‘And you blame yourself?’ Paul’s voice was cold.
‘In a way, y…’
‘So, you want to go to Kenya, is that it?’ The words were sharp. Chala looked down at her wine glass.
‘I saw the website you were looking at.’
‘I’m sorry Paul, it’s just—’
‘Don’t say fucking sorry! If you feel so sorry all the bloody time why don’t you do something about it? I’m not a Catholic fucking priest, you know. I’m not going to wave a hand and absolve you every time you say sorry!’
Chala braced herself for more words.
‘So what about our marriage? That just gets thrown out, does it? A piece of rubbish Chala’s had enough of!’
‘Paul.’ She reached out to touch him, but he snatched his hand away. ‘I just think that the best chance we’ve got for a future that isn’t like this is for us to have a break from each other.’
Paul stared at her and she felt raw and wanted to say sorry, but knew she couldn’t.
‘I’m not stupid,’ she continued. ‘I know I’m putting everything at risk, but I also know that those words on the cliff were said for a reason and I want our marriage to be about what we wanted it to be. I know it’s been hard for you since Philip died, and I know you’ve done everything you can to help me get over it, but I feel that I’ve got to do something to break out of the place I’m in. Space and perspective go together, right? That’s what you always say a…’ – she struggled – ‘maybe the space will do you good too.’
Paul was still staring at her and she took the step beyond the point of no return.
‘I’ve found an organisation that arranges voluntary placements. There’s one now in a children’s shelter in the Rift Valley. Two mont…’ She stopped and looked up at him, but his pupils had shrunk inside his eyes.
‘Would that be OK, Paul? Two months isn’t so long, is it?’ And when he said nothing: ‘I know what the stakes are, Paul. I’m not suggesting this lightly. What do you think? Paul?’ She reached out to touch him again, but he caught her arm mid-air and held it between them. She felt the tightness of his grip and braced herself for his anger, but when his response came, it was just one word, almost breathed.
‘Go.’ He looked at her long and hard, letting her arm drop at last. ‘I want the woman I married back again. Maybe you can find her in Kenya.’
PART TWO
CHAPTER 16
The smell of human skin hit her the moment she entered the airport building. It brought Philip’s ghost to her as clearly as if he were walking beside her. The flashback from ten years before was so acute it made her want to cry. No wonder Philip’s sister had shied away from going back. But at least we’re spared flash- forwards, thought Chala – imagine a world in which a certain smell or tune conjured up with the same intensity an experience yet to be lived. Imagine how the Chala of ten years ago would have felt walking through Nairobi airport if she’d been able to see herself now, moving through the unchanged space, without Philip by her side, with just his ashes in her luggage. Ignorance of the future is what makes us strong, she thought; hope is only possible because of it.
And despite the appalling sense of loss she felt as she queued at immigration, there was something appealing and earthy in this smell she recognised. The customs official checked her visa and smiled her through. Karibu Kenya. The buzz in the baggage hall, already within view of those waiting to meet the early-morning arrivals, was one of muffled excitement; the excitement of tourists coming for adventure or people returning to a country they obviously loved. Chala felt caught up in it.
She spotted the placard with her name almost immediately. The placement organisation had arranged for a driver to take her straight to Naivasha, two hours away, where she would settle into her hotel and meet the person who ran the shelter project. Her driver’s name was Chege and his smile might have been for a long-lost friend.
They drove past the life-size elephants in rusty scrap metal that guard the entrance to the airport and off along the potholed road into the city. Lane discipline didn’t seem to exist here. Trucks travelled in the outside lane; cars swerved from one lane to another, overtaking wherever there was a space; and when the minibus taxis hit a traffic jam they simply created a new lane between the others or on the dusty verge beside the road. The word for these prolific minibuses, and a memory of them painted in vivid colours and cartoons, came back to her. Now they were uniform white with a yellow line along their sides and relatively subdued announcements painted over the back windscreen: ‘We love Nicolas Cage’ or ‘Fear God’. The last time she was here human limbs (and the odd goat or chicken) had spilled out of open doors and windows. Now they looked like tour buses, with individuals neatly seat-belted in, reading papers.
‘What’s happened to the matatus?’ she asked Chege.
‘This is one of the good things our new government has done,’ he told her. ‘By now they are regulated.’
Chala loved the quirky word combinations that crept into Kenyan English; she remembered a Kenyan saying to Philip over a game of chess at one of the lodges, ‘Bwana, you have me beaten. I am really in the bush with this one.’
As they made their way through Nairobi’s rush hour and finally emerged onto the open road leading to Naivasha, she realised that all the regulation in the world could not change a culture overnight: the matatus might move slower, but they still overtook without hesitation on blind corners. Life was cheap, and trust in God ran deep.
Despite the driving, Chala found herself falling asleep, drifting in and out of a pleasant, woozy state, between the occasional jolt of brakes that would bring her to abruptly. On one of those jolts she opened her eyes to a sight that she would take with her when she left Kenya. ‘Third World View Point’ read the hand-painted board on the side of the escarpment. A few makeshift, wooden shopfronts, painted in zebra stripes and decked out with carvings and red, checked Maasai blankets, stood like beach huts on scaffolding, clinging to the sheer drop by the edge of the road. And beyond these huts, filling every inch of her peripheral vision, the huge vista of Kenya’s Rift Valley poured away into the distance. They stopped, and Chala breathed in the vast landscape and the clean, sharp highland air. She felt bizarrely hopeful, wondering what the future would bring, trusting, for now, the instinct that had brought her here.
CHAPTER 17
Chala sat on the veranda of Naivasha’s rather rundown, old colonial hotel, sipping her first Tusker and waiting nervously for Winnie.
The drama of the view had continued to unfold around her as they drove down the escarpment, past the volcanic nipple of Mount Longonot and into the plains, with Lake Naivasha shining before them, framed by mountain ridges folded back against themselves. The drive into Naivasha town had brought her back to reality. Colour and rubbish competed for attention. There were people everywhere. Entire buildings were painted with the colours and logos of different brands: Nescafé red, Omo washing powder blue, Safaricom mobile network green. Flies and women with children strapped on their backs swarmed around Peter’s Butchery, with whole sides of a cow strung up in the open, unrefrigerated shop window. Matatus and motorbikes swung around each other, blowing dust from the huge open potholes in the middle of the road. Dusty, tattered pieces of plastic littered the dirt pavements. A young boy lashed out viciously at the skinny donkey that pulled his cart. People wove in and out of the traffic on foot, and occasional shops blasted out the cheerful twang of Swahili guitar.
The overall effect was overwhelming, and Chala was glad of the cold beer. She had dumped her bags in the sparse but clean room that was to be hers for the next two months, showered in a thin jet of lukewarm water and come out to the veranda, where she had sat at the only free table, feeling mildly self-conscious and hoping that no one would talk to her before Winnie arrived. She realised that she didn’t even know whether Winnie would be white or black – a ‘larger than life Kenyan woman’ was all she’d been told. She registered, without eye contact, the mix of peopl
e seated on the veranda: whites, blacks, Asians, sometimes at the same table, and Swahili words slipped in and out of the English sentences she overheard.
A tall, heavily built black woman with braided hair, in tight jeans and a crisp yellow shirt, approached her table. Chala stood up tentatively as Winnie broke into a wide smile.
‘Karibu! Sit!’ She shook Chala’s hand and gestured at the waiter, who jumped immediately. ‘Bring me a beer, man, and the lunch menu.’ She used the same clipped ‘man’ that Chala would hear the whites, or mzungus, use. To Chala, it sounded like something out of a Sixties film. Despite the smile, Chala felt immediately in awe. Winnie’s whole demeanour and mannerisms were more like those of a well-known politician than someone who ran a local charity.
Over time, Chala would discover that Winnie had actually campaigned as a local candidate for parliament. Scarred by a ruthless divorce, she had nevertheless been lucky to get away from a man who had beaten her, and vented her anger by rebelling against her country’s macho culture. Although she’d never made it to parliament, she had established a network that would prove invaluable when she later decided to pour her energy into setting up a shelter for street kids on the outskirts of Naivasha. As she talked about the history of the shelter she mellowed.
‘Look over there. You see those kids?’ She pointed at the vegetable stall opposite them. Chala saw three boys in ragged clothing tapping at the window of a Toyota for money. The youngest couldn’t have been more than five or six years old. Their tummies poked out through their shirts – a sign of hunger – and their eyes were bloodshot – a sign of the glue they sniffed to keep the hunger at bay.
‘The glue causes brain damage, you know.’ Winnie took a swig of her beer. ‘There are more and more of these kids every day. We can only take so ma…’ Her voice trailed off and Chala filled the space with a question.
‘What makes them take to the street? Are they all orphans?’
‘Here, you are classed as an orphan if you only have one parent living. Some have lost both parents, but many have a mother living who just cannot afford to feed all the mouths left behind when the father dies.’
‘But the whole incidence of street kids is relatively new, isn’t it? Why has it got so bad?’
‘There’s a one-word answer to that: Aids.’
Chala didn’t know what to say. She felt suddenly intensely tired after her trip. Paul had gone with her to the airport, and saying goodbye had been achingly hard. They had already talked hesitantly around the rules governing the new space between them, Chala feeling that it was his right to decide what level of contact he wanted to maintain while she was away. When the moment of no return was finally upon them, Chala had fought against the tears and the doubt that she was doing the right thing. He had held her chin up to his face and said just two words before he turned away: ‘Come back.’
‘Do you want to rest this afternoon and go up tomorrow?’ Winnie’s question brought her to, as the brakes had done on the escarpment.
‘Yes, if you don’t mind. I think that would be best.’ Winnie glanced at her sideways, perhaps wondering if she was up to the challenge, but Chala felt drained and didn’t trust herself to meet fifty street kids today.
CHAPTER 18
‘Jambo, habari yako?’ Chala wished she knew more Swahili. The boys were lined up in front of the main building, the smallest in front and looking slightly bewildered. She noticed the larger boys touching or patting them to reassure them. They were addressed in Swahili first by Winnie and then the on-site administrator, a man called Mwangi. A short introduction in English followed, telling them how lucky they were that this English lady had come to spend time with them. Chala squirmed and offered the only words she could in their common language.
She walked along the line, shaking hands with each boy and asking their name, wondering how long it would take her to learn them. Most lowered their eyes when she spoke directly to them, but a couple of boys stood out at this first meeting. One, a tall, lanky boy called Samuel, had lost one eye, but smiled at her with the one he had left. The other, one of the younger ones, a six-year-old boy called Julius, gave her the double handshake that Kenyans use for an informal greeting, causing a titter around the group. Chala warmed to the twinkle in his eye and his obvious sense of mischief.
At the end of the line were two dogs, also from the street, called Twiga and Chyulu. They lapped up her attention when she dropped down to stroke them, and a few boys laughed again when she tried to repeat their names. They clung to the presence of the staff, these dogs, and it came as a shock to Chala to realise later that this was because they were afraid of the boys. Habits of the street – and cruelty to animals was one of these – died hard, even in this haven.
Next came a tour of the shelter itself. Simple concrete buildings with corrugated tin roofs stood in a semicircle: classrooms, dormitories and a large all-purpose hall that functioned as a dining room and general social space, with a kitchen at one end. The property had been donated by a local landowner: ten acres that backed up against a ridge behind them, forty minutes’ walk from town along a dirt road, with a distant view of the lake. Chala was impressed by the ethos of self-sufficiency around the project. The boys grew their own vegetables and bred rabbits, chickens and geese. There was even a cow that acted as a lawnmower on the football pitch, as well as supplying milk. As Mwangi led her through the buildings, she noticed that he used the bunch of keys strapped to his belt to open various rooms.
‘You keep these locked all the time?’ she asked him, not guessing why.
‘Yes,’ he answered matter-of-factly. ‘Even the toilets must stay locked. You have to remember where the boys come from. It’s better not to give them the temptation to steal or do harm to themselves.’ It was a lesson she was to learn over and over again in the coming days.
Winnie wanted to set up a website, and one of Chala’s jobs was to put together content. She and Mwangi would sit down with each boy in turn. With Mwangi putting the boys at ease and putting direct questions in Swahili that Chala felt unable to ask, she would uncover their stories. One boy found abandoned on the street at the age of three; another rescued from a mother who lived in the street herself and had gone mad; another who had spent three years in jail after a police sweep in an attempt to ‘clean up the streets’. Some were newcomers and some had been here since the shelter opened three years ago. Some were fourteen or fifteen when they joined – these were the most difficult to keep from leaving, and occasionally a boy took flight again, unable to adapt to the unfamiliar security of the shelter. Julius had been found on the street by Mwangi, smoking a cigarette at the age of five. He had seven brothers and sisters, and an elder brother had persuaded him he would be less hungry on the street than he was at home. Samuel had been beaten repeatedly by the drunk uncle he had been sent to live with when his father died. When he lost his eye after the worst beating he had ever had, he escaped to the streets – at the age of eleven.
But this was all detail Chala would discover slowly through the interviews over the coming days. Now Mwangi led her into the hall, where all the boys had gathered on wooden benches. The occasional free-range chicken wandered across the concrete floor as Winnie addressed the boys. She was stern and headmistress-like, but clearly the matriarch in their lives. She would chastise, but she would also squeeze the cheeks of the little ones whenever they came near. Mwangi motioned Chala to sit on a bench at the back, next to the other staff members and Winnie. He then announced in formal English that the boys would sing a song to welcome her. On cue, the boys shuffled into position: a motley choir in their tatty clothes and bare feet or ill-fitting shoes. They sang the famous song played for tourists in Kenya’s safari lodges, ‘Jambo, jambo bwa…’ It sounded so out of place here, and Chala felt moved. She found herself thinking of Amanda and her voice, soulful and beautiful, at her wedding. How she would love to be able to share this with Amanda. And Paul. And Philip. She blinked back the tears. Her sense of fragility felt like a
crime.
‘Thank you so much.’ Chala stood up after the song. ‘Remind me how you say thank you in Swahili?’ she asked Mwangi.
‘Asante sana.’
‘Santi sana.’ She caught the smile on little Julius’ face and knew that she had not pronounced it quite right.
CHAPTER 19
‘So, what’s it like?’ Paul’s interest was genuine and Chala felt a wave of gratitude.
‘I love it. I think the boys are starting to accept me and Winnie’s hired me a moped to get up there. A bit hair-raising at first, but I’ve just about got the hang of it now. I’ve already got some great photos for the websi…’ Chala stopped and the pause stretched on the line between them.
‘What about you? How’s everything at home?’ She wondered if Paul, too, would register the use of the word home. The open-endedness of the situation they were in made so many words loaded. She felt him tense.
‘Yeah, everything’s fine. I’m working on finishing a couple of new pieces for the exhibition next month and I’ve played a bit of cricket. You know John plays? Well, someone in the team had a skiing accident so they’ve roped me in. It’s good fun, actually. I might have to find a woman to make the sandwiches when it’s my turn, though!’ He was trying to make light of their situation, but even at this distance Chala could sense the effort in his voice. She groped for something harmless.
‘And Rudolph? Are you feeding him?’
‘Hey, if I needed someone to nag me, I’d ask them to move in and keep the bed warm!’ An edge had crept into the effort.
‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’ That word – the word he hated – so ready on her lips.
‘He’s fine.’ Paul’s voice cut through her hesitation. ‘Let’s face it,’ – a soft laugh – ‘nothing much changes in the life of a hamster.’
She softened, too. ‘No, no I suppose it doesn’t, really.’ Another pause. ‘But, you’… OK?’
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