Show Me the Sky - Nicholas Hogg [60]
So I run harder. I catch up with him in the car park of a derelict factory. Pigeons flutter through the broken windows. Bits of glass everywhere. He’s scaling a fence. I shout, ‘Stay right fucking there,’ and the rotten wood splits apart. He falls backwards to the dirt, but bounces quickly to his feet. He stands before me with a length of splintered timber.
When he says, ‘Back off, motherfucker,’ in an American accent I realise I have the wrong man. Whoever this toe-rag is he’s not mine. And I’m ready to be the diplomat, explain the mistaken identity and walk away. But he swings at my stomach. I curl my body up and back like a cat. He swings again as I sway, swishing the air between us. When he jabs at my chest I parry the fence post with my forearm and clutch his wrist. I pull him close as a lover and butt him across the cheekbone. He goes down. I keep hold of his wrist and break it as he falls. It makes a sound like snapped cane. Only then does he drop the fence post.
‘Mvembo’s gonna fuck you up,’ he snarls.
I say nothing. I twist his wrist at the break.
He gargles another, ‘Fuck you.’ He goes on that if I have a problem with a woman, it’s not his. ‘I keep my girls on a close rein,’ he says. ‘You think the five-star hotels let the gutter rats past the door?’
And when he tells me he has friends in the police, I’m particularly offended. So I stand on his neck, my foot neatly across his windpipe. ‘You aren’t him,’ I say. ‘If I want to beat up pimps, I can do that in London. I’m very sorry I’ve made a mistake.’ Then I let him go.
He chokes a breath. He says, ‘My fucking wrist,’ and: ‘Damn right you made a mistake.’ He fumbles in his pocket. He drops a knife on the ground, and just before he clutches the hilt I kick him in the stomach. Twice. I leave him wheezing in the dirt. Then I walk away to find a drink. Filled with ice and whiskey.
After waking up drunk, hungover by midday and fooling myself I’m sober by sundown, I get into a taxi and ask for the Paradise. The driver, a shrunken old man, his wrinkled skin left behind on his diminishing body, simply stops the cab and tells me to get out when I ask if he knows a man called Mvembo. ‘Gangster,’ he says, as the spinning wheels flare up dirt.
Mvembo was the man going to ‘fuck me up’ according to the blue cap pimp I left crumpled on the street. The Paradise bar seems the most likely place in town I’d run into either of them. But it’s also where I’ll find Kemi, the girl who spent the night with Dominic Toon.
I take another taxi to the Paradise. Still quiet, just a few early- birds propped against the counter. All men. The girl I want to speak to isn’t yet here. I play and lose three games of pool with the barman. He knows Kemi. ‘She was here last night,’ he says. I don’t ask him about Mvembo, or the American. I sit on a high stool and wait, one eye over my shoulder. This is, I decide, the worst place in Mombasa for me to lie low.
I walk through the old town, down to Fort Jesus where shadows skulk from alleys offering bags of cannabis. Then I go down to the sea front and sit on a rock, watching the lights flicker across the bay. Moored fishing boats ride the waves rolling off the Indian Ocean. If I smoked I’d light a cigarette, but I don’t.
With the sun slid behind the town, silhouetting mosques and churches, the ramparts of Fort