Nairobi Heat by Mukoma Wa Ngugi Page B

take the good and the bad and hope for the best.’
    ‘I wish my ex was as philosophical,’ I said to her as I made a move towards the spare bedroom.
    ‘Philosophy has nothing to do with it,’ she said with a laugh. ‘We don’t ask for those that we love. Maybe I am just resigned to my lot?’ She paused. ‘And just so as you know, you are bleeding all over my floor.’
    I had no idea what she was talking about.
    She pointed to my shoulder. ‘If it is not as bad as it looks, there is an emergency kit in the bathroom cabinet,’ she said and took a sip of her hot chocolate.
    I couldn’t understand what was going on. Maria didn’t even pretend to want to know what had happened to my shoulder, or why I stank horribly. And O hadn’t explained. The American in me wanted to call it denial – but if it worked for them, it worked.
    O was leaving the bathroom as I walked in. I took a shower and washed the stab wounds with Dettol. They stungharshly but they weren’t deep. Having cleaned my wounds I bandaged my shoulder, found a cleaning cloth in the bathroom and went to the sitting room to wipe up the blood.
    Having cleaned up after myself I said goodnight to O and his wife, who were sitting on the couch, looking every bit the normal couple, and went to bed. Before I could fall asleep, they started making love. I sat there listening to them, thinking about the life my parents had mapped out for me. I missed it. I suppose we all miss some other kind of life, a parallel life.
    Finally, O and Maria left the sitting room and went to their bedroom. For a while all I could hear was the murmur of their voices, followed every now and then by laughter, and it was to this sound that I drifted off to sleep.

I WOULD RATHER DRINK MUDDY WATERS
    I was sitting at my desk. Mo walked in naked, in high heels, but the other cops went about their business as if she wasn’t there. She came to me and unzipped my pants. As my penis slid into her, she took my gun and placed it on my forehead. Suddenly she had a huge basket of vanilla ice cream. With her bare hand, she started feeding it to me in bigger and bigger quantities until I felt like I was drowning. My stomach was getting bigger and bigger and my penis smaller and smaller until it slid out of her. And just when my stomach was about to burst from too much ice cream I woke up, belching and looking for my dick. I couldn’t help laughing. Who has a wet dream that is also a nightmare?
    I looked at the time – it was two in the afternoon. I dressed quickly and went to find O. He was in a cloud of smoke in the kitchen, smiling contentedly. This wasn’t the same man I had been with the day before and as I stared at his smiling face I realised that I was also in a better mood, in spite of everything – I was well rested, had made a little bit of progress, and had an assurance that I was looking in the right places.
    ‘Listen, you schizoid sonofabitch,’ I said to O halfplayfully, half annoyed that we had wasted a whole morning, ‘we have work to do.’
    ‘Yes, we do,’ he said, ‘but bars around here don’t open till four.’
    He had a point. The woman in the photograph was our only lead and if she worked in a bar it made more sense to go looking for her in the evening.
    O made his omelette for me and incredibly the masterpiece seemed to taste even better the third time around. ‘It needed a little less onion and a little more coriander,’ he explained as we were eating. Then he contemplated me for a while. Finally, he said, ‘Tell me, how does it feel to be black in your country? Tell me how it really feels …’
    ‘Don’t you ever just smoke in peace?’ I said, raising my hands up into the air.
    ‘I am a philosopher by nature, you know,’ O replied. ‘So, tell me.’
    ‘Look, O, I can’t say I know. How does it feel? When I am by myself I don’t feel black. I mean, how do you define yourself? What would you say you are?’
    ‘A Luo,’ O answered.
    ‘So, are you a Luo