Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  Then time disintegrated into tiny, isolated particles, like shards of broken glass scattering in all directions. When Chala looked back on these moments, there was no fluidity in them; they were fragments, images burnt into her mind without any sense of chronology. Fire in the road and contorted faces. The flash of dark blades in the air. Women yanking tiny children by the hand through the dust. Their pick-up swerving and the shock on a man’s face as the vehicle went over his foot. A tangle of bodies falling to the ground and the chaos of screams competing with a kind of pumping war cry. The stench of burning rubber.

  Then the car was jolting and Chala felt herself being pulled down, her head thrust between Mwangi’s legs. She was choking on dust and the vague smell of urine. She wanted to scream, to see what was happening, but he kept her head down close to his crotch and all she could feel was the lurch of the car and Mwangi’s hand gripping the back of her neck. The pick-up seemed to jolt repeatedly and get heavier. She could hear a wailing sound that seemed to keep pace with them and grow and grow. She heard cracks in the air like fireworks. She felt the warm, yellow flush of fear between her legs.

  When the vehicle jerked to a standstill, the wailing seemed to spill around them. At last Mwangi released his grip on her neck and she raised her head slowly, reluctant to leave the safety of his crotch behind and allow sight to complete the jigsaw of sound and smell. She tried to look at Winnie, but Winnie and Mwangi were already out of the vehicle. People seemed to be pouring off the back of the pick-up: women and children, crying and scattering all around them. She saw a pool of blood in the dust. Men in uniform were shouting and Winnie was waving her hands in the air. Chala realised that they were at the police station. She looked out through the windscreen into the face of a policeman just out of his teens and saw incomprehension in his eyes.

  She shuffled across the wet patch on the seat, about to get out, when Mwangi appeared by the window.

  ‘What—?’ she started, surprised at the sound of her own voice, but he interrupted her.

  ‘Ngoja kidogo. We are coming, just stay in the car, Mama.’

  She waited and stared at the young policeman, resolute now, talking to the women and children huddled on the ground.

  Then there was more screaming and people crowding at the gates of the police station and policemen shouting and blowing whistles and Mwangi and Winnie hurriedly approaching the pick-up.

  ‘What—?’ Chala heard herself again and was again interrupted, this time by Winnie.

  ‘We need to leave now. We’ll go to my house.’ Mwangi jumped in beside Chala, and Winnie was already turning the key in the ignition as she pulled her bulk into position behind the wheel. She turned for a second and touched Chala on the arm. ‘Don’t worry, girl.’

  And then the vehicle sped off, empty and rattling, out of the back entrance to the police station, along the cut-through to Winnie’s house.

  As soon as they got into the house, Winnie handed her a Kenyan sarong to take to the bathroom. Understanding, Chala changed out of her jeans, washed herself, and wrapped the kikoi around her waist. She looked briefly in disbelief at the face in the mirror, rubbed her stomach mechanically, and followed the sound of Winnie and Mwangi’s voices onto the veranda.

  ‘We are finished, Mama.’ As Chala stepped into view, Winnie spoke over Mwangi’s words, so that Chala was not even sure she had heard them right.

  ‘Chala, kuja, sit and we will talk. Tusker for you.’

  Chala apologised mentally, took the outstretched beer, gulped at it and looked at Winnie. Mwangi, too, seemed to implore Winnie with his eyes. Solve our problem, Mama, give us the answer.

  ‘What is happening?’ Chala broke the silence with the question that she had failed to finish in the pick-up.

  ‘The police think it was the Mungiki revenging.’ Mwangi could no longer bear the tension. He, too, needed to put words to what he had seen.

  ‘Who a…’

  ‘The Mungiki are a Kikuyu sect,’ Winnie explained. ‘A bunch of thugs who take oaths and are trained to hate and to kill.’ Her voice was trembling and she took a swig of beer.

  ‘But I don’t understand.’

  ‘You will never understand.’ Winnie almost turned on her, and then softened. ‘This is retaliation for all the Kikuyu that have been killed or chased away from their homes. Now it is the Luo tribe who are the targets. There are many Luo who come to Naivasha to work on the flower farms. Now these Mungiki thugs are working their nonsense.’

  ‘But—’ She didn’t know how to finish her sentence. She still didn’t know what she had seen – or hadn’t seen.

  Now she learnt in clipped sentences about the hackings, limbs slashed onto the ground, the brute madness of men fuelled by drugs and hatred and nothing to lose. She learnt that it was Luo women and children who had been thrown by their men into the back of the moving pick-up in a bid to get them away. Winnie had driven as if through a war zone, swerving down back streets to escape, her foot hard on the accelerator, the sound of shots close by.

  Chala began to understand what Mwangi had done by thrusting her head between his legs. Every day he dealt with the damage wreaked by trauma. Despite his own fear, he had acted instinctively to protect her.

  ‘Thank you, Mwangi,’ she said between tears. ‘You saved me from seeing.’

  ‘You are a mzungu, Mama. You should not need to see everything we saw.’ Chala registered the strange double standard she had come across before; the notion that white people were more fragile than black Africans and that a different set of rules applied. But Winnie cut through her thoughts and her voice was iron.

  ‘No one should have to see those things.’

  CHAPTER 34

  ‘Che. Che, are you OK? I saw Naivasha on the news. I thought all the troubles were over. What’s happening?’

  Chala paused to try and breathe calm into her voice. She mustn’t let Paul hear her fear.

  ‘Che?’

  ‘It’s OK, Paul, I’m in contact with the British High Commission. They’re watching the situation, but they’re not evacuating anyone yet. I’m at Winnie’s house. It’s safer to stay put than move around at the moment.’ She paused again, willing her heart to slow down. ‘There are roadblocks around the town and it’s pretty chaotic, but they’re not targeting whites or Kikuyu. I’m—’ she gulped for air, ‘fine.’ She didn’t mention that Winnie had faced a gang of thugs at her gate who warned her that if she was harbouring a Luo they would torch her house. Or that Winnie had made another journey to transport her own Luo cook to the safety of the police station. Unable to break up the violence, the police had opened the gates of the police station and the prison, turning them into makeshift refugee camps in the space of hours. Luo houses had been systematically targeted; crosses drawn overnight on buildings burnt to the ground the following day. Luo and Luhya men were being pulled out of cars and forced to strip to identify their tribe according to whether they were circumcised or not. Those whose penises betrayed them feared for their lives.

  ‘Paul, don’t watch the news, sweetheart. I’ll call you again later.’

  She rushed straight off the phone to the toilet, her body’s response to the last twenty-four hours. Every time she opened her bowels, she looked irrationally for any sign of blood, as if the movement might dislodge the foetus.

  Don’t leave me now, stay with me. When she looked back at the previous day’s events, she realised that her body had quite simply made the decision for her. It was the moment when she had wet herself in the pick-up – the flush of fear had been suddenly and irrevocably for the life of her unborn baby.

  She looked at herself above the bathroom sink and saw the tightness beneath her eyes and the lack of sleep the previous night. Grief is grey, fear is yellow, she thought. You see it on people’s skin. And yellow is the colour of the solar plexus, the place you feel real fear in your body, the colour of urine. Above her fear, she stroked the life she now knew she wanted to save.

  When Femke phoned, she tol
d her everything. ‘I’m going to keep the baby, Femke.’

  ‘Oh Chala, I’m very happy for you.’

  There was an awkward pause. It felt wrong to talk about happiness in the current situation. And then Femke spoke again, ever direct.

  ‘Have you told Paul?’

  ‘No.’ But there was an unfamiliar note of resolution in Chala’s voice, a new confidence. ‘No, I will be back in a few days. I want to tell him face to face.’

  ‘And you and Paul, are you going to be OK?’

  ‘I think so,’ she said slowly. Suddenly, it seemed unimportant to try and measure whether they would make it as a couple. The bit that mattered was wanting to try. ‘I want to hold on to what I’ve got,’ she said, relieved to hear the words in her own mouth and not someone else’s. The sadness in Denise hovered in her mind’s eye. She would not add a life of regret to the sweet folly of Bruce.

  ‘Will he want the baby, too? What if he doesn’t?’ Always ask the question.

  ‘I think he will.’ Chala chose her words carefully. ‘And if he doesn’t, then I will just have to accept the consequences. All I know is that I want to try and make it work.’ She breathed deeply, changing the subject. ‘But what about you? Are you OK, Femke?’

  ‘Yes, I’m fine. I’m not the one who’s in Naivasha.’

  ‘And Mick, what does he say about what’s happening?’

  ‘He’s angry with the international press again. All the talk about, how do you say, tribalisms?’

  ‘Tribalism, yes.’

  ‘These tribalisms are because of terror, not hatred under the skin. If someone puts a panga in your hand and threatens to kill your children if you don’t use it, and if you are terrorised enough, you will use it.’

  Chala pictured herself with a small girl by her side and what brute terror might make her capable of. ‘Winnie thinks the same. She is convinced this was all orchestrated.’

  ‘But who by?’

  ‘God knows, but they say that these Mungiki have some very high-up connections.’

  ‘You don’t think the government are letting it happen, do you?’

  ‘No, that feels a bit too conspiracy theory for me. I asked Winnie why they don’t just bring in the army and crush the violence by force. She says they’re scared of losing control. There are too many different tribes in the army, so it could get out of hand.’

  ‘It is too complicated.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s no wonder the press just call it tribalism.’ Talking about the situation in academic terms made it seem more manageable, kept the yellow tug at bay. Everyone everywhere had become an expert on Kenyan politics overnight. ‘What about your blockhead?’

  ‘They say to do nothing yet. We still have our letters if we need to go quickly with the dogs. Mick still says that’s hippy shit.’ She tried to laugh. ‘Are you OK, though?’

  It was the question that everyone kept asking.

  ‘Yes, I’m OK. I just want this to be over. You know there are two boys up at the shelter who’ve had to go into hiding. David is Luo and Joshua is Kalenjin. Winnie says it’s way too dangerous to have them here and so they’re hiding in a house on the other side of the prison. And do you know what tribe the family is who are hiding them? Kikuyu! The tribe that are supposed to be their enemy. That says it all, don’t you think?’

  ‘Yeah, I know. I think Mick is nervous, though, in case this starts to spread around the lake. Everyone is watching and waiting. I don’t know if I can stay here any more after this.’

  ‘Don’t think about that now.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I’m just a silly Dutch vet full of hippy shit, right?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Chala hesitated. ‘Femke? Thank you for being there for me. I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t been there.’ She felt breathless again and swallowed the tears.

  ‘Hey, you just look after the little one. Go and have a cup of tea. That’s your English solution to a crisis, isn’t it? Go and have a nice cup of tea and I’ll call you later.’

  She left the comfort of conversation, made a cup of tea with a quiet smile and took it to the veranda to wait for Winnie’s return. The house was eerily quiet without staff. Winnie had taken Mwangi back to the shelter, but had refused to take Chala with them. Everyone was protecting each other.

  She watched a tiny hummingbird hovering and darting into the flowers of a frangipani tree. Shards of recent memory flashed at random in her head.

  CHAPTER 35

  The bleep of an incoming text became a siren in her dream. Chala was having sex with someone with no face. Suddenly the siren sounded and they were locked together, naked, on a green hillside. They began to roll down the grass slope, over and over each other, moulding into each other. She could feel his lips and his breath, but still she couldn’t see his face. Then there were men on horseback and suddenly people were firing at them. Chala stood up in her dream and someone aimed a rifle at her stomach. ‘No!’

  Her own scream jolted her awake. Her arms were clutched around her tummy and she looked at her unfamiliar surroundings in momentary childhood confusion, almost calling out for Philip. Then she stopped dead. The bullets of her dream were no longer in her dream. She fought an impulse to run to the toilet.

  ‘Winnie,’ she called, throwing a kikoi around herself. ‘Where are you? What’s happening?’ All she could hear was the firework crash of bullets and distant shouting. She noticed the phone flashing beside her bed and grabbed it shakily. It was a message from the Dutch blockhead; Femke was translating and forwarding everything she received. ‘The army is sending helicopters to stop the riots in Naivasha. Stay in your houses. We keep you informed.’

  ‘Winnie!’

  ‘I’m here. It’s OK, girl.’ Winnie appeared at her bedroom door as Chala was racing down the corridor. She, too, showed the dishevelled signs of a bad night’s sleep.

  ‘What time is it?’ Chala felt disorientated, not knowing what questions to ask, grasping for detail that would make this normal.

  ‘It’s nearly midday.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yep, me too. I went back to bed to try and get some sleep after breakfast this morning.’

  ‘What is—’

  ‘It’s OK. They are firing from helicopters to break up the riots.’

  ‘Shooting people?’ Chala could not process the information.

  ‘No, they’re just blanks, but all the same, you wouldn’t want to be in that crowd at the moment.’

  Chala wanted to curl up in a little ball. She sat down, not trusting her legs.

  ‘Listen, girl.’ Winnie was in charge again. ‘It’s good that they mean business. Then the cutting and burning will stop.’

  Chala flinched from the implications of the word she had just used – cutting.

  ‘But—’ That impulse again, forever on her lips. ‘I thought they were too scared to bring the army in. Why now?’

  ‘Maybe they needed time to get the soldiers’ relatives out first. They wouldn’t fire if there were some of their own down there.’

  ‘Oh God, what a mess. What do you think will happen?’

  ‘The fighting will stop. The Mungiki will go back into their holes. Some people’s lives will be ruined and the rest will go back to normal. Life will go on as it always does.’

  Chala wondered how she would ever be able to put this experience into words for people back home.

  ‘And what about David and Joshua?’ She remembered the Luo and Kalenjin boys from the shelter who were in hiding. ‘What will happen to them?’

  ‘Oh, they’ll come out of hiding when everything’s calmed down. They’ll stay there for a while and then they’ll go back to the shelter.’

  Chala thought suddenly of Kamau and wondered what had become of him. ‘Oh shit, I need to go to the toilet.’ She jumped to answer the nervous call of her body again and disappeared with Winnie calling after her that she’d make some coffee.

  There were messages on her phone from Paul and Amanda and Denise
. They had seen images of chaos on the news as helicopters blasted over Naivasha. There was something absurdly surreal about the fact that people in England could actually see what was happening within her own earshot, when she herself could see nothing. Winnie didn’t have satellite TV and she felt a peculiar sense of being locked in hiding, her head still metaphorically between Mwangi’s legs.

  She sent a variation of the same text back to everyone and joined Winnie on the veranda for coffee. The firing was sporadic now, but the helicopters still whirred noisily in and out of earshot. She started to ask Winnie a question about what had made her decide to go into politics, wanting to focus on something else, something from the past that could be nicely packaged up, something finished and safe, but Winnie didn’t seem to hear her. She was looking intently towards the gate at the bottom of the short driveway up to the house.

  ‘What is it?’ Chala felt instantly breathless.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said slowly, and Chala heard the yellow fear creep into her voice.

  Then the askari was shouting and someone was rattling the gate and she heard a man cry out.

  ‘Go inside!’ Winnie barked at her, as she began to stride towards the gate.

  Chala hesitated for a second and then backed indoors, allowing the metaphorical hand to come down on her neck. She crouched down beside her bed, ready, if need be, to roll underneath it, and stared at the door. It’s OK, it’s OK, she said in her head to the little life inside her.

  When she heard the footsteps, she strained to recognise the sound of Winnie’s gait. Unsure of herself, she was about to slip under the bed, when the sound of Winnie’s voice broke into her head.

  ‘Hey girl, it’s OK.’ Chala wondered for a second if Winnie might have been forced to say those words by someone with a knife or a gun to her head, but she trusted the reassurance in Winnie’s voice. She went to the voice and put her arms around Winnie and cried. Winnie, too, had tears in her eyes. She drew back from the embrace and pointed over at the wooden sofa in the corner of the veranda.