by Gabi Moore
I wrung it out, fanned it in the room and slipped it over my sundress. There. Now I was a little more presentable, and probably smelled a bit better, too. No fashion magazine I knew had outfit tips on how to transition seamlessly from an afternoon at home to a nightmare in a strange African country, but I think I was pulling off the look.
Unfortunately, all my underwear was badly soaked. I washed a few pairs, but they were too wet to wear. I hung them over the little sink on a crinkly wire and then gingerly lifted the rim of my sundress for a quick sniff. Also yikes. Now I’m not squeamish, but Lord knows I would need some clean clothes, and soon.
Then I heard a giggle. I froze and scanned the room, my heart in my throat.
Some rustling, the sound of feet. I ran to the window just in time to catch a handful of kids scampering off, laughing to themselves. Little shits.
Pardon me. A lady doesn’t cuss. But as you can imagine, I was feeling more than a little fed up by that point. But it was fine. Right? All of this was just learning. Just expanding my mind. When I returned home, I didn’t just want to be some airheaded stay at home mom who knew nothing. I wanted to be something inspiring to my children, someone with substance. Apparently, I’d have to find that substance here, in this hovel of a room …but God doesn’t give us more than we can handle, does he?
I smiled and waved and tried to yell hello after them. They couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old each, all dusty limbed from playing in the dirt and bare foot. They pulled their tongues out at me and danced and teased and then scampered off, like little monkeys. They were handsome children. They had bright, clear eyes and velvety skin and they were so, so quick. Forgive me father, but I instantly thought about how good they’d look on my Instagram.
Chapter Five - Viktor
You know that feeling you get when you see some freshly fallen snow on the ground? Some fresh, soft, perfectly smooth snow just waiting there and you get this insatiable urge to just jump in it? Well, that’s kind of the way I felt the first time I saw her bewildered, crumpled little self waltz into Mama Tembi’s.
I can’t even remember the last time I saw snow, but I sure as hell am familiar with that feeling. Call it prey drive, maybe. Lust. I don’t know. I could feel her helplessness, right in the pit of my stomach. And I can’t explain it, but I just had the instinct to …take her. Living in the forest does weird things to you. For one, it sharpens your sense of smell.
But anyway. I’ve seen a few of these types come in here over the years, these holier than thou Americans with white sneakers and bad attitudes and cameras. But she took the cake. I nearly laughed out loud when I saw her: a little rat of a girl, all skin and bones and wearing this thin cotton dress that looked even more fucked up than she did. She was putting on a brave face, but man, the heat did not suit her. She had combed her dusty blonde hair into two pigtail braids, one on each side, and even from my seat at the “bar” I could make out the shiny rock embedded at the center of a silver cross round her neck.
“Well fuck me! Call everything off. Here she is, Mama, here’s your one true savior, all our problems are solved now, you can stop worrying” I said and watched as she entered the far end of Mama Tembi’s general store slash café slash informal town hall. Mama Tembi whipped me with the end of her dishcloth.
“Ay! Watch that mouth, you animal. Not in my shop.”
I leaned back in my seat and eyed her. She was like a baby gazelle, tip toeing through the open plains with no idea of who was sizing her up. Mama Tembi’s might not look like much, but it’s the closest to a community hub this little town has, and whether she knew it or not, how she carried herself here would pretty much decide whether the locals put up with her missionary shit or iced her out until her plane came to fetch her. Something they never seem to understand: when you come here, you’re on the back foot. You’ve never been to Mchinji before. But them? They’ve seen dozens of missionaries, just like you. Hundreds even. They knew the deal.
“But Mama, have you seen her? Actually seen her? Just take a look,” I said and gestured to the crowd that had gathered around the big table, all the new missionaries with the old, plus some sundry village do-gooders. Mama Tembi isn’t my friend, but she’s a breath of fresh air for sure. She takes no shit, not from anyone. She’s built like a wildebeest and has already put two husbands and countless children in the ground. Mama Tembi had AIDS, too, but she never gave you the impression that she couldn’t kick its ass, along with anything else that got in her way. She was focused on rolling some cigarettes and didn’t bother looking up.
“I don’t have to look, Vik, I have work to do,” she said.
“But you’re missing it! She looks like she’s going to burst into tears any moment now.”
She raised a single eyebrow at me and tightened her mouth.
“And if you get involved, she’ll cry for sure.”
She wasn’t wrong. But like I said, something about her looked like she needed a good cry.
“Vik, I’m serious. Leave this one alone, OK?”
Mama Tembi’s eyes flicked to the crowd and then back to me, where she frowned, one half rolled cigarette still poised in her fingers. I sighed and slumped down further in my chair. I wasn’t usually this cynical, but something about these people just irked me no end. Like there was some intolerable imbalance in the universe and I just had to set it right again.
“And would it kill you to put a shirt on when we have new people coming in?” she said and flicked me with the cloth again.
Mama Tembi’s is certainly the largest structure in this two-bit village. It was built by some over ambitious British South Africans in the sixties as a sort of club house, but they had long since cleared off and the place was abandoned and then renovated as a general purpose “café”. The long running joke was that you could get everything here – except good coffee. Mama Tembi knew how to turn backyard chard and beans into a feast, and she knew who in the village was “bad news” and when a woman was pregnant and exactly how much paraffin I’d need for my little cabin before I’d have to come crawling back for more. She knew everything.
Around the big central table, they’d hold town meetings or wedding meals or sometimes watch sports. Mama’s “bar” was off to the side and here she sold single cigarettes and Fanta. If your change was less than a few hundred kwacha, she’d give it to you in government issue condoms. The kitchen staff had made some piri piri goat and yellow rice for the new missionaries. Mama Tembi smiled and welcomed them all. She was happy to accept their “aid”, knowing their real help came in the 4000% markup she put on the mini sizes of Omo washing powder they needed, and not in the mass produced paperback bibles they handed out.
I recognized the old Congolese nun that worked closely with the mission leaders, but there were also a few new faces. They fussed around the new girl. Everyone sat and ate. I realized: she was the first blond I had seen in quite a while. She was cute. I was going to enjoy watching this place tear her apart.
I took a tin bowl from under the counter and stood up, Mama Tembi giving me the evil eye.
“What? A man must eat” I said and winked at her. Mama Tembi wouldn’t ever be too hard on me. She liked those little bags I would slip into her apron once a month or so, and she liked how much she could resell them for. And in her own way, she liked me, even though I was just some crazy “white man”.
I waltzed up to the table and stood there above them, feeling my presence bring the conversation to a grinding halt. Mama Tembi click her tongue and went back to rolling. Most people at the table nodded a vague greeting to me but she, she looked as though she had never seen a man’s torso in her life. Her eyes went wide as I leaned over, my chest and flanks mere inches from her face, as I helped myself to some stew. The deer in headlights look suited her.
“This is Vik, our local troublemaker,” said Sister Dora, who had only recently stopped crossing herself whenever she saw me. I smiled and extended my hand to her. I loved just how quickly she shot out
her little hand to take mine. This is what a man looks like, sweetheart, take a good look. I could actually see her swallow. I could smell her. This would almost be too easy.
“Oh, hello, pleased to meet you Vik. I’m Penny. Uh, do you …do you live in the village?” she peeped, and I realized that she was probably confused about how to categorize me. She had a soft, deep-south lilt in her accent and the kind of face that hasn’t known a day of trouble in its life. I’m sure she didn’t know what to make of my dark skin and blue eyes. Black, but not. White, but not. And half naked. That part seemed to be having the most impact. I took her hand but she struggled to make eye contact.
“He actually lives out of town, that way, in the forest,” said Valerie, shrugging in the right direction. Valerie had been a sweet fuck, but I had gotten tired of that pretty soon. Women like Valerie can go pretty far, but they never truly get it. They’re no strangers to the dark side, sure, but it’s just that they like to take holidays there, have a little thrill with something new and then go straight back to their dead, two dimensional lives. She was cool. But no love lost.
“Vik is on his own mission, sometimes he graces us with his presence. Especially when there’s food around,” said one of the younger missionary kids. The crowd laughed, but not too loudly. The ones who had any sense gave me the wide berth I deserved and the ones who didn’t wouldn’t last a week here anyway. Her hand went briefly into mine and then flew away again, and she tucked it under the table.
Then, and this is the important part, she stared at my crotch. A microsecond, barely anything at all, but when you live alone in the forest with nothing but the trees and your own heartbeat for company, your eyes become good at seeing even the tiniest of things. And it was a big thing. If you know what I mean. She looked, and I looked at her, and she saw me looking, and in a split second she knew that I had seen her looking. And when I kept looking at her, her pretty little face exploded in a flush and she struggled to put her gaze somewhere, anywhere else.
I guessed it would take me a week. Valerie had taken about a month. But this girl was hungry. Within a week I’d have her on the floor of my cabin, and I’d have those sweet little ankles right up behind her ears, and I’d fuck her so hard and so good she’d be taking her good Lord’s name in vain, one way or another. I knew that with that little flick of her baby blue eyes, I was already halfway in.
Conversation around the table flowed a little, although awkwardly, and I could see her straining to smile at everyone, struggling to keep up the façade. She was tired. I said nothing. Just watched. Ate my stew and rice and watched. Naturally, once the bullshit threatened to run out, the conversation lagged a little, but Sister Dora jumped in to save things.
“There’s been a bit of a problem, actually, with the garden,” she said, “The mission arranged for some fertilizer, but there’s been a problem with their trucks. It’s going to take a few more months at least, to get it here.”
Penny’s face went the most delightful shade of pink.
“Months? But we need to start with planting soon” she said, then softly added, “don’t we?”
“I mean I’m not saying the trucks 100% won’t come, it’s just that we might wait a week, we might wait three months, that’s all.”
“But the planting season will have passed by then. What can we do? Isn’t that a problem?” Penny said, her little pigtails looking a bit limp. Clearly, she would take a while to acclimatize to the “African way” of doing things. Yes, sweetheart, it is a problem. Everything’s a fucking problem.
“Well, we’ll figure something out. The guy’s coming next Friday to give us an update, and we’ll speak to him then. In the meantime, you can work with Valerie at the school, there’s a few little things you can do there to stay busy…” Sister Dora continued. You could see the panic on the girl’s face as her vision of salvation slowly wilted and disappeared. She had pictured gardens. She had come for gardens.
“But …but isn’t there some other way to get fertilizer? Surely…”
Everyone ate their stew in silence, waiting for her to finish her sentence. She seemed a little surprised, almost as though she had expected someone to jump in and interrupt her mid-sentence. There are problems, sweetheart. But what are you going to do to fix them?
“Surely we can find someone else, find a local supplier?” she said, not quite sure of herself. I could tell just by looking at her that she had never done a day’s garden work in her life. Not real gardening, anyway. She was used to reducing the miracle of life’s energy down to little seed packets she ordered from glossy catalogues, and had delivered to her by Amazon. No bugs, no thorns, just pretty pictures.
“Not in the quantities we need, Penny. Unless you know how to get hold of a truck big enough to carry a few tons of it, there’s no point starting the garden yet. Maybe next year,” said one of the missionary kids.
This set off a light in Penny’s eyes. She squirmed a little. I liked seeing that. I would make her squirm much, much more.
“Next year? But …but I’ll be gone by then!” she laughed. The others sat and ate in silence, and her face reddened with the realization of just how arrogant she sounded. I felt a little bad for her. Just a little, though. This place had a way of giving people just exactly what they deserved. And holy hell did this girl deserve to be brought down a peg.
I cleared my throat.
“Blood and bone,” I said, and stared right into her unguarded, powdery blue eyes. Nothing in this village was that color. Nothing at all.
“I’m …excuse me?” she said. Her façade slipped a little more and she was starting to seem genuinely irritated. I was going to enjoy seeing it all come off. Every last layer of bullshit. I couldn’t wait to strip it all off of her, and see what a dirty little animal she really was underneath it all.
“I said, blood and bone.”
I hadn’t spoken till then, and she seemed a little surprised that the savage at the table who couldn’t be bothered to clothe himself properly was now daring to speak to her. She smiled nervously, all her little conversational tics and habits failing her. She floundered for something to say, but I spoke and cut her short.
“You don’t need fertilizer. You just need blood, and bone,” I said, and took a mouthful. The best way to solve a problem: see that there isn’t one.
“No offense Vik, but we need a little more than your hippy gardening methods here, the soil at the plot is really, really depleted. That’s kind of the point. We took a long time to source exactly the right fertilizer for this place…” one of the kids started saying. He wanted to seem like a hot shot, obviously, in front of the girl. But it was me that would be fucking her before the week was out, not him, and somewhere in his dim, animal mind, he understood that. They all understood that. He didn’t make eye contact, either.
“What hippy farming methods? Do you know how to make fertilizer…?” she asked me now. I could feel her turning on her manners again, now that there was a chance I had something she wanted. I smiled at her and this seemed to make her a little giddy. There’s nothing in this village the color of her eyes. Except my eyes.
“Dead animals go into the soil, plants come out. Nothing to make” I said. She winced a little.
“I’ve never heard of that. So if we put, like, carcasses and things in the soil it can act like a fertilizer? Are you sure?”
The missionary kid piped up again. “Yeah, Penny, maybe it can work with, well, certain plants, if I can say that, but we’re growing normal vegetables and things here…”
I heard Mama Tembi cluck her tongue behind us. But I wasn’t doing anything. Technically. Clearly this girl was going to run into my arms, of her own free will.
“Penny, Vik has some strange ideas, and I’m not sure he can help us here. Let’s just wait for the truck and then we can…” sister Dora started. But to my surprise the girl was interested. She jumped in, “But maybe he can help. Will you at least come and have a look at the plot? And tell us what you think? It can�
�t hurt” she said. I liked seeing her a little more forceful.
So that’s how this would all play out. I’d make her little perfect missionary fantasy come true and then I’d fuck her till her pigtails came undone. I changed my mind. I didn’t want her down on the ground. I wanted her standing, so I could watch her struggle to stand after I made her come.
“My fiancé works at an oil refinery, and I know they make fertilizers there, I think, and so I can also ask him, what exact things need to go into the soil, you know?”
Huh. Fiancé. I changed my mind again. It would have to be from behind, no question.
The other people at the table seemed unconvinced. Malawi was a place where solutions were scratched together. Take whatever dream or big idea you had, trim it down at least 80%, and then be prepared to be disappointed still. The place didn’t need a fucking community garden. It didn’t need Becky from New York to come and teach the kids ballet so they could express themselves and dream big. Or Shawn from Michigan to teach them “English” and hand out gummi bears. They certainly didn’t need little Penelope over here to do a damn thing.
But I could think of a few good uses for her.
“You’ve barely touched your stew, Penny, don’t you like it?” Sister Dora asked, gesturing to the full bowl.
“Oh it’s lovely!” she said, and the façade was full of cracks. She stared down into her lap looking embarrassed.
Valerie spoke up, “Oh, don’t worry sister, she doesn’t eat meat, we should have said.”
The group went quiet.
Didn’t eat meat? Oh, she would. Soon.
Chapter Six - Penelope