The Cock Thief - Parselelo Kantai

John Naiguran woke up suddenly and blinked, adjusting to the dimness inside the bus. There were people around him, strangers, fellow travellers. The hand on his shoulder had been shaking him for some time.
‘Alfred, Alfred, amka. Wake up.’
It was the Kikuyu girl, the student – Janet? – on her way to university in Kampala, she had said. They were on the night bus from Nairobi. She had boarded the bus in Limuru, half an hour into the journey. He had told her he was Alfred, a money-changer on his way to Busia at the border.
He felt for the bag beneath the chair. It was still there, still heavy. He sank into his seat and sighed.
‘Did you know you sleep with your eyes open? You were looking at me as if tulikuwa pamoja ngeta.’ ‘as if we’re accomplices in something’ She spoke fast, as if she had stolen her language from streets she didn’t know and now wanted to sell it off quickly.
This girl’s name eluded him. He had organised her from very limited visual resources, from moonlight and shadow and the scant information provided by her silhouette. She already existed in his mind as bits and pieces of disjointed and faintly unpleasant memories – the sum of a few encounters he had with the kind of woman he imagined her to be. She was a long and skinny slip of a thing. Her face was a series of angles cut around a set of eyes whose pools, even in the darkness, invited the prospect of drowning. She had appeared on the bus just as the last of the night preachers was wrapping up a prayer. The bus was shuddering up the walled highway through Kikuyu. The conductor, a forgettable figure in a baseball cap whose journey from the front of the bus to the back was a trail of odours (stubbed-out cigarette, sweat), had already checked everybody’s ticket and was now dozing in the seat next to the door. At Limuru, a man weaved onto the road from the break in the wall. The driver swore, braked sharply and pulled the bus onto the bumpy roadside as the prayer reached its crescendo – Yesss Lord…Shetani ashindwe! Riswa! – and the passengers shamed the devil and hissed at the demons of the road. And just like that the girl was there by the door where only a moment before the preacher had stood.
There was something strange about her. It was as if she was there and not, existing in constituent parts but not as a whole. For one, she looked very different from her voice, a rough, rousing roar of four in the morning in those dark little hovels by the roadside, the ones run by fat round women called Rhoda and Francisca who serve cheap lethal brews to broken men in oversized jackets. Now she spat a gob of miraa suddenly into a polythene bag magically extracted from somewhere in the complicated folds of her clothes. Miraa. He hated it. It was undisciplined. Leave the leaves to the goats. And then she was unwrapping half of a Big G, chewing it, making rude, rhythmic clicks. She seemed to appreciate the sound more than the flavour. She stared at him the whole time, her large liquid eyes shining out of the khanga that covered her head and framed her face; the rest of it disappeared inside a fur-lined jacket, unzipped half-way down to reveal a T-shirt tucked tight into a pair of worn jeans. Limuru, he knew, got very cold. He wondered what she would do with her jacket in the heat of Kampala. But it was the sound of her walk that convinced him this was a malaya, a prostitute going west to seek new flesh markets. She had come down the aisle towards the seat, swaying slightly, her boots clicking loudly against the floor of the bus. There was something of an advertisement about the sound of her walk. There was nothing left in Kenya. Everybody was leaving, and lying about it.
‘And you also talk. You’re a sleep-talker.’
‘No, no, no.’ His left arm was dead. He shook it vigorously, felt the blood returning.
She tried to read the chewing-gum wrapper in the moonlight, holding it up in her tiny hands.
‘Ingredients,’ she said, reading. She made it sound like a word in her mother tongue, Kikuyu. ‘Sugar, preysurfatifs, fravareng.
‘You talktalktalktalk,’ she said, the miraa tripping up her words. Then she turned to him as if she had just remembered something. ‘There is an Old Man who is disturbing your head.’
Lights appeared in the large windscreen up front; illuminated the driver, a large battling figure hunched over the steering-wheel; whished past. The driver was talking loudly in KiKamba to the conductor. Corporal Naiguran smelt cigarette smoke again, freshly lit this time, and the story came to him of Muli, the Mkamba driver. How one evening the Old Man, taking a walk on the far side of the grounds where the last of the colonial arboretum still stood, had stumbled upon him smoking.
Ndambuki always told the tale, as if, being a Mkamba himself, it was his duty to carry this legacy of pain and grievance until the next Mkamba came along. Muli had been with the Old Man since the dark days of Kikuyu humiliation, when on this very road, Ngoroko Ngamau, the king of the Rift Valley had intercepted the Old Man at a road block and, because Ngamau was short and had to compensate for this through a display of Big-Manness, or maybe simply because he could, he had slapped the Old Man.
Twak! Ndambuki would say, as if he was there, his onamatopeia mixed in with something between historical indignation and malicious glee. And the Old Man, being a Christian, a mission-trained Kalenjin and not yet the president of the republic, the Old Man, had accepted the insult without comment. It was as if Ngoroko Ngamau was saying, you are Kalenjin, you herd goats. I am Kikuyu, I run the country. Muli had borne silent witness to that act (privately, Corporal Naiguran wondered how silent Muli had been. I mean, how had it become the biggest national secret, the Old Man’s silent tears at back-left in the Mercedes as they limped away from the scene? Which child in which village primary school had not heard the story? But interrupting Ndambuki’s stories amounted to declaring a week-long war in the officer’s mess, with sudden guerrilla attacks on your mother’s honour as you rounded off the third Tusker).
Muli was older even than the Old Man, and had been smoking for 30 years, ten, twenty cigarettes a day, depending. Somehow the Old Man had never known. But right there, as Muli puffed away on his beloved Sportsman, in his favourite patch, his feet sunk deep in jacaranda mauve, he had come face to face with his employer. No words were exchanged. It was said that the Old Man wept as Muli left. And you had to wonder about those tears, however generous the Old Man was in arranging Muli’s retirement package. So Muli got his large piece of land somewhere in Mwingi, and a loan to set up a citrus farm, his dream retirement project. He never made it to Mwingi. Tragic road accident. The usual fate of all the Old Man’s bosom buddies. And again the Old Man had wept at his funeral, declared his unswerving dedication to Muli’s family and the people of Mwingi in general. And for the longest time, Corporal Naiguran had refused to believe the other stories, of Muli’s facade-like joint directorships in unnamed companies, about how much Muli had known of the Old Man’s other life and how he never let his trusted assistants go quietly.
They were going uphill but Naiguran couldn’t be sure where they were. The driver tried to engage a low gear. The engine protested, seized up, a winded child’s frantic gulps for air. The sleeping passengers seemed to rise, and for a moment, were suspended above their seats, dancing shadows. He remembered once seeing a music video, Michael Jackson, where the dead were resurrected in mist and smoke. They collected themselves from the grave – arms, legs, slipped on faces as easily as gloves – and assembled in the graveyard, whole beings. Present and absent at the same time. Now roused from their long sleep, they walked the earth in silent, terrifying formations.
The gears crunched in and the passengers trembled like eggs in a tray. And from deep in the belly of the bus a wail, low and desolate and full of dying machinery, began to organize itself. Then the beast sprang forward and the passengers fell back. Corporal Naiguran held onto the seat in front of him and the bus settled down to a groaning, sedate pace. He used the sleeve of his dead arm to wipe the window. It was misted with sleep-breath. He wanted to open it, but feared the cold.
‘You are cold, eh?’ said the girl making as if to snuggle up to him.
He moved away, but she was relentless.
‘My jacket is for two,’ she said and he was not sure whether it was concern or seduction. He could feel himself stirring. He turned away.
There was nothing to see outside – a vast emptiness falling away as they climbed up the shoulder of the Rift Valley. But as they came to the crest of the hill, he saw the silhouette of the Mau escarpment on the horizon, like the wall of a giant stadium, the moon a solitary floodlight. He calculated that they were past Kikopey and about half an hour from Nakuru where the bus usually stopped – at the petrol station rumoured to belong to the Old Man – and people grabbed something to eat at the all-night restaurant.
This empty stadium. He remembered the first time he had come here, with his father and their animals, when he was an uncircumcised boy, a layioni, dressed in nothing but a red shuka. He remembered the sound of cow-bells in the dust. It was during the 1979 drought and the salt and minerals in the soil, more than the grass, sustained the few animals that survived. His father, tall and straight and pointing with his stick at where they had come from, how in the old days their animals had filled this valley. These were good pasturelands, but Naiguran knew that these days the land was being turned into little plots of maize. Kikuyus and their maize. They were everywhere, grasping, like this girl next to him on the bus. They had crowded out men like his father, roaming and rebellious with their sons and their cattle. His family had moved up into the Mau and never returned here. He was seized by the despair of lost things.
It seemed incredible to Naiguran that it was just this morning that he had driven the Old Man to the airport. He pressed his foot down on an imaginary brake as the bus lurched over a pothole, remembered the power of the long Mercedes, the deep vibration of the steering-wheel in his hands. The Old Man, on his way to Khartoum for the peace’ summit, never once looked up from behind the newspaper, trusted him. Corporal Naiguran could see him in the rear-view mirror of the Mercedes, could see the top of the balding head, the grey hair at the sides, a semi-circle of matted cottonwool.
Naiguran was Muli’s replacement. The Old Man had personally recruited Naiguran when he first heard his name, when he first saw him among the shining youth of the Narok Prison’s choir. From tenor to the republic’s driver Number One. A career change even before he had a real career. None of that business of climbing up the ladder of success, of spending years driving some inconsequential Ministry of Education undersecretary across the country, waiting patiently inside the car for the one o’clock news outside a nyama choma den in West Mugirango and hoping that Bwana Undersecretary was among the list of new Presidential appointees and you, therefore, rose with him. Those careful hops of the civil service: Job Group 1, at Ksh 5,834 a month (plus Ksh 300 house allowance, less Ksh 1,300 NSSF deductions). Two years of steady driving, of a life lived somewhere in between the Drivers’ Pool at head office and that nyama choma place in West Mugirango and maybe a recommendation letter in triplicate was written and if you were lucky (and from the right tribe) you found yourself at Job Group 2 , and Ksh 578 richer. at some point, something would have snapped inside him if that had been his route. The sharp explosion of it would have hidden the real reasons, the muddy frustration. He could see it: a silly argument perhaps on a slow morning when they were all standing by the cars, and all his bearing of mitumba suit bought at the Sunbeam market and pressed red ruling-party shirt, black shoes gleaming in Kiwi shoe polish, all that would have disappeared in his rage of a Maasai olmorani.
They were having a heated discussion in front, the driver and conductor. At first Naiguran was alarmed, then he caught a phrase in Kikamba and only then realised how much of the language he had actually picked up from Ndambuki:
‘Niaka ngolova musyi!’ said the driver. And Corporal Naiguran realised that it was not an argument but the nostalgia of home for men who were constantly away from home. He had stopped feeling guilty about home, and about how long it had been since he had seen his father. All these things, and who could tell which of them had led him into this bus. He continued to pick away at things in his mind. The explosion in the carpark: he could see himself reaching for his simi, the short lethal knife he always kept beneath his car seat and going after the enemy, not stopping until he had been satisfied by blood.
He had been spared that route. Between Corporal Naiguran and the Old Man, it was personal. Love at first sight, you could say. Corporal Naiguran liked to think of it as a kind of mutual regard, the unexpected attraction between young Joseph and Pharaoh. Joseph and his dream-deciphering, Pharoah and his sceptre. He could never understand what the Old Man had heard when he stepped up on that day at Uhuru Park to do his tenor solo. Later the Old Man would only say that it was a question of loyalty. And the Maasai were loyal. Hawana maneno mengi. Or more accurately, they said it as it was.
It suddenly struck Naiguran that he had become so accustomed to that image of the Old Man in the rear-view mirror he could not remember the exact moment when the hair began to thin out and grey. But he knew it had been some time during the ’92 election, when everybody feared the Old Man would lose. All these years later, after so much had changed and they were no longer in State House, between him and the Old Man they still maintained the fiction of his power.
At the airport this morning, as he got out of the car, he had spoken directly to Naiguran, his voice grating more and more these days, as if his soul was being dragged through a cement-mixer. But he had been in a good mood, and had joked: ‘Naiguran, chunga nchi mpaka nirudi, eh? Take care of the country until I return.’ Naiguran had laughed and nodded. But he had looked down, could not take the intensity of the Old Man’s gaze, those red eyes, burning, that reached to your very core.
He knew now that he would not be seeing the Old Man again, not after what he had done. He had crossed a line, he had gone to the other side. Even shame was denied him now. It was not the Old Man’s rage that he feared, nor the prospect of a police cell and the gun-butts and kicks of his fellow corporals. He did not fear any of that. It was that the Old Man had faded. . That was why he had left. There was nothing there anymore. Yes, everybody was leaving, and lying about it. ‘Alfie, why were you crying?’ The girl wanted to talk again. He could smell her sweat, and there was something exciting about it. Her long thin braids swung free from the khanga and brushed against his neck as she leaned into him. He was aroused and shifted in his seat, saying nothing.
‘Uko sawa? Are you all right?’ she was asking. She was not his type at all. He faced her and glanced down at her breasts, banana-shaped and rising low in her T-shirt. He realized she was not wearing a bra; her nipples stretched the thin material. She noticed him looking, and slowly zipped up her jacket, her eyes never leaving him. He looked away, angry with himself. The window had clouded over again. He found himself comparing the girl – Janey? Njambi? – to Selina, her roundness, yellow face, bouncing breasts, firm, thick buttocks, things you could hold onto when it mattered. But as he imagined her – his thoughts a kaleidoscope of twisting, thrashing bodies, Selina’s legs tight around his waist, her jerks and yelps – the image that flashed before him was of this girl, naked, her eyes widening in surprise as he pierced her, his thing a wet piston clicking in and out like her chewing gum.
His erection bulged against his trousers. It was becoming a problem. He reached for the bag. It was heavy but he put it on his lap.
‘What do you have in that bag?’ she asked.
He stared at her, silent, unable to hide his dislike of her.
She continued as if he had spoken. ‘You kept saying: “Jogoo! Jogoo!” in your sleep.’ Then she leaned towards him again and said, in English, ‘Cock! Cock! Do you have a cock in that bag?’ She laughed, a silent, wheezy sound like a car on low battery being cranked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A very big one. It’s made of gold.’
‘Naweza kuishika? Can I touch it?’ she said suggestively, and he realized she was very high.
She reached across and began to trace her hand along the bag. He grabbed her thin wrist and squeezed. She moaned theatrically, her eyes wide as if this was all a big joke. ‘Hé! Ni kubwa! It’s huge!’ she said.
‘It belongs to the President,’ he replied without smiling. She thought this was very funny.
She was still shaking with laughter as the bus slowed down, pulled over to the side of the road and stopped. The cooked smell of the tyres came through unseen cracks and openings. Dust particles swam in the headlights, and there were other lights doing a firefly dance in the windscreen. Naiguran peered through the interior gloom. He saw figures in luminous green waving torches – the dancing firefly lights. Behind them the yellow metal spikes lying across the road and the ‘Stop: Accident Ahead’ sign of a roadblock. The police.
The door was pulled open and a policeman clambered in, talking loudly and urgently into his radio.
Since the Old Man was flying back from Khartoum the next morning, one of them, probably Kipkorir, the security boss, would have sent for him.
‘Where is Corporal Naiguran?’
When he failed to respond to the radio call, somebody – probably Ndambuki, because everybody knew how close he and Ndambuki were – would have been sent to his room at the base. Ndambuki would have found it padlocked from the outside. And he must have stood there staring at that lock and sensing absence – the way you walk into an empty house and feel its uninhabited silences. It would have hit him then – that Naiguran had gone ahead with the plan without him. Enraged, vindictive, he would have broken the lock, marched into the one-roomed house, knocked things around. Then he would have radioed Kipkorir back that afande, sir, both his gun and his radio are missing, sir. Also, afande, sir, most of his clothes and other valuables are missing (a lie, but nobody would bother to double-check until he was broken and pulpy on the floor at Nyati House, being ordered to confess). Afande, it appears that Corporal Naiguran has gone Absent Without Leave.
It would not take them long to discover that the golden Jogoo, the cock, the most treasured symbol of those years of power, was missing from the Old Man’s bedroom. It would not take them long to put two and two together, to curse – Ndambuki especially – Corporal Naiguran, the quiet one, for having had the balls to go ahead with their collective bar-room fantasy. ‘Can you imagine how much it would fetch when you melted it down?’ That was Ndambuki, one night months ago in a corner of the mess, drunk and avaricious as the rest of them, when it became clear that the centre was no longer holding. In other words, when they came after him, it would be with a large degree of professional jealousy.
What Naiguran had had on his side was time. He knew how they all let things slide when the Old Man was away. Assuming that he, Naiguran, was on sentry duty, Ndambuki would be busy in the servants’ quarters, his trousers around his ankles, amazed at how easily Selina had yielded to him after so many years trying. Horny little rat. He would sell his mother for pussy given half a chance. His Selina. Naiguran tried not to think about it. Kipkorir would be drinking with his Ministry of Lands buddies God knows where, going through registers of available property in Kileleshwa and Kilimani. Occasionally either he or Ndambuki, or maybe one of the other senior officers who had not travelled in the Old Man’s entourage, would radio the security booth to find out how things were. But it would be a formality and they would hardly bother to listen to the reply. Everybody knew that nothing happened when the Old Man was away.
That’s what Corporal Naiguran had been counting on. That he would have enough time to get to the border, cross by boda boda – it cost ten shillings on those taxi-bicycles – and eventually find one of those Indian gold merchants at Jinja.
Something had gone wrong. They had discovered he was missing earlier than he had counted on.
‘Fellow Kenyans, do not panic!’ announced the police officer, a tall burly figure. He was smooth and reassuring, had probably attended one of those community-policing courses at the training school in Kiganjo. The barrel of his G3 rifle pointed downwards.
‘We are looking for wolves in sheep’s clothing, people who hide among you and want to do our country harm. Help us by producing your ID cards.’ He held the radio close to his ear, but Corporal Naiguran could make out bits and pieces of the conversation over the nationwide police frequency. The radio hissed and farted and went silent. Then, as the officer came down the aisle, it suddenly came back to life.
‘Secure all exits . . . border points . . . Over!’
Even the shrrr-shrrr of radio interference could not hide the shrillness of the voice at the other end.
‘Kitambulisho tafadhali. Your ID card, please.’ The police officer was now standing by their seats, shining his torch in their faces. Naiguran reached into his shirt pocket and handed his across to the officer. The officer examined it under the torch then trained the light on Naiguran’s face.
‘Alfred Simiyu, eh?’
‘Those are my names, afande.’ His voice was steady but dots of sweat were forming on his brow.
‘Very good. And when were you born, sir?’
Naiguran smiled, expecting the question. He began to reply. Nothing came out. His throat was very dry and he suddenly could not remember what birth date they had finally settled on. Whether the one on the ID was his or Selina’s. He and Selina had been standing in that cramped printing press on Accra Road, standing there and arguing over dates. She had taken him there, said not to worry, it was owned by her cousin, a former finger-printing expert with the CID. He remembered all this clearly, remembered thinking how her voice became a squeal when she was arguing, remembered shuddering at the enormity of what he was going to do – remembered everything but the date they had settled on for his new identity.
The officer was now very still and had stopped examining the ID. A small thrill of doom coursed through Naiguran, an orgasmic squeeze. It felt like the time during his final exams in high school – maths – when he had ten minutes left and had not even started Section B, and his panic had caused him to ejaculate. His eyes were beginning to roll and everything was liquid and sinking. The deadness in his hand had returned and was spreading through his body. He felt the girl’s hands on his face. They were rough and twisted, and suddenly very familiar to him, calloused village hands of hewing wood and drawing water. Her touch, so comforting, seemed to hold him in a vice. He was dragged into one of those dreams of an approaching rhino, slowly turning and pounding its feet in the dust and all you could do was watch it come after you. And she was saying to the officer: ‘The boy is not well, afande . . . malaria . . .’ He sensed more than heard the officer moving off. But even then, he did not find it strange, as she took her hands off his face, tenderly as if he was a baby falling asleep – he did not find it strange as his head slumped forward and his eyes swam in the sweet afterglow of a fading crisis, that the last things he saw were not her boots but a pair of tiny hooves peeping out from under her jeans..
***
He was at the car park again, by the Narok Prison’s choir bus, nineteen years old and a fervent tenor in a new red shirt damp with spreading underarm sweat, the new recruit in the choir bussed into the city to sing for the Old Man at Uhuru Park. It was his first time in Nairobi. There had been his uncle Mpeti, the choirmaster whose English and learning had stopped at Standard Four but who had conquered the world with a display of such clownery and tomfoolery that, as everybody held their sides, dying of laughter, he crept past them and seized the new world that was being created around them.
Uncle Mpeti’s first choir, the little girls from Ol Choro Orok Primary School performing for the District Officer at the opening of the new school block. And Uncle Mpeti, ignoring Father’s anger at the humiliating spectacle, gesticulating like a madman to prove his undying loyalty to the Old Man whom he had never met, shouting and ad libbing the Old Man’s praises over the tender sopranos of the little girls. Bending over backwards, doing a split that made a rent in the seat of his trousers. And the DO, whose job description it was never to crack a smile at these functions, found himself nodding with automatic allegiance at first, then laughing openly. Nobody could get away from Uncle Mpeti’s fierce love for the Old Man. The word spread. The little girls were replaced by bigger girls, the DO by a DC. And all the time, Uncle Mpeti would explain to Father that this was a new age where clever people became fools and bent to the changing times. Stupid people, like Father, spat at the strangeness of the times and turned their backs to it. Then there was the mixed choir at Ole Sankale High and the revelation of Naiguran’s abilities as a tenor, all this in front of the new Provincial Commissioner, an ambitious man impatient for a promotion. Uncle Mpeti became part of his entourage, the choirmaster of the Prison’s choir, John Naiguran his secret weapon. And all this in the hope that one day you would meet the Old Man, maybe shake his hand. How many choirs and choirmasters had contorted themselves for just such an opportunity? How many legends had been spun about the magic of that handshake, of clowns transformed to Permanent Secretaries?
And right there at the centre of the podium stood a golden cock, a gift from the Queen of England to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Old Man’s wise and majestic rule. Her Majesty had sent a special envoy with the cock and, it was rumoured, a private letter of apology for not being able to attend herself. It was, even more than the towering bronze statue of the Old Man in Central Park (a gift from the Koreans), his most prized possession. Naiguran never stopped looking at the Old Man that day as they sang, feeling how alike they were, how it was possible to rise and change. Had not the Old Man once herded goats like him? Were they not both from the same place? And now the world knelt at his feet, honoured him with gifts.
The cock had become even more valued over the next few years when Her Majesty’s government and the donors and diplomats started insisting on ‘democracy’ and ‘multi-parties’ and ‘human rights’, and froze foreign aid. And as the decline of his authority had accelerated, had become a living thing roaming the streets and shouting ‘Justice! Justice!’ they had all held onto the things they could from the glorious age: the golden Jogoo.
Everybody had heard of the strange, hypnotic powers the cock possessed, how the Old Man’s angriest opponents, his most idealistic and intractable critics, would receive invitations to State House and accept them only at their own ideological peril. Strong men who spoke on behalf of the people were known to have left State House speaking a strange new language.
In their post-coital tangle (usually on the creaking spring bed in her squeezed little room in the Old Man’s compound – the smell of soap and eucalyptus leaves even now still stung his nostrils), he and Selina would often discuss how hurt the Old Man was by his old friends’ betrayal; how the lavish dinners, the bacchanalian feasts, had dried up; how empty the parking area was these days. Selina said she even missed cooking for the Europeans. The Old Man only liked to eat traditional foods – maize and beans, sour milk and sweet potatoes – which meant she couldn’t do anything with all her Swiss gourmet training Selina once confided to Corporal Naiguran that she had overheard the Old Man talking directly to the cock in the bedroom.
********
Corporal Naiguran awoke to the familiar sounds of a small town at dawn. The tooting horns of boda boda cyclists racing each other, straining with the first of the early-morning passengers. Franco and TPOK Jazz playing Sandoka Sandoka. The music came from a tribe of transistor radios that echoed up and down the dusty thoroughfare. Shopkeepers flung open the wooden shutters of their kiosks. A lone cow mooed by the roadside next to a pile of rubbish. Dogs who had ventured too close to open pots yelped and whimpered, fleeing the slipper or the heel of an irritated mistress. Children were crying. He could hear their mothers’ voices, low and distinct, the sounds alone painting a picture of tea brewing on stoves in smoky wooden kitchens. Outside the window the rising sun stained the grey and smoky clouds with a childish pink-orange. It would rain in the afternoon, he knew from that colour of sky, but it would be a hot morning.
The bus had stopped and the interior lights were on. Many seats were empty. He turned to the man sitting next to him.
‘Where are we?’ he asked.
‘Busia,’ said the man. ‘At the Uganda border. . Everyone has gone to immigration for passport stamping.’
His face was buried behind a newspaper so that only the white cottony periphery of his crown was visible. It was as if Naiguran was again looking at the Old Man in the rear-view mirror.
He reached for the bag beneath his feet, weighed it in his hand and felt reassured by its heaviness. And then it hit him: Busia! He stood up, exultant, scrambled past the reading man and strode to the door. He remembered something and turned back.
‘By the way, there is somebody sitting there. That seat is taken. A Kenyan student, on her way to Kampala.’
The man looked at him strangely. ‘My friend, I doubt that very much. I’ve been seated here since we left Nairobi.’
Naiguran found this odd. Even more odd was how much he sounded like the Old Man. He had obviously slept for longer than he thought. But now he was in a hurry. There was no time to waste. He made effusive noises, full of yeses and OKs and I understands, and walked up the aisle to the door.
As he stepped down from the bus, bag slung over his shoulder, his eyes were already darting about in search of a boda boda that would transport him into Uganda – Uganda and a new life. He had made it! He stilled the hysterical excitement building within him, swallowed back the urge to let out a whoop. He felt little delicious twitches running up and down his body.
He saw a long line of boda bodas parked in front of a row of decrepit wooden stalls. Others whizzed past him. The boda bodas with their multicoloured flags and horns and mudflaps with messages and warnings: Malipo ni humu humu! one mudflap declared ominously – your rewards are right here on earth. Men, holding up transistor radios to receptive ears, stood beside stationary bicycles, waiting for morning travellers. For a terrible moment Corporal Naiguran was reminded of the policeman in the bus, the crackling message on his radio. But, in the morning light, he wondered whether all those things had happened – even the girl seemed unreal, part of a long nightmare, bus-sickness. It was over now. He was awake, alive and they did not know where to find him, could not; he, Alfred Simiyu, was a new man
He caught the eye of a particularly hefty-looking boda boda driver and gestured to him. The man grabbed the handlebars of his bicycle and started moving towards him, expectant.
‘Good morning, chief,’ Naiguran greeted him. ‘Habari ya asubuhi? How much to Uganda?’
‘Shilingi hamsini kama kawaida, bwana. Fifty shillings as usual,’ replied the boda boda man.
‘Fifty! Since when?’ Corporal Naiguran was about to start haggling and then thought better of it, buttoned up his new suit and patted it down. Rich men did not quibble over little things. ‘OK,’ he said a little imperiously. ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’
He clambered onto the bicycle behind the man, felt odd about having to hold another man’s waist, so placed his hands on the metal rack under him.
‘Let me take your luggage for you, sir,’ said the boda boda man.
Corporal Naiguran saw no point in protesting and handed the bag over. As he did so, he felt it move. Something stirred inside the bag as if waking up.
The man smiled as he took the bag. ‘Hé, hii Jogoo ni kubwa! This cock is huge!’
This time Corporal Naiguran was going to say something. Then the bag moved again and a cock crowed on hundreds of transistor radios – the signature tune for the National Service news bulletin. As it rose in pitch, the cocks around him began to crow. They stood majestically in scratched-out yards, in the ditch by the road, in their coops in the market. Louder and louder until the radio cocks were drowned out by the living cocks. Their crowing echoed from the no-man’s land where Corporal Naiguran sat on the rear of a fifty-shilling boda boda, swept through the market on the Kenya side and rippled into the blue hills in the distance. But the closest one of them, the nearest cock crow, came from Corporal Naiguran’s bag.