Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  ‘This man needs a woman’s help.’

  ‘What?’ Chala jumped.

  ‘Come on, he is injured. We’ll talk later.’

  And together they washed and dressed the deep gash on his arm, holding the flesh together with a bandage until he could get the stitches he needed. Chala felt what a thousand nurses must have felt in war. It didn’t matter what tribe he was from or what he believed in. He was a human being in distress – no more, no less. Later she would learn that he was the brother of Winnie’s cook. His house had been burnt down and his wife and children had fled to the prison unharmed, but he had gone back in to help another brother with his family. Then a blank bullet had knocked him over and someone had slashed his arm with a panga. He had fled for help, seeking refuge at the house of the ‘enemy’, his sister’s employer’s house, the house of a Kikuyu, trusting in what he knew about her.

  How deeply we act on trust when it matters, thought Chala again.

  CHAPTER 36

  Mick turned up early the next morning and Chala was so pleased to see him she felt like crying.

  ‘It’s going to be OK,’ he reassured her. Helicopters still circled intermittently overhead, though, and he had refused to bring Femke with him. Chala grilled him on what he had seen and what was going on around the lake. He said there were burnt patches on the tarmac where roadblocks had been set up, and there was a deathly hush around the empty market stalls that lined the road into town.

  ‘It’s still tense, but it’s calm. The rumour mill is still running wild, though. Talk of an attack on the police station and the prison. Don’t worry, it won’t happen.’ Chala remembered Mick saying nothing would ever happen in Naivasha, but she didn’t remind him of that.

  ‘How is Femke coping?’ How quickly they had slid into being a couple, she thought, as she saw his face soften.

  ‘She’s OK.’ The same line. ‘We had a bit of a fright when the violence seemed to be spreading around the lake, but it’ll all blow over now, I reckon. And then we’ve just got the after-effects to deal with. The flower farms are working together with the Kenyan Red Cross to put up a refugee camp for 10,000 people.’

  ‘Good God, that many?’

  ‘Yep, welcome to Africa.’

  ‘But are these the same people that are at the police station and the prison at the moment?’ Chala felt like a dumb schoolgirl, but she needed to understand.

  ‘Yep, they are overflowing, and the police don’t have any food to give them.’

  ‘What about the Red Cross? Or some foreign aid agency?’

  ‘The Red Cross is busy getting the camp sorted. Aid agencies are all focused on the western provinces. A few blanks from a helicopter is news, but 10,000 displaced people, hey, that’s a throwaway line.’

  ‘When did you get so cynical?’

  ‘I think he was born that way.’ Winnie joined them, bearing coffee. ‘I don’t like to agree with Mick – on principle – but this time he’s dead right.’

  ‘Winnie, habari yako?’ He took her hands in his and Chala thought that Femke had found herself a pretty good Kenya Cowboy. ‘How are the boys?’

  ‘I haven’t been up there since it all started. I dropped Mwangi at the police station when I took my cook, Emily, in on Monday and he managed to get back up there on foot. They’re OK, but they’re keeping their heads down.’

  Chala thought of their ride in the pick-up with her own head down and shuddered.

  After Mick had gone, Winnie announced that she was going to the shelter. ‘There’s still some tomatoes and onions in the fridge. You can make us something for lunch.’

  ‘No, I want to come too.’

  Winnie looked stern and was about to say something, but then paused. There was something new in Chala’s voice. ‘OK, girl. Come on, then.’

  They drove along almost deserted streets, past burnt tyres and patches of rubble. Stray bits of evidence littered the side of the road: a mangled bicycle, a dead donkey, a discarded mattress. Chala tried to stop herself deducing what had happened, and yet it was a release to get out of the house, to see the world for real around her.

  As they rounded the corner past the police station, she blanched at the scene they glimpsed through the wire. A swarm of people spread out on every free patch of dust between the station buildings and the wire enclosure. Women in rags breastfeeding babies and small children in the heat of the sun, giving whatever their bodies had left in them to give. Winnie saw it too and they drove past in silence. She stayed quiet for the rest of the journey, concentrating for signs of anything amiss on the road ahead of them, and Chala was relieved when they reached the shelter.

  The boys flocked around them as usual and Mwangi and Fred beamed quietly, their matriarch back in the fold. Someone tapped Chala on the back of the leg and she turned round to catch Julius by the wrist. Josphat was laughing, in awe of his hero, but quickly lowered his eyes and went silent when Chala looked in his direction. After a few moments of conferring with Fred and Mwangi, Winnie nodded and clapped her hands.

  ‘OK, boys,’ she said in Swahili. ‘Remember all those bags of ugali we brought up on Sunday? We’ve got work to do.’

  Chala did her best to follow, but the Swahili was too fast. She pulled at Mwangi’s elbow and whispered, ‘What’s she saying?’

  ‘We are going to make food for the people at the police station.’ His voice was as matter-of-fact as ever.

  Chala felt a choking in the back of her throat. Her heart went out to these people. She didn’t grasp the full tribal ramifications of the course of action Winnie had proposed, but she appreciated the irony of street kids preparing food for people who had themselves lost their homes overnight. She caught Winnie’s eye and smiled.

  CHAPTER 37

  Boys of all sizes stood at the tables lined up on the concrete floor, while others sweated over enormous vats in the kitchen. Some cut up the thick ugali into small white slabs, some put the chunks into plastic sandwich bags, others spooned soupy green mush made from local spinach into a second plastic bag. These were then tied together with the ugali plastic bag and the parcels piled high in woven baskets. The boys worked surprisingly quietly, making a thousand food parcels. Using the same maize meal as a base, they also cooked uji, a slippery, gooey porridge with sugar, which was poured into large black water containers and left to cool.

  Winnie categorically refused to let any of the staff or Chala go with her. She dropped Chala back at her house and then disappeared in the laden pick-up. Chala waited, both nervous and dismayed that she had not been allowed to go with Winnie. If it was OK for Winnie, as a Kikuyu, to be seen feeding the Luo, then surely it would be no problem for a white girl? She lay down and tried to stroke peace into her tummy, but there was a restlessness bursting inside her. She opened her laptop to work on the website.

  After a couple of hours she began to look obsessively at her watch and the compound gate. When the pick-up drew in finally, she jumped up to greet it, just as the boys always did at the shelter. Winnie’s face was strained behind the smile as she climbed out. ‘How did it go? What did the police say?

  How did you give out the food?’ Chala wanted detail; she wanted to be able to visualise, grateful yet tired of being protected from seeing.

  ‘It was hard, girl. There’s no toilets there. Not enough clean water, not enough shelter and some people are getting sick. There wasn’t anywhere near enough food to feed everyone. We just fed as many of the women and children as we could.’

  ‘I want to come with you tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not sure if it’s safe for you to come too.’ She hesitated. ‘The pick-up got stoned on the way back. It was a bit scary.’

  ‘Oh God, be careful, Winnie. Maybe it’s me who should be going in, not you. No one knows who I am, and I’m white. It might actually be safer.’

  ‘Forget it!’ Chala was crestfallen. ‘Come on, girl, let’s get some lunch. And a beer. I need a beer.’

  ‘I’ll get it, you stay here.’ Chala jumped
up.

  As she handed out the beer glasses, Winnie looked at her hard. ‘Should you be drinking that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think you’re going to be a mum, isn’t that right, girl?’

  ‘How on earth did you know?’ But she was relieved that it was out in the open.

  ‘I’m a woman and I’m African. I know a mother when I see one!’ She laughed and raised her glass to Chala’s. ‘Here’s to you, girl. You better be getting home to that man of yours pretty soon or he’ll be sending me death threats.’

  * * *

  Chala was lying on the veranda between phone calls to the UK when Winnie’s phone jumped into song on the table. Visibly drained, she had gone to try and get some sleep after lunch, forgetting her phone. It had already bleeped a number of incoming messages, and Chala had thought of taking it into Winnie, but then decided just to answer it.

  ‘Sema,’ she said to the unnamed number that had called. ‘Utakufa, Mama, utakufa. Usirudi police station.’ Chala dropped the phone, unsure of whether she had really heard what she thought she’d heard.

  At that moment, Winnie entered, stretching. ‘Was that my phone? Hey, what’s wrong, girl, you look like you’ve seen a ghost!’

  ‘I might have got it wrong. It was someone speaking in Swahili, but I think he said that you will die if you go back to the police station. Winnie, what does this mean?’

  Winnie picked up the phone, saying nothing, to check the number that had called. Number withheld. Chala watched her read through the various messages that had come in, watched her sit down slowly and stare at the garden, watched the yellow creep into her body language.

  ‘Those messages, they’re death threats, too, aren’t they?’ Chala already knew.

  ‘They say that a Kikuyu who feeds Luos deserves to die.’

  ‘Can’t you call the police?’

  ‘What can the police do?’ She gritted her teeth. ‘They are probably just empty threats, but there is one thing I don’t like about this. They are using many different numbers – too many different numbers to be just one person making the same threat.’

  ‘Winnie, listen.’ Chala was sitting up straight like an eager schoolgirl in the front row. She heard the resolution in her own voice. ‘You said there are white people there from a medical agency, right?’

  ‘Yeah, there are two from France.’

  ‘So, why don’t I go in with the food? They won’t worry about me, I’m just a mzungu.’

  Winnie looked at her, thinking hard. She wasn’t used to stepping back, but she also knew this was no game. ‘But the car – they’ll recognise the pick-up. You could still be in trouble.’

  ‘So we get hold of another car. We can get one through Mick.’

  ‘That would make sense,’ she said slowly, ‘but you don’t have to do this.’

  ‘I know that.’ Chala chose her words carefully. ‘I want to. I want to be part of this, too, and it makes sense, you know it does.’

  ‘Make no mistake, girl, it is still a risk. This is Africa.’ But she smiled at her as she had on that day that felt as if it belonged to another lifetime, when Chala had first enthused about the website and the sponsorship scheme.

  But this time it was much bigger than the rush of approval. The sensation she had now was new: the feeling that she was doing something right.

  CHAPTER 38

  ‘How are you? How are you?’ The English words exploded around her in chorus as she stepped out of the rusty pick-up that Mick had had delivered early that morning. She smiled self-consciously and marched towards the building in pursuit of Odeaga, the policeman Winnie had instructed her to ask for. She was vaguely aware of a lifting of faces as she passed clusters of people sitting or lying on the ground, sometimes around tiny charcoal fires with a pot of water stewing tea or a few sad leaves of spinach. The shells of abandoned old cars had been converted into makeshift homes; she noticed one with a kikoi strung up like a curtain. People clung to the tiny line of shade provided by the station offices. The sticky stench of stale sweat clung to her skin and she caught sight of an open wound in a queue outside the French medical tent, festering with flies.

  Odeaga turned out to be the same young policeman she had seen on the first day, the one with incomprehension in his eyes. Now he was business-like and efficient. He told her to park up at the far end of the driveway and, as she did, he rounded up women and children: children in one line, women and babies in the other. Children came running with cups in their hands, most of them old plastic water bottles with the top cut off, or other objects ingeniously converted to hold liquid. Odeaga called two more of his colleagues over to help. They handed out the butterfly bags of ugali and spinach to the women, while Chala and Odeaga poured uji for the children. Winnie had also bought 150 eggs, 200 bananas and a few kilos of tomatoes that morning. The boys had supplemented the egg count with around forty of their own from the chickens at the shelter, and all had been carefully hard-boiled. But Chala kept these supplies hidden for the moment, wanting to see how far the rest of the food would stretch. Odeaga told her that the road had opened today and a busload of women and children had departed for Kisumu, leaving Naivasha and any men they had left behind.

  ‘What about food for the men?’ she asked Odeaga as she slopped uji into outstretched cups, trying to keep the portions fair despite the wildly varying sizes of containers. Some of them hadn’t eaten for four days.

  ‘They are strong. They can wait.’

  Pouring the porridge was awkward and took so much concentration that Chala hardly took in the faces in front of her. All she saw were arms and cups of different heights and sizes. Every now and again, Odeaga, ever watchful, would reprimand a child who had sneaked back into the queue for more and Chala would look up from her task and catch a child’s eye.

  The last container of porridge was empty at about the same time as the food parcels ran out in the women’s queue. Chala looked up to take stock of the length of the lines before them. They seemed just as long as they had been when they started.

  ‘Are these all new people? I mean, they haven’t eaten already?’

  ‘They are new,’ Odeaga said simply.

  So, they handed out the rest of the food, one tiny piece at a time: a banana to each child, an egg to each wom… and then a tomato per person and then one tomato between two and then: ‘Pole sana – there’s nothing left.’ They turned away, some with a shrug, some in disgust, some just looking down at their feet.

  The next day, Femke joined her.

  ‘You don’t have to do this, you know,’ she had said on the phone, giving Femke a get-out clause, just as Winnie had done with her the day before. ‘If you want you can bring the food to Winnie’s, and I can take it from here.’

  ‘No, I am coming.’

  ‘What does Mick think?’

  ‘I’m not his dog, you know.’ Chala thought how Mick would laugh at the English nuance of what she’d just said. ‘He says to be careful, though. None of the local organisations are willing to be seen taking sides. It’s too dangerous. That’s why he can’t come, because of the Rotary Club.’

  Half an hour later Femke was there and they held each other tight for a moment, before Winnie came up and took Femke by the hand. ‘You are sure?’

  ‘Yes, I am sure.’

  ‘Good girls.’ Winnie had gone early to supplement supplies and oversee the cooking operation at the shelter. ‘But it would be good if you go in Femke’s car today, so they don’t see the same car going in and out.’

  So they loaded up Femke’s car and set off for the police station. Femke was quiet on the way and Chala understood why. They drove right up to the point that Odeaga had shown Chala the day before. By the time they stepped out of the car, queues had already begun to form, children scurrying to find their cups. As they walked over to the building to find Odeaga, Chala caught the eye of a man crouched on the ground. His clothes were torn and his flesh hung loosely round his jaws. He had the haunted, wistful look that
she had come to associate with hunger. She smiled softly, but he looked away from her in resignation. There were other men nearby, stretched out on the ground, apathetic from lack of food.

  ‘Why don’t the men go with their families on the buses?’ Chala asked Odeaga, when they found him. Apparently some more buses had left early this morning and there seemed to be just a bit more space.

  ‘They can’t afford to go too. There will be no work when their families get home. The men need to wait and try to go back to their jobs here when they can.’

  ‘But have they eaten anything at all?’

  ‘There is water here.’

  ‘Femke?’

  ‘Yes.’ Femke sounded hoarse, struggling with the sudden exposure to human suffering, used to dealing with animals.

  ‘I think we should feed the men today. What do you think?’ They both looked over at the queue of eager children and Femke nodded slowly. ‘Odeaga?’

  ‘Mama, I will do what you tell me.’

  ‘OK, then we need two lines. One for the men and one for women with babies only.’

  They held back, as Odeaga shouted orders. The police had emptied the garage and workshop area of vehicles and put in a TV, so Odeaga sent all the children and women there. Chala heard some women swearing at them as they walked away, but most went silently. Occasionally a woman shouted ‘shame’ at a man, as the men gathered uncertainly in line.

  Chala felt Femke’s presence beside her at the head of her line, handing out the ugali and spinach food packs with a shaky hand to women with babies strapped around their back or their middle. One woman’s baby was swaddled in an old jumper and had the impossible pinkness of a newborn.

  ‘Ana mwezi ngapi?’ Femke asked the mother. ‘Two days.’

  Chala heard the exchange, heard Femke’s shocked silence. She felt her own stomach twinge at the thought of giving birth in such circumstances and she forced her attention back to the men in her own line. A quick nod or downcast eyes, an occasional weak smile: the men were both grateful and embarrassed.