‘In the Tings’ living room there’d been a magnificent silk tapestry of a heron eyeing koi fish in a lake. Reflected in the water were jagged-toothed mountains, wind-blasted trees and swirly bushes. One had to look really hard to see that amid the foliage lurked a tiger, poised to pounce on the luckless bird.
The tapestry was Mr Ting’s pride and joy. He’d translated the Chinese characters for Makena: ‘Coming events cast their shadows before them.’
Whenever Makena could get her tired brain to function, which these days wasn’t often, she wondered if she could have foreseen the tragic events in her own life. Had there been signs?
Maybe the nightmare on Mount Kenya had been a premonition after all. She should have listened to her gut and warned Mama and Baba that something terrible was about to happen.
If they’d refused to take her seriously, she could have faked a stomach bug and caused them to miss their flight or something. Even if they’d later rebooked, the extra day or two might have given them time to watch the news and discover that Ebola had reared its ugly head in some parts of Sierra Leone and become an epidemic. They’d have learned that many of the patients diagnosed with malaria were actually feverish with the Doomsday Germ.
Would they have gone anyway? If you are brave for a noble cause, because you want to help others or fight for justice or save a life – perhaps even your own life – then being brave is the best thing of all, Baba had told her.
Was entering a plague zone to save a life the right kind of bravery or the stupid kind? Makena didn’t know. She did know that if her parents hadn’t gone to Sierra Leone to try to save Aunt Mary, her aunt would have suffered and died alone. Makena could never wish that on anyone, least of all her aunt, who’d devoted her life to helping others.
Makena was not alone but she felt alone, which was the same thing. Most days she wished that she were dead too. That way, she’d be with her mama and baba and not in Isiolo, sitting on a cracked step under a dull sky, watching a fly crawl over her leg.
She waved at it half-heartedly but it returned five seconds later and she lacked the energy to drive it away again. She did, however, straighten the fly net over the baby’s pram. When the baby fretted, she sang a spiritual that had been her favourite lullaby when she was younger. The lyrics were heartbreaking but her mother’s beautiful voice had more than made up for it.
O my Lord, sometimes I feel like a motherless child
A long, long way from home
Makena was halfway through the song when she realised that now it was true of her. She was the motherless child a ‘long, long way from home’, just as the slaves who’d once sung it in America had been far from all they knew and loved in Africa. The words died in her throat but she didn’t cry. For a few blessed moments she’d felt her mama’s presence and heard her exquisite voice. She lived in fear of forgetting. She had the photo of her father, ice axe in hand, grinning as he dangled from a rock face, but of her mama she had nothing but memories.
The baby whimpered, bringing her back to the present. Makena squinted hopefully down the pot-holed street. Priscilla had promised to be back more than an hour ago.
Taking a tissue from her pocket, she blew her nose hard. The cold she’d caught from the younger children was getting worse. She’d been awake half the night because she couldn’t stop coughing.
It was hard to believe that nearly four months had passed since the evening she’d phoned Sierra Leone. It felt like a lifetime. A life sentence. Time crept by at the pace of an ancient grandmother, marked only by the revolving shadows of the sunflowers or the demands of the baby to be fed and changed.
The ‘first-class’ school had never materialised. ‘The money was not enough,’ was all Priscilla was prepared to say on the subject. ‘Pocket change,’ she’d added with a sneer.
Makena noted that the pocket change seemed to have done very well in keeping Priscilla in stylish dresses and matching handbags and jewellery. She flounced out in them every other day when a dark, shiny car with a dark, shiny man at the wheel whisked her away for a long lunch. On her return, the clothes and necklaces went into a box under her double bed.
By the time Priscilla’s children returned from school and her husband from work, she’d be in one of three outfits, the hot-pink dress or a simple one with orange and white checks. She also had a demure black and cream skirt and top with a matching cream hat that she wore on Sunday when the family attended the Kingdom of Fire Ministries.
Makena had been once. In Nairobi, her parents had been infrequent churchgoers. The chapel they’d attended when Baba wasn’t travelling offered polite sermons about a kindly shepherd, and hot cross buns for tea.
The Kingdom of Fire was epic both in scale and emotion. Great cauldrons of ugali and stew smoked at the entrance. Scores of people came from far and wide to crowd into an old warehouse and blast the roof off with their praying and singing. At the height of the preaching, a gale-force love seemed to sweep the place. For the briefest of moments Makena had allowed herself to be caught up in it, then she reminded herself that if God had really cared for her he wouldn’t have snatched away Mama, Baba and Aunt Mary. She’d refused to ever go again.
Priscilla, who in any case preferred her to stay at home with the baby, told Uncle Edwin that Makena was too traumatised to attend church or school.
‘When she has recovered, God willing, she will catch up with her lessons. Until then, we must be patient. What does it matter if she has to repeat the year?’
And Edwin, who regarded his wife as a heaven-sent combination of a beauty queen and Mother Teresa, just smiled and said vaguely: ‘Very wise, very wise. Yes, we can think about school when she’s better.’
Makena wasn’t holding her breath. Priscilla divided the world into two types of people: those who could be used and those who were a threat. Shani, Uncles Edwin and Samson fell into the first category. For reasons she could never understand, Makena fell into the second.
Part of the resentment was historic: Makena’s mother had been a science teacher. Uneducated herself, Priscilla had a contempt for learning.
‘Your beauty is your passport in this world,’ she’d tell her daughter as she transformed her into a little doll each Sunday. ‘Be alert for opportunity. Aliye na hamu ya kupanda juu hukesha. A person who wants to rise in society must stay awake.’
‘Your brains are your passport in this world,’ Makena tried telling the girl, but it was hopeless. She resembled Priscilla in more than just looks. A week after Makena moved in, the girl had given her a couple of hard kicks in the bed they shared, while pretending to be fast asleep.
Taking the hint, Makena had moved to the sofa. She’d been there ever since with the baby in his pram beside her. There were no spare blankets. At night she wrapped herself in a threadbare towel. She’d have done anything for the rock hot water bottle her father had made her on Mount Kenya. But comfort, like everything else about her former life, was a thing of the past.
That afternoon Priscilla returned in a taxi, two and a half hours late. Makena watched nervously from behind a curtain as she tottered unsteadily up the path, mouth pinched. Her mascara had run beneath one eye.
She barely glanced at Makena or the baby, just went into her room and reappeared in the faded orange dress. Her face was scrubbed bare of make-up and she looked oddly vulnerable.
She started banging around by the stove. Makena hurried to help. If she assisted with the cooking, she had a better chance of grabbing a bowl of ugali before Priscilla covered it in chicken or goat stew, which she often did out of spite. She knew it made Makena sick to her stomach.
As with the first-rate school, the promised vegetarian meals had never happened. Since Edwin ate lunch at the garage, the children at school and Priscilla goodness knows where, supper was a small, meaty meal or beans cooked with meat bones. Only occasionally, if her afternoon had gone particularly well, did Priscilla return with a pumpkin or sukuma wiki – collard greens – which she made with tomatoes, onions and many Kenyans’ favourite flavouring: mchuzi mix.
That evening Makena was heartened to see Priscilla take the sukuma wiki out of the fridge. The vitamin C might help shift her cold. But when she went into the kitchen the greens were lying in a pool of blood. A lump of fatty meat of unknown origin was leaking into the leaves.
Makena’s default setting these days was numb resignation, but her sinuses were killing her and she felt wretched and hungry.
Snatching up the bloody greens, she cried: ‘Why do you do this? You know it means I can’t eat them. Why do you hate me so much? I’m sick of this. I don’t want to be your free babysitter and maid any more. I want vegetables and I want to go to school – the good school. The one Uncle Samson gave you cash for. If you don’t send me, I’ll phone him and tell him you’ve stolen the money. Then I’ll tell my uncle—’
She never got any further. Priscilla gave her a swipe that sent her flying across the kitchen. She cut her cheek on the sharp handle of the low fridge. The other children were walking in from school. The boy burst into tears. The girl stopped open-mouthed.
‘You ungrateful brat,’ screamed Priscilla. ‘After all we have done. We have taken you in when we didn’t even know you. You were nothing to us. Now you have a roof over your head, food on the table and in time we were planning to send you to the best school. And you repay us with threats. Usishindane na akushindao. You should beware of challenging one who is more powerful than you.’
She stood over Makena. The knife she’d been using to trim the meat was still in her hand. Blood dripped from it.
‘Did you think you could come here and lead a complimentary existence? You have seen how we struggle. Did you expect free lodgings, free water, free electricity? On top of that, you demand that we serve you your own special VEGE-FARIAN meals. As if you are royalty! And all the while you are like a viper in our midst. I have sympathy that your parents are gone but you are not unique. There are ten thousand orphans in Kenya. Sometimes I wish you had been lost in the car crash with your mother and father.’
For the first month after her parents had died, Makena had cried a river. She’d cried so hard and for so long that the river inside her dried up and left a hollow as arid and empty as the district in which she now lived. But at Priscilla’s words a single, horrified tear fell from her eye.
She scrambled to her feet. ‘What are you talking about? They didn’t die in a crash. They died from Ebola.’
Priscilla sprang backwards, knocking the plates off the counter. They shattered spectacularly. Spears of china stabbed Makena’s legs. Her aunt didn’t even turn to assess the damage. Her hand was over her mouth.
‘Ebola? Ebola! Edwin told me … I didn’t know … oh my. Oh no … and for the past three days you’ve been sneezing and coughing. You have brought this disease, this curse, into our home. You’ve been with my baby.’
Makena edged away. Her entire body shook with fear and shock. ‘No. No, I just have a cold. I-I w-wasn’t there.’
‘Get out!’ screeched Priscilla. She ran and lifted the baby from his pram, then gathered her other weeping children to her like a mother hen. ‘GET AWAY FROM US AND NEVER COME BACK.’
As Makena stumbled out into the yard, the door was locked and bolted behind her.