The Snow Angel Page 8

  ‘Open it!’ urged Janeth. ‘I can’t bear the suspense.’

  Makena removed the paper as if it was gold leaf not the sports page of the Daily Nation. Inside was an empty jam jar. A label made from a torn scrap of cardboard had been tied to the lid: ‘FILL ME WITH SNOW’.

  Her roommates were shaking their heads. ‘An empty jar? We are poor but you would have been better off giving her nothing. What snow is she going to fill it with, Diana? Are you going to climb inside?’

  Makena was so choked up she could barely speak. ‘It’s a long story and one for another day. But I promise you that if Snow was a millionaire, she could not have bought me anything more special than this jar.’

  She hugged her friend tight. ‘Thanks, Snow. I’ll keep it always. One day I’ll find a way to fill it.’

  In Mathare, there were two types of people. Those who lived by the motto: Mwenye meno makali ndiye mmaliza nyama: the person with the sharpest teeth is the one who finishes the meat. And those who believed the saying Msafiri mbali, hupita jabali: one who travels widely will pass the mountain.

  To Makena’s amazement, most people fell into the second category. The rays of light and love that shone through the darkness of Mathare were a source of daily wonder to her. Hope was everywhere. It found its way up through the dirt and desperation like a wildflower struggling through a crack in an inner-city pavement.

  The slum school nearest her shanty bore no resemblance to the one she’d attended. Optimistically named Success Academy, it was more barn than place of learning. Sheets of rusting iron were welded together to form a long, narrow structure barely bigger than Makena’s old classroom. Two hundred children crowded into it. There were no desks or chairs. Girls and boys of all ages sat on the dirt and shared a single toilet – a putrid hole in the ground with a metal screen.

  Despite this, the pupils smiled more readily than any she’d ever known and the teachers were smartly turned out and dedicated.

  One newly qualified teacher lived near Makena by the river. Every day she emerged beaming from her rickety shack and set off to the school. Makena watched her go with a lump the size of a golf ball in her throat. Some mornings it was all she could do to keep from running up to the woman and sobbing: ‘My mama was a teacher too.’

  Many slum women scraped a living selling bags of grain or beans, or making crafts from scavenged soda cans, cloth and leather. They nodded over their wares late into Mathare Valley’s firelit evenings, hoping a customer less poverty-stricken than themselves would help them feed their hungry children.

  It was deadly business. Nightly, they ran the gauntlet of the dreadlocked, machete-wielding Mungiki. The Taliban, who prowled the alleys seeking ‘protection money’ from slum residents, could be just as brutal. The lives of these women were short and unimaginably hard, yet they laughed more often and with a more intense joy than any Makena had seen out shopping in the fancy stores of Nairobi.

  As she and Snow picked their way through the crowded, broken alleys that afternoon, the red dirt squares between rang with cheers and groans as the boys fought fierce games using a jwala, a football made from tightly wound plastic bags and twine.

  Every boy in the slum dreamed of wearing the green and yellow uniform of Mathare United Football Club, one of Kenya’s top teams. The best showed off their skills in the hope they’d be spotted by scouts from Manchester United and other legendary clubs. For most, it was their only chance of ever escaping the slum.

  Snow gave a live commentary on the game as they walked. Makena barely heard her. She’d been in the slum nearly a month but she’d never lost the feeling of being prey, and not just because she was scared the Reaper would come hunting for her. There were eyes watching in every corner of Mathare Valley. Many were friendly or indifferent, but some were calculating.

  Makena feared more for Snow than for herself. Mathare Valley was packed with refugees from countries such as Tanzania and Malawi where children with albinism were being kidnapped daily. She’d heard whispers in the slum, where some talked of Snow as a ‘zero’ or an ‘invisible’. Snow pretended not to hear them, but the night sweats she suffered betrayed her secret terror that she was worth more dead than alive.

  They passed the last of the shanties and climbed the rocky path to the rim of the crater in which the slum sprawled. When they reached the grassy summit, the view left them spellbound for all the wrong reasons. Seen from above, the shanties and mud shacks were packed so closely together that they appeared to share a single roof. A pall of smog and nyama choma cooking smoke hung over it.

  ‘Mathare’s other name is Kosovo,’ Snow told her. ‘You know, like the European country where they had a big war. When people in Mathare saw the bombed-out buildings and concentration camps on the news, they said: “That looks just like our home!”’

  Surrounding Mathare were tilting blocks of social housing, crumbling and riddled with crime. Between them were still more of Nairobi’s two hundred slums, more pits of lawlessness and misery. Kibera, Nubian for ‘forest’ or ‘jungle’, was the largest in Africa and among the biggest in the world.

  Makena shivered, not just at the sight of them but because she had cramps. Janeth and Eunice had given her a bag of hot mandazi – pillowy, deep-fried pyramids of dough dusted in icing sugar, all to herself. Her stomach was in shock. It hadn’t been full for weeks. A film of sweat shone on her skin.

  The cramps faded and she smiled at Snow. ‘Thanks to you, Eunice and Janeth, I’ve had five magic moments already today: a snow jar, a beautiful sunrise, a shower, mandazi and The Karate Kid.’

  They’d had a fun afternoon at the Slum Cinema, watching Ralph Macchio defeat his Cobra Kai opponent on a crackling, pirated DVD.

  Beneath her floppy hat, Snow was rubbing aloe on her arms and face to soothe the sunburn on her pale skin. ‘You have at least one more magic moment to come. There’s the sunset, obviously, but I think we can stretch to a couple more.’

  She fixed Makena with one of her intense looks. ‘You miss your mountains, don’t you?’

  ‘A little,’ admitted Makena. To her, the mountains and her father had been one and the same thing, as if the same ancient lava crackled through their seams.

  ‘A lot. What did you say the highest peak on Mount Kenya is called? Bat something.’

  ‘Batian.’

  ‘Right.’ Snow sprang lightly up to the summit of the tallest heap of rubbish. ‘Come up here. Let’s pretend we’re sitting on top of Batian.’

  Makena joined her reluctantly. ‘That takes a huge leap of imagination.’

  ‘That’s why I gave you my gift – to help you make it. Didn’t you say that all you had to do was touch your jar of melted snow and, in your mind, you’d be sitting on top of Mount Kenya?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Well, then?’

  Makena couldn’t help laughing. She took the jam jar from her backpack, held it between her palms and closed her eyes. Blanking out Mathare Valley and the smell of rotting rubbish, she pictured herself sitting beside Lake Rutundu, breathing in the herby smell of heather. Snow glistened on Mount Kenya’s peaks. All around her was mauve-tinted moorland and eagles wheeled overhead.

  A rowdy group of boys brought her crashing down to earth. They began searching through the heaps nearby.

  Makena gave up on her vision but not on her ambition to some day fill her jar with snow. She nudged her friend. ‘You’re always telling everyone else to have a mission. What’s yours?’

  A dreamy expression came over Snow’s face. ‘I want to dance on a stage and have my name in lights like Michaela DePrince.’

  She dug in her skirt pocket and pulled out a page from a magazine. It had been folded so often it was ready to disintegrate, but Makena had no trouble making out a black ballerina in a brilliant pink tutu. She appeared to be flying – actually flying – over the red brick buildings in New York City.

  ‘That’s Michaela,’ Snow said proudly. ‘Isn’t she beautiful? She was a war orphan from Sierra Leone
.’

  ‘A war orphan?’

  ‘Uh-huh. When she was four, this magazine picture of a ballerina dancing The Nutcracker blew into her orphanage. She made up her mind that one day she would dance and be happy like the girl in the picture. Her teacher was killed in front of her and so many bad things happened to her, but finally some kind Americans adopted her. Now she’s a dancer with the Dutch National Ballet and I’m looking at her photo and dreaming of being happy like her. After I read her story, Mama bought me a ballet book and I taught myself some moves. It’s a circle.’

  Makena admired the picture. The young woman was so graceful and strong. ‘Have there been any albino dancers?’

  ‘Hundreds! There’ve been albino singers and actors and athletes too. Some are famous but those aren’t always the best. No one ever thinks about the nameless ones because they don’t sell expensive tickets, but a lot of them have done things that are far more important. They’ve helped people who are hurt or made war children smile. These are the legends in the real world – our world.’

  ‘But you still want to be on the stage with your name up in lights?’

  ‘Yes,’ Snow cried passionately. ‘Not because I want to be rich and famous, although that would be cool, of course! More because I want to inspire people the way Michaela has done.’

  Makena decided right then that when she grew up she too wanted to inspire kids to be proud of who they were. She wasn’t sure how, but she’d think of a way.

  Snow nudged her. ‘Read Michaela’s story out loud. Reading’s hard for me. The words go back-to-front and sideways. They dance, but not in a good way.’

  ‘You can get help for that,’ Makena told her. ‘Glasses or contact lenses.’

  ‘Here? In the slum?’

  ‘Maybe not here but when you’re a dancer on stage.’

  ‘Okay, I will. Now tell me what the story says.’

  Halfway down the page Makena came to a quote from Michaela. ‘The corps is the backdrop to the story—’

  Snow giggled. ‘It’s not corpse as in dead person. It’s “corr”, as in corps de ballet. It’s French. In the book my mama gave me, it said that’s the name for the ballet dancers who dance together as a group. The soloists, the principal dancers, are the ones who get all the attention, but the corps is like a family. They belong to each other.’

  The page blurred before Makena’s eyes. She’d once belonged.

  She struggled on: ‘Michaela says: “The corps is the backdrop to the story, a forest, a snowstorm, a flock of birds or a field of flowers. One red poppy in a field of yellow daffodils draws the audience’s eyes to the one poppy. However, I don’t think the answer is to cull the poppy. I think it’s to scatter more poppies about the field of daffodils.”’

  Snow tucked the article into her pocket. ‘That’s what I’m going to do. I’ll be a red poppy scattering the seeds of hundreds more poppies.’

  THE REAPER

  ‘Can I have one last request?’ asked Makena. ‘For my sixth magic moment, I mean. Would you dance for me? The sunset can be the backdrop and maybe me and those little kids coming up the hill can be your corps de ballet.’

  Snow lit up like a boxful of stars. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’

  Snow called to the eldest boy on the next-door rubbish heap. ‘Hey, Innocent? What tunes do you and your crew play?’

  He strutted across, drumming a rhythm on a tin can. ‘We know everything.’

  ‘We’re doing Slum Lake. Swan Lake, only in Mathare. It’s a ballet by Tchaikovsky. You wanna play for us?’

  ‘Sure thing. We don’t know no Chomsky but if you’re talking 2face Idibia, Pharrell, Akon, Beyoncé, Ladyship Black Mambazo, we’ve got the beats.’

  Makena wasn’t a dancer. ‘Two right feet,’ her mama used to tease. ‘Right for climbing but maybe not for dancing.’

  Snow wouldn’t take no for an answer and before Makena knew it she was following her friend’s flying feet (sort of) as she performed allegro and cabriole leaps. Innocent’s band sang and drummed up a storm on buckets, tins and a homemade guitar, and the sun set in a wildfire blaze over the rubbish heaps of Mathare Valley.

  Children came running from every part of the slum. Their audience grew by the minute. But it was Snow who was the star of the show. She never tired. When night descended and Mathare’s cooking fires and illegal lights flickered uncertainly to life, Snow became a girl of myth; free of gravity.

  Thunder blasted, bombshell loud. Makena, who had sat down because her stomach hurt, felt the ground shake beneath her. Lightning snaked across the dump. It illuminated Snow as she flew through the air, suspended above Mathare Valley just as Michaela had been over Harlem.

  A bulldozer ramped over the hill, dazzling Makena with its lights. A tsunami of rubbish came with it. Dirt spat in her eyes. Trying frantically to evade the crushing treads and stampede of children, she went tumbling down a dark slope. Unable to halt her fall, she rolled until she hit the road below, twisting her ankle.

  The pain was electrifying. For a minute, she thought her ankle was broken. It ballooned in an instant, making hobbling difficult and running impossible.

  A second bulldozer arrived and began demolishing a line of shanties. Its progress was overseen by aggressive, shouting men. Panicked residents were running everywhere. Police sirens added to the din. A security guard spotted Makena and moved threateningly towards her.

  Makena gritted her teeth and half-jogged, half-limped out of range. A chaos of children came flying from the slum. ‘Run, Kissmass!’ yelled a girl from her story group. ‘Run with us.’

  ‘Where’s Snow?’ called Makena. ‘Have you seen Snow?’

  A police car screamed into the street, drowning her words. The children sped off. Makena followed as fast as she could. People were tearing in every direction, some dragging possessions, but she couldn’t keep up with any of them.

  She became increasingly panicky and disoriented. A family tried to take her with them but gave up when Makena had to stop to rest her ankle. When she rounded the next corner, she was alone.

  Her stomach cramps had returned and a headache hammered at her skull. She hoped she didn’t have cholera. There’d been an outbreak in Mathare. Health workers had been distributing leaflets warning people to wash their hands regularly with soap and avoid buying street food. The mandazi now seemed a mixed blessing.

  Given the state of her foot and stomach, Makena decided that her best and perhaps only chance of surviving the night would be to do what she’d done that first night alone in Nairobi: find a bin and sleep beneath it.

  In the morning, she’d return to Mathare Valley and find Snow. She’d convince her friend to leave the slum. They could hitch a ride to Mount Kenya and live off honey and foraged roots and leaves. Snow was talented and resourceful and Makena understood mountains. Together, they’d thrive. And when they were old enough, they could save up and go to the UK or Europe, where Snow would become a famous ballerina.

  Anxiety added to the cauldron in Makena’s stomach. She kept seeing Snow suspended in mid-air as the bulldozer crested the rise. Had her friend escaped its crushing treads and great metal jaw, or had she…?

  No, Makena refused to allow the thought to take up residence in her brain. Snow would be as angry and sad as everyone else in Mathare Valley. She’d no doubt have a few cuts and bruises. But she’d bounce back. That was the thing about free spirits: they were indestructible.

  It was then that Makena noticed the Mercedes. It was idling by the side of the road, dust motes twirling in the red glow of its rear lights. There was no number plate on its bumper.

  Terror paralysed her. If the Diplomat was here, the Reaper wouldn’t be far behind. They were probably on the look-out for lone children.

  Lost girls like her.

  Like a beast from a fairy tale, an immense silhouette unfurled from behind the car. The Reaper had been leaning down, out of sight, talking to the driver.

  Makena dropped to the ground, desp
erate for somewhere to hide. Almost immediately, she recognised the street opposite. It was the one where she and Snow had picnicked on the day they met. If she could get to it without being seen, she might be able to hide under the market cart. She prayed it was still there. Either way it was a risk. The street was a dead end. If the Reaper or the Diplomat spotted her, she might end up trapped.

  The monster leaned down again, summoned by the driver. Makena crawled behind a low wall and inched forward. She was in luck. The cart was standing in the shadows, a tarpaulin hanging over it.

  The Reaper straightened. He strode away in the opposite direction.

  It was now or never. Makena made a break for it as speedily as her swollen ankle would allow. Unfortunately, the cart was further along the street than she remembered. Each step and every breath was pure torture.

  She was almost there when she tripped over a can concealed in the darkness. Its tinny clang reverberated along the silent street like a cymbal smashed by a drummer.

  Makena dived under the cart. Nothing happened for a moment. Then she caught the muffled thud of running feet. Her head was spinning; her heart slammed her ribcage. Had the giant seen her or not?

  He was walking now, his footsteps stealthy and sure. She could almost hear him smile. There was nothing she could do. Nowhere she could limp or crawl. She’d run out of options.

  The Reaper stopped beside the cart. He lifted the tarpaulin and reached in.

  SHIMMER

  Twenty minutes earlier, on the Meru–Nairobi Highway, Helen Stuart had clicked off her phone and run a hand through her messy auburn bob. ‘That’s it,’ she told her companion in the backseat of the Hearts4Africa Land Rover. ‘Official confirmation from Matron. We’re overflowing, over-capacity and, as per usual, over-budget. Every bed, sofa and spare mattress is occupied. We should go home. Don’t know about you but I’m so exhausted that I’m ready to check into The Best View.’