He was not a stranger. I knew him quite well, but we hardly ever said much to each other. He was a really good friend of Michael, Christine’s brother, and so I had run into him several times at the Bernard house. I would feel my heartbeat accelerate every time we passed each other as Christine talked non-stop about one or other of her schemes. She did not talk much to him, either. She was too busy being in love with Hans, the guy her parents absolutely abhorred.
 
I guess that while I was lost in my fantasies, she was lost in her rebellion. So when I started my new job at the administration office at North Beach Hotel, Christine and I both set off on our strange journeys into discovery.
 
Hans, was 27 years old, an IT genius employed at the Hotel, mainly handling security systems and once in a while helping out in administration. Hans Karisa, was a bit of a cultural mongrel although the only thing that the Bernards noticed was that he was an black native. Hans’ birth parents were from the Giriama division of the Mijikenda tribes. His father, Karisa Kai, was a fisherman who died out at sea when Hans’ mother was still pregnant with her first and only son. Four months later, Zendere gave birth to a son at her in-laws home. It was a breech birth, and the midwife did not succeed in stemming the blood loss in time. Zendere died at dawn. Her son was left to his grandparents and an uncle who was a beach-boy (hardly a boy, more of a for-hire-toy-boy for the wealthy tourist women looking for a holiday adventure). This uncle is the one who eventually negotiated the adoption of the boy child by a German couple who then paid the family enough to build a Swahili style home, that the family could use as well as rent out back rooms to migrant hotel workers.
 
Hans, named as such by his ‘germanised’ Uncle, was raised both in Mombasa and in his adoptive parents’ Munich home. The arrangement made it possible for him to visit with his Giriama relatives. This worked quite well for his birth relatives because it meant that the financial ‘support’ continued. As a matter of fact, now with Hans’ in his adulthood, having completed a fancy education abroad, and receiving the gift of investment in the North Beach Hotel as well as a few other tourist establishments from his adoptive parents, Hans was now more than ever before in a good position to grease his Uncle’s lifestyle. The grandparents had died while Hans was still in his teens.
 
I knew this because my old soccer gang was quite familiar with Hans’ bling wearing, gold teeth flashing uncle. Kombe Kai had become something of a beach mafia king. And he was not quite satisfied with his nephew’s financial support. Just for the chance to play beach soccer at the Mtwana cove, we had to pay 50 bob everytime. He extorted these levies from everyone, even the fishermen who tried to bring in a meal home via the cove. Avoiding the cove was really no good, because he had other ways of getting paid, the vigilante ‘community police’ who had to be paid, by landlords, shopkeepers, or just workers coming home from late night shifts at the hotel. And if you did not pay up, the Kenya Police would show up with mysteriously acquired evidence of your misdemenours. Everyone knows that ‘handling’ cops is much more taxing than paying Kombe Kai.
 
Anyway, so Hans was Christine’s choice of a lover.
 
My choice was just as weird and complicated as Christine’s. Michael’s best friend was also a third generation European settler. Cooper Blaine’s grandparents came to Africa from Scotland as Anglican Church missionaries and stayed in Creekside. His family had invested heavily in the coastal tourist industry, and he specifically, in the air travel branch of the industry.
 
After I begun work at the administration offices at the Hotel, I started meeting Cooper away from Christine’s family’s colour-conscious watch. He had some kind of deals with Anil Shah which meant that quite often he would come into the office for one thing or the other. I was surprised when he stopped to chat with me the first time, but I soon got used to it even relaxed enough to engage in playful flirting. Not much later I agreed to meet with him outside of the office environment.
 
Now you have to try and understand where I was coming from. I had spent my entire teen years feeling like I was less than best. My mother’s relatives had a lot to do with that. But I must admit that a lot more had to do with my own fancy desires. I hated being poor, and perhaps in a way I associated my being poor with my race and colour. I am not sure that I was a gold digger as such, but if I was I sure had plenty of role models around me.
 
Not my mother though. My mother always believed in working honestly for everything she got. I did look up to her, in my own way. But I guess I let my pride and fantasies carry me away from my mother’s high ethics. I wanted to be a fancy princess and for the moment, Cooper was my way of getting there on fast track.
 
Did I fall in love with him? Yes. I idealised him. I couldn’t be honest at the time and admit that his money had a lot to do with it. He was older, 10 years older than my 19. He was ‘cultured’, a whole lot more sophisticated than I was. And I loved what his money could buy.
 
The first time I met him outside of work, he sent a car to pick me up and deliver me to the Bistro on Dolphin Road. It was mid-afternoon on a Sunday. I had just gotten off from work and did not have any classes. I should have hurried to the Sunday Afternoon Church service like I had promised my mother, but I got into the sleek BMW and sat on the left back seat. Dolphin Road was major upper scale. Strangely, the affluence of high class villas and the Los Angelos style boardwalk shops and cafes by the water was bordered by the slum and poverty of the Shanzu village. I prefered to focus on the red top and makuti villas shining white against the jade blue of the ocean.
 
When I got off the big car, he was sitting at a table at the corner of the little cafe, talking into his fancy phone. He looked up as I walked in, and waved at me, the corners of his eyes crinkling as he smiled at me. My very own Mills&Boon man; tall, dark haired, bronze skinned, sapphire blue eyed… And there at the Bistro, next to the curio and art gallery, there my affair with heartache begun.
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Are you wondering like I am, whether Gabrielle, our creekside princess has the strength to make it, to leave her anger, grief and pain behind and make something of her life? Or will the experiences in her youth set her up for failure and destruction? Join us here next Friday and find out!

In the meantime, you can help me tell this story by sending your ideas  tocreeksideprincess@gmail.com. What will happen is that your idea will help carve a subsidiary character through whom our main character will learn something on her way to being a Queen.