Mombasa Road Retravelled

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Mombasa Road Retravelled Page 21

by KJ Griffin


  Chapter 20

  It's dawn outside. The air is cold. Deathly cold. A dry, dewless chill hangs like rigor mortis in the air, which at the same time is alive with a thick, noxious cocktail of fumes that must be spewing from barricades of burning rubber tyres. The smoke can't be seen, but its stench stifles the nostrils. Blended with an amalgam of tear gas residue and charred plastic, it grips like a vice on the bridge of my nose. I cough and retch, struggling to stay balanced on the saddle.

  Here and there the barricades have spewed out their guts onto the tarmac, littering the highway with bricks, rocks, slabs of stone and concrete breeze blocks. My police escort slaloms gingerly around these hazards. From distant quarters sporadic bursts of gunfire can be heard towards the shanty slums on the other side of the rail tracks.

  We slow to a walking pace ahead of the largest roadblock, manned by a yet another massive phalanx of police and GSU soldiers. The policemen's white hats stand out like beacons against their blue rain capes in the grizzly grey murk. Further away from the safety of the barricades the tremulous suggestion of daybreak reveals scuttling movements of shadowy GSU combat fatigues, fanning out in ever wider circles towards the darker hub of downtown Nairobi.

  The whites of jumpy eyeballs flash at me from taut faces. Another burst of gunfire, much closer now, erupts from the darkness to my left and is immediately answered by one nervous GSU soldier just in front of me, who raises his assault rifle above his head and fires off a returning salvo into the unknown.

  Somewhere out there behind the burning barricades there's a revolution going on which I have helped to create, and although it may be unplanned and largely unexpected, it's an illegitimate child whose destiny I should at least furtively care about.

  But I don't. Not in the slightest. I couldn't give a damn about any of that right now. All I can see is Little Stevie, all I can hear is the sound of his forehead tap, tap, tapping against the cell wall, all I can feel in the lighter load on the bike behind me is his devastating absence. And what's worse, with every revolution of cambelt I'm riding further away from my son, not towards him. That can't be right.

  Somewhere up the Ngong Road my police escort pulls over by a clump of flame trees. I draw up behind the vehicle with engine idling and watch as a sergeant gets out and walks towards me:

  'You can get to Karen OK from here, bwana. No more roadblocks.'

  It's all said in an unexpectedly friendly tone. More than that, this apologetic fellow must notice I'm struggling to sit upright on the saddle, for he hurries over to steady me against the handlebars:

  'Don't worry, you can make it, bwana!' he smiles, patting me on the back, then, as he leans closer towards me, his left hand flashes me a surreptitious Football Kenya sign.

  Semi-slumped over the handlebars in the cool early morning light with my guts on fire and the firm grip of panic squeezing me ever tighter by the balls, this should be an insignificant detail in the total mess that has overtaken my life. But it isn't. It's a talisman, whose arcane power is instantly seized and welcomed by the part of me that knows deep down I simply can't give up. Not yet. For Little Stevie's very survival depends on me finding reserves of strength I should long ago have exhausted.

  'Thanks,' I croak, and it's with this genial fellow's chunky smile still at the back of my mind that I yank back the throttle to go shooting off in the direction of Karen.

  It's eerily quiet along this road. No traffic, no pedestrians singing their way along dusty paths to downtown Nairobi jobs. Roadside dukas are all boarded up. Everyone's hiding.

  But the chill headwind suffuses me with a fledgling belief that I will get Little Stevie out of the hell of Nairobi Central in double quick time and back to the safety of Kiwi John's Langata house. In no time at all, I tell myself, I'll be rushing back into town in the opposite direction to reclaim my son, having got Luxmi to raid the Betfair war chest of every last pound and put her on standby to transfer it into a South African bank account number Wamunyu has written down for me. It won't be as much as the greedy bastard wants, but when I'm back in Nairobi Central and Wamunyu realizes he's just one phone call away from getting a couple of hundred grand deposited there and then into his secret stash, I know he'll take what's on offer and Little Stevie will walk free.

  As if on auto pilot the Africa Twin finds its own way back to the iron gates outside Kiwi John's villa, and for the first time I realize I don't even know if Kiwi John and Yasmiin have made it safely back to Langata. I last left them sixty miles from Nairobi before we hit any of the roadblocks. Anything could have happened to them.

  Doubts resurfacing at the back on my mind, I rev the engine and toot belligerently in front of the corrugated iron gates. Nothing. Not even an askari's rungu club poked through the gap where the rusty padlock and chain grip the two halves together. So I have to keep the tooting up for some time, then start beating the gates with my fists, till eventually I hear footsteps on the gravel, which stop to peer through the spyhole. Then comes a shout:

  'Brian! Shit mate, where's Little Stevie?' Kiwi John asks, helping me to dismount, for I've cut the engine and am lying slumped forward in emotional relief across the petrol tank and the handlebars.

  Then from inside the house there are more shouts of Brian! Brian! and a hullabaloo erupts, all heading my way. Laila and Almas are the first out onto the verandah but are slowed down just a fraction of a second by bare feet on sharp gravel and are overtaken by Yasmiin, slip-slapping towards me in sandals.

  'Brian!' she shouts even louder than the others, loose hair swirling around her shoulders and frenzied hands yanking me upright:

  'Thank God you are safe! But where is Little Stevie?'

  'Oh my God, look at the state of him!' Laila wails.

  I glance down at my chest and see that I must have been vomiting steady rivulets of green-grey puke all the time I was in the saddle. But that doesn't stop my friends from hugging me close each one in turn and scooping me up one heave at a time, till we reach the wooden verandah, where I collapse onto the swing chair.

  'Little Stevie's locked up in Nairobi Central,' I gasp as Yasmiin wipes my face with a wet cloth, tut-tutting and dabbing carefully around the bruises. 'I've got to get my hands on every penny I can and empty out the Betfair accounts.'

  'But all the phones are down and the internet is off,' Laila wails, before Kiwi John grabs her hand and gives her an evil stare.

  That's all I can take. The agony of thinking about all this is too much and I burst into a succession of deep, convulsive sobs, my head pushed up almost into Yasmiin's bosom. There was a time that such intimacy in itself would have been quite a thought. But this is not it.

  You've got to get me across town to Parklands right now, mate,' I plead, clutching Kiwi John's arm. 'I have to find Luxmi and see what we can do.'

  'I'll take you to hell and back if you need me to, mate,' Kiwi John growls with such bitter phlegm in his voice it doesn't even sound cheesy, 'but are you sure that's the best thing for you right now in your condition?'

  So I tell my friends everything that happened to me and Little Stevie both outside and inside Nairobi Central and about the deal I've cut with Wamunyu. They shake their heads and tut as the listen, helping me back to my feet so that I can shuffle inside the house, where I make it as far as the sofa.

  A cold pallor has descended on me now and I'm grateful for the heap of blankets Almas smothers me in. With the whole family sat in a semi-circle around me on the stone floor I even manage a few mouthfuls of the passion juice Laila holds out for me, turning anxiously towards her husband while she offers me the glass:

  'But you two can't drive across town now,' Laila protests. 'You will be shot or arrested. Almas, try the phones again.'

  Which Almas dutifully does, working her way through the collection of family mobiles laid out in a neat row on the antelope-hide coffee table. But with each futile click she tuts and shakes her head again, loose hair shaking this way and that across bare shoulders.

  'You'r
e right, Laila,' I say, pushing the blankets off my chest. 'It's too dangerous. I'm going alone.'

  Kiwi John won't hear a word of that and there's almost an argument between him and Laila:

  'I'm going with Brian and that's that,' he snarls in a tone that the whole house knows better than to argue with, 'but we'll be safer, quicker and more manoeuvrable on the bike. I'll drive, Brian, you're in no fit state, mate. Just sit behind and grab on tight.'

  'Wait!' Yasmiin shouts.

  All this time she's been standing up by the windows, peering out through the gaps in the ugly metal anti-burglar grilles that disfigure the living room windows:

  'Wait, I know how to get Little Stevie out better than either of you. John, you have to take me somewhere. Right now.'

  It's said with such a finality of tone that even Kiwi John is momentarily baffled, but once we have all had a second to digest Yasmiin's offer, there soon follows a chorus of protest, not only from Kiwi John and Laila, but also from Almas and Lulu, who have evidently taken warmly to the glamorous lodger their dad has just brought back from Mombasa.

  And just when it all seems to be settled, Laila takes up the argument with Yasmiin, this time in Swahili, but her words only seem to confirm Yasmiin in her initial decision, for she scoops her jeans jacket from the back of an easy chair and her white baseball boots from the door, arranging her hair all the time in the mirror next to the door.

  Only I can stop Yasmiin now, but with my insides as broken as my heart, I can't say I'm too pleased with Yasmiin's intrusion; such histrionics are not what's needed right now. And is the burning sensation that's growing stronger by the second in the pit of my stomach just the cancer itself, or the despair of wasting a single second on noble gestures while Little Stevie stays locked up in Nairobi Central?

  'Hang on!' I gasp, rising up from the sofa to catch Yasmiin's arm as she makes for the door. That's it. The sudden burst of motion has cost me too much. For as I try to remonstrate, a wall of vomit erupts from my mouth and I can see it in slow motion impacting against the stone floor below my feet, its ricochets curling upwards and outwards all over Kiwi John and his family just before my head crashes right on top of the mess. Then, no more.

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