White Lies

—Hey mzungu, hey you …

But I’d become detached by those photographs, or disfigured by malaria. I didn’t feel mzungu. I was snide, doing business with my companion. There was no doubt we were trapped in some kind of companionship now, so much so that he sensed my greed. He noticed the tear in my trousers, the grey smelly jacket. I didn’t have any socks on. A ponytail lanked out from under my crooked straw hat. I didn’t even have a rucksack, just carried my passport photographs in my hand like any Kenyan.

—Run after him, I said, scanning the crowds. Not for the owner of the packet, but to see who was looking at us, and how soon we would be swallowed up in the next wave.

—Give it back …

I pointed to a man running against the lights, dodging his way across. I was covering myself, that’s all. My companion didn’t move. The packet was secure under his shirt and his hands were free. The lights changed. He was of course entitled to test me out. As the surge began, he simply stepped into the road without looking back. The crowd behind me caught up and I was swept towards him. At the kerb I made a lunge at his shirt. It ripped in my hand.

—Give that money back, I said.

But he knew what I meant and I was powerless to deny it. I was saying give it back to me.

—No, man, five-five. Look, there is ten thousand shillings in it.

The packet was exposed through his ripped shirt. It was written on. 10,000/-.

I was disappointed. It wasn’t enough. It was only one month’s rent on a Karen bungalow, or four more months bumming round Kenya. The price of a guard dog or twenty dinners at the International Casino. For my companion it meant capital, profit, or months of the good life down the Baboo Night Club in River Road. If he kept the whole ten thousand it was a year’s salary.

The man I thought had dropped the money was running back. Perhaps he remembered the feeling of it falling out. I knew it wasn’t his money, that it was a payroll, that they’d call the police and he’d be beaten up. He ran past so I set off after him, shouting, ducking traffic as the lights changed. Across the Uhuru Road he went, until a council gardener shouted for him to stop. I grabbed his hand, started pulling him back to Kenyatta.

—You’ve had your money stolen. Back pocket …

He was wearing a bottle-green corduroy jacket. Round face, short, squat, out of breath. He slipped his hand into his jacket and showed me a green wage packet.

—Not me, he said. This is all I have.

I walked back to the traffic lights.

—Pssst. Pssst. The silly cunt thought I hadn’t seen him standing there. Even the Nairobi City Council gardeners were leaning on their tools watching the two thieves meet up again.

—Psst. You ran after the wrong man, he said. You, a fool, shouting like that you get me killed. Now we go. Split five-five. Five thousand you, five thousand me. Aieee you fool. Say sorry.

—Sorry.

—That is okay. We are friends.

He clutched the money through his clothes. I suppose he’d earned custodial rights, but my self-evaluation was declining. I’d overacted the part. I’d take a thousand bob now just to get gone. But why should he have the nine thousand?

—Where you going? I asked.

—Walk, he say. Look for place.

He was fiddling with the packet now and pulled out the chit.

—Look. Ten thousand shillings.

It said Kenya Transport Co. Mombasa 6,000/-. Nairobi 4,000/-. I could take my half to the Transport office and get the loser off the hook but I wanted to go to Tanzania one day. I wanted to give Austen five hundred bob. I had to pay three hundred shillings for my new passport. I found myself telling all this to my new friend, so he didn’t think I’d betray him. I showed him more holes in my clothes and said I couldn’t pay the doctor for some medicine and didn’t even have any underpants. He said soon I would have a lot of money.

We walked to Club 1900. He hesitated.

—No way, I said and walked on.

He caught me up and started to jibber.

—It is our lucky day. One time, before, I found nine thousand dollars in Mombasa and bought a Volvo. Five thousand shillings, it is nothing to me. This is true, I have eighty thousand shillings on me.

He started to look ridiculous, a parody of suspicion, tracing and retracing his steps, peering off the road at any path or hideout. We were down among the wholesale shops, the dry goods, the Asian importers and office suppliers. Old Nairobi, low colonial stores, shoe shops, seamstresses, the smell of cotton and leather and printers’ ink. Cool, tidy, dusty shops with atriums and balconies where gentle but highly strung Patels sat at colossal rolltop desks looking down into the shop below. I’d begun to go there to change my currency, just paltry sums like a ten-dollar bill, but I was always invited to draw up a chair under the ceiling fan to drink a Pepsi and to listen to their gripes about police harassment, bent customs officers, greedy relatives in St Leonards.

—Give me twenty steps, he said. I am turning off this road on the corner.

He pointed to a rubbish patch, a wasteland with paths that crisscrossed between the ditches and the warehouses. It was lunchtime. Workers lounged in groups, Asian shopgirls smoking and drinking tea, messengers in flipflops chucking mango skins in the gutter. They all watched as I waited for my signal. It came from a ridge a hundred yards away. He beckoned, like he was digging a hole with one hand, before squatting under banana fronds. A hundred people saw me pick my way over to the sewage drain.

—Were you seen? he says.

I felt sick. I’d used up a whole day’s energy and shouldn’t have been slagging on an empty stomach after two weeks throwing up chloroquine. My legs were too weak to squat and I got the shakes. He was waving the packet in the air.

—Your lucky day. My lucky day. Which day you born?

He gave me the chit. I was born yesterday.

—You destroy it. Tear it up.

I struck a match but he blew it out.

—No, just tear.

I tore it up and wanted to ditch it where it would be carried away on the flowing scum.

—Now just put it down, he said.

As I sprinkled the fragments he wanted me to squat. The notes were half eased from the envelope when I saw a man come over the ridge.

—There are some people, I said.

Now the man in the green cord jacket smiled at me.

—They’ve followed us, I said.

—Ah, he said. They are the police. Just sit here.

The man in the cord jacket smiled at me again

and came across to shake hands.

—How are you? he said. We go to the police now.

I got up and followed him across the ditch and got wet feet. I was ushered under another banana bush with more urgency now. This was it, a beating, and I’d nothing to bribe them with except perhaps my jacket. We all squatted. Were the police already under the banana bush? I couldn’t see the shopgirls any more. My companion showed them the money.