No sooner had she put a cigarette between her lips than a willowy waitress with a tremendous smile blew over to our table. Beautiful in the way caucasian men like their girls beautiful. My interviewee looked up at her with a look that could melt plasticโa look that can cause a blood clot. I waited for her to say something acerbic and sarcasticโas is her natureโbut she thought the better of it and chose to be the bigger girl.
When she came back she sipped her latte and sighed. My mother had an affair with my father. He was married.
And as with such illicit affairs, things started going tits up at some point and they soon began locking horns. I was very young but I remember their fights in our house in Upperhill; booming and loud and endless.
Their hatred for each other would blow through our house like a wrecking ball. I remember my dad beating my mother into a pulp, breaking her hand one time. One time he beat my mother so much, she bled all over the bathroom tiles. There was so much blood it looked like an abattoir. She was feisty. She clawed back. She openly disrespected my father. She hurled ugly things at him; names mostly and they must have wounded him. She called him stupid, an idiot. A whore. She cast him as a villain to my brother and I.
Eventually, she moved out with us. I was maybe four. We then moved around a lot, staying with relatives and a couple of her friends. At some point we lived in a lodging in Nairobi West, stealing soap from the housekeeping trolley. Best past-time ever! She met a man she fell in love with and told him I was her sister, and my brother was her cousin. Our relationship was vicious and virulent. I was terrified of her. She would beat us savagely like she wanted to kill us.
