“You’ve been seeing more of Mwangangi over the last few months,” said Michael in a tone that suggested mere continuation of a subject.
“We get on well,” said Janet. “We have London in common and we both miss it.”
“I’m away at the end of the week,” he continued, the apparent non sequitur causing no confusion, as the noticeably strengthening breeze touched their faces. The stars directly above were now obscured and fingers of light cloud had spread across the western half of the sky. The night was changing quickly. “I should be back before the end of July.”
“I’ll be gone in early August,” she said, lulled by inaction and thus gulping more whiskey than she had wanted, forcing her to cough and splutter. The paroxysm pushed her forward and she spilled most of her drink. As she coughed, her eyes lifted wide open and her gasping at breath admitted laughter in its rests. That instant, she began to feel suddenly drunk, her head spun and she did not hear Michael’s laughter as he patted her on the back during the thirty seconds or so it took the fit to subside.
But by then, his pats of assistance had changed their touch, being now gentler and focussed on the small of her back. A moment later, she was pulled to her feet in his embrace and, as drops of rain began to sound in the dust, he kissed her, clumsily, forcing her lips apart with his tongue, his hand pushing under the waistband of her jeans to find the solace of her behind. Her senses numbed, she did not react immediately, which was her mistake. When she did act, mere seconds late, she over-did her rejection and actually hit him full fist at the side of the head.
“Oh Jaysus!” shouted Michael, reeling away. The thump was not hard, but it was meant. “Oh Jaysus, Janet, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He paced away across the grassless dust he called a garden but, as the raindrops quickened, he came straight back to face her.
“I’m sorry too,” she said and kissed him lightly on the cheek. She wasn’t crying, but it was a sad kiss, a valediction. “Michael, we’re both pissed. Let’s call it a day.” And she kissed him again with repeated cool before turning to leave.
She was not quite able to keep to a line, even before the rain really started, after she passed through the gap in the mission’s euphorbia grass hedge, well before she reached the main road. A hundred metres further into her short journey, she found herself almost unable to stand, the torrential downpour now all around, with foam-frothing rapids in the deep-cut gully drains at the roadside flashing white in the lightning. Now she was crying, though she was not sure why. Privately she had perhaps always wanted that to happen. He was a truly wonderful man, fun to be with, dedicated, honest, caring and sensitive. But he was not a man, he was a priest, off limits, incorruptible, beyond sex. And now she knew she had taken these assumptions too much for granted, maybe ignoring the need also to attach the term ‘human’.
When she reached home, she was in a mess. Drenched to the bone and spattered with mud after a couple of stumbles and slips, she found it difficult even to find the pocket of her water-leaden jeans, let alone extract the key that no doubt was embedded in a mass of soggy paper tissues at the bottom. For an instant, she thought she saw movement behind her. Had he followed her home? Was he there? As she turned, lightning flashed and the roar of rain reached a new crescendo, the storm hammering against the zinc sheets of her home’s overhanging roof.
Something moved, but it wasn’t him. It was just the donkey that fetched her water from the dam every day. It was tethered just thirty yards away next to the half finished new teacher’s house. He looked forlorn and lonely, seemingly up to his knees in mud, displaying his gender. She had noted this some months previously as the animal had passed by, amidst the loud sniggers of her students.
Somehow rationality took over, despite being misplaced. Thinking that she might protect her concrete floors, she decided to undress right there, watched by this apparently intent pack animal in a stroboscope of lightning. She could leave her clothes outside and even try to wash off some of the mud before going inside. But the plan proved a ruse when the newly opened kitchen door revealed that the storm was now so strong that the run off from the school compound had started to drain through her house, attaining its desired down gradient via the gap at the opposite side of the house, under the door at the front. So naked, wet and muddy, she tried her best to dry off with a towel as the pools at her feet grew. She did not even close the kitchen door, because when she pushed, it now scraped on gravel in the mud and scratched to a stiff halt. What did it matter? He had not followed her. Anyway, here in Migwani, she often left her door open, even when she went away at weekends. It was a safe place.
She woke up with a hangover. The morning was unusually dark under the first wholly overcast sky she had seen for several months. It took two concentrated inspections of her bedside clock to confirm that it really was already after nine. She was usually active by six. When she heard people in the house, memories of her jammed kitchen door leadened her mind. She panicked and, although too afraid to speak, issued a loud involuntary gasp.
“Take your time, young lady.” It was Michael’s voice. “We’re just clearing up a bit.”
She got out of bed and quickly assembled a pair of brightly coloured wrappers about her, one at the waist and one about the shoulders before taking the half dozen steps through the dark internal hall to the living room. She found Michael and his cook, Mutua, washing down the floors with vast quantities of clean rainwater.
“At least the rain also filled up your tank,” said Michael, looking up from his contorted pose as he used an inappropriately small hand brush to sweep a wave of liquid towards the open front door. “We were OK. The water came down the hill, but the gullies took it all away into the valley. Your problem is that the school compound is actually quite flat and you get a general build up. Mutua, ingine,” he said to his workmate, nodding at the empty bucket. Without a pause, the wiry old man, his late middle age belying the term ‘house boy’ still used by some expatriates to label his role, picked up the bucket and set off via the kitchen to the rain water tank at the end of the house. The instant that he disappeared to the left of the doorway, Michael went to her with a light embrace. “I really am sorry,” he said. “I want us to be friends.”
She kissed him. She shouldn’t have, but she did. “It’s a deal,” she said. They separated and smiled again at one another. “It was all my fault,” she said. “I’ll never drink whiskey again.” And then they stood there in silence, looking their separate ways until a sharp metallic click indicated that Mutua had just replaced the padlock on the tank. The filled bucket arrived a few seconds later, by which time both of them were standing, brushes at the ready, waiting for Mutua to send his tidal wave of muddy water towards them.
It took all morning to clean up after the flood and all afternoon to clear the mud-blocked concrete gutters that ran round the house, unnecessary drainage that proved inadequate the one time it was needed. They had a sandwich and water for lunch and then, late in the afternoon, Michael and Janet shared the meal that Mutua had left in the mission oven, having left them an hour before to prepare it. They chatted, shared a couple of beers and she was back at home, in bed before nine, sleep preparing her for the task of planning her work for the approaching new school term. Michael’s repeated words, “I’ll be gone by Friday,” still resonated in her memory.
And he was. At ten o’clock that morning Janet was in a Form One English class, all sixty-five students – sixty-four boys plus the Chief’s daughter – were busily and quietly engaged with an essay, whose just legible title adorned the over-shiny chalk board next to the teacher’s desk. The door opened a little and, as always, all eyes focused on the intruder and immediately recognised Michael’s ruddy face, topped by his camouflage bush hat. Janet left the still settled students without a word. She said a quick goodbye and then he was gone, the now clanking dark green Toyota Corolla bottoming as it took the ditch by the school entrance too quickly. The cloud of dust i
t threw hung in the air for a minute after the sound of the car faded behind the hill. And he was gone.
But Janet was not to be alone for long. The Friday evening Uhuru na Kazi took her to Kabati where she waited an hour for the Nairobi-Kitui bus to take her into town. For weeks one of the bars had been advertising a dance featuring the Mwema Brothers playing live, and since the entry of their latest single into the national hit parade, interest in the event had only increased. She met John Mwangangi in the restaurant near the Standard Bank where she usually ate the chicken and rice with soup which was always dependably sustaining and tasty, despite the fact that the chicken always seemed to have needed an extra three hours at simmer. She was actually laughing out loud at it when he appeared at the top of the courtyard steps, the offending chicken thigh held up on her fork for inspection.
“Hi there. Will you eat it or play tennis with it?”
“A tennis ball would be easier to cut,” she replied. It was a measure of how often they had met like this that their conversation began without the need to complete their greetings, as if it had simply continued from last time. They did greet, this time, and John ordered food and two cold Tusker beers. “Baridi sana,” he reminded the barman, indicating that he did not want bottles taken from the batch he had just seen being newly loaded into the fridge. And so they chatted over their supper. John was earlier than usual. She had expected him to show up at the dance, perhaps around ten, but he had only driven from Thika, where his last appointment of the week had concerned a land dispute between an expanding pineapple farm and a group of local families.
They had never agreed a regular arrangement, however, though they had met on many of the occasions that Janet had travelled into town for the weekend. They had run into one another sometimes as early as Friday evening, such as this occasion, but other weeks it had been as late as Saturday afternoon that he had spotted her emptying the school box at the Post Office or even Sunday morning by the time she had passed his car parked outside one of the town’s shops. In Kitui, where you could walk the entire length of the town’s tarmac street in twenty minutes, it would never be long before two acquaintances met.
Janet had planned to stay the night in town, since she knew that the dance would go on until after midnight and did not want to disturb her early-retiring friends at Kitui School. John’s food arrived and they chatted for just fifteen minutes or so when, almost in passing, she broke a short silence after finishing one beer and ordering another, to say that she had booked one of the rooms on that very courtyard for the night. She offered mere information, but the statement suddenly became, for both of them, an assumption that they would spend the night together for the first time. They did not even make it to the dance, and were together in the concrete box of a room, with its creaking sieve of a Vono bed and uncovered plastic foam mattress, well before ten. Janet had brought her wrapper cloths, so when four of them were laid down, the bed looked quite pretty. They took their time. There was no frenzy of grabbed moments because they had all night and all the next day as well, if they wanted. In these strange, bare, even hostile surroundings, when the bed bugs entered the equation, they lay naked together, chatting, touching, kissing, behaving like teenagers learning the secrets of the other’s body slowly, methodically and by rote. Repetition strengthened their knowledge and somehow the night passed and as dawn greyed the glassless and curtainless window, they realised that they had never put out the light. For Janet, used only to oil lamps and candles, Kitui town’s electric light always was a luxury to be savoured, but on this night she had kept it burning to learn more, to feast her eyes on this man she felt she knew like no other. By the time they parted after a breakfast of mandaazi, butter, jam and coffee, the wonderful system of a cup of hot water accompanied by a tin of Nescafe powder and a plastic spoon causing both of them to laugh, they had agreed that it would happen again, but never on a Friday. Having neither electricity nor telephone, Janet was not contactable if John was delayed by work on Friday evening. So, to ensure that she never made an unnecessary bus journey into town, they decided that Saturday would be their day and that he would always pick her up from home. By car the detour to Migwani would add on only an extra half hour to the trip from Nairobi whereas the bus often took four times as long. Public decorum could be maintained if Janet was ready to go at any time, so his car would never need to wait in the school compound and thereby attract the recognition of prying eyes from the town. And he would be true to his word. He never stood her up, never missing a visit without telling her the week before that he would not be there.
So April became May became June and July. She had less than four weeks left of her allotted two years doing good works in Africa and she wanted him more than ever. She cared nothing now about what the townspeople thought of her and so John stayed at her house on Saturdays and now Fridays as well. It would be several years later that Janet would re-examine her time with John, after the trauma of their parting faded from empty bereavement to mere sadness at what might have been. She had not seen it at the time, but a cooler analysis placed this relationship with John as something less than an affair. It had become more formal than that. It was years later that the revelation came and she saw their relationship as a ‘traditional’, but inverted, modern Kenyan arrangement. She was the bush wife, Lesley Mwangangi the city version, one for the weekend, the other Monday to Friday. But whereas the usual arrangement was for the bush wife to be the staid, dutiful preserver of family and property, whilst the town wife provided the sex, with Lesley Mwangangi and Janet Rowlandson, John had reversed the geography, but retained the spirit. Those years later, Janet would feel real anger, not directed against John Mwangangi, whom she had loved, but at herself for being so naïve.
But this latest weekend had been different, breaking a habit just three weeks old. Michael was back from leave. He and Janet had renewed their acquaintance and friendship, but she was ready to go, scheduled to fly just a week after his return. She had changed. And he had changed, apparently re-focussed and re-committed to his work, unwilling to admit any diversion. He had set about his parish work with renewed vigour and enthusiasm. She told him about John Mwangangi and he was visibly shaken, whilst mouthing support for her right to live her own life. There was a barrier now. He couldn’t say what he wanted.
At the end of that last week, John came to stay with her on the Friday before the Saturday when Michael was to take her to Nairobi and her flight to London. With obvious duty, they had both attended the essential but over formal gathering to mark Janet’s departure, an event that everyone involved labelled ‘party’ without intending to enter into any kind of spirit. But it happened and Janet was touched by the enthusiastic attendance of over fifty parents and all the students on this Friday afternoon, stolen from the timetable purely to honour her.
And then the guests and students had left, slowly, each wanting to offer their thanks for her time in Migwani, convinced that the local command of English had been eternally improved through her efforts. By five o’clock, the school was largely quiet and by six it was deserted, to remain so until the start of next term.
They had begun their love-making barely minutes after they had entered the relative privacy of Janet’s house, the door barely closed behind them, but with all curtains having been carefully closed by Janet before going to the Form One classroom to attend the party. An hour later, they ate together the meal that Janet’s cook had prepared at lunchtime and left on a low oven before walking home for his usual weekend off. At about nine, after another hour together in bed, she had been mortified to hear that John had to leave. “I’ll see you in the morning,” he had told her. “Your flight is not until nearly midnight so you won’t need to leave until late afternoon. We’ll have lots of time. Tonight I have to meet my father to talk over a few things. I’ve taken a room at the Safari Bar and I have to meet him there tonight. Come tomorrow morning at about nine. We’ll have the morning to ourselves.” And with that he left
her, alone on her last night in Migwani, her last night in Kenya, harbouring a growing resolution that one day she could come back and do what she felt was in her power.
At eight the next morning she walked the dusty road into Migwani, a walk that would normally take her just ten minutes. Today she allowed an hour so she could call at every shop (all six) on her way to say her goodbyes to people she now knew by name, by family and by association. She was still early when she arrived at the Safari bar, but had to loiter across the road for a while until old spitting Munyasya lifted himself from his sleep and breakfast on the bar’s doorstep and shuffled his way to the shade of his tree where he continued his sleep. After her experience with him in the café, she had learned to give him a wide berth.
She found John’s room closed, locked. He had gone out. The barman, however, promised her that no one had yet left from the rooms at the back. The only way out was through the bar where he had slept. He had unlocked the front door at seven and he had been nowhere. He was surprised enough to go and try the door himself. He too found it locked. He went for his key. The correct one located, eventually, from what seemed like a jailer’s bunch, he pushed it into the lock. It wouldn’t go in. There was a key in the lock inside. The two of them called through the unglazed barred window. There was no reply. There was a cloth hanging over the grid, which they pushed aside to peer into the room, but it was on the shady side of the courtyard. The bed was below the window and it was empty. They could see nothing else in their revealed cone of light. Still no sound came from within. The barman knew his establishment well, however. Standing on a stool from the bar he could reach through the window frame as far as the key. Though unable to turn it, he could rock it out of the lock and soon a reassuring clink of low-grade steel on concrete brought a smile of relief from both of them.
Mission Page 27