CHAPTER 8: Is this it?

Dylan is still not home when I wake up; my calls are still going unanswered. I start panicking, Dylan would never miss work for anything, and he would have come home to shower and change clothes in the least. I start calling his friends, they all have no idea where he is.

I make a desperate call to this police, I am told it is too soon to file a missing person report. At this point I am going crazy with worry. I call in sick at work. I think of calling Chido but decide against it, a part of me is scared that Dylan is in a bar somewhere, too drunk to remember home, or worst still, in the home of another fertile woman.

The longer I dwell on this, the more it makes sense and I am livid, in my anger I decide to patiently wait for him. He will come home eventually, he has to. I wake up again 2 hours later to the sound of a message notification on my phone, it is Dylan.

‘Hey, sorry for not picking up your calls, I will see you later.’
I stare at the text unbelieving, 11 words, no explanation, and no information about where he is. I dial his number as my hands tremble with anger. No answer. Just before I call again, he sends another message.

‘Back to back meetings all day can’t talk.’
I almost laugh; Dylan thinks the day will not end?
I cook, I eat little, I bathe, I clean the house, I take a walk , the day painfully drags. I decide to read the diary, which might calm me.

19 August 1988
Baba found out about mhama’s cheating last week….
I stop reading, the memory itself is still too painful, a detailed account of mhama’s infidelity, father’s anger and mhama’s attempted suicide is not what I need right now. I look for another page.

3 September 2018
It looks like mainini is here to stay; she brought all her belongings, neatly packed in one small suitcase. Her presence neutralizes the relations in the house, dad has ignored mhama for weeks, mhama in turn doesn’t talk to me, and I am too scared to even look dad’s way. Mhama’s sister is a soft spoken ever smiling giant.

Done with her O’levels, my grandparents are now expecting her to get married; she tells me sometimes how she feels they are not too pleased she hasn’t found a city working man to get married to, like all the other village girls her age.

She prays a lot. At night when she thinks I am sleeping, I can hear her throwing her hands in the air warning invisible spirits not to mess with her marriage, sometimes the prayers are addressed to God, these are softer, quieter pleas for a husband, at times, she just cries.

During the day, she keeps herself busy around the day, I watch her clean the walls and windows and repeat this every other hour because after a week of daily cleaning there is only so much more one can find to do in a 3 roomed household.

When she is not cleaning, she is reading from a tattered New Testament Bible that smells of smoke with pages looking like someone wiped a floor of soot and soup with it. On the few times that I have failed to escape, she assumed the role of the moral police and told me how my behaviour is shameful, how I should stay away from Garikai and instead hang out more with his mother at church. I always laugh at her innocence and naivety. She is sweet. Later diary xxx

It is crazy how I was so convinced of my wisdom, so set in my ways. I wonder where I would have ended up if not for mainini, my mother had stopped caring about me and what I was doing with my life. We did not realise, or understand how depressed she had become, she still had a stall at the market, still provided for us, but what remained was only a shell of her former self.

Her depression episodes and my own had inspired my career. I see how my people easily disregard mental illnesses and it fuels my passion for my work. You would think my father would have had his ego bruised enough to go and find a job to keep but this did not happen.

He continued with his drinking, going AWOL for days on end. When he was around he would snap at everyone for everything, he became even more violent. One night, I hid under the bed as he banged both mother and mainini against the wall and furniture because they had served him cold supper, there was a blackout, and we had no money for firewood, he did not care.

Mhama had forbidden mainini (who still had a burst lip and open cheek) to go to church that weekend, she did not want to encourage rumours, she said. As baba continued to show off his verbal and physical abuse skills more and more, mhama wrapped herself up into her own skin, her presence was unfelt. I drank and smoked even more, not only with Garikai, I made new friends.

Mainini seemed to carry the fountain for gentleness and laughter inside her, I resented her for not being affected by the poison that we breathed, spoke and heard in our home. She still tried to save me from whatever demons she saw in my eyes, she got to me after the abortion.

My train of thought is interrupted by the sound of a car outside, I slowly breathe in and out, Dylan is home.