Where The Young Go

The day Nkatha fell began so unexceptionally ordinary in every way but for the warm, clear skies in the middle of July. The yellow sun above haloed bright over the snow-capped mountain so that everything its light touched gleamed in the startling hues of emerald and blue. And all about, stretched out far past the point where the earth dropped into the sky, were rolling farms of coffee and tea. Within it all was a little red-roofed house on the side of a hill.

Sunny days were few and far between this time of year, so on that day, her mother laid out an old blanket on the grass in front of the house. She then watched as they marched out one by one, each armed with their own special task. Kagwiria, the eldest, brought out the tea kettle filled to the brim and sloshing this way and that with milk tea. The younger daughter, Nkatha, trailed close behind, her feet still muddy from herding the cattle. In her hands was a precariously balanced tray of their mother’s sweetened pastries. Father passed around the blue-rimmed metal tea cups with the red and yellow flowers on the side. He then sprawled out his large frame on the blanket, taking Nkatha down with him as she giggled and kicked all the way. Mother clucked disapprovingly, her eyes shining with the beginnings of a smile.

On another day, far in the future, Nkatha would look back and wonder if there had been any signs of what was to come. She would go through the events of that day, forward and back and forward again in choppy, disorganised bits, searching for missed clues.

There were none, of course. It had all happened so fast. 

One moment, she was there with her family, the sun sitting hot on her cheeks, a half-empty cup at her feet, her mother’s gentle hands plaiting a braid on her head as her father enraptured them with tall animated tales. The next, she was yanked under into a dark nothing that swallowed her whole.

The fall felt like a simulation of death that, for a frightening moment, Nkatha thought she might have forgotten how to breathe, that perhaps her lungs had erased all memory of the last twelve years. She opened her lips then closed them, like a fish out of water grasping for the assurance of life.

Above her, Nkatha saw her mother’s face shrinking into a pinhole of light until all that remained was the erratic flailing of her own limbs.

Then she emerged, bursting out into the new world wide-eyed and out of breath. At the age of twelve, Nkatha had become – in all the ways that mattered to the world – a woman.

Nkatha’s world began to seep colour then. 

Her father, this large, bounding being she had once believed to be made up entirely of laughter, became distant. Meanwhile, her mother pounced heavily upon her every morning before the last dregs of darkness washed from the sky. Those once gentle hands twisted grotesquely into chains that bound themselves to Nkatha and slammed her to the ground with every misstep. 

Nkatha, with her two hands, two feet, and unbent back, found that she was being chiselled so finely until one day, she knew, her face would meld into her mother’s, with its tight lines and beaten hide of a skin that might have been beautiful once.

Amid it all, Nkatha found solace in her sister’s shadow. Over the first few weeks following the fall, the new woman learned to seep into her elder’s soles. Like an eight-limbed body, the two synchronously moved from one chore to the next to the farm and, in the evenings, to the river bearing large clay pots dense with the sweet wafting sprigs of petrichor.

That very first step onto the river bed was a transmuting experience for Nkatha. A simple movement, deft in its pacing lest one slip and fall into the blackened mud, shifted her between two domains. The first domain from which she emerged was a giant viscous bubble swollen with the deafening orchestra of noise – even in the quiet – that rose and rose over the course of a day until finally erupting into a choking molten heat with the dark of night. The second domain was an oasis of brilliant blues, pulled fast from the skirting edge of the sky to wind wide with rageful waters through thick-barked trees and the trilling giggles of the recently fallen. It was in this second domain that Nkatha would find that first breath of fresh air that had eluded her all day.  

Nkatha made new friends by the river.

There was the spindly and pudgy-faced Kendi, a chirpy little thing no more than a year younger than Nkatha, who always had a flurry of thoughts flowing through her in succinct separate bits. Sometimes, the bits felt like the colour yellow, like sugary sweet gelatine, or green, like cool soft grass on a sunny day. And other times, usually when the air was colder and the clouds were thick with rain, Kendi’s bits poured out in these maudlin grey, viscid messes that would slither uninvited into the hard-to-reach nooks of Nkatha’s mind.

Then came the day Kendi was cut, and suddenly, the bits stopped altogether, no matter how hard Nkatha pressed for their return.

It was on that very first meeting with Kendi by the river that Nkatha learned of the irimu, the fearsome creatures of the wood. “They are this big,”- Kendi said as she made herself large by standing on her tiptoes and stretching her arms – “and fat,”- she puffed out her cheeks – “and feed on human flesh!” – she snapped her teeth into the air, rousing squeals from her enthralled audience.

Gakii, who was often quiet and by large kept to herself, jumped in then. She had been hunched over by the water, scrubbing a troublesome piece of cloth against a rock in tireless concentration, when she heard Kendi’s tall tales of the irimu. Gakii considered herself an expert on everything to do with the monsters of the wood, and according to her, the irimu were not, in fact, fat or large or tall. They were thin and short with claws and fangs that they used to carry you to their buffet in the woods like ants. She should know; she’d seen them with her own eyes.

Kendi shot Nkatha a look then. Nkatha, who had been standing on the fringe listening in, felt suddenly included.

Her chores long forgotten, Kendi asked Gakii why the irimu hadn’t taken her. She added, “You would have made quite the meal after all,” and shook her nothing bottom to the mirth of her audience. But Gakii didn’t seem offended; instead she just rolled her eyes as though she were used to jokes about her weight.

Of course, she wouldn’t mind, Nkatha mused. 

When she first saw Gakii, Nkatha had two thoughts: the first was that the new woman would be married off quickly because of her incredible beauty, and the second admonishing the first for thinking such a cruel fate for the new woman. Nkatha was right, of course. Soon, Gakii was heavily pregnant, a state she would be in for the short span of her life. 

“Why would they take me?” Gakii said. “I’m not one of those women.”

Those women – the bad women. The women who did not want to be cut, did not want to marry who was chosen for them. Women who had fallen too far to be caught and, in their descent, had sunk into the jowls of monsters of the wood, called to them by the scent of their disgrace.

It was the names of these taken women that Nkatha would hear carried in the whispers by the river. Kinya. Mwende. Kinanu. Gone. Gone. All gone. Snatched up from their beds and gobbled up like a hearty meal.

For several nights after, Nkatha struggled to find sleep. In the dark of night, shadows took on the amorphous shape of water and created beasts where there were trees, hulking men in place of hang coats and wall-scratching spirits where there were skittering mice.

Eventually, Nkatha told Kagwiria what she had heard about the irimu and the girls they took.

Good, her sister had said, that they were now in the belly of a beast rather than bleeding downstream.

One evening, Nkatha and her sister arrived home from the river to find their father with news. He had met a man while on his travels. A rich man. Who was looking for a wife.

Within days, Kagwiria was wed, and Nkatha’s only confidant was gone. Suddenly, the weight of the world that had been shouldered by two was hers alone to bear.

In the isolation, her mother’s clenched fist enveloped the sky, digging deep into the earth’s red flesh so that the world took on a new shape. Days morphed into each other. Mornings were nights were afternoons. Dreams were made up entirely of her waking day so that she roused from every slumber with the haunting sense of no sleep at all.  

And when preparations began for Nkatha’s cutting, the very act of existence became unbearable.

So she left

without thought or plan or even a coat – sprung forward only by the force of her fear – Nkatha slipped quietly from the only home she’d ever known.

The only home that her father and his father before had ever known too. 

Before the fall, Nkatha had imagined herself as one of them, these sons who were buried in the very soil that they were birthed upon. She came to learn, however, that that soil did not belong to her, it belonged to them, and after her cutting she was to be transplanted elsewhere just as Kagwiria had been transplanted, as her mother had been transplanted, and her grandmother before them, and that her semblance of home would be wherever her feet were made to land. And even then, that new soil she would have to learn to stand steady upon would not belong to her either.

On the morning of what she would one day call her ‘great escape’, the sky above was still a dark cloak over the earth. Nkatha let her hands lead her from the clay walls she knew as grey to the wooden fence overrun by pink and purple hibiscus flowers and finally to the skeleton tree whose gnarled branches creaked and moaned with imaginary ails at the slightest breeze.

The very tree from which Grandfather had been found swinging by a bewildered passer-by who mistook him for an ill-hung scarecrow.

That tree, Grandfather’s tree, stood at the precipice of all life.  

Before the ‘incident’, her mother had often been heard saying in low sympathetic tones, “He’s not all there”. Yet whenever Nkatha had looked into grandfather’s podo bark eyes, she’d thought perhaps there might have been too much of him instead that’d been stuffed into the shrunken body of a morose old man. 

As strange as everyone thought him to be, Grandfather had always been kind to the children. He never would have let them marry off her sister, Nkatha knew. And more than anything else, Nkatha was certain that grandfather would have caught her before she fell. 

The skeleton tree stood at the mouth of the sloping main road. From here, she could go anywhere. Even in the ink of darkness, the land of the living opened up to her with its dizzying possibilities. Yet the only path that called to her led to the river. 

On this familiar path, she knew every scraping bush, every stumbling root. Every rock, every hanging branch. And when she finally heard the rush of the water, she sat by it, unmoving, not knowing what to do but allowing herself the privilege of indecision, if only for a while.

She must have sat there for an hour, maybe more, when the sky begun to pink dully above. As the young light slowly worked over the treetops in its descent, it peeled back what had been hidden in the dark. Blinking, Nkatha was startled to realise she was not alone. 

In a cloud of her own fear, brought forth by the revelation of having company where she had thought there was none, Nkatha saw an apparition. A fanged demon. A nightmare that spilled shadows where it stood-

In one light, the creature was no larger than herself. In another it bore sinew as wide as a tree. It had canines so large they looked like tusks in one face and no teeth at all in the next. It had the scales of a mucous green one moment and then a tar black coat of towering feathered wings that hang heavily upon its back. In this feathered form a slight breeze brushed over the creature’s wings so that even while standing still it looked like it was flying.

Her dark winged saviour.

The words must have rung as clear in the creature’s mind as they had in Nkatha’s for its transformation abruptly stopped. In that moment, Nkatha found that the darkness in the creature’s eyes beckoned to the hollowness that had been festering inside her since the fall.

Then the creature began to move deeper into the woods and as though bewitched, for she surely must have been bewitched, Nkatha followed.

Nkatha walked silently behind the irimu through the heavily wooded forest. Above, like stars in the sky, thin strips of sunlight pierced defiantly through the blockade of leaves above to wink in and out of the enclave of trees. This light dulled the edges of the world so that Nkatha began to feel as though she were in a dream. Sometimes, however, a sudden clarity overwhelmed her, bringing with it the smells and feel of the forest into such harsh focus that she would stop walking and sway dizzily on the spot. Nkatha would look back then at how far she had wandered off. Fear would pound in her ears. Her chest would tighten. In such moments, the irimu was nowhere in sight. But only for a moment. Then, the edges of the world would slowly grow soft again as the air reclaimed its dewy sweetness and the irimu returned before her. Fear dissipated, her chest lightened and Nkatha would pick up the dark winged creature’s trail once more.

Nkatha followed the irimu for hours. By high noon, her feet were crusted in mud and blood. The forest had begun to thin as well, and the trees opened up to another world of high fences and square houses. Nkatha knew right away that this was where the foreigners lived, this place that her father and the men of the village had spat on the ground each time they spoke its name. This was the school. She had imagined it as a vile and filthy place, yet the ground around it was swept, the hedges were kept, and she could hear the chatter of life on the other side.

Exhausted, Nkatha collapsed by the school’s gate. Hours later, in a semi-conscious state, Nkatha felt them rather than saw them. She felt their anxious feet crowding around her. She felt their strong hands lift her from the ground. And then, through leaden eyes that refused to stay open, she saw the dark-winged silhouette of the irimu disappear into the forest as she was carried into the school.

Several years passed before Nkatha would allow herself to ruminate on those she had left behind. Perhaps it was the deeply inebriated state she found herself in that night that gave way to it, but in such a place of remembrance where pain met guilt, Nkatha saw them again, all at once, for what would be the very last time.

She was in a hot Nairobi pub. Tobacco smoke hung sourly above her head like a grey velvet mist. Her hands were stained with ink from the faulty typewriter that had become an extension of herself over time. Even now, her fingers flexed as though in search of it. The big war was over, and a new one had begun rumbling heavily beneath the country’s centre, demanding to be fed its due. Nkatha was with Kendi that night, who had arrived at her doorstep a few months before, close to a decade after they had last seen each other, in the middle of a rainstorm no less, soaked down to the bone and shivering so hard Nkatha feared she would break, carrying nothing on her person but the clothes on her back and three coins sewn into her pocket. 

As the two women huddled around the small table, cradling past-lukewarm beer, Nkatha saw what felt like a familiar face from the corner of her eye. When she turned fully towards it, she instantly knew the woman was much older than she should have been. In fact, she shouldn’t have been there at all. Yet there she was.

Nkatha was struck dumb by the startling thought that this must be her childhood friend Gakii all grown up, that her bones had reached up past the red mountain soil to become marvellous limbs now slung carelessly above her head in dance, that her face had blossomed forth towards the sun to open up like so into a woman’s knowing smile.

She was not alone, this impossible vision. Right there beside her on that diminutive dance floor was the dancing figure of her sister Kagwiria.

Kendi caught Nkatha watching the dance floor. There were a handful of plain-faced couples and nothing else, yet her friend’s eyes were trained forward with such intensity that Kendi concluded she must have wanted to dance as well. With the strength and balance of one immensely inebriated, Kendi dragged her equally drunk friend to the dance floor.

On a stuffy wooden dance floor flooded with the lulled crooning of a broken-hearted jazz man, Nkatha danced with her ghosts.