Nairobi Heat (25 page)

BOOK: Nairobi Heat

6.69Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

‘How was Africa? How was it for you?’

‘Well, Chief, Africa is just Africa … just like the US is the US. I could have died there, but then again I could have died here. I found love there, I think. But I had it here, once,’ I answered.

He looked at me and cleared his throat. ‘Who cares about that shit, man. I mean, how was it for you in Africa?’

‘Africa is the people, Chief,’ I said, trying to answer him. ‘But you gotta go see the people for yourself … sit down, talk, eat, fight and love with them.’

Then the adrenalin was gone and suddenly the pain was almost unbearable.

‘Let the boys take you to hospital …’ the Chief said with a chuckle, reaching out to hold me up before I lost consciousness. ‘Take some time off, find a wife, do something.’

It was finally over and for the first time in a long time I felt content. It was as if I had left myself and gone somewhere and had only just returned.

Two weeks or so later I was lying on the couch in my apartment when my cell rang. It was O. I was glad to hear from him – my shoulder had yet to heal and I had spent the last few days locked up in my apartment depressed as hell, the feeling of euphoria I had experienced that day outside Joshua’s house had not lasted long. Two days earlier I had
been to the grocery store, to stock up, and had left feeling disgusted. I had wanted to throw up – the chicken, so full of chemicals that it looked white, the giant oranges and bananas, all the fat motherfuckers and their motherfucking fat little bastards crying at the counter for candy that would rot their teeth. ‘Africa is the people, so the US must be the people,’ I found myself muttering over and over.

The following day was a Sunday and with nothing better to do I had pulled myself out of bed and made it to church. On my way there it had started raining. The mid-morning sun had been quite hot and when the rain had hit the pavements and tarred roads the air had suddenly been filled with dust and a light wetness. Then, for just a second, I had not been entirely sure where I was – back in Madison or in Eastleigh.

In the church, surrounded by folk I had known all my life, I had felt a warmth returning that had been lost to me since that night when I first stared down at Macy Jane Admanzah’s body. But it was when the choir’s guitarist had started to play the opening chords of
Amazing Grace
that I had finally felt something stir in my heart. He had played two verses solo, using a metal slide, and unlike Muddy’s guitarist, who had run the slide across the frets so that the sound was rough, the choir’s guitarist let the slide linger on a note – so that it hung in the air. And when the choir had finally joined in the sopranos had sung above the guitar, the tenors along with it and the bass underneath, each competing with each other and yet in harmony, the sound rising and rising until the whole church stood as one; some singing, some crying, some dancing. This was where I belonged, I realised as I looked around me. I needed to live my life in an intense place, a crucible. But then
the service had ended and whatever had stirred – a feeling of belonging, of being embraced by voices whose register was an intense thirst for life – had died away.

‘Look, man,’ O said. ‘I was just sitting here watching the old Ali-Foreman fight. Man, Ali was the business. Listen, I had a revelation. In life, you are either an Ali or a Foreman. People remember Ali as Ali. They remember Foreman as the funny old guy who fought Ali. You have to decide. Africa will make you Ali, America a Foreman …’

‘What the fuck are you trying to say, O?’ I asked, interrupting him.

‘Private detectives … let us set up shop. We shall be the first international private eyes, you and I …’

I remained silent.

‘Imagine all the assholes we can bring down …’ he said, trying to convince me. ‘For a hefty fee, of course.’

I started weighing up his offer as soon as he hung up. The truth of it was that in the US, if I tried hard enough, Mo and I would perhaps finally end up together and maybe make a good life for ourselves – kids, grandkids, et cetera. But I wanted more. I had seen some of the world and looked into an abyss so dark and cruel that I could never forget it. In Africa I could live out my contradictions, or at least my contradictions would be reconciled by the extremes of life there.

I looked at my little study full of files about dead people. I felt like I was in a stranger’s apartment. Yes, I lived there – I recognised the wooden table, the clothes and photographs on the walls – but everything was from my past, there was nothing from the present. Perhaps I too had become something in need of solving. I had to move. It made sense. I
could belong anywhere. I would choose Africa. There I had hated and loved like nowhere else.

There was Muddy and O. There was Janet. There were things to do there. I wasn’t superfluous. I was useful and needed. What more could I have wished for? Why not see what happened?

I called the Chief, told him I was done and hung up on him before he tried talking me into staying. I wanted to live at one hundred degrees centigrade – all or nothing all of the time – and maybe do some good while at it.

Think me crazy, but I left the US at the height of my career for another beginning in that same Africa I had left.

MUKOMA WA NGUGI
was born in Illinois but raised in Kenya. The son of world-renowned African writer and Nobel finalist, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, his own poetry and fiction has been short-listed for the Caine Prize for African writing in 2009, and for the 2010 Penguin Prize for African Writing. He lives in Stamford, Connecticut.