White Lies

—Lions still up there, bloke.

This was Masai country parcelled up and sold to Kikuyus who didn’t already have an ancestral plot in the bush. Narrow strips of land still shadeless between rough homesteads. Umbrella thorn and clumps of candelabra where Masai cattle grazed on the unenclosed land. Grey-black cotton-soil sloped up to the hills patrolled by kites and eagles.

In Austen’s compound the rainwater tanks were empty and the earth was cracked. Wanja was in the shamba tying strips of cloth and ribbon to withered stalks. She wore an anorak despite the heat, hair uncombed and dusty. An ex-prostitute Austen had ‘rescued’ from the tourist bars, now she was singing a Kikuyu hymn as a big old white drake with goiters and sores stumbled round her.

Austen told her he’d got the chickens but she just stared and shrugged. He untied them and they ran round the compound. Wanjiku looked like a mission-school house-girl with dusty knees, short white socks and grey cotton frock. No one knew the identity of her father, just that he was one of Wanja’s Johns from the Starlite days. Wanjiku curtsied and helped us unload the truck. There was a gas fridge in the storeroom and I guzzled cold water from glass bottles.

—Don’t forget to boil the water first, bloke. Comes from a standpipe in the village.

It tasted of flouride and Wanjiku’s teeth were stained from it. Inside, the hut was baking because there was no ceiling under the pitched tin roof. Austen said there were love birds nesting up there once, but the chatter drove him nuts so he’d chased them away. Wanjiku started sweeping the bare concrete floor round the tatty sofa and dusted Austen’s desk which rocked against the shiplap walls. There were stacks of blue flimsy foolscap, a huge grey typewriter, a paraffin lamp, some rare books on a single shelf reserved for Africana.

I dozed in a corner all afternoon while Austen was away. Wanjiku crept about, peeled potatoes, filled the paraffin lamps. The roof clanked and the smell of baked creosote fumes gave me a headache. The sunset didn’t linger into evening and Wanjiku lit the oil lamps and put the potatoes on the bottled gas stove. Austen came back with two oil drums full of water and I helped him drain them into one of the rainwater tanks which were sunk underground. I said I needed a shave and a wash.

—Piss on the saplings, bloke, and waste-water on the paw-paw tree.

Wanja came in to eat the fluffy boiled potatoes and bean stew with fragments of goat’s leg. She started singing Kikuyu hymns and Wanjiku joined in.

—The Spirit of Zion Church, Austen said. I could throttle the fucker who put that up. Just a tin duka with a cross on it by the water tap. I say we go out bloke. Bring a sweater, it gets chilly.

He really wanted to take me to the Starlite or the Pub, but he was being protective because he said Zanna wouldn’t approve.

—First day, bloke. Take it easy, ha.

We headed out through Masai country and came to the Craze which was supposed to be an out-of-town nightspot and hotel. The bar was empty and there was one white couple on the disco floor, dancing like it was a game of blind man’s buff. Me and Austen sat on twirly iron chairs with red, heart-shaped, leather upholstery. On the menu was chips, fried eggs, fried bread and baked beans: sixteen bob. There was tomato sauce on the table and waiters in red jackets lined up to shake our hands. When the white couple saw us they came straight over and the disco was turned off. They were brother and sister, the bloke a slightly younger version of Austen, tanned and wiry with a clipped voice like he’d been shouting at natives all his life. The moustache was 1901. He was repatriating himself, that’s what he said. Eleven years in Zambia. He banged his fist on the table.

—Why should I bother with that man? Eh? Tell me that.

—Who? Kaunda? Austen said.

—Of course. The man’s a fool. KK’s done nothing in eleven years. Just sacrificed his socialist ideals for a kilo of fucking sugar.

He was just as bitter about the Craze too. He’d wanted a last fling, a stop-over in whore country, but these Indian bastards had conned him into staying at the Craze. They’d offered transport and said these out-of-town weekend nightspots were trendy with the new middle-class African and enlightened Europeans. His sister had come out to meet him for the week and they were flying back together. She wore an orange kaftan and kept saying: it’s alright Robert, it’s cool.

She got the disco turned back on. The light show was a bloke shaking a coloured bulb in each hand like maracas. The four of us danced till Austen said it was fuckin ridiculous and we left.

Wanjiku came running out the shack when we pulled up. As Austen switched the engine off we could hear a commotion, a wailing and crying in the distance. It was too dark to see my hands. I could make out a dim glow here and there half a mile off.

—Where’s Wanja? Austen said.

—Oh Austen, Wanjiku said and started crying. She say to tell you she has gone to Tanzania.

—Shit and derision! What’s going on up there?

—I do not know.

Austen locked me in the shack with Wanjiku and gave me an airgun. He let the Ridgeback loose and set off on foot with a panga. I blew the lamps out but what with the fear, the jet lag, the heat and the sudden change of diet, my guts gave out. I had five seconds to get to the long drop only we were locked in. I could’ve gone through the window but the dog would’ve shredded me. Austen came back and found me washing my trousers in a bucket and needing somewhere to stash the soiled pages of yesterday’s Daily Nation.

—Bloody drunkard, mshenzi. Not you bloke. Up there. Josphat bloody Githinji. Chang’aa gang war. Four women with kids after Githinji’s son start stoning old Mama Githinji. Whole family’s running all over the shamba yelling like dogs. God! The police car’s outside the bar. Two police, dead drunk, say they’re not assigned.

He wanted to sit and talk now, to map out my career, to get me stringing for the BBC Africa Service. Him and Zanna had all the contacts. I didn’t booze back then, or talk much. I just listened and gulped down Austen’s Roosters, short lethal fags made of uncured tobacco with no filters. Austen shuttled between the sofa and the crate of Export Guinness in the storeroom, small bottles brewed under licence in Kenya. One flick of his well-worn Swiss Army knife and the bottle tops rattled to the floor. One Rooster, one Guinness, six or seven swigs a bottle till he became louder and maudlin while Wanjiku slept soundly on a mat on the kitchen floor.

Everywhere I suggested going for a story he said was too dangerous.

—Stay out of Uganda for the moment bloke. The Ministry of Defence just announced it: guerillas gonna resume bombing campaign in Kampala.

So I flicked through the Daily Nation. Teenage girls at Lamu jailed for idleness.

—Trouble there too, bloke. Three hour shootout between bandits and police. Killed two of ’em and arrested the truck driver. Indian smugglers. Three hundred and forty elephant tusks. God! Right fucking shambles this Wildlife bloody Army. Kenyatta’s bloody wife still flies about in an army helicopter massacring zebra with a machine gun.

I said I’d just hitch out to Naivasha then. A dispute between neighbours had turned into the serial buggering of chickens by rival gangs in Kakamega. Austen said I couldn’t sell a story like that so why didn’t I go interview a dentist about flouride in the water. And if Wanja came back I could ask her about skin-lightening creams. He said all the prostitutes used them to make their skin go pale. He reckoned it was the mercury in the cream that had turned Wanja mad.

My idea was different. I wanted to visit Joy and do a story on gold panning and cattle rustling. But I wanted to be something first, get the red dirt on my boots and find some connection for myself. Maybe my character would form itself in parallel to the story I found. I didn’t tell him those bits, and I didn’t ask him about Joy either, but I didn’t have to wait long before he mentioned her:

—Hey bloke, I’ve got it. You must go and see this woman Joy up in Amolem …

I could’ve asked him what she was like but he was ratted on Guinness now and I wanted to preserve her welcome like it was a real memory, not a guess or a hope.

The Rooster smoke was coming out his ears as he banged the chair and shouted:

—D’you know what that cunt Mengistu does to the Ethiopian people? Charges the fuckers he shoots for the bullets.

I wasn’t interested enough to listen now. I was picturing Joy in her long months between visitors, the airmail envelopes crisp and yellow and filling with insect pepper, her despair if a guitar string snapped, sewing up the holes in her mosquito net with raffia, listening in the night for cattle raids and aeroplanes, snakes and shooting stars … Listening out for me.

—Hey bloke, Austen said. Zanna give you that bloody jacket for Schick?

It was in the bottom of my pack, a heavyweight camouflaged Barbour which I’d agreed to deliver, new and oily.

—Christ almighty, Austen said when I gave it to him. Bloke’s gonna wear that down the Starlite? Mad bastard.

—Who is this Schick? I said.

—You don’t wanna know bloke. Man should wear a Keep Away sign round his neck.

It took seven bottles of Guinness before Austen was pissed enough to go to sleep.

Next day I set off for Naivasha, fifty miles north, reaching Dagoretti by clapped-out bus. For the settlers of Karen/Nairobi, Dagoretti was where Africa began, with the last white homestead in sight of the township.

The streets stank of raw sewage and barefoot women carried bundles of firewood. Kids queued for water with twenty-litre cooking-oil tins. There were mud houses in the lanes, roofs made of flattened tin cans, doors from packing cases. There were barber shops in the market square and radio repair shops, charcoal sellers, bars and cafes. Women in brilliant white dresses walked home from church.

A few kids followed me up the long hill towards Kikuyu.

—Hey you. Mzungu. Liverpool, Liverpool. Where are you going?

At the top there was open pasture rising to a coffee grove. A gutted white mansion behind the spiked muigoya hedge. A boy was collecting the leaves in a basket so his family could wipe their arses.

—Good morning sir, he said. Have you come to live?

—No, I said, and he was crestfallen.