The new line was cheap and the number was easy to remember. It came with someone else's debts, someone else's mother, and eventually someone else.
DENNIS, your loan of KES 4,300 is 12 days overdue. Pay today to avoid CRB listing. Pesa Haraka.
That was the first one, the day after I got the line. I didn’t even know the number yet, I had to check it under my contacts as “ME”. The guy at the shop on Moi Avenue had told me straight, numbers get recycled, the old owner stops using it for six months, the network gives it to someone new, si ni kawaida. He said I might get a few random texts. Just ignore, he said.
I was in second year, broke like everyone, and the new line had a free 2GB bundle for the first month. I ignored.
DENNIS, your loan is 19 days overdue. Your contacts will be notified.
DENNIS, FINAL NOTICE.
Then the lender stopped. And the family started.
* * *
Dennis uko wapi. Mum hajalala siku tatu.
Den please just call. hata kama ni kitu umefanya we wont be angry.
This is your aunt Mumbi. Your mother is in Kenyatta hospital, her pressure. If you have any heart you will call.
I read that last one in the hostel at like 1 a.m., lying on my bunk with my roommate snoring, and I felt so bad for this Dennis’s mum. I almost replied. I typed sorry this is a new number, the owner changed and then I deleted it, because my own mum always says never get involved with strangers’ things, especially money things, especially on the phone.
I should have sent it. I think about that a lot. If I’d just sent that, the first night, maybe it would have stayed their thing. Their family’s. A wrong number, a sad story, the end.
* * *
The first one from him came on a Thursday. I know because I had a CAT on Friday and I was revising.
Hi. Ni mimi Dennis. I know this isn’t my line anymore. Sorry kukusumbua.
I sat there. Then I laughed, because obviously. Obviously it was one of his friends, or some guy who’d seen the family’s posts on Facebook, those missing-person posters people share with the photo and “PLEASE SHARE”. Somebody joking. Somebody trying a scam.
Tell my mother I’m at the place by the stage. She knows the one. Tell her I’m sorry about the money.
Which stage, I typed. And I sent it.
I don’t know why. It was 2:14 a.m. I was tired and the message was so polite, so sad, and he’d said sorry, and nobody who’s trying to scam you says sorry.
It was one reply. That’s all. Two words and a question mark I didn’t even put.
* * *
After that they weren’t for his mother.
Githurai 45 stage. Saturday. 9pm.
Come alone.
Bring the 4,300.
Wanjiku.
That last one came alone, nothing else, at 3:33 a.m., and I sat up in my bunk so fast I hit my head on the slats of the top bed. I had never told him my name. My name was not on the line. I’d registered it with my ID, sawa, but the ID says Grace Wanjiku Ndung’u and nobody calls me Grace, not even the university. Only family and the girls from home call me Wanjiku.
I went to the stage on Saturday. Not to meet anyone. Just to look, in daylight, at 1 p.m., with my friend Wambui, who thought the whole thing was hilarious and kept saying “maze, your ghost has a loan, even ghosts are broke in this economy.” Githurai 45 is mad on a Saturday. Matatus with the music shaking the windows, touts shouting fare, women selling smokies and boiled eggs, the footbridge over Thika Road full of people pushing. Nothing strange. Nothing at all.
Except under the footbridge, on the concrete pillar, among all the posters for churches and herbalists and tuition, there was a missing-person poster. Faded, half torn off. A young guy in a graduation gown, smiling. MISSING SINCE 3RD MARCH. DENNIS K. And a phone number at the bottom for the family.
My number.
Wambui stopped laughing.
* * *
I took the SIM out that night and bent it in half and threw it in the pit latrine behind the hostel. Then I went back to the shop on Moi Avenue and got a new line. New number, nothing recycled, I made the guy check twice. I put it in my phone and I felt so free I bought chips and sausage for the whole floor.
Three days. Three days of nothing. Then on Tuesday, in the middle of a lecture:
Wanjiku umekosa stage.
Wanjiku you missed the stage.
Ni sawa. We’ll find you.
I blocked it. It came from a different number. I blocked that. Different number. I switched off the phone and put it in my bag under my clothes and lay on my bunk with my eyes open till morning, and when I turned it on there were forty-one messages, all different numbers, and every single one was just sorry.
* * *
My mum called this evening. She never calls on weeknights, airtime is expensive, she normally sends a please-call-me and waits.
“Kiji,” she said. That’s what she called me when I was small. “Why are you texting me from a strange number?”
I said I wasn’t.
“You are. Since evening. Unknown number. Mum it’s Wanjiku, I’m sorry. Mum I’m sorry. Mum I’m sorry about the money.” She was trying to sound annoyed. She sounded frightened. “Which money, Wanjiku? Have you borrowed something? Are you in trouble?”
I said no, Mum, no, it’s a scam, block it.
“I can’t block it, it’s you,” she said. “It’s your name. And now it’s saying I should come and meet you. In Nairobi. At some stage, Githurai, nine o’clock, and come alone.” A little laugh, not a real one. “Kiji, you know I don’t know Nairobi.”
Mum lives in Nyeri. It’s three hours on the matatu.
I looked at the time on my phone. It was 5:40. She was already on the road. I could hear it behind her voice, the engine, the conductor shouting Nairobi, Nairobi, the music shaking the windows.
