Popular Posts

Friday, June 10, 2016

Short Story. SUSPICION BY BOB EJIKE




SUSPICION
BY BOB EJIKE

My eyes caught the bold, black, embossed print of the rectangular black letter-heading of Samsung and the inscription of the name of the buyer forcibly scribbled with a black ballpoint pen in a crabby handwriting, BUDDY SSENYONGA, that faintly crimped the other side of the light paper. I stood rigid in my position and read the acknowledgment which bore a date from the period that I was away in Italy, with trembling hands, my eyes gaping shockingly at my younger rival’s despicable signature

Our home had become filthy with decayed bags of fast food lurking in the corners, dirty dishes lining the tables and unwashed clothes hanging out of Rosaline’s suitcase. I started returning before her to do some cleaning and washing up. It was on one of those occasions that trying to pull out some soiled garments from her suitcase, a crispy bright, white receipt fell out on the floor, lying in clear view. I picked it up distractedly and was putting it back into the suitcase when my eyes caught the bold, black, embossed print of the rectangular black letter-heading of Samsung and the inscription of the name of the buyer forcibly scribbled with a black ballpoint pen in a crabby handwriting, BUDDY SSENYONGA, that faintly crimped the other side of the light paper. I stood rigid in my position and read the acknowledgment which bore a date from the period that I was away in Italy, with trembling hands, my eyes gaping shockingly at my younger rival’s despicable signature at the bottom of the page. The total cost of the purchase was 450,000 shillings. It was the proof of payment of Rosaline’s new Samsung phone.
The sight of Buddy’s calligraphy discombobulated me, my heart raced frantically as if I was doing an Olympics contest. In my traumatized state my legs betrayed my body and I sat heavily on the bed, unable to think.  I embarked on strenuous mind control and just refused to allow myself to think of the piece of paper I was holding. It was not long before the curtain swirled open Rosaline and walked in gingerly. She sensed the mood instantaneously. ‘What’s the matter honey?’ She asked.
I held up the receipt and handed it to her. She scanned it with her eyes and her composure cracked instantly. She became remote as she twisted under my piercing scrutiny, disarmed and mortified. Oblivious of where to focus her view, she dropped her eyes, searching the floor momentarily as if for escape, then she lifted her frame, cleared her throat and faced me. ‘Have you been searching my bags?’ She demanded, looking suddenly unperturbed. 
‘I see you’ve been seeing Young Handsome behind my back’ I mumbled, filling the adjectives with sarcastic contempt and a host of images of her lachrymose comportment when I was leaving for Italy came rushing back to my mind. Could it be that she had been acting? Was this a case of split personality or was I getting things mixed up?
‘Honey, it’s not the way it looks. I only went to buy a phone’ she stated, dropped the evidence on the floor and sat in the upholstered chair opposite me, but met my gaze with difficulty.
My relentless stare flooded upon her, badgering her for an answer and promising fire and brimstone if the answer was unconvincing. ‘The receipt says that he bought the phone, not you’ I reminded her coldly.
‘Yes, I came to the shop to buy a phone and he offered to buy it for me in his name, so that I could enjoy a ten percent discount that is given to their workers when they buy something for themselves from their workplace’ she volunteered.
I was confused, not knowing what to believe, whether to trust her or not. Then a hypothesis developed in my mind. ’How did you get all that money to buy that phone?’
‘It was the money you brought me at Katikamu when you returned from Nigeria’ she mumbled defensively, forgetting that she had already informed me that she had saved for it.
‘If you already had the full amount for the phone why did you need the charity of his cheap discount?’ I queried primly in a steely voice, my reproving eyes unmoving.
‘A salesman offered to give me a discount. Why should I refuse…….?’
As she was talking I interrupted her. ‘I remember you pleading on the phone when I was in Lagos. Your frenzied cry that you would not be allowed to take your final examination, which made me abandon my building project to fly all the way back to Kampala and make that lonesome drive to Luweru the next morning, setting forth before the light of day. I remembered your frantic call the next morning to ask me to send you additional money. The reason for that call was that you had already put away the money I gave you, in anticipation of buying this phone and you had therefore already become broke again by the next day. Rosaline, you had planned everything from the very beginning. There had been no theft of your money in school. It had all been made up by you. You, Rosaline, a teenage high school girl whom I gave everything, meticulously planned to dispossess me and dispose of me, to go and sleep with another man and offer him your virginity after my years of sacrifice. You even planned your return to me in advance, knowing that I loved you to such an extent that as far as I was concerned you could get away with murder, that all you needed do was cry long enough and shed sufficient crocodile tears and I would forgive you. You used your sister as your excuse, like you use everyone around you. The same way you used me for your welfare and education. The same way you are still using me. You could only do this to me because I trusted you. As soon as my back was turned, you returned to the same man who deflowered you, the first man who took you to bed while I was waiting for you. You waited for me to travel abroad then you returned to him, and now you want me to believe that you did that only because you wanted to buy a vulgar cellular phone?’ My sore ran deep, my ego trodden in the sludge of what I perceived as her second betrayal.
‘Yes’ she whispered in a sudden rush of tears.
‘Why should I believe this incredible story? The last time I believed you it turned out that you were telling the burdensome, deceitful lies that made me fly all the way across the continent at high cost, abandoning my building project just so that you could get money to buy a naughty cellular phone. I was not supposed to be on that plane. What if that plane had crashed and I had lost my life? What would I have told my creator? Would I have said that I was flying in that plane to give some uncaring girl a cell phone? Rosaline you are selfish, greedy, immoral, inconsiderate and heartless. You are a cheat and a user, in spite of your sworn assurances to me that made me forgive you and take you back; you still went back to that boy in flagrant breach of your pledge before our reintegration. You think you are smart and I am a fool because I care for you. You kept that receipt here on purpose for me to see, so that in case any of my friends had seen you with Buddy and reports to me, you would be able to deny any affair with him by saying that you had gone to buy a phone and you think in your little mind that that will make me not to know that you actually went to fuck him!’ I rose from the bed, my hands waving irately in the air.
‘I didn’t fuck him! I never did. I never will!’ Rosaline was shrieking and shaking hysterically. She threw the instrument of discord to me.  ‘Call Buddy and find out. I have finished with him and we ended when I resumed with you. I can’t fuck more than one man at a time. My pussy cannot handle more than one dick! I cannot even cope with your own unusually heavy demands not to talk about adding another man. I fall asleep during my lectures because I am oversexed, don’t you understand? The last thing I need now in my life is the complication of one more man. How can I add another, am I crazy? I told you I found out that I am not in love with Buddy and I left him, that I am okay with you the way you are and it is you I love and I don’t want this worthless fellow who has nothing to offer, anymore!’ She was an emotional wreck, trembling like a confused animal.
Our neighbors started banging on the wall, loudly reprimanding us for disturbing their peaceful sleep. I had to bring down my voice to a whisper. ‘But you still went back to him, the same man. Why?’
‘I went to buy a phone in a shop that he happens to be working in. I had seen it when I was seeing him and I wanted it. I only went there to buy the phone!’ She unleashed a strangled scream and was up on her feet yelling and crying.
I delivered my verdict slowly and deliberately. ‘You are either a hardened cheat or a brainless idiot. If that man who deflowered you were the last person selling phones in this city, you were not supposed to buy a phone from him or get close enough to him or create any situation that would take you back to him for anything. If you loved me and valued this attachment, nothing in this world would have made you go back to that man.’
An eerie silence descended upon us, the aura of suspicion almost palpable. I knew that Rosaline was not a drooling moron, that she was acutely intelligent, but also an amoral  individual who preyed on my emotions and weakness to satisfy her needs and greed,  and that she could do just about anything to get what she wanted. She was not the naïve teenage girl she looked; she was an extremely sly and calculating mature woman despite her tender age, and an expert in the trade of the passion of pain in her mindless opera of using those who loved her to achieve her personal advancement objectives, and that my optimism in a future with her was my undoing. It was the instrument of her control over me.  I began to remember the forebodings and warnings of virtually everyone who knew about us or had seen us together and became suddenly wary of their singular prediction of a disastrous aftermath.
I had unearthed this girl from the ashes of the ruptured sanctuary of her poverty-stricken background, rehabilitated and foisted her at great cost. All I demanded from her was serenity, but she had proved incapable of giving me peace of mind, ordinary peace of mind which cost nothing.
 I gazed at the floor in front of me, emotionally weakened, battling with my reservations, my confidence wavering, my masculine ego dissipated and an overpowering feeling of frailty overtook my mind, incapacitating my entire being. An overwhelming feeling of insecurity flooded my veins, flushing out my pride. My positive concept of myself and my personal myth died and were cremated, their ashes blown away, replaced by a cowering feeling of inferiority. If my woman would run after a penniless kid who eked out a living by selling phones in a corner shop, then the spectacular achievements I prided in so much were just illusions of self grandeur. If I could not keep my woman to myself with all the attainments of my professional life, all the money I was lavishing on her and all the care I was smothering her with, then I was nothing but a joke, a huge joke. All traces of gladness evaporated from my body and mind and the font of my felicity became vacuous, slippery, dubious, unstable and untenable. I was unsure whether to trust her or not, but then how could a man in his right mind trust a woman who sought the company of another man with whom she had shared primal carnal pleasure, with the flimsiest excuse?
 I had no inkling of what may have taken place between Rosaline and Buddy when I was in Europe, if she had slept with him again, whether she had moved into his place and returned just before I came back, or if she had even been hosting him and having sex rumps with him in our home, or if she had actually just gone to buy a phone as she claimed and left afterwards, which was quite normal and legitimate from a very simplistic and blindly trusting perspective. If that was the case, it meant that it was entirely my fault, that I had become abnormally untrusting, unduly jealous, unnaturally possessive and in fact paranoid. But how could I trust a girl who appeared to be craving for another man’s company and linking him up at the least opportunity. Yet Rosaline was always quick to jump in with the assurance that she loved me with all her heart. I was in a complete dilemma, unaware of what to do with this relationship in which I had invested a generous share of my time and resources. One mind told me to leave and never come back, that Rosaline was a fantastic romantic scammer, while another, the more pacific mind, insisted that it was not irregular for a girl to stop by and buy a phone from a former lover with whom she no longer had anything to do, especially if she had been promised a discount, and the only thing wrong with it was that I had found out, that it did not necessarily mean that she had jumped into bed with him again, and the fact that she was dating me did not mean that she had to keep malice with her former boyfriend, one-night-stand, or virginity breaker, whatever he really was, and that was the whole discordant indigestible point, the fact that he was the first man who had physically perforated her and that he had done it before me, while I was there, waiting and spending on her, her first and deepest cut for crying out loud! The Young Handsome one that took her virginity after six days of meeting her, bastardizing my two long, rich, aged, famous, talented, ugly, agonizing years of waiting in vain! And he was back!
Could Rosaline have really gone into the workplace of the first man that had physically penetrated her, bought a phone and walked away, without the memory of their first, (and probably other), physical encounters propping up in her mind and seducing her into taking an appointment with him and seeing him later for more gratifying sexual intercourse in the absence of her middle-aged boyfriend, or sugar daddy, (depending on what she really considered me to be), who had in any case been methodically transformed into little more than a provident old man to be hidden in this secret hideaway, and thoroughly milked and pacified with timetable-regulated sex.
I recalled a catalogue of noble deeds I had carried out for this affair to work, costly sacrifices, everything that was important to me actually, my time, energy, intellect, money, health, commercial studio, career, and now my self-confidence. I became dimly aware that my sanity was gradually going too, for I thought in mire and my thought was mired without logical conclusion and my mind was bogged down in mire. There was no way I could be sure what had taken place between the two  former lovers or secret lovers, in my absence, nor could I believe that Rosaline had gone to visit her first (and probably deepest)  cut only because of her desire to purchase a banal phone. There were thousands of phone shops in town. Even if she confessed, how would I know that she was confessing the truth? After all, my suspicion was based on a confession of events that I had not witnessed and could not verify. How was I even sure that Buddy was truly the man who had deflowered her as she had claimed? How was I sure that he was not another cover, like the dreaded Big Sister Doric? How was I sure of anything? God in his infinite wisdom had made the human mind and regenerative organs in such a way that they left no evidence of their activities, with the divine foreknowledge that the world would know no peace if people were aware of the evil deliberations and the secret acts of their partners. There was no way I could ever know what went on in Rosaline’s mind and what had transpired in my absence, or what was presently  going on in her life, even though we lived together. I could only guess or go crazy trying to find out. Even if she confessed to me, it could still not be the truth.
 A dark cloak shrouded the room, shielding any shaft of happiness from penetrating and I knew that I would never be joyful in this home again. I did not think that Rosaline really wanted my joyfulness because I was aware that if she truly cared about me, she would not have gone back to see her former crush…flame…..lover, one-night-stand, hit-and-run, or whatever he really was to her, who had caused us so much pain and anguish, and drained off much of the trust that should have provided a strong bedrock for our affair and made it viable. I knew that if she loved me, she would not have lied to make me fly from Nigeria to Uganda just to provide money for her to buy this miserable phone that was still causing us heartaches, and she would not have hatched an elaborate plot to ensnare me and gone the whole course of  two years in an emotional bond only to dump me for another man after enjoying my prolonged tutelage in high school, and if after that I had done the unthinkable, against most prudent advices by charitably forgiving her and once again becoming her man and a provident one at that, nothing in this whole world ought to have made her return to that man who had deflowered her, to upset my emotional balance and erode the unusual trust I had bequeathed upon her.
 I knew from that moment without doubt that Rosaline was latching unto me for her selfish ends. I did not think that she was merely putting her body to profitable use by being with me, because she liked my company greatly and was learning much from my vast experience. She took immense pleasure in having sex with me, which was why she always called me when she had no lectures, to come and take her home and stay with her, which was to a large extent synonymous with sex. So I knew that she enjoyed it perhaps even more than I did, despite her feminine pretenses. She could have taken those times off to be with Mr. Young Handsome, whose dreadful notion still lurked disconsolately in some corner of my mind, persistently stalking me, like a preying serpent in ambush, waiting for the right moment to strike, or any other man for that matter.  Or was she sharing her time between us? But then how much time did she have, for she was with me most of the time? Or was she spending more time with me because I was better in bed and financially more liquid, or both? I appreciated the generous amount of time she gave me; however I was very greedy about her, wanting all of her all to myself.  But I realized sadly that whatever she felt for me was not strong enough to make her exclusively mine.
She broke the uncanny silence.  ‘Darling, you have no cause to levy this accusation against me. You have no evidence to prove it. I have been here with you trying my level best to give you the best of me, but you cannot get over one single stupid incident from my past. It haunts you, plagues you, torments you and distorts your view of reality, making you reason irrationally, fictionally, creating hallucinatory images that are just figments of your imagination. Life becomes a page in a horror story. How much longer can we go on this way? Do you want me to die because of that singular error that I committed? Would it give you pleasure if I died?’ Her voice reduced to a funereal mumble. ‘Maybe you will finally have peace when I commit suicide, and quite frankly I am thinking of it because I don’t know any other way out of this nightmare you call love. Maybe it would be a good idea to die, so when I am dead both of us can finally find peace and harmony.’
I was stunned by her words. I sat back in the mattress, shockwaves running through my veins. I had taken my jealousy too far without knowing it. It had not been my intention to get to this point. I had not expected a reaction of this extremity. ‘You don’t need to commit suicide. Instead let us go our separate ways peacefully’ I counseled.
‘Just like that? After using me?’ She asked and sat in a seat. ‘You don’t understand, you fool, that I am in love with you and I can’t live without you. But also I can’t handle your unending suspicion and frequent accusations of infidelity, based on nothing but one single mistake from my past’
‘It isn’t a single mistake’ I charged.   ‘Your great intelligence should have told you that going back to that man for anything, especially when your partner is outside the country would raise suspicion even in the mind of an angel and only a man born without brains would believe that you went back to the man who deflowered you, under these circumstances, to buy a cellular phone.’
‘I am sorry darling. It will never happen again. Maybe I am not too intelligent after all’ she muttered.
‘No you are not, or you are playing a Russian roulette.’ I said flatly, considering her threat of suicide. Suddenly the death menace seemed like most things about her, a self-seeking ploy made to protect her interests or just a cheap bluff.   I took my briefcase and stamped away from the room, my furious shadows cast on the passage as her profound sobbing faded in my ears.
I examined Young Handsome silently with my eyes for what seemed a lifetime, wondering where his handsomeness had gone. Maybe he left it at home before coming to work this morning at the Samsung agency.   Young, he obviously was, and if that was truly an achievement no one could take it away from him. But he was by no means handsome. On the contrary, there was nothing gorgeous about Buddy Ssenyonga. He was in fact a pitifully ugly boy. Only his mother or a blind, intoxicated or insane person could have perceived him as handsome. He had a gloomily dark complexion with neither that oily shine nor that elegant slimness that made Ugandan dark people impellingly attractive. He had puss-tipped scabies or pimples, all over his face, which seemed to bend slightly to the left around the ear. He had a wide nose that showed its reddish inside at close range, a large unattractive mouth and deep-set eyes that seemed somewhat buried within his face but were wide and intelligent-looking, though too big for his face, and when he spoke I could almost see his esophagus. He was slightly taller than me and had a broader chest than mine, which was the only striking thing about his person, and his legs were both faintly bending away from each other around the knees, forming something like two K backing each other. He walked as though he was being pushed a little from behind by invisible hands.
I looked at our reflection on the big display mirror that walled the side of the shop behind which stood the glass showcase full of assorted types of cellular phones, from which Buddy was picking out a phone ostensibly for my examination and possible purchase. I compared my physical attributes with his as dispassionately and objectively as I could. There was no basis for comparison between my famed comeliness and his plain countenance, even though I was about double his age, (which hardly manifested visually).  He did not come anywhere near my finery to have matched me, let alone bested me.  I could not imagine how this obnoxious, virtually uneducated and unexposed simpleton could have infatuated and swept my sheltered, quiet virgin girl off her brilliant thinking faculty to the extent of her setting me askew after years of onerous support, in order to be willfully seduced, bedded and deflowered by him within six days of their meeting. It was unbelievably bizarre, like in the American film when the protagonist jumps from a helicopter unto a skyscraper and kills dozens of his enemies, all trained fighters like him, and then escapes and jumps all the way down from the window and clings to a rod from a house just before reaching the ground safely without even breaking a leg. 
 Incredible! But millions of people are fascinated by such, pay billions of dollars to watch them and wait anxiously for the next Hollywood box office movie. People believe anything, that is the mystery of the mind. I could not understand why a girl who had a man with my remarkable aesthetic preeminence would have one moment to spare for such an ugly duckling and even describe him as ‘handsome.’ Anyway a woman was free to her own unique way of assessing men. Maybe for Rosaline all things in trousers were the same. I did not think that I was at a par with Buddy, nor did I accept his implicit superiority over me, but I conceded to a woman’s right of choice, odd as it may be, because I knew that it was the conduct of woman that oiled a love affair and it was the lack of oil in my own affair that had brought me to Samsung, Bombo Road.
I had been unable to sleep for three nights and kept thinking of Rosaline, her detestable cell phone and the preeminently young and exceedingly handsome Buddy. I was picturing him as a swaggering Superman flying through the grey skies and stomping into Rosaline’s house to rescue the beautiful, young girl from the sexual exploitation of her aging foreign lover. This weird thinking became overwhelming and persistent and I knew that I was progressively dabbling into the loony fringe and would soon go roving mad if I did not do something equally crazy. I elected unashamedly to visit Samsung, pretend that I wanted to buy a phone and catch a glimpse of the young handsome man that was said to have seduced my girl. Frankly I did not know for what reason I wanted to see Superman, but lo and behold Buddy was everything but a superman.
‘I know you are not here to buy a phone’ Buddy whispered, keeping a surreptitious eye on his Indian bosses who were sitting at a table in a corner, cannibalizing a personal computer.
I was not a little surprised but I managed to find my words. ‘Can we talk outside?’
‘Sure.’ He agreed.
We strolled out into the crowded and busy Bombo Road. Buddy looked calm and unperturbed.
‘You know me?’ I inquired with a smile despite the circumstance.
‘Yes, who doesn’t?’ He replied a bit flatteringly and added, ‘anyway she talked about you a lot’
‘She talked about me?’ My astonishment registered in my voice.
‘Yes she did’ he assured me.
I was stunned. ‘When did she talk about me, when you were banging her brains off? Smashing her nineteen years old virginity six days after meeting her was your idea of love. Was she shouting my name in wild ecstasy?’
Buddy looked genuinely puzzled. ‘I never took her to bed and I didn’t break her virginity. She must have lied to you. We are just good friends, former school mates, nothing more.’ I was dazed with puzzlement, and more so when he added, ‘go and take care of her, she loves you a great deal. Don’t be overbearing, control your temper and your jealousy. Give her more freedom. She is a young woman’ and he turned and briskly reentered the showroom.
I stood there looking like a fool, not having the strength to carry my legs forward. Eventually I walked gradually to the backstreet Buganda Road beside the Central Police Station where I had parked my vehicle, got in and drove away slowly. I maneuvered through the affluent Kololo, into Kampala Road, heading towards Jinja Road, trying to understand my encounter with this mysterious rival of mine. My phone squealed out music. It was someone called Diana who had become a real nuisance on my phone with her propositions of ‘Lave’. Little wonder the Inspector General of Police had held a press conference recently to appeal to women of easy virtue to stop using the 999 Police Emergency Number to seduce his men. It had come to his notice, the IG had announced, that loose women were calling 999, pretending to be in trouble and when the policeman arrived at the address given by the female caller, rather than find a villain attacking the woman, he would find a naked woman, often wearing a wedding ring, trying to seduce him, and many officers had fallen victim to such cheap seduction.
Who was Buddy? What was he really to Rosaline? If he had not deflowered her, who had? If he had been the one, why was he denying it? Was he afraid of me? He had not looked scared; on the contrary he had seemed quite bold, almost as if he had been expecting my visit. He had been very relaxed throughout our very brief encounter and I had not been in any way threatening. If he had been afraid of me he would not have come outside with me. I could not have compelled him. He said that they were just good friends. If that was true it meant that Rosaline was still hiding the man that did that first job, leaving me without the slightest clue, leading me on, which was even more embarrassing and disturbing. Had she and Buddy broken up and remained just friends and he had chosen to lie to me? Had he lied to confuse me so I would accept their casual friendship and let them continue seeing each other? Was he a clandestine lover in consort with her in a cunning ploy to continually milk me, perhaps even for his own maintenance, as my closest confidants had always suspected? Otherwise why was he helping me to retain my rapport with Rosaline? What was his interest? Was he just being a good friend to Rosaline and a peripatetic Good Samaritan?
I knew that I would never be able to answer any of these maddening questions and I wondered why I was desirous of knowing all the details of all these things that had happened to Rosaline in the past which ought to be dismissed and forgotten, may be because I suspected that they were still taking place now behind my back. Rosaline had gone to see Buddy a short while ago, before I returned from Europe, so it was no longer really in the past. Whatever it was, was in fact probably happening now in the present. Why was I trying to unravel the mystery and get to the end of it like an overzealous secret agent? Was it out of love or a bruised ego? I realized that it was not out of love, that I had been going on an overstretched ego trip and that the reason for my odd mission was that I was still encountering aspects of her past infidelity and wished for its final cleansing. If she had not been a virgin when I met her, how would I have known that she had cheated on me in the first place? Wouldn’t I have accepted her and been happy and satisfied with her the way she was?
 I realized that I was being unfair to Rosaline by probing so brazenly into her deepest privacy, that her unbridled desire for the tiny sophisticated communication gadget that had made her lie to make me fly across the continent, could also have rendered her insensitive enough to go to buy it from her ex in my absence,  and that accepting a discount from an old flame did not translate to sexual  infidelity, nor even its intent, that I had no proof to confirm my suspicion, except circumstantial evidence, that since  Rosaline said she loved me, there was no need for me to keep digging around in the useless attempt to unearth all the particulars of the singular error of her past. It was better to bury it, especially because attempting to comprehend it and come to terms with it was beginning to give me a headache and render my life and actions abnormal, putting me at the brink of insanity. So I chose to take the advice of the man I despised the most and opted to control my sense of insecurity, which had almost completely dissolved since I realized that the man I feared so much was not even my match. I decided to go back to our home and take care of my woman.
BOB EJIKE
You can read the entire book by request through the author’s email profbobejike@yahoo.com
 

 


No comments:

Post a Comment