I wanted to be like Malcolm X! Fuck it! Shit! I wanted to be Malcolm X, you know. I was so unhappy that this man was killed. Everything about Africa started coming back to me.

Then one day I sat down at the piano in Sandra’s house. I said to Sandra: “Do you know what? I’ve just been fooling around. I haven’t been playing AFRICAN music. So now I want to write African music … for the first time. I want to try.” Then I started to write and write. In my mind I put a bass here … a piano there. … Then I started humming, then singing. I said to myself, “How do Africans sing songs? They sing with chants. Now let me chant into this song: la-la-la-laaa. …

Talk of comedy! Yesterday, Friday, I was here in Kĩambu to collect the largest wages of my life. I was with friends. Now I am back in the same town, without the money, and nobody knows me. The prison guards shake their heads to every question concerning the fate that awaits us. A Saturday in ruins, I note in my mental diary.

One night, desperate for the loo, I stepped on a giant slug and it squelched between my toes in long green tubes. I think that’s the night I became a soprano. After that, I made myself a salt path every night to dispose of them. As young, first time tenants, we had no idea that we could complain – we had to pay the whole term’s rent up front, so we had no leverage at all. God, it was awful, but we loved having our independence.

My room was a desert because it was barren. True, it was filled with books, photographs, clothes, lotions, hair creams, perfumes, a bed with a firm mattress, blankets knitted by my grandmother, bad paintings, candles, old letters, and new shoes. But those things had lost their meaning. It was as though they belonged to someone else whose life I had been dropped into, whose life I wouldn’t have minded torching until it was nothing but ashes.

He was my baby brother and I was supposed to take care of him. The fact that I had nothing to give him filled me with shame. The fact that I didn’t want to talk to him filled me with shame. I didn’t want to talk to him because I knew he would talk about Anabel. I didn’t want to think about her, so I couldn’t think about him. I shoved my phone back in my purse, left his text unanswered. My father, I thought, would have been disappointed in me.