by Iman Verjee
Panicked, Jeffery dialed Nick’s number again. ‘What have you done to him?’
Fingers pinched into the soft dent of his collarbone, collapsing him forward. ‘Let’s say he won’t be answering his phone any more, sawa? However, he still owes me money and I have come to collect it.’
‘From who?’ Jeffery asked. The man pressed down harder into his shoulder and Jeffery struggled to remain upright. ‘I’m not the boy’s father. Why would I pay you?’
‘We know he was working for you.’
Jeffery remained adamant. ‘You have the wrong man.’
‘And yet here you are, calling-calling him for almost two hours now.’ The man released Jeffery and he fell backward against the wall. ‘I know he comes here every Wednesday with a package for you.’ The man stood, indicating with a tilt of his head to his companion that he was ready to leave. ‘Two hundred thousand – that’s how much he owes me.’
‘Get it from someplace else.’ Jeffery feigned bravado but as he raised his glass to his lips, the liquid splashed against the sides, spilling over, and he quickly put it down.
The man said, ‘If it’s not here on Wednesday, two weeks from now, I shall come to South C and collect it myself.’
Jeffery’s chest caved with the realization that they knew where he lived. After they left, he snapped his fingers and whistled for Marlyn. She came running as he shouted, ‘What’s the matter with you, woman? Get me a drink!’ snatching it from her as soon as she brought it and gulping it down.
His head spinning unpleasantly, Jeffery dialed Nick’s number again. ‘Pick up, pick up, mafala!’ But there was no answer for the rest of the day.
Her presence changed the nature of the household. When he stepped in that evening, he was greeted by a bell-like laugh and tea cups hitting the wooden table and, for a split second, Jeffery didn’t feel so lonely. On the rare occasion he did come home while Esther was still awake, they hid from each other and the rooms remained silent and gloomy. But nowadays, the house was more cared for, its surfaces and corners polished and glowing, its furniture and floors shining with the pleasure of use.
He hadn’t paid attention to the sound of Betty until now, light and simple. He was touched by the way she brushed Esther’s hair from her forehead, checking to make sure her tea was always warm. Watching them, Jeffery hesitated to enter the kitchen, but he had spent most of the day drinking and was in need of water. Slinking in, he hoped to sneak out with minimum fuss, but when Betty looked up he couldn’t stop the ‘Hello’ that slipped from his dry mouth.
Esther’s back tightened at the greeting, her fingers clutching Betty’s as they glanced meaningfully at each other. Humiliation set his cheeks alight when he realized, in that one look, that Betty had been told the truth about David.
‘Hello.’ Her voice was timid and he wanted to reassure her, I’m not going to hurt you, but he had spent so many years now being malicious that he had forgotten how to speak gently. ‘I’ve just come to spend some time with Esther,’ she explained.
He took a sip of water – ‘Very good,’ nodding enthusiastically and staring at the back of the woman who was supposed to be his wife, thinking how she was still a complete stranger to him. It was in times of such self-awareness that he ached for his mother, the comfort of that unlit shack, the late-night noise of people drinking, living and loving. Even the stench of human waste had a special quality about it because it felt like home.
‘I’ll be in the next room,’ he told them gruffly, taking his glass, a chair tucked under his arm.
Once settled at the open window, Jeffery watched the long-legged mosquitos dance in, their thin wings iridescent in the blue glow of the television. He pricked his ears in the hope that he might be able to eavesdrop on the women.
‘I don’t know why he’s home today,’ Esther was saying. ‘I was really hoping he would stay out.’
Jeffery had stopped feeling insulted by such things. After all he had done to her, how could he blame her for feeling that way? But when Betty said, ‘He looks like the most evil man I’ve ever seen,’ even the pinpricks of itchy poison from the greedy mosquitoes weren’t enough to distract him from the truth.
As they continued speaking, Jeffery tried to settle his mind. He had spent most of the afternoon drowning his anxiety in the buttery skin of Marlyn, wishing he could hide out in that motel for the rest of his life.
Nick had been discovered that evening, a broken and bent heap lost in a garbage dump near Nairobi River. There was a gunshot through his chest, but Jeffery could see that prior to that he had been severely beaten. Hoisting up his trouser legs, Jeffery had crouched to adjust the boy’s crooked glasses, overcome by a horrible and unexpected remorse even though he thought he would be used to death by now.
As they wrapped Nick in a polythene bag and slid him into an ambulance, Jeffery knew with certainty that there was nothing stopping those men from killing him, and he had returned to the bar, hoping to find the solution somewhere in his alcohol-soaked, numbed brain. Yet even now, the answer had not come to him, until he heard Betty say, ‘I’m sorry, Esther. I must get going – Mrs Kohli wants me back at the house early tomorrow so I’ll take the late bus tonight.’
He sat up so suddenly that the glass almost tumbled from his knee. He had forgotten all about that house, its marble pillars and modern, brick roofs. The three cars in the wide driveway. An idea was coming to him, still taking shape, as Betty passed him on her way to the door and said to him, he felt almost out of fear, ‘Goodbye.’
The chair crashed to the floor as he rose. ‘Wait, please. I’ll drop you.’
‘I’ll be alright.’ Her expression told him that she would rather face the crushing blackness of night and all its possible horrors than sit in a car with him for twenty minutes.
‘It’s the least I could do, given the good care you have shown my wife. Come on, I don’t mind one bit.’ He didn’t give her another chance to protest.
She was turning back to Esther for help, but by then he had already swung the door open and herded her firmly out.
They didn’t talk for the first few minutes of the drive but he hardly noticed because night-time in Nairobi was full of noise. The thrum of Westlands bars, street vendors desperately haggling for one last sell, the thousands of crickets like chirping pinpoints in the dark. He turned up the volume on the radio and glanced at her from the corner of his eye.
She was pressed close to the door, her hand lightly wrapped around the handle as if she were preparing to jump out.
He asked, ‘Do you enjoy working for your employers?’
It took her a moment to answer. ‘Why?’
‘I’m only wondering,’ he replied, swerving to miss a matatu speeding on the wrong side of the road. ‘You know, I wanted to be a policeman all my life. Now that I am one—’ He clucked his tongue. ‘Well, that’s a different story.’
‘I won’t stay a housemaid forever.’ She was offended. ‘I’m planning on starting my own beauty salon.’
This time when he looked at her, he saw that she was much younger than him. ‘How old are you?’
‘Thirty next month.’
‘Yes, you have time.’ He nodded his approval. ‘It’s a very good dream but takes a lot of money.’
‘I’m saving up.’ She was curt, didn’t want to reveal herself to him.
‘And what do your employers do?’ He kept his tone neutral.
‘They own a business. A furniture store.’
The information sparked the first hope he had had since those two men had come to visit him at the bar. Without thinking, he murmured, ‘They must be very rich.’
She said sharply, ‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’
They had reached the house and Jeffery didn’t answer as they rolled down the paved hill, where he pulled to a grinding halt outside the gate. As Betty climbed out, Jeffery spoke, staring up at the rise and fall of the impressive home.
‘It doesn’t make you angry?’
&n
bsp; She paused, one leg still in the car, her eyes craned downward. ‘What?’
‘That this isn’t even their country and yet they get to enjoy every part of it while we’re the ones made to suffer.’ He thought of his mother again, chewed down on his lip.
In the close confines of the car, the only sound the humming of insects in the blackness beyond, his words stung her with something she had always known but never wanted to consider before. For a moment, she forgot how frightened she was of him and said, ‘You’re right. It’s not fair at all.’
They shared a look, a feeling, and it was the closest he had felt to anyone in a long time. ‘See you tomorrow.’ His voice turned husky, the house blurred and forgotten behind him.
She knocked on the gate and whispered through the gap for the askari to let her in. She paused at the step, turning to wave.
It hurt him, that simple gesture – almost like an acute rip in his gut. But then she disappeared and he looked up once again at the house. And he had to smile because it was going to be his way out – and Betty was going to help him.
39
The large manila paper was spread across the desk as Jai and Michael discussed their latest graffiti. They had spent a week completing it, an image of a young girl dying in her mother’s arms while all around them wealthy politicians sat in a gilded restaurant, fat-bellied and fat-pocketed. Although the woman’s hand was reaching out for help, they ignored her, lost in their gluttony. Beneath it, it read:
PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT
‘I’m not sure about this one,’ Michael said to Jai. ‘It’s very intricate and there’s a lot to draw. How will we get it done in under an hour?’ Nudging his friend in the side. ‘Are you listening to me?’
Jai shook himself out of a thought. ‘Sorry, I was distracted.’
‘I don’t think we can get this done in under an hour,’ Michael repeated, pointing out the details he thought they could do without and, again, Jai’s mind wandered.
Leena had been home for two weeks now and, although he was happy to have her back, he was troubled by the fact that ever since she had landed, she had been edgy and critical of everything around her. She was ungrounded, perturbed, and when he asked her what was wrong, she said, ‘It’s difficult to explain since you’ve never been out of Nairobi.’
He tried not to feel insulted by her tone when she said, ‘I’m strangely disappointed.’
‘About what?’
She thought of her small room in Stanmore, all those handsome British men and a life scattered through with brief romances and said, ‘When I was away, I would be so homesick, I think I made up memories of this place. But now that I’m back, I find that it’s not really that rosy. I feel a pull to go back there, but while I was in London I wanted to return home. It’s like I’m in some kind of suspended reality.’
Jai spoke as he always did about this topic, forcefully. ‘Everyone we know has this idea in their mind that they need to leave here and see the world – it doesn’t matter what they’ll find, they’re just sure it’ll be better.’ He looked out into the rolling, gray horizon, thick with fast-approaching thunder clouds. He could smell it rising from the baked earth, moist and dirt-like. ‘I could never bear to leave this place.’
‘Jai the savior.’ She had said it with a smile but there was an old bitterness in her words.
He told Michael all of this. His friend had stopped looking at the drawing, fixed on Jai’s words instead. His every muscle was unmoving, trying to grasp what Jai was saying. Though all he could comprehend, all that rung through his mind, was that she was back.
It was rare that he remembered Leena. It was only when he saw children playing a game of marbles or caught the lemon scent of another woman’s hair that he would indulge in a moment of nostalgia – sink into the comfort of a well-worn recollection and laugh to himself. How he used to wash his underarms in the sink or linger on the veranda, waiting to catch a glimpse of her, because the leap in his chest and the swimming in his head made him feel more alive than anything else ever had. And that is what this news did to him: made him dizzy with sick excitement as he realized just how empty Nairobi had been without her.
He forced steady words out. ‘Everyone changes, you can’t stop that. It’s normal to feel distant for the first couple of weeks.’
‘I guess you’re right.’ Jai turned back to the drawing and said, ‘You’re also right about this drawing. It could definitely do with some cutting.’
It was Michael’s turn to be distracted. He was full of something: a dusky evening and a bougainvillea bark lit with gold. A magenta flower sliding from his fingers to behind her small ear and a gaze, however small, still shared. Weighed down and thrilling.
He shook himself free and tried to ignore it; that was the disturbing thing about memories. They have a way of growing, even when there is nothing left to feed them. Beautiful things but dangerous – waiting for the right moment, the most inconvenient time, to spring up and surprise you with something that can never be true.
He was alone on Saturday night when it happened. He hadn’t planned on ending up there; he’d left Jackie in the apartment to go for a long walk because the house had been too constricting for his looming thoughts.
It was a hot and uncomfortable evening – a reflection of his own feelings. Stifling. Inescapable. The idea of her refused to leave him, even after he had exited the building and moved rapidly down the road. He dashed across the street, avoiding men transporting cartons of water in large-wheeled carts hoisted upon their shoulders, slowing down traffic.
At first, it had been enjoyable to think of her. To recall the games they had played, the first time he had ever listened to music from a Walkman. To cycle hands free on a bicycle he had borrowed from a man in the park and let his memories catch up.
Knowing that Leena was in the same city kept him constantly nervous; he worried and hoped that he might run into her on the street, though he knew how impossible such a scenario was. Even if he did, would they recognize each other? Even worse, if they recognized each other, would she even care? He recalled the inconsiderate way in which he and his mother had been dismissed from the Kohlis’ house. He had been sent from the apartment block without even the opportunity to say goodbye, but it hadn’t mattered because she had been so caught up in moving houses, in the prospect of her fancy, new life, that she had immediately forgotten the old one and everyone in it.
A few weeks later, when Jai had come to visit him, he told Michael that Leena hadn’t come along because everyone in the family agreed it was best she make her own friends. The loss had been agonizing, a constant somersaulting in his stomach so affecting that he felt it even now, pulsating slightly.
‘You’re only sixteen,’ Jackie had said to him back then as he sat sullenly by the window. ‘What can you possibly know about love?’
Ever since Jai told him Leena was back, Michael had been spending early mornings in his Lavington studio, trying to pin down his feelings, but found that they ran too deep and refused to surface. They were reluctant to reveal themselves. For what would happen if they were nothing but emotions he had expanded on his own, developed into things that weren’t real but just some sunny-day boyhood recollections and nothing more?
He had needed space to think, which was why he found himself climbing the short green gates of Aga Khan Primary School, leaping into the deserted parking lot. He stilled himself, listening for any guards, and when he was certain he was alone, he took off in search of a canvas.
As always, he carried a can of spray paint with him when he left the house and now, finding a small wall at the back of the building, amid parked school buses, he shook it open.
He had no idea of what he wanted to say until he wrote it, didn’t know who he was angry with until mid-way, when he stopped and exhaled an understanding ‘Oh.’
Before him was an outline of a woman – slim in face, narrow in shoulders and with a hard, unrelenting brow. Worry and age had sprung up
in lines around her mouth and the corners of her eyes but she had retained a youthful attractiveness, hardly having aged a day since he last saw her. She guarded something behind her: a girl who was trying to peer over her mother’s shoulder. Before them stood a boy and it was this boy he colored in, flushed at the thought of having something so personal and inerasable displayed in public. On impulse, he leaned into the mother’s face, scrawled on top of her eyes and over where her mouth should be:
IF ONLY CLOSED MINDS
CAME WITH CLOSED MOUTHS.
The can dropped from his hand and he sagged against the wall. He missed her terribly, felt the brunt of her indifference even now, years later, but more than that, it was Pooja he was livid with. She had seen them on the evening of her anniversary party, when he had pushed the flower into Leena’s hair – and though he hadn’t been able to make out the exact features of her face, he had known from the stiffness of her pose how distressed it had made her. Michael had watched in dismay as she crushed the bougainvillea in her daughter’s hair, throwing the flattened and colorless petals onto the steps.
When she fired his mother, Michael had pretended not to know the real reason because he hadn’t wanted Angela to be right. He had ignored her warnings and lied to himself that the differences between the Kohlis and them didn’t matter – and then had been appalled to find that they were the only things that did. He knew that, in her own way, Pooja had been afraid of him. She had packed up and shifted their entire lives in three weeks because she didn’t want Michael to be a part of them any more. Michael had the sudden urge to call Jai; he would ask him where he was and he would go and see Leena.
He stood to take the mobile phone out of his pocket when he heard a voice.
‘That’s a nice drawing, kijana.’
He turned slowly, an arm raised to shut out the blaze of the torch. He said, ‘It’s not a drawing, officer. It’s art.’