The hardest thing I went through last year was in June, when I followed my wife to Diani, where she had gone for work,” he says over the phone. To be clear, “followed” implies she went ahead, and he joined her later. He actually means he stalked her to Diani. He wasn’t expected; he simply showed up unannounced.
I can hear his children playing outside on what sounds like a playground. One is ten years old, the other is maybe four. The thing with phone interviews with people you have never met is that you create an image of the person based purely on how they sound. Boys. Occasionally, he will tell me something like, “Hold on, Biko…just go in the house…yes, I’m coming…Daddy is on the phone.” He sounded 5’7”, with no facial hair, maybe a shy beard at most, and a cocoa complexion. He sounded like he had good skin that he—to use a women’s expression—doesn’t deserve. Men don’t deserve good skin, eyelashes, or eyebrows.
They had been having problems in their marriage.
“I married a bad girl,” he says by way of explanation.
“How bad?” I ask.
Because there is a sliding scale. Some might consider a woman who has pierced both eyebrows and has a tattoo covering her whole left breast “bad.” Others might consider a woman who uses the F-word in every sentence “bad.” Some might say single mothers who can drive a stick shift are “bad.” You have to be careful with what you define as “bad.”
“She used to drink and smoke when I met her,” he explains. Oh, that’s definitely bad, I think to myself. That’s not even bad; that’s as close to illicit as you can get.
“What was she smoking, weed? Crack?”
“No, cigarettes,” he says. “And I had a problem with that from the time we were dating. I was clear that that wasn’t a quality I preferred in someone I would date seriously. Nobody in my family drinks or smokes. My brother drinks now, but he started the habit much later in life. So, drinking and smoking were my non-negotiables.”
Fair enough.
After university, they got serious. He told her, “Look, if we are going to take this to the next level, you have to stop drinking and smoking. We can’t raise a family if you are doing these things.” She said it was all in the past, a heady youthful phase in university that she was over. She was ready to be an honest woman. And so, one cloudy morning, eleven years ago, they dressed up in their nicest clothes and said “I do” at the IG offices with a few friends present. “It was rebellious,” he laughs, “not doing a proper wedding. It’s something we would have done, seeing as we are both last-borns.”
Their two sons came quickly. So did the cracks. I get the feeling that the eleven-year marriage started rocking quite early. For example, when their firstborn had barely gotten his balance while walking, he stumbled upon messages from a man on his laptop that she had borrowed. The chats on Skype (remember those days) were salacious; a tryst being organized in the fringes of the city. When she was pregnant with their second son, who is now four, she discovered he was cheating with the girl from work, the one with the big breasts. That brought another shitstorm that lasted a while. He also discovered that she was secretly back to drinking, especially when he was away for work. She defended it by saying it was just a wee bit of a drink to take the edge off a bad day, or stress at work. At some point, he suspected that she might have had something with his friend, an acquaintance he had introduced her to for work.
I felt weary sitting on the balcony listening to these tales of marriage. I briefly wondered, during his narration of domestic woes, what happened to my rude neighbor who had a problem with my drilling the first day I moved into the apartment. I have never run into her again. I don’t even recall her facial features anymore. It almost feels like something that happened to someone else in another lifetime.
He says there were days he would walk out on the family during these massive rows and get himself an Airbnb where he would hide away for days, thinking and sulking. “My record is ten days away from home, just silence. She doesn’t know where I am. I don’t call home.”
“Why?” I ask. “Why do you do that?”
“Because I have a bad temper, so I decided to just leave that space, to keep our distance.”
These shenanigans eroded the trust so much that last year, in June, when she came and told him, “Babe, we have a team building in Diani and I—” he said, “No!” before she could finish the sentence. No team building in Diani! No team building in Machakos! No team building in Kendu Bay! None! They can build a team, but you aren’t going to be in it! I don’t want to hear those two words next to each other; keep “team” away from any “building”!
But then, she went. Because, remember, once a bad girl, always a bad girl.
“She blackmailed me, and left for Diani,” he moans.
He was restless after she left. He couldn’t focus in class (he’s a lecturer). He paced up and down the corridor, imagining her in the arms of some guy with a bigger beard and small, dark, snake eyes. He imagined her laughing across the dinner table with this imaginary man. All the messages he had ever seen on her phone over the course of their marriage came at him vividly. “I was drowning in paranoia.”
On the first night, he called her when he was sure she was in bed and listened for the sound of a man breathing or watching a TikTok video at volume 0.2. The voice in his head kept whispering things in his ear: “She’s up to no good. She’s with a man. She’s dodgy. She’s being her usual bad self, a little troublemaker”. He barely slept. The next morning, in a moment of burning jealousy and suspicion, he impulsively booked a return ticket on the SGR for the next morning. Now his skin was really in the game.
He packed a small bag and kissed the children. “Daddy will be back in two days.”
It was Wednesday. “I called her before I boarded. I was looking for a fight to justify my going. We had a fight about something old, so I was pretty pensive during the trip.” He stared out the window during the train ride and ignored the panic and anxiety rising to his throat like bile. He couldn’t eat anything, couldn’t talk to anyone. He stared outside his window without seeing the running landscape. He played out scenarios in his head, all of which would confirm his fears. “It was a great internal battle,” he says. “A part of me wanted to find her alone with her colleagues, another part wanted to confirm who she was.”
As he neared Mombasa, his hands started shaking a little, and his breath got a bit erratic. As the train pulled into the station, he placed his head against the window and took deep breaths, misting an abstract shape on the glass.
On his way to Diani, he booked himself into a small place about five minutes from his wife’s hotel. When he got there, he showered, changed into a t-shirt and shorts, and took a tuk-tuk to her hotel. It was just after 5 p.m. Because hotels have great security, he strolled right in, nodding casually at the guards. To avoid attracting attention, he stopped at an artificial fishpond to get his bearings. He phoned her. She said the sessions were over, and she was having a swim in the pool. He strolled casually, looking for the pool. Indeed, she was there. She was seated at the edge of the pool, feet in the water, having a glass of wine.
“At this time, things were just not great in my life; work, finances,” he tells me. “I was going through a very challenging time in my life, and I had a lot of suicidal ideations. I felt desperate. I felt like I was losing control of important aspects of my life, and nothing was going right; not my marriage or finances. So, it’s in this state that I found myself sitting somewhere watching my wife swim.”
After about an hour or so, he watched the pool attendant go around saying something to the people in the pool. The pool was closing. He watched as she heaved herself out of the pool, dripping wet. She was wearing a swimsuit that flattered her derriere. She toweled herself as she chatted with some girl who was bent over beside her, wringing her braids dry. She then tied the towel around her waist and walked away with her drink in her hand. The sun was setting over the ocean, the beach finally emptying. In a few minutes, the beach would get dark, and the sand would be left to contend with the footsteps of strangers who would be in hotel rooms or Swahili dwellings in the small villages lit by lanterns.
He followed her at a safe distance, down the paved paths. Beads of water on her back caught some of the sunset, dramatizing her back, turning it into the color of tiramisu.
“She had told me her room number, so it wasn’t too hard finding it,” he said.
It was on the first floor, a mushroom-colored door with a number on it. He could hear the shower running. He went up to the second floor and stationed himself where he could see the comings and goings on the stairwell below. “I figured she would head out to dinner after her shower. Maybe that’s where she would meet the man.” She would probably wear something he hated; the short things that she liked to wear when she was out of town for such events. He isn’t the type to check out WhatsApp stories, but one time he saw a photo of her wearing a scandalous dress on her WhatsApp stories. It left her thighs bare, and “there was a man’s hand on it.”
“I’m sorry,” I ask, because I thought I heard, “her thighs were bare and there was mandarin on it.”
“A man’s hand was on her thigh,” he says.
“And?”
“We had a fight as usual, she made excuses, and I eventually let it go.”
He hated that she would wait to wear these short little dresses that exposed her body that only her husband was meant to see. “It felt like a violation of marriage.”
Anyway, as he stood there, he was sure she would come out wearing something that showed half her back, thighs, and a generous portion of her breasts. And waiters and other guests would feast their ugly eyes on her as she weaved through the tables, carrying a bowl of cream of mushroom soup in one hand and a saucer with one lone bun on the other. And he hated that thought.
As he stood there, he heard a door open right behind him, and a man left his room and went down the staircase. “However, he didn’t proceed to the ground floor; I heard a door open on the first floor. I prayed it wasn’t my wife’s door. I waited a while and went downstairs.” He stood outside her door for ten minutes, his heart out of control, before he raised an unsteady hand and pressed the doorbell. He was so nervous he wanted to throw up. He was trembling a little. His mouth felt like dry sand.
“My wife opened the door.”
Two things became very apparent quickly, both confusing. “First, she was still wearing only a towel. Second, there was a strong smell of weed coming out of the room. I didn’t know my wife smoked weed.” His wife blinked hard and stared at him blankly. He said, “Babe, what’s happening? Are you smoking weed?’” She’s been drinking and smoking, and she’s confused to suddenly see me standing at her hotel door. When she recovered, she said in a weird voice, “Babe, kwani uko hapa?”
He pushed his way into the room. The smell of weed was heavy inside. The man from the staircase was seated on an accent chair, smoking. “I walked up to him and asked him, “Do you know this woman is married?’” He was confused, and high. I lost it. My wife told him to go. He picked up his drink, and his lighter and left. I’ve never been violent, but I slapped her a few times; the towel fell down. Now she was naked, and we were having a fight. I don’t know if it’s the last-born in me, but I called my mom, I called my dad, I called my brother. Her phone was ringing; her colleagues were asking if she was fine. I think the dude went and told them that I had showed up and she was in trouble. When I was on the phone with my dad, she smashed my phone. I smashed her work laptop…it was insane…” “Wait,” I interrupted him, “what exactly are you telling your parents when you called them?”
“I had been suicidal before that time,” he mentioned. “I was facing some life’s challenges, and I had planned to disappear. I guess I was hurt and angry. I was telling them, “These are the things I was telling you I go through in this marriage. This was what I was dealing with; my wife drinking and smoking weed in a towel with a man in her hotel room.” I was just confused. I told her she was leaving the hotel, and she was leaving with me. She refused. I growled, “I’m not leaving without you!” I took her to the reception, and I forced her to check out. We took a tuk-tuk to where I was staying, but when we got there, she refused to disembark. She told the driver, “This guy has threatened to kill me, he has beaten me, take me to the police station.” I was scared. I knew the police would come for me. I got off and picked up my bags and took off to Mombasa. The next day, I bought a new phone and got on my SGR train back home. When I got home, she was there.”
I think this guy sports hair long enough to comb, I decided. I don’t see a guy in dreadlocks going through something like this. Or a guy with an Afro. I feel like guys who take over ten minutes to take care of their hair each morning have less threshold for domestic drama. That’s my theory. Or bald men. Bald men tend to be more selfish; they choose themselves more. That’s just my theory; don’t quote me, it’s not peer-reviewed.
This guy’s story annoyed and exhausted me. He says getting the marriage back on track has been difficult and is still ongoing. The aftermath of June presented more ugliness. In August, they had a major row when she came home late and tipsy; “There were no fists involved, but there was shouting, pushing, and shoving. I didn’t spend Christmas with my family; I disappeared for four days. We are better now; we are working on things.”
“Why do you stay in this marriage?” I ask him. “Why don’t you just leave for the sake of both of you?”
“Because I believe in family,” he says. “Family is a big thing for me. I grew up in that kind of setting, where family is everything. Shit can go down professionally, my life can fall apart, but if my family is still standing, then I’m good. I don’t think there is anything that can happen that will stop me from working things out. If I can make it work, I will make it work. Marriage keeps me in check. I really love her. I adore my wife. I really hope she loves me too; sometimes I think I love her more than she loves me.”
I don’t know why listening to that made me sad for him, for her, and for his children. I told him that his story has angered me. That it felt ugly, and stressful, and that neither of them needed to go through that. Not at 35, surely. But love is a complicated thing, an animal with many heads. I told him that I hoped they would find happiness and peace in whatever form they choose. Most importantly, I hope they protect their sons.
He sent me a voice note this morning. He had just seen his sons off to the school bus and seen his wife off to work. He said January was peaceful, and so has February. “I’m happy. We are happy.”
***
What’s the hardest thing you did last year? Email me with a synopsis; [email protected]
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