Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1)

by Vincent de Paul

  On seeing me walk in with Linda hand in hand, she rushed to us and hugged me, a firm drawn out hug, and I disgracefully wanted to do something to embarrass her but the voice of reason told me that it would be naïveté. And two, it could harbour ill-feelings from some quarters. She then led us to the VIP lounge where her fiancé and parents were, of course with few invited guests of honour, and introduced us to those present.

  “Mom, Dad, Sam, meet my friend, Ken.”

  My eyes were on Samson. A flicker registered in his eyes. I could not miss it. Susan looked at me, and I interjected. “It’s Paul, not Ken.” She winked at me coquettishly. Funny how we were such a bunch of friends now, I wondered.

  “He’s a very good friend of mine right from our University days. And Ken, these are my parents and my fiancé, Sam.”

  Samson rose from his seat and shook my hand dispassionately. “Nice to meet you, Ken, I have heard a lot about you.”

  “Pleasure. I have heard a lot about you, too,” which was absolutely true.

  “We are pleased to have you at this party,” Sam said.

  And maybe pleased to have succeeded in taking Susan away from me, obviously to get at me for duels lost in different arenas.

  Susan took Linda with her, I don’t know where to. I did not know why the hell she set it up that way. Maybe it was an arrangement with Samson. But I did all I could to avoid Samson. I lost myself in an endless conversation with one of the guests and Samson’s efforts to get to me were futile because I always assumed him. What was there to talk to him about?

  The party was spendthrift as though it was the wedding itself, and I wondered how the wedding, the reality of everything, would be. It was really a fantastic wingding. When it was over, Susan offered to see us off at the gate, and in her eyes I could read something concealed somewhere yet I could not fathom it. I wanted to know why she had wanted me with Samson, confront her, maybe rebuke her, but I never brought myself to. I decided not to ruin the evening for either of us, especially her.

  “What does she do?”

  “Are you sure you want to talk about her?”

  “She’s a nice girl,” she said, looking at the direction of Linda on my left side. “When are you two getting married?”

  As soon as possible.

  God knows, Sue. But I doubt whether I would marry. You… I checked myself.

  At the gate, she hugged us, Linda first.

  Ours was like a sign of our leave-taking. She was mischievous enough to sneak a furtive brush of her lips onto mine making me feel an enigmatic pavane of my hairs in my insides. I wanted to kiss her back, kiss her the goodbye we never said. I didn’t.

  “Sue, I wish you a wonderful marriage. I never thought it would come to this,” I whispered to her ear like an early morning bird.

  I felt as if I could strangle her. What a farewell. I gently pushed her away from me, feeling strange from the contact of her breasts with me.

  I reached for Linda’s hand.

  Susan started back while Linda and I watched her. And then for the first time that evening, my mind had obnoxious thoughts about Susan – uncouth, hardnosed, impudent, bimbo, amorous, suave, soppy… Who does she think she is? Am I not the one who broke her virginity? They are not ought to marry. To hell with her, away with the-bag-of-bones-obnoxious Susan.

  Linda missed nothing. She was beginning to know me, though I was trying not to be known.

  “Did you mean what you said?”

  “Pardon my language. I wanted to hurt her. Forget I said it.”

  I did not attend Susan’s wedding. She wanted me to. I did not partly because I had a job to do and partly because I could not stand witnessing Susan being chained together with my arch-enemy.

  *

  It felt good to be in the church, away from the worries that plagued the secular world. I felt as though I was part of the clergy now, but a different kind of clergy. Working in the church humbled me in ways I never knew existed. It was a life – so – so liberating.

  My first year in the church was over without anything happening. I had not heard of anyone asking around about me. It seemed like I had gotten a clean break. I was sure that even if anybody got wind of my whereabouts, church would be the last place they would look for me; and that included Hanan. Well, if he wanted to get me he would have by now.

  The following year, nothing much happened, and I began getting more comfortable with the life I was leading. I guessed I had attained spiritual enlightened, and I needed nothing more in this life.

  However, when I was thinking that I had made it I just realized that I was not over myself yet. I could want to be anything, make life whatever I wanted, but deep inside I was still me, whom I am.

  CHAPTER 109

  Tuesday, 17th September;

  Virginia fiddled with the empty wineglass as she watched Timothy as though she were seeing him for the first time. She had lots to tell him. He too had lots to tell her.

  Timothy felt a tingling in his insides. He trusted his instincts. He had a foreboding of what she wanted to tell him. She had called him earlier on in the week at home and her voice had made him know that whatever she wanted was serious – not their usual lunch hour quickies.

  Virginia was lost for words. She searched for milder words to use but it seemed all vocabularies stocked in her head had everything but euphemism for what she wanted to tell Timothy. All she was left with was a glib and coarse blurting.

  “I’m pregnant, Timmy.”

  She was watching him.

  “You’re what? Are you sure about it?”

  “Yes. I have seen a doctor and performed a scan.”

  A dark heavy blanket of pregnant silence engulfed them. Except for the rustle of the afternoon breeze and the sputtering of cutlery from the neighbouring tables the silence was explosive. Timmy’s face turned ashy and pale, and when he said, “That certainly poses a problem,” his voice was edgy.

  “Virginia, are you sure it’s mine?”

  Her eyes slit and narrowed on her lover. Tears stung and threatened to squirt. It took much of feminine water power resistance and self-restraint to hold them back. However, she couldn’t. She let them cascade down her chubby cheeks like the waters of Victoria Falls. How could he ask her such an insensitive question? Did he doubt her? Did he think she was screwing whoever God knew behind his back? What the hell did he mean by that? How could he say such a callous thing?

  “I knew it. You never trusted me. All along you’ve been clouding ya’ head with doubts that I was screwing somebody else behind your back.”

  “You tell me now you mention it.” Timmy could be an ass if he wanted to. He hurt her feelings by calling her loose, and he was not sorry about it.

  “I get it, Timothy. You’ve got nothing to do with this...”

  “Virginia, I’ve got a family to care about.”

  “Don’t feed me that crap,” she said amidst tears. “You should have thought of that when you’re cheating on your wife.”

  “For God’s sake, Virginia, how did you get pregnant?”

  She was piqued. A lump blocked her throat, but she managed to fight back. “How do you think I got pregnant?”

  “You always told me you were safe. You told me to hell with condoms. I trusted you on that. Now that you are pregnant, it’s entirely your mistake.”

  “I hear it now you say. To want me think that I don’t remember that you wanted me to have you a kid is adorable of you.”

  “Later I changed my mind. Veronica’s...”

  “I don’t know about Veronica. Besides, it’s too late if you changed your mind then.”

  “Now you’re pregnant. What do you want me to do? Carry it; it’s your own cross for your insatiable libido.”

  The last dam-burst flooded her cheeks with ocean-salty waters. How could Timmy be so insensitive, crass and morose?

  But at the back of his mind Timothy knew that he had messed things up, and he was not willing it to get any messier. It was his responsibility to d
o damage control before it was too late to do anything.

  “Look, Virginia,” he said reaching for her hand across the table. She pulled her hands away and buried her head in them in sobs. His voice was a little gentler when he spoke again. “I know someone who can...”

  “Timothy, you don’t want me to abort my baby, our baby,” she cringed to what he was about to say. “I won’t spill my own blood.”

  She continued to cry, low guttural sounds that were gradually turning to high-pitched whimpers. She was making a display of them. He looked nervously over his shoulder and saw the couple on the neighbouring table were looking their direction.

  “Look, Virginia,” he said. “You’ve got no choice.”

  She didn’t say a word. She had no voice.

  He got a cheque book from his jacket’s inner pocket and a notebook. He scribbled a name and wrote her a fifty thousand shillings cheque and handed them to her.

  “Call that number and tell him I send you to him.”

  “Why him? Do you get yourself a special deal?”

  She then knew that she was dealing with a dangerous man. Apparently it was not the first time he had done this. How many clients had he taken to this man for abortions? How many girls had he ruined their lives? How many women had he cheated on his wife with? She looked at him across the table. He was not the Timothy she knew. She lowered her eyes and shook her head. “I am sorry,” she said. “I can’t do this.”

  “So am I, Virginia.”

  She gave him those eyes of hers that time and again he had said stole his breath away. He didn’t even flinch. He levelled his beady eyes with hers. “Get over with it, Virginia.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if I don’t do what you want? For God’s sake, there comes a point in life when other people come first than your selfish self. I can’t kill my baby. What if I decide to have the baby?”

  “That’s entirely your decision.”

  “And you’ve got nothing to do with me?”

  “So you say,” he said absentmindedly. “And you’ll never hear of me again. That fifty thousand is the last you’ll get from me.”

  That stung like hell. “Oh, really,” she said sarcastically. “You think I am a pauper?” she picked up the cheque, looked at it and folded it at the centre. She then tore it along the fold and handed it back to him.

  “Thank you, Timothy. I don’t need it.” With that she stood up and walked past him out of the restaurant.

  She went straight to her brother’s house that he had given her to be staying in when he joined the church. She went to her bedroom and locked herself in. She sank in her bed, buried her head in the pillows and soaked them with tears; tears of dejection and hurt. She hated everything – herself and life. She felt as though everything had come to a standstill in her entire life.

  Virginia was a sous-chef at the Panafric Hotel in Nairobi. Before then she had worked as a chef-de-partie at the Jacaranda Hotel where she had gone straight from the Kenya Utalii College, courtesy of one of her brother’s friends who was a friend of the manager there. A year later she left the Jacaranda Hotel for the Panafric Hotel.

  That’s when it started. Timothy was the manager Panafric Hotel and he did not hesitate to tell her the truth – he was divorced – when they started dating. Her friends were against her dating a once married man.

  “But they’re divorced,” Virginia would retort.

  Her best friend, Sophia, an East African Standard Group reporter, knew Timothy. She tried to warn her. Virginia listened not. She was blinded by love, overwhelmed by the emotion beyond reckoning, debilitated by the feeling she felt when she thought of him and deluded by the elation of their being together.

  Actually, Timothy was not divorced. He hailed from Nakuru and that’s where his family lived. His wife was a lecturer at Egerton University, Njoro Campus.

  After having experienced quite a number of unsuccessful relationships with men who knew not how to love, Virginia had ended up heartbroken more often than not. When she found Timothy, a once married man, she was sure that he was the man her heart wanted. He was loving and caring. He was her ray of sunshine for almost a year when one day, out of the blue, he told her that he was going back to his wife – they had made up and resolved that being away from each other was worse for their children and the family they had raised from the scratch than their detest for each other, they couldn’t just throw away fifteen years, and were marrying again.

  At that time, her brother, Kennedy Maina, had just come from Israel where he had gone on self-exile and he gave her his house to be staying at. Her brother had bumped into Jesus and had gone to live in the church. It was then that she talked with Timothy.

  Timothy organized for her to leave Panafric Hotel and recommended her well. She got a job at the Blue Post Hotel in Thika. She was now near home, but they still continued to see each other. Not until Timothy outrightly walked out on her telling her that he and his ex-wife were hooking up again, for the sake of the children. He had made up his mind and was not turning back. Virginia cried a river. It made no difference to Timothy. A month later she discovered she was pregnant for him.

  She did not know what to do at the time. Timmy had walked out on her, and she couldn’t go back to her mother. It seemed now that there was nothing left to say between them.

  CHAPTER 110

  Saturday, 14th December,

  The Thika Catholic Church had a vocations workshop. One Father Peter Muema from Kitui Diocese who had been in Rome for ten years was back in the country having completed his doctorate in theology. He wanted to talk to the youth about vocations and the understanding of God’s call in their lives. The day was to start with a Mass at eleven o’clock.

  I was in the vestry cleaning the chalices and ciboriums in preparation for the Mass. I heard the sacristy door open. I did not turn to look who it was. I already knew it was Sister Rose, the nun from the congregation of Jesus the Good Shepherd, who used to help me with work in the sacristy.

  “Hi, Sister. Good morning,” I said, dipping a brush in a brasso container without even turning to look at her.

  “Good morning to you; in the name of Maria.” The voice was honeyed, totally different and unfamiliar. It was not Sister Rose Wanjiku, and I turned unceremoniously to check who the stranger was.

  I came face to face with a Mona Lisa Smile countenance on a perfectly sculptured chocolate complexioned face of a young girl whom I guessed her age to be barely over twenty. She was short and plump with a mass of shiny black curly hair which indicated some sort of crossbreeding in the genealogy showing from the centre of her head where a white veil had not swathed. Her round hazel eyes bore into mine with a rare confidence, straight in the eyeball. She was not shy. Her nose was thin and impeccably planted on her cute face and had a cupid-bow mouth with thin sensuous lips. She was shapely for her age with an unexaggerated steady gait. She wore a long immaculate sky-blue dress swathed with a white veil from the centre of her head to the lumbar region. Her bust was endowed, exceptionally noticeable. She smiled encouragingly at me, and I was lost for words. The Madonna without the child.

  Several seconds elapsed before I said, “How are you?”

  “I’m fine. How do you do?”

  “How do you do,” I answered.

  An embarrassing moment of silence seemed to invade the room, the moment I feasted my eyes on her, before I asked, “What can I do for you?”

  She told me that she was just passing by to check on the Christmas program and know whether she could be given any task do on that day.

  “And you are?” I asked her.

  “Hedwig Sanzi Joe. I’m a Chagga, from Kilimanjaro.” She paused briefly as though she had said that by mistake any had realized it was too late to check herself. “Mi’ ni Mwanashirika wa Shirika la Bikira Maria.” Her Swahili was perfect.

  “I see,” I said, but she had lost me. She was speaking Cantonese. “I’m Ken, by the way, the
sacristan.”

  Hedwig went ahead to explain about this Shirika thing to me.

  She was a devotee of the devotional group of Mary the Immaculate Conception, according to her, to protect herself from the unbridled hedonism, culture and globalization, things that have scourged the world today, because the devotional group helped guard them from the temptations through prayers. Guarded like the Vatican guard, I thought. From the very word go, I liked her. All this time her eyes were on me, unblinking, unfaltering.

  She talked of the Immaculate Virgin Mary and the Son of Man, that is, Jesus. This made me remember the day I met Susan, and Susan herself.

  “You new around here?” I asked Hedwig.

  She told me that her family had just moved from Kitui. Her father, an accountant in the district commissioner’s office, had been transferred to Thika, their home place.

  “Oh, welcome to Thika then. I’m sorry we don’t have that devotional group over here.”

  I turned to my work, but still talking to her.

  She answered the questions I asked her briefly and straight to the point. She was well versed with the organization of the Catholic Church. I told her about the day’s program and she offered to help me in preparing for the Mass. I was naturally exhilarated listening to her.

  Quite oddly, a terrific weight dropped from my mind and say, my heart. Louche thoughts lingered, bugging like a headache.

  She could make a good wife, I thought. Here she has come, at your doorstep. Manna from heaven. Go ahead. She has come for you. A chance lost is never seen again. Never. The devil on my left shoulder whispered dearly.

  No son, you are an instrument of the Lord. She is your sister, remember! Furthermore, she is just a kid, laden with innocence. Corrupt not the young mind. She is still in school. She is more of a little sister to you. You can’t do this. Not to her. You can go to jail for just thinking of defiling her. Paedophilia is a mortal sin besides a crime punishable by law. The angel on my right shoulder countered.