Mombasa Road Retravelled

by KJ Griffin

  Chapter 17

  Life becomes ever calmer in our beach hideout for the next three weeks, but as the FC Kenya fans slowly drift away back to Nairobi, my own form takes a severe dip, and it's as if the downturn in my health starts to drive all my friends away.

  First Kevin, a surly and shifty frown furrowing his brow, then Big Evans Majengwa, waving his fist in the air and giving knockout high fives to anyone rash enough to raise a palm towards him, are drawn by the lure of this raging political fever that's now engulfing the entire country, and they leave us to head up-country, where they can join the swelling rallies of FC Kenya supporters.

  Finally even Fingers catches me alone one morning while Little Stevie is off running with Farah. The even-smarter-than usual outfit he's wearing plus the little brown travel bag in his hand help to explain the awkward expression on my dear friend's face:

  'Mr Brian, I am sorry,' he smiles apologetically, 'but I must go back to Nairobi now. There's much to do.'

  'No problem, mate,' I wave him off nonchalantly, in urgent need of a few hours' sleep before Little Stevie returns. But Fingers doesn't move.

  'What about Yasmiin, Mr Brian? Will it be all right to stop watching her room? Or do you want me to keep someone looking?'

  Shit! I feel really guilty now. I didn't realize we had still been spying on Yasmiin all these last few weeks.

  'No, don't worry, Fingers. There's no point any more,' I sigh. 'Yasmiin's one of the family now. We can trust her.'

  Fingers nods and rotates his red baseball cap from back to front, then back again. Still he won't go.

  'Why don't you come with us, Mr Brian? Come to Nairobi! You must see the revolution you have started. You must be there to see it when we all become landlords of the sky!'

  We both laugh at this, even if it costs me down below:

  'I think I'll be watching you from the sky soon enough, mate, far sooner than either of us would like!'

  Then, perhaps less enthusiastically than Fingers would expect:

  'But let me stay down here in Mombasa for now. Next time I ride back up-country, it'll be because I'm heading up to heaven myself to admire all your beautiful, new real estate from close up.'

  I don't know how much of my meaning Fingers really guesses at, for I haven't told him or any of the others what's coming my way. But we both shake hands as if we know something's not quite right, and I feel a deeper sense of sadness than I would ever have anticipated at seeing Musembe's suave heir turn and stroll back up the path, heading towards the main road.

  So from now on Yasmiin, Little Stevie and I have the Octopussy Apartments all to ourselves. And in our new-found isolation an even tighter kind of bonding is cemented between us: If I move to the pool, fresh, clear and empty in the so-so equatorial winter warmth, Yasmiin will follow with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders and Little Stevie will tag along behind clutching his football books. And we can sit this way for hours. Silence feels good between us and conversation is ignored.

  When we are not just resting around the pool, Yasmiin spends endless hours finding out just how uncompromisingly ruthless my son's pool cue can be; Little Stevie doesn't play friendlies, not even with Yasmiin, and he continues to clean up the table with his customary monotonous precision, where others might have engineered a few false shots just for the joy of watching Yasmiin stretch across the table.

  It's cool, breezy and overcast most mornings now, and the pleasant softness of winter in the tropics encourages Little Stevie and Farah to roam ever further on their morning runs, till eventually they are gone right up to lunchtime. That's just what I need. I can return to my bed once they have set off and get some more rest, for the vomiting spasms have returned with a vengeance over the last two weeks and I have even had to give up the qat chewing.

  When I do hang around to nibble at few slices of mango or papaya after Little Stevie and Farah have left, Yasmiin and I are increasingly joined by the old Indian owner, who has evidently taken a shine to our Holy Family, seeing as we have become his best-ever customers. With slicked back grey hair and a pair of beltless, starched black trousers permanently slipping down the south side of steep-sloping gut, he sits nodding for hours, clandestinely ogling Yasmiin from behind his shades, while a permanently sagging cigarette butt drools ash like a lava flow into a milky coffee. Now and then he wafts a copy of the Daily Nation in front of our faces, and it seems that every day now Dismas has staged an even bigger FC Kenya rally in Eldoret, Nakuru or Kakamega. Every cover photo shows a tumultuous crowd all flashing the football finger signs, all chanting for change, while centre-stage Dismas's gawky, gap-toothed smile radiates with rabble-rousing rancour.

  When I'm not too sick to give a damn, I'm overwhelmed with a deep-down satisfaction you wouldn't even get if you called every game in the Bundesliga correct on a wet, Saturday afternoon, and when this happens I reach under the table for both Little Stevie and Yasmiin's hands and we sit for a long time this way, together and touch-tight, like some weirdo prayer meeting about to erupt into choruses of 'Praise Him! Praise His holy name!' except of course, crap like that is never going to slip past my lips as long as the Almighty is still letting seething slumfuls of Little Beatrices wander the garbage dumps of the developing world.

  Instead, Little Stevie starts fidgeting on the chair next to me and asks suspiciously:

  'Why are we holding hands, Dad? We've never held hands under the table before. Not even in Italy with that woman, Daniella.'

  'We're doing it because of that,' I say with a lump in my throat, nodding at the latest photo on the front page of the Nation. 'We did that together, you and me, Stevie! Look what we've started!'

  Little Stevie squints for a second at the photo of jubilant masses flashing FC Kenya signs from every section of the terraces in Nyayo Stadium, Nairobi, where Dismas has just held his latest rally. But it's a fleeting second, like when I was trying to teach him to read aged eight and his eyes made such momentary contact with the page, you would have thought the words stung his eyes.

  'Well, I'm proud of this, Dad,' he replies, pointing to his new exercise book of football data. 'We did these last games together, only me and Yasmiin!'

  And it's true. Mainstream European football may be in its summer break, but as we do every year, Little Stevie and I have wandered off to pasture our now super-sized herds in the lush meadows of the Scandinavian football markets, where the great game is played on interminable summer evenings amid the pine forests and fjords.

  Little Stevie and I have long been proud to belong to that small subset of humanity that really roars with relief when the impregnable, arctic-circle lair of Tromso holds out unscathed yet again against raiders such as Viking Stavanger in a game that could be played at midnight without floodlights, but this year it's even more remarkable because half of Kenya now knows enough about Swedish football to tell their Malmo from their Hacken, and can mouth blood-curdling, Viking threats when TPS Turku from the Finnish Veikausligga resume the bitter feud against their clansmen from Inter Turku. But to cap it all, I've let Little Stevie and Yasmiin do the selection meetings on their own for the last ten days, and so far they are off to a hundred per cent start!

  The call from Dismas one Wednesday morning in early July catches me walking with Yasmiin by the sea on a rare sunny and warm morning, the first real beach weather we have enjoyed almost since the end of the British football season.

  Little Stevie is out running with Farah, so I don't need to hide my frailty. We pause every couple of hundred meters or so when the next spasm of pain gushes against my stomach walls. The sand scrunches soft and golden beneath our bare feet, but the warmer upturn has brought the tourists out in droves from neighbouring package-holiday hotels, like hatchling larvae who are gulped at by the sticky tongues of gaunt curio sellers.

  'Brian, how are you doing, man?' Dismas asks. 'Have you been following the news? Your dream looks set to come true!'

  I'm panting heavily and have to clasp Yasmiin's arm tightly before I ca
n reply. A couple of curio sellers have sprung from the shade of the nearest palms and are waving small wooden figures of Masai moran in our faces. I wait till Yasmiin swats them angrily out of my way before I can talk to Dismas:

  'Yes, I've been watching you, Dismas. But you'd better make President quick, or I won't live to see you clinch it.'

  There's a respectful pause at the other end as there always is when one man tells another of his imminent demise.

  'You will live long enough, Brian. You must. But let me warn you of one more thing too.'

  'What's that?'

  'My spies tell me the Government Big Men are going to move. They want to strike us down now, before FC Kenya is unstoppable.'

  'But they won't be interested in me, Dismas; it's you they'll be after. And I guess you can take care of yourself, Big Man that you are with all that mass support.'

  'Me? Yes, yes, bwana, I'll be fine. But you are not as safe as you think. All of Kenya knows who started this off: the Mzungu on the Motorbike and the Quiet Boy. If that is not enough, there is also someone with powerful connections who is mad because you have his girlfriend with you. Take my advice and get out for a while, bwana. Ride your motorbike south to Tanzania till the election comes in December and I can give you the President's protection.'

  'Someone with powerful connections?' At first I'm confused; then in a flash, a moment of clarity:

  'Shit! You mean, Vic Hanson? Is that bastard really looking for Yasmiin?'

  I have scarcely uttered the American's name before I feel Yasmiin snatch the mobile from my hand. Our eyes meet; hers are full of smouldering fury:

  'Let me go to Vic right now, Brian. I know what I must do with him. You should never have stopped me!'

  She wants to take off but she can't cut loose from me. People have recognised us now and we are surrounded by a thin horsehoe of FC Kenya supporters. Their smiles are frank and affectionate, and for them there's nothing rude in just standing in our way, staring, smiling and whispering with cupped hands to each other, like they're comparing real movie stars in the flesh with the glossy pages from Hello magazine before they go mouldy on the toilet floor.

  I smile back and shake as many hands as I'm able to. Maybe it's that which does the trick, for a burst of inspiration suddenly strikes:

  'Dismas, you're still a criminal prosecutor aren't you, when you're not too busy leading the poor huddled masses to revolution?'

  Dismas's baritone voice chuckles at the other end:

  'Why do you ask, Brian?'

  'If you had enough good witness statements you could arraign Vic Hanson, Gregory Aspinall-Watt and Pwani oil for the illegal arrest of Sheik Hamza Hassan of Lamu and for complicity in the murder of six innocent civilians in Lamu town, couldn't you?'

  'Well, Brian?'

  But there's no time to listen to prevarication:

  'Dismas, I'm sending her to you right now,' I cut in, 'Sheikh Hassan's daughter: Yasmiin Nassir. You will do this for me immediately won't you? I want to see those bastards from Pwani Oil and Hanson's mob put away before I die!'

  It takes a few minutes longer to persuade the President-in-waiting, but my credit is good and I know his compliance is just a matter of time. And when the agreement does come, I'm satisfied and filled with a firm resolve.

  Meanwhile the thin slither of faces standing before us has grown to a three-deep throng, and I have to grab tightly on to several of their outstretched hands to keep on my feet, while Yasmiin clings on to my other shoulder, propping me up for the long trudge back to the Octopussy Apartments, which we had better complete before Little Stevie and Farah return from their morning run and my weakness is exposed.

  Convincing Yasmiin of my plans for Vic Hanson and Gregory Aspinall-Watt is hard, harder still above the hubbub of voices that follows us all the way back to Octopussy, which we reach only after I've expended extra energy I don't possess by returning far too many greetings; and I'm even more drained by trying to convince Yasmiin that Dismas's indictment will be more effective than her own bullet in the head when it comes to squaring accounts with Vic Hanson and Gregory Aspinall-Watt.

  In the Octopussy's car park, pulled up right next to the Africa Twin, is Kiwi John's battered brown Land Cruiser, and my old mate is stripped off and doing lengths of the pool. He turns at the deep end, looks up and waves, then front crawls at a sprint towards us, emerging from the water in only his dripping underpants to put two arms round my shoulders:

  'Brian, Jesus!' he murmurs, looking me up and down. 'You're not well are you, mate?'

  'No, I'm getting close to injury time now,' I shrug. 'But the game's still not won. There's much to do.'

  We pull up some chairs by the pool and chat. I'm glad to be in the sun once again and stretch out on a sun lounger while Kiwi John and Yasmiin shake hands in the shade.

  'Skin cancer's become the least of my worries,' I joke, but not even Kiwi John laughs at that. 'A bit of extra warmth seems to do me good. Anyway, what brings you down to the coast, mate?'

  'I've just cleared a container load of spares for the Mercedes truck,' he shrugs. 'Fucking thieves, those bastards in customs!'

  But the more my old friend talks, the more I realize this visit is more about seeing me than bribing customs officials to process the paperwork on a load of lorry spares. In any case, he will only get his trucks on the road again if and when the fortunes of aid money that have frozen and congealed inside the bank accounts of questioning and querulous donor countries over the last six months start to flow freely once again to carry his trucks on their gravy train tide back up into the wastes of southern Sudan.

  Kiwi John glances frequently at Yasmiin, and I suddenly realize there's a whole story concerning Yasmiin he doesn't yet know - he must be labouring under a host of false assumptions I so wish we could have fulfilled together, Yasmiin and I, at another time, in another life.

  'We've missed you,' Kiwi John concedes, 'and the girls keep asking about Little Stevie too. What's more, Laila says she's fully forgiven you and you're welcome to bring any amount of stray glue sniffers back to the house, if only you'd come back to Nairobi!'

  We both chuckle at that, but Yasmiin has grown restless with our conversation, and I don't blame her either, for I know she's wrestling a far weightier predicament inside her own mind.

  She gets up from the uncomfortable pool chairs, whose stripy plastic lattices leave deep imprints across the buttocks, and staring absent-mindedly across the pool, she seems to have reached some sort of decision of her own, for she pats my shoulder almost subconsciously, which is her way of telling me she's off.

  Kiwi John watches Yasmiin's hips and buttocks gyrate to the cadences of her footfall as she saunters back towards the beach, for it's all on show through her soft-flowing diraa, which hangs like a see-through yellow sari a maharajah has had woven from the finest gossamer silk for his favourite concubine.

  And when Yasmiin is out of earshot, Kiwi John leans towards me and whistles long and hard under his breath:

  'Jesus! You're going out in style, Brian! Forget all the bloody football wins, that's your best ever result mate. Jameela, eat your heart out!'

  'It's not like you think, mate,' I sigh. 'And more's the pity, I can tell you. But the truth is, I'm too near the end of it all for the romance of my life. That wouldn't do Yasmiin herself any good, or Little Stevie either - it would only complicate things. No, on the contrary, I've got to get Yasmiin back to Nairobi to meet with Dismas. I want to help her get even on some bastards before I croak; you know, those wankers with an even worse record than the scum we took on in the Safari City days.'

  Kiwi John hasn't heard any of the Pwani Oil story yet, so I fill him in with all the missing details and while I'm at it, we talk over what's been going on here at the coast since we last chatted way back in Annie Oakley's before the Juventus game. That night in Annie Oakley's seems a lifetime ago and rightly so. Since that night on the beach with Yasmiin, my days are measured in heartbeats. Nairobi is a lot of ventricu
lar contraction ago.

  'OK,' Kiwi John grunts pensively when all has been explained, 'I'll take Yasmiin back to Nairobi with me when I leave tomorrow, if both you and Yasmiin want it that way. But why don't you come too, Brian? Little Stevie and all your gear can go in the back of the Land Cruiser. That way, you'll be able to manage the bike all right, even if you're not feeling strong.'

  But I shake my head:

  'It's nearly time for that ride, mate, but not just yet. And when I do feel it coming, I'll get to Nairobi all right, don't you worry. It's after Nairobi I'll need your help; you see, I've got a separate plan for my final game.'

  Which I explain to Kiwi John, and he again he grunts and nods, leaning over to clasp my hand in two of his oily own, and I can almost hear a lump bobble up and down in the back of his throat, like an air lock in one of his engine hosings.

  'Not quite time for goodbye yet,' I smile weakly. 'Besides, here comes trouble.'

  Little Stevie and Farah arrive sprinting up the path and halt just before the pool. They've been out for two hours at what must have been a very brisk pace, but Little Stevie is hardly panting at all. He stands glistening by the pool, tall, thin, lean and deep-bronzed, not even needing a prompt from me to come and shake Kiwi John's hand. I'm so proud.

  'Look at you, mate! A proper Greek god,' Kiwi John smiles, looking my son up and down. 'You should tell your dad to bring you back to Nairobi; I know someone who'd like to see you again!'

  'Almas,' Little Stevie says matter-of-factly. Then,

  'But she thinks I'm a weirdo like the bastards at school.'

  Kiwi John is laughing now:

  'Well, if she ever did, I think she'll change her mind quick enough when she sees you again, mate! But anyway, Little Stevie,' Kiwi John adds, his voice turning serious, 'you're not weird, you're just different. And you and your dad are family now. Our family.'

  That sets the tone for what turns out to be a perfect afternoon. For a start, it stays warm and sunny and we all take turns in the pool, even Little Stevie. And when it's Yasmiin's turn to strip off to her cream bikini, Kiwi John's eyes are giveaways, and I sense that it's no coincidence that soon three waiters plus the old Asian owner all start to saunter in the shade by the empty scatterings of plastic pool loungers.

  By mid-afternoon, Yasmiin produces a bundle of fresh qat, around which I join her for what should soon prove to be a very hard call on my tortured guts, but miraculously isn't, and I feel better than I have for weeks on this qat-induced buzz.

  Little Stevie finds a willing pool partner in Kiwi John, and my dour old mate puts up typically stubborn resistance on the table and is so convinced that he can nick even one game from Little Stevie that they keep racking up frame after frame, while Kiwi John hits the Tuskers and Yasmiin and I chew in a mutual contentment that soon dispenses with words. Until, that is, shortly before a calm and balmy sunset she looks me square in the eyes:

  'I will agree to your ideas for Vic, Brian, but only if you come to Nairobi with me tomorrow.'

  Which finally does it for my time at the coast. I give in.

  'Hallelujah!' Kiwi John shouts, when I break the news to him. 'Let's have a party tonight then hit the road by dawn, just like the old days!'