Look At Me

   18    

It was a typical Saturday afternoon, which meant that Tom was shirtless in his living room rolling weed. He didn’t even like smoking weed that much. Mostly he smoked it because he was bored. And he was bored most Saturday afternoons. He was alone in the two-bedroom flat in Langata that he shared with his friend Mark. Mark worked Saturday mornings in a bank in Westlands as a teller, after which he would normally go to his girlfriend’s house to spend the weekend. Often he’d not see him until Sunday evening. He was a bit neurotic, Mark. He never smoked, never drank. He got his high from desperately loving women who didn’t feel the same way. Whatever the case, this new one seemed to be working out.

Anyway, he smoked his weed with the windows wide open while watching TikTok videos. He was in an old pair of purple Lakers shorts. A fierce patch of sun burnt his left thigh as he smoked from the old beige sofa next to the window. He felt at peace. He also felt unsettled at the same time. Lately, he felt unsettled a lot, a sense that he wasn’t doing a lot with his life at 31. He felt the weight of expectations to conform; get a real job, date a real woman who he hadn’t met online, stay in an apartment where fights didn’t break out in the middle of Friday night, where someone shouted, ‘Pigia Timo! Aki pigia Timo.” His mom constantly told him that “he was better than the life he was living.” That he needed to start “living his life responsibly.” Whatever that was. He knew he probably should and he was increasingly feeling that he was merely kicking a can down the road.

After smoking his weed, he fell into a nap until his phone woke him up. It was coming to 4pm and the patch of sun had moved. He answered his phone with his eyes closed. Martin was on the phone. Martin announced that he was driving towards Langata to pick him up. “Dress up,” He said. “We are going to Naivasha. Be there in 15 minutes.”

Tom showered because he was feeling mighty clammy. Twenty minutes later, he walked out the flats and saw an old Audi idling opposite the road, waiting like a predator. Martin.

“I was still feeling a tad high from the weed,” he tells me when we meet. “My mouth felt like I had been eating sand and charcoal.”

Martin was a chubby guy with dimples. Like Mace when he was still in Bad-Boy. He had a can of six-packs on the passenger side, two which had had downed, the empty cans tossed at the backseat. The third can was open, and sweaty in the cup holder. “We sat chatting and smoking in the car for a few minutes,” he recalls. Martin didn’t mind people smoking in his car.

“We are going to see Joy.” Martin told him.

“Bro, in Naivasha?”

“It’s her cousin’s birthday and there is a thing. There will be babes.”

“Sawa.”

Joy was a very beautiful girl and very vain. Tom wasn’t sure what the deal was between him and Joy, because she wasn’t likeable if you could get past her beauty. “She was selfish and self absorbed,” Tom says, “But there was a chance that her hot friends would be at the party, so it felt like there was something in it for me, after all. Besides, it beat lying about in shorts on a Saturday evening.”

Off they went. But first they stopped at a liquor store and grabbed a bottle of gin, cigarettes and a vape. [Of course Joy vaped]. Just before sunset they were in Naivasha. The PIN led them to a residential house with a big compound- an Airbnb, where the party was happening. The furniture was garish. Fake wooden floor tiles. Curtains that looked like they were on fire. Everything felt loud and brash. “Or maybe I was high,” Tom had smoked half a blunt and a few doubles of gin on the drive down. Joy was there, small tattoo on the neck, supple eyed, dolled up, and made up like an elaborate ruse. “You brought my vape?” She asked Martin while hugging him.

“Hey Tom,” she hugged Tom.

There were all sorts of characters at that party. There was draft beer, lots of gin and shisha. More people sat outside the house, on the verandah, out in the garden. Tom and Martin secured two plastic disposable cups and settled on the verandah. “I’m not a drinker to be honest,” Tom says. “I prefer to smoke cigarettes and that occasional weed. I remember that I only must have taken another two doubles and smoked the other half blunt.”

There were girls but none piqued Tom’s interest. Well, until he saw her making her way through the house. “She was clutching her purse, wearing a silver dress, with all these diamonds, shiny things on the neckline. A healthy curvaceous size 16 or 18.”“ Tom remembers. “Very hot babe. My type.”

Tom, not one to count slowly from 100, simply walked up to her and said hello, before she could resettle back on her seat in the dining area. She was demure. “Which I liked.” He says. “I tried to get her to talk to me but she said politely that she was chatting with her girls, if I could look for her a little later. So I went back to the verandah.”

At around 10pm, Tom, from his recollection, went to look for her again and found her seated with a skinny guy in a hat that was too big for his head. “I started chatting her up, telling her that I had been waiting the whole night to chat her up, if we could step out and get some air.” Tom recalls. “But what I’m told later was different from what I remember. I was told that I was talking loudly. That I was playful but also a bit aggressive and high, which doesn’t sound like me at all. And that Martin and Joy came and begged me to accompany them outside to the car. That’s what they tell me. I don’t recall it that way. The person they are describing doesn’t sound like me at all.”

“It sounds like the weed and the gin, maybe?” I offer.

“No,” he shakes his head. “I’m never like that even when high.”

Anyway, what everybody agrees is that the skinny guy claimed her. He said “This is my girl, bro. Ishia.” Or he said, “What is it with you and my girl, bro?. Ishia.” Nobody remembers what exactly he said but everybody agrees that he said, “Ishia.” And “bro.” There was a scuffle. The skinny guy tipped over the coffee table and fell down after an intense bit of shoving and shirt holding and menacing words. The usual male penis-contest bravado. The melee was squashed and the boys asked to stick to their corner and behave. Tom went back to the verandah where Martin was, now drunk, scolded him because Joy was annoyed with him for messing up her cousin’s party and was not talking to him anymore. “You are costing me a lay tonight, bro.” Martin seethed.

“I forgot about the thin guy entirely, forgot about that altercation all together,” Tom says, “Until I ran into him upstairs where I had gone to look for a free toilet.”

Thing is when Tom came out of the loo he was standing there, as if blocking his path. “I remember thinking, oh come on, not this shitbag again.” he says. “It was more like a nuisance than anything else, like when you realise you have stepped on a chewing gum that you have to scrape from under your shoe.”

I chuckled. I liked that analogy.

The thin guy had a look on his face, a vengeful look. Of anger. Of wounded pride. A man with a bone to pick. What happened next happened so fast it took me a minute for Tom to fully comprehend it. To appreciate the violence of it all.

The skinny guy seemed to be floating towards him. He came so close Tom could see the strands of his eyebrows, the dark colour of his intentions. Then there was a small jerking movement, his hands moving, a small twist of his body. Then a pain on the side of Tom’s belly, a swift intense pain, almost sweet in its intensity – for if there is a thin love between love and hate, isn’t the line also thin for pain and pleasure? It reminded him of how “a needle pierces your skin when they draw your blood in the laboratory.”

Tom was stunned. “It all happened in a fraction of a second. I barely had time to blink, man.”

Then the skinny guy turned back and walked away. “I knew he had harmed me. I was high but I was aware. I just didn’t know how. It was all so sudden, so swift, like he had done this a million times before.” His hands, by reflex. went to where the pain was and he looked down to see a tear in the shirt. “Then I saw the fabric turn red. That’s when I knew what had happened; the bastard had stabbed me.”

I try not to tell stories during someone else’s interview but I heard myself say, I knew someone who was stabbed because of a chic. I was a child, maybe 9 and I had gone for December holidays in the village and I heard my uncles recount the story so many times the following morning. He was stabbed at a hang in the village called Omega One. So I grew up with the notion that discos were such dangerous places – a place to get stabbed because of a girl.

“Omega One sounds like a food supplement.” He said.

Oh, that made me laugh so hard. It really does sound like a food supplement. Something from fish.

“Omega One was the Homeboyz of those days.”

Anyhow, back to the crime scene.

After being shanked, Tom staggered backwards into the toilet and sat on the seat. Shock, maybe. “It felt surreal. It felt like it was happening to someone in a movie.” He held the wall with one hand. He felt paralysed by fear. “My lips felt very dry. I started panicking.”

He called Martin but he never picked. He could hear the loud music coming up from the stairway. When he started getting dizzy he called his mom. “You always call your mother, man when shit hits the fan.” He called his sister. Nobody picked. “I thought this is how I die. In a toilet in Naivasha.” The walls were a dull cream. “I thought, no way I’m dying in this toilet. I need to get downstairs and seek help. My hands were already soaked with blood. I tried to stand up but I had no power in my legs, I felt like my legs were made from air. I gathered strength, heaved myself up, took one step and crumbled on the floor.”

That’s the last thing he recalls.

When he woke up he was in a hospital bed. He had a tube running from his hand. There was a tube curdled under his nose. The room was bright and white and there was no window. “I could hear my mother’s voice from afar. She was addressing someone. Maybe she was addressing me. I was convinced I was dead.” Two faces appeared above him. Someone shone a torch in my eye. He blinked. “I desperately wanted to drink water but I couldn’t find my voice.”

He stayed in the hospital for six days.

Then he moved in with his mom to recover for a month or so. Then he resumed work.

“You recover from your wounds, but then you realise that you have more wounds inside.” He says. These weren’t visible wounds, fixable with stitches or bandages. They were unseen, impervious to medicine. “I started having panic attacks and night terrors.” He described how simple acts, like encountering someone on the stairs at night, triggered intense anxiety. “I couldn’t bear standing close to unfamiliar men. Being in crowded places. I couldn’t stand in queues. My heart would race, and I’d struggle to breathe. This happened more and more. My nightmares were filled with strangers wielding weapons. Mornings were the worst, I couldn’t muster the courage to leave the house on some days, forcing me to call in sick. Eventually, my job suffered. They couldn’t keep me. I was too distracted. They said I was also aggressive.”

“Were you?”

“Yeah. I got into spats with colleagues….”He pauses. “I was angry a lot.”

“What was making you angry, who are you angry at?”

He pauses.

“At that guy who stabbed me.” Long pause. Then a chuckle. “You know, I fantasised about stabbing him in the neck. I fantasized fighting with him, rolling on the floor, and stabbing him severally, all over, everywhere, on his chest, everywhere, him trying to block me with his hand and me just stabbing him through his hands…it was…I dunno, very unhealthy.”

We pause. We let this violence dissolve in the silence but it doesn’t quite do that. It floats on our conversation like a thin film of oil on water.

“I’m also angry with myself.” He offers.

“Why?”

“For being weak.”

“You feel like you could have done more?” I ask. “ Like go John Wick on him?”

He laughs. “ I actually do. I could have done something. I should have.”

He explained that for a time, leaving the house was impossible. He felt exposed, as if his weakness was visible to everyone, especially other men. He imagined them seeing him as easy prey, someone to intimidate. His shame felt public, a source of deep embarrassment. “I lived in constant fear, day and night,” he said. “I became consumed by anger, directed at myself and those around me. I changed drastically last year. It was an incredibly difficult period.”

“Did you ever see the man who stabbed you again?”

He did. “And it’s what saved me, ironically.”

He tells me that they found him and apprehended him. Charges were pressed. He was scared at the prospect of running into him ever again. He was scared of him and his knife, his violence. He couldn’t imagine ever being in a room with this man again. He went down to the police station for paperwork and things. His mom drove him. He didn’t expect to see him since he was out on bond, but when they walked into the police station, he was surprised to find him seated on a bench between a man and a woman who he knew instantly were his parents. “I had a rush of all manner of feelings at the same time. I felt fear, of course, that was my primary emotion last year, but I also felt some relief. I had created this guy to be this monster in my head, this huge dominant figure that stood over me.”

But in daylight, in the bright light of reality, away from the weed and the music, and the darkness of the night, “he looked much smaller, weaker.” He didn’t look like someone who could hurt anyone. “Immediately, I also felt embarrassed of what my mother might have been thinking about me, that this small guy, this skinny guy could hurt me. I felt like I wasn’t enough as a son, her only son – ”

“By the way what happened to your dad?”

“Whatever happens to absent fathers.” He said. “And that’s the thing, as the only son, I should be the one protecting my mother right? And here was this skinny guy who stabbed me. It just…didn’t compute on the manhood profile. You know what I mean? I also felt another relief; I was surprised at how meek this guy looked. Almost humble. For a moment I thought he wasn’t the menacing guy who had blocked my path in the toilet.”

“So, what happened at the cop station, did you walk over and kick him in the teeth?”

He laughs.

“No, man. I didn’t. He looked scared. He could barely look at me. And I looked at him hard..”

“Not for his benefit, but for yours.”

“Exactly. And he couldn’t return my stare. He cast his eyes to the floor between his legs. I wanted to shout at him to look at me. He couldn’t bear to look at me. I took that as cowardice. He was only strong because he had a knife. Without a knife he’s a pussy.”

Tom saw a trauma therapist for a month in December and then stopped. “There are things a man just has to work out on his own from a certain point.” He says. “Otherwise you can be very dependent on someone helping you. It’s me who got into the car to Naivasha, it’s me who walked up to that babe, this is my battle.”

“Do you still get nightmares and panic attacks?”

“Very rarely. The therapy helped with that by the way. I have to give the devil his dues.”

“Are you still scared?”

“We are all scared, Biko.” He says, sounding very old and wise.

“Did you ever find out who that babe who got you stabbed was?”

“No, actually.” He thinks about that. “I actually didn’t.”

“If you knew the moment you walked into that house that she would get you stabbed, would you still talk to her?”

He pauses.

“I don’t know…I don’t know…This is truly a sick question.” He laughs.

“But something must kill a man, ey?”

* What’s the hardest thing that you endured last year? [Or year before?] Email me on [email protected] Registration for writing masterclass is open. Register HERE. Now that you are here and you don’t want to register for the class or share your story, grab one of my books HERE on your way out.