off towards Harambee Avenue, Kandle wobbled suddenly, halting the crazy laughter in his chest. Looking around, he felt the standard paranoia of the Zone start to come on. Walking in downtown Nairobi at rush hour was an art even when sober. Drunk, it was like playing rugby in a moving bus on a murram country road. Kandle forced himself back into the Good Zone by going back to Lenana School in his mind. Best of all, he went back to rugby-memory land, to the Mother of All Rugby Fields, Stirlings, the field where he had played with an abandoned joy. He had been the fastest player on the pitch, a hundred metres in twelve seconds easy, ducking and weaving, avoiding the clueless masses, the thumbless hoi polloi, and going for the girl watching from the sidelines. In his mind’s eye the girl was always the same: the Limara advert girl. Slender. Dark because he was light, slightly taller than him. The field was next to the school’s dairy farm, so there were dung-beetle helicopters in the air to avoid and mines of cow-dung to evade.
He could almost smell the Limara girl and glory a few steps away when a Friesian cow appeared in the try box. It chewed cud with its eye firmly on him, unblinking, and as Kandle tried to get back into the Good Zone he saw the whole world reflected in that large eye. The girl faded away. Kandle put the ball down, walked over to the cow, patted her, and with his touch noticed that she was not Friesian but a white cow with some black spots, rather than the other way around. The black spot that came over her back was a map of Kenya. She was a goddamn Zebu. All this time she never stopped chewing. With the ball in the try box he took his five points.
Coming back to, he realised he was at the end of Tom Mboya Street. A fat woman came at him from the corner of Harambee Avenue, and just when she imagined that their shoulders would crash into each other Kandle twitched and the woman found empty space. Kandle grimaced as she smiled at him fleetingly, at his suit. At the corner, his heightened sense of smell (from the alcohol) detected a small, disgusting whiff of sweat, of day-old used tea bags. He stopped, carefully inched up against the wall, calculated where the nearest supermarket was, cupped his palm in front of his mouth, and breathed lightly. He was grateful to smell the toothpaste he had swallowed in the Zanze toilets. The whiff of sweat was not his. That was when Kevo came up to him.
‘Fucking African,’ Kandle said. ‘What time is it?’
‘Sorry we were late, man. Here’s everything. Susan’s upstairs. We just got in and Onyi told us you’d left.’
‘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
