across Kimathi Street. Beatrice was going to wave and carry on her way but Macharia crossed the street. He took her to Trattoria for lunch where they got a table at the balcony. They talked of inconsequential things: new music, what was showing in the cinema, their careers, childhood friends, home, and when the conversation lulled, they watched the pedestrians below in a silence that felt like a homecoming.
As the waiter took away the bread basket, Beatrice watched the basket rise and in a moment of lucidity understood what this feeling she had for Macharia was: it was as if for a moment she was suspended thousands of feet above ground with a view of valleys and lakes, blushing flamingos, bowing mountains, the Great Rift Valley endless and majestic below her and then all of a sudden she was falling.
‘Why didn’t you ever visit?’ she asked interrupting his story about a colleague at work (he never quit the architecture degree). Macharia straightened, taken aback by the question, he ventured a look at her face then looked down to where fellow Nairobians were milling around on the street below. She watched his side profile, her heart beating hard against her chest, knowing that whatever answer she got would not improve or change anything. Yet, hopeful (again, against her character), she waited in expectation for something, she didn’t know what, but something nevertheless.
‘I couldn’t,’ He said. The shrug: an impulsive movement but also a self-defence mechanism against a feeling. It succeeds in isolating and belittling at the same time. Which was how Beatrice came to find her absurd hope dashed against the absurd shrug.
‘What do you mean? Macharia, when we left…I don’t know, I just thought, I thought that maybe you’d keep in touch or even write a letter like you used to.’ Beatrice hated how she sounded, she hated that she was giving her cards away, that he knew she had waited.
‘Ciku, I don’t have many friends. I didn’t want to lose you and I knew then I wasn’t ready to be with you in that other way.’
‘What other way?’ Beatrice asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear him say it anyway. Let him reveal his cards too!
‘You know,’ Macharia said with a quietness that made it sound grave and sad. Odd. A man could love you and it could be grave and sad and not enough.
‘Who was asking you to be with me like that?’ she asked, feeling like cauterised rejection.
‘Ciku, before we were kids. It didn’t matter then but now––’
‘It didn’t matter?’
‘No, you know what I mean. It wasn’t serious.’ The waiter arrived with their food. They could have been eating bricks for all Beatrice cared.
‘So you never came because you didn’t want to be with me, which is what you think would have happened?’
Macharia’s eyes never wavered from hers as he said, ‘Yes, we don’t know how to be without being something else. I was going through things and I knew…if I came I was going to keep coming and then…then I was going to stop. And I didn’t want to hurt you.’
‘Wait––’ Beatrice put up a hand. ‘So, you preferred never to speak to me again but still call me your friend?’
‘Ciku…does it matter now?’ The unsaid: We are married.
‘No, I guess not, only you never gave it a chance to matter.’ And then, throwing caution to the wind and that absurd hope again: ‘And after…when you…you were ready? Why didn’t you come then?’ The unsaid once more…
…
Macharia’s brows furrowed. By now, there was no longer any pretence at eating. Beatrice started to say something again. She stopped. The waiter came and took their plates away, asked if they wanted their food packed (both shook their heads no), asked if they were interested in dessert (a no from the pair once more), it was getting late, they needed to return to their lives.
When the waiter returned with the bill, they reached for it in unison. Their hands grazed and Beatrice was soaring again. It might have been the intimacy of the touch, their inability to be without being something else, whatever it was, instead of parting ways when they got to the street, they walked in complicit silence to the Hilton Hotel just round the corner from the restaurant. They stayed there till seven p.m that evening.
~
‘Betty?’ Steven was looking at Beatrice as if he’d been trying to reach her for some time.
‘Oh, sorry, sorry, I’m just…I’m just, I don’t know Steve. I don’t know how to tell you. This…everything…’ she gestured towards the wedding guests below. ‘This is more than…I don’t know…’ she shrugged and shook her head. He kissed her forehead.
Beatrice had told Steven bits and pieces about her first marriage. Never straight on. Never “I wasn’t happy” or “I loved another man” and definitely not “I had an affair and Nyambura is not Mr. Mathai’s child”. She’d told him about the long hours at work, building the family business from a tiny car spare parts shop to owning a BMW dealership as well as several other businesses. She’d told him about Mr. Mathai (though the man’s reputation preceded itself so Steven knew a lot about him either way), his chronic people-pleasing ways, his penchant for dipping into company coffers, his affair. Steven’s life appeared less complicated. His wife passed away from a brief bizarre bout of Tuberculosis sometime in the late nineties or early two thousands.
‘People are starting to say we are acting like high school lovers. Let’s go mingle a bit,’ Steven suggested. They descended from the stage as the DJ remixed Sauti Sol’s Lazizi, joining their guests who for the most part had abandoned their seats, socializing around or on the dance floor, at the buffet table, balancing plates and drinks as they exchanged stories.
~
Beatrice’s last wedding had triple the attendance of this wedding. Of course, that was during the time when weddings were held in the village and even people from the surrounding villages came “just to see”.
And her first husband? Mr. Mathai had a joviality that was intoxicating and addictive. To spend time with him was to see the sun and live to tell the story. She was marrying the sun. The sun had deemed her worthy of his eternal light and warmth––at least that’s what her friends from university said. The question many had and some were tactless enough to voice when Beatrice and Mr. Mathai announced their engagement was, “How did you do it, Betty? How did you convince Mr. Mathai to settle down with you?”
The early days of her first marriage were not anything Beatrice was in a hurry to remember. Somehow in the chaos of unrequited love for another man and the blinding light of the sun, she’d not formally met her husband. That is to say, they were veritable strangers to each other.
Yet, to forget those early years would be to forget the love that surrounded her today. Perhaps, Beatrice reflected, it was just as well the memories would not let go of her.
CHAPTER THREE
Malaba Estate, January, 1991
New neighbours in Malaba Estate were treated like curios, their lives, prior to Malaba, a puzzle that the incumbent residents enjoyed assembling until it was as complete as possible. Seldom did a stranger move into the estate. Perhaps Mama Sally referred one of her friends, or maybe the referral came from the Shahs who’d already bought three houses next to each other, knocked down the walls in between the houses and built hallways connecting them.
A neighbour would hear that so-and-so’s friend had moved into house thirty-two and from this, one could reasonably deduce that if the new resident was so-and-so’s friend and it was clear so-and-so was of questionable character, then it only stood to reason that the new resident was also highly suspect. A judgment that held until such a time as such and such proved they were not.
There were allies and enemies and peace treaties over tea, intermarriages, deaths and divorces, playground fights, tribal wars, harambees, all-night prayer meetings, dowry celebrations. In short, Malaba was a city unto its own. A fine one at that.