The Quiet One

Chapter 1: I. Noise

Wanjiru Kamau had been hearing other people's thoughts since she was seven years old, and she could tell you, with some authority, that most of them were about lunch. It was not the glamorous gift that stories promised. It did not come with secrets of state or the locations of buried treasure. It came with a middle-aged man on the number 46 bus thinking, in a loud, damp, unbroken loop, chapati, chapati, chapati, did I lock the door, chapati. It came with a teacher in her primary school thinking, with the most perfect calm, that the child in the third row was stupid. It came with her own mother, standing at the stove one evening in 2006, thinking very clearly, I cannot do this anymore, while smiling and stirring a pot of beans. She had been seven. She had understood, in a single cold rush, that her mother had not said it aloud. And she had understood, a few seconds later, that nobody else could hear what she heard. Her grandmother had been the only one to believe her. Cucu was seventy, tiny and fierce and half blind, and she had listened to the whole confused story on the back step of the house in Kiambu with her chin in her hand. Then she had said, in Kikuyu, that her own grandmother had had something like it, and that it was neither a blessing nor a curse, but a weather, like any other, and that a person could learn to live in it. "Hum," said Cucu. "When it is too much. Hum something, any tune. It makes a little roof." She had hummed for twenty years. She hummed on buses and in queues and in the lift of the clinic building, a low, tuneless, constant murmur under her breath that made colleagues think she was happy. She wore headphones. She kept her head down in crowds. She lived in a small stone cottage on the edge of Nairobi National Park, the only wildlife reserve in the world with a city skyline behind it, where the nearest neighbor was a family of warthogs and the loudest thing in the night was a hyena. She was a veterinarian. It was not an accident. Animals had no words. A lioness in a sedation cage, a giraffe with a broken leg, a three-week-old orphaned rhino with a bottle of milk: all of them were mind-silent to her, like a room with the radio switched off. Babies, too, thought only in feelings, warm and wordless and enormous, and she sometimes held a newborn for a full minute in the maternity ward of the Kenyatta hospital, just to stand in the quiet. She was twenty-seven years old. She had never been kissed by a man whose thoughts she could not hear, because there had never been such a man. She was, on the whole, very good at being alone.