‘Okay …’ Jade smiles nervously and follows me through to the living room.
At first, I worry this is going to backfire – that she won’t be able to do a good enough job to fool Walt. But she rises to the occasion and puts in a turn as the best hammy soap-opera doctor that a woman-pretending-to-have-broken-her-leg-to-stop-a-crazy-old-man-from-assaulting-her-friend could hope for.
Bravo, Jade, I think. I shouldn’t have underestimated you.
I send Fiona an email that night to let her know about the day’s events. I don’t think she needs to be updated on Walt’s every breath, burp and fart – but I do think she should know when he turns landscaping implements into weapons of mass destruction. Her response is to have me instruct all carers and staff, and Marguerite, to ensure that all ‘potential weapons’ be locked away or removed from his reach. The trouble is, Fiona can have us lock away the golf clubs and the fire poker and the kitchen knives, but any loose object heavy or pointy enough to do damage is a potential weapon to Walt’s enraged eyes. We can’t lock down the whole world.
I manage to juggle some shifts with Ruby and Jade so that I have time to go out the following Saturday. Claire’s invited me around for a barbecue and to stay the night – her girls think a sleepover with their Aussie cousin will be ‘super’.
I arrive to the happy squeals and indignant cries of children playing in the yard. The girls race over and drag me onto the trampoline to show me their new tricks. I try and fail to repeat their tumbling, then I chase them around the house, and throw a tennis ball for the dogs.
I head over to the patio where the adults are huddled together, hushed tones, brave faces – something’s up. I remember Claire’s friends – Prisha and Sandeep – from a night we were introduced at the bar. There, they were the kind of boisterous good company I missed so much from home. Today they’re just as welcoming, but clearly weighed down with worry.
‘Jambo, jambo!’ Claire gives me a warm hug. ‘Here, what can we get you – a beer? A wine? Come through, I’ll grab you a glass.’ In the kitchen she fills me in. ‘So,’ she says, pouring us both a glass of white, ‘we’ve had a bit of drama. I’m trying not to let the kids figure it out.’
‘Okay …’
‘Henry – Robert’s dad – was shot yesterday.’
‘What!?’
‘He’s fine, he’s fine. He was hit in the leg, but he’ll be fine.’
‘What happened?’
‘He was ambushed. Hijackers. In the middle of the road in broad daylight. Driving right past the Korean Embassy – can you believe it? He was on his way to the bank, with the cash from the bar. Two in the afternoon. So he’s driving along and this car overtakes him, and there’s another one behind him, then the one in front pulls up across the road and they block him in. And then these guys all get out – five or six Somalis, we think – and they’ve all got AKs and they start firing at his car. One of the bullets went through the bonnet, hit the chassis then ricocheted back up through his seat and hit him in the back of the leg. He was bloody lucky – or bloody unlucky, depending on how you look at it.’
‘So what? Just to rob him?’
‘Jah! They grabbed the money and took off.’
‘Is he okay? I mean, apart from the bullet?’
‘He’s shaken up. But he’ll be fine. I was with him just now at the hospital – they’ve bandaged him up, and he’s going home this afternoon. He won’t be able to walk for a little while but he’ll be fine. But shit, you know – we’re just … it seems like an inside job. It had to be. It’s just devastating – it means one of our staff has betrayed us. These guys – they had to know what he had and where he was going. You know, we’re even careful to change the route each week. So they knew his car. They were following him.’
‘Oh no.’
‘That’s really the worst part. To think we can’t trust the people who work for us. It’s bloody awful.’
But Claire has some good news for me too. An old school friend of Robert’s is heading ‘up country’ the following weekend to visit a friend, just past Kitale. Claire had remembered that I’d been wanting to visit the deformed animal sanctuary in Kitale and asked him whether he could take me with him – he’d never heard of the place and was immediately as intrigued as I was.
‘Marcus prides himself on knowing the country inside out,’ Claire explains. ‘So he’s happy to take you somewhere he’s never been before. He’s kind of what we call a “KC” here. Have you heard of a “KC” before?’
‘That’s a “Kenya Cowboy”, right?’ I haven’t met any in the flesh yet, but I know what to expect. Sarah and Jack have filled me in, pointed out a few of the Crocodile Dundee types when we’ve been out and about in Nairobi. A ‘KC’ is a white man who considers himself native to Africa, with bloodlines in the continent running several generations deep. He’ll speak Swahili fluently, probably other tribal languages too. He prefers to spend his time in the bush, as far from the bustle of the city as possible and wears tatty khakis and a dusty tan no matter the place or occasion. He smokes. Drinks. Is a sometimes boorish type who hasn’t yet figured out that you can’t just do whatever you like because you’re a white guy with money anymore – although, more often than not, he gets away with bad behaviour. KCs generally don’t have ‘a job’, instead making ends meet through a series of on-the-ground logistics contracts – helping set up safari camps and managing ranches, that sort of thing.
Marcus, Claire tells me, being the son of a French hunter and – more importantly – the owner of an apparently indestructible Land Rover – is the ultimate KC.
‘Come, he’s outside – I’ll introduce you.’
Marcus is standing at the edge of the patio, smoking. He has the matter-of-fact manner of a man from another time. I tell him I want to see the two-headed cow.
‘So do I. I’ll take you there,’ he says. ‘We can stay with my friend in Mount Elgon. He’s got a flower farm. A greenhouse of a million roses. Would you like to see that too?’
Of course I want to see a greenhouse of a million roses in the middle of Kenya – but the trip will take four days. I’ll have to beg Jade and Ruby to jointly cover me while I’m gone, which means doing a run of back-to-back shifts with Walt through the week to buy the time. It’ll be worth it, though, I’m sure.
It had better be worth it. I spend night after night up with Walt, the bed alarm alerting me to his nocturnal wanderings. He’s either terrified because he doesn’t know where he is, or furious because he thinks he does and that people are out to get him. He thinks Marguerite is his mother most times, which only fuels the confusion, so she takes to sleeping in the study while I sit on the bed with him for hours calming him down.
The days aren’t much better. There are moments of calm, but many more of agitation and anxiety. Car engines, chequebooks, empty jerry cans, dogs barking. The list of triggers in Walt’s carers’ notebook grows longer and less avoidable. Marguerite takes her frustrations out on us and finds reasons to leave the house as much as possible, which leaves us with one less tool in our arsenal to manage Walt’s difficult turns.
By the time Marcus picks me up early on the Friday morning, I’m ready for any kind of escape.
I climb into a Land Rover that’s clocked more than half a million kilometres, much of it on the corrugated stretch to Lake Turkana in the Ethiopian end of northern Kenya. This has left it with a chronic, all-over rattle and more than a few battle scars. The doors don’t close properly. The brakes have to be pumped twice to take effect. Loose screws and grimy cigarette tins dance across the dashboard as we climb down the escarpment road out of Nairobi, and the Great Rift Valley opens up to our left in that breathtaking roar. We don’t talk much, at first.
For miles ahead on the road, a snaking line of banked-up trucks hugs the cliff face, puffing black smoke and groaning with effort as impatient cars pinball through impossible gaps in the oncoming traffic to get past them. At every bend is a cluster of souvenir stalls and lookouts flagged by
faded red Coca-Cola signs, rickety old slab-and-tin shacks teetering on the lip of a sheer drop, looking like they might be swallowed whole by the valley at any moment.
‘You know, apart from the traffic, this road hasn’t changed much in the last seventy years,’ Marcus says. I find that very easy to believe. ‘They made Italian prisoners build it during the Second World War. There’s a tiny chapel up ahead on one of the corners. It looks like something out of the Amalfi Coast, in miniature.’
I watch him change gears with an arm streaked with jagged scars.
‘Are you looking at my arm?’
‘Yes. Sorry,’ I say, embarrassed to have been caught, though it doesn’t seem to have bothered him at all.
‘I fell through a glass door when I was twenty-five. Severed a bunch of tendons and nerves, all the way from my shoulder to my wrist. Lucky to live, really. I lost a lot of blood. Anyway. It works well enough.’ He flexes his hand and grins. I take it he’s not easily offended. ‘So what’s old Walter Smyth like?’ he asks. ‘He must be an interesting guy.’
‘Oh, you know,’ I say. ‘Colonial.’
Marcus laughs. ‘Ah, well – you can’t hold that against him. We’re all a product of our time. You realise his early years in Kenya, most people were still wearing animal skins. And now look! They’re selling sheepskin hats to tourists and using the money to buy Levi’s jeans. That’s an extraordinary change for a person to witness in a lifetime. It’s an even more extraordinary change for the Africans! I’m not sure it’s been for the best, either. Who says our way of doing things is better?’
A matatu screams past on the right, fishtailing as it pulls back into the lane in front of us at such late notice that by the time the oncoming truck blasts its horn it’s accusing innocent drivers behind us. I brace myself against the dash for the impact – but none comes. We slow up with mere inches to spare before we plough into the back of the van. Marcus doesn’t seem anywhere near as alarmed as I think he should be. Nor do the matatu passengers – not even the woman holding a sleeping baby against the back window seems to realise how firmly she just brushed shoulders with Death.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I gasp. Marcus holds the steering wheel with his elbows as he lights another cigarette.
‘How old did you say Walt is? Eighty-something? Hell, he must have seen some things. You should ask him to tell you some stories.’
I really don’t want to talk about Walt.
‘Why don’t you tell me about what you do up in Lake Turkana?’ I say.
‘The World Bank is funding a wind farm up there. Slowly. Very slowly. Anyway. I’m doing logistics for them.’
‘What does that actually mean though?’
‘It means I help make things happen. That part of the country is virtually lawless. The tribes up there – the Turkanas and the Pokots – are constantly at war. They’re always raiding each other’s cattle. It’s a huge problem. But you know – that’s their world. They’re desert nomads. They’ve always carried on like that. To them it’s not theft – it’s tradition. Problem is, they’ve got guns now. So it’s all a lot bloodier than it needs to be. When you go up there, the locals walk around with AK47s slung over their shoulders and just about nothing else on. So when the World Bank or whoever it is wants to send some equipment through their territory – turbine blades, say – I go in to help negotiate the passage with the locals. You need to know the right people to get things done. It’s diplomacy, really.’
‘And you enjoy it?’
‘I love it. Well, I love the work. I’m not so sure about some of the people I work for. The wind farm thing is fine. And I like collecting soil samples from remote areas for researchers. But there are all sorts of prospecting companies out there, who I must help from time to time. They’re all very quiet about it, but they’ve been looking for oil, and I’m fairly sure they’ve found it. Just a matter of piping it out now. And I’m not sure they – or the government – have the best of intentions when it comes to the locals. There’ll be land grabs soon. Things will get nasty. They always do.’
Marcus’s prophecy will take five years to come true. By 2016, the value of virtually barren land in northern Kenya skyrockets when it becomes known a billion barrels of oil is sitting beneath it. Gangs of young men armed with machetes and guns tear through Turkana in convoys of trucks. They are land cartels, headed by elite Turkanas who take advantage of poorly kept paperwork, out-of-date land registries and corruptible administrators to snatch parcels of community-held grazing land, then subdivide it and sell it off for themselves.
We drive through Naivasha, Gilgil, Lake Nakuru. I remember the lake from the safari I took at the end of my first stint with the Smyths. It’s a soda lake – alkaline – home to millions of flamingos. At Molo, we follow the highway as it swings north, heading for Kitale.
The drive is exhausting. Parts of the road are so bad that rather than avoiding the potholes, we simply aim for the smallest ones. I have to hold on to the door handle with one hand and brace against the roof with the other, to stop myself from being thrown around the cab. There’s no air conditioning so we have the windows down, hot dust collecting in the corners of my eyes and mouth, filling my nose and ears. I could not be happier.
We pull up, finally, in Kitale. The town’s population is supposedly 100,000, though it looks to me only a fraction the size. On the main street, Marcus asks several passers-by for directions to the Kitale Nature Conservancy, but nobody has heard of the place.
‘Ng’ombe na vichwa viwili?’ he says to a group of men outside a mechanic’s garage. They keel over with laughter.
‘A cow with two heads?’ one repeats in English. ‘Ach, no! No, no, no, no. We have nothing like that here in Kitale.’
I start to wonder whether the whole thing is just a myth – whether the girl who told me about it had been misled – but Marcus isn’t disheartened.
‘It’ll be here. Don’t worry. We’ll find it,’ he says. And eventually we do. On the A1 road heading north out of town, where on a fifteen-foot-high red wall painted with a mural of animals is a sign in big white lettering which reads:
KNC
KITALE NATURE CONSERVANCY
FOR: – ECO-TOURISM – BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION – EDUCATIONAL TOURS – RECREATION AND MEETINGS.
Behind an imposing set of iron gates is a 250-acre complex, fronted by a sprawling, lumpy pile of brightly painted, hand-moulded concrete with thick thatched roofs. It’s like something out of The Flintstones.
The place looks deserted. A three-legged dog sits tied to a multi-pronged signpost directing visitors to ‘BUTTERFLY VIEWING’ and ‘PICNICS’. Just as we’re about to head for the ‘DEFORMED ANIMALS’ a guide appears, shakes our hands, and beckons us to follow him the other way.
‘This way, this way please!’ he orders, leading us through to the botanical gardens.
‘My name is Denis,’ he says formally, as we stand among a smattering of native shrubs and trees, small wooden tags inscribed with their Latin names wired to their branches. ‘I am here at your service, to guide you through the wonders of our park. Please, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask.’
Marcus and I follow Denis around the plantation, coming to a stop at each and every specimen for him to run through his didactic spiels by rote, eyes closed. Latin name / common name / geographical region / traditional medicinal use. It becomes apparent that just about anything that grows out of the ground has been considered a cure for stomach ache or a potent aphrodisiac, by some tribe, at some point in time.
‘The man can go for six hours with this one,’ Denis says, holding out the leaves from one thorny bush. ‘Twelve hours,’ at another. Then, the gold standard: ‘This one – twenty-four hours! Mmhmm. Yes. Like Viagra. A whole day! His wife will get very tired. So maybe this is why he has to have many wives.’ Denis laughs, but I don’t think he actually meant it as a joke.
One of the trees has papery bark that men grind up to brew a tea that makes their penises grow long
er. ‘The women sometime make it in secret,’ Denis says. ‘If their husbands cannot satisfy them.’ He doesn’t seem to find any of this embarrassing or amusing. Kenyans in general, I’ve found, are not at all shy when it comes to discussing sexual matters.
Then he leads us to the Biblical Mountains exhibit – a dirt trail flanked by a series of colourful cement dioramas, depicting each and every Bible story that takes place on a mountain. We walk past piles of rocks topped with gruesome tableaus that look as though they were created by a pre-schooler having a bad acid trip in a church.
Here’s Noah’s Ark, beached beneath a rainbow, and Aaron worshipping the golden calf. Here’s Moses on Mount Horeb with the burning bush, and again on Mount Sinai reading the Ten Commandments from stone tablets. Abraham, on Mount Moriah, holds a knife to the neck of a child. The hand-painted caption on a piece of slate propped up in front of the awful scene reads ‘Abraham about to sacrifice his son Isaac, Gen 22:1-15’. A terrifying giant King Og, barrel-chested and smeared in blood, holds a dagger behind a white shield with a red skull and crossbones.
‘Why mountains?’ I ask Denis.
‘Mountains are very important in the Bible,’ he says, as though it’s obvious. It turns out the man who runs the park, Mr Ndura – a former teacher – is deeply religious. He has built the whole place with his own hands and money, and this holy gauntlet is his personal tribute to God. It’s an admirable effort, but it must be said: these figures are the stuff of nightmares, with their crude, out-of-proportion heads and tiny hands, lumpy eyes and jagged-toothed mouths screaming at the sky. I’m glad to leave the monstrous visions behind us and move on to the monstrous animals I’ve come to see.
At first, nothing seems out of the ordinary. There’s a perfectly normal horse, a couple of Ankole cows with their magnificent horns reaching skyward, a shaggy ostrich in a pen. Then a dwarfed billy-goat hobbles over, his whiskers almost reaching the ground on account of his short, stocky bowed legs. Denis gives him a handful of pellets, and points out a nearby bull. A mass the size and shape of a large pumpkin hangs down behind his tick-riddled pizzle.
I Built No Schools in Kenya Page 25