RUBBISH

‘Stop! Over there on the left. By the jacaranda tree.’

For most of the four-hour journey to Nairobi, Makena had tried to doze. Her cheek still hurt but the swelling had gone down. The driver’s wife had iced it, muttering darkly about Priscilla. She hadn’t believed Makena’s tale about tripping over a step. She’d also brewed her something foul-tasting for her cold. Whatever it was had practically cured Makena overnight, but it had left her feeling as if her head was detached from her body. She had the sensation of gazing down on herself from a great height and seeing a thin, broken child slumped against the lorry door.

Until a moment ago, her only plan had been to throw herself on the mercy of the Tings. She was sure they wouldn’t turn her away. But as she roused herself from another miserable replay of the evening before, she realised that the driver was taking a shortcut down her old street. The home she’d last seen when she kissed Mama and Baba goodbye was zooming towards her. Makena’s heart, a dead thing in her chest, pulsed for the first time in months. She came to life with a suddenness that startled the driver.

‘Stop! Over there on the left. By the jacaranda tree.’

The driver was confused. He pulled off the road to check his notebook. ‘This is not the address I was given by your uncle. We are nearly there. Another five or ten minutes, depending on traffic.’

‘You think I don’t know my own home?’ said Makena, guessing, correctly, that her uncle would have avoided saying much about her background or her hurried departure.

‘Sure, sure, you must know it. I also must be confident that you are safe. I promised Edwin. You are a young girl in a city of thieves and … Ah, ah! Usitoke! Don’t move. Let me find a better place to park.’

But Makena had the door open and was jumping down into the street. As she rounded the front of the lorry, a man in a suit exited her home.

The lorry driver was in a panic. ‘Wait, child! I will accompany you across the road. First, let us go together while I find a place to—’

‘There’s no need.’ Makena waved to the man across the street as if he was a long-lost friend. He lifted a hand uncertainly.

She looked back at the driver, leaning from his cab. ‘See. I’m expected. Thanks for the lift. You and your wife were so kind to me last night. Please thank her for the medicine. That’s some powerful muti.’

The businessman met her at the gate. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked as the lorry growled into motion behind her. ‘Are you a friend of my daughter’s?’

Makena couldn’t speak. She’d stepped on the spot where she’d last seen her parents and the past had sucked her into a vortex. Her father’s voice echoed in her head. ‘See you later, alligator.’

She’d been laughing as she answered, ‘In a while, crocodile.’ She’d been carefree. She hadn’t known that ‘later’ might mean never again.

Her knees buckled beneath her. She sat hard on the muddy pavement. The man threw down his briefcase and wrenched open the gate, yelling to someone to bring some water.

‘Are you ill? Shall I call a doctor or your family?’ He took a phone from his suit pocket. ‘Do you know your mama’s number?’

Makena felt sick. She should never have come. ‘I-I used to live here. My family used to live in this house. Now they’re dead.’

The man looked uncomfortable. He tucked his phone away. ‘We heard. I’m sorry for your loss. But what are you doing here?’

His wife came rushing up with a bottle of water. Groomed and perfumed, she had the harried look of someone with a high-pressure job. Her husband muttered something and she gasped.

‘Can you deal with her?’ he said under his breath. ‘I’m late for a meeting.’ He drove away without waiting for a reply.

The woman was nicer. She squatted in front of Makena and took her hand. ‘Would you like to come inside?’

Makena shook her head violently.

‘Then what can I do to help you?’ She looked up and down the street. ‘Did someone bring you?’

Makena wiped her eyes with her sleeve. ‘I left some things here. My mama’s friend, Shani, she told me that the landlord sold everything – all our furniture, our pots and dishes, our pic…’

‘Breathe. Take your time.’

‘He got rid of our p-pictures and everything to c-cover the rent. Shani saved some of my clothes. What I want to know is, do you have the items that were on my bedside table? They weren’t worth anything in money but they were special to me. They’re all I have left of my parents.’

The woman became defensive. ‘Look, when we came here, the place was a mess. The landlord is a criminal. He took our deposit and then when we arrived with our possessions nothing had been cleaned. I found a box of junk in the small bedroom. No toys. Just sticks and dirt and a jar of water. It was disgusting. I threw it all away.’

Makena let out a sob but no tears fell. She felt in that moment that she would never feel anything again. Nor would she have any reason to. Everything she had ever loved had been taken from her.

‘That wasn’t junk. It wasn’t disgusting. Those were precious things my baba gave me – a leopard stick, volcanic ash and melted snow.’

The woman looked ready to weep herself. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry. I didn’t realise. This breaks my heart.’

Then she brightened. ‘Hang on, I remember now. I did keep one thing.’

Makena hadn’t wanted to see how her home had changed but her feet carried her to the open front door. When her parents had rented it, the house had been a cheerful space decorated with homemade cushions, batiks and worn but comfortable furniture. Teetering piles of pre-loved books bought by her mama with every spare shilling had doubled as coffee tables or homework desks. The radio was forever on. They’d danced to Pharrell Williams, clapping because they felt like happiness was the truth.

The house was silent now. No books were in evidence. Everything in the ordered lounge was sleek and pricey. Everything matched. The life Makena had shared with her family had been erased.

The woman returned with a framed photograph. It had been dropped, but Makena didn’t care. Behind the splintered glass, that picture of her parents laughing on their wedding day was worth more to her than all the gold in Africa. She pressed its cool, sharp edges to her cut cheek and drew strength from her memories.

‘Thank you,’ was all she could manage.

There was a break in the woman’s voice. ‘You’re welcome. I’m glad I kept it. It felt wrong to discard such a loving photograph.’

She glanced at her watch and swallowed a curse. ‘I’m sorry but I must get to work. Who brought you here? Is somebody picking you up?’

Makena gestured airily at the street. She didn’t want to lie but she didn’t want to be watched over either. ‘Any minute.’

‘Maybe I should stay with you. There are plenty of troublemakers about.’

‘Hakuna Matata. I’ve lived here most of my life. If anyone bothers me I’ll get one of the neighbours I know.’

‘You’re positive? Then I’ll go.’

She took some Kenyan shillings from her purse and pressed them into Makena’s palm. ‘Here, have this. Get yourself an ice cream or sweets – anything to make you smile.’

Out on the street, Makena tossed the frame into a bin and added the wedding photo to the plastic sleeve that held the precious picture of her father climbing the Ice Window. Both went into the pocket of her climbing trousers.

She started walking. After the quiet of the north, Nairobi’s rush hour was worse than ever. It was as if the city was staging a brass band parade made up of ten thousand tone-deaf players. By the time Makena reached the Tings’ house, the elephant was not simply standing on her chest; it was trying to grind her into the dust.

Makena was dreading the moment when Shani answered the door to discover that her ex-colleague’s daughter was her problem once again. She and Betty had enjoyed working together but had never been close. The only reason Makena had ended up with the Tings was because she and Li were friends and no one else could be found to look after her at such short notice.

Shani had already had to deal with far more than she’d bargained for. If she and Mr Ting did take Makena in, it would lead to the kind of rows about money and space (or lack of it) that had happened with increasing frequency in the weeks before she’d departed to live with her relatives.

There was also a risk that they would get the authorities involved. Well-meaning officials might take her into care or dispatch her back to Priscilla and Uncle Edwin.

As Makena tried to summon the courage to approach the house, Shani emerged with the children. Li and Leo were neat and adorable in their school uniforms. Her friend skipped to the car with a book.

Makena ducked behind a tree. She waited until they’d driven away before moving on. They’d done all they could for her. Not for anything would she be a burden to them.

She began to walk aimlessly, in a daze of pain and loneliness. Borne along on the current of jostling, sweaty workers and hawkers, she felt shielded; part of something bigger. At Priscilla’s house she’d been utterly alone, but in Nairobi there was safety in numbers. Cars, matatu taxis and bicycle owners could honk and rant as much as they liked but they couldn’t run her down if she was crossing a road with twenty other people.

Everyone was going somewhere. She allowed herself to believe that she must be too. For a while she attached herself to a family, losing herself in a daydream where she still belonged. Eventually, the children started to stare and point. Trying to escape the pitying glare of their mother, Makena was almost crushed by a donkey cart.

She found herself in a street market. The air was blue with smoking pans of biryani and chapatti; beef knotty with gristle, blackened cobs of makai. She ducked under clothes-rails, squeezed between green hills of pumpkin leaves and bowls of dewy mangoes.

Emerging from beneath the plastic awnings and pink riot of Chinese toys, she noticed that thunderclouds were bearing down on Nairobi. Already they’d merged with a man-made cloud of oily black smoke rising from the distant slums. As far as Makena could tell, stuff was always burning in Kibera and Mathare. Warring gangs and slum dwellers experimenting with illegal electricity were the cause of many blazes. Fuelled by festering rubbish and crowded shanties assembled from planks, cardboard and rusting iron, fires could rage out of control for days.

The police and fire service seldom ventured into Mathare Valley and never at all into its worst neighbourhood, Nigeria Ndogo. They didn’t dare.

Makena’s feet had halted, of their own accord, at the steps of Blessings Hair & Beauty. She stared up at the salon on the first floor and had a sudden fantasy that all she had to do was climb the steps and sit in Gloria’s chair and she’d be back on the Khumbu Icefall with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Her mother would interrupt her as she crossed an imaginary crevasse.

‘What’s up with you, Makena – do you have ants in your pants? How is Gloria expected to make a success of your braids with you wriggling and writhing in the chair?’

Makena would look up from her book and her mama would be leaning round the door, her expression a mixture of exasperation and tenderness. The nightmare of the past few months would be exactly that, a nightmare. She’d have dreamed the whole thing. Life would return to normal.

‘Is that you, Mountain Girl?’

Makena started violently.

‘Don’t you remember me? I’m Nadira, Gloria’s daughter. What happened to your braids?’

Makena’s hand flew to her head. One sweltering, claustrophobic afternoon up north, when she’d once again been left alone with the baby, her grief had become so unbearable that the only way she could think of to deal with it was to rid herself of all reminders of the past, including the ones in the mirror. She’d cut off her braids with nail scissors.

When Priscilla returned from lunch with her secret friend, her reaction had not been what Makena was expecting. There’d been no scorn. No anger. Her gaze had moved from the rat’s nest on Makena’s head to the braids scattered on the floor. Empathy had skimmed across her face before taking flight.

Without a word, she’d scooped up the braids and put them in the bin, saying briskly: ‘Let’s get you tidied up.’

She’d combed out Makena’s hair – roughly, but she’d done it – and trimmed it as best she could. ‘Next time you want to try a fool thing like that, don’t. When you damage yourself, when you destroy the body God gave you, it can’t always be reversed.’

It was the last glimpse Makena ever got of the humanity and heartbreak that lay beneath Priscilla’s brittle, beautiful shell.

Gloria’s daughter came into focus. ‘What’s going on with you, Mountain Girl? Where’s your mama? Do you want to come upst—’

Makena bolted, upsetting a table heaped with dried beans. Shouts followed her as she dodged and weaved through the market. She wanted to run until she felt nothing and saw no one. Run until she reached Mount Kenya if she had to.

On and on she went, her too-small trainers slapping the crumbling streets. Dust and fumes struggled through her lungs. She slowed only when a stitch raked her side like a leopard’s claw. Then she stumbled further.

When she was down to her last atom of energy, she bought an ice cream and slumped in a triangle of shade. She stared blankly into space, not thinking. The shadows deepened and moved around her.

Towards evening, the wind whipped up. Too late Makena tried to find shelter. There was little to be had that wasn’t already taken. The storm, when it came, was a Nairobi-style deluge. Bomb-blast thunder. Strobe lightning. The streets gushed with muddy streams surfed by a flotilla of litter.

Somewhere far away was smart modern Nairobi with its gleaming malls and beautiful young professionals. Night would draw in swiftly and Makena knew she had to get back there if she was to have any hope of being safe.

Dripping and sniffing, she tried to get her bearings. A youth with glittering eyes stepped into her path and his friends jeered at her. Evading their clutches, she sprinted down an alley, rounded a corner and ran full pelt into a tree.

Then the tree shifted.

The hand that shot out and grabbed her wrist was the size of a goalkeeper’s mitt and the forearm attached to it practically the width of her waist. Makena’s eyes travelled up. And up. And up. Her brain struggled to comprehend what it was viewing through the rain.

She screamed and tried to leap away. The giant’s head was among the storm clouds. Lightning illuminated it. Makena had a momentary image of a misshapen monster.

‘Whatcha doing, psycho?’

The glittering youths were back.

The monster wheeled to lunge at them. Makena swerved away and was gone. She ran until she could run no more and then she limped. Her clothes streamed with water.

The storm was so fierce that it had driven all but the most desperate to shelter. Makena was barely able to hobble when at last she spotted a row of industrial skips behind a rundown brick warehouse. Beside them were two smaller bins, bigger than household ones but manageable. She tipped the rubbish out of one of them. It was mostly filled with paper but it hinted at a previous life when it had been a receptacle for fish guts.

Upending it, she crawled underneath. There was enough space for her to sit upright and use her rucksack for a cushion. It would keep her dry. A tear in the plastic side let in enough air for her to breathe but not enough to counteract the fishy fragrance. She tied her only spare T-shirt over her nose as a makeshift mask.

Her mouth was as dry as the fields around her uncle’s house. She downed a bottle of water and the fruit her uncle had given her, pounding the oranges until they were soft, then drinking the juice from a hole she gouged in the top. She wasn’t hungry. If she had been, the stench of the bin would have killed her appetite quickly enough.

Strangely, she was not afraid, not even after the incident with the Tree Man. She’d been more on edge living with Priscilla. She was quite proud that she had, on her own and in a storm, found shelter for the night to come. For the moment, that was her only concern. That, and putting on her dry sweatshirt before she caught pneumonia. It had a streak of blood on it from the cut on her cheek. That alone was a reminder that she was better off in a bin.

In the morning she would make a plan. There was bound to be one; she just couldn’t think what it might look like right now. Her mind was a fog.

If the worst came to the worst, she’d go to the Tings after all. Or she’d turn up at the International School where her mother had recently begun teaching with Shani and appeal to their sense of charity. Perhaps they’d consider awarding her a scholarship. She could live in as a boarder and be educated for free.

The bin was parked against a wall. She leaned back and shut her eyes. Things would work out, somehow. Children from good homes didn’t end up on the streets or in orphanages, did they? Those orphans were victims of war, famine or disease.

Like you, she couldn’t help thinking.

Makena ignored the chorus of doubts in her head. There was a solution. She just had to figure it out.

The rain drummed a lullaby on the bin. Though she was cramped and cold, she slept.

Next thing she knew, she was being rudely awakened. The bin was plucked into space. Before she could move, someone had seized the hood of her sweatshirt and was bundling her up, ready to toss her into the maw of a garbage truck.

‘Let go of me,’ she yelled and had the satisfaction of nearly giving the bin man a cardiac arrest. ‘Are you blind? I’m a girl, not a pile of unwanted clothes. Give me back my roof.’

‘Your roof?’ He stood scratching his head, framed by the crimson dawn. ‘This bin is not your house. It’s private property. Go back to Mathare. You should be careful where you choose to sleep. Next time we might throw you out with the rubbish.’