Africa39 (21 page)

I decide it’s many hours that make a night and I can still get up at 2 a.m. I’m going to sleep for a few hours. And I don’t bother to switch off the lights because I am thinking keeping them on will stop me drifting into dreams; the constant brightness will wake me up soon.

I flip-flop in bed. I look through the parting of the curtains and see what I think are stars in some constellation. I used to know the name. But the light is on and the sky is simply black. When we finished with the orange, Daddy spelled out the various arrangements we saw in the high sky. The following day I saw the face of the setting sun whilst standing in the kitchen and saw the very clear edges of the sun’s circle. I looked right at it until it sank into the horizon. Maybe that’s why I can’t see the stars properly tonight . . .

My God, it’s Friday morning. My fingers are again playing with the hair on my thighs.

I am again putting on black trousers and a fashionable striped shirt. I am going to wear a tie today. I see my laptop unopened on the white desk. I failed again. But I am not angry. Tonight, I will try again.

I crack two eggs and half fry them, constantly looking at the wall clock. I’m checking if there is enough time to eat well and get to the biometric clock-in device before nine o’clock. The yellow eyes of the eggs shiver inside the white oval. That’s how I like it – a mix of crunchy brown toast and leaky yellow yolk in my mouth. I am suspicious they are looking closely at my clock-in reports because after this many years on the job I know the tricks of stealing ‘company time’. Like standing next to a newspaper man outside the mall and reading the day’s headlines off the broadsheets draped over his moving arm. But I’m washing breakfast down with a hot coffee then brushing my teeth and then adjusting the hair a little more with a comb. There are so many mornings in life exactly like this.

How about questions: Like how many expired tins of Nanny Goat Milk does it take to push Striped Shirt into taking it out of his system? And how worthy do I look as I stand there watching him flex his circumoral muscles and spit, knowing how much fun I’ll have gossip cunting with the other staff after he’s done and gone?

Where are the PDQ rolls for the credit card machine? How can these indigenous-bred cows simply take this shit from us sophisticated
dukawalla
types and not walk out, en masse? How did these cows get born with such extraordinary levels of tolerance? Could it have been the lady with the big black purse, the slightly fat lady?

Did she pilfer the Hydroxycut by putting it into that big black purse of hers? And can we transpose the expired Alpen to fresh bulk?

Then I come to the end of another dull working day. Crepuscular Nairobi rolls across windscreens. A dark figure ahead cavorts with an invisible lover called air. There’s traffic but the number of times a wheel turns Fridays means it’s slowest traffic, the couple of snail hours of wasted life, listening to same old, seeing same old. I know her number plate, her previously plain face now looking uncommonly sexy. I have never talked to her. And I speculate on whether the change of day into night means it’s now another world. Whether the night-time insects that now crawl out are different from the daytime ones – migrating butterflies being replaced by the crickets, a family aroused out of its torpor by the darkness, coming to claim the world with fellow collembola. Maybe the night-cooled concrete inside the billion buildings bends them into shapes different from those in the day. How about myself and her? Perhaps we are programmed to live in dreamworld and become imagination itself. And Rapid Eye Movements blossom. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to be but we invented night lights and so we’ll never know and maybe we’ll have to console ourselves with only half and quarter chicken junk food dreams. My car moves up and she is now opposite me, on my left, and I look at her and she, just like that, also turns and looks at me. And beyond her is the other woman, the cavorting woman, who’s slowly changing postures on the footpath, the utterly naked woman, with very small breasts and overgrown pubic hair. But she in the car looks at me, not her. The neon Nairobi night jazzes across her windscreen.

I attack the laptop wearing a complete work uniform – the striped shirt and black trousers. Belt, shoes and socks. I am not going to remove my wallet, mobile phone and receipts which are all stuffed into one trouser pocket. The collection is visibly bulging because the other trouser pocket is torn and everything had to be kept in this one and it has pinched my thigh all day long. I am going to leave the pen, on my shirt pocket, clipped on. I am trying again.

Daddy has a full-blown flu now. He’s struggling with the stuffy nose and shaking
kaboom
every time he sneezes. He has to retire now. I keep telling him it’s my turn to take care of things. But this man was born with the talent for hard work. After he showed me day and night in the torch-lit kitchen, I went to bed and read myself ‘The Three Little Pigs’ (as I sucked an Eveready) and fell asleep and wafted into a wholesome dream; Daddy washed the dinner dishes and whistled up a salad out of the orange and the few fruits left in the bowl and put the creation in the fridge. When I woke up the next morning, I tasted the cold grey patch of the orange in the salad and it tasted sour and acidy. Just like the Eveready battery. It’s my turn to take care of things but I hate my job and all I want to do ever is sit in front of the laptop and write.

A paragraph comes out:
Now imagine you are landing into Nairobi on a night like this.

From the windows of the Boeing you see the orange-red beacon flickering on the wing. And below is the entire night of the capital, moving and shimmering with countless stars. The nose is tipped and the Boeing body is diving in. Your eyes are ranging over this whole assortment of switched on tube lights and turned on TVs, trying to peek further into the underlying life of the litfest world and hoping, before the undercarriage hits the fine tarmac, to spot through an open window, in a split second, the steaming beef and vegetables being scooped out of the pan.

Then I don’t know what to do.

I think about tomorrow.

I think about how the seven o’clock sun will blaze across the sky as I drive eastward along Mombasa Road and onwards to the Organic Body Building warehouses at Mlolongo. Where Striped Shirt . . . ah! Fuck him. I don’t want to think about him or his organic body buildingness.

I think about how, like an uncaged something, I’ll move into my car after clocking out. The great remains of the weekend waiting for me. The leather of the steering wheel burning my palms. It’ll be a sky blue Saturday. And it’ll be a complete coincidence – a plane indeed landing. I’ll see it floating in from my left side where the national park expanse is. And this is it – as my car moves forwards, the plane moves in from the left. I’ll slow down and look up through my windscreen and I’ll get to see it from exactly underneath for a second or two. The hot silver metal of its undercarriage, the landing gear tyres, the smoke coming out from its turbines and the oil boil sound of its whoosh-thunder as it glides past. The zenith sun blindingly revealed.

I think about how the traffic will stretch from Bellevue to Nyayo Stadium. I’ll look into my side mirror and I will see that my fingers look like Daddy’s, my slim nose looks like his, my curly hair is his. I think I am Daddy.

I think about a yesterday.

Yesterday, I read a volume of Ladybird Educational in the Aga Khan Nursery School library. I came home and told Daddy I was very confused. Some guy had written, ‘the Earth rotates’. I told Daddy to look outside and tell me if he thought the earth was rotating because I couldn’t think it that way. Then at night Daddy took me to the kitchen.

from a novel in progress
The Score

Hawa Jande Golakai

Dawn snuck up out of nowhere. Across the grass, patches of morning gold swelled and merged, creeping over stretch by stretch of dewy lawn. Blinking as rays striped across her face, Vee swallowed hard and picked up the pace. She squatted and examined the dead man’s feet. His shoes were relatively clean, bar disks of dried mud and grass jutting off the back of the soles. Flecks of mud spattered the bottom inch of his chinos. She leaned closer and took a picture with her phone. Gingerly, Nokia pinched between two fingers, she inched up the cuff and peered up his hairy leg.

A flurry of gasps made her jump.

‘
Hai, wenza’ntoni!
’ Zintle yelped.

‘You frickin’ crazy?’ Chlöe growled.

‘What I should do?’ Vee hissed over her shoulder. ‘Y’all got a better idea?’

Huddled and wild-eyed, Chlöe and Zintle stared her down in silence, ample bosoms undulating in unison. Zintle tightened her grip on Chlöe’s arm, chunky fingers digging trenches of red into Chlöe’s milky skin.

Dah helluva mark dah one will leave
, Vee thought, wincing.

‘We’re not supposed to touch anything. And you’re touching things!’

‘I touched one thing!’ Vee wobbled as she got to her feet and reached out to steady herself. Her flailing hand grappled over dead leg, which sent her stomach contents into a slow roil. The man’s body, strung by the neck to the coat hook, took up a gentle pendulous swing, the fabric of his chinos and leather of his shoes making a low, eerie rasp against the grainy cement wall. Chlöe and Zintle shrieked and leapt away. Vee toppled onto her butt, scrabbled in the gravel till she found her footing and scurried over to them. Together, the circle heaved in harmony.

‘I’ve never seen a dead person before,’ Chlöe whispered. ‘No, I mean I’ve seen a
normal
dead person before. At a couple of funerals, when they’re clean and stuffed and make-upped. But not like this.’ One hand knuckled to a cheek, she moved it in frantic circles against her skin, a sure sign she was freaking out. ‘Not, like, a brutal murder.’

Vee sucked her teeth, a biting ‘
mttssshw
’, cut short considering the sombre atmosphere. ‘Dah wha’tin you call a
brutal murder
? It somethin’ like a very orange orange?’

‘Acch man.’ Chlöe rolled her eyes. ‘I mean . . . you know . . .’

‘I’ve been to hundreds of funerals,’ Zintle breathed, then stopped, mouth agape. From her expression, this was clearly a new one for her too.

‘Exactly. Who’s seen
this
kinda thing happen every day?’

Vee held her tongue. In her time, more recently than she cared to recall, she’d seen far too many abnormally dead people. Shot, hacked, diseased, starved . . . And once, bloated flesh piled high enough to darken the horizon of her young mind for months, years even. In comparison, this hapless soul had gone with reasonable dignity.

She averted her eyes, the violence of her heartbeat reaching up her chest like a clenching hand, closing her throat. Now was not the time to let an acute phobia of dead bodies run riot. The dangling man had her property. Every time she looked at him, her eyes were drawn to his neck, a thickened, bruised pipe wrapped in purple fabric. Her flesh tingled and shrank, drawing her face tight. She had to think clearly and quickly. Neither was happening.

‘Why isn’t anyone coming? Why the hell’s it taking so long?’ Chlöe whined.

Zintle turned her back to the scene. ‘They’re coming. We called them, so they should be here soon. But you’re right, it’s taking forever.’ Eyes fixed to the gravel, she smoothed down the front of her maids’ uniform and shuffled her feet. ‘I want to leave this place.’

Chlöe clucked sympathetically. ‘It’s OK if you want go back to reception. We can all wait there.’ Vee whipped her a withering look. ‘Or maybe hang around with us a bit longer. Please. It’ll look weird to the police if we’re left alone with him, when we’re the ones . . .’

Vee fired another eye, sharper still, watched Chlöe taper off to a biting of her lips.

Situation was bad enough already. Why help it escalate from strange to outright damning, which it sure as hell would when the police inevitably found out exactly which guest had been present when the body was found. The less incriminated she looked, the better.

‘I can’t keep working here any more,’ Zintle repeated. ‘Too much bad luck.’

Vee softened. The last forty-eight hours had been rough on all of them, but Zintle had borne the brunt. If she heard the phrase ‘excelling outside of one’s job description’ ever again, she would think of hospitality’s unluckiest ambassador.

Zintle’s face contorted. ‘Ugghhnn, I feel sick.’ She doubled over, clutching at her stomach.

Chlöe’s horror magnified. ‘
Sies
man, don’t throw up.’ She rubbed a soothing hand over the maid’s back. ‘If I see or even hear someone throw up, it makes me sick too.’

‘I . . . uuggghhnn . . . won’t vomit . . .’ Zintle compelled herself, gulping air like a landed fish.

‘Oi. Can you not say “vomit” either? It’s not helping.’

Vee edged closer. The man’s eyes were shut, tiny slats of the whites just visible when she crouched. She’d always thought the popular strangled expression was one of bulging, terrified eyes, shot through with harried blood vessels. Tongue drooping over toothy grimace for effect. Nothing like that here. Facial muscles slack, expression . . . not peaceful, or particularly anything for that matter. Just gone.

She inhaled and clamped her airways before creeping even nearer. Once upon a time in a faraway lab somewhere, super-nerds had taken time to ascertain that the soul allegedly weighed twenty-one grams. They probably hadn’t bothered identifying its odour, but some process made the human body smell torturously different after death. Not decay exactly; this man had been gone a mere matter of hours. But there was that subtle yet unmistakable turn after the flesh and spirit parted ways, the thing she could stand least of all. She stared at the noose around the man’s neck, throbbing alternately with regret and then shame for feeling such regret.