The Dream Chasers (4 page)

THE SKIES WERE ABOUT TO
relieve themselves on the earth's head. Some drops escaped through their crossed fidgety legs. People collided. Headlights glowered at bumpers. I sat in the back of the bus, next to the window. The glass chattered in the window, as though it had lots to say and was getting impatient because no one was listening.

The bus was filled with labourers on their way to work. They carried tools in their hands—mallets, hammers, chisels, and axes. Their trousers had patches sewn in. The trousers were mostly corduroy, washed too many times. The roughness on the labourers' hands looked like an expensive decorative finish to their flesh, like the rough cast sprayed over walls and ceilings when a house is done.

I wondered what their names were, these labourers. How many daughters did they have? Which milkshake would they prefer: vanilla or strawberry? Did they kill mosquitoes by smashing them between their fingers? Did they wear slippers with thumbtacks stuck on them: one slipper blue; the other, red? I watched the conductor steady himself along the aisle as he received passengers' fares. His knuckles were doodled with hair. When the bus hit a bump, he held the bar over the headrest on the seat in front of me.

The rickety bus teetered over dusty slopes, rattling us against its battered sides, ramming us against each other. The rain slashed the sky, but a little sun peeked from behind a cloud. The hyenas were getting married, Mama would say. The sun made little rainbows in the rainwater. When I was younger, I had tried to touch the rainbow and to move it, and to make it by throwing palmfuls of water in the air. It had been my first lesson in physics: some things one can never touch, move, or make. One can only pretend to.

I got home, took a bath, and sat down on my spot on the reed couch, looking at the empty space in Mama's spot. Putting six teaspoons of sugar in my tea instead of two, I chugged all of it and then ate six slices of bread.

I watched CNN, laughing at bulletins that were not funny. I threw my head back, lifted my cheeks with my fingers, and made the face Mama made when she laughed.

Ha ha ha
! The laugh sounded as though it got sick in my chest, as though it meant to come out as phlegm.

I gathered up my breakfast things and arranged them in the sink: forks on the left, plates on the right, glasses in the middle, blacks on top, and whites at the bottom. In the other sink: toothbrushes on the left, toothpaste on the right, and soap in the middle.

I scrubbed the floors and mopped them, then stood at the window watching the rain, following the movements of the suicidal drops as they jumped off the edge of the drain pipe.

I took a
matatu
to Muchai's apartment in Nairobi West estate. The door was open; I let myself in.

“Nyaera?” I said, shaking awake the figure on the couch. “Is Muchai home?”

Nyaera put her legs on the floor and sat up. She studied my face in the light of the television. “Muchai is busy; he's not taking any visitors.”

“I'm not a
visitor
.”

I walked down the short corridor to the bathroom. While I was in there, I heard Nyaera and Muchai argue.

“Why do you fawn over her?”

“I'm not
fawning
.”

“Then tell her to leave. Tell her to leave or I'm leaving.”

“Nyaera, we've been through this before.”

“That's what I thought.”

The front door slammed. I turned the knob and saw Muchai standing by the window, watching Nyaera's retreat as she walked out the front gate.

“Maybe I should never have come here.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

We sat in silence, a silence in which we spoke words within the enclosures of our minds. Without, there was nothing to say; but within them, we rambled away. Our eyes never met, but his mind's eye locked with mine. He watched me with his mind—an unwavering, mental stare.

“I came to talk to you, but you don't look up to talking. Maybe I should go home.”

Muchai walked me to the door. He stood there for a few moments looking—really looking—at me. His eyes took their time on my face, at the figure-hugging manner in which my dress held me, at its abrupt stop two inches from my knees. He looked back at my face. His eyes rested there for a few moments. He opened his mouth to say something, but his mobile phone interrupted him. “Hello? Yeah. … Yeah. … What do you mean I sound bored? Of course, I'm not very bored. … Yeah, she's here. … What has that got to do with anything? … Be reasonable. … I'm tired; I can't talk about centrepieces and bridal party colours now. … No, it's not because Lulu is here. … Go to bed. I'll see you tomorrow at my parents' house.” He sighed and threw his phone on the couch.

“What's happening at your parents' house tomorrow?”

“Nyaera's family and mine will have lunch together. You should come.”

“I'm not family. If I were, I'd be Kikuyu like you.”

Muchai clicked his tongue.

I opened the door and left the apartment block for the bus stop.

A man sold maize nearby. He fanned his flame with a plastic lid. The red embers in his charcoal burner had cracked the tips of his fingers, roasting his flesh along with the maize. Other men pulled handcarts by the roadside, their backs rippling with muscles and trickling with little pathways of sweat. It was only midmorning, but the sun had travelled halfway across the sky and pitched camp high up. It beat down on the earth and glazed and scorched. Even the breeze was hot, and it carried with it wafts of donkey droppings and melting rubber.

I rode home in a noisy
matatu
. “Nasty” was painted across the top of the windscreen, in purple. In front of me, a woman in a pink chiffon dress opened a book titled
By the River of Babylon
. She used a crusade pamphlet as a bookmark, which said, “Come; fetch your anointing.”

At home, I sat on the veranda, sorting out pishori rice. I picked the little, shiny stones that hid within the rice, pushed them to one side of the tray, and pushed the clean rice to the other side of the tray. When the clean rice became a small hill on the tray, I poured it into a basin. I poured the last of the rice inside the basin.
Swoosh.
The chaff made me sneeze, and my sneeze created an avalanche in the rice. Some of it scattered across the floor, across the ridges of my toes, and across my flip-flops. Mounds of stone and rice debris fell into the basin of clean, sorted rice.

I picked up a handful of clean rice and rocks, and hurled it into the garden below. The mother hen raced her chicks to it, cackling. The geese pranced parallel to the laundry slabs, shaking their tails, occasionally stopping to do a yoga-like stretch—a pose with the right foot and left wing stretched to the sky and the left foot and right wing to the ground. I placed the basin of rice on the chair next to me, the chair that Mama would have sat on had she been home. Its canvas had ripped, spilling out innards of foam and sack.

I thought of Mama's black lips curling round the edges when she leaned in to smell the aroma wafting from the pot of
kienyeji
chicken. And of her fingers dyeing red when she squeezed in half a tree tomato from the garden and offered one side to me. I reminisced about her putting on a headscarf when she blew over the outdoor fire, so her wig wouldn't smell of firewood smoke. Or how she would glance disapprovingly at me when I ate ugali
with a fork, instead of moulding it in my fingers.

I remembered the passage in a programme:
Hallo, Children
, when Tom had lost his pencil.

Mary, have you seen my pencil?

Peter, have you seen my pencil?

Cat, have you seen my pencil?

This time, I wondered,

Chair, have you seen Mama?

Goose, have you seen Baba?

Sky, have you seen my heart?

Beyond the gate, Muchai skipped over pools of rainwater as he crossed the street. He walked towards me. The gravel in the footpath glittered as it caught specks of sun, and steam rose from it. The morning's rain gathered pebbles together, stirring them around like ingredients in broth. The steam coiled around Muchai's shoes, some of it hissing as though annoyed that he had stepped on it. He opened out his palm and showed me a ring. “There's no wedding anymore.”

“What do you mean there's no wedding?”

“Nyaera came to break it off soon after you left. She said my mind is elsewhere.”

“Do you love Nyaera?”

“She's a good Kikuyu girl.” As though that made sense.

He threw the ring across the veranda. It spun several times, fast and blurry. Then it swallowed its pride, fell on its side, resigned to the fact that it would never achieve the ultimate purpose of its existence, and that all the pain it went through at the smelter's and the jeweller's, was for naught.

Muchai glanced at the sky. “We should go inside before it starts raining.”

He opened the door, entered the sitting room, and switched on the television. The news was on. All it spoke about was the electoral commission this, the voter registration that. Raila Odinga's camp complained that some voters, mostly Luo, weren't on the list of registered voters. I stood up, rolled up the sisal mat, and placed it against the wall.

“Lulu, the wind is blowing leaves into the house. Get in before it scatters your thoughts in the fields.”

“Maybe the thoughts will sprout in the earth, and we will reap food for thought.”

I closed the door behind me. The television went off. I flipped the light switch on and off twice. The bulb stared at us, barren.

Muchai and I drank mud-red tea. There were yams in the storeroom. I took some out, sat at the window, and began to flake off their skin with a blunt knife.

“I'm leaving for Eldoret tomorrow,” Muchai said.

“What for?”

“I told Mother about Nyaera breaking off the engagement. She suggested I accompany her to Eldoret as she goes to vote. The clean air and open spaces will clear my mind.”

I felt like one of the
nyawawas
I'd heard about in stories. They were spirits of dead people. They rose from Lake Victoria during thunderstorms. Villagers would pound cooking spoons against pots and roam from village to village to drive them out.

“Can I see you when I get back from Eldoret?”

“Muchai, what kind of question is that? We've seen each other almost every day since we were in primary school.”

“But I'd like to
see
you, Lulu, nothing like ‘just friends'.”

I looked outside the window. A charter plane flew by so low its belly seemed to brush against the top branches of the tree by the fence. The clouds drifted by in the sky, forlorn like
nyawawa
clouds. The grass in the garden danced in the wind. It was yellow, pus-coloured; it went so high it covered half the window, scratching it, throwing orange and red ladybirds on the glass.

“Lulu, look at me. Tell me what you're thinking. Have I offended you?”

“Even after Kenya votes in a new administration, I shall still be a Luo girl, and you a Kikuyu boy.”

Muchai walked up to me. “A woman once boiled rocks and made chicken soup for her children.”

I did not realise there were tears in my eyes until Muchai kissed them. “Please promise to let me
see
you when I get back.”

I closed my eyes, felt the urgent prodding of his lips over mine, the deafening pulse of blood in my ears, the choking way in which I forgot how to breathe right.

In the morning, I lay across Muchai's chest. It was cold, so he brought the covers up to my neck and tightened his arms around me. The clock on my bedside table ticked loudly.

“Do you want to hear a story Mama once told me?” I asked.

“Tell me the story Mama once told you.”

“One December day, there was a bad storm. The wind was so strong it blew off a sheet of metal roofing from a neighbour's house. A man went zooming past in a
bodaboda
. The metal sheet flew in the air towards the man riding the bodaboda. The metal sheet sliced his head neat off his neck. It all happened so fast, the man's head didn't know it had been severed.

“As it bounced on the ground, it laughed loudly. ‘Phew! That was a close shave. That metal sheet nearly sliced off my head!'

“We aren't that bodaboda man, Lulu. Our heads are still intact. Look, here is my head. And here is yours.”

“Aren't you the one who told me that, sometimes, the more you look the less you see?”

“Then stop looking and start seeing.” Muchai memorised parts of my face, the feel of my cheeks on his palms, and the taste of my lips. I knew he memorised because I memorised, too.

MAMA CALLED ME EARLY ON
the day before elections. “I'm at Machakos Bus Station. Will you help me with the luggage?”

The highway was filled with cars. Every few feet, a wiry man with rust-coloured teeth blew over a flame, turning maize and cassava this way and that on the wire gauze. Other men stood by their wheelbarrows, peeling sugarcane, cutting the pieces up into little cubes, and packing them in see-through plastic bags. Women ambled between the cars, selling grapes, underwear, and flags.

On the side of town where Machakos Bus Station was, the buildings were all brownish purple, like concrete insides of yams. The alleys and roads all rammed into each other, and buildings started and ended at ill-conceived spots. Idle men fiddled with the bells of their bicycles. A drunk fellow swayed precariously on his feet, tipped forwards, and crashed into a vandalised post. A dark pool gathered around his bottom.

Mama sat on a park bench, a palm to her cheek, staring into the air. At her feet were two sacks and a duffel bag. She wore that gingham dress, the one that erased all the curves from her body and drew straight lines in their places. Across her bosom was a faded scorch print from leaving the iron too long on the fabric.

“Mama?”

She looked up. “Oh, you're here.”

She stood up, rolled a scarf around the crown of her head, and lifted one of the sacks. It had maize grain in it. She balanced it on her head. “Will you pass me that bag?”

I did.

“Carry the other sack. It has beans in it.”

I tried to lift it. My hands went wobbly; my arms buckled.

“Oh, for God's sake!” Mama put down her sack of maize and lifted the sack of beans to my back. With my arms over my shoulders, I held onto the corners of the sack and arched forward so it wouldn't slide down my back.

Mama balanced the sack of maize on her head again, took the bag in her hand, and began to walk.

“What's all this?” I asked. “Are we opening a grain shop?”

“Lulu, the woman that fills her granaries isn't kept awake in the night by the growling of tapeworms in her stomach.”

We took a somewhat empty bus home. We sat at the back on separate seats: she at one window, me at the other. The car outside my window had a bumper sticker that said:
Najivunia Kuwa Mkenya
.

“Mama, are you proud to be Kenyan?”

“
Tch
!
Lulu, why should I be proud to be Kenyan? Don't you know that pride is one of the seven deadly sins? The English say that pride comes before a fall.”

The bus went up Lang'ata Road, past the Lang'ata Cemetery. I imagined a Kikuyu man buried next to a Luo man. They lay peacefully next to each other. I thought of headstones I've seen in previous visits to the place:
God gives and God takes. A flower has been plucked. May His Name be praised.

“Mama, look at that place. Isn't it beautiful?”

“The cemetery?
Asi
! Daughter of mine, are you a witch?
Walahi
! If you buried me there, I'd haunt you for the rest of your life. Can you imagine the horror of being buried next to a Kikuyu man?”

“But you'd be dead. How would you know I'd buried you there, next to a Kikuyu man?”

“My spirit wouldn't move on.”

“There are so many dead people there. Wouldn't you love the company?”

“It's taboo, Lulu. A person must return to the ground that gave birth to their lineage, the ground their forefathers walked on.”

The bus accelerated past fruit carts and suits on display, past a Kenchic restaurant whose patrons lined up for chips, past men who chewed last month's gum in between tobacco-blackened teeth, and past women who fashioned tin lamps for a living.

“Haven't you been eating?” Mama asked. “Why do your clothes wear you? If you're a clothes hanger, then what is it you're doing here in this bus? You should be hooked to your closet in the house.
Asi
!”

When we got to the house, Mama cooked ugali
,
kale, and beef stew. She rolled out the sisal mat and we sat out in the grass.

“Baba called me,” she said.

“What did he want?”

“He told me you were poisoning his wife's mind.”

Mama moulded her ugali
into a fist-sized ball. She flattened one end of it and made a spoon out of it. She used it to scoop her beef stew and bit on the edible utensil. Stew dribbled down her chin. She wiped it with the back of her hand.

“Mama, Baba beat his wife up because I poisoned her mind.”

“
Tch
! Who ever heard of such a thing? Did anyone ever die from a poisoned mind? Did you sprinkle rat poison over her thoughts? Lulu, he beat her up because he beat her up, not because you poisoned her mind. You know he used to beat me up, too. I remember the first time he did it. It was during Christmas, you were six. Baba hadn't been home in a week. One of the neighbours directed me to where they had spotted him.

“I took your hand. We crossed ditches and jumped over quarry stones. The murram burnt through the slippers on our feet. Your little hands strangled my fingers. Carols rent the air. At first, they were sweet, like audible crystals of sugar. But soon, every house and car and shop in the street played them, until their sweetness could have given you audio diabetes.

“You and I, we stood outside the Sidewalk Bar. I let you play in the dirt, in the parking bay. You knotted braids in the scant patches of grass, singing, ‘
Cinderella, dressed in yellow, went upstairs to kiss a fellow. By mistake, she kissed a snail. How many doctors did she see?'

“Baba's tortoise car was parked next to the skip. He was at the deck chairs outside the bar. A crate of beer sat at his feet, half a goat on the table, and a woman by his side.”

“Was it Chinika?”

“No, it wasn't Chinika. The woman was a magazine-stencil woman, like those mannequins in the shops in town. You know them? The ones in striped bodysuits, with arms delicately placed over hips, flyaway hair, and flawless legs stretching from here to Mombasa.

“When Baba came home that night, I confronted him. He beat me. I slept with you that night. You cried and told me you wished you were Muchai's sister instead of Baba's daughter.”

“Baba should have married a drum. It makes for good beating.”

Mama drank her soup. “Ah, you now. Why aren't you eating? Me, I'm done with mine. Look.” She showed me her empty plate. “Or did I cook you the wrong food? What do clothes hangers eat for lunch? Tell me and I shall cook it for you. Is it grated cotton sweaters? Is it baked timber? Marinated tin?”

“Mama!”

“Go on; put lumps of ugali
in your mouth. Do it now, or I shall make you drink a cup of cooking oil to fatten you.”

“
Urgh
! Mama! I'm eating. I'm eating.”

She watched me for a few minutes. “Did night runners come to the house while I was gone?”

“Mama, this is not the countryside.”

Mama clicked her tongue. “Neighbours, come feast your ears with my daughter's stupidity. Of course, I don't mean that kind of night runner. I mean the kind that should be burnt in the market square if caught. The kind that comes in their birthday suit and wreaks havoc with people's daughters. Did that kind of night runner come to spend the night here?”

I choked on the ugali
in my mouth. I coughed and coughed and coughed.

Mama threw her head back and laughed. It wasn't a pretence laugh to curb the sushi silence. It was a laugh deep from the tips of her toes. It took a few seconds to travel up her body. When it fell out of her mouth, it fell out in snipped-up pieces.

Ha.

Ha-ha.

Ha.

“When did you become so serious, my daughter? Of course, I'm only pulling your leg. I know you're a good girl. You'd never let a night runner inside our house, much less a Kikuyu one.” Mama stood up. “Election day is tomorrow; the markets will close. We should go shop today.”

Mama and I went to Gikomba Market. The stalls rising out of the ground were haphazard, like an absurd sketch of ragged brown squares that no one had bothered to complete.

Around us, women scaled the tilapia and piled tripe in cooking-fat containers. The market women wore flowered headscarves, woollen sweaters, maxi skirts, and gumboots. They kept their money in clear paper bags, inside their brassieres. Their breasts hung low, tucked into their waistbands. Mama bought what we needed to buy: tilapia, tripe, cowpeas, fruits, and kale.

Somewhere in the distance, someone screamed. “THIEF! THIEF!”

The market people took off like mad wildebeests, running towards the screams. The earth trembled under their feet. Body parts slapped loudly against each other in the melee. Containers toppled; tripe bled into the ground, as though offering libations to the gods. Their rank odour rose in the hot, choking air, shimmering in the sun as though the gods were awakening. After sometime, the market women returned to the stalls.

“Why didn't you go see the thief burn?” the women asked. “Thieves must pay. We threw a tyre over his neck. See that?” The women pointed into the distance, where a cloud of dark smoke rose into the sky.

Mama clicked. “What about thieves that steal husbands' hearts? And thieves that steal our taxes? Who shall throw tyres over their necks?”