Twenty minutes earlier, on the Meru–Nairobi Highway, Helen Stuart had clicked off her phone and run a hand through her messy auburn bob. ‘That’s it,’ she told her companion in the backseat of the Hearts4Africa Land Rover. ‘Official confirmation from Matron. We’re overflowing, over-capacity and, as per usual, over-budget. Every bed, sofa and spare mattress is occupied. We should go home. Don’t know about you but I’m so exhausted that I’m ready to check into The Best View.’
The quirky names of Nairobi’s street hotels and restaurants were a standing joke between her and Edna Wahome. The Best View, in particular, made them laugh. It was a rainbow-hued shack facing a concrete wall.
Neither of them knew how the teetering assembly of red and green metal and candy-striped awning that was The New Boiling Soup Hotel had come by its title but they enjoyed trying to guess.
‘Perhaps The Old Boiling Soup Hotel went out of business because their sweet and sour soup was lukewarm,’ suggested Edna.
Her own favourites were the ones with creative spelling: The Exelent Motel and The Foward Thinking Inn. Helen liked the optimistic ones. The Hotel Majestic was a chicken coop painted sky-blue and Mama Africa’s Finest Suites were three breeze-block rooms, crudely decorated with flowers and lions. Both women loved The Funky Monkey Inn.
As they crisscrossed Kenya, they had an ongoing competition to see who could find the hotel with the funniest name. It was a silly pastime but it made them smile. In their line of work they needed all the smiles they could get – this week more than ever.
At two a.m. on Monday, bulldozers had descended on Kibera slum. A property developer had purchased a corner of land and wanted it cleared. The landlord he bought it from had taken the money and run without mentioning it to his tenants. In the dead of night residents were chased from their shanties with no warning or notice. To see them picking through the rubble in daylight – weeping for the loss of their meagre possessions, homeless with nowhere to go – was devastating. Edna and Helen had spent three days trying to put a feeding programme in place for the children.
Tonight, a Thursday, it had been the turn of Mathare Valley. Bulldozers had crushed more than fifty shanties. As always, it was the orphans who suffered most. It was those orphans – particularly the girls – that Edna and Helen wanted to help.
For the past fifteen years, they’d dedicated their lives to Kenya’s forgotten children. They’d met while volunteering for an international charity. Newly arrived from the UK, Helen was fresh out of university and already besotted with Africa. Edna, a Kenyan, had recently qualified as a nurse.
They’d hit it off on day one. It helped that they had the same dry sense of humour and stubborn belief in justice.
They’d quickly become disillusioned with the charity. Hard-won donations were frittered away on shiny new vehicles when second-hand models would have done just as well. Corporate sponsors were treated to luxury safaris. Charity bosses received bonuses that could have kept whole villages in food and medicine for years.
After a row with her manager over a lunch paid for with donations meant for orphans, Helen had walked out. Edna had walked with her. Over a consolation chai tea, they’d hatched a brave and crazy plan. They’d start their own Kenyan orphanage and give hope to children. The napkin on which Edna wrote the name they’d dreamed up was now framed and hanging on their office wall: Hearts4Africa Home for Girls. In slums, it was the girls who were at the greatest risk, so that’s where they decided to begin.
Their first six-bed orphanage was as ramshackle as The New Boiling Soup Hotel. Their second was a condemned building.
Fifteen years on, Helen still found it hard to believe they’d turned what her father Ray had called ‘Project Nuclear Bunker’ into a light-filled home full of smiling girls. Most of them smiled, anyway. All had arrived traumatised. It took time. In some cases, days. In others, years.
It was Edna and Helen’s firm belief that love was in the details. It was in Cook Rose’s nutritious meals; in the tiny but well-stocked library; in the polished wood floors and the plum-hued bougainvillea spilling in at the windows.
In that first year, Helen’s mum and dad had flown out from their home in the Scottish Highlands and spent two months camping in the grounds. Together with Edna’s brother and cousin, they’d transformed two acres of rubble, litter and dirt into the flower-filled garden that it was today.
They’d flown out every other year since, so the grounds and orphanage were full of Scottish touches: tartan cushions on the worn sofas, lavender lining the paths. They’d taken Africa back to Scotland too. Rose had given Helen’s mum Kenyan cooking lessons and Edna’s cousin had taught Ray how to make wooden carvings.
Running Hearts4Africa involved a great deal of heartache but it also brought huge rewards. Two former orphans had recently graduated from the University of Nairobi. Yet Edna and Helen never forgot that for every orphan rescued, there were a hundred thousand waiting to be saved.
That’s why tonight, as so often before, they went the extra mile.
‘I’m worn out too,’ said Edna, ‘but I think we should search the streets around Mathare Valley one last time. The cholera outbreak is very worrying. What if we left behind a sick child whose life could have been saved if only we’d got to them in time?’
‘But where is this child going to sleep?’ asked Helen. ‘We can’t exactly put them in a tent in the garden. Wait! I’ve got it—’
‘The library!’ they said in unison and burst out laughing. They’d been friends for so long they tended to finish each other’s sentences.
‘You’re as bad as each other,’ commented Tambo, Hearts4Africa’s driver. ‘No wonder the orphanage is overflowing.’
Helen paid no attention. ‘We can string up that hammock someone donated. It’ll be an unconventional bedroom but sort of romantic at the same time. The girl will sleep surrounded by stories. How about drawing straws to decide which of us breaks it to Matron? I’m not sure I’m brave enough.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Edna. ‘Wanjiru doesn’t scare me.’
The streets around Mathare were strewn with the wreckage left by the newly homeless. A spill of millet, a child’s T-shirt, a three-legged chair.
‘The police and developers who did this must have calculators for hearts,’ ranted Helen. ‘How wicked would you have to be to want to destroy people who already have nothing? Where will their children sleep tonight? They have nowhere else to go.’
Edna glanced at her friend. She looked drained. It was a conversation they’d had many times. Edna knew that they’d keep on having it until wars stopped, droughts ended and governments became less corrupt.
‘You’re so good with our orphans, Helen. Do you still want children of your own some day? You used to talk about it all the time.’
‘If I met the right person, I’d love children of my own, but that’s not likely to happen. I’m thirty-eight and the years are slipping by faster and faster. As for adopting, we have so many orphans that if I chose one it wouldn’t seem fair to the others.’
‘In my experience, it’s the other way around,’ said Edna, who’d already adopted three of their orphans. ‘Children choose you. It’s a bit like falling in love. You look across a room and there’s a connection. If they feel it too then you belong to one another.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘Sometimes it is.’
Helen’s phoned beeped. She checked the message and frowned.
‘Everything okay?’ asked Edna.
‘I’m not sure. Mum hasn’t been well and Dad sounds worried. That’s not like him, as you know. If they spoke Swahili in Scotland, his middle name would be Hakuna Matata. Ray “No worries” Stuart.’
Edna knew exactly what she meant. One Christmas when Ray and Helen’s mum had stayed at the orphanage, an Egyptian cobra had got into the pantry. Ray had calmly pressed its neck to the ground with a broom, picked it up and popped it into a sack. He’d released it on the outskirts of Nairobi.
The incident had become part of orphanage legend. Ray hadn’t understood the fuss. ‘Relatively speaking, cobras strike slowly. I was never in any danger.’
Edna, who loathed snakes, shuddered at the memory. ‘If your mama is ill, will you have to return to Scotland?’
‘It’s hard to say. Mum is insisting that she’ll be better in a few days but Dad has got me fretting. I’ll give him a ring in the morning. Can you manage without me if I have to go to Scotland?’
‘We could give Serena a chance to help run things. She’s ready.’
Serena was one of their success stories. By the time she was eight she had lost both parents and a leg. Soon after starting Hearts4Africa, Helen and Edna had found her begging in the crime-ridden streets around Korogocho slum. Now she was an elegant twenty-three-year-old with a management diploma. The prosthetic blade on her left leg gave her a distinct advantage when she played football with the orphanage girls and staff.
‘Good idea,’ Helen said distractedly. ‘Serena would be a real asset to us.’
She leaned forward and pointed. ‘See there – up ahead. That’s the Mercedes people have been telling us about. The one with no number plates. What possible reason could it have to be parked outside Mathare Valley at midnight, unless it’s up to no good? Why don’t you give your detective friend a ring, Edna? He might want to send someone to investigate.’
As she spoke, the Mercedes revved its engine and powered away, but Edna called the police anyway.
Helen squinted into the shadows as Tambo drove, afraid she might miss a sick or abandoned child. They’d found girls sheltering in unbelievable places – even bins.
Tambo braked sharply. ‘What’s going on there – on that street? That man – I think he’s the Reaper.’
‘The Reaper?’
‘That simple giant we’ve been hearing about. The one criminals use for their dirty work.’
A hulk of a man was crouching beside a covered cart. When he stood he was over two metres tall. He bolted when he saw them, vaulting a wall with surprising agility.
Edna reported this development to the detective and ended the call. She too was exhausted. ‘Guys, we’ve done as much as we can tonight. Let’s get home to bed.’
The vehicle moved forward.
Helen rapped her window. ‘Wait! Tambo, can you reverse a little? I think I saw something. A fox, maybe.’
Tambo snorted. ‘There are no foxes in Nairobi unless they’re on two legs. Must be a mongrel. We can’t afford any more pets at the orphanage. Already we are like a zoo with two dogs, three cats and a rabbit.’
Helen wasn’t sure what she’d seen. It had resembled a fox, but that wasn’t what caught her attention. It was the trail of sparks that had swirled behind it as it trotted out from under the cart. If it was a trick of the light, it was magical.
‘I’m not about to adopt the fox or whatever it was, Tambo, but I do think we should take a closer look at that cart. What if the Reaper was about to harm something or someone?’
‘Let’s check it out,’ agreed Edna. ‘It’ll only take a minute.’
They turned into the street. Tambo parked and left the engine running. As she climbed out, the night wind was cool on Helen’s skin. She approached the cart cautiously, torch in hand. The fox had gone, but it could have left behind a wounded mate or cubs. She’d noticed a shimmer.
Kneeling, she lifted the tarpaulin. An emaciated girl with huge, terrified almond eyes cowered from the light. She was clutching a glass jar.
‘Don’t be afraid,’ Helen said gently. ‘I’m here to help you, not harm you. You’re safe now.’
The girl’s hand was freezing in hers. She’d sprained her ankle and couldn’t walk. When Helen lifted her, she was nothing but bones. Despite that, Helen could feel the child’s heart thrashing strongly against her cheek.
Edna came hurrying over to help. Tambo was guarding the vehicle. The area seemed deserted but appearances could be deceptive in and around the slums. The Mungiki used the drains and sewers as smugglers’ tunnels. They could strip a vehicle of tyres, hubcaps and valuables and melt away in seconds.
Together, the women laid the girl on the blankets they’d prepared in the back of the 4x4. As soon as her head touched the pillow, she lost consciousness. It was as if she’d been holding on until she knew she could relax. Her hands relaxed and she let go of the jar.
Helen caught it before it smashed. Curiously, it was empty. A torn cardboard label was tied to it: ‘FILL ME WITH SNOW’.
Helen looked from the jar to the girl and her entire world shifted on its axis.
‘Would you mind calling the hospital, Edna?’ she said weakly. ‘Tell them we have a suspected case of cholera. They’ll need to have all their wits about them. We have a life to save tonight.’
