Blood & Milk (25 page)

“Truthfully, I’m not sure at this stage. Three days, maybe a week?” I gave her my best stupid-tourist smile. “Can I pay for the three days now? And if we need longer, I’ll let you know in plenty of time.”

She nodded with a smile and processed the payment. “Of course.”

She handed over the key card, gave us directions to the room, then ran through a brief detail of room service, the pool area, security. There was even a courtesy bus that would take us around the city and bring us back, if required.

The room was huge and extravagantly furnished. Everything was brand new, in shades of creams and browns. The view over the water was ridiculous. What it cost to stay here now made sense. “Wow,” I said, walking inside. “We’re not used to this.”

Damu lay his spear on the single bed and looked around the room like he couldn’t believe his eyes. “What is that?”

He was staring at the large black, wall-mounted rectangle on the wall. “That is a television.” I picked up the remote control and pressed the on button. The screen blinked once, then what looked like a news program came on, a woman reporter took up most of the screen with a parkland behind her.

Damu gasped and quickly tried to look behind the screen, making me laugh. “It’s just images projected through the screen,” I explained. I hit the channel button letting him see a few different shows. “I used to watch a lot of television, but truthfully I haven’t missed it at all.”

Damu was squinting at some talk show. “Why do they yell?”

I snorted. “God only knows.” I clicked the TV off and tossed the remote onto the bed. Nope, I hadn’t missed it all.

Damu took in the room around him. “Is this like your home?”

I barked out a laugh. “Uh, no. Not like this. My whole flat would fit in this room.”

“Flat?”

“Sorry, my home. A flat is a small house with other small houses.” I figured that explained it well enough. “It was not as nice as this place.”

“You have not been home for a long time.”

“No, I haven’t. I put all my furniture into storage before I left. I technically don’t have a home anymore.”

Damu’s gaze shot to mine. “What will we do if we not have a home?”

I rubbed my hand up his arm as I walked past him. “We’ll find one together.” I sat on the huge bed and fell back, sinking into the cloud-like mattress with a sigh. “This bed is awesome. Want to see how we fit on this big bed together?”

I expected him to reply, but when there was only silence, I turned to look at him. He was standing at the glass sliding door, looking out over the ocean.

“Damu?”

He half-turned his head to glance at me, but went back to looking at the water, and that’s when I realised something…

“You’ve never seen the ocean,” I said, rolling off the bed. I stood beside him and kissed the top of his arm. “Come on, I’ll take you down there. Passports can wait until tomorrow. Today we add another first to your list. Buses, planes, cities, television, and beaches.”

The thing about Tanzania was that the beaches were beautiful. Blue sky, white sands, and aqua coloured water. Damu looked stunning against the Indian Ocean, but his smile… his smile was something special. There were people who stared at him, though it was something we were used to now. It wasn’t every day you saw a Maasai man at the beach, or down the street for that matter.

We’d left our shoes in the hotel room, and the sand was warm between our toes and the water was cool. As the tide rushed in to wash over our feet, Damu put his good hand on my arm and laughed. And even though not getting Damu a passport weighed on my mind, for the rest of the afternoon, at least, we didn’t have a care in the world.

* * * *

The next morning, right after our breakfast of porridge with brown sugar, we went shopping. I needed better clothes for where I was going today, and the tourist-style Ngorongoro National Park outfit just wasn’t going to cut it. I mean, Jesus. If my old friends back home could see me now… The fashion conscious, coffee-sipping socialite they knew was a distant memory.

The man they once knew, before Jarrod’s death, no longer existed. Hell, even the shell of a man they knew before I left for Tanzania was long gone.

I was so different now. Jarrod’s death had changed my life completely, in ways I couldn’t have imagined. If someone had told me three years ago that Jarrod would be gone and I’d be in East Africa trying to save the life of a man who had saved mine, I’d think that person was insane.

Yet, here I was, walking into a clothes store in Tanzania, looking for a suitable outfit to wear to get an appointment with the Australian Consulate.

I picked a shirt off the rack, when it occurred to me that I’d thought of Jarrod and how he’d died, and although my heart ached with the loss of him, it didn’t wreck me like it once did.

“Heath Crowley,” Damu whispered beside me. “Are you sad?”

God, I loved his perceptiveness and his gentle way with words. I looked up at him and smiled. “I’m fine.” I held the shirt against my chest. “What about this one?”

It was just a simple blue button down shirt, and I highly doubted Damu cared either way. To him, clothes were not important. “Yes,” he agreed.

So, some tan dress pants and a blue shirt, and a pair of brown dress shoes later, which the woman behind the counter charged me an obscene amount of money for, we found a supermarket and grabbed some fresh fruit, rice crackers, and bottled water. It really was remarkable how my entire diet had changed along with my life. Gone were the superfluous food and material things, and in its place were the bare essentials. It was eye-opening what was truly important when the bullshit was stripped away.

It was liberating and gave me a clear perspective of what I needed to do.

I had to get Damu out of the country.

When we’d gone back to our hotel room, I changed into my new clothes, shaved, and did my hair. I walked out and held my arms out, giving Damu a full view. “How do I look?”

He was sitting on the bed and looked me over from head to foot and frowned. “Not like my Heath Crowley.”

I laughed and leaned down to kiss him.
His Heath Crowley
. It gave me a thrill to hear that. “Well, it’s not for long. I need to make a good impression and to meet them on their terms.” The truth was, I felt constricted and stuffy. “So I can get
my
Damu to Australia.”

He grinned, but then it slowly faded. He stood up and looked down at his shuka. “What of my clothes?”

I leaned up on my toes and kissed him. “Perfect. Don’t you change a thing.”

The truth was, I wanted them to see him in his traditional Maasai clothes. I wanted them to see that this was not a normal case. “Come on then, let’s get this over with.”

The Australian Consul in Tanzania wasn’t what I expected. It looked like a house with a security gate. We literally just walked straight in. A young man behind a glass office wall came out to greet us. “Can I help you?” It was the first Australian accent I’d heard in a long time. A lump formed in my throat.

“Yes. I’m an Australian citizen,” I said. “I need to speak to someone about getting an extraordinary circumstance passport for my friend here.” I motioned toward Damu.

The guy, no older than me, blinked and frowned. It was clearly not a standard request. “If you can take a seat here.” He waved his hand at the three chairs to our left. “And I’ll see if someone can help you.”

So we waited. And we waited.

People were busy, walking from office to office with files in their hands. Other people came in and were seen to―they’d made appointments, and we hadn’t―so I didn’t begrudge them that. But after two hours and just when I got up to ask someone if there were bathrooms we could use, a woman came down the hallway.

She was possibly fifty, with blonde-grey shoulder length hair. She reminded me oddly of Hillary Clinton. She smiled right at me. “Sorry to keep you. There’s more paperwork than hours in the day,” she said. “My name is Susan. Please, come this way.”

Susan led us down the hall she’d come from, and I had hope, maybe foolishly, that this would be easier than I’d been dreading. I smiled at Damu as we sat in the two chairs across the desk from her.

“So tell me, what can the Australian consulate do for you?”

Right. Here went nothing. And everything.

“My name is Heath Crowley. I’m from Sydney. I’ve spent the last year living in a remote manyatta with the Maasai.”

She blinked. “Is there someone back home I can contact for you?”

I shook my head. “No.” I focused on Damu and smiled at him. “This is Damu Nkorisa. We’d like him to come back to Australia with me.”

“Okay,” Susan said slowly. “How does that involve the Consulate? That is an issue of the Republic of Tanzania.”

“He has no passport,” I explained. “In fact, he has no form of identification, at all.”

“Oh.”

“The Maasai don’t register births or deaths. There are no such things as birth certificates and certainly no photo ID.” I smiled at Damu. “In fact, Damu had never left his village until two days ago.”

Susan nodded slowly, looking between us, then tilted her head. She had the diplomatic smile down pat. “I’m still not sure if this is a matter for this office.”

“He can’t stay here,” I said, getting to the point. “I fear for his life if he does.”

Now she frowned and shifted in her seat. “Should this be a matter for the police?”

“No. We’ve done nothing wrong, we just want to leave. I have a current passport, Damu needs one. He needs a visa or something. Isn’t there an extenuating circumstances under the Australian Government’s refugee status? Or mitigating circumstances?” I couldn’t remember what it was called. “There has to be something that can make this happen.”

This had her attention. “Possibly. Though he―”

“Damu,” I corrected her. “His name is Damu.”

She smiled at Damu. “Sorry. You will still need a Tanzanian passport, and I can’t help with that.” Her eyebrows knitted together and she took a deep breath. “What is the real reason he must leave?”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “He was in danger amongst his people. They were beating him. I have no doubt if we hadn’t left, they would have killed him. He’s been displaced, his life threatened because of his sexual orientation.”

She pursed her lips and spoke carefully. “Don’t tell anyone that. Not here.”

“This is Australian soil, yes?”

“Yes,” she answered. “But out there, with the Republic of Tanzania deciding if Damu can leave or not, they will not take kindly to this news.”

“That’s
why
we have to leave.”

“I can’t get a passport for him. It’s not within my power.”

“Isn’t there a refugee travel clause or something? If he stays here, he will die.”

“I can’t get him a passport,” she repeated.

I was so frustrated and angry, it brought tears to my eyes. “I won’t leave without him. I can’t. I’ve lost one partner to a hate crime, had him ripped from my life too soon, and I refuse to lose another. He was cheated out of his life because of fear and hatred, and I can’t…” My voice croaked and tears welled in my eyes.

Damu was obviously confused by everything we’d talked about, but his worry for me was evident on his face.

Susan took a notepad and started to scribble something down. I assumed we’d been dismissed, like our lives weren’t worth her time.

I wanted to rage at this woman. I wanted to reach across the table and shake her. How dare she decide Damu’s life wasn’t worth anything! But I knew landing myself in a Tanzanian jail wouldn’t help Damu’s cause. I stood up and looked to Damu. “Let’s go.”

She put her pen down. “Mr Crowley, I said
I
can’t get him a passport…” She slid the piece of paper across her desk and she whispered. “But I know someone who can.”

I picked up the post-it note and read the name and address. When my eyes found hers, she added, “Speak only to him. You’ll need to pay, and it won’t be cheap.”

The tears that had been threatening, finally spilled down my cheeks. “Thank you.”

Susan looked at the slip of paper in my hand. “You didn’t get that from me.”

“No, of course not.”

I turned to walk away, and she said, “Mr Crowley, Mr Nkorisa?” Damu and I both stopped and waited. She gave us a small but warm smile. “Good luck.”

* * * *

We hailed a taxi and I gave the man the address Susan had given me. The trip took no more than ten minutes, and when the driver stopped the car, he put his hand out. “Fifty dollar.”

I stared at the meter. “The meter says ten.” I’d quickly learned most places here worked with Tanzanian Shillings and the equivalent in US dollars, so that was fine. But this was blatant robbery.

He turned the meter off and tapped the top of it. “Broken.”

First the clothes were overpriced, now this. Needing to keep my cool but not giving in completely, I threw the equivalent of about thirty dollars at him. “That’s all I have,” I said, and nodded for Damu to get out of the car.