Mombasa Road Retravelled

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 10

  And so almost six weeks since arriving frozen and starving in Meru town, we've donned our leathers once again and the Africa Twin looks lean, snarling and ready for road after staying so long cooped up in the White Star's secure parking.

  We have sent Farah on ahead by bus and there is a surprising number of moist eyes bidding surrounding the bike ready to wave us farewell, not least among the staff of the White Star, who have started to assume we were in permanent residence.

  My last errand is a stop off in the market to buy a few kilos of giza from my regular supplier, Njoroge, who is by now, of course, an avid member of Football Kenya:

  'So long, Mr Brian,' the young lad bids me with genuine regret. 'You won't get fresh like this anywhere else in Kenya.'

  'Of that, I'm sure, Njoroge. Are you staying up for the game tonight?'

  'You bet, Mr Brian. We will be checking on the scores by internet. Come on Juventus!'

  It's the second leg of the Champions League first round knockout tonight, European football at its best, and a massive Football Kenya wedge has already been placed on the Old Lady to complete the job on Lyon in Turin after a goalless draw last Wednesday in the Stade Gerlande.

  We shake hands with Njoroge while several people we've never met before also come over to say goodbye, and soon there's quite a little send-off committee gathered round the bike in the middle of the bustling market.

  'I guess they must all be members of Football Kenya,' I say, glancing round at Little Stevie in time to see him returning a very serious-looking wave.

  'Are you looking forward to a ride, Stevie?' I ask.

  He doesn't reply directly to that, but I do get a pat on the right shoulder, which means he must be as eager as I am to be back on the Black Beast, despite missing out on his early morning run.

  Outside Meru we turn towards Embu. It should be a straightforward trip on good roads that will take us clockwise around the eastern fringes of Mount Kenya, before sinking south for Thika and Nairobi.

  It's the hottest time of year, just before the long rains are due, and how I long to clip our helmets onto the back of the bike and ride the wind, but that will have to stay out of the question: I'm not going to put Little Stevie's life at risk on this fast road.

  So we sweat it out in our helmets, cruising at an easy pace over a succession of narrow bridges, underneath which fast-flowing streams course down from the veiled mountain. On almost every bridge we are passed by a procession of Peugeot 'speed taxis,' tilting past us at seventy miles per hour, each with twelve passengers crammed into eight seats, boxes of chickens flanking the windows and several sacks of maizemeal on the roof. As if the 'speed taxis' aren't bad enough, we frequently have to slow and swerve to avoid the wind-rush of one Toyota pickup after another, all massively overloaded with supplies of fresh qat and all in a breakneck hurry to reach Nairobi, where they will be divided up either for local consumption in the capital or for export to the giant Somalian market, all done at breakneck speed so that the leaves remain in pristine condition.

  The cloudless sky rewards us with a succession of views of Mount Kenya, each of which is accompanied by two pats on my right shoulder from Little Stevie. We're mellow, warm and contented, and the frozen fingers we endured on the outward trip back in December are a dim memory now.

  We arrive in Murang'a by lunchtime. This town is the heartland of the populous Kikuyu tribe and the market is swarming with activity, even busier than Meru. We cruise the crowded streets for a while before I spy a nyama choma restaurant which advertises a quiet terrace with plenty of shade.

  By the entrance, there's the ubiquitous crowd of street-kids looking to turn a trick. I hire the lot of them to look after our bike with promises of mingi shillingi for all when we return, then we step inside and I choose a fresh goat leg for roasting, while Little Stevie finds a quiet corner table and sets up the chess board.

  I have already conceded the first game when the steaming meat arrives, but it's worth it just to see Little Stevie still taking in proper food even now we've left Meru, and how relieved I am to see that this improved diet of his won't be a one-place wonder.

  The full stomach also sets me up nicely for an afternoon chew, so I open up a bundle of giza and thrust it in the inner pocket of my leather jacket. Chewing qat at the wheel is no more than an occupational rite of passage for the long distance Kenyan driver, but qat on a bike is probably something of a first, and I guess it could be original enough to make the pages of that unremittingly tedious publication, The Guinness Book of Records, perhaps somewhere next to the entry for bloke who set the record for the most number of days walking backwards round a lamp-post with a three-legged poodle.

  It's the hottest time of day by the time our bellies are full and we return to the bike, but despite the heat, the small crowd of street-kids has swelled beyond recognition and there are six or seven young guys loafing behind them too.

  I'm wary of the young lads and keep a careful eye on their shifty faces while handing a wad of one hundred shilling notes to Little Stevie to distribute among the kids. He tries his best for a few moments, then suddenly struggles to keep up with demand. The kids are way too rowdy and their unruly mobbing and pressing starts Little Stevie off on a performance of mole rat chirps, which in turn sends the kids even crazier still.

  Soon it's mole rat mayhem around the bike. Each time Little Stevie lets off another squawk, the kids laugh louder and longer, so in no time the whole situation is completely out of control. As if things couldn't get any worse, Little Stevie now throws a real wobbly and just dumps all the money on the ground amid all these thieving hands, thereby sparking off a real riot that is pretty similar to the flat-pack fisticuffs you see when IKEA opens a new superstore anywhere in M25-shire.

  It's time for me to act: I jump into the melee, hauling Little Stevie away from the street-kids' increasingly bolder clutches and away from the bike, while he makes the loudest mole rat noises ever chirruped either by or on behalf of any African rodent, and if I didn't have my hands so full right now ensuring our joint safety, I would seriously consider recording Little Stevie's impressive trills and sending them off to the Guinness recorders for their expert consideration. If the editors haven't already got a separate section for mole rat imitation, they can surely find space somewhere next to the continuous tingling on a triangle section, and with celebrity status like that to our names, we Woods could finally be living the contemporary British dream. Who knows? Such new-found, mole-rat superstardom might even catapult us into a couple of episodes of Celebrity Big Brother. I can't wait!

  But back in the messy world of grim reality, not only am I dripping sweat onto my leathers trying to keep the kids from mobbing both of us and looting our gear, but I've also got one hand partly occupied preventing Little Stevie from untying all our gear from the back of the bike so that he can ferret his comfort books out. Even worse, every so often the big Africa Twin takes a severe knock and wobbles precariously on its stand.

  The situation looks doomed to disaster before I notice I'm being robustly helped by the group of six or seven young lads from across the road, the same blokes who seemed to be sizing us up a few minutes before the riot began.

  The young lads are rough. Most of their work is done in loud Kikuyu shouting, though I do hear more than one whack and a slap, followed by a sharp yelp of pain. But in no time they've cleared a protective cordon around the bike and I'm so relieved for their assistance, I'm not even going to bother wondering if this was all just a simple set up job and our rescuers are going to want a 'fee' for saving me and Little Stevie from being lynched by midgets.

  Curiously, they don't ask for anything. Instead, a young fellow with serious scars on his cheeks is clasping my hand and grinning at me and Little Stevie like he's just met genuine celebrities, which in a way, I suppose, although it's a little premature to claim front cover of Hello magazine just yet, could turn out to be truer than he thinks, what with all the mole rat noise pedig
ree.

  'Mr Football Kenya and the Special Boy!' he beams, turning towards Little Stevie, but instantly finds that he can't shake my son's hand because Little Stevie has now actually located his comfort books from the bottom of our rucksack and has proceeded straight to a shrill recital of the must-know star data in the constellation Vulpecula, the Little Fox. And as we've now jumped to the letter V, I realize that the poor boy must have covered an awful lot of astronomical ground on his own on that dreadful day my sickness returned back in Meru, which would explain why I must have missed a lot of significant constellations between the letters M and V that I may not be able to catch up on for some time, till, that is, we go full circle in the celestial orbit of Little Stevie's crisis moments.

  And now it all registers with me.

  'Football Kenya, eh?' I say, wiping the sweat drops from my forehead and re-tightening the gear on the back of the bike, while I look from face to beaming face around our rescuers:

  'Are you all members then, lads?'

  They are, and I've got my work cut out shaking all their eager hands quickly enough. They even manage to grasp Little Stevie's spare hand one by one and in turn and give it a vibrant, staccato shake. But Little Stevie's hand does all this handshaking business without really acting like it's connected to the rest of him, so he misses all their grins and good will, and instead keeps his face buried deep inside the yellow exercise book. And perhaps he's got every reason to avoid them too, for Vulpecula is a miniscule constellation after all, and surely not many of us would attempt it from memory without an aide memoir?

  But with no response from Little Stevie, the lads crowd round me instead:

  'Osiah spotted your bike when you rode into town, Mr Football Man,' one of them tells me, 'and he knew it was you guys.'

  I must be looking at Osiah now, for a short guy in front of me nods vigorously and clasps my hand once more:

  'Thank you!' he says. 'And now I can tell everyone that I have shaken hands with Mr Football Kenya and the Quiet Boy. Thank you, sirs and God bless you!'

  Sirs is not our style, and we could certainly do without the blessing of an omnipotent and omniscient God who thinks it's acceptable practice to let the likes of little Beatrice sniff glue on a Nairobi garbage mound, so I tell them our real names then add:

  'And let's leave God out of it too, eh, lads! The Almighty has a habit of getting his hands in the wrong places in football matches - ask Maradona, Thierry Henry or Luis Suarez! - and we investors don't like the funny peculiar side of the Funny Old Game as much as the commentators and the crowds do!'

  They all laugh at this, though I suspect it's more out of politeness than being on exactly the same wavelength, and we fall to chatting about the Juventus game tonight.

  The Murang'a boys tell me how our new text message scoreflash service has been greatly appreciated by people who have virtually no access to television or internet. On match days before kick-off, they say, they all put their mobiles in a big circle on the floor and wait with baited breath for the first mobile in the circle to shake, screech or buzz. If it's a goal the right way, the winner gets ten shillings from each.

  I love to think of this image, but what hits me even more than this is the fact that I'm standing in Murang'a, a town I've never visited before, and our secret Football Kenya community is right now spreading its tentacles all over Kenya, interweaving all our destinies and uniting them in the short term tonight in what Alessandro Del Piero and the boys in black and white stripes can conjure up at the Stadio delle Alpi in Turin.

  That's a nice thought, but right now a more important realization hits me late and hard, and I want to know how the guys knew so much about me and Little Stevie:

  'All the mobiles are talking about you, Mr Brian,' Osiah tells me rather coyly. 'Everyone wants to know who started this thing off, so the message goes down the line and eventually the answer comes back: The mzungu on the motorbike and his son with the computer that everyone calls The Quiet Boy.

  The Quiet Boy! I wonder, and repeat it to myself several times over, finding that I like the sound of it more each time, though there's a touch of mild regret too, seeing that the mole rat noises have evidently not achieved their true recognition. But I suppose what is more important is the discovery that Little Stevie and I have become cult heroes. That bit was never in the plans and I'm not sure it's as good as it sounds. Stardom could complicate things.

  The Murang'a boys want to ask a whole lot of questions about how we got started and where it's all heading, so it's a while before we've all calmed down and I finally get Little Stevie to put the Yellow Peril down too.

  The street-kids have reformed less threateningly a few paces off and possibly in even greater numbers too. With their shrieks added to the cheers of the Football Kenya boys, Little Stevie and I are treated to a tumultuous send-off, which sees me tooting the horn madly and giving the thumbs-up all around before we roar off along the street on a high, and I can't resist overtaking anything we see in our way because it's now, it's here and it's all starting to happen for us.

  I'm on a buzz and I've got speed in my veins now for the first time in twenty years. Outside Murang'a town I open up the Africa Twin's throttle and we burn off matatus, four-wheel drives and even the speed taxis themselves.

  Little Stevie must be enjoying the jet-rush too, for he gives me a little tap on my left shoulder every time we jump a line of trucks and especially when we take on and pass a black Mercedes stuffed with a stiff bunch of suits, who must inhabit an air-con bubble world you don't see into or out of.

  Despite reservations about me and Little Stevie having inadvertently become the sort of I'm-A-Celebrity-Get-Me-Out-Of-My-Own-Arse overnight superstars I would soon grow to hate with a passion if I ever bought a television set, I can't help enjoying the buzz the Murang'a boys have given me, but it's not just their vibe alone that is propelling all this speed. After so many weeks away I'm on a roll at the prospect of the rendezvous I arranged by text over lunch. And what's more, today is Wednesday: we're going to put Fingers' information about Yasmiin's movements to the test, and I am hurtling directly towards Annie Oakley's with only one thing on my mind.

  Before long we've reached Thika, short on flame trees but strong on masses of faceless corrugated iron shacks, where the road broadens into dual carriageway and simultaneously thickens with every consumptive car and fraudulently licensed driver in Kenya. I cut our speed to cope with the traffic and increase my rate of qat chewing.

  The last ten miles or so are a nightmare vision of what the world will look like when all the dispossessed harbour pretensions of joining the nearest traffic jam, and it's stuffy in Nairobi town as the fumes of early rush hour traffic stagnate in the torpor of February heat, with Little Stevie wriggling uncomfortably in the smog right behind me all the way to Milimani Road and Annie Oakley's.