Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (38 page)

PEOPLE BEFORE PROFIT

‘I'm not sure about this one,' Michael said to Jai. ‘It's very intricate and there's a lot to draw. How will we get it done in under an hour?' Nudging his friend in the side. ‘Are you listening to me?'

Jai shook himself out of a thought. ‘Sorry, I was distracted.'

‘I don't think we can get this done in under an hour,' Michael repeated, pointing out the details he thought they could do without and, again, Jai's mind wandered.

Leena had been home for two weeks now and, although he was happy to have her back, he was troubled by the fact that ever since she had landed, she had been edgy and critical of everything around her. She was ungrounded, perturbed, and when he asked her what was wrong, she said, ‘It's difficult to explain since you've never been out of Nairobi.'

He tried not to feel insulted by her tone when she said, ‘I'm strangely disappointed.'

‘About what?'

She thought of her small room in Stanmore, all those handsome British men and a life scattered through with brief romances and said, ‘When I was away, I would be so homesick, I think I made up memories of this place. But now that I'm back, I find that it's not really that rosy. I feel a pull to go back there, but while I was in London I wanted to return home. It's like I'm in some kind of suspended reality.'

Jai spoke as he always did about this topic, forcefully. ‘Everyone we know has this idea in their mind that they need to leave here and see the world – it doesn't matter what they'll find, they're just sure it'll be better.' He looked out into the rolling, gray horizon, thick with fast-approaching thunder clouds. He could smell it rising from the baked earth, moist and dirt-like. ‘I could never bear to leave this place.'

‘Jai the savior.' She had said it with a smile but there was an old bitterness in her words.

He told Michael all of this. His friend had stopped looking at the drawing, fixed on Jai's words instead. His every muscle was unmoving, trying to grasp what Jai was saying. Though all he could comprehend, all that rung through his mind, was that she was back.

It was rare that he remembered Leena. It was only when he saw children playing a game of marbles or caught the lemon scent of another woman's hair that he would indulge in a moment of nostalgia – sink into the comfort of a well-worn recollection and laugh to himself. How he used to wash his underarms in the sink or linger on the veranda, waiting to catch a glimpse of her, because the leap in his chest and the swimming in his head made him feel more alive than anything else ever had. And that is what this news did to him: made him dizzy with sick excitement as he realized just how empty Nairobi had been without her.

He forced steady words out. ‘Everyone changes, you can't stop that. It's normal to feel distant for the first couple of weeks.'

‘I guess you're right.' Jai turned back to the drawing and said, ‘You're also right about this drawing. It could definitely do with some cutting.'

It was Michael's turn to be distracted. He was full of something: a dusky evening and a bougainvillea bark lit with gold. A magenta flower sliding from his fingers to behind her small ear and a gaze, however small, still shared. Weighed down and thrilling.

He shook himself free and tried to ignore it; that was the disturbing thing about memories. They have a way of growing, even when there is nothing left to feed them. Beautiful things but dangerous – waiting for the right moment, the most inconvenient time, to spring up and surprise you with something that can never be true.

He was alone on Saturday night when it happened. He hadn't planned on ending up there; he'd left Jackie in the apartment to go for a long walk because the house had been too constricting for his looming thoughts.

It was a hot and uncomfortable evening – a reflection of his own feelings.
Stifling. Inescapable.
The idea of her refused to leave him, even after he had exited the building and moved rapidly down the road. He dashed across the street, avoiding men transporting cartons of water in large-wheeled carts hoisted upon their shoulders, slowing down traffic.

At first, it had been enjoyable to think of her. To recall the games they had played, the first time he had ever listened to music from a Walkman. To cycle hands free on a bicycle he had borrowed from a man in the park and let his memories catch up.

Knowing that Leena was in the same city kept him constantly nervous; he worried and hoped that he might run into her on the street, though he knew how impossible such a scenario was. Even if he did, would they recognize each other? Even worse, if they recognized each other, would she even care? He recalled the inconsiderate way in which he and his mother had been dismissed from the Kohlis' house. He had been sent from the apartment block without even the opportunity to say goodbye, but it hadn't mattered because she had been so caught up in moving houses, in the prospect of her fancy, new life, that she had immediately forgotten the old one and everyone in it.

A few weeks later, when Jai had come to visit him, he told Michael that Leena hadn't come along because everyone in the family agreed it was best she make her own friends. The loss had been agonizing, a constant somersaulting in his stomach so affecting that he felt it even now, pulsating slightly.

‘You're only sixteen,' Jackie had said to him back then as he sat sullenly by the window. ‘What can you possibly know about love?'

Ever since Jai told him Leena was back, Michael had been spending early mornings in his Lavington studio, trying to pin down his feelings, but found that they ran too deep and refused to surface. They were reluctant to reveal themselves. For what would happen if they were nothing but emotions he had expanded on his own, developed into things that weren't real but just some sunny-day boyhood recollections and nothing more?

He had needed space to think, which was why he found himself climbing the short green gates of Aga Khan Primary School, leaping into the deserted parking lot. He stilled himself, listening for any guards, and when he was certain he was alone, he took off in search of a canvas.

As always, he carried a can of spray paint with him when he left the house and now, finding a small wall at the back of the building, amid parked school buses, he shook it open.

He had no idea of what he wanted to say until he wrote it, didn't know who he was angry with until mid-way, when he stopped and exhaled an understanding ‘
Oh
.'

Before him was an outline of a woman – slim in face, narrow in shoulders and with a hard, unrelenting brow. Worry and age had sprung up in lines around her mouth and the corners of her eyes but she had retained a youthful attractiveness, hardly having aged a day since he last saw her. She guarded something behind her: a girl who was trying to peer over her mother's shoulder. Before them stood a boy and it was this boy he colored in, flushed at the thought of having something so personal and inerasable displayed in public. On impulse, he leaned into the mother's face, scrawled on top of her eyes and over where her mouth should be:

IF ONLY CLOSED MINDS
CAME WITH CLOSED MOUTHS
.

The can dropped from his hand and he sagged against the wall. He missed her terribly, felt the brunt of her indifference even now, years later, but more than that, it was Pooja he was livid with. She had seen them on the evening of her anniversary party, when he had pushed the flower into Leena's hair – and though he hadn't been able to make out the exact features of her face, he had known from the stiffness of her pose how distressed it had made her. Michael had watched in dismay as she crushed the bougainvillea in her daughter's hair, throwing the flattened and colorless petals onto the steps.

When she fired his mother, Michael had pretended not to know the real reason because he hadn't wanted Angela to be right. He had ignored her warnings and lied to himself that the differences between the Kohlis and them didn't matter – and then had been appalled to find that they were the only things that did. He knew that, in her own way, Pooja had been afraid of him. She had packed up and shifted their entire lives in three weeks because she didn't want Michael to be a part of them any more. Michael had the sudden urge to call Jai; he would ask him where he was and he would go and see Leena.

He stood to take the mobile phone out of his pocket when he heard a voice.

‘That's a nice drawing,
kijana
.'

He turned slowly, an arm raised to shut out the blaze of the torch. He said, ‘It's not a drawing, officer. It's art.'

A few minutes before this, Jeffery had received a phone call from one of the security guards at the Parklands Mosque. He had noticed some suspicious activity – a young man jumping over the gates of Aga Khan Primary School.

‘So go and check it out yourself,' Jeffery had snapped. ‘What are you calling me for?'

‘We don't know if he's armed, sir,' the guard had said. ‘And I don't have a weapon.'

Jeffery had slammed down the phone. The police station was empty – it was still too early for drunks and thieves and Jeffery was bored, so he decided to take a walk.

The night was warm and usually he would have enjoyed the sticky way it clung to him but he was jumpy. After discovering Nick's body in the river, and knowing that the two men were familiar with where he lived, and surely where he worked, he felt nervous and exposed, and half-way to the school he almost turned back.

But now, standing before the young man, Jeffery was glad he had come. He shone the torch on the drawing and recognized almost immediately the handiwork. He moved the spotlight down to the bottom right-hand corner – saw the slogan there.

‘You've decided to become more risky?' He shifted the light back to the young man's face, enjoyed putting him at the mercy of the unrelenting torch.

‘I don't know what you're talking about.'

The boy stayed leaning against the wall, seemingly unbothered. He was composed and well dressed, unlike many others Jeffery had to deal with. Perhaps he was the rich, rebellious kind, with a father who was a successful criminal lawyer or a gynecologist. It would make sense because the boy talked to him loudly and with confidence, such mannerisms that were reserved for those with money.

‘I recognize your handwriting. And that saying,
Kenya ni yetu
, just like the other ones…' He waved his hand in the air, as if thinking, though the words had never left him. He stretched his lips back in an effort to frighten the boy. ‘Very clever but it's still not allowed.'

‘I was out for a walk when I came upon this. I was reading it when you surprised me.'

Jeffery snatched the boy's hand up and held it under the light. He raised his eyebrows at the telltale ink stains on his palm. ‘Let's go.'

‘Where are you taking me?'

‘Don't mind that. Just follow.'

‘I'd rather not.'

‘It's not a request,' Jeffery growled, pulling out his gun.

The boy raised his hands, infuriatingly at ease. ‘I didn't know it was a crime to walk in this city.'

‘You're on private property and it's illegal to draw on the walls.'

‘It's art,' repeated the boy, ‘and you don't know that I did it.'

‘I don't have time for your silly debating.' Jeffery swung his gun in the direction of the gate. ‘Let's get moving to the police station.'

He shoved the boy ahead of him, forcing him down the loose gravel parking lot. They left behind them the still-fresh story, consumed by the darkness and splitting apart slowly, dissolving in the hot rain that had just begun to fall.

No one came in or out of the station. The flimsy
mabati
door swung in the sudden wind, the chill of the thunderstorm roaring in. The boy sat in handcuffs, looking about as if bored.

‘Do you know that the defacement of public buildings is an offense?' Jeffery asked finally.

Usually, he wouldn't have brought the boy back here. He would have bribed him for five thousand shillings or more and left him at the school – would have gone to get himself some fried chicken and chips. But he had wanted to see the boy in the light, the person who had attacked him personally with every drawing, the one who had publicly revealed his shame.

‘Everyone has a right to voice their opinions,' the boy told him.

‘Then do it at home on a piece of paper that they can hang in one of those fancy galleries,' Jeffery said. ‘You can't ruin the image of our city just because you have an opinion. Do you think you're the only one living here?'

‘I think I'm the only one with a working brain who lives here.' He was suddenly visibly upset. ‘Just because someone has more money than you, or is a different color, doesn't mean they should treat you badly.'

The unexpected confession surprised them both. Jeffery said, ‘In that regard, I must agree with you.'

The metal cuffs clanged against the edge of the table as the boy sat back. ‘Can I go now?'

Jeffery was busy with his own thoughts. He was irrationally driven to seek this boy's approval, as if it would lessen his disgrace, which the drawings had solidified and made painfully real. He asked, a childish glint in his eye, ‘Do you want to make some money?'

‘Doesn't everyone?'

‘Yes.' Perhaps this boy was more similar to him than he had imagined. ‘Suppose I have a way of helping you make some fast
doh
.'

The boy continued to stare at him and Jeffery took this as a positive sign to continue. He told the boy of his dilemma. With Nick gone, he was alone and it couldn't hurt to have someone young and strong on his side – and the boy seemed much more astute than Nick had ever been. When he finished recounting his plan, Jeffery crossed his arms over his chest and smirked, so certain in the lure of greed that when the boy asked, ‘You want me to rob a house?' Jeffery nodded pleasantly.