One Day I Will Write About This Place (3 page)

Maybe Liza’s mother came with the wedding women? She will see me; everybody will know I dressed up like a girl yesterday.

Mum will find out I wore her clothes and wig.

Everybody is against me. The ache of my pineapple situation strums against my chest, and I let it yo-yo around. It feels good.

I hear feet clumping toward me. I jump off the seat under the hair dryer and lie on the floor, under the chair. I cover my face with my hands. A body thumps onto a chair; a head eases into the helmet. The dryer starts to wheeze, and I can feels bits of hot air on my head.

It is the bride! I peep up at her, through my raw yellow ache. Through the hands covering my face. She looks beastly with her eyes upside down and her pink-­lipsticked mouth inverted. I am quickly tender and pineapple pink. Butterfly belly. Barefoot on hot gravel. Her lips are a pink baboon bum, which must really hurt. I harden my eyes, my heart.

I focus on the lips. They are a safer texture: pink-­lipsticked toyland, the color of happy candy, and bubblegum balloons and hard, committed happiness.

I am quickly sharp and bright and happy. I take my hands away from my face, and stand up. She grimaces and shrieks.

“Oooooooh, whooo is that? Why are you hiding?”

My face falls.

“Don’t cry! Oh, don’t cry!”

Now I want to cry. Her face blurs, and everything is tangled and jagged. She leans toward me, this wedding woman with shrunken hair. Her mouth is now pink earthworms and snails and teeth. Her face swells down toward me, tearing out of the traffic jam of patterns, to present itself as whole and inevitable.

I gasp. And look. The beast is gone. She is a whole person, bland and indivisible again. I am in doubt about my own recent doubts. How could she have been anything other than the thing she is now?

“Mama Jimmy. Is this one your firstborn? Is this Jimmy?”

She has opened the closed cramped world. I have been trying to keep my lips tuckedtogethershut. Forever. Quiet. Opening two lips is tearing cobwebs. A silent superhero. Cool.

“Hello, auntie,” I say, drawing pictures on the floor with my foot. The pineapple rises in my chest. Maybe she will give me some wedding cake? The squeaky painful taste of perfect white sweetness. Icing tastes in your mouth like Styrofoam sounds when it is rubbed against itself.

Almost too much.

I let my eyes rise slow and cute. This game I know. I tingle and let my eyes touch hers briefly, then I look down again.

She coos.

My mother turns toward us and looks sharply at me.

Does Mum know? Did Liza’s mother call her?

Mum’s voice is like shards of water and streams of glass. It rises up her throat like warm suds. She has a small double chin where this noise is made, a nasal accent, but not American, or English. Her nose is long and thin.

I have discovered that nasal accents come from people with long thin noses. Wreng wreng. My nose is thin, but not as thin as my mum’s. Sometimes I try to hear myself, cupping my hand over my ear and twisting my mouth to the side, but I can’t hear myself being nasal. Mum reaches out her hand and takes mine. She licks her finger and smooths my eyebrow. Her fingers reach around and pull me to her chest. My back recoils from the hard bump on her stomach. I don’t want to crunch the baby. Mum smells good, like powder and perfume and burning hair oil.

“KenKen”—this is Mum’s embarrassing nickname for me—“what are you doing there?” She laughs, and my heart purrs.

“He is my second-born. The shy one.”

One bee does not sound like a swarm of bees. The world is divided into the sounds of onethings and the sounds of manythings. Water from the shower­head streaming onto a shampooed head is manything splinters of falling glass, ting ting ting.

All together, they are: shhhhhhhhhhhh.

Shhhhh
is made up of many many tinny tiny ting ting tings, so small that clanking glass sounds become soft whispers; like when everybody at the school parade is talking all at once, it is different from when one person is talking. Frying sausages sound like rain on a tin roof, which sounds like a crowd.

The rain is soft now. The wedding women are in rollers. The hair dryers are all blowing, red eyes. Mum pats the bride’s hair and murmurs to her in Kiswahili, which Mum speaks in an accent full of coughing Ugandan
gh
’s and Rwandese
kh
’s. Her voice is soft, and tingly, and people get tingly with her and do what she says. She never shouts.

From outside, there is a sound of thudding metal. Mary rushes outside. Then Mary is shouting at somebody in her funny Kiswahili. Then there are screams. The wedding women stand up. We all rush to the door. The bride starts to cry again.

It is Mrs. Karanja. Mrs. Karanja owns Kenya Coffeehouse, next door to Mum’s salon. She does not like it when we leave our municipal council garbage cans near her café. But that is where we are supposed to leave them. The council refuses to come into our courtyard to collect them.

There is sweat on her face. Her eyebrows are clean, perfectly drawn ovals, and her eyes and lashes are sticky with brown smudges. Brown paint leaks out of the outline, down her cheeks, and her ruby-painted mouth is lifted to one side, into a sneer. One of her teeth has a smudge of fluoride brown I have not seen before. She is pulling a giant tin garbage can, and Mary, who is dark and hard and thin, is pulling our garbage can back. There is garbage strewn all over the concrete.

Mrs. Karanja’s manservant stands behind her, a Pokot man, a warrior dressed in cheap military khaki and sandals made from car tires. Jonas. He usually gives me tropical sweets when he sees me. I like to sit on his knee on his little stool. He has parallel lines cut into his face and torn ears that have been rolled up into themselves.

Mrs. Karanja has rich, buttery skin. When you draw the hair of ordinary people you can draw just random dots on the head for short hair, or wildly scribble around, with a crayon or pencil, for long hair. President Kenyatta calls ordinary people
wananchi.

With overseas white people, and international music stars, like Diana Ross, or the Jackson Five, you draw the outline carefully and color or paint in yellow, or black, or brown inside, filling in all the gaps until the picture is one clear color and you cannot see lines or scratches, just yellow, brown, or black. When Ciru and I draw overseas people, we are careful to make them look like they do in the coloring books and on television.

Mrs. Karanja has penciled eyebrows, twin black unbroken lines that belong to people who have no gaps in them. But she is breaking. She is shouting, “Why do you put your garbage can next to mine? I am tired of this. Tired! You Ugandans spoiled your country—why do you want to come here and spoil ours?”

The rain has stopped, the sun is high, and the pavement is filling with pools of growing, shaking crowds. Bell-­bottom trousers flap, and some bare feet are spread open like a fan from never wearing shoes. Groups of feet pound toward us: the curio dealers on Kenyatta Avenue, the brokers who hover outside the coffeehouse, the newspaper sellers, the people who are just there and bored and getting wet from the rain.

Mrs. Karanja shoves Mary, who falls to the ground. They are hitting each other now. Bodies shuffle uncertainly in the crowd, fingers rubbing thighs up and down, hands curled into themselves.

Mrs. Karanja screams, shoves Mary away, and stands and screams, and points at Mum. Mum grabs hard at my shoulder and pulls me to her chest. Her hand reaches for mine. I try to slip away, but she is faster than me.

The guard has let Mary go, but he stands behind her. She is breathing hard, her eyes wide, teary and wild, and they are fixed on Mrs. Karanja, who swivels from side to side.

No one speaks. The wedding women are silent. My ears heat up. It is as if Kenya is over there, with the crowd, and behind us are the wedding women—­who have sided with Uganda. All of Kenya is pulled together by Mrs. Karanja. And the wedding women have been shamed to silence.

Crowd legs now shuffle toward each other, whispering and frowning and smirking, nostrils open and twitching. Even the municipal council
askari
does nothing. His truncheon sits helpless; his neck stretches forward toward Mrs. Karanja, his eyes wide.

Mum’s hand is tight on mine. Bodies start to rub against each other. Mum will not let go of my hand. If I was a golf ball, I would roll fast and forward and hit that tin garbage can and let us tumble. I want to howl and put my head up Mrs. Karanja’s skirt and make loud spitting snotty noises, or hit the concrete wall hard with my head, bounce back, satisfied that I am not rubber. People stream out of Barclays Bank, to join the crowd across the street. I am still trying to pull my fingers out of Mum’s grip, so I can pinch her hard.

Mrs. Karanja walks to the corner and picks up another garbage can. This one is full. She kicks it over and stares at us.

There is a pile now, on the ground: old hair, thousands of tiny oily coils of black string from undone hair, wet grains of old tea, KCC milk packets, shampoo bottles, digestive biscuit packets, gray lumps of wet old newspapers, one Lyons Maid ice cream packet, several Elliot’s Bread packets, a tin of Mua Hills plum jam, bottle tops, maize cobs that look like bared teeth, one Trufru orange squash bottle, one Lucozade bottle for when Ciru was sick, yellowing maize skins tangled with maize hair that looks like white people’s hair, empty jars of Dax pomade, raffia packets, string, banana peels and maize cobs, ants.

“Go back inside the salon.” She pushes my back.

I want to say no, but I move. I slam the door behind me. The gas flames are still heating the combs and the salon is hot and smells of burning hair and Idi Amin.

I stand on a chair and watch from the window.

Mum starts to pick up the garbage. Mary helps. Mrs. Karanja stands in front of the crowd and watches. When the first can is full, they leave it and head toward Mrs. Karanja’s shop. They put it on the ground, between the two shops, where all the cans from the street are supposed to be.

Mrs. Karanja follows them.

“You will see. You will see.”

The crowd is still. She summons the guard and tells him to spill the garbage outside Mum’s door. He shrugs at the crowd, his eyes wary and afraid. He picks up the can, walks past Mum and Mary, avoiding their eyes, and then overturns it outside the door. He walks back, his shoulders sloping, following her back to the coffeehouse. A woman jumps out of the crowd and starts to help gather the garbage; soon there is a small group helping Mum and Mary. The wedding women jump forward and start collecting. Even the bride joins in.

Mum turns back to the salon, and Mary follows. The wedding women come back in. Everybody is quiet for a moment, and then the gasping chatter begins as the hair dryers start to roar.

It is school break time, and cold. July. I am standing by the new school’s new weather station watching aluminum cones fly in the wind and I see my father coming toward me.

I run to him and jump: uGhh! “You have heavy bones,” he says. His hands are hard against my armpits and my nose burns from the cold air as I swing, like the wind cones.

It is not my birthday. Why is he here?

He says, “Go and call your sister.”

Ciru comes. Jimmy is already in the car.

“You have a baby sister, at War Memorial Hospital.”

Chiqy, my new sister, looks just like I did when I was a baby, says Mum.

I am triumphant.

Because she is also the second girl, she will have a first name of Bufumbira origin, like my name, Binyavanga. In my birth certificate, I am Kenneth Binyavanga Wainaina. She is named Kamanzi. Melissa Kamanzi Wainaina. We nickname her Chiqy. In our family, as in most Gikuyu families, the first boy and first girl are named after the paternal grandparents. The second boy and second girl are named after the maternal grandparents. Jimmy is called James Muigai Wainaina. Ciru is June Wanjiru Wainaina after my father’s mother, Wanjiru. I am Binyavanga, after my mother’s father, and so on. So Binyavanga becomes a Gikuyu name.

We are mixed-up people. We have mixed-up ways of naming too: the Anglo-colonial way, the old Gikuyu way, then the distant names from my mother’s land, a place we do not know. When my father’s brothers and sisters first went to colonial schools, they had to produce a surname. They also had to show they were good Christians by adopting a Western name. They adopted my grandfather’s name as a surname. Wainaina.

Baba says, in the old days, everybody had many names, for many reasons, a name only for your age-mates, a name as the son of your mother, a new name after you became a man. These days, most times, your name is what is on your birth certificate.

…

We are afraid to be inside the house. Shapeless accordion forces have attacked the universe. Kenyatta, the father of Kenya, is dead. Mum is always tired, always talking to our new sister.

Last month the pope died, and this month the new pope died, the smiling pope. All day today, they showed on television grainy old reels of traditional Gikuyu dancers singing for Kenyatta. A man and a woman do a Gikuyu waltz, another man plays shapeless sounds from an accordion as they dance, and Kenyatta, large and hairy, sits on a podium. The mourning for Kenyatta seems to last forever. There is no school.

Georgie and Antonina are our new neighbors. We like to sneak through the hedge into their garden. A whole quarter acre of ripe maize fills the back of their garden.

One warmer-than-usual day, during this never-­ending holiday, we run—­happymanic with uncertainty, fallen leaves crackling and breaking—­and play, sun hot and sure. Soft feathers and grass in an abandoned bird’s nest smell good, rotting and feathery. We find rats’ nests and mongrel puppies as we run with yellow and brown beetle kites. We tie the legs of the beetles with string and let them fly behind us. Hot syrup sweat drips into eyes and stings, and I am lost in this wheat-­colored world of flapping leaves and bare feet digging into hot soil.

We forget to sneak back in time, and as we squeeze through the hole in the kei apple hedge, there is Mum, a belt in hand, carrying baby Chiqy. Chiqy is crying, Mum’s face stony and silent. When she gets angry she does not talk.