She had good legs. Femme matador. And man, could she move. She passed, and everyone turned, and you got the feeling she would have been at home selling one of those shoes from those guys in town shouting “kiatu thao!” Women think it’s all about the nyash or the boobs, but you know what the real dealmaker is? Good, decent legs.
But it is the same treacherous legs that carried her from the table across ours to join a group of men in their late 40s and beyond. They are from Nakuru, the bar lady would tell us. The men, that is. Not the legs. We were heartbroken, for we knew she was not their daughter. Not with that skirt. Not with those legs.
I told myself if I wanted to, I could get her. I was sure she had never seen anyone quite so handsome, and besides, I have three sisters and tens, maybe hundreds of female cousins, so women are no mystery to me, and they are not gods. But then again, why were we heartbroken? All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovesick wrench is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making.
Speaking of, D— who I am with at the counter, is telling me of the bad decision his older brother made. Beat up their old man. Cut his head in two.
“Yeah,” D— says. “I almost beat him up, but he ran away.”
“The old man serves a living god,” he says.
“Or maybe he just has a hard skull,” I say.
Yeah. The old man may serve a living god, but he definitely has a hard skull.
I, very much like you, wanted the details.
“Leave nothing out,” I said.
Turns out D—'s brother had gone, smoked whatever it is he had smoked, and came back antsy. Found his dad sitting in the chair, watching Telemundo or something like that, his graying head a ripe coconut that demanded a long stick.
And, with the brawn strength of a brute, he picked up a cosh and hit his father twice on the head, cracking the coconut. Old man knew nothing about it. But isn’t that just how life is? Bad luck always chooses a good man.
Yet bad luck chose D—'s father for another reason—he is far too much of a patsy. There had been many instances when D—'s brother had threatened to toss the tosh and escape the guardrails of his mind. We implored committing him to a mental institution, watering it down with the term ‘rehab’ to make it more palatable. We said it’s only a matter of when, not if, he goes off kilter. Runs crazy. Crazy may not be the right word, but it’s the one that comes to mind.
The old man said he cannot commit his son to a mental institution. What will people say? Ah, that old stick again. You know how it is in Kenya.
Psychiatric treatment of any form is hidden like a dirty bra strap. You want people to know your brain is touching wires? That when your dark thoughts knock at your door, and you say there is no seat for him, he tells you not to worry because he has brought his own stool. Nobody says this out loud. Some things you know.
A few years ago, D— and his family had suffered a tragic loss that rewired the central nervous system of their interactions. But I’d rather not go there. They all found their ways of coping, as we all do.
When my mother died, I joined a group therapy thing where we would each share things we loved and hated about the ones who had left us, and in that sense, turned our trauma into taxidermy. I don’t know why, but I always found it silly to talk about the dead, as if by talking about them you delayed their journey to cross over to the other side. Maybe it’d work for you, but it didn’t for me. So why I was there, I can’t tell you. I guess I was looking for an escape from my mind. “Dissociative disorder,” they called it in Group. Trust scientists to give a sexy name to your ailment.
I found comfort in reading the obituaries and passing by Langata Cemetery during my cycling to scan the tombstones. I guess it gave me a certain comfort to see people much younger than my mum had died, and that unlike an appointed time, death is just a sadist who gets off from a coin toss or playing rock, paper, scissors with people’s lives. Rock, you die. Paper, you die. Scissors, you die. I should be ashamed to admit that, but I am not.
“The problem with pain, Eddie,” they used to say in Group, “is that pain demands to be felt.” Of course they’d say such things in Group. They were all handling this so maturely, while my walls were caving in from inside. Knowing my mother, the one abiding gene trait she has passed on to her children is stubborn rigidity, and that means she did not go gently, even when the cancer had eaten up a quarter of her body, even when there was so little of her left to keep fighting. Because bad luck was coming for her, it had to happen one way or another.
Even in my reverie, I see the girl with the good legs passing, maybe to go to the bathroom, maybe to go smoke, it doesn’t matter. She smiles at me, or she could be smiling from whatever someone on the phone pressed to her ear is saying, hard to say. One of the men stands up, and follows her, says hi to D— and I and we ask whether they are going to sleep. “Sleep? Bado! I am an old man, you go sleep, nyinyi bado vijana mko na miaka mingi ya kuishi, mimi silali ng’o!”
Maybe he is right, I tell D—. Maybe if you don’t sleep you don’t see death coming. But D—'s not answering, just sitting there staring at nothing as if he was listening to something no one else could hear. An angry black man. Thought is the enemy, I am thinking. People think it is drugs. It isn’t drugs.
The enemy is your mind, how it gnaws through your every brain cell. Drugs, alcohol, these are just the cure. A cure, in the end, worse than the disease. Aegrescit medendo. Nobody says it, but some things you know.
