1
One day Martin asked Paulina to go to the bank. This was something quite new. She had learned how to deal with the big city shops. Government offices in the old provincial style were famihar to her - sentries more or less on guard outside the old colonial buildings, whitened stones, trees, long, cool staircases, desks set in ordinary rooms with high ceilings and green or brown paint like a schoolroom in town or a police station, files that were a long time coming and receipts written tediously by hand. The new officialdom of towering buildings, all lifts and windows, did not exactly frighten her: it belonged to another world, one she had hardly ghmpsed, collecting a form, perhaps, from the passport office or delivering a note for her boss to someone whose telephone was out of order. But a bank, that was within her compass and yet outside her experience.
Martin explained where to go and how to identify herself as authorised to collect the money. She had not thought about it before, had always assumed that he collected his pay in cash at the end of the month and kept it in pockets and boxes as small people did - as she herself did, paying in modest sums to the Post Office Savings Bank. Then she saw that there must be accounts for the shop in Gem, goods bought and wages paid. Of course she had not seen that particular shop or, for a long time, the brothers who shared it - the half-brother worked as a clerk at Maseno and the second cousin ran a matatu between Kisumu and Eldoret, but in her heart of hearts she knew that local purchases ~ sugar, soft drinks, cigarettes from a town wholesaler - would be made piecemeal from cash in hand, and scanty wages, she knew also, would be supplemented by borrowings from stock. This was very far from the shiny walls of the bank, the slippery floor and the potted plants. For a moment she could picture herself as if she were a proper wife with a son in secondary school and babies round
her knees, standing at the counter, a rough and greasy table that would leave a mark on the front of her dress - bottle-tops and spit-out pith of sugar-cane and lumps of clay brought in by sandalled feet strewing the floor - the smell of rough tobacco and kerosene and hard soap, the air dusty and full of repetitious voices . . . No, it had not been meant to work out that way. Better face the bank.
She was wearing a neat dark dress, flat-heeled shoes and, of course, a watch. No working woman could be seen without a watch. All the same, she felt cowed by the splendour of the building, but she kept her dignity, marched straight to the right counter, queued, signed, completed the transaction without mishap. She was surprised, then, to hear her name hissed, ‘Paulina.’ She could see no one she knew. And no one she knew, except the Brethren, would be likely to call her by her baptismal name in a public place. Unless - she saw the cashier in the next compartment gesturing to her. The woman was enclosed in glass and stone, immobilised by the sheafs of bank notes and bags of silver around her. Her hair was straightened and stuck out from her head like a wire brush. She had an ample figure swathed in patterned jersey and heavy beads bounced upon her bosom and from her ears.
‘You don’t know me, Paulina? Your mother asked me to look out for you in Nairobi.’
There was a little scar, the shape of an arrow, on the forehead and the weal of an old burn on the forearm. Paulina racked her brains.
‘It can’t be - Rhoda?’
‘Indeed it can be Rhoda. Do you forget that we started school together?’
Rhoda indeed, who had left her in standard two, had plodded on to finish primary school the year Paulina got married and then gone away to teacher training. How long - Paulina wondered suddenly - since she had seen any of the girls from that class, how long since she had thought of the mud-walled classroom with holes cut out for windows, the half exercise books and stubs of pencil on the floor, the ba-be-bi- bo-bu on the blackboard.
Rhoda had lived very near them, so they had continued to recognise one another till full grown, though a girl taking examinations (in boarding school she was by then) was set apart from the maids-of- all-work around the homesteads. And then when Paulina was at
Homecfaft Rhoda had been a young teacher coming into Kisumu on Saturdays for shopping, and once had brought a netball team to play against them, and during the later years she heard that Rhoda had married a senior teacher and so, perhaps, had come in for this glamorous job and this glamorous outfit.
‘It is so long,’ said Paulina awkwardly, when the customer waiting had been served. ‘I did not know you were in Nairobi. And how are things at home?’
‘We are well,’ said Rhoda, a httle uneasily. ‘My husband is in the Ministry now, and we have five kids - one doing CPE this year and three others in primary and one in nursery. And my goodness, the expense of that. It is enough, I tell you.’
Paulina’s heart sank, but no questions followed. Rhoda already knew from home that there are things one must not ask.
‘You are working here? You are not with Community Development any more?’
‘Yes, I am working with a family.’ She named them - she could be proud of them. ‘And Were is here some of the time, but his work takes him travelling a lot.’
‘Oh, I am glad, really glad. ’ Rhoda evidently had not known of their coming together. ‘Otherwise after work there is nothing. Life in Nairobi is hard.’
‘Hard?’ Paulina gazed at the fancy ceilings and the bobbing beads. ‘When I first came I found it hard. You were in school then. The closeness of things and the noise and the smells. But if you have a nice place to stay it is not so bad. Life can be hard anywhere.’
Rhoda nodded, and signalled Paulina not to go away while she attended to another customer. Paulina’s attention was on a man at the next desk weighing little bags of money one against the other as though they were beans in a shop, and then deftly pulhng out soiled notes from a bundle and writing on them - writing numbers actually on the notes that were real money. It looked unholy.
‘When are you free? You must come and see us at home. Saturday afternoon?’
‘Saturday?’ Paulina had to think hard. ‘Yes, I think I can be free in the afternoon. In the evening they are having a party. I must be back to serve drinks. I’ll let you know if I can’t get off.’
‘Saturday, then. Meet me outside here at one o’clock. We stay at Kariokor. Not far . . . Yes, sir, twenty shillings for a pound this morning. Fair enough.’
Paulina crept away. Kariokor? Life hard in Nairobi? Kariokor? She almost slipped on the broad, shallow steps as she remembered creeping round the door that would never quite open, trying to scrub the tiny window clean, the passing buses spraying dirt over your washing and your pots and pans. Taking a firm hold on herself she marched into a tea-shop for tea and cake, the consolation befitting a mature Kenya woman, before collecting the children’s record-player which had been left for repair and taking the bus home.
On Saturday she met Rhoda outside the bank as promised, and wriggled after her on to a rush-hour bus which was full beyond her experience, jabbed with elbows, knees and shopping baskets until she was almost breathless.
‘Sometimes James collects me in the car on Saturdays,’ Rhoda said, ‘but today he is off out somewhere - you know.’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Paulina, uncertainly.
She nearly missed getting off at the right place as Rhoda squirmed her way ahead to the exit door, but there were shouts to the driver and she scrambled off under the arm of a youth who was holding both sides of the door. She knew, of course, that there were flats you passed on the bus going to Easdeigh but it had not struck home to her that this was in fact the new Kariokor.
The flats towered high. There were many vehicles about and good stout washing lines. The stairs could have been cleaner but the flats inside were spacious and convenient. Rhoda’s was comfortably furnished and curtained, with a gas stove and a fridge.
‘Children, did I ever tell you to have this mess out of my way by lunchtime,’ she bellowed in English. A game of ludo was set out on the table, a mess of crayons and comics on the floor. The radio was playing very loudly.
‘I always tell them to be ready, but, you know,’ said Rhoda.
‘Yes, I know,’ answered Paulina.
Lunch was served by a teenage maid who recalled the children to their duty by a series of blood-curdling yells over the stairwell. Paulina admired, whole-heartedly, the children, their drawings, the
house, the furnishings, the food.
‘I am so glad you came,’ enthused Rhoda. ‘Otherwise it is so dull at home you are longing for Monday morning to get back to work again.’
‘Dull? But with the children here you must have so much to do - so much to talk about.*
‘The children? They are not babies any more to want nursing. I assure you, my dear, at the end of ten years of teaching you have had enough of children - Emma, sit up and eat properly. The visitor will think you don’t know how to use a knife and fork.’
‘You like your present job better, then?’
‘Oh, it pays much better than teaching, yes. And less botheration. But these people eat it all, of course. Nothing left for poor mother. Frank, just look at that mess on your shirt, be careful now.’
‘But you have beautiful dresses. I am surprised you can bear to wear them for work.’
‘For work? Where else would I wear them? That’s the one thing you get out of it, being able to look a bit decent. You see all sorts of big people, coming and going. Then you get home, put on your old dress, spend an hour telling the girl what to do, go to market, very likely, if you can’t trust her to save your money for you. I tell you, it’s a treat to have a visit from someone from home. These single girls have the best of it - pictures, dances. Me, I don’t know what the inside of a hotel looks like in Nairobi.’
‘But you have the car . . .’
‘My dear, in Nairobi you have either a car or a husband at home occasionally, not both. Oh no. I’m thankful I have a job where I meet some decent people. Otherwise life in Nairobi is hard, I tell you,’
‘But don’t the children want to go out? I see a lot of interesting things with Mrs M.’s children if sometimes the family can’t find time to go together.’
‘Oh, they go out quite enough - only last term you went to the museum from school, didn’t you, Frank, and they have their sports days and all that. They do all right. But Kariokor, day in, day out, if you didn’t have a job you couldn’t stand it.’
‘Did you know I used to live here once upon a time?’ asked Paulina, turning to the children.
‘I hear the flats were very good when they were new, but oh! they
are so messy now. We keep on saying we are going to move, but we don’t get around to it.’
‘There were no flats when I lived here. That was in colonial times and there were just little red-brick barracks then. You know, children, what the Carrier Corps was?’
The children looked at her and went on eating steadily. She wondered for a moment if they did not understand Luo, but remembered that the maid had been speaking to them quite freely: perhaps they just did not expect to speak with adult visitors.
‘I thought the flats had been here for ages,’ said Rhoda. ‘They look so beaten up by now. But of course I’ve only been five years in Nairobi.’
‘But I was in Nairobi eighteen years ago. You can’t imagine how things have changed since then.’
‘Time flies,’ said Rhoda, still the schoolmistress at heart. ‘To think that it’s longer than that since we were at school together. You see, children, you must make the best of school time. It soon gets finished. They come to CPE,’ she added, turning to Paulina, ‘ready for secondary school, and you have hardly noticed that they are out of their cradles. You know?’
‘I know,’ answered Paulina dejectedly. What else could be said to a schoolmate with whom one had shared those early years? And yet she hugged a kind of knowledge which Rhoda would never share and could never be asked about.
Beside the bus stand where they waited to go back to town an old beggar reclined on a blanket.
‘Don’t be frightened,’ said Rhoda. ‘He is always there. Aren’t they everywhere nowadays? But he won’t bother you.’
Paulina had had no thought of being bothered. The old man with his majestic bearded head looked well in control of the situation. Someone had given him a cigarette and he was smoking it with a flourish between two fingers, like some of the university visitors, not like a workman closing his hand over the stub in his mouth. He might have been challenging the young layabouts to snatch the fag out of his hand. Style, he was saying to them, is important if you are to make the best of what you have, and that was the lesson they were learning from this old beggar who did not look under-nourished or humiliated
either. The panache with which a teenage tumboy hung out of a matatu or a country bus, expending on those spectacular leaps and quite unnecessary delays energy which might more profitably have been used in the classroom or on the football field, was all part of the same complex, the rakish angle at which a barefoot parking boy put on the tattered remnants of a hat picked up from some gutter after a fight, the theatrical bow with which an urchin had once offered her a seat before jumping off the city bus warily ahead of the conductor’s demand for a fare. The boys seemed better at it than the girls. Perhaps woman’s life was so arduous at bottom that only the most leisured and wealthy had time to cultivate the seeming spontaneities of style.
2
All the way back Paulina was thinking about the other beggars of Nairobi. There seemed to be so many of them, and a few of them glued to the same spot they had used long ago when she first came to the city. Had there always been so many or was it just that she had then less knowledge of the affluent streets? Some of them used to go home to Pumwani, the blind led by a child or a lame man pulled on a trolley by litde boys: some, too, who could straighten their shoulders and speak with normal voices once they were at home. Some could afford to use the buses nowadays, and generally the conductors were patient and would give them time to scramble in on hands and knees before telling the drivers to start. But there were those just like half bodies, head and trunk, whom you could lift with one hand like a baby, and she shuddered to think how these were looked after for, even though some had been given wheelchairs, you could not ever see them making use of them or imagine them heaving themselves up or propelling the chair along with those tiny arms. It did not bear thinking of. At home the only beggars were those half-crazed who hung around bus stops and bars and were steered away gently by the headman if they looked like getting out of control. But there was the other kind of begging too, the hands held out for soap or tobacco money, the long whine of complaints . . . Even at home people were not secure in what they produced, not confident, not content. Would someone, then, feel at home in any place?
She reached what she now called home in time, put on an apron and
bustled about setting out trays of nuts, crisps and biscuits. The cook was finishing off the sticks of grilled meat and then going off for the evening.
She did not exacdy share in the party but moved in and out, opening bottles and emptying ashtrays, greeting those who were regular guests of the house. The coloured girl they had seen at the theatre - Nancy, Martin had called her - was there with one of the civil servants, very much made-up, wearing a midi-skirt, a low-cut blouse and calf-length boots. She greeted Paulina civilly and seemed to be looking her up and down. Then she worked her way close to the MP and spoke to him in confidential tones.
‘Joyce isn’t coming today?’
‘Joyce is a kid. This isn’t the sort of place for her.’
‘Isn’t it? I thought it might be.’
She turned aside and Paulina filled her glass. Mr M. was looking a bit uneasy. In someone’s own house, she thought, people should not embarrass him like that. Mrs M. was chatting determinedly with a big group in another corner, chiding one of the Commission members for not having brought his wife. The man rallied back as well as he could, saying that in such delightful company one should not be tied to the same face one saw at breakfast every morning, but there was a hint of something more than humour in Mrs M.’s persistence, and she was not sorry to turn her attention to Paulina’s request to take some refreshments to the children’s room as they were obstinately awake and calling for her.
‘We never get any fun,’ asserted the eldest.
‘Not much fun for you there,’ rejoined Paulina. ‘A lot of grown-up people standing about and talking. You’ve got as good to eat as they have and you can hear the music from the gramophone just as loudly. ’
‘We can’t even see the TV.’
‘Well, for one night that won’t hurt you all that much.’
‘Is Joyce there?’
‘Joyce? What Joyce?’
‘The pretty one. Nearly white one. She works in Daddy’s office.’
‘Does she now? I don’t see anybody there from the office.’
‘Yes, she was with Daddy when he came to pick me up from school. Mummy had asked Daddy to come because the other car was out of
order, and she said she worked there, and she was nice and played I Spy with me. And she said she wants to be an MP herself when she grows up - well, she is grown up, of course, but not very. Her mother keeps a hotel in Eastleigh, she said.’
‘A kind of hotel, perhaps. I think I know her mother. But she’s not at the party. They’re mostly old people.’
‘Really old people? Older than you?’
‘Perhaps some of them are even older than me. Now eat up and be quiet. I have to go now - it sounds as though your father wants me in the kitchen. And wipe your hands before you get grease all over the sheets, mind.’
‘Paulina - where the hell did you get to? Find me another bottle. They think your taps run neat whisky, these people, as soon as you get “The Hon.” in front of your name.’
‘Half a minute. Here you are. I was just attending to the children.’
‘Children! Good Lord, aren’t they old enough to go to bed by themselves? Now find me some more glasses. Two are broken already.’
He was not often that sharp with her. After all, he had the right. But the question about Joyce nagged at the back of her mind and the wastefulness of it all, and the hard looks of the women in expensive frocks, keeping themselves up, of course, just as the Pumwani wives used to do, against the competition of pretty youngsters who had never had to liven up election rallies after a hard week’s work and forbear from counting the spoons and knives after the victory party.
‘My God, why do we do all this?’ cried Mrs M. after the last guest had gone, kicking off her high-heeled shoes as Paulina swept up the broken glass. ‘No need to wash anything now but for heaven’s sake tell the cook not to make breakfast for us in the morning. You can see to the children and get them off to church, only get me a flask of tea about nine o’clock and see that no visitors disturb us - none at all. Oh Lord, why don’t we go back to the village?’
‘Because you would be brewing the beer and carrying the man’s chair for him if you did,’ answered Paulina boldly, and Mrs M. made a face at her to show she knew she was out of sorts and out of character.
Martin was fast asleep. He woke with a sore head, perhaps because he had had to go and share supper with the cook, perhaps because he
had caught a glimpse of Nancy and was harking back to a relationship Paulina could only guess at, perhaps just because he had missed the whisky and the deep talk of pubUc affairs. He flounced out without saying where he was going and she fell to work, cornflakes and tea for the children’s breakfast, stacking away the glasses and linen after Juma had washed them, counting the empties for return. She tidied up the lounge, leaving the hard cleaning for Juma to do next day, took a couple of ‘call-back’ messages and saw him started on the lunch before the first delegation arrived.
The first delegation consisted of a couple of elegantly suited young men whom she recognised as coming from the constituency. She sat them under a tree in the garden and gave them tea. The second delegation was made up of five rather older and shabbier men who said they came from a co-operative. She had a bench brought out for them and promised more tea, while a basket of whole maize lay delicately on the grass awaiting presentation. The third incursion was a carload of ladies wanting to take Mrs M. off to a rally somewhere. They said they would call back in an hour when, Paulina said, swallowing hard, the family might be back from church. At this point she discreetly tapped on the bedroom door.
Mr M. emerged a little later, informed the delegates that he could spare them just twenty minutes, as he had a lunch date at 12.30 and noisily drove away. Mrs M. decided to remain ‘in church’ but the ladies did not in fact come back till four o’clock, by which time she had gone to visit a friend in hospital. Nobody ate lunch except the children, and Paulina spent the rest of the day crocheting in the garden. She liked doing things with her hands and enjoyed seeing good work done by others. Perhaps women’s work was like that - the word for creation was the same one you used practically for knitting or pottery. Men’s work was so often destructive - clearing spaces, breaking things down to pulp, making decisions - and how often did the decisions amount to anything tangible? Words in the air, pious intentions, rules about what not to do. She was glad that a lot of her work lay in making and mending things. This was more satisfying to her than those nebulous women’s meetings where you were expected to keep your hands still but weave and work your mind laboriously through a tangle of words.
3
A relation of Mrs M.’s kept a tailor’s shop just off Cross Street: Paulina had been there with her to check on a fitting and sometimes went to pick up a finished garment or a bag of beans sent in from the country. She liked going there in a nervous kind of way - she was moved by the immense vitality of the district, every little shop front spawning new business, enterprises taking shape on the pavements, the young and strong thronging corners, seeking a way to employ their overflowing energy, preferably for profit but at least to use up some of the exuberant time which they could not picture running out, could not pin down in cartons or padded jackets till the unimaginable day when someone would want to buy it off them. She was still amazed by the contrast with the languor of small town streets, their p)onderous slowness and paucity of conversation.
She liked the square at the bottom of the hill with trees and iron balconies in unevenly chmbing flats, hke the pictures of old European cities she had seen in travel agents’ windows. True, the space under the tree was not neatly planted but a sleeping place for drunks and vagrants and also, perhaps, for disheartened and hungry jobseekers. Of course the saris and shukas fluttering from the railings were not like Paris or Italian dress seen in newspapers, and the pastel-painted turreted temple altered the skyline, but still Paulina felt herself in the presence of something sophisticated and immeasurably old.
She might smooth her skirts away and clutch her handbag tightly, for all these twenty years she had remained fastidious, disturbed by the more raucous aspects of the town, the gobbets of raw meat, the repetitious rows of the same watches, the same transistor radios, the same suitcases and schoolbags, the letters stencilled, here and there reversed, on the insides of shop windows, shirts flung open to the waist, babies’ tasselled berets or cut-down ladies’ felt hats on bejewelled young men, platform soles and wedges strapped like fetters on girls’ feet, as ungainly as lip plugs or facial scars from remote countries. She steeled herself against the strident music, Hindi or Congolese, pouring from open shop fronts, the shouts across the street in one language or another which always seemed, half-caught, to contain a word or two of your own, the husky pleas of street-sellers.
the whistles which could not, any more, be aimed in her direction but which she must not even appear to be curious about, the honk of horns which might mean come in or get out of the way, the whirring of machines, an occasional chortle of pigeons. But still she enjoyed going there, with the same detachment, perhaps, as the ochre-haired moran or cloaked Turkana watchmen with their intricate ear-rings who were always gazing haughtily into windows of electric torches or striped socks, and still she came back, dazzled with activity, to the good order of the residential districts, where occasionally a gap between houses, a servant’s shack under the trees, a shrub in flower or the high painted gates of an embassy took you into the fairytale world of the children’s picture books.
It was on a visit to the tailor’s that Paulina found herself briefly in the news. She was on her way to pick up a suit of Mr M.’s that had been made larger, and paused to stare in a shop window at one of those ornaments where a bird dips and raises its head without visible mechanism over a seeming pool of water. From a side alley came shouts and scuffling, then the sound of a small boy crying. One or two people stopped to stare, then hurried on. Paulina peered round the corner. She saw two big boys, perhaps eleven and twelve, holding down a smaller boy on the ground, a few coins clutched in his hand. One of the big boys had his foot on the child’s chest and was trying to prise open his fist: the other was slapping his face.
‘Let me go, let me go,’ the little one howled. ‘It’s my money. You can’t take it.’
‘But I bet you on the next lorry in the garage. You owe me eighty cents.’
‘No, no, I don’t,’ wailed the urchin. ‘You took the twenty cents I had then. I never bet a shilling. You can’t take what I didn’t have then.’
The little boy was wearing a ragged pair of shorts and an oversized T-shirt that read, between holes, ‘University of California’. His head was cropped almost bare and he was reasonably sturdy. The boy threatening him was tall and skinny, with stick-like arms and legs. Every rib showed under his buttonless shirt and his shorts were made up of patches. His eyes were red and sore, his hair long and gingery with wisps of straw and wood shavings adhering to it. The princely
character with his foot on the victim’s chest wore, with an air of condescension, odd sandals, one red, one blue, knickerbockers to mid-calf, a Blue-Band Margarine T-shirt and an eye-shade on a piece of elastic. A one-inch fag-end hung from the corner of his mouth.
‘Stop it,’ said Paulina firmly in Swahili. ‘Let the little boy alone.’
They took no notice, nor did passers-by. Paulina was surprised at herself.
‘I told you to stop it,’ she repeated. ‘Two big boys against one little one. That’s not fair.’
To her surprise the slapping stopped, though the arrogant foot remained in place.
‘It’s my money, missus,’ said a small voice. ‘A man gave me. I didn’t steal it. I want to eat, not to bet with it.’
‘Betting is wrong.’ Paulina could hear herself, sententious, like a very young curate. ‘And also silly when you have so little. Keep the money for food.’
A crowd was beginning to collect.
‘They can go to Kariokor,’ said a man in messenger’s uniform. ‘They get looked after there if there really isn’t any family: if there is, they have to go home. But some of these Nairobi boys are just sent out to beg.’
‘He’s got a mother and a room to live in,’ announced the skinny one, pointing at the small boy. ‘He don’t have to work for his food like some of us.’
‘But she doesn’t come till night-time, Che,’ cried the small one. ‘You think I’m going to stay hungry till then?’
‘You got something, Johnny,’ the possessor of the eye-shade pronounced judgment: someone in the crowd addressed him as Muhammad Ali. ‘But Che ain’t got nothing. That’s why I’ve got to help him more than you. It isn’t just a matter of size.’
This philosophic statement impressed the onlookers.
‘What about you?’ asked a big boy in the crowd.
Muhammad Ali removed his foot, acknowledging himself outnumbered, but kept a firm hand on Johnny’s shoulder when he bounced to his feet.
‘Me? I can work when I have to. I got a brother sells things.’
‘Oh yes, we know what kind of things,’ said a shopkeeper, menacingly.
Paulina felt the initiative slipping from her and for the first time in her life she resented it.
‘You three - would you like something to eat?’
They did not need asking twice and suddenly small, ragged, doubtless hungry boys bristled from the pavement. They seemed to appear from nowhere.
‘You and you and you,’ she repeated. ‘I can’t treat everybody. But no more fighting now. Let him keep his money.’ And she led them off to a snack bar with wall paintings of smartly dressed customers with forkfuls of chips and mugs of tea. She was surprised to find someone at the edge of the crowd taking photographs, deeply offended when he asked for her name and her opinion on child vagrants. Haughtily she turned her back on him and led her charges to a table where, despite raised eyebrows behind the counter, they were served with tea and large sticky buns, after much splashing of hands under a running tap.
Muhammad Ali, she discovered, lived in a shanty with his brother and a couple of friends.
‘It’s not bad when it’s dry. When it’s raining, though, it’s hard to keep warm: even if you put cardboard on the floor the damp seeps up into your blankets and all that. And the rats. My brother makes some money selling things from door to door. Vegetables? Well, odd things he picks up, like. One of his friends helps a man who runs a handcart from the country bus stop and the other one sometimes gets work on a building site. Not regular, of course, but still we can eat. Only you can’t leave food over because of the rats. You need to bring a bit every day.’
‘And can you leave your things safely?’ asked Paulina, who had seen the wretched humps of cardboard and polythene down by the river. ‘Don’t people try to take your blankets in the day-time, or your cooking things?’
‘Oh no, neighbours don’t do that. Someone from outside might try to ferret around, but probably there’s someone we know there most of the time. We help one another, you see, don’t dirty near someone’s shanty and that. It’s the City Council you have to watch out for, but we’ve been in the same place nearly a year and not got burned down. Some of the people used to fold all their stuff up every Saturday and stow it in a ditch in case of a raid, put the house up again in the
evening, but it’s a waste of time that. If they burn, it will go anyway.’
‘I saw a fire,’ put in Johnny. ‘Last year I saw a fire down by the tea- shanty they call “Hilton No.2”. The smoke was bad.’
‘Yes, it was bad, and they pulled out a lot of things, but one house they said they had a lot of stolen clothes and they had to let’m burn because the askaris were watching to see what you brought out. All the dustbins people had scoured out for brewing had to go - of course they belonged to City Council to start with, before they were hired out to houses.’
‘But you feel safe enough?’ asked Paulina.
‘Oh yes, we can look after ourselves. Only if they move you, of course, then you write off your vegetables. One of our friends has a little patch he digs down by the river. And they come sometimes to look for bhang - police that is, not City Council. Then sometimes they come with horses because people say the horse can smell the bhang.’
‘But you could go home if you had to.’ Che made the statement wistfully.
‘Yes, my people are there - my dad and my second mother and the smaller children. But there are too many people to feed from the plot. Far too many. Here is better. When I’ve started to pick up casual work, like my brother’s friend. I’ll send home for my next brother. Life is better here. Let the girls stay there. We managed to get uniform, pencils and things for the bigger one to go to school. They don’t have to pay fees for the first classes now. I only went for two years myself,’
‘I only went to standard two myself,’ said Paulina, and was horrified to hear herself saying it. For years it had not been said. ‘But I have learned a lot of things since. If you try hard you keep on learning.’
The boys nodded agreement.
‘And what about you, Che?’ she asked. ‘Did you go to school? I think you must have to get a name like that.’
‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘I went to school when my mother was alive. She died when I was nearly finished class two. I was nine then, going on ten. I had a uniform and she always patched it and kept it clean. And we always had enough to eat. Nothing fancy, not meat and that but regular. And hot porridge before we started for school. My sister was in standard one. Then there were two that died, and then a
brother and the baby died too when she had it. My dad had a job as night watchman in Nakuru. He didn’t come often, but when he came he used to bring us bread and maybe a pencil or something like that.’
‘You keep thinking back, Che,’ said Muhammad Ali. ‘That’s no good. You’ve got to learn to look after yourself in town. Get a nice doorway with a wind break early before they’re all taken up, like I showed you. Not go mooning about and then just lie down in a corner where it will rain on you.’
‘She used to call me Kariuki,’ the boy continued. ‘But there was this student came to teach at the secondary school during the holidays, and he said I had to be brave and strong like Che. He was a soldier. Do you know about him?’
‘Not much,’ said Paulina. ‘He was on an island somewhere. But I see students talking about him and one of them uses the name - university students, I mean.’
This passed them by.
‘So my dad said we couldn’t go on to school for a while because he needed all his money to get another woman to look after us. And when he was there she was all right to us, but she started going queer when she got her own baby: then she hated the sight of us and used to keep beating us for every little thing. And then last year she started saying that she didn’t get married to come and live in a back-of- beyond village with a load of kids, and not any rice or hair oil or nice soap like her friends had for their babies, and only seeing her man one day or two in the month, and then she started to drink. And then she didn’t cook every day, and never early in the morning, and started saying it was our fault that my dad didn’t pay her attention. He only wanted his first wife’s children and all that. In the end my little brother got so hurt he ran off to his granny: she doesn’t have much, but she likes him and tells him stories. But my sister had to stay to help look after the baby, so my dad said. But me, she said I didn’t do anything around the place but eat, and so one day when she beat me worse than usual I ran to my friend’s big brother who is conductor on a country bus, and he talked with his dad and put some ointment on the bad places and gave me a ride on the bus free. That was about two months ago.’
‘He didn’t know anything,’ put in Muhammad Ali. ‘Lucky for him
I found him wandering about. I showed him the temples, where they give you free food if there is a celebration going on. And how to find the eating places, where good food sometimes gets thrown out when they close, and how - well, all sorts of things I showed him. He just didn’t know how to stay alive.’
‘Well, you’re not very fat yet, Che. What about that place the man said at Kariokor? I know where it is.’
‘Oh, we all know where it is,’ Che replied, for the first time claiming the fellowship of the down and out. ‘But if you take their free meals and their bed, within a fortnight you’ve got to be sent back where you came from. No thank you! She’ll kill me rather than take me in, and if I can manage for myself long enough I’ll kill her, and take my sister away, and get a place for her to stay and proper dresses and all that. You think I’m thin? You haven’t seen my sister.’
‘And couldn’t you get a message to your father?’
‘My father is sleeping on some doorway in Nakuru. The difference is that he gets paid for it. But my father is finished. Is that what having a wife does for you? He drinks too, now that he finds her with the stuff, and he’s too far gone even to listen to our side of it. No, you learned a lot since you came to Nairobi and you’re all right, aren’t you? I’m going to learn too and however hungry I am I’m keeping well away from that Kariokor place. Nobody’s going to say I come crawling back.’
His bewilderment and resentment frightened Paulina. Was he right in suggesting that all her lessons had been learned in Nairobi? She had resented her own time in Kariokor, escaped from it but never fundamentally questioned it. But for these children return meant renouncing their brave adventure into town and a new world, facing, after an interlude of feeding at the Save the Children Centre, recriminations at home, hunger, renewal of humiliation all the more bitter for glimpses of life that looked from the outside so different. No wonder so many of them refused to go, listened to the false bells pealing ‘Turn again, Whittington’, as the lucky boy in the story had - but then the stories were always about the lucky ones - or went into the refuge pondering all the questions and possibilities that to most people do not become apparent until their course of life is irrevocably set. Perhaps, after all, that was what it all meant, this turmoil and
change that had beset her ever since getting married, that act which the grannies, like the story-books again, regarded as so simple and inevitable that after it there was nothing left to tell.
She roused herself: the boys were still chattering and looking hopeful. She called for second cups.
‘Me,’ Johnny said simply, ‘I only have to live in the day-time. My ma makes me tea in the morning and in the night-time she brings me chips or cassava or something, and I have a blanket to sleep on behind the curtain. I’m not to come out till the morning, out round the curtain I mean. Then there’s only me and my ma.’ He paused. ‘Where do you hve, missus?’
‘I live on the other side of town. I work in a big house. I look after the children and the visitors. So there is a little house for me and my husband.’
‘You got children, missus?’
‘I had a little boy but he - died - a long time ago.’ She had said it. She choked a little but she had got it out, and these children could understand it, because to them grief and deprivation was commonplace.
‘You don’t want another little boy like me?’
‘Don’t be silly, Johnny,’ Che snapped at him. ‘She wants her own one. Only natural, isn’t it?’
‘What happened to him?’ asked Muhammad Ali politely, showing sympathy the only way he knew.
‘There was a big crowd. I was living near Kisumu then - and he got - shot.’
The boy nodded, age-old and knowing - he made her think of the old man saying, ‘We left our dead . . .’
‘I had an uncle shot in the Emergency,’ he said. ‘Of course, I didn’t know him - my auntie told me. They never found out who did it, but he crawled back half a mile, bleeding, before he finally passed out. So my dad had to pay school fees for his kids, see, after he came out, and then they kept his part of the land for themselves. That’s why there isn’t much left. . .’
Paulina looked at her watch.
‘My goodness, I have work to do, you know. I must get on.’
‘Thanks for the tea, missus.’
‘That’s all right. But no more fighting, mind. I know it’s hard for you, but knocking one another about won’t help.’
‘And look out for that watch of yours, ma - missus I mean - that big boy who tried to get in with us, regular for watches he is.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Che quietly. Then, afraid of being misunderstood, ‘Not sorry for anything I’ve done, mind. I mean I’m sorry about your little boy.’
Paulina hurried off to the tailor’s, feeling she had learned something that both clarified and complicated things. As she came out with the parcel she saw Johnny, eyes wide and appealing, scampering along to keep pace with a well-dressed man who had just got out of his car.
‘After all,’ Johnny was saying, ‘for all you know you might be my father.’
4
It was late. She was behind time with the children’s supper and the oldest had skipped his homework, so she did not speak to the family about the incident but mentioned it to Martin that night.
‘Danrn silly,’ he growled. ‘You can’t do anything. Show sympathy and they’re only after what they can get out of you.’
She neither retorted nor acquiesced and he appeared to forget about it until the Sunday paper came out with a picture of her haranguing the little boys on the middle page.
‘Discipline by kindness,’ read the headline. ‘This lady, whom our reporter overheard urging a group of parking boys to stop a fight, afterwards took them to a restaurant for a meal to remember. Refusing to give her name or comment on the situation, this good lady has given a practical lesson in charity that many of us only talk about. ’
Martin was angry with a tight-lipped fury that she had not seen in him for many years.
‘Making fools of us all,’ he shouted. ‘Now every beggar in Nairobi will come flocking after us expecting to get something. Just drawing attention, that’s what it is.’
Mrs M. was overjoyed.
‘You should have given them your name,’ she said, ‘and a lecture on responsible parenthood.’
‘Me give a lecture! You’re joking!’
‘No joking! You used to teach women to knit and crochet, which doesn’t by any means come by the hght of nature. Ways of keeping families together, poor or not, surely ought to come easier.’
‘But I who haven’t. . .’
‘That didn’t stop you getting along with these kids. Look at their faces.’
‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t name any names,’ said Mr M. ‘Might have been embarrassing for us and landed you with a whole lot of begging letters. I know you feel sorry for these children but palliatives don’t help much.’
‘And what is there except palliatives?’ demanded Mrs M. ‘The kids would be dead before you could alter the system to provide residential care for all of them. What you can give them right away is a crumb of self-respect.’
‘Not necessarily charitable care. Just jobs and homes for their fathers.’
'‘Only jobs and homes - and a ticket to the moon each! In any case how many of these particular kids have a father who’s not drunk, dead, sunk without trace or just plain unemployable?’
‘I don’t think it’s self-respect they’re lacking in,’ said Paulina. ‘It’s other people’s respect. And therefore they find it hard to respect grown-up people themselves.’
Mr M. stared at her and nodded agreement.
‘All the same, Paulina, you must think before you act.’
‘I reckon I’ve had a lot of time for thinking - years and years for it,’ said Paulina, slowly and deliberately. ‘And these kids have more thinking-time than is good for them, too. It’s my business who I buy a cup of tea for, and who I give my name to, if it comes to that.’
She picked up the late breakfast dishes and swept off to the kitchen with them. Mr M. whistled.
‘It looks as though you’ve got yourself a new woman, all right,’ he said in his own language.
‘Good for her.’
‘Indeed, good for her. I hope Martin knows his luck.’
‘I doubt it,’ replied Mrs M., ‘but she makes the best of it.’
Martin did not come in till ten at night. He refused the food that was ready for him and insisted on having the light turned out straight away
though his wife was still sewing.
Next time Paulina went to the tailor’s Mrs M. gave her some outgrown shirts for ‘her’ boys. She didn’t run into Che or Johnny, but Muhammad Ali was stalking about in a shirt that still read faintly, after many washings in the river, ‘Stings like a bee’ and a crown of cardboard with the newspaper photograph mounted on it above a band that read ‘Pride of Kumasi Street’.
On the way home she ran into Nancy, making for a bus stop. Paulina would have passed with a quick greeting but Nancy was determined to talk.
‘I saw your picture in the paper,’ she said.
‘Oh, that. The photographer must have been just passing.’
‘It was good, though. Don’t be bashful about it. Anything that helps readers to see those kids as people is good.’
‘One of them considers himself “people” all right.’ She told Nancy about the cardboard crown.
‘I like that. You see - I know you don’t approve of me, but you ought to know -1 could easily have been like that. Only my mother worked hard for me and even got me started in secondary school, but I didn’t finish. You have to be tough, you know.’ %
‘I don’t know how tough you are. You don’t sound it today. But I know what you mean also. Did Martin ever tell you about what happened to me in Kano?’
‘He didn’t. But Joyce did. I’m sorry. You know - all that time I wasn’t seeing Martin, honest. I left Kibera the day Tom Mboya died - I was just a kid: I couldn’t stand all the weeping and wailing. And it was afterwards that - it happened - wasn’t it. After we met you at the theatre, then Joyce told me. I hadn’t known her very long then: she was doing a secretarial course the same place I was doing a refresher course: my boss gave me day-release to do it. So of course she didn’t know I’d ever been friendly with Martin. ’ They were looking straight at one another, Nancy’s handsome light brown face, with high cheekbones and hair elaborately pinned back was just beginning to show wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, to need that vivid lipstick to gain attention. She is, what, ten or twelve years younger than me, thought Paulina, and soon she will be old. Why do we look at these young things as though they are a challenge to us for ever? And Nancy
was thinking, she doesn’t make much of herself. She thinks she doesn’t care any more. But what dignity she has, good features, good sense. A decent girdle and a bit of colour about her, if you got rid of that awful headscarf, and Martin could be in for a bit of competition again.
‘But the point is - sorry, the buses are going but I need to talk to you - Joyce, she’s not so tough.’
‘She had a good home, I know, ever since she was a baby.’
‘But me. I’ve always had my eye on the main chance. Not that it’s done me any good. Any security I’ve got comes from my own hard work, and if you let the time go for getting married . . . well, when I first knew Joyce she’d just left school with a third grade, and so when that boss of yours came stalking round her I thought she was on to a good thing. I didn’t arrange it, mind you, but I didn’t try to stop it either. And now I see that she’s really upset about it. Is his wife cutting up rough?’
‘I’ve no idea. We are on good terms, but not as close as that. If we had been I’d have warned the wife myself. I felt a bit bad when I saw Joyce in his car once. But I suppose Amina - Joyce’s mother - always had an eye on the main chance, as you say, herself. I wouldn’t have expected her to encourage the girl, but I thought it was not up to me to interfere.’ There was a silence between them while the babble of early office leavers, late hawkers, urgent traffic and military helicopters at practice continued all round.
‘There was sometimes a kind of - strain - in the house,’ went on Paulina. ‘You know what I mean? People are fed up over their work - they say so. They’re bawling the kids out for making too much noise - you know it. Something wrong with the bank balance, they let it drop. But sometimes there’s something else and you wonder whether you imagined it, or brought it in, or whether they even know it’s there.’
‘I do know. Certainly something made him cool off on Joyce pretty quick. I think she has got the message, but I’ll try to see that she doesn’t call him up any more. You can tell the lady so if it seems necessary. OK?’
‘OK. Thank you.’
‘And . . .’
‘And?’
‘Fd do the same for you if it were necessary. But as far as anyone I know goes, it isn’t necessary.’
‘I know,’ said Paulina cheerfully. ‘But it would be no good the pot calling the kettle black.’
‘Look who’d be calling me black!’
You could talk like that. It wasn’t taboo any more. So they parted cheerfully, and at that moment Paulina heard a little voice piping up Tom Mboya Street. ‘After all, you might be my father.’ She was too embarrassed to break up the act and present Johnny with his prep school shirt.
The next day somebody rang up Paulina and asked for an interview. It frightened her to think that someone could track her down just from a photograph and find the house and the telephone number as well as the name. She was a little flattered but instinctively refused the interview.
‘Perhaps,’ she said vaguely, ‘some other time, when I’ve done something. This was only an incident.’ And she took down the lady reporter’s name and number. ‘When I have done something.’ She wondered what in her life she had ever expected to do. But it bore thinking about.
CHAPTER