Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (25 page)

And he blinked and felt belittled because he had forgotten how that could possibly be true.

That same night, after she had rolled off him, he swung his legs off the bed and reached for the bedside table. Rifling through his wallet, he pulled out a stack of notes. He shoved the money at her, forcing her from her peacefulness. She gave an astonished gasp of laughter as he pried open her fingers and said, ‘I need my sleep.'

‘I don't understand.' She clenched the notes. He hadn't paid her anything in over a year.

‘I'll come and find you when I want.' He adjusted the pillow, closed his eyes.

She had dressed hastily, pausing with one heel dangling from her toes, leaning down to kiss him – her tongue thick and wet between his unresponsive lips. He rolled onto his side and listened to her reluctantly leave and thought how sad it was that she had pocketed the money and felt glad that he was no longer in such a position.

‘Thank God!' David had clapped his back at the news. ‘Now we can really have some fun.'

A different woman every evening, a new hotel every night – Jeffery became so used to the things in these rooms that had been absent from his previous life – a television, a mirror, his own private bathroom – that going back to Kibera, he saw his home for what it really was: unfit for any living person.

‘Yet still you refuse to move into the city.' David had clucked his tongue. ‘I don't understand you. Why don't you take a break from all the
malayas
and join me and my wife for dinner?'

Jeffery found himself in the strange position once again, after a very long time, of being jealous. ‘That is why you never take a woman.'

‘The line has to be drawn somewhere. If it wasn't, imagine all the terrible things we could do to each other.'

David's wife, Esther, was a simple woman with slightly pock-marked skin from a bad bout of chicken pox and who wore her hair natural, a wiry, small afro that framed her angular cheeks and bird-like eyes. She startled him with how she reminded him of his mother, so that the whole first night he clung to her every word.

When David told him that he lived in South C, Jeffery had arrived expecting to stand before a gated house but what he found instead was a block of high-rise apartments – gray and morbid with black grille windows and small balconies. He was embarrassed for his friend as he entered the congested, one-bedroomed flat and saw that it was nothing short of run down. Linoleum floors with cement holes where the tiles had fallen away, the constant running of a leaking toilet and such sparse furniture that the chairs they used for dining were also the ones they dragged to the boxed TV to end the night. Nevertheless, the house smelled homely – yellow corn bubbling in the pot and Mr Sheen
wood polish, and Jeffery couldn't help but be desperate for such things, all the more harrowing because they did not come with a price.

It was one such evening when everything changed.

They had just finished dinner and had moved the wooden chairs to the living room, the window thrown open to cool down the house from the heat of the day, and he heard the sounds of three young boys singing and playing the drums from the apartment upstairs.

‘Doesn't that disturb you?' Jeffery asked his friend.

‘It's entertainment. Sometimes Esther and I go up there to listen to them. One day, they'll be famous – mark my words.'

‘Better cash in,' Jeffery grinned.

‘I'm working on it.'

The two men sipped on their drinks with slow ease. Jeffery closed his eyes to catch every trill of the cymbals, the dull pounding of drums that seemed to close the walls in around him and he almost felt happy. Then Esther asked, ‘Did David tell you the good news?'

An uncomfortable silence fell over them. David puffed his cheeks out in a guilty exhalation. ‘I haven't had time yet.'

‘Tell me what?' Jeffery paused with the glass at his lips. His friend's expression caused him to return it to his lap without taking a sip.

‘It's nothing.' David tweaked his mouth.

‘It's big.' Esther prodded her husband, who was glowering at her.

Now that his wife had let the news slip, David had no choice but to continue. ‘They offered me the senior officer position at Parklands police station.'

‘What happened to Muema?' Jeffery inquired.

‘He found a job at the airport. Said it's easier money and much less pressure.'

Jeffery slammed the drink down with much more force than intended, causing Esther to jump. ‘It's getting late.'

David called out for him but Jeffery ignored his friend and went staggering down into the dark, claustrophobic evening.

Instead of alighting a
matatu
, he wandered aimlessly down the broken pedestrian walkways, hitting shoulders with drunkards and side-stepping women linked at the elbows, heads bowed close together, sharing secrets. As he passed, he was sure they looked up to snicker. A bicycle swerved by him, the sharp ring of the bell not registering in his mind until someone shouted, ‘
Mjinga
!
Watch where you are going.'

It was past ten o'clock when he boarded the bus. It was empty and he sat toward the back, watching the nightlights of the city grow and shrink behind him, taunting Jeffery with a broken reflection of himself. He was corrupt – a horribly overweight cheat – and he had become this way because of David. Yet he hadn't minded because they had been working together but now he would be alone. His friend was moving up in the ranks and soon Jeffery would have to report to him. He would have to give him a larger share of their profits. In time, David might decide that he no longer needed a partner – and so it was Jeffery's greed and pride that made him do what he did next.

The following morning, instead of heading straight to the station as he always did, Jeffery went to Biashara Street, walking rapidly to the electronics store with his head bowed into the collar of his jacket and shoved open the door so forcefully that the bell continued to shriek after him.

Startled, the man looked up. When he spotted Jeffery, he lifted his hand in a high-five greeting. ‘
Mambo
.'

‘
Poa
.' They clapped hands.

‘
David ni wapi
?'

‘That's what I've come to talk to you about. We have a problem.'

‘What kind of problem?'

‘David is going to be announced as the senior officer at Parklands police station,' Jeffery informed him.

‘Good for us,
sindiyo
? Always helps to know people in high places.'

‘He's going to put you out of business.' A spew of words beyond his control. ‘He's been arranging it for some time now with another
sacco
to steal away all your buses.'

‘He can't do that.' The man brushed aside the information but Jeffery detected a flicker of worry behind the indifferent façade.

‘He will put all your buses under inspection and when they fail, he is going to impound them and sell them off.'

‘He can't do that,' the man repeated, looking around his empty shop.

‘Who will stop him?' Jeffery asked.

‘Why are you telling me this now if he has been planning it for a while? How do I know you are not his accomplice?'

‘Your worries are none of my concern. I'm just informing you – if you don't do something
chap chap
, you will be out of business by the end of this month.'

The two men stared at each other for a long moment. The shopkeeper spoke. ‘I'll work something out.'

As he left the shop, Jeffery turned back once more. ‘I don't want to know what you're planning. I have no part in this – I simply gave you some information and I want you to remember how I have helped you.'

Once outside, he fell against the side of the building, pulling the handkerchief from his pocket to dab his perspiring forehead. He was suffocating on the smoggy, industrial air and pushed himself back up onto the main street. He couldn't imagine what the man might do but his anger had inebriated him, pulled him outside of himself so that he had acted purely on impulse. Two days later, he discovered it was worse than anything he could have imagined.

Too many police officers crowded in the doorway of the station when he came up the driveway that morning, voices climbing over each other; some men pulled out cigarettes with trembling fingers, forgetting about their rations and lighting one after the other, over and over, the air smelling of wet ash.

‘What happened?' Jeffery pulled the men out of his way, his large stature forcing its way through. ‘Why is everyone standing here like this?' Stopping dead himself when he reached the front of the crowd.

His shock came up all at once, a massive roil, and he had to look away while he swallowed it down. David's body, strung up by thick rope to a hook in the ceiling where an old lampshade used to hang, took a pendulous swing, the tips of his polished black shoes scraping the table eerily. Jeffery noticed that his shoelaces had come undone and he felt an urgency to retie them properly.

‘Get him down,
mafalas
!' Jeffery scrambled to get up on the table. ‘What are you doing, staring like that? Get him down right now.'

He struggled to hoist himself up, had to pause to catch his breath and found that some men behind him were sniggering, shivering with silent mockery. ‘David, David!' He grappled at the dead man's shirt, the mud-flecked hems of his trousers, trying to release him but unable to figure out the first step in doing so, his mind was such a daze. ‘This is not what I wanted!' he cried out before realizing he was giving away too much.

A few of the younger officers took Jeffery's place, springing up onto the desk and using a knife to sever the rope around David's thickened, bruised windpipe. He fell, a loud thundering crash, and six men came rushing forward to catch his limp body.

When he was taken from the station half an hour later, wrapped in a black polythene sheet in the back of an ambulance, the image of death lingered in Jeffery's mind.

He believed he had seen the worst of it, witnessing his mother shrink and disappear into her own waste, but this was equally horrifying because though he had been angry with his friend, Jeffery was certain that he would also be lost without him. He put his head in his hands and made a tally: two deaths to his name.

This one was put down to suicide. Too much pressure, the police commissioner had said in front of a host of media. Frenzied, bloodthirsty animals who failed to grasp the dreadful reality of the situation. To them, David had always been dead, whereas Jeffery remembered the gravel rasp of his voice, the brown-stained smile, the softness that fell across his eyes every time someone mentioned his wife.

The commissioner was equally disillusioned. He glorified David as a shining example for all other police officers, adding credentials to his name – a fighter of crime, a patriot in love with his country; he would be sorely missed and had given the commissioner a lot to reflect upon regarding the living standards of the police force, who were the backbone of Kenyan society. And when Jeffery was named the new senior officer later on that very day, he couldn't turn it down, reminding himself that if he did so, his friend's death would have been in vain.

He refused to attend the funeral, instead heading in search of Marlyn after many months, stepping into the dim Westlands bar and, without waiting for her to finish her shift, took her to the Jacaranda Hotel. He was rough and angry with her, and when she cried out he put a hand over her mouth and nose, gripping his fingers tightly together.

‘His poor wife. What will she do now?' Marlyn was pressing the sides of her cheeks lightly, where he had bruised her. He hadn't responded but her question had given him an idea of how he could relieve himself of his guilt. After leaving her that night, he went to David's house and walked in to find Esther packing.

‘Where are you going?'

‘Upcountry, to my family home. How can I stay here alone?'

She looked even smaller and more like his mother. He caught her by both arms and promised, ‘I'll look after you.' When she staggered back in confusion, he added, ‘It's what David would have wanted.'

He left his house in Kibera and everything that was in it and took his final bus ride into the city a week later, where he moved straight into his friend's South C home. He climbed into bed with his wife and claimed her and that was where, several months later, he was roused and frightened by the obese and greedy stranger smirking back at him from the unformed, shapeless reflection of the exposed windows.

Leena walked the empty corridor, turning the lights on as she went. The smooth marble tiles were cold so she raised herself on tiptoes and continued down the stairs. She never noticed how big the house was except for when she was alone in it, staring into the deserted, quiet rooms, some of which they used and a few of which always remained unoccupied.

There was a drawing room her mother had set up in the hopes of entertaining their new neighbors, complete with a colonial-style coffee table and an extravagant divan couch. The plush, ruby carpet blended with the dark, wood-paneled walls and the impressive bookcase, filled almost entirely with Raj's old cricket trophies. The furniture here was now draped in white bedsheets because, as Pooja had come to discover, the neighbors in Runda minded their own business.

‘And they're all
gorahs
!' she had exclaimed, dismayed, a week after they had moved in. ‘You tricked me, Raj Kohli. What will I do now for company with only white people living here?'

‘There is a Punjabi family living three doors up.' Raj tried to placate her. ‘Why don't you go and disturb them?'

‘How much can I speak to one woman?'

‘You mean, how much gossip can one woman give you?' her husband had teased back.