Mataachi Inc

“Let me take your life and make a song out of it.”

I knew a girl once. A wonderful girl I met one day who was the most beautiful girl in the world. A girl everyone I knew wanted to go out with. A girl who until me had not gone out with any of the people who had wanted to go out with her, kept to herself and kept herself above all her admirers, like a true goddess. I knew that girl once and when I met her, I fell in love with her because everyone was afraid of letting themselves fall in love with her because though no one around had gone out with her, somehow she has acquired the reputation of being a heartbreaker. The kind of girl who drove a teetotaler to drink and become a sad living example of instruction in bars around the city after work as he sobbed soberly in front of his three Johnny Walker Whiskey bottles, his envious job no consolation for the ragged refugee status of his heart. The kind of heartbreaking girl who took the laugh of joy out of a natural life lover until his friends were passing him crouched on a street corner with a glazed distant look in his eyes that could no longer see them and he could not even smile back at the pure smile of a child. An awesome reputation of heartbreaker had grown around her like that no one could explain and that she had never tried to explain. Until I met her and I fell in love with her. And I thought she had fallen in love with me.

And falling in love with her, I begun to discover the girl she used to be, sometimes, in flashes, before she became the heartbreaker, the goddess of pain. Moments that showed me that before kissing her pouting full lips and lying in her strong arms, listening to her crooning to Chris de Barge songs, I had not lived before her. That my life had been a mirage before her. Moments that privately made me want to go away and weep for the deprived life the boy I had been had lived while all the men who had loved her before had been living while I survived on a scourging diet. Not just made want to go away and weep, but there were indeed many moments when we were out and bladder full I used to excuse myself from our table full of mirth filled laughter to go into toilets behind establishments that were open air and I could look up at star filled night skies with distant unheard crickets, pissing into discoloured bowels, and I would laugh sometimes in near drunken glee at the full life I was living, sometimes I would clear my throat many times spitting not to sob at the non-life I had lived before her, and the new life I was discovering with her and because of her, in love like I had never been in love!

Before her, before Kim, I was Teflon, life slipping over me with no trace. With Kim, every street, every bar, every taxi, every word, every song had a story behind it, a life of its own and a memory of us in it and every time I was there, with or without her, she was there with me. Wandegeya was no longer Fiona’s the night I will never forget as long as I live. Wandegeya became Kim’s and the night she got me involved in an altercation that concluded with me staring into endless barrel of a pistol. Wandegeya became hers the night to no dare or provocation she turned a hotel renown for staidness into a heaving hive of bawling and singing when she convinced the manager to let her sing for the love of her life, her boyfriend in the hotel, a song, her favourite song and his, at least in karaoke version because tomorrow was his birthday and it was 2 minutes to midnight and he could only guess that she had not gone out to buy him cigarettes and not to beg with batting eye lashes the manager of the most prestigious hotel in Wandegeya and one of the oldest in Kampala to allow her a rare honour, to sing to her boyfriend, the man who would be her husband the father of her children. Wandegeya was Kim’s, 2am, our grinning cab waiting, standing in front of a grilling chicken and chips stand, Mwebase insisting he had never given a customer his full special without including his ebigenderaako and insisting that his wife in bed with a lactating infant would not mind him waking her up to inquire where the freshest onions were and Kim miraculously purchasing airtime from a pharmacy calling me to say that she was sorry for her craving, she had been in a clinic, they had proven she was not pregnant, but nevertheless though she still wanted those chips and chicken, she had fallen in love with me again because I was in the cold, 2am, Monday night, when I had to be in the office 5 hours later, making sure she had what she desired the most in the world at that moment, and while she was going to give me the most mind blowing love making, she just wanted to say, before she crossed a single lane and came over to me, she knew she had been difficult that night, she appreciated what I was doing right then, and she loved me more than she had ever loved anyone. She was in love, when she least expected to be in love. Wandegeya became hers, when she already had my heart and I had not told her. Wandegeya became hers, while she was mapping regions of me that I had never dared let any girl explore, on a night when I had least hopes of her, my life, or living, Wandegeya became hers and I was hers, in the seconds of taking her call, Mwebase at a distance hailing me triumphantly with his ebigenderaako hoisted above his head, I became hers as my Wandegeya became hers too. That Kim I was ready for, prepared by the lion eating Tsavo Game Park rumours. I was ready.

But there was another Kim. A Kim no one had told me about, warned me about, or even fantasized that she existed. A Kim in sudden glimpses, of Rimbaud illuminations, that had no calling card or business location, a Kim even she could not control, that came of her own bidding and thrilled not just me but thrilled her too. A Kim I did not just fall in love with, a Kim who kissed my soul, looked in the depths of me, was not horrified, and extended her warm living hand to grasp because she understood, such murkiness was in her too, and she was offering my lost soul to twin with her lost soul, there was still hope, we could make it.

Kabalagala became our town too. For a different reason though. Before Kim, I had never known a girl who could not only convince a boda boda rider to be her unofficial ‘chauffeur’ often for free, but could get someone like Hakeem, stingy and money hungry as he is, to fuel up his bike so that on Saturday night of all nights when Kabalagala roads are murder, Kim should decide that she wanted to practice how to ride that bike. With me as her first passenger! The curses of the taxi drivers’ denting their fenders on hastily reversed into pavements, horns blaring, would never drown my screams as I wondered, holding on, why I had not taken Hakeem’s very dirty white helmet when he winked and insisted that I would need it!

But that was not all. I had never met before a girl who had a head of business like Kim. Once when we were at Punchline and I was scowling at my gambling machine which had swallowed more of my tokens, Kim cheerfully laughing said, “If you want a real gamble, why don’t you do something real?” I was pissed, “Like go out more with you?” she had laughed again, “I have been the one doing the gambling going out with you. Now it’s your turn. I want you to rent us a room in Kabalagala, just near Kampala International University.”

The Bell beers I had been gulping had evaporated immediately, me gagging, “Do you know how much a room costs here? You crazy? Why?” A Kim answer came back, “Just just.” I had imagined that because we had been hanging out too much in Kabalagala, Kim wanted a place where we could, you know, dash for a quickie, whenever we felt it. It was, for a while, and I remember those dawn love making mornings, music pumping into the room, but not for long. For the 150, 000 shillings room I rented, we were soon raking in five times that amount because Kim had figured we would not be the only ones needing such a room on short notice yet not wanting to use a hotel. With peephole lessons thrown in for learners. That girl was crazy! And I was crazy in love with her, like I had never known Fiona. Fiona who one afternoon, I returned from work early, Saturday, and found seated on the stairs of my house, waiting for me, a year nearly since we had last loved. A year ago, that brooding beautiful face back, Fiona on my door, again.