"When They Catch You"

This story is for Ishta, a girl who asked me for more, and wouldn't stop.

@Two Men

“When they catch you, and they will catch you, they never let you go,” He used to tell me, his short stubby fingers with stained nails caressing the neck of his Pilsner, “They caught me.” His wet fingers would stop short of the blue Pilsner sticker and slide their way up the neck of the bottle again. Seated opposite him, I was glad for the afternoon beer, wishing it was evening though, because then I had scruples about drinking beer in the afternoon in Kisenyi.

He knew about my scruples. The first time he had suddenly suggested we skip one of our afternoon lectures and go have a drink, my startled, “Now?” had made him throw his head back, belly nearly popping out of his untidily tucked in white shirt, laugh so hard that the other students lounging under trees and leaning against the Faculty of Gender Studies had turned around to look at us. He had told me then, as we walked toward the university’s main gate, my long steps slowed down to his panting short ones, why he liked to drink any chance he got, and why afternoon drinking was his favourite. Indifferent to the gaping students with one ear phone in their ears, fiddling with large screened fancy phones like video games we were walking through that set my heart racing.

“My lips are not red for nothing; my eyes are not this colour because I was born with them like that. There was a time when the only drink I could get were the ones I made myself when I was so poor I was not ashamed to steal beggars’ clothes. No one can tell me I don’t deserve my drinks and to drink when I want, can they?” he had a loud, shrill voice, but it was a friend of his at the funeral who had told me that I was the only person Mustafa ever talked to like he was questioning himself.

I wonder if they have got me. It does not feel like they have. But I wonder if when they get you, you never realize that they have got you because you’re too busy thinking you are happy or maybe you’re too occupied in seeing to everyone’s happiness, you never get a chance to think, be alone and see. But it does not feel that way. God, I hope am not deluding myself.

Nakato’s Bar was the rich man’s bar in Kisenyi. It was not Nakato’s Bar anymore when Mustafa started bringing me here. She was dead by then. But it had been her bar though and I had been told how she had started it up and how she had died. Mustafa was part of her story but whenever I asked him about her, he became silent, a rare thing, and turned his face away from me, fingers pulling at his lower lip. He would never talk about her but this was the only bar he ever brought me to when we came drinking in Kisenyi, where he was happiest, always sitting in a special inner room that doubled as a room for an hour lovers. A small room with brown threadbare couches, low wooden coffee table so stained with drinks that it was turning black and two exits.

Mustafa loved this room in the afternoon, downloading his stout softening bulk into the corner of the sofa that was opposite one of the locked metal doors so the sunlight from the window through the dirty white lace curtains could flood his face. Sighing, undoing the button of his trouser. Charity, Nakato’s younger sister, grinning, asking us what we wanted, knowing Mustafa would explode, “But Kyality! Upto now you’re still asking us what we want? This woman is difficult!” he would shove away the coffee table with his foot against the sofa opposite us, the sight of it inducing more outbursts, “Naye when you’re getting us a new coffee table? This one is now only good for firewood! You shouldn’t be complaining that you have no newspapers to light the sigiri, you have this! I’m not bringing you anymore newspapers!”

“When they catch you, at first you think it is you who has caught them!” Mustafa would say, slashing the air between us with a fierce sword finger, “That is their magezi! They make you think they’re the ones who are giving up, kumbe, it is you!”

He would drop back into the hollow of his corner, rubbing his gleaming clean shaven head against the wall, as if before his eyes, on the askew coffee table, it was all happening again before him. He next short sip he would take from his Pilsner, bottle lifted off the dusty, cracked cement floor, would seem resentful; the bitterness of beer on his face like he was a first time drinker. “But you will see, you will see yourself. You and I are not different.”

It had seemed then like we were so different. Not to me. To everyone who knew us then. I liked to think that I was going to be the man he failed to become. That I was the better version of him. Tezira’s joyful screaming comes pealing through the house to me in this room like a bounding beach netball. Aaron is teasing her with our ten month old kitten again. My daughter and my son. They will soon be climbing all over me, pleading for a game of snakes & ladders and my pirate haaarrr!

It was when he was drunkest that Mustafa would bring his face close to me, voice lowered, saying, “They get you through the women.” I used to wonder if he was talking about Nakato or his wife whose photograph was in The New Vision and The Monitor newspapers nearly every week at some NGO gifting. I used to wonder why we could not just get drunk, why he would not get drunk like I was drunk then, leave me be, but he would shake me awake, spilling his life’s wisdom, “All our stories are women’s stories even if we do not like to admit it. They are!” I still see his eyes, saying that.

Tezira is in the room, laughing, “Daddy, snakes! Daddy, snakes!”

TO BE CONTINUED….