‘I’m starting to lose that loving feeling for you guys,’ Kandle said, taking the heavy brown envelope from Kevo, who began doing a little jig right there on the street, for no sane reason, jumping side to side with both feet held together. Passers–by watched with amusement.
‘Everything else was sent to Personnel,’ Kevo said, still breathless. ‘So good luck.’
‘Were you kids fucking? That’s why you were late?’ Kandle grinned, seeing that the envelope held everything he needed.
Kevo smiled back. ‘See you in a bit.’
As they were parting ways, Kevo shouted to him.
‘Hey, by the way, Jamo died last weekend. Crashed and burned. They were coming from a rave in some barn. Taking Dagoretti Corner at 8 a.m. at 160 – they met a mjengo truck coming from Kawangware. Don’t even know why they were going in that direction. Motherfucker was from Karen.’
‘Which Jamo?’
‘Jamo Karen.’
Kandle rolled his eyes. ‘There are about five Jamo Karens.’
‘Jamo Breweries. Dad used to be GM.’
‘Don’t think I know him.’
‘You do. We were at his place a month ago. Big bash. You disappeared with his sis. Susan was mad.’
‘Ha,’ Kandle said.
‘Anyway, service in Karen. Burial in Muranga. Hear there are some wicked places out there. Change of scene. We could check out Danny and the Thika crew. You know Thika chicks, man.’
‘I’ll think about it.’
‘You look good, baby,’ Kevo said, and waved him off.
Kandle suddenly realised that he had forgotten his bag. It meant he was missing his deep-brown stylish cardigan, his collared white shirt, his grey checked pants, his tie. He should have asked Kevo to pick it up for him. Feeling tired, he almost went under again.
Since childhood, Kandle had always hated physical contact. This feeling became especially extreme when he’d been drinking. It had been worsened by an incident in high school – boarding school. One morning he’d woken up groggily, thinking it was time for pre-dawn rugby practice, and noticed that his pyjamas were down around his knees. He was hard. There were figures in the dark, already in half-states of readiness, preparing for the twelve-kilometre morning run. Nobody seemed to notice him. He yanked his smelly shorts on, and while his head cleared he remembered something.
Clutching hands, a dark face. He never found out who had woken him up that morning, and after that he couldn’t help feeling a murderous rage when he looked at the faces in the scrum around him, thinking one of them had abused him.
Over the next few months, during practices, he looked for something in the smiling, straining boyish faces, for a look of recognition – he couldn’t even say the word ‘homosexual’ at the time. With that incident he came to look at rugby askance, to look at Lenana’s traditions with a deep, abiding hatred. Then one day he stopped liking the feeling of fitness, the great camaraderie of the field, and started feeling filled with hate when even the most innocent of tacklers brushed by him. He took to cruelty, taking his hand to those in junior classes. He focused on his schoolwork, became supercilious and, maybe because of that, ever cleverer, dismissive of everyone apart from two others who he felt had intellects superior to his. He became cold and unfeeling. His mouth folded into a snarl.
In spite of a natural quickness, he’d never succeeded in becoming a great rugby player. Rugby, he discovered, was not for those who abhorred contact. You could never really play well if you hated getting close. Same with life and the street, in the city – you needed to be natural with those close to you. As he went up Harambee Avenue, he realised he was well into the Bad Zone. Looking at his reflection in shop windows, he felt like smashing his own face in. And then, like a jack-in-the-box that never went away, his father’s dark visage appeared in his mind’s eye, as ugly as sin. He wondered whether the man was really his father.
After completing third form he had dropped rugby and effaced the memory of those clutching hands on his balls with a concentrated horniness. He became a regular visitor to Riruta, looking for peri-urban pussy. One day, during the school holidays when he was still in form three, he had walked into his room and found Atieno, the maid, trying on his jeans. They were only halfway up, her dress lifted and exposing her thighs. The rest of those holidays were spent on top of Atieno. He would never forget her cries of ‘Maiyo! Maiyo! Maiyo!’ carrying throughout the house. God! God! God! After that he approached sex with a manic single-mindedness. It wasn’t hard. Girls considered him cute. When he came back home again in December, Atieno wasn’t there; instead there was an older, motherly Kikuyu woman. His father took him aside and informed him that he would be getting circumcised in a week’s time. He also handed him some condoms.
‘Let’s have no more babies,’ was all he said after that.
On Harambee Avenue, three girls wearing some kind of airline uniform came towards him in a swish of dresses, laughing easily. He ignored their faces and watched their hips. One of the girls looked boldly at him, and then, perhaps for the first time that day, a half-stagger made him realise how drunk he actually was, though it would have been hard for anyone apart from his father to tell.
And so the Bad Zone passed on. He quickly fished into his jacket pocket and came out with a small bottle of Smirnoff Red Label vodka, swigged, and returned fully to the Good Zone. Ahead of him was Eagle Bank. He smiled to himself. He forced himself to calm down and breathe in. The usually friendly night watchman, Ochieng, was frosty.
‘You are being waited for,’ he said in Kiswahili, shaking his head at the absurdity of youth.
Inside he was met by the manager’s secretary, Mrs Maina, a dark, busty and jolly woman. She too was all business today.
‘You are late, Kandle,’ she said. ‘We have to wait for the others to reconvene.’
This was the first time she had ever spoken to him in English. She had lost that loving Kikuyu feeling for him.
Kandle, who knew how to ingratiate himself with women of a certain age, had once brought Mrs Maina bananas and cow innards mixed with fried nundu, cow hump, for her birthday. She had told him later that they were the tastiest things she had ever eaten, better than all the cards she’d received for her birthday. Even the manager, Guka, coming out of his office and trying some, commented that he wished his wife could cook like that.
Mrs Maina blurted out another few words as Kandle waited outside the manager’s office. She sounded overcome with exasperation.
‘What? What do you want? Do you think you’re too good for the bank?’
‘No. I don’t want much. I think I want to become a chef.’
She couldn’t help it. They both laughed. Kandle excused himself and went to the bathroom.
When he was alone he removed a white envelope from his jacket pocket and counted the money inside again. Sixty thousand shillings, which he planned to hand over to the accountant to pay for the furniture loan he had taken out before he went on leave. Back in the bank, Mrs Maina told him that the committee was ready, and Kandle was ushered into Guka’s office.
There was a huge bank balance sheet in the centre of the desk. Guka Wambugu, the branch manager, was scowling at the figures. The man was dressed like a gentleman farmer, in his perennial tweed jacket with patches at the elbows and a dull, metallic-grey sweater underneath, over a brown tie and a white shirt. All he needed were gumboots to complete the picture. Kandle noticed that the old fool wore scuffed Bata Prefect shoes. Bata Mshenzi. Shenzi type. Kandle held down the laughter that threatened to burst out of his chest.
Some room had been created on each side of the desk for the rest of the committee. Mr Ocuotho, the branch accountant, sat on Guka’s right, looking dapper and subservient as usual, his face thin and defined, just shy of fifty and optional retirement. He was