Yellow Room

by Shelan Rodger

  Femke’s queue dried up before the food had run out and her body relaxed with the knowledge that at least all those mothers with babies had eaten today. Then they split the men into two lines and used up the rest of the bananas and the eggs and the carrots and the uji. There was nothing left for the women and children.

  When they got back to Winnie’s house, she handed them a cold drink and greeted Femke warmly with the double Kenyan handshake.

  ‘We must be able to get more mzungus to help. There are loads of mzungus round the lake.’ Femke wanted to talk to Mick, to call every mzungu in her phone, to make sure that they had enough to feed everyone.

  Winnie smiled, but was firm. ‘You know it is not a good thing for too many of you to be there, even if you are white. It will attract too much attention. It will bring trouble.’

  Femke spoke to Mick and he agreed with Winnie. They compromised by agreeing that anyone who was prepared to donate food could drop it at Femke’s house, and that way at least they could increase their supplies.

  The next day, Femke displayed her foodstuffs like jewellery to Winnie and Chala. Someone had brought three enormous crates of cucumbers. There were thirty loaves of bread, a whole stack of catering packs of biscuits, four extra containers of uji, a hundred extra eggs. Every child that day got at least a biscuit or a piece of bread.

  As Femke prepared to get in the car, she nodded in the direction of Chala’s tummy. ‘How are you feeling? You look tired.’

  ‘I think I am going to leave on Friday. The refugee camp will be open in the next few days and they won’t need us any longer. I’m almost done with the website. I think I need to go home and tell Paul.’

  ‘Goodness.’ Femke was silent and Chala felt shy.

  ‘What will you do? Will you stay?’

  ‘Yeah, I think I will still stay after all. I want to set up a dog programme, to vaccinate all the street dogs against rabies.’ She looked down suddenly and Chala saw that she was hiding tears. ‘Ignore me, I’m just a silly Dutch vet, but I will miss you.’

  Chala hugged her new friend and knew that it was going to be hard to leave.

  CHAPTER 39

  There was a loud drum roll that went straight to the hairs on Chala’s skin and in flooded the fifty-strong choir of street boys. They stepped into their positions with easy precision, the smallest at the front, tallest at the back. Even little Josphat looked sure of himself, next to Julius in the front row. And then the drums stopped abruptly and one of the boys in the middle sang a long note in a pristine voice that had yet to break. Someone else started a slow, rhythmic clapping and then everyone was singing and clapping a well-worn song. Julius clicked his fingers cockily and Simon clapped just a shade out of time.

  Chala remembered the choking feeling she had had the very first time she’d come here and how long ago and how superficial that all felt now. She closed her eyes and savoured this moment.

  After three songs, they shuffled into position on the benches and one of the older boys, Samson, received a nod from Mwangi. He stepped out theatrically and read from a sheet in front of him in self-conscious English. The ends of sentences ran into the beginning of the next. The effect was to make it sound like a poem and, Chala realised with a deep blush and a choking sensation, it was about her.

  ‘Good friends are like stars. You do not always see them, but you know they are there. Be strong as you have always been. Let nothing shake you. We will all miss you.’

  Then Sampson fell silent and Mwangi nodded again and Julius swaggered over and handed Chala a large flat object wrapped in shiny red paper.

  ‘Shall I open it now?’ Chala glanced at Winnie, sitting in the corner, for approval and Winnie just smiled. She opened it. It was a tray with photos of the boys varnished into the surface – the photos she had taken for the website, which Winnie must have had developed for the boys to use. She could not remember a time that a present had meant more to her.

  She got up, hating to be the centre of attention, but realising that she must speak. She opened her mouth and began to say thank you in a voice that hid nothing of how deeply she had been moved, but someone interrupted her. It was Julius.

  ‘Kiswahili, Kiswahili!’ And suddenly there was a chorus of boys chanting for her to speak in Swahili. She told them in broken Swahili that they were like little brothers and that she would always remember them and loved talking with them. But she got the word ‘talk’ wrong in Swahili and said ‘swim’ instead and the boys chortled and chortled.

  Chala looked at the faces of each one of the staff and let her eyes stop at Mwangi. He, too, was laughing.

  * * *

  She breathed in the familiar sweaty warmth that had hit her the moment she had arrived at Nairobi airport and allowed the tears to fall unchecked. After the barbecue they had held in her honour, she had shaken each boy by the hand and then each member of staff. When it came to Mwangi she had lingered, wanting something momentous to leave him with. In the end she had told him simply that he was a good man. Then Winnie had dragged her away to her house, where she was allowed to shower before the guests arrived for the small farewell party that Winnie had organised. Mick made a speech and mocked the girl who hated parties and Femke gave her a necklace.

  Winnie had insisted on accompanying her to the airport with her driver, even though it meant a 5.30 a.m. start, and had held her very tight before letting her go. ‘Go have a baby, girl!’ she had said in her best gospel voice.

  As soon as she got through immigration, Chala headed straight for the Ladies’. She stood upright in the tiny cubicle, closed her eyes, took a deep breath and focused on somewhere beyond all the chakras in her body. She conjured up the sense of resolution around the decision to feed the refugees at the police station, how good that had felt inside her. She thought of Kamau and the chance he had thrown away in life because of an unlocked toilet door.

  Then she walked to the café, ordered a coffee and sat down. Without touching the coffee, she took out her phone, scrolled down to the Bs and deleted a name. After a long pause, she drank her coffee and pondered the journey of the last few weeks of her life. The situation in Kenya was not yet resolved. As communities grappled with the newly displaced and hungry amongst them, politicians continued the stand-off and the estimated death toll was now up to a thousand.

  But she was going home. Home to Paul. And she was leaving Kenya with a gift that no one had ever been able to give her before: a sense of self-worth, the irrefutable and unfamiliar sensation of having done something right. She stroked the gentle life inside her as if it were a metaphor or a promise. Her mother had conceived her by a Kenyan lake, Philip’s ashes had been laid to rest in another of Kenya’s lakes, and now she was leaving Kenya with her own child. Goodbye Kenya – asante sana.

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER 40

  Paul circled one of her breasts with his finger, and her nipple responded to the gentle tease of attention. He moved his finger in smaller and smaller circles and she felt the sweet current travel through her body. Still teasing, he traced the shape of each breast alternately, around and around the nipples, until she felt like dragging his head down onto her.

  ‘You’ve put on weight, Che.’

  She opened her mouth to speak, but he put a finger on it. ‘I like it. I like the fullness of you. It’s like having two women at once.’ He tweaked a nipple then and she felt the spasm echo between her legs. ‘I get the old one back and a new one too. I like it. I like what Kenya has done to you.’

  They had talked endlessly about Kenya over dinner, a safe subject perhaps, a way of reaching across the distance between them, but it was such a relief for Chala to pour out the detail of what had happened, without the need to hide the fear she’d fe… and a knot buried deep inside her began to unwind – slowly, tentatively, like a snail learning yoga.

  Yet they had been shy of physical contact at first. Their hug at the airport had a quiet desperation about it. They had drawn back and looked into each other’s face
s for signs of what the other had become, but relief had got in the way.

  ‘You’re OK – thank God you’re OK, Che,’ he had kept saying. The frown was there, would always be there, but the relief was blatant in his eyes.

  ‘And you’re here. I’m so glad you’re here,’ she had softly acknowledged with tears in her own. She wanted to pull him towards her, pull his mouth into hers, yet she still felt that she didn’t have the right to do this. She would show him she was there for him, but she would not pressure him. He had the right to decide when relief might give way to something else. She was nervous, too; nervous of him noticing the life inside her too soon, wanting space for them both to find each other first before she broke the news.

  It wasn’t until the end of dinner that he had reached over and touched her face. Now his mouth dropped at last to her nipple and he played her with his tongue, moving between one nipple and the other, burying his fingers in her wet warmth for h… and now, only now as he entered her, did his mouth meet hers.

  She woke up from heavy sleep with his head resting against her shoulder. She looked at Paul, at the man she had married, the man she wanted to be the father of her child. His worry lines had softened with the peace of sleep, the frown of his mood swings folded gently back against itself. He looked contented, she thought, wondering briefly if Philip had had that look on him before the water swamped his flesh. She looked back at Paul and touched him ever so softly on the crease of his frown.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love, for what I put you through.’ But she said it inside herself, and it was a different kind of sorry, a sorry that opened horizons, a private acknowledgement of what he must have suffered and of her desire to be there for him in the same – ultimately unconditional – way he had managed to be there for her. ‘I am stronger now, I need you less, but I love you more.’ And the memory of a man who had given her unexpected pleasure on a night three months ago on the other side of the world seemed meaningless.

  She thought of little Julius’ ordeal at the shelter, of all the women and children who had lost their husbands or fathers in the ‘nonsense’ of Kenya, of the inevitable ease with which a human being will take up arms to protect his nearest and dearest, of the lengths to which terror or habit can drive a man. And the snail inside her doing yoga uncoiled in slow motion a tiny bit more. It didn’t matter who the biological father really was. Her night with Bruce would remain behind a locked toilet door for ever. She would not burden Paul with a secret that could only hurt him. All her life she had lived with guilt and this would be her penance; one more piece of guilt, which she would suffer alone and in private, to give them a chance for a new beginning. Again, she thought of Julius and Kamau. It was a small price to pay.

  She stroked her bare stomach under the sheets. This morning she would tell him about the baby. She moved her hand up to his temple again and gently leaned in to smell his hair and kiss him quietly on the forehead. She watched a slow, sleepy smile form on his face and he pulled her back into him with his eyes still closed.

  CHAPTER 41

  ‘No thanks, I’ve had enough coffee.’ She waved him away as he reached to refill their cups. ‘So have you recovered?’

  ‘From being abandoned by my wife after less than half the seven-year itch?’

  The word sorry rushed into the can of worms that he’d just opened, but she squashed it back down and caught him smiling. ‘No, not that,’ she said in a deadpan voice. ‘Your encounter with the cricket ball. I can’t believe you had to go to hospital!’

  Suddenly the frown was there, and Chala had that momentary familiar sensation of treading on eggshells in Paul’s company, but now he was waving her away as if she were the one offering more coffee. ‘Oh, that? Yeah, I’m over that.’

  Chala took the hint and changed the subject, eager to hold on to the freshness between them. ‘And what about that guy you were talking about, did he buy your hall of mirrors?’

  ‘Yep!’ Paul had a wide smile on his face again. ‘Guess how much.’

  ‘God, I have no idea.’ She waited for Paul to tell her, but he was waiting for her to suggest a sum. What could a little-known artist possibly be paid for an unknown painting? ‘I don’t know, £100?’

  ‘Is that all you think I’m worth?’ She was about to object, but she saw the delight on his face. ‘Up a bit.’

  ‘£200?’

  ‘Add a nought.’ ‘No, really?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Oh.’ She stopped short. He was still smiling. ‘Add another nought.’

  ‘What? That’s impossible! That’s £20,000!’

  ‘It’s a kind of sponsorship thing, really. He’s got loads of contacts in the art world. He’s going to put on an exhibition and he gets twenty per cent of whatever we sell. I’ve been working madly ever since!’ He pulled her over from her side of the table to sit on his lap. She sat with one leg either side of him, facing him – it was how they used to sit before they got married. ‘It’s my lucky break, Che. I know it is. This is my big chance.’

  ‘That is truly brilliant.’ She hugged him warmly, delighted that time was rewarding his courage at last.

  ‘God, you’re getting heavy.’ He pushed her playfully off his lap and, unnoticed, she took a deep breath, but just as she was about to speak he grabbed her by the hand. ‘Come on – want to see what I’ve been working on?’

  She looked at him with momentary disbelief. She could only remember one other time he’d actually let her see an unfinished painting. He, too, she realised, had changed.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Fuck it, come and have a look.’ And she followed him downstairs into the basement.

  He showed her two finished paintings and two he was working on. He had never worked so quickly, never before started more than one painting at once. She reacted without self-consciousness in front of them all. The last one he showed her was still in its early stages and she could barely make out the detail around the one clear object in the foreground. It was a knife, a large African machete being wielded mid-air in a cloud of dust, yet the knife was shining and on it was the broken reflection of the face of a small child, eyes wide open in terror.

  ‘My God,’ Chala was awestruck. ‘How could you produce something so powerful without even being there?’

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘It’s incredible.’ She looked away from the pain of the painting into his open face. ‘You’re incredible.’

  ‘Come on, then, enough of this. Another coffee while we talk about what to do with £20,000?’

  ‘And the money from the house.’

  ‘Philip’s house? You want to sell it? I thought you wanted to keep it for ever.’

  ‘That was before I knew there was a way to have a new beginning. I want to move on, Pa… with y… and—’

  ‘OK, don’t go all hippy on me here. You might spoil the paintings.’ He was laughing and pulling her towards him. ‘But seriously,’ he pulled back to look at her again, ‘that’s good, Che. You really have changed. I like the new you.’

  Her hands were beginning to sweat. She needed that coffee. It was time to tell him.

  ‘Fuck!’

  Chala jumped. ‘What?’

  ‘You haven’t even said hello to the kid yet!’

  She almost jumped again.

  ‘Rudolph first. Coffee second.’

  They went upstairs and poked Rudolph out of his furry slumber and Chala found herself talking to Paul about getting a dog.

  ‘A dog, a horse, a boat, a house in the sun – the possibilities are endless. Come on, coffee!’

  They finally settled around the still breakfast-laden kitchen table and Chala allowed herself to float for a few moments longer in the bubble of Paul’s enthusiasm. They talked about the money and the opportunity for Paul to turn his passion into a real living, about where they could choose to live if this happened, about the kind of work that Chala would like to get involved in. Without any formal transition they had passed from a night of tender yet slightly amb
ivalent reunion to talk about the one thing that indicated commitment as a couple: the future. After the last twenty-four hours, Chala felt sure that Paul would welcome the pregnancy with open arms. At last she gave life to the words that sweated in her hands.

  ‘Paul.’ Her hands gripped each other under the table. ‘There is something else that affects our future together. Something I found out in Kenya, but I wanted to be certain about before I told you, and I wanted to tell you face to face.’ She hesitated. ‘I’m pregnant, Paul. I’m going to have a baby.’

  The look on Paul’s face would never leave her. She had expected confusion, surprise, shock, but also joy. She saw no delight in the wall of his face. He seemed to sink into himself and, when she searched his eyes, there was nothing but distance. He spoke, finally, and the words brought no relief.

  ‘You’re right.’ His voice was flat. ‘This does affect our future together.’

  CHAPTER 42

  ‘Should you be eating that?’ Paul pointed at the hot pepperoni on her takeaway pizza.

  ‘I’m sure it won’t do any harm.’ She looked up and they made eye contact for what felt like the first time since she’d told him she was pregnant. He had spent most of the day away from her, out walking and in his studio, and she had waited in patient agony for him to make a move to speak to her. When he had surfaced and suggested they order a pizza, she had wanted to cry.

  ‘I thought you always said you would have an abortion if you ever got pregnant.’ It was an accusation.

  ‘Yes, I know, I did.’ She chose her words as if she were being tested. ‘But you once said that I couldn’t know how I would react unless it happen…You were right.’

  Silence. She spoke again. ‘That was why I didn’t tell you straight away. I did think about abortion. It was only when I was in the middle of the riot that I suddenly knew for certain I wanted to keep it – that it suddenly seemed possible.’