We’ve come to this place on the barren plains to start anew. But as I look around, I wonder if anything can thrive here apart from the thorns. The earth is cracked, and flakes that once were mud move under our feet.

I think of skin starved of moisture, peeling and revealing sensitive nerves. Thorns pull threads from the thin fabric of my skirt and scratch my bare legs — as if the landscape were determined to undress, then skin us.

The man trying to convince us that this place could become home warns us about the ticks.  “Wash with Dettol when you get home.”

We’re located on a migration path. Two years from now, when our house is planted in this black earth and the acacia has been replaced by struggling maize, how will the animals find their food and water? Seeing our house becoming a home on their path, will they begrudge us our comfort?

The man is standing with Mother on the edge of the eighth of an acre plot. He points to the hills that distance has turned into a dark blue that fades into the sky.

“Do you see that shine? Like a mirror? That is Savannah University. It is not so far from here,” he says as I approach them.

Mother nods and smiles although her lips tremble.

“And the road to Savannah? Where is it?” I ask.

He looks around, tugs a thorn loose from the nearest bush. “It will be constructed soon. There are plans.”

A road means the destruction of homes built decades ago on land that belongs to cars, bicycles and boda bodas. Mother insists that he show her where the road will be.

“Beyond that borehole over there, passing straight down to the hills,” he says, gesturing sharply across the plains as though his hand alone could slice the earth open to make way for tarmac.

“Borehole?” Mother asks.

“Yes. See there? Where the trees are greener? It means there is water. But it is not very good to drink. Salty” he says, laughing as though he’s made a joke, not realising that his words push more than they pull.

He carries his drinking water in a bottle tinted blue, enriched with more palatable minerals.  “So clear you can see through it,” the label reads. He starts sucking from the bottle, making great wet sounds. I can see his throat muscles flexing and releasing as he swallows. He sounds as though he is gagging.

“Borehole water never cures my thirst,” he says.

This man is more used to speaking to speculators than to home seekers. He knows how to speak of land value growing while the site sits fenced. He has tried several variations of his hook on Mother: “In 20 years, when you sell this place for 10 times what you pay now, you will call me. You will call me and buy me tea.”

Mother is thinking of when we will live here, two, three years from now. But this is the first clean deal we can afford. The company selling this land has been recommended by an uncle of an uncle. “Good people, our people,” he told Mother over the phone. 

We have vowed to buy a piece of land and to start building as soon as we can. We haven’t had a home in years.

**************************

When the fire flared between Mother and Father, it razed everything. But even then, there was still a home for Sisi, Mother and me — on the edge of a hill, bordered by a road on one side. Grandmother saved it from Father by threatening to strip naked and to break a clay pot. Sisi and I watched the confrontation and laughed.

Mother had locked herself inside the house and refused to unlock the door until Father and his new woman left. But where Grandmother could summon spirits to battle Father, she could not do the same for the government.

In the heat of adolescence, when Mother and I drew our battle lines, I watched as our home was flattened. The yellow excavator with its long arm pulled down our house — the roof crunching as though it were made of potato crisps, and the walls falling as though they were brittle pastry.

Sisi and I had been home alone when the demolishers came. We saved our school books. Back then, the fear of a teacher’s rod was still greater than the desire to cling to memories or valuables.

Mother came home to find us sitting on what was left of the veranda revising Kiswahili. “Maiti hizi,” I insisted. “Maiti hawa,” Sisi countered. Our argument — should corpses be granted grammatical dignity? Or once empty of life, should these bodies be delegated to the same noun class as dreams, bananas and accidents? Mother sat next to us, listening to Sisi contradict me in a thin, stubborn voice. Even then, we should have seen the disease creeping into Sisi.

We didn’t notice the scavengers until they were close enough for us to smell the greed. When Mother rose to scream at them, they scattered faster than birds.

Mother and I dug through the rubble. Sisi watched over a growing pile of mundane things rendered valuable by their survival of the demolition: Pillows, a folder with our old report forms, beads from a shattered necklace, a still functioning alarm clock. We couldn’t find our birth certificates. At sunset, the scavengers had grown bold enough that we were the ones to flee this time.

After we lost our home, Mother and I began speaking again. At first it was out of necessity. And then because we no longer had a home in which to hide our secrets, we started telling them to each other.

We moved into a two-roomed flat that was always damp and cold. I shirked off the tight and itchy skin of the teenager in this flat. Here, I learned to mother Mother and to listen to Sisi. When Mother bowed under the weight of the bank loan, my first job paid the electricity bills and bought Sisi’s drugs.

Now we’re emptying ourselves into this eighth acre — pouring out all our money and all our hopes. The agent is quiet, watching Mother warily. She walks around the plot, pulling a blade of grass and tasting it. Crushed between the teeth, this blade will not taste like the grass of our old home. It will not release a salty juice that tastes of tears.

Mother comes to me and asks earnestly, “What do you think?”

I want to run from this place.

“Let’s take it,” I tell her instead.

She doesn’t protest. Too early we’ve crested that peak of the parent-child relationship after which roles are reversed. She is a better daughter than I ever was to her.

“Let’s go talk,” I shout to the man who is now staring at his empty water bottle as though the concept that things can be depleted, finished by consumption, is foreign to him.

“Great. Great. Good choice,” he says clapping his hands, an ovation to some performance put on solely for him.