Africa39 (36 page)

‘I tell you he doesn’t drink. He only goes because he has to hold his grandfather’s walking stick.’ Juma.

‘Lujuuju!’ Sejembe-head.

Juma lunges forwards and grabs Sejembe-head’s throat.

I put the milk jug down and watch Juma go. Warm blood streams through my veins and wakes up my entire body. The chill disappears. I am filled with warm laughter and it is a good feeling. So different from the cold fear that always pinched my heart when Jjaja looked at me before.

Juma is Jackie Chan. Springing forwards snake-style to bite Sejembe-head. My happiness is unstoppable. It’s like the sunlight seeping into every crevice in our locked-up house in the mornings. I chant, ‘Juuuma, Juuuma, Juuuma.’ The other boys join in.

Juma! I will forage the neighbourhoods for marbles and
janto
. Together we will dig small holes in the ground and play
duulu
. We will live our playtimes in delight; laugh, play, roll in the dust, run about. I will share my thoughts with him; tell him that when I grow up, I will work hard, get money and buy fried fish balls daily.

Oh, no! Jjaja is bending the corner of the kiosk! The boys disperse.

I missed the milkman.

‘He hasn’t come yet, Jjaja.’ I am on my knees now and a piece of gravel has dug into my skin but I swallow the pain.

‘That’s OK. We will go to the shops and buy fresh dairy milk instead.’ As she passes by me to enter the house, she hands me a black
kaveera
containing clothes. I receive new clothes instead of a clout on my head! This is more frightening.

Joshua Mondo dressed in a blue T-shirt with the picture of my favourite footballer, Didier Drogba at the front. A smiling Didier Drogba. Joshua Mondo clad in a pair of jeans! That’s me. A few moments ago Jjaja scrubbed me up with a rag she cut from the worn-out burlap sack we no longer use to keep coffee. Soaked me up in a foam she made with Dettol soap. Scraped my head hairless with a piece of broken glass – a quick, rough experience that left too much broken skin – and smeared my body with Movit Herbal Jelly. Then she dressed me up in the smiling Drogba and the jeans.

It’s already dark. I love it that I am dressed in new clothes but I hate it that I cannot go out to show off my smiling Drogba. I don’t even know why I am dressed up at this time. I am sitting on the fibre mat in Mukulu’s bedroom where Jjaja told me to sit and wait. Mukulu is drunk asleep. He returned after sunset with a half-litre empty sachet of
kasese
peeping from his coat pocket. Before I could tell him how my day had rolled on fresh diary milk, fried Nile perch, rice, new clothes, and Jjaja Mukyala’s baffling goodness, he slumped across his bed, feet hanging over the side. I am waiting for Mukulu to wake up.

A knock? A persistent, impatient knock on the front door. Rapid blows obviously made by a fist not the knuckle of the forefinger. I jump off the mat and sneak to the bedroom door and position my face against the slit in the lower hinge.

Two people enter the house; a man and a woman, both wearing
kitenge
fabric. The man has a matching cap that makes his head look like a box. He sits down on Mukulu’s stool, facing away from me. The woman takes the mat that Jjaja spreads next to the heap of my rolled-up bedding. She is facing me. The scarf on her head is wrapped so that there are two stiff ends hanging beyond her ears. The ends appear like horns. A buffalo head on human shoulders.

‘You came at the perfect time. The old man is out of our way.’ Jjaja is down on her knees, her fingers moving. She is plucking at her skirt as if she is picking
sere
spikes from the fabric.

The man rises, picks up the left side of the
kitenge
to reach into his trouser pockets. He extracts something which he holds towards Jjaja. She instantly jumps up to receive whatever is being handed to her. She doesn’t plant her palms down for support as she rises. Whatever she has received has given her the strength to rise unaided.

She is smiling. I see her clearly. As she buries that something in her brassiere, she faces the kerosene lamp. I have seen this smile before. Last Monday I sneaked up on her in that
matovu
shrubbery behind our house. She was counting a wad of shillings which she later secured in her bra. She had that smile: a rapid movement of the lips twitching, nose flaring. A rabbit happily chewing
kanyebwa
weed.

The man bends towards the light; he pushes his arm forwards and looks at his watch. Then he turns back to stare at Jjaja. I scuttle back to where she left me because this time Jjaja is shambling into Mukulu’s bedroom. I sit down and rest my head at the back of their bed and feign sleep.

‘Joshua, dear.’

She bends over and pats me, repeating my name. I rise slowly. I am trying to listen to the sound of my name as it crawls on her tongue. A violent chill rushes through me, digging through my skin, flesh and bones. I am afraid. Jjaja’s tenderness is eating me up. I can’t see, can’t think, can’t walk normally. I shuffle behind her, clutching on to her hand. I am a goat being propelled to the slaughterhouse.

The woman smiles at me. A big, happy smile like the one Jjaja gave me this morning. Her smile widens to expose the whole set of her teeth. The man only glances at me. When I turn to look at him he looks away and focuses on my rolled-up grass mattress in the corner of the room. I am scared of him. Scared of the oversized, full-length green
kitenge
and the matching headgear. I am scared of his big belly that cannot be hidden by this large attire. He looks like the men I have seen in Nigerian movies. Mukulu says such men hide wickedness behind big stomachs and full-length outfits. If Mukulu could wake up now, he would tell me to keep away from these strangers.

‘
Mutabani wange
!
’

The woman speaks, calling me her son. Her words rattle in my ears like falling pieces of scrap metal from a truck. She jumps off the mat and hurries to take my hand. I withdraw it and she instead strokes my head, grazing the open sores in my burning scalp.

Jjaja snatches my hand and forces it into the woman’s. ‘Joshua, dear, she is your mother. The one who gave birth to you. And he is your father. I finally found your parents.’

I stare at Jjaja in bewilderment. I know that Mama died. Aunty Lito told me. ‘Don’t call me Mother. Call me Aunty Lito. Your mother died. She used to be my friend. Even Karo was your mother’s friend. She took care of you when you were a baby. Before she brought you to me. The parents who gave birth to you are both dead.’

According to the jumbled details of my life, my birth parents are dead. And dead people can only resurrect when Jesus comes back – so Aunty Lito used to say. But Mukulu told me Jesus will never come back, so dead people will never be resurrected.

‘My parents died, Jjaja. Aunty Lito told me. Even Mukulu told me so.’

She smiles. Not the rabbit smile. This time her teeth are barred. She is grinning. ‘If I say that these are your parents, it means they are.’

‘Mukulu told me I am his grandson. I want to stay here.’

‘Shut up now and listen to me. You are going away with your parents. Now!’

‘Going’ dashes towards me like a rock let free from a catapult, shattering my ears. This is a nightmare. I am settled into Mukulu’s home. Mukulu’s love gives me strength to endure Jjaja’s cruelty. This is home. I can’t go away from Mukulu. I glance in the direction of the room where Mukulu is snoring. I need him to walk through the bedroom door and explain all this. He is the only one who can save me from these lies. But I know it would take pouring a basin of hot water on him to make him wake up.

Jjaja talks on. I listen with my ears closed, see with sightless eyes. I am choked up by my own helplessness. The woman has her hand clutched around mine. Jjaja is giving me away. I hate her. I hate the new clothes she gave me. I hate smiling Drogba!

Suddenly the man rises off the stool, steps towards us and within moments he has me lying across his chest in a manner one carries a newborn baby. I wriggle and scream. He cups my mouth.

‘Behave, you devil!’ Jjaja pinches my ear.

By the half smiling, half glaring look on her face, I know that I have lost my life once again. I have lost four lives in my ten years of existence. I am leaving. Again.

The person who opens the door is tall and skinny. His shoulders are hunched as if weighed down by his long arms. He is dressed in a sleeveless white T-shirt with a shredded hem, and a pair of loose pink-flowered shorts from which two long legs descend to the ground and end in two gigantic ostrich feet.

Ostrich feet waves to the man and woman, who immediately dash back to the car and drive off. I stand in sheer confusion, terrified of whatever will happen to me in this strange place. Ostrich feet shows me the way through a winding trench of a white corridor. I count my steps, one by one, steadying myself, spreading my arms to keep balance. The white walk is scary. The smooth white tiles are thorns under my calloused soles. The white ceiling is Jjaja’s water drum sitting on my head. The white walls are the open jaws of a python.

The corridor ends in a semicircle of six closed doors all painted black. Six doors arrayed hand in hand. I step aside to let him pass. He looks at me head to toe, and smiles before reaching into his pocket for a bunch of keys. He easily spots the key that opens one of the two doors in the middle of the semicircle. Another wave signalling me to enter. The room is dark. I raise my face to look at him, hoping he will see the terror in my eyes.

Our eyes lock. He opens his so wide that the whites of his eyes threaten to swallow me up. For a moment I pray that Mukulu will appear from along the corridor and ask me to take his walking stick and wait for him outside. I see myself outside, hurrying into the friendly darkness of Kikuubo slums, smelling the stagnant sewage that always welcomed me home to Mukulu’s house.

A rough tug on my shoulder wakes me from my daydream. The room lightens as soon as I step inside. A small room housing a spiral staircase that leads to an ascending fierce darkness. An overwhelming urge to turn back and disappear jumps to me. I want to shove backwards, knock over Ostrich feet and disappear down the white corridor. But I can’t. The white corridor has turned black. And Ostrich feet is right behind me. The lock clanks. The spiral opens into another white corridor. It seems like the lights in this house depend on human presence; coming to life soon as we enter a room, and dying as soon as we leave.

Another semicircle of closed doors. More lights coming to life. A beautiful white bed squatting lonely in the middle of a large room. This time Ostrich feet enters before me, and in a few strides he is sitting on the beautiful bed. I did not see him shut the door, did not hear the lock clank but I feel the locked door behind me. Just as I am beginning to think Ostrich feet is mute, he speaks.

‘Take off your shirt.

‘Put it down.

‘The jeans . . .

‘I mean take them off!

‘Put them down.

‘Turn around!’

I stand in naked shame, my eyes glued to the white tiles beneath my feet.

He jumps off the bed and wades past me to the door. ‘Dress up.’ He slams the door behind him.

The morning is as white as the sheets I slept in, as white as the pyjamas Ostrich feet gave me last night. I don’t know if I slept at all. All I know is that Ostrich feet dragged me by the collar and buried me inside the white sheets I was afraid to sleep in. He warned me I would wake up dead if I left the bed before he came back. Then tears started gushing down my cheeks. The tears are still flowing. Under my cheek is a damp patch of drying tears: a large blot of shit on the white sheets!

Ostrich feet scares me but he is not as scary as my strange surroundings. Not as scary as the prospect of never seeing Mukulu again. This cannot be my new home. I don’t see myself, Joshua Mondo here. I belong to Mukulu’s mud-and-wattle house. I belong with the trenches, stagnant waters, rubbish heaps, broken bottles, rotting dogs. I belong in Kikuubo. I belong with Mukulu’s drunken love and Jjaja’s sober hatred.

Key turning. Lock clanking. Ostrich feet.

‘Good booooy.’ He hurries to pull out the sheets he tucked in last night. Then he reaches for my hand to pull me out of bed. His hands are so soft they feel like a ripe avocado.

‘I can see you didn’t get out of bed. Big bro is always right, you know. Do as he says and you will always be a good boooy. Now come on, Kato is waiting for you.’

The white walk down corridors, staircases, and through black doors leads us to a boy whom I at once guess is Kato. He is seated alone at a round table making sketches on the glossy black surface with his forefinger, and shielding whatever he is sketching with the palm of his left hand. He pauses, gazes at me. His face looks angry. Lips bunched. Nose flaring. But I can’t see the same anger in his eyes.

Ostrich feet waves me over to the pulled-out chair facing Kato. I can’t take my eyes off Kato. I am trying to know him. Trying to find out if he, too, was brought into this house by the man in the Nigerian attire and the woman with a wild headscarf. Was he deceived that they were his parents? Did he leave behind people like Mukulu who love him?