The Snow Angel

by Lauren St. John

  Makena’s feet had halted, of their own accord, at the steps of Blessings Hair & Beauty. She stared up at the salon on the first floor and had a sudden fantasy that all she had to do was climb the steps and sit in Gloria’s chair and she’d be back on the Khumbu Icefall with Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Her mother would interrupt her as she crossed an imaginary crevasse.

  ‘What’s up with you, Makena – do you have ants in your pants? How is Gloria expected to make a success of your braids with you wriggling and writhing in the chair?’

  Makena would look up from her book and her mama would be leaning round the door, her expression a mixture of exasperation and tenderness. The nightmare of the past few months would be exactly that, a nightmare. She’d have dreamed the whole thing. Life would return to normal.

  ‘Is that you, Mountain Girl?’

  Makena started violently.

  ‘Don’t you remember me? I’m Nadira, Gloria’s daughter. What happened to your braids?’

  Makena’s hand flew to her head. One sweltering, claustrophobic afternoon up north, when she’d once again been left alone with the baby, her grief had become so unbearable that the only way she could think of to deal with it was to rid herself of all reminders of the past, including the ones in the mirror. She’d cut off her braids with nail scissors.

  When Priscilla returned from lunch with her secret friend, her reaction had not been what Makena was expecting. There’d been no scorn. No anger. Her gaze had moved from the rat’s nest on Makena’s head to the braids scattered on the floor. Empathy had skimmed across her face before taking flight.

  Without a word, she’d scooped up the braids and put them in the bin, saying briskly: ‘Let’s get you tidied up.’

  She’d combed out Makena’s hair – roughly, but she’d done it – and trimmed it as best she could. ‘Next time you want to try a fool thing like that, don’t. When you damage yourself, when you destroy the body God gave you, it can’t always be reversed.’

  It was the last glimpse Makena ever got of the humanity and heartbreak that lay beneath Priscilla’s brittle, beautiful shell.

  Gloria’s daughter came into focus. ‘What’s going on with you, Mountain Girl? Where’s your mama? Do you want to come upst—’

  Makena bolted, upsetting a table heaped with dried beans. Shouts followed her as she dodged and weaved through the market. She wanted to run until she felt nothing and saw no one. Run until she reached Mount Kenya if she had to.

  On and on she went, her too-small trainers slapping the crumbling streets. Dust and fumes struggled through her lungs. She slowed only when a stitch raked her side like a leopard’s claw. Then she stumbled further.

  When she was down to her last atom of energy, she bought an ice cream and slumped in a triangle of shade. She stared blankly into space, not thinking. The shadows deepened and moved around her.

  Towards evening, the wind whipped up. Too late Makena tried to find shelter. There was little to be had that wasn’t already taken. The storm, when it came, was a Nairobi-style deluge. Bomb-blast thunder. Strobe lightning. The streets gushed with muddy streams surfed by a flotilla of litter.

  Somewhere far away was smart modern Nairobi with its gleaming malls and beautiful young professionals. Night would draw in swiftly and Makena knew she had to get back there if she was to have any hope of being safe.

  Dripping and sniffing, she tried to get her bearings. A youth with glittering eyes stepped into her path and his friends jeered at her. Evading their clutches, she sprinted down an alley, rounded a corner and ran full pelt into a tree.

  Then the tree shifted.

  The hand that shot out and grabbed her wrist was the size of a goalkeeper’s mitt and the forearm attached to it practically the width of her waist. Makena’s eyes travelled up. And up. And up. Her brain struggled to comprehend what it was viewing through the rain.

  She screamed and tried to leap away. The giant’s head was among the storm clouds. Lightning illuminated it. Makena had a momentary image of a misshapen monster.

  ‘Whatcha doing, psycho?’

  The glittering youths were back.

  The monster wheeled to lunge at them. Makena swerved away and was gone. She ran until she could run no more and then she limped. Her clothes streamed with water.

  The storm was so fierce that it had driven all but the most desperate to shelter. Makena was barely able to hobble when at last she spotted a row of industrial skips behind a rundown brick warehouse. Beside them were two smaller bins, bigger than household ones but manageable. She tipped the rubbish out of one of them. It was mostly filled with paper but it hinted at a previous life when it had been a receptacle for fish guts.

  Upending it, she crawled underneath. There was enough space for her to sit upright and use her rucksack for a cushion. It would keep her dry. A tear in the plastic side let in enough air for her to breathe but not enough to counteract the fishy fragrance. She tied her only spare T-shirt over her nose as a makeshift mask.

  Her mouth was as dry as the fields around her uncle’s house. She downed a bottle of water and the fruit her uncle had given her, pounding the oranges until they were soft, then drinking the juice from a hole she gouged in the top. She wasn’t hungry. If she had been, the stench of the bin would have killed her appetite quickly enough.

  Strangely, she was not afraid, not even after the incident with the Tree Man. She’d been more on edge living with Priscilla. She was quite proud that she had, on her own and in a storm, found shelter for the night to come. For the moment, that was her only concern. That, and putting on her dry sweatshirt before she caught pneumonia. It had a streak of blood on it from the cut on her cheek. That alone was a reminder that she was better off in a bin.

  In the morning she would make a plan. There was bound to be one; she just couldn’t think what it might look like right now. Her mind was a fog.

  If the worst came to the worst, she’d go to the Tings after all. Or she’d turn up at the International School where her mother had recently begun teaching with Shani and appeal to their sense of charity. Perhaps they’d consider awarding her a scholarship. She could live in as a boarder and be educated for free.

  The bin was parked against a wall. She leaned back and shut her eyes. Things would work out, somehow. Children from good homes didn’t end up on the streets or in orphanages, did they? Those orphans were victims of war, famine or disease.

  Like you, she couldn’t help thinking.

  Makena ignored the chorus of doubts in her head. There was a solution. She just had to figure it out.

  The rain drummed a lullaby on the bin. Though she was cramped and cold, she slept.

  Next thing she knew, she was being rudely awakened. The bin was plucked into space. Before she could move, someone had seized the hood of her sweatshirt and was bundling her up, ready to toss her into the maw of a garbage truck.

  ‘Let go of me,’ she yelled and had the satisfaction of nearly giving the bin man a cardiac arrest. ‘Are you blind? I’m a girl, not a pile of unwanted clothes. Give me back my roof.’

  ‘Your roof?’ He stood scratching his head, framed by the crimson dawn. ‘This bin is not your house. It’s private property. Go back to Mathare. You should be careful where you choose to sleep. Next time we might throw you out with the rubbish.’

  SNOW

  In the last novel Makena and her mother had read together, orphaned boy wizard Harry Potter had used an Invisibility Cloak whenever he wished to disappear. In Nairobi, none was required. Twenty-four hours on the streets without access to a bathroom and clean clothes was all that it took for a girl to become a gutter rat and join the six hundred thousand-strong ranks of Mathare’s unseen.

  That’s what the woman selling iced buns on the street corner called her – a rat. She eyed the bloodstain on Makena’s sweatshirt and implied worse.

  ‘I didn’t steal the money,’ Makena informed her crossly as the vendor took her damp, crumpled bills with distaste. ‘My mama gave it to me. She�
��s a science teacher, you know.’

  And for a minute she could almost believe that her mother was still a science teacher and would be along as soon as she was done with her lessons.

  The part about her mother giving her the money was true. It had been intended for Shani, to help with Makena’s upkeep during her original six-and-a-half-day stay. Shani had refused it so Makena had hidden it in the pouch for valuables at the bottom of her backpack, ready to return to her mama when she came home. But Betty never did.

  Scratching through Makena’s belongings on that first, awful day in Isiola, Priscilla had somehow missed the money. Within the hour Makena had transferred it beneath a paving stone in the garden, for safe-keeping. There it had stayed until Priscilla evicted her from the house.

  The morning had not got off to the best start. Being mistaken for rubbish had a way of draining one’s confidence. But it cheered Makena to think that the cash her mother had intended to help her was finally helping her, just when she needed it most.

  Nearly two days had passed since her last proper meal, longer if she considered that her breakfasts and lunches at her uncle’s house had consisted of bread and jam alone. She was ravenous. She did not intend to waste the money, but as she’d be on the streets for another day at most, after which she’d come up with a plan, she treated herself to a good breakfast.

  She came away with two iced buns, two Cokes, a bottle of water, a banana and two vegetable sambusas. It was such a grand haul she could hardly carry it. All she had to do was find a place to enjoy everything away from prying eyes.

  Her wild flight through the storm had got her thoroughly lost. In daylight it was apparent she was in what her parents would have termed a ‘bad area’. It was far too close to Mathare Valley for comfort. Driving through Nairobi, her father had always taken detours to avoid the slum that sprawled over two kilometres. Makena had only seen it twice, through a shut window, her car door firmly locked.

  Both times she’d been conflicted. Part of her was riveted with sad horror at the crush of rusting shanties that walled in the squalor as effectively as any fortress. The other half found it too hard to bear. That was the half that usually won. She’d avert her eyes as they swept by one of Africa’s largest slums.

  Now its tragic skyline was barely ten minutes’ walk away. A ribbon of smoke twisted into the blue above it.

  Makena hoped that her breakfast would give her the strength to jog the five kilometres back to downtown Nairobi. Or she could take a Matatu Madness taxi. Just as she was considering it, one did an illegal U-turn in front of her. It mounted the pavement, nearly mowing down Makena and a woman selling peanuts. The driver leaned on his horn, as if it was their fault for being there. He accelerated crazily away, his crammed-in passengers staring wide-eyed from the rear window.

  Makena nixed the Matatu idea at once. She’d rather walk to Nairobi on blistered feet. More chance of arriving alive. Strange how her survival instinct had kicked in. At her uncle’s house, she’d spent every other minute wishing she were dead. Now she wanted to delay that day for as long as possible.

  The roads around Mathare overflowed with music, grime and life. The sambusas were cold by the time Makena found a picnic spot. A market stall not currently in use had been left on a quiet side street. An aged, ripped green tarpaulin was slung over it, weighted down with stones.

  Makena hovered until she was briefly alone, then scooted under it. Beneath the cart it was clean and rather pleasant. She spread out a paper bag and laid out the iced buns, sambusas, banana and Cokes. She bit into an iced bun.

  ‘Are you going to share that or hog it all to yourself?’

  Makena almost choked.

  An albino girl in a floppy hat leaned out of the shadows.

  Makena recoiled. It’s not that she didn’t know about albinism. There’d been a girl in her class with the condition. Her parents were as black as Makena’s but Mama had explained that albinism occurred when a rogue gene blocked the enzyme involved in the production of melanin – ‘the body’s paint palette’. The result was soft pink skin, a dusting of white-gold hair, and faded blue eyes.

  Pigment aside, the girl at school had been no different to Makena or anyone else, but most of the children had ignored her. Some were mean to her because she didn’t fit in and others shut her out because of superstitions that she wasn’t quite human or that touching her would infect them with illness or turn them white. Makena had refused to sit beside the girl but not because she was an albino. To her, skin was just skin.

  ‘Whether a person has stripes, spots or is as colourful and shiny on the outside as a butterfly, isn’t important,’ Mama had often said. ‘It’s what’s underneath that counts. Are they courteous to others and kind to those who are weaker or less fortunate than themselves? Are they loyal to their friends? Do they stand up for what is right?’

  Makena felt the same way. When she reeled away from the girl beneath the cart she was really recoiling from a shameful memory – the memory that she too had rejected the albino girl at school for the worst possible reason: because it was easier to follow the crowd.

  She stuck out her hand. ‘I’m Makena. Sure you can share my breakfast. If I eat all of this by myself I’ll pop. I think my eyes were bigger than my stomach.’

  The girl grinned and their palms met. ‘Good recovery. I could write a book on all the thoughts that went through your eyes just then. That’s okay. I’m used to it. I’m Diana, as in the Queen of the Supremes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Diana Ross, Motown legend.’

  In a strong, clear voice she sang a few lines from songs about morning heartaches, Monday blues and getting by even when there were clouds in the sky.

  ‘Heard of her but not the song,’ said Makena, handing her new associate a sambusa, an iced bun and a can of Coke.

  ‘Don’t you know anything?’

  ‘I know a lot. More than you, I bet. I like everyone from Rihanna and Freshlyground to Oliver Mtukudzi and One Direction.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Don’t you know anything, Diana?’

  She giggled. ‘If we’re going to be friends, you’d better call me Snow. That’s my label around here.’

  Makena was taken aback. ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘Why not? Snow is cool and not just in temperature. I saw it in a movie in the slum cinema once. These kids were rolling in it and building snowmen. It was beautiful.’

  Makena found it surreal but also rather wonderful to be discussing snow with a stranger under a market cart, one flap of a yellow-billed Black Kite’s wing from Mathare.

  ‘I’ve seen real snow on Mount Kenya. It was from a distance, but the early-morning sun was on it and it was a gorgeous, sparkling pink. Last time he climbed it, Baba brought me some actual snow from the summit of Batian. That’s the highest of the three peaks. ’Course it had melted by the time it reached me but I didn’t mind. That’s what imagination is for. All I had to do was touch that jar and I’d be sitting on top of Batian in one second flat.’

  It had been so many months since she’d allowed herself to think about the mountains she loved that even talking about them was a release.

  Snow munched steadily through her feast, face enraptured. ‘Where’s your baba now?’

  Pain filled Makena’s chest like a vial of poison. She had to force the words out. ‘He … he and my mama passed away unexpectedly. One week they were here, next they were … gone. My Aunt Mary too.’

  ‘What happened?’

  Makena had a flashback of Priscilla reacting to the word ‘Ebola’ as if she were the Bubonic Plague in girl form. ‘I don’t want to say.’

  ‘Sure, whatever. But just so you know, in Mathare, there’s nothing new under the sun. How do you think the residents keep smiling? They arrive believing that whatever has happened to them is the worst thing in the whole world. Within hours they’ve learned the truth. Now they’re thinking: “Compared to my new neighbour, I am truly fortunate.”

  �
��There’s this girl I know whose parents were chopped to pieces in front of her in South Sudan.’

  ‘Chopped to pieces?’ Makena put down her bun, appetite gone.

  ‘Uh-huh. Her story is tough to hear but there’s always worse. You should see the child soldiers. They’ve escaped from Al-Shabaab or the Lord’s Resistance Army or Boko Haram. Most are still babies but they shiver and shake and forget their own names like old men because they can’t get the pictures of the terrible things they’ve seen and done out of their heads.’

  She opened a can and took a long swallow. ‘Famine, war, snakebite and malaria orphans, we’ve got them all. Then there are the Ebola orphans from Sierra Leone. We’ve been seeing more and more of those.’

  ‘It was Ebola,’ Makena burst out. ‘That’s what killed my mama and baba.’

  Snow shrugged as if the Doomsday Germ was of no more consequence than the weather. ‘That’s life. Every now and then it springs a nasty surprise. That’s why there are always at least three magic moments every day, to make up for it.’

  ‘Are there?’ Makena was doubtful. In the four months since she’d been orphaned, she couldn’t recall a single one. The thought that there were thousands of children in more ghastly situations than hers brought her no comfort. Her own wounds were too raw. ‘Why three magic moments? Why not two or twenty?’

  Snow counted them off on her fingers. ‘Sunrise and sunset, there’s a couple right there. If I wake up scared and hungry in Mathare and life doesn’t seem worth living if I’m stuck in the slum till I die, all I have to do is look up. The sun doesn’t care whether it’s shining on Mathare Valley or some gold skyscraper in the USA. It always brings its best costume to the party. Some sunrises take your breath away more than others but no two are the same. It’s like the dawn is saying, “If I can be bothered to show up and treat each morning as if it’s a fresh start, so can you.”’

  ‘How do you find the third magic moment?’ asked Makena.