The Remaining by Muthoni Garland

Alfonse disappeared one Saturday, after a half-day’s work, after a generous helping of rice and meat stew at the late lunch at which he’d told off his son for a D grade (‘in English,’ he’d sneered), after giving his daughter money for a movie, and after - what now seemed to his wife - an unusually vigorous bout of sex with her. Alfonse had walked off into a cool Nairobi evening, and not come back.
“Nobody just disappears,” Rebecca’s father-in-law declared. They were in his house in Kinoo on the hilly outskirts of the city, one of many timber, three-room structures built on cement foundations, the outhouse and kitchen separate huts outside. The house he’d built on retirement from the civil service, and resulting eviction from an old bungalow in the old colonial quarters of Nairobi. The surrounding area was a jigsaw puzzle of one-acre plots spotted with TV aerials, black-plastic water tanks atop platforms erected on stilts, vegetable gardens, and a grade cow or a goat or two tethered near a wooden gate. In some of the compounds, there were also a few untidy lean-to sheds covered in polythene, home to Kikuyus evicted from the Rift Valley.
Rebecca’s hands shook, spilling a little of the tangawizi tea that her mother–in-law had brewed on the charcoal jiko in their hut of a kitchen. Taking care not to splash it on her grey business suit, Rebecca had helped sieve it into a huge thermos and convey it across the murram compound where she’d parked her Toyota, and up the concrete step that led into the living room. The tea was too hot, too sweet, too milky, and because the mug was huge, there was too much of it. With her fingernail, Rebecca pushed the thin layer of cream to the edge of her mug.
“Oh, I forgot you people prefer your tea in the complicated English fashion, everything separate,” her mother-in-law said, with an amused glint in her eye, and made as though to rise. “Let me boil some water.”
“This is fine. Really.” Riled by the ‘you people’, Rebecca slurped at the tea, and scalded her tongue in the process.
Her mother-in-law chuckled. “Take it easy, our daughter, there is more in the pot.”
“I’ve called our friends, searched the places he visits, contacted his colleagues at school. I don’t want to alarm you but nobody seems to know where Alfonse is.” Rebecca slowed her words. “And these are… troubled times.”
Alfonse would have called this an understatement in keeping with our national delusion - that if we didn’t acknowledge the violence of poverty in the slums surrounding us, then we’d be safe in our little pockets of leafy suburb.
“So, you are telling us our son has been gone Saturday night, and Sunday night. He has not yet showed up at home, or at work.” As her father-in law held up a finger to mark each point, his hands shook - due to age, he often said, but Rebecca suspected it had more to do with years of drinking. He was ‘saved’ now, an elder of the New Redeemed Church of Africa.
“Yes, father.” Rebecca said, hoping this meant he believed her, and would help. She also made a mental note to double-check their maisonette for written messages – the paper might have fallen into a crack or fluttered onto the floor and under a cupboard.
“And you are saying that our son has not called you on the mobile telephone, or left a message for you, and you do not know where he is. Is that correct?”
“Yes, yes, father.” She could not suppress the impatience in her voice. “And his phone is switched off.”
Her in-laws glanced at each other and then turned assessing eyes on Rebecca.
“Thank you for coming to us with your concerns. That is as should be. You are our daughter. But, a man is not called a man for nothing.” Her mother-in-law chuckled briefly, as though to convey there was no accounting for the behaviour of men.
“But it is too soon,” her father-in-law pulled at the knots on the chunky home–knitted sweater that emphasised his bulk. “It is too soon, our daughter, to jump to any conclu?”
“Conclusion,” Her mother-in-law finished, as though in that glance they’d held a secret conference, and come to a mutually agreed plan of action.
Her husband continued, “After all, does a cloud always bring rain…”
“But I know Alfonse…” Rebecca said.
Her mother-in-law launched into a delicate series of pretend-coughs to cover-up the interruption.
Rebecca spoke louder. “Alfonse would have said something, called if he was delayed somewhere. I know him.”
She wondered if knowing an accumulation of habits adequately explained a man or his motivations.
Her mother in law leaned forward, alert to the new hesitancy on Rebecca’s face.
“Our daughter, were there problems between you and our son that we should know about?”
“No, no more than the usual…”
“The usual?”
Perhaps Rebecca had nagged Alfonse too much about his spending time with his One-World Rastafarian brother, God help us. After sessions with him, Alfonse would come home singing, “No peace, no justice.”
“Face it, your brother is allergic to work,” Rebecca insisted, “and he’s infecting you with his socialist nonsense. When did you last comb your hair?”
Alfonse would stay out later, and she’d complain about that. Maybe this was, in fact, Alfonse making a statement by staying out very, very, very late.
“Everything was just fine,” she said, with a bite to her voice. “I don’t know where Alfonse is, and I don’t know why he went.”
“It sounds like,” her mother-in-law worked a teasing smile onto her face, “you might have had a disagreement, a misunderstanding?
“No, no, nothing like that.”
“Sometimes, what looks like a jigger is just a black spot on your toe,” her father-in-law added. “Time will reveal the truth of the matter.”
Her mother-in-law laughed. The way she wielded humour made it difficult for Rebecca to know how her mother-in-law really felt. She was solidly built, like a discus thrower, and wore a pleated skirt that ended at her disproportionately thin calves. In her old photographs, she was slender and very pretty. Alfonse had told Rebecca that when they were young his mother regularly run away to her parent’s home. And that his father would slaughter a ram to ‘soften’ her parents so they’d persuade her to return to him. Perhaps her in-laws imagined Alfonse’s disappearance a modern twist on that scenario, and that she’d come to beg for her man, and they would act as awkward as possible before finally giving in. Should she have come with a ram?
She glanced around the room, as though they might have hidden Alfonse behind the red velvet sofa or under the hairy drum with a sheet of glass on top that served as a coffee table. The television in the corner was new, covered with a crotcheted kitambaya, and hooked to a car battery. Its aerial lead snaked up the wall and disappeared behind a high rail strung mostly with Alfonse’s photographs and certificates - a degree in English Literature, and shorter training courses. There were also religious images of Mary, Mother of God, with a blinding halo around her head, and of Jesus bleeding on the cross. Alfonse was the eldest, and most successful son, and on this wall, in this small wooden house built by his father on retirement from the civil service, there was little visual evidence of Alfonse’s three brothers – one of whom owned a matatu, and employed another as tout. The one closest to Alfonse had once been arrested for stealing money from the shop where he’d worked – he claimed it was just an excuse to fire him. He’d since turned avidly Rastafarian.
The Mother of God, the Son of God and Alfonse on the wall - Rebecca felt a flutter of fear, an intimation of the impact of his loss on these two plump and grey-haired people, a glimmer of understanding for their denial of her news. They’d moved from mud hut to government bungalow, and down a rung to wood and concrete. Alfonse was the son following the desired trajectory, the symbol of their aspiration, their consolidating hook into Kenyan middle-class, the son to show-off about, and to envy.
“How are the little ones?” her mother-in-law asked, abruptly, as though they too might inextricably turn out to be missing.
The ‘little ones’ were teenagers.
“Keziah is frightened, and John is difficult.”
Her in-laws glanced at each other, clearly not expecting an answer that left no doors open. Her mother-in-law was no longer smiling.
Her father-in-law cleared his throat. “What we need is time to consult on this matter. You go back to work, go home, look after your children…”
“But Alphonse has been missing for two days. I can’t carry on as usual.”
Distaste crossed over his face. “Even a child in a hurry cannot be born before its mother.”
Everything in its time is what he meant, but it reminded Rebecca of the teasing from the wider circle of Alfonse’s family at social events, the jocular asides about women from Nyeri who tasted the goat when it was still roasting, about Mama-Lucys, first ladies from Nyeri who planted their buttocks on the heads of men. Rebecca had grown up in Nairobi, and her parents had spent most of their lives there, but their family plot was in Nyeri, and it was where her father was buried. Although she barely knew the place, her in-laws considered her a Nyerian. So maybe the regional dislike had always lurked, camouflaged by the ceremonies and rituals of their formalised muthoniwa relationship.
Rebecca straightened her back, put down her unfinished mug. “Alright. Maybe I’m being too hasty. Let’s hope he turns up tonight.”
But her in-laws weren’t listening. They were peeking up at the images of Alfonse on the wall - surreptitiously as though they didn’t want to be caught. The animal rambling in the stable disturbs the sleeping ones - seeds of panic had been sewn.
“Let us pray.” Her mother-in-law raised her voice. “Let us seek God’s intervention in this matter.”
Her husband lifted thick, trembling hands. “Amen.”

###
Bewilderment washed over Rebecca. A third night without her husband, the sour musk of him in the sheets and pillows on their double-bed triggering a maze of questions. Where, why, who, when, why, where, how, why, where… Then she was a bird flying all over the world, landing on the shoulders of men - dark men of average height and build, men in steel frame spectacles, black trousers and striped kikoi shirts, men with clumps of dreadlocks in desperate need of cutting, men carrying rolled up newspaper with which they swatted at her - duplicates of her husband trying to dislodge her. Who’d have thought so many men looked just like Alfonse. How come she’d never noticed this anonymous quality of him before? Rebecca woke in a wet bed, soaked with her sweat, but it was the first time since his disappearance that she’d slept through the night.

###
The corporal led them up a narrow staircase, along a narrower corridor, past closed doors, and into an interrogation room. A long room dominated by a wooden table. It seemed clean enough but smelled faintly of urine. He indicated Rebecca and her son, John, sit on the hard bench across from him. John promptly slumped forward, elbows on the table, and busied his hands picking at the pimples and black scabs of former pimples dotted across his shiny face. She’d brought him along because he seemed angry with her (her?) for not knowing where his father was, and she thought involving him in the search might make him easier to handle.
After flicking specks off the expanse of able, straightening the empty papers in his file-folder – yellow, lined foolscap sheets like they used in school, the corporal turned a depressingly young face to them.
Rebecca kept to the outline she’d rehearsed. Alfonse was forty-two. She, thirty-eight. They had been married sixteen years. Two teenage children, a boy and a girl – John, here, was the older. They lived in a flat in Kileleshwa, quite near the police station, actually. Alfonse taught English at Riverside Academy, a private school. She was a manager at Standard Bank. No financial problems, although - Rebecca smiled without really smiling - who ever has enough money? No marital problems, or no more than the usual small-small quarrels. Alfonse had come home three days ago, and after a late lunch with his family, said he was popping out. He hadn’t come back. Oh, and here were some photographs.
The corporal looked at her, and looked at the envelope she extended as though he had no idea what to do with this information.
“We want you to help us find him.”
The blank look on his face was replaced with not quite a sneer, but something less than admiring.
“Madam,’ he said, aggressively, “you earn more than your husband?”
“What has that got to do with anything?”
John, who was pulling the skin on the sides of his face, and thus distorting his features, suddenly perked up. He stroked the few hairs on his chin.
The corporal turned up his lips as though he’d won something. “Madam, has your husband done this before?”
“Yes…No.”
“Yes or no?”
“No. What I mean is Alfonse has taken walks before, gone for a drink, gone to meet friends or family. That sort of thing. But he always comes back.”
This wasn’t strictly true. A few times Alfonse had not returned home after meeting with his Rastafarian brother. He’d called, though. She’d hated those conversations, and Alfonse had later taken to sending texts and then switching off his mobile phone. He usually said they were at their parent’s place, perhaps, it now occurred to her, knowing that Rebecca would never question them.
“Where were you?” The corporal asked John.
At first it looked like John wouldn’t answer, an empty look on his face as though none of this had anything to do with him. “When Baba left, you mean?
The corporal nodded.
“At the movies.”
“Where?”
“Kenya Cinema. I didn’t want to go but Baba made me take Keziah”
“Keziah is his sister,” Rebecca clarified.
As if, at long last, a meaningful clue had been placed before him, the corporal’s eyes burned brightly at Rebecca, “What happened after your husband bribed the children to leave the house?”
“He didn’t bribe them, he…” Rebecca started, and then wondered, had he? She moderated her voice. “Alfonse played music on the stereo.”
As if on cue, John sang a line from Alfonse’ favourite tune. ‘There is no justice in this land.”
“Pleeeease, John.”
John’s voice trailed off, “See, no justice…”
The corporal smiled at him before turning to Rebecca. “So he played reggae music…and then?”
Rebecca didn’t see the relevance of telling him about the sex that had followed, but from the smirks on their faces she felt certain that both corporal and son were ahead of her on that page. “Alfonse played his music and then he left.”
“When did you start looking for him?”
“On Sunday morning. Alfonse didn’t take the car so I didn’t imagine he was going far. He was not the type of man to sleep out, but I thought that maybe he’d met someone, drank too much…” her voice fizzled out.
“So your husband liked to drink?”
Amount was so relative, she thought, and men liked to think they could out-drink others. “No more than most men. Look, I know this is not about drinking.”
“I thought you said he met someone and drank too much…”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. You seem determined not to help us.”
“You people are always in a hurry to accuse others.”
“What do you mean by ‘you people?”
The corporal’s eyes raised his arm, waved away the question. “Have you talked to your neighbours?”
“We’ve checked with the school where he teaches, with family, friends, his with neighbours, with everyone we could think of. As far as I can tell, my husband came straight home from work. Nobody is sure whether they saw him go out that evening or not.” Her voice fell. “I guess they didn’t.”
The corporal nodded. “People can be unreliable.”
They pondered that statement for a while. Since there was nothing on the day to mark it out as different from any other, it was hard to remember the details of what was said or seen.
“Alfonse was in a good mood…”
“He was not in a good mood,” John interrupted his mother.
It took a moment for Rebecca to latch on to the memory of Alfonse sniping about John’s grades at the lunch table.
“My son is blaming himself for a small thing – Alfonse said John could do better in exams. But which parent doesn’t want their child to do well?”
“I don’t think he was jovial,” John insisted.
Rebecca pursed her lips. “Trust me, my husband was in a good mood later on. A very good mood. He was jovial.”
“So everything is under control?”
“Jesus Christ!” Rebecca hissed under her breath. Her son looked away.
The policeman closed the folder of empty papers. “We can’t take a written statement until your husband has been gone for at least two weeks.”
“You’re not going to help us?”
“If I were you, madam, I’d check the hospitals. I’d ask around again. Somebody will have seen him.”
If I were you, she thinks, I’d do what it says on your badge - offer service. Perhaps she should have followed her in-laws advice - relied on them to informally contact someone they knew who knew someone high-up in the force.
The policeman stood, and waited quietly until Rebecca rose. She’d applied more make-up than usual, layering on the powder to camouflage the lines of worry and tiredness. But the corporal spied something there that released his pity.
“They usually show up, madam.”
What did he mean by ‘they,’ she wondered, in which category of man did the corporal slot her husband? Accident-casualty, madman, bigamist, kidnap-victim, criminal? These were the possibilities that kept playing in her mind. “Is there nothing else you can do? Alfonse could be in trouble…”
“Is there something you haven’t told us?”
Rebecca shook her head.
He turned to her son. “Sometimes a man has private business to take care of,” he said, with a knowing air. “Women don’t understand.”
Despite the teenage acne, John grinned at the corporal as if he too understood hidden codes of manhood.
“I’d like to see your superior.” Rebecca said, surprising herself. She’d never have thought to push the police, not when they had the reputation of jailing first and then cooking a charge afterwards.
“Madam, I’m trying to help you.”
“You haven’t even opened the envelope. You don’t know what my husband looks like.”
The corporal shrugged, drew the photographs from the envelope, stared at the images. “This man looks familiar.”
“What do you mean? Have you seen Alfonse?”
The corporal studied each photograph and turned it around, as though the red coded strip in the back might offer clues.
“Maybe you’ve jailed him?” John suggested, his head cocked to one side.
Rebecca frowned at her son, and then offered, “Maybe you’ve seen him in the neighbourhood.”
“No, no…I can’t place him. But I will remember.”
Rebecca wondered if it was Alfonse’s generic looks he was responding to or something more specific. Since the troubles began, looking like a stereotype of your tribe sometimes brought on unpredictable reaction. Did he know something that they didn’t, or was he playing with her? Was this his roundabout way of asking for a bribe? “I still want to see your boss.”
The corporal shrugged, “Okay. Come with me.”
He lead them out of the room and along another long passage. He knocked on a door that lead into a even smaller room with another door at the end of it.
There were two other people in the room, grey-haired and half-asleep on the only chairs available. The corporal spoke to the secretary in their language, and she gestured him through. He, in turn, indicated that Rebecca and John should wait for him. The secretary banged on her Olivetti typewriter, and Rebecca noticed her son marvelling over this ancient piece of machinery as though she were putting on a special demonstration. Because the room was so small, they stood too close together, too close to the secretary and her carbons, and the pervasive smell of sweat in the air.
“Are you going to tell them about the Chokora?” John asked, in a hoarse melodramatic whisper. Street boy
“What?” Rebecca stared at her son. The older couple stared at her. The secretary continued typing.
“Nothing.” John mumbled. “I’m just joking.”
“Is this a time to be joking?” She wanted to stop but heard herself continue. “What is wrong with you? Are you crazy?”
John’s gaze glazed, the black in the whites of his eyes dulled. He’d switched her off.
She’d genuinely forgotten about the street-boy, but now it came back to her in a rush. Alfonse had been driving her to work, the kids in the back arguing, she complaining about traffic or the glare of sun bouncing off the glass building. As they approached an intersection, a street boy, sniffing a bottle of glue, suddenly crossed in front of the car. In retrospect, she did hear a sound that could have been a crack but it was hard to tell because of the noise of the street. In any case, the boy rose, and holding his hand at an awkward angle, stood in front of the car, and stared at them in a daze. Before Alfonse could open his door, a policeman appeared and waved his rungu. The boy staggered a bit, and then took off, disappeared. The adrenaline of relief had directed Rebecca’s anger and sharpened her words. “Why did that idiot throw himself at our car? Is it a new way of begging?” She noticed that Alfonse was staring at her as though she were a stranger. The children were absolutely silent.
“Yes, thank god for the policeman.” Alfonse had said, under his breath, his sarcastic tone shocking her anew until she didn’t know how to react and decided to never ever again mention the accident. Alfonse had driven, she’d worked, come home to supervise the cooking and homework, and life went on as usual. Now it occurred to her that it was about that time that Alfonse started spending more time with his brother.
Rebecca became uncomfortably aware of her breathing, and found herself counting seconds in, seconds out, seconds out of beat. She heard the corporal talking to the boss behind the door, also in their vernacular. They laughed. She suddenly realised that they’d be kept waiting a lifetime, that the older couple had probably been stuck in that waiting for several years – they had that look, and that smell, as though they slept in those chairs.
“Let’s go,” she hissed at her son, and without waiting to see if he’d follow, marched out of the room, along several narrow corridors, up a staircase and down another. When she slowed down, Rebecca was relieved that her son was behind her because she was lost. She hoped she’d figure the way out of the maze of a station without embarrassing herself any further.

###
“Baba had other plans for his life,” John said to his sister as they ate in front of the television in the living room. “Plans that didn’t include us.”
“Baba would never ever, ever, leave me,” Keziah screeched at her mother like a child of seven rather than fourteen. “Would he?”
“Of course not,” she told her daughter, too strongly because she did not know. “Eat your food.”
Rebecca usually insisted they ate at the dining table, but she was exhausted, and wanted nothing more than to lie back, lift her feet, disappear into the sofa. Why was she so frightened? For Alfonse or for herself? Her mind see-sawed over two contrary visions – that Alfonse had been involuntary assisted in the leaving, or that he’d sought to go. Had he left, or had he left her?
“Baba had plans…da da dum dum…”
“Shut up, John. You’re only saying that to hurt me.”
John raised his white paper napkin in a mock gesture of surrender, but Rebecca could see that his eyes were shining. He abruptly rose and left the room. He sprang up the stairs - two at a time, banged the door to his room, cranked up the music. Reggae music.
Oh Alfonse! She pulled hard on the skin around her nails as she willed herself not to cry. Like his son, he sometimes switched her off, as if pondering over such deep matters that he couldn’t hear her, matters that she couldn’t be expected to understand. He’d been overlooked for promotion, and Rachel supposed that this was his middle-age reaction to the realisation that he might never achieve all that he’d planned. So Rachel bit her tongue and waited for this phase to pass, except that it didn’t pass.
When they’d met, she’d looked up to Alfonse, a well-paid, well-spoken teacher in an international school who lived in a large flat in the school compound. Meeting his family in Kinoo should have given her pause, but did just the opposite. Like her, they were also under the same spell of Alfonse’ charm and future promise. And she imagined the failures of his brothers would spur him to greater achievement. Instead, it was like they’d conspired to bring her down to their level of untidy desperation. Her husband began to talk of poverty and justice until she’d accuse him of wanting to impoverish them so that he’d feel better about himself. He’d laugh, and she’d take that as a sign that time would soon iron out these new wrinkles. In his ‘odd moments’ as Rebecca came to think of them, Alfonse didn’t shout and rail, but she felt increasingly uncomfortable about the intensity of his soft spoken words. She sensed his disdain when she bought True-Love magazines or complained about the maid eating sausages meant for the children. She’d blamed his brothers for the change in Alfonse, especially the Rastafarian. But now she wondered if it had something to do with the street boy.

###
Polite Notice, said a bold black sign on a laminated yellow board, A supplemental generator has been ordered. Please bare (sic) with us. Signed by order of the Town Clerk (and dated two years previously).
Rebecca thrust notes at the attendants - a thin old man who didn’t look long for this world himself, and a younger version of him with the same squinty-eyes and concave body. Maybe one acquired that look if they worked at the mortuary long enough. She showed them Alfonse’s photographs. “This one looks familiar,” the younger man said. The older man was non-committal. Their grey coats were splattered with dark stains, and they wore no gloves, but approached the cold room of unclaimed bodies cheerfully enough.
Rebecca felt numb with dread. John said nothing, but watched his mother closely, as though he didn’t trust his own eyes to identify the body of his father. This time, it was he who’d insisted on coming.
The attendants pulled the metal drawers, one after another, yanked back the sheet or khanga or whatever bits of cloth covered the bodies. Some were accident victims, others caught in the cross-fires of robbery and car-jacking, others still, murdered, and yet others dead of disease in hospitals - their relatives decamped to avoid the bills. Some of the bodies had been mutilated, macheteed, limbs at odd angles, dreadlocks all over the place. Even in death they seemed to be protesting their fate.
“Mungiki,” said the older attendant. Tribal militia. Using what looked like a truncheon, he pushed back the limbs. “Those guys are crazy. Came to our place, said they’d protect Kikuyus, ati bring justice. I tell you, they are just killers. Taste of blood from their drugs, inside that that Rasta hair nothing but crazy.”
He spoke too loudly, as though to negate the cold silence and oppressive odour whose tentacles gesticulated in the air before reaching right into Rebecca’s gut and pulling at something.
“Indians turn black when they die,” said the younger attendant
“Your husband was black wasn’t he?” asked the older one, as if he hadn’t seen the photograph. Or maybe he was making a macabre joke. God knows what working in this place could do to a mind.
“We don’t know that he’s dead,” Rebecca said.
Her aunt crossed herself. Rebecca’s widowed mother was too ill to leave Nyeri, but she’d insisted on sending her younger sister who’d never been to Nairobi. Her aunt seemed fearful of everything inside and outside the mortuary.
Her in-laws were searching other hospitals and mortuaries, making enquiries over the country, currying favour from even the most tenuous connections. It had taken almost two weeks to get them believing and since then, Rebecca avoided them because she got the impression that they suspected her of holding back information, or worse. She also avoided them because she couldn’t help blaming the Rastafarian, even though he was the most forthcoming towards her – called her twice a day for news.
“Ngai Fafa,” her aunt kept exclaiming, “Dear God.”
The older attendant snorted. “God is not interested in these ones. They have no owners.”
Some drawers contained more than one body and this horrified Rebecca more than the signs of violence. Some were naked. The attendants stared at Rebecca when she looked at the privates. She looked because the privates were there, and was surprised that most were big and stiff rather than shrivelled. Her husband’s privates had no distinguishing mark, and the exercise of looking only confirmed that he’d not been particularly well endowed. And that, in the greater grief of things, meant nothing.
As though participating in a drama, her son gasped before each reveal, rolled his eyes at more grotesque elements, but his acting was not convincing. Sensing his fear, she worked her hand into his. He gripped it. John hadn’t held her hand for a long time. Despite the situation, it felt good. Then they were through, walking back to the car, - aunt, mother, son - each gripped in silent pod of shock and horror.
“Some people don’t realise this is a very important job,” the old attendant said. “Bodies coming here all the time.”

###
“When did you report him missing?” This from the same under-age looking policeman at the station.
“You said his name was?”
“You didn’t make a statement?”

###
She was no longer surprised when people claimed they recognised Alfonse, that he looked extremely familiar. Several reporters from the radio, newspaper, and TV stations came by the house or called her at work to interview her. They even visited her in-law’s house in Kinoo, where the Rastafarian hogged centre stage and on the wings of that, became somewhat of a media personality, rapping and reggae-singing about loss, poverty and lack of justice. Themes that echoed old threads of Alfonse’s conversations: “Poverty kills. The nation is complicit in the murder of its citizens.” “Who listens to the children who eat garbage on the streets?” “What is civilisation if my neighbour dies of hunger.” What is democracy if people can be uprooted from their homes to roam the streets like beggers?”
But the Rastafarian’s looks also invited speculation. Hair was a political statement, and in Kenya dreadlocks and blood were too often connected. Rebecca saw it in her colleagues eyes, and in those of strangers who claimed to have seen him. Many leads associated Alfonse with the Mungiki, which Rebecca bitterly contested. It seemed to her that behind the sympathetic show of teeth, many thought Alfonse complicit in his own disappearance, and her a fool by extension. Shame made her admit to herself that in their place, she’d probably feel the same, that looks even by association were enough to denounce a man.
She hired a private investigator to follow up on the many leads but even the most promising turned out to be men who vaguely looked like Alfonse, or shared his still, intense manner.
EVERYTHING YOU WANT TO KNOW ABOUT GETTING AN AMERICAN GREEN CARD. The stapled little booklet arrived in the carton of books from his office. It was stuffed between Things Fall Apart, and Allah Is Not Obliged.
“It’s easily available on River Road, cost fifty shillings. Photocopied you see.” The investigator pulled at its staples. “But I’ll tell you a secret. This information is available on the internet. Word for word.”
What business did Alfonse have on River Road? And why didn’t he ever mention interest in going to America? Perhaps it was not surprising that a few days later, the investigator called to say that a man fitting Alfonse’s description had been sighted in Boston, USA. When he asked for money to chase that lead, Rebecca said she’d go herself. Not surprisingly either, a few days later the investigator said that he’d pulled some strings and found out that the man was yet another look-alike.
Rebecca stopped talking to reporters when one pretending to be a new student, managed to get though to her daughter, who came home demanding her mother tell her the truth. “Was Baba Mungiki? Is that why he stopped combing his hair?”

###

MISSING.
ALFONSE WAMBUGU NJAMA, ALIAS ENGLISH TEACHER.
ELDEST SON OF DANSTON AND PERIS WAMBUGU. HUSBAND TO REBECCA WANGECHI NJAMA. FATHER TO JOHN AND KEZIAH NJAMA. ENGLISH TEACHER HAS BEEN MISSING FROM HIS HOME IN NAIROBI FOR ONE MONTH. HE WAS LAST SEEN WEARING A STRIPED KIKOI SHIRT AND BLACK TROUSERS. A GENEROUS REWARD WILL BE GIVEN FOR PROVEN INFORMATION ON HIS WHEREABOUTS.
John said the advertisement looked like a notice for a most-wanted criminal. Rebecca concurred. It ran it in all the papers, and on the TV and radio stations. She had no money left for a generous reward, but she’d cross that hurdle if and when she bumped against it.

###
“You really think he went to look for…” Keziah’s voice was a screech of protest.
Rebecca had to strain against her son’s bedroom door to hear John. She felt ashamed for stooping to the kind of behaviour she hated, but needs must. She needed to know what her children really felt, and if they knew something significant that they’d chosen not to tell her.
“It’s obvious.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Because, that boy is your brother.”
“I have a Chokora for a brother?”
“Get used to it, little sis.”
“You’re such a pretender, John. Always pretending you know more than everyone.”
“You’re the pretender, pretending not to know. Just like Baba used to say, pretending that ignorance will save us.”
“Aren’t you scared?
Rebecca didn’t hear his answer, only the wild beating of her heart. Factoring in the approximate age of the boy and playing over everything she knew of Alfonse in their younger bliss, it seemed improbable that he’d fathered him. In any case, it was too improbable a coincidence that they’d accidentally run into a boy who turned out to be a son. Or was it? Maybe the boy had not been a street boy at all. Maybe he’d been a child displaced, lost, confused, running any which way? Was that why Alfonse had looked at her with hate that day?
After a while, John began to play his hip-hop racket of Sheng, about Githurai and other pockets of urban poverty, music that Alfonse had bought to corrupt their son. She’s sometimes heard John rap the words, with passion, as if accepting that something about the way he lived his life depended on his engaging with this new language, and its owners. But if Kenya had changed that much, Rebecca thought, she was as displaced as the Kikuyu immigrants crowding even Banana Hill on the outskirts of Nairobi where she used to buy paintings until she found the artist colony invaded by same polythene lean-tos as where her in-laws lived in Kinoo. Now the invasion was inside her house. She’d seen it in the way her son joked with the maid, saying, “Poa’ to her ‘Sasa’ street greeting. And John dressed like a tout, like his matatu uncle. But it was not his fault. Her son had no idea how tenuous the hold to middle-class, how a slip could become a great fall. How the uprooting and displacement in the land meant you had to hang on and protect what you had even harder.

###
On another hot, still day, much like the sixty that had passed since Alfonse’ disappearance, they stood outside the central Nairobi police station, stymied with indecision, crowding the cracked steps as though for a group portrait. Rebecca desperately wanted her father and mother-in-law, her brothers-in-law, and her aunt to go their own way. The awkward silences of her colleagues in the bank, and the half-hearted enquiries of friends she ran into at the shops or supermarket were easier for Rebecca to deal with than the concerns of family. “This is so unlike our Alfonse,” said his mother. ”So unlike him…”
“These are heavy matters,” said her father-in law.
“Yes, we must leave them to the lord,” finished his wife. ”Only God can help us.”
“What did the police mean that they were working on leads? What leads?” her brother-in-law asked, as though he’d not been present at the family conference arranged by the someone higher-up in the force. “Do you think they’ve received clues about where Alfonse went?”
“Haiya, let the police do their work,” said her aunt.
“I don’t think they know anything,” said John. “I don’t think we’ll ever find out.”
“Oh my son, don’t speak like that,” said her aunt, her frightened eyes pleading with him. “Let us pray for strength, and patience. Your father will come back to us.”
“Maybe he’s lost his memory,” Keziah offered.
“Mark my words.” his mother said, “Our Alfonse has been kidnapped.”
“Is that true, Mama?” Keziah asked. “Has Baba been kidnapped?”
“Of course not,” Rebecca told her daughter, and then realised that everyone was staring at her. She’d been too emphatic. “There is no reason to believe he’s been kidnapped. Nobody has asked for a ransom…yet.”
God, she was so weary of it all, this relentless waiting, and these useless words they spoke each time to protect their precious image of Alfonse as the perfect son, father, husband. She loathed the realisation that no matter how well you thought you knew someone, there was always another angle, another revelation.
###
Three months since he’d disappeared and Rebecca could not call up an image of him She traced her fingers over the hard metal of her husband’s stereo, a digital sensing for connection. Memory stirred like a formless weight pressing on her, but she could not picture Alfonse. She looked up, searched the wall for his portrait. He was up there, in his hair-combing days, smiling. Anger shot through her, so pure and fierce that Rebecca stumbled.
Her daughter rushed into the living room, stared at the broken glass as though it might provide an answer.
“The picture fell. I’ll clear it up later, after I’ve finished with this,” Rebecca said. She moved back to the stereo, arranged the components in a sports bag, padded it with newspaper. “You’d better move away. You don’t want you to cut yourself.”
“Baba will need his stereo,” said Keziah, and placed her hands on the straps as though to restrain her mother from carrying the bag. “He’ll need his music when he comes…”
Rebecca jerked the straps loose, slung the bag over her shoulder, banging her hip. “Your father will get plenty of music from me.”
“Mama! You’re so mean.” Keziah said, “No wonder Baba’s gone.”
Rebecca stared at her daughter. It’s not my fault, she wanted to shout, that your father disappeared. Instead, she awkwardly patted her daughter’s shoulder, the bulk of the bag falling between them. “You’re going to miss the school bus.”
“I don’t want to go to school. I want to stay with you.”
“I know. I know.” But when Keziah made as though to lean into her mother, Rebecca stepped away. “But you will go to school. And I will sell this bloody thing, okay?”
“Mum, its okay.” John said from the door. “Sell it, we need the money.”
He sounded as cool and collected as his father.