She meets women who humble her with their energy and optimism — women like Grace Amolo and Nouma Mwangi who set up a poultry farm on the eastern outskirts, and built a school in their community; women like Scholastica Nalo, a widow who supported four children with a small tailoring business, and has now taken on two apprentices.
Another group of women in Nyanza need funds to buy coffee bushes and lease land in an area where cholera has wiped out many breadwinners. Cholera, although easily treatable now, is still endemic in Kenya because of poverty and poor infrastructure, another consequence of the relentless corruption that sucks the blood out of a country and injects poison instead. Just like mosquitoes spreading their disease, she thinks. Didn’t that mad old lady who lived next door in London say something about cholera in Kenya? She smiles, remembering the crummy flat she left behind and her eccentric neighbours, and wonders: What happened to the cherry trees?
One day, her work takes her out to the coastal island of Lamu where a cooperative of local women has opened a thatch-roofed guest house near a popular resort. The long stretch of beach with its white sand and clusters of palm trees is idyllic; you can hear the swell and surge of the great Indian Ocean and the calls of the fishermen returning in their dhows at dusk with their catch. But you only have to go half a kilometre inland to encounter the poverty. Two of the women who started the cooperative are widows of fishermen lost at sea. They have deep-set wrinkled eyes from squinting against the sun, and lean muscular bodies like her Grandma Njoki. Before they received the grant to start the cooperative, they had worked as prostitutes in an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa that was destroyed in a bomb blast in 2002. They came back to Lamu with their savings and started their own guest house. Gradually other women from the island came to join them; there are seven of them now. Then in 2011 two British tourists were kidnapped by Somali pirates from a remote resort a few miles up the coast, and tourism in the area slumped. But the guest house was close enough to Lamu Old Town to feel safe, and gradually business picked up again.
She approves an extension to their grant for a further year, and sitting on the train from Mombasa back to Nairobi she ponders on how little she really knows about Kenya, and what a lucky and sheltered life she has led.
Berthold: A Perfect Day Out
You could say I was lucky with Lucky. I perfected my fake stammer while the real stammer all but disappeared. It was as if I was coming to life after a long hibernation, alert and curious about the world I had woken into.
One Sunday in autumn, with the sun bright and low in a cloudless sky, Stacey and I climbed the path at Alexandra Palace, our hearts beating slightly from the effort. At the top of the rise we turned to look back over the city spread below us, its steep terraces, leafy parks and pincushion of towers all smudged in a smoky haze: so much history, so much splendour, so much hum-drum.
This was Stacey’s idea of a perfect day out. Personally I would have gone for a cosy matinee at the Curzon, but she insisted that Monty needed his exercise. She wasn’t being nearly as pliant as I’d been led to expect from our earlier encounters, and I found this annoyingly arousing. She was wearing her fawn raincoat with high heels, and holding Monty on a lead. I was wearing my white trainers and linen jacket, and wishing I’d worn something warmer. I’d been recalling my visit from the fraud investigators.
‘Anthea and Alec — they’re quite a pair, aren’t they?’ She gave a sly smile. ‘Were you scared, Berthold?’
‘I was a bit.’ I bent down and threw a stick for Monty, who was racing up and down the hill with his tongue hanging out and a manic grin on his face. ‘I didn’t know whether they were investigating Inna or me.’
‘I did my best to get them called off, but unfortunately these investigations can gather their own momentum. It was because Inna’s Housing Benefit claim came through a different department. How is she, by the way?’
‘I’m not sure. I tried to persuade her to ditch that Lookerchunky bloke, but she was having none of it. Last I heard from her was a picture postcard from Crimea. Did you know Crimea was famous for its nudist beaches?’
‘Isn’t she a bit old for that?’
‘I don’t suppose that’ll stop Inna. She was never one for playing by the rules. So when did you realise that she wasn’t really my mother?’
‘That mad woman told me — the one who delivers sermons wearing a shower cap. I tried to warn you.’
‘Mrs Crazy? You believed her?’
‘One of the saddest aspects of my job is how little solidarity there is — I mean, poor people don’t stick together. They snitch on each other. You know, there’s a dedicated phone line in the council offices for people to report their neighbours. It never stops ringing.’
I felt a stab of hatred. That stony adversary, belligerent fruitcake, venomous God-botherer, over-coiffed old cow. I hoped she got a good long sentence for assault and battery and would be forced to let her hair dye grow out behind bars.
‘So all our efforts — the dementia, the forgotten husbands, the office fire, the casket of parrot ashes — it was all for nothing?’
‘It was a good laugh, wasn’t it?’ she giggled.
‘So where does that leave us now? I mean, what happens to the flat? Will I have to move out?’
‘Not necessarily. It all depends on who you live with.’
From the summit of the hill, London straggled southwards, pulsing like a living thing, vast and complex in all its grime and glory. A wave of emotion caught me off guard.
‘I’d like to live with you, Stacey.’ I just blurted it out without thinking, the way I had blurted out my invitation to Inna Alfandari, but as soon as I said it, a comfortable sense of certainty settled over me like a warm coat. ‘If you’d have me.’
‘Mm. I’d like that too.’ She smiled, then her smile opened into a laugh. ‘It would be great. Your flat is so spacious compared with my little shoe box. But,’ her smile wavered, ‘what about Monty? Pets aren’t allowed in those flats.’
I stared at the little mongrel that now stood between me and perfect happiness. He yapped a few times, picked up his stick, raced madly around in a circle, then dropped it at my feet and sank his horrible little teeth into my ankle. I moved him away quite roughly with my other foot but you couldn’t really call it a kick. She picked him up and held him to her chest.
Snuggled inside the fawn lapels between those magnificent breasts he turned his beastly head and surveyed me with a look of triumph. ‘Yah!’
‘Couldn’t we pretend he belongs to someone else?’
‘Berthold, you can’t build a whole life on a fib.’ She threw me a severe look. ‘I mean — you’ve already tried it once.’
The mongrel smirked. ‘Yah, yah, yah! Grrr!’
‘There was no need to go to all that trouble to pretend Inna was your mother. Under the bedroom-tax rules, any occupant would do.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ The wide blue sky seemed to spin for a moment, then settle with a bump on the treetops.
‘Most people don’t. You could have inherited the tenancy from your real mother anyway.’ She giggled. ‘Of course most people wouldn’t just take a complete stranger into their home like you did, Bertie.’
‘Well, if I’d known …’ If I’d known, I might have chosen somebody different; somebody more normal. But then I’d have missed out on all the globalki, slotalki, klobaski, the vodka, the wailing folk songs and off-kilter history. A whole journey into a different world, in fact. ‘Still, no regrets.’