One Day I Will Write About This Place Read online

  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.

  Maybe Liza’s mother came with the wedding women? She will see me; everybody will know I dressed up like a girl yesterday.

  Mum will find out I wore her clothes and wig.

  Everybody is against me. The ache of my pineapple situation
strums against my chest, and I let it yo-yo around. It feels good.

  I hear feet clumping toward me. I jump off the seat under the hair dryer and lie on the floor, under the chair. I cover my face with my hands. A body thumps onto a chair; a head eases into the helmet. The dryer starts to wheeze, and I can feels bits of hot air on my head.

  It is the bride! I peep up at her, through my raw yellow ache. Through the hands covering my face. She looks beastly with her eyes upside down and her pink-­lipsticked mouth inverted. I am quickly tender and pineapple pink. Butterfly belly. Barefoot on hot gravel. Her lips are a pink baboon bum, which must really hurt. I harden my eyes, my heart.

  I focus on the lips. They are a safer texture: pink-­lipsticked toyland, the color of happy candy, and bubblegum balloons and hard, committed happiness.

  I am quickly sharp and bright and happy. I take my hands away from my face, and stand up. She grimaces and shrieks.

  “Oooooooh, whooo is that? Why are you hiding?”

  My face falls.

  “Don’t cry! Oh, don’t cry!”

  Now I want to cry. Her face blurs, and everything is tangled and jagged. She leans toward me, this wedding woman with shrunken hair. Her mouth is now pink earthworms and snails and teeth. Her face swells down toward me, tearing out of the traffic jam of patterns, to present itself as whole and inevitable.

  I gasp. And look. The beast is gone. She is a whole person, bland and indivisible again. I am in doubt about my own recent doubts. How could she have been anything other than the thing she is now?

  “Mama Jimmy. Is this one your firstborn? Is this Jimmy?”

  She has opened the closed cramped world. I have been trying to keep my lips tuckedtogethershut. Forever. Quiet. Opening two lips is tearing cobwebs. A silent superhero. Cool.

  “Hello, auntie,” I say, drawing pictures on the floor with my foot. The pineapple rises in my chest. Maybe she will give me some wedding cake? The squeaky painful taste of perfect white sweetness. Icing tastes in your mouth like Styrofoam sounds when it is rubbed against itself.

  Almost too much.

  I let my eyes rise slow and cute. This game I know. I tingle and let my eyes touch hers briefly, then I look down again.

  She coos.

  My mother turns toward us and looks sharply at me.

  Does Mum know? Did Liza’s mother call her?

  Mum’s voice is like shards of water and streams of glass. It rises up her throat like warm suds. She has a small double chin where this noise is made, a nasal accent, but not American, or English. Her nose is long and thin.

  I have discovered that nasal accents come from people with long thin noses. Wreng wreng. My nose is thin, but not as thin as my mum’s. Sometimes I try to hear myself, cupping my hand over my ear and twisting my mouth to the side, but I can’t hear myself being nasal. Mum reaches out her hand and takes mine. She licks her finger and smooths my eyebrow. Her fingers reach around and pull me to her chest. My back recoils from the hard bump on her stomach. I don’t want to crunch the baby. Mum smells good, like powder and perfume and burning hair oil.

  “KenKen”—this is Mum’s embarrassing nickname for me—“what are you doing there?” She laughs, and my heart purrs.

  “He is my second-born. The shy one.”

  One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees. The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings. Water from the shower­head streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.

  All together, they are: shhhhhhhhhhhh.

  Shhhhh is made up of many many tinny tiny ting ting tings, so small that clanking glass sounds become soft whispers; like when everybody at the school parade is talking all at once, it is different from when one person is talking. Frying sausages sound like rain on a tin roof, which sounds like a crowd.

  The rain is soft now. The wedding women are in rollers. The hair dryers are all blowing, red eyes. Mum pats the bride’s hair and murmurs to her in Kiswahili, which Mum speaks in an accent full of coughing Ugandan gh’s and Rwandese kh’s. Her voice is soft, and tingly, and people get tingly with her and do what she says. She never shouts.

  From outside, there is a sound of thudding metal. Mary rushes outside. Then Mary is shouting at somebody in her funny Kiswahili. Then there are screams. The wedding women stand up. We all rush to the door. The bride starts to cry again.

  It is Mrs. Karanja. Mrs. Karanja owns Kenya Coffeehouse, next door to Mum’s salon. She does not like it when we leave our municipal council garbage cans near her café. But that is where we are supposed to leave them. The council refuses to come into our courtyard to collect them.

  There is sweat on her face. Her eyebrows are clean, perfectly drawn ovals, and her eyes and lashes are sticky with brown smudges. Brown paint leaks out of the outline, down her cheeks, and her ruby-painted mouth is lifted to one side, into a sneer. One of her teeth has a smudge of fluoride brown I have not seen before. She is pulling a giant tin garbage can, and Mary, who is dark and hard and thin, is pulling our garbage can back. There is garbage strewn all over the concrete.

  Mrs. Karanja’s manservant stands behind her, a Pokot man, a warrior dressed in cheap military khaki and sandals made from car tires. Jonas. He usually gives me tropical sweets when he sees me. I like to sit on his knee on his little stool. He has parallel lines cut into his face and torn ears that have been rolled up into themselves.

  Mrs. Karanja has rich, buttery skin. When you draw the hair of ordinary people you can draw just random dots on the head for short hair, or wildly scribble around, with a crayon or pencil, for long hair. President Kenyatta calls ordinary people wananchi.

  With overseas white people, and international music stars, like Diana Ross, or the Jackson Five, you draw the outline carefully and color or paint in yellow, or black, or brown inside, filling in all the gaps until the picture is one clear color and you cannot see lines or scratches, just yellow, brown, or black. When Ciru and I draw overseas people, we are careful to make them look like they do in the coloring books and on television.

  Mrs. Karanja has penciled eyebrows, twin black unbroken lines that belong to people who have no gaps in them. But she is breaking. She is shouting, “Why do you put your garbage can next to mine? I am tired of this. Tired! You Ugandans spoiled your country—why do you want to come here and spoil ours?”

  The rain has stopped, the sun is high, and the pavement is filling with pools of growing, shaking crowds. Bell-­bottom trousers flap, and some bare feet are spread open like a fan from never wearing shoes. Groups of feet pound toward us: the curio dealers on Kenyatta Avenue, the brokers who hover outside the coffeehouse, the newspaper sellers, the people who are just there and bored and getting wet from the rain.

  Mrs. Karanja shoves Mary, who falls to the ground. They are hitting each other now. Bodies shuffle uncertainly in the crowd, fingers rubbing thighs up and down, hands curled into themselves.

  Mrs. Karanja screams, shoves Mary away, and stands and screams, and points at Mum. Mum grabs hard at my shoulder and pulls me to her chest. Her hand reaches for mine. I try to slip away, but she is faster than me.

  The guard has let Mary go, but he stands behind her. She is breathing hard, her eyes wide, teary and wild, and they are fixed on Mrs. Karanja, who swivels from side to side.

  No one speaks. The wedding women are silent. My ears heat up. It is as if Kenya is over there, with the crowd, and behind us are the wedding women—­who have sided with Uganda. All of Kenya is pulled together by Mrs. Karanja. And the wedding women have been shamed to silence.

  Crowd legs now shuffle toward each other, whispering and frowning and smirking, nostrils open and twitching. Even the municipal council askari does nothing. His truncheon sits helpless; his neck stretches forward toward Mrs. Karanja, his eyes wide.

  Mum’s hand is tight on mine. Bodies start to rub against each other. Mum will not let go of my hand. If I was a golf ball, I would roll fast and forward and hit that tin garbag
e can and let us tumble. I want to howl and put my head up Mrs. Karanja’s skirt and make loud spitting snotty noises, or hit the concrete wall hard with my head, bounce back, satisfied that I am not rubber. People stream out of Barclays Bank, to join the crowd across the street. I am still trying to pull my fingers out of Mum’s grip, so I can pinch her hard.

  Mrs. Karanja walks to the corner and picks up another garbage can. This one is full. She kicks it over and stares at us.

  There is a pile now, on the ground: old hair, thousands of tiny oily coils of black string from undone hair, wet grains of old tea, KCC milk packets, shampoo bottles, digestive biscuit packets, gray lumps of wet old newspapers, one Lyons Maid ice cream packet, several Elliot’s Bread packets, a tin of Mua Hills plum jam, bottle tops, maize cobs that look like bared teeth, one Trufru orange squash bottle, one Lucozade bottle for when Ciru was sick, yellowing maize skins tangled with maize hair that looks like white people’s hair, empty jars of Dax pomade, raffia packets, string, banana peels and maize cobs, ants.

  “Go back inside the salon.” She pushes my back.

  I want to say no, but I move. I slam the door behind me. The gas flames are still heating the combs and the salon is hot and smells of burning hair and Idi Amin.

  I stand on a chair and watch from the window.

  Mum starts to pick up the garbage. Mary helps. Mrs. Karanja stands in front of the crowd and watches. When the first can is full, they leave it and head toward Mrs. Karanja’s shop. They put it on the ground, between the two shops, where all the cans from the street are supposed to be.

  Mrs. Karanja follows them.

  “You will see. You will see.”

  The crowd is still. She summons the guard and tells him to spill the garbage outside Mum’s door. He shrugs at the crowd, his eyes wary and afraid. He picks up the can, walks past Mum and Mary, avoiding their eyes, and then overturns it outside the door. He walks back, his shoulders sloping, following her back to the coffeehouse. A woman jumps out of the crowd and starts to help gather the garbage; soon there is a small group helping Mum and Mary. The wedding women jump forward and start collecting. Even the bride joins in.