Читать книгу SOUTH B'S FINEST - MAKENA MAGANJO - Страница 5

Beatrice watched her children as they disappeared into the crowd. Kanyi had taken after her. He was short and compact, even his movements were hers, practical movements. They didn’t exert energy where it wasn’t needed lest it be useful somewhere else. That was the philosophy in their stride.

Nyambura, in a case of nurture versus nature, defied reason to become a replica of Mr. Mathai. Her sensibilities so aligned with Mathai’s. Beatrice couldn’t think of one without thinking of the other. It was as if everything of Macharia––everything that Nyambura could have inherited from her biological father, his features, his character, his little idiosyncrasies that Beatrice had come to know so well she’d catalogued them in her organised mind (once, not any more, she reminded herself), had been excavated from Nyambura’s DNA. Fate, it appeared, had refused her even this: it would not let her make a totem out of her daughter.

~

Someone came up to congratulate the bride and groom, but Beatrice’s mind was back in time. Nairobi, circa 1981, the year she bumped into Macharia on Biashara Street on her way to buy Kitenge fabric she was going to up-sell for twice as much as it cost to the richer girls in her halls of residence at University of Nairobi. There had always been something between Beatrice and Macharia, even though, from the beginning, it felt more like dying embers than the sparks of a new fire.

Macharia asked Beatrice if perhaps she had time for a quick lunch, to catch up, and in the characteristic way she forgot her characteristic self when she was near him, Beatrice forgot the errand that had brought her into town. He looked good. He was studying architecture. Oh, I didn’t know you liked architecture? He laughed, he didn’t think he liked it all that much.

‘Maybe I should have come to you for advice first. You always know the right thing to do.’

‘Me?’ Beatrice sounded incredulous.

Macharia was a year older than her. He was (for the neighbourhood they grew up in), a symbol of success. Everyone either wanted their children to be like Macharia or their daughters to marry Macharia. Beatrice had never stopped to consider that the self assured boy, she’d played with in her childhood was ever unsure about anything. He’d always moved with an ease and certainty about him. When his classmates dropped out of school to run their parents business concerns, Macharia was resolute about finishing his A-Levels and applying for university admission. He was the first of his generation from the whole neighbourhood to join university.

‘You always knew what would get us in trouble and what wouldn’t,’ Macharia said.

They grew up with only a barbed wire fence separating their homes. Their families were intertwined and forever feuding, as all great neighbours must.

‘That’s just common sense which wasn’t a strength of yours.’ Macharia affected a look of hurt. Beatrice bit her lip. He made her want to giggle, she wasn’t the giggling kind.

‘That’s fair. Anyway, how are you finding Nairobi?’ The last time they’d seen each other––when was it? Ah yes! It was during an event at her parent’s home in Nakuru, but Beatrice couldn’t remember what it had been for, maybe her older brother’s rũracio? Her memory of the event was inextricably linked to Macharia. He had offered to help her uncles roast the goat meat, a generous offer that was met with raucous laughter. In his crisp blue shirt, neatly folded up to his elbows, no one took him seriously as “one of the men”. ‘Nairobi has changed you,’ they kept saying to him, and to her, ‘don’t let it change you when you go next year.’

Macharia had turned to her in surprise then.

‘Next year?’ he’d asked, a look that could only have been joy and relief, on his face. She too had been accepted to the prestigious University of Nairobi to study Commerce. Beatrice, ever practical, had never nursed any hope that they would continue their friendship in the capital city. Macharia was her brother’s friend. He wouldn’t want to spend time with her if her brother wasn’t around, at least he’d never shown any inclination to do so. This is incorrect. He had shown an inclination but it was always covert and she’d thought that was meant to make the connection more special and intimate somehow.

Their friendship, yes, you know the kind I am about to speak of, friends by proxy (a brother, a friend, a cousin), with an undercurrent that is powerful, spiritual (I’m fanciful, allow me this), never spoken of but always tugging underneath until––

Macharia reached across the table in the crowded restaurant full of Nairobi’s denizens jostling each other in a pretend rush to finish lunch before heading back to work. He took her left hand into his and lightly squeezed it. Sitting across from him, their hands intertwined, Beatrice forgot Mr. Mathai who had been courting her for nearly six months now. Her mind replayed that last evening at home with Macharia, underneath a full moon, their hands squeezing each other, just like this (familiar gestures are like magic spells, you are in thrall each time they are repeated), the kiss that came after, his warm breath upon her ear, ‘I’m really happy you’re coming to Nairobi. It’s lonely there on your own.’

Beatrice blinked and forced herself to stay in the present.

‘Ciku, it’s really good to see you. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy, I haven’t looked for you. But you look good––happy I mean,’ Macharia was saying now.

It was the touch not the words. The way his hand felt in hers. In high school, Macharia asked her best friend out. They dated for three brief months (if you can call it that), in which he wrote Beatrice more letters than he wrote Freshia.

After lunch, they promised to keep in touch.

Beatrice waited the kind of waiting you wish never to do on behalf of anyone. Macharia never looked for her, never visited her at her halls of residence, never called the phone booth outside her halls. In the months after their lunch, Beatrice recounted their conversation like a detective looking for missing clues. Had he said he was quitting architecture? Maybe he moved to another campus away from this one that was beside the central business district? Why did she not take his address? Don’t be silly you were never going to show up to his place unannounced! What if he’d come to visit her and he’d asked for Ciku when everyone in university knew her as Beatrice or Betty? Even as her courtship with Mr. Mathai hobbled along, Beatrice would catch herself wondering if maybe today Macharia was going to remember his promise to keep in touch.

He never came for her wedding.

~

The next time they met, four years later after that encounter on Biashara Street was at a mutual friend’s home and Beatrice was a married woman. Mr. Mathai interrupted their reunion to ask Macharia where he got such an excellent fedora from. He then steered the conversation and Macharia away from Beatrice who was left standing next to Macharia’s wife. Once or twice, she thought she saw Macharia looking at her, though she reprimanded herself each time. She was a married woman now. Looks and eyes and these things that hope surfaced did not, could not, mean anything.

~

They were in the city again when they next spotted each other across Kimathi Street. Beatrice was going to wave and carry on her way but Macharia crossed the street. He took her to Trattoria for lunch where they got a table at the balcony. They talked of inconsequential things: new music, what was showing in the cinema, their careers, childhood friends, home, and when the conversation lulled, they watched the pedestrians below in a silence that felt like a homecoming.

As the waiter took away the bread basket, Beatrice watched the basket rise and in a moment of lucidity understood what this feeling she had for Macharia was: it was as if for a moment she was suspended thousands of feet above ground with a view of valleys and lakes, blushing flamingos, bowing mountains, the Great Rift Valley endless and majestic below her and then all of a sudden she was falling.

‘Why didn’t you ever visit?’ she asked interrupting his story about a colleague at work (he never quit the architecture degree). Macharia straightened, taken aback by the question, he ventured a look at her face then looked down to where fellow Nairobians were milling around on the street below. She watched his side profile, her heart beating hard against her chest, knowing that whatever answer she got would not improve or change anything. Yet, hopeful (again, against her character), she waited in expectation for something, she didn’t know what, but something nevertheless.

‘I couldn’t,’ He said. The shrug: an impulsive movement but also a self-defence mechanism against a feeling. It succeeds in isolating and belittling at the same time. Which was how Beatrice came to find her absurd hope dashed against the absurd shrug.

‘What do you mean? Macharia, when we left…I don’t know, I just thought, I thought that maybe you’d keep in touch or even write a letter like you used to.’ Beatrice hated how she sounded, she hated that she was giving her cards away, that he knew she had waited.

‘Ciku, I don’t have many friends. I didn’t want to lose you and I knew then I wasn’t ready to be with you in that other way.’

‘What other way?’ Beatrice asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear him say it anyway. Let him reveal his cards too!

‘You know,’ Macharia said with a quietness that made it sound grave and sad. Odd. A man could love you and it could be grave and sad and not enough.

‘Who was asking you to be with me like that?’ she asked, feeling like cauterised rejection.

‘Ciku, before we were kids. It didn’t matter then but now––’

‘It didn’t matter?’

‘No, you know what I mean. It wasn’t serious.’ The waiter arrived with their food. They could have been eating bricks for all Beatrice cared.

‘So you never came because you didn’t want to be with me, which is what you think would have happened?’

Macharia’s eyes never wavered from hers as he said, ‘Yes, we don’t know how to be without being something else. I was going through things and I knew…if I came I was going to keep coming and then…then I was going to stop. And I didn’t want to hurt you.’

‘Wait––’ Beatrice put up a hand. ‘So, you preferred never to speak to me again but still call me your friend?’

‘Ciku…does it matter now?’ The unsaid: We are married.

‘No, I guess not, only you never gave it a chance to matter.’ And then, throwing caution to the wind and that absurd hope again: ‘And after…when you…you were ready? Why didn’t you come then?’ The unsaid once more…

…

Macharia’s brows furrowed. By now, there was no longer any pretence at eating. Beatrice started to say something again. She stopped. The waiter came and took their plates away, asked if they wanted their food packed (both shook their heads no), asked if they were interested in dessert (a no from the pair once more), it was getting late, they needed to return to their lives.

When the waiter returned with the bill, they reached for it in unison. Their hands grazed and Beatrice was soaring again. It might have been the intimacy of the touch, their inability to be without being something else, whatever it was, instead of parting ways when they got to the street, they walked in complicit silence to the Hilton Hotel just round the corner from the restaurant. They stayed there till seven p.m that evening.

~

‘Betty?’ Steven was looking at Beatrice as if he’d been trying to reach her for some time.

‘Oh, sorry, sorry, I’m just…I’m just, I don’t know Steve. I don’t know how to tell you. This…everything…’ she gestured towards the wedding guests below. ‘This is more than…I don’t know…’ she shrugged and shook her head. He kissed her forehead.

Beatrice had told Steven bits and pieces about her first marriage. Never straight on. Never “I wasn’t happy” or “I loved another man” and definitely not “I had an affair and Nyambura is not Mr. Mathai’s child”. She’d told him about the long hours at work, building the family business from a tiny car spare parts shop to owning a BMW dealership as well as several other businesses. She’d told him about Mr. Mathai (though the man’s reputation preceded itself so Steven knew a lot about him either way), his chronic people-pleasing ways, his penchant for dipping into company coffers, his affair. Steven’s life appeared less complicated. His wife passed away from a brief bizarre bout of Tuberculosis sometime in the late nineties or early two thousands.

‘People are starting to say we are acting like high school lovers. Let’s go mingle a bit,’ Steven suggested. They descended from the stage as the DJ remixed Sauti Sol’s Lazizi, joining their guests who for the most part had abandoned their seats, socializing around or on the dance floor, at the buffet table, balancing plates and drinks as they exchanged stories.

~

Beatrice’s last wedding had triple the attendance of this wedding. Of course, that was during the time when weddings were held in the village and even people from the surrounding villages came “just to see”.

And her first husband? Mr. Mathai had a joviality that was intoxicating and addictive. To spend time with him was to see the sun and live to tell the story. She was marrying the sun. The sun had deemed her worthy of his eternal light and warmth––at least that’s what her friends from university said. The question many had and some were tactless enough to voice when Beatrice and Mr. Mathai announced their engagement was, “How did you do it, Betty? How did you convince Mr. Mathai to settle down with you?”

The early days of her first marriage were not anything Beatrice was in a hurry to remember. Somehow in the chaos of unrequited love for another man and the blinding light of the sun, she’d not formally met her husband. That is to say, they were veritable strangers to each other.

Yet, to forget those early years would be to forget the love that surrounded her today. Perhaps, Beatrice reflected, it was just as well the memories would not let go of her.