My progress towards saving for the bike is accelerated when Uncle Glen comes to visit. He lives in Abidjan, which I know is the capital city of the Ivory Coast because Félix Houphouët-Boigny is the life president and happens to be one of Baba’s favourite dictators. Uncle Glen lives in the country Boigny rules. He works there in a fancy job at the African Development Bank and he is in Ottawa for a conference.
He comes over for dinner and as he greets us he gives us each fifty dollars. Fifty dollars. Queen Elizabeth stares at each of us serenely from the middle of each of the clean rose-coloured notes. The Canadian parliament, which I visited on a school trip, looms behind the Queen, ominous and even more regal than she is. I look over at Mandla and Zeng and see they are just as dumbfounded as me. Mummy has to remind us to say thank you and to close our mouths.
Normally, Mummy would refuse to accept the money, but Uncle Glen is her older brother so Baba will not complain that he might have An Agenda. Uncle Glen brings news of Swaziland, and Mummy is happy. The two of them sit on the couch like small owls remembering home. Their faces are puffed like feathers and their shoulders rise and their feet barely touch the ground and their voices are like hoots, low and pitched only at one another.
When the timer on the oven goes off, we move to the table. Mummy and I bring plates from the kitchen, and Uncle Glen keeps up a steady stream of chatter. He tells her about the latest escapades by the young nieces and nephews whose schooling they are both supporting. He tells her about deaths and car accidents and mysterious illnesses and they both shake their heads at a new disease that seems to be targeting young people. ‘It turns them into skeletons and they die quickly,’ he tells her and she only shakes her head and wonders what it could be.
Uncle Glen turns to us as he dishes up his lasagne. He asks us about school and what we want to be when we grow up and, as we answer, our eyes linger on him for longer than they should. We are inspecting him, taking in the details of his face and the set of his shoulders and the sound of his voice. When he turns to Mummy and they begin their chatter again, we continue to steal looks at him, peeking at him furtively.
He notices and asks, ‘So what is it about your uncle that is so interesting to you girls?’
We are surprised that he has noticed. We giggle in embarrassment. Mummy casts an amused eye over her children and asks – ‘Zeng?’ – because she knows her baby will tell some charming version of the truth.
Singled out and in the limelight, Zeng looks at Uncle Glen and shrieks, ‘You look like Mummy!’
There is such amazement and delight in her voice that we all burst out laughing. Rewarded by our response, she continues, ‘You do! I didn’t know that adults had brothers and sisters.’
‘Don’t you remember Aunt Thandi and Aunt Zanele?’ asks Mummy.
Mandla and Zeng shake their heads but I nod and say, ‘I do!’
Mummy folds up her sadness and tucks her loneliness under her plate. Then she smiles. ‘Well, we better get out the albums, then.’
We spend the evening flipping through satin-covered photo albums and Mummy and Uncle Glen roar with laughter until, as I have seen so many times, Mummy’s face is wet with tears. She laughs so much that it makes us laugh too even though they are speaking in siSwati that is far too fast and complicated for us to understand. It rushes over us, a stream of Ts and Ds and soft Ls.
We stay up later than normal, but eventually it is time to sleep. We say good night and Uncle Glen gives us three tight squeezes and each of us wish that he could stay or that we could go or that he could transport the stories and the laughter here but we have no words for this feeling; it is just warm and a little bit sad and when I am grown I will know that the word for this feeling is nostalgia.
A week after he leaves, I deposit Uncle Glen’s money. At the bank, Mummy gives me the last thirty dollars I need and adds forty extra so that there is something left in my account after I have withdrawn the amount to pay for the bike.
The next weekend we go to the bike shop. Mummy is smiling a lot and she mentions more than once to the salesman that she wants to make sure that this is a good bike because I saved up for it myself. I am embarrassed. Her accent is too thick and she thinks he will care about some kid and her savings plan. I am wrong. The man warms to Mummy and he is impressed. He says he has been trying to teach his kids about saving but they won’t listen. He gives me a free pump and three extra months on the warranty.
I ride my bike to school the next morning, hunched over like a professional. I move faster than I ever have before with the wind on my face and the morning sun on my shoulders. I wait at the busy corner for Mandla and Zeng to catch up, then I speed off and wait again at the stop sign. When they get to me I tell them to hurry up and I’m off again.
At school I act like it’s no big deal. I add my bike to the rack alongside the others, and fiddle with the lock. Everyone notices, though, just as I have been hoping they will. Belonging thrums in my veins.
In October it snows and we pack our bikes away. The cold months have barely begun but I am eager for winter to end. ‘It’s okay,’ I tell myself. ‘In the spring I will ride further and faster than anyone. I might even make it to the Rideau Canal.’
* * *
Spring never arrives. In November, Baba returns from one of his trips. Whenever he comes back his presence irritates me as much as his absence saddens me when he is gone. I understand that he has to travel but the stints are long: five months then three then six. When Baba is away we develop a rhythm and when he comes back we have to readjust and we all act odd.
When it is homework time in the days after he returns he always wants to help us. Mandla is perfect at everything so they don’t fight. She is good at maths and just as good at English and she gets everything right in science.
Zeng just smiles her way out of everything and he forgets to ask her if she needs to practise reading. She is too busy telling him stories about her day and making him laugh.
He tries to help me with my maths but I don’t want his help. I want to show him my essays instead because they are good and he is always proud when he reads my stories. Maths is always a fight. ‘Can’t you see?’ he always says, even when it is clear that I can’t see. ‘You just carry the eight and round up.’ Numbers swim in front of my eyes and confuse me. Words are different. They fall into place neatly, ideas stacked like LEGO pieces. I know how to arrange them.
Mummy is happy, though. She smiles when she comes home and finds our heads bowed and his bending in close to ours. Then, when we ask her permission for something because we are used to not having him around, she says, ‘Ask your father,’ as if she doesn’t know what to do. We are out of sync and it’s not as easy as just being happy that he is home.
Within a few days of his arrival, they make the announcement: we are moving back to Nairobi. They don’t tell us that we should start preparing mentally, the way Canadian parents would. They just say it, the way you might say, ‘Oh, I’m going to get an ice cream – I’ll be back in ten minutes.’
Mandla and Zeng are happy. ‘Yay!’ As if they are proposing some little adventure. Clueless.
Mummy can see that I am upset so after the announcement she tells the girls to go upstairs and asks me to stay. Mandla and Zeng are a pair, their names always said in a breath and a sentence. I am not jealous. They are younger than me and don’t remember as much as I do and I don’t need them the way they need each other.
We listen to them brushing their teeth and then Mummy begins. She explains to me that this is an excellent opportunity for Baba and the timing works very well. She says that we will get our citizenship in December, which is great because that is a big achievement for us but Baba’s work wants him to start in Nairobi in January so we will be in Kenya in time to celebrate Christmas with the Sangwenis. Baba is quiet. He looks impatient, as though he doesn’t understand why Mummy is speaking to me as though I am owed some sort of explanation. He only got back a few days ago and he has not yet adjusted to the
fact that I am growing up and that none of us stands still when he is gone.
I am devastated. It’s bad enough that we are leaving, but so soon?
I don’t say much; I just look down and fight back the tears and then ask if I can go upstairs now. I would prefer to storm upstairs and scream ‘I hate you!’ like they do on TV but I can’t. Instead I leave the living room quietly, barely saying good night so that they know how unhappy I am. I sit in my room, staring at my Corey Hart poster and looking at my signed Richard Marx album, and I’m too sad to even cry.
I look at my homework desk and at the neatly stacked books and at my backpack sitting on the chair and my eye wanders to my side table, surveying all the things I own, which I will soon have to pack up. Then I see the bike receipt.
The thought of the bike breaks the dam and I cry and cry the way I wish I had cried downstairs so that they would know that this hurts and I am tired of always being the one who has just arrived, tired of leaving just when I am starting to feel like I finally belong.
* * *
The airport smells like sweat and striving and is busy but still has the air of something that is fading and becoming obsolete. I am angry, but as we head into the city past the huge faux elephant tusks that stand like sentries on either side of the road leaving the airport, the rage lessens. The familiarity of the sun and the morning heat and the jangle of traffic and seeing faces that are as brown as mine everywhere make me feel like I belong here in a way that was impossible in Canada.
When our shipment arrives six weeks later I am interested in only one thing. I see it standing in the driveway of our house, gleaming in the sun, and it reminds me of Canada. The bike assumes new importance in Nairobi because it looks as though it comes from overseas, from a place where factories soundlessly churn out spokes and chains and bells that are assembled in wordless concentration by lumbering, well-fed men in light-blue overalls.
I ignore the fact that it is hard to navigate the potholed road in front of our house. I pretend not to notice the way Mummy purses her lips smugly when she tells me to stay away from the main road because I will get killed if a matatu decides to ram into me and my posh bike. I don’t care. Instead, I insist on riding it around the bumpy streets of our neighbourhood. Even after my third puncture I persist because the bike has become my personal rebellion, a totem I refuse to stop worshipping even if we are in Loresho which is in Nairobi which is thirteen thousand kilometres away from Hunt Club which is in Ottawa which was never home even when I was desperate for it to be.
Loresho Crescent is a beautiful but simple street where Bougainvillea tumbles across hedges and creeps along archways atop wrought-iron gates. Long, wide bungalows peer out at the road from behind fat verandas cluttered with chairs and hammocks and an assorted bricolage of easy and good living. In front of each house there is an askari’s box. It is tiny and silly: a wooden structure just large enough for a watchman to sit or stand in. In contrast to the well-thought-out and rambling homes, in which size seems not to be a consideration, the askaris’ boxes are a crude vestige of the past. Yet they don’t stand empty. Each of them has a man sitting in it, or pacing around it. At night all the askaris retreat into their guard-boxes to keep warm. The askari set-up does not shock me. It is one of the many facts of life that should be alarming but require no comment and so I see it but I don’t.
Because we have just secured our Canadian citizenship, we are in Kenya as expatriates. Baba is a big boss, the country director for a large international humanitarian agency. He helps people to make it out of poverty and one of the perks is that we attend the most expensive school in the country and live a carefree life as if the misery he seeks to eradicate each day does not exist.
On Saturdays we go to Silver Springs Hotel, where Mummy goes to the sauna and we splash around in the pool with the children of Kenyan professors and bankers and managing directors and on Sundays the South African students and the people from The Movement come over for lunch. Baba travels but for shorter stints than he did when we were in Ottawa and Mummy is more relaxed and we have a maid called Edith who helps with the housework and there is a driver so that Mummy does the coordinating, but not all the doing, and suddenly life is crowded again and it is no longer just the five of us. Here with our busy lives and our social status no one will call us monkeys or come snooping in our house looking for evidence that we don’t belong.
At school, I make friends quickly and easily. The knot in my tummy eases and I swallow my fears. Soon, it is as if I have always been here and Canada was a nice dream that gave me a passport and an accent and a place to go every summer holiday.
* * *
My best friend in Nairobi is Patience the Zimbabwean ambassador’s daughter. She lives in a hollow soulless mansion with a sweeping staircase just ten minutes away from my house. Patience is boy-crazy and this irritates Mummy so Patience and I hardly ever hang out at our house. Mummy doesn’t say anything specific – she just finds a way of making her disdain known.
This particular Sunday we agree to meet halfway and hang out at her house. I walk my bike up Loresho Crescent and take a shortcut across the big field on the other side of Loresho Avenue. I use the small dirt path that bisects the unused land. Most of the domestic workers who would ordinarily be around are at church or visiting their families in the bursting slums, so it is quiet. Even the kiosks are hardly selling.
I do not know it, but I am a prime target. I am a slow-moving shiny rich girl on a shiny bike, virtually alone in the middle of an urban field. I am blissfully unaware that anyone is watching me as I gleam down a brown path. There I am, bumping lazily along the path, looking at my feet, at the tracks in the mud, at the dryness of the maize, wondering why I didn’t carry a few shillings so that I could buy some roast mahindi when suddenly I am being pulled and then pushed and there is blood on my ankle and the bike is being yanked from right under me where I am lying all of a sudden on the muddy path.
The person who yanked me is moving too, so fast that at first he is just a blur. He is single-minded and his feet are whirring around the pedals and his tiny buttocks are working hard to get away and then he is gone, leaving me lying there, gleaming alone in the mud on the path.
‘My bike. My precious Canadian bike!’ I think this or something like it and I start to cry and shout at the same time because I saved up for it and it is mine and no one can just steal it like that. Then my fight instinct kicks in – late but potent – and the Swahili word for ‘thief’ pops into my head and I yell it as loud as I can.
‘Mwizi! Mwizi! Mwizi!’
An old woman in front of me, who is ragged and colourless and who just moments before had looked as though she had no will to live, jolts into an upright position – her walking stick forgotten momentarily in the face of danger, excitement and the possibility of vengeance. She adds her voice to mine, and it comes out in a remarkably sturdy and rich baritone. Our cries carry across the field and together we wail, ‘Mwizi! Mwizi!’
People heed the call. All sorts of people emerge. They come from the edges of the field and from the area I have just passed, running from the kiosks at the main road towards me to hear what has happened and to assist in capturing the culprit. A thief is on the prowl and no one will rest until he has been apprehended.
We point in the direction he went and soon there is a chase. The rogue hits the tar road on my shiny bike and I lose sight of them as they go over the hill. Since he is on wheels and those chasing him are on foot, I give up hope and begin to sniff and cry in shock and self-pity. The old lady looks at me pitifully. ‘Pole,’ she says.
‘Aya, asante mama,’ I thank her, smiling through tears of foolishness and humiliation.
I am angry. Wasps surge at my temples and swarm my chest. Does he have any idea that that bike cannot be replaced? The little vermin doesn’t know how hard I worked. He hasn’t a clue of its value. He will not know how to take care of it, or ride it carefully. It will end up on some scrapheap somewhere, sold for a p
ittance. I am livid. Outraged. I am apoplectic.
I crest the hill, fuming – and there he is! My assailant has been caught. The little cockroach has been caught. He is squirming but he is firmly in the grip of an angry Good Samaritan and a small crowd throngs around him. They have mobilised in my defence. The Good Samaritan had been driving when he saw the Thief cycling away with a growing crowd billowing out behind him. If the boy had made it to another nearby shortcut he would have got away but the Good Samaritan had given chase in his new pickup truck and had railroaded the little crook into the side of the road.
Now here he stands being manhandled before my very eyes. The crowd is intent on teaching him a lesson. As I approach, the Good Samaritan tightens his hold on the Thief. I stand just inside the circle and he greets me. ‘Hello Young Madam,’ he says. ‘Is this your bicycle?’
Yes, I nod. ‘Yes, it is.’
The Samaritan has the meaty face of prosperity and a paunch to match.
‘And was it he who stole it just now?’ He asks me this authoritatively and I nod and say yes again. The boy is very small. His shoulder blades are wings and he has a long sensitive face, with large eyes and a twitchy nose; he is less a cockroach than he is a mosquito.
The Good Samaritan has the air of a self-appointed prosecutor and judge. He is well rehearsed in thundering accusation and solemn deliberation, so he comfortably wears both hats. Meanwhile, the crowd stands like a chorus in a Greek tragedy, seeing no conflict in serving as both witness to a crime and a jury of my peers.
‘So, you stole this bike from this young girl. Did you not?’ the Good Samaritan bellows, partly to scare the boy but mainly to amp up the crowd. He is so large and the Thief is so small that, at a purely physical level, it seems unfair that they be pitted against each other.
Always Another Country Page 10