The Present Moment

by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye

  Two or three more exchanges were made and then one day the driver of the delivery van jeered at her in the road.

  ‘So they got your friend at last.’

  ‘Who got who?’ she asked, confused, but confused because of knowing, not of doubt.

  ‘They’, he indicated the officers’ quarters, ‘got your fancy man. Ha, it’s not only Kikuyu they’ve got an eye on, them lot. Watch out for yourself.’

  She turned her back and walked away. She did not feel anything towards the man except gratitude that he recognised her commitment, but the sense of failure was strong in her. She would be no more use now.

  That was the night the memsahib followed Robert down to the quarters. Next day she wept and screamed and left. Mimi herself could not stand it any longer. She had savings in the Post Office, though she also gave generously towards the support of the Emergency orphans at Dagoretti. She was glad now, fiercely glad, that Robert’s children had not lived. She would never have been able to trust them. His wife, too, was better unencumbered. Mimi was glad now that her baptism certificate and her testimonials in a foreign-sounding name left her movements unrestricted. She went to Nairobi where she had the address of one of the aunties. She had drifted away. They thought she had not made much of herself. She never discovered how much they knew about her recent life, but, maintaining a certain reserve, they never held it up against her.

  It was not difficult to find work in those days. She had, once more, the advantage of not being a Kenyan. But the laundry work was hard, and, though the money sounded all right, she had for the first time to rent a room by herself, and there were no perks of food or sharing of utensils. She hardly saved anything. The overfurnished houses of the aunties, their elaborate tea-sets and fancy covers, set a standard she was not accustomed to. A sip of sweet sherry now and then, with a biscuit, behind the pantry door, had become a necessity when facing the pasty memsahib in the kitchen. Sixteen years she worked in Ngara as paint crumbled from the shop-fronts and the names over them changed, while Asians joined the queues bound for London and the flats filled up with black families who did their own washing and held their ceremonies in country places far away. The identity card now showed her as a Kenyan born in Mombasa. The rent went up: milk, bread and rice went up too; she needed glasses and false teeth. These came out of the Post Office book. There were bitterly cold winters: she needed thick sweaters, coming out of the steamy heat of the laundry, and a drop of something to keep the spirits up. She bought heavy stockings to cover the swollen veins and they wore out quickly as she stumbled over the roughening pavements amid the ever more intrusive parked vehicles.

  When the pneumonia struck, she came back from hospital to lie gasping in her stuffy room, chores done at weekends by schoolgoing children attached to the aunties, always in a hurry. There was no job left for her even if the doctor had passed her as fit enough. The Post Office account dwindled.

  She hunted around, not used to insecurity, served in a shop for a few weeks while someone was away having a baby, but was slow and clumsy. Her glasses fell and shattered on the glass counter. In any case they were overdue for renewal and she did not find much difference without them. She minded some children after school until the parents came home from work, but after the first week they never paid her and she had to give it up.

  Little by little she secreted her household goods in old bags or, at last, in old newspapers, and sold them, shamefaced, in the street markets, but the rent remained unpaid. Desperate, she cut the flowers from the tiny patch of front garden – half were hers anyway, and the surviving auntie was almost blind – and tried to sell them far away in the town, but they were commonplace and fetched very little. Halfcrazed, she stole flowers from distant gardens, a few at a time, hoping to escape attention, but it was noticed and she was taken to the police station and given a warning. Creeping home, she found the house barricaded against her – the auntie had long since surrendered to the mortgage, and her daughters-in-law paid rent for her own apartment in grudging instalments. Mimi’s scantily covered bed, a meagre change of clothing, the charcoal burner and a rough box of kitchen utensils were all that remained. She saw the justice of their being locked away.

  She still had her ID, proving her to be a Kenyan citizen, some ancient tax receipts and a plastic rainhood tucked into an old-fashioned black silk purse. Believing that you would not be molested if walking purposefully, she set off on a circuit of the town, hardly conscious of hunger but desperate for a cup of tea. After dark an urchin shoved her sprawling, snatching the useless purse, and her dental plate broke as she hit the pavement full face, bruising her nose and chin. She pulled it out and threw away the pieces, checking carefully that she had swallowed none. Where she was going it would be of no advantage to her.

  A night watchman found her huddled in a doorway. He let her warm herself at his wood-fire and brought a damp rag to wipe her soiled face. Then he explained to her what to do. It was counsel of despair, but she was grateful for any human counsel. In the morning she dragged herself to the street by the mosque.

  The days and nights blurred then into a round of pain and humiliation: she did not know for how long. In fact it was about six weeks before she was picked up in the street in a state of collapse, taken to hospital and from there eventually to the Refuge. She blessed those passers-by who gave her something to eat instead of a coin which she would have first to defend against predators and then make the painful voyage to convert into food and drink at a kiosk. As the big buildings went up and the empty sites were developed, from day to day the eating places of the poor had moved further away from the best begging grounds, across more perilous roads, less warmed by makeshift fires. She hung her head, dreading to meet the eyes of old neighbours, putting off as long as possible the need to pick her way into the public lavatory, treasuring a length of sacking that enabled her to squeeze out in cold water one piece of clothing after another and partly dry it on the vacant lot in the pale morning sun.

  But there is mercy, and here she was, retaining part of her mystery, helping Bessie little by little to reach out from her much longer withdrawal, recognisable, wonder of wonders, to Mr Robert’s sister-in-law. She must have been badly shaken at the time to retain the picture so clearly in her mind, Mama Chungu thought: she herself could not have described the white lady, probably because there was nothing in her, except her concern for the baby, to cause surprise. (Silly bitch, thought Mama Chungu resentfully, to reveal herself like that. Suppose I had let myself go and asked for a port and lemon or a quilted bed jacket, I might have been out on my ear again.)

  She would have preferred to avoid the pain of recognition, and yet it confirmed a continuity in Mimi which Mama Chungu had begun to doubt. Not that these young hussies of nurses needed to know about it, but she had been pretty once and had chosen her side.

  Bessie did not return to her line of questioning when Jane came again, but she did manage to speak to her. She felt freer with the young than with these old people who might have knowledge of the struggle and shame which had been locked down below the layer of conscious speech in her – the fire which had engulfed her family when she, in her slow, uncoordinated way, was late in getting them moved from the homestead to the new village; the detention camp where she was herded after wandering out after curfew hopefully in search of them; the hateful guard who had engendered this last, late son upon her; the cousins who had cared for the child, as she could not, in their own, bereaved home, and taught him to be compassionate towards her. They too, she thought belatedly, would miss the boy and might even wonder where she was, if they ever came to Nairobi and saw her house made desolate. She did not know that already an outdoor garage was thriving on the site. A warning instinct had told her not to go back to see if dogs had licked the blood. And she had forgotten, if Leonard had ever told her, that his aunt was blind now and old Ezekiel too weak in the joints to go far from home. They had received Leonard’s Post Office book and his civilian clothes. If she had understo
od this, Bessie would have said that they had the right, for they had sheltered and schooled him, and she had everything she needed. Except the boy.

  ‘I think I may go into a convent,’ said Jane, ‘when I have finished my training. They always have need of nurses.’

  ‘You are a Catholic, then?’ asked Bessie, with a vague memory of incense and crosses and a beautiful lady who had a baby and then was seen to hold him dead and naked in her arms.

  ‘No, not really. But I was at a Catholic school and learned about what they do. After John died, I just wandered about at home, when I had time off, and I always seemed to come on a tall tree, with branches like a cross, calling me. I think that is what it meant.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Bessie. ‘I do not understand much. To be a nun is hard. But this one, Rahel, when she could talk, would always speak of a dead tree. She saw it when she was young and it changed her.’

  ‘So did she take to religion?’

  ‘Oh no. Perhaps they did not even have this religion then, I don’t know. She is old. She was married to a soldier and had one son who grew up. I think the others all died. But he ran away, they told me. In a military family it is a great shame to run away. To the rest of us it might seem just like common sense. So he is lost too.’

  To succeed in running away might at least soften the memories of those left behind, but they both put the thought away.

  ‘I see,’ said Jane, a bit bewildered. ‘Perhaps I can ask her when she gets better.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I do not think so. She does not often talk. But then I do not often talk to these old people either. It is because they are jealous of my having a baby.’

  ‘Well, I have two years training still to go.’

  ‘I know you are sad,’ said Bessie. Her thoughts had always come slowly, and now she had for many years lost the habit of explaining them to other people. For herself, any hook to hang a picture on was direction enough for thinking – chicken, tea, baby, fire, dress, blood. Baby and blood especially. But this girl had known Leonard. There must be some way, with a great effort, of getting towards her, sucking up the knowledge she had, wrapping it up like a bundle of rags inside the tidy dress they made her wear and wash, wear and wash, wear and wash. She missed her rows of tins filled with secrets – pebbles, bits of charcoal, bright buttons, a photograph. They would never have found which one had the photograph in. But she did not miss them all that badly, because one got used to anything, really. That was what she was trying to say.

  ‘I know you are sad. But you get used to it in time. And there are other – other. . . .’ She did not know how to say that from even the ugliest and unkindest guard a child like Leonard could come.

  ‘I know, my mother,’ answered Jane, turning away. ‘We were not even promised to one another. There are other nice boys. It is not their fault that John was the one to – to – lose his life. But it is not even feeling sad. It is not even wanting. . . . There is a medical student who kept asking me out. I wouldn’t have gone anyway because I know he has let down one or two girls before. All the same I know he is good-looking, rich, clever, amusing, by what people say – but it is only knowing, not seeing. It is like at the beginning of your training going to the mortuary frightens you – all those dead bodies, people wailing outside, you feel sick. But after a while you get used to it and all you feel is that it is cold – so cold. You can do anything you have to do there, but always so cold.’

  ‘Cold,’ echoed Bessie. ‘Cold. You must always keep charcoal. Don’t pass a little piece. Keep it by you. It will comfort you. A picture maybe. And keep your clothes on. To keep changing and washing, changing and washing, makes you so cold – cold. And then they take the baby away.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Wairimu slipped outside soon after it was light, unbolting the kitchen door. She did not expect to sleep much, since she no longer worked hard or differentiated clearly between dreams and memories, but lay snugly wrapped in her cot while she heard the heavier women heave themselves over on creaking springs (had they never lain still on bare board frames, thinking themselves too good for the easier mat on the floor?) or spitting into their little tins, and Bessie sobbing night after night for her lost baby.

  She liked to take a quick pee in the garden before anyone could see – it still felt more natural to her than stooping over the clammy pan indoors – and had a vague memory that at first light one should be facing the mountain. Although people told her that it could be seen on blue January mornings from the ground and easily (easy to whom?) from the top of those tall buildings, she could not trust her eyes so far. And it did not matter. Even long ago the blind would be led to the right position, and nowadays you were taught to look for Ngai not even up in the sky but in your own heart. If it were not so, how would the Refuge have been built for them by people far away? Even this young man from Uganda – a green and mushy place, she had heard, where crocodiles lurked and women grovelled on the ground – came with a Kikuyu name and an understanding of what old ladies cared about. The grandson of Waitito? Well, that was all he knew, it was no good asking for more. Making mistakes began a long time ago, as the proverb says.

  The Somali guard was awake and shifting in his greatcoat. He would unlock the gate and go off duty when the kitchen helper arrived with the milk. He never missed the first call to prayer, which perhaps unconsciously had been Wairimu’s signal that day had come. The chanted syllables rippled through the half-light: though Eastleigh was never deserted, movement at dawn was subdued, cautious, from figures sleeping in doorways, stirring breakfast porridge in kiosks, trudging from distant suburbs to early duty in town, converging on the bus depot to start up transport for more affluent eight o’clock workers. Later in the day the muezzin would be overpowered by the noise of traffic, trade, education and a thousand radios.

  Grudgingly the guard opened the gate.

  ‘Don’t you get lost now, granny. My orders are not to let anybody in, but I’m not supposed to let you old girls go out gallivanting either.’

  ‘Go on,’ she replied cheerfully. ‘You don’t know how often I might have tiptoed past you to keep a date on a moonlit night.’

  She walked down to the corner kiosk where they sometimes bought bread on allowance days or Vicks or Sloane’s liniment (‘Whiskers’ they called it) but it was not yet open. It was getting light, but a cloudy, grey morning, no blaze of splendour from the east. She turned round the corner where the kids had made a space for playing football, or perhaps kept a space where once the Somali had grazed their herds, moving in to work as butchers, house servants and drivers for the white man’s city where a high value was put on the clothed and the literate. She had known a lot of Somali in the old days. . . . She paused to rest as the lights started to go on in the squat houses surrounding courtyards that had begun to colonise the area in the twenties and the tall, balconied flats behind.

  As she turned to continue her walk – it was good to be away from the nattering of those old women for a time, and it would be fully light before the porridge was ready and windows thrown open to winkle out the latest of the sleepers – she noticed something lying in the gutter, too big for a dead dog. A drunk? Surely on so cold a night even the farthest gone would have crept to better shelter. She shuffled nearer and bent as far as she dared without risking the sharp pain. It was a young man, brown-skinned, curly-haired but the soft hair messed with blood, well-dressed – not simple robbery, then, to leave the leather jacket, the smart shoes – twisted to an extent that surely indicated death. She did not touch him – she had seen too many deaths: deaths sensed just out of earshot in the forest, deaths outside the police lines in Government Road, deaths in the Emergency, deaths of old people, hungry and forgotten. There was a risk in touching. But she lifted up her voice and the old cry, the cry of mourning, thin and reedy, broke from her, more urgent than the call to prayer.

  The curtains in the lighted windows did not move and no doors opened. A dog or two gave a desultory bark and then fell silent.
Wairimu felt the impulse to run away and then remembered that her body was no longer capable of doing so. A man in a bus conductor’s uniform came hurrying towards her, perhaps late to report on duty. He looked to where she pointed and shrugged.

  ‘Nothing we can do for him, ma. Anyone you know? No? Well, I’ll phone police from the depot and you’d better get off home as far as I can see. Where can they find you for a statement? Oh yes, Old Women’s Refuge, I know it. But don’t you stick your neck out, mother. It won’t do him any good.’

  She was still gazing at the body as he strode away. There was something familiar about the features though she did not remember seeing the young man before. She bent her knees and picked up something from the gutter just by the dead man’s sleeve, took one last look and then trotted back at her best pace to the gate of the Refuge. Suleiman was just leaving but he paused to hear her story and then marched with her into Matron’s office to telephone the police. Matron, a scarf over her rollers, was not best pleased, but here was a circumstance she could not say no to.

  By the time morning porridge was finished, every person in the house had heard the whole story, and although they did not allow a crowd to form, the police, who were photographing, measuring, sifting round the place of the killing, did so under the baleful stare of a dozen or more old ladies, not one of whom could be hurried in her slow progress towards the purchase of a box of matches, to call on a fever-ridden friend, or to pick up the latest news from the gate of the Maternity Hospital. Even Bessie took her little tin and shuffled after the others, seeming to understand the violent event and the need for stealth. But though she managed to wriggle closer than the others to the body, and to look at it longest, she turned away disappointed, still muttering under her breath, ‘My baby, my baby.’