Mission

by Philip Spires

  “Mister Michael’s words?”

  “Father Michael’s!”

  “But taking a wife and having a son is also important,” said Samuel, still somewhat distracted. “It is not our culture to reject the importance of this duty.”

  “It is also against our culture for a man to limit himself to just one wife, but your own Church condemns polygamy.” The final word, spoken by Boniface in English, pricked Samuel like a thorn.

  “But you can’t call such evil things a ‘culture’. Taking more than one wife is simply pagan. And it is not condemned by our Church, but by the Bible. That is the law.”

  Boniface laughed. He pitied Samuel, believing that he was incapable of seeing through what for him was obvious trickery.

  “Listen, Boniface. I can show you how unnatural, how wrong your belief is. If I was to call over one of those girls...” He pointed across to the far side of the bar where a trio of nervous and apparently self-conscious girls sat around a table littered with Coca Cola bottles. “…And arrange for her to become your girlfriend, you would have to refuse. Do you call that a natural reaction for a healthy young man?”

  Boniface inspected the prospect before replying and thus he joined the other members of his group who had been eying the girls for some time. “No,” he replied. “I would not have to refuse. I am not a priest yet. I have taken no vows. I don’t even know if I will ever have the chance of entering the seminary. That is for God to decide. At this moment I am as free as anyone to have a girlfriend if I so wished, but if I still wanted to be a priest, then I would have to confess all my sins before I took my vows, and then I would have to be prepared to live out those vows for the rest of my natural life.”

  Almost before he had finished, Samuel had risen from his chair and crossed the room. That was obviously what the girls had been expecting, because almost as one their eyes lit up with mischievous but accommodating smiles. During the previous hour they had received numerous attentions from interested admirers, but they had consistently met invitations with a good humoured but cutting and dismissive defiance. After all, they were educated girls. They were worthy of more than the attentions of mere common men. Thus, when Samuel introduced himself as a teacher and invited them to join himself and his friends in a drink, they seized the opportunity with obvious eagerness, whilst at the same time displaying a disinterest that suggested that this was no more than their right.

  Clearly Samuel was intent on proving his point and Boniface immediately felt his heart sink. Surely he was going to be put on the spot and whatever happened he would have to make sure that he did not lose face in front of the others. It was obvious that Samuel knew at least one of the three girls and he made it clear from the moment he introduced her to his friends that she had once been his girlfriend. Whatever happened, Samuel was surely going to provide Boniface with the opportunity of practising what he was destined to preach. If he refused he would suffer not only the sarcasm and ridicule of his friends, but also intellectual and personal defeat. His actions would have proved Samuel right, for what could be more unnatural than a fit and able young man refusing the obvious invitations of a young and willing girl? On the other hand, if he were to accept the expected challenge, he would be acting contrary to his own deep convictions and thereby committing a dreadful sin, something which he would surely pay for dearly in the future. As the evening progressed, however, his reluctance to participate in what had developed into a wager was gradually eroded by the inviting, beautiful smile of Josephine Ngao.

  She was eighteen years old but looked younger. Even in comparison with the thin short frame of Boniface, she was small and slight. When, after only one more drink, the groups began to intermingle so that each man sat next to a girl, she set the young man’s heart and expectations racing when she showed a positive eagerness to be at his side. He bought her another drink, beer this time, and proudly stretched his back straight to emphasise his relatively dominant stature. They talked playfully, at first only as members of a group, but later to one another, without the unwanted intrusion of having to maintain a social identity. Boniface was pleased when she told him that she was a form four student at Mutune School.

  “Ah, so you are a Catholic?”

  She nodded.

  Though undeniably attracted to her, Boniface was almost visibly relieved at this revelation. It was his answer to the riddle, his face-saving way out of the predicament. This girl who was surely warned by the nuns in Mutune every day about the dangers of sin would surely never be willing to sleep with him anyway, and so he had surely foiled Samuel’s plan. He was sure that Samuel did not know that she was a convent girl and so he made not the slightest attempt to enlighten him. He would save that joy until later. Whatever happened from now on, he must surely stick to her. In this particular predicament, she was surely his potential salvation!

  “So you will take your EACE this year?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you think you will pass?”

  “If God is willing. Did you pass your certificate?”

  “I failed in Mathematics, but I have just taken it again. I spent a full year just studying that one subject so I am sure I will get it this time.”

  “And what will you do then?”

  “I hope to go to Nairobi to study in the seminary.”

  The girl’s eyes lit up with both surprise and admiration. “You want to be a priest?”

  Boniface nodded, smiling with pride. Josephine eyed him with wonder, as if inspecting some precious but absurd rarity. She spoke again. “When I leave school I would like to go to Nairobi more than anything else.”

  Josephine Ngao willingly answered all of the young man’s questions. She was the daughter of a sub-chief, an old man whom Boniface had met several times, since he had been asked by Father Michael to sit on his school’s board of governors. The old man was nothing less than a local celebrity. A professed Roman Catholic, he somehow managed to maintain six wives and fourteen children from his meagre public servant’s salary and yet the family never went hungry, despite the fact that he was also paying school fees for some eight of his offspring. Josephine, however, still habitually described her father as very ‘bush’. Occasionally she had even gone as far as to use the term ‘primitive’. She hated going home because he was always too strict and insisted on treating her like a child, which she felt she most certainly was not. And so, on this night as always when she was at home from school, she was staying with her friend Regina, and indeed hoped to stay there throughout her half term holiday. Regina’s father was dead and her mother was already growing old. She needed more looking after than Regina, herself, could provide, so Josephine often volunteered her help. For his part, Josephine’s father was actually proud of his daughter’s good work and raised no objection to her spending much of her holidays away from home, provided, that is, she always kept in touch and made frequent visits to her brothers and sisters. The best thing about staying with Regina, though, was that her mother’s home was quite near to the town, not miles out into the bush like that of her own family.

  “I like school very much, but the sisters are very strict with us girls.”

  “But surely they have to be. It is a poor school where the teachers are not very strict.”

  Josephine agreed but qualified her opinion. “I understand that, but the sisters don’t seem to realise that form four girls like ourselves are different from primary school children. We are almost adults, but they still treat us like babies. For the last year, for example, no one has even been allowed to go into Kitui town, not even on Saturdays. And for those of us who have the bus fare, the town is no more than a few minutes ride from the school. We can be there and back before the sisters have even missed us.”

  “They must have a reason for doing that. Some of the girls must have misbehaved. After all, being allowed outside the school compound is a privilege, not a right.”

  “
But I think that in Mwingi, Father Patrick did not force the boys to stay in the school compound all the time.”

  “That is true... but then it is different with boys.”

  “Why? Why should boys be treated differently? If you are in form four in Mwingi and I am in form four in Mutune, why should I not have exactly the same privileges?”

  Boniface answered quickly. He had obviously thought about this point at length. “For two reasons. First, girls need more protection than boys and second, because Mutune is so near to Kitui town, you need even more protection to make sure that bad men from the town do not cause you problems.”

  Their conversation had drifted word by word away from the Kikamba in which it had begun, so that by now they were both speaking almost entirely in English. Boniface was impressed by Josephine’s command of the language, but immediately took offence at the independent way she reacted to what he said.

  “That is complete nonsense! We are old enough to look after ourselves. How do they expect us to learn to live our lives properly as adults when they keep us locked up like babies?”

  He countered in similar serious fashion. “I have heard some very bad stories from Father Michael about Mutune School. He told me that the sisters have been forced to make a special arrangement with the police so that they will patrol the road from Kitui to Mutune in Land Rovers every night. He said that there are many men with cars in the town that drive out to the school to meet with girls there. They go off and play sex and then the men pay hundreds of shillings to these girls. It is very bad, Josephine. That is why the nuns are very strict.”

  Again she dismissed his words. “But that proves what I have said. Even now, the nuns are very strict, but the bad girls you speak about - and I shall not play with words, I shall call them prostitutes - these prostitutes still manage to behave badly and do their business. They know how to pick the locks on the dormitory doors and bribe the prefects to mark them present at lights out, even when they have been gone for hours. They stay away all night and then, very early in the morning - at dawn or even earlier - when we all get up to go to the dam to collect water for washing, they come out from their hiding places and join in. Then, of course, all the girls walk back to school together and the nuns are none the wiser about who was in school and who was out of school the previous evening. All the girls know who they are. They have no secrets.” She paused here for a moment while Boniface, grave faced, continued to shake his head in an expression of sincere disgust. “But what I am saying is that even though the sisters are very strict, they still cannot control these prostitutes, so then the rest of the girls, the good ones, are really the only ones who are being punished.”

  “Then you should tell the headmistress their names.”

  Slightly embarrassed, Josephine fell completely silent for a moment. “We cannot do that,” she said nervously. “These girls are very skilful. Most of them are friendly with the boys from the bar in the town. If you say that you are going to tell sister, they just threaten you, saying that if you do anything, then they will tell these boys from the town to find you. And if they do find you, it is very bad.”

  “But you would be safe. You are in school all day, and then in the dormitories all night.”

  “And what about when we go to church? Or when we go home for weekends or holidays? Where do we go to be safe then?”

  If not yet enough to convince him, this was enough to surprise him and consider things differently. He had never thought it might be possible that these girls from the stories could seriously threaten the others to keep them quiet. It surely was the kind of act that no woman would be capable of carrying out. His silence brought the matter to a close.

  For a few minutes both Josephine and Boniface paid more attention to the others around the table than to one another. Alexander, as usual already too drunk to care, had been counted out. Slumped forward in his chair, he dozed, quite oblivious to his surroundings. Samuel and his charge were clearly ready to leave. Staring almost with concentration at their empty, froth crusted glasses, the couple exchanged neither a word nor a glance, either with each other or anyone else around the table, while his hand haltingly found its place of rest on her thigh. Justus and Mary, however, had not yet passed stage one of the almost ritual progression. His small rather rotund body comically leaned across the corner of the table toward her immense frame at exactly the same angle as she leaned away. Thus, in their parallel but unsympathetic inclination they were still playing out only the preliminaries of a possible encounter. He stared at her whilst she looked absolutely anywhere except at him. He spoke to her whilst at all times she tried her utmost to join any other conversation on offer. He was still interested in her, but she tried her best to give her attention to anyone but him. As time had passed, of course, things had grown ever more difficult, since the number of words shared had sharply decreased as either incapacity or other interests had taken over. And so, with Samuel and Regina otherwise engaged in their concentrated and palpitating silence, and Boniface and Josephine becalmed in wordless doldrums, something simply had to give. With an exaggeratedly bored, but genuinely relieved sigh, Mary stood up and announced that she was ready to leave. When Justus also stood, her face dropped. Looking at the others and, finding them still otherwise engaged, she looked ready to make a dash for the door, but decorum and good sense persuaded her to wait for her friends. There might still be safety in numbers, but it was a deflated young woman who slowly sat down again without a word. Justus followed, offering an ignored question.

  Alexander snored a little. Then without a word, Regina stood and grasped Samuel’s hand to lift him to his feet. Josephine now stood up quickly and, taking Regina by the arm, led her aside, a pace or two apart from the rest. They proceeded to exchange a few words in a whisper accompanied by frequent nodding, as if what was said could have been as effectively communicated in code, as part of an assumed prior agreement, and then they rejoined the group. By then Mary had already made her move and, with Justus mirroring her gait in pursuit, she waddled hastily towards the door. Alexander was by now asleep and took no further part in the proceedings. When at a suitably respectable distance, Samuel and Regina began to make for the door, Josephine and Boniface found themselves momentarily alone in the corner of the bar, which only a few moments before the whole group had occupied. She spoke just above a whisper.

  “Regina will go to her house... and we will go to yours. Come on.”

  With that she set off, turning her back on Boniface who, for a few seconds, was simply too stunned to follow. Surely he had misunderstood. He followed.

  Outside he was surprised to find himself alone. Looking around, he saw nothing. There was no moon and the shaft of soon fading light that filtered through the bar’s open doorway rendered all darkness darker and his eyes useless.

  “Boniface! Here!”

  The voice from the shadows startled him. Peering into the night, he was able to make out the dim outline of Josephine set against the paling grey of a wall. He went over to join her intent on asking her to repeat what she had just said to him inside the bar, but time was obviously short and, before he had time even to open his mouth, she had embraced him and pressed the whole length of her small but solid and lusciously smooth body against his. Whatever words he had intended to speak stuck deep inside him as a sensation he had never before known filled his body and coursed like a drug through his veins. She kissed him and rubbed his limp hand hard against her breasts. He felt himself swim in their softness and suddenly his mind cleared of all other thoughts except desire for her and growing pride in himself.

  Then, as abruptly as she had given herself to him, she pulled away. “We can go to your house.”

  Again the words took some time to register. He had kissed her again and pulled her hips hard against his own before he dared admit that it would be impossible. “No, we can’t do that... my mother and father... they are still there.”

&nbs
p; “But you are a teacher. Surely you don’t still live at home with your parents?”

  “Of course I do. What is the point in paying for a room in the town when my parents are so nearby?” The words flowed quickly. Without any conscious decision they had begun to speak to one another in Kikamba again.

  “Come on. Follow me.”

  Before Boniface could speak again, Josephine had set off and was pulling him along behind by the hand. They walked, almost ran a hundred yards before she stopped on a patch of open ground some distance from both the bar and the road. They immediately kissed again, but again Josephine quickly broke free of his ever more passionate embrace. Before Boniface could phrase the words that ached to be spoken, she had grasped his hand and thrust it firmly between her thighs. With surprising violence and a single mindedness that shocked the words from his mind, she held his wrist hard and pushed his hand against her. Somehow she placed his fingers into a seam of wetness so divine that for a moment he was sure he could feel God in his bones. Her face was pressed hard against his and she began to moan a little. Boniface tried to say, “No! No! This cannot be...” but she touched him and he dissolved in senseless ecstasy. When he eventually spoke, the words were subtly transformed by a new expectancy. “No, not here,” he said. “I know where we can go. There is a good place. Follow me.”

  Then, as she smoothly disengaged herself from him, he led her off into the darkness, back towards the town. Josephine made a few impatient remarks, questions that he now neither heeded nor heard. He felt for a small bunch of keys he knew to be in his pocket and found them. He smiled a proud smile and ignored what sounded like growing protests from behind. “Here,” he said, unlocking the back door of his father’s shop. “We cannot be disturbed here - and there is a mattress which my father uses for his siesta.”

  Primarily it was fear of discovery that kept Boniface awake for the rest of the night. He was up and about long before dawn and, having lit and kindled his mother’s charcoal stove in the kitchen, he was able to rouse Josephine at first light with a welcome cup of sweet tea. After one sip she seemed ready to continue where they had left off just a couple of hours before, but Boniface was obviously too nervous to respond.