Mission

by Philip Spires

  Perhaps she had grown too dependent on Michael. They had hit it off from the very day she arrived in Migwani and had remained on good terms throughout, their friendship, if anything, having strengthened as time passed. So often, and especially amongst the expatriates, it seemed that positive first impressions often faded. Promising friendships did not meld and acquaintances drifted apart. But not with Michael. It was as if, having communicated well from day one, they had since taught one another a whole new language. Of course she had known priests since her childhood, having received a conventional Roman Catholic upbringing from a devout mother, convent school included. But she had never met a priest like Michael. He was a ‘free spirit’; he drank, danced and played football for the town team, Migwani Black Stars, the only white man on the field. And he could not only talk, he could listen as well, a skill not commonly associated with men, she thought, and that’s why the two of them had spent so much time in one another’s company.

  She lived alone. She was not comfortable going alone to any of the town’s bars after dark, since it was assumed that any woman who did that must be a prostitute and, though most of the regulars knew her and knew that this did not apply to her, it only needed one unfamiliar face to appear and the inevitable glances in her direction would start, making her feel uncomfortable and insecure. So she and Michael had drunk their beers in the mission in Michael’s living room, by the glaring light of his hissing pressure lamp, its kerosene signature tainting the air even in daylight.

  Often plunged into darkness when a suicidal flying beetle found its way to the lamp’s core and self-immolated on the flaming mantle, breaking its brittle silk-ash mesh and thereby killing both itself and the light, the two of them had grown used to sitting in the dark, allowing their eyes to get used only to the starlight which diffused through the mission’s glazed metal-framed windows. She found it hard now to remember what they had talked about – the Church, missionary life, education, fellow priests, the Bishop, other volunteers, Africans and Africa, Europe and Europeans, the Irish, the English, men and women. He had taught her some of his Irish songs, often nationalistic and bloodthirsty, some historical, some geographical, all sentimental, and often they would round off an evening together with an a cappella medley or, on special occasions, a sing along to Michael’s strummed guitar, after, that is, the seemingly regulation half hour he always needed to tune it. She was safe with him. She was safe in the mission because Michael’s cook, Mutua, often lived in during the week, walking home to see his family in Thitani only on Saturday morning and usually returning with Michael on the pillion of his pikipiki after Sunday mass.

  And Janet was usually away at weekends, after dashing the kilometre to town after the school’s last class on a Friday afternoon to catch the orange and white Mrembo bus to Kitui or the blue and white Uhuru na Kazi to Nairobi, neither of which could be relied upon to run. As a volunteer, there were always other volunteers to visit, but she would always be home by sunset on Sunday and probably back with Michael in the mission that evening to chat about what she had done.

  Time passed, however, and, as her stay in Migwani reached its second year, her ease of familiarity began to widen her circle of friends. She had in no way distanced herself from Michael, nor had they drifted apart. She had just met other people and found it hard to fit in regular social calls on all of them, given that she had no opportunity to travel out of Migwani except at weekends. As her second year in Kenya had progressed, however, she became ever more confident and sometimes even travelled to nearby towns in the evenings, knowing that there was no bus to bring her back. Like a local, she would just wait for the first vehicle, flag it down and, always using Swahili, since she had never even been able to develop an ear for any aspect of Kikamba, except for simple greetings, try to negotiate a lift home. She lived by the main road, with its fifty or so vehicles per day, and also had learned by rote the Kikamba proverb. “A beautiful girl does not pay on the bus,” always using it as her opening gambit with any driver who stopped.

  It was during her second year that she began to spend more time with John Mwangangi. Paradoxically, when he had lived up the road in Mwingi, when he had been a civil servant at least partially responsible for the efficient management of her school, she had seen almost nothing of him. They had met on just a few occasions, such as the school’s Harambee day. But then he had seemed distant, so immersed in the responsibilities of his office that he had not had the time or the reasons to mix with the likes of classroom teachers such as Janet.

  Now, of course, during the week he was in Nairobi, doing his legal work. But at weekends, he spent increasing amounts of time at his shamba within Migwani location, his new farming venture that aimed at creating a new model of development for the whole district. He had bought land adjacent to his family’s established smallholding in Kamandiu and had sunk boreholes. He had been lucky and had struck a sweet supply, precious fresh water that he hoped would grow tomatoes, cabbages and other vegetables for the wholesale market. He needed to be there at weekends as often as possible to supervise the pipe laying, the terracing and planting. It had become his pet project and he lavished all the time, energy, money and attention a celebrity’s pet might have received. Janet had found the project exciting from the moment she heard about it. Here, at last, was something that looked and felt like real progress and could provide a model for others in the area to emulate. Here, it seemed, was a way out of the poverty, famine and disease that formed such a large slice of life and death in Kitui District. In Janet’s eyes, John Mwangangi quickly took on the aura of a visionary, a prophet to foil Michael’s sainthood.

  And strange though it may seem, she could help him because time he spent with her became an experience that refreshed other aspects of his life, enlivened and energised him. Though he was nothing less than obsessed with his project and completely overworked with his caseload in Nairobi, he needed diversion. Though they had been mere acquaintances for more than a year, now that he was, himself, a visitor to the area, it seemed that Janet suddenly became a friend, someone beyond the machinations of his interests, someone, perhaps, he could trust. He dearly missed London, where he had lived for more than a decade and seemed to gravitate instinctively towards the company of Europeans. Janet never tired of talking with him about her home town, as she put it, despite the fact that her origins were rather more suburban than urban. John had lived throughout in central London, a Southwark resident during his training in Lincoln’s Inn. So Janet and he had, in imagined recollection, regularly meandered through the West End together, reminiscing by flickering oil lamp glow about the bright lights, reliving in this desert scrub the rainy nights when headlamps would glare off the road surface of the Strand. He was a sophisticated man, this John Mwangangi, and cultured, sensitive and complex. Just how complex had only become apparent after one Saturday evening in conversation in the back room of Migwani’s Safari Bar. Seated at the end of the courtyard, under the stars, with the hotel’s scruffy rooms along the sides completely unoccupied and quiet, John had opened up in a way she had never known. This epitome of confidence and achievement suddenly and unexpectedly revealed weakness and doubt. His wife, Lesley, he had told Janet, hated Kenya and dearly wanted to go back to London. Since, after leaving Mwingi, a few months after Janet’s arrival in Kenya, she hardly ever visited the rural areas, Janet hardly knew her and had indeed initially assumed that she was, herself, Kenyan and not, as John eagerly told her, a Londoner. Janet had met her only a handful of times and always at large social gatherings, mainly at their house in Nairobi, formal parties where it was possible only to meet and greet. Now compounding this problem were demands that John’s father had made in relation to their daughter, Anna. When John first told Janet that the grandfather wanted the girl to undergo initiation via circumcision to demonstrate his own allegiance to tradition, Janet initially laughed out loud, thinking that she had misheard him. When he went on to describe the processes of clitoridectomy and, eventu
ally, prior to marriage, infibulation, she went quite cold, feeling shock of ignorance then cold horror. But how could John even contemplate such things being done to his own daughter? That’s what Lesley says, he had told her, thus placing Janet in the same compartment as his wife, a status she found immediately claustrophobic.

  She had discussed John Mwangangi’s family dilemma with Michael and found herself deeply shocked that he did not also immediately dismiss the daughter’s ceremonial circumcision as crazy. Michael had been clear that he did not agree with any form of bodily mutilation, especially of the female genitalia, since his religion had taught him to worship that place, at least in its immaculately unpenetrated manifestation. But it remained a fact that most people did it. An uncircumcised man, he explained, was forever a boy in this culture. When Janet had pressed him about female circumcision, however, he admitted that he knew very little about it, only that it was usually demanded by older women for their daughters. There seemed to be two justifications, the main one being that the young should not get away with not having to go through what the older generation had been required to do, rather like demands for National Service in Britain. The second reason, though rarely admitted, was probably the real reason why it was done. An uncircumcised woman can experience sexual pleasure, like a prostitute, and frozen decency was the more respectable option.

  Compounding all of this was the tremendous bond that had developed between John’s daughter and her grandfather, Musyoka, during the family’s time in Mwingi. In theory, they could not communicate. The old man spoke no English and Lesley Mwangangi had consistently demanded that her daughter should learn no Kikamba. Despite this, grandfather and granddaughter truly enjoyed one another’s company. Hand in hand, they had taken walks together, during those months, walks with regular stops so that the old man could demonstrate something via sign language about a particular bush or tree or uncover something repulsively creepy under a stone. But since the family’s move to Nairobi neither Lesley nor Anna had been back to visit the grandfather more than a couple of times in almost a year, and it was noticeable that the old man now publicly greeted his son impatiently, even angrily, prompting palpable expressions of surprise, shock and even disgust in those who overheard.

  It had been just before Easter, sometime in April, that Janet and Michael had sat up all night discussing John Mwangangi’s dilemma. Easter, of course, was one of the priest’s busiest times of the year and he had said several masses over the weekend. But now, on the Monday evening, he had done his duty and was determined to have some ‘fierce crack’ to relieve the fatigue.

  Two unrelated events had prompted the opportunity. Janet had uncharacteristically not managed to get away that weekend. Having planned a trip starting on the Thursday evening before Good Friday, she had waited for the bus, but none came. She was to meet friends in Nairobi and then travel together to Kericho, upcountry. Having missed the appointment by twenty-four hours courtesy of the no-show bus, she would have to change her plans to do something alone or stay at home. When, that afternoon, it rained, thus precluding any travel for at least another day, she decided on the latter. So she was at home for the Easter weekend.

  The second facilitation of Michael’s crack was an unexpected visit from Father Pat from up the road in Mwingi, who was just returning from his three months of biennial leave. He had turned up at the Migwani mission with a litre of duty-free Jameson’s, a present for Michael, and the three of them had started on the pale spirit at sundown, chatting about this, that and everything between a few songs. Michael really did have a good voice and Pat was much more than a strummer on the guitar. Pat had set off along the dirt by ten, leaving Michael and Janet to sit and savour the unusual sight of cloud slowly obscuring the brilliant white stripe of the Milky Way across the night sky.

  She learned that night that Michael and John Mwangangi had been close ever since his return to Kenya, intent on being an agent for change amongst his own people, and that they had planned and begun a number of joint projects while John had been the District Officer in Mwingi. But that had all gone sour when the local Member of Parliament, James Mulonzya, had made formal complaints about what they were doing. John was adjudged by his superiors of being more political than administrative and, rather than fight his corner against an authority that was unused to question, he had opted to re-join the private sector and pick up his legal career in Nairobi. That, of course, suited his family to perfection since his wife hated Mwingi and longed to live in the city, a place she now hardly ever left. John had privately continued to pursue his own mission to reform his homeland through the establishment of his model farm. But the family’s ‘retreat’ to the city had fundamentally worsened his relationship with his father. The old man, it seemed, could happily accept having no contact with his son and grand-daughter if they lived in London, but now they were in the same country, he could see no reason at all why they should not live nearer the ancestral home and have more contact with the extended family.

  Michael’s analysis of John Mwangangi’s dilemma really did enlighten Janet that evening. As the bottle of Jameson’s dwindled to half, they said less to one another, preferring to sip their spirit in silence and watch the stunning developing beauty as a gigantic thunder cloud began to mass from the east.

  “We might even get some more tonight,” said Janet as the cloud, still distant, flashed yellow-white, its internal fluorescence struggling against its starter. In the silence that followed, she mused on the fact that she had not mentioned the word ‘rain’, but that both of them had understood it as the focus of her statement. And it was such a rare event that, when it did happen, it was to be savoured. She remembered her first storm, in late November after her arrival in the previous August. Her personal rain water tank at home had run out in early September, having not been re-filled since the last rains in April and for eight weeks she relied on the forty gallon oil drum by her kitchen door, a rusty, dented but still watertight receptacle that was refilled once a week. She had grown used to the smell of the regular visits from the school’s donkey and its full-time handler as the twin five gallon burdens the beast could carry up the steep valley-side from the seepage holes by the cattle dam were emptied into her store. She had grown used to the technique of grinding alum crystals to a powder and adding them to the light mud in the drum. She knew that it was better to wait until the next day, until the dirt had mainly settled to a bottom sludge, a sludge that would not be emptied out until the next rains rendered the drum redundant, before using any of the water. But she also remembered not being able to wait for the next mug of tea and so she also remembered that she must leave the boiled kettle for a minute or so to allow the grit and mud to settle out before dousing her dusty but gorgeous Kenyan tea in her giant blue enamel pot.

  From that first storm, her memory could still reconstruct the exact sound of the giant drops beginning their spatter on the tin roof. She was marking Form One essays by the light of her pressure lamp, an appliance she used only when working, since it burnt more kerosene than she could usually afford. But the moment that those drops had registered their significance, she snuffed the lamp’s fuel supply and watched, for a moment or two, as its ashy mantle’s glow paled to dark. There was nothing romantic in this image. She did it every time, to make sure that the delicate and expensive membrane was still in one piece. By the time she had reached her front door, the noise was growing quickly, no longer that of individual drops. The cloudy night was profoundly lightless, except for the occasional multiple flashes from within the cloud, which lit the streams of water now flowing from the corrugations of her front porch – the only part of the roof not guttered to collect the precious fluid – instantaneously transforming them into icicles, solid and hanging, within her inability to interpret what she saw. Elation took over. She would never remember deciding to strip off and stand in the rain, she just did it. And the shower she took in the line of channels from the porch roof was the most refreshing she had
ever known, taking the dust of years, not months, with its flow. A minute later, of course, she was up to her ankles in mud and had to go back inside to wash her feet, but then she returned to the open door swathed in wrappers just to watch and listen to the blackness. She would never forget that first storm, and would be able to relive her feelings whenever there was even the promise of rain, for usually promise was as far as it went, as the cloud she tracked across the night sky continued on its illuminated way to drop its rain sixty or seventy miles to the west on the slopes of the mountain.

  An age seemed to pass between Janet’s words and Michael’s prosaic, but profound response. “Let’s hope so. Friday’s storm was a real Godsend. Another would be paradise. We might even get a harvest this time…”

  Unused to whiskey, she had been careful not to drink too much and had not tried to copy Michael’s practice of taking it neat. But the alcohol was doing its trick and she could feel her senses starting to fuzz, so when the unexpected happened, she took time to respond, hesitated, only half-reacted. Somewhere, a long way distant, someone began playing a drum, an African drum, a single note, low and resonant, on a regular slow beat. Michael also took time to respond. “I’ve never heard anything like that before,” she said.

  “It’s the rain,” he said. “Someone is happy tonight. Someone is already sure we are going to get some more.” The trickle of recharging whiskey, which followed the clink of glass, seemed almost deafening against the near complete silence, itself regularly punctuated by the dull slow thud of the drum, possibly miles distant. They sipped a little more of their drinks in the ringing silence for several minutes, there still being enough light from the stars to the west of the cloud for them to exchange a knowing glance as the sound of a gentle breeze began to rustle the leaves of the mission’s giant mango tree nearby.