3
That last Sunday of the year there were still visitors at the orphanage. They carried their apprehension like a badge a day after the election results were announced. All who passed the gorilla pit noticed the slightly built, light-skinned young man with brown hair, a zigzag bolt of lightning on the left side of his scalp, above one ear. He would have been thought good looking, but there was something wrong with the face – a tightness, a lack of mobility.
Soon the crowds would arrive, some from church, others rural primary school children in cheap, ugly browns and purples, wearing leather shoes with no socks, smelling of river-washed bodies, road dust, the corn-cob life, meals on a three-stoned hearth. Jimmy knew all about these children – had lived among them, and become one of them after his father had left and his mother had taken them to her parents’ in Kerugoya for six months.
On holidays like today, foreign tourists would crawl out of minibuses and crowd the fence as they flipped through the pages of Lonely Planet Kenya, carrying water bottles, cameras, distended stomachs and buttocks, with their wiggling underarms like astronauts on the moon. They watched with strained smiles as their children actualized Mufasa and other television illusions, as they chatted about cutting their trip short, with all that was going on. The children made everyone jump, clanging the metal bars of the cage, trying to get Sebastian’s attention, sticking out their tongues at the immovable hairy figure and having their photos taken. When the warders were not looking, they would throw paper cups and other odds and ends at Sebastian, who threw them back.
When the sun crossed its highest point in the sky, faraway screams rent the air. The gazelles and impalas stopped grazing and looked up in their wary way, tensed to accelerate from zero to a hundred as they had always done. The old lions seemed to grin, yawning at a sound they understood only too well, and licked their chops. Smoke billowed in the air from a distance, and loud popping sounds could be heard. In half an hour, as if in response, the crowd had thinned, and Jimmy was left practically alone beside Sebastian’s cage. In the beautiful, quiet afternoon they started their dance, small mimicking movements they shared. Scratches and hand flutters, heads bowed forward and swaying from side to side.
Jimmy listened to the faraway sounds once more and said, ‘That must be Kibera. Maybe time I also left, old man.’
Over the last six months Sebastian had started to avoid making eye contact with Jimmy. At first Jimmy had taken offence, then he realized that Sebastian’s eyesight was failing. He had cataracts, and his eyes and cheeks were stained with cakes and trails of mucus. Sometimes Sebastian would join their weekly ritual of movements for only a few sluggish moments, then turn away and slowly walk to the shade.
Now they could hear screams coming from Kibera and Jimmy looked up to see a large mushroom cloud as a petrol station was set ablaze in Kenya’s largest slum. Sebastian raised his head ever so slightly to catch the breeze, and he began to pace, nostrils flaring and mucus streaming. He lifted his palm and beat it on the ground along with the faraway popping of gunshots. Jimmy had read all the books there were on gorillas, and he knew about their sense of community, their empathy – their embracing of death.
Jimmy had been born not far from State House where the President lived. The house he remembered smelled like the Animal Orphanage. It smelled of the giant pet tortoise that had disappeared when he was eight. After he had cried for a week his mother brought him Coxy, and the house came to smell of rotting cabbage and rabbit urine. Later, when he was older, Mum allowed him to keep pigeons, and they added to the damp animal smell of the house. It smelled of the bottom of the garden where he eventually strangled Coxy and the second rabbit, Baby, and drowned their children, overwhelmed by three squirming litters of rabbits; the piles of shit to clear. His mother found him crying at the foot of the garden and said in consolation, ‘What are rabbits anyway? Your father is a rabbit. Always up in some hole.’