AUTHOR: PAMELA MUGENI
MOBILE: 0723 311 274
EMAIL: Pamela_mugeni9@gmail.com
THE MUD LOVER
I really cannot tell what drew me to him. As far back as I can remember, there had not been anything particularly impressive about him. Yet he had tugged me along in his muddy lifestyle. For years.
He had slipped into the mud yet again, splashing me and my friends as we struggled to get him out. My call for care had once more fallen on deaf ears. Like it had times too many to count.
He sat there on a muddy patch of grass, head in his muddy hands and tears streaming down his muddy face, lamenting how bad the road was, how heavy the rain had been, and how unfairly rough life had been on him. I ought to have been angry and mad, but as usual it is my sympathies he appealed to.
“You will have my last clean suit. Spoil it and it will be the end!” I threatened for the umpteenth time as I walked back home to get him his last change. He thanked me and lay back, not bothered that the whole place was muddy. I would need dry cleaning services if the suit was ever to get back its sky blue sheen. It mattered little to him that this one I had acquired on loan.
Because of him we were late for the party, his party, and because of him we had spots of mud all over our party suits. More time was being lost as he looked for a place to wash off the mud before slipping into the new suit.
“What business do you have with this person? Don’t you see his affair with the mud is deliberate?” my two friends Shaina Ndule and Mpishe Pae, with whom we were heading to the party, growled when I arrived with the suit covered in polythene. “Why bother with someone who doesn’t care about self?”
I had asked myself the same question over and over, and threatened to have no more business with him, but I would slide time and again and find comfort only in his muddy company. Sometimes I wondered if I wasn’t muddier than him.
“How shall the other guests take us at the party?” Shaina Ndule asked.“And was it a must that you should bring him along?”
“And who is he anyway?” chimed in Mpishe Pae.
As we waited for Matope Mbele to change, I told them who he was and how we had met.
I had first met him some seven years back here in Lidoa, the town I had put up at upon securing a junior job with the government. He had fleeted into my lonely life, bringing hale and mirth and laughter, opening my soul to moments I had believed would forever be for others. I had known nothing but misery all my life. My father, remarried in his sunset years long after my mother had passed on, bought peace in the home by giving his grand-daughter wife a free reign of terror on the only child he had managed in his first marriage at an advanced age. I had partaken to the cup in full measure, spending nights hungry on a tongue-thin mattress with bedbugs and mosquitoes for company, waking up to mean words that cut to the centre of the heart and laughter straight from hell challenging me to go join my late mother in the grave for a morning cup of tea. I would be hit for six for every year of childlessness she had suffered, a heap considering she was in the late twenties and would have been a mother at twelve, paying for the crimes of my mother who in her grave had consulted some juju to ensure her grand-daughter co-wife’s womb would not experience the joy of a new life playing within.
My refuge had become books. I read and read as tears flowed down my cheeks and soul, and earned myself an expulsion from home the day it all appeared to pay off. I started off with a junior position with the government, finding myself in the grips of a supervisor who was every inch an image of my step mother. She would shout and harass and intimidate to protect her position, which she hoped to cling onto and pass to her son who was completing college but had a position already guaranteed. The glands that had opened with my mother’s death continued to widen, and the tears were copious and unrelenting when they came.
It is in this state that Matope Mbele found me. He became a kind of guardian angel, lifting the lid off my misery in his own slimy and muddy way and stealing his way into a soul scarred over many years.
He had a story of his own. A muddy one, he admitted. He had first slipped in the mud when he had just joined high school at the age of fifteen. With a friend they had ran away to the coastal town of Mombasa, financed by his parents’ money after selling a portion of their land to pay for his school fees, deceiving self he was going to start a happy-ever-after life away from the harsh discipline of school and parents. The twenty one-thousand-shilling notes he had thought inexhaustible were over in a flash. Soon what to eat and where to live was a nightmare.
He could not go back to his parents after disappointing them with a no-show in the school he had been admitted to. Neither could he remain in Mombasa where he knew no one and where the friend who had helped squander his parents’ money had left him.There was no way easy way out of the mud. He had to come back to the city of Nairobi and fight for breath.
Not knowing where to start, having no money and nowhere to go, he thought of the best way to seek for sympathy. He stood in the middle of a street and shouted himself hoarse, to the effect that someone had grabbed all he had and ran off.
He was immediately surrounded by a crowd. “What is the problem?”men and women asked, unaware he was acting it all. He was an innocent school boy mugged of all his school items including money for transport, he said between sobs. The crowd raised enough to see him home, looking around and cursing the imaginary thieves who had no shame pouncing on even schoolboys.
Aware of the bog he had ensnared himself in, he left Nairobi muddier than he had left Mombasa. He knew neither where or what would follow. After the bus dropped him where his fare ended, he walked on foot until he found a kindly soul. The next he knew he was working for Mukubule, my neighbour when I was staying at the other end of town.
That’s where I first met him and for a year or so he gave me company, mesmerizing me with endless stories of escapades I had been denied in growing up. For the first time I had something to look forward to in the evenings, breaking the routine of long overtime I never claimed, arriving home just to drop a tired body on the bed. Matope Mbele made me laugh and cry, not with sorrow but with mirth that enlivened the soul. I learnt for the first time that those who visited Mombasa, which my hero had traversed north to south, never felt like coming back, with illustrations of the beautiful women that walked the beaches and the yummy foods prepared along streets and in hotels.
I followed, mesmerized, unaware the muddy path I was taking. Matope Mbele would sometimes serve the unwitting red flag. He would hold his head in his palms, deep in thought, then chime, “People wonder how we remain so close yet you work for government while I’m a mere houseboy.” Then he would look me straight in the face, wear a rhoguish smile and unleash new episodes of his muddy escapades.
And then he disappeared once more, without warning or goodbye. People said he had gone upcountry, others back to the coast. I missed his company, especially when I was inmy blues. He was the type that brought warmth to your life even when things felt like a storm, feigning confidence that could take you to the moon if you did not question his muddy existence.At times I hungered for him, just like a small child misses its mother.
Two years later he resurfaced, again without notice. He just happened at my place of work one morning, his radiant smile and warm handshake bellying his manner of departure. He told me he was looking for some casual job to earn him enough to start a business, and would I mind accommodating him?
I did not object. Instead I was delighted to see him; to partake more of his entertaining stories. I was made to move to another place away from Mukubili, his former boss, because he feared spotting. My present house was bigger and had a visitor’s room that afforded Matope Mbele the freedom and comfort he needed. That I might also need assistance one day,and that I would be treated the way I had treated others, had always been my philosophy.
Then the mud started falling off my eyes, and I started seeing him for who he was: a sadistic gambler and daily drunkard. He would come home muddy all over, drunk soggy and knocking at the gate in the wee hours of the night, unworried about the disturbance he was causing the sleeping neighbours. I would get out to open for him, each time vowing it would be the last, primed to tell him words that would stick in the throat as he staggered in.
Hell knows where he was getting all the money from.When it came to friends he was totally omnivorous, dragging all and sundry into his slimy path. Today it would be some youth, tomorrow a group of women and the following day a horde of men. One thing was clear, though. Like me, they were mesmerized by his apparent cleverness. They spent what time they could at my house, whether I was in or not, taking gins and other concoctions, singing songs, telling stories and making merry. I was like a refugee in my own house.
Matope Mbele would put on my expensive suits and visit my place of work in them. But that was not my worst nightmare.He would sit in the office and chat my workmates for long, spewing information in his muddy, carefree style.
I lived in dire fear of him causing me trouble with neighbours and workmates. Because of him I was now insecure both at work and home. I felt exposed; I had no doubt in my mind that the neighbours and workmates he talked to so recklessly knew each and every of my strong and weak points. Some mockery had crept into my workmates when we were talking, and I could feel their eyes all over me as I passed.
Unfortunately the situation was now out of my control. Matope Mbele had come looking for a rug to wipe off his mud and found one. It was a deep muddy dam I had dug for myself.
When he disappeared again without as much as a word of bye I breathed a sigh of relief. I never pretended I missed him one single day. I promised myself that if he ever happened again he would find a different person, one who would brook no nonsense.
But if I thought I had seen the last of him I was mistaken. One evening four years later, my attention was drawn to a man walking towards me as I headed home. As our eyes locked, I realized I had not been mistaken. It was Matope Mbele alright. Though he had lost some weight the usual muddy appearance in his clean clothes was there. Meaning he had slipped and fallen again and was looking for a soft place to land.
This time I wasn’t going to be fooled; if anything, I wanted to make him appear the fool. He had left me annoyed after I had been so kind to him. Some of my suits that he used to swim in the mud in still had permanent mud spots, and some of the characters he had introduced to my house had been behind a theft or two that had ultimately forced me out of the area into a more expensive one
As usual he was already drunk. We exchanged greetings and had an uneasy chitchat. Iwaited for his usual burst of laughter as I reminded him of past boasts that he would never care. That had been his way of life: laughing at any attempts at explaining that life was not a rehearsal, making the whole thing sound so simple that the person talking appeared the fool.
To my dismay, he began to sob like a sick child as passersby watched. When it came to attention seeking and bouncing back the ball to the sender, Matope Mbele was an expert. I had handled tears before, but not adult men’s in public. Already a crowd was forming to witness the two men, one younger and smartly-dressed and looking confused, the other older and shaggy and clinging,
sobbing in spasms that shook his whole body. I could not avoid embracing his muddy frame and patting his back to calm him. I assured the gathered crowd that he was a friend going through a rough patch and that he would be alright. I felt it fit to give him a push up a narrow path branching off the main earthen street where I felt was convenient and private enough.
“I have a big problem,” he started when the sobbing had died down. Not surprising; I had heard the same introduction over and over again before a catalogue of needs was rolled out. Every time he fell in the mud, it was always one messy need on top of another.
“My child is admitted at the provincial general hospital with severe burns,” he went on.“I don’t know whether she will survive.”
“What! Did you ever have a family?” I asked, genuinely surprised. In all his carefree life, he had never given a hint he could have responsibilities beyond self.
“Yes! Recently I got married to the mother of my first daughter, now ten. She burnt the child during a family row as she accused me of irresponsibility,” he said, looking up at me with teary eyes.
I was sorry for the woman who had agreed to move in with him. Responsibility? Not Matope Mbele. I could almost feel her frustration that she had unfortunately vented on an innocent child. And the man responsible was here shedding tears like a scalded child, hoping another man would take responsibility on his behalf. It was sort of becoming something with a different motive.
“Nobody wants to see me,” he resumed in his drunken monologue.“Not this woman, not my parents, not my brothers. Hypocrites! There was a time I went home with my wallet loaded. I was hero to everyone; my parents, brothers, all. When I became bankrupt they deserted me. On this earth people only accept you when you are in better position and not covered in mud as I am now,” he added, pointing at his trousers that had smudges of mud around the knees.
“That’s how life is!” I assured him with a feeling of déjà vu.
“You are the only person who has ever been good to me. I will always be grateful to you.”
As if you ever are, I thought to myself.
“You have an affair with the mud. Don’t you ever realize how muddy that path can get?” I ventured to ask.
He did not answer me but continued with his drool, blaming everyone and every situation for the ditch he was in.
Even after all the time I had played host to him I did not know how to help. The problem with Matope Mbele was Matope Mbele himself. You try to get him out of a murky situation and you ended up in one yourself. He may have fallen out with his new wife, his child may have been burnt and was critical in hospital, but I did not want to get involved. Trying to help would only leave me deeper in mud.
Still I had to support him to get up and walk. He leaned heavily on me, his drunken breathe nauseating, the smell of sweat in a body that had not been bathed for days calling for a throw up. We were a spectacle. I had expected to make him taste a dose of his own medicine, but now I was the one stripped naked. Watching us, nobody could tell who was drunk and who was sober.
When we next met a few months later he was a whole lot new person, he said, and was planning a church wedding.
My two friends exchanged glances, obviously wondering the kind of girl he was preparing to wed, and the kind of wedding. The much they knew of Matope Mbele was that he was a reckless mess. It would be the shock of their lives to meet him at the high table as the bridegroom-to-be.
I had also been terribly shortchanged. I had expected a whole lot new Matope Mbele, one who would hold steady even when the path was slippery. The fact that he had fallen a couple of times already, and that he was in his second change of suit, was an anticlimax. I only hoped he had sobered up enough.
“Oh I have slipped again!” we heard someone say from the bush. We watched petrified as Matope Mbele emerged, the knees of my cream trousers a smudge of brown. He must have knelt in the mud praying to his muddy goddess.
My friends threw me knowing glances. I knew I ought to be mad. To shout at or even slap, but my heart flattered with sympathy. I was still in a slippery patch, not sure whether to hold on or
let go. My burning desire was to see him at the party. It would be the last I would be seen with him, I vowed.
“Does it not bother you this fellow is just but a thorn in the flesh?” Shaina Ndule asked. “Do you realize with these theatrics we won’t make it to the party? We have less than an hour to go!”
I looked at my watch and the panic set in. We had been on the way since noon and now it was past four o’clock. And the star of it all, the bridegroom, was here engaging in his muddy theatrics.
Another thud made me look up.
Matope Mbele was in the middle of another ditch, sweeping with his arms in search of some weed to hold onto.
I heard Mpishe Pae stomp his foot behind me. I turned, just in time to see him tug Shaina Ndule by the coat tails and lead him the way we had come. I turned again, to see Matope Mbele struggle onto a dry patch, my suit hugging his wet body and dripping muddy droplets. It could mean only one thing. The party wouldn’t be. Whether the bride was waiting or whether it was all a ruse we couldn’t know, but a soggy groom in the company of three besmirched comrades would be the antithesis of a pre-wedding party.
I turned and followed Shaina Ndule and Mpishe Pae.
I never saw Matope Mbele again. Nor did he return my suit, one of my best, brought all the way from Canada by a friend who had visited there.
When the date of his wedding was due, I tried the numbers he had given me. I would at least wish him luck and remind him of my beloved expensive suit.
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