Nairobi Noir

by Peter Kimani

  Pash was the name of the girl from that family. Together, we made some fine music. I guess had I run for public office that year, the Jackie effect would have secured me enough votes to get into Parliament! Forgive me if I sound conceited, but I think I would have laid any girl I set my sights on at that time. I was on the top of my game, thanks to Jackie.

  I came to learn a good number of the girls believed it was a matter of time before I traveled to England to join Jackie, so they all wanted to remain in my good book to stand a chance of traveling with me, perhaps as a second, third, fourth, or fifth wife!

  But that did not happen. Instead, Jackie returned to Nairobi. She sent an e-mail announcing, rather formally, that she was back in town and wondered if we could reconnect. I panicked. By now I was living with this fine girl who I had put in the family way. I should clarify up front that I did not invite her to my house. I just found that some of her clothing had been smuggled into my hood, one garment at a time, until her entire wardrobe—which wasn’t much—had been transferred to my humble abode.

  Mwari, for that was her name, had gone about her business without any idea that she was expecting and only learned about it when she started experiencing morning sickness. She seemed to react particularly badly to the smell of onions, so we soon started having meals without them. Then she said she couldn’t stand dhania, so that too was off the menu—a sign of what marriage tastes like. I silently vowed I would kick her out if she claimed she couldn’t stand mchuzi mix.

  Then Jackie came back into my life, after a mere four months away. The Jackie of the past had always taken me to her place in Karen. But the new Jackie said she wanted to come to my hood in the ghetto. She wanted not just to learn Kiswahili, but my culture as well.

  I ruminated over the matter. Jackie coming to Kibra would obviously cause a riot among the girls, but I now had a girl in my nest. My life was already getting complicated. That night, I told Mwari: “The Englishwoman is back.”

  Mwari was quiet for a while and I thought she hadn’t heard me. Then she said in a clear, firm voice, “Tell her to come meet her cowife!”

  Problem solved! I wrote Jackie that night and said she was free to visit.

  By morning, Mwari had changed her mind. “Tell her I am your sister,” she said.

  “But brothers and sisters don’t do the things we do!” I laughed.

  “I am serious, Bobo,” she said. Mwari rarely called me by name. It was always babe, sweets, or other endearments. Occasionally, she would address me as Bob or Bobby. Never Bobo. “When she takes you to England, she will not suspect a thing if you say you are inviting your blood sister.”

  I burst out laughing.

  “This is no laughing matter, Bobo. I am coming to England with you.”

  “Who says I am going to England?”

  “Why is she back, if not for you?”

  * * *

  I was equally curious to find out what had brought Jackie back to Nairobi, and into my life. I was certainly happy to have another chance to give her the thing, show that she no longer freaked me out.

  Mwari’s acting was sterling. She made Jackie some pilau—this time she coped with onion without a whimper—and enacted a very convincing “sisterly” performance. When Jackie inquired who between us was older, Mwari blurted that we were twins, then laughed out loud when Jackie appeared to consider that possibility.

  “We were tight like twins,” Mwari said with a smile, flashing her two long fingers stuck together.

  * * *

  “You never mentioned you had a sister,” Jackie said, after we retreated to her old apartment in Karen.

  “You never asked me,” I replied defensively.

  “Fair enough,” she smiled, flashing her broken tooth.

  We were lying side by side, cuddling.

  That night, I gave it to her like nobody’s business.

  “Mr. Bobo Shanti,” she cried out, “you are thrashing me like the Nubian drums . . .”

  * * *

  The friendship between Mwari and Jackie blossomed. They met frequently, sometimes without me, and both seemed to have endless things to talk about. When I asked what they were up to, Mwari called me to silence, pointing to a small Sony recorder on the table. Jackie was recording their conversations.

  On a trip to Jackie’s apartment in Karen one evening, I stumbled upon the recording device. I held it in my hand and marveled at its small belly that had been fed for days, without filling up. Jackie was in the shower. Without event pausing to think, I pressed play. Mwari was recalling our childhood together: “My brother Bob was aborted seven times by our mother. She had wanted to kill the baby and herself because Father had fled with another Nubian woman. Although I am younger than Bob, I knew this from Mother. When she was angry, she cursed, ‘I should have aborted you properly on the eighth time’—” I turned off the recorder at Jackie’s approach, and lay on the bed and considered the fabricated biography.

  I noticed how Jackie’s tenderness toward me increased with the passage of time. I knew she was taking pity on me, and I took pity on her because she was being manipulated by Mwari.

  Things got a little awkward when, between bouts of lovemaking, Jackie would ask about random events that Mwari had shared with her. And since I didn’t want to betray Mwari, I feigned reticence about the past.

  “Bob, you must see a counselor if you and I are going to remain together,” Jackie said one morning. “You have to deal with your past traumas.”

  I told her I wasn’t sick.

  “Are you kidding me? You manifest all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder,” she burst out. “If you didn’t know, denial is one of them!”

  “I am not denying anything,” I responded earnestly. “Trust me, I know myself . . .”

  “Yes you are,” Jackie declared. “I have been studying each of the images that you selected for exhibition. They mirror the narratives that Mwari has told me about you. In fact, her insights have been revelatory. The photos are perfect mirrors of trauma and memory using autobiographical trope . . .”

  Jackie spoke kizungu mingi until I wasn’t sure she was even talking about me.

  “You are not who you think you are,” she said with finality.

  I shook my head and walked away.

  * * *

  “What nonsense have you been feeding Jackie?” I confronted Mwari.

  She stared at me as though I were a space alien. “I thought you asked me to act as your sister,” she said.

  “What upuzi have you been feeding her? She thinks I’m a walking dead. Killed at birth.”

  Mwari was quiet for a moment. “That was just pandisa. Did she think it was true?”

  “You don’t know these jungus,” I sighed. “Don’t give her any more cock-and-bull stories.”

  “You mean I should tell her I am your wife?”

  “You are not my wife!”

  “Booobooooooo . . .” Mwari wept.

  I slammed the door and took off to Karen. That night, Mwari went into premature labor. She was all alone. It was the trail of blood that alerted neighbors. The baby did not survive. Word reached me while I was still at Jackie’s.

  “Mwari just lost our baby,” I told Jackie.

  She stared at me for a very long time. “You made your sister pregnant?” she asked quietly.

  “It-it’s not . . . not what you think,” I stammered.

  “She never told me she was pregnant,” Jackie went on. She was quiet, then: “Now everything makes perfect sense.” She paced up and down. “I am expecting your baby,” she said simply, paused, then: “I will flush it.”

  The news of Mwari’s death came that evening. Three deaths in one day.

  * * *

  I went to the chang’aa dens of Katwekwera, on the other side of our valley, and drank myself silly. I wanted to hide from the world. I went through funeral wakes in a drunken stupor. I was in and out of the dens. After the burial, some of my gang from my base joined me in the dens. Other boy
s from the “ShootBack” project came calling as well. They were there to condole me and the only way they knew was drinking. After a few days, Jackie sent me a thousand pounds with a note that I should seek help. I had enough to drink for a long time to come.

  * * *

  It seems like a long time since I started drinking. I don’t need the money to stay drunk. Many offers come from men and women who want me drunk, so that I may regale them with tales of laying white women. The Jackie effect remains strong. I would have forgotten everything about my past but for some silly journalist who called recently.

  He thrust a book in my face when he came to talk to me in person and said it was based on my life. Some Englishwoman had published it in London. I glanced at the small picture on the back cover. It was Jackie all right, though the caption said it was Jacqueline Penny. Its title: Dispatches from a Shithole Country. The cover illustration had the picture of the man with a flying toilet, from our “ShootBack” project.

  “This book is full of shit,” I blurted, provoking laughter in the chang’aa den. Neither the journalist nor the drunks in the den understood what I meant.

  “But you should read the book first, before making any judgment,” the journalist challenged.

  “I can judge this one by its cover,” I said.

  “How so?”

  “I am not who you think I am.”

  “But how can you predict what’s inside the book?”

  “Tell them! Tell them!” one drunk coaxed. “Tell them you knew her inside out! You are the master of this story!”

  SAY YOU ARE NOT MY SON

  by Faith Oneya

  Kariobangi

  On the day the sewer volcano erupted, it was not just shit and grimy water that came through Njenga’s door in Kariobangi North.

  “Mamako ako wapi?”

  Njenga stared up at the animal barking down at him.

  His mother, Nyokabi, called all of them animals. Their neighbor Nyalego said they were wild animals because they preyed on people.

  “A human being would not do what they do to people,” they told him.

  The animal in question had banged the thin wooden door so loudly that the window rattled. Njenga could swear he saw the mud wall crack too. The animal leaned harder against the door and it creaked open a bit more, knocking over the battered wooden chair that was one of the two mismatched seats in the room. A rickety, stained wooden table and a beer crate completed the furniture. The air still reeked of rotten eggs even though Njenga had tried to clean up as much as he could. Feces still smudged the bottom of the furniture. Ras Kimani was a skinny dreadlocked man with very few teeth in his mouth and even fewer scruples. His matted hair hung limply on his head. Njenga resisted an inane urge to pluck off some of the worn-out dreadlocks that just hung there precariously.

  Njenga had seen the man before. He knew his name. Ras came to their house at the end of every week to collect security money.

  Njenga heard his mother plead for more time. She asked Ras to forgive her. Njenga hated it when his mother asked for forgiveness. Whose Jesus was this man to be a forgiver?

  He had seen Ras squeeze his mother’s buttocks and heard him tell her she was lucky she was so beautiful.

  Njenga dreamed of the day his mother would not have to worry about paying the bills. But his dreams were punctured by reality.

  He glanced back furtively at his four-year-old sister Lois, who was peering through the slit of the bedsheets that divided the single room into two. It seemed like she was shielding herself from something she could not yet grasp, but knew enough to fear.

  She shrank back behind the linens, stepping over the sufurias they stored near the single wooden bed.

  Ras glared down at the scrawny boy who wore an old, tattered, nylon Arsenal T-shirt and a pair of patched-up navy-blue school shorts.

  Something leaped up from the boy’s eyes and reminded him of his own phantom childhood dream of becoming a football star. But the thought was fleeting and he squished it as one would an annoying mosquito.

  “Er . . . Er . . .” Njenga stuttered, the words that had unfurled themselves resolutely from the pit of his stomach now losing momentum and struggling to free themselves from his throat.

  “Aniririra kimwana! Speak up! Nyokabi ako wapi?”

  Njenga knew where his mother was but he also knew that Ras would not like his answer. “Sijui,” he said, sticking out his chest enough to make Ras notice that the fear that had hung thickly in the air before was now dissolving.

  Ras spared a fleeting thought of admiration for the little boy. He could use someone like him. Someone with guts.

  “Wacha kunibeba ufala. Na uambie mathako pia aendelee kukimbia kama panya, atajua mimi ni paka size gani.”

  Njenga was sure he did not want to find out how big a cat Ras was or could become if provoked.

  Ras asked him if he knew what they did to people who did not pay security fees, his tone dipping as he bent his six-foot frame down to make eye contact.

  “No,” Njenga whispered, but it was also a prayer for his mother to be safe.

  Yet he knew.

  “Let’s try this again because I like you. Unakaa kama boy mpoa. Fan yeyote wa Arsenal ni friend wangu. How old are you?” He gripped Njenga’s shoulder.

  “Nine,” Njenga whispered, the word straining itself from his tight throat. He held the door handle so tightly that it croaked, as if in protest at being made to be part of a conversation it wanted nothing to do with.

  Ras moved his hand from Njenga’s shoulder. He had squeezed it so hard that Njenga felt tears burn in his eyes. He slapped Njenga’s cheek three times, gentle slaps that held the promise of violence.

  “Now that was not so bad, was it?” Ras smiled. “So, ameenda wapi?”

  “Ameenda job.”

  Ras said he would be back, spitting on the doorstep as he slouched away.

  Njenga rubbed the spit into the ground with his shoe and locked the door behind him.

  “Kwa nini amekuchapa?” asked Lois, her doll eyes wider than usual.

  He shrugged and said he didn’t know why the man had slapped him.

  “Pole Njenga.” She rubbed his face gently and told him she was sorry.

  But a different memory hung in the air, its sting as fresh as if it had just happened. Njenga remembered the last time he had to answer the question about where his mother was. It had been the matron at the Missionaries of Charity Mother Teresa’s Home who wanted to know her whereabouts.

  Njenga had insisted he did not know. His mother had warned him that the question would come when she took them there a year before. “Nataka kujipanga kwanza alafu niwakujie,” she’d told them.

  She’d promised to come back for them as soon as she’d gotten some money together. She’d spoken as one would about going to the market to drop off a bag for later pickup. She had told Njenga to man up when his lower lip started quivering.

  But someone had whispered to the matron that the woman who’d brought two abandoned children to the home was actually their mother.

  “People say you look like her,” said the matron.

  Njenga did not utter a word. He had promised his mother he would not breathe a word about who she was. She was going to come back for them. He knew she would.

  Silence.

  “Ni mama yako?”

  “Hapana. No.”

  “Siwezi wasaidia if you don’t tell me the truth!”

  “She is not my mother.”

  “They said you were stubborn. But that won’t help you much. Nyinyi watu wa Bhangu hamtawahi learn.”

  He did not breathe a word.

  His mother had warned him about the questions that would come.

  “Makûûria kana wî mwana wakwa uuge ndûrî wakwa. Makûria kana nîûrî mami uuge ndûrî. Wauga nîniî mami mekûnyita mahingîre na ndûkanyona rîngî. Nîwaaigua?” (My son, if they ask you if I am your mother, say you are not my son. If they ask you if you have a mother, say you don’t have one. If you say
I am your mother, they will lock me away and you will never see me again. You hear?)

  The prick of the words still smarted.

  * * *

  Nyokabi stopped to catch her breath at the bridge over the Nairobi River on her way home.

  She looked down at the dark, cloudy river as it flowed spiritlessly underneath the bridge and wondered what stories the water would tell if it were human. What stories would it tell about her?

  Nyokabi had once been a dancer at Mahutini Bar in Kariobangi South.

  She’d met Njenga’s father somewhere between “Afro” and “Vunja Mifupa.” He was perched on the sina tabu stool at the bar, his short legs dangling oddly from it. He kept shooting glances at her as he caressed a bottle of Allsops. Eventually, he squeezed a hundred-shilling note into her tight shorts, shoving it close enough to her womanhood to let her know the depth of his interest.

  He wasn’t the kind of man whom she would usually fall for. He seemed to have more problems than she did. He sipped a single beer for too long. It seemed like he needed that money to pay his rent more than he needed to appreciate her dancing, but something about him came across as sincere. Maybe it was the gentle way he caressed his beer bottle. Later, he said it was because he was not much of a drinker. But Nyokabi knew. She knew what such prosaic explanations meant. She fell for him anyway. Maybe it was because he smelled like a goat and she felt like it meant he was not a gangster. All she remembered was that she followed him to his single room in Bhangu and they created Njenga as he squeezed his juice into her. She still remembered his Allsops beer breath on her face.

  She didn’t see him again until Njenga was three, when he came back to finish the loaf of bread he had started eating and left midway.

  He gave her Lois. This time, his breath smelled like Senator Keg, the famous brew named for Barack Obama when he visited Kenya as a Chicago senator.

  Nyokabi never heard from him again after this. So she took Njenga and Lois to the children’s home. Lois was too little to remember. She had only been three years old, but Njenga knew. She knew this by how his eyes followed her everywhere in the house, as if he was afraid she would suddenly disappear.