Her name is Wangui. Where she comes from, a woman’s worth is weighed by the success of her children. If the children are sons, the expectations rose a notch. Daniel, her only child, is 8 months old now.

Water drips from the shirt she is hanging on the clothesline onto her slipper-shod feet. “Sasa mama Dani!” a neighbour calls out from a window overhanging the drying yard. “Poa sana mama Alex.” Wangui can’t stand that word ‘poa’. What kind of response is that anyway? Answering in any other way would however offend the neighbour and be considered haughty. Wangui has had 2 years to learn.

It’s 3:00a.m. You have been drinking for hours on end. You shuffle out of a club in Westlands, rummaging through your pockets for loose change to tip the security chap who was keeping an eye on your car. You find a few coins, some crumbled notes and a paper bearing a phone number and a name: Wendy. Hmm…I could have sworn she was called Winnie, you mumble under your breath as you slide into the driver’s seat and bang the door shut. Oh, the dregs of the night, the results of debauchery. What would be life without a note bearing a phone number from Wendy…or Winnie?

“I need to get a thousand Euros from Baby’s Vater,” Ma said to me, as though I’d asked. “The money will buy Nashikawa’s coffin, pay the mortuary fee, buy five cows to feed the guests, get us tickets back to Berlin.” I wondered what Ma would say to me this time when she left me for Germany.