A Fool's Knot

by Philip Spires

  Two months ago, with eagerness overflowing, he had taken the bus to Nairobi and had visited the man whose address he had been given in Kyome. He talked to the man and explained his desire to teach in the Bible school. The job would be well paid, nearly a thousand shillings a month, almost as much as a qualified secondary school teacher could earn. Though Barnabas had been told clearly that only people with advanced level qualifications would be considered, he returned to Migwani proud and expectant. The man told him to wait until they had considered his application, a statement that Maluki interpreted as acceptance. According to Barnabas the letter would soon arrive telling him that he should come to Nairobi and begin work. He was still waiting.

  It was in a magazine that he saw the advertisement. To pass the time on the return journey from Nairobi, he bought one of the expensive glossies that purchasers would read several times cover to cover before trying to sell it on. Rejecting the Kenyan magazines because he knew them to contain many bad things, he chose an English – and therefore in his eyes respectable – magazine called New Scientist. He was attracted by its title and a picture of a white-coated teacher addressing students on its cover. He enjoyed reading it, though it did take him some time. He read all the words and even convinced himself that he understood them. Some of the things he read reminded him of things he learned in his secondary school science lessons. Others he recognised from the words he learned recently to support his studies for his General Science exam and, during the journey home, he took great pleasure in pointing out each key phrase with enthusiasm to the unfortunate sitting next to him and explaining its meaning. He was silenced by a box of words in a narrow column inside the back cover. The words told of courses in computer programming being offered by a college in London. They invited all people to write for details.

  With imagination duly fired, Barnabas wrote to the address for details and then waited expectantly for the reply, already trying to imagine what life in London would be like. He knew that another Migwani man, Mwangangi Musyoka from Kamandiu, had gone to study in England, and he had returned to become a District Officer and then a rich man in the city. He resolved to go to see him and ask his advice when the time was right.

  Faithfully the agency replied and Barnabas collected the letter just two weeks later. His friend had told him that the letter was there. He had seen it in the cardboard box, which served as the mailbox for all letters addressed to residents of Migwani. Users would sift through the contents of the small box on the shop’s hardboard-topped counter to see if there was anything for themselves and invariably decided to take any letters for friends or family with them, but often then forgetting about them in the following weeks. With excited pride Barnabas studied the outside of the envelope before opening it. It had to be genuine because it bore an English stamp with a picture of the Queen and the address had been written with a typewriter. Inside he found a second envelope with the words ‘Do Not Open’ stamped all over it. A letter pinned to this explained that inside there was a short test which the applicant must complete in the presence of a responsible person, who must then sign to say that everything had been properly conducted. The test was then to be returned to the address at the top of the letter. After some days of indecision, during which he re-read all of his secondary school notes as revision, and after many hours of contemplating the problem of who might be responsible enough to satisfy the people in London, he finally made up his mind to ask the English teacher in Migwani, part of her qualifications being her known proximity to Bwana Mwangangi, his role model.

  His encounter with Janet was unfortunate. He rode to Migwani on a Sunday, after attending church in Thitani and went straight to her house in the secondary school compound. Having knocked on the door several times, he concluded that she must have gone to church, but he decided to walk around the house anyway just to make sure there was no one there. Janet, in fact, was spending the day lazily stretched out on a collapsible bed in her bikini within the privacy provided by the euphorbia hedge that edged the whole school compound. Having been told that she would depart for England within a month, she had thought it wise to seek out at least a show of a tan, otherwise her mother would nag at her for looking pale and her friends would never believe she had lived in Africa.

  Barnabas was deeply shocked. As he came round the corner of the house and saw her, he could only stand and gape. Having been educated in a tradition that did not allow even a man to bare his shoulders in public, such an array of nakedness left him quite speechless. Had the flesh not been white, he might simply have scoffed damnation aloud and turned away. But this was Janet who lay before him, and he was rendered dumb and weak-kneed by the sight.

  Seeing him, Janet greeted him and, calmly donning a wrapper, which still left her shoulders bare, she approached to shake hands.

  “I thought you were at church,” he said, barely in control of his mouth.

  “No. I don’t go to church,” she replied calmly. The remark served only to anaesthetize further his already numbed senses.

  What kind of person was this, he thought, who would go outside wearing almost no clothes and who did not go to church? After a moment’s thought, concluding that since she was white Janet must be a Christian, he produced the brown envelope with the covering letter still attached and handed it to her. She read the letter and wanted to laugh. It was only then that she realised that he seriously wanted her to invigilate the exam.

  “Can you spare the time, Miss Rowlandson?” he asked. “I have already done my revision and, as you can see from the letter, the test will take only ten minutes. Can I do it now?”

  After re-reading the instructions Janet pointed to a series of example questions and answers on the back of the letter. “Have you studied these?” she asked.

  “Yes, Miss Rowlandson,” he said, “but I have done a lot of other work as well. There,” he continued, pointing at the worked solution, “they have given the answers to these questions, so they will not be in the exam.”

  Janet smiled knowingly. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Yes, Miss Rowlandson.” Barnabas was adamant.

  For the stipulated ten minutes Barnabas sat across the table from Janet with pen in hand, poised ready yet reluctant and eventually redundant. The exam turned out to be a set of extremely complex questions of the kind that were used in IQ tests. At first Barnabas was eager, setting about the task with great technique, reading the question through before attempting his answer. Clearly, however, he had not understood a word of what he read, and when Janet announced that his time was up he was quite speechless in his disappointment. He had not made even a single mark on the paper and flatly refused to comply with Janet’s suggestion that he should at least tick the boxes at random. He seemed to be more interested in obtaining her signature on the paper than in attempting to answer any of the questions and, when she had signed it, he offered her great thanks and carefully folded the paper into the previously stamped and addressed envelope.

  “Will you post it for me in Kitui?” he asked. “I don’t want to give it to the post office here in Migwani because many letters are lost from there.”

  With that he thanked Janet for her kindness and left. Janet felt a little dazed for a while. She read and re-read the address on the envelope. Then, deciding she had to speak to him, she dashed out of the house towards the school. Having called him, she caught up with him right outside the school’s main office in the centre of the circle of bare earth, where the students gathered at each Friday morning assembly to hoist the national flag.

  “Are you really sure you want me to send this?” she asked. “The stamps are worth two shillings. If you don’t want to send it, I will buy the stamps from you. I can use them to send my own letters. All I have to do is stick a label over the address and I can use the envelope as well.”

  He seemed more than a little offended, patronised even. Then he answered, his voice almost pleading. “But, M
iss Rowlandson, you have signed it… I am sure that when they see your name there they will take me. Please, you must send it for me.”

  Still standing where he had left her, she watched until he disappeared from sight before she began to laugh, shaking her head in disbelief.

  Back in her house, Janet toyed for a while with the idea of throwing the letter into the bin and forgetting the whole incident. But she had given her word and thus she should fulfil her unspoken promise to post it. She placed it, still smiling ruefully, in her jacket pocket. On her next trip to Kitui she might forget the letter, but she would not forget her jacket. Alone again in the house, she set about re-establishing the routine through which she had learned to live most days. First, though, she rocked the blue gas bottle which stood by the cooker to check if it was empty and then lit the stove to make a coffee. Having lost interest in her suntan, she went into her own room to change.

  As she began to pull the curtains of her bedroom, she noticed a car standing outside the mission house. It had not been there earlier when she was lying in the sun. It was the Bishop’s white Datsun. She knew that Father O’Shea had gone to Nzawa that morning to say Mass and she knew that the monthly trip usually took the whole day so, after Mass at nine o’clock, the mission ought to have remained closed until sunset at least. From the vantage of her house, before which the entire town spread out on the far side of a shallow valley, she could clearly see that the mission door was open. Even the car door had been left open and Mutua, the cook, was taking a suitcase from the boot. With curiosity aroused, she dressed quickly, turned off the gas and as ever without locking the door left her house to walk down to town.

  She entered the room without knocking. It looked as if it had been hit by a whirlwind, like a junkshop after an earthquake. Every square inch of living room floor seemed to be covered with an admixture of treasures, some discarded and lying in apparently random heaps, others neatly stacked in the chair. Books, clothes, some folded, others creased in piles, a guitar without a case, a large box in the middle of the floor overflowing with green vegetables and fresh fruit composed a still life completed, with ultimate absurdity, by a set of golf clubs, resplendently and gleamingly new propped up by the wall next to the bookshelves, which Father Michael had never filled. Obviously someone had just arrived from Nairobi and this meant that she would probably be soon presented with a fresh cauliflower, a bag of apples or even a piece of steak which could be fried without being first beaten to a pulp with a mallet.

  Picking her way carefully between the piles, trying in vain not to step on anything she might soil or break, she managed to reach the centre of the room when Mutua appeared through the open kitchen door, struggling with a large tattered brown suitcase, which he held against his chest. His eyes peeped over the top and, as he greeted her, he clumsily tried to wave his hand as it struggled to find a hold on the case, which was obviously too heavy to risk carrying by its frail-looking handle. The strain became too much and he let out a warning shout as the case crashed to the floor, spilling out its contents and leaving him unbalanced for a moment, staggering and groping wildly at the air for support. Having regained his balance, he looked at Janet in a way that disclaimed any responsibility for the mess and turned to leave the room by the way he entered. He rubbed his back and muttered in English for her benefit, “Too heavy. Too old.”

  Her way forward now completely barred by the suitcase and its scattered contents, Janet stood with her hands on her hips and tried to make some sense of the mess, while deciding where next to place her foot. “If you think you’re getting your hands on that box of tricks, you’re entirely correct,” said a voice behind her, causing her to jump. Janet did not turn round. She did not need to. She just laughed. In a moment she was laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes and she finally turned to see Father Michael Doherty picking his way towards her. “Jaysus, girl,” he said in his usual exclamatory tone, “you’ll do yourself an injury. Here, sit down for a minute and I’ll get you a beer.” Then, trampling without reserve on the things that Janet had been so careful to avoid, he quickly emptied the last of the contents of the suitcase onto the floor, closed it, turned it on end and invited her to sit on it. Still not quite fully in command of her senses, she sat down and, of course, it collapsed under her weight, spilling her into the middle of the pile of once neatly folded clothes it had previously contained. This just made her laugh harder and she now felt quite unable to stand. “Well, sod that for a lark,” said Michael, kicking aside the now multiply-articulated box and creating a space on the floor with his feet into which he could pull one of the armchairs away from the wall.

  “I ought to have known it was you, as soon as I saw this lot,” said Janet a minute later, when laughter no longer choked her words. “No one else could possibly be responsible for a mess like this. So they finally let you loose again on this poor unsuspecting world?”

  “That’s right,” he answered, kicking shut the refrigerator door, while holding two bottles of beer in one hand and rummaging in the drawer of the chest at its side for an opener. He then issued a quite unexpected expletive and fell down onto his hands and knees to peer around the back of the fridge. “Once before I did that,” he said, “and the effing flame went out. I opened it up the next day and everything was spoilt. And the room was full of kerosene fumes. I nearly gassed Mutua when he turned up for work.”

  “I wasn’t expecting you for another few days. In fact I was beginning to think that I might not see you before I left,” she said.

  “There was a change of plan,” he said as he stood and immediately located the bottle opener. He told Janet that two priests from elsewhere in the Diocese had both had to return to Ireland at short notice because of illness. One had been diagnosed with hepatitis and would need to take at least six months off. Another had suffered a motorbike accident and had gone home indefinitely. He was in a bad shape, Michael told her. His hip would need a pin through it and then, after healing, he would probably have to learn to walk again. On top of that another four of the missionary priests had completed their two-year tours of duty and their leave was already overdue. “So,” continued Michael, “Bishop O’Hara was left with a difficult choice. Either he had to leave some stations unmanned or he had to bring me back.” With that he went to the kitchen for the glasses.

  Janet could only burst into laughter again at what happened next. Immediately he entered the kitchen, Mutua shouted at him in Kikamba, “Don’t kick the fridge door. You’ll put out the flame!”

  “Keep your hair on,” replied Michael, as if offended.

  Mutua, whose head was invariably shaven was provoked into listing the reasons for not kicking the fridge door shut, paramount among which was his recollection of trying to relight the burners one day, when a minor flare-up had singed his eyebrows. Michael listened to everything Mutua said and then spoke a few words in Kikamba that Janet did not understand. “Only a stupid fly is killed by a falling turd,” he translated in an aside for her benefit. Mutua laughed and then patted Michael on the back, a gesture of profound affection. He was obviously more than pleased to see him back in Migwani, despite the reappearance of the madness he brought to life in the mission.

  Janet’s first surprise came a little later. Now seated amid the mess, she listened to the story of Michael’s stay in Ireland. He began by apologising for only having written once during his absence. He had been very busy and assured her that he had not forgotten her. Since he had known for a month that he would return before she was due to leave, he had decided not to write. Where he would go, he would not send greetings, he said in Kikamba, immediately translating it for her benefit. Janet dismissed his apology, telling him not to worry, as she leaned forward to offer him a cigarette. “Ah… this is the first shock…” he told her. His expression was wide-eyed as he patted his stomach. “Didn’t you guess from the size of the tub that I had given up?” he explained, nodding towards the cigarette.

 
Janet apologised for tempting him and lit one for herself, but she found herself drawing on it with a new and surprising self-consciousness, perhaps borne of the knowledge that had it not been for her desire to share things with Michael, she herself would never have become a smoker. During the long hours after sunset in what felt like an interminable dry season soon after her arrival in Migwani, when they had passed so many evenings in conversation over beers in the Safari Bar or sitting in the dark on the mission veranda, it had been Michael who had first prompted Janet to take a cigarette. It had always been part of her nature to appear just a little nervous and agitated, just a little too quick with action or reply, and during that period the demands of her work, with its inherent frustrations and impossibilities had brought the mannerism into sharper focus. Michael had tried to tell her that impatience would solve nothing and that she should learn to put her ideals on a slower flame. He offered her a cigarette as an elixir of relaxation and she had smoked ever since. Now she felt estranged from herself as the cigarette burned between her fingers, perhaps because she now feared that the priest might even disapprove.