Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi Read Free Book Online Page B

that? You scared those motherfuckers with your motherfuckers last night. I did not know you spoke black American.’ He laughed in delight.
    O slipped in and out of Americanisms easily – Americanisms that had filtered into Kenyan culture through movies and music videos. And he did it fluidly because he wasn’t self-conscious about it. I, on the other hand, brought up by black middle-class parents, had been trained from an early age to disdain colloquialisms – Ebonics was forbidden. That was a long time ago, but rightly or wrongly I was brought up believing that to make it in the United States black people had to speak proper American English. The change in my diction had obviously surprised O.
    After breakfast – just as good as the previous day’s – I went to the bathroom for a shower. I waited for the water to run hot, but I was out of luck – a cold shower again. Back in my room I put on jeans, sneakers and a T-shirt and grabbed a light jacket which would easily hide my gun when I put it on.
    As soon as I walked back into the kitchen, O pulled out a deck of cards. The only game we both knew was Crazy Eights – a rather childish game, but there was nothing more to do except wait. We played one long hand and then gave up.
    Every cop hates down time. It’s the worst. It feels like the rest of the world knows something you don’t, and everything that is not related to the case feels like an interruption, but there is nothing to do except wait. O was a talker, so we sat around shooting the breeze for a while, trying to keep our minds off the waiting game.
    ‘Your wife, tell me about your wife,’ he finally said.
    What the hell, I thought, it was as good a time as any to get into the personal stuff. ‘Childhood sweetheart. We grew into each other … Know what I mean? Broke up several times, but kept coming back for more. So, we got married,’ I said, trying to sound flippant.
    ‘And then you grew apart?’ O asked.
    ‘That’s it. I don’t know how it is being a cop around here, but back in the States being black and a cop has some … complications. She said she couldn’t stand my being a cop. The truth is our paths drifted further and further apart. By the time she was getting her MBA, I was getting my badge; she went corporate, I went to the streets. You know what I mean? My street life didn’t jive with her ambitions … Finally, I think she just stopped loving me. Perhaps we never stood a chance from the beginning.’
    Did I miss her? Hell yeah, and the more she couldn’t stand me the more I wanted her. The more life in the streets took stuff out of me, the more I needed her. ‘ “You want to consume me!” Those were her last words to me,’ I said to O.
    It takes a long time to be fair to your ex. I had thought it had been long enough, but the bitterness with which I had spoken suggested otherwise.
    ‘Listen, man,’ O said, sounding stoned, ‘I know just whatyou mean. Last night I wanted to consume my wife …’ He paused. ‘What a beautiful word: consume.’ He let the word roll off his tongue a few more times.
    ‘I think, at the end of it all, my wife hated me, and that was one of the hardest things to accept,’ I continued, feeling that now I had started my confession I had to get it all out in the open. ‘I couldn’t reconcile myself to the fact that over the years she developed a basic contempt for me and found my work petty. “A simple man after simple truths,” she liked to say at the end of every argument.’ I paused and looked up into O’s bloodshot eyes. ‘I knew things were coming to an end when she started giving me this look. I had never seen it before, and I can’t really describe it, but it contained a fucked-up mix of contempt, resentment, self-loathing and love. I mean, she would bite her lip and look deep into my eyes as if she was trying to tell me something telepathically … It was creepy.’
    ‘Shit, man, you should have just asked her what she was