Who Will Catch Us As We Fall

by Iman Verjee

  ‘I can’t even afford unga any more,’ one of them was saying. ‘It’s a hundred bob now! A hundred shillings for one packet of flour. Aki! How are we supposed to survive this way?’ The girl gulped her drink. ‘We elect a new government and they promise us all kinds of things. Free education, affordable housing, lower cost of the essentials. But it’s all bullshit. They come to us for support and when we get them into State House, they forget about us.’

  ‘Why don’t you do something about it?’ Jai had asked.

  ‘Excuse me?’ The wine glass coming down from her mouth, puckered in annoyance.

  ‘If you believe so passionately in your rights, why aren’t you doing anything to protect them?’

  ‘Was I talking to you?’ she snapped.

  Jai held his hand out. ‘My name’s Jai.’

  ‘You could be my father for all I care,’ she growled and turned back to her friend.

  ‘Maybe if you were more proactive, you wouldn’t feel so powerless.’ Jai was unperturbed by her irritation.

  ‘And what exactly do you think I should do?’ She swung her body back around so that she was sideways on the chair, arching her neck to talk to him. ‘Some of us don’t have the time to do whatever we want. We have to work – nothing comes free to us.’

  He brushed aside her taunt. ‘There are lots of things you can do. You can write an article and submit it to a newspaper. You can organize a protest. You can vote.’ He leaned in closer and asked, ‘Do you vote?’

  ‘That’s none of your business,’ she said, burying her words in her wine glass.

  ‘Right.’ He sat back and crossed his legs, Michael’s kicks falling on deaf shins. ‘And then you wonder why you are being stepped on.’

  Michael paid hastily for their beers and once outside, instead of heading back toward campus as they had planned, their feet found another direction. Jai walked fast, breathing out stiff clouds of air. ‘Silly girl.’

  Michael forced him to slow down. ‘I know what you were trying to do in there but you don’t have to be so forceful.’

  ‘She was an idiot.’

  ‘You can’t belittle people that way. If you think they should know something, then educate them. Follow your own advice and do something.’

  Jai started to move again, faster and more excited. ‘You’re right. Let’s go.’

  A few hours later, they stood in a deserted alleyway with spray paint residue on their fingertips and clothes and a hastily scrawled message that they could hardly decipher under the yellow shards of a broken street light above them.

  It was a picture of a fat politician, a briefcase stuffed with money in his hand, a chain around his neck. At the other end of this chain was the young woman from the bar, dragging him down the steps of Parliament. Beneath the picture, Jai had written:

  MY VOICE. MY VOTE. OUR FUTURE.

  As they squinted to survey their work, admitting that they needed practice, Jai said, ‘We should wear gloves next time.’

  ‘And plan it out better and bring a torch,’ replied Michael.

  They always worked with simple designs and most often in black. It was difficult, with just the two of them, to find time to do something intricate, starting off in deserted areas but then moving to more public spaces as they became more skilled, where they could be sure to get a wider audience. They did it once a week, on Saturday evenings, because it was easy for Jai to leave the house without Pooja questioning him and the cops were usually preoccupied with drunk misdemeanors so they were less likely to be caught.

  It was Michael who had the idea for a slogan.

  ‘I think it’s important to put our mark,’ he told Jai. ‘Let people know that they’re not alone – that someone is out there fighting for them.’ And so they had come up with the slogan Kenya Ni Yetu.

  ‘Kenya is ours. It’s perfect.’

  It had been close to a year since they had made their first graffiti design and had finally decided to place it in the most visible spot they could think of – the wall of a public toilet on Koinange Street, facing the street, where most politicians drove by on their way to the office. That was why Michael wasn’t surprised when Jai told him their graffiti was already being made to disappear.

  He told his friend, ‘This country is built upon lies and cheats and to uncover it could mean the collapse of everything we know.’

  Jai sat against the windowsill, extending his legs outward. ‘So why do we do it?’

  Michael looked past his friend, at the cloudless sky, the metallic skyline of the city just visible in the distance. ‘Because this country is beautiful and full of life,’ he answered. ‘And who will fight for it, if not us?’

  ‌

  37

  She went there most evenings now, reaching South C shortly after nine o’clock in the evening, down the ill-lit street, where she knew Esther would be waiting for her by the window – a large and anxious shadow pacing behind the muslin curtain.

  Betty was aware that her cousin watched her come through the gate, had calculated the exact number of footsteps it took for her to reach the front door, because it always stood open when she arrived and then she was gathered up into Esther’s soft folds of fat – silky skin that smelled of a nostalgic mix of Johnson’s baby powder and Vaseline.

  ‘I was starting to wonder how I would pass the evening alone…’ Every day, Esther was surprised and unable to hide her relief when she saw her cousin. Always greeting her with the same pleading gratitude.

  ‘Don’t hold me so tightly.’ Betty would extract the woman’s hands from her own, taking her usual seat at the small table. ‘Come and sit down. I’ve missed you,’ she said to Esther, as if talking to a child, careful singing – full of love.

  Tea was boiling on the stove, the low bubbling over a blue flame warming the kitchen, and Betty thanked her cousin for the sweet cup of tea, blowing on it unhurriedly in an effort to rid herself of the chill outside.

  Esther sat with her own mug. She had given up drinking alcohol and, slowly, had begun to resemble the girl Betty remembered. Her body was no longer grossly bloated but now charmingly overweight. She looked at the world as if she recognized it once more, though the dullness in her eyes remained. It was only when Betty came through the door that the cloud of sadness lifted and Esther would stamp her feet in impatient excitement, speaking in rapid tones as if she had collected all her thoughts throughout the day, storing them for this moment.

  ‘Did you know the maid in Flat 6 is having an affair with the askari? I saw him go in when the lady of the house wasn’t there… How can unga be so expensive these days? I thought Maggie from the kiosk was surely cheating me but it really is a hundred bob… Do you like my new braids? I got a woman to come home and do them for me…’

  She never left the house, despite the constant encouragement from Betty, who would come in early on Saturdays to cheerless, cold rooms and she would go about opening all the curtains and windows, saying, ‘Really, cousin, how can you live this way?’

  ‘I don’t want to leave David alone,’ she would tell Betty, refusing to step outside. ‘What if something happens? What if Jeffery comes back?’

  Betty would take her cousin’s hand, rubbing the glossy skin with her fingers, in a soothing, circular motion. ‘You know David isn’t here any more.’

  ‘It’s not my fault you aren’t looking properly – that you can’t see him. I don’t want that man to get to him again.’

  And Betty would persist, ‘What happened, why won’t you tell me?’ But Esther remained determinedly silent.

  ‘What does it matter what happened? He’s gone and that’s it.’

  But that evening, her outline flared by the brass glow of the kerosene lamp, Esther said, ‘Today would have been his birthday.’

  Not wanting to jolt her cousin out of her daze, Betty put the cup down carefully. ‘Who?’ she asked, though she already knew. Her curiosity about David had been growing ever since she had had the conversation with Jeffery on the steps, his f
ace swallowed in darkness. How defeated he had sounded, talking about that man, how heavy and broken.

  ‘David would have been forty today.’ Esther tapped her index finger nervously on the table, taptaptaptap, until its legs shook and Betty had to reach out and stop her. ‘We always had a cake,’ she continued. ‘I used to wake up early to bake one, stick up some balloons and he would bring his policeman friends back here.’ She was concentrating hard on the memory, trying to bring it into focus. ‘I would always get so angry with him. I used to ask, Why can’t it just be the two of us? Why do you have to bring all of those men?’ She looked up at Betty. ‘But he always owed someone something.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He wasn’t a bad man.’ Esther almost begged her to believe it. ‘He just did bad things sometimes. I used to tell him to stop but once you start down such a path, it becomes difficult to turn back.’

  Paraffin oil leaked into the air, phenyl-like and sweet, transporting Betty back to their childhood days, when she thought Esther so queer and ghost-like, and her skin tightened in shivers.

  ‘What did he used to do?’

  ‘What else do policemen do here?’ Esther cocked her eyebrow. ‘He stole from everybody he could and then blamed the government, as if we have no control over our actions. As if the injustice done to us gives us the right to treat others so poorly.’ The creased skin of her closed eyelids trembled. ‘Still, I loved him very much and he didn’t deserve what happened to him.’

  Confusion tugged at Betty’s mind. ‘I don’t understand. Jeffery said you were having an affair with David. So how come you spent every birthday with him? Where was Jeffery?’

  At this, Esther began to laugh. She howled until she was clutching her stomach and doubling over, grasping at air. ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ she mumbled between hysterical waves. ‘Oh, that man! That man has no shame.’ Her laughter suddenly died and her face fell into an ugly hardness. ‘No respect, even for the dead. I said that David did bad things but that he wasn’t a bad man. But Jeffery is different. He can do anything.’ She tapped Betty’s skin, taptaptap. ‘But then again, I’m living with the man who killed my husband so I suppose you should ask me, what else did I expect?’

  The words were knocked out of her. ‘Wha—’

  ‘It’s this country that does it to you.’ Esther ignored her cousin’s reaction. ‘It teases you with a mirage of beauty so that you believe all things are possible. It tempts but cannot give you anything. You see people suffocating under piles of money while you’re struggling to put even one meal on the table. There are mansions constructed from the finest materials, so unnecessarily extravagant for the two people living in it, while somewhere in Kibera, seven people share an impermanent shack the size of this kitchen – so how can you not be angry? When there is all this unfairness around us, how can we blame our men for going mad?’

  Pooja flitted about the house, checking all the rooms, ensuring the paintings were perfectly aligned against the walls and the fridge was fully stocked: cheese, grapes, hot sauce – all of her daughter’s favorite things. She called out as she went, ‘Is no one going to help me? Why must I do all these things myself?’ her sharp voice reaching the high ceilings and traveling to all the upstairs bedrooms so that Jai came out on to the landing.

  When she saw him, she demanded, ‘Does no one but me care that your sister is coming home today?’ wiping away the smudges on a decorative mirror with her chuni. ‘Where is Betty?’

  ‘I’m here, I’ve arrived.’ A hurried voice, the sound of the back door closing as Betty rushed in.

  ‘You’re always late these days,’ retorted Pooja, unamused. ‘Even though I told you there is a lot of work to do today.’

  ‘There was such a big jam on Waiyaki Way,’ Betty tried to explain. ‘I left as early as I could but the traffic refused to move.’

  ‘You have a room here.’ Pooja gestured in the general direction of the outhouse. ‘I don’t understand why you would sleep elsewhere.’

  It was not often that Betty stayed at Esther’s, but last night they had talked until the pale hours of the morning, undisturbed because Jeffery never came home. By the time she had jolted from the bed, Esther snoring loudly beside her, it was already nine o’clock, an hour past the time Pooja was expecting her.

  ‘My cousin is very unwell,’ she lied.

  ‘One day it’s your cousin, the next your aunt.’ Pooja waved her arm snidely in the air. ‘You can do whatever you want, Betty, just don’t treat me like I’m stupid, okay?’

  Jai came down the stairs quickly. ‘Just tell us what you need to be done.’

  ‘Everything,’ Pooja snapped, walking rapidly away into the kitchen. ‘That’s why I told her eight o’clock – we have to make sure everything is perfect.’

  It was a strange sensation, flying back into a place she had left only a year before. Although everything seemed familiar, it was also joltingly different. Here, the streets smelled of burning garbage and flowers, as they always had, while close to her uncle’s house in Stanmore, it was the spices of kebab shops and the stink of beer from the pub across the street.

  The British way of life had fascinated her. She had learned much about it from observing out of her bedroom window the simple goings-on of the Drunken Goose across the road, the quaint bar that played seventies British rock music. The patrons would sing along, their voices reaching her as she blew bored steam-circle onto the glass. How tempted she had been on some nights to climb out of the window and join them.

  She had been astonished and envious of their lives, for here young people could do whatever they wanted. Women smoked with strange men and then left the bar with them, waving goodbye to friends who barely acknowledged them going. People drank until they were forced to throw up in trash cans, bushes or even right on the street and yet still, no one whispered. No one pointed. They were not worried that they might run into a cousin, a family friend, who upon seeing them would immediately report the misdemeanors to a parent. That is what had impressed her about life in Britain; one never had to worry about suffering through any shame for having fun.

  People roamed the streets at two o’clock in the morning, never checking over their shoulders to ensure they were safe. Leena never realized how deeply the concept of fear and suspiciousness had been engrained in her until she watched those people; she had never resented her lack of freedom to do certain things because she had never known how simple and easy it could be to do them.

  This country was not made up of real worries, she concluded from all her watchings. Yes, people were concerned about how much money they had to spend, about bills and jobs and heartbreaks, but it is a different thing altogether to be burdened with the fear of your life. To wake up to stories about a woman being strangled by her housemaid, or a friend of your parents who was shot point-blank on his way out of the office because someone had spotted a briefcase in his hand. Back home, you were forced to keep yourself tightly hidden away, behind the locked doors of houses and cars; you spoke to those who were like you, people you knew, and ignored strangers, just in case.

  London was boring in a lovely, comforting way and now that she had become used to that, she found it frightful coming out of the arrivals building in Nairobi – assaulted in every way by the noise, the colors and the rushing bodies, mindless of her presence.

  And then there were arms going around her waist and she yelped with fear until she caught a whiff of the mint gum on his breath, the warm air of his laughter at the nape of her neck. And he was saying, ‘Come on, monkey. It’s only me.’

  And the gateless house in Stanmore was forgotten, the Drunken Goose only a funny story and London nothing but a place that wasn’t home.

  ‌

  38

  The two men had been watching him for a while now, hunched so closely over the small bar table that their elbows were tip to tip, the tops of their shoes touching. They sat to the left of him, slowly sipping their Tuskers. That was what had made Jeffery suspicious. No gro
wn man spent that long drinking a single beer unless he was waiting for something.

  ‘Ingine?’ Marlyn’s voice offering him another drink. He dragged his eyes away from the men.

  Lowering his voice, he asked, ‘Who are those guys?’

  ‘They’ve never been in here before.’

  Dressed casually in cotton shirts and white sneakers, they were unremarkable, nothing startling about their behavior, and yet Jeffery couldn’t shake the prickling disquiet disturbing the hairs on his neck. Stupid boy. Coming into my office and scaring me for no good reason. Now it’s four o’clock and he’s not even here yet.

  He had called Nick three times already but there was no answer. He sat sipping his watery drink and listening to the drone of the standard Safaricom message, insensitive to his growing frustration – Mteja hapatikani kwa sasa – telling him what he already knew: the boy was unreachable.

  ‘Something the matter, mzee?’

  He had been so focused on phoning Nick that Jeffery hadn’t noticed the two men approaching his table, blocking him on either side.

  ‘Can’t you see I’m busy?’ he snapped.

  ‘Who are you trying to call?’ The man leaning in on him had sagging jowls, countless lines bracketing his mouth. His voice was rich, the kind that would lend itself nicely to TV or radio. If he hadn’t looked so menacing, he might have been pleasant.

  ‘Do I know you?’ Jeffery let his eyes wander the bar, as if in boredom, but he was anxiously looking to see if there was anyone else in the room. Marlyn was at the back and he was the only customer. The man swung his body onto the stool beside him.

  ‘Unfortunately, Nick is unable to pick up his phone at this time.’

  ‘Why?’ Jeffery’s voice shuddered.

  ‘The boy became greedy. We had a deal and he thought he could outsmart me. When I found out he had been stealing from me, I asked for my money back.’ The man shrugged at the simplicity of his actions. ‘If he had done so, perhaps he would have only lost a finger or an eye, but sadly…’