He shook his head as if he was having trouble understanding. ‘He’s making trouble,’ he said, speaking with a struggle. He sounded as if he was talking with his mouth full. ‘He wants to fight. He’ll be beaten. He’s drunk.’
He said the last word with loathing, then chortled and slapped his forehead at the absurdity of it all. He shook his head again and began to cry. My mother pushed me aside and slapped Khamis across the face. I pushed her back. Khamis was now sobbing like a child.
‘Where is he?’ I asked him again. I held him across the shoulders to stop the wild rocking that accompanied his sobs.
‘At Sood’s,’ he cried, his voice small like a child’s.
‘I’d better go,’ I said to my mother. Her face was hard with anger. She seemed to be waiting for me to say something, to gloat or complain.
‘Do you know what time it is? You have an examination tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I know, but I have to go.’
Khamis groaned and pushed my hand away as I went to help him off the wall. The sight of my mother, holding a jagged piece of firewood, alarmed him enough to move. He staggered ahead of me, muttering and spitting. I left him in the clearing. When he realised what I was saying, he allowed himself to slide to the ground with relief. I was tempted to search him, to see if he had any money. I had heard stories of fat wallets found in the pockets of sleeping drunks. Khamis farted loudly and without warning. I hurried away as he strained to repeat the performance.
It was a dark night. The emptiness was eerie. There was a touch of dampness in the atmosphere, a tang in the air. The rains had started, but only in a desultory, tentative way. Any day the real rains would start. I reached the sea front and followed the old cobbled pavement that ran all the way to the docks. The hissing of the sea drowned the frightening sound of my footsteps. Customs guards were lounging near the dockyard gate. I thought they would stop me, but they stared blankly and left me alone. A footpath ran alongside the wire fence that skirted the dock area. I passed pyramids of sacks and crates. We had played here as children, making hide-outs and caves.
The path branched away from the fence and headed towards the warehouses that now stood silent and huge in the emptiness of the night. Beyond the warehouses was a grotto of mango trees. In the clearing between the two stood an old, low building, surrounded by pieces of junk that had been salvaged from elsewhere and dragged here. This was Sood’s, dirty and disreputable, tolerated by the law because it attracted those whom events had already defeated.
Two men were lounging on the steps. They stirred as they saw me approach. As I came nearer, I saw them relaxing again, smiles on their faces. I stopped some distance from the steps. One of them, the man wearing a sleeveless shirt open to his navel, moved forward. The other man looked older. He leant against the wall, stroking his patchy beard. They both looked tough and unpleasant men, grizzled by a lifetime of living hand to mouth. The man who had moved forward tilted his head, pointing his chin at me.
‘I’ve come for my father,’ I said humbly. ‘I think he’s in there.’
They both laughed. I suppose it sounded childish. The older man moved quickly, rattling down the steps. I stepped back, legs tensed for flight, heart hammering. He stopped suddenly and I realised that I had raised both my fists. He eyed my fists and smiled, flicking a hand at them.
‘You fuck off home before I stuff your little penis in your mouth,’ he said. ‘Come on, before I change my mind. Bloody swine! Get out of here.’
I lowered my arms slowly, as if I was having an internal argument about the wisdom of such leniency. The younger man laughed, then beckoned his friend. A fit of shaking passed through my limbs. The younger man spoke angrily and abusively at his companion, calling him a shit-eater and a cannibal. ‘He’s come to get his father,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what that means, never having had one. Leave the boy alone.’ To my eyes now he seemed a kindly man, a noble savage. ‘There’s no one in there,’ he said, addressing me. ‘He might be over there, in that junk. Now fuck off out of here, huh?’
He nodded his head once and winked. I tried to spot a human form among the old car seats and broken bed frames. There was enough light to see by, but the shadows confused the landscape. I found him lying in a boxed settee whose stuffing had been removed.
I thought at first that he was hurt. His legs were splayed out at odd angles. The arm of the settee hid the light from his face. I touched him on the arm, tentatively, but he did not move. He was still wearing his jacket, and his walking stick was leaning against the settee as if someone had carefully placed it there. I tried to shake him awake. Fuck my arse, he shouted, rousing himself into a thrashing of arms and legs. I leaned forward and slapped him as hard as I could, and felt a tingle of cruel pleasure from the pain that I knew I was inflicting on his senseless body. I hit him again, feeling shame for the pleasure that it gave me. He groaned.
‘Come on,’ I shouted, ‘It’s time to go home.’
I shook him violently. He thrashed out again and this time landed a blow on my chest. Then he saw me. He struggled to a sitting position, as if trying to hide his drunkenness. He leant back with a groan, smiling mockingly at me. ‘You see how I am,’ he drawled.
There was a noise behind me, and I turned to see a man crawling out of a steel drum lying on its side. He smelled of urine. ‘I’m a tough guy,’ he muttered as he crawled on all fours.
‘I fucked his arse many times,’ my father said, pointing his stick at him. ‘He falls down in the streets and little children fuck him.’
The man slowly subsided, sinking flat on the ground. My father leant forward and spat at him. It did not seem to matter. The man sniggered and rolled over, suddenly looking very vulnerable. My father felt this and struggled to his feet, changing his grip on the walking-stick. I put an arm around him to shield him from the man. The touch of him was disgusting, flabby and loose. He directed us towards the man who now seemed asleep. Suddenly, with unexpected strength, my father leant forward and swung the walking-stick onto the man’s back. I let go of him. He struggled to regain his balance, took a sudden breath and threw up.
I waited until he had finished, waited while he groaned and wiped himself, and only went to him when he seemed ready to go to sleep again. It took me a long time to persuade him to move and we made slow progress. It started to rain as we walked across the clearing. There were only a few drops at first, heavy and separate, landing on the skin with a squelch. It was the start of the big rains. I could tell by the size of the drops. The rain was getting heavier by the minute, spitting dust at our feet. Soon it was pounding furiously on our heads exhilarating in its violence. We stumbled towards the shelter of a warehouse. A great sheet of water surrounded our narrow cover, pouring off the gutterless roof. I could hear my father breathing heavily next to me.
‘They’ll be dancing in the country,’ I told him. ‘Assuming you’re interested . . . or care.’
‘Fuck off,’ he mumbled.
I groped for him in the dark and found his arm. I yanked it and set off. He came without protest. The lumps of water stung as they pitted the flesh, and I felt his arm slip out of my grasp. I swiped around me but I had lost him. The stupid bugger. I’ll fail my exams. Ahead were the Customs gates, and the lamps on either side of them were throwing wide refracted beams on the ground. I yelled out for him, hoping he would hear me above the rumble of the water. Ba, where are you? Ba! A song answered me, or it may have been a scream of delight. I ran towards the light, hoping that I would not collide with one of the rusty skeletons on the waste ground. I saw the wire in time to break my rush with outstretched arms. A cry came from behind me and I yelled out where I was. When I saw him he was grinning, his arms open to embrace the water that was sheeting all around us. I reached for his shoulder and pulled him towards me. He huddled to me, reciting in a whisper lines from the Koran.
The path was now very slippery and we had to walk with care. At last we reached the metal road, the refracted beams travelling far
ahead of us to light our way. My father was absorbed by the sight of the rain falling across the beams of light. I started to jog away, to encourage him to follow but he called out for me to slow down. ‘It won’t hurt you,’ he shouted. I walked ahead of him, anticipating his every movement forward, and having to go back often to persuade him to hurry. The rain had cleared his head a little and he was not staggering and falling as much as when we started out. He turned to look at the light once more, walking backwards. He toppled over very gently, as if he was carefully letting himself fall on a bed. He lay in the puddles of water, clapping his hands and laughing.
‘A long time ago,’ he sang, making his voice deep and croaky like an ancient sheikh reading the tajwid. ‘When I was only a baby. And sailed the seas, searching for my rizki. Our ship was sunk by a reef, and we swam to the land of Socotra. The king there held us captives . . . ’
‘You haven’t been anywhere to be sunk,’ I said, bending down to him and offering an arm.
He looked at me for a moment, still grinning and blinking the rain out of his eyes. ‘Once upon a time,’ he said, waving an oratorical finger, ‘I was a man of honour. Do you know what happened?’
‘Let’s go home,’ I said. ‘Come on, old man. I’ve got an examination tomorrow.’
‘They know about you,’ he said quietly. ‘I’ve told everybody that you’re going to run away.’ He held on to my arm while I pulled him up. ‘You dirty bloody traitor!’ he screamed at me. We walked in silence along the waterfront, stopping only once for my father to urinate. We were nearly home when he drew alongside and leaned on my arm.
‘This is the best place for you,’ he whispered. ‘I told everybody that you’re going to run away. They’ll put you in prison, you fucking traitor. You’re too good for us, anybody can see that. They’ll put you in prison.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, meaning that the authorities knew that I wanted to leave. I had applied for a passport.
‘My dear son, my brave young genius,’ he said in a high-pitched voice of mockery. ‘You’re afraid of nothing. What a son! Who hates his father and his mother and his people and his God . . . ’ I could see the hate on his face. Water was dripping off his hair. We were in the open ground under the mzambarau tree. The rain was beginning to slacken. He let go of my arm and walked away, meandering across the clearing. He stopped in front of the old man’s brothel and blew an enormous raspberry at it. He waited for me to catch up, and then let me pass. He poked me in the back with his walking-stick, once, twice. I let him go first into the alley. I heard him curse as he slipped. I stepped over the half-prone body and turned into the backyard.
I started to undress while I was still outside. He appeared round the corner, his shadow looming and wavering in the darkness. My mother appeared at the door, holding a lamp above her head. She looked at me first, running her eyes the full length of my sodden, half-naked body. I smiled at her appraisal, and that seemed to reassure her, for she nodded and swung the lamp towards my father. His eyes were closed and his clothes were covered with mud. She put the lamp down by the door and went back inside. He staggered after her, rumbling with suppressed laughter.
3
The days of the examinations passed in a blur. We all recognised them as the climax of years of misery, not only because we recognised them as the threshold of whatever futures we desired for ourselves, but also because each of us hoped through them to state our worth and value. Everything conspired to seduce us into this absurd position. We were the heroes of the day, confronting the tests of life and intellect, grappling with an irrational enemy that sought at every turn to ambush and trick us. After each sitting, we set off from the examination hall in a body, like guerrillas returned from battle, wandering the streets and parading ourselves as the smiling survivors of the examiners’ wiles. We formed self-important discussion groups by the roadside: should the answer have been stalactites or stalagmites? Nobody laughed at us, although our teachers feigned amusement at our intensity. We all knew the prizes that had become available to those who had succeeded ahead of us.
Our reverence for the power of these things was by then a matter of habit. Rumours had started even before the examinations were finished that the results would never be released. The government was concerned that successful students would want to leave, and with so many people leaving already, a serious shortage of teachers and penpushers was developing. There were rumours that results would only be released to those who completed two years of a new National Service. In the throes of the examinations, my interest in these things was lively but detached. They were part of the heady atmosphere of intrigue and politics and revenge that independence had brought.
It was after the relief of the examinations had subsided, and the weeks of waiting turned into months, that the meaning of what we had been denied became clear. In small numbers at first, students were called to government ministries and offered clerical jobs at reduced salaries. Others were called to the Ministry of Education and offered teaching assistantships without salaries, only expenses and the promise of a scholarship abroad when the results became known. The rest of us were advised to join the army. I went to the Immigration Office to enquire after my passport. It was a way of passing the time. I joined the queue and shuffled for hours to the counter, where the officer would tell me, without needing to consult a file, that there was nothing yet.
My father often talked to me during the long months of waiting. It was as if coming home with him that night had lifted some of the burden of dissembling off him. He wrote the letter to my uncle, a long, whining appeal to the big man. He read it to me before he sent it, drawing my attention to this or that bit of cleverness. He read it with a flourish, giving it in voice and gesture the force that it lacked on paper. He reminded uncle Ahmed of his promise to my mother, your dear sister, that should she need the money from her share of the shop it would always be available. Now her son was ready to do honour to the family name, so could he please cough up? It was signed Your Brother.
Nearly four months passed before we received a reply. In that time it was dangerous to mention the subject of the letter in front of my father. It only brought on one of his rages. When a reply came it was vague and full of courteous address, inviting me to go to Nairobi for a holiday. This was enough for my father. He stopped cursing uncle Ahmed as a sin-eating miser and no longer prayed that God would bring down a plague of boils on the thief. He assumed that the matter was resolved. The money was more or less on the way. You can’t expect him to say yes I’ll give you the money. It wouldn’t be polite. This is enough. He suggested that we go out and celebrate.
Sometimes he joked about the night we had come home together, telling me in a whisper how drunk he had been although I had not noticed. He told me how tired he had been that night, because he had spent the evening doing naughty things which a young man should not need to have spelt out for him. I laughed, as was expected of me.
In the house I was now referred to sarcastically as the man going to Nairobi. My mother bought the odd thing from the door-to-door man because she thought it would be useful on the journey to Nairobi, or uncle Ahmed would like it as a present. Nobody mentioned the passport. Uncle Ahmed had fixed the holiday for June, two months after the arrival of his letter. I made daily visits to the Immigration Office, shuffled in the queue all day and received the same reply.
One evening, when I was beginning to despair of making the journey at all, Zakiya called me outside. She walked towards the shadows beyond the stand-pipe in the yard and waited for me there.
‘I can talk to somebody,’ she said. ‘About the passport . . . if you want me to.’ I could not see her face but heard the shame in her voice. I had not realised that things had come to such a pass. The question that leapt to my mouth was Who? but I managed to stop myself asking it.
‘No, it’s all right. They’ll give it to me in the end. I’ll just keep on going there until they give it to me . . . ’
She chuckled,
but it was a sad, self-pitying sound. ‘You’re such a child sometimes,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have bothered asking you.’
‘Zakiya . . . ’
‘No, don’t start,’ she said sharply. ‘You wouldn’t even know what you were talking about. I’m seeing the man anyway . . . and I thought I would ask him for you. But if you don’t want me to . . . ’
We stood in silence for a long while. I did not know what to say to her. I think she was waiting for temptation to work on me, and I was trying to think of a way of not hurting her by my refusal. Not for a moment was I about to accept a favour from a brute who was already abusing my sister.
‘I was just trying to help,’ she said eventually.
I heard her swallow, trying not to cry. She had only just reached her seventeenth year. She strode back towards the house. I called to her but she ignored me.
The days dragged by slowly now. The rains had come and gone, and the dry season had returned. Weeds and bushes were everywhere in bloom, anxious to fulfil their purpose before the sun reduced them to ashes.
The old man brothel-keeper had bought himself a he-goat. He kept it tied up in the alleyway between our houses and rarely fed it. Demented with hunger and flies, it charged anything that moved within its compass. It had destroyed all the weeds within reach of its long rope, plants that for years had tenaciously clung to the walls. Sometimes, in sheer desperation, it ate mouthfuls of dirt.
The goat came to occupy an important place in our home. My mother wondered aloud whether the goat had been acquired to add variety to the orgies in the brothel. He sits there and watches the animal starving. What is he keeping it for? It can’t be for food. My grandmother gave up everything else and devoted her waking hours to watching the hated animal. She sat by her window, trying to beat down the goat’s stare with her will. My father, against whom the goat had developed an instinctive dislike, harangued it with abuse. Sometimes he marched down the dark alleyway clutching the kitchen knife, which he would brandish threateningly at the goat, swearing at it under his breath. The goat would be frantically trying to break its rope so it could charge him.
Memory of Departure Page 6
