This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photo by Julian Christ on Unsplash.
For Agnes and Bernard
There is always a maybe in our failures and a chancy sometimes in our hopes. Maybe we will get there. Sometimes we will think that we have arrived. Kenya @50:Trends, Identities and the Politics of Belonging| Dr. Joyce Nyairo
CHAPTER ONE
Windsor Golf and Country Club, August 4th, 2012
This is not the beginning but when I consider it all (pictures, diary entries, recipes cut out of magazines, old receipts––I was thorough), it is this wedding photo of the Malaba Estate neighbours (ex neighbours, some of them), smiling into the camera, the years showing in their smiles, hard stares, grey hairs, that calls to me most. It is in this moment, captured by a hired photographer who delivered the pictures a full year after the wedding, that the past stretches its hand into the present and reminds it that it is nothing without the weight of events that have come before. Very well then, to honour the past, we will begin here.
~
The venue practically chose itself. Since what can only be described as the dramatic departure of President Moi a decade earlier, economic prosperity had found its way to the vacant and ghostly corridors and lawns of Windsor Golf and Country Club, and returned the once glamorous club to a sibling of its former glory. In the hall that held the wedding party, there was only the slightest hint of judgment, not unusual at these things, of course. This was not the couple’s first marriage. No dowry had been paid, an agreement the couple came to unanimously. This agreement did not sit well with some of the bride’s family, but what can we say?
Impressively, the food at the reception was not…bad. Now, mind you, I didn’t say it was delicious, but the roasted goat meat, though not tender, was well salted, the pilau, though under-spiced, was not dry, the chapatis, though dry…no those were bad. The chapatis were, without question, bad. Regardless, the caterers had outdone themselves, delivering a lukewarm yet passable selection of Kenya’s finest foods.
The Priest kept on time and on message during the mass earlier that morning. He only strayed off topic twice, the first time to deliver an anecdotal story on the power of faith in times of strife, and the second to remind the guests that an offering would be taken. Even the M.C. largely behaved, referring to the couples advanced age only a handful of times.
The gifts table was piled high with starter-home gifts––you know the lineup––the cheap glasses, one set of good china from a wealthy distant relative, pots and pans (non-stick), dining table mats and one tiny Samsung fridge. The D.J. played all the wedding classics (think Backstreet Boys and Boyz II Men), and nostalgic tunes from E-sir’s Boomba Train to Esther Wahome’s Kuna Dawa. The M.C. like a hype man in a rap contest brought the guests to a fever pitch and had them dancing and singing along for the better part of the reception. So far, the wedding was a success precisely because it was tinged with the right amount of mediocrity to ensure it was not memorable for the wrong reasons.
~
‘If you are tired, we don’t have to stay long.’ Steven Kosgei touched his new wife’s hand lightly. Beatrice shook her head. Tired? No. She was far from tired, instead she was overwhelmed with gratitude at how her life had turned out. It was nearly fourteen years to the day her first husband, Mr. Mathai went missing.
Beatrice was a practical woman who believed that life dealt you your cards and you either played a damned good game of poker or you lost. There was no time to bemoan the set of cards, you just got on with it. This was how she came to find herself married to a man she barely understood at the age of twenty-five and, at twenty-seven, pregnant with what I suppose would be referred to as her childhood sweetheart Macharia. Yes, these were her cards, but for the first time, they seemed to be––she hesitated to even think it––good.
~
‘Betty, Betty…’ Mrs. Mutiso, a long standing friend of Beatrice whom she’d met when they moved to South B nearly twenty years ago, waved a phone in Beatrice’s direction as she made her way to the stage where the bride and groom sat on a lone table piled high with a floral arrangement that had given Beatrice heart palpitations when she found out how much it would cost. Nevertheless, her wedding planner, the very same Mrs. Mutiso, had persisted. Mrs. Mutiso stopped before the stage. She briefly pondered taking the steps up to join the couple then thought otherwise and stretched her hand out for Beatrice to take her phone.
‘The twins are engaged? When did this happen?’ Beatrice asked looking at the phone. Before her was a picture of Mrs. Mutiso’s daughters holding out their left hands, ring fingers adorned with matching engagement rings.
‘Yes! Just now! Just now!’ Mrs. Mutiso beamed, her mouth curved into a bright, lipstick-red smile.
The girls in the picture stood side by side in winter coats, their necks and the lower part of their faces obscured by giant woollen scarves, behind them a white canvas of fresh snow. Steven, who’d also leaned in to look at the picture betrayed his confusion. It was only August. There was no snow in Frankfurt in August. Beatrice shook her head lightly deterring him from pointing out that the engagements could not have happened just-now. Mrs. Mutiso didn’t wait anyway for a response. She reached out for her phone and the moment it was in hand, she swayed away, phone ahead of her, ready to show anyone else her twins and their just-now engagements.
~
‘Mum, some of us want to go out after this, is it okay?’ Kanyi, Beatrice’s son and youngest child, jumped onto the stage, kissed her cheek and patted his new step-dad absentmindedly on the back.
‘Where to?’
‘Just like a ka-after party thing.’ Kanyi evaded the question of “where” and took a long swig of his mother’s glass of water in an effort to seem nonchalant.
‘An after party for what?’ Beatrice saw her daughter and eldest child, Nyambura, wading through the crowd of guests, headed for the stage. She already knew that with Nyambura, whatever the girl was going to say it was not going to be in the form of a request.
‘But si-for you mum.’ He winked.
‘For me how and I’m not even invited? Steven, did you hear anything about a party? Me I didn’t know we were going out after this. How can you celebrate someone who isn’t even there?’ Though she belaboured the point, Beatrice did so in an effort to prolong the conversation.
‘You’ll be there in spirit and you look like you need to rest anyway,’ Kanyi joked as he jumped down from the stage, her “yes” a foregone conclusion.
‘Hey! Watch it young man. This is my wife you are now speaking to.’
Steven Kosgei tried his hand at banter, the outcome a tepid response that Kanyi politely laughed at. When it was clear that he was serious about Beatrice, Steven, a man who did nothing in half measures, pursued a relationship with her two children. The impetus wasn’t what you might be thinking. He did not need nor was he seeking their permission to court their mother. From the time he was old enough to understand that there was this thing called fatherhood, Steven had yearned to play the role to his future children. His future children became a distant dream when, a few months into his first marriage, his wife walked into their bedroom just after the nine o’clock news and announced she didn’t want to have kids. Steven, not used to speaking his mind, accepted this new reality with an equanimity that would have been puzzling if you had never met a person of his temperament.
But now life had given him a chance at a sort of fatherhood and he had taken on the challenge with zeal. Steven was not deterred by the emotional and physical distance between the two children and their mother. Nyambura was a comic living in what he surmised as poverty in New York (...at this age? Sharing a house? Why doesn’t she just move back. At least here she can afford an entire apartment with what she pays for a room there. Beatrice have you asked her if she’d like to move