Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (27 page)

‘It's personal so you don't have to answer if it makes you uncomfortable.'

The way he spoke, with an urgent undercurrent to every word, made her wonder if anyone had ever refused him.

‘Ask away.'

‘What happened between you and Patrick?'

She liked that he called him Patrick and not the askari or the night guard, the way everyone else she knew would have done. ‘My father caught us kissing.' She paused, trying to gauge his reaction. If her confession shocked him, he didn't show it. ‘You know, when you leave this place, you think about things in a different way.'

‘But you don't love him.'

She let out a dry laugh. ‘No. It's just early adulthood rebellion, or that's my father's opinion anyway. I found Patrick attractive and somewhat intriguing but that's it. If I did love him, I would be more worried.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Even I can see that a relationship like that would never work.'

‘Why not?' There was a force in his voice that made her hesitate – as if he had needed a different answer.

‘We're worlds apart. I know it shouldn't matter but it does. When you come from completely different places, when your ideas on life never meet, it's impossible to understand each other on any kind of deep level. Even the language barrier imposes a sort of shallowness.' She took a sip of tea, swirled it thoughtfully in her mouth. ‘You'd be fighting your whole life – fighting other people, fighting each other. I don't want that.'

Jai sat back, thinking of the
I-told-you-so
look his mother had given him outside, and recalling a particular incident that had taken place a few weeks after they had moved into the new house.

Leena had been at the mall with her friends that afternoon and he had entered the living room, where his father was reading the newspaper, ignoring his mother as she complained about the Pio Gama Pinto picture he had hung up above the fireplace.

‘Why can't you just get a proper painting instead of sticking up this old newspaper, making us look like beggars?'

Jai had stopped at the doorway, taking a preparatory breath. ‘I want to go and see Mike.'

‘I'll take you,' Raj had offered almost instantly.

‘No, you won't,' Pooja interrupted.

‘You can't stop me, Ma
.
He's my friend.'

Pooja's nostrils flared. She had not moved to this lonely house, away from all her friends and into the land of pink-faced, hoity-toity strangers, for nothing. ‘Why can't you just listen to me for once? Why does everything have to be a fight?'

‘You're the only one fighting,' Raj had told her. ‘There's nothing wrong with Jai being the boy's friend.'

‘There's everything wrong with it!' But when asked what, Pooja found it difficult to put into words. ‘What other children do you know who are friends with such kinds of people?'

‘I'm tired of hearing you talk in this closed-minded manner.' Her husband had risen, gone to the door.

‘And you!' She hurried to block his path. ‘You've stretched your mind so far open, even dirt is getting inside it!'

‘Let's go before your mother gets carried away,' Raj had told his son.

‘Fine, go. But leave Leena out of it.'

Her ultimatum made them pause. ‘What do you mean by that?' Jai asked.

‘I don't want her to know that you're meeting him.' Now, more than ever, his mother appeared vulnerable. Shrunken in fright. ‘She needs to grow up and find some friends of her own.'

‘Michael is her friend.'

Pooja gave a shudder and said to her son, ‘You're a clever boy. Think of how people will look at her if anything should happen—' Unable to finish her sentence, she grabbed her husband's hand, the cold metal of her rings digging into his skin.

‘If you care about your daughter at least half as much as you do your son, you'll make him see some sense.'

‘Do you understand what your mother is saying?'

Jai hadn't liked the thought of lying to Leena or Michael but he had never disobeyed his father so he said, ‘Okay, Ma.
Whatever you want.'

She had snapped, returning to the couch, ‘I wanted them out of our lives but you two are as stubborn as donkeys.'

But she was less aggravated, even close to smiling, as she turned back to the TV.

Now, listening to Simran at the table, Jai wondered if his mother had had a point. ‘Would you have fought for him, if you loved him?' he asked.

She hesitated. It was a difficult question and, no matter how much she had changed in her first year abroad, there were some customs she had found impossible to escape, so deeply entrenched were their narratives within her. ‘Something like that would take two very brave people.'

When Leena came back down into the kitchen, Jai quickly changed the subject. He told Simran, ‘We have a guest room upstairs. You can sleep there.'

She thanked them again as the shouts of a woman dragged their eyes and ears upward.

‘I don't know why I married you! You are going to kill me with these thoughts of yours, Raj Kohli – I swear it.'

Simran winced. ‘I hope I didn't cause your mother too much trouble.'

‘She's always like that,' Jai assured her with a grin to his sister. ‘Tomorrow it'll be something else and you'll be old news.'

In what he had come to consider a lucky twist of fortune, Jeffery had met Nick a year ago. He had heard from some of the other officers that there were young boys, fresh out of university and unemployed, selling illegally obtained electronics in the back alleys of Mathare slums.

He had been making enough money from the
saccos
by then. Being senior officer meant that he took home the biggest share of the profits and he had the liberty of dipping his fingers into whatever else the juniors were involved in. Normally, it would be difficult for a senior officer to keep track of their activity, but after what had happened with David, they all feared him too much to lie.

‘Killed him first and then took his house. And then his wife. Imagine! And he was his
friend
.
Now think, what could he do to us?'

This was the kind of conversation Jeffery was used to hearing outside his office when he closed the door and pretended to work, but instead leaned against the window and gathered up the words through the spaces between its sea-green glass slates. Of course, he would always feel guilty but it was more infrequent now, and every time he deposited three hundred thousand shillings into his bank account, David was forgotten completely.

And so Jeffery had made his trip to Mathare slums.

Nick's ‘office' was a wooden stool beneath an umbrella, sharing the small lane with glued-up street boys and other drug addicts lying immobile on foul mounds of garbage. Jeffery had worked his way through the mess, disgusted by them and forgetting that he too had once been forced to live that way.

Back then, Nick had been stealing the phones himself – going down busy streets in town and snatching them from peoples' ears and pockets, seeking refuge in back alleys where pedestrians were always reluctant to follow him. More often than not, they never chased him. It was as if they expected to be robbed and so, when it happened, all they did was throw their hands up in the air and yell, ‘Shit!'

But as the year passed, and with the help of Jeffery's connections, Nick's business grew and he began to employ those very same drug addicts he had shared a space with, getting them to do the stealing for him in exchange for money.

‘You must always cover your tracks,' Jeffery had taught him, ‘so that one day, if someone should discover this little shop, they will never be able to trace the stealing back to you.'

The day he had first gone into the slum in search of Nick, he had stopped leisurely at his table and said in his most pleasant voice, ‘
Kijana, niaje
?' tucking his fingers into his belt loops and letting his belly fall out.

‘Officer.' Nick had whipped off his headphones and stared in dismay at his merchandise, which was on full display, and he realized that it was too late to hide it.

Jeffery bent down. ‘
Sema
,
where did you get all of these phones?'

‘Some I bought, most are what people threw out and I found.'

Jeffery cocked his head in question, picking up a Nokia that looked almost brand new. ‘Now tell me, why would a person throw out such a one?'

‘Maybe they thought it was broken.'

‘And maybe you think I'm a
mjinga
,' Jeffery mocked. ‘Do you think I'm a fool?'

‘No,
mzee
.'

‘
Toa
ten K and I won't take you to the station.' Jeffery was impatient to leave that place, which reminded him so much of things he wished to forget.

‘Officer,
sikia
—'
the boy started.

‘Do you want to spend the night in a jail cell?' Jeffery asked. ‘I can arrange that, though many things happen there, nothing good.'

The boy unzipped his backpack and reluctantly pulled out cash roped together by a brown elastic band. Counting out ten thousand shillings, he scowled as Jeffery snatched it away. The police officer pushed it into his pocket, felt the wonderful weight of it ground him.

‘
Asante
.' As he turned to leave, he spotted a man sitting against the hard wall of garbage, staring up at him accusingly. Jeffery kicked him in the shins. ‘
Una angalia nini, wewe
?' he snapped, before realizing that the man was blind. Then, agreeably to the boy, ‘See you next week.'

As the months went on, Jeffery and Nick agreed on a percentage of seventy to thirty of everything the boy made. They met every Wednesday at the bar in Westlands at three o'clock in the afternoon. It was a brief transaction; the boy would pass him as if going to the toilet, slide the money into Jeffery's lap and the officer would count it, hiding it low under the table.

One day, in the cheap motel he sometimes took her to, Marlyn asked, while buttoning up her blouse, ‘How do you know the boy isn't cheating you?'

He lit up a cigarette and allowed the sheets to fall about him as he reached for his empty whiskey glass to use as an ashtray. ‘He knows what will happen to him if he does.'

‘What?'

Jeffery extended his index and middle finger, placed perpendicular to his thumb, which was raised straight up above his closed fist. He held the finger gun to Marlyn's temple, pulled the imaginary trigger and said, ‘
Pap
.'

‘You need to expand your business,' he told Nick soon after their last meeting at the bar. ‘You can't expect to make a decent living selling only phones.'

‘How else can I make money like that?'

‘
Pale zote
,' Jeffery said. ‘That is what is so wonderful about this country! There is a job for every man, you just have to be smart. There's cocaine, booze, pussy, but for you,' glancing disdainfully at the meek boy dressed like a school teacher, ‘the easiest would be spare parts.'

‘How shall I start?'

Nick hated Jeffery – found him mannerless and so greedy that he was like a whimpering hyena every time you showed him the straight, hexagonal edges of a five shilling coin. But the police officer knew many people, was like a magician, able to pull profits from even the poorest man.

‘I know someone – he sells second-hand car parts to people looking for cheap deals. Emblems, side mirrors, headlights, those kinds of things. He's looking for a supplier and he'll pay you a lot more than what you get for those broken
simus
.' He didn't mention that the same man had promised Jeffery a cut of the profits, should Jeffery find him a young, naive supplier.

‘Those parts will be hard to get if I'm working alone,' Nick replied. It would require stealing them from cars – those that were parked, stuck in back-to-back traffic – or snatching them from other thieves, and to do so he would need a team.

‘Then find someone to help you, that's not my problem.' Jeffery jerked the boy's collar. ‘I won't be so kind next time.'

Nick was now working with two other men.

‘We've become a gang,' he told Jeffery, as if in warning.

The police officer spat out his drink in a loud snort of amusement. It was humorous to picture the bespectacled former medical student as being a part of something so risky. ‘Are you threatening me?' Jeffery leaned in closer to Nick. ‘How many times do I have to warn you,
kijana
,
before I simply put one in your head and throw you into the river, with the rest of Nairobi's filth?'

Nick, who came from a respectable middle-class family, had only started selling phones on the side for some extra cash to spend in nightclubs and to buy the occasional joint, but now found himself embroiled in a gang who specialized in selling cocaine and a police officer who was even worse than that. ‘I'm sorry,' he squeaked.

‘As long as I continue being happy with my share, then it's
sawa.
You do whatever you want.' Jeffery accepted the forty thousand shillings placed in his eager palm, more than the boy had ever given him in a single transaction.

After the boy had left, Jeffery leaned out into the smog-filled air and watched the chaos of the city unfurl beneath him. Street vendors selling baby animals – puppies, kittens, rabbits –
chokoras
with their fresh peanuts wrapped in newspaper cones, a woman setting up a hot-dog cart ready for the late-night trade – he could see every kind of
duka
imaginable.

He smiled widely, intrigued by what was happening outside: a young girl leading an old woman down the traffic-blocked street. The elderly lady wore a scarf and in her hand was a broken cane. She walked slowly, pushing out the walking stick to tap and check that she was on the right path. Her eyes were open and she stared blankly ahead, never blinking. It was the one aspect of the trick Jeffery had never understood. How they managed to hold their eyes open for so long, keep them so unseeing, when in fact they were only pretending, because sympathy was a powerful tool. He saw a hand stretch out from behind a car window, could almost hear the sharp cling of coins dropping into the girl's cup and he chuckled, for how could one not love such a city? It was brimming with countless opportunities; one only had to be creative enough.