One Day I Will Write About This Place (10 page)

I wait for the terrible moment when he will ask, “Who here has not received the blood of Jesus?” and I will refuse to put up my hand, and Mum’s stillness will wound, and then we give money, and then songs rise, and throats open, all of them like crickets in the night; some eyes roll back, one man’s chest heaves up and down and he wheezes as if demons will, right now, shoot out of his heart. He is crying.

Pastor John asks them to leap, leap and be healed, leap right into heaven, leap over the burning fires. All this time, all these hours, the cripple has said nothing. He said nothing at home, as he fumbled with his tea and saucer. He said nothing when I greeted him. All his sounds are only metal braces hitting wooden crutches, squeaks of wood on the floor, formless trousers whispering as they rub the floor. His loudest sound is a giant silence, every time he moves. I wait for it, the crack, and the break, the collision of metal, wood, and bone.

Then he speaks.

A wail. Thin and rusty, it cuts through the pounding waves of God noise. The sound he promised arrives; he clutters to the floor, moaning and crying. His crutches all over the place. Benches scream as we clear out; his arms flail on the floor. I want to leave this place and sink into the hot bath again. Mum kneels over him, the pastor looms, his arms reach forward, and he urges the cripple’s moan forward—­release it, the poison, the demon, the sickness. Yesss. Yesss. Everybody hisses. The moan rises, and rises.

Then I see them, those thin dead legs jerking to life inside the metal braces.

…

The crutches and braces have been abandoned. The cripple crawls all over our home, his spaghetti legs twitching. He sings, low chesty God songs.

Jimmy is always off on his long runs; he has timetables. Jimmy’s day has a plan. He has made his home life into a vocation: bike, gym, run, basketball, arranging music collection, girls, books about fast cars and planes and guitars. There is no room for negotiation. The world must submit to his timetable.

The vague get hijacked. If I am sharing Jimmy’s room, I will wake up a few minutes before he does, and I will busy myself as he does, grunt as he grunts, move with male resolution as he does, and I can do this without thinking about it. When he is gone, I can escape to other places, where people with certainty shoot up elevators; they rise to the roof on New York escalators; they reach in and kiss, ride words to the sunset.

Some of them flounder and flail, then on page 187, as they are about to break apart from the unbearable pressure of being themselves, of being vulnerable to the insistence of others, they find a power. Oh! Here they were, thinking they were made all wrong, but everybody has a moment when the world stops, pauses, turns, approves, and says, it was you all along, it was you who held us all up, and we never noticed… oh, Da-­yana, Daai-­ana, it was always you I truly loved.

I often have the house to myself. Now he is here. He shuffles around, praying loudly, asking for nothing, saying nothing. If this moment continues, it becomes inescapable. I no longer fear that the cripple will clutter and break. I fear that he will crawl, and kneel, and stand.

Those who come from the most painful awkwardness have the most triumphant stand-­ups; they have seen a failing world and can fully appreciate a working one. The charisma of his new patterns will occupy this whole house. I will be colonized by them. With every step, he is killing the once-a-year Jesus who smiles beatifically and says nothing, really.

Nonono. My deal is simple. Keep loose and float. Follow easy patterns, and schedules. Commit only to a present tense that lets your legs move behind others, and keeps your head in the clouds. Being cool is never stepping beyond your comfortable patterns.

Too many things are calling, suddenly asking for heres and nows, for all of me here and now. Sex has started whispering in my ear, demanding a plan of action. What need do I have for these things? For to be what I am, as promised by fictions, by fantasy and the future, is to fly, from dorm bed to Motown, from the household of the king of Siam to running Huckleberryfree on the field, from my bedroom directly into the Walton household, to
Star Wars,
to stardust. To be, one day, a Television Nairobi professional with a car. An escalator guy in a suit. Every evening cool with jeans and a beer on a good sunset balcony, listening to R&B.

To succumb is to let them all in, to see the confusion; to succumb is to be a porridge-­spouting Godguy, sealed shut by some hot Pentecostal spirit. The spirit crawls all over the floor, legs starting to waken, threatening to stand.

I pray, one day. I watch the cripple scraping the floor with his knees, and I promise God silently that I will get saved. I will, I say. When I am twenty. Let me stay loose, I ask, and the cripple’s legs buckle and he tumbles.

Crutch! God!

God! Let me have sex first.

His name is Julius. He leaves one day, asks to be taken to the bus station. He crawls properly now. We never see or hear from him again. I am sure he knew how much I wanted him gone.

…

It is third term. I have adapted to boarding school. I feel okay, as though I have been here forever. I don’t know what comes over me. I am sort of fooling around in the field one Saturday, a novel in hand, as usual, and I get an old urge.

I stand, then walk, past the dorms, and the staff room, past the gate, in full school uniform, past the consequences, the cane, the suspension letter, the ruined record. I do not use one of the usual tricks to sneak out, the holes in the fence, the bribed security guards. I walk into Njoro town, eat chips and drink a cold Fanta, and take a
matatu
home, to Nakuru.

There is nobody home. I climb into the house through the window and run a hot bath. Mum finds me asleep in my bed. She sits there, runs her hand across my forehead. I can hear her there, quiet, and I am not afraid; I just want her to keep her hand right there. She runs it through my hair. Her hand. I keep my eyes closed for the longest time and listen to her breathing.

We have tea and cake. I gulp it all down.

“I have to take you back to school, you know.”

I nod.

“Do you want to go back?”

I nod.

She takes my hand and turns it. I try to pull it back.

“What happened to your thumb?”

My thumbnail is mushy and bleeding, with pus. Over the past few months, I have been peeling my nails with a razor blade during night prep. Short, tight bursts of quiet peeling, nibbling, and scraping, only stopping to turn the page of my novel. Sometimes I stay up late at night and peel at my nails under the bedcovers. Always hungry. When all the unfeeling casing is gone, I can sleep well.

I don’t know what she says to the headmaster. I am not punished.

After a few weeks, Mum comes to visit me at school.

“Pack your things,” she says. “You are going to a new school.”

We drove to Nairobi today, my father and I, to the city. I have five pimples. The capital city, for me, is the opportunity to spend time on soft teenage hydraulics­—­bookshops and burgers and
Right On
magazine and soft-­cheeked girls who say “That’s fantabulous!”

We drove here, to Nairobi, my father and I, to get some complicated tractor or combine harvester machinery fixed. We do these things from time to time these days. My father throws the request casually—­my mother must have suggested it in forceful whispers: get him out of his room.

They are both being nicer than usual and I am being spoiled. I put my book in my bag and head off to the car. My father is like warm bread: he smells good and radiates good biology, and my enzymes growl and glow around him. The car’s bonnet is open. So. I want to know about clanging metals and growling engines, and I stand there on the side, after you suck the oil out of a tube, in a manly way, and spit it on the ground and say, “They are not aligned.”

Nods. We stand, all of us, looking at the car’s entrails, in meditation.

“No. No.”

“This car is injection.”

And, feet apart, we shall consider this—­and jump into action, heaving and arranging and pulling and revving, and soon things will purr, and exhausted men will come home sweaty and eat hearty, and sleep the sleep of the dead.
Jua kali,
is the name we have for this enterprise. Hot sun. They live and work outside khaki Kenya; here they are free to make themselves what they want.

Hot sun city. There is a large industrial park—­a slum—­surrounding us, a flat plain of corrugated iron sheeting.

Take the sun—­give it ten thousand corrugated iron roofs—­ask it, just for the sake of asking, to give the roofs all it can give the roofs and the roofs start to blur; they snap and crackle in agitation.

Corrugated iron roofs are cantankerous creatures: they groan and squeak the whole day; as they are lacerated by sunlight, their bodies swollen with heat and light, they threaten to shatter into shards of metal light. They fail, held back by the crucifixion of nails. Corrugated iron roof people do not go to the grassy leafy part of the city without a clear purpose. The police will get them. City council
askaris
will get them. The hotter it gets, the more it seems that some heat and light will burst out of this place.

We are in a large patch of earth in the middle of this glorious and terrible light. There are mountains of twisted scrap metal and spare parts all around us, baked by the sun, red from rust, black from oil, and brown from dust, throwing crumbs of defeated iron to the ground: cars, parts of cars, the innards of air conditioners; dead exhaust pipes, no longer coughing or snoring or spitting illness.

One guy runs past me, waving some spare part and rattling loudly in Gikuyu, and another man runs after him. They are partners, dancing, arm in arm, shoulder to shoulder, one laughing, the other growling.

One is bent over, the other reaching for the end of his arms. His hands, which are holding the rattling part. Then, one laughing, the other not. And it is a game and a dance.

Then it is a fight.

A crowd gathers. Men cheering. My father frowns and his huddle of freelance consultants break away to witness and bay.

And.

The fight is over. They are separated.

I invent a word.
Hughagh:
(a) a sound that is at once the belly under a fist’s assault and what issues from the mouth when the chest is banged; (b) a mid-­chorus reminder of one’s reservoir of strength: commonly used in jingles and sports shows, by army tug-­of-­war teams, and by female tennis players.

Immortalized by Billy Ocean: Hugh agha ha! When the going gets tough, the tough get going, yeah! Hugh agha ha! Yeah yeah yeah.

Hughagh
rules football matches in City Stadium; the city comes to a standstill as Gor Mahia football club fans make their way back home.
Hughagh
is a policeman. Is a member of Parliament on a podium with his hidden little groups of paid thugs in the audience. Sometimes
hughagh
is a fist in your woman’s face; sometimes
hughagcgh-­hic
is lubricated by a tin or two of fine
kumi-­kumi
liquor, mellowed in rusty ten-­gallon drums that once stored diesel. Three tins and you will sleep on the open drain outside the drinking shack and wake up blind for life, or paralyzed.

Hughagh
can be fun, too:
hagh hagh,
you laugh at those who are poorer than you, laugh from the bottom of your belly at Kirinyaga people if you are from Kiambu, at Tugens if you are Nandi, at Punjabis if you are Gujarati, at the small tribes if you are from a big one.

Somebody taps my shoulder, a thin Somali man, handsome, in giant white-­rimmed opaque sunglasses, a maroon shirt with little gleaming snowflakes all over it. The shirt is not tucked in, Somali style. He flashes his eyebrows up and down for me, our little conspiracy. And out of his hands a crackling magic mat unrolls.

Sunglasses, wrapped in noisy plastic paper.

“Ferrari,” he whispers, his voice carrying Yemeni monsoons and bolts of cloth. I consider, briefly, and decide not to risk it. Ferrari is a very cool thing. It roars forward, streamlined and low, lipstick red; it slinks and gleams and smells of fresh glossy magazines and cool. But if he is selling them, he is multiplied by ten thousand and so it must be that everybody in Nairobi has Ferrari.

I shake my head. He thrusts them closer to me. Surely I have not seen them well. I move away and turn. He comes around to me with a new grin and thrusts a watch in front of me. A muscle in his jaw curls into sharp knuckles, stems of khat peeping out of the side of his mouth. His left cheek is swollen, his eyes red and bleary.

Khat is salesjuice. Supercaffeine.

“SayKo!” I point at my watch and shrug.

His finger jabs agitatedly at his watch.

SayKoSayKo! Let us get excited, my friend. Listen.

The South Africans sing “SayKunjalo—­the time is now.” Sekunjalo. SayKo. He puts the watch to my ear, and I establish, beyond any doubt, that SayKo is ticking. Nownownow. And now I know—­that he will jab and poke at me until I am in a frenzy and will lash out or buy.

SayKoSayKo! SayKoSayKo! SayKoSayKo!

Because when it gets too hot, we melt. Or break. My pimples are glowing. I can feel them. I push his hand and move away, close to the huddle of Sokasoba men and my father, who will not appreciate being interrupted.

“Heeeeey!”

They shout. My father frowns.

“Waria!” Derogatory term used in Kenya for Somalis.

“Toroka!” Run. Leave. Depart from here.

One of them shouts at him, “Waria!” And Waria grins and walks away, and I feel like shit. He makes his way to somebody else and somebody else, grabbing, gesticulating, jawing, jabbing. Tick. Tock. SayKo. SayKo. SayKo. And steam rises. Growl, Ferrari.

They say, in my new school, that electrogalvanizing deposits the layer of zinc from an aqueous electrolyte by electroplating, forming a thinner and much stronger bond. These multiple layers are responsible for the amazing property of the metal to withstand corrosion-­inducing circumstances, such as saltwater or moisture. Besides being inexpensive and effective, galvanized metal is popular because it can be recycled and reused multiple times. We call it
mabati.
Or corrugated iron.