I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  Whether or not our testimonies make the trustees more inclined to release the funds for our wages remains to be seen. I find myself – not for the first time – marvelling at my own idiocy. How did I get here? What am I doing? Who takes a job on the other side of the world without clarifying the details of pay?

  We’re all – Alice, Fiona and I – sitting in the living room reading one night after dinner. I’m on duty, next to Walt on the settee. The fire crackles, the opera CD plays softly, the dogs lie lazy at his feet. He kicks off his slippers and rubs his toes across Jua’s belly. She lets out an easy sigh.

  Then Walt’s breathing changes. He lowers his newspaper to his lap, tilts his head back and shuts his eyes, pinching his eyebrows together ever so slightly.

  ‘Walt, are you alright?’ I ask gently, not wanting to startle him.

  He opens his eyes and looks at me. ‘Oh yes, quite alright,’ he says, giving me a reassuring tap on my knee before closing his eyes again. But I can tell he’s not.

  I notice a light knocking sensation on the back of the couch, as though the taut upholstery is being struck with a tiny drumstick. Walt reaches one hand up to his shoulder.

  It’s his heart, I realise. The pacemaker. Pounding through his back.

  ‘Hey, Fiona,’ I whisper. She looks up from her book. ‘I think Walt’s heart might be playing up.’

  She jumps out of her chair, shoos the dogs out of the room and kneels in front of him. ‘Dad – Dad, are you feeling alright?’ She takes his wrist to feel for his pulse.

  He smiles, laughs. ‘Yes, yes, I’m perfectly fine. Just the old heart getting a bit wound up.’

  The bugger is stoic, I’ll grant him that.

  ‘It might be his blood pressure,’ says Fiona. ‘It can drop after a meal, which will trigger the pacemaker to kick in.’ She stands to pull him to his feet. ‘Come on, Dad, up you get – let’s have you walk around a bit, get that blood flowing.’ She locks her elbows through his and heaves him up. ‘Harambee!’

  She walks him in slow circles around the room, talking to me and Alice all the while. ‘You must be very careful when this happens – make sure you’re supporting him. Ideally there’d be two of you, one on each side. We don’t want him fainting. But moving around will help with circulation and should get that pacemaker to calm down.’

  After a few minutes, it’s settled and he’s sitting back in his armchair, fussing over a dog with its muzzle between his knees.

  ‘We’ll ask Dr Andrews about it at Dad’s check-up tomorrow,’ says Fiona. ‘You two should both be there, actually.’

  It’s another morning off I won’t have – but I don’t mind going. I now appreciate, in a way I didn’t before, that Walt could die while I’m on duty with him. It would be good to know whether the doctor has any tips on how to avoid that.

  Peter drives us to the Aga Khan Hospital after breakfast. It’s one of the best private hospitals in East Africa; of course, only a lucky few can afford to be treated there. We’ve been here a few times before – but more just for routine check-ups and prescription renewals than anything this serious.

  A row of leather chairs is lined up in the hallway outside Dr Andrews’ office. We wait about fifteen minutes to be seen, while amputees and cancer patients and pregnant women are wheeled past. Walt thinks we’re in an airport departure lounge. ‘Have they called our flight yet?’

  ‘No, Dad, we’re here to see the doctor about your heart.’

  ‘Oh. We haven’t missed our flight, though, have we?’

  An ancient African man with a wizened face shuffles past, skin shrivelled like a walnut, eyes somehow still sharp behind milky cataracts. He’s impeccably dressed – spit-shined shoes, a three-piece suit – and two younger women accompany him. His daughters, perhaps?

  The African man stops in front of Walt. He smiles, bending down to shake Walt’s hand. Walt smiles back, grips him warmly.

  ‘Jambo, bwana,’ says the African man.

  ‘Jambo, mzee,’ says Walt.

  Alice and I look at Fiona, who shrugs, as mystified as we are. The two women smile at us kindly, give a nod of solidarity, then usher their charge along. I’m sure neither old man actually knows who the other one is – perhaps they were just reminded of a friend from a previous life. Or perhaps it was just a moment of acknowledgment – that no matter the colour of our skin, age betrays us all in the end.

  A receptionist steps into the hallway. ‘Walter Smyth?’ she calls.

  ‘Oh blast, I’ve lost my bloody passport!’ Walt says, patting down his pockets as we all troop through.

  ‘No, Dad, don’t worry, we’re here to see the doctor.’

  Dr Andrews leans back behind his big mahogany desk, makes a show of taking us all in. He’s been the family doctor here for decades. He knows all about the ‘differences of opinion’ between Fiona and Marguerite when it comes to Walt’s care.

  ‘Well!’ says the doctor. ‘Quite a crowd you’ve brought with you today, hey, Walt?’

  With a perplexed smile, Walt turns to look at us all seated next to him. ‘Yes, well. To be totally honest – I’ve no idea who they all are!’

  Something about the raw truth of this makes us all laugh, Walt included.

  ‘Alright then, let’s get you up here and have a look at what’s going on.’

  The doctor has Walt take off his shirt and sit on the examination bed, where he anchors half a dozen multicoloured leads to his chest with little rings of sticky plastic. The wires lead into a monitor and produce a rainbow of squiggly lines across a screen.

  Then Dr Andrews helps Walt onto a treadmill. Alice, Fiona and I help hold him steady as he walks, very slowly, across the moving belt. He grumbles a bit but is surprisingly compliant for someone who can’t understand why a group of strangers are asking him to undress and walk to nowhere.

  Dr Andrews studies the monitor, adjusts some dials, consults his paperwork. Says ‘mmhmm, mmhmm’ a lot.

  ‘Okay,’ he says finally, ‘thank you, Walt. You can put your shirt back on.’

  We help Walt off the treadmill and back over to the bed, as he wags a teasing finger at us. ‘But all these young women seem to prefer me with no clothes on!’ he says.

  I don’t know that he even recognises Fiona as his own daughter right now. She always seems to quietly relish it when he doesn’t remember Marguerite, and I wonder if it bothers her when she’s the stranger. She betrays so little emotion, it’s hard to tell.

  ‘Okay,’ says the doctor, ‘so I’ve made some adjustments to the pacemaker. We do want it to be somewhat responsive to changes in blood pressure, but perhaps not quite so responsive as it has been.’

  Fiona seems pleased that her diagnosis was right. ‘Should we also run some more bloods?’ she presses.

  ‘Well …’ Dr Andrews doesn’t seem to think this is necessary. ‘He had some done not too long ago,’ he says, flipping through Walt’s file.

  ‘I think it would be best to get a good overall view,’ Fiona insists. ‘Urine, too. If you wouldn’t mind?’

  ‘Sure,’ says Dr Andrews, pulling out his referral pad and scribbling some lab requests. Like us, he seems to realise it’s easier to say ‘yes’ to Fiona’s demands. ‘Here, take this in to the nurses next door. They should be able to see you right away.’

  They do. They prod and they poke him, they have him piss in a jar, and even though the results come back a few days later reporting all is as well as can be, Fiona still manages to find something to worry about: his iron – while within the acceptable range – is slightly lower than it was in his last test. This is a wicked problem. He can’t take iron supplements, because they might constipate him. He can’t eat more red meat, because of the fat that comes with it, and because he’ll want to put salt all over it, which will sometimes actually be sugar, and we don’t want him doing that because if he becomes diabetic he’ll have to have a needle every day and he won’t understand why and if he refuses we’ll run the risk of him going into a coma.

&n
bsp; Fiona tells Khamisi that from now on, we are to have spinach with every meal but breakfast.

  It’s a rare grey, drizzly day. Alice is out on the patio with James and David, helping them repair a loose railing. Fiona and I are in the study, watching a documentary about the great migration with Walt. She brought the DVD over from the UK in the hope of entertaining him on days like this. He’s gripped by it, even though he’s seen it a dozen times before – even though he’s seen the real thing many times before.

  ‘Oh, they are marvellous creatures, aren’t they?’ he gushes about the baby elephants rolling around in the mud. Then with a fatalistic sigh, ‘Well, nature is cruel,’ when a young impala is taken by a cheetah.

  The phone rings in the dining room and I go through to answer it. It’s Marguerite, in a real state.

  Apparently she’s emailed Alice to ask what’s going on, as Fiona hasn’t been replying to any of her messages, and Alice has replied asking her whether it’s true that she told the Trust not to pay us, because Fiona is threatening to fly us out to Zanzibar until it’s sorted, if that’s the case. (The Zanzibar strategy is news to me. And frankly, it’s quite appealing. I’d better make sure I get my passport back in case she does follow through.)

  Marguerite is defiant. ‘Absolutely not!’ she says. ‘In fact, I’ve been asking them to make sure you’re paid! And I’ve never told the lawyers I want you gone, never in my life! I tell you, I am totally fed up with the way Fiona treats me. Telling all these dreadful, dreadful untruths! If it wasn’t for dear old Walt, and you and Alice, I’d just run away. Do you know what else she’s done? You won’t believe it – she’s told the trustees that she thinks my doctor and I should be called in for police questioning! I’m starting to think I may as well just top myself. The sooner the better for everyone!’

  She hangs up, sobbing. It’s awful, but Fiona says it’s all just for show – that I shouldn’t be sucked in by her histrionics. I dunno … The suicide threat might have been exaggerated, but her distress sounded pretty authentic to me.

  At breakfast two days later, the phone rings again. This time Marguerite delivers the news of her impending death in a much more upbeat tone. ‘Oh, hellooooo!’ the voice sings. ‘Now, I’m calling to let you know that I’ve just accidentally drunk a cup of “mothball tea”.’

  I am so fucking over this bullshit. Accidental death by a warm cup of camphor? This is it – I’ve reached the point where nothing anyone in this family says or does can shock me anymore.

  ‘Right,’ I say. ‘I see. Just out of curiosity, how did the mothball end up in your tea?’

  Alice and Fiona look up at me, confused.

  ‘It was on the floor, you see!’ says Marguerite.

  ‘Mm-hmm. So, you picked a mothball up off the floor and put it into a cup of hot water?’

  I shrug back at them.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘well, you know, it looked awfully like a tea bag.’

  ‘Right. Yes. I can see how that could happen. And you didn’t notice that the tea tasted funny when you started drinking it?’

  ‘Well, do you know, it was the funniest thing – I was so jolly thirsty that I just gulped half of it down in two swigs and it was too late by the time I realised!’

  ‘Alrighty then,’ I say. ‘Well, let us know if you take a turn for the worse.’

  ‘Will do. I say, is Walt there?’

  ‘He is …’ I say, hesitating. Walt woke up in a dark mood and has spent the past hour telling us how he’s going to ‘shoot that bitch wife of mine in the head’ the moment he gets the chance – much to Fiona’s delight. I’m not sure that now is the best time for them to talk.

  ‘Would you put him on for me, please?’ Marguerite asks. ‘It’s been an age since we spoke.’

  What can I do? She’s his wife. I pretend not to see Fiona signalling for me not to, and I pass the phone to Walt, who for all his tough talk earlier is now sweet as pie.

  ‘Hel-loooooooo, darling,’ he says. ‘Where are you?’

  A tinny squawk garbles through the earpiece.

  Walt pulls the curtain aside and peers out the window. ‘Oh yes, all’s well here. Lovely blue sky.’

  More squawk.

  I sit back down at the table to continue my breakfast, but moments later Walt is holding the receiver up to me, his arm outstretched, looking exasperated. ‘Could you please explain to my dotty old wife that I’m in England?’

  ‘But you’re not, Walt. You’re in Kenya.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Keen-ya,’ I say again, this time with his pronunciation.

  I hear Marguerite’s faraway voice coming down the line, sounding like a mosquito stuck in a thimble. ‘Yoo-hoooooo! Is anyone there? Yoo-hoo?’ She starts whistling.

  ‘Look out the window, Walt,’ I say. ‘See, there’s the askari.’ Patrick is standing at the gate, fiddling with his slingshot. ‘We’re in Africa.’

  Walt puts the receiver back to his ear. ‘Oh – apparently, I’m in Keen-ya,’ he concedes.

  He’s nowhere and everywhere all at once.

  Fiona decides she wants to buy Walt some new slippers. And he can’t just have any old slippers – they must be podiatrist-approved slippers. Fiona thinks you can buy some at Nakumatt, so that afternoon we all pile into the Mazda: Walt in the front with Peter driving, and Alice, Fiona and me in the back seat, like we’re on a family road trip. We make the short drive down to Village Market, the upmarket shopping complex near the UN headquarters. We pass dozens of sinewy marathon runners on their training route, and the furniture sellers with their polished wood four-poster bed frames and plush recliner armchairs, and the nurseries full of potted plants and bunches of fresh-cut flowers. I’m fascinated by these open-air roadside businesses.

  ‘What do they do with everything at night?’ I ask Peter.

  ‘They have an askari,’ he says, glancing up at me in the rear-view mirror, careful not to divert his attention from the road for too long.

  ‘A lot of the stallholders in a particular area will pool their money to pay for a night watchman,’ Fiona explains. ‘But every now and then even they get held up.’

  ‘Yes, it is very-very bad,’ says Peter.

  ‘What’s bad?’ asks Walt.

  ‘The bandits,’ says Peter. ‘The bandits who rob the stalls.’

  ‘Oh no, how dreadful!’ says Walt, looking intently at Peter with a surprising amount of sympathy. He thinks Peter’s saying he’s been robbed. ‘Did they steal much?’

  Peter catches on quickly to the misunderstanding. ‘Oh no, bwana,’ he says. ‘No, no, they didn’t get anything. I am fine.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness for that,’ says Walt, sincerely relieved.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, Dad – look, here we are!’ says Fiona, trying to distract him from worrisome thoughts as we pull up at the boom gates. Security guards have us pop the bonnet and boot, and they run the mirror around the car before waving us through. Peter drops us at the entrance then finds a shady spot to wait in the car park.

  Village Market is where expats and wealthy locals come to enjoy sushi in the open-air food court, set against a waterfall feature and terraced gardens. It’s a mecca of Western-style comforts and wealth, full of rich Kenyan kids eating frozen yoghurt, teenage couples going to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, conspicuous US special forces soldiers playing mini-golf, and guests staying at the adjacent five-star hotel buying expensive souvenirs and having coffee and cheesecake at Artcaffe. Just outside the gates, Coca-Cola is sold in dusty dukas for thirty bob a bottle; inside, it’s ten times the price.

  Fiona says we’re not supposed to bring Walt to places like this – that they’re too busy, too unfamiliar – but today she says it’s fine because the three of us are there to look after him. I can’t help but notice that she’s more than happy to bend her hard and fast rules when it suits her. And apparently she’s forgetting that it is technically Alice’s afternoon off.

  Fiona and Alice walk ahead to scout for the f
ootwear department, leaving me to wander around with Walt until we know where to take him. I’m happy to be assigned that role. I enjoy coming to Village Market just for the people-watching aspect – and Nakumatt, the country’s largest department store chain, is a great place to watch Kenya’s small but growing middle class browse the shelves of modern promises.

  Walt is similarly fascinated by this wonderland of colourful stuff and noise. He grabs me conspiratorially, holding up a purple nylon wig. ‘This place is an absolute asylum!’ he whispers. ‘Are we at the circus?’

  A group of Kenyan teenage girls come around the corner, giggling hysterically. They’re each wearing a different coloured wig and are draped in rainbow strands of metallic baubles.

  ‘Look at these people!’ Walt says, gobsmacked. ‘They’re completely mad. Stark. Raving. Mad!’

  ‘Oi!’ Alice hollers from the other end of the store. ‘Down this way – we found them.’

  ‘Come on, Walt, let’s head down here,’ I say, taking him by the arm and reaching for the purple wig to return it to the rack. He pulls it back, makes as though he’s going to try it on, then breaks into a fit of mischievous giggles.

  I’m touched by his expression of pure, childlike delight. It reminds me of how my grandmother loved visiting the pet store in Mackay, because she thought she was at the zoo. We actually should bring him here more often, I think. He gets a real kick out of it. But Fiona would never agree. To her mind, it seems, almost no moment of joy is worth unwrapping him from his cotton-wool cocoon.

  The new slippers don’t do anything to stop a run of tricky days with Walt. He’s fixated on the idea that his mother has died, and that he needs to go to her funeral.

  One particularly long and difficult day, while Fiona is taking Walt’s passport (still hidden inside my suitcase) to ‘somewhere safe on the other side of town’, he is so determined to drive down to Dover to farewell his dear old mother that he becomes aggressive when Alice and I won’t give him the car keys.

  ‘I reckon we should just take him for a drive,’ Alice suggests, as he storms after her through the sunroom. ‘He’ll forget where he’s going as soon as we get halfway down the road. Let’s just take him for lunch at the Club.’