Mission

by Philip Spires

  She already knew what she should and should not do here. What she would do was, of course, presumed. It angered her that he insisted on treating her like a child, that even now, after so long, he appeared not to trust her to remember the conditions under which their arrangement could continue. If ever he brought it to an end she would tell him in no uncertain terms exactly what she thought of his condescension.

  It was obviously an office. Each time she went there, in those fleeting seconds it took to feel her way to the door in the opposite corner, she tried to imagine herself at work behind the desk. Without those dreams, she would surely have turned back before this point on every occasion. It was behind such a desk that she could easily picture herself sitting in the not too distant future. In just a few more years, after finishing school and progressing through college, she aspired to be nothing less than a full-time assistant to a manager of an office like this. She would be polite and efficient and those whom she dealt with would respect her not only for her undeniable beauty, but also for her status and achievements. Merely imagining the pride that this would bring made her feel inwardly warm and satisfied.

  John opened the door and peered into the silent and total darkness it revealed. A cursory glance set his always troubled mind more at rest and audibly he began to breathe more slowly as he felt for the oil lamp he knew had been left for him on a small table by the door. A metallic crack echoed from the bare concrete walls as his fingers made contact with the handle.

  “I have no matches,” he whispered to Josephine.

  It took her only a moment to retrieve her own box of Kuni kibiriti, full of long thin red-tipped sticks, of which about one in three was capable of lighting when struck against the side of the box from an attack distance of about two feet. She always carried a box of matches inside her bra and occasionally its cornered cuboid would press against her blouse, but here this was to be expected and would go unnoticed. As she handed them over to John, she felt a lingering touch of his hand on hers and she instinctively resented it.

  The lamp was soon burning steadily. Its low yellow flame cast a dim flickering light and deep dark shadows about the room. The wire surround of a small electric fan on the desk near the lamp projected onto the bare concrete of the walls, making them irregularly patterned with criss-cross lines.

  In an instant, as John ushered her aside so he could close the door behind them, she looked about and pitied herself. Like a closed corridor that led nowhere, the narrow stock room was cluttered and oppressive. The blank pitted concrete of the long wall opposite the door seemed to mirror her own lack of inner feeling. The first few times had been exciting. She felt that at last she had penetrated the other world and in John had gained a passport, which would guarantee her future admission to its ways in her own right, but time and experience had taught her that he was ashamed of her. He wrote the terms. She must accept them all or be rejected. Her acceptance of the role he offered had long since rendered their meetings as humdrum as their surroundings. Like the filing cabinets and cupboards that crowded this stock room, the things they acted out together were merely the trappings and details of a business transaction. They gave nothing to one another, but took whatever they could. Everything, though, happened within defined limits which both of them understood, he because he had laid them down and she because she had never been offered a choice. What she received, she needed and it benefited her; she had long since ceased to speculate about what he wanted. He still came to her, and that was all that mattered.

  With the door now safely and securely locked behind him, he breathed a long and almost tired sigh. Now when he turned to face her, he smiled. He seemed suddenly relaxed, as if relieved of a long and tortuous tension. At last in this new guaranteed privacy he could begin to enjoy those comforts for which he had striven so hard and risked so much. Thus, by the time he came forward to embrace her, he seemed like a man who felt he was safe, at least for a while.

  As ever, she responded immediately. No matter what disinterest she might have felt before this moment, once his body touched hers she was ready to play the game on his terms. Whatever she did, she knew that he would enjoy her and so she would enjoy him also, or at least try to. Before she met Boniface, it had been easy to trick herself into thinking that John saw her because she meant something special to him. It had been easier then to convince herself that she really did enjoy what he did to her, but now it was different. Everything had changed. Now she needed to work hard with John. She needed to act out a role to satisfy his demands for she knew that he listened to her intently and registered every movement of her body in search of what he might interpret as a compliment to himself.

  Soon her blouse was undone and her bra hanging loose beneath it. Having been explored by his hands, her breasts were immediately neglected and thus the ritual progressed as his hands moved to press her bare thighs ever more roughly. This, the first encounter in what was becoming an ever greater battle with herself, had thus been won and, still according to the ritual, she broke free from his embrace. John needed no prompting. A broad smile spread across his face as he started to undress. His eyes, however, still followed every minute detail of Josephine’s movement as she lay, now naked, on the low camp bed by the wall.

  It was as usual some hours later when John left her. There were no smiles now. Josephine lay back and watched him dress in the now almost intense light from the oil lamp’s flame. Why was he always in such a hurry? It made no difference to her. She lay back and watched him button his shirt. As ever, he seemed to resent her watching him. It troubled him, made him feel uneasy. It was as if this was not part of their unwritten agreement on what should be given and what could be taken and thus it threatened to jeopardise the future of the contract.

  “Come on now. It’s time to go,” he said curtly.

  She did not even try to mention that she was tired, that she had studied right up to nine o’clock that evening after starting classes at eight in the morning. That would have gone far beyond what both of them perceived as her rights. She simply did as he said and dressed.

  They were soon ready to retrace their careful steps to the garaged car. John lifted the glass surround and blew out the oil lamp, plunging them both into a familiar but still claustrophobic darkness. From that moment, it seemed that the ritual ran in reverse until, some fifteen minutes later, it entered its habitual last phase as the white car crept to a halt near the shops at Mutune, almost the very spot where earlier Josephine had made her rendezvous.

  John turned to face her. As he spoke in a whisper, he felt in the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a long leather wallet. “I will be coming to Kitui again in two weeks. I’ll see you here at the usual time.” With that he pushed a hundred shilling note into her hand. She did not bother even to look at it, but immediately pushed it inside her blouse and into the elastic safety of her bra.

  “I will need to go home to Thitani for one week-end...” she said. It was delivered as an announcement, but like everything she said to him, contained at least an element of pleading.

  “Then go next week-end. Then I can see you as usual in two weeks time. Here is an extra ten shillings for your bus fare... But remember Josephine...”

  Though she heard these words that had been spoken so often in the past, she did not listen to them.

  “Our arrangement can only continue if you are faithful to me. If you see any other man, no matter who it is, then I am finished with you. Do you understand?” He was not even looking at her as he spoke these last words, his attention having already moved on to the next part of their ritual encounter. “Right. Wait here a moment.”

  Without giving her even a second to react to his words, he got out of the car and closed the door behind him. She looked across at his broad back in the moonlight as the sound of his urine hitting the ground began.

  “All clear,” he said a few moments later.

  She reacted like clockwork. A
s he again reclaimed his seat in the driver’s side, she opened the passenger door and smartly got out of the car. Closing it firmly but quietly behind her, she walked ten brisk paces across the road and into the black moon-shadow of a large mango tree. She did not even look back. It had always been one of the unwritten rules that they should neither communicate nor even acknowledge one another’s existence in any situation where others might see, and that inevitably included an open road outside Mutune market at two o’clock in the morning.

  Not until she had reached the safety and anonymity of the shadows did Josephine turn to look back. For some reason she suddenly remembered standing there on the first few times she watched his car, KPY, she called it, after its registration mark, as it scythed its way through the night, casting a billowing mass of dust into the air which obscured the stars. She remembered how special she felt then, how much older and prouder she became as a result of thinking that now she knew all that was to be known and that no longer could her elders claim she was a mere child. Above all, however, she had seen then a vision of some new, almost tangible power. John had become hers. She possessed him. It was he who travelled to see her. It was he who lay after his invariably hurried and snatched ejaculation into her, as if he could no longer control even his own breathing. For some minutes, every time they had intercourse, it seemed she totally controlled him, ruled not only his passions but also, for this short time, his past, his future, his marriage and every inch of his flesh. She remembered still with deep satisfaction her discovery that during the lost dazed minutes that always followed his withdrawal from her that, with just the slightest touch of her finger, she could induce near convulsions in his body. Since then, the revelation had become a commonplace. Now she just wanted him to wake up and talk to her, which still he never did.

  In those early days, she had also wondered if John thought of her in the way that she thought of him when they were apart. At one stage she began to wonder how she might exist for the two weeks until he came to her again, but now she suffered no such illness. These days the only real thrill he ever gave her was the rubbing of his crisp folded bank notes against her breast and the only satisfaction she gained was the knowledge that a little more of her future had been bought. Was this what as a child she had heard adults refer to as ‘maturity’?

  ***

  By the time her dream dissolved in a crash, as the car hit the step up onto Kitui town’s tarmac, the baby was already dead. Perhaps it had been dead ever since they left Thitani over a half an hour ago. The strange thing was that she could not even remember having checked whether it was still breathing. She could remember, early that morning still calling her child “my little boy, Muthuu,” but at some point, a point which she could no longer fix either in time or experience, she had started to think of her child as ‘it’, a mere object. Surely she had known for some time that it lay dead in her arms, but at the same time, could she still not hear the cries of her little Muthuu, if she so wished? So completely had her dreams removed her from the hectic reality around her that it seemed she had completely shut the immediate present out of her mind. Perhaps, for the last half an hour or so this had been her own sub-conscious way of protecting herself from a reality she could not face. And this reality was the pathetically small bundle, enclosed in a bright blue and white floral wrapper, which lay lifeless against her.

  The bounce and slide of Michael’s car over the rough dirt road had become almost hypnotic. At first she had tried to resist the pitches and sways which the car’s over-tired suspension transmitted to its occupants, but soon she had simply given up, had relaxed and allowed herself to be thrown from side to side like so much luggage, surrounded by a cocoon of noise which drowned everything outside of herself. Not being able to see forward past the high headrests of the front seats from the slouched and burdened position she was forced to adopt in the back, she had looked to the side, where speed had blurred her eyes. She could have moved to a position of greater comfort, but that would have taken a conscious effort, and would have demanded that she instinctively uncover Muthuu to check on his own comfort during the process. This she simply was unwilling to do. Better that she should leave him - or it? - alone.

  There had been nothing to do but dream, to allow herself to drift in the ever-present past of memory. It was not the first time she had relived her experiences with John Mwangangi, nor the first time she had tried to imagine how things might have been. She had no illusions about him that was for sure; at least none since those first few encounters when either he had tricked her or she had tricked herself into believing that he wanted her because she herself was special, or that he had found something special within her. It had not been long before she had learned to laugh at such delusions, before she had learned to laugh at herself for even thinking them, but now she was far beyond laughter. Perhaps that is what people meant by ‘growing up’?

  “Shit!” Michael’s exclamation was delivered almost under his breath as the car hit a pothole in the road. From the newfound smoothness of the tarmac, Josephine was suddenly and violently jolted back in her seat and momentarily she let go of little Muthuu in his blue flowered bundle. The wrapper loosened, exposing a clearly lifeless face, now so small and screwed into a tiny and ugly knot by the pain of dying. It was dead.

  In shock, she immediately felt strangely liberated, almost beyond her own life, as if her continued existence could serve no further purpose while this curse of death lived on inside her. And then her thoughts were suddenly sour. She had done nothing to deserve such a fate, of that she was sure. Why then should she be punished like this? It seemed that her life had never offered her a choice. Throughout she had merely followed orders yelled at her by necessity. She had been born into a large family. It had always been a supportive family, that was true, but was it her father’s fault that he therefore never had enough money for her school fees? Was it her fault that the nuns would not allow any of the girls to work at weekends to earn their keep? Was it her fault that there were hundreds of school students like herself looking for work in the holidays and was it her fault that as a consequence all she could get was five shillings a day? Even if she had been able to find a job every day of the school holidays, she would never have been able to earn enough to pay all the fees she owed.

  Was it her fault then that she had decided to sell the one thing she had for which people were willing to pay? In a country where enterprise in the market was encouraged as a means of achieving wealth, not only for individuals, but the nation as a whole, what could possibly be wrong with a woman selling a service to customers willing to pay? Why should anyone mind whether that service is delivered by hand, mouth, brain or vagina? Are bankers condemned by the Church as usurers? But which women are not seen as potential whores? For Josephine, selling her services to John Mwangangi - and, indeed, some other men like him whose need for gratification was channelled through their wallets - provided her with the only means at her disposal to become independent of the needs and desires of men. It was a means to pay her own way to a personal independence promised by the passport of education. And now it angered her to think that the only thing that allowed her to stay at school eventually banished her from it. After nearly eleven years of primary and secondary schooling, at a point when her goal was all but within her grasp, a man-child began its life within her.

  ***

  A minute after the bell sounded the start of break, Josephine Ngao joined the straggling queue of sad-faced girls that had already formed outside the school office. None of them particularly wanted to stand there by the open door, but everyone wanted to be first when the cry of “Next” echoed forth from within. When Josephine appeared, however, all the girls immediately stood back to allow her pride of place. It was not fear of her that caused them all to withdraw from the doorway, but the simple knowledge that their prefect shared the Sisters’ power. The next turn would therefore be hers by right. It was not an egalitarian faith that these nuns taught, but
a linear hierarchy at the head of which sat a God, male but de-sexed, sometimes in the form a Christ, who had defiled himself by becoming a man.

  It was a small Form One girl who emerged from the head’s office. Her face wore a blank expression of disappointment. Clearly Sister had refused her leave to defer payment of her school fees until the end of the month when her relatives’ salaries would be paid. The story was common to all but a privileged few of the girls in this place. The knowing glance that she dared to cast towards Josephine said no more than, “Don’t expect anything from her today...”

  “Next!”

  Josephine entered the office, taking care to close the door behind her. It scraped noisily on the concrete, having expanded after the recent rain. The sound caused an involuntary shudder in her spine and a weakness at the knee, like an orgasm without pleasure.

  “Leave the door open, will you? It will stick and we won’t be able to get out. I must get a man in to do something about it.” Sister Augustus did not even appear to look up from the letter she was writing as she spoke.

  Josephine hesitated at first. Looking at the concentric arcs of smudged brown earth the door had left on the floor, she feared that she might already have jammed it. She gave it a little pull back toward herself, but it did not move. Were these nerves? The instruction from Augustus, however, took hold of her actions, prompting her to leave the door and begin to speak. Still Sister had not looked her way.

  “Sister Augustus, I wish to speak...”

  “Oh, it’s you Josephine.” Augustus now not only looked up from her desk, but also immediately replaced the top on her fountain pen and set it aside carefully into a small storage rack on a shelf to her right. “It’s all right. Leave the door. You can close it if you need to.” It was suddenly a different person who spoke. Though Sister Augustus only rarely raised her voice and never lost her temper, her usual voice embodied a severity of tone that could arouse guilt in the innocent. When she spoke to Josephine, however, the hard edges softened, as if she were acknowledging that one day this girl might be her equal.