Only Good Christian Girls Live Here
Ruth Kenyah
Ruth Kenyah
My knees have eyes. Rigid and bent, they watch with interest the shifting and stirring between my legs. As they observe the activity between them, my real witnesses, the eyes on my face, focus on the restless wasps dancing lazily near the light bulb above. There is a big one and a baby one. Neither of them was there when I first came into the room and I only noticed them after I took off my clothes and lay naked on the untidy bed, which is now squeaking sharply in an ever-increasing tempo beneath me. In spite of this, I cannot take my eyes off the two insects. The bigger wasp buzzes around the bulb, lugging its massive behind while the smaller one dances around it, dipping and diving in a silent rhythm of circles and pirouettes. A low grunt emanates close to my ear, its owner is unaware of the aerial menace. On the ceiling, the stinging insects have abandoned the bulb entirely and are floating downwards. They fly slightly apart, both creatures circle around, rising and falling, getting lower each time. Soon baby wasp swoops down towards me, heading straight for my face, I turn away fearfully and close my eyes tight. The light flutter of wings around my eyes makes me wish that I had more hands to spare; if I did, I would have unwisely swatted at the fiendish bug. But I need my hands right where they are now, clasped tight between the much bigger hands over my head. I wait a few seconds before I dare to open my eyes again and see that the big wasp has reached my left thigh. It is hesitant at first but then with a firm land, its hard behind taps on my skin. I arch instinctively; trying to dislodge it but the motion between my legs has become a perpetual push against my pelvis that renders my hips useless. Soon little wasp has followed big wasp. I shut my eyes again. As the bed judders, my thighs flex, tighten and stiffen and I wait for the sharp burning pain that will undoubtedly follow.
*
“You’re going the wrong way.”
This firm announcement comes from a girl sitting behind a wooden table. She’s wearing a dark blue sweater over a dress with stiff white collars.
“Out is that way,” she says. In her hands is a mobile phone that she uses to point to the opposite end of the corridor.
I glance up and down the narrow fluorescent hallway, confused. I had stepped out of a room, walked a few feet, and turned a corner to where I now stood. Obviously I’ve turned the wrong way, left instead of right, because a few feet past the girl are double doors with metal frames and glass center with the words MATERNITY WING painted in blue. The words are split so that MATERNITY is on one door and WING on the other.
The girl watches, waiting for me to make a move. When I turn around, her attention returns to the phone in her hand.
I keep my eyes on the other double doors ahead. The ones that say EXIT.
Exit. Meaning to come out.
Come out--past tense, came out. Continuous tense, will be coming out.
As in It will be coming out of you for the next few days.
I reach the exit doors and push them open.
Outside, the day has aged a few hours. The queue of mothers and their babies that had been waiting when I came in is shorter, but the number of young children and babies still looks the same. They are all over the hospital grounds; some crawl or play on the grassy patch next to the entrance and others sit on their mothers’ laps. The older ones cry for lollipops and ice cream from the hawking vendors walking past, while the younger ones are contentedly swaddled in sheets and blankets in their mother’s arms. Half of mine is in a trashcan in examination room number four.
Examination, as in test of proficiency. As in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education Examination. Two months of intense agitation, anxiety and stress where everything learnt through four years of Secondary School is tested. The exam is supposed to determine success or failure in adult life. Our results have been out for a few days now but I've yet to check mine.
I find an empty matatu at the bus stop and climb in. It’s the first in the lot, but is yet to fill up. The driver is stretched out on the front seat asleep. I slide to the window side. Outside, a hawker taps my window and holds up an assortment of snacks – biscuits, sweets and bananas. I’m famished, but I can’t stomach anything yet, so I close my eyes and wait to feel relieved.
It’s almost five o’clock when I walk into the house. Mum is home.
“Where’ve you been all day?” She yells from the kitchen when she hears the door.
“Out,” I say.
“Come help me finish these chapattis.”
I tell her I will but I need to go to the toilet first. I trudge upstairs to my room, drop on the bed and lay there for a minute. I place my hand on my abdomen and feel gingerly around it. The crippling pain is nearly gone now. There are ghosts of it inside me somewhere around my belly button, but they are not the sharp spikes they were before, these feel more like period cramps. In a few days, there will be no pain at all and my life will be mine again.
“Makenna!”
I’ve taken too long, I can hear mum coming. I sit up quickly, take out a pack of Pretty Girl sanitary pads from my dresser and shuffle out to the toilet. Inside, I pull down my jeans and panties, strip the soiled Pretty Girl off, lay the new one and then wrap the used one carefully in tissue. I hear mum at the door as I pull my jeans back on.
“Makenna! I won’t ask you again!”
I stuff the wrapped sanitary into the pocket of my jeans as mum bangs on the door. She is waiting with a bath towel in her hand when I open it. Wednesday night is Chama night for her group, The Esteemed Ladies, and she wants to get ready for it.
“Are you sick?” she’s looking at me with a slightly troubled but mostly annoyed frown.
“It’s just period cramps.”
I try to move around her to get to the stairs but she stands in my way.
“Where did you go today? You weren’t home when I arrived.”
I hadn’t given a single thought to what I would say but the lie comes easily.
“Nilikuwa church,” I say. We’re all Christians in this house; mum has made sure of it and commitment to church is required by her as part of our collective salvation.
I watch the irritation on her face pass to understanding but the worry remains.
“There’s nothing to fear about exam results, Kena,”
She sounds the way she did before. Before my academic performance became the only thing we talked about, before her faith stopped being mine, before I needed to lie, before I had secrets. When only good Christian girls lived here. Now I feel a rush of emotion and want to tell her everything.
Mum waits; her sparse V-shaped eyebrows are raised hopefully above her rimless glasses and her narrow forehead is creased.
I open my lips to speak, the words tumble forward and begin to edge out the guilt I’ve been feeling, but it’s like they’re full of cement.
Eventually she steps past me into the bathroom with a weary sigh and everything is as it will be from now on.
“Finish up in the kitchen,” she says closing the door.
I swallow hard to quell the stinging in my throat and amble back to my room before heading downstairs. In the kitchen, there are eight chapattis left to cook. Eight is just one of the numbers that has been occupying my mind in the past weeks. I think about the other numbers as I pick up the rolling pin and start to roll and count down the remaining balls of chapatti dough.
8– Number of subjects examined.
7– Number of papers I completed.
6– Number of subjects I hoped to pass.
5– Number of subjects I would probably pass.
4– Number of days results have been out.
3– Number of months I’d been dating Jeremy.
2– Number of weeks since I’d heard from Jeremy.
1– Number of times I’d slept with Jeremy.
When the chapattis are done, I take one from the bottom of the dish with a glass of milk into the living room and sit down to watch TV. The Beat is on; Rihanna and someone are diamonds in the sky. I nibble on the bread and think about how I nearly died.
*
Two weeks ago, I was coming out of the Afya Daima Pharmacy at the shopping centre where a girl in an oversized lab coat, pink lip gloss and dark eyeliner had just given me the news.
“You’re pregnant,” she said, holding the white stick she had asked me to pee on earlier.
“Ati what?” I’d said in a thin whisper that was not my own.
“Yeah, you are. From the date of your last period, I’d say you’re just about six weeks.”
I stared at her unable to speak, thinking how confident I’d felt when I walked into the clinic sure that the missed period was just an overreaction caused by an obsessive diligence of my menses.
She noticed my stricken silence but continued.
“We have some additional services if you’re interested.”
“But that’s impossible.” My voice cracked. My mouth had become very dry.
She cocked her head to one side with a slight frown and asked me a question I definitely knew the answer to.
‘Did you use protection?’
I nodded.
‘Condoms?’
I nodded again.
She shrugged. “Maybe the condom got punctured. It happens; boys are careless, sometimes they’re too eager, they get excited and mishandle them or they just don’t put them on properly. We hear that a lot in this place.”
My heart dropped to my feet and I started to shake. I felt dizzy. Hot. Cold. Sick. Like I was running a malarial fever.
She could tell from my pallid look that I was probably going to pass out right there in the clinic so she started to usher me outside.
“My dear the test is positive but you can buy a home test kit and see for yourself if you want.”
I started to whimper, feeling like the child I thought I wasn’t anymore, and she pulled me into a corner.
“Was it your first time?” she whispered.
I stammered to a yes, embarrassed that she had guessed so easily.
She’d nodded knowingly. “I’m so sorry. Most girls don’t usually know what a condom is supposed to look like when it’s on properly the first time they do it”. They trust boys to know everything and sometimes even they don’t have a clue.”
My nose was running freely by then so she pulled out a crumpled piece of tissue from her lab coat pocket and handed it to me.
“These things happen,” she said in a reassuring whisper that did nothing to calm me. “You can sort yourself out.”
Afya Daima is cheap so everyone goes there. I’d gotten there early to avoid the crowd but in the five minutes she’d taken to tell me my life was over, people had already filled up the small space.
She scribbled something hastily on a piece of paper and squeezed it into my hand. “Call this guy and tell him. He’s good. He’ll take care of you, sawa?”
I listened but didn’t hear her. My head felt heavy and my knees wouldn’t move.
Then she hurried back to her waiting clients and left me there in a daze.
I don’t remember walking into oncoming traffic, but that’s what happened when I stepped onto the street. I remember a commotion, people shouting and tires screeching but I didn’t know what was going on until someone grabbed my arm and yanked me off the road. It was an older man in a gray suit and he smelled of sweat and moth balls. He shouted at me,“Wewe sasa ni kulewa ama ni akili mbaya?” I don’t know if I shouted back, all I know is for days later my arm hurt where he had grabbed it.
Those two weeks feel like a lifetime ago.
In my back pocket, my phone vibrates. I pull it out and see it’s a text from Jeremy.
U hme?
Yes.
I cme?
I type yes but I don’t press send. Mum is still in the shower. I can hear the water running. I want her to leave before I tell Jeremy to come over.
I told Jeremy about it the same day I found out. On the phone, I broke down mid call. He came over immediately and we talked in my room, no one was home.
“Are you sure?” he asked. There had been as much terror in his voice as there had been in mine at the clinic.
After my near death, I took the test again at two other pharmacies, each time hoping for a miracle. But reality is a mighty contender, rarely defeated. As the news was confirmed twice and thrice, it went round for round with any hope I had and killed it after several blows. When it finally dawned on me that there were no miracles to be had, it took everything in me not to willingly leap in front of traffic.
“But we used protection,” Jeremy said.
I told him what the girl at the Pharmacy had told me.
“But I wasn’t rough with it!” he shouted.
“I think it’s possible.” I’d answered with quiet certainty. “It was our first time and we were both nervous. Maybe you didn’t put it on properly.”
Jeremy flinched.
“Are you serious? Come on! I’m a man, I know how to use that stuff!” He was breathing fast and heavily.
“What happened then?” I was angry myself.
“I dunno. You said you were safe. And you said a condom was enough. Why didn’t you just take those pills chicks take after?”
I started to cry then. Hot fat tears that left me with a headache later. Jeremy got up and came to the bed. He put his arm around me, woodenly.
We didn’t talk much after that. Jeremy was sulking and I was hurt. He said he needed to go home and think.
We didn’t talk much over the next few days or the week after that. In the meantime I tried unsuccessfully to forget about what was growing inside me. It felt like a malevolent presence that had attached itself to me, haunting my sleeping and waking hours and I wanted to exorcise it. I knew what my options were. The number the girl pharmacist had given me was already saved on my phone, and all I had to do was call, but the idea of what that meant terrified me more than the news she had given me. The alternative was much worse. I couldn’t imagine what would shock my mother more, the knowledge that I had a vagina or that I had used it without her permission.
*
“Makenna!”
Mum is standing at the foot of the stairs, glaring at me. I didn’t hear her get out of the shower or come downstairs. She is dressed. Her weave is brushed neatly back.
“Pole,” I mutter.
But she’s already walking to the door.
“I’m off,” she says, “Mama Millicent will drop me back when we’re done. There’s chicken stew in the fridge. Warm it up when your father and brother get home. Make sure Kyama doesn’t eat all the drumsticks.”
I follow her out. I see dark blue sneakers in the space between the gate and the ground as we walk to the gate. I hadn’t replied to Jeremy’s message, but he has come anyway. Mum pulls the gate open and stops.
“Oh! Hello,” she says to Jeremy.
He’s as surprised to see her as she is him. He smiles nervously at her.
“I’m Jeremy,” he says, extending his hand.
Mum only nods. I see her take in the thin eighteen-year-old man in sagging grey skinny jeans, red t-shirt, blue sneakers and uncombed hair with a mix of suspicion and barely concealed hostility.
“This is my friend,” I say. It comes out like a whisper.
Mum stands there nodding and saying nothing for seconds that feel like an eternity. Jeremy fidgets uneasily under her stare. I will her to leave.
“I’ll see you when I get back,” she says to me. Her stare is direct and I can see that my exam results aren’t the most important thing to her anymore.
Jeremy relaxes when she leaves. He starts to get inside so I step outside quickly and pull the gate closed behind me. I glance over at mum; she hasn’t yet turned the corner at the end of our street. She’s letting me know she’s not in a hurry.
Jeremy understands and steps back.
“Ameenda?” he asks, looking at mum’s retreating back.
“Chama,” I say.
Then he turns back to me.
“So you’re good now?”
Good. Meaning having the right qualities, untainted, commendable, worthy, morally excellent, well behaved, kind, agreeable, sound.
I don’t answer so he says, “As in you’re no longer pregnant?”
When I nod, his shoulders relax. He stands up straighter and flexes his arms like a man who’s just completed a hard task and needs to stretch and free his muscles.
“How did it happen?”
I tell him about the vaginal bleeding and severe pain in my abdomen that had started last night as a vague feeling of cramps, but which had increased steadily to a full blown flaming torch below my navel by the morning. I tell him that the doctor had given me two pain pills, sanitary towels and a glass of water, and then let me sleep in one of the empty examination rooms.
“Wa! We dodged a bullet, si ndiyo? And thank God it wasn’t a baby yet. That would have been worse. At least it was just…”
He waves a hand around to indicate nothing.
“A bunch of cells,” he finishes.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about the bloody, slimy bits and pieces that slid into my underpants with the wrenching pain of the unwanted and that the doctor had said would be coming out of me for the next few days.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. These past two weeks have been crazy. That whole condom thing really scared me. I just really thought that we were safe, you know?”
I nod silently. I’d thought we were too.
“Maybe now we should just tuliza for a while? Maybe take a break,” he says.
“Okay,” I say, not meaning it.
“Will you be sawa?”
I say I will be. The tone of my voice must tell him I’m lying but he ignores it because he knows where it would lead and he does not want to go there.
We hug before he leaves.
As we hug, I see it. In the orange grey gloom of the evening, its long, thin body looks like an apparition, but then it flies closer to me and I can see the brown colour, the big behind and the wispy legs and know that it’s real. I pull away from Jeremy’s embrace fearfully and take a step back.
“What is it?” Jeremy says looking around, seeing nothing. “Is it your mum?”
I’ve always been afraid of wasps. They are mean and sting with persistence and without provocation. They hadn’t stung me that time in Jeremy’s room, but maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky now.
I blink rapidly and the wasp is gone.
“It’s nothing,” I tell Jeremy.
“Sawa, we’ll talk sometime,” he says. The relief in his voice is painful to hear.
It’s almost dark by the time Jeremy leaves. Back inside the house, I turn off the TV and start to draw the curtains.
*
I graze the pocket where the rolled up tissue wrapped sanitary is still tucked in, it’s a hard lump that’s pushing against my hip bone. “A bunch of cells,” that’s’ what Jeremy said, not a proper baby. In my biology exam, the final question in part A of the short answer section was, In what week does a human embryo develop a heart? I answered fifth but it could have been sixth. I wasn’t very good at biology.
I hurry up off the couch and rush upstairs to the bathroom where I pull out the wrapped sanitary from my pocket. It’s crumpled up and some of its contents have leaked into the toilet paper it’s wrapped in. I unroll more toilet paper and wrap it some more. I wrap until it’s the size of my fist. I hurry back downstairs to the kitchen and find a plastic bag from the overflowing cupboard filled with the same beneath the sink. I drop the wrapped sanitary pad in it and fold it neatly, and then I get out the back door.
At the very end of our backyard is a guava tree that Kyama and I climbed as kids and beneath it is a heap of dry grass; leaves and twigs that mum swept there so dad could burn over the weekend. Over the heap of fallen greenery, mum laid a rake and jembe so the wind wouldn’t scatter the leaves again. I walk to the foot of the tree and lay the black plastic bag and its contents on the ground beside me then pick up the hoe and start to dig at a brush free spot. When I lift the hoe over my head I notice that my hands are shaking and my heart is starting to race. I grip the handle tighter and bring it down too hard on the ground. It strikes a rock and bounces back up. The movement sends little electric tremors up and down my arms. I dig around the rock and when it is fully exposed I roll it aside and dig again and again and again. When I finish, I’m out of breath and sweaty. The hole is about a foot deep and even less wide. I pick up the plastic bag, unknot it, take out the tissue wrapped Pretty Girl and lay it in the hole and then cover it up again placing the rock over it. I stand in the dark by the shallow pit for a long time. Something whizzes past my ear. I duck and swipe viciously at it, but a second later I realize it’s a moth and giggle at my own stupidity.
Inside the house, a door slams, and the lights come on in the kitchen and backyard. I hear voices. Dad is home, most likely Kyama too. Mum would be along soon. I drop the tools back on the trash heap and go back inside. It’s time for dinner. I have to warm the stew and make sure Kyama doesn’t eat all the drumsticks.
*
“You’re going the wrong way.”
This firm announcement comes from a girl sitting behind a wooden table. She’s wearing a dark blue sweater over a dress with stiff white collars.
“Out is that way,” she says. In her hands is a mobile phone that she uses to point to the opposite end of the corridor.
I glance up and down the narrow fluorescent hallway, confused. I had stepped out of a room, walked a few feet, and turned a corner to where I now stood. Obviously I’ve turned the wrong way, left instead of right, because a few feet past the girl are double doors with metal frames and glass center with the words MATERNITY WING painted in blue. The words are split so that MATERNITY is on one door and WING on the other.
The girl watches, waiting for me to make a move. When I turn around, her attention returns to the phone in her hand.
I keep my eyes on the other double doors ahead. The ones that say EXIT.
Exit. Meaning to come out.
Come out--past tense, came out. Continuous tense, will be coming out.
As in It will be coming out of you for the next few days.
I reach the exit doors and push them open.
Outside, the day has aged a few hours. The queue of mothers and their babies that had been waiting when I came in is shorter, but the number of young children and babies still looks the same. They are all over the hospital grounds; some crawl or play on the grassy patch next to the entrance and others sit on their mothers’ laps. The older ones cry for lollipops and ice cream from the hawking vendors walking past, while the younger ones are contentedly swaddled in sheets and blankets in their mother’s arms. Half of mine is in a trashcan in examination room number four.
Examination, as in test of proficiency. As in the Kenya Certificate of Secondary Education Examination. Two months of intense agitation, anxiety and stress where everything learnt through four years of Secondary School is tested. The exam is supposed to determine success or failure in adult life. Our results have been out for a few days now but I've yet to check mine.
I find an empty matatu at the bus stop and climb in. It’s the first in the lot, but is yet to fill up. The driver is stretched out on the front seat asleep. I slide to the window side. Outside, a hawker taps my window and holds up an assortment of snacks – biscuits, sweets and bananas. I’m famished, but I can’t stomach anything yet, so I close my eyes and wait to feel relieved.
It’s almost five o’clock when I walk into the house. Mum is home.
“Where’ve you been all day?” She yells from the kitchen when she hears the door.
“Out,” I say.
“Come help me finish these chapattis.”
I tell her I will but I need to go to the toilet first. I trudge upstairs to my room, drop on the bed and lay there for a minute. I place my hand on my abdomen and feel gingerly around it. The crippling pain is nearly gone now. There are ghosts of it inside me somewhere around my belly button, but they are not the sharp spikes they were before, these feel more like period cramps. In a few days, there will be no pain at all and my life will be mine again.
“Makenna!”
I’ve taken too long, I can hear mum coming. I sit up quickly, take out a pack of Pretty Girl sanitary pads from my dresser and shuffle out to the toilet. Inside, I pull down my jeans and panties, strip the soiled Pretty Girl off, lay the new one and then wrap the used one carefully in tissue. I hear mum at the door as I pull my jeans back on.
“Makenna! I won’t ask you again!”
I stuff the wrapped sanitary into the pocket of my jeans as mum bangs on the door. She is waiting with a bath towel in her hand when I open it. Wednesday night is Chama night for her group, The Esteemed Ladies, and she wants to get ready for it.
“Are you sick?” she’s looking at me with a slightly troubled but mostly annoyed frown.
“It’s just period cramps.”
I try to move around her to get to the stairs but she stands in my way.
“Where did you go today? You weren’t home when I arrived.”
I hadn’t given a single thought to what I would say but the lie comes easily.
“Nilikuwa church,” I say. We’re all Christians in this house; mum has made sure of it and commitment to church is required by her as part of our collective salvation.
I watch the irritation on her face pass to understanding but the worry remains.
“There’s nothing to fear about exam results, Kena,”
She sounds the way she did before. Before my academic performance became the only thing we talked about, before her faith stopped being mine, before I needed to lie, before I had secrets. When only good Christian girls lived here. Now I feel a rush of emotion and want to tell her everything.
Mum waits; her sparse V-shaped eyebrows are raised hopefully above her rimless glasses and her narrow forehead is creased.
I open my lips to speak, the words tumble forward and begin to edge out the guilt I’ve been feeling, but it’s like they’re full of cement.
Eventually she steps past me into the bathroom with a weary sigh and everything is as it will be from now on.
“Finish up in the kitchen,” she says closing the door.
I swallow hard to quell the stinging in my throat and amble back to my room before heading downstairs. In the kitchen, there are eight chapattis left to cook. Eight is just one of the numbers that has been occupying my mind in the past weeks. I think about the other numbers as I pick up the rolling pin and start to roll and count down the remaining balls of chapatti dough.
8– Number of subjects examined.
7– Number of papers I completed.
6– Number of subjects I hoped to pass.
5– Number of subjects I would probably pass.
4– Number of days results have been out.
3– Number of months I’d been dating Jeremy.
2– Number of weeks since I’d heard from Jeremy.
1– Number of times I’d slept with Jeremy.
When the chapattis are done, I take one from the bottom of the dish with a glass of milk into the living room and sit down to watch TV. The Beat is on; Rihanna and someone are diamonds in the sky. I nibble on the bread and think about how I nearly died.
*
Two weeks ago, I was coming out of the Afya Daima Pharmacy at the shopping centre where a girl in an oversized lab coat, pink lip gloss and dark eyeliner had just given me the news.
“You’re pregnant,” she said, holding the white stick she had asked me to pee on earlier.
“Ati what?” I’d said in a thin whisper that was not my own.
“Yeah, you are. From the date of your last period, I’d say you’re just about six weeks.”
I stared at her unable to speak, thinking how confident I’d felt when I walked into the clinic sure that the missed period was just an overreaction caused by an obsessive diligence of my menses.
She noticed my stricken silence but continued.
“We have some additional services if you’re interested.”
“But that’s impossible.” My voice cracked. My mouth had become very dry.
She cocked her head to one side with a slight frown and asked me a question I definitely knew the answer to.
‘Did you use protection?’
I nodded.
‘Condoms?’
I nodded again.
She shrugged. “Maybe the condom got punctured. It happens; boys are careless, sometimes they’re too eager, they get excited and mishandle them or they just don’t put them on properly. We hear that a lot in this place.”
My heart dropped to my feet and I started to shake. I felt dizzy. Hot. Cold. Sick. Like I was running a malarial fever.
She could tell from my pallid look that I was probably going to pass out right there in the clinic so she started to usher me outside.
“My dear the test is positive but you can buy a home test kit and see for yourself if you want.”
I started to whimper, feeling like the child I thought I wasn’t anymore, and she pulled me into a corner.
“Was it your first time?” she whispered.
I stammered to a yes, embarrassed that she had guessed so easily.
She’d nodded knowingly. “I’m so sorry. Most girls don’t usually know what a condom is supposed to look like when it’s on properly the first time they do it”. They trust boys to know everything and sometimes even they don’t have a clue.”
My nose was running freely by then so she pulled out a crumpled piece of tissue from her lab coat pocket and handed it to me.
“These things happen,” she said in a reassuring whisper that did nothing to calm me. “You can sort yourself out.”
Afya Daima is cheap so everyone goes there. I’d gotten there early to avoid the crowd but in the five minutes she’d taken to tell me my life was over, people had already filled up the small space.
She scribbled something hastily on a piece of paper and squeezed it into my hand. “Call this guy and tell him. He’s good. He’ll take care of you, sawa?”
I listened but didn’t hear her. My head felt heavy and my knees wouldn’t move.
Then she hurried back to her waiting clients and left me there in a daze.
I don’t remember walking into oncoming traffic, but that’s what happened when I stepped onto the street. I remember a commotion, people shouting and tires screeching but I didn’t know what was going on until someone grabbed my arm and yanked me off the road. It was an older man in a gray suit and he smelled of sweat and moth balls. He shouted at me,“Wewe sasa ni kulewa ama ni akili mbaya?” I don’t know if I shouted back, all I know is for days later my arm hurt where he had grabbed it.
Those two weeks feel like a lifetime ago.
In my back pocket, my phone vibrates. I pull it out and see it’s a text from Jeremy.
U hme?
Yes.
I cme?
I type yes but I don’t press send. Mum is still in the shower. I can hear the water running. I want her to leave before I tell Jeremy to come over.
I told Jeremy about it the same day I found out. On the phone, I broke down mid call. He came over immediately and we talked in my room, no one was home.
“Are you sure?” he asked. There had been as much terror in his voice as there had been in mine at the clinic.
After my near death, I took the test again at two other pharmacies, each time hoping for a miracle. But reality is a mighty contender, rarely defeated. As the news was confirmed twice and thrice, it went round for round with any hope I had and killed it after several blows. When it finally dawned on me that there were no miracles to be had, it took everything in me not to willingly leap in front of traffic.
“But we used protection,” Jeremy said.
I told him what the girl at the Pharmacy had told me.
“But I wasn’t rough with it!” he shouted.
“I think it’s possible.” I’d answered with quiet certainty. “It was our first time and we were both nervous. Maybe you didn’t put it on properly.”
Jeremy flinched.
“Are you serious? Come on! I’m a man, I know how to use that stuff!” He was breathing fast and heavily.
“What happened then?” I was angry myself.
“I dunno. You said you were safe. And you said a condom was enough. Why didn’t you just take those pills chicks take after?”
I started to cry then. Hot fat tears that left me with a headache later. Jeremy got up and came to the bed. He put his arm around me, woodenly.
We didn’t talk much after that. Jeremy was sulking and I was hurt. He said he needed to go home and think.
We didn’t talk much over the next few days or the week after that. In the meantime I tried unsuccessfully to forget about what was growing inside me. It felt like a malevolent presence that had attached itself to me, haunting my sleeping and waking hours and I wanted to exorcise it. I knew what my options were. The number the girl pharmacist had given me was already saved on my phone, and all I had to do was call, but the idea of what that meant terrified me more than the news she had given me. The alternative was much worse. I couldn’t imagine what would shock my mother more, the knowledge that I had a vagina or that I had used it without her permission.
*
“Makenna!”
Mum is standing at the foot of the stairs, glaring at me. I didn’t hear her get out of the shower or come downstairs. She is dressed. Her weave is brushed neatly back.
“Pole,” I mutter.
But she’s already walking to the door.
“I’m off,” she says, “Mama Millicent will drop me back when we’re done. There’s chicken stew in the fridge. Warm it up when your father and brother get home. Make sure Kyama doesn’t eat all the drumsticks.”
I follow her out. I see dark blue sneakers in the space between the gate and the ground as we walk to the gate. I hadn’t replied to Jeremy’s message, but he has come anyway. Mum pulls the gate open and stops.
“Oh! Hello,” she says to Jeremy.
He’s as surprised to see her as she is him. He smiles nervously at her.
“I’m Jeremy,” he says, extending his hand.
Mum only nods. I see her take in the thin eighteen-year-old man in sagging grey skinny jeans, red t-shirt, blue sneakers and uncombed hair with a mix of suspicion and barely concealed hostility.
“This is my friend,” I say. It comes out like a whisper.
Mum stands there nodding and saying nothing for seconds that feel like an eternity. Jeremy fidgets uneasily under her stare. I will her to leave.
“I’ll see you when I get back,” she says to me. Her stare is direct and I can see that my exam results aren’t the most important thing to her anymore.
Jeremy relaxes when she leaves. He starts to get inside so I step outside quickly and pull the gate closed behind me. I glance over at mum; she hasn’t yet turned the corner at the end of our street. She’s letting me know she’s not in a hurry.
Jeremy understands and steps back.
“Ameenda?” he asks, looking at mum’s retreating back.
“Chama,” I say.
Then he turns back to me.
“So you’re good now?”
Good. Meaning having the right qualities, untainted, commendable, worthy, morally excellent, well behaved, kind, agreeable, sound.
I don’t answer so he says, “As in you’re no longer pregnant?”
When I nod, his shoulders relax. He stands up straighter and flexes his arms like a man who’s just completed a hard task and needs to stretch and free his muscles.
“How did it happen?”
I tell him about the vaginal bleeding and severe pain in my abdomen that had started last night as a vague feeling of cramps, but which had increased steadily to a full blown flaming torch below my navel by the morning. I tell him that the doctor had given me two pain pills, sanitary towels and a glass of water, and then let me sleep in one of the empty examination rooms.
“Wa! We dodged a bullet, si ndiyo? And thank God it wasn’t a baby yet. That would have been worse. At least it was just…”
He waves a hand around to indicate nothing.
“A bunch of cells,” he finishes.
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about the bloody, slimy bits and pieces that slid into my underpants with the wrenching pain of the unwanted and that the doctor had said would be coming out of me for the next few days.
“I’m sorry I didn’t call sooner. These past two weeks have been crazy. That whole condom thing really scared me. I just really thought that we were safe, you know?”
I nod silently. I’d thought we were too.
“Maybe now we should just tuliza for a while? Maybe take a break,” he says.
“Okay,” I say, not meaning it.
“Will you be sawa?”
I say I will be. The tone of my voice must tell him I’m lying but he ignores it because he knows where it would lead and he does not want to go there.
We hug before he leaves.
As we hug, I see it. In the orange grey gloom of the evening, its long, thin body looks like an apparition, but then it flies closer to me and I can see the brown colour, the big behind and the wispy legs and know that it’s real. I pull away from Jeremy’s embrace fearfully and take a step back.
“What is it?” Jeremy says looking around, seeing nothing. “Is it your mum?”
I’ve always been afraid of wasps. They are mean and sting with persistence and without provocation. They hadn’t stung me that time in Jeremy’s room, but maybe I wouldn’t be so lucky now.
I blink rapidly and the wasp is gone.
“It’s nothing,” I tell Jeremy.
“Sawa, we’ll talk sometime,” he says. The relief in his voice is painful to hear.
It’s almost dark by the time Jeremy leaves. Back inside the house, I turn off the TV and start to draw the curtains.
*
I graze the pocket where the rolled up tissue wrapped sanitary is still tucked in, it’s a hard lump that’s pushing against my hip bone. “A bunch of cells,” that’s’ what Jeremy said, not a proper baby. In my biology exam, the final question in part A of the short answer section was, In what week does a human embryo develop a heart? I answered fifth but it could have been sixth. I wasn’t very good at biology.
I hurry up off the couch and rush upstairs to the bathroom where I pull out the wrapped sanitary from my pocket. It’s crumpled up and some of its contents have leaked into the toilet paper it’s wrapped in. I unroll more toilet paper and wrap it some more. I wrap until it’s the size of my fist. I hurry back downstairs to the kitchen and find a plastic bag from the overflowing cupboard filled with the same beneath the sink. I drop the wrapped sanitary pad in it and fold it neatly, and then I get out the back door.
At the very end of our backyard is a guava tree that Kyama and I climbed as kids and beneath it is a heap of dry grass; leaves and twigs that mum swept there so dad could burn over the weekend. Over the heap of fallen greenery, mum laid a rake and jembe so the wind wouldn’t scatter the leaves again. I walk to the foot of the tree and lay the black plastic bag and its contents on the ground beside me then pick up the hoe and start to dig at a brush free spot. When I lift the hoe over my head I notice that my hands are shaking and my heart is starting to race. I grip the handle tighter and bring it down too hard on the ground. It strikes a rock and bounces back up. The movement sends little electric tremors up and down my arms. I dig around the rock and when it is fully exposed I roll it aside and dig again and again and again. When I finish, I’m out of breath and sweaty. The hole is about a foot deep and even less wide. I pick up the plastic bag, unknot it, take out the tissue wrapped Pretty Girl and lay it in the hole and then cover it up again placing the rock over it. I stand in the dark by the shallow pit for a long time. Something whizzes past my ear. I duck and swipe viciously at it, but a second later I realize it’s a moth and giggle at my own stupidity.
Inside the house, a door slams, and the lights come on in the kitchen and backyard. I hear voices. Dad is home, most likely Kyama too. Mum would be along soon. I drop the tools back on the trash heap and go back inside. It’s time for dinner. I have to warm the stew and make sure Kyama doesn’t eat all the drumsticks.
Ruth Kenyah is a freelance writer and researcher in Nairobi, Kenya. She was a Storymoja Creative Writing Fellow from 2012-2014 and is currently working on other short stories as well as trying to write her first novel.