Naked Terror on a Swimming Saturday
By Wesonga Robert
You are already familiar with my recent undertaking. Nevertheless, I will still remind you that after many days of my friend Beni telling me stories of his escapades, he gave a condition for his continued co-operation. He insisted that I tell him a bit about my experiences. That is why I dug deep into my mental archives and found him a story. I told him the story, sieving the details and choosing only the less revealing bits to tell him. For who can be more at liberty, than he who holds information that no other person has?
The morning was bright and full of promise. The glorious sun of the Samburu grassland set the yellowing grass aglow. The sturdy semi-arid vegetation hardly stirred in the caressing breeze that descended from Kirisia Hills, down Baawa Valley. Our steps were brisk. Perhaps they were the steps of men who knew they were going to come back from hunting with something to rest inside the stomachs of their families. Lobash, the tout, was also my friend. He was the one who was then teaching me Samburu language. Apart from being my linguistic mentor, he had on that Saturday decided to take me swimming. During the four months I had lived in Maralal, never had I taken the refreshing deep into a water body larger than my bathing basin. That is why the idea of going swimming was more than a temptation.
I confess that part of the reason why I decided to consent to the trip was my yearning to listen to what Lobash would spin that day. He was a man who was full of stories. He claimed to have been in every town in this republic, except Nairobi. I did not wonder how that was possible considering the geographical centrality of the nation’s capital. He once told me that he had been a soldier in the border town of Mumias before resigning, stating that the job became boring. Not wanting to tell him that Mumias was not a border town, I decided to ask another friend who whispered to me that Lobash was a veteran of many prisons around the country.
That day Lobash was redoing his recitation of Mwangi Gicheru’s ‘Across the Bridge’. The last time I had checked I had actually confirmed that he was accurate to the comma. One would consider the undertaking ordinary if he had not finished the whole of chapter one in his first narration to me. Seeing as he did it, I accepted that it was nothing short of the amazing. That Saturday I half-listened to him until we reached a pool of water. It was surrounded by a neatly arranged row of stones.
Having decided that the OMO T-shirt I had been jogging in each morning needed washing, it was the only article of my attire that I dived into the pool with. Lobash remained on the bank fidgeting with my cheap camera phone, after explaining himself that he could not swim. Five minutes later, I took another deep immersion for the sixth time. When I came to the surface breathless, I noticed Lobash disappearing in a thicket with a club-wielding Moran in terrific pursuit. I scrambled out of the water and took off in the opposite direction. It is only when I scattered a shocked flock of bleating sheep that I suspected Lobash had taken me to a private watering place instead of a swimming pool.
When I arrived at my landlord’s housing complex – if the mixture of timber, sand and cement could be called that - the place I liked calling home, the shopkeeper’s daughter had refused to close the shop early. I therefore waited because the shop was but a few paces from the gate. From the little shrub in which I hid waiting for darkness, I ruefully gazed at the red sun being cut into half by a lazy dark cloud.
I did not tell Beni that I arrived at my landlord’s bedroom window without my trousers to get my spare key from him. All my keys were lying inside the pockets of my trousers beside the pool.
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