You never think about the women you’ve had. It’s the ones who get away that you can’t forget. But even then that lasts for what, two hours? Three, tops. Because after that, she’ll want to tell you about her childhood traumas.
This one time I was on a contract in Uganda, because why not? It’s not a must-have but it’s a nice-to-have on your CV. A great conversation starter. You don’t meet many people who have worked in Uganda. But I did. Everything had an intentional look—pale land interrupted by fists of banana plantations. Nothing was ever in a hurry. There was life everywhere. Kampala, 15 minutes from everywhere else. And everyone, including home security guards, watchmen, they all carried guns with mean angry nozzles. I found that fascinating.
I’d spend my days writing copy and my nights as a lovelorn troubadour in where else? Kampala’s red light district drinking, what else, Nile Special, which, folks said, is what real beer should taste like, the original shit, not those low-voltage ‘lite’ things city boys take. I didn’t know if I believed them. I’d been warned about the women in that district, their thunder thighs and 34DDD breasts. People told stories about them, threesomes and foursomes. I desperately wanted to believe them.
“Don’t spend all of it on the whores,” they said, for a man does not live on top of whores alone. Solid advice, which deserves to be ignored. See, I’d read somewhere, or probably heard it on a podcast, who knows, that God don’t mind you having a vice. He just don’t want you to abuse it. That, I believed.
Well. I’d grown partial to one of the crones there, her slattern smile and serpentine guile enough to keep me coming back. She wasn’t exactly pretty. Not to me. Actually, she was fat. She did have nice skin that was darkly erotic but that was just about it. She also smoked cigarettes as part of her act. Or maybe it was no act at all. Oh. And ass. She was proof that it was men and not God who wrote the Bible; because with that ass, how can one say we are equal before the eyes of God? For all are created wonderfully? Please. One look at her and you can see even God plays favourites. Still, enveloped in youth, I went back every day—we only worked till 4 PM, and that was pushing it—so what else was a man to do? Kampala ain’t no Kanairo.
I have a fat policy. Well, I have a policy against dating fat chics. I’ve always preferred my women skinny, anorexic even, if we are being honest—with poor eyesight and a bad attitude, so how did I get here with a fat Ugandan? These are the accidental kinks of habit that become our permanent selves. In primary school, I had a teacher, Mrs O— who saw herself as part of the divine ordinance and carried the notion that kids can be lassoed and tamed with a proper spanking. Mrs O— was fat, there was nothing else to say about it—and she would punish you just for looking at her the wrong way. I dreamed of the day her chair would break and she’d fall down and we’d all laugh at her, why not? That was how I felt.
So you can see I was in a bit of a pickle here. Here I am. Here she was. She wanted to know, Are we serious? She’s never been with a Kenyan before, how will this work? What is it with women and questions? At first, she inquired. Then she demanded. Nobody likes an ultimatum. She thought she could bully me into submission, like Mrs O—; I thought she couldn’t. She thought she’d had the final word; I thought different. She figured she could tell me what to do. I figured she couldn’t.
When I told her that I just wasn’t seeing where this was going, or if it was going, she started crying, keening through the stations of her grief. My mother once told me that in place of muscles, God gave women the ability to cry on a moment’s notice. I’d have ignored her, but something thrust against the front of my trousers, and coward that I am, I told her everything’s going to be alright, and then I told her about Mrs O— and her physical qualities and my fat policy, and I didn’t know it then, because I must have upset her even further. In therapy, they tell you to own your truth. Yeah, right. These days, you say something about one woman and you’ve said it about all of them.
Eddy, fuck you. She said, looking at me as if I was Jeffrey Dahmer or Museveni or something, emptying her pain, and closing her heart. “Toka. Just go.”
I’d won but it felt exactly like losing. Like I myself had been emptied.
