The Fall of Jezebel

These flaws I got

They are part of who I am

Take me; or not

'Cause I finally understand

I'm so gone tryna be everything you want

That had to stop (or something like it)

'Cause baby you ain't worth it

If I gotta camouflage

For love, for love

God, I love Brandy. Say what you will, but I really believe she sings for me, me and me only. It is like she takes apart every thread of my soul before she sits down to craft her next master piece. Sometimes I think I am the only man in the world who has bought a few of the 30 million albums that Ms Norwood has managed to sell to the world throughout her whole career. I'm not even starting on pirated copies that I hear blaring in kombies all day long. You betcha ass if she lives long enough, Ms. BeRocka will surely overtake The Material Girl as the best-selling female art girl of all time.

Meh; who am I kidding? Brandy? With her deep, eviscerating, thought-provoking, self-scrutinising, self-critical lyrics; that Brandy on top of the world? Naw! Not even if she sells her music for 50c while naked on the vegetable vending streets of Harare. People nowadays have been roasted so brown and so thorough in nudity and violence that they want their music to be about sex, naked women, porn, more sex, guns and etc; lies about love, lies about eternal love et cetera. And sex again. Well; Brandy, my Brandy, is not about all that bull shit – she grew out of all that fairy tale mumbo jumbo and will tell you that she is just a girl next door who is not your first example of perfection – she has got them flaws too, and if you don’t like her because she is a fucking brilliant singer with flaws, then what the hell.

People of this world have never liked anybody who tried to tell them the truth. Noah tried to warn them about the flood and they laughed in his face, querying why the good lord had chosen to tell only Noah about the impeding doom. But perhaps Jesus has the best story to tell when it comes to people and their dislike of the good old truth. With him being famed as the only son truly bearing the genetics of the lord himself and all, my belief is that the gaping holes that were the evidence of his nailing to the notorious cross are long gone now. But his story is still a nice read.

And with people's sudden aversion to this thing called hard work in favour of the sleek new world of mapipi and instant miracles, I know if the Jesus of 2,000 years ago was to return and try to redeem his father's sheep, he would be shocked to death to find his church with absolutely no takers – simply because he does not perform enough miracles. And this time, the competition will be a lot tougher, what with new prophets materialising everywhere before our eyes, making the lame walk, healing blindness, and predicting celebrity and presidential demises.

I guess Brandy read the story of Jesus the Son Of God too – or else she would be splashed all over television, cyberworld and blogosphere Beyoncesquely or Shakiraistically twisting her bootylicious ass at the ogling world and telling us how her ego is a million times bigger than all the words in the world. (There was this time when they displayed Beyonce and Shakira's asses and called that Black and Latino pairing Beautiful Liar. Well, I couldn't agree more). And we would be so caught up in the earth shattering whirlwind of the swirl of her bum that we would wonder what exactly she is trying to sell to us – is it the idea of her humongous ego? Or is it her deadly asset, Ass and its equally fatalistic friend, Cleavage, to which we find ourselves somehow intricately embroiled?

There are times when I find myself wishing Brandy could sing about sex and ass and all that jazz so she would find her way to Eldorado where gold diggers have struck the gold seams under the guise of music. Nobody wants their favourite musicians to be poor. But then Ms. Norwood is not someone you would label as poor… I know, I know; but because she refuses to live wildly and to sit on a chair and pretend to make a music video while actually flashing a few pubic hair strands and an occasional labia at the camera, her music money will never fill half the piss pots filled by the Madonna who is not actually a Virgin. Besides, her music would heavily lean towards mundane, thoroughly childish efforts like I Wanna Be Down and Come A Little Bit Closer. Brandy would never find the motivation and willpower to bare her soul to the world and expose its follies with moving works of art the calibre of Camouflage, Finally, Should I Go and Drum Life.

Well; I don’t want Ms. Norwood to sing about brainless themes like eternal love and fairy tales. I love Camouflage; so much that it has stayed Number One on my Ringtone Charts for three years now. It has that naked sense of innocence and come-what-may in it that almost always manages to move me into a stupor. Because it is so innocently true, and I love the truth for the sheer innocence and truthfulness of it.

But right now the Camouflage of my soul has suddenly gone quiet. Its life and death has been so sudden, like the shrill, vainglorious cry of a robbery, rape and murder victim in the middle of the night, which goes a full blast, "Yowee ndofa…!" before being stopped cold by the knife in the hand of her Waterloo.

It's just that Camouflage refuses to die. As suddenly as she died, Brandy's voice comes to life again, this time so desperately high and insistent that I have to bite my own hand to keep myself from blasting Ms. Norwood into sextillions of fine particles. God knows how much I do love to hear her sing, but by God, not in the middle of the night. No! And especially not as a ringtone on my phone; because if there is anything I hate more than Beyonce or Shakira or Madonna wiggling her ass into millions of fucked up, sex crazed hearts, then it is midnight callers.

The sheer realisation that I have been awoken at 00:00:10 hours by Brandy warning me of a midnight caller is enough to raise the exponentially sensitive demons in me that are allergic to such sleep-depriving sacrilege. I lash out and my hand connects with the bedside lamp. The hotel people are gonna have a fit in the morning. But I don’t have to care about that right now. Somehow my hand cannot muster the strength to grab the wailing, hollering, blinking phone whose vibrations seems to be shaking the whole ten floors of this building.

But Brandy will not stop her lament until I drag myself to wakefulness and fumble for the chidhura on the table by the bedside. It had been vibrating in circles, drifting closer and closer to the edge that; had I been another second too slow in reaching for it, Ms. Brandy would have been silenced by the loud bang of the phone as it crashed against the floor. I don’t think I would have given a pig's fart about my new phone hurtling towards the floor - especially when I glance at the screen and see who has succeeded in cutting short the joy of my dreams.

Goddamn her; I'm gonna eat her heart for this.

"Musa," I hiss into the phone. Musa is my elder sister who thinks she is my mother in the absence of our real mother. Mama Wethu lives with her beloved husband at our rural home 400k from here. They cannot hear me when I kill their first born child for an unsanctioned midnight phone call.

"You had better be dead to call me at this hour, or by God, I'm coming there to kill you with my bare hands."

I curse under my breath as I actually see Musa smiling at my vacuous murder threat. She cannot recall how many times I have promised to shorten her life span during the past twenty years. Before I found my own place to stay, I had lived under her wing so long she was practically my mother. My other mother. And I still threatened to kill her every day, for almost anything. If she bought me shoes, then I was gonna kill her for it. If she told me she loved me, that was a crime punishable by death. I wonder how many death sentences I have given her before the latest pledge to choke her air supply lines.

Almost a minute pass before any of us can say anything; I can be excused, for I am obviously trying hard to extricate my unwilling body out of the king of sleep's warm aegis. I yawn and almost hear my gums falling off. The clock has a lot of zeroes with a single one somewhere in among them; a puzzle geek could actually have fun testing my resolve by tasking me to locate the figure 1 among countless zeroes on the clock.

Fuck you very much Musa; I am very much awake now. A cock crows in the distance (a cock crowing in town? That would not be the cock on top of that Cock Building, would it?). I blink and try to turn the light on. Click. Nothing happens. Click click. Nothing again. Damn; the ZESA assholes have been up before me already! Then I remember that I smashed the lamp just now. Fuck.

"Sekuru; zviri sei?"

Sekuru. That has been my name ever since Musa gave birth to a pair of rubble rousers she calls her sons. I'm certain if I also give life to a person of such questionable calibre, I would give him up for adoption without thinking twice. Probably to somebody who has the experience of raising rubble rousers. Nothing but a nattering pair of trouble, Musa's boys are; they had to call us to their school the other year when the two boys shoved one poor girl's head into a bucket of blue paint and she came out of it dripping like a stillborn baby blue whale. Luckily it was just face paint.

"You didn't wake me to ask that Musa."

"No. But there is nothing wrong with finding out how my favourite brother is spending the night."

"I was having a peaceful night," I breathed my sour breath into the Nokia. (I wonder how phones can stand the stench of foul breaths emanating from reeking, hangover-filled mouths like mine. Maybe they were specially designed to withstand such things). By favourite, Musa is trying to say I am her only brother; she did not have a say in our parents giving it another go at trying for another son so Musa could choose on who would be her favourite.

"Until I was awoken by my ringing phone and I saw your number on it. Now everything is so fucked up it's no longer peaceful. Somebody is about to die."

She did not say anything.

"So; what do you want at this godly hour, my favourite sister?" I ask, suddenly getting alarmed that I am away from home and suddenly have to receive a call from her at this goddamned hour. Phone calls at 00:00:00 am/pm when it is not the dawn of a new year are never ones to look forward to. If anything, they are to be hated and dreaded for waking the receiver from his beauty sleep and everything else they connote. Right now I don't know why Musa is on the other end of the line with me; but I am already beginning to feel ill at ease.

"Guess who called me just now?"

I yawn and rub my eyes. The world has 7billion people; and fourteen million of them live in this country. If the figures of cell phone companies are to be believed, then about twelve million citizens of this great nation of dreams are just one phone call away from me. Or from Musa for that matter.

Now, after those millions in this country, and billions outside it with access to a phone, she wants me to guess the one person who has just awoken her from her own sleep by a simple call. I really wonder how some people's brains function.

"That's it," I hiss, already pulling the blankets I had tossed from the bed earlier. "Musa, if you think you must call me, it's fucking fine. But don't call me until it is eight in the morning, okay? No; make that ten. Good bye."

"Sorry, little bro. I thought I already apologised for that. But there is more."

I sit still and say nothing.

"It's about grandmother."

"I have no grandmother," I say. If I was talking to a journalist, I don’t think I would have said it more matter-of-factly.

"Sekuru, don’t say that. She gave birth to your own father. And now she is really physically dead…"

It was simply impossible. My grandmother did not look like the sort that would die. (Fuck, I can't be thinking of her in the past tense, now. She is alive, waiting for me to do something; anything, that would set her temper on the journey through the roof). At any time ever. To me, she was just as indestructible as she was despicable. People of this country will never know how lucky they have been to have a president who cares for them so much that he chooses to lie instead of feeding them the bitter truth that for him, taking care of their needs is just a top priority as it is for a biker to put an ash tray on his bike. They should also be grateful for the opposing parties too, who hide behind a finger and wax lyrical about how they are the real godsend motherfuckers came to free people from the iron grip of its neo-captors. Simply because it could have been worse – they could have got Kate, my own grandmother.

I suddenly give out a spasmodic, utterly involuntary laugh. I still have not found out how grandma Kate came to be called Kate when she was born in the 1930s to parents who hid their children in maturas and granaries so they would not go to school. My theory is that she was called Kiti, after some animal that looks like a cat, and that she changed the name herself once she came to realise the implications of her original name. So I call her by her theoretical name. Grandma Kiti. But – judging by her wide eyes and meticulous hands – my grandmother was more cunning that a dozen cunning cats and their myriad lives.

Did I mention that she was my father's mother? Yea; she gave birth to him some time in the late fifties – then dumped him on the doorstep of my grandfather's rural home the minute he was weaned from her breast. That was also the day she left my grandfather for the first time; the two were to play this marriage/divorce game countless times. At least until grandmother had five more children after my father. But I digress. My father and his mother have never seen each other since their acrimonious separation. And he never talks about her. Sometime I even wonder whether he knows her at all.

"Dad, I how come you never talk about your own mother?"

"Because she is my mother, sonny. And fathers never talk anything bad about their mothers."

"So you are saying you would say bad things about your mother?"

"No."

"The first time I asked you about her you said she had died when while breastfeeding you."

"Yes. And nothing has happened to change that has it?"

"But there is a lot of uncles and my aunt Kate who were born long after you!"

"Yes, son. They were born by their mother. I was born by mine and she died when I was two."

"You really don’t wanna talk about her, do you?"

"No son. I really don’t."

I asked my father if I could be allowed to talk shit about my own mother to my own son someday; the man just laughed and kept his mouth shut. But dad says my mother is an angel who was sent from heaven as God's compensation for letting my father grow without a mother. I can't say I don’t agree; because mother really is an angel; in all aspects of the word and its latent connotations. I don’t know; maybe it is because she is my mother. In fact I wish she was the president of this country, so she could touch people's hearts with her angelic beauty and kindness, and they in turn would worship the ground on which she walks, like all true angels deserve. But I will be the only male on earth to tell the true story of how milk from her breast tastes like. All the people on earth can cry, and she will feed them the whole nectar in the world. But under no circumstances will she take out her breast and jet its sweet nourishing creamy liquid contents into the world's parched throat like she will do when I cry. Or Musa.

It was the angel who introduced us to our grandmother at the time when we had given up hope of ever seeing the woman who gave birth to our father on this side of the earth. We had grown then, and we had to attend college in Harare; and dad had grown this cancerous hatred of the capital that had persistently refused to all attempts at chemotherapy . During my days as a child, I actually thought he had never been to Harare. But I digress; the long and short of it was that we needed a place to stay, what with us being kids of a SRB and all. And Kiti had a place to stay – our grandpa had died and left a large house in the suburbs that grandma took care of on behalf of Aunt Kate, who was the only minor child left at the death of her dad.

I don’t know how mother managed to convince grandmother to take us under her wrinkled wing; I guess I was just too excited at the prospect of living in the city to enquire. Besides, the old woman did look happy to have a lot of other young people who were not her last daughter doting on her. Except that the younger Kate – who was an angelic face in her own right – never dotted on her mother; actually she did the opposite. Now. I could understand if she was a man; but a girl going at loggerheads with her mother at all times of the day?

"But tetez," I began one day, as we sat on the rocks outside the front of the house. Musa was still at school. My eyes were inspecting every speck of dust on the lane, bated-breathlessly anticipating the soft patter of feet that would get my heart onto some wonderful thumping exercises.

"Why are you always arguing with your mother?"

"Because she is my mother, man," she smiled. "And children are supposed to give their mothers a hard time."

I could not help laughing. "Dad says exactly the same things."

"Your father is a wise man."

"I think you are both crazy. Grandmother is an old woman; she could do with a little love from her last child. All this hostility would drive her crazy."

"Kiddo, what would drive your venerated grandmother crazy is when she no longer has anybody to milk bone dry. Because she loves money, and she loves it when people make money for her."

"What do you mean?"

Kate looked at me mischievously. "You'll know soon enough. Isn't it you love her? So you will know. With my mother, everybody will always know sooner or later."

She left me there wondering as she embarked on one of her mysterious sundown journeys to wherever. She never told me where she would be going, but with time, she would ask me to wait for her at some place if she was not home by such or such a time. I never asked any probing questions.

Of course, during those my first days in heart of Zimbabwe's administrative and economic business, I could never know that the root of my aunt's feud with her mother was because the latter insisted on giving everybody independence  in its totality. Grandmother always said her children were free of her the very second they decided to pop out of her womb; she had no business taking care of them once they were out.

"People have the whole world to live a perfect life," she would say. "And nobody needs me to travel the whole world. I did my part in giving birth to you, so you should do your part and live for yourself. I don't ever want anything to do with anything that calls itself my child, because all my children are in my womb. And they definitely do not talk."

I must say when I first heard her say this I laughed out loud, for it indeed was the funniest thing I had heard her say. Most of the time, she griped about her children living her to die alone in a big house, and I felt sorry for her. So when she said she did not want any fuck all to do with the kids she accused of abandoning her in the first place, I wondered why she had not thought of a career in comedy.

But – like aunt Kate said – sooner or later I would know.

I cannot remember her name now, but believe me, I have tried. Even now, if somebody asked me to give them my all of my limps so they could furnish me with that name of names, my first answer would not be no. Whatshername. Whatshermotherfuckingname. I don’t know why the name Sharon comes to mind when I think of her. It's weird, I know; because Sharon, regardless of its biblical meaning, is an earthly name for whores and pimped out Nigerian girls with too much lip stick, fake smiles and fake tempers on those atrociously acted Nigerian movies about Nigerian girls. I wonder why I can't think of the name Brandy when I think of her. Maybe it's because there is only one Brandy, and she is already perfect without any more outward embellishments. Or it's just because those days, Ms. Brandy was still just Miss Brandy then, and all she ever wanted was to be down and she herself had not even dreamt of one day:

I'm standing on the edge of the industry

Wondering if it's all that important to me

To get my records back out there on the street
It ain't like I'm hurting or anything
I'm to the point right now my money ain't an issue
I can go where I want
Do what I want to do
Too tempted to leave it in my rear view
Because this game ain't what I'm used to

Whatever man. I'm just glad I do not think of the name Tafadzwa when I think of her. Sharon who is not actually called Sharon was a perfect girl. Some people are just perfect in their own right, not just perfect for anyone in the world. Sharon was one of them. She had paid the bus fare for me one day when my pockets carried only those banknotes too big for the hwindi's liking. Naturally, the tout started to invoke his abusing prowess on me, but Sharon saved the situation before blood could be spilled. I thought; wow. She might not be my mother, but she must have been raised by an angel. So we got talking then, she clearly blown by the fact that she had paid bus fare for an undergraduate. She was still in high school herself, and still in those classes where one had no idea what needed to be done for one to get to varsity.

Would it shock anybody to learn that I was only too happy to fill her in with the details? And that our conversations carried on from that kombi to other days and other topics that had nothing at all to do with school; especially after we got over the shock that we had been living just three streets from each other the whole time? School regulations required that she keep her hair short, but for religious reasons, she kept it bald. Which was all fine by me; she had that perfect head that looked like the first egg of a hen that has just experienced the pleasure of hatching for the first time. And she had that perfect voice that sounded like Brandy when she says:

"What I feel being a human being is, is just" – she gobbles up a few globs of phlegm – "having the freedom to be yourself. Not caring what other people think. Just having that freedom to be you; and not being afraid. Because if you're not yourself, then who are you?"

Me and Sharon of the perfect head who is not actually called Sharon had settled on this habit of watching the sun set as we talked about nothing while sitting on the rocks in front of grandma Kiti's house. I had started to flirt with the intrapersonal war of whether she was a virgin or not, and come to the painful conclusion that she wasn't. Not that I wouldn't have believed her had she told me otherwise – it was just that I had been raised in that part of the world where we were taught the maximum age for virginity in Harare was 12. Years. I even suspected that aunt Kate Junior herself, who was almost the same age as me, had long lost her hymen to the absolute, almost utilitarian power of sex; and knew the ways of all the men in the world than my father would know my mother all her life. (Why else would she leave the house every day at five and return around eight)?

Because sex IS powerful, man. It has the power to make the most ardent atheist among mankind go religious and scream oh, my God! It can make you so kind that you say yes to everything. And it can make you a beggar (pleeeeaassse baby, give it to me!). And this Sharon girl was well over 12; about sixteen or so – what power would she have over sex that she would resist it until she met me?

In any case I never thought that Sharon would be my girlfriend at any point in life, much less sleep with me. For one thing, she wore her white divine garments to church every Saturday, and I took my rich brown beer bottles to the bar every Saturday and Sunday.

But she still talked to me, with all my warts, my drinking, general ungodliness and all. Not once did she try to talk me into the gospel of garments and miteuro and the insatiable libido of the men folk in her church, who – she told me – always insisted in taking the front row seats opposite young maidens who would make their growing list of wives in the near future. Neither did I even dream of trying to gazump her into my superior and carefree underworld of the Lion Lager of my dreams with which I fought weekly duels of guzzling, intoxication, hangover, headache, more guzzling in that order.

So – here we were again this other day, drinking in the sun's setting rays and eyeing each other with those eyes that always wondered what the fuck we were doing in each other's company when we were so clearly an ill-matching pair that had no hope of fulfilling the fairy tale wishes of that Korean girl and her Korean boy in Sad Love Story. We were not even close to Romeo and Juliet too…

"What the fuck are you doing here," a voice startled me and I almost jumped; not at the reality that a voice had materialised behind me, but at the fact that it had the gall to say what it had said in the manner it had said it. Because I knew the aging body behind that voice.

"Ha ha, grandma," I started, embarrassed that my grandmother seemed to know a lot of inappropriate words for her age. "How can you…"

"I asked you a question," she ignored me and instead bored her eyes into Sharon, who was taking forever to make head or tail of what was happening – one moment she is all giggles and tingly with her friend who knew every little funny tingling thing in the whole world – and the atmosphere is all humid for red hearts with spears fucking right through them into kingdom come. The next she is cowering behind me, trying to stay away from the ire of an old woman whose words are worse than a thousand spears tearing through the fresh flesh of a red heart. And the atmosphere is all humid for violence and bloodshed.

"Does my grandson look like he is short of apostolic salvation to you?"

God, she was serious!?

"Or you were sent by that shameless bitch of your mother to snare him into you web of STDs? Let me tell you one thing, you bitchlet; my grandson already has an STD. It's called life. And you need to stay far away from him so he can enjoy his STD in peace, without you adding your syphilis and gonorrhoea and herpes and all other VDs that you carry with you. He has no money to give you."

And she bitched on and on. I barely heard her; only thing I knew was, what she was saying was something to raise demons in any sane person; and mine did not need too much provocation. Now. I was mad; and that is just to state the obvious. It is normal to be mad in such situations. But mad still does not begin to tell what I felt at that moment in time. Because I know it was precisely at the moment she mentioned the word bitchlet – a word I had never heard of my whole life – that I knew I simply had to hate her. I wanted to do a handful of handstands like a skunk before gassing her wretched soul to hell. Not in public – I would pack her into a strait jacket and shove her into a tiny chamber with sulphuric acid laced with five kilograms of wemakonzo in it. Hell, I wanted to tear her very soul into several sextillions of dust so it would not return to its creator. But still that would not be enough.

And it was for that reason that I remained routed while the only friend I had in Harare who was not Musa was being excoriated to the bone marrow.

The only thing I finally managed to do was drag Sharon away from my grandmother's vitriolic torrent. She did not flinch when I grabbed her waist. In fact, I doubted she was going to ever feel anything towards anything again. I took her to their house in silence; and she managed to stay sane until we turned into her street. Then she completely broke down. It was a quiet lament, but its effect was not unlike the weeping of Rachel as she did that dirge for her lost children. I had to bodily haul her into her mother's house; still I was at loss as regards what to say to her. I had only heard of the word ambush in passing, but it was on that day that I only came to fully understand its meaning.

I left her at the door, and mumbled that I was coming back to her – just let me deal with the old woman first.

"No," she said quietly.

"You will not come back here. And you will not see me again."

The door was pushed shut with me still there, soaking in bewildered wonderment as to how many bad things should happen to one person in ten minutes for the devil to be satisfied. In my eyes was an expanding stream of fire between me and her, that seemed to burn worse that the fire that burned Gollum and his beloved ring in The Lord of the Rings. I fled from her red fire door and went home.

I really should have said I was sorry. But I figured it was too late now. Somehow I believed her when she said we were never going to each other again. She was going to make sure of it. I turned and ran hard. I ran like a mad man.

Damn you, Kiti. Damn you to hell. I'm gonna devour you with my bare teeth for this.

But when I returned, I found Kiti had applied for and acquired herself permanent citizenship of the Raving Republic of Crazania where she had all the freedoms in the world to yell at the world without expecting any backlash from it. After all, Crazanians are well known for their craziness; it really would be weird if there was a second when they stopped yelling at themselves and other less manic citizens of the world.

I wanted to smash straight through my side of the border of the Principality of Sanity into her crazed state, but my hand froze on the door when I realised that Kiti was not alone. Musa and Kate Jnr. were in the house too, and I have never seen the two girls more wasted by anger than I did that evening. God; why were they back so soon today from that secret hellish place whose secret location they so coveted that they swore they would never disclose it to me? Surely, there must have been trouble in paradise, and when I inevitably cast my eyes in the direction of Kate, the aunt; I finally realised why the eyes had been reluctant to find her all along.

Her head looked ten times bigger than usual; like it had been pounded by the enormous ferrous hand of a pugilist called Iron Mike who has not yet been arrested for the rape of some model. I could see she was groaning, but not so much from the pain of her injuries than the hurt of not being able to match her mother's legendary tirade.

"You stop bleeding on my floor," Kiti raged, and Kate groaned.

I ran to her side. "Kate; who did this to you?"

She tried to smile, and managed to sneer so horribly that I recoiled. "Why don't you ask your beloved grandmother. She has an answer or two."

"You," Kiti started again, this time pointing at me with a fore finger that reminded me of my high school head's baton stick, called Tickler. I didn't like Tickler one bit. Kiti had ignored the yelling of my sister to find out who had kicked her door inside.

"You… you," she said again. I could feel the bile rising inside me, and I willed it to come in buckets, so I could puke it all over her sorry constitution. "I'll deal with you later. But off you go to your room right now. You have a visitor, and I don't want visitors to get a whiff of our business in this household."

The way she was yodelling, I was sure the whole country was actually being forced to listen to the business of this household right now. But I did not say anything; I just stared coldly back at her as I passed by, without saying a word to anybody in the room that was steaming with emotions to the point of explosion. An imbroglio of unsaid words crushed against each other in the air and threatened to turn the whole house on fire. The image of a weeping Sharon was still very much spinning in the cesspool of my boiling mind – so hot was it that I was scared that the lava of my blinding ire might scald somebody to death were I to stop and utter anything. I opened the door to my bedroom, which was as tidy as any boy's room in the third world was supposed to be, half hoping that I would find her sitting on my chair, so I could kneel on her feet and tell her all the things I had failed to say when I took her home – how sorry I was that Kiti had tried; and succeeded; in humiliating her in front of the whole neighbourhood, and how I was gonna make sure she paid for her abominable act of profanity. And how such things were never going to happen again as long as I lived…

"My God, aren't you a beautiful piece of flesh," a strange sonorous voice startled my thoughts, just as I was about to enter the room, such that I banged my already ringing head straight into the Mukwa mass. I'm sure my brain went to all corners of the world before it recollected in its haven under the shell of my skull. I could feel my meninges heating to the point of bursting their elasticity, for I had no time to think properly before I raised my head and…

My God; was she a beautiful piece of… my Goooood; she was naked! And supine on my bed, with her bulging bosom creating ideas in my head that invited the horny virility of Bafomet and the cursed wrath of the gods of abstinence. She had one of those skins that were so smooth, so slippery and so lustrous that not even a mosquito would perch and not run the hazard of sliding down the supple luminosity. The silkiness was everywhere – even on parts that are normally covered in silky clothing material and not just silky skin – except on her head, which was covered by a long, curly mass of fake brunette hair.

"Kate does know where to find them boys strong and young – and horny," she said, salivating at my vibrating pivot. I had not uttered a word since I came to this house, but now it was out of utter shock that I found myself speechless.

"Come here boy. If you are as strong under those pants as you look on the outside, I swear I'm gonna leave my car with you."

She smacked her red lips and waved her fake brunette mass this way and that, and I could feel my member starting to throb. Then it hit me – she had a mass of wavy brunette fake hair. She had hair on her head! Sharon did not have any semblance of hair on her perfectly oval head; maybe she kept it down there; but not on her head, which she always kept covered by a white headgear. I never understood why she would want to keep such a beatific gift under the cover of some white scarf. Even when she explained it was a church thing, I failed to understand – why would anybody hide their natural, God given beauty in the name of religion? But it was not at my instigation that she dropped into the habit of forgetting her headgear when she came to see me. Still I liked it.

Standing in that room like a robot surrounded by temptations so insurmountable that the most embarrassing part of my anatomy stuck out and was literally spitting venom in its throbbing strike for the recognition of its rights, I suddenly realised how livid I was that there was no sign of Sharon and her ignorant, innocent, cantankerous but jocund arguments (and wondering how such things can be desirable traits in a girl, in place of sexy and sweet and smiley). Urrgghh; how right grandma was in trying to disentangle me from the warm tentacles of my sweet Sharon who was not actually called Sharon. She must have seen the signs. Oh; my Rose of Sharon! Whyest didst thou not telleth me that my heart had found a sweet nest next to yours? Holy fuuuuuuuuuck!!!

It was true that I had stupidly hoped to see her in my room that evening. Not that I had expected any visitor, much less a bootylicious female visitor who seemed so nymphomaniac that I could see her cunt beginning to bubble at the sight of my uncontrollable pego furiously hitting for an escape from my garments. All I wanted was not to tell her how much I had suddenly realised that I hated my father's mother, or that I was going to make the shrunken woman pay for her deeds.

But to tell her that she was the only female person on this earth whose eyes I had looked into and thought of what heaven must look like; that I loved the way she frowned when she tried to remember something; that there were countless times I forgot she was just a girl in the middle stages of secondary education; that I liked the occasional rasp of her voice, for its sheer raspiness, not for the fact that it sounded like Brandy asking to stop caressing the mic for a moment to breathe.

That in these, my eye opening moments in this heartless capital where I had just discovered the disturbing fact that people could develop whoring skills just by talking to their friends while sitting on rocks front of humongous houses, she was indeed the love of my life. Because some things simply need to be said, lest there comes a time when these things can no longer be said.

Too late. All of that had gone tits up in the wake of Kiti's lyrical cyclone. Somehow I just knew I was never going to see her again.

My eyes began to steam and sting. I grabbed my bag from the wardrobe and started throwing my belongings in.

"Hey boy – what's wrong now? Come here to mama. I can make you rich and happy at one single go."

I didn't say anything, nor did I even turn to look at her again.

"Please boy. Just do me already. Grrrr! What's the problem? Is it that small girl at the gate; because I can see your poker likes me. You go to university, right? Right. I have been there. That is my problem right now. Somehow the more educated a man is in this country, the more pussy he can afford to toss and turn. But it seems for women the level of education is inversely proportional to the number of men who chase her. Shit. Can you believe that?

"But that is where good Samaritans like Kate here come in. they find us some healthy young flesh to give us a good time, and we reward them handsomely. A real angelic pimp my Kate is. I have always relied on her for a good fuck. But where in the hell did she dig you!! And how can you say no to this!!!
"Ok, young man – can you at least get my business card?"

I stormed out and made a beeline for the lounge, where I found grandma and her granddaughter still inseparable in their shouting contest. I had to physically pull her from there with both my hands.

"We are outta here."

And we were outta there for real. I could now understand why Kate Junior always laughed when I commented on how closely knit my family was – compared to the rest in Harare. But my aunt always laughed out loud and said this family was a microcosm of Somalia, with a million fault lines that could not be repaired. Somalia indeed; Kate was an avid history fanatic, but it was only now that I could see the truth of her statements.

I picked up the phone.

"Who are you calling," asked Musa.

"Why, dad of course. I want to tell him the best news he has ever heard. That I now fully agree that he was born by Jezebel herself; only that she is fifty percent snake and smells like skunk. And that I am leaving the devil's hell the very moment I get the satisfaction of wrecking this house into rubble."

"No."

"What!"

"We are not calling dad right now. We are not telling him we have left this place. We are never telling him that. Ok?"

I was aghast. Was she mad?

She was silent for so long that I thought she had lost her sense of speech. At last she said. "Dad has bigger problems right now. He doesn't need to worry about his children."

"Why? We are his children. He should worry about us!"

"Not now, lil bro. Mama is sick."

I think I jumped out of myself at that. Part disbelief and part shock. How could an angel fall sick? Why would God be angry with an angel to the point of striking her with disease? Or had dad did something wrong that he no longer deserved the love of an angel? But surely he could not be punished for hating his mother; because if that was the case, then I surely was going to hate whoever had made that decision without consulting first.

"What is it?"

"It's cancer, you little ingrate!" It was grandma who boomed triumphantly from her perch at her bedroom door. "You're all a stupid bunch of fuck-ups! You and your mother, the manipulative bitch. How dare she turn my own son against me! And look how useless you two turned out to be. Disappointing! You hear that? You are disappointing.

"And now your precious mother is dying… and will you stop spitting blood on my carpet…!!!"

She never finished. Musa was on her before I could even blink or render meaning to what the condemned woman was trying to say. Grandma grogged for help; which was absolutely helpless now since nobody outside could hear her. Kate Jnr was busy bleeding on Kiti's floor and trying to cheer her niece on to take any helpful action. And I was still numbed by all the side-swapping confusion of the past few hours that I was finding it impossible to even help myself.

I collapsed on the floor. Why? So all the things that had exploded flat in my face today were a premonition for the news that my mother was surely going to die of cancer soon? Why was my mother going to die of cancer? And how could she – the only person I had known in this world who was selfless for the sake of selflessness – could she be bedraggled by cancerous tumours in her body when Kiti was alive and well and very healthy to continue taking this family past the hopelessness of Somalia? I looked unblinkingly skywards; partly because I was angrily stabbing my tears back wherever they came from with my lashes, and partly because I was eyeballing the man upstairs, wanting some instant answers.

But I guess God has dealt with far tougher geezers in his eternal life to be troubled by a spoilt brat called poor old me who has just learned that his indestructible mother has taken a fatal ailment. Instead, I felt the soft touch of Musa explaining that mother might be okay after all, since the cancer was detected early, and should be cured if all chemotherapy procedures are religiously adhered to.
I can't say I actually heard her; I just made sense from the phrases I was catching here and there – my whole attention was focussed on wondering how Kiti seemed to get away with everything she wanted, when innocent people like Musa, Kate Jnr and I could go homeless on the stroke of her evil wand. Kiti could burn all the bridges she wanted, yet she herself stayed intact.

"What happened to aunt Kate?"

"Some man dragged her to the car and tried to rape her. He said he had been paying the old bitch for too long and it was time to reap his benefits. But the girls at the salon heard him and stopped the whole mess."

Somalia indeed; Kate Jnr had said it.

That was about a decade ago. And for the record, the angel we call our mother did recover from the plague, although it meant I had to fight Musa, who decided to shelf her studies and find work so I could continue to go to school and dad would stop worrying about tuition. Musa won. Musa always wins. She told me it was just temporary, and she would go back to school as soon as I got to my feet. We both knew she was lying and I told her what I exactly thought about it. We were living in two rented rooms; bills would spiral, and the state of the country's economy was actually loath to people suspending their education and expecting to bankroll it later, with money honestly gained. She just sat there, tried not to weep and said we were going to be okay.

We did do okay. She got married and never went back to school. I got to my feet and left the nest, but she still treats me like I am her first child. Not that I'm complaining – it is impossible to have two mothers, but I am not oblivious to the fact that I have to woman who mother me around.

We never spoke of grandma Kiti until today. Father never knew that we had left her place, but I know he grinned to himself stupid when he finally did – right before he thought about worrying for our welfare. Now my mother was still alive and well and healthy to do all good for the people who deserved them. And those who did not.

And for the first time since ten years ago, I had seen her. Yesterday afternoon; she was waiting her turn to cross a junction, and I was in a company vehicle driven by some no-nonsense motherfucker, so I could not stop. She has some hair on her head now, and it is some real hair, which she keeps short. I shouted. Not her name. I just shouted at her; and our eyes locked for eternity. All those times we spend on those rocks watching the sun came to me like Noah's forty-day flood. Then she was gone. I was mad. When I finally coaxed the driver to stop and returned to where she was standing at a dead gallop, the girl had already been swallowed by the Hararean mazes.

Now Kiti is dead. Really physically dead, as Musa had said. I cannot help wondering whether my severely inadequate encounter with Sharon yesterday was not a premonition to the news of my grandmother's death.

"Sekuru? Are still there?"

"Yea," I say as slowly as I can manage. "It' hard to believe."

This was always going to take some time to sink in. I always thought grandmother was one of those people created to live on earth forever, fucking the good land with their stinginess which only compared to those ZESA assholes who kept their substation ablaze while the whole neighbourhood groped in darkness.

"Have you called home yet?"

"No. I don't know what to say to them."

I know exactly what to say to my parents. I would tell them exactly how I feel towards them, and how glad I am that none of them has turned out to be like their mother/mother-in-law.

And I would tell them that I have found another angel who is just a mini version of mother, and although I seem to have  lost her for now, I would spend all my energies in turning this place upside down until I find her again. And this time, I will never let go of her.

"I'll do it, Musa," I say into the phone.