“Beer,” replied John. “It’s a special beer made from millet flour. It’s called mawa.”
“Its origin,” observed Bill, still peering with apparently grave interest at the liquid, “would be easier to describe than its appearance. It looks like the contents of a vacuum cleaner, swimming,” he said.
“No,” said Janet, laughing. “Not here. If you don’t hit the dust with a brush, it generally walks away. And there are no vacuum cleaners.” From the beginning of her stay in Migwani, ants had always been a problem in her house. As time passed, however, she had learned to ignore them, having learned that once she had carefully picked them out from the marmalade or jam and ejected them to the side of the plate, breakfast tasted the same as it always had. She was thankful for Daniel’s initiative. It had provided a focus for their conversation and allowed her the luxury of relegating her recent intimacy with John to the background of her thoughts.
“The best way,” announced John, “to find out what it is like is to taste it.” With that he told Bill to empty his glass, which he then filled with mawa from the pot. This rendered Bill quite speechless and prompted Janet to a fit of laughter, which Anna shared. Even Lesley, though revolted by the sight of the opaque grey liquid, could not help but laugh at the confused expression on Bill’s face as he held up the glass to the light of the storm lamp and tried in vain to peer through it.
“Amazing,” said Bill, still unable to bring himself to drink. “It’s totally opaque, like porridge.”
Remembering the milk at his father’s house, John smiled and poured a glass for himself, saying, “You seem to be making a habit of this. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it if you try some.”
John drank from his glass as the others watched, struck dumb by their conviction that he would choke. When he did not, Daniel poured some of the beer for Janet and Leslie and also some for himself. Anna protested, but no one was going to allow her to have a share. “Cheers,” he said, raising the glass and drinking.
The others now decided to try the experience. All three winced. Lesley coughed and spluttered through her laughter and replaced the glass on the table, pushing it forcefully away in a single movement. A moment later, after wiping her lips with her handkerchief, she looked at the others in disbelief, saying, “How can you possibly drink that?”
“I am not sure whether to drink it or chew it,” said a concerned-looking Bill, as he watched the thick liquor stick to the glass, repeatedly turning and twisting it to get a better view of the contents.
Janet’s reaction was different. After approaching the exercise with great caution, she had cast fear to the wind and taken a sizeable gulp of the liquid and swallowed it. She was helpless for a second or two, gasping like a fish out of water. After slamming the glass hard on the table, she rushed to the kitchen to get a glass of cold water, which she drank in one. Returning to the others, much to the amusement of Daniel, who was quite beside himself with laughter, she sat down, wiping her now running eyes, “Wow.. it’s like drinking neat gin with flour in it!” This comment apparently renewed Bill’s interest to try more and he drank again, this time with more conviction.
Before long, they had all overcome their initial problems and went on to finish the pot. Lesley, who declared with some conviction that she did not like it, was the only one to remain with a glassful in front of her. Eagerly, Bill took it from her and finished it off. He announced that he had really started to enjoy it. They did not have long to wait before they all began to realise just how strong it was. The word ‘beer’ was clearly misapplied, since a few minutes later they all knew they were quite drunk and filled with euphoria. All, Lesley and Anna included, if only by association, much enjoyed the hours that followed. Impromptu parties such as this had always been the most enjoyable part of life in Migwani for Janet. In the past, with Father Michael, she had often returned from the bar in such a mood and they had spent some hours telling stories and dancing to music from a radio.
It was after midnight before the euphoria died down and the weariness of a day’s journey caught up with the travellers. As quickly as they had begun, the festivities ceased and everyone lolled exhausted in their chairs.
After a while Janet rose from her chair, rubbed her eyes and yawned, saying, “I had better get some sheets and blankets for you. Bill, would you mind sleeping here?”
She was cut short by John who, without a second thought, said, “Don’t bother about us. There are too many of us to stay here. We’ll go and stay in the Safari Bar in town.”
Janet determinedly avoided a glance towards Lesley. This, clearly, was John’s carefully calculated way of ensuring there was no risk of extended private contact between his wife and herself, who now, of course, was his lover. The evening had gone well, bypassing, from John and Janet’s shared perspectives, difficult terrain, smoothed by Daniel’s perfectly timed injection of local brew.
Suddenly revitalised, Bill looked up and smiled. At last he would spend a night in a local hotel and find out just what one might receive for the meagre fee. They left Janet, truly grateful for the hospitality she had shown. Lesley, leading the very sleepy Anna by the hand was the first to leave, thanking Janet again and kissing her goodbye, telling her that she must come to Nairobi soon to stay for a weekend.
After Lesley and Anna had walked off towards the car, Bill and John remained with Janet in her kitchen, still trying to express their thanks. Janet maintained that there was no need for them to go to the hotel, but John would hear none of it, stating that he thought they had overstayed their welcome already. Quickly, Bill scribbled his address in her address book and told her that if ever she might need somewhere to stay in London, she would be more than welcome in his house. Bidding a fond goodbye, they left and joined Lesley and Anna in the car.
“She has become a true African,” said Bill, whose admiration for Janet was clear.
“Indeed she has,” said John in a calm, measured tone.
Chapter Twenty
June 1976
Janet looked on and laughed, laughed so much she almost cried. This unknown man dispersed a cloud which began to gather. She was on the road, on the way to recovery. His performance, skilled as well as spontaneous, entertained her like nothing else had done for months passed. Its true joy was its unexpectedness. Sitting on this bench in the shade of a concrete canopy in Nairobi’s Kariokor bus station, awaiting the arrival of her bus, the last thing she expected to see was a performance like this. Unannounced at first, a young man dressed in a threadbare primary school uniform of khaki shirt and shorts, and wheeling a bicycle, crept slowly out into the centre of the large expanse of tarmac, where idle buses were parked. Then, beginning with a bow to his distant audience, he displayed his skill as a trick cyclist. He offered real circus, spinning the front wheel, standing on one foot on the saddle and doing headstands on the handlebars. For ten minutes his cycle described lazy circles on the tarmac, as if propelled by some perpetual energy. Easing himself from one trick to another, from handstand to headstand, from balancing on the crossbar to swaying from side to side over the rear wheel, he entertained a gathering crowd, holding their attention, provoking them to laughter and applause. Had he not appeared by chance to entertain the waiting crowd, among them Janet, she would have sat alone with her discomfort and thus meditated herself nearer the depths of depression, which had threatened to envelop her for several days.
As ever, Nairobi was a stuffy and uncomfortable place, a city Janet found easy to detest. It seemed to live an independent life, a life far removed from any other part of Kenya. Everyone in the city, even a visitor due to stay only a few hours inside its influence, was transformed by the obsequiousness of its life, and tricked into mimicking the false grandeur of its façade. Even the beggars, who each day shuffled the length of Kenyatta Avenue on hands and knees, dragging behind them their waving polio-shrunken legs, even they seemed full of the city’s infectious false pride. A beggar in Kitui
was part of the town, a showman whom people knew and recognised, like a landmark in the town’s character. For instance, the old man who sat in the road opposite the Standard Bank in Kitui completely covered by a large black blanket crying, “Don’t forget the leper,” had become an involuntary traffic island. The one-way system that operated around his pitch was known and honoured by all. Traffic in Kitui, of course, was somewhat limited in quantity. Only a handful of vehicles would pass the spot each day, but all followed the direction marked by the old beggar’s bent arm, which stretched out from beneath his blanket to hold the chipped enamel bowl in which he collected the average salary for his job. At sunset he would emerge from under his shroud to count the day’s takings. Then, wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, he would walk to the bar in perfect, if wrinkled health at a great pace, with the weight of pennies jingling inside the knotted handkerchief he used as a purse.
The one they called ‘the tinker’ was simply a showman, a zany one-man band who looked less like a musician than a walking advertisement for kitchenware. Completely covered in tin plates, enamel pans and sufurias, the giant shining aluminium cooking pots used for making ugali, which he tied with strings and hung around his neck, he possessed no permanent pitch, electing to dance his way through the town, sometimes past the cathedral, sometimes through the bus station, syncopating with his steps the rhythms he played on his bamboo flute. Since he was entirely naked save for his swinging pots and pans, people looked upon him as a mwana wa mungu, a child of God, a madman, rather than a beggar.
Even the smaller towns had their resident eccentrics. Kabati, the ugly town between Kitui and Migwani, which had grown in five years from two mud-walled shops to a town the size of the District centre by virtue of having been founded at the junction of two bus routes, even Kabati possessed its own mwana wa mungu. Rejoicing in the name of King Kabati, he was surely a child of God, for his words, his actions, his vision seemed governed by some rationale, some unconventional wisdom, which was immediately apparent, and yet both absurd and forever indefinable. He was utterly irrational, but so completely that he created his own reality. Janet had met him many times, had sat and talked with him over a tea in the shop where most travellers who changed buses in the town took their refreshment, where they would spend the blank hours around midday awaiting the arrival of their connection. Unlike most other acknowledged madmen, King Kabati was young, tall and quite handsome too. He claimed to have left secondary school only a few years ago, having completed his studies, like so many others, by obtaining an unclassified, and therefore useless, result in his examinations. His great ambition had been to work as a clerk in a government office and then seek promotion until he had become “a big fish in the net like Bwana Mwangangi in Mwingi, a man who could command his own fleet of Land Rovers and give orders to everyone else in the District, save for the Commissioner in Kitui and a handful of rich people.” Even his dreams were realistic enough to recognise that this particular office could be most easily attained by birthright. He certainly suffered no scattered confusion in his madness.
Some months ago, when she met him for the first time, he had accosted her in a way similar to the spitting old man in Migwani. By then more experienced in how to deal with such people, she had suffered no fear and invited him to take some tea with her. Then to her great surprise, he had interviewed her in English across the table, as if he were some strangely warped tax collector. She had laughed at the incongruity of this business-like tone coming from one so absurd, dressed, as he was, in shirt and shorts with his head topped by a silver crown made of aluminium cooking foil. Entertained, she had played his game only to be presented, to her astonishment, with an apparently authentic and blank British Inland Revenue tax declaration form. Listening intently to her answers, he had filled in the form with a stub of a pencil he carried on top of his head within the confines of his crown, held by a knot of his close-cropped hair. Having competed his interrogation of her, he declared the meeting closed and left her, pausing, as he stood, to take a large knife from the waistband of his shorts and complete the sharpening of his pencil, before sliding it into its place along his scalp. The knife he held on to for just a little too long, she thought, before returning it with a show of blasé speed to his shorts.
She had gone on her way, that day, having changed from the Nairobi-bound Uhuru na Kazi that had brought her from Migwani, to a Nairobi-Kitui bus of the same company, with her list of errands to be accomplished in town again at the forefront of her mind. Indeed, she had completely forgotten her meeting with King Kabati until the very next time she found herself waiting for a connection in the same teashop. It was some weeks later, but King Kabati strode directly up to her and introduced himself, referred her to their previous meeting and politely asked for a few minutes of her time so that their business might be concluded. Again over a tea that she bought for him, he announced that there had been quite a lot of work to complete on her behalf since their first encounter. He announced that the ministry had fully reviewed her case and had decided that she had overpaid her tax. Therefore she was due a refund of one hundred shillings. This could be paid, he told her, as soon as she paid the five shilling investigation fee, a charge made to discourage spurious claims for rebates.
Everything about the man was a contradiction. His English, his manner, his logic, within its own context, seemed perfect, but the whole was so absurd as to be rendered completely surreal. Faithfully, Janet complied with his request and handed over a five-shilling note. Then to her surprise, he produced from his pocket the tax form she had filled in those weeks before, still crisp and neatly folded, as if it had been filed for future reference. After sticking a ten-cent stamp at the bottom of page three, he asked Janet to sign over it with what appeared to be the same stub of a pencil. Then, pocketing the five shillings, he produced a wad of hundred shilling notes and presented one of them to his client. Janet was rendered speechless. The note, of course, was not genuine, but every detail of a real note had been painted in a dark red hue on to a piece of paper torn from an exercise book to produce a child-like, but strangely accurate forgery, despite the portrait of Jomo Kenyatta looking distinctly pop-eyed. Smiling, as she scratched at the colour in an attempt to convince her eyes that it was real, King Kabati had proudly stood up and bid his goodbye. As he turned and literally skipped out of the door, clutching his five shillings of earnings, less the cost of a stamp, he pointed to the wad of fake notes still in his hand and said, “Goat’s blood.” With that he set off ostensibly to honour his next appointment.
But Nairobi beggars, thought Janet, mirrored the schizophrenia of the city. Along Kenyatta Avenue crawled the handicapped, but they seemed to regard their predicament as a business, accosting only the white or obviously rich with their often gnarled, misshapen hands. They knew that these people would rather discard ten shillings than suffer the embarrassment of being followed along the street by one so obviously destitute, so desperately ugly. Here, in what the well-to-do called the native sector, a beggar was again the mixture of madman and circus act one could encounter and enjoy anywhere in the country. Here, the child of God performed, sometimes for himself alone. He never crawled; there was dignity in his madness. Only when his act was completed would he visit the groups of people at each bus stop to collect the pennies they would willingly give and the thanks they would voice for the entertainment he had given. What would happen, she thought, if this trick cyclist had chosen to give his act in the road outside the veranda of the New Stanley? There, tourists met to laze away the hours between sightseeing and shopping over exorbitantly priced coffee, served by proud white-coated waiters. “What would they think?” she thought, as she watched him wheel his bicycle, still counting his money, over to the side of the bus station, where he bought a slice of pineapple for twenty cents from a street vendor. Surely, she concluded, a tourist would not even regard him as a madman or even a beggar. No, for the tourist he would be an example of the street theatre that page two h
undred of the guidebook probably labelled and described.
But had she, herself, not operated this double standard without a thought for the alternative? When sick, why had she assumed that she must travel to Nairobi for treatment rather than visit the health centre in Migwani or the District Hospital in Kitui? She could have gone to the nuns in the mission hospital in Muthale, but then circumstances had not allowed it. She was just thankful to have been swept along by events. It had made her life easier.
Almost two weeks ago, she had rushed away from Migwani immediately after school, bound for Kitui on the bus. The week had been frustrating. Twice she had been invited for dinner at the mission by Father O’Shea, who had been appointed to run Migwani in Michael’s absence. She sensed his difference from Michael the moment they met. He was older and more overtly meditative, and conscious of his priesthood. After serving more than twelve years in the district, he had yet to visit a bar, regarding them as places where he was neither welcome nor appreciated. Neither had he ever eaten in a local restaurant, though he never refused the food he was offered when he visited a parishioner at home. He enjoyed a beer, but it was to be shared with his peers, not his flock. She had accepted his invitations and had enjoyed his company to a point, but she found his manner rather strange, discomforting in its intensity. Prematurely grey-haired and with piercingly bright blue eyes, which would stare at her with unblinking clarity during pauses in the conversation, as if he were a tape recorder on a momentary pause, his whole appearance and manner made her feel nervous. She talked to him in the way she might speak to a father, not the religious kind, and not a peer, as she could with Michael. Above all, his deep resonant voice seemed constantly to be offering her advice or admonition, drawn from a direct and long acquaintance with the problems that frustrated Janet’s work and locked the people of Migwani into poverty’s cell.
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