“The police could not get a word out of him,” he said. “They said he was out of his mind.”
“Will they hang him?” Ruguaru asked.
“They shot him.”
“What?” several voices exclaimed.
“They killed him.”
There was silence.
“Bad,” Nyoka said, covering his head with his blanket. They heard him sob.
“Very bad,” Ruguaru said.
“Terrible,” they said.
“Sad,” they said.
Having thus expressed their feelings, they lay down for the night. Some quickly fell asleep, to escape the reality of the bedbugs and whitewashed walls, while others prayed silently, muttering into their blankets so as not to be heard, and sobbed and wept for their souls.
“Meja,” Nyoka said suddenly. “What happened to Maina?”
“What I have just told you,” Meja said to him. “It was in all the newspapers.”
“They could not have been mistaken?”
“They had his photograph.”
He tried not to remember the photograph, his friend lying naked on the grass covered with mud and blood, his dead eyes staring vacantly at the sky. “Career Criminal Shot Dead,” the newspapers said.
“Did he look mad?” asked Nyoka.
“He was dead,” said Meja.
“But did he look mad?”
Meja tried to remember the look on Maina’s face.
“He looked the same,” he said. “He looked like Maina, only dead.”
“He was my best friend,” Nyoka said. “I taught him to crawl through windows.”
He turned over and covered his head. Meja thought he heard him sob.
In the newspaper photograph, surrounded by armed policemen and curious onlookers, Maina had looked old and wasted and covered in mud and blood, and dead. The police denied it, but eyewitness accountss said they had seen policemen drag him from a swamp, where he was hiding, and shoot him dead.
Meja looked at the Maina’s sleeping place by his side. Affande would send another prisoner to fill the vacancy, but in everyone’s heart, the space would never be filled.
He lay staring at the dim light bulb above him, and through a haze of tears, saw the ready smile, and remembered what Maina had told him when he was new in the city.
“There are only two ways in the city. There is Main Street, and there is Back Street. Then there is way home”
From the distant highway came the sound of traffic speeding to the city, with its tall buildings, its beckoning neon lights and the unfathomable backstreets.
THE END
By the same author
Rafiki
Crossroads
The Boy Gift
Baba Pesa
Winds Whisper
Dukuza
The Cockroach Dance
Going Down River Road
The Big Chiefs
Frog in a Blender
Carcase for Hounds
The Mzungu Boy
Weapon of Hunger
Christmas Without Tusker