Chapter nine

Let me tell you about something that happened to me during the past rainy season that still sends shivers down my spine up till today. It was during the short rain seasons where the water would form rivulets and roll down the lonely path to the shopping centre. It wasn’t really a big place, just a boring place with a shop they called ‘chamchi-tugul’ meaning love y’all in Kalenjin, a poshomill, a small barber shop where we always cried when our parents sent us to pay him a visit and a small house always under lock and key where we always peeped with a hope of discovering loads of money locked in, little did we know that it was the barber’s store room. The rainy season though never stopped us from playing our football games, shirtless of course. We played without our shirts, not because it was fun that way but just because some of us had only the one. We were two goals ahead, all credit to me for stopping the ball with my face twice though I almost went blind in one attempt and mad in another. The ball was getting heavier by the minute as it sucked water everytime it landed on the soggy ground, but the heavier it got, the more you enjoyed the game. The momentum had changed and everybody struggled to stay near the ball to prevent a clear shot from taking place. This is because the shots being produced were now not on goal but at some unprotected back and oh, the pain and itch when it met your lose skin folds. It was during this time, between my hysterical laughter and mouthful of mud that my mama called me. I almost cried. I tried the trick we boys had taught ourselves as a basic survival instinct, ignore. She called out twice and in the third, some fool shouted to me that I was being called, as if I was deaf and I tell you if she hadn’t been looking at me, someone would have gone home crying. I went to her alright and she sent me to the shops. She cautioned me from using the main road where our small pitch was located and instead sent me round the house and out through the small home shamba from where I passed in front of two houses  where the children and their mother were drinking some porridge from their enamel cups and I crossed slowly hoping they would call me in for some, they didn’t. There were rivulets as usual and I immediately put my bare feet in the larger one and started following its course as I headed to the shops, a very heavy, but tattered jacket covering my upper skeleton. I was still looking at the water when I saw something that a boy my age would never have imagined to see, not even my broke father. There in front of my disbelieving eyes lay a crisp fifty shilling note, stuck against a small tuft of grass.

I arrived at the shops with the self confidence of a mayor and ordered three mandazis and the small ‘monkey-bottle’ juice and started drinking without fully opening the lid to make sure it wasn’t over soon and ate two mandazis. It was at this time that I reached into the pocket to order what my momma had sent me. There wasn’t any money, only a hole. I checked and triple checked even the soles of my feet but it wasn’t there. It is then that it occurred to me that what I had collected was actually mine and it had fallen from the pocket and had itself carried forward by the rivulets and wait for me to ‘collect’.  The mandazi turned into a cold stone in my stomach and the juice into rainy water. The shop owner stared at me with cold eyes, paper bag in hand waiting for me to dump the money into his hands. The journey back home was a very long one, and oh how my momma had a field day on my bottom.