside the hut, staring wordlessly into the distance.

“Leopold’s boy,” says Drusilla over the peevish whine of the air-conditioning, “speed-freak of course. Not slept in days probably.”

They clamber into the white Land Cruiser. Drusilla drives them at break-neck speed down Mengistu Boulevard. They pass in a blur the looted shops and the abandoned market and the roundabout, where they scatter the vultures ministering to the donkey’s corpse. Their progress is momentarily interrupted by the bizarrely operational traffic lights opposite the single internet cafe, where two or three gentlemen wearing sunglasses lounge at tables over bottles of Guinness. With these personages, Drusilla exchanges cheery greetings in appalling French.

“People smugglers,” she explains, “absolute blast to go drinking with. Hopeless at poker, for which I’m duly thankful.” 

The cloud rolls in from the ocean. Grey muzzles the sun. The choking heat remains.

Down a rutted track, eventually, and through a gate guarded by more speechless militiamen. Also Leopold’s boys, Mr Marsh-Marlowe is given to understand. They weave round anti-suicide blocks, then through another fence. More corrugated iron fencing. More speechless militiamen. Beyond here, the camp. Mr Marsh-Marlowe gazes through glass at utter perdition: gimcrack huts of plastic and twine, with dark puddled doorways where human beings listlessly squat. The wrinkled, shrivelled dugs of the women, the naked skeletal children. Embedments of filth. Pots and pans, piss and shit. Visible down alleys: standing pools of grey water, burst bodies of dogs; dead rats also. Unforgiving heat broils them. Larval grey sky pressing underside upon anthill.

“I ought to warn you,” says Drusilla, “bit of a whiff when you get out. Fine once you’re inside the restaurant of course.”

“These are human beings”, says Mr Marsh-Marlowe to himself, “people.”

Drusilla kerbs the Land Cruiser in the ninth circle of Hell. Mr Marsh-Marlow, gagging into his filthy handkerchief, opens the door and steps gingerly down into the stinking heat.

The restaurant. Insulated behind darkened glass, tinting with sepia the desolation without. Italian slate floor. Mood-lighting. The diminished roar of a generator. Eighteen or twenty tables at which sit assortments of bullet-headed arms dealers, alcoholic pilots, dreadlocked activists, earnest missionaries. The staff, all in black trousers and white shirts, seem to be Lebanese.

“Mrs Kaftanjellyby, a pleasure as always.” says the head-waiter in the accents of the American School.

“Table by the window please, Pierre,” says Drusilla.

They sit across the table from eachother. Mr Marsh-Marlowe tries not to look through the glass at the emaciated woman brushing the flies from the wizened face of the dying child.

“Don’t worry,” says Drusilla, “they can’t see us, it’s two-way.”

Pierre, bearing a mini iPad, bustles over to their table.

“Ready to take your order boys and girls. The bad noos is the entire menu is off-limits again.”

“Oh dear,” sighs Drusilla, “how ghastly. I suppose those rebel johnnies are still taking pot shots at the C130. Who sold them those S75-A’s, that’s what I want to know. Russkies I s’pose.”

Pierre nods vigorously.

“I’ve made it absolootly clear to Leopold,” he says, “I even gave him the goddam map coordinates. He’s absolootly gotta prioritise those SAM batteries. We can’t afford to give Waitrose the slidest pretext for halting deliveries. We ain’t had quails eggs for weeks as it is, or foie gras.”

“Absolutely,” says Drusilla, “anyway, what can we chow down on instead? Nice bit of kid?”

“Braised kid, yes indeedy,” says Pierre.

“Locally sourced?”

“Absolootly. Nodably fresh.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe, anticipating braised kid, and adjudging this to be as good a moment as any for the disclosure of purposes, clears his throat.

“Mrs Kaftanjellyby,” he trills, “I do not think I have as yet made myself sufficiently clear. The fact of the matter is, I am not an accountant, nor was I sent here by the agency.”

Drusilla is by this intelligence put somewhat out of countenance.

“Who sent you, then? Mossad? Now I think of it, you do look like a bit of a Jew.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe permits himself a bitter little smile.

“Not Mossad, Mrs Kaftanjellyby. Nothing so glamorous, I’m afraid. The plain truth is, I am here at the behest of Haringey.”

“Haringey?”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe appears to swallow something.

“Child Protection to be exact,” he says unhappily, “you have children, have you not, Mrs Kaftanjellyby?”

“My loins have been blessed with issue,” Drusilla affirms, “what of it?”

“The oldest is eight, Mrs Kaftanjellyby, is she not?”

“Gaia,” says Drusilla, “my pride and joy.”

“Yes, Mrs Kaftanjellyby,” says Mr Marsh-Marlowe, “no doubt, Mrs Kaftanjellyby, all the same, rather young to be left to look after a six year old, a four year old, and a two year old, think you not, Mrs Kaftanjellyby?”

“I left them ample provisions,” says Drusilla very haughtily, “organic too. Which is more than can be said for these benighted people,” indicating with jerk of thumb the child dying the other side of the tinted glass.

“Well,” says Mr Marsh-Mallowe, swallowing again, “that’s really neither here nor there, I’m afraid. Your neighbours came across Gaia scavenging in the bins.”

Mr Marsh-Marlowe fishes from his nasty grey knapsack a nasty grey envelope, and begins rather laboriously to unfold it. Just then Pierre reappears, bearing a dish under a large silver dome, which he sets upon the table.

“Voilà!” he breathes, lifting the dome.

“In God’s name,” whispers Mr Marsh-Marlowe, going very green, “how has it come to this?”

“Braised kid,” says Pierre, “like we said.”

“Surprisingly plump,” avers Drusilla in tones of approval.

“Oh,” says Pierre, “he’s not from the ‘fugee camp. One of Leo’s jackasses shot him this morning. By mistake, of course. Shame to let him go to waste.”

“Protein must be reabsorbed,” says Drusilla, nodding thoughtfully and carving a slice of rump, “is that an apple in his mouth?”

“Organic,” says Pierre.