Alice loads up a plate of food for Walt, and Fiona continues. ‘He’ll probably just have a piece of pawpaw and a banana and a slice of toast with marmalade for breakfast. Encourage the banana – the potassium is good for him. Watch him with the sugar, though! He’ll want to sprinkle it all over his pawpaw. You mustn’t let him – I can’t stress enough how much we don’t want him to get diabetes. He can have as many refills of coffee as he likes. Just remember to watch the sugar. And best to pour it for him – his wrists are a little weak.’
Walt protests as Alice takes the pot out of his hands. I wonder whether not letting him do anything for himself is a good strategy.
‘Now. Pills. He has a good dozen or so to take each day. Six in the morning, then another lot with lunch and again at dinner. I’ll go through them with you later. Sometimes he’ll take them happily enough, but I’m sorry to say that often enough he won’t. You’re going to need to get creative.’
Walt takes a mouthful of pawpaw, and we hear what sounds like sand being ground between teeth.
‘Bugger.’ Fiona spots a stray sugar bowl and moves it out of his reach. ‘Anyway – pills. Put them next to his coffee at the beginning of breakfast on this sweet little hippo dish, and don’t make a big deal about it. It helps if you can take your own in front of him – that way he thinks we’re all in this together.’ It doesn’t matter that I don’t have any pills of my own to take: there are a whole stack of multivitamins in the pantry I can use as props. ‘They won’t do you any harm,’ Fiona assures me. ‘“Doctor’s orders!” is a good catchphrase for this one, I’ve found. But look, if he flat-out refuses, don’t push it and get him all wound up. He’s a stubborn old coot. Just put them aside and try again later, when he’s forgotten about it.’
Breakfast is followed by time sitting on the patio, while Fiona explains that Walt’s teeth should be brushed both before and after breakfast. ‘I don’t want them going rotten. It helps if you go in and brush yours with him. Keep a second toothbrush in his bathroom, if that’s easier. Once that’s done you can sit out here in the morning sun. No! Not on that chair – that’s Dad’s. I’ve put an extra pillow under the base so that he doesn’t have to bend his knees so far to get in and out of it, see? Let’s pull it out a bit so that the sun’s on his back. Yes, that’s how he likes it. Just there.’
Three newspapers are laid out neatly on the table. Walt scowls at the front pages, deciding which one to pick up first. The Kenyan papers – the Daily Nation and the Standard – are both all about the country’s recent constitutional referendum. They have photographs of local politicians and advertisements for money transfer companies. The Telegraph – flown in from the UK so that Walt can read about the future a day late – has a picture of Naomi Campbell testifying at former Liberian President Charles Taylor’s war crimes trial at The Hague. The story tells of how after a fancy dinner she’d attended with him years earlier, two men had come to her hotel room in the middle of the night and presented her with ‘a pouch’, simply described as ‘a gift for you’. It was only the next morning, she says, that she opened the pouch to find a few ‘dirty-looking stones’, and assumed they’d been sent by the warlord.
There’s no news from Britain about Kenya’s recent election. Just Africa’s blood diamonds and bloody dictators.
‘Oh, he does loooove sitting here in the morning, with all the birds,’ Fiona whispers, tearing up while she gazes at her father.
Esther appears, carrying the pawpaw and mango skins left from breakfast.
‘Morning, Esther,’ says Fiona, jumping up to help her spread the fruit along the edge of the patio wall and scatter some birdseed around. ‘Habari?’
‘Mzuri sana, Madam. Good morning, bwana,’ Esther replies.
‘Morning,’ says Walt, not looking up from his newspaper.
And then the birds arrive.
They stream in along gold-flecked sunbeams, no less. Noisy yellow weavers, with red eyes and dark heads and wings splashed with black lacquer. Goofy grey mousebirds with fluffy spiked crests and pale cheeks, tripping mid-air over the long tail feathers that drag behind them. Sparrows and pied wagtails and even the occasional little bee-eater; he looks like a feathered superhero, with his golden chest and a wedge of bright yellow tucked under his throat, a green cloak on his back and stripes of aquamarine over the black bandana that covers his eyes. Then the tiny little firefinches, my favourites, always the shyest and last to arrive; they’re bright red and put together with dainty curves and cusps, like a collection of Scandinavian ornaments. We all sit there, quietly watching, as the birds chirp and chirrup, tweet and trill, and are briefly spooked when a family of squirrels scamper in along the railing.
Walt scolds the weavers as they bully the finches off the seed. ‘Cut it out, you nasty buggers!’ he says, shooing them with his hanky. He watches the mousebirds balance on the edge of the fruit skins to tear the last bits of flesh from them, and chortles when one flips a skin over entirely, briefly trapping itself underneath in a flapping panic. ‘Oh, you bloody fool!’ he laughs, delighted by such idiocy. (I’ll soon learn that on a good day, Walt can sit for an hour and a half watching the birds. It’s the happiest he ever seems. Bird Time is the highlight of Walt’s days. But Bird Time never lasts.)
All those cups of decaf coffee in Walt’s gut eventually filter through to his bladder, and he stirs in his chair. He folds his newspaper over, stands up and startles at the sight of me, before tapping the side of his nose and saying with feigned familiarity, ‘Now, my dear, if you’ll excuse me a moment, I think I might just go around the corner.’ He shuffles into the house.
Fiona takes the opportunity to warn me about Marguerite, The Wife. ‘I want us to get everything running smoothly before she arrives next week. All of this will become more complicated once she’s here.’
‘How so?’ I ask.
‘She’ll interfere and nag and do everything she can to stir him up,’ Fiona says. ‘She’s awful. Dad hates her. Always has.’
‘Oh … so … why did he marry her in the first place?’ I ask. ‘And why hasn’t he divorced her?’ Forty years is a long time to stay with someone you can’t stand.
‘She bullied him into it. It’s what she does. He’s tried to leave her, several times. She’s got him completely under her thumb. You’ll see.’ Fiona checks the monitor: Walt is still at the toilet. ‘I just – I want Dad to live the rest of his days in comfort. And with the right care, I think he’s got a great many more days left. Marguerite doesn’t look after him properly – he’s a drain on her lifestyle. We just need to stay on top of his medications and diet and he’ll be well enough to enjoy life, here in Kenya. This is his home. But she hates it here – much prefers to be socialising back in England.’
‘So why is she coming back then?’
‘Oh, she can’t have it look like she doesn’t love her husband. And she doesn’t want to risk her right to his money. Honestly, if he dropped dead tomorrow I think she’d be delighted. That’s why she’s trying to push him along.’
‘Push him along?’ I ask, wondering how literally she means it, but we’re interrupted before I can find out.
Walt returns from his trip around the corner with his wallet and a frown. It’s a dummy wallet, full of old library cards and a few hundred Kenyan shillings cash, for when he needs to see that he has means. But it isn’t always enough to placate him. He pulls the notes out, rubs them between his fingers.
‘What’s the matter, Dad? Has that horrid wife of yours been raiding the coffers again?’
‘What?’ Walt looks up, startled, as though surprised to hear another voice.
‘Has Marguerite been shopping again?’
‘Marguerite?’
‘Yes, Dad. Marguerite. Your wife. You know.’ Fiona leans over to whisper in her father’s ear. ‘The Serpent.’
Fiona loops her arm through his and helps him back into his chair. He rubs his hands over his face and looks up to the sky as though searching for divine assistance,
the same way he did after he first woke up this morning.
‘Oh, her,’ he says. ‘Yes. Well. It would appear so.’ He pats the wallet into his pocket.
But I’m not sure if Walt knows who ‘The Serpent’ is at all.
Fiona shows me how to steer Walt on walks around the garden, ‘never too far away – you need to be able to catch him if he loses his balance’, how to help him in and out of chairs, and tells me to make sure I watch him on the baby monitor every time he goes to the toilet for a shit. ‘It’s one of the most common places for people in his condition to have a heart attack,’ Fiona explains. ‘That’s why we don’t want him getting constipated. You’ve got to make sure he’s getting enough fibre. Watch him carefully when he goes to the loo. If it looks like he’s straining, you might need to introduce some Metamucil to his diet.’
Apart from his regular medical appointments (cardiologist, dentist, podiatrist) there aren’t too many places we can take Walt for outings: the country club, the golf club, or the homes of a few pre-approved friends. (Anyone with too many stairs or small dogs is out. ‘Tripping hazards,’ Fiona tells me. ‘Just not worth the risk.’) But whatever we do with him, he is to be home and showered by six each evening. We’re to help him out of his clothes and turn the taps on for him so that he doesn’t burn himself, to pass him the soap and a washcloth. Every three days, at least, we’re supposed to wash his hair.
‘He absolutely hates washing his hair, but if you tell him he looks like “a greasy dago” you can usually convince him to do it,’ Fiona says one evening, showing me how she squeezes shampoo onto the top of Walt’s head as he bends down to scrub his knees.
‘Sorry, what’s a “dago”?’ I ask.
‘A wog!’ Walt replies, squeezing his eyes shut to avoid the suds.
‘Yes, Dad, an Italian gentleman.’
‘A dago. Or Di-ego if you’re being polite.’ Walt is delighted to be able to fill me in on the etymology of his favourite slur. And I have to admit, Fiona’s tactic has worked: it distracted him long enough for her to work up a lather in his hair.
‘You must be ready and waiting with a towel – we don’t want him walking across the wet tiles to find one himself. And have another spread over a plastic chair for him to sit on as we help him dry off. Check him over for any bumps and bruises, and to see that his moles haven’t got nasty. There’s a big one on his back here, and a few down his arms. Clip his nails if they need doing. Not too short – squared and filed at the edges please, as we don’t want him getting an ingrown toenail.’ Walt’s skin is old and delicate, dry and prone to eczema. He needs two types of cream rubbed into his legs and arms each evening: three big pumps of sorbolene and one of an emollient for each limb, and the leftovers dabbed onto the scaly patches around his hairline. For any sores or spots, there’s a small tube of medicated ointment.
Walt is to be helped into his pyjamas left arm first. He’s less flexible on that side since getting the pacemaker.
Then we’re to help him into his bed socks, slippers and silk robe, and take him through to the living room, where Esther will have the fire roaring and the day’s newspapers laid out (again) and a small bowl of Indian crackers on the table beside his armchair. He has a ‘G&T’ which is actually just a tall glass of tonic and fresh-squeezed limes, with a little gin wiped around the rim to give him a whiff of booze with each sip. ‘Only three ice cubes, please. Three. Any more and he’ll scoop them out of the glass and throw them into the fire.’
Then, for the half-hour or so until we’re called for supper, we can ‘listen to the wireless’. Fiona’s managed to find a modern stereo designed to look like a vintage radio. There are three choices of soundtrack: Walt’s two favourite CDs – Dreams of Ireland or Classic Operas – or the radio’s BBC Africa News Hour.
News hour is unfailingly dire. But let me tell you now: it doesn’t take long for stories about mass rape in the Congo and violence in Sudan to become more tolerable than hearing ‘Danny Boy’ for the fifteenth time.
4
ALICE
Here’s the thing I’ve come to realise about my friend Alice: she’s odd.
I mean, we all are, in our own special way. But Alice’s way of being odd is to not seem to notice how odd everyone else is. The woman is utterly unfazed by the sheer insanity of other people. Me? I walk around every day marvelling at how nuts everyone else on the planet is and wondering why they’re not all normal like me. But Alice? She knows that everyone is nuts – she just accepts it as part of the physical reality of the universe. Doesn’t even see fit to pass comment, unless probed. Then she’ll think about it for a moment, concede you might have a point, perhaps even add a few observations of her own in support of your theory, and just get on with her day. She did spend several months training with Thai monks at a Muay Thai school once; maybe that’s where she learned how to be so zen.
Look, it’s an admirable quality. But frankly, here and now, I feel like she’s gaslighting me.
One night, in our room after dinner, I find Millicent has left a missionary magazine on the end of my bed, open at a page about discovering Jesus ‘where you least expect him’.
I say to Alice, ‘Ah … so … what is the deal with these people?’
And Alice, shadow boxing in the corner of the room, abs rippling like the back of an egg carton, just says, ‘What do you mean?’
‘Are you serious?’ I say. She’s serious.
I check the door is shut. There’s no lock, so I prop up a chair against it. Fiona’s in the next room putting Walt to bed, and it’s already clear she’s not much of a knocker.
‘Let me get this straight,’ I say. ‘We’re here not just to “look after” a nutty old man who was kidnapped from England by his daughter, but to protect him from his own wife, and to spy on said wife and report back to the daughter on her every move, and the wife doesn’t actually know we’ve been hired, are living in her house, and that she’s going to have to pay us.’
‘Well, she knows about me,’ Alice says, starting a round of sit-ups. ‘But yeah … you’re going to be a surprise.’
‘What if she kicks us out?’
‘She won’t!’
‘Fiona reckons she’s trying to do away with Walt. What if she tries to “do away” with us?’
‘Oh, she is not. Fiona’s just exaggerating,’ says Alice.
‘And yet she hired me without even interviewing me. I could be anyone!’
‘I told you! She trusts my judgement!’
‘You can see what I’m saying though, right? This is bananas. These people are bananas.’
‘Yeah,’ Alice says, stopping mid-crunch to think about it. ‘But you know, they’re really rich.’ She shrugs. ‘Money makes people weird.’
‘So you admit it! They’re weird!’
‘Yeah, but it’s not weird that they’re weird.’
‘Fuck me. You’ve got a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. What did they do to you in England?’
Alice is getting exasperated with me. ‘You don’t understand. The doctors had said he had to come here. He wasn’t in good shape – he wouldn’t have survived the winter. Marguerite wasn’t looking after him properly. He was so frail. Like, he was in a wheelchair and on an oxygen tank and everything. You don’t realise how much better he is now than he was even a month ago. Trust me. All this would make more sense if you could have seen how he was back in England.’
Later that night, just after we’ve turned the lights off, I remember the cherry on top.
‘Oh, and let us not forget about the evangelist across the hallway,’ I say to Alice in the dark. ‘Let it be known that I have called it early: this place is totally fucked up.’
I’ve got the morning shift. It’s my first time with Walt on my own. Well, sort of on my own. No doubt Fiona is hovering over a monitor in another room.
I’m surprised – and relieved – at how readily Walt accepts my presence. Even though he has no idea who I am, he seems to feed off my confidence, as though if
I act like I know him well and am meant to be there, he’ll figure that he knows me. We get almost all the way through the pre-breakfast routine without incident – then there’s a hiccup.
Walt has two pairs of shoes on the ground beside the chair in the corner. We’re supposed to alternate them every few days, so they don’t rub in the same spots and give him blisters.
We’re also to make sure his orthotics are in them, and to remember the separator for his bunions – a squishy piece of pink plastic, like a piece of chewed bubblegum, that we mould to fit between his toes.
But I can’t remember which shoes he wore yesterday.
I hesitate.
I decide the pair of shoes the bubblegum is currently in must be the pair he wore yesterday, so I pull the other ones forward.
I’m wrong. Before I can get Walt’s toes in, Fiona comes tearing in to correct me.
‘And you must tie his laces for him,’ she says, ‘so he doesn’t have to bend down too far. Double knots! He’ll try to stop you doing it for him but you’ve just got to cheerfully insist.’
‘What are you women doing down there?’ Walt asks, reaching to take over. ‘I can manage that.’
‘No, Dad! Just sit back, we’re nearly done. Don’t you know what a lucky old man you are? You’ve got a young blonde kneeling at your feet!’
Gross.
‘A bit of flirting always helps,’ she whispers to me. I can see that it does. But I don’t much like it.
The rest of my shift runs smoothly. We have breakfast, he takes his pills, we do Bird Time, we walk around the garden. At lunch I remember all the benevolent trickery I was taught the day before: Walt isn’t allowed too much salt, so the ‘table salt’ is actually caster sugar, which he sprinkles liberally on his meals in a frustrated quest for flavour. We can’t substitute it with the stevia blend, because the granules are too fine and he’d notice the difference. (‘All the more reason to cut down on the sugar elsewhere,’ Fiona says.) He isn’t allowed alcohol, so the ‘red wine’ we have with lunch and dinner is actually Ribena, decanted into an old merlot bottle and carefully recorked. The sundowner ‘shandy’ we’re to make him each afternoon involves a special non-alcoholic beer you can only buy at a few stores in town. We have to be careful not to let him see the cans with the big ‘0.0%’ logo on the label. ‘If he asks, it’s Tusker. There are some empty bottles in the bottom of the pantry you can show him as proof if he ever gets suss.’ I have to give Fiona credit. She’s thought of everything.
I Built No Schools in Kenya Page 4