It's Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong Read Free Book Online

that I’d bought the most expensive lock on the market when I moved in–and slotting the chain into position, I’d fall asleep in the early hours, stressed and fraught. In my dreams, a huddle of burly figures in formless grey overcoats with blurred, dark, hatchet faces, battered their way in to shoot us both in our separate rooms.
    In the morning, after a restless night, I’d wake feeling embarrassed by my melodramatic thought processes. If I was finding John’s stay a bit of a psychological ordeal after only a few days, what must it be like for him? How had he endured the last few years, living with that anxiety day by day? Yet he seemed astonishingly cool. For the most part he ignored his collection of mobile phones as they constantly vibrated and shrilled. Occasionally he’d pick one up, disappearing into his room to hold a quiet, intense conversation in Gikuyu or Kiswahili. But usually he would just look at the display, check whowas trying to make contact, then put the handset down. The one that rang with most persistence was his line to State House.
    â€˜It’s very interesting,’ he mused. ‘They haven’t cut off my State House mobile phone. My safe in the office hasn’t even been opened. And my secretary is still at her post.’
    â€˜It’s their way of telling you that you can still go back,’ I suggested. ‘They’re saying, “It’s not too late, the lines are still open.”’
    Yet even by that stage, I had begun to recognise what constituted signs of stress in the Big Man. His booming, seemingly carefree laugh was the equivalent of most people’s titter–a sign of tension, not relaxation. The more nervous he became, the more heartily he laughed. He wasn’t sleeping well either–I gave him some of my sleeping pills when he mentioned the problem–and his mental fatigue was evident in his tendency to tell me the same things over and over again. His sentences were like ripples on the surface of a pool–they gave a hint of the thoughts churning obsessively in the depths below. I could guess what those might be: How on earth had it ever come to this? Was this the right path? Where did he go from here?
    The best way of relieving the stress was exercise. John was the kind of dedicated workout enthusiast who knew which machine targeted exactly which muscle group. One of the first sorties we made from my flat was to tour the local area scouting out which gym had the best weight-training facilities. Working out–a three-hour process–was not just a hobby, he needed it, needed to feel the adrenalin coursing round his body if he was to stay focused and sane. Other men might have started working their way through my drinks cabinet, but my fridge filled up with cartons of fruit juice. John, iron-disciplined in this as in so many things, had turned teetotal during his time in State House, when he had noticed that winding down from a stressful week with a bottle of whisky had become a habit, and that the habit was becoming increasingly hard to break. It was typical of him that he wouldn’t let himself slip back, not even now, when he had the best of excuses for needing the odd stiff drink.
    His other recourse was religion. Having spent so much time in Britain, John had registered the scepticism, if not downright antagonism, of his European acquaintances when it came to matters religious. His Catholic faith was something he never talked about with his mzungu friends, I noticed, turning instead that side of himself with which they felt most at ease. Only the Virgin Mary medallion around his neck and the rosary ring on his finger–one metal bobble for each Hail Mary to be recited, removed only during weightlifting–gave the game away. But one of his last visits before leaving Nairobi had been to call in on the Consolata Shrine, where troubled minds went in search of solace. And in those fraught early weeks in London