The Dream Chasers Read online

  “The Dream Catchers had a flourishing city whose streets were paved with gold. They had only the most beautiful women by their sides, with dozens and dozens of Dream Catcher babies to perpetuate the Dream Catcher line. But then there was trouble in paradise. One Dream Catcher man jilted his lover. You know what they say: Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She was a smart woman. She knew how easy it is to get into the minds of men; to manoeuvre destiny by manoeuvring their thoughts. So she started a rumour.

  “‘The sentinels have spotted a hostile tribe advancing in the horizon,’ she said. ‘These men are covered in cloaks, with pangas strapped to their waists. They shall kill all the Dream Catchers in their sleep.’

  “The Dream Catchers became terrified of dreaming. The thoughts they thought were filled with pangas slicing people’s necks, with blood gushing into rivers and drowning the women and children.

  “Sleep is the cousin of death. So when the Dream Catchers slept, they had nightmares of hostile men wielding pangas, of massacres in which they themselves were killed. As with all their dreams, these too came true.

  “Blood poured out of their dreams, became a gushing river that drowned the women and children. The Dream Catchers were gone forever. But the horrors of that time remain. Until today, you are warned to avoid dying inside your dream because you will die outside your dream as well.”

  When I got home, I found Mama seated at the veranda.

  “Mama, what are you doing out here at this hour?”

  “Waiting for you, of course. Why? What does it look like?”

  “You should have gone to bed, Mama.”

  “What did that uncle of yours do? Did he teach you to smoke? Did his wife fill your head with nonsense?”

  “No, Mama.”

  “Did they poison your food? Did your uncle beat you to death?”

  “Maybe they did. And now, I’m a nyawawa.”

  “But they aren’t good people. A hyena’s kin is still a hyena.”

  Mama took out a thermos and a mug. She poured me fermented millet porridge. “Here, drink this uji. It may neutralise any poison they fed you.”

  I took it. “Enough with your paranoia. Uncle and I went to the basilica for Mass—”

  “Asi! He prays! And the way he smokes like a jiko whose firewood is wet.”

  “We had lunch at his house after that.”

  “Who cooked it? Did they make you their slave?”

  “No, Mama. Aunt Akma slaughtered a chicken and made ugali. She oiled my hair and told me stories. She is a wonderful woman, Mama. And their house is so nice.”

  Mama picked up a rock and hurled it into the garden. The rock disturbed a clump of grass, and fireflies darted into the air like sparks from a charcoal burner.

  “Do not call the forest that shelters you a jungle, Lulu.”

  “Mama, I didn’t say that our house is bad.”

  “Just because I can’t afford to drive you around in a car or to cook you chicken everyday doesn’t make me a bad mother.” Mama stood up. She went to lie down. I hugged my knees and watched the moon watch me.

  Muchai came a few minutes later. He sat next to me on the veranda, and we stared at the wind in its various manifestations: the fidgety clouds, the shivering leaves, the airborne gravel, and the flapping clothes on the lines.

  “What are the chances that the wind is Luo?” Muchai asked.

  “None. It is too vigorous. It keeps stealing from the sky and the trees and the ground. It must be Kikuyu.”

  “And what are the chances that the sky is Kikuyu?”

  “None. It is too proud. See how it shows off its stars? See how it teases the wind? It must be Luo, that sky.”

  “And the crickets?”

  “They won’t shut up. They have too much gossip. Luo again.”

  Muchai laughed. “And you?” he asked. “What are the chances that you are Kikuyu?”

  “None. My last name is not Kamau or Mwangi or Njoroge.”

  “But you’re a good girl. My family thinks that all good girls are Kikuyu. I’m sure your mother has an opinion, too.”

  I nodded. “Mama claims that the spirit of a Kikuyu man came back from the dead and killed her younger sister Atsango.”

  “My father was afraid I’d bring home a Luo girl. That’s why he agreed to pay one million shillings for Nyaera’s bride price.”

  I looked into his face, broke down the barriers he erected in his eyes. “He was afraid you’d bring me home to him?”

  He nodded. “I came to give you this.” He handed me a small card. It was an invitation to a dowry party that was to take place at his house in a few days.

  I spotted an owl inside the mukinduri tree. It had large eyes, as though it wore spectacles. Mama would have had a fit if she saw it. She said that owls were a bad omen; wherever they were spotted, someone or something had died. We watched it; it watched us. I wondered what thing had died. Maybe it was something inside me.

  [Five]

  “LULU,” MRS NJOKA SAID WHEN she spotted me, “come give this old lady a hug.” She smiled at me as she spoke, dimples punching her cheeks. Muchai’s mother was beautiful, even into her late fifties. She wore a red print dress with a Chinese collar.

  “How is your mother?” she asked. We stood in their garden, inside a tent. There was loud mugithi playing around us. People gathered in one great row, placed hands on each other’s waists, and danced towards the front of the tent.

  “Mama is alright,” I said. “She sent her regards.”

  Heads tipped back, and smiles cracked open under tinkling laughter. Handkerchiefs wiped the laughter that spilled out of eyes. More music came. Mrs Njoka led me to another tent where food was served. There was a buffet with goat, roast potatoes, ugali, steamed rice, mutura, and traditional vegetables. She thrust a glass of red wine into my hands. “The young people are inside the house. Go find them. Have some fun.”

  I entered the house and stood in a corner watching the younger people eat, talk, and slide into shadows. I saw Nyaera. She was seated alone in another corner. I walked up to her.

  “Lulu? What do you want?”

  “Do I have to want something? I came to congratulate you on the impending nuptials.”

  “If that’s all, then thank you.” She was her prettiest from the right side of her face because each feature was then softened and hardened at the same time, and her eyes were black pearls, and her skin, black silk.

  Her face was full of contradictions. Her eyelashes were charming little men taking a gracious bow after a dramatic display. At the same time, they were little more than a broom whose bristles were brittle and clumped in dried paint. The sanguine colour of her lips called out like a juicy plum wanting to be eaten, but they were also like an engorged boil needing to be burst. I walked away from Nyaera and climbed the stairs to the room at the end of the hall. I knocked twice.

  “Lulu?” Muchai said when he opened the door.

  “Can I come in?”

  He moved aside and I sidled in.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “It’s your party. Why are you holed up in here?”

  Muchai shut the door. We stood a foot from each other. “You shouldn’t be up here.”

  “Why?”

  “How do I explain this?” He paced the floor and stopped. “I’m a drunk Kikuyu man. All bad for a sober Luo girl.”

  “I’m not sober.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  I held a hand to him. His hand tried to evade mine, but our fingers brushed and then intertwined. He held my hand for a moment, naked torment brimming in his eyes. I was afraid to move, afraid to injure his blatant vulnerability.

  “Do you want me to leave?” I asked.

  “What I want and what you should do are two different things.”

  I looked down at my feet, my fingers twisting the ed
ge of my shirt. I refused to let him pick my face apart, pry the mucky blurred thoughts in my head with his eyes.

  Muchai raised his hand, the hand that twined with mine. He brought it to my jaw, to my chin, to the slight crack between my lips. When I swallowed, it felt like I had swallowed a live chicken. It scurried about my throat, flapping its feathers, choking me. He rested his forehead on mine, with his hand and mine still clasped, pressed between our chests. Muchai tilted his head so that his lips found my cheek. He pressed them there for a few seconds.

  “You should go,” he said. He stepped away from me and turned the doorknob.

  I ran up the street to my own house, took a sisal mat, and spread it on the grass. I lay on it, with my arms beneath my head, grieving eyes to the sky. Mama’s singing came to my ears.

  The word will stand. The word will stand. The world will pass, but the word will stand. Your riches will pass. Your education will pass. The world will pass, but the word will stand.

  I turned and saw Mama’s shadow on the kitchen window. She was preparing supper. I rolled the sisal mat, left it in the veranda, and went to find her.

  “How was the party?”

  “All right.”

  Mama uncovered the sufuria on the gas cooker. Steam containing nutmeg, coriander, and black pepper rose above her head, like spirits exiting a possessed person. “I didn’t expect you back so soon. What happened?”

  “My heart has become a truant. It jumped over the wall and escaped. I must let it sleep outside, on the park bench.”

  “Asi! What are you saying, Lulu? Translate your thoughts into a language I understand. Am I hearing you say you’re seriously eyeing a Kikuyu man? A married man?”

  “Muchai is not married, Mama.”

  “But he’s Kikuyu. That is much worse.”

  “I don’t have time for this, Mama.”

  “What do you have time for, Lulu? Tell me so that I can go to the bank and withdraw some money to pay you for your time.”

  “Mama, don’t make things up in your head.” I felt drained.

  “What do you know about my head?” Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

  I turned away and started towards the door that led into the corridor.

  Mama shouted at me: “Don’t you dare walk away from me, Lulu!”

  I walked on.

  “I’m speaking to you! Turn back this instant! LULU!”

  I heard wind near my ear and saw a flash of light near my face. An object hit the wall and fell to the ground. It was a butcher knife. I turned to Mama. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I didn’t mean to throw it at you,” she whispered. “You provoked me.”

  I walked towards her, opening my arms out. Mama shook her head, tears splashing against her cheeks. She opened the back door and walked out into the night. The next morning, she called me.

  “I’m in the village,” she said. “I came to see my mother. I want to think. Don’t call me. I shall call you.”

  Mama crept back into the house while I was asleep. I imagined her taking her black dresses, her petticoats, and her woollen sweaters off from the hangers, lining them against the bed, ironing what needed to be ironed, and folding them into airtight squares. I pictured her arranging her wigs and underwear on the left of the suitcase, her clothes on the right; the petticoats at the bottom, the dresses on top. I envisioned her placing a deodorant stick, a toothbrush, two bars of bathing soap, and two tubes of toothpaste next to the wigs and underwear, while humming Miriam Makeba’s “Pata Pata”.

  She would continue droning as she rode the matatu to town, and as she took a shuttle to the village. I could see her—still humming—as she shoved her suitcase into the hut of her growing years, as she pounded rock-hard maize cobs together to knock off yellow grains into a waiting basket.

  I took the next bus out of Nairobi to Mombasa. At Baba’s house, I found Baba’s second wife Chinika doing laundry.

  “Lulu!” Chinika dropped the shirt she was holding. “What are you doing here? Baba never said anything about you coming.”

  “If it’s too much trouble, I will sleep at a lodging house in town.”

  Chinika rinsed the shirt and flapped it in the air. Some of the spray flew into my face. “What will people think? You want them to call me the evil stepmother? Of course you shall stay here—trouble or no trouble.” She placed pegs on the collar of the shirt. She then took a magenta bedsheet and hung it on the line. The sheet dripped into the ground, its blood a constant patter that splashed beet-red drops on my white socks.

  Chinika continued. “Sorry for the journey. I hope it went as smooth as nywee.” She gathered the corners of the bedsheet in her fingers and wrung it out between her palms. When she let go, the bedsheet was anaemic, fluttering weakly in the morning air.

  “Yes, it went as smooth as nywee.”

  Chinika poured water into the drain, bursting bubbles, chasing away the ones that refused to pop. She threw leftover pegs into the bucket and walked towards the house. I followed her.

  She bustled between the counter, the refrigerator, and the microwave. She retrieved crockery and cutlery and set it before me. The microwave beeped, and the light inside it went off. Chinika opened the little door and took out a plate on which was arranged several mandazis the size of slippers. She poured me a cup of hot milk and pushed a ceramic sugar pot towards me. “Eat.”

  She walked out of sight, and I heard her make a phone call. When she came back, she said, “I’ve just spoken to your mother. Did she really try to stab you?”

  I clicked. “Ah! Mama and her big mouth! Now why would she say you a thing like that?”

  “Water always finds a way of bursting out. Where are your things, Lulu? Didn’t you come with anything?”

  “No, I don’t intend to stay for long.”

  “Well, you must be tired. I will show you where to sleep.” Chinika led me to the guest room.

  There was a large carton with Sony Wega printed across it, in the corner. In it were clothes that Chinika had outgrown. On one side of the room next to the windows was a metal bed. There was a desk and a wardrobe against another wall. The wardrobe had other cartons in it, filled with box files and globe files and spring files binding together previous versions of Baba’s life.

  Chinika woke me up in the evening. “Baba is here. He wants to see you.”

  My mental images of Baba, cemented over years of not seeing him, had become so convincing that I almost couldn’t recognise his face when I saw him.

  “I heard you were here, Lulu. I don’t like to be ambushed. You should have called.” He paused to study my face. “How long has it been? A year?”

  “Two years.”

  “I heard she tried to stab you.”

  “She has a name.”

  “Eshe.” He rolled his eyes.

  “I provoked her.”

  “Chinika provokes me all the time; I’ve never stabbed her.”

  “You stab her in a different way. You stab her heart.”

  Baba glared at me. “Dress up. Put on something decent. We are going out for supper.”

  “I don’t have anything decent. I came with nothing.”

  “Then borrow something from Chinika.”

  Baba took us to a Japanese restaurant. We ate rice, with raw fish wrapped in seaweed. Sushi, Baba called it, making it sound as though it wasn’t just raw fish and seaweed. We all ate in silence—silence that was wrapped in seaweed, raw sushi silence, that muffled the jazz music and the clang of forks on plates, that drowned out thoughts.

  Back at home, Baba’s business partner Mr Almasi came to see Baba. They sat out in the front patio where they reclined on chaises lounges, drank Chardonnay, and took tequila shots, barking out laughs at indecipherable political jokes.

  “Chinika!” Baba said. “Bring Mr Almasi food. Don’t just sit ndee in that kitc
hen.”

  “Puh!” Mr Almasi said when I took a jug of warm water and a basin to him, so he could wash his hands. “That water is too hot, little girl. Do you want to cripple my hands?”

  Baba had a taste of the food. He spat it out in the grass. “The rice is uncooked. Chinika has started to cook like Kikuyus. She’s making us raw food.” He was one to talk about raw food. He’d made us eat raw fish.

  “Chinika didn’t make the rice, Baba. I did.”

  “I am not surprised. You take after your Mama.”

  “The mahamri is too oily,” Mr Almasi said, as though Baba was having all the fun criticising the food. “She also makes mahamri like a Kikuyu.” He stared down my dress as I bent to place the jug of crippling water. He gawked and nibbled on the mahamri, and then gawked and nibbled some more.

  I thought of some mchongoano that Muchai had liked when we were younger: “You are so poor that, instead of eating ugali and meat, you eat ugali and a picture of fish.” Mr Almasi ate mahamri and a picture of me, as I went to the kitchen.

  Baba followed me. “Dammit! You’re behaving like a whore. Go put something decent on.” He went back to the patio.

  For a long moment, I stared at Baba from the kitchen window. Mr Almasi said something to him. He smiled his finished smile with the smattering of whiskers on it. When I was younger, he had saved that finished smile for me. To other people, the smile had been incomplete, almost famished, ending three-quarter way past the middle of his face, as though afraid of bursting through the banks of happiness that existed beyond that point. He had saved his happiness for me. But things had changed.

  [Six]

  I CHANGED OUT OF THE dress that offended Baba and sat out the back with Chinika, beneath a baobab, grating coconuts. I cracked the shells, pried out the coconut, and handed it to Chinika who worked it on the mbuzi. Coconut husks fell at my feet, spun in the grass, tripped on baobab roots, and fell on their sides.

  “Did your mother really try to stab you?” Chinika asked.

  “I provoked her.”

  Chinika shook her head. “I’m sad for your mother,” she said. “But really, I’m sadder for myself. At least your mother’s mind is asleep in a safe house. Mine keeps me awake each night.”