A Fool's Knot (7 page)

On the outside, Janet remained calm. Inside she had begun to boil a little, heated by what she considered to be trivial bureaucratic nonsense. “Would it help if I checked with the police officer who took the boys' names? He might have made a mistake.”

“Yes, we could try that,” said John still fingering through the papers. He then leaned back and banged on the hatch door. There was no reply so he banged again, much harder than before.

Now we'll have to wait for the inquest on why there's no answer, thought Janet, her frustration growing. This is just to put me off. “Shall I go across to the police station?”

“I think you had better,” said John. “My clerk has gone for lunch.”

Janet rose from her chair and left the office, the increased speed of her movements giving away her lack of trust in the current process. Outside, she broke into a run, telling the waiting Mwanza that she would be back in a minute. She did not stop to reply to his enquiry.

Across the road, she had some difficulty locating the officer who had made the arrests. The policeman on duty was convinced that he had gone for lunch. The officer in charge, whom she immediately demanded to see, was in the adjoining room. He declared that the officer in question was away ‘investigating'. The action was left open-ended, as if the policeman had embarked on a mission to seek out misdemeanours. Janet's impatience became visible as no progress was made. After ten minutes of more indecision, the man she sought appeared. He had simply been to the toilet at the far end of the compound and had stayed on for a quick cigarette. One by one the runners sent out to look for him returned with their negative reports stifled in mid-sentence by his presence. Still more time was needed, however, to establish once and for all that this officer was the one who had documented the case and taken the boys' statements, and more still to establish the veracity of the claim that the District Officer wanted to see him, there being, of course, no documentary evidence of this fact. But eventually Janet's persuasive attributes overcame the collective reluctance and the officer crossed the road with her back to the DO's compound.

John explained that there might be some confusion over one of the names on the Nzawa list. The policeman answered in Kikuyu - no wonder he got the spelling wrong, Janet thought - confirming that he had written the names exactly as each of the accused had instructed. Munovo was the correct name.

John turned to face Janet. She thought he looked sincere, but was not convinced. “Well, Miss Rowlandson, I am afraid I cannot issue a bail notice for this boy. I suggest that you come to the preliminary hearing on Friday so that you can identify the boy in person. If you travelled to Kitui to do that, then the officer in charge would have to notify me of the result in writing before I could act. It would be Friday at the earliest before I received his reply. So come to the hearing on Friday, speak on the boy's behalf and then I will consider your request for bail.”

Janet agreed, but her calm exterior was a conscious mask to hide an inner fury. “Of course it's the same boy” went around and around, unspoken in her head. In a final attempt to convince Bwana Mwangangi, she went out to the reception and returned with the boy's mother, who had accompanied her from Migwani and who had waited patiently and silently throughout in the waiting area. There followed a protracted argument between her and John in Kikamba, but there was no change in his position. The aging woman, who spoke no English and only a little Swahili, scoffed and left in a temper without waiting for Janet.

John watched her leave, shook his head and said, “I am sorry, Miss Rowlandson, but I simply cannot do it. These are simple people …” he began, raising his arms to signify what Janet interpreted to mean all people outside the confines of his office, “and it is difficult to explain the law to them because they have no concept of how it works.”

They are not the only ones, thought Janet, scathingly.

“Come to the hearing on Friday with the boy's mother and we will see what can be done then.” There was a finality about his tone.

Janet got up and left the office, bidding John Mwangangi a curt goodbye and not offering a handshake. John placed the wad of papers in a file and locked it in his cabinet. As he closed the office door, pulling it hard to ensure the latch engaged, his thoughts passed from Nzawa School and came to a rueful rest on contemplating the half-hour of his lunch break he had just lost.

After rejoining Mwanza and Munyolo's mother outside, Janet suggested they go into town and find a teashop. She felt disinclined to talk about what had happened, regretting most of all the waste of a whole morning and the necessity to devote perhaps another whole day on Friday. The three of them took lunch together. Janet spoke very little Kikamba and so could communicate with the boy's mother only via Mwanza, who revelled in his position as interpreter.

“The woman is saying, Miss Rowlandson, that the man is doing something very wrong because in Kikamba the names Munovo and Munyolo are the same.”

Janet's impatience was obvious. “He's obviously just another of these jumped-up government employees sitting in his office and creating bureaucratic complications to help justify his position. He has to do that, otherwise he would have nothing to do!”

For once Mwanza remained silent, Janet's tirade being beyond his translation skills. When he did speak, Janet's attention wavered at first, as it always did when Mwanza piped up, thinking that he might be changing the subject and starting to gossip in his usual way, but she soon began to register what he meant and was deeply shocked.

“Miss Rowlandson, I would love to ride a motorcycle like Father Michael's. I have a friend who can sell me one at a very fair price. He has bought it, but does not have enough money to buy petrol for it, so it just sits at his house not being used. He has asked me several times if I want to buy it, but I have said no, and I have said no because of one reason. I have enough money to buy the motorcycle, but I do not yet have a licence to ride it and I would not be able to afford to pay the bribe needed to get one. This man today is not making trouble because he feels that there is any difference between the names. He is using the policeman's mistake to ask for a bribe. There is no difference between the names.”

Janet felt suddenly enlightened, but not comforted. “If that's true, then he might not even grant bail on Friday if I do not bribe him.”

“That is true,” Mwanza agreed. “Let me tell you the experience of a friend of mine…”

Janet nodded from time to time but was not listening.

The journey home to Migwani was hotter and stuffier than ever. The bus waited a full hour in Mwingi market while more than two hundred people jostled and pushed to get on. Though she had travelled on such packed buses many times, her unacknowledged desire to preserve a personal space, and her deeply felt though unconscious revulsion when it was not granted, added to produce a sum of great embarrassment and discomfort. She was lucky in that, as usual, the crowd parted at the first sight of her white face to allow her to get on first, a favour which on most occasions she refused with a sharp but polite shake of the head. But today she simply accepted, because she knew she would get a seat. An hour or more later, after being squashed hard up against a jammed window on the sunny side of the bus, she wished she had refused, stayed outside and tried to beg a lift from a passing truck or Land Rover. Perhaps she might have been home by now.

Mwingi market had been packed that day. The marketplace resembled a nest of human ants without the soldiers. People had brought their cows and goats. It seemed that everyone wanted to sell these days. People needed the cash to buy food to supplement what their
shambas
could not grow. Famine caused by the failure of the last rains was starting to bite and it was now very much a buyer's market. So the hopeful had stood all day in the sun with their animals, repeatedly turning away the small but canny band of purchasers. By the end of the day, prices had fallen to rock bottom, and goats were being hurriedly sold for as little as twenty shillings, the thought of walking home to an empty cooking pot having got the better of many sellers. As businessmen brought around their lorries and pick-ups to load up the animals they had bought, animals whose meat would sell for ten shillings a kilo in a Nairobi butcher's shop, those people who had rejected all offers began to untie their animals ready for the long walk home. Few had bought, but many had sold, and it was they who queued for the bus holding the half sacks of maize or, for the lucky ones who had sold a bull, sacks of beans to fill their families' bellies until the next market day, when the entire scene would be repeated, repeated that is until all of the family's animals had been sold. Then there was not much to do except find a suitable tree, sit, and wait for the next rain, not due for some months.

The woman who shared the seat with Janet and Joseph Munyolo's mother had sold two goats for fifty shillings and had bought a nearly full sack of maize. She entered the bus when already more than sixty others were crammed onto the seats. Noticing immediately that Janet was smaller and of slighter build than most, the woman made straight for the seat which, of course was only meant to accommodate two, and, finding an unoccupied corner onto which she could place a small percentage of her behind, she sat and lifted the sack of maize onto her lap, panting loudly, as rivers of sweat ran down between her ample breasts. She made a comment about the heat and fanned herself rapidly with a loosened corner of the wrapper she wore around her upper body, and gave out a long deep sigh. Over the next few minutes she carefully adjusted her position, each time nudging a per cent or two more of her buttocks onto the seat, using her significant weight to ease the other two occupants marginally closer to the window. By the time the bus reached Migwani, she had found enough space to have also planted the sack of maize on the seat beside her to ease the pressure on her thighs, leaving Janet so squashed against the window that her own behind was actually against the side of the bus, with only a small portion of one leg actually in contact with the seat. The woman would have been put off the bus back in Mwingi had Janet not paid her fare in a vain attempt to try to get the show on the road. Even Janet's poor Kikamba was enough to follow what was said.

“Where to?”

“Kwa Siku.”

“Four shillings and eighty cents,” ordered the conductor, beginning to write the ticket.

“But I have no money,” replied the woman with an air of total innocence.

“Either you have the money or you get off,” said the young man, still commanding. He seemed to be very angry indeed, having already dealt with several people who were trying to get a free ride.

“
Aiee
,” said the woman in feigned total surprise. She eyed the slightly built young man from within her enormous frame, peering over the top of the sack on her lap. She seemed to suggest that it would take an army to move her if she refused to budge. “But you can afford to take me. Look at all these other people who are paying you their fares. What does it matter to take one more person?”

“And at least sixty of them have the same story as you. You have money,” said the man, pointing at the sack.

“But I have stood all day to buy this food for my family,” she pleaded. But the tone of her voice said much more than this. She knew that the bus was already overloaded, that the company was rich and could afford to take her for nothing, that the man was asking her family to go without food so that the bus owner could make more profit.

At this point Janet interrupted. As she saw things, the argument could easily go on forever. He demanded the fare. She was not going to pay and neither was she going to move. And she was too big and heavy to be helped off the bus. So Janet produced a five-shilling note and paid the fare, indicating that the woman could have the twenty cents change. This unfortunately did not help matters. An old man sitting in front, who had just gone through the same routine with the conductor, only to have eventually produced the money for the ticket from a knotted handkerchief inside his shirt, stood up and shouted to announce to the whole bus that this was not fair. If this European woman was so rich, then she should pay for everyone. This fat woman, he said, pointing to the seat behind, should not get special treatment. With the two flat yellow pennies, the change from her fare, nestling in the palm of her hand, the woman also announced her delight to the entire bus and held up the twenty cents as evidence of what had transpired. The woman then turned to the side and thrust the coins into Janet's hand, indicating that they were a gift that could not be accepted and the general argument began to subside, ignoring the fact that the woman kept hold of the ticket. The conductor moved on to the seat behind to begin a similar process all over again. Janet sighed out of frustration and tried in vain to doze off on her shrinking seat.

And so it was with great relief that she finally made her way off the bus in Migwani, negotiating her way down the central aisle, stepping over buckets and sacks of maize, stooping to avoid bundles of sugar cane propped against the overflowing luggage rack, pausing on the way to avoid stepping on a trussed chicken or a goat's leg. With a perfunctory wave to the window where Joseph's mother now sat to continue her journey, she set off despondently towards the mission to tell Father Michael the details of her fruitless journey. As she passed in front of the south-facing bus, her clothes wet and her face dripping with sweat, she had to step aside as two of the luggage men violently pulled to one side the wiry frame of Munyasya, who had lain down beneath the wheels. He protested, shouting at them in his strange spitting voice. But he could move only slowly, so once he was clear of the bus, the men knew it would take him a minute or more to get to his feet.