Twisted Times: Son of Man (Twisted Times Trilogy Book 1) (9 page)

Kate’s E-mail was still raw in me. My child, my blood, was no longer inside her. She had aborted my kid while she, if my memory served me right, was a pro-choice antagonist. From my youngest years till that moment I had never seen such a God-fearing girl like her. Her family was staunch Catholic just like Mom.

Her father was the chairman of the Catholic Men Association (CMA) while her mother was the Chairlady of the Catholic Women Association (CWA) and a devote member of the Catholic women devotional group of St. Anna.

Kate herself practically grew up in the church and was a liturgical procession dancer. That was one thing that made me love her even more. It was her holier-than-thou smokescreen life that made me have the notion that she was the girl my heart wanted. I knew from the start that she was exceptional and she was going to make a good woman in her adulthood.

Everything in me was a haze of thoughts – Kate, the aborted baby, the yet to come night’s job, home, and the whole elegiac prose of the life I was living.

I checked my Philip Persio waterproof wrist watch that I had bought immediately I received my first cheque. It was a   Chrono alarm two-in-one watch, with a digital part at the foot of the analogue. It was already past eight p.m. – time to join other vampires for the hunt. We expected to find some stumbling blocks on the way today – guards – but we were to go on with the mission no matter what.

At last the time came. There was no more of Kate on my mind. It was all business.

We managed to retrieve the casket without much ado, but as we tried to get it over the three-foot-tall wall topped with metallic art work of coastal style decoration, Arnold tripped over and fell on the ground, the spades he was carrying clattering against each other undoubtedly waking any light sleeper.

The guards awoke and swarmed to us.

With the agility of a deer that has known it has met its fate with the hunter we helped carry the casket to the waiting pick-up truck where Dick was waiting to drive us away. We put the coffin in the back of the pick up early enough for Arnold to get in front before the Securicor guards caught up with us. But they were late, Dick sped off at full pelt.

This day, we had travelled from Nairobi to Nakuru to attend the burial ceremony of a certain businessman who had been killed by armed robbers while leaving one of his chain stores in Nairobi. Not our handiwork. Though his original home was Eldoret he had bought a ten-acre piece of land in Lanet, Nakuru, from a man called Abdirahaman behind the Armed Forces Training College. It was Arnold’s job to collect such information before embarking on any business in a new area. He was the intelligence officer of Mavis. 

We spent the day at the Club Taidy’s in Nakuru while Jack attended the burial in person to reconnoitre. When the time came for our mission, Arnold and I boarded the Nakuru–Ndudori
matatu
while Jack and Dick drove in our getaway car, a Mazda marqué pick-up that Pius, the guy who modified our stolen cars, had given to us promising that he had done a very good job on it.

The guards were beaten to their game for they did not have a vehicle. In a matter of minutes we emerged on the Nakuru-Ndudori road. The main gate of the military training college seemed deserted. There was no sign of life. As Dick drove off I could not help thinking that I had seen one of the guards pull off something like a walkie-talkie…
stop being paranoid.

Our journey was to culminate in Nairobi.

We encountered police on patrol in the general area of Mbaruk and that’s where I thought that our fortieth day had ultimately come. I was damn sure Dick was hitting 200kph from the wind that was hitting us at the back, and no doubt this could send some message to anyone that if we were not fleeing from something we were definitely avoiding something. The police on patrol hailed us to stop, but Dick did not. He panicked or so I thought. Perhaps he thought that the police had been alerted. This prompted a chase. It was a late night Hollywood showdown on the Nakuru to Nairobi highway.

Our car was too much for the police’s to keep up with. When the police lacked speed they supplemented that with their weapons. They deflated all our tires and within no time we could not drive any further.

I did not know how I was left alone. I just found myself alone in the back. Jack was nowhere. I had to act fast before the police caught me. That’s when I did something I had never dreamt of in my life.

I opened the coffin, got in and lay inside as though I was dead. I could hear them talking as they circled the car cocking their guns, orders being issued and the scampering of heavy shoes. When they opened the coffin, my heart was pounding so hard against my rib cage that I thought it would explode and kill us all.

“It’s a dead man. I don’t know where they were taking the corpse… but I am sure it was not being legally transported,” one officer said in Swahili.

“Maybe rituals… that is common in Naivasha.”

“What kind of rituals?”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

I started feeling antsy, especially from hearing discussions about me as though I was already a morgue case. It was barely five minutes when they came to a conclusion on what to do with the body. They would take it back to Nakuru, they decided. “Kinyua, bring our car. We will tow this thing first thing in the morning.”

I heard shuffling of something I did not know.

I assumed that they had moved away from the pickup to wait for their car. I slowly opened the coffin and checked around. Their car was parked some twenty metres from our immobilized truck. One of the officers was standing about five metres from the back of the pickup, probably the one who had sent Kinyua. I had to move with the gracefulness of a deer, careful.

Coming out of the coffin as noiselessly as I could I jumped off the pickup from the sides and darted to the nearby bush at the side of the road. As I snaked in the blurry night I heard heavy footsteps right behind me. It couldn’t get any worse. They were hitting the earth’s crust so hard, scurrying behind me, too close. It was evident the police had heard me get off the pickup and decided to chase after me. Didn’t they give up? I began to run.

Don’t give up. Don’t make that mistake. Keep running.
I ran towards the direction I deduced was Nairobi; east or west, home is best.

When I was no longer hearing any footstep behind me I took a rest. I did not know how long I had been running. I was just getting away, putting distance between me and the police.

At a distance of about a kilometre I saw some light as though there were some shops there. A quarter an hour later I was there and to my relief it was a shopping centre. I could easily get a vehicle there to the city.

It was the famous Kikopey. Travellers to Western Kenya and Rift Valley talked high of Kikopey for its
Nyama choma
. At about four o’clock in the morning I got a bus to Nairobi, Eldoret Express.

Memorable moments; memories forever!

That was what she was going to have for the rest of her life. Memories of her son.

From his youngest years Shannon thought about him. She could not concentrate on anything in class those days. She was always seeing the innocent visage of the child she had left behind in front of her. The blackboard used to have fading images of the helpless baby she had held in her arms briefly. She tried very hard to accept the fact that she was a mother – young and naïve.

It was her mother, Theresa, who had given her hope of life again. Her father did not want to see her. To him she was an outcast, he would have disowned her as well. Her mother told her that it just happens – the first time
she
tried to eat the forbidden fruit that’s the day
she
became a mother. She did not listen, and the by-product of her pleasure seeking was a child who was to be a living ghost, a phantom so elusive to her dancing far away.

Shannon remembered the day she gave birth garishly. It was the beginning of Kenyan spring of 1985 before that year’s parents’ day of her new school. The occasional pregnancy test was conducted. She could not believe what the matron of a nurse who was conducting the exercise told the principal.

Shannon was pregnant – again. This time round the tidings hit her like tons of ten thousand bricks. Was this still an accident like the first one? Was it unwanted? The man responsible this time round was her biology teacher. He wanted her to abort. She could not. He was transferred to another school while she was suspended for a year to give birth and go back to school. Again it was her mother who walked with her all through. It was a boy again. This time round she did not leave her second child with her mother. She breastfed him up to weaning age.

The following year her father lost his battle with cancer.

She went back to school a sorrowful young mother, but this time round
she did not play around with boys, or offer herself to men who had homes to go to after after-school shenanigans with students.

Two years later, 1987, she married her husband – Fredrick Maina – a primary school teacher.

Though Fredrick accepted to take care of her sons as though they were his own, he wanted a son of his own – blood of his blood, and bone of his bones. He could not sire one. They could not. And then the worst happened eight years into the marriage. Her second son died. Danny died.

From then on her only hope was in Ken. She loved Ken so much it hurt, but the kid was strangely adamant. Her husband always blamed her for bringing him up imperfectly, for smothering him with love. “Or is it because I don’t have a son of my own?” her husband would ask her.

She used to pray daily for her son to change. She was a member of the St. Monica devotional group of the Catholic Church. Story goes that St. Monica herself prayed for her renegade son, Augustine, for thirty years after when God answered her prayers – today Monica’s son is the famous Saint Augustine, doctor of the church. Shannon too hoped God would answer her prayers.

Shannon’s prayers were answered two years after the death of Danny. Suddenly her son began going to church and even devoted himself than ever. She was happy that her son had begun seeing the light and was into the church like Catherine and her brothers and sisters – their neighbours. She had always envied Regina for having such a God fearing family.

Regina’s husband, Catherine’s father, was the chairman of the CMA. Regina herself was the leader of the CWA and a member of the St. Anna devotional group. All their children were so committed in church.

Except for her daughters and herself, Shannon Njeri wanted her whole family to be like that of Regina, but it was proving hard. But when her son started going to church, she thanked God for answering her prayers. It was then that her husband, as though touched by the hand of God, suggested that they send Ken to the seminary for his secondary school education. Thank God. Even her husband was beginning to see the light. To their surprise, Ken did not object (not that he had any say on the matter though), but he was from another see from where they wanted to send him to. They wanted to send him to St. Joseph’s junior seminary, Molo. They were from Thika. Her husband promised to see to that.

The rector at first stood his ground, but he at last bent the rules. The rector could not deny a fellow teacher the chance for his son to be taught by the best.

Everything went well for Ken at the seminary until his last year that Shannon knew that her son had not changed at all, not in the least.

The sun was casting long eerie looking shadows that evening. She was in the kitchen when she heard somebody opening her son’s house. It was her son. Ken did not even talk to her. He just gave her a letter.

She read the letter quietly and when she was done the only words he spoke were that he was not going back to that school. She tried to talk to him, but he was just as unmoved as he used to be. She couldn’t wait for her husband who was at a certain symposium representing his school.

She decided to take her son back to the seminary herself. On the way she tried to talk sense into him, but it was to no avail. She feared for his KCSE exam results. The exams were ongoing when he was suspended and he was saying that he won’t go back to that school? Would he just let it go down the drain? Kids are so irrational.

The rector told Shannon Ken’s offences – bullying, extortion, stealing first formers’ money, pornography, occultism, and God knew what else? She did not get everything. Her mind was spinning. She believed Ken was capable of doing some, but others? Not her son.

The rector and she tried to talk sense in to Ken’s head. He said nothing but accepted the punishment awarded to him by the rector. He went ahead to finish his exams where he managed to get straight A’s in almost all subjects and a mean grade of A stand. Two years later this war began, this war between him and his father.

Shannon wiped the tears that had welled in her eyes. It was now almost two years and no trace of her son. She did not know where he went and her husband seemed to care less. At first they thought that he would come back to them like the prodigal son, but days turned to months and now it was almost two years. Was she to lose her son just like that?

Once again she prayed for her lost son to come back home.