Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1) (33 page)
Read Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1) Online
Authors: Vincent de Paul
2014
Monday 6
th
January;
“Do you mean,” Hedwig said, “that you were interviewing me that day to come to this?”
“What’s wrong with it?” I asked with a genuinely innocent shrug.
“Oh, nothing,” she said sarcastically, piqued, “Nothing at all. Only that I wonder, what about your wife?”
“I have never had one,” I told her, hoping I will get the better of her.
“Oh, I see. Okay then, I am completely astounded to hear that. Little did I know about what you wanted all that time you’re interviewing me.”
We were sitting at a tiny corner table in the vicarage’s lobby, a cosy frangipani pungent smelling place not far from my room at the vicarage.
“I think I should have told you then,” I admitted. “It was pretty much a good idea to know of you first.”
“And what has made you say it now? Why do you think of me that way? For God’s sake, I am a school girl,” she was no longer peeved.
“Because you accepted to come over I take it that you wanted to too. About your school girl thing, I think I have not asked to sleep with you,
school gal.
And I have not refuted the fact that you’re still in school. I will wait in the world’s longest queue just for the mere fact of being with you.”
“I am too young for that, I can’t do that. For God’s sake I am in high school.”
Now that was a shocker. I had thought that the school girl she meant was college or university. How many college girls were screwing around? She looked as though she was in college, though. It never occurred to me that she was a preteen looking twenty the way she did. I was about to say something when she added, “Lest you mean we be friends.”
“In a way we kind of are friends.”
“Mere friends!” She said brusquely.
“It could be, especially for now when you are still in school.”
“You think the course would change?”
“Think it’d change?” I shrugged, as if to relegate the matter to unimportance. “I don’t really know or have to think whether it’d change or not, it’s only a chance that is needed. Do you think I will or might…?”
“Why not?” she cringed to what she thought I was about to say.
“Because I don’t think that you should see me as Tom, Dick and Harry. I’ve been kind of researching and you’d be surprised by some of the goodies in it.”
“Such as?”
“Well, apart from the fact that you’ve seen many girls fall victim to false love and teaching by your elders that men are vile creatures that eat the yolk of the egg and hit you with the empty of the shell, I know you’ve read and heard many things. It’s all over in the news about love triangles and love affairs turned sour… about paedophiles and all. I am not...”
“It’s pretty true.” She interrupted me sceptically. “I don’t want to regret later. I think I should learn from the mistakes of others since I won’t live that long to make them myself.”
Smart girl.
“Not with me.” I gazed down at the glass of coke on the table that was supposed to be hers. “Why aren’t you taking your drink?” I asked her. Or maybe she feared I had laced it with Psychedelic Heroin. Well, if that was what she was thinking, she was justified in being paranoid. Only if she could know I was not that kind of man? Well, some years before I would have done it without batting an eyelid, but that was then.
“I am,” she picked up her glass and took a sip, her expression disapproving, nonchalant, and disinterested.
“Have I hurt you by…?”
“How would you? I think you are probably crazy, and out of your mind. We just met the other day…” she took another sip, her gawk on me. “Do I look like am thirty to you? And to think I am interested in you? It sucks,” she said and looked at me in the eye.
“If you were interested in me, I’m sure you would find a much better way of telling me,” she told me.
“I’m not sure I know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything. I am not the type to be sweet talked with a crumpled note of fifty shillings. I know what I want with my life.”
“Hedwig, I have not suggested anything soppy. I just wanted to book early in time. Moreover, the early bird catches the worm.”
“And the early worm gets eaten up,” she said satirically. “The world is full of women, more beautiful and ready for you than me. Why don’t you go to them?”
“You’ve got what they don’t. No man who’d know you would want to let you pass by him. You’re endowed with rare beauty, Hedwig, the inner beauty.”
“How long do you think you would love me before you get tired of me.”
“I will never tire of you. I shall love you forever and ever.”
“The same old promise, ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one per cent inspiration. On the other hand, forever is something denied to mortal man.”
“I told you, Hedwig, I am Ken, not Tom, Dick or Harry.”
“That’s what I’m trying to think whether I would accept as a fact – not to take you as already Tumescent, Dick and Hurry!” she took a long pause then asked, “How many girls have you told this?”
I was silent for a moment, and then took a new tact. “You don’t think I am a savage, do you?”
“Yes! I think you are one sicko who should undergo psychotherapy. Look at me, I am like your daughter if you ever got to marry early, or sister for that matter,” she was spitting it out.
Now this isn’t good.
My mind started to race. Though I was at the fringe of which way to go, I still felt that I needed a woman, as the saying goes – behind every successful man is a woman – for my success in my Christian journey, and I thought I would find that in Hedwig. Being in school was inconsequential, school was for a season. She was mature in a seductive way, alluring. She was right in not only disapproving my insensitivity but also reproaching me for my amative mind.
True, I was ready to wait for her to finish her education, not matter how long it took. She was that woman whom I wanted her to reign my heart even if it meant with an iron rod till death put asunder between me and earthly life, or so I convinced myself. Whatever made me think of her that way, heaven knows; and this coming from someone who had impregnated three sisters and run away to hide in the church.
She was right as hell in whatever she was saying. I was not ought to, but being doltishly in love it’s strange. I could wait for ninety-nine years like the Father of Faith, Abraham.
“You are wrong,” I answered, almost irked myself. “The fact that I fell for you, a school girl, doesn’t make me a savage, and a Don Juan.”
“A what? If you’d spare me the jargon please I would greatly appreciate.”
The gal has nerves.
I explained it to her. She was not convinced that I was not a Don Juan.
“Hedwig, you’re too direct with me. Do you have to be so frontal?”
“How do you want me to put it out to you? To mince my words with you? Enhe? It’s my life. I can’t sit around and enjoy the ride of all times while I know I’d be ruining my life. They’re all in it, girls like me, but I am not the type.”
I felt seemingly helpless in her presence. She had rare assertion. If she was like that at her age, how would she be in five years? I did not blame her. As I sat there studying her figure, somewhere deep inside me a melancholic sigh inadvertently slipped past my lips inaudibly.
“You don’t just fall into bed with anyone. That’s the first rule of trust. And trust isn’t something that comes ad lib. It’s built, Ken, or is it Paul? Build that trust first and fortify it. Whenever I would open myself to the risk of love depends entirely on me over time…”
“You don’t give in easily. Do you?”
“No!”
I could not blame her. A strange sense of tediousness caressed me, metamorphosed to apathy then to lethargy and lassitude. I was up for a great battle.
“Why?”
“Many reasons, best known to me….”
“One?”
“I don’t believe in limerence and immature love.”
There was a long moment of silence when at last she said, “Yes, Paul. I give you an assignment. Love is patient and kind, not jealous or conceited or proud, not ill mannered or selfish or irritable, it does not keep record of wrongs, not happy with evil, never gives up and its faith, hope and patience never fails. Love is eternal…” and with that she rose to go before I could gather the gumption to tell her that she had alluded the biblical St. Paul in his missive to the Christians of Corinth.
I was left where I was sitting, hanging my head, frowning – church girls are tough. Her words meant an acceptance of her decision. “If you think that by saying you love me you can follow what the Bible teaches, then you can think that you love me.”
She was going, walking away from me. She had to. I did not want it that way. I called after her. She turned, indifferently.
“Yes?”
“Have you definitely made up your mind that you don’t want to be waited for even by somebody who’s willing to spend all eternity in the queue?”
She stood where she was and stared into space; maybe dithered.
Something was happening to her. Her head was raised as if to drink in the sun. What a beautiful scene! But it wasn’t. There was so much going on beneath the surface, or so I thought. I could sense the waves of emotions vibrating from her. I couldn’t sort out what they were, but whatever Hedwig Sanzi Joe was feeling was incredibly intense.
An emotion that intense couldn’t exist without a release that would be volatile.
You look beautiful when you are thinking.
Damn, I had acted as careless and raunchy as a teenager, I thought in disgust as I strode toward the church to prepare the chapel for the adoration hour. Why be surprised? I was raunchy, but God forbid, never careless. I had made mistakes in the past, but not out of carelessness. But that moment with Hedwig had brought dizzying sensuality of what former Son of Man had been.
Not good at all. I had filled a young innocent mind with amorous thoughts, and showing her the tart jaded side of that emotion called love would make it more complex.
Morals and law could not allow, but I had broken all the codes. I shouldn’t have done it. Dammit, she didn’t deserve it from me. For once, why couldn’t I forget what-I-want-fantasy and be a good man? Maybe I wanted to take what I wanted and to hell with –
My cell phone rang. Unknown number. I hit the answer button.
Silence. “Hello there. Long-time no see, enhe?”
I said nothing.
I knew the voice too well to mistake it for anybody else. Why now?
“I told you that I’d come for you. You can run but can’t hide from me. No, you can’t. You can’t... we’ve some scores to settle you bastard.”
The phone went dead.
My head started to spin... it shouldn’t be now, not after that entire period of time.
The caller was none other than my former crime boss.
I am grateful to all the professionals who willingly shared their time and expertise: Josephine Njoroge (lawyer and philosopher, Egerton University), Dr Solomon Okoth (Nairobi Hospital), and Augustus Nyakundi (editor).
For their responding to my crowdsourcing call out and proofreading I would also like to thank Ken Mukira, Wambui Njuguna, Eric Khalwale Amwoga, Mirriam, and Juliet. Special thanks and a standing ovation to Nduta Macharia who is as wonderful a copyeditor as she is a friend.
Vincent de Paul is the author of the 2010 Nairobi International Book Fair literary awards winning collection of poems,
First Words
, and the sensational collection of love poems;
Holy Emotions
and
Holy Crimes.
Other works are
Flights of Poetic Fancy
and
Flashes of Vice: Vol I & II.
He has a Diploma in Comprehensive Creative Writing from the Writers Bureau, UK.
Vincent has been published online on different websites and dailies in Kenya, Africa Creates, the African Street Writer, The Africa We Know About (TAWKA) Diaries, NaijaStories, AfricanWriter.com, African Street Writer, Artbeat Afrika, and Storymoja Africa amongst others. In 2013 he was long-listed for the Nigerian Belgian-based writer, Chika Unigwe Best Short Competition and published in an anthology of New Age African poets,
Black Communion
, in Nigeria.
Vincent de Paul is a member of Bloggers Association of Kenya (BAKE), affiliate of Association of Independent (AIA), and Naija Writers Community. A freelance writer, blogger, author and poet, he is all over the cyberspace. For more of his works go to:
