Nairobi Heat (12 page)

I thought she was introducing a song, but before long I realised that this was a spoken word performance.

Silence descended as the guitarist took off his wedding ring and replaced it with a glass guitar slide. He tested the sound, so that for a moment the whole bar, dimly lit save for the stage, was filled with a bluesy sound. And then, starting to speak in slow rap, she joined the guitarist: ‘My hair has roots
all over the earth, like the roots of an old, old, old baobab, tapping and traversing the whole earth.’

Turning sideways, she leaned back as she undid the wrap around her head so that long thin dreadlocks unfurled, almost touching the ground, completing her arc.

‘And my skin, this old raggedy skin thing …’ The crowd laughed and even I smiled because her dark skin, glistening from oil or sweat or both, was so smooth that it looked soft to the touch and anything but ragged.

‘This old skin is the same skin my great-grandmother wore to sleep and to the garden, this is the skin that she wore when in battle. Don’t be fooled by its softness, in peace it’s for pleasure, but it quickly grows scales when it’s time for war.’ She caressed the length of first one arm and then the other, back and forth, back and forth until her skin seemed to radiate her blackness. Then, as she raised her hands up high with her fists clenched, the guitarist hit some violent chords, making his instrument sound like machine-gun fire and missiles.

‘And these breasts, these breasts can feed a child and bring a grown man to tears in the same evening.’ The crowd laughed approvingly – she was tall, about my height, and slender, but when she thrust her chest forward the T-shirt she wore to her midriff hugged her breasts tightly.

‘And my hands, they are rough from play and lifting machetes. They can undress you, or they can peel my covers away.’ She lifted her T-shirt up until we could see the beginning of her breasts.

‘And my mouth can curse or love, speak hope or pain, but when you are good to me, let’s just say my tongue wraps around things easily.’ She raised her hands high in the air and
ground her hips.

‘And this, this is not a treasure to be beheld from afar, when you come closer, when you come closer you will see that it will lead your tongue to my pleasure.’ Her hand followed the small chain that hung from a sparkling belly button ring down into her jeans. And then she broke into an easy laughter as if to remind the audience it was a performance after all.

‘What the hell!’ I heard O exclaim as the lights came up and everyone stood to give Madeline a standing ovation. It was an odd mixture of people, now that I could see them – elite Kenyans, refugees and expatriates. It reminded me of the mixture of people we had encountered in Mathare, only this was the other end of the scale.

After bowing first to the guitarist and then to the crowd Madeline made her way to the bar where men and their wives clamoured to shake her hand and buy her drinks. A few minutes later she was rescued from her fans by a gentleman who led her away to a table near the stage. O and I ordered drinks and kept watch, waiting for an opening, but it wasn’t until an hour or so later that she stood up and walked to the bathroom. When she re-emerged I stood to intercept her, but instead of heading back to her table she came over to the bar.

‘You are that detective? The American?’ she asked after I had introduced myself and told her that we’d like to ask her a few questions. ‘You want to know about Joshua?’

She did not betray any emotion beyond curiosity. I on the other hand was perspiring like an acne-ridden teenager out on a mercy date. Finally, having untied my tongue, I confirmed her suspicions but added there was another matter we also needed to talk about.

‘Can it wait?’ she asked.

And somehow, in the face of her request, the urgency of the whole case receded into the background. ‘Yes, of course, I can wait,’ I stammered.

Her drink came and, still looking at us, she leaned over the bar and whispered something to the bartender. Then she leaned in further over the counter and kissed him lightly on the cheek. ‘Call me Muddy, it’s short for Madeline,’ she called over her shoulder to me as she turned away and walked back to her table.

‘On her fans, gentlemen. They buy her more than she can drink,’ the bartender explained a few minutes later as he placed six Tuskers in front of us.

‘Now, that is what I like to hear,’ O said.

A few minutes later the guitarist came and joined us. He was very young, in his early twenties, and still had the swagger and bravado of youth. He sat next to me and took one of the beers without saying anything. ‘Muddy said I could,’ he explained when I looked at him.

I had to laugh. We were like three little pigs at the trough – and her feeding us.

‘You can jam, man. How long have you been playing for her?’ I asked the guitarist after he had taken a long pull on the Tusker he had liberated.

‘One year. She is good to me. You know? I came here from Rwanda, but I was very young. She is good to me …’ he said reflectively.

‘You married?’ O asked, pointing at his ring.

‘No, this just for show … Makes it look serious when I take it off and put on the slide; replacing the wife with the
guitar. That kinda symbolism works great for the crowd,’ he said with a sly smile.

‘Ever seen her with this man?’ I asked, showing him the photo of Samuel Alexander that had been in the locket.

He laughed. ‘She does not go with white men.’

‘Perhaps you don’t know her that well,’ O said.

In the photograph in the locket her hair had been long and curly – her dreadlocks must have taken some time to grow.

‘Have you ever met B.B. King?’ the guitarist suddenly asked enthusiastically, changing the subject.

He looked disappointed when I told him I hadn’t. ‘But I saw Michael Jackson in concert once,’ I added.

He shrugged. Michael no longer had the currency he used to.

We sat around without talking much. The bartender kept our trough full of beer, and O and the guitarist became visibly drunk. At some point I asked the guitarist why everyone called her Muddy, but he said he did not know. ‘Could be something to do with Muddy Waters,’ he said a minute or so later and started to hum ‘Catfish Blues’. I joined him and before long we were all wailing away, out of tune, especially O, who didn’t even know the song but sang anyway.

If you had told me a mere two weeks earlier that I would soon find myself in a bar in Africa singing ‘Catfish Blues’ with a schizoid detective called O and a blues guitarist from Rwanda, waiting on one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, I would have told you straight out that you were crazy, but here I was.

Eventually, the bartender signalled to Muddy that he was closing up and she left her table and walked over to where we
were still drinking. ‘If you want to talk you have to drive me home,’ she said.

O handed me the keys to the Land Rover. As he did so, the guitarist stood up to come with us, but Muddy told him to stay with O and make sure he got home all right. She didn’t have a purse or anything. I suppose she was all she needed. And before long, my date and I were on our way to her place.

Muddy lived out in Limuru, thirty minutes or so outside of Nairobi, and as I drove her slender hand would, every now and then, point in this direction or that, guiding me first out of the city and then deep into the countryside. I was ready for whatever was ahead of me. Or more precisely, I didn’t care what was ahead of me. My heart was beating fast; my mind full of stupid questions to ask her: ‘Where are you from?’, ‘What music do you listen to?’, ‘What do your parents do?’, ‘What are your favourite colours?’. But in reality I knew that the get-to-know-you-questions from my teenage years wouldn’t work, and as we drove deeper into the night I began to realise just how little actual dating I had really done.

Muddy punched in the knobs on the old radio and found a station that was playing country music. There aren’t many things in this life that are certain, but that’s one of them – a country music station anywhere in the world. Strangely, I didn’t mind.

‘Muddy … why do they call you Muddy?’ I asked her.

Nobody wears safety belts in Africa, and she had her feet up on the dashboard, leaning towards me and humming along to Kenny Rogers as he sang a duet about not falling in love
with dreamers.

‘They call me Muddy, because the men I know would rather drink muddy waters,’ she finally answered with a sigh, signalling with her hand that we should make a left off the main road onto a gravel track.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked her as the Land Rover’s wheels hit the dirt road, creating a monotonous grinding noise that jarred heavily against the calm of country music – I’m not much of a blues man but drinking muddy waters didn’t sound pleasant.

Instead of answering she asked me to slow down as we were approaching her gate, which a watchman opened as soon as she leaned her head outside the car window. She pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from her pocket and threw it at him as we crawled past.

Does everybody in this country live like a prisoner? I wondered as two huge Alsatian guard dogs came careering around the corner of the small house that now stood in front of us, barking furiously. It was as if the wealthy, the middle class, the farmers, the poor and even the criminals were all imprisoned in their own little worlds.

Climbing down from the Land Rover, Muddy calmed the dogs down before sending them back to the watchman. When he had them under control I opened my door and stepped out into her yard, watching as she unlocked security door after security door until finally we were inside her place and she turned on the lights.

The first thing that struck me was how simple everything was. The wooden furniture was spaced out in the sitting room so that it looked more like a low-class barroom. But she’d
made it work, brightening the room up with paintings of little stick figures and wooden carvings. Her place reminded me of Joshua’s in a strange way – even though, unlike Joshua’s, it was clear that she lived there.

Muddy invited me into the kitchen – again very spare – and opened a cabinet that contained several bottles of expensive liquor. ‘You know moonshine?’ she asked me.

I nodded.

‘Try this,’ she said, reaching behind the glass bottles and producing a plastic container, ‘it’s African moonshine.’

She poured me a shot of clear liquid, and I grabbed it, ready to down it. ‘You’d better sip it,’ she advised, and as soon as it touched my tongue I knew why – it was almost pure alcohol.

‘What is it called?’ I asked her.

‘Changaa,’
she said.

Then, leaving me to my thoughts, Muddy went to change. She returned from the bathroom in what looked to me a like a dress-sized dashiki. Her dreads were down, so that when she sat at the kitchen counter, one hand cupped under her chin and the other shifting her shot glass back and forth, they dangled in front of her. She looked up at me – her eyes burrowing into mine – and I looked down at my hands. Cupping the shot glass they looked huge, and suddenly I felt like I was back at the airport all over again – all too aware of my excessive size and bulk.

Muddy stretched out her arm next to mine. I had never imagined myself to be anything other than black, but I was clearly lighter than her. ‘You must be poisoned by the blood of both,’ she said.

I didn’t say anything.

‘ “I who am poisoned with the blood of both, where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” It’s a poem by Derek Walcott.’

‘I’ve never heard of him,’ I responded.

‘Detectives don’t really think too much, do they?’ she asked with a snicker.

I moved my arm away from hers. I was hurt and hated myself for feeling wounded. I had no illusions about who was in charge here. The simple truth was that she could have poured gasoline on me, struck a match and I would have stayed to see what happened. But nevertheless I had to try and get some of my questions answered. I took out the photo of Samuel Alexander we had found in the locket in the bath and placed it before her.

‘Madeline … Do you know him?’

‘Call me Muddy.’

‘Okay, Muddy, do you know him?’

‘Yes, he was my lover.’

‘How long ago?’

‘A couple of years …’

‘Do you know that he’s dead?’ I asked.

I felt her startle. She took a few deep breaths.

‘Suicide,’ I said. ‘With you in his hand.’ It felt good being mean to her.

‘You asshole, you let me sit there all night having fun without telling me?’ she said bitterly.

I didn’t say anything. I had nothing to say.

Reaching into her kitchen drawer, Muddy pulled out two joints and lit both of them. I started to say that I didn’t smoke, but she reached for her cell, dialled and a few seconds later the
watchman appeared on the other side of the barred kitchen window. She stood up and passed him one of the joints, taking a long drag on the other as she did so.

‘I came here with nowhere to go, so I worked in some shitty joints,’ she began. ‘Then I met Sammy. It was him who introduced me to the spoken word, to The Last Poets, to the world of Saul Williams … You know them?’

But before I could answer she started reciting something from The Last Poets; she spoke softly, yet each line felt like a muted gunshot: ‘ “You will not be able to stay home, brother. You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out. You will not be able to lose yourself on skag and skip, skip out for beer during commercials, because the revolution will not be televised …” Beautiful people with beautiful words, who found a way to express their anger and hurt.’