Chapter 1
“Grab
your coat, and just leave a note on the bed.”
“A
note?”
“Yes.
A note.”
“Why?”
“Run
away with me.”
She
burst into an irresistible laughter, before I quickly moved closer, my belly
barely brushing hers, and covered her mouth with my right palm. There was
silence. Immediately my palm drizzled with hot droplets of moisture from her
warm breath. I removed it slowly and our eyes locked in the mirages of the
night. It was illuminated with a tiny flame of fire dancing on a piece of cloth
that continued draining paraffin from inside a small bottle it drenched its
tail in. Outside, the night covered the village. The only noise we could hear,
was our struggling breathing stunts, disturbed by the spaceless ovation we gave
ourselves, over that out of hell idea.
“Do
you know what that means?” she asked, staring at me like she was searching for
something in my eyes. My throat felt rusty, but being a boy as I always was, I
silently swallowed a mouthful of saliva and wet it in the process.
“Yes,
I do,” I lied. From the deepest roots of my cocky brain, I had no idea what she
meant. But who cared. That’s what it meant to be a man. Fake it, till you make
it. So, the big boys used to bully us with it. She wrapped her bubbly arms
round my waist. My heart instantly knocked on the chambers of my lungs
excessively. The pain. It wasn’t excruciating, neither was it sobering. It was
the first kind. What came next, seized my muscles with a tense seizure of
incomprehensible blood flow. She ran her index finger on my cheeks, before
pulling herself away from me. I felt drunk. She walked round me. Then I felt a
light nab on my back. It was her elbow that lightly greased on me. I looked
over my shoulder, and all I could see in the silhouette of the dark room, was
her glittering catty eyes above the pillow on the bed. I blinked
simultaneously, trying to adjust my sight. I got it.
Lying
on my left side, my bobby anxious face beaming at her below, time stopped. I
didn’t know what to do. Completely dumb struck. The foolishness of every
amateur. You know what to do, yet you don’t know how to do it. My thoughts were
all over the universe, looking for the heaven angels to come to my aid. How
could they offer me a service without an installation manual. Wasn’t every
piece of gold sold with instruction on how to melt it? Then her right knee rose
and rested on my right leg. The war of my ego struck the membranes of my belly.
I felt like answering the call of nature. The silliest thing that could ever
happen to a man. My face was slowly emitting springs of sweat. The angels were
a disappointment.
“Tell
me…” she said as if talking to herself, her right hand raised, massaging my
afro hair. That gesture was comforting. The electrical charges in my tongue
cooled down.
“Tell
you what?” I needed to say something. It would have been such a shame, staring at
the face of a spring of life and appear silly and ignorant.
“If
I run away with you, where will we go?”
She
was thoughtful. Where would I take her? I didn’t have my own house. Not even a
hut. I shared a reed mat with my other three brothers in our father’s hut. And
there I was, promising heaven to her. I was a true mongrel. The only place I
knew I could go was the grazing lands a few kilometres from home. Imagine, a
vast arable land with nothing but green grass till the end where the sky
touched the land. Beyond that, my world never existed. So, where would I take
her.
“Probably
to the left, where nothing is right, or to the right, where there is nothing
left,” I muffled. Was the universe finally responding to my foolishness? I
didn’t know where that came from.
“What
does that mean anyway?”
I
hardly responded, and her right hand torpedoed my face to her. What I thought would
have been a moment of forcing stars to sparkle with jolly affirmations, in a
second or so instead, came a bombshell that instantly wiped out all the sweat
on my face.
“That’s
not what your friends do it,” she whispered, almost moaning.
Fireworks
exploded in my head. We were smuttily silent. Action, cut. Forehead to forehead
still. Her hands clutching the back of my head like a baby monkey learning
gymnastic tricks for the first time in trees. I slowly pushed my head up till
her grip was loose, and I let my head free. It then dawned on her.
Self-sabotage. The innocence of experimental passion showered over us. The
paraffin lamp was getting dimmer. I slipped off the bed made out of sticks sank
on the floor or ground depending on one’s preferential vocabulary, with a
mattress made out of patches of left over lint bags patched together and filled
with soft dry grass. It made some irritating noise when I stood up, wondering
how in the first place I never heard that noise when I first sat there. I was
surely back from heaven to the real world.
It
seemed like the lessons of such encounters were quickly getting hold of my
young years. Such a delicate balance between giving and taking in such
undertaking, everyone referred to as love, until that night when I found a
different definition. I introspected. Lost in the maze of confusion. Who were
these friends. I thought I asked her, but realised it was my mind battling for
sanity. I had given it all – probably too much. But was too much bad enough?
Did it mean that the more you gave it out, the quicker you disappeared in their
mind; and the little you gave it out, the faster they disappeared?
I
walked towards the door. By the noise from the mattress, I could guess that she
had sat up.
“Maimbolwa….
it’s not what you think.”
Oh,
yes. I knew she was totally berserk. I stopped and turned.
“Is
that my new name now?”
“I
mean…gggg!” she cursed.
I
stepped in the darkness of the night my lips thick with agony. It took me close
to two hours earlier that evening to be there from home. Do the maths, and you
will guess how many kilometres I had to walk to see her. The plan was simple. I
needed to leave in the early hours of the following day so that before sun
rise, I should have been home, in our hut and no one would have known let alone
my brothers we shared a sleeping space with. It was however mission treacherous.
We
met six months ago at an SDA church camp meeting. Whatever made me stroll to
that meeting in the middle of the bush near a river, only the god of hell could
show me the notes of his diary about me. Oh…it was the moon. Bright and full. It
enticed me for a lone evening walk. Before I knew it, I was in a group of young
men and women following a beaten path going west. The first group, walked in
silence, only for their breathing as they almost trotted. I had to look back to
make sure they weren’t running away from something killer-some. Curious, I
cautiously paced up behind, ignorant of the fact that, on the other side, lay
the lessons of growth I had always been preached for, that curiosity took
courage, and that courage took a willingness to be vulnerable. Then, I was
ready for vulnerability. However, if you tabled the same situation to me six
months later in that hut, I would have knocked you with that paraffin lamp I
blamed for its hazy flame. I came to believe my grandfather’s favourite adage: masiku
taabanywi nyama. Truly, you cannot share meat in the dark. It was a flame
of mischievous betrayal.
The
second group that caught up with me, was that of young girls. They gave me a
hint of what was going on. They were singing amid sensuous guffaws. At first, I
couldn’t connect the giggles with the songs, for the lyrics were swallowed up
in the commotion. Hadn’t it been for the black book I presumed to have been a
bible one of them held in her left hand, I would have thought there was an
initiation ceremony somewhere. My presence ignited a tenser wave of
psychological egocentrism. I let them pass and strategically followed them. Un
aware of the level, the psychological game had been taken to, the group ahead
of me reduced their pace. Forthrightly, I thought I was walking faster, until
one of them called on me to hurry up. Low and behold, a chilling thrill pricked
the veins of my eardrums. I didn’t have to rush. They stopped till I was part
of them.
“Please
hold this for me,” the one carrying the bible said, handing it to me. What a
silly test. I peered at her, and she smiled. Bad manners, I got the book from
her and clutched it in my right hand like an egg in a breakable plate. I
thought she wanted to do something while I helped out, but I was wrong. There
she was, clapping as she sang, stealing glances at me time to time. For me, it
was nothing but a night game of hide and seek. The camp site was filled with
people. I offered her book back; she insisted I kept it while she went to look
for a place to sit. I stood there, like a Ninja spying on a mafia king. The
longer I stood, the more I saw squadrons of pairs preaching to each other in
the dark thickets of the bushes. They were cinematography night scenes. Then
she reappeared, from an unexpected direction and led me towards the main arena.
She spread a chitenge wrapper in the middle of tense faced congregants, and we
sat on it, listening to the preacher man talk about the ‘last days are here.
You must repent from your sins…’ Sins indeed. I had seen plenty of them in that
short time I was there.
I
held the bible like a lamb of the spirit. What was I to do with it. The owner
didn’t need it, why would I? Well, what happened thereafter, was something made
out of nowhere. We didn’t tell each other anything. Nothing of that sweet
nothings sort. When we parted, her last words were an invitation to her home.
So, it became. The six months, that followed graded a trail to her village. We
would meet under mango trees a few metres from her village, chatting the whole
afternoon like lunatics. Where those incessant stories came from, only the
dragon flies that flew around us all the time, would guess. Then we agreed for
a sleep over. What a silly idea it was. There I was now, in the dark night,
thinking of a two hour walk in that bush back home. I hated my guts!
