Show Me The Sky

by Nicholas Hogg

  The Reverend McCreedy Orphanage was relocated from the old church to the outskirts of Mombasa in the 1960s. A brass plaque has survived the moving, inscribed: Reading, Writing, Love and Care, since 1841.

  Miss Oburu, a large, beaming woman, with a gaggle of children swinging from the hem of her dress like satellites, welcomes me through the gates. We walk across a football pitch without a blade of grass, the children running up to shake my hand giggle and say, ‘How do you do?’ Open doorways on to silent classrooms show students bent at their desks, copying sums from a blackboard. Chickens and goats scatter as we turn into the playground. Children too young for schooling follow Miss Oburu into her office like the Pied Piper. I take off my hat, slip my hand into my top pocket and switch on the Dictaphone.

  ‘Sorry it is a little untidy.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Children. I have business. Out.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Out I said!’

  ‘Bye bye.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Away from the window! Have you collected the eggs yet?’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘Well, go now. They’ll be cooked before dinner if you leave them in the sun. Very sorry, Mr … ?’

  ‘Nash. Charles Nash. Thanks for seeing me.’

  ‘Away from the window, George! I told you! Sorry, Mr Nash, I’m a very busy mother with two hundred children.’

  ‘Two hundred! That’s quite a handful.’

  ‘In fact, can you shut the door?

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Otherwise the children will just stand and stare, probably interrupt me to practise their English with you.’

  ‘I imagine the Reverend McCreedy would be very happy to know his legacy has lasted over, what, 160 years?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. Well if the reverend is upstairs watching over us, I hope he puts in a good word for me to the Lord. I need a peaceful spot in heaven after taking care of a family this size. But anyway, don’t get me started, Mr Nash, I’m sure you’ve not come all the way to Kenya to hear about my troubles, not that they are worth much next to the trials of these dear children. How can I help you? You said something on the phone about your nephew? I can’t say we’ve ever had an English boy at the orphanage. Why are you asking here?’

  ‘He’s twenty-three, so I guess he’d stand out from the other kids. No, he had an argument with his father, a fight.’

  ‘And came here?’

  ‘Well, to Mombasa. The last thing he said to his father was that he had no family, and that maybe he belonged in an orphanage.’

  ‘I think he’s a little old.’

  ‘No, to work as volunteer. Have you had any enquiring recently? I saw on the website you have university students placed here.’

  ‘This is basically a big house, with a big family and many mouths to feed. I have as many volunteers as possible. Nobody is paid a wage. And visitors, whoever and whenever, so when they leave they drop some coins in the collection box.’

  ‘Any foreign volunteers this week?’

  ‘Let me think a moment … Until Tuesday we had three doctors from Sweden, testing the children. But they’ve gone now. Of course, yesterday a busload of Seventh Day Adventists from Canada came with schoolbooks and bibles – we have to sell them on we have so many. And that is all, I think.’

  ‘No young Englishman?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’

  ‘Are you sure? Even just a phone call? An email?’

  ‘No, what am I talking about! I’d forget my head if it wasn’t screwed on! Last Friday a young journalist from England visited.’

  ‘Early twenties?’

  ‘And quite a slight young man.’

  ‘Did he look anything like this?’

  ‘Let me see. Now where are my glasses?’

  ‘On your head.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. And this is your nephew?’

  ‘Peter.’

  ‘Peter, you say, well now he does look very similar to the journalist, but …’

  ‘He may have a beard now, or be thinner.’

  ‘But I don’t think so. You would almost think them brothers, but no. These are two different people. And now I remember, his name was Dominic, yes. I have his card somewhere, here, in this drawer, I think. Yes, there you are. Dominic Toon.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Said he was writing a story on Mombasa street children. He wanted to know about the orphanage, how the children come from the pavement to our family. He also asked lots of questions about the history of the place, about Reverend McCreedy. He even asked, which I thought was quite shocking, if I’d heard any rumours that the reverend was not a properly ordained member of the church. Strange question, don’t you think? But apart from that he was pleasant enough.’

  ‘And you’re sure it wasn’t Peter?’

  ‘Can I see the picture one more time?’

  ‘Here. It was taken a year ago. He will have changed a little.’

  ‘Very similar, but … I don’t think they’re the same person. Though you do have me thinking I could be wrong now.’

  ‘Any information where the reporter is—’

  ‘Miss! Miss Oburu!’

  ‘What do you want, child? I’m busy with a visitor.’

  ‘There’s a lady at the gate. Looking for her son and daughter.’

  ‘Sorry, Mr Nash, excuse me a moment. Come in, child. Did you ask her name?’

  ‘She says her name is Njenga.’

  ‘Njenga, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh Lord, Lord. We have storm clouds, sunshine, then again the storm clouds. Sorry, Mr Nash, I have something to attend to. Some bad news.’

  ‘Her children?’

  ‘We don’t have them. Well, we did until a week ago. They ran away. You’ll have to excuse me.’

  ‘Sorry, could I just ask if you know where Mr Toon stayed? Which hotel? Where he was heading?’

  ‘No idea, I’m sorry. I really must speak with this lady. I have to go now, Mr Nash. This is what I do. Oh Lord, what do I say to this mother? Usually I say we can’t change the children’s past, but we can change their present. And of course their future.’

  I palm money to hotel staff, pay for false information. According to receptionists at both the Mombasa Lodge and the Harbour View, Dominic Toon was in two places at the same time.

  My taxi driver can see I’m losing the plot and offers a joint. I decline. He lights it anyway, one hand on the wheel, the other used to either smoke or hit the horn. When he finishes he flicks the stub into the gutter, turns and asks, ‘This man you’re looking for, he is single, yes?’ I say I think so. ‘And also young?’ I nod. ‘Unless he a saint, then I know where he go.’

  The sodium tubes of the bar illuminate the surrounding tenements, crumbling apartment blocks and roofs of corrugated tin, bones of dogs urinating against the wheels of waiting taxis. Above the dirty street a neon sign glows ‘Paradise’. I pay the driver, take a breath, and enter. Cigarettes and beer. That tang of alcohol and perfume swirling the air. Before I reach the bar a girl has linked her arm around mine. I say no thank you twice before she lets go. I order an iced tea and show a barman the picture of Billy K downloaded from the web. I chose a shot where he looks more boy next door than global rock god. But the barman shrugs his shoulders. I push a $10 bill over the counter. He puts the note in his pocket, picks up the picture and says no. I order another iced tea and sip through a straw. I watch mosquitoes zapped in the UV trap, pool players in high heels and jangling earrings firing balls into the pockets.

  After the second iced tea I order a whiskey and coke. And I tell you now it feels good. New blood in my veins. Then I have another, a double. I swivel the stool and study the rest of the bar, mostly American and European businessmen, a few tourists who have wandered from their safari. The local girls slink the dance floor, a feline knowledge for those men wantin
g a rented woman in a rented room. When they sit on the stool next to mine and lean over for me to light their cigarettes, I show them the picture and ask if they have met a Peter Cornell. Or a Dominic Toon. They shake their heads and rest their palms on my thigh. I lift them off and say more no thank yous. But I sit at the bar and allow myself to be pitched sex by the prostitutes because it saves me walking the dance floor and flashing the photo.

  One woman, early forties, shaved head and violet lipstick, watches the younger women come and go, then saunters over. Her tease is ordering a bottle of beer and biting the top off with her gold teeth. Then she puts the bottle between her drooping breasts, squashes them together and offers me a sip. I say no and again show the picture. She snatches the beer from her bosom and takes a quick gulp. ‘An English boy?’ she shouts above the shuddering sound system. ‘Maybe a week ago.’ She looks at Billy K more closely. ‘Yes. He was here.’

  I ask her who with and she rubs her thumb and forefingers together. I put $20 in her hand.

  ‘One of the younger girls. But I don’t think she here tonight.’

  ‘Where could I find her?’ I enquire, peeling off another $20 note.

  ‘You know Kenyan girl very beautiful. Well, sometime the man fall in love, take his woman on holiday. Maybe go to the beach, maybe come back in a week, a month. Sometimes never.’

  I ask her name.

  ‘I forgot,’ she says. I put another $20 in her open palm. ‘Kemi.’

  Then I drink some more. I ask the barman about Kemi and for $10 he confirms she’s not here. No other women come over to ply their wares, and I actually feel rejected. Alone. At closing time I approach a woman with braids that hang to the small of her back. I pay her to take me to a hotel. I pay her to take me to a hotel because I’m too drunk to see the exit sign. Or hail a taxi. I have no confession to make here. The $50 I give her is to put me into bed and leave.

  The problem with drinking is not being drunk. It’s being hungover. Paranoid. Waking in the weight of morning with an eggshell chest. For a while I sit on the edge of the bed and look at my hands. It takes some time to remember what country I’m in, and why. Then I go downstairs for breakfast. When the waiter says cooked or continental I turn and walk out on to the street. Rather the company of beggars and touts selling bogus safaris than restaurant clatter, or the four walls of my room closing in.

  I let myself be hassled and snagged by the street kids, give them all the coins in my pocket, then tuck my wallet into my underwear. I wonder what parent would desert their child, have them tramp the streets hungry with outstretched hands. Then I see a dog watching me from a second floor window, and I know.

  I walk on. Men ask to ‘change money, change money’. Buses pump out diesel fumes and African dance music so loud the speakers distort. I’m pushed along the road like a branch in a river, happy to have no thought where I should put the next step. I run aground in a market place, stalls of fruit and fish, butchers with pigs and cows strung up on steel hooks. I buy two bottles of coke from a kiosk and gulp them down without taking a breath.

  Then I see him.

  I see him buying a bunch of bananas from a fruit stall. He has a wispy beard. He wears a blue baseball cap. My stomach turns, like I’ve just leaped from a plane without a parachute. Can it really be this easy? I shadow him between tables of watermelon and guava. He turns and glances back, but pays no mind to another foreigner haggling for fruit.

  Then while I’m paying for a bag of oranges he slips down a side street. I give the stallholder $5 and say keep the change. And the oranges.

  Away from the market the narrow lanes are very quiet. Old men sit on doorsteps and smoke or drink tea from tiny glasses. A woman beats the dust from her rug with a rolling pin. Always a stray dog. I keep the blue cap in sight until a maze of alleyways comes out at a junction. Right or left? A boy, three or four years old, wearing a T-shirt but no pants, sees me. I ask, ‘Which way?’ The words mean nothing but he knows what I want. He points right and I whip out a $10 note and put it in his hand. He has no idea what it is. Then I run. When blue cap sees me, he runs too. We sprint the cramped streets. He cuts across backyards and flaps through a washing line hung with sheets. I can taste whiskey in my sweat. I belch acid. I chase and guess at about a minute of exertion before I’ll collapse.

  So I run harder. I catch up with him in the car park of a derelict factory. Pigeons flutter through the broken windows. Bits of glass everywhere. He’s scaling a fence. I shout, ‘Stay right fucking there,’ and the rotten wood splits apart. He falls backwards to the dirt, but bounces quickly to his feet. He stands before me with a length of splintered timber.

  When he says, ‘Back off, motherfucker,’ in an American accent I realise I have the wrong man. Whoever this toe-rag is he’s not mine. And I’m ready to be the diplomat, explain the mistaken identity and walk away. But he swings at my stomach. I curl my body up and back like a cat. He swings again as I sway, swishing the air between us. When he jabs at my chest I parry the fence post with my forearm and clutch his wrist. I pull him close as a lover and butt him across the cheekbone. He goes down. I keep hold of his wrist and break it as he falls. It makes a sound like snapped cane. Only then does he drop the fence post.

  ‘Mvembo’s gonna fuck you up,’ he snarls.

  I say nothing. I twist his wrist at the break.

  He gargles another, ‘Fuck you.’ He goes on that if I have a problem with a woman, it’s not his. ‘I keep my girls on a close rein,’ he says. ‘You think the five-star hotels let the gutter rats past the door?’

  And when he tells me he has friends in the police, I’m particularly offended. So I stand on his neck, my foot neatly across his windpipe. ‘You aren’t him,’ I say. ‘If I want to beat up pimps, I can do that in London. I’m very sorry I’ve made a mistake.’ Then I let him go.

  He chokes a breath. He says, ‘My fucking wrist,’ and: ‘Damn right you made a mistake.’ He fumbles in his pocket. He drops a knife on the ground, and just before he clutches the hilt I kick him in the stomach. Twice. I leave him wheezing in the dirt. Then I walk away to find a drink. Filled with ice and whiskey.

  After waking up drunk, hungover by midday and fooling myself I’m sober by sundown, I get into a taxi and ask for the Paradise. The driver, a shrunken old man, his wrinkled skin left behind on his diminishing body, simply stops the cab and tells me to get out when I ask if he knows a man called Mvembo. ‘Gangster,’ he says, as the spinning wheels flare up dirt.

  Mvembo was the man going to ‘fuck me up’ according to the blue cap pimp I left crumpled on the street. The Paradise bar seems the most likely place in town I’d run into either of them. But it’s also where I’ll find Kemi, the girl who spent the night with Dominic Toon.

  I take another taxi to the Paradise. Still quiet, just a few early- birds propped against the counter. All men. The girl I want to speak to isn’t yet here. I play and lose three games of pool with the barman. He knows Kemi. ‘She was here last night,’ he says. I don’t ask him about Mvembo, or the American. I sit on a high stool and wait, one eye over my shoulder. This is, I decide, the worst place in Mombasa for me to lie low.

  I walk through the old town, down to Fort Jesus where shadows skulk from alleys offering bags of cannabis. Then I go down to the sea front and sit on a rock, watching the lights flicker across the bay. Moored fishing boats ride the waves rolling off the Indian Ocean. If I smoked I’d light a cigarette, but I don’t.

  With the sun slid behind the town, silhouetting mosques and churches, the ramparts of Fort Jesus, I think about Anna, and how empty this beautiful scene is without someone to share it with.

  First I see the American. Lit like a ghost beneath the tube lights of the pool table, his wrist in plaster. He leans against the edge of the baize, tilting back a bottle of beer. His blue cap turned backwards. Two Kenyan men stand guard beside him, smoking. I take a seat in a coffee shop across the road and watch girls walk in and palm rolls of money into his good hand. They pay him to work
the bar. He stays sitting on the table and only stands when white men wander in from the street. He sidles up to them and gestures across the room with sweeping arms. Demonstrating his wares. Then he returns to perch again on the edge of the pool table. The only black man he stands for is the passenger of a silver Mercedes. The driver pulls right up on the pavement outside, gets out and opens the rear door for a tall, thin man, whose skin pigmentation has left pale patches on his face, like a map. He steps from the car and struts into the bar. He shakes the American’s hand without looking him in the eye. But the gesture is transaction, not greeting. The fold of bills slip into his top pocket.

  I ask the waiter of the coffee shop, a young guy wearing a faded Arsenal shirt, if he knows the owner of the Mercedes. He gives me that shrug of the shoulders signalling the answer is going to cost money. I give him a $10 bill. ‘Mvembo,’ he says.

  Mvembo reaches out and balances the cast of the American. He shakes his head. I move my chair a little further towards the rear of the coffee shop, into the shadows. Mvembo only stays long enough to pick up three girls and leave. Again the driver holds the door as he gets in the Mercedes. Along with the three girls who clamber into the back. If one of them is Kemi, my lead on Dominic Toon has gone.

  Still the American marshals the bar. More girls and drinkers arrive, and along with them more cohorts around the pool table. Two of the Kenyan bodyguards argue and square up. The American steps between them, says something and they back down.

  It would be a suicide mission for me to walk in and begin questioning the girls. I think of his knife stuck in my back.

  I order a beer to follow the cappuccino. Just the one. I need my wits about me. I watch the waiter go over to a motorbike parked in front of the coffee shop. He tops up the oil. After he washes his hands I call him over to my table. I gesture for him to come a little closer and ask if he wants $100. He looks around. Does he believe me? Then he says if I want to put my dick in his ass there’s not enough money in the world. I shake my head.