I Built No Schools in Kenya

by Kirsten Drysdale

  We’re sipping iced Lucozades from one of the food vans set up near the show ring where G4S – the security company that sponsors the event – is demonstrating the prowess of its canine team. A pack of snarling German shepherds strain on their leashes. A man in a padded suit runs out into the open. ‘One … two … three … four … five …’ the announcer counts. ‘Release the dogs!’

  The crowd applauds as the dogs launch themselves at the puffy man and drag him to the ground, jaws set tight on his arms and legs.

  ‘There you have it, folks, the intruder is brought down in under ten seconds,’ says the man on the PA. ‘For more information about the G4S canine squad and your private security needs, please come and enquire at our stand, just to the right of the main stage.’

  ‘I guess this is the Nairobi version of Boost Juice handing out free smoothies, huh?’ says Ruby.

  I realise the group sprawled out beside us is from the Nairobi Star, one of the local newspapers.

  I introduce myself to the nearest of them, a bearded man in his fifties trying to scrape the mud out of the tread of his shoes. As luck would have it, he’s the editor. I tell him I’ve been following the bodybuilding scene a bit, and pitch him a report on the Mr Kericho competition. He’s into it.

  And that’s that. I’ve finally got a real job to focus on.

  Magda thinks this is just wonderful news. We’re all out to dinner at the Club for her birthday that night – Walt and Marguerite, Ruby and Jade and me.

  ‘Excellent! Excellent!’ Magda says, clanging the side of her wine-glass with her knife when I tell her about the serendipitous ending to our fun run through the forest. ‘A toast to the new correspondent!’ We all raise our wine – well, Walt raises his Ribena – and send cheers around the table. ‘It is very good that you went on this run. Yes.’

  ‘Well done, well done indeed,’ says Walt with enthusiasm – then quietly to Ruby sitting beside him, ‘What is it that she’s supposed to have done?’

  I have the sudden realisation as we leave that I’m nervous about going back to the flat.

  ‘Do you get a funny vibe from the flat?’ I ask Ruby, when we make our way out to the car park afterwards.

  ‘What do you mean? It’s awesome! So much better than being stuck at the house.’

  ‘No – I know it’s nice. I just … I don’t feel safe there. I can’t quite put my finger on why. It just feels isolated and vulnerable.’

  When Peter drops us home after dinner, we sit at the gates, the motor idling, waiting for the askari to appear. Nothing. Peter taps the horn. Nothing.

  Walt starts to get agitated. ‘What the devil is going on?’

  ‘Sijui, bwana.’ Peter clicks his tongue. ‘This is not good.’

  I start to get nervous. I’m still no more comfortable with the whole sitting-at-the-gates-in-your-car-at-night thing.

  Finally, the askari turns up. Peers through the window of the guard hut, unlocks and opens the gate.

  Peter pulls up beside him.

  The man’s eyes are bloodshot; he reeks of booze – I can smell it from the back seat.

  ‘Are you drunk!?’ Marguerite exclaims.

  ‘No, madam,’ he replies, thick-tongued and woozy.

  ‘You are! I can smell it! You’ve been drinking, haven’t you? Were you asleep just now?’

  ‘No, madam, I was … I was on patrol.’

  Peter and Walt interrogate the askari in Swahili, as he mumbles back with pathetic excuses.

  ‘Enough!’ Marguerite says. ‘You need to be here to let these girls in!’

  ‘Yes, madam.’

  ‘Don’t let this happen again!’ says Walt.

  ‘Yes, bwana.’

  I don’t sleep much that night. I’ve never had a good vibe from the askari. Now I worry about him being so passed-out drunk that he won’t stop any intruders, and I worry that he might be so angered by his dressing-down that he might seek revenge on us.

  A few days later, I’m at Claire’s place and tell her where we’ve been staying.

  Her eyes widen. ‘You must be careful there, hey?’ She drags me away from the living room, to be out of earshot of the girls. ‘I don’t like them hearing too much of this stuff. But you should know – that area along the forest, it’s a bit dicey. There was a home invasion there not so long ago – they really flogged the family up. Brutal stuff. Tied up the father and cut off his ears, beat him badly. The gangs come in and out through the forest, it’s hard to catch them in there.’

  ‘I take it having a drunk askari isn’t a great idea either?’

  ‘No, it’s really not. Honestly, you should tell Marguerite to find you somewhere else to stay.’

  I don’t have to – Marguerite figures that out on her own. She’s heard the same story from some friends at the Club and immediately fired off an all-points email, addressed to Fiona, the lawyers and the family Trust, and cc’ing the carers. She says she’s been told that there have been disturbances around the area recently, and that she isn’t comfortable making us stay there. She thinks it’s too easy for ‘the baddies’ to get in and apparently picked up on the vibe I did, claiming she also felt spooked when she went to see the cottage.

  And so, less than three weeks after moving into our boutique hotel, we’re back in the asylum.

  If Walt isn’t going to be medicated, we are. With the best benzodiazepines we can get our hands on. The house is unbearably tense; I’m on edge all the time, jumping out of my skin at sudden noises, waking up in the night in cold sweats. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced this kind of stress. Ruby is in the same state. We really do need some pharmacological assistance. Or so we tell ourselves.

  It starts out innocently enough: a temazepam here and there, begged from Marguerite to help with ‘trouble sleeping’. Then a few gobbled down in daylight hours, to help ‘take the edge off’.

  But then, just as Marguerite’s supply runs dry, we luck into a source of our own.

  Ruby goes to see a local shrink, on account of her increasing anxiety. She’s expecting talk therapy but comes back with a prescription for a short course of bromazepam, an anti-anxiety drug similar to Valium. ‘One three-milligram tablet a day,’ are the doctor’s instructions. ‘For a week, tops.’

  Well, that’s all well and good. But the pharmacist didn’t have any three-milligram tablets in stock, so Ruby was issued six-milligram tablets instead. And they didn’t take her script, so she has an apparently infinite supply.

  We decide to try it that afternoon, while Walt’s napping. It’s wonderful stuff: much more suitable for our purposes than temazepam, or Valium, or Xanax. Somehow, it induces supreme relaxation without drowsiness, making us feel as though we’re made of nothing but bubbles and rainbows and indifference. We float around the house in a coherent but tranquillised haze, floppy limbed and unflappable, absolutely zero shits to give about the Smyths and their internecine sniping, immune to their provocations, infinitely patient with Walt and his circular conversations. Zen. As. Fuck.

  ‘I say, have you seen the news?’ says Marguerite, laying a thick slab of marmalade onto her toast. She’s in her bright pink polo shirt and a pair of white capris today, fresh back from an early round of golf, dewy beads of sweat amassing beneath her visor. It’s almost exactly the outfit Ruby dressed up in for the fancy-dress party.

  ‘No, what’s happened?’ I ask Marguerite warily, as I guide Walt to his place at the end of the table. I hope whatever the ‘news’ is isn’t going to ruin the good mood he’s woken up in today.

  ‘That British couple, nabbed from their banda in Lamu! Well, they killed the husband, actually. But they’ve kidnapped the wife and dragged her off to Somalia.’

  There goes that hope about Walt. He starts freaking out. ‘Oh, how dreadful! Who were they? Anyone we know?’ This is exactly the kind of thing that shouldn’t be discussed in front of him, but Marguerite can’t seem to help herself.

  ‘No one we know, darling,’ she says, seemingly oblivious to the distres
s she’s causing. ‘They were on holiday from the UK. They’d just been on safari on the Mara. It was terrorists, they say!’

  ‘Bloody Mau Mau. Shoot the lot of them, I say!’

  ‘No, not the Mau Mau – that other ghastly lot from up there – “Al Shaba-Bobby” or something.’

  ‘Al Shab-who?’ says Walt.

  ‘I think it’s “Al-Shabaab”,’ I say.

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ says Marguerite, leaning across the table to add, sotto voce, ‘Mohammedans. And of course, they’re demanding a ransom. Millions! Well, you know how those things go. Even if her family pays up they’ll probably still chop her head off.’

  ‘Sorry, whose farm was attacked?’ Walt is still fretting. I distract him with a slice of pawpaw.

  ‘No, not a farm, they were taken from Lamu! Can you imagine? Up on the coast there. We used to go there all the time – it’s a lovely spot, isn’t it, Walt?’

  ‘Oh, Lamu. Yes, that is a lovel–’ Walt begins, but Marguerite barrels on over him.

  ‘They just came through the window in the night. Shot him. Threw her into a boat, and took off. Shocking. And I tell you what, this is the last thing those resorts need coming into the holiday season. It’s all over the news in England. People are cancelling their trips already! Well, I can hardly blame them. Wouldn’t you?’ Then, out of nowhere, she jumps up from the table shrieking.

  ‘What? What is it?’ I ask, thinking she’s spotted a terrorist about to come through our window.

  ‘Oooooooooooo! Ooooooooooo!’ she screams, bouncing from side to side as Walt and I hold on to the edge of the table in panic and Esther comes running in from the kitchen.

  Esther and I crawl around under the table, searching for the snake or the spider that must have crept up Marguerite’s pants, but there isn’t one. All we can see are her bare legs and blue cotton briefs, now that she’s taken her trousers off and is holding them out to Esther. ‘Soak them in hot water, will you please, Esther? Hot! Make sure you use the hot tap!’

  Esther, bewildered, takes the pants through to the laundry. Marguerite, in just her underwear, sits back at the table, takes a bite of toast, and washes it down with the last of her tea as though nothing’s happened.

  ‘What was that all about?’ I ask.

  ‘Hmm?’ she says.

  ‘With … with your pants just now,’ I say. ‘I mean, you’re not wearing them anymore.’

  ‘Ohhhhh! So silly – I dropped some marmalade on my lap. A jolly big lump of it right down my front.’

  ‘What a horrible mess,’ mumbles Walt, going back to his pawpaw. At least he’s forgotten about the jihadists on Kenya’s doorstep.

  When our reserves of bromazepam start running low, a Kenyan friend of Sarah and Jack’s suggests we ask for it without a prescription. ‘You just need to be assertive about it,’ he says, amazed we bothered with prescriptions in the first place. ‘This is Kenya. Just take a scrap of paper with the name of the drug scribbled on it. Rules here are … you know, flexible. Especially for mzungus. You’ll have no problems.’

  It works. Especially at the strange little dispensaries that for some inscrutable reason are often found at petrol stations in Nairobi. ‘The doctor told me to get this,’ I say, handing over my note confidently with a wad of cash. (I’m astonished at how quickly I’ve become a practised, privileged junkie. I now understand how drug abuse can go undetected in some people for so long.)

  Sometimes the attendant meekly protests. ‘Sorry … you should have a prescription for this.’

  So I include it with the rest of Walt’s order. ‘It’s for the bwana,’ I whisper over the counter, nodding pitifully in Walt’s direction as he sits bewildered on a plastic chair, asking what we’re doing at the bloody travel agency again – he’s had enough gallivanting for one year, thank you very much.

  ‘Ahhh.’ The pharmacist nods. ‘Do you want to take two boxes?’

  I give it a thoughtful beat. ‘Yeah, you know what – I guess we’d better,’ I reply gratefully. ‘Saves us having to come back too soon.’

  The small windows of time I have between shifts become grand feats of laziness. The Club becomes about as far as I can be fucked going to get out of the house. I spend hours lying next to the pool, drinking Scotch, eating bar snacks and reading current affairs magazines, telling myself it’s all a way to ‘stay on top of what’s happening in the world’. I inevitably doze off before I get to the end of an article, and try to forget that I’m not doing very much writing of my own.

  It gets to the point where Ruby and I take to washing two of those lovely pink pills down with a glass of whisky and soda at the end of an especially trying day. It turns the house into an immersive theme park, the implausibility of our situation suddenly rendered in hilarious high definition. We roll around the floor of our bedroom in stitches, having just noticed some bizarre Anglophilic details in the décor. Like the fact that in every room there’s a watercolour portrait of a different breed of hunting dog, each with a dead duck in its mouth. Or that there are seven doilies in the study alone.

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Ruby slurs.

  ‘Come on then, let’s go count them,’ I reply.

  We stagger down to the study, where Marguerite is watching Sky News with a cup of peppermint tea, and Ruby distracts her with dumb and obvious questions about the next day’s plans while I walk around the room pointing out the seven crocheted mats that sit under vases and coin trays and water jugs, counting them up with exaggerated fingers and mouthing each number in silence, and Ruby starts giggling and Marguerite notices our bleary-eyed high-drunk faces and says, ‘Good gracious, you girls look dreadful! No wonder you have such trouble sleeping – you should go to bed when you’re so tired!’ And we say, ‘Yes, you’re right. We’ll go to bed now. Goodnight!’

  And we stumble back to Ruby’s bedroom and flop into bed and lie in the dark doing impersonations of Marguerite, a medley of her best catchphrases and most outrageous quotes. ‘Yoo-hoooo!’ we warble in our best soprano toff. ‘Do you know it was the funniest thing …’ ‘I had a lo-ver-ly round of golf this morning – I won, even with all the blacks and yellows cheating, can you believe it? And they do cheat. They do!’ ‘Peter, Peter! Oh, do drive more smoothly over the bumps, won’t you?’

  We laugh so hard the noise can’t escape our bellies, leaving us in tears and gasping for air. Then we sleep like the dead until morning, when Walt’s mattress alarm buzzes under my pillow, and I go through to his room to lay out his clothes and tie up his shoelaces, still blissed out and giddy in the benzo-afterglow, and wondering who out of all of us here, really, is losing their mind the most.

  15

  NYTOL

  We can’t get any bromazepam. Our good luck has run out – the pharmacists just won’t give it over without a prescription anymore. Maybe there’s been an industry crackdown. Or maybe they’re just onto us. Instead, I get an over-the-counter sleeping aid called ‘Nytol’.

  Nytol is diphenhydramine hydrochloride, a type of antihistamine. Given I’ve only ever reacted badly to antihistamines, I really should know better. This isn’t a good gamble. But I figure it’s ‘only an over-the-counter’ drug. The effects will be mild, surely.

  We take four pills each. Ruby is out within half an hour. She sleeps soundly throughout the night, snoring gently, drooling a little on her pillow, having peaceful dreams.

  I know this because I lie on the spare bed in her room and am awake all night enduring horrifying auditory hallucinations and heart palpitations.

  A mosquito the size of a soccer ball circles my head. It buzzes and whines like an orbiting power tool, threatening to land on my ear. I try to swat it away. It swoops closer. Gets angrier. Summons a bunch of friends to taunt me, a whole swarm of bees and locusts and nasty beetles. I swear, I even hear one of them whisper my name.

  For what seems like hours I lie still, trying to steady my heart rate with deep breathing, whispering mindfulness exercises. My toes are touching the sheets … I
have five fingers on each hand … I will tap each one against the next …

  But the buzzing persists, and my skin starts crawling, and then I start scratching myself to pieces.

  The monsters become too much. I jump out of bed to turn the light on. My legs vanish. I cling to the doorframe as I search along the wall with rubber arms for the light switch, then scream as the room floods with brightness. Ruby doesn’t even stir. I can’t see the bugs but I can hear and feel them, dive-bombing me, wriggling down my pyjamas. I crawl along the carpet to my laptop and open it to see the drug information page I looked up earlier that night. Further down the page, under basic advice about dosages, I see ‘hallucinations’, ‘nightmares’ and ‘itchy skin’ listed as possible side effects. Mm, yes – things I should have thought about earlier.

  I look up ‘diphenhydramine’ on drug review forums and read dozens of posts by people who’ve also been plagued by the invisible army of giant insects. There is nothing to do but wait for the effects to wear off. I spend the rest of the night in the bathroom, sitting on the tiled floor with the lights on, swatting phantom bugs away with a damp washer and slathering myself in sorbolene. Esther finds me wrapped in a mosquito net when she comes through to collect the laundry in the morning, my head between the bathtub and the toilet, my laptop between my knees.

  ‘Kirsten! Are you okay!?’ She helps me to my feet through what feels like the thick fog of a horrendous hangover.

  ‘Yeah, thanks, Esther,’ I reply, checking the room is clear, relieved the buzzing has stopped, glad to have my legs back.