Who Will Catch Us As We Fall (5 page)

The officer growls. ‘Move, before I put you back in.'
Boys like this, trouble, trouble all the time.
He thought he had taken care of this one but the
kijana
seems to be enshrouded in some kind of divine luck.

The handcuffed man looks at Leena again with a playful smile. ‘The ill-tempered
mzee
here wants some lunch money. Three hundred bob should suffice. What do you say, chief?' He turns back to the officer, whose face has darkened, pencil threatening to crack within his fleshy fist.

With his hands finally free, the man winces as he massages his wrists. He is dressed too neatly for this place – a black turtleneck sweater and beige pants and his hair is cropped in close curls to his head. There is a hint of stubble over his cheeks, running darkest along his full upper lip. He looks at her and sees a bewildered Indian girl, her hair in a loose knot, with a big stain where it shouldn't be.
There is something
.
He leans in closer to get a better look but is shoved once more. ‘Hey!'

The man behind the desk bellows, ‘No more drawings, got it?'

‘They're not drawings,' he replies. ‘It's art.'

‘Who cares? It's not allowed.'

‘Free speech, my friend.'

‘Outside! I'm tired of
kijanas
like you living only to disturb me.'

The young man is at the door, glad to be away from the stench and cold. No matter how many times he comes back here, he will never get used to how lonely and scared it makes him. The girl cranes her neck to watch him leave.

‘Don't stay too long,' he warns. ‘This place has a tendency of turning victims into suspects.'

They are all quiet after he has gone, looking questioningly at each other. Leena feels as if a shadow has passed over her, partially exposing something.

‘You come back with your passport.' The officer slams his book shut.

Jai comes in from the back entrance and sees Leena standing before the cop, her mouth pinched with impatience. ‘Is everything okay?'

She shakes her mind clear, relieved that he is back. ‘He's telling me that I need ID to process my request even though the request is for a stolen ID.' She is feeling strangely uneasy and her voice grows loud, trembling slightly as she twists the hem of her cardigan between her fingers.

‘Why don't you go and wait in the car?' Jai hands her the keys.

She snatches them from him while the policeman tries to hide a smirk, a slightly mocking look on his face as he watches her go.

The young man is leaning against a tree, extending his foot outward to play with a stray cat. When he sees her approaching, he pushes himself straight. ‘Let you out already?' Something had caused him to linger after seeing her, but he had started to feel silly and almost left.

She fiddles with the keys. ‘I couldn't deal with it any more.'

‘That's understandable.' His voice is gravelly, rolling with pleasant surprises.

The easiness in his demeanor inspires the same casualness within her and she is able to speak freely. ‘Why did they have you in there?'

‘Some graffiti I did at City Market – gets them every time.'

‘You've been in there before?' She is surprised. He seems too intelligent and, she blushes to think it, too attractive. There is a pleasing symmetry about his features, the way they crowd his narrow face. A low forehead and a wide-bridged nose – a mouth so large that it would look girlish on anyone else but lends him an unabrasive sensuality.

‘A true artist always suffers for his craft, a true patriot for his country, is that not so?'

‘I don't think I would risk spending one night in that place, let alone one minute, just to write some things on a wall.'

‘Not just things,' he corrects her, squinting again. What is it about those sweeping gestures she makes with her hands as she speaks? Each action reveals something new, peeling back the layers of his memory. ‘Isn't it my duty as a citizen to question the status quo? To express my opinion?'

‘You sound an awful lot like my brother,' she laughs, fiddling with the keys again and trying to ignore the pleasant warmness in her cheeks. The way he looks at her is too direct for a stranger but she doesn't mind it.

‘Your brother?' His relaxed manner falters slightly. He peers closer at her.
It can't be.
He would have been told.
But…
He has also learned never to disregard his gut, which is now beginning to churn and ache.

‘He's helping me out in there.' She jabs her thumb in the direction of the station. ‘He's worried I might blow up or something. Jai is always convinced I'm doing things wrong when I'm not doing them his way.'

A heartbeat pulse at his jaw. ‘Jai – that's your brother?'

She looks up from the keys, nodding, and then asks, ‘Are you okay?'

He has sagged against the tree and when he hears her voice he gives a violent shake, a stumbling, stammering boy, so drastically changed from the person who stood before her moments ago.

His hand trembles slightly as he rubs his chin. ‘I just haven't eaten anything since yesterday.' He moves toward her, shuffles back. For the first time in a long while, his next step eludes him. He looks up and sees Jai at the door – detects a slight shake of his head.
Not yet.

A person so used to saying what he thinks, he struggles to hold back his feelings. ‘I should go.'

She shifts on her feet, wondering if it would be too bold to ask him for a name. What would she do with it anyway? She has lived here long enough to know that even if she wanted to see him again, there are too many lines to cross and too many uncertainties waiting on the other side of them. ‘I'll look out for one of your drawings,' she says.

‘Art,' he corrects her, the smile deepening the lines of his face once more.

‘Right. Art.'

He stumbles backward, filled with an odd sensation that his body and brain are not working together, as if forcing his muscles to move in a direction they don't want to go. Casting one look back at Jai emerging from the station, there is enough trust between them for him to know that it wasn't done out of malice but out of love for a person they both care deeply for, though it doesn't make him any less angry.

‘Bye,' she calls out. But he keeps moving, pretending not to hear her.

The policeman's pockets are deliciously heavier than this morning. He scratches the long nail of his pinky finger across his aggravated nostril and
picks apart the hard layers encrusting the inside wall of his nose.
Too dry, this heat. Too hot.
He watches the Land Cruiser back out of the station, turn with a roar onto the main road. Pats his recently acquired money. Smiles because he no longer feels guilty cheating a system that long ago betrayed him.

Youthful and fresh on the job, his mother had helped him to dress in the sky-blue shirt, the black uniform trousers that had been a size too big. Handing him his baton she'd sat back on her heels, clutching her head and exclaiming loudly, ‘Oh, Constable!', weeping and writhing so that he had been late after trying to calm her down.

The first morning as a part of the Kenyan Police, he had joined the ranks of workers walking to one of Kibera's eight exits: men in patched overalls and women in freshly washed blouses, squeezing past one another in pathways so narrow that it was necessary to turn sideways to pass through them. He'd plunged past wheelbarrow porters, twisting his body to avoid the sharp edges of their carts. Strode past the vendors on both sides of the street selling fresh fruit and vegetables, soap, sweets and cigarettes. Past Miss Judy's school, where she was leading her students in morning prayer, chirping like small birds within the
mabati
structure that was painted crayon-yellow, giving it an uncomplicated cheerfulness.

He waved to the tailors hunched over pedal-powered sewing machines, greeted the accountants and lawyers who shared trestle tables in open-air offices, feeling them stare.
Let them look.
He was better than Kimani the houseboy. Better than Njoroge the cook. Better than Wangai the driver. Better than his drunkard, whore-loving father, who had worked for Hatari Security Company as a night guard. He worked for the president now. Forward on, forward on, into the high-rise center of Nairobi.

Already he saw himself outside of this forsaken place, living within the modern joys of the city – in a small house with his mother, where he would one day be able to afford a car and not have to worry about the disease-riddled mud dirtying his shoes or duck the ‘flying toilets' – bags of human waste – as they came whirling, carelessly thrown onto the streets.

Constable Jeffery Omondi, fourteen steps closer to becoming commissioner of police, a good friend and confidant of the president—

‘
Weh
!
Watch where you step, who do you think you are?' Thomas Ngusye, who owned the only cinema in Kibera, complete with seventy plastic chairs, drew his stepped-on foot back and sneered. ‘Constable what? Lowest-ranked police officer, that's what.'

‘I'm still higher than you,' Jeffery had called back, nothing to stop him.

He had spent all day out on the road, striding in front of cars and directing them with his bare hands – even the
mzungu
his father had worked for listened to him. Officer in Charge of the Smooth Operation of Traffic. He chased away street boys, taught
matatu
touts a lesson. Officer in Charge of Cleaning Up Nairobi Roads. At the end of the day, he rewarded himself by taking a
matatu
home rather than walking because his salary, low in comparison to many others, was still the largest he had ever received.

Meeting his friends at Mama Lucy's, he took a step up from the
chang'aa
, the regular moonshine he drank, and spent his wages sipping on
busaa
, a fermented maize drink served in half-liter cans instead of glasses. By ten o'clock that evening, he lay bleary-eyed on the mud floor beside a plastic sheet filled with roasted maize, having just enough sense to slip some into his pocket before anyone saw.

Jeffery is jolted back to the present by Heba, a trembling old Muslim woman who is a constant visitor to his station. He knows what she is going to say before she says it.

‘He stole one of my cats,' she announces in her rusted voice, raising a wobbly finger. ‘That man, he owes me money, took my land and stole away one of my cats.'

Same story, same man with no name. Jeffery snaps, ‘You have more than a hundred cats. What is one?'

He sees her sometimes on his nightly visits to the city center, wandering the broken and dark alleys with bread in her pocket and a packet of milk, so crazy that even the night thieves leave her alone. She once told him that she was searching for lost kitten souls, those that Allah had bestowed upon her the responsibility of saving.

‘I'm an angel,' she tells him, pushing a browning piece of paper in his face. ‘In this prophecy, Allah says he has sent down an angel in white,' gesturing to her salwar kameez,
permanently stained with dust, ‘to do his work. He will reward anyone who helps bountifully.'
Scrawled nothings, jibber-jabber garbage.
He is tempted to tear it up.

‘Go away, old woman.'

‘We had a business deal,' she shrieks. ‘With that man in the tall building – he says there is no money to build but he is hiding it from me.'

‘What's his name?'

‘Owiti.'

Owiti today. William yesterday. Tomorrow himself, Jeffery.

‘One day I will have millions of shillings,' she warns him.

‘Then come back when you have it.' He shouts for the junior police officer. Let him deal with this mad, shrunken creature. Jeffery is in charge of this police station; he's above such nonsense. Thirteen years later and three steps up from where he started – but only because one man hanged himself at this very desk and the other left to work at the main airport, tempted by the higher salary and a lower level of resentment from customers.

As the other policeman drags her out, Heba fixes her cataract-stained eyes on him. ‘I know what you did.'

‘What did you say?' Jeffery holds his hand up to stop them.

‘I know how you harmed that poor soul.' Her eyes roll back in her head; her second-hand walker gives a tremendous shake. ‘That sad, broken-to-pieces girl. But Allah will forgive you if you help me.
Bismil-lahir-rahmanir-rahim
,' she begins praying.

‘Which girl?' Jeffery presses his hands to the desk, rising. Feels a pool of sweat form beneath his collar.
How could she possibly know?

‘Oh that poor, poor thing. She is only a kitten.' Heba groans. ‘And you have left her to die.'

His sweat dries up, hands banging down. Ridiculous of him to have indulged her in the first place. He would have shot her with pleasure, then and there, if he hadn't been his mother's son. ‘Go home and don't come back!'

Jeffery sits back down, tired of them all, pulling at the waistband of his trousers, now two sizes too small instead of one size too loose. Three steps up in the job but the same ground-floor salary. Then he remembers the cash in his pockets. No need to think of anything else right now – he has found ways to get by. Cheat or be cheated. He'd learned his lesson long ago.

The drive home from the station is full of unshared thoughts. Leena picks at her jeans where there is now a crinkled, stiff stain.

‘I'll have to throw these away.'

‘Just ask Grace to wash them for you,' Jai says.

‘I had piss thrown on me.' She finally feels the aggressive stirrings of an undeserving victim. ‘Even if she washes them ten times, I'll never wear them again.'

He keeps his eyes on the road. ‘If you're going to do that, give them to Grace. I'm sure she'd appreciate a good pair of trousers.' He pauses, considering something. ‘After all of this, are you still okay?'