SOUTH B'S FINEST. MAKENA MAGANJO

him. Beatrice shook her head, he sang louder, his words carrying to where Mrs. Mutiso stood… ‘do you love me or do you want to leave me…oooh please stay, don’t walk away…’

      The sight of Steven serenading his new bride had slackened the aunty’s grip on Nyambura who bumped into Mrs. Mutiso as she ran out.

      ‘Sorry Aunty Carol,’ Nyambura said to Mrs. Mutiso as she steadied herself.

      ‘It’s okay dear––’ Mrs. Mutiso noticed the tears reflecting in Nyambura’s eyes. ‘Don’t listen to her,’ she said, trying to comfort Nyambura.

      ‘She isn’t wrong though is she?’ Nyambura responded acerbically. ‘All this time I used to think mum was the evil one.’

      ‘Why would you think that about your mother?’ Mrs. Mutiso asked confused. Surely, Beatrice had not told Nyambura?

      ‘I just…she was never there and he was…or at least I used to think he was. It turns out in between dropping us to school and picking us up he found time to cheat on mum and get a child he didn’t have the imagination to name anything other than my name!’

      ‘Your mum might not have been as fun as your dad was, but she tried Nyambura, you have to know that by now. Everyone is doing the best they can with what they have and sometimes it falls short of what you are hoping for, but at least they try. She tried.’ Mrs. Mutiso tried to defend her oldest friend. Nyambura’s eyes glittered in anger.

      ‘Or maybe they were both just fucked up,’ she said and run out.

      Mrs. Mutiso knew better than to follow after Nyambura. She turned back to find Beatrice gliding on the dance floor, smiling up at Steven who continued to sing the song. If she had the money to bet, she’d have bet that the reason Beatrice was not singing along was because she did not know the words to Kelly Brown’s greatest hit. The Beatrice of the eighties (the decade the song came out), would not have deigned to waste her time memorising popular hits.

      A tremble ran through the hand that held her phone. A throbbing pain slide up her neck and settled on her temples. Mrs. Mutiso’s vision clouded over. She hated this song.

      She heard Mr. Mutiso’s version of the song before she heard Kelly Brown’s. The first time she heard Kelly Brown perform it, Mr. Mutiso had taken her to Starlight Club. Under the disco lights, as the funky-rock singer performed his biggest hit for the party revellers, she’d turned to Mr. Mutiso in surprise. It sounded like a completely different song to the one he’d been singing to her the past month. Mr. Mutiso shrugged knowing full well he’d been butchering the song, they burst into laughter, collapsing into each other, dancing and cheering Brown on, and that was the night wasn’t it? The night of their first kiss, if the dates align. Through Kelly Brown, Mr. Mutiso had finally wooed her.

      Mrs. Mutiso blinked rapidly, trying to shake off the cloak of the past. She was cold now. When the news of Kelly Brown’s gruesome murder in Germany reached Kenya, she’d mourned the great singer as if he were her family. Mr. Mutiso finding her reaction irrational, had said, irritably, ‘It’s not like you knew him.’

      Unlocking her phone, Mrs. Mutiso looked at the picture of her twins showing their “just-now” engagement rings. Her phone screen was fractured in the middle, not unlike her existence, which right now felt as if it were at a great personal effort and the friction of the years had led to fissures in her spirit that grew wider as the days dragged on.