My father had a dusty white pick-up for work, which
he sometimes took me in to the construction site. While he spoke to the
foreman, I wandered through the stacks of steel rebars. At the beams, I
balanced, one white trainer in front of the other, hopping onto the next and
then the next, in whichever shape they lay. The challenge was not to step
off the beam. The ground beneath was a sea of poisonous water.
Also, the site was an ideal place to find
stones. I searched out the smoothest, flattest ones from the large piles,
rubbed them in my palm and dropped them into my little shorts pocket for hop-scotching
on our verandah later on. I would play against myself, favouring one
stone then the other.
One afternoon at the site, from my place on the top
of one of the sand mounds, I saw a Land Rover arrive with a boy in the front
seat. His father stepped out and disappeared off somewhere to talk to my
father, but the boy stayed sitting with his arm resting on the open window
sill. I stepped, sideways two skips at a time, grains seeping into my
runners, down the mound.
“I’m Anna,” I said up through his window. I
tucked my thumbs into my pockets.
He bucked his head. “What were you doing on
the sand heap over there?”
“Climbing. I might be a mountain climber when
I grow up. Do you want to come and try?”
He opened the door and stepped down. He was
taller than me. He ran his hand through his hair – he had curls almost
the same shade as the pale rusty sand mound.
“Race you,” he called and sprinted off.
It took me only a second and I was after him.
Of course he arrived at the peak first. I didn’t care. I hailed
from the top as loud as my lungs would allow. “Daddy, look at us!”
The boy was Mark; his father owned the godown, his
grandfather the whole coffee estate in the highlands around Mount Kenya.
He lived with his parents on the South Coast, across the ferry, past the shanty
houses with tin roofs in Likoni, past the turn offs to big beach hotels where
Europeans came to holiday, in a forest of coconut trees, by a broad stretch of
white powder sand.
Our families grew close in a short time, and soon
my mother, my father and I were spending the weekends at Mark’s house. I
learned how to swim in the spot of Indian Ocean in front of their garden.
Mark and my father taught me – from my father to Mark, from Mark to my father,
I paddled, clinging to each one. Back and forth, until I could move like
a fish. Above and under water.
Mark taught me how to sword fight with sticks we
found in the garden. He showed me the right stance from which to jut
forward and attack, the right angle to raise my arm in defence.
We dug giant holes on the beach, connecting each
one with a tunnel that eventually lead down to the water so we could watch the
surf erode our underground city.
Under the sun, after a long afternoon,
the copper streaks in Mark’s hair muted to a soft gold. The freckles
under his tan would spread wide over his nose and across his cheeks.
Sometimes we stayed inside and lay on our stomachs on the bedroom’s cool
concrete floor and invented worlds with his collection of Playmobile
figures.
Our favourite business though, was playing Vasco da
Gama, the first European explorer to reach Mombasa. In the afternoons,
while the parents sat in the sitting room under the ceiling fan with their
ice-drenched gin tonics, to escape the heat, Mark and I snuck to the other side
of the fence, to the abandoned plot next door.
We trekked, swords in
hand, through weeds that reached our knees. The doors to the broken down
house were locked, but we fashioned its dilapidated verandah into our
ship. Many times, by mistake, I stepped on one of the thick black thorns
that grew from creepers along the edges of the beach, and Mark pulled it from
my heel. When a branch scratched my knee, he blew the dirt from the
gash. “You alright?” he asked. I nodded and on we went.
But one day, I was seven years old, Mark was inside
doing schoolwork and I was playing with my father on the beach.
My father was swirling me in the air. With a
swish, he swung me high, and held me flat like a plank above his head. He
swooped me this way and that, while he jogged along the water’s edge, so I
could pretend I was a bird.
“Faster, Daddy, faster! You have to create a
wind, to lift my wings.”
“You’re asking the impossible.” He laughed
out. “It’s the middle of the day.”
“Try. Just try, Daddy.”
He picked up speed, and I became a seagull, gliding
through the spotless sky. The sticky air flattened my face, fluttered my
eyelashes. Torrents of giggles spurted from my mouth, I couldn’t stop
them.
“I have to pee, Daddy,” I screamed between
peals. “Stop! I have to pee.”
With an easy whoosh, he landed me onto the warm
powder sand.
“Stay here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a
second.”
“You’re not going to run all the way up to the
house, are you?”
“I have to, right away, or I’ll pee in my
swimsuit.”
“You can go in the water.” He winked at
me.
“That’s gross.”
“Try it, fish do it all the time. And you
don’t have to worry, the sea washes away everything.”
“Fish do it all the time?”
“Of course. They don’t have toilets in the
ocean, do they? They have to pee in the water.”
“And jellyfish and the crabs too?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay, I’ll be a crab.” I scuttled sideways
into the sea, with my arms and legs bent, until the ripples reached my
shoulders, and I was treading water.
When I came back out, my father and I decided to
bury ourselves in the sand. So we started to dig the holes. My back
was to the sea, and I was facing the garden, burrowing away like a frenzied
dog. I happened to look up, and there was Mark, sprinting across the
lawn. I jumped to my tip toes, lifted my hands to my mouth and yelled as
loud as I could.
“Mark, we’re over here. Come bury yourself
with us.”
He zipped on as though he hadn’t heard. All
the way to the edge of the yard, where the bougainvillea fence with its five
hundred magenta blooms separated this garden from the next.
“I think he’s gone to the Baobab,” I said to my
father. “I’m going to go and get him.”
And away I skipped along the beach until I was
standing under the huge, old Baobab.
The tree reminded me of an elephant. It was a
pinky grey, and probably the oldest and fattest of all the trees in the
world. It had no leaves at the moment, because we were in the middle of
the dry season, when the Baobab loses its foliage and looks like a ghost
tree. But its branches were made for adventure: intricate, wide and
hundred-fold. I couldn’t wait to be old enough to climb them.
The
smooth trunk of this particular Baobab divided at the root, just where it left
the ground, and grew up in three parts; Mark and I often stepped into the
centre, leaned against one division and propped our feet up against
another. And we’d sit inside the centre of the tree. We played there
often, competing with the ants, who were also quite fond of the middle of the
old Baobab.
Some of the branches stretched all the way out over
the sand. A few times the tide had come up so high that when Mark jumped
down from the lowest branch he landed in the surf.
His parents had left a wooden ladder leaning
against the trunk for him to get to the lowest branches, and by the time I
reached the tree now, Mark was already stepping off the top rung onto the first
one. I wasn’t allowed on the ladder or up on any of the branches.
But as I stood with my neck craned upwards, looking at him, an idea burst into
my head.
I had been dying to climb the way Mark did. Every time I
saw his legs dangling off that first branch or his arms gripping the one above,
pulling himself up to sit even higher in the tree, my body itched to do the
same and I imagined it was me doing all those things. But now – now I was
going to do it. I was going to go all the way up.
Ingrid
Haring-Mendes has just
completed her first novel, Tears of a Painter, a story set
against the backdrop of East Africa. When she isn't writing you can find
her behind her camera or constructing elaborate Lego structures with her two
boys.
See Brian Henry's
schedule here, including writing workshops and creative writing
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