One Day I Will Write About This Place (2 page)

…

We are on our way home, after a family day in Molo. We are eating House of Manji biscuits.

Beatrice, who is in my class, broke her leg last week. They covered her leg with white plaster. The water heater in our home is covered with white plaster. Beatrice’s toes are fat gray ticks. The water heater is a squat cylinder, covered in white stickyhard, like Beatrice’s new leg. She has crutches.

Crunch
is breaking to release crackly sweetness. Crunch! Eclairs.
Crutches
are falling down and breaking. Crutch!

Biscuits.

Uganda, my mum’s country, fell down and broke. Crutch!

Field Marshal Amin Dada, the president of Uganda, ate his minister for supper. He kept the minister’s head in the fridge. His son wears a uniform just like his. They stand together on television news, in front of a parade.

I am sleepy. Ciru is fast asleep. Jimmy asks Baba to stop the car so he can pee.

I immediately find I want to pee.

We park on the shoulder of a valley that spreads down into a jigsaw puzzle of market gardens before us. For a long time, I have wanted to walk between the fault lines of this puzzle. Out there, always in the distance, the world is vague and blurred and pretty.

I want to slide through the seams and go to the other side.

After pissing, I simply walk on: down the valley, past astonished-­looking mamas who are weeding, over a little creek, through a ripe cattle
boma
that is covered with dung.

Look, look at the fever tree!

Her canopy is frizzy, her gold and green bark shines. It is like she was scribbled sideways with a sharp pencil, so she can cut her sharp edges into the soul of whoever looks at her from a distance. You do not climb her; she has thorns. Acacia.

She is designed for dreams.

I am disappointed that all the distant scenery, blue and misty, becomes more and more real as I come closer: there is no vague place, where clarity blurs, where certainty has no force, and dreams are real.

After a while, I see my brother, Jim, coming after me; the new thrill is to keep him far away, to run faster and faster.

I stretch into a rubber-­band giant, a superhero made long by cartoon speed. I am as long as the distance between me and him. The world of light and wind and sound slaps against my face as I move faster and faster.

If I focus, I can let it into me, let in the whole wide whoosh of the world. I grit my teeth, harden my stomach.

It is coming, the moment is coming.

If I get that moment right, I can let my mind burst out of me and fold into the world, pulling it behind me like a cart. Like a golf ball bursting out of the fire. No! No! Not a golf ball! The world will flap uselessly behind me, like, like a superhero cape.

I will be free of awkwardness, of Ciru, of Jimmy, of Idi Amin dreams. The world is streaks of blinding light. My body tearing away, like Velcro, from the patterns of others.

Later, I wake up in the backseat of the car. “Here we are,” Mum likes to say whenever we come home. My skin is hot, and Mum’s soft knuckles nibble my forehead. I can feel ten thousand hot prickling crickets chorusing outside. I want to tear my clothes off and let my skin be naked in the crackling night. “Shhh,” she whispers, “shhh, shhh,” and a pink-­tasting syrup rolls down my tongue, and Baba’s strong arms are under my knees. I am pushed into the ironed sheets that are folded back over the blanket like a flap. Mum pulls them over my head. I am a letter, I think, a hot burning letter, and I can see a big stickysyrup-­dripping tongue, about to lick and seal me in.

In a few minutes, I get up and make my way across to Jimmy’s bed.

Sophia Mwela lives next door to us. Sophia is in my class. She is the class prefect. I sit next to her in class, but she rarely speaks to me. Like Ciru, she is also always number one in class. Their family is posh and rich. The Mwelas talk through their noses; we call it wreng wreng, like television people, like people from England or America. Their house has an upstairs, and they have a butler and a uniformed driver. They take piano lessons.

Their father works for Union Carbide. He is the boss and has even white people working for him. Ciru and I are going to show them. We are going to dress up like Americans. It is my idea.

Ciru and I invade Mum’s wardrobe. I put on one of her Afro wigs, some lipstick, high-­heeled shoes stuffed with toilet paper. I ask Ciru to dress up too. No, she says. We agree to pretend I am her cousin from America. I put on some face powder, and we are sneezing. A shiny midi dress. A maxi on me. I chew lots and lots of peeled pink cubes of Big G chewing gum. We climb the tree, Ciru and I, the tree that separates our hedge from theirs.

We call Sophia.

“Sophiaaaa,” says Ciru. We giggle.

“Sophiaaanh,” I say, Americanly. “Sow-­phiaaanh.”

Sophia arrives, solemn, head turned to the side, face frowning, like a serious person, like a person who knows something we do not know.

“This is my cousin Sherry from America. She is a Negro,” says Ciru.

“Haaangi. Wreng wreng,” I say Americanly, whinnying through my nose, and make a little bubble of gum pop out of my mouth. My high heels are about to fall off.

“I arrived fram Ohi-­o-­w. Laas Angelis. Airrrprrrt. Baarston. Wreng wreng…”

I fan my face and let my lips rub against each other like the woman of Lux. I release them forward, to pop.
Mpah!

Sophia says, “How is Ohio?”

“Oh, groovy. It is so wreng wreng wreng.”

I say, “I came on Pan Am. On a sevenfordiseven…”

She turns her head and nods. Look at her! She believes!

I shrug, “I just gat on a jet plane, donno when I’ll be back again.”

She turns away.

“Call me. My number is five-five-five…”

The next day, Sophia tells everybody in class that I dressed in my mum’s clothes and pretended to be an American.

They laugh and laugh.

…

Jimmy likes to roll his eyes and say groovy American things like “you’ve lost your marbles” and “you can say that again.”

Thousands of marbles—­each one tied to your mind with a rubber band—­are scattered by your mind into the hard smooth world it sees.

Golfballmarbles.

The world you see undulates with many parallel troughs—­a million mental alleys. Every new day, you throw your marbles out of your mind and let your feet and arms and shoulders follow, and soon some marbles nestle loudly into the grooves and run along with authority and precision, directed by you, with increasing boldness.

Each marble is a whole little round version of you. Like the suns.

In the groove.

But just when your marble is wheeling along, groovily swinging up the walls of your trough and back down again, challenging the edge, whistling and gum chewing and downhill biking and yo-yo bouncy and American—­gravel pounded by rain outside your bedroom window becomes sausages frying, and sausages frying can shift and become squirming bloody intestines or an army of bristling mustachioed accordions chasing you, laughing like Idi Amin.

Your marble slips off, and it clatters into a groove that contains another marble and they knock each other, sausages and gravel and intestines and a hundred manic accordions making loud spongy noises.

And now you are moving, panicked and lost. I am afraid of accordions, of spongy sounds, of losing my marbles.

…

“This is the Voice of Kenya Television.
The Six Million Dollar Man
is brought to you by K J Office Supplies.”

“It looks good at NASA One.”

“Roger. BCS arm switch is on.”

“Okay, Victor.”

“Lining rocket arm switch is on.”

“Here comes the throttle. Circuit breakers in.”

“We have separation.”

“Roger.”

“Inboard and outboards are on.”

“I’m comin’ a-­port with the sideslip.”

“Looks good.”

“Ah, Roger.”

“I’ve got a blowout—­damper three!”

“Get your pitch to zero.”

“Pitch is out! I can’t hold altitude!”

“Correction, Alpha Hold is off, turn selectors—­emergency!”

“Flight Com! I can’t hold it! She’s breaking up, she’s break—­”

…

It is Saturday.

I fake a nosebleed, and Mum lets me go to work with her.

I don’t want to see Sophia Mwela. I know she will come to the hedge between our houses and call out for Ciru and ask her where her American cousin is.

She will be laughing.

I am not talking to Ciru. Nobody is laughing at her. I don’t want to stay at home today. Jimmy does not know what happened. I am sure Ciru will tell him.

Mum has a hair salon, the only proper hair salon in Nakuru, which is the fourth-largest town in Kenya. It is called Green Art. Mum also sells paintings and wooden carvings.

I sit on the floor, at the foot of a huge hunched spaceman, in Mum’s hair salon. I can smell coffee brewing, from Kenya Coffeehouse next door.

…

The hair-­dryer spaceman has a gray plastic head. His face is a huge hole gaping at me, and the hole is a flat round net for him to blow hot air. I stick my own head into his helmet and play Six Million Dollar Man.

Mary is chatting with Mum about Idi Amin. They always talk about Idi Amin in Mary’s language, Luganda, which Mum speaks even though it is not her language. Museveni’s rebel army is gathering force in Tanzania. They chew roast maize slowly as they talk. Mum speaks Kinyarwanda (Bufumbira), Luganda, English, and Kiswahili. Baba speaks Gikuyu, Kiswahili, and English. We, the children, speak only English and Kiswahili. Baba and Mum speak English to each other.

I am going to be a quiet superhero today. Whooshing to the sky, with my invisible cape. With my bionic muscles.

I will show them.

“Steve. Austin. A me-­aan brrely alive,” I wreng wreng Americanly. “Gennlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the tek-­nalagee. We can build the world’s frrrrst bi-­anic man… I can’t hold her; she’s brrreaking up! She’s brrreaking—­”

The plastic helmet of the hair dryer has steamed up from my breath. I start to write on it with my finger.

…

Mary has big soft eyes, and she rolls her hips when she walks, which always makes me and Ciru laugh.

Idi Amin is killing people and throwing them to the crocodiles. The Nile is blocked with dead bodies. We have many aunties and uncles in Uganda. My grandparents, my mum’s parents, are in Uganda.

Baba’s friend disappeared at the border, and all they found was his broken glasses in a mass grave.

Mary is from Buganda. She ran away to Kenya from Amin. Many people are running to Kenya from Amin. Mum is Bufumbira. But Mum speaks Mary’s language because she went to a girls’ school in Buganda, Uganda’s best girls’ school, Mt. St. Mary’s Namagunga.

Mum’s stomach has started to swell with a new baby. She wants another girl.

Mum met Baba when she was a student at Kianda College in Nairobi. He was very groovy. He had a motorbike and a car and had been to England. We are Kenyans. We live in Nakuru. Mum was born in Uganda, but she is now a Kenyan. Baba is a Kenyan. He is Gikuyu. He is the managing director of Pyrethrum Board of Kenya.

I like how Mary’s fingers are able to do things even when her eyes are looking away. She moves customers’ heads up and down, side to side, and her fingers click fast, like knitting needles, and the big bush of messed-up hair becomes lines, and towers, like our new roads, railways, and bridges.

Kenyatta is our president. He is the father of our nation.

Kenya is a peace-­loving nation.

We are all pulling together, and in school we sing,
harambee,
which means we are pulling together, like a choir, or tug-­of-­war. Standing on the podium of the choir, waving a fly whisk, is a conductor, President Kenyatta, who has red scary eyes and a beard. One day, we are told, Kenyatta’s Mercedes was stuck in the mud, and he shouted
harambee,
so that people would come and push and push his long Mercedes-Benz out of the mud, so we all push and pull together; we will get the Mercedes out of the mud.

Every so often Mary dips her finger into grease and runs lubrication down the corridors and grid streets, so they gleam like America on television. Sometimes she eats while she is doing this. Every few weeks a new hairstyle arrives, from West Africa, or AfricaAmerica, or Miriam Makeba, or
Drum
magazine and the Jackson Five: uzi, afro, raffia, or pineapple, and Mary immediately knows how to make it.

Kenyatta is the father of our nation. I wonder whether Kenya was named after Kenyatta, or Kenyatta was named after Kenya.

Television people say Keenya. We say Ke-­nya. Kenya is fifteen years old. It is even older than Jimmy.

Kenya is not Uganda.

Rain rattles the corrugated iron roof of Green Art Hair Salon. Hot Uplands pork sausages are spitting in a frying pan. It is a storm now, and the sound of the rain swells loud like the crowd after a goal in a stadium.

The door opens with a whoosh and droplets of water hit my face from the outside.

Tingtingtingting.

There is an ache in my chest today, sweet, searching, and painful, like a tongue that is cut and tingles with sweetness and pain after eating a strong pineapple.

“I found you!”

Sophia will say, if she bursts into this salon right now.

I miss Ciru.

I am already full of things to tell her. If she were here, she would pull me out of inside myself. I would wobble for a moment, then run or tumble fast and firm behind her.

A group of women rush in. They are dressed for a wedding. They are hysterical. Their hot-­combed hair shrunk in the rain. They had spent the whole night preparing at home. They are late for the wedding.

The bride is crying.

“Gennlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the tek-nalagee.”

Mum issues instructions. Sharp voices explode: clunking and whooshing and foaming like hands shaking up cutlery in the sink. They bubble like water when it is starting to make glass. If you stack up all the layers of bubbles, you can make a window. It will be round and soft at first, so you can put a big book on it, and jump on it and jump on it and make it flat and hard and sure.