The Dream Chasers

by Claudette Oduor

  “You also have to live with Baba. That’s enough to make anyone sad.”

  Chinika nodded. “I had so many dreams once. Baba told me to stop dreaming because, if I dreamt too much, my fossil would be discovered in a mudslide of dreams I could never lift. ‘Those who dream too much can’t fall asleep at night,’ he said. Now I have ailing ulcer dreams that ooze the pus of regret.”

  I looked at Chinika as she spoke, spotted a rogue tear sprout from its sleep and sprinkle across her lap.

  “Did you start working?” I asked.

  “I had a few businesses here and there. Baba closed them. He said no wife of his shall disrespect his name by breaking her back working.”

  “Chinika, what did you go to the secretarial college for? Did they teach you courses called ‘How to Be Terrified of Men’ and ‘How to Give up Your Dreams for Men’?”

  “Only the chewer of chilli peppers knows how the chilli peppers sting.”

  “But I don’t need to chew the chilli peppers to know how they sting. I only have to look at your face.”

  Chinika ignored me. “How is the university?”

  “I’m on a semester break. Mama couldn’t afford the fees for this year. I will go in during the next, after she receives dividends for her shares.”

  “I wish I too had shares. I wouldn’t put up with this anymore.”

  In the morning, I found Chinika in the kitchen, brewing coffee.

  “You’re up early,” she said.

  “I thought I’d see Baba before he left for work.”

  Chinika handed me a cup of coffee. I sat at the table, watching her put detergent in a pail and stir the water into a lather. She mopped the terrazzo kitchen floor with a rag.

  Baba came into the kitchen. He had a suit on; its jacket was draped over his arm. The cuff links on his shirt glimmered in the shy morning sun.

  “Morning,” he grunted, tightening his tie.

  “Morning, Baba,” Chinika and I said.

  “Baba, I was hoping to talk to you—”

  “I’m late, Lulu. We’ll talk when I get back.”

  “But I’m leaving.”

  “Lulu, don’t talk back to me. I said I’m late.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it, standing at the door. “My wife, Almasi and his family will join us for supper. You should spend your day cooking.”

  “I’ll spend my day at the bank,” Chinika said slowly, looking down.

  “At the bank? What for?”

  She looked up. “I want to see if they can give me a loan … to restart my businesses.”

  Baba choked on his tea. “Lulu, get out.”

  I went to the guest room but still heard Baba’s infuriated voice. “What kind of insult is this? Isn’t the food I give you soft enough for your palate? Is the bed too hard for your skin? Do the sheets give you welts? Today is today; you will know not to stick thorns in a lion’s paws!”

  I heard the sound of blows and Chinika screaming.

  “Who are you crying for? Do I look like your mother? Shut your mouth!”

  The kitchen door creaked open, the echoes of Baba’s shoes reverberated through the corridor. He pushed open the door to the guest room.

  “Lulu, I don’t want you here. Before you came, Chinika was a good woman. Now she questions authority. When I come back, I shouldn’t see even a hair from your head. You understand?”

  [Seven]

  THE SKIES WERE ABOUT TO relieve themselves on the earth’s head. Some drops escaped through their crossed fidgety legs. People collided. Headlights glowered at bumpers. I sat in the back of the bus, next to the window. The glass chattered in the window, as though it had lots to say and was getting impatient because no one was listening.

  The bus was filled with labourers on their way to work. They carried tools in their hands—mallets, hammers, chisels, and axes. Their trousers had patches sewn in. The trousers were mostly corduroy, washed too many times. The roughness on the labourers’ hands looked like an expensive decorative finish to their flesh, like the rough cast sprayed over walls and ceilings when a house is done.

  I wondered what their names were, these labourers. How many daughters did they have? Which milkshake would they prefer: vanilla or strawberry? Did they kill mosquitoes by smashing them between their fingers? Did they wear slippers with thumbtacks stuck on them: one slipper blue; the other, red? I watched the conductor steady himself along the aisle as he received passengers’ fares. His knuckles were doodled with hair. When the bus hit a bump, he held the bar over the headrest on the seat in front of me.

  The rickety bus teetered over dusty slopes, rattling us against its battered sides, ramming us against each other. The rain slashed the sky, but a little sun peeked from behind a cloud. The hyenas were getting married, Mama would say. The sun made little rainbows in the rainwater. When I was younger, I had tried to touch the rainbow and to move it, and to make it by throwing palmfuls of water in the air. It had been my first lesson in physics: some things one can never touch, move, or make. One can only pretend to.

  I got home, took a bath, and sat down on my spot on the reed couch, looking at the empty space in Mama’s spot. Putting six teaspoons of sugar in my tea instead of two, I chugged all of it and then ate six slices of bread.

  I watched CNN, laughing at bulletins that were not funny. I threw my head back, lifted my cheeks with my fingers, and made the face Mama made when she laughed.

  Ha ha ha! The laugh sounded as though it got sick in my chest, as though it meant to come out as phlegm.

  I gathered up my breakfast things and arranged them in the sink: forks on the left, plates on the right, glasses in the middle, blacks on top, and whites at the bottom. In the other sink: toothbrushes on the left, toothpaste on the right, and soap in the middle.

  I scrubbed the floors and mopped them, then stood at the window watching the rain, following the movements of the suicidal drops as they jumped off the edge of the drain pipe.

  I took a matatu to Muchai’s apartment in Nairobi West estate. The door was open; I let myself in.

  “Nyaera?” I said, shaking awake the figure on the couch. “Is Muchai home?”

  Nyaera put her legs on the floor and sat up. She studied my face in the light of the television. “Muchai is busy; he’s not taking any visitors.”

  “I’m not a visitor.”

  I walked down the short corridor to the bathroom. While I was in there, I heard Nyaera and Muchai argue.

  “Why do you fawn over her?”

  “I’m not fawning.”

  “Then tell her to leave. Tell her to leave or I’m leaving.”

  “Nyaera, we’ve been through this before.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  The front door slammed. I turned the knob and saw Muchai standing by the window, watching Nyaera’s retreat as she walked out the front gate.

  “Maybe I should never have come here.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  We sat in silence, a silence in which we spoke words within the enclosures of our minds. Without, there was nothing to say; but within them, we rambled away. Our eyes never met, but his mind’s eye locked with mine. He watched me with his mind—an unwavering, mental stare.

  “I came to talk to you, but you don’t look up to talking. Maybe I should go home.”

  Muchai walked me to the door. He stood there for a few moments looking—really looking—at me. His eyes took their time on my face, at the figure-hugging manner in which my dress held me, at its abrupt stop two inches from my knees. He looked back at my face. His eyes rested there for a few moments. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mobile phone interrupted him. “Hello? Yeah. … Yeah. … What do you mean I sound bored? Of course, I’m not very bored. … Yeah, she’s here. … What has that got to do with anything? … Be reasonable. … I’m tired; I can’t tal
k about centrepieces and bridal party colours now. … No, it’s not because Lulu is here. … Go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow at my parents’ house.” He sighed and threw his phone on the couch.

  “What’s happening at your parents’ house tomorrow?”

  “Nyaera’s family and mine will have lunch together. You should come.”

  “I’m not family. If I were, I’d be Kikuyu like you.”

  Muchai clicked his tongue.

  I opened the door and left the apartment block for the bus stop.

  A man sold maize nearby. He fanned his flame with a plastic lid. The red embers in his charcoal burner had cracked the tips of his fingers, roasting his flesh along with the maize. Other men pulled handcarts by the roadside, their backs rippling with muscles and trickling with little pathways of sweat. It was only midmorning, but the sun had travelled halfway across the sky and pitched camp high up. It beat down on the earth and glazed and scorched. Even the breeze was hot, and it carried with it wafts of donkey droppings and melting rubber.

  I rode home in a noisy matatu. “Nasty” was painted across the top of the windscreen, in purple. In front of me, a woman in a pink chiffon dress opened a book titled By the River of Babylon. She used a crusade pamphlet as a bookmark, which said, “Come; fetch your anointing.”

  At home, I sat on the veranda, sorting out pishori rice. I picked the little, shiny stones that hid within the rice, pushed them to one side of the tray, and pushed the clean rice to the other side of the tray. When the clean rice became a small hill on the tray, I poured it into a basin. I poured the last of the rice inside the basin. Swoosh. The chaff made me sneeze, and my sneeze created an avalanche in the rice. Some of it scattered across the floor, across the ridges of my toes, and across my flip-flops. Mounds of stone and rice debris fell into the basin of clean, sorted rice.

  I picked up a handful of clean rice and rocks, and hurled it into the garden below. The mother hen raced her chicks to it, cackling. The geese pranced parallel to the laundry slabs, shaking their tails, occasionally stopping to do a yoga-like stretch—a pose with the right foot and left wing stretched to the sky and the left foot and right wing to the ground. I placed the basin of rice on the chair next to me, the chair that Mama would have sat on had she been home. Its canvas had ripped, spilling out innards of foam and sack.

  I thought of Mama’s black lips curling round the edges when she leaned in to smell the aroma wafting from the pot of kienyeji chicken. And of her fingers dyeing red when she squeezed in half a tree tomato from the garden and offered one side to me. I reminisced about her putting on a headscarf when she blew over the outdoor fire, so her wig wouldn’t smell of firewood smoke. Or how she would glance disapprovingly at me when I ate ugali with a fork, instead of moulding it in my fingers.

  I remembered the passage in a programme: Hallo, Children, when Tom had lost his pencil.

  Mary, have you seen my pencil?

  Peter, have you seen my pencil?

  Cat, have you seen my pencil?

  This time, I wondered,

  Chair, have you seen Mama?

  Goose, have you seen Baba?

  Sky, have you seen my heart?

  Beyond the gate, Muchai skipped over pools of rainwater as he crossed the street. He walked towards me. The gravel in the footpath glittered as it caught specks of sun, and steam rose from it. The morning’s rain gathered pebbles together, stirring them around like ingredients in broth. The steam coiled around Muchai’s shoes, some of it hissing as though annoyed that he had stepped on it. He opened out his palm and showed me a ring. “There’s no wedding anymore.”

  “What do you mean there’s no wedding?”

  “Nyaera came to break it off soon after you left. She said my mind is elsewhere.”

  “Do you love Nyaera?”

  “She’s a good Kikuyu girl.” As though that made sense.

  He threw the ring across the veranda. It spun several times, fast and blurry. Then it swallowed its pride, fell on its side, resigned to the fact that it would never achieve the ultimate purpose of its existence, and that all the pain it went through at the smelter’s and the jeweller’s, was for naught.

  Muchai glanced at the sky. “We should go inside before it starts raining.”

  He opened the door, entered the sitting room, and switched on the television. The news was on. All it spoke about was the electoral commission this, the voter registration that. Raila Odinga’s camp complained that some voters, mostly Luo, weren’t on the list of registered voters. I stood up, rolled up the sisal mat, and placed it against the wall.

  “Lulu, the wind is blowing leaves into the house. Get in before it scatters your thoughts in the fields.”

  “Maybe the thoughts will sprout in the earth, and we will reap food for thought.”

  I closed the door behind me. The television went off. I flipped the light switch on and off twice. The bulb stared at us, barren.

  Muchai and I drank mud-red tea. There were yams in the storeroom. I took some out, sat at the window, and began to flake off their skin with a blunt knife.

  “I’m leaving for Eldoret tomorrow,” Muchai said.

  “What for?”

  “I told Mother about Nyaera breaking off the engagement. She suggested I accompany her to Eldoret as she goes to vote. The clean air and open spaces will clear my mind.”

  I felt like one of the nyawawas I’d heard about in stories. They were spirits of dead people. They rose from Lake Victoria during thunderstorms. Villagers would pound cooking spoons against pots and roam from village to village to drive them out.

  “Can I see you when I get back from Eldoret?”

  “Muchai, what kind of question is that? We’ve seen each other almost every day since we were in primary school.”

  “But I’d like to see you, Lulu, nothing like ‘just friends’.”

  I looked outside the window. A charter plane flew by so low its belly seemed to brush against the top branches of the tree by the fence. The clouds drifted by in the sky, forlorn like nyawawa clouds. The grass in the garden danced in the wind. It was yellow, pus-coloured; it went so high it covered half the window, scratching it, throwing orange and red ladybirds on the glass.

  “Lulu, look at me. Tell me what you’re thinking. Have I offended you?”

  “Even after Kenya votes in a new administration, I shall still be a Luo girl, and you a Kikuyu boy.”

  Muchai walked up to me. “A woman once boiled rocks and made chicken soup for her children.”

  I did not realise there were tears in my eyes until Muchai kissed them. “Please promise to let me see you when I get back.”

  I closed my eyes, felt the urgent prodding of his lips over mine, the deafening pulse of blood in my ears, the choking way in which I forgot how to breathe right.

  In the morning, I lay across Muchai’s chest. It was cold, so he brought the covers up to my neck and tightened his arms around me. The clock on my bedside table ticked loudly.

  “Do you want to hear a story Mama once told me?” I asked.

  “Tell me the story Mama once told you.”

  “One December day, there was a bad storm. The wind was so strong it blew off a sheet of metal roofing from a neighbour’s house. A man went zooming past in a bodaboda. The metal sheet flew in the air towards the man riding the bodaboda. The metal sheet sliced his head neat off his neck. It all happened so fast, the man’s head didn’t know it had been severed.

  “As it bounced on the ground, it laughed loudly. ‘Phew! That was a close shave. That metal sheet nearly sliced off my head!’

  “We aren’t that bodaboda man, Lulu. Our heads are still intact. Look, here is my head. And here is yours.”

  “Aren’t you the one who told me that, sometimes, the more you look the less you see?”

  “Then stop looking and start seeing.” Muchai memorised par
ts of my face, the feel of my cheeks on his palms, and the taste of my lips. I knew he memorised because I memorised, too.

  [Eight]

  MAMA CALLED ME EARLY ON the day before elections. “I’m at Machakos Bus Station. Will you help me with the luggage?”

  The highway was filled with cars. Every few feet, a wiry man with rust-coloured teeth blew over a flame, turning maize and cassava this way and that on the wire gauze. Other men stood by their wheelbarrows, peeling sugarcane, cutting the pieces up into little cubes, and packing them in see-through plastic bags. Women ambled between the cars, selling grapes, underwear, and flags.

  On the side of town where Machakos Bus Station was, the buildings were all brownish purple, like concrete insides of yams. The alleys and roads all rammed into each other, and buildings started and ended at ill-conceived spots. Idle men fiddled with the bells of their bicycles. A drunk fellow swayed precariously on his feet, tipped forwards, and crashed into a vandalised post. A dark pool gathered around his bottom.

  Mama sat on a park bench, a palm to her cheek, staring into the air. At her feet were two sacks and a duffel bag. She wore that gingham dress, the one that erased all the curves from her body and drew straight lines in their places. Across her bosom was a faded scorch print from leaving the iron too long on the fabric.

  “Mama?”

  She looked up. “Oh, you’re here.”

  She stood up, rolled a scarf around the crown of her head, and lifted one of the sacks. It had maize grain in it. She balanced it on her head. “Will you pass me that bag?”

  I did.

  “Carry the other sack. It has beans in it.”

  I tried to lift it. My hands went wobbly; my arms buckled.

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” Mama put down her sack of maize and lifted the sack of beans to my back. With my arms over my shoulders, I held onto the corners of the sack and arched forward so it wouldn’t slide down my back.

  Mama balanced the sack of maize on her head again, took the bag in her hand, and began to walk.