Say You’re One Of Them (3 page)

“Holy Mary, Mama Ex-mas . . .”

“Pray for us.”

IT
WAS
DRIZZLING
AGAIN
when Naema returned with Baby. He was asleep. Naema’s jeans,
mutumba
loafers, and braided hair dribbled water, her big eyes red from crying. Usually she sauntered in singing a Brenda Fassie song, but tonight she plodded in deflated.

She handed the money over to Mama, who quickly banked it in her purse. She also gave Mama a packet of pasteurized milk. It was half full, and Naema explained that she’d had to buy it to keep Baby from crying. Mama nodded. The milk pack was soggy and looked as if it would disintegrate. Mama took it carefully in her hands, like one receiving a diploma. When Naema brought out a half-eaten turkey drumstick, Mama grabbed her ears, thinking that she had bought it with the money she’d earned begging. Naema quickly explained that her new boyfriend had given it to her. This boy was a big shot in the street gang that controlled our area, a dreaded figure. Maisha and I detested him, but he loved Naema like his own tongue.

Now Naema wriggled and fitted her lithe frame into the tangle on the floor and began to weep silently. Mama pulled the blanket from the others and covered the girl’s feet, which had become wrinkled in the rain.

“Maisha is moving out tomorrow,” Naema said. “Full time.”

Mama’s face froze. No matter how rootless and cheap street life might be, you could still be broken by departures. I went outside and lay on the row of empty paint containers we had lined up along the shop’s wall, hiding my face in the crook of my arm.

Guilt began to build in my gut. Maybe if I had joined a street gang, Maisha would not have wanted to leave. I wouldn’t have needed money for school fees, and perhaps there would have been peace between Maisha and my parents. But my anger was directed at the
musungu
men, for they were the visible faces of my sister’s temptation. I wished I were as powerful as Naema’s boyfriend or that I could recruit him. We could burn their Jaguar. We could tie them up and give them the beating of their lives and take away all their papers. We could strip those
musungu
naked, as I had seen Naema’s friend do to someone who had hurt a member of his gang. Or we could at least kill and eat that monkey or just cut off his
mboro
so he could never fuck anybody’s sister again. I removed my knife from my pocket and examined the blade carefully. The fact that it was very blunt and had dents did not worry me. I knew that if I stabbed with all my energy, I would draw blood.

After a while, my plans began to unravel. I realized that I would never be able to enlist Naema’s boyfriend. Naema herself would block the plan. In fact, until that night she had been taunting Maisha to move out, saying that if she were as old as Maisha she would have left home long ago. Besides, even if I fled to the Kibera slums, as soon as we touched the tourists, the police would come and arrest my parents and dismantle our shack. They would take away Maisha’s trunk and steal her treasures.

BABA
STARTED
AWAKE
, AS if a loud noise had hit him.

“Is that Maisha?” he asked, closing his eyes again.

“No, Maisha is working,” Mama said. “My Maisha commands
musungu
and motorcars!” she said, her good mood returning.

“What? What
musungu,
tarling?” Baba asked, sitting up immediately, rubbing sleep and hunger from his eyes with the base of his palms.

“White tourists,” Mama said.

“Uh? They must to pay
ma
-dollar or euros. Me am family head. You hear me, woman?”

“Yes.”

“And no Honolulu business. What kind of motorcar were they driving?”

“Jaguar,” I answered. “With driver. Baba, we should not allow Maisha to leave—”

“Nobody is leaving, nobody. And shut up your animal mouth! You have wounded my wife! Until I break your teeth tomorrow, no opinion from you. No nothing. Did you thank the
ma
men for me?”

“No,” I said.

“
Aiiee!
Jigana, where are your manners? Did you ask where they were going? Motorcar number?”

“No, Baba.”

“So if they take her to Honolulu, what do I do? Maybe we should send you to a street gang. Boy, have you not learned to grab opportunities? Is this how you will waste school fees in January? Poor Maisha.”

He squinted incredulously, and lines of doubt kinked up his massive forehead. He pursed his lips, and anger quickened his breath. But that night I stood my ground.

“I don’t want school anymore, Baba,” I said.

“Coward, shut up. That one is a finished matter.”

“No.”

“What do you mean by no? You want to be a pocket thief like me, . . . my son? My first son? You can’t be useless as the gals.
Wallai!
”

“Me, I don’t want school.”

“Your mind is too young to think. As we say, ‘The teeth that come first are not used in chewing.’ As long as you live here, your Baba says school.”

“
La hasha.
”

“You telling me
never?
Jigana!” He looked at Mama. “He doesn’t want school? Saint Jude Thaddaeus!”

“
Bwana,
this boy has grown strong-head,” Mama said. “See how he is looking at our eyes. Insult!”

Baba stood up suddenly, his hands shaking. I didn’t cover my cheeks with my hands to protect myself from his slap or spittle, as I usually did when he was angry. I was ready for him to kill me. My family was breaking up because of me. He stood there, trembling with anger, confused.

Mama patted his shoulders to calm him down. He brushed her aside and went out to cool off. I monitored him through a hole in the wall. Soon he was cursing himself aloud for drinking too much and sleeping through Ex-mas Day and missing the chance to meet the tourists. As his mind turned to Maisha’s good fortune, he began to sing “A Jaguar is a Jaguar is a Jaguar” to the night, leaping from stone to stone, tracing the loose cobbles that studded the floodwater like the heads of stalking crocodiles in a river. In the sky, some of the tall city buildings were branded by lights left on by forgetful employees, and a few shopping centers wore the glitter of Ex-mas; flashing lights ascended and descended like angels on Jacob’s dream ladder. The long city buses, Baba’s hunting grounds, had stopped for the night. As the streets became emptier, cars drove faster through the floods, kicking up walls of water, which collapsed on our shack.

Back inside, Baba plucked his half-used
miraa
stick from the rafter and started chewing. He fixed his eyes on the trunk. A mysterious smile dribbled out of the corners of his mouth. Eventually, the long stick of
miraa
subsided into a formless sponge. His spitting was sharp and arced across the room and out the door. Suddenly, his face brightened. “
Hakuna matata!
” he said. Then he dipped into the carton and came up with a roll of wire and started lashing the wheels of the trunk to the props of our shack. For a moment, it seemed he might be able to stop Maisha from going away.

Mama tried to discourage him from tying down the trunk. “
Bwanaaa
. . . stop it! She will leave if she finds you
manga-mangaring
with her things.”

“Woman, leave this business to me,” he said, rebuking her. “I’m not going to sit here and let any Honolulus run away with our daughter. They must marry her properly.”

“You should talk,” Mama said. “Did you come to my father’s house for my hand?”

“Nobody pays for trouble,” Baba said. “You’re trouble. If I just touch you, you get pregnant. If I even look at you—twins, just like that. Too, too ripe.”

“Me am always the problem,” Mama said, her voice rising.

“All me am saying is we must to treat the tourist well.”

Atieno was shivering; her hand was poking out of the shack. Baba yanked it back in and stuck her head through the biggest hole in the middle of our blanket. That was our way of ensuring that the family member who most needed warmth maintained his place in the center of the blanket. Baba grabbed Otieno’s legs and pushed them through two holes on the fringe. “Children of Jaguar,” he whispered into their ears. “Ex-mas
ya
Jag-uar.” He tried to tuck Atieno and Otieno properly into the blanket, turning them this way and that, without success. Then he became impatient and rolled them toward each other like a badly wrapped meat roll, their feet in each other’s face, their knees folded and tucked into each other’s body—a blanket womb.

Mama reminded him to wedge the door, but he refused. He wanted us to wait for Maisha. He winked at me as if I were the cosentry of our fortune. Mama handed Baby to me and lay down. I sat there sniffing
kabire
until I became drunk. My head swelled, and the roof relaxed and shook, then melted into the sky.

I was floating. My bones were inflammable. My thoughts went out like electric currents into the night, their counter-currents running into each other, and, in a flash of sparks, I was hanging on the door of the city bus, going to school. I hid my uniform in my bag so that I could ride free, like other street children. Numbers and letters of the alphabet jumped at me, scurrying across the page as if they had something to say. The flares came faster and faster, blackboards burned brighter and brighter. In the beams of sunlight leaking through the holes in the school roof, I saw the teacher writing around the cracks and patches on the blackboard like a skillful
matatu
driver threading his way through our pothole-ridden roads. Then I raced down our bald, lopsided field with an orange for a rugby ball, jumping the gullies and breaking tackles. I was already the oldest kid in my class.

Mama touched my shoulders and relieved me of the infant. She stripped Baby of the plastic rompers, cleaned him up, and put him in a nappy for the night. With a cushion wrested from Naema, who was sleeping, Mama padded the top of the carton into a cot. After placing Baby in it, she straightened the four corners of the carton and then folded up our mosquito net and hung it over them. It had been donated by an
NGO
, and Baba had not had a chance to pawn it yet. Then Mama wrapped her frame around the carton and slept.

I
WOKE
UP
BABA
when Maisha returned, before dawn. He had been stroking his rosary beads, dozing and tilting until his head upset the mosquito netting. Mama had to continually elbow or kick him off. And each time, he opened his eyes with a practiced smile, thinking the Jaguar hour had arrived. The rain had stopped, but clouds kept the night dark. The city had gorged itself on the floods, and its skin had swelled and burst in places. The makeshift tables and stalls of street markets littered the landscape, torn and broken, as if there had been a bar fight. Garbage had spread all over the road: dried fish, stationery, trinkets, wilted green vegetables, plastic plates, wood carvings, underwear. Without the usual press of people, the ill-lit streets sounded hollow, amplifying the smallest of sounds. Long after a police car had passed, it could be heard negotiating potholes, the officers extorting their bribes—their Ex-mas
kitu kidogo
—from the people who could not afford to go to their up-country villages for the holidays.

Maisha returned in an old Renault 16 taxi. She slouched in the back while the driver got out. Kneeling and applying pliers to open the back door, the driver let her out of the car. Baba’s sighs of disappointment were as loud as the muezzin who had begun to call Nairobi to prayer. My sister stepped out, then leaned on the car, exhausted. There were bags of food on the seat.

She gestured at Baba to go away. He ignored her.

“So where is
our
Jaguar and
musungu?
” Baba asked the taxi driver, peering into the shabby car as if it might be transformed at any moment.

“What Jaguar? What
musungu?
” the driver asked, monitoring Maisha’s movements.

“The
nini
Jaguar. . . . Where is my daughter coming from?” Baba asked him.

“Me, I can’t answer you that question,” he told Baba, and pointed to his passenger.

She bent in front of the only functioning headlamp to count out the fare. Her trousers were so tight that they had crinkled on her thighs and pockets; she struggled to get to the notes without breaking her artificial nails, which curved inward like talons. Yesterday, her hair had been low cut, gold, wavy, and crisp from a fresh perm. Now it stood up in places and lay flat in others, revealing patches of her scalp, which was bruised from the chemicals. It was hard to distinguish peeling face powder from damaged skin. To rid herself of an early outbreak of adolescent pimples, she had bleached her face into an uneven lightness. Her eyelids and the skin under her eyes had reacted the worst to the assorted creams she was applying, and tonight her fatigue seemed to have seeped under the burns, swelling her eyes.

The driver could not easily roll up the window. He extended his arm to guard the food bags, his collateral. Baba brought out a six-inch nail and went for the worn tires. “What
dawa
have you given my daughter? She always comes home strong.”

The driver crumpled immediately, his pleas laden with fright. “
Mzee,
my name is Karume. Paul Kinyanjui wa Karume. . . . Me, I be an upright Kenyan. I fear God.”

“And you want to steal my daughter’s bags?”

“No. Please, take the bags. Please,” the man begged, trying to restrain Baba from bursting his tires.

“
Aiie,
Baba. You shame me. Shut up,” Maisha said weakly, pushing the money toward the driver.

Baba collected the bags and strolled from the road, his nose full of good smells, until he suddenly broke into a run, to untie the trunk before Maisha reached the shack.

The driver got into his car and was about to put the money into his breast pocket when he started frisking himself. Baba stood watching from the door of the shack. Soon it was as if the driver had soldier ants in his clothes. He unzipped his pockets, then zipped them again quickly, as if the thief were still lurking. He removed his coat, then his shirt, and searched them. He recounted his itinerary to the skies with eyes closed, his index finger wagging at invisible stars. He searched his socks, then he got down on all fours, scouring the wet ground. He dabbed at the sweat, or tears, running down his face. “Where is my money?” he said to Maisha, finally finding his voice. “
Haki,
it was in my pocket now, now.”