Playing a Dangerous Game

by Patrick Ochieng

  CHAPTER SIX

  ***

  MAMA NEVER STOPS reminding Baba to find a house on the hill. She has some of our things packed in cartons, but now that it is taking longer than expected she unpacks them. She never stops talking about having a house with a compound and her own vegetable patch.

  “I don’t know where this country is headed,” Baba says. He is sitting in his favorite green chair next to the Grundig record player. He grabs a newspaper from the table, snaps it open, and buries his head behind it. “Those crooks at headquarters want a bribe before they give us a house up the hill? There is no way I’m going to give anyone even a cent. It’s my right to be given one of those houses,” he says from behind his newspaper.

  “Why not give them what they want? Everyone is doing it,” Mama says.

  “That’s corruption and I’ll not be part of it,” Baba’s head momentarily peeps out from behind his paper.

  “Remember the man who used to be in Block 5, the one with the two huge dogs that used to bark endlessly? The one who worked with you at the yard and got promoted long after you?”

  Baba’s head peeps out a second time.

  “He already has a house at the top of the hill. His wife sits with me in the Mothers’ Union committee. She told me they gave a little something to the housing people.”

  “I thought that was un-Christian,” he folds his paper on his lap. He has a sly twinkle in his eyes.

  “It’s what everyone is doing,” Mama says again.

  “They are no more than a bunch of hypocrites! But what do you expect? Lots of coffee would disappear while the man was on duty. His name was Mwenda, if I remember.” Baba’s paper goes up again and his head disappears behind it.

  At times I wonder if he really reads his paper or if he just shelters behind it.

  “WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE EAT in that posh school?” Odush asks one Friday after school.

  “There’s lots of stuff in the school shop,” I say.

  Odush raps his fingers against the Zephyr’s rusted hood. He loves doing that and it’s irritating. “I’m sure they don’t have chili-sprinkled mangoes, like what Mama Maembe sells at St. Josephs.”

  “It’s just a stupid kiosk,” I try hard to show it’s no big deal.

  “Since he moved to that school he thinks he is better than all of us,” Odush raises his nose up in the air.

  “And who has stopped you from joining? They would probably never let the likes of you past the gate,” I say, losing my patience and taking him by surprise. That shuts him up.

  I don’t mind my friends poking fun at me about Hill School. Sometimes I join in, because my heart is still at St. Josephs. What I can’t stand is Odush getting personal. It makes me feel like punching him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ***

  “TRUST AND OBEY

  For there is no other way

  To be happy . . .”

  Apondi has been singing the same verse forever. Her singing is at times drowned out by the clanking sound of pots and pans banging against the kitchen sink. It’s impossible to continue sleeping once Apondi begins washing and singing:

  “Now that you are dead, will you be carrying your beautiful new bride to the grave with you?” she sings, and I’m wondering how one can carry anything after they are dead, let alone a bride.

  It’s Sunday morning and it feels great, because for a whole week I’ve slept in my own bed, which is unusual.

  Most of the time Mama makes us give up our beds for relatives who just show up from shaggs lugging bags full of sweet potatoes and guavas, and babies tied to their backs. Some even come clutching live chickens under their arms as presents for Mama. Then Mama makes us give up our beds for the lumpy sofas in the living room.

  Sometimes their snorty-nosed children wet our beds and the smell stays forever.

  Some of them come for treatment in the big hospital named after the Father of the Nation. Mama makes Deno escort them there since they are too scared to cross the busy streets and he has to herd them like kids. Deno is always careful his friends do not see him.

  Others come job hunting or kupiga lami, which means “to hit the tarmac,” and they are the worst. They stay for weeks and head out every morning to the industrial area to look for work. At least that is what they say they do.

  “How can someone come from so far to look for work?” I ask.

  “They don’t come to look for work, those crooks,” Deno snorts.

  “So where do they go to so early in the morning?”

  “They go to Uhuru Park to sleep under trees until lunch time, when they hurry back to eat Mama’s ugali.”

  “Why would someone come all the way from shaggs just to sleep under a tree in Uhuru Park?”

  “You don’t know those guys. They love the city and being able to brag about the tall buildings and the cars that zoom by when they go back home.”

  When they stay too long, Mama convinces them to leave, with a promise Baba will holler out if there is a job opening. Mama has already left for church, like she does every Sunday. Baba too leaves early. His job at the railway yard is an essential service and so he works on weekends.

  Apondi never stops singing. She sings in the bathroom, in the kitchen, even when her mouth is full. If it is not a hymn, it’s a nursery rhyme or one of those songs they play on VOK Radio:

  “Nyakonyakonyako

  Nyakonyakokonya . . .” Apondi repeats the words over and over again.

  The song is by Congolese musicians, who dress in colorful bell-bottoms and put on so much makeup and perfume you can smell them from a mile away. They sing a blend of Lingala, Kiswahili, and sometimes even Luo.

  Apondi knows the words of every song by heart. She knows all the songs they play on the VOK radio station. She even sings the songs that blare out from the bar next to the slaughterhouse, where tipsy men lean on a wooden counter and tear at huge chunks of roasted meat, which they wash down with beer from brown bottles with an elephant on the label. At night you can hear them sing out in slurred tones. It’s like playing one of Baba’s single vinyl records at 33 rpm. Mama says such men will never catch even a glimpse of God’s heaven.

  I remember a song about God’s heaven . . .

  I’ve got a shoe

  You’ve got a shoe

  All God’s children got shoes

  When I go to heaven gonna put on my shoe

  Gonna walk all over God’s heaven . . .

  “APONDI, I’M STARVING. Can I have some tea?” I stand at the kitchen door and raise my voice above the din of her washing and singing.

  “Apondi . . . Apondi . . . all the time. You think I’m a machine? Someone could think the sun will never rise, unless you call Apondi’s name a hundred times.”

  She rolls her eyes and scowls.

  Me, I’m not going anywhere. My stomach is rumbling like one of those Safari Rally cars found its way into it. Apondi can bite off my head for all I care, but I’m not leaving without breakfast.

  “Apondi, could I . . .” I start again, but she doesn’t let me get past those three words.

  “I still have your dirty clothes to wash, yet here you are, pestering me about useless things like breakfast.”

  “But I’m hungry!”

  “So what if you are hungry? Some people didn’t even eat supper yesterday and they haven’t died.”

  “Please!”

  “Go fool someone else with those puppy-dog eyes. You are not getting anything from me and you can report me to your mother when she comes back. Then I can tell her what you and your stupid friends are up to.”

  I stretch out my arms to savor the heat from the charcoal jiko stove in the corner of the kitchen. It crackles and lets out tiny, glowing sparks that sting. I’m almost giving up when Apondi pours me a mug of tea and slaps two slices of bread on a saucer.

  “And when you are through, you can go and play that silly game of pata potea with your silly friends, near that old car behind the block. It’s where you idiots hatch al
l your naughty plans. As long as you hang around that old car, you will never make anything of your lives,” she swears. “One of these days I’ll talk to Mwachuma, ask him to cut that car into pieces and sell it as scrap metal in his yard,” she threatens. Mwachuma is the old one-eyed man who operates a scrapyard at the edge of the estate and has a black dog called Tarzan.

  Apondi speaks of the Zephyr like it’s an evil thing that must be stopped before it ruins us.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ***

  DADO AND MOSE ARE already seated on the Zephyr’s hood, behind the estate. The grass around the rusted car has browned from being starved of sunlight.

  Mose has his hands clenched into fists in front of him. “Pata, potea. Pata, potea,” he sticks out one clenched fist after another and gestures me with his eyes, so I can pick the fist that has the ten-cent coin he has wagered, but I’m not interested.

  Dado plays along and points out the wrong fist, losing his money with the bet.

  “Pata, potea,” Mose goes again, but Dado has had enough.

  From the corner of my eye I see Odush approaching. He traveled to shaggs with his parents for the first-term school holidays. There is still a whole week before school resumes.

  “When did you get back?” I ask, but Odush only clears his throat to catch the attention of the others.

  He undoes the buttons on his shorts and pulls out his thing, and his face lights up in a smile. He holds it gingerly in his hand.

  “It’s cut!” Mose says, and we all draw close, eyes riveted.

  Odush laughs all grown up–like. His laughter rolls inside his throat and bubbles out through his bared teeth. “It’s how you become a man,” he says.

  “Who cut it for you?” Mose demands.

  “Was it painful?” I ask.

  “You! I know you would poop in your pants,” he gestures in my direction and displays his big white teeth, like the Colgate toothpaste guy on the cover of Baba’s magazine.

  “Where is the piece they cut off?” Dado asks.

  Odush ignores him.

  “I saw my cousin Bura’s thing after it was cut and it didn’t look like yours.”

  Odush fixes Dado with an “if you don’t shut your big mouth, I’ll shut it for you” stare.

  “Show us the piece they cut off,” Dado persists.

  “How would I know what the old guy did with all the pieces? There were twenty or so of us circumcised. And who says they give it to you after the cut?”

  “Maybe he made samosas with it,” Dado sniggers.

  “One of these days I’ll bash your silly head in,” Odush says before slipping his thing back into his shorts.

  “My mum promised to take me to a doctor to get mine cut,” I lie.

  “It’s not the same thing. It must be done by the river with nothing for the pain. But now that your father is a manager you could have it done in the hospital with all the frilly stuff.”

  “Their people don’t even cut—they just pull out teeth,” Mose says.

  “My mum says it’s primitive to get cut with a rusty knife near a river like some people do. You could bleed to death, or get tetanus,” Dado says.

  “Tete . . . what?”

  “It’s what you get when you have a wound and you don’t go for a jab,” Dado says. His mother is a nurse at the railway dispensary so he knows such stuff.

  “What does your Muuum know about getting cut?” Odush glowers. “Women don’t get cut.”

  “Some women also get cut,” Dado says, and we all look at him funny.

  “What’s there to cut?” We laugh.

  “I don’t know, but I’ve heard that some women get cut.”

  “I’ll bet you screamed your head off when they did it,” I say, and Odush swivels like he is about to punch me.

  “I’m no crybaby like you. And why are you people still here in the estate when you should be in one of those huge houses, up the hill with those other snobs?” he says, and everyone laughs.

  “And what are you laughing at?” I turn on Mose.

  “But everyone laughed.”

  “It doesn’t give you the right to laugh. And it wasn’t me who decided to join that school. I don’t even like being there.”

  “Let’s go grab zambaraus from Desai Street,” Dado suggests.

  And we are off, past the abandoned mabati structure that once housed a barber shop.We zoom past the wall that stinks of pee, despite the sign that warns: NO URINATING ON THE WALL.

  Once we get past the railway crossing sign, with the word DANGER emblazoned in red, we race up to the rail overpass.

  Mose rushes up the steep stairs to the top of the overpass, then slides down its metal handrail and rushes up again. He does it over and over until we are on the other side. Then he sprints along Desai Street to catch up with us.

  Cute houses peep out from behind Kei apple hedges along Desai Street. A short Asian man with a blue turban opens one of the ocher-painted gates, peers in our direction, then retreats. He reappears with a tall African man in well-pressed khaki pants. They gesture at us with bunched fists.

  We don’t stop to find out their intentions.

  “Let’s go get zambaraus from the tree in the compound of the abandoned house,” Odush says.

  “You mean the ghost house?” Mose says.

  “I think that ghost stuff is just meant to scare people,” Dado says.

  “Are you saying the story of the white woman and her daughter dying in that house is fake? And what about the husband, who committed suicide after that? Is that also made up?” I ask.

  “They could have died in there but that doesn’t mean there are ghosts.”

  “What about the sounds people say they’ve heard coming from in there, and the lights they’ve seen going on and off at night? Apondi says she once heard the sound of something being dragged on the ground and that of a child crying—probably the ghost of the dead girl,” I say.

  “And what was Apondi doing on Desai Street at night?” Dado asks.

  “She was escorting one of her friends who had visited.”

  “I don’t see anything like ghosts in there,” Dado points at the deserted house, “only juicy zambaraus. I can already feel them in my mouth. Who is coming along?”

  I want to tell Dado and the others about Mama calling the house an evil place and how she seemed scared when we passed it, but I decide it’s not a good idea. I don’t want them thinking my mother is a coward.

  It’s zambarau season and there are lots of bunches of shiny purple fruit hanging from the huge tree in the compound of the ghost house. I love zambas and the way they stain my mouth and tongue deep violet. I can never get enough of them.

  We pause outside the closed wooden gate to the ghost house before crawling through an opening in the hedge.

  “Who’s climbing up?”

  Everyone looks in my direction.

  “Let’s toss for it,” I say, but no one is listening. They all know I’m the best climber.

  “Maybe now he is in that posh school, he’s forgotten how to climb trees,” Odush laughs.

  “Fine then! I’ll climb,” I say and sneak closer to the tree.

  I wrap my arms and legs around the zambarau tree’s rough, gray trunk. I haul myself up, inch by strenuous inch. My eyes never leave the door to the white house below. Scary thoughts of ghosts flap through my head. Any minute now they will burst out, soar up, and drag me into the decrepit house.

  Why did I even agree to the mad idea of climbing the tree? Odush and the others are safe on the ground and could race off, leaving me alone with the ghosts. I fight the urge to abandon my climb halfway, and then it is too late, because I’m already at the top.

  When no ghosts rush out of the deserted house, I work my way to the sides where most of the fruits dangle from the smaller branches. Soon, Mose and the others are howling for fruit.

  “To your left, a little higher to the left, get the juicy ones!” Mose shouts, and me, I’m as scared as hell. Surely, with so m
uch noise, whatever is in the house below will be alerted.

  When nothing happens, my confidence soars and I edge on higher, to where I know I shouldn’t. I reach out for a mouthwatering bunch and suddenly the branch snaps, and I’m hurtling down, with leaves and branches and all manner of things whizzing past, scratching my arms, slapping at my face.

  Something whacks my wrist hard, before I slam against the corrugated iron roof of the ghost house and onto the hard ground. I do not remember rising, or squeezing through the hole in the hedge, but now I’m on Desai Street running like demons are on my tail.

  Dado is with me, but I can’t see the others. I’m out of breath. My sides and my arm feel like someone has beaten me with a blackboard ruler.

  “Are you okay?” Dado asks.

  I nod.

  “We thought you were smashed to pieces,” Odush says when we catch up with him and Mose at the overpass.

  “I didn’t know you could fall from so high up and not . . .”

  “Aha! So you thought he was dead?” Dado presses. “Is that why you scampered off, like two scared rabbits? Or maybe you were scared of ghosts.”

  Mose looks down and sketches in the dust with his foot.

  Odush averts his eyes.

  “What if the ghost of the dead woman and her daughter got me?” I ask with a smile.

  “When you landed on the roof, I saw someone peer out from the window of the ghost house,” Odush says and we fall silent.

  “By God, I saw someone at the window,” he swears, and we exchange glances.

  I don’t say a thing but there is something bothering me too. From up in the zamba tree I saw some smoke waft out from the chimney of the ghost house. Why would smoke come out of a deserted house? I wonder. But my hand is aching so I don’t give it that much thought.

  “Awooooooo!” Dado presses his palm against his mouth and wails like he is a ghost, and then we are laughing and also screaming, “Awooooooo!”

  “Anyway, ghosts don’t scare me,” Odush says, and we aren’t surprised. The guy always finds his words only after the threat is gone.

  He spits on the ground and rubs the back of his hand against his mouth like the loaders at the railway.