Mataachi Inc

@Two Men

“Everything I touched was gold, and everything I loved got broken, on the road to Mandalay.”

                                                                         Road to Mandalay, Robbie Williams

Evenings were sacred to my father. Even when he was at home. He was not to be disturbed and we did not need our mother to tell us that. It was the way my father sat slumped on his side in his favourite sofa, the radio to BBC Focus on Africa loudly tuned. Sometimes I used to think he might be sleeping but whenever I crept past the sitting room where he was, I could see by the lowering of the Johnnie Walker in his glass, he had not been asleep. In that time no one dared approach our father, not even our mother. The heartbeat of the house on tiptoes, waiting, waiting for that bellow when he would demand, “When is the food ready? Isn’t the food ready?”

I spend most of my evenings alone. When I can be at home. Which is often these days because usually Madeline has not yet returned from University. I check in on the children who sit around the dinning table grappling with their school homework before I can let them watch TV, call Maria the cook to inquire how she is doing in the kitchen but I tend to be alone much of the evening, in the room that is supposed to be our home library. Yes, sometimes I do take down a book and read from one of the many books I used to buy when I was living on my own but what mostly amuses me flicking through the pages are the margin notes I made then when I still believed that life could be learned from books.

Most of the time, in the dark in that room, only the shaded desk lamp on, I listen to music. I play over and over the music that I used to listen to. Some new music that I like. On some evenings when I do not think that Madeline will come later than usual, when I have borrowed the weekly cartoon DVD for the Aaron and Tezira, instructed Maria that I must not be disturbed, I bravely listen to the music that was our music. The music that brings Madeline, Mustafa, my father, and everything flooding back. Assured that no one will see the way I become, listening to Michael Learns to Rock, Some Day, the red gleaming bursts of the radio in the dark counting down the songs, flickering like the happiness that I thought would last forever, able to shrug off easily the sadness of those years, clawing to protect them all. Failure unimaginable. I listen to that music. Friday evenings usually.

When Madeline returns far too late, after 11pm, I like to think that she has been out trying to capture what she used to scorn of my festive Friday nights out, when she was pregnant with Aaron and I would not stay home with her though her eyes begged she wanted me to stay. I like to think that she was the woman who made heads turn to see her drawing up in the Mercedes Benz I bought her three months ago when she successfully made it to her second year Masters Course and only the research bit is left and she is doing it so well. I like to think of her with her girlfriends, in a corner, the table theirs, loudly chattering, the drinks flowing, and I like my imagination to stop there. I will not let myself imagine further than that. I dare not. Friday nights are the hardest.

When she is very late on Friday nights, I do not call anyone, hauling myself from my sofa in the library room. I wait because she has never failed to come back and I know she will. I walk through our home in the dark, sure of where the corners are, where the steps start and how they are, the curtains are drawn but I know the views beyond the great windows which the curtains conceal. I stride in the carpeted dark the entire house waiting.

When she does come home, in our room, I sit by our bed, watching her disrobe to go for a quick shower. Sometimes she has not been that sober and it is to crazily stagger out of them to be able to sleep without hindrance, nude and warm beside me. I can at least say I have mastered my longing. Disgust will not stop the desire from coming alive in me watching her, one part of me wondering who has been running their hands all over her, the other oblivious to all that but the wonder of how her breasts jerk as she releases them from their bra, the smooth gentleness of her rising and falling stomach, her back as she turns away from me to place her earrings in her jewelry box on her side of our bed, her thighs, I’m helpless in my wanting her inspite of everything and wanting no one else. …Marge…My Madeline…

I will reach for you, the rebuffs hurtful but not deterring, reach again till you stop fighting me, prayerful my urgency this night will communicate my sorrowing confession into redemption, my caressing fingers sink into you my unwilling exile, my lips you evade my fervent never diminishing faith in us; somehow after all this, restore what time and I destroyed, earn your forgiveness one last time, admitted once more into the sacred sanctum of your heart. Begin anew life. It is for this why I still wait up for you when my discarded pride would never have let me. To let you know. For you attempting forgotten crescendos. Urging your return. Asking you to try again like you used to. Refusing to give up. Because you are the beating of my heart. I’m the beating of your heart. I still believe this.

@Two Men

“I don’t know how you do it, making love out of nothing at all.”

I can say right now, in this moment, that I completely, absolutely, devotedly love Madeline, the mother of my children. It is not something I’m always certain of. Part of my uncertainty is motivated by fear. I have often wondered if Madeline still loves me. I know she once did, when we were still in school, when my father’s name was recognizable and I had not dropped it from mine. That is not so long ago but there is a way three children make the time before they were born seem like all that happened in another time, even another century, that far.

I hope Madeline is happy. I have tried to provide everything that could make her happy, that she said would make her happy since those years when I had so little to give her.  Madeline used to say that the reason why she did not want to admit to me what she felt for me for so long was because I’m so proud. She was afraid that if she had told me then that she had fallen in love with me even before I ever noticed her, I would look down on her.

She had told me this when we had been watching some old time movies. Madeline is crazy about those black and white Hollywood movies. She was first to sleep over in my second rented house because of those classic black and white movies, coming over to see where I had moved and finding that I had finally brought myself to carry a stash of movies that my father had purchased during his student years in Pennsylvania and said I could have if I ever wanted them. I had never, until then, seen her as uninhibited as she had become, seeing them in a CD case next to my TV and DVD player, totally ignoring those then recent acquisitions, she had slumped down on her knees, nearly toppling them all over, on a weekday afternoon that I will never forget. Taxiing there.

I’m paying for her Masters’ Course right now. I have little idea where the obsession comes from but even back then when I was already sick of school, in my second year of university and she was in her final year in secondary school, she already had made up her mind that she was going to study until she made Professor. I will be lying if I do not say I thought the pregnancies and responsibilities might make her forget about all that. Aaron and Tezira did not make her abandon her dreams, they had made her more determined.  There were times in those years when I wondered if she might hate our children because it seemed like they and I were the ones holding her back.

I could not blame her for unexpressed sentiments that maybe I had got her pregnant as a trick. I know her and the last thing she wants is to live in poverty and for some of our most crucial first years, it had seemed like that would be our fate. To live a life of struggling to survive, investing our future in the wellbeing of our children who we would hold ransom in our old age to pay back for the deferment of our own dreams. She had thought I was a rich man’s son and because I had once been and did not think much of money, I had not disabused her of that impression until the realities of our lives together then did. In my moments of doubt, I think the Madeline I loved died in those years, tearing as she blew a charcoal stove to a blazing coal efficiency.

I look at Madeline sometimes now and I wonder. I wonder if Aaron and Tezira are the shield she has between me and her. I wonder if I’m the fallen hero of her old dreams, a man already in her past she has just not yet told this. I wonder, as each semester a negligible amount goes to pay her tuition fees from my business, I’m nursing the asp that will strike me fatally when she no longer has need of me. In pausing to reconsider, life is lived in the memory of choices you could have made but did not, wondering if perhaps you made a mistake. There are times when Madeline makes me think I made a mistake. Not in marrying her, not in her becoming the mother of my children, but in delaying the passage of her dreams with some of the choices I made.

Have you ever made love to a woman and she was not there with you? Sometimes I wonder if I’m to spend the rest of my life atoning for the initial disappointments I inflicted. I know I cannot leave Madeline. It is not cowardice that holds me fast to her. It is not Aaron and Tezira who keep me from leaving her. It is not because everyone knows her as my wife. It is not because her beauty is beyond compare.

In a Nokia phone stolen from me eight years ago from me walking along Wilson road, in that Nokia phone’s text messages’ folders lies the answer. If that phone still exists and has not been torn apart for spare parts. A friend had subscribed to those network quotes and had forwarded me one: In love, you must hold back. Madeline had taught me not to hold back.

I have never told her this. Insincere confession was my father’s getaway card and all my life I have striven not to be like my father. The greatest tragedy I suppose that can happen to a man is to marry a woman who is as unlike his mother as the sun is to the moon. In living my life to never disappoint my mother again I seem to have lost my wife, I sometimes think. All these are thoughts when she is not in my sight. When I cannot reach out and stroke her arm, when her side of the bed is empty and only the scent of her hair is in her pillow, not hearing her voice. In my worst sleep waking nightmares, I doubt the quality of her love. The truthfulness of it all. Everything else notwithstanding. We are not our reputation and no one understands that better than I.