1. Giraffes In My Garden
or, the start of the greatest friendship in the world.
Come on sweetheart
let’s adore one another
before there is no more
of you and me.
—Rumi
There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.
—Emil Nolde
When we first moved to Mombasa, my mother used to homeschool me. Lessons took place on our dining table and consisted of math and German. She also had an atlas of the world, so I learned the capitals of the countries; and a big book of animals, so I learned which animal fell into which genus. I had a set of thirty colouring pencils, and my first works of art concerned animals copied from this book.
We started school at eight in the morning after my father left for work and stopped at twelve thirty when he returned home for lunch. In between, she allowed me half an hour of play time, which I spent drawing my animals into the habitat they belonged. Sometimes, I mixed them up. I placed a zebra in the forests of the Amazon or married off a penguin and a tiger and placed them into the heart of the Savanna. Starlings would dance in the surf of the Indian Ocean, and giraffes sat at a table in our garden. This annoyed my mother to no end, because she thought I hadn’t learned it right.
School time was all very structured, which helped my mother feel safe in this new place, I suppose, but it made me miserable. To add to it, I didn't have a single friend.
“Papa, take me with you,” I’d beg my father on most mornings as he was leaving the house. And he would have too if not for my mother. She was deadly afraid of letting me out of her sight.
There was a saving grace, however. Every few weeks or so, for a day, she’d go into fits of rage, shouting at either me, my father or the poor lady who worked for us, cleaning the house and washing our clothes, who was too afraid of my mother to do anything but nod. My mother then locked herself in her bedroom and didn’t emerge until the evening, eyes swollen and face a blotchy scarlet or the palest yellow I’d ever seen, so pale that it wasn’t even yellow anymore— like a banana that had lost its peel.
On those days, she forgot about me, and I got to ride along with my father as he drove his dusty, white, single-cabin Toyota pickup from site to site until we stopped for lunch at a hotel in the middle of town and ate fish and chips in its restaurant. I loved that pickup. Two roads away from our house, under the boughs of a flame-violet Jacaranda that still stands there today, my father would pull over the pick-up.
“Fancy a ride in the back?” he’d ask.
Then he’d speed over the bridge that connected the North Coast to the island. Standing up holding onto the cabin, I’d let the salty wind of the creek kiss my nose and lift my two chocolate braids behind me.
After the bridge came a crossing that almost always had a lot of children playing nearby in their frayed shorts and smudged t-shirts, kicking a ball made of bound together plastic scraps or running barefoot with their little wire push-cars. I’d watch with envy. If we needed to wait for traffic to cross, they’d call, how are you today? In return my father would blow the horn in a delightful rhythm, and the children would chase after our pickup in fits of laughter.
On one such afternoon my father took me to one of his new sites. He was building a temperature controlled warehouse for a coffee exporter.
The site was in the industrial part of the town, close to the harbour. Apart from the walls around its perimeter and a little shack-like structure inside, there was nothing standing there yet. But it was littered with building materials— metal beams, concrete blocks, mountains of sand, cement mixers. And there were workers going about everywhere, their heads covered with hats fashioned from old cement bags to stave off the heat.
It didn’t take me long to find something to do. I saw the tallest sand mountain and decided it would make a good climb. When I reached the top and looked around, I noticed a Land Rover honking at the gate. Someone was running to open it. In the front seat sat a boy.
After they drove in, his father quickly stepped out and disappeared off somewhere, probably to find mine, but the boy remained sitting, his arm resting on the rolled down window.
I scurried down the heap, sand seeping into my tennis shoes, determined to get to him before his father returned and drove away. I arrived, tucked my hands into my little shorts pockets and declared my name.
“I’m Anna-Maria.”
His hair was a thicket of disheveled curls, almost the same shade as the pale rust of the sand mountain.
“What were you doing over there?” He bucked his head towards where I'd come from.
“Climbing. I might be a mountain climber when I grow up. Do you want to have a go?”
He didn’t look convinced. But he opened his door and stepped down anyway. He was quite a bit taller than me, at least a head, probably shoulders too, and I tried to stand straighter. And then—“Race you,” he called suddenly, and before I knew it, he’d charged off.
“Not if I race you first.”
In less than a second I was running after him. It was exhilarating.
Of course he won. But I didn’t care. I grabbed his hand, yanked his arm up into the air and yelled as loud as my lungs would allow.
“Papa, look at us!”
***
Later at the cars, when our fathers were getting ready to leave, his said to mine: “Bring her over to play. It’ll give Kirstin a chance to convince your wife to put the poor kid in school.”
That was all, and then they left.
“Please can we go? Please.”
I must have said it at least two hundred more times that afternoon.
“I’m going to die if I never see Mark again.”
My father chuckled.
“No one’s ever died from losing a friend they met only a moment ago.”
“But I didn’t just meet him a moment ago. In here,” I clutched my hand to my heart, “I’ve known him my whole life.”
Now my father belted out a proper laugh. He had the most heartwarming laugh of any I’ve heard.
“I hope you never have to endure a broken heart, my girli. But if you do, I want you to know— the greatest works are born from heartache.”