by Kabubu Mutua
Fiction
Even now I remember the first time I saw him, a beautiful boy cycling through Uhuru Street as if he’d done it his entire life. How I envied him. How by that week’s end I had convinced Mama to buy me a bicycle—what better way to beat my morning tardiness, to seize my days, than cycle to school by myself? In any case, Mama deplored my apathy for academia, and thought that gifting me a bicycle would somehow rouse my interest in school. Cycling was easy, and soon I coasted through Uhuru Street with an ease I’d never imagined. And so my friendship with Kauli began. His family lived in the house opposite, a small brick house lined with lantanas. Sometimes in April bees flitted in that compound, and once they stung me when I went over to cycle with him. Over the following days I wore my sting with pride, and Mama asked if she could blow my hand with her lips rounded into an O.
We were seven or eight then, Kauli and I. Age doesn’t matter, anyway, if you come to think of it. What matters is how Kauli began losing his hearing that July, so our English teacher, Madam Okola, when asking Kauli a question, had to repeat herself, saying, “Are you deaf?” even though it was obvious. It was of great interest, then, to see Kauli’s place in the class unoccupied in the days that followed as rumors spread about what had happened. Someone said he’d transferred because his mother disliked our head teacher, Madam Musa. I knew this was untrue because I’d seen Kauli at their house, cycling around the jacaranda in their yard. When I waved at him he ignored me. In the end, when he was tired he stopped to wave through their wrought iron gate, then began to cycle so fast I thought he would spin and fall. But Kauli was an expert cyclist, more skillful than I ever was in the way he maneuvered his curves. Sometimes he let me in, and we cycled around their compound—he was not allowed to leave on account of his sickness.
Kauli was a strange boy. He trapped birds in upturned water basins and tortured them. Often, I set them free. He said mercy made me weak, like a girl, and reminded me that he was older (one year, seven months). I said it was stupid to compare ages when we attended the same standard. Besides, I was taller than him: who was he to question me on matters of maturity? His mother said he was sick, but that he would recover and no longer trap birds in upturned water basins.
I began to sketch him, tracing his form with my graphite pencils. I suppose I thought I would make him better, freeze him into perpetual happiness. I still have those sketches in my drawer: Kauli in flight, racing against the wind; Kauli dancing; Kauli swinging through the grove of banyans that touched their compound; Kauli gliding through the community pool. And yet his face is never complete. Perhaps a part of him would forever remain lacking.
And so my love for painting began—all these years I’ve tried to quantify life, to frame lives on canvases, yet each attempt has left me wanting. Yesterday my lover cupped my chin in his hands, said, “In all your paintings, there’s a lone subject, not a girl or boy—I mean one can’t tell. Is this someone from your past?” I laughed, said, “Is that so?”
I wonder now: is it so obvious that Kauli has clung to me after all these years?
* * *
When Kauli got better, we cycled into the trails that left our estate and parked outside our house for glasses of mango juice. We coursed through that age with a purity of mischief, blasting music when Kauli said he wanted to dance or screaming as we scaled the walls until Mama said we were making her go mad. The house was out of bounds, she said, directing us to the yard where we could scream all we wanted.
Looking back on those days, I can see that Kauli’s loss of hearing fascinated me. I suppose I wished to be like him. I stuck cotton pads in my ears and imagined what it felt like to be half-deaf. At the community swimming pool, I sank to the bottom and listened to the vacuous silence of the water around me, opening my eyes to the clear iridescence of the refracted light. I never told Kauli about my fantasies.
That January, at the beginning of the new term, Kauli acquired a hearing aid. I was floored and asked if I could touch it. I ran my fingers over the pink plastic, feeling its smoothness. Kauli said it had cost his mother a fortune. Now, he wore it with delight. I suppose I envied him, so I lied to Mama that I had begun to lose my hearing too.
“You can’t hear?” she asked.
I nodded.
“—what a liar I’ve raised,” she said, lining her lips with gloss.
In the end I never saw the inside of an ear specialist’s office.
* * *
Aged twelve I kissed Kauli. I suppose I’d wanted to do it all along—what with the way boys in our class spoke of girls, I imagined Kauli, now a teenager, sticking his lips against mine. He must have imagined it too, because he said he liked it. We kissed in class during PE, in an empty, dusty classroom that smelled of chalk and spilled biro pen ink and open exercise books. It was a hot, humid afternoon, and when I stared out the window, all I saw were our classmates chasing the ball in a haze of red dust. Kauli let me trace the line of muscles on his chest and stomach, let me dig my fingers into his bulge. He stopped me when I began to stroke him. Afterwards, he dug into my shorts.
The thing with Kauli is, he never made up his mind sometimes, and it drove me crazy that I had to make certain decisions for him. If we walked to the ice cream stand in the market and there were three flavors, he wouldn’t make up his mind about the flavor he wanted and I had to choose for him. Always it was vanilla and he said it tasted like toothpaste.
* * *
That September my grades plummeted and Madam Musa summoned Mama to her office. The cramped space had a portrait of the Lord on the wall and smelled of hair pomade—the rumors were true, then, that she locked herself in there at lunchtime to fix her hairdo.
I was not trying enough at school, Madam Musa told Mama, who looked bored throughout and kept yawning.
I could not see the chalkboard correctly, I lied.
Madam Musa tapped her acrylic nails on her mahogany desk and said she knew someone. A volunteer American organization was visiting her church to test eyes and donate free spectacles. Was Mama willing for me to come down for the tests?
Mama nodded yes. I was delighted, and followed through with my fraud—at the testing tent I pretended not to see the letters, and said that my eyes watered in intense light, and squinted throughout the ordeal with my dear mother by my side. By the end of the week, I had new spectacles that pulled the light in all the right ways. Now I had a disability of my own, and my classmates respected me. They thought I was a type of genius. Kauli observed me for a long time and said, “You are not eye-sick, are you?” I laughed. Kauli saw me for what I was, a lying child. I adored him for that. My grades improved. Perhaps there’s a connection between wearing glasses and academic success. Cliché, I know. But I felt it whenever I touched my textbooks to study: the clarity of formed ideas, the desire to be good, to impress those who’d given me so much. Mama said I might join the best high schools in the country.
After school Kauli and I often cycled to his house, where we flipped through his Supa Strikas comics. I loved Shakes for his dreadlocks. I said I would let mine stand like that. Kauli said it was impossible for locks to be so stiff. We blasted songs by Miriam Makeba and Brenda Fassie. We kissed again and again. We agreed we would run away, paint mustaches on our faces, wear hats, take the next bus out.
“And money—we will need money to survive, no?” I asked.
“You will paint strangers for a price.”
“And you?”
“I will cheer you on, and lie in bed all day playing music and smoking cigarettes, and listen to you complain about your customers.”
We laughed. I adored that idea, of a life untouched by rules.
It was Kauli who, on a rainy November day, informed me that Brenda Fassie was a lesbian. She liked girls the way we liked each other. “What were we, boys who like each other?” I asked him. He flipped through a glossy gossip magazine and said, “Homosexuals,” casually, as though it did not matter, such a big word. I thought about that word for days. For the record, I had seen whatever we were doing—touching, stroking each other, kissing—as acts of service and yet Kauli had found a word. Now I had a name, such a dirty-sounding name, even though Kauli seemed not to care. I maintained we were just friends.
* * *
A month after my seventeenth birthday, we tried sex. Kauli said it was highly likely that it would backfire. Our school days were ending. We stripped naked and checked his door lock twice. Down the corridor Kadzo the maid was frying samosas. Rumba soared gently from a stereo system. The act was painful, and Kauli covered my mouth with his palm. I liked the idea of him being in control. In hindsight, I should have done things differently—I should have eaten less that morning. Perhaps I should have said no. Kauli stopped midway because I couldn’t stop crying. “We will try next time,” he said, wiping me, then himself with a towel. I dreaded each memory of that time. Yet, as the months gradually passed, I touched myself when I thought about him.
Looking back now I like to think that Kauli was in love with danger. He was pulled to things flaming with precarity. Take for instance when he began smoking. On the foil-lined pack of his Marlboros, a warning regarding the health implications of smoking—cigarettes cause cancer—screamed in black print, and yet he gulped through a pack a week. I thought he looked sexy, holding those cigarettes, his parents none the wiser. I adored the fact that he knew he looked sexy. I owned him, and pictured that he would stay that way forever, holding that cigarette with the light hitting his face at all the right angles.
In the days when we were having sex, it was common for Kauli to be seen fighting with boys from Uhuru Street. Mama said it was a pity that he’d grown to be that kind of boy. I pitied her for thinking I was an innocent—I who never missed Sunday Mass. I was an effeminate boy, and hated it. I stole half-tubs of lipstick from Mama’s drawer, dashed them on my lips, and pretended I was a girl. I admired my handiwork before the mirror, and prayed no one ever saw me like that. It’s shameful to want to be something else when condemned to be one thing. You might say I was a confused child, who’d gotten in with the wrong person, but I’ve often thought that he was my baby, someone who needed taking care of. Through the years I have fallen for strong men with different disabilities and ailments—a former soldier with missing legs whom I had to help in the bathroom, another with a life-ending blood cancer, and another with a missing eye (a fake sheep’s eye in its place). It is strange to think about it. That I fell in love to take care of them, to make them feel better.
Kauli and I committed several crimes and got away with all of them. We set fire to the principal’s Volvo because he called half our class a bunch of nitwits and detested our mothers. We skipped Friday afternoon classes to watch banned films projected behind the town bar. I was always scared, and Kauli pulled my hand through the fence saying, “Don’t be a girl.” Part of me pulsed with fear and I felt I might vomit from the adrenaline. Those were our best days. Sometimes as the credits rolled Kauli would cry, recalling an emotional scene or mourning an actor he thought should have survived a shootout.
* * *
The last term of high school, Kauli began taking out his uncle’s Honda for rides on the roads that forked away from our town. He honked at our gate twice, a signal that I should come out. I climbed behind him and we rode out into the hills. When we had parked on the peak of a ridge, he told me he despised his father and the rest of his family for thinking that they owned him. I said he was lucky to have a father. We sat next to each other, and a cold wind cut our faces. We opened Tusker lagers and drank ourselves into a stupor. An approaching rain pulled us into sobriety. We huddled under the branches of a giant fig tree. Then, as the rainwater cut the air in silver lines, I wondered about our future. Who were we fooling, staying together, lying to each other as if we had infinite time? Already, some girls had made passes at me, and I dreaded seeing them at school. I asked Kauli what he thought about us, now that our high school days were ending. Someone had to ask. No one can blame me for caring. Not that I had answers myself. Kauli’s face suddenly furrowed, and he stammered something along the lines of, “Thinking too much will end us.” Then he jumped on the Honda and rode away without me. I had to hitch a ride back home in a country bus filled with passengers cradling chickens and baskets of fresh fruit.
At home Mama was frying beef. She popped her head from the kitchen to ask where I had been. I said watching a football game. She guessed that I had been out with girls. Those girls, where would they take me? she wanted to know. I removed my coat, threw it on the couch. Those girls, Mama said, would have sex with me and leave me dry; girls were clever these days. The game was inverted now, she added. I suppose she thought she was handing me some life-changing advice. Still, a part of her statement was true. Look at me and Kauli—clueless, loving each other with so much passion we were unaware it was love. Who could have imagined?
* * *
Kauli honked at our gate four days after leaving me in the hills. When I refused to come out, he walked up to our house, let himself in, and walked down the corridor to my room. I was sketching cartoons. He came in, sat on my bed. He had shaved the sides of his head in the style of an American pop star and smelled of cigarettes. He lit one. He was lucky that Mama was at the market.
He said he had been thinking and thought it was necessary to care about our future. In addition, he said, scratching his forehead, he was sorry that he had left me strung out in the hills; there was nothing he could do to show he was sorry. I thought he was pretty, like a baby, apologizing with his innocent eyes.
That evening we went out together. We had completed our high school examinations. I thought all of the history questions on Kenya’s independence from the British were bogus: Explain the benefits of colonialism. Parts of me were opening up to the world, like a flower to sunlight. Kauli thought it was a matter of routine, answering those questions. I had skipped them, scribbling my answers to questions that made sense: Describe the course of the first liberation.
He suggested we ride to the neighboring town. It was larger than our own. More roads, more bars, more shops, more people. It was already nighttime and the sky called to mind a black canvas sprinkled with white ink. We parked outside a bar whose name I don’t remember. Inside, lights bled into each other, blinking reds and blues. I had never attended a party, but I had often fantasized about blacking out in one.
Kauli nodded at a man by the entrance and we went inside. A crowd bumped and swayed to thumping music. A girl made eyes with me; I avoided her. Kauli took me by the hand through the crowd to the end of the hall. There was another door, another guard. Kauli nodded and he let us through. A blast of tobacco smoke hit my face. The music was different, faster; I could feel it. I wanted to move. We ordered gins. Kauli knew a lot of people, nodded to everyone his eyes met with an easy familiarity. There were only men. Kauli pulled me to the dance floor and said, “Dance.” Someone blew a plume of smoke from pouted lips. I began to dance. “What is this place?” I asked. Kauli laughed. “You don’t like it? We could go somewhere else.” Kauli was like this, always returning questions with questions. I guess he thought it made him mysterious. Somehow, it worked. But sometimes it drove me crazy—it felt needy that I should require certain things from him.
“Drink,” he said, pressing my cheeks with his fingers so my mouth opened. He poured gin into my mouth. “I know people,” he said finally, swigging from a glass. His throat bobbed like a second animal. I loved the music. My head was soft, mellowed. It felt like swimming.
His hand slipped from mine. The crowd oscillated in the music, swallowed him. Someone leaned into my face, called me good boy, I looked so innocent, and was I lost? I said no, and the music drowned my voice. I looked around: painted faces, a mirrorball spilling shards of colored light on swaying bodies, glass bottles, cigarette smoke curling in hazy lines. Everyone, a stranger. Kauli had disappeared. My head began to swirl. I fell in with the crowd’s swelling, a wavelike force that pushed me on and on and then, finally, spat me into the cold air outside.
In the soft darkness, I saw an impression of Kauli’s silver necklace glinting in the pale moonlight. He sat on a Peugeot’s bonnet, trousers pulled down. Someone knelt before him, moving fast. I froze momentarily before walking away. Kauli called my name. And although his voice was as familiar as ever, it was now an echo, a pleading from a billion light-years away.
* * *
I have often wondered if, over the following days, I should have acted differently. If I should have let whatever I had with Kauli run its course, let it slide with time’s passing so I would remain blameless for its ending. Perhaps that afternoon, I shouldn’t have announced to him, as he repaired his uncle’s Honda, that I was finally leaving for the city. That my mother’s aunt, a famous city lawyer, wanted me to apprentice in her firm. What choice did I have anyway, I who lived under the auspices of my mother?
“I was drunk,” he said, then proceeded to turn a screw. The entire time he avoided my eyes.
No, no, all of that was forgiven, I said, aware of my lie (I who’d cried when the alcohol finally wore off the morning after, the night at the bar infused with a blinding clarity). Yet I was ashamed to say that I now detested him. After all, I’d seen him for who he was—who was to say he hadn’t sought pleasure elsewhere while we were together? I was young, you might say. But he owed me the truth.
“Do you hate me?” he wanted to know. I dug my fingernails into my palms and looked away. Soon September would end, and the long, foggy days would disappear. The scent of fresh lemons from the grove curled into my face. I walked away, sensing his form frozen behind me. Jumping on my bicycle, I realized that I preferred the possibility of what could be. I pedaled away, directionless, towards tracks I’d never explored.
* * *
The day Kauli crashed the Honda into a culvert, I was at home preparing for my journey to the city. I did not know until that evening, when Mama informed me she had seen his crumpled motorcycle being towed to the police station. It’s funny how the memory of love shifts the largest borders. I remember cycling out to the town hospital, rushing through wards thick with the smell of medicine. How my breath steadied. He lay asleep, limbs in bandages, legs strung to a frame. At least he was alive.
I spent days beside him, opening windows, changing flowers, chatting with the old man who lay on the other side of the screen. His family was dead, he told me, and he had no one. I thought about the old man often, in the days that followed, picturing myself fifty years hence, nursing the grief of departed family and friends. It was harrowing, to experience all that loneliness in imagination.
Someone once told me that a gravely injured person is granted the choice of returning or leaving. If they return, they should lead an uncompromised life. The memory of that pact is scraped away so the life they lead is a continuation of the life they led before their injury. If they leave, they return as a newborn and continue as above. If they’ve served their sentence on earth, they join the primordial soup and become one with creation. I thought about Kauli’s choice in the days that followed. Would he return for me? Perhaps I was selfish to require that from him, but you must understand he is the only person I ever loved selfishly.
On the seventh day he stirred. His eyes opened as slits.
“You crashed your bike,” I said.
“I’m going to die?”
I must have said no, partly to soothe him, and partly to grant myself a measure of grace. What did I know anyway? He’d broken a few bones is all. In hindsight, I had feared the worst.
I enjoyed taking care of him, walking with him on Uhuru Street and helping with his bandages.
Once, Mama said, “It’s that Kauli, isn’t it: the reason you don’t want to go to the city?”
I nodded. Had she known? She’d never said it, but I felt the ease with which she spoke about him, as if he were my brother. And yet her softness only offered me temporary reprieve; soon it would become untenable for me to stay. I now know that she was merciful.
That December the lantanas touching our house burst into a bright pink, and the sunlight curled in whorls against the white of our compound walls. Often, I cycled alone—Kauli’s legs would take months, perhaps a year, to get accustomed to pedals. Gradually, taking the bicycle out became a chore, and a pang of melancholy surged through me when I raced down that street. Eventually, I gave it up.
* * *
On Jamhuri Day, we went to the square for the fireworks. Kauli’s plaster cast was now browned the shade of old ivory. Strangers patted his shoulder, smiled at us as we broke the crowd.
“I feel like a god, people blessing me every time,” he said.
“Everywhere you go you are loved,” I said, helping him to a wooden bench under a tamarind. The night sky was clear, the sharp December wind spilling into our faces. A group of middle-aged men sipped White Caps from the bottle on the back of a pickup truck. Someone grilled slabs of goat near the wooden benches. Music blared from a portable speaker.
“When I was in the hospital I dreamed you were married,” he said, lighting a cigarette.
“It’s strange, the things we see in dreams.”
He sucked the burning cigarette until his cheeks hollowed. We were silent for a while before he exhaled and said, “It’s a large beautiful world. Go stake it out. When you return–”
“You sound like an ancient king sending spies to enemy territory,” I said.
We laughed. I caught the scent of warm cigarette smoke mingled with the aroma of roast goat. Before us, the fireworks came, elaborate fractals of red, green, and blue. I laid my hand on his. Everyone around us was cheering, whistling to another year free from Britain.
Kabubu Mutua is a writer and translator who grew up in Machakos, Kenya, and spent most of his childhood in boarding school. His writing has appeared in adda, A Long House, Short Story Day Africa, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2021 Afritondo Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 Peters Fraser and Dunlop Queer Fiction Prize. A 2022 Short Story Day Africa Inkubator Fellow, he currently lives in Nairobi.