Assembled not unlike the different desperate parts bought from different companies and countries to mount up a beautiful toy of the rich, this is the story of our or whoever.
Or Whoever met Nora outside a beer outlet. She was buying beer. He was hanging around. He pursued her silently until he had that one chance to say something. What he said was, 'I feel like smoking some joint.' Decent pick up line that, for a ganja farmer. But he continued to follow her, even as she was coming up to my room. The reason she told him to pick her up later is a mystery, unless she was trying to getting rid of him, in a nice way.
So my imagination is that he tossed in his bed all night, thinking of the next move towards the taming of this wild beauty. Or co-existing together in their almost similar niche. That same drive must have woken him up in such a zeal that he forgot that there is nothing smart about going to pick a girl in a man's house. Maybe, a little sense, had him think twice before knocking, but my instantaneous opening of the door and lack of knowledge of the ongoing served his ease. He was, after all, a stalker. But like all careful men, hearsay and truth cannot be put to similar scales. And trust, as a choice to the wise, is not a momentarily feeling swept into subservience by other feelings such as lust.
With Or Whoever gone she sat at my bed and looked at me. For a moment there was nothing to say. Then I quickly rose to make tea. But she said that she wasn't as much interested. With a cocky, little laughter, she entered her pocket and took out a fresh bottle of Kenya King. I gasped. I looked away to hide my repulsion.
One sip and she started to belch. Then, in almost and instant, she pulled my basin and started to vomit there in. Disgust caused a sharp pain down my throat. And it was that same irritation that drove me to ask why she'd behaved so uncouth the previous night. She did not answer, rather, feeling the need to seem a little bit responsible, she went out to the washroom, cleaned up my basin, and came back. I asked, again, and hence resurfaced her anger. The contents of her vomit caused a doubt in me. It seemed, she may have had nothing but beer for days. True, for she later revealed she had no appetite, and had only soda, and bread twice for the last few days.
“What did you want me to tell you? Ehe! What! That I have been sleeping at the back of a shop for a week?” Her voice was not raised, but intense, it carried a feeling so deep I instantly rolled over to the guilty side. I felt slapped in the face by my own presumptions.
I was hungry for details. At least she explained that she was sleeping at the back of that shop I had last seen her the night before. The children to the owner, out of mercy, had allowed her some shelter as she sought a way. Apparently, her boyfriend had thrown her out again. And home, where she had a father and mother, and other places, where she had sisters and a brother, no one saw her as worth taking. They all had given up. On her. On the promise of love. On the truth that blood is thicker than water.
Her telling of the story made her sip of her bottle like it was the proven cure of her troubles. Suddenly she had to get going. She was already too late for the play. I wanted to escort her, she said no. And walked right out, only to meet with another acquaintance who doubles as my neighbor. She spoke to him a while, a rather long while, and it occurred to me that she was trying to justify her being in the neighborhood. For once I hoped, deep down, that she would be gone, and not come back.
She, and a friend of mine from the ground floor, came in at exactly the time I had finished making dinner. It wasn't much, neither fancy, but they both enjoyed it. We talked a while together, the three of us, and I noticed that she did not have a beer bottle. Nothing much had changed, and in her talking, you'd never differentiate whether or not she was drunk. But I cared less.
My friend from ground floor, under the assumption that the two of us needed the space to be naughty, left, a certain, peculiar smile of good-luck-dude on his face. We turned to each other, her and me, and found that there was nothing to say about me and her, nothing to physically share. My canal feeling were long suppressed by the revelations of what she'd been going through. And, of course, a certain call. A call she'd made. A call that had revealed to me that somehow, somewhere, she'd had careless sex. And she needed money to buy the morning after drug.
We talked more about herself. About her boyfriend, before she reluctantly left. And next day, on the Valentines day, she came whilst I was in the shower. She did not excuse me to dress up, neither did she look away. She watched. My dressing was up-hazard, and I felt a certain fear, maybe of the thought that a demon would attack my reason, and cause me to jump on her with a ferocious zeal.
Our conversation ran almost all day. We talked depths of secrets that are rarely, if ever shared. And I gathered that;
In living with her boyfriend, she had ignored her own place and now had rent arrears pilled up. She could not go to her place, no, and the hustle was in trying to find a way to sort herself out. Our conversation bore stories of people who found hope in the hopeless. Mother Teresa. Of people who regretted after treating other with unruly unkindness. Her boyfriend.
He knew, when he kicked her out, that she had no place to go. But somehow in his own wisdom he thought that this was going to teach her a lesson. That this unkindness, was going to make her submit to the righteousness of the alcohol free life. So she was sheltered at the back of the shop, and on the night before this, the owners, parents to the merciful children, returned, forcing her out.
I cannot for sure tell why she had not come back the previous night, and slept there in my room. She had found the situation changed, and after walking around like a night owl, pushed the window of a packed Nissan matatu, hoped in, and slept. I felt mad, so furious of her that she could put herself at such a risk, whereas she knew that my door was always open for her. That concealed, it was time we searched for a solution.
I'm no hero, neither was I in a position to be one that time. Loaded, I do not think that I would have been superman either. She needed to find a formidable solution. An agreement reached, she called her sister again. This time with a better refined language. And her sister promised a try. Moments later, transactions had occurred, and the caretaker to her house was calling, saying she may have her house back, for he would be there to open up at three.
She went away a few minutes past three. Having spent the entire day with me, watched half a movie, and talked for hours, I was certain that she'd be back to tell me the outcome. She was, but misfortune had attracted its twin. The desire to exploit.
Outside town, the caretaker had not arrived as promised. So Nora and I stayed at my place, after she'd returned, till ten, when he called. She picked her bag and went off, still unwilling to be escorted, her eyes dull with sleep and tiredness. But the story came the following day.
He was a shameless man, this caretaker. When she arrived, he was at the estate bar. Drinking. Waiting. Lusting. Scheming. For some reason he had no key to her house. He could only accommodate her in his, and open up hers the following morning. Lights, redder than red, blinking in her mind, she turned down his offer of beer, just with the same zeal as she'd turned down his cunning excuse of accommodation. Spirited with a zeal to show her he'd no ulterior motives, he promised to show her to his sisters place, but again she refused.
But all of this still left her no choice. She wanted a place to sleep, badly, for security on this side was not something to compare with the place I live. She accepted his third offer, he would take a lodging, she'd take his house. So off they went, to have him open up for her.
The moment he did, he changed language, trying his best tongue to have her be-maid him that night. She easily had him believe she was going to check something in her house through her window. But when she was out, she felt freed from a trap. He rushed out to look for her, she rushed back and locked herself in his house. By the time he realized, knocking the door with a beggar's thrill, she was coiling herself in bed, feeling the much missed warmth of the blankets, drifting in transient to succumb to her tiredness and a cured insomnia.
Next day in the evening she passed by my place, carrying two loaded paper bags. Clothes of all type, simply stashed in with no proper arrangement, made the bags look unusually too big. I wondered how she'd been able to carry them. We talked a while, shared my supper, and then she had to get going. She noticed my love of books, and my little collection of novels, and falling in love with Jane Austen's Emma, I let her have it. I was certain, this day, with all that carriage, she was going to allow me to escort her to the stage. She didn't. I had to, at least, so I walked her down the stairs and to our own gate.
I was happy, finally, that she was getting her life back. The disappointment I had felt, the day she had gone to the play practice drunk, was now not significant. I was happy that she was winning a battle, a battle fought against many enemies, the worst of whom was herself.
The following evening, someone knocked at my door. I opened up and for a moment my mind went blank. She was dressed in a white top and a long black dress that sprawled with elegant ease to her ankles. Her brown, old wig was gone, in its place beautiful curls that swung with brilliance at the slight blowing of the wind. An enchanting smile greeted my surprise. And she walked in with a knowing, little and cocky laughter.
“You're not going to say hi. Are you?” she asked, placing the two tiny paper bags at a corner.
I was stunned. I still couldn't believe that this was her. It was like a legendary piece of sculpture, having being ignored for a long time, had gained a skilfully furnishing and shown to the same eyes that had previously loved it with its imperfections. I felt the need to touch her. I felt the need to jump on her and devour her like a sex starved teen. I felt a compelling need to lick her like a lollipop. To let every inch of her feel the tenderness of my caresses. To be one with her in a perfect act of sin. But I stopped.
She'd just been to her X's. Who, in seeing her so transformed, begged her to go in. A smile alone, and a request for him to bring down her stuff, was enough to make him wince. The boys in the neighborhood, who just yesterday had avoided her like a plague, now hovered around, salivating. One, drunken, had rushed to her and asked her whether she'd seen Nora. She laughed, as he apologized, promising to call when sober, and apologize again. She had a particular way of talking, this evening, that made me wish upon the stars.
My conscience leading me otherwise, we ate and talked. She gave stories of two of her friends, a gay and a lesbian. The guy was an avid church goer. He got the rights to train and direct dance and a play at the church. After several meeting, he was all complaining. 'The girls are as stiff as electricity poles. They cannot move. The boys don't want to be touched. I try and touch their bum, try and show them this stuff, but they just won't let me! The don't want me showing them how to hold a girl while in a decent dance!'
Humor isn't one of my gifts. But its a specializing of hers when enlightened. So I laughed like crazy under her spell of hilarious story telling. The girl, her friend from high school, demanded that on every out, they were to be girls a lone. While the rest wanted to lure boys to them, she kept scrutinizing them girls like they were meat roasted and ready for a hungry wrestler.
It was a wonderful evening. We talked and laughed a lot. Then when silence suddenly dawned on us, she looked me straight in the eye and said.
“Thank you!”
“What for.” I asked, even though it was obvious she would say it still.
“Lately I have met many men. During that time of my trial, and none of them waited before suggesting, or hovering all over me like some cheap trump. But it was only you, and the kids at the shop, that showed me mercy. You are the only one who did not take advantage of me.”
For any woman, if a man, stranger, accommodated them, there would be interpretations to his actions. Mostly just two, extreme situations, especially if you are strangers. One, if you receive her, treat her like a goddess, talk to her like a queen, take not, even suggest, advantage of her, then, you may as well be gay. On the other, if you treat her rudely, jump on her like a starved tiger to a fattened lame antelope, then you have no respect for yourself or her. Your canal desires, your inability to push them to submission, is after all, treating her like a whore. So the depth gets deeper. The woman's heart, unfathomable.
I wished to kiss her that night more than anything. But then she said;
“He told me to organize my life, and that he'll always be there waiting!”
“And you'd go back?”
“I don't know. I love him!”
Love to me is a sacred thing now seen through the perspective of an occult. The beautiful lie. And I didn't want to talk about it, for it pained me that a girl could still love a man that had caused her so much pain. But she was still so spectacular I constantly got my thinking mixed up. Feelings of hate drowned by those of liking and love.
She rose. Picked up her bags and said.
“Will you see me off to stage?”
That question was so out of place. So, so out of place. All days before, she had not, even once, had me escort her even when I begged, but tonight, she was asking for it. Sounded like an army officer, being send out to the war tone Dar fur or Iraq, knowing without a doubt, that she was never to return.
At the matatu stage we lingered. We talked, about the future, our tomorrows, and the possibilities that hope holds in store. When she was finally decided to go, she hugged me tight. So very tight. And said goodbye. Since then, she is now like a moment, a moment that happened, and was gone. A moment, like all beautiful dreams, that when you wake up, you find you are no man's hero, but a solitary being in an uncomfortable bed. A dream. Gone with the wind.
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