In the name of my Father

 

It’s mom and dad at it again. These days I just roll over and play dead, wishing away their nightly vigils of violence. Even our neighbours no longer scale fences to come and rescue my parents from killing each other like they used to in the olden days. My friends think they were the golden days – they say during that time, when my dad opened his mouth, everybody would stop whatever they were doing and listen. Everybody, including, his erstwhile nemeses; they would hang to every of his words.

Oh, the olden days, my friends would sigh, a palpable nostalgia evident in their voices. I’m not sure, but I think I heard a hiccup or a sob escaping from Ruins when he started reminiscing what he called the good ole days. Days just after my dad had rescued me from the captors that had kept me under their grip for exactly a century, if the history of Ruins is to be believed. One hundred years! I gasped as I stared at him in utter disbelief that he loved me so much that he could lie to me that way.

I actually managed a laugh as I squinted my eyes at the emaciation of my limbs – I had screamed at the hospital people the other day when I failed to see my watch on my wrist where it had been eternally condemned; and they in turn believed somebody had stolen my precious time keeper while I slept – until one of them took off my sickly garments while preparing me for the bath – and shrieked in disbelief when he located the watch, which had slithered all the way past the elbow to my shoulder.

To say my limbs were just skin and bone was an understatement of the millennium. Skin and bone – that they were. And more. The scrawny fingers of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings were trying to pull themselves out of my sooty, blackened hands that looked like they were just out of the Number 3 Mine at the colliery. God; I should weep for myself – I am a crumpling Crumpling. The only thing that’s keeping me together is the myriad threads of undulating veins that run up and down the precipice between skin and bone. The only job that would suit me fine right now is as a scarecrow.

I asked Ruins why anybody would want to kidnap, let alone keep me captive for one hundred fucking years. Even he looked at me and laughed at the absurdity of his suggestion.

“Jesus; kid – you are not even aware of how worthy you are!”

Oh. So Ruins was not laughing at himself, but at my own naivety. I must be worth some value then. If Ruins says I am worth something, then I am worth something. What am I worth by the way? A bucketful of shit? Maybe mounds of earth with me buried under them. Now, that IS worth something.

But Ruins said my father came for me with all guns blazing in a battle with my captors that took the better part of two decades. I bet Ruins couldn’t lie even if his life hung by the thread of a simple fib. Because ever since I was small, I heard rumours that it was not even my father who came for me, but some knight in shining armour who is said to have mysteriously died just days after I was set free. Almost everybody in the village talks about that knight, and how things might have been very different had he lived to see me grow.

Sometimes it is hard not to believe the rumours; because the earliest recollections of myself are not of this eerie, marrow-chilling phantom that got into the book of records for providing the only live specimen of a skeleton for biology fanatics to feast on. I remember dreaming about a future where my playground was in the clouds. The good ole days, Ruins would say. When my dad would promise me all the happiness enjoyed by my former keepers, who were so successful they could afford to party hard and drink hard and still become richer and happier the following morning.

Of all his promises, father only succeeded in the partying and the drinking, which he did himself and his friends, who had helped him in the long march to my freedom. And when he was drunk, he would blubber about how he got me out of what he called the vice-grip of the Egyptian Pharaohs of our modern times.

Soon, he must have forgotten about me altogether, as he argued that rescuing me had sapped all his energy, so he needed his food and drink and rest. Nothing whatsoever to do with my growing up. The only time he would come to visit me at school was after every five years when he was up for the periodical custody battle with mom. Then he would rake all the harrowing memories of how he spent half his life trying to save me from the jaws of the crocodile – why would he give me up to some woman called my mother? Hell, almost all his friends had been wiped out in the score years it took him to liberate me from the bondage of the Pharaoh. No! This scallywag goes nowhere that’s not by my side. No. Don’t revoke the war demons in me by that bullshit talk of yours; you don’t know what I’m capable of, woman.

He would become so emotional that he would clench his fist and bang the dock or the table so hard it would almost break into flying fragments. In fact, he did break the table with his fist one day, with me cringing underneath it, scared out of my wits that father’s voice might crush me into oblivion through the ceiling. I don’t know how word got out, but people started addressing my dad with the moniker, Fist of Fury. Dad revelled in it, almost literally pinned the nickname on his sleeve while he waved his fist into the air in his rounds to woo the judges into forfeiting to him my custody for at least five more years.

Frankly, I think the men on the bench were scared of dad and his gang and their furious fists. I remember one court year when one of the judges conjured up the courage to ask me who I wanted to live with between mom and dad; the man of the house hit me so hard for publicly humiliating him that I woke out of my coma after 52 weeks. The Furious Fist Family was so angry that it grabbed anything with pussy and tried to bury its anger inside it. Apparently it did not work – when I woke up, dad was still fuming at mom.

“You brought this upon my children you useless piece of cunt! First, you dole out your withered depression to the bloodsucking pests who kidnapped my kid in the beginning! Then you actually ask your pimps to starve me out of existence!

“Oh; you’re gonna have to do better than that, you slimy conniving bitch. Because the Fist is going nowhere. Nowhere at all!”

He banged the table, and I almost relapsed into coma.

Mother told me father never visited me in hospital while I played cat and mouse games with death. It wasn’t surprising; the way he went on ad nauseum about the witching and bitching effect my mother had had on his enemies made me wish to stick his fist into his mouth.

But I did ask mother if the old man was right about her having sold her soul to the devil.

“Son, your father is a crazy old man. And you are a naïve young boy. Please just let me and your father sort this out, for your own safety.”

But two years ago when I fell ill again, this time to a lethal attack on my intestines by some horrible affliction that had me setting permanent base in the Blair toilet (we had resorted to the Blairs after the taps to our home ran dry. Actually, there were a lot of things we had given up hope of ever enjoying; things which, during my days in captivity and soon after my independence, we took for granted – electricity, the water itself, the mealie meal, let alone the money. Most of my friends pleaded with me to join them in their great trek to neighbouring villages. But I always shrugged my polite no and hid my head in my hands. Their fingers had started to add sooty black to their pigmentation then. But I ignored the signs.

“You should go kiddo,” Ruins could not hide his tears as he wound his hand around me. He himself could no longer because he said he was now too old; besides, he could handle my father anyway.

“This father you love so much will be the death of you. Go, for all our future’s sake.”), father finally took notice.

I sighed, saying nothing. I simply could not believe that my father could be as heartless as was being said by the neighbours (they had woken up one day to the eerie greetings of bulldozers ready to decimate their homes into pulp and rubble. They said my father had ordered it, because he wanted to cleanse our home of rodents, scorpions, pests, parasites, malcontents and decadents who had invaded while my father drank at the beer hall). How could a father who had spent a patient eighty years planning to rescue me and had actually taken twenty years to execute his plan allow any sacrilege as to leave me in the scorching open to wither and die alone?

Ole Ruins would know. Ole Ruins is as old as the love-hate story of my parents. He once told me that the two people who claim to love me the most actually did love me once – and actually loved each other in the process. I hid my face in disgust and embarrassment when Ruins confided in me that back in the day, my dad would drool just at the sight of mama’s big behind. Mama, who daddy called Gogo Veshure – whatever that means. Now he calls her the biggest whore with the biggest ass the world has ever seen. Whatever that means. I asked Rui; what is a whore? What is an ass? But Rui said I was too young to understand.

Ole Rui is wrong; I mean I can’t be too young, can I? I have heard dad in his Drunken Master best, yelling at mom almost every night throughout the night.

“You whored your bionic ass into every fucking mind of every neighbouring whoring pimp who was unfortunate enough to get lost in your radar. You big-assed whore! And you whored them into banishing me from whoring in their lands! You know what – you deserve each other! What use do I have with teats and pussy as frigid as the titbits of a brass statue at my cemetery! There is a whole cornucopia of untamed pussy in the Eastlands that is waiting to be discovered. You go ahead and whore your way into the sunset; I’ll go east, baby! And I will return with my big black dick still hard enough to fuck you and your pimps into kingdom come. Just dare me! I have the Fist and the Dick of Fury! And I have my son! You got that, Bitch? I have my fucking son!”

And mom would lapse into her own trance and wax lyrical about how dad’s whoring in the Eastlands had killed the family, and how the son he showed off would soon die of hunger.

“Tongaka tione,” mother always ended with those chilling words. They sounded like father’s fist when it bangs the table and sends everybody and everything flying around. And Rui says I was too young to understand! I have been hearing the word whore in my family since I could hear words and make sense of them. But whore has never made sense to me. I wonder whether whoring is a good thing; father accuses mother of it, and goes on to vaunt of doing it himself in the same sentence.

When I got sick I almost screamed with joy; dad was away whoring and drinking. When he came back and saw me – it must have been for the first time in his life – he pissed all over himself in shock. Mother laughed. Hard. It was the first time I had seen her laugh. She sounded like a howling mongrel that has just sniffed the imminent demise of its owner in the dead of night. I laughed too. Hard.

But dad – oh, poor dad! Then man went ballistic. He went haywire. He screamed like an avalanche crushing down the mountains after being set off by the staccato sounds of a helicopter.

“You can now marvel at the handiwork of your bloodsucking ticks! See! I knew they had left the poison in my well from the days of the struggle. I knew it!

“Listen to me, and listen good. I haven’t laid a finger on you ever. Yeah, I might have slapped you once or twice. Or I might have rearranged the facial features of some of your brothers. But who’s counting? That is the way of the family. We have degrees in slapping each other around now and then, don’t we? Everybody does it. You know that.

“But if my son so much as feigns to die – if he so much as makes me think he is dying – you are gonna have to answer to me. Savvy?”

To which mother only folded her arms and levelled up to him.

“Haikona ndiwe baba here? Tongaka tione.”

People on beds surrounding my own in the hospital kept disappearing; and they were going to new homes where they shared with no one. My dad realised the game was really up for him this time around; unless he took my mother’s hand into another marriage. I begged my mother not to fall into the man’s trap.

“Can’t you see he is just trying to dupe you so he gets his moral standing back? The man wants nothing to do with you; all he wants is the right to be my father without anyone asking questions, and you are falling right into the trap.”

Mother whacked me across my face. I guess I should have been shocked by her chubby fingers trying vainly to inflict some pain on my facial skin and bone - but I was just to glad for my impeding demise to give a rat's fart. I thought mother was just to tired of pretending to fight for me when all she wanted was to get her hands into dad’s cookie jar – me – and whore herself into a stupor.

“What do you know about my marriage, you inquisitive brat? Do you want me to whore?”

Shit; the whore-word. Again. I tried to cup my ears and felt my flabby, debilitated hands falling back on the bed. Great – now even my own organs refused to listen to me.

“I kept you alive all this time. You think I don’t get tired of the job? In your next life, you should try to fend for yourself! Ingrate.”

I wanted to tell her that in my next life I wouldn’t want her as my mother, but I started coughing horribly, gobbles of coagulated blood escaping through my mouth and nose. Mom sped off to the church where dad was waiting. She said she had set the man some stringent conditions for their second marriage to take off, and father had agreed, only too eager to earn the title of father once again.

I must admit they almost succeeded in pretending to make it work during the first days. I grew stronger; but what I actually made me sick in the gut was the sight of my parents foolishly smiling into the cameras and making empty promises never to let me starve to death again. Hell, I wanted to starve myself to death. And now that mom has tasted how it feels like to have the whoring power of dad, she doesn’t want to let go. None of them cares whether I live or die. After two years together, they have grown so apart; you could cut their silent war with a chain saw.

I hate them. I hate mom; and I hate dad. I hate ‘em all. They don’t want me to live; yet they can’t afford to have me die either. I wanna grab the rapscallions and drag them into the river where Legion’s demons were drowned. Then I think I will be alone to starve myself to my death, in peace.

I know God would let me do it.