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 back? Maybe if we gave her incentive to move back…), Kanyi a third year student at JKUAT who found every excuse under God’s green earth not to visit (is this normal? Do other children do this? Beatrice, maybe we need to buy him a car so that it’s easier for him to make the trip from Juja…).
He researched things on Google, and later Quora (...did you know Beatrice that you can ask a question on Quora and people, real people, will answer in less than five minutes…), like “How to bond with your step-children”, and “Why don’t children pick up their phones even when they are online?”
Before long, Steven and Beatrice had a joint family account (...for holidays and emergencies for the kids…), and Steven had added them to his health insurance plan (...Nyambura, I know you’re not on one as you pursue your dreams which we pray will earn you money…). He sent the children (as he referred to them), educational emails about Kenya’s history on public holidays––this one a particularly lamentable effort––but we have time, we have time, you will see why in time.
‘Hey guys, I’m going out with Esther later.’ Nyambura had finally arrived and even before the sentence was finished she was already weaving her way through the guests, towards her childhood best friend, Esther Karanja.
CHAPTER TWO
A Past Revisited
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
