The Dream Chasers (3 page)

“LULU,” MRS NJOKA SAID WHEN
she spotted me, “come give this old lady a hug.” She smiled at me as she spoke, dimples punching her cheeks. Muchai's mother was beautiful, even into her late fifties. She wore a red print dress with a Chinese collar.

“How is your mother?” she asked. We stood in their garden, inside a tent. There was loud
mugithi
playing around us. People gathered in one great row, placed hands on each other's waists, and danced towards the front of the tent.

“Mama is alright,” I said. “She sent her regards.”

Heads tipped back, and smiles cracked open under tinkling laughter. Handkerchiefs wiped the laughter that spilled out of eyes. More music came. Mrs Njoka led me to another tent where food was served. There was a buffet with goat, roast potatoes, ugali, steamed rice,
mutura
, and traditional vegetables. She thrust a glass of red wine into my hands. “The young people are inside the house. Go find them. Have some fun.”

I entered the house and stood in a corner watching the younger people eat, talk, and slide into shadows. I saw Nyaera. She was seated alone in another corner. I walked up to her.

“Lulu? What do you want?”

“Do I have to want something? I came to congratulate you on the impending nuptials.”

“If that's all, then thank you.” She was her prettiest from the right side of her face because each feature was then softened and hardened at the same time, and her eyes were black pearls, and her skin, black silk.

Her face was full of contradictions. Her eyelashes were charming little men taking a gracious bow after a dramatic display. At the same time, they were little more than a broom whose bristles were brittle and clumped in dried paint. The sanguine colour of her lips called out like a juicy plum wanting to be eaten, but they were also like an engorged boil needing to be burst. I walked away from Nyaera and climbed the stairs to the room at the end of the hall. I knocked twice.

“Lulu?” Muchai said when he opened the door.

“Can I come in?”

He moved aside and I sidled in.

“Are you okay?” I asked. “It's your party. Why are you holed up in here?”

Muchai shut the door. We stood a foot from each other. “You shouldn't be up here.”

“Why?”

“How do I explain this?” He paced the floor and stopped. “I'm a drunk Kikuyu man. All bad for a sober Luo girl.”

“I'm not sober.”

“Aren't you?”

I held a hand to him. His hand tried to evade mine, but our fingers brushed and then intertwined. He held my hand for a moment, naked torment brimming in his eyes. I was afraid to move, afraid to injure his blatant vulnerability.

“Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

“What I want and what you should do are two different things.”

I looked down at my feet, my fingers twisting the edge of my shirt. I refused to let him pick my face apart, pry the mucky blurred thoughts in my head with his eyes.

Muchai raised his hand, the hand that twined with mine. He brought it to my jaw, to my chin, to the slight crack between my lips. When I swallowed, it felt like I had swallowed a live chicken. It scurried about my throat, flapping its feathers, choking me. He rested his forehead on mine, with his hand and mine still clasped, pressed between our chests. Muchai tilted his head so that his lips found my cheek. He pressed them there for a few seconds.

“You should go,” he said. He stepped away from me and turned the doorknob.

I ran up the street to my own house, took a sisal mat, and spread it on the grass. I lay on it, with my arms beneath my head, grieving eyes to the sky. Mama's singing came to my ears.

The word will stand. The word will stand. The world will pass, but the word will stand. Your riches will pass. Your education will pass. The world will pass, but the word will stand.

I turned and saw Mama's shadow on the kitchen window. She was preparing supper. I rolled the sisal mat, left it in the veranda, and went to find her.

“How was the party?”

“All right.”

Mama uncovered the sufuria
on the gas cooker. Steam containing nutmeg, coriander, and black pepper rose above her head, like spirits exiting a possessed person. “I didn't expect you back so soon. What happened?”

“My heart has become a truant. It jumped over the wall and escaped. I must let it sleep outside, on the park bench.”

“
Asi!
What are you saying, Lulu? Translate your thoughts into a language I understand. Am I hearing you say you're seriously eyeing a Kikuyu man? A married man?”

“Muchai is not married, Mama.”

“But he's Kikuyu. That is much worse.”

“I don't have time for this, Mama.”

“What do you have time for, Lulu? Tell me so that I can go to the bank and withdraw some money to pay you for your time.”

“Mama, don't make things up in your head.” I felt drained.

“What do you know about my head?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

I turned away and started towards the door that led into the corridor.

Mama shouted at me: “Don't you dare walk away from me, Lulu!”

I walked on.

“I'm speaking to you! Turn back this instant! LULU!”

I heard wind near my ear and saw a flash of light near my face. An object hit the wall and fell to the ground. It was a butcher knife. I turned to Mama. There were tears in her eyes.

“I didn't mean to throw it at you,” she whispered. “You provoked me.”

I walked towards her, opening my arms out. Mama shook her head, tears splashing against her cheeks. She opened the back door and walked out into the night. The next morning, she called me.

“I'm in the village,” she said. “I came to see my mother. I want to think. Don't call me. I shall call you.”

Mama crept back into the house while I was asleep. I imagined her taking her black dresses, her petticoats, and her woollen sweaters off from the hangers, lining them against the bed, ironing what needed to be ironed, and folding them into airtight squares. I pictured her arranging her wigs and underwear on the left of the suitcase, her clothes on the right; the petticoats at the bottom, the dresses on top. I envisioned her placing a deodorant stick, a toothbrush, two bars of bathing soap, and two tubes of toothpaste next to the wigs and underwear, while humming Miriam Makeba's “Pata Pata”.

She would continue droning as she rode the
matatu
to town, and as she took a shuttle to the village. I could see her—still humming—as she shoved her suitcase into the hut of her growing years, as she pounded rock-hard maize cobs together to knock off yellow grains into a waiting basket.

I took the next bus out of Nairobi to Mombasa. At Baba's house, I found Baba's second wife Chinika doing laundry.

“Lulu!” Chinika dropped the shirt she was holding. “What are you doing here? Baba never said anything about you coming.”

“If it's too much trouble, I will sleep at a lodging house in town.”

Chinika rinsed the shirt and flapped it in the air. Some of the spray flew into my face. “What will people think? You want them to call me the evil stepmother? Of course you shall stay here—trouble or no trouble.” She placed pegs on the collar of the shirt. She then took a magenta bedsheet and hung it on the line. The sheet dripped into the ground, its blood a constant patter that splashed beet-red drops on my white socks.

Chinika continued. “Sorry for the journey. I hope it went as smooth as
nywee
.” She gathered the corners of the bedsheet in her fingers and wrung it out between her palms. When she let go, the bedsheet was anaemic, fluttering weakly in the morning air.

“Yes, it went as smooth as
nywee
.”

Chinika poured water into the drain, bursting bubbles, chasing away the ones that refused to pop. She threw leftover pegs into the bucket and walked towards the house. I followed her.

She bustled between the counter, the refrigerator, and the microwave. She retrieved crockery and cutlery and set it before me. The microwave beeped, and the light inside it went off. Chinika opened the little door and took out a plate on which was arranged several
mandazis
the size of slippers. She poured me a cup of hot milk and pushed a ceramic sugar pot towards me. “Eat.”

She walked out of sight, and I heard her make a phone call. When she came back, she said, “I've just spoken to your mother. Did she really try to stab you?”

I clicked. “
Ah
!
Mama and her big mouth! Now why would she say you a thing like that?”

“Water always finds a way of bursting out. Where are your things, Lulu? Didn't you come with anything?”

“No, I don't intend to stay for long.”

“Well, you must be tired. I will show you where to sleep.” Chinika led me to the guest room.

There was a large carton with Sony Wega printed across it, in the corner. In it were clothes that Chinika had outgrown. On one side of the room next to the windows was a metal bed. There was a desk and a wardrobe against another wall. The wardrobe had other cartons in it, filled with box files and globe files and spring files binding together previous versions of Baba's life.

Chinika woke me up in the evening. “Baba is here. He wants to see you.”

My mental images of Baba, cemented over years of not seeing him, had become so convincing that I almost couldn't recognise his face when I saw him.

“I heard you were here, Lulu. I don't like to be ambushed. You should have called.” He paused to study my face. “How long has it been? A year?”

“Two years.”

“I heard she tried to stab you.”

“
She
has a name.”

“Eshe.” He rolled his eyes.

“I provoked her.”

“Chinika provokes me all the time; I've never stabbed her.”

“You stab her in a different way. You stab her heart.”

Baba glared at me. “Dress up. Put on something decent. We are going out for supper.”

“I don't have anything
decent
. I came with nothing.”

“Then borrow something from Chinika.”

Baba took us to a Japanese restaurant. We ate rice, with raw fish wrapped in seaweed.
Sushi
, Baba called it, making it sound as though it wasn't just raw fish and seaweed. We all ate in silence—silence that was wrapped in seaweed, raw
sushi
silence, that muffled the jazz music and the clang of forks on plates, that drowned out thoughts.

Back at home, Baba's business partner Mr Almasi came to see Baba. They sat out in the front patio where they reclined on chaises lounges, drank Chardonnay, and took tequila shots, barking out laughs at indecipherable political jokes.

“Chinika!” Baba said. “Bring Mr Almasi food. Don't just sit
ndee
in that kitchen.”

“
Puh
!” Mr Almasi said when I took a jug of warm water and a basin to him, so he could wash his hands. “That water is too hot, little girl. Do you want to cripple my hands?”

Baba had a taste of the food. He spat it out in the grass. “The rice is uncooked. Chinika has started to cook like Kikuyus. She's making us raw food.” He was one to talk about raw food. He'd made us eat raw fish.

“Chinika didn't make the rice, Baba. I did.”

“I am not surprised. You take after your Mama.”

“The
mahamri
is too oily,” Mr Almasi said, as though Baba was having all the fun criticising the food. “She also makes mahamri
like a Kikuyu.” He stared down my dress as I bent to place the jug of crippling water. He gawked and nibbled on the mahamri, and then gawked and nibbled some more.

I thought of some
mchongoano
that Muchai had liked when we were younger: “You are so poor that, instead of eating ugali and meat, you eat ugali and a picture of fish.” Mr Almasi ate mahamri
and a picture of me, as I went to the kitchen.

Baba followed me. “Dammit! You're behaving like a whore. Go put something decent on.” He went back to the patio.

For a long moment, I stared at Baba from the kitchen window. Mr Almasi said something to him. He smiled his finished smile with the smattering of whiskers on it. When I was younger, he had saved that finished smile for me. To other people, the smile had been incomplete, almost famished, ending three-quarter way past the middle of his face, as though afraid of bursting through the banks of happiness that existed beyond that point. He had saved his happiness for me. But things had changed.

I CHANGED OUT OF THE
dress that offended Baba and sat out the back with Chinika, beneath a baobab, grating coconuts
.
I cracked the shells, pried out the coconut, and handed it to Chinika who worked it on the
mbuzi
. Coconut husks fell at my feet, spun in the grass, tripped on baobab roots, and fell on their sides.

“Did your mother really try to stab you?” Chinika asked.

“I provoked her.”

Chinika shook her head. “I'm sad for your mother,” she said. “But really, I'm sadder for myself. At least your mother's mind is asleep in a safe house. Mine keeps me awake each night.”

“You also have to live with Baba. That's enough to make anyone sad.”

Chinika nodded. “I had so many dreams once. Baba told me to stop dreaming because, if I dreamt too much, my fossil would be discovered in a mudslide of dreams I could never lift. ‘Those who dream too much can't fall asleep at night,' he said. Now I have ailing ulcer dreams that ooze the pus of regret.”

I looked at Chinika as she spoke, spotted a rogue tear sprout from its sleep and sprinkle across her lap.

“Did you start working?” I asked.

“I had a few businesses here and there. Baba closed them. He said no wife of his shall disrespect his name by breaking her back working.”

“Chinika, what did you go to the secretarial college for? Did they teach you courses called ‘How to Be Terrified of Men' and ‘How to Give up Your Dreams for Men'?”

“Only the chewer of chilli peppers knows how the chilli peppers sting.”

“But I don't need to chew the chilli peppers to know how they sting. I only have to look at your face.”

Chinika ignored me. “How is the university?”

“I'm on a semester break. Mama couldn't afford the fees for this year. I will go in during the next, after she receives dividends for her shares.”

“I wish I too had shares. I wouldn't put up with this anymore.”

In the morning, I found Chinika in the kitchen, brewing coffee.

“You're up early,” she said.

“I thought I'd see Baba before he left for work.”

Chinika handed me a cup of coffee. I sat at the table, watching her put detergent in a pail and stir the water into a lather. She mopped the terrazzo kitchen floor with a rag.

Baba came into the kitchen. He had a suit on; its jacket was draped over his arm. The cuff links on his shirt glimmered in the shy morning sun.

“Morning,” he grunted, tightening his tie.

“Morning, Baba,” Chinika and I said.

“Baba, I was hoping to talk to you—”

“I'm late, Lulu. We'll talk when I get back.”

“But I'm leaving.”

“Lulu, don't talk back to me. I said I'm late.” He poured himself a cup of coffee and drank it, standing at the door. “My wife, Almasi and his family will join us for supper. You should spend your day cooking.”

“I'll spend my day at the bank,” Chinika said slowly, looking down.

“At the bank? What for?”

She looked up. “I want to see if they can give me a loan … to restart my businesses.”

Baba choked on his tea. “Lulu, get out.”

I went to the guest room but still heard Baba's infuriated voice. “What kind of insult is this? Isn't the food I give you soft enough for your palate? Is the bed too hard for your skin? Do the sheets give you welts? Today is today; you will know not to stick thorns in a lion's paws!”

I heard the sound of blows and Chinika screaming.

“Who are you crying for? Do I look like your mother? Shut your mouth!”

The kitchen door creaked open, the echoes of Baba's shoes reverberated through the corridor. He pushed open the door to the guest room.

“Lulu, I don't want you here. Before you came, Chinika was a good woman. Now she questions authority. When I come back, I shouldn't see even a hair from your head. You understand?”