“You’re fifty-four, not sixty-bloody-four,” shouted David, a plea implied somewhere within.
“I’ll be fifty-five before the end of the second term. I’ve been granted a two-year sabbatical. That will make me fifty-seven when it’s over. They may ask me to do a year or so as an adviser, or I could go freelance and do some inspection work. But I think the most likely outcome will be that after the sabbatical they will grant me early retirement.”
Janet and David had both noticed how little reaction there had been from Michael. He had listened intently, absent-mindedly tracing the edges of his place mat. Realising that both of them were now staring at him, he looked from one to the other, shrugged his shoulders and returned to his self-appointed endeavour to fray the mat’s edge with his finger. There was a long pause.
“It’s a terrific opportunity, but…” Bernard’s words were cut short by Michael.
“Kairos.” It stopped the show. “Kairos,” he repeated. “Not a revelation, like St Paul suffered on the road to Damascus. There’s nothing dramatic or particularly sudden about kairos. It’s a lovely word, a theological term meaning a moment of opportunity, a chance to be grasped as it passes, for pass it will if not taken. I once heard a talk by a genius of a man – also a priest – who had been a political prisoner for years. When he was eventually released, he gave a lecture tour. He told a simple story, a parable, about some people who rented a bus to go to market, but it broke down on the way. They waited for help, hoping that another vehicle would pass by but, like when we were in Kenya…” he nodded toward Janet without looking at her, “…there was very little traffic on that road and nothing came along for hours. They waited in the sun getting more and more depressed when a bloke on a motorbike came along and told them that the market was finished and that no one would pass that way until the next day. So the people from the bus got together, talked through what the problem might be, pooled their skills and fixed the bus. They had missed the market, but at least they got home and they had solved their own problems. They had learned to work together to achieve things that otherwise they would have deferred to others and so they had become empowered. And the moral of the tale? The guy on the bike was the Messiah. They heard his words and acted on them. They took the opportunity that presented itself and changed their own condition. That’s kairos, the moment of opportunity. It sounds like Janet has one of her own.”
“But…” David managed no more.
“That just about sums it up,” said Janet, checking that her words had registered with each of the others before turning to face Michael. “I saw an advert in the Times Ed at the end of last term. It was for a new campaign by the people who originally sponsored my time in Kenya. It said they were now looking for experienced people to do quite specific professional jobs. And there it was in black and white, a full page spread. As I read through it, I saw myself written into the text, my name already attached to one of the jobs they had on offer. It was giving me the chance to do something I have dreamed about for years. So I applied.”
“Bugger me,” muttered David. “When was that?”
“I had the interview in August and they offered me the job there and then, on the spot. It’s taken me three months or so to work out the exact conditions with the authority. I obviously didn’t want to prejudice my pension and I didn’t want to let anyone down. But, like Michael says, now is the right time for me to act. Everything is possible. All the pieces are in place. I have the experience to contribute. Thirty years of service easily qualifies me for a sabbatical, though, I must say, two years is a very generous offer. I have a talented, loyal, ambitious, young and capable deputy, so whoever applies for my job from outside the school, we will have a serious candidate from inside. They need someone to play a role that fits my skills and experience perfectly. I am solvent and have precisely no financial worries. My children are both well established and independent. And,” she said, turning full face towards David, “I have a kind, caring, considerate husband who loves me enough to want what I want, to grant me my wishes, to support me and to continue buggering the maid in my absence.”
He knew it was coming. At some point she would strike and now it was done. So it was with new composure that David posed the question he had to ask and, as he spoke, his eyes glared a question at Michael, whose head remained bowed, offering no contact or clue. “So pray, dear wife, our very own headmistress, pray tell us what you are to do.”
Janet giggled again. Was it shock at the revelation, or the joy of victory? “Well, dearest David, for two years I am to fulfil the role and function of an advisory teacher, to implement a programme of secondary school management reform in Africa, based in the Ministry of Education, Nairobi, Kenya.”
Bernard straightened further in his chair and shook his head. But he also smiled, because he knew that this is what Janet wanted. He wanted what she wanted. David was flabbergasted. He could not have spoken even if he had tried. Marie, Karl and especially Douglas almost applauded her, but they did not, accepting the gravity of her words with personal sadness mixed with joy close to elation. Their father, after all, was clearly excluded from the celebration. Michael simply did not move.
“Coffee, ma’am?” were the words that preceded the re-opening of the dining room door and the emergence of Rosita bearing another tray with all the accoutrements needed to serve the after dinner beverage.
As Rosita set down the tray on the table and began to collect the zabaglione glasses, a strange normality reasserted itself. David rose, mumbling something about brandy. Douglas and Marie whispered to one another. Bernard shook his head, though not in reply to David’s implied offer of a drink.
Janet turned to Michael, who had still not raised his head, as if concentrating on the detail of San Gimignano towers pictured on his place mat. “Did you know? You work with Mo Thomas, don’t you? Had I let something slip to her? Did you know?”
He did not answer, but he would, later.
Boniface
Boniface ought to have been a priest. As a schoolboy in Mwingi Junior Seminary, his heart had indeed been set on this one ambition, but despite the fact that he himself and several of his classmates openly expressed their desire to join Holy Orders, neither he nor any of his peers saw the idea through. Many in the school, of course, had espoused the idea as a concubine, adopted it for a while out of mere pragmatic convenience to secure their privileged place in Father Patrick’s secondary school. Others, with similar end result, had professed the ambition of joining the priesthood with neither the maturity to comprehend the difficulty of the task nor the mettle to see it through. In their eyes it was merely a job and a job worth doing, demanding and receiving almost unqualified respect from others. In this poor area where, through the example of its fine schools and towering new concrete cathedral, the Church was effectively the vanguard of modern life, where the priesthood was a job fit even for a European, where every priest had a car, a motorcycle and at least one radio, in this place boys wanted to be priests like those elsewhere want to be pilots, astronauts, film stars or sometimes even dustbin men.
For Boniface, though, the priesthood was neither pipe dream nor ruse. With all his heart and mind he strove towards his ambition, guided by Father Patrick’s considered advice. Having administered the school for twenty years since its foundation, the priest had seen many students come and go, but in all that time only a handful had made the transition from junior to senior seminary. Only two of those had as yet been ordained as priests and he prided himself that even in their earliest months in his school, he had earmarked both of them as probable candidates. Such cases were rare, and Father Patrick was rarely wrong. Though he was responsible for the running and development of the school and also for parish work besides, it had always been his practise to provide extra tuition and counselling for those boys who, in his opinion, promised the most. From the very first day that he entered Mwingi Junior Seminary, Boniface Mutisya had been identified for this privil
eged treatment. He had given the boy four years’ special catechetical and theological instruction at the rate of one hour per day during term time. Boniface, though never a bright child, had been pleased to be so treated and had stuck to his appointed task diligently and enthusiastically without a single word of complaint.
In return for the boy’s extra studies of the Bible and Catechism, Father Patrick had given up much of his own free time to ensure that the boy would surmount the formidable but necessary academic hurdles. When, at the end of four years of arduous and self-disciplined study the boy seemed destined to obtain the leaving certificate passes he needed to progress to the senior seminary in Nairobi, his path in life had seemed ready-prepared. All Boniface had to do was keep standing. The momentum of his ambition would surely see him through.
From the beginning his credentials had been perfect. His father, a trader in Thitani market, was not only a devout Roman Catholic, but also, at least in the public eye, possessed a near guaranteed cash income from which he could provide school fees. As a patron of the Church he had constant dealings with first Father John O’Hara during his many years of service in Migwani and then later with his successor, Father Michael Doherty. His infant son thus received his early teaching from a future Bishop. The child had sung in John O’Hara’s choir, had learned to don a fine white surplice to help at services and later, when he began his schooling in one of Migwani’s primary schools, had lived in the mission house itself for some months until a boarding place within the school’s compound became vacant.
John O’Hara had thus become in part a father to the boy and, when news arrived that the long-standing parish priest was to become Bishop, it seemed only natural that Boniface Mutisya, suitably groomed and surpliced, would share the platform at the investiture. As he stood aside, proudly holding the heavy gilt cross high as if it were feather-light, and saw a grave-faced O’Hara bedecked with the resplendent robes of his office, the boy wept out of wonder. He was a still slightly built seventeen by then, though in the eyes of his mentor, still very much a primary school child. Within a year, however, he had made the desired transition and had embarked upon his four years of study and instruction in the Mwingi Junior Seminary. The new dignity with which the now enrobed O’Hara had greeted the boy that day, however, lived on in glowing memory and, if anything, grew both brighter and stronger with the passing of time, until he himself began to see it as nothing less than a blinding revelation. Exam passes, and, on Father Patrick’s recommendation, a guaranteed place in the Nairobi Senior Seminary reinforced the vision. So by the time Boniface Mutisya, now twenty-one, made his way home from Mwingi at the end of his final term, both his heart and mind were set, firmly cemented on his one and burning ambition. Over the following years, he would begin to see that moment of homecoming as the high point of his life, a watershed from which he had subsequently drained to be captured in the insignificance of the general flow. Indeed he would look back and conclude that he had been denied the one extra step, which would have permanently raised him to a higher plane, a plateau sanctuary that, once achieved, would have sustained itself.
***
Boniface Mutisya sat proudly upright in the front passenger seat of Father Michael’s rattling Toyota. Not once did he turn to check the comfort of Josephine, his wife, as she struggled to hold their sick child steady against the constant lurching of the car. This apparent lack of concern was no mere sham. Today Father Michael, a reckless driver at the best of times, was truly excelling himself, propelling the car sideways as much as forward along the pot-holed dirt road at over sixty miles an hour. Boniface was simply terrified, so terrified for his own safety that any consideration of his ailing child could take only second place behind an undiluted and all-consuming self-interest. And, so strong was his need to maintain masculine dignity before his wife that he dare not turn to face her lest she should see the helplessness of his fear. Thus, with consciously imposed control, he faced only forward with head held high and hands clasped on his lap, successfully suppressing each frequent and fearful compulsion to close his eyes and grab something solid.
There were times, surely, when Father Michael had fallen asleep at the wheel, when the car momentarily lurched sideways or sped defiantly towards a seemingly bottomless pothole in the heavily pitted road. Then, desperately trying to swallow his apparently rising gut, though offering no external clue to his inner plight, Boniface would steal an occasional sideways glance out of the very corner of his eye, if only to reassure himself that Father Michael was still there. On each nerve-racked occasion the picture was the same. With his head lolling on one side and camouflage hat pulled low over his eyes, Michael leaned towards the open side window, where his forearm rested. With silent nonchalance, he mouthed an Irish nationalist song through lips still pursed by the same impatience with which he had greeted Boniface’s urgent plea earlier that morning. The violent, radiant red of the priest’s sunburnt face heightened, Boniface believed, by anger, which he himself had caused, seemed to demand silence, or more accurately, amid the bangs and crashes of this now loose car on the quite awful road, seemed to demand that no one should speak, even in the odd moments when the young man’s fear subsided and allowed him to find the necessary words.
***
Knowing that he was about to receive the praise and adulation of his entire family, Boniface stood and watched, as the bus from which he had just alighted set off on the long road to the south with its gears clanking and its exhaust spouting irregular clouds of rolling black smoke. And still the owners of this heap of cream and orange rusty scrap had the cheek to name it Mrembo, a handsome young man.
Every day this bus ran from Mwingi to Mombasa, or from Mombasa to Mwingi, one of a pair of almost identical buses that operated the service. The three hundred miles took over thirteen hours, mainly because the first hundred and fifty were on dirt roads, where the buses could do no more than sixty miles per hour between pick-ups - and this often sideways! Most passengers, however, used the service only for local journeys, which was better for both the owners and the operators of the Mrembo buses. To travel all the way to Mombasa, Boniface would have needed only twenty-five shillings, whereas the ten or so miles from Mwingi to Thitani cost him almost five. It might have been relatively cheaper per mile to travel all the way to the end of the route - Boniface knew this because his mathematics teacher in the Junior Seminary had used the Mrembo bus journey to Mombasa as a means of teaching averages - but he was glad he was getting off in Thitani. Not only was this home, but he was still in one piece, which he might not have been had he taken Mrembo all the way to Mombasa, as demonstrated by a secondary school mathematics class on probability. This company had a reputation for employing very poor people as drivers and there were always many stories of the buses running out of fuel or crashing.
With his mind aglow with the joy of achievement, but also tempered by a sadness born of a nagging fear for his future, he waved goodbye to the school friends with whom he had shared his last end of term journey from Mwingi. They all knew that the day was a landmark. From here their lives would separate, quite possibly never to cross again. For four years they had travelled to and from school together, had shared the same Sungura dormitory during term time and had attended the same classes to achieve their very different ends. Now, with the departure of this particular bus of the Mrembo company, a division of Mulonzya Enterprises of Mwingi, into a growing cloud of dust of its own making, the pattern was set for change. As Boniface watched it disappear into the near distance, and with it also the happy if somewhat obscene gestures of his friends through the back window, he knew he was waving goodbye to an era, finally dismissing his youth.
Still casting frequent glances toward the fast fading growl of the Diesel engine, as the bus laboured to the top of a shallow hill to the west of the town, Boniface ambled across the hard-baked bare red earth of the market place. He walked as quickly as he could, but was constantly hindered by the swinging of the large
wooden box he carried. Such boxes, strong, dovetail-jointed structures, finely made by local carpenters, were one of the constants of school life. Every student had one, invariably padlocked through a steel hasp on the front and kept tucked away beneath the bunks in the dormitory. In it were stored a student’s worldly possessions, which always made the ritual termly trip to and from home in their entirety. Thus, inside this strongbox which now Boniface struggled to carry, there were two complete school uniforms, that is two pale blue shirts and two pairs of grey shorts, four books which Father Patrick had given him during his time in the seminary, exercise books full of copied text book notes for each of the subjects he had studied, and a few toiletries, a toothbrush and a half-used cake of soap. It was the paper of the exercise books that made it heavy. He had made a lot of notes, especially during the evening prep sessions in the library, when he had almost succeeded in copying out in his meticulous if rather fussy hand a complete geography textbook. The information was useful for the exam. Boniface now knew everything there was to be known about the Saint Lawrence Seaway, its construction, method of operation, cost, uses, advantages, disadvantages, maintenance and its possible future development. He had developed an intimate understanding of the Great Lakes of North America, the economy of the towns on their shores and of their vast hinterlands in both Canada and the United States of America. Boniface had understood all this, despite himself never having seen a stretch of water wider than the cattle dam in Migwani and never having visited a town larger than Mwingi, whose four hundred or so inhabitants had never regarded themselves as urbanised.
But after four years of travelling back and forth on occasional weekends as well as ends of term, the box that he struggled to lift was now much the worse for wear. It now looked nothing less than battered, with evidence of recent repair. Its swinging dead weight seemed to stretch the young man’s thin arm and impart a limp to his walk as its bulk impeded his step. By the time he reached the shade of the neat concrete cube which was his father’s shop, his beautifully smooth skin was dripping with sweat and shone black in the fierce light of the afternoon sun. Then, having reached the building and sighed with relief as he stepped inside, he could only watch helplessly as the box flew open. The padlock itself had held, but the strain on the lid had broken the hasp, ripping the securing nails from the wood and splitting the frame. The resulting crash shattered the silence inside the empty shop and brought both his mother and father rushing in to investigate from the rear of the building. Almost together, but from different sides, their faces appeared in the open doorway behind the shop’s counter to peer through the relative darkness of the interior.
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