Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (11 page)

‘What's that?' Michael asked.

‘A Walkman. It plays tapes of my favorite music.' Jai handed Michael one of the headphones – ‘We can listen together while we work' – dragging the chair closer so that the headphones could sit comfortably in both their ears.

Intrigued, Michael slipped it into his ear, felt the uncomfortable newness of its pressure and then a loud bass flooded his head, tickling his teeth. He laughed giddily. ‘This is great!'

Jai was still peeling. ‘I go through so many battery packs a week.'

Michael didn't know the song that was playing – it was in English. But he reveled in the way the music seemed to surround him; at the same time within and outside of him, making his feet tap involuntarily.

Jai turned down the music. ‘If you ever get bored helping out your mother, you can always join in our games. It would be nice to have some actual competition.'

‘What's the one you play with the bats?' Michael felt more comfortable now, after sharing the music.

‘It's cricket.' Jai tossed down some potato peels on the newspaper below their feet.

‘It looks complicated.'

‘Like all things, until you understand it. I could teach it to you.'

Michael was beginning to believe that his grandmother might have been wrong about these
muhindis
– there was nothing slippery about Jai's manner.

Angela emerged from the kitchen and the two boys sat up quickly, pushing apart. Michael handed Jai back his headphones. Under his mother's quizzical gaze, he felt like a burglar caught in the act of sneaking out of a house that wasn't his. ‘Breakfast is ready,' she informed Jai.

Jai dropped the peeled potato into the bucket and rose, wiping his hands on his trousers. ‘Remember,' he craned his neck back to Michael as he stepped into the house. ‘Whenever you want.'

A few minutes later, Angela looked up from the dishes she was washing to see Michael hunched over the bucket of vegetables, his shoulders moving, tapping his foot and, under his breath, humming a song she didn't recognize.

He hadn't tried to catch the ball. It just smacked into his open, waiting palm held straight up like he was about to ask a question in class. It was a natural reflex, a smooth impulse that required no effort or strain. Just a neat swinging back of the elbow, hand cupped like a net.

‘Whoa.' Jai dropped his cricket bat. ‘Whoa! That was amazing, you made it look so easy,' he said, reaching Michael and holding up his palm for a congratulatory high five. Michael handed him the ball instead.

‘Right place at the right time,' he said, but the adrenaline was pumping through him in jolts, warming his cheeks.

‘Do you want to join us?'

They were out on the street, their backs to the houses on either side. To the left was the gate and to the right of them, beyond the walls, a crowded line of kiosks – small, locally owned shops that sold everything from cigarettes to soda bottles and
sukuma-wiki
. Past that, there were the slums: clustered, make-shift shelters whose corrugated metal roofs made tinkling music in the rain, like steel drums. They had been forced to play that way after Ricky Singh smacked a huge one into Nishit Patel's house, past the front yard and into the back one, narrowly missing his wife's head.

The wickets were created from fallen branches and placed four meters apart. Tag was at one end, Jai's bat at the other and Leena stood in the middle, impatiently gesturing for the ball.

‘It'll be fun,' Jai prodded.

The sting of the ball still sat in Michael's palm, temptingly heavy. Combined with the fact that he had actually begun to like this
muhindi
boy, Michael was compelled to answer the same question differently that day.

‘Come on, Jai!' Leena called out to her brother's back. She was tired of his repeated, inexplicable attempts to draw Michael into their games, their lives, when he so clearly didn't want to be a part of them. She was surprised then, and a little nervous, when Michael started to walk toward them. Tag spoke up loudly.

‘There's no room for anyone else. We have full teams already – sorry!' And then, soft enough so that it could pretend to be a whisper, ‘Who wants to play with a maid's son?'

Jai shouted back, ‘Your mother was calling you in for lunch, Tag. You can go now – Michael will take your place.'

Tag's voice died in his throat. He turned to Leena for support but she scuffed the ground with her toe, arms folded behind her back.

‘She was calling you in fifteen minutes ago.' As always, she sided with her brother.

Tag dropped the bat, kicked it away. ‘Whatever. I'm tired of this game anyway.'

Jai pulled on Michael's arm. ‘You can't say no now.'

As they approached, Leena refused to meet her brother's eye. She was angry at him for ruining the game, thought he was selfish for sending Tag away just so Michael could join in. He wasn't like the rest of them and it created a level of discomfort that made playing the game less fun.

But Leena was also jealous of the way her brother looked at the boy with a keen interest he never seemed to regard any of them with. Jai spoke freely with Michael, his smile a permanent white, as he pointed out which position to stand in, where to hit the ball. Watching them stand close together, their movements so similar, as if they intrinsically knew what one was about to say to the other, she realized that Michael would never have to ache or beg for Jai's company – and that was what hurt her the most.

‘Do you know how to play?' Jai asked.

The bat was heavier than he had anticipated and as Michael went to pick it up, his arm dropped with the weight. Leena was glaring at him, tapping her foot in annoyance. He seemed to be grinning at her, as if they shared something secret, and she remembered those days he'd stood by the veranda fence and watched them.

Jai jogged to the opposite wicket. ‘Leena, you're up.' He tossed the ball to her and she rolled it in her palm, letting the worn-out red leather leak into her fingertips as she took her position a few steps behind Jai.

At his cue, she took off – a skipping run just as he had taught her. Keeping the ball loosely between her fingers, she released it as her arm came down, a satisfying clockwork motion that rushed and settled in the hinge of her shoulder. The ball bounced once, racing toward Michael – a blurry, red dot. He wouldn't be able to hit that. It was her best bowling performance. She almost began cheering.

Smack.
The ball fell to the center of the bat, sending hard vibrations through the wood and up to his palms, his skin erupting into tingles. They all watched it sail through the air.

‘Whoa,' Jai said again once Michael had lowered his bat. Leena stood at the line, panting and furious as her brother rushed to Michael. ‘That's what we call a six – see how it went flying over the boundary without bouncing?'

Once Jai had returned to his position, Michael shrugged at Leena. Something about the flashing annoyance in her eyes made him want to tease her, the excitement making him bold.

‘It's not my fault you bowl like a girl.'

Jai turned to his sister and burst into laughter, his fist thrown up in a delighted cheer.

From then on, Michael joined in their games and they discovered that he was good at all of them. That he could run barefoot and never miss a step, or swing a cricket bat as if it were an extension of his own limb and send the ball flying over the compound wall with a loud
crack
.

‘I suppose it's nice to be with someone your own age,' Pooja told her complaining daughter, watching out the window and worrying herself.

But Leena knew it had nothing to do with age. Tag was only a year younger than Jai but she had never seen her brother sprint out to Tag the way he did to Michael, searching for him as soon as breakfast was over, leaving her lonely at the table. He never discussed the winning tactics of football with the other boys the way he did with Michael, huddled together under the wide shade of the bougainvillea tree, drawing diagrams in the dirt with a twig, their faces serious until one of them cracked a joke and the air broke with their unstoppable laughter.

Jai refused to participate in any of the games that Michael wasn't included in and so he quickly became a fixture in their lives, a constant member of their group, unlike them in so many ways but too talented for it to make much of a difference.

But outside of those games, Michael remained a ghost to them. It was as if they didn't see him when they invited the other boys in for snacks or to watch the highlights from the previous day's Manchester United or Arsenal football match. It was more than intentional, this act of leaving Michael out. It occurred to them naturally, as a thing never to be questioned or thought about.

Leena knew that Michael was affected by this. She could see it in the dulling of his eyes, the almost undetectable clench of his fist, which he quickly hid in the pocket of his shorts. But he never complained. Michael moved through life the way he did through the games they played – gracefully and seemingly without effort yet with a firm and unshakeable confidence that turned everything the right way.

‘He's your maid's son,' Tag said to Leena once as she followed him in for his mother's chocolate milkshake. Jai and Michael were lying on the grass outside and their sounds petered out behind her. ‘Of course I wouldn't invite him into my home. What if he stole something? What if he wanted to use my toilet?'

And although she took the cold drink outside, holding it up to them after checking that Tag wasn't in sight, they both refused.

‘Why would he want to drink from Tag's glass when he wasn't even allowed inside his house?' Jai asked in a way that made her feel at fault.

She had always enjoyed Tag's mother's milkshake – sprinkled with pistachio flakes that crunched down between her teeth as she drank it. But that day, it wouldn't move past the middle of her throat and she poured most of it out behind the bougainvillea tree.

Traffic officer Jeffery Omondi pulled out a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the back of his neck, which was tickling with sweat. He brought the cloth forward, frowning at the brown residual streaks left there. Dust and fumes laced the humid air, made it thick and impossibly heavy, unavoidable while standing in the middle of afternoon traffic.

He had strategically placed himself at the junction of Ngong Road and Haile Selassie Avenue, his preferred spot to teach the more junior officers the most important lesson of all – how to mint money – because it never failed to provide him with the necessary opportunity.

‘
Eh-he
,
are you watching?' he snapped at the spindly, alarmed boy beside him. Barely a man, younger than Jeffery had been when he first joined the police force and he had only been twenty-two. ‘
Mjinga
,' he cursed under his breath.
Fool.
Not for the first time, Jeffery contemplated what had become of his beloved Kenyan Police Force, in whose motto,
Utamishi Kwa Wote
,
he had truly believed. Service to All – a phrase that suggested justice, equality and an unshakeable sense of patriotism, but what he had discovered instead was greed, conspiracy and a different, truer motto:
Utamishi Kwa Mimi
–
Service to Myself.

It wasn't that he hadn't been aware that corruption within the police force was endemic, aggravated by the low wages and appallingly poor housing, along with a general sense of mistrust from the public – he may have been naive but he hadn't been disillusioned. However, he had been profoundly dejected to discover just how deep the infection really ran. From the lowest police officer to the highest-ranking government official, it was rare that Jeffery met a clean man anywhere in the force. Corruption was rampant at every level – a carefully thought-out process of abusing public resources that required a chain of willing participants from down to up, each parting with their own share of the money once the deal was done. He had found it difficult to navigate the institution, which was a messy maze of bribery, canvassing and influence peddling, but he had been let know early on that if he wasn't willing to play the game, he would be transferred, or even worse, fired.

So when he had started to get his hands dirty, he told himself that it was for a bigger cause. That one day, when he was the top man, sitting in the spacious government office surrounded by a three hundred and sixty degree view of the city, well versed in all malpractices, he would turn the force into a pristine beacon of hope, where a ‘Good Day's Work' didn't involve a police officer allowing himself to be bribed by a criminal in custody, soiling Nairobi's streets for nothing more than five thousand shillings.

But somewhere along the line, that dream had rotted under his ever-loosening morals. He had been blinded by how easy bribery was and bowled over by the rewards one was able to reap. He could afford three large meals a day and could dine in restaurants, which as a younger man had been beyond his reach. He spent years ignoring his wife, leaving her at home while he wandered the enchanting nightlife of the city, which fell easily under his command like a desperate prostitute recognizing how his trouser pockets puffed out with wealth.

And because people offered it themselves, because so many Kenyans were willing to pay their way out of the law – to take the shortest route – it never felt like stealing.

‘There.' Jeffery pointed to a car heading toward them, grabbing the boy roughly. The car weaved from the left lane to the right, overtaking a slower-moving vehicle before switching back to the left. He tried not to say,
Ah-ha
!
because it happened all the time. He lifted his hand and flagged down the driver as she approached Nairobi Club. ‘Come on,' he told the junior officer. ‘You want me to leave you here?' and stopped because the words were not his, but someone else's.