GEORGINA IV

Look at him sitting there cussing, cursing and clicking till his mouth tastes salty. Nothing hurts a man like the feeling of betrayal. For a man, everything he puts his attention to is an investment. He measures the love he offers through the time, money and resources he spends and the sacrifices he makes. Part of the huge sacrifices is the forsaking of all others just for one woman.

(Read the previous episode here.)

The least he expects from his woman is a show of gratitude by being loyal. Yes, facts out there have it that men have loyalty issues – story for another day. Today it’s all about what both parties bring to the table. And so it hurts him more than breaking a spine to realise that his investment has sold itself to another.

That other person rubbing the skin and touching the loins of his woman has abso-freaking-lutely no idea that all that – that feels soft and cute in his hands is the work of another man. He parabolically smoothened her skin with sand paper, applied a coating on it and shined it with a rug like a carpenter would the round knob at the edge of a bed’s pillar. That’s his knob to hold whenever he gets up and feels too dizzy to stand. All that only for another man to lick with his tongue and use it for his own pleasure?

“Hell no!” Martin said firmly as he rose up from the couch where he was seated after receiving a text from his friend asking whether Georgina was home safely. He was breathing fire and so you can imagine his mind looked everything like a forest on fire. His sentiments pointed at just one fact, she couldn’t have gone to that son of a gun for no reason. And even though he did not want to believe it, he couldn’t help but go along with it.

She was somewhat lucky she didn’t show up at the time he looked like a ripe tomato on his face. At almost 9.30pm, a key was heard pecking the door and shortly after, she walked in. Looking all tired and moody. Probably she hoped she would find him in the bedroom so she’d go straight to the shower. She froze at the entrance as if she had seen something strange. It’s like the ghosts of her actions were whispering threats to her.

She shut the door behind her and walked past behind him. She stopped when she heard, “Where have you been?”

Silence.

“Why do you care?”

She continued walking and stopped again when he said, “I care like hell if you’d gone to be with someone.”

He turned. She could feel all the furniture in the room turn with him. Like dogs that stood beside him ready to hear “Attack!”

She stammered. “Now where has that come from?”

“Gina who had you gone to see?”

“What makes you think I had gone to see someone?” She raises her voice.

“Your tone sounds more like a panic tone to me.” He said.

She clicked and turned to leave the room.

“It’s Dan isn’t it?”

She stopped and made an about turn wild enough to fuel a tornado. “You don’t even care to know why I left in the first place Martin. You speak to me like shit and you expect me to feel nice about it? To sit here and pretend to be a good girlfriend who loves too much to put up with your freaking accusations!”

“So that’s the reason you went to see him. To get consolation huh!”

“The f*** Martin!”

He stood up in rage, “What did you just say?”

“I said the f***!” Her eyes now chilli red and veins popping on her neck you’d think they’d burst in any minute.

“Gina I have put up with a lot of shit from you. And cheating? I cannot stand that crap!”

“There you go, accusing me of cheating again! Go ahead hunk! Go ahead and accuse me at the expense of a whole brothel of girls in your chat boxes sexting you. Go ahead!”

“Oh now you’re just tripping. You want me to prove to you? Prove to you that you sucked D today? Shall I call Dan right now?”

“Martin who said I went anywhere near Dan today? Where are you getting all these?”

He sighed, took his phone from his back pocket, unlocked it and showed the screen to her face.

“Gina I am not arguing with you anymore.”

She stares at the thread of messages. Shock smears her face when her eyes reveal to her that that idiot just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. He just had to tell Martin that she came by his office crying. Strength leaves her bones and she staggered to find a place to sit or lean. She finds the wall beside her and she slides against it. Tears drench her eyes and the smell of dispair emits from her.

“Babe I didn’t mean to…” She bursts into sobs.

“You didn’t mean to what?”

“I was so hurt by your accusations. I didn’t know what else to do. It just happened. Babe I’m really sorry.”

The ryhthm of her sobs sounded like an emotional song. But none of it pricked Martin’s heart to mercy and forgiveness. He had run out of those.

“Gina. Just pack your stuff and leave.”

Those words were the arrows that pocked Gina’s heart through and through. Since then, she has walked with arrows across her heart. Very painful yet the attempt to remove them is even more painful and scary. They were as painful because she realised that the one person who had loved and stood by her, her antidote and remedy, had given up on her just like everyone else. And it would take a very long time for her to get back on her feet.

****

The break up happened as a prelude to the string of mishaps that would follow. The devil of misfortunes was seated on the roof of Martin’s house biting and suckling a grass stalk as the work of his hands went bananas underneath him.

He didn’t stop there. He must have accompanied her to the cab she boarded when she left his house with a cloud of weariness and anger floating above her. The guy on the roof must have laughed his evil heart out until he chocked to his sputum as he watched the look on her face.

It was a season when her finances had started to take a dive. She had not cleared her rent for some months and so now, she wasn’t so sure where she was going to. As she sat in the cab soaked in her problems, she didn’t know that her pants were getting soaked in another problem.

She asked the cab driver to change route to the nearest hospital. She found out that she was pregnant while having a miscarriage. Among the things that break a woman’s heart. And so she spent the night in the hospital. No one except Martin got to know. And guess what, he didn’t give two damns about it.

Her financial abyss saw her resolve to spending two nights at a hotel in town after she was discharged. She only had a tiny bag, her phone, a charger and a change of clothes. The next four nights she spent at a restaurant before she discovered the school chapel. Anyone who saw her at the time couldn’t tell that she was ‘homeless’ and going through a season of gnashing teeth. Nobody knew the pain and shipments of problems she was habouring in her soul. Nobody couldn’t even tell. All but her hairdresser.

“My hairdresser is the ONLY person who took one look at me when I went to have my hair done, and immediately told me that something was wrong with me. I was overwhelmed. I wanted to sob, but then again people couldn’t see me sob when I had faked a smile to look okay. It seemed like she was the only person who could see beyond my fake smile. She kept sending me messages just to encourage me, even though I didn’t tell her anything as well. I really appreciate her.”

For her close friends, life was normal. They still had their buddy who they’d call to turn up whenever. At the time, she was still on drugs from her miscarriage. And so, on one evening, she was invited to drink as usual. She showed up looking glam as she was always the element of the party. When the party was over, some guy was dropping some of them off and she was the last one to be dropped ‘home’. She just alighted somewhere knowing she would find the rest of her way to where she would spend the night.

At this time, the godfather of mischief was once again on sight ready to execute what he is good at; ruining people’s lives. He must have sat by the roadside. This time with a bottle of whiskey on one hand and lit a cigarette between two fingers of the other hand. He must have said to himself that the events of that night would be smoking. (Say it like Jeff Koinange.)

She walked on that poorly lit lonely road with hands folded on her chest because of the slight cold crawling through her body from her hands. Her mind must have been occupied by the rememberance of her daily housing problem that for some hours, she had managed to forget courtesy of booze. Too occupied to hear someone tip toeing behind her.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed her by the shoulder firmly, then her neck, like you would a chicken. In what seemed like a blink later, she was in a car. She had managed to ID the ruthless nigga by then. It was the guy that had dropped her off. The door of the car shut and he sped off. She kept calm but inside her she was panicking like a bird in a cage. He drove to a secluded parking space in what looked like a lonely estate. All this was happening so fast.

In one moment, she was pinned on the backseat. In the next, he tried taking her clothes off and then a fight ensued. It’s like she wasn’t sure what he wanted to do but the attempt to undo her clothes confirmed the worst. Girl is a fighter. Her record states that she has fought men before and now here was a time when she was counting on that experience to save her life.

She broke two windows of the car and bit him till he was bleeding a river. Blood was literally trickling from both of them. The godfather of mischief must have been out their cheering and jeering like a mascot in WWE wrestling. Only that this wasn’t wrestling. Okay it was the wrestling that you mjango, would never wish for your sister. And so we rebuke you godfather of mischief! Shindwe kabisa!

He overpowered her when he chocked her until she started seeing men in black suits, sunglasses and funny looking hats dancing with her coffin. That’s when he did it as she lay there struggling for breath and crying like a little baby. In a situation like that, two minutes feels like two hours.

Oh yes, he was done in two minutes mjango. Look at that – a strong body but a weak manhood. A worthless piece of shit! He drove back to the main road and left her by the roadside.

I can imagine she must have sat by the roadside asking herself that one question that women in her shoes ask themselves, “What did I do to deserve this?” Though it may not seem like it, but I can also imagine that amidst the dancing godfather of mischief, the Lord’s angels must have been surrounding her as she sobbed by the roadside and led her life to better times.

There was just one person left in her life that cared for her. He was out of the country at the time. He was the first person she told about what had just happened, how fate had forced itself into her. He would have teleported immediately if he could. The best he could do was to reach out to Martin who, unknown to him, had run out of mercy and patience for Georgina. And just like before, even the news about her sexual assualt didn’t move him enough to do something.

“My best friend didn’t come through for me. I cried even more. I blamed myself again. Why would he come when I had cheated on him anyway? Sort of a consolation. It hurt like hell.”

Phil, her therapist friend called in the medics for her. A few minutes later, an MSF ambulance showed up, treated her and helped her report to the police. She was hospitalized for a while where she was put on 28 day drugs, given injections for all kinds of STDs, PEP and emergency pills, name them. It was a nightmare mjango. Anyone would run mad if life took a hit like that on the face, on the belly and on the balls. Gina was no exception. The pressure that was mounting on her was too much. Too much to bear that she became suicidal.

Once again, Bwana godfather stood by the door of the small room Gina was staying at the time. This time he was wearing a sleek suit and shoes made from snake skin and a fedora hat like the one Raymond Reddington loves to wear – that drew a shadow on his red face. He watches as she drowns two doses of PEP with vodka so that she can pass out and die in her sleep.

“You know you aren’t supposed to take liquor or any drugs when on PEP, cause it affects your liver as well. So I deliberately took two doses of PEP on an empty stomach, then proceeded to get some cheap vodka to drown it. So I could get drunk, pass out and die in my sleep. Wueh. The opposite happened…. I threw up till my throat was sore.”

I guess he left feeling disappointed. He doesn’t like his ego pricked. And you bet all his life since he was kicked out of heaven he has had infinite ego pricks. But he always has a plan B. That plan B took place in a cell.

Gina’s life had crawled to shits. She had become an alcoholic, kinda. Drowning her misery in booze and more booze. Probably it’d suffocate (the misery) and die and she’d finally be set free. But mjango you know that’s not how it works. You will drown instead. Most probably with cuffs in your hand like Gina after she was picked up by the men in blue for being drunk and rowdy in the streets in the middle of the night when the world is asleep. That’s a nuisance to the law. And the law has places for people like her. A shithole behind bars.

She woke up in there only to realise she was locked up, without any money to bail herself out. And so the bad man in a suit sat at the corner of the cell and lit a cigarette. (No offence to mjangos who smoke. But I don’t know why I can’t help but imagine this godfather of mischief without a pack of cigarettes and a lighter in his pocket.) He likes to watch shit go down while having a smoke. Probably so that after it’s successful, he’d throw the last bit of the cigarette on the ground and step on it like a villain star in a movie before he exits the scene of his crime.

He watches as she takes off her bra. He most likely grabs his loins when he sees her nipples dancing through her blouse as she hurriedly tries to hook it to the cell window. He doesn’t care about the tears forming at the edge of her lower eyelids. They are the the excretions from her heart that is now bleeding rather profusely from being fed up with the pressure weighing down on her. The bra slips through her hands, fortunately, and falls through to the men’s cell. Oh yes, look at him crash the cigarette in his wrinkled hands. The second angel of her day, shows up shortly after to bail her out.

“Nani anaitwa Georgina hapa?” A stern feminine voice of the law asked from outside the cell.

She looked up and responded.

“Toka! Pesa yako imelipwa.” As she opened the cell.

Gina knew too well not to start asking questions. She knows how a miracle feels like.

She found the last person she expected standing at the reception of the police station. This was the umpteenth time Martin had bailed her out of shit she got herself into.

“This guy came and bailed me out. Took me home, and for the first time in a long time I felt really safe in his Arms.”

His kind act from bailing her out however wasn’t a reconciliation strategy for him. From then henceforth, they only spoke in the language of business. But like the habit of exes, they met in two business occasions and slept together in one – at his friend’s house. Business then proceeded as usual. She had two hoods she was supposed to sell. On those two occasions and several more, he still couldn’t tell that she was going through hell. All he lived to ask for was the money from the hoods. Money she thought that he thought she conned him. One of those hoods, the luminous green ones is the one she had on when she went to see Phil, the therapist. When she had had enough of life and its back stabs.

It was Phil who diagnosed that she was having a condition known as Narcissistic Personality Disorder. All what she did, from her story as a teenager, how she treated her best friend and deskmate back then like a dish rag (of which she painfully regrets) to how she had been treating her family, to how she has been treating her boyfriends and to how she has been treating Martin, her lover – summed up to just one thing – narcissism.

She accepted that she truly has a condition that is not normal. But she also accepts that she is not broken beyond repair.

Since December 2019, Georgina has been on a reformation journey from the Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She is not proud of the things she has done in the name of narcissism. Neither is she proud of the souls she has hurt. However, she has learnt to forgive herself. She has forgiven those that hurt her too. Now she longs to present herself to those people she hurt one day and tell them what she has been going through. Tell them that she is a better person now. That she got help. Ask them to forgive her.

She misses Martin, but she knows too well she lost a lover to the wind of NPD and all she can do is forgive herself for that. She appreciates the fact that it was through him that she realised she needed to seek help. All these has transformed her to a transformer – She is now on a mission to help those living with NPD to learn that they don’t have to be shy about it. That they too can transform to better versions of themselves. She is also on a mission to create awareness about NPD.

She says,

“NPD is a now problem. It’s visible in a lot of people, but it’s not actually easy to acknowledge that one needs help. Such are the things that traumatize other people and lead to depression. Narcissistic bosses, parents, friends, siblings, partners… name it. They might be the root cause for depression in others. People need to start checking themselves. I’m about to start a series on it, and I hope to create more awareness.”