Two Years of Wonder - A Memoir

Chapter 2: Ivy and Maurice

Ivy and her family lived in Kariobangi. Kariobangi was a nice place during the day. There were many children to play with, but Ivy did not like Kariobangi at night when there were noisy people, drunk from local brew, that would hurt you if you went outside.

But otherwise Kariobangi was a place to call home. Ivy and Maurice liked to go down to the stream and throw in plastic bags, to watch them flow along until they disappeared in the tunnel that went beneath the road where all the matatu stages were. When she had been younger Ivy thought that this hole led to hell and that if you went down it you never came back because the devil was waiting for you there. However, one day when she had gone on a trip with her mother they had walked to the other side of the road to catch a matatu and there Ivy saw where the stream came out and she realized it did not go to hell, at least not here, but just kept going along on the other side of the road. She looked to see if any of their plastic bags were still there waiting on the other side but none were. Her mind raced with the new horizons that this represented: if the bags were not still there and they were still floating they would be thousands of miles away by now. Ivy could not even imagine what the world would be like so far away. There might be places like Kariobangi but with completely different people, names, and matatus. Maybe far enough down the stream it turned into a river and that was where wildebeest would cross and get attacked by lions and crocodiles—she had seen that on a television once.

She and her brother had to be careful when they went down to the stream because sometimes there were chakora—scavengers—there. Scavengers, street boys, could be very dangerous. They would stand in the water sometimes looking for metal to sell to the metal collectors. Or sometimes they would be so high on glue they would just be confused and try to drink from the stream, but they might fall down and drown. One time one of Ivy's friends, Winnie, threw a stick at two street boys and they chased after her and beat her. Then her family came and beat the two street boys until one was dead and the other they put a tire around, filled the inside of the tire with petrol, then lit it on fire. He kept calling out for water until he fell down and died. Ivy saw both their bodies—their faces looked funny, all swollen so their eyes were tiny slits. Their skin was covered with mud and rocks. Sometimes she saw the burned boy, his skin red and black like burned chicken, in her dreams.

So when there were street boys around, Ivy kept Maurice away from them. She knew she could beat up regular boys that might decide to disturb them, but street boys were a different matter. They were crazy like animals and did not know pain, because of the glue they sniffed. That was likely why crowds had to burn them.

Ivy walked alongside Maurice when they went to school. However, lately she had been feeling tired and sick like her mother. Some days Ivy's friend Anne would have to accompany Maurice to school. Once Ivy's mother took her out of school for a whole term so she could rest. It had helped but when she had returned she got very bad marks because she had missed so much. Plus, she did not like the idea of Maurice being alone at school without her to look out for him.

When Maurice was sick he was taken to the doctor and often got better. Ivy would never get as well as he did. She wondered if it was because when you got older you were weaker—her parents certainly seemed weak. When Ivy asked if she could go to the doctor, her mother often told her the doctor was too expensive and she would just have to be strong.

☼

Ivy's mother survived so many beatings from her father, even the beating with the belt, she was sure that her mother could survive the illness that had infected her chest. Ivy told her brother Maurice that their mother was a strong woman, a fighter—which was where Ivy got her pugnacious spirit from—and that soon their mother would grow well and be back to normal.

But Ivy had been wrong. Their mother could not defeat her sickness. Ivy cried when they buried their mother in the ground next to father's other two wives. Many of their father's other children came for the funeral and one of them, Bahati, never left. She moved in and began to take care of Ivy, Maurice, and their father. People thought she was a new wife but Ivy's father had to explain that she was one of his daughters from his second wife.

Bahati thought that Ivy and Maurice should be in school so she took Ivy to the doctor and bought her medicine (she could because her husband had a good job). In a few days Ivy was feeling better and she started attending school again, but for a while her marks were not very good because she had missed so much. She was also very tired at the end of the day and often did not do her homework. The teachers would hit her knuckles with a pencil if she did not do her homework, but this did not bother her much—it did not hurt nearly as much as punching or being punched by someone. She would try to do her homework, but often she just wanted to go to sleep when she got home. At the end of the year they even told her she would have to repeat the grade. This did not surprise her but she was still very embarrassed.

When the next school year started, Ivy was already sick again. She was repeating it just like the year before, she realized, with the sickness and everything. She wondered if she would be fifty and still in standard four. The good news was that Maurice was the top of his class, so if she was not a good student and failed out of school, she was not too worried, since she was sure Maurice would grow to be smart and get a job to support both of them.

It was while she was in her second year of standard four that her father died. Maurice would not play or talk for several days after. Ivy did her best to distract him, to comfort him by reading to him, and buying him sweets, which he unwrapped and ate, without his usual smile. Ivy was also sad, but more so because Maurice was. She did not think she would miss the beatings from her father. She was more afraid that their father's ghost would come back and haunt them or that they would become poor. Many people came for the funeral, more people than for her mother's funeral. Because Bahati was around there was lots of food prepared this time. Bahati did not even go to the burial; instead she stayed home with her friends and finished cooking the food.

Ivy's father's other children remained the next few days for the reading of his will. When it was read, there was great fight with lots of yelling. People were very upset. Then they left very quickly and soon it was only Bahati, her husband Raphael, and her baby Emanuel left in the house.

Ivy knew better than to ask right away what the commotion was about. The next day, however, she learned.

Charity, another daughter from Ivy's father's second marriage, a full sister of Bahati, wanted Maurice. Her son had died the year before and she only had daughters. What she wanted more than anything was a new son. She had begged for Maurice, but the will was very clear.

Ivy and her brother were to stay together. They had not been left to anyone in the family, but rather to the parish priest.