Blood & Milk (12 page)

He looked horrified. “No.”

I burst out laughing and put my hand on his arm. “I was kidding! I’m joking.”

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Not the
o’remiti
, but we will get you some
mswaki
.” He looked at my armpits, then sniffed with a scrunched up nose like I was rank.

Mswaki was the plant they used as a deodorant. I barked out a laugh and pushed his shoulder. “I don’t smell!” Well, I didn’t think I did. I smelled my own armpit. I didn’t stink at all. Much.

Damu pushed my shoulder and laughed. “Joking.”

I shook my head at him but couldn’t help but laugh. “You totally got me!” I shoved the twig in my mouth and chewed, scrubbing it against my teeth. “I really miss toothpaste,” I said, the words a jumbled sound around the twig in my mouth. “Your brand of Colgate really sucks.”

“Our brand of what? What is brand?”

I waved him off. “Never mind.”

Then Damu turned and his smile slid away. He looked to the ground and took a discernible step away from me. There could only be one reason. Given Kijani was away, it had to be Kasisi. And sure enough, there he was. Up the river where we normally bathed, he stood on the riverbank watching us.

I smiled at the chief. I think he liked me. Either that or he thought I was completely insane and therefore good entertainment. Kasisi smiled back at me, just as other elders joined him. As they prepared to bathe, Damu and I took our leave.

“You okay?” I asked as we made our way back to the kraal.

Damu nodded, but he hardly looked convincing.

“He never saw us do anything,” I said to reassure him. “We were laughing, that is all.” Damu never responded. “If it bothers you, we don’t have to… you know, do what we do in bed. It is a risk, I know that. And if you say no more, then it’s no more.”

Damu shot me a nervous look, and his lips twitched. “You want no more?”

“Oh, I want lots more,” I said. He almost smiled. “But I will do whatever you want.”

Damu stopped walking. “What we do, Alé…” He struggled for the right words. “What we do, is my only joy.”

“Oh.” And just like that, his words squeezed my heart.

“It is in all my life that I have something for me. That make sense of my heart. Not toward women, but to men, it make sense now. Because of you.”

I reached out to touch him, needing to comfort him, but given our exposed location, I pulled my hand back. I could only hope he saw compassion in my eyes. “Damu.”

“So please you not tell me I don’t have you.”

I shook my head. “You have me. I won’t deny you anything. That I have made you happy and made you see that what you desire is not wrong”—I put my hand to my heart—“that heals something inside me.”

He looked at me for a long, silent moment and smiled. “You not want to stop?”

I shook my head. “Never.”

He started to walk again, his peaceful demeanour back in place. I wasn’t sure why I’d said I’d never want to stop. Never was just as much a promise as the word forever. I should have been stunned by my choice of words, but somehow they felt right. I hadn’t yet explored what Damu meant to me exactly, I hadn’t allowed myself to think anything of it. Was it simply opportunity? A sexual fix after what felt like an eternity of being alone?

I didn’t know what to call it or what classification of relationship to name what we had.

At the end of the day, it didn’t matter. We just were. Damu had spent his entire life on the outside of his family, of his people, for reasons that were not his fault.

I couldn’t help but draw the parallels to my own life.

I understood his pain because I’d lived it. My family wanted nothing to do with me unless I stopped being gay.

It had taken me eighteen years to realise that love shouldn’t come with terms and conditions. When I’d finally found the courage to stand on my own two feet, to not deny who I was, then Jarrod walked into my life.

It was similar for Damu. I’d literally walked into his manyatta and been the first person in his entire life to treat him as an equal, to treat him with the respect he deserved.

When I’d struggled with my desires and where my fantasies had taken me, at least I had television and the Internet to help me. I could read and research, I could join forums that were safe places, and we could talk anonymously about our greatest fears and hopes.

But Damu had none of that. He’d admitted he’d had desires for men, and knowing that would be a death sentence, he had no one to turn to. He had no one to talk to, no one to tell him it was okay. He must have spent his entire life in a permanent state of confusion and thinking there was something wrong with him.

Until I got here.

I just hoped it wasn’t going to be his downfall.

“We herd in crater today,” he said brightly.

“Really?”

“Yes. No grass here until the rains.”

“Will we see elephants?”

Damu grinned at me. “Possibly.”

I had a bounce in my step the whole way there.

* * * *

Walking down into the Serengeti crater was something not to be believed. The sky was an incredible blue, the air was clean and crisp, and the endless grasslands were browns tinged with swirls of green, making the waterways easy to pick out.

Damu and I had to spread out, keeping the small herd of goats between us. Bringing the farm animals into the crater in the small-rains season came with risks. Predators saw them and us as easy targets.

“Lions?” My voice was an octave higher than normal.

Damu laughed. “Yes. Just keep watch for other animals.”

“Why?”

“Other animals will see and run away. But you not see lion coming.”

I stopped cold. “Oh thanks. That is
not
reassuring.”

All he could do was laugh. We herded the goats down the rocky embankment, which the goats navigated easily. Damu did too, each step carefully placed and expertly taken, whereas my old sneakers let me down. The grip was gone―the soles completely smooth―the mesh material on top was torn, and the original colour was no longer recognisable. I slipped and slid down the rocky incline, and when Damu was certain I was okay, he laughed at me some more.

I went to one end of the herd, Damu at the other and we held the long sticks that Kasisi had given us and kept the goats in line. I kept looking around me, checking the longer grasses for movements of a possible lion or cheetah.

Considering the hundred metres between us, Damu had to whistle to get my attention. “Watch the goats,” he said, pointing to his eyes then to the herd.

“What if a lion comes?” I yelled back.

“Roar at it,” he answered. I think he was joking. I mean, seriously…

I yelled loud enough for him to hear. “People give Australians a hard time about our wildlife, but at least we don’t have lions and cheetahs and rhinos and hippos.”

“Not to forget the black mamba snake,” Damu said with a grin. I could almost see every tooth in his head. “Make eyes bleed.”

Oh, Jesus Christ
. I spun around, looking at the ground, and Damu laughed so hard he had to hold his side.

I had to wait until he’d finished before I could reply. “Not funny!”

He just laughed and went back to tending to the goats, and after an hour or so of quiet between us, he whistled again, but this time he pointed his stick to the far horizon. I spun around to see a family of elephants, walking in the distance. Probably a few hundred metres from us, three full-grown female elephants, a juvenile, and a calf were plodding along, no doubt on their way to find water.

I put my hand to my mouth, in shock and awe.
Oh my God
. Real elephants, wild and free, right in front of me.

Then I noticed some zebras a ways off and some gazelle, some water buffalo. It looked like a postcard picture or something out of one of the travel brochures I’d seen a thousand times but never really appreciated. Until now.

I hadn’t heard Damu approach me. “You like?”

He was beside me now, so I turned to look up at him. “It’s beautiful. It’s so perfect, it doesn’t even look real.” But then I took him in as well. Standing proud in his red shuka and holding his long stick as he surveyed the Serengeti, he looked just as remarkable. “You are beautiful too,” I said. My own words surprised me. “This land, the animals, you. Everything.”

My heart started to hammer, a nervous flutter. Something I hadn’t felt in a long time. It was foreign and strange, and I recognised it for what it was. It was affection. I still couldn’t put a name to what Damu meant to me. Not because there wasn’t a name that applied, but because I wasn’t ready. But I could no longer deny that I had feelings for him…

Does that mean I’m letting go of Jarrod?

I didn’t think I ever would. He had been part of my life for a reason, and by the same logic, he’d left my life for a reason too. I had screamed at any god who would listen.
Why, why, why take him? What sense did it make that his life was cut short? What was the purpose of such a senseless death?

And now I was faced with a possible answer.

Had it been to find Damu? Was it not Jarrod who, in my dreams, led me here? Was he telling me to come here, not to find myself or not to learn to live again, but to find Damu?

My mind reeled, splintered into a dozen different directions, and all the while my heart thundered, my blood pounded in my veins.

And standing in the open plains of the Serengeti, as the African wildlife meandered in the distance, I realised one thing. I was alive. My heart beat, my blood pumped, my lungs squeezed, and nerves fluttered in my belly. I was alive.

It had only taken me over twelve months of non-living to realise. To get on a plane and fly to the other side of the world, to live a life so foreign to my own, to meet one man who would bring me such comfort and warmth when I had none.

Damu, seemingly oblivious to my internal revelations, chuckled and shook his head. “Men cannot be beautiful. Women, yes. The sunrise, the breeze, the rain, yes. Me? No.”

I put my hand on his arm and hoped he could see the sincerity in my eyes. “You are the beauty in those things for me. The sunrise every morning, how the breeze moves the tall grass, the rains to nourish the ground. Without you Damu, none of these things would exist for me. You make them beautiful.”

He stared at me for the longest moment before a shy smile crept over his face, and he looked away. Only then did he realise some of the goats had wandered from the rest of the herd. He ran after them, and we spent the next few hours at opposite ends of the herd. I would catch him looking at me, though, with a hint of wonder and confusion in his eyes, and he’d quickly look away as he fought a smile.

I was reminded that this was very new to him. Not just our relationship, but friendship in general was new to him. I imagined he looked at me the same way I looked at my first high school crush.

It was sweet.

It made my heart happy, twinged with a little sadness, but mostly happy.

I expected my dreams that night to be brutal. My subconscious had, after all, conceded that my
affections
for Damu were real.

I lay in his arms, cradled and protected, my face in his neck, and I waited for what horrors would come for me.

I slept like a baby.

* * * *

The new woman that Kijani had returned with, whose name was Razina apparently, never came out of Amali’s hut. Damu told me she would stay in the house for a month, and he was right. For the weeks that followed, I never saw her.

The first time I saw her was when Damu and I were walking to the river. We met the women as they were walking home, and Razina was with them.

“
Éjó áá entedekenyá?
” I asked them. Which, when translated, literally meant ‘what does the morning say?’ It was the Maa way of saying good morning.

“
Sídáí olêŋ!”
they replied.
Very good
.

It was then I noticed Razina. She balked when she saw me, her eyes going wide. “Mzungu,” she mumbled. I was used to that now. It meant white man. And truthfully, that’s what I was to these people. I didn’t have a problem with that.

Then she noticed my eyes and her stare widened even further. “
Enkong'u a-paashar
i
,” she whispered. I understood enough to decipher that she’d basically just muttered that I had different eyes.

Amali and Yantai pulled her to keep walking, and they all giggled. I could hear them telling her I was a white man with different eyes that lived with them as we went our separate ways.

I forgot about my heterochromia. It had been so long since I’d looked in a mirror. I know the women in the kraal did have a mirror, but I hadn’t seen myself in all the time I’d been here.

God, how long had it been? Six months? Had I really been here for six months? “How many months have I been here?” I asked Damu as we got to the river.

“Six moons.” He eyed me cautiously. “Why you ask?”