‘You don’t have to pretend to be enamoured. I won’t be offended if you have somewhere else to go.’

‘Stop it. Close your eyes for a bit.’

Emma nods, then puts her hands in the pocket of her coat and curls her legs underneath herself. Just before she closes her eyes she says, ‘Sweetboy76, who’d have thought it would lead to all this?’

Chapter Thirteen

Kindred Kenya

October 2020

Kiama

It’s lunchtime and the streets are busy, Kiama keeps checking behind himself, slowing to allow those walking too closely to pass in front. Overly risk-aware, that’s what Dad always rips him for. Even though they both know what it’s rooted in.

‘Why is it so busy?’ Yvonne asks. ‘Does no one here work?’ She looks again at the directions to the Kindred Kenya offices she had taken down this morning when she finally managed to get through to the number Cynthia gave.

Kiama flips around quickly as someone bashes into his shoulder, but it’s just a lady rushing for the bus, she doesn’t even look back or apologise. He decides that he hates Nairobi, its crowds and dirt, its noise and traffic. Even the memories from before are crappy.

He remembers being here as a kid and sitting in a hotel restaurant with Mum and one of her expat friends. They spent a whole afternoon talking and laughing with each other while he sat in the middle, desperate for something off the dessert trolley, which Mum refused because he had been ‘playing up’ earlier that day. Then there were the few times he came into the city with Purity on errands. That was the worst, trying to keep with her as she weaved through the crowds, her little legs powering quickly through the streets she knew so well. He was always terrified of getting lost in such a big, unfriendly place and would grip the strap of her handbag.

In the first few weeks, before he began school, he spent a lot of time being dragged around with Purity. Mostly visiting family, the street children she called ‘son’ and women who looked a hundred years old and called her ‘Auntie’. She seemed to know everyone.

‘I can see the sign,’ Yvonne says, ‘there, at the end of the street. Finally.’

Kindred Kenya is wedged between a newspaper kiosk and a hairdresser’s. They push open the door to a steep staircase, which smells of frying food and burnt sugar, and go upstairs.

A lady in a green head wrap greets them at the top. ‘Habari Gani,’ she says.

‘Hi, we spoke to Makimei on the phone this morning,’ Yvonne says, putting on the voice she probably uses at work. When he first called her, it’s the voice she used, one so bland and neutral he wasn’t sure if he had the right person.