As the passers-by paused, gossiped, moved on, a girl kept walking up and down the road. She was tall and bony. You could almost hear the beads clicking in her long hair against the windcheater. Surely not on the beat – not in the middle of the morning – not on this street – not beside the corpse, for goodness’ sake. Nekesa looked at her curiously and a twitch of recognition passed between them, though Nekesa’s equivalent younger self would have been wearing a flowered cotton dress and had her hair arranged in skimpy plaits over the line of the skull. Of course the girl was really watching the body, and that flick of the shoulder scarf across her face was to disguise her tears. Nekesa stationed herself on the corner. After all, she knew how.
‘Very sad thing,’ she remarked as the girl drew level with her. Police were still fussing over the body, trying to keep the crowd back.
‘Very sad.’
‘You knew him?’
‘What are you getting at? Nothing to do with me.’
But she seemed unable to keep her eyes off the place where the body lay.
‘You knew him?’ asked Nekesa again.
The girl shook her head.
‘It might help to find out, you see. If you could give the time or who was with him.’
‘I can’t. And if I could, why should I bother?’
‘Because it’s the only thing left to do for him.’
The girl flicked her plaits back and there was a long pause. Then she started to talk.
‘He wasn’t with me last night or for a long time before. After all, he’s a student – he has friends of his own kind: he isn’t going to look for a girl like me unless he’s pretty low. And unless I were much better off than I am, I wouldn’t be able to send the others away and wait to see if his lordship might drop by. Surely you know that?’
‘Of course I know it,’ said Nekesa. ‘You see it in me, I see it in you. I’m old enough to face facts and be no threat to you. Besides, something else happened to me. I’ll tell you about it presently. But there is something I want to know from you first.’
‘I fancy him, that’s all. Did, I should say. Name is Joseph, a university student. You know they don’t tell their whole names or where you can find them. But I thought he might be a medical from his hands and – from – from some fancy words he uses. It was the girl in the next room who called me: “Look over the road in a minute and you might see someone you know,” she says, only meaning to upset me, because I had no idea. . . . No, she was with her regular boy last night. It was when she was going out to get the milk that she saw him lying there. Why are you so interested, anyway? Do you know him?’
‘I’m not sure. I think I know one of his family, but she doesn’t call him Joseph and I’ve not seen him close to. I’ve no intention of worrying her without being sure. My eyes are not as good as they used to be. And in any case she doesn’t always tell the truth. She might be just pretending that he is a connection of hers.’
‘Who does tell the truth?’
‘I do, for one. Because, you see, the Lord saved me. Me, a cheat, a prostitute, a drinker. True I was getting old, but if I’d had my eyes open it might have happened years earlier. For you too.’
‘Oh yeah, oh yeah, I’ve heard that at street corners before. And then I starve or what? You didn’t go on the street because it was fun, I know that. Something pushed you. Me too. You reckon you’re going to get me a job as a receptionist/telephonist tomorrow?’
‘Well, stranger things have happened – what is your name, now? Judy? I wouldn’t rule out the possibility, Judy. I got that way because my mother was sleeping around and my stepfather didn’t have much of a job either. There was no school for me and not much training for any girls then, except the few at mission boarding schools. But there are lots of jobs for you girls nowadays. Not enough to go round – I’m not old and silly enough to think that – but enough to give you a hope. I used to fancy myself as the lady in the dry cleaner’s; that was the height of my ambition. Good clothes, you know, coming in creased and messy and going out all clean and good to feel. I could have learned enough reading and writing for the tickets and numbers, and I guess that would have suited me fine. That would be child’s play to you. You’re not twenty yet, surely: time enough to change.’
‘I’m eighteen, actually. Mother died. I stayed on in this block with my father and brother. My older sisters work in Nakuru. Father was a drinker – got worse when Mama died and he was sent up for dangerous driving. Of course he won’t get a job when he comes out. Brother got killed in 82. Only last year, but I guess we’ll always think of it as 82. I’d just finished a typing course – result fair after a third division school certificate: no money to repeat. Where does that get me? The landlord let me keep on one room because he was sorry for me, but I’ve still got to find the rent, haven’t I?’
‘Your sisters?’
‘One is married to a real holy Joe. Do you think he’d have me soiling his wall-to-wall carpeting? Me – lipstick, ear-rings, a trade word that slips out now and again. The other one has two fatherless kids to support, so they hardly manage to speak to her. Do you think she’d take care of me as well? All right, I won’t say it.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Nekesa, ‘but I can’t keep on standing here. Come in the Refuge and sit on my bed. Allowed? What’s to stop you? Do you think we’re already practising to be a choir of angels or something? Old age isn’t infectious unless you let it get you down.’
Judy looked around her, embarrassed. Rahel was apparently asleep in one of the four beds, smelling faintly of urine and breathing noisily through her mouth. Two other beds were neatly made and empty. Nekesa’s looked a bit grubby – it was far from inspection day – and there were husks of groundnuts on the cement floor. On top of the locker stood a used enamel mug, a violently coloured picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and an ancient Christmas card depicting Santa Claus and a couple of reindeer. Are these the rewards of virtue, the girl thought to herself.
‘You see,’ said Nekesa comfortably, ‘this won’t look much to you. For me, it’s as good as I’ve ever had. He gives according to what you ask, you see. For me it was a bit too late to ask for a university student and a couple of kids. A pair of long-lost sisters wouldn’t have been too hard for him to rustle up if I’d thought about them in time. You have. But I’d be a bit more ambitious if I were in your place. Don’t imagine you’re doomed for life at eighteen.’
The girl looked sideways and began chipping at her nail varnish.
‘You see, I’d been in Kampala during the Emergency – that’s another story. I came back to Nairobi when I was about forty. Things were looking up. Uhuru was coming. For one reason and another Kampala was a little bit hot for me at the time. Perhaps somewhere inside me I could see the troubles that were coming to foreigners in Uganda.
‘Anyway here I was, all on my own. A lot of my old friends were Kikuyu and had got moved here and there during the bad times. My mother had gone off to Western with one man or another long before, and my brother had died. I hardly knew my dad or the little ones. But I knew what I wanted to do. I had some money saved up and I started a trading pitch at Machakos Bus Stop – that’s right, Airport you call it now. I had combs, mirrors, picture frames, handkerchiefs, safety pins, all that kind of thing. Gikomba Market as we know it now had not started then, and though young men had started selling things inside the buses, it had not yet become the racket it is nowadays. Things were very much cheaper then than they are now, but still I had several hundred shillings tied up in stock. I shared a room in a house at Shauri Moyo with a Ugandan friend of mine who had also retired from the game. Pumwani would have been a bit nearer, but we didn’t want to be pulled back into the old routine, and there’s no upper or lower age limit in Pumwani, as you know.
‘I was doing all right and Keziah had a refreshment stall near the stadium. I had my licence to trade and everything – a reformed tart, you might say, but still bitter and rotten-hearted. Uhuru came and went, Jamhuri, the pro
mise of federation with Tanganyika and Uganda all forgotten, people feeling good, confident, expecting improvement, wanting more and more of the kind of things I had to sell. This went on up to 1971, the time of the great loyalty rally. You won’t remember it, of course. Busloads of people coming into Nairobi, excitement, extra refreshment places, police everywhere, suspicion, people afraid for their positions, eager to get a leg up.
‘Police came round my stall.
‘ “Licence? Are you a Kenyan?”
‘ “Yes, of course.”
‘ “It’s been reported that you are from Uganda.”
‘ “I have lived in Uganda, but I have been back in Kenya for eleven years.”
‘ “Husband?”
‘ “I am not married, sir.”
‘ “Why not?”
‘ “Why not? Perhaps I was too fussy.”
‘ “What? Wha-a-a-a-t?”
‘A flying kick. Mirrors broken, combs scattered, kids diving to pick them up.
‘ “Place of birth?”
‘ “Nairobi.”
‘ “Where is your father?”
‘ “Dead for all I know. He turned my mother out when I was a little girl.”
‘ “Oh, like that – I see – like that.”
‘Arms and batons waving about. I leaned over, trying to protect the glazed portraits of the President, whether out of loyalty or because they were best sellers at the time I did not stop to think. But too late; the whole pile came crashing down, myself on top of it.
‘ “That’s what you call loyalty, is it? Bloody foreign bitch.”
‘Passengers were crowding round, picking up what they dared. Stallholders hastily packed up and moved away. A bus scraped the fender of a taxi and attention was diverted. People and police moved that way.
‘I tried to push myself up but the pain in my right arm made me crumple again. Using my left arm, I managed to get myself sitting straight on the ground. I felt dizzy. Mechanically I began dropping the undamaged items into a carton. Some were kicked away in the dust but people were ashamed to snatch those near at hand when they could see I was hurt. The teenage son of one of my neighbours came to help me. She had picked up her stock in trade and carried it to the far side of the bus park. When the boy saw my condition he ran over to look after her trade while she came to see how I was. She was a tukutendereza person and we didn’t usually speak more than a word of greeting unless we were begging small change for a note, since I had told her that I was not interested in her appeals to come to Jesus. But right now I was not in a state to reject anything.
‘She touched my arm gingerly but let it alone when I winced.
‘ “You need hospital,” she said, “but I don’t know how you’re going to get there. And you’ve lost a lot of things. Shall I send Victor to pick up what’s left? Is there anywhere you can leave them? I can keep an eye on them while I’m here, but I don’t think the two of us will be able to carry them home along with our own stuff. Oh dear, oh dear! And why should they do this to you? You weren’t doing any harm.”
‘ “Don’t you think your God is punishing me for my sins?” I asked her. At least that’s what I meant to say – I hadn’t got much control over my voice.
‘She looked deeply hurt.
‘ “Do you think God goes around breaking people’s arms and spoiling their pictures?” she asked, really curious. “No wonder you don’t think much of me if that’s what you think I’m witnessing to. But right now we have to get you treated. Can you afford a taxi if I send Victor with you? He’ll walk back, of course.”
‘My head was still buzzing.
‘ “If Victor will really help me,” I said, “the best thing for him to do would be to go and call Keziah. She will know what to do. Do you know her refreshment stall? It’s near the football ground.”
‘ “Yes, I know it. I’ll send him straight away. You just sit still but give me a shout if anyone tries to interfere with your things.”
‘I don’t think I ever thanked her. I sat there scraping the broken glass into a heap and putting the pictures and other goods into a carton. I tried to work out the value, but it seemed different each time I counted. It must have been an hour before Keziah got to me but when she did, sensible woman, it was with her own equipment loaded on to a handcart. She quickly added what could be salvaged from my stock and told the young man to take it to our house. We knew that our landlady would take good care of it. Then she bargained with a taxi driver and they took me up to Kenyatta Hospital.
‘I had to be admitted with a broken arm and some cracked ribs. Keziah came to see me when she could. She dared not lose trade, especially as she had to pay the whole rent for the next couple of months. But Mama Victor came to see me the very next day. She spoke to some of the saved nurses so that they came to see me too, and every day one or other of the group was around, begging me to praise the Lord. Do you wonder that I did? No one had ever taken that much trouble over me before.
‘I went back to work eventually and paid the house rent for the next two months. Keziah had done her share, and she had a child in boarding school to support. I hadn’t got much to sell, and for a long time I had to pay a boy to carry my things because of my bad arm. Well, I managed. Then, of course, I had to stop selling on Sundays. People have got slack about this these days but it seemed to me a very clear command. I loved going to the meetings but then there are bus fares, you see, and always clean dresses, everything neat and new. So I wasn’t really saving enough to keep my stock up as prices increased. By the time my chest began to trouble me, I could hardly afford to spare the time I needed to rest and go for treatment. Keziah went back to Uganda after the liberation and I never heard what became of her. She hadn’t been saved by that time, but the Brethren encouraged me to go on sharing with her and get the message across, and we got along very well. She was afraid I would get upset about her smoking, but it had never been much of a temptation to me and it wasn’t the biggest obstacle in her way either. I was so used to it that it didn’t bother me, except for being a bit embarrassing if some of the sisters called in and started sniffing. But they were always very polite to her.
‘One day in 1980 Mama Victor had to report to the Brethren that I had collapsed in the market and they came to take me home. Of course Victor was grown-up by then and working in the Industrial Area, and all the younger children wanted to read to form four, so with things changing like that their mother did not get much time to help me. As you can imagine, the Brethren discussed me thoroughly, and then they made arrangements for me to come here. So I have been comfortable here for three years.
‘You don’t think being comfortable is enough? Sure it isn’t, in terms of blankets and hot dinners. But being clean and useful before the cross of Jesus, that is another matter. Do you believe me?’
‘I believe that you mean every word of it, granny. And I am grateful that you should waste words on a hard nut like me. But whether it could happen again. . . .’
‘It keeps on happening, my daughter. Listen – I shall hurt you now: that is the way of grannies with children. Let me for once get out of my skin enough to be a granny. You cared for that boy who is lying dead in the road, didn’t you? You thought there was not a chance in a million of your getting on his level, but you still cared. Am I right?’
‘Too right.’
‘Then that means there is a well of feeling in you not yet dried up and soured as it gets to be – I should know – after all the hot breaths and the pawing. You might never have seen him again, but you still want to cry because his death is a loss to him, not just a loss to you. And if the Lord of Heaven suffers because a loss to you matters more to Him than a loss to Himself, aren’t you at least going to listen to His offer? Come now, I will take you to someone who can explain better than I can.’
The girl was thinking, I have not made my bed, and the dirty dishes will be crawling with insects on the table, and before Monday I have to get my pills, and if I went straight back now I might g
et one more look at him – but all the same she went with Nekesa.
CHAPTER TEN
Next day, of course, the report came in the newspapers. It was not headline news (this was the prosecution of an assistant minister for debt) and not an eventful day, since neither back street murders nor official bankruptcies were uncommon. But it was of absorbing interest in the home. Wairimu, Suleiman and the bus conductor were all quoted, though not pictured, and Matron had unbent sufficiently to pay for extra copies of the Swahili paper. The dead man had been identified as Joseph Baraka Wau, a third year medical student, aged twenty-three, of Nairobi. His father was being recalled from a business trip to Uganda. The flat in Westlands where he lived during vacations with his younger brother and sister had not been tampered with and his father’s car remained in the garage. This was the second time the family had been engulfed in tragedy, as the murdered man’s mother and her two older children had perished in a fire eight years before.
Priscilla was the first to read it in full, as she was the fastest reader as well as always the first to be washed and dressed, not like that Wairimu, wandering outside in her night wrapper and headscarf. She sat at the table blinking and twitching her nose, not daring to read aloud as she would soon be asked to do. Evans used to say she looked like a rabbit when she was thinking – how they would laugh then, and he would pretend to lift her by the ears, like a couple of kids playing, until somehow their bodies were engulfed in one another. She slapped herself down for remembering and put away her spectacles. But there was no escape from this knowledge. Suleiman, glorying in his fame, was sticking his head through the window, repeating all the news, and Priscilla found herself already behind Sophia’s chair as she let out a piercing scream.
‘Baraka, Baraka, son of my daughter, Baraka. Is there no end to the evil that can fall upon this family? Aie-e-e, my grandson Baraka.’
The old ladies understood at once, though only Nekesa had had a fearful expectation that it would be so. This was the eldest of the children who had survived the fire which had consumed the big house and killed Sophia’s daughter, Hawa, and her children of sixteen and seventeen. The three younger children had been out in the car with their father. Sophia had run out of the kitchen door screaming. She had been cooking on a paraffin stove which overturned and the flames had leaped to an open tin of kerosene in the corner. She had been unhurt but prostrate with grief. Her son-in-law was as one demented, accusing her of arson, witchcraft, insane jealousy. She was examined over and over again by doctors and psychiatrists, questioned by the police, pressed repeatedly to consider whether any deliberate hand, even if not her own, had turned against the family. Why had she not stoppered the kerosene before lighting the stove? She was elderly, easy-going, forgetful, could not recall whether she ordinarily did so or not. Cooked for herself perhaps not more than once a fortnight. Had not mentioned her intention to her daughter. Collapsed again, trembling and sobbing.
The Present Moment Page 17