‘Yeah, you really don’t need to do this sort of thing for us,’ Alice says, picking up one of the piles from the bed to prove we’re capable of moving clothes around ourselves.
‘Okay then, okay,’ says Esther, smiling. I don’t think she’s offended.
‘But thank you very much!’ I add, as she leaves the room.
I look at Alice. We were meant to be ‘the help’, not have it. Although I suppose this is the taste of colonial Africa I asked for. I’ve never felt more white in my life.
‘Yeah, it’s pretty weird,’ Alice says. ‘But it’s how things are here. You just have to tell them if you don’t want them to do all the things they normally would.’
Esther, Alice explains, is the only woman on staff because Marguerite believes having too many women is ‘asking for trouble’, that they ‘compete for attention from all the chaps’.
‘I’m pretty sure that’s bullshit,’ Alice says, ‘but I’m not sure Esther is thrilled we’re all here. It’s made a lot more work for her! Come on – I’ll introduce you to the rest of the staff.’
We find Patrick walking around the bottom of the garden with two dogs, all of them looking up at the tree canopy.
‘Are you taking care of the monkeys again, Patrick?’ Alice asks, startling him.
‘Oh yes, madam, yes, yes,’ he says, rushing over to greet us, again with that affable smile. I get the sense the man is physically incapable of frowning.
He’s got a handful of pebbles, and a slingshot made of wonky strips of old tyre-tube rubber wrapped around a forked piece of wood.
‘The monkeys come through here every afternoon,’ Alice explains. ‘They stir the dogs right up. Patrick’s our first line of defence. You should see how good he is with that thing!’
Patrick laughs. ‘They are very naughty monkeys!’ he says.
One of the dogs – a brown bitzer – comes over to lick my hand.
‘This is “Shujaa”,’ Patrick says, and then pointing at the golden retriever scratching at the base of a tree, ‘and that is “Jua”.’
‘They’re lovely,’ Alice says, ‘but Jua can be a little bit confusing for Walt. He’s got a golden retriever in England too. So … it’s not very helpful when we’re trying to make him understand he’s in Kenya.’
The sound of tumbling rocks distracts us. We turn to see a short, stocky man tipping out a wheelbarrow full of stones next to a small sandpit.
‘Oh – that’s James. Let’s go say hi,’ Alice says. ‘James is Walt’s favourite,’ she whispers, as we walk towards him. ‘He’s been with the family for years, and his father was their gardener before him.’
‘Hello, Alice!’ James says. ‘How are you today?’
‘Very good, thank you, James! This is Kirsten – my friend from Australia.’
‘Hi James, nice to meet you,’ I say, shaking his hand.
‘Jambo, Kirsten,’ he says, smiling. ‘Karibu.’
‘She’s here to help us with the mzee too,’ Alice says.
‘Ma-zay?’ I ask.
‘It means like, “old man”, right, James?’ Alice says.
‘Yes,’ James says. ‘It is to be respectful to say mzee.’
‘So it’s different to bwana then?’ I ask.
‘Mmm, yes,’ James says, head tilted, pondering how to explain his language to us. ‘A bwana is a boss. But a mzee is any older person.’
‘Right. So Walt is a bwana and a mzee then?’
‘Yes,’ James laughs. ‘He is both.’
‘Mzee when he’s being nice, bwana when he’s being bossy,’ Alice says.
James laughs again. ‘Yes. That is okay.’
I suddenly realise how dark it’s getting, how tired I am. I try to stifle a yawn.
‘You must be buggered,’ says Alice. ‘Come on, let’s go inside. It’ll be time to get ready for dinner soon.’
But I just cannot stay awake. I don’t make it to dinner.
I walk back down the hallway to the room I’m sharing with Alice, climb into the bed closest to the window, pull a mint green duvet up to my chin, and fade to black.
It’s three in the morning when I wake up in a pinched-sphincter panic.
There’s a silhouette in the bedroom doorway. It’s a man. He’s holding a gun and saying he’s going to blow my bloody head off.
My mind scrambles through the sleep fog for a foothold and then it comes to me – Kenya. I’m in Kenya. With Alice. And the crazy old man. And this is a home invasion.
Terror has me pinned flat to the bed, clammy and mute, while my insides scream and my heart thumps so hard my ribs hurt.
Alice jumps up from her bed and lunges at the intruder.
I scream. Surely it’s all over. Everything I’ve ever known about to be exploded out of my skull in fragments of brain and blood and bone. I spend the split second before my death thinking about how mad my parents will be – about how the whole reason they left Africa was to make sure this sort of shit didn’t happen to their kids.
But that brief eternity passes, and I realise there’s been some kind of mistake: my head is still intact, my heart is still beating.
Alice slaps the wall and the light comes on.
The man in the doorway is Walt. He’s wearing a striped tie over flannelette pyjamas and pointing a vacuum cleaner at us.
I nearly choke when I remember to start breathing again.
He blinks into the light, looking back and forth between Alice and me. Then he pulls his wallet out of his pocket, holding it open to show us it’s empty.
‘Where’s my fucking money?’ he snarls. ‘And who the hell are you? What are you doing in my house!?’
I hear a door fling open, somewhere down the hallway, and footsteps approaching. Walt turns to aim his plastic pipe at them.
‘Oh, Dad,’ Fiona says, in a playful tone, ‘you silly old bugger! What are you doing up at this ungodly hour?’
He looks at her as though it should be obvious. ‘I’m blasting these thieving scoundrels away!’
‘Here, give me that.’ She prises the vacuum free of his clutches. ‘After all, cleaning is women’s work, isn’t it?’
The rage falls away from his face and his empty wallet falls to the floor. The murderous bastard is laughing. ‘Christ, yes! I wouldn’t be caught dead standing on your toes in that department,’ he teases, wagging his finger in his daughter’s face as she walks him back to his room.
I smell my own acrid death-sweat, as Alice rolls back into bed. ‘That was lucky,’ she says, ‘we only put the guns into storage last week.’
3
THE ROUTINE
When I next wake, it’s dawn. Somewhere nearby, a muezzin wails into a megaphone, waking the birds and the faithful. I draw the curtains and lie back in bed, watching the sky come to life and everything between me and it slowly take shape through the window. A honeyed smoke tinges the air, its scent lighting up a memory of a family trip to Zimbabwe in 1995 when I was eleven years old. My parents wanted me and my two younger sisters to see where they were from. Or as they put it: ‘So that you brats know how bloody lucky you are!’ But their plan backfired. The excitement of a place teeming with monkeys and elephants and lions led us to conclude we’d have been much luckier growing up there than in boring Mackay, where all there was to see was sugar cane and dumped shopping trolleys.
Mum has always said that sweet smoke is the smell of Africa for her, and that the sound is the cry of a fish eagle. And here I am, thirty years after they left the continent, breathing that same hazy air. Only my Africa sound will be the incessant beeping of a pager.
It first starts going off at about half-past six.
‘Jesus Christ, what is that noise?’ I ask.
Alice rolls over and hands me a pager. ‘It’s connected to a pressure sensor under Walt’s mattress that detects when he gets out of bed,’ she says, reaching to grab a baby monitor from the table between our beds. ‘Although, as you saw last night, it’s not entirely reliable.’ She flicks on the monitor
screen: it shows a grainy image of Walt standing beside his bed, one hand resting impatiently on his crotch. She watches him for a moment. ‘It’s okay, he’s just going for a piss,’ she says, settling back onto her pillows.
There are, in fact, two cameras connected to the baby monitor, operating on separate channels. One is in Walt’s bedroom, hidden beside a faded photo frame on the top of his dresser; it captures most of his bedroom, from the hallway to the ensuite, but leaves a blind spot in the far corner. The other camera is on a windowsill in the bathroom; it films the shower and the toilet. The monitor also transmits sound, and automatically switches to night vision when the lights go out. Whoever is on duty has to carry the pager and baby monitor with them at all times, switching between the two channels as Walt’s pixelated spectre floats from one side of the little screen to the other – our own geriatric version of The Truman Show.
I watch as he flushes the toilet and climbs back into bed.
‘He always does this,’ Alice tells me. ‘He’ll usually go back to sleep for a bit. But if he does try to get up-up before seven, go into his room and convince him to have more of a “zizz”. You can usually get him to lie down again for a while if you say, “Everyone’s having a sleep-in after the big party we had last night.” That helps to put him in a good mood, too. But once he’s decided he’s getting up, there’s no turning him around. You’ll have to go in there to help get him ready for the day.’
Half an hour later, the pager starts beeping again. On the monitor I see that Walt has swung his legs out from under the blankets and is shuffling his feet into a pair of slippers. He rubs his face with both hands, then runs them over the back of his head and looks around the room. A man in his own home, but totally lost. I feel a sudden pang of pity for him, and resentment at the injustice of old age.
‘Yeah, he’s up-up now,’ Alice says, heaving herself out of bed. ‘You can tell when he starts looking around the place like that, trying to work out where he is.’
And so begins my induction into the ‘cruisey’ job of looking after Walter Smyth.
While Alice guides Walt through his morning routine, I hang back to watch with Fiona so that she can ‘explain things in a bit more detail’. I soon find myself wondering if I should take notes.
‘You must place Dad’s razor and soap brush on the ledge above the basin there – just to the right of the soap. Only turn the hot tap thirty degrees to the left – that will get it to just the right temperature. We don’t want him scalding his hands when he takes the plug out. And don’t forget to put his comb out – he’s very fussy about making his hair neat in the morning.’
Fiona talks in that low, intense voice she’d first greeted me with, all the while watching her father, seemingly poised to intervene should she need to at any moment. She’s a tall, athletic woman, with a practical haircut and practical clothes, whose default expression is like that of a tennis player waiting to receive a serve. She’s spent the last few weeks completely overhauling the house to better suit Walt’s needs – the access ramp I’d noticed out the front was thanks to her. The ensuite itself had just been remodelled and fitted out with handrails, the toilet replaced with a raised seat and arm rests, and the door widened to make room for a commode or wheelchair, if and when the time should come. She strikes me as the kind of person you’d be thankful for in an emergency – but also as the kind of person who makes everything feel like an emergency.
‘Now. When you lay his clothes out for the day, put them here on the end of the bed – so they’re the first thing he sees when he turns around after shaving. Lay them out in reverse order of how he needs to put them on.’ She places his cashmere pullover, his trousers, then his shirt, singlet, underpants and socks on the bed. ‘Roll his belt up beside them – buckle on the outside – and tuck a clean hanky into his pocket. Everything’s here in this dresser, see? You’ll have to help him keep his balance while he steps into his pants. And do his buttons up if they’re too tight and fiddly – his hands can get a little stiff. Pyjamas should go into the wash every second day, please. Hang his dressing-gown here on the back of the door.’
Up close like this, without the dehumanising fuzz of a monitor screen masking the detail of his ageing skin and thinning hair and cloudy eyes, I see how vulnerable poor Walt is. He doesn’t even seem to notice we’re there, live-commentating the minutiae of his life. He looks right through me, and it’s only when Fiona directly addresses him that he responds.
I’m reminded of my own grandmother when her dementia was starting to take hold – of all the little things we knew to do to help her life run smoothly when her mind was coming to a spluttering halt. My mother would go around to visit her at her retirement village flat at least every second day. Mum stuck a whiteboard next to the phone, with all the important names and numbers on it, and wrote out Granny’s schedule for the week.
On Fridays we’d pick Granny up and bring her out to stay with us on the farm for the weekend. When we took her back on Sunday nights, we’d make sure she had fresh milk, take the rotting soup bones out of the fridge, and run the dirty clothes she’d hung back in her wardrobe through the washing machine. But no one was there with her every second of every minute of every hour of every day, to make sure she didn’t stash Scotch Finger biscuits under her pillows, or to remove the family of mice nesting in her underwear drawer.
Eventually, we moved her to a high-care nursing home. It was only a matter of months before we had to move her again, to the hospital ward where she lay for three weeks, refusing food, having fluids administered intravenously, her stomach blown up like a basketball against her emaciated frame as her organs shut down and her bladder closed up, until finally, with her face twisted into a grimace and my mother holding her hand, she died.
It still makes me furious. That a woman who was so against any creature suffering she refused to kill even spiders – would gently remove such unwelcome intruders by hand and release them into the garden while the rest of us screamed profanities – should be made to die that way. My grandmother was a lifelong member of the RSPCA. She’d spent her life hand-rearing the orphaned wildlife her game ranger husband brought home from the bush. Had she seen an animal forced to endure the sort of physical pain she had to, she’d have reported animal cruelty. It makes me wild with rage that we couldn’t do more to help her in her final years, and her final moment.
I find myself wondering how much more we would have done if we had the kind of money the Smyths have. If we’d have modified her house and moved in round-the-clock carers trained to cater to her every idiosyncrasy and rigged up a surveillance system to keep her monitored. Maybe we would have. Maybe Fiona isn’t being over the top at all – maybe Walter Smyth’s golden years in Nairobi is the ultimate case study in how to help someone die when money’s not an issue. Playing out in a place where for most people it very much is.
By seven-thirty that morning we’re sitting at a breakfast table festooned with tropical abundance. Honestly, it’s an orgy of fruit, bordering on obscene. Clutches of lady finger bananas fan the ends of a platter filled with diced mango cheeks and thick slivers of pawpaw, topped with wedges of lime and halved granadillas and a scattering of strawberries. A toaster on the sideboard has a springy fresh loaf of brown bread sliced beside it, crumbs tumbling over the long wooden slab. Toasted muesli and natural yoghurt and honey sit in their store-bought containers, the garish branding out of place against the rawness of the surrounding spread. There is a white linen tablecloth, silver cutlery, glasses that wait for the chilled orange juice in a carafe beading with condensation, and teacups for the porcelain milk jug that is draped with a square of white gauze, weighed down at the edges with colourful beads.
For eggs or more coffee, we’re simply to ring a little brass bell and Esther will come through from the kitchen in the next room to take the order. (After a few days, I hide that bell. I just can’t bear it.)
Walt sits at the head of his table, with Fiona to one side of him, Alice to the
other, and Millicent and I across from each other at the end. He looks around as he unrolls his napkin, trying to work out who all these people are, and where in the world he is. I’m feeling much the same way.
Millicent intrigues me. She’s the daughter of a long-time friend of the Smyth family, and lives with her elderly mother elsewhere in Nairobi. It’s just that bit too far to travel every day, so she stays in the house with us when she’s on the morning or night shift, sleeping in the sunroom. Millicent evidently has nowhere near the Smyths’ kind of money. She makes her living doing this sort of thing all over the world. ‘Only Commonwealth countries, though,’ she says sagely, as though I should know what that means. She wears huge thick glasses with tinted lenses and rusting gold frames, and has tawny-grey hair that reaches nearly to her waist but is always pinned up in a topknot. I imagine that a street blog would deem her style – a reliable combination of ankle-length skirts and sturdy linen blouses in clashing palettes and patterns – ‘rustic Mormon chic’. Millicent says ‘bless’ and ‘dear’ a lot. She must be about sixty-something? It’s hard to say: the whites here have all had so much sun damage.
Fiona’s running commentary continues. ‘Dad’s not to have any caffeine, so Esther will prepare a separate pot of decaf coffee for him – make sure you don’t get it mixed up at the table with yours. In fact, I think I’d rather you girls didn’t even have a pot of the regular stuff in here. Make your own in the kitchen out of sight if you absolutely must have it. Safer that way. And watch how much sugar he tries to put into his cup. We’re trying to cut down. Aren’t we, Dad?’
‘Hmmm?’ Walt isn’t paying attention. He’s fiddling with his watch. It must be a strange thing to know the hour of the day but not the decade you’re in.
‘He forgets he’s done it. I’ve seen him put five spoons in before. Five! Can you imagine? He’ll end up with diabetes. We really don’t want that. Best you put the sugar in for him so that you can keep it under control. Just one teaspoon of the stevia blend, please. Keep it in the sugar bowl so that he doesn’t realise.’
I Built No Schools in Kenya Page 3