Chasing monkeys

Full Moon

The room was dark when Mapalo heard the whisper. His eyes cracked open for a second, then comfortably shut again.

As he lay on the couch in avoidance, the fleece blanket pulled to his chin, the sound reached him once more from somewhere near the doorway. Just loud enough to pull him out of his slumber.

Something moved in the darkness, cutting through the pale silver light. Shadow stretched across the bare concrete floor and banana yellow walls, eerie and long. Arms stretched ahead, hands feeling through the air.

Moonlight came through the curtains in a pale strip and fell across the panicked face, and in that light Mapalo saw his father lowering himself to his knees beside the couch.

“Wake up, son. I have something to tell you.”

Mapalo groaned. He pulled the blanket tighter and turned toward the back cushion.

“Mapalo.”

“What is it.” His voice was flat with sleep.

“I have to tell you—” Lwanga paused. His eyes rose slowly to something near the ceiling, an invisible presence only he could see.

Mapalo reached above him and pulled the curtains apart. The moonlight flooded the room with a divine ambience, washing over the scanty furniture and Lwanga, still on his knees.

The room itself held a rich nourishment of days gone; the cracked plaster on the far wall, the worn curtains that his mother had chosen, the poster of Fryde hanging slightly crooked above the television set that no longer worked. The chipped wooden skirting board. The subtle odours of fabric gone too long without a wash, and the musty wooden fixtures, ordinary details of an old house at night. With an inclusion of pungent teenage body odours that thickened the air.

Lwanga knelt beside the couch, eyes transfixed on the invisible presence above his son.

Mapalo turned to face him, and in the moon light he saw his father, caught in a trance. He blinked rapidly, adjusting his sight to whatever had captured his father’s attention.

“Tate.” Mapalo rubbed his eyes. “You said you wanted to tell me something.”

Lwanga blinked back to his reality. His eyes darting around the room in pursuit of his bearings.

“You’re my son,” he said, his eyes finally landing on Mapalo. “My Mapalo.” His eyes now conveyed heartbreak. “I need to tell you about your mother.”

He smiled. A small and cheerful smile.

“She was beautiful. Not just how she looked.” He touched his chest. “In here.” His hand moved to his temple. “And here. She taught me a lot of things. She even tried teaching me how to bake.”

A small laugh echoed from his throat. Lwanga paused thoughtfully, his nostrils palpitated as he tried ever so desperately to calm himself.

“She was a terrible baker. Every weekend she tried again. Flour on the counter, flour on the floor. The bottom of the cake burnt. The middle still raw.” His voice softened. “But she never gave up. Everyone gave up on her, but she never gave up on anyone.”

Mapalo’s chest tightened. He had been bracing for bad news. Now he was bracing for something different. Something far worse.

“Tate. You should be sleeping.”

“No. I can’t sleep. I still have to tell you—”

“I have school tomorrow.”

The words had barely left Mapalo’s mouth before Lwanga was on his feet.

“Just listen to me damn it!” He bellowed.

Mapalo flinched. Instinctively pulled the blanket to his chest.

Suddenly the crickets outside, became louder than before.

Lwanga looked at his son’s face. He recognised the fear, present as a reflection of his own. The anger left him instantly.

He turned and walked to the far wall and stood with his back to the room, his shadow large against the plaster. His fingers gently ran across the crack, recollecting the cost of his anger. Then he turned back slowly, his head lowered in shame. Arms hang loosely by his sides, he inched his way back to the couch, and lowered himself to the floor again. His head still hanging low, his eyes lifted, pleadingly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking Mapalo in the eye. “But you have to listen.”

He cleared his throat softly and sniffled, as he averted his eyes.

“She used to warn me. She said, Papa, one day you will be sorry you didn’t listen. And I would smile and say of course.”

Mapalo stared at his father, his fear ebbing away as curiosity took hold.

Lwanga shook his head. “If I had listened even once.”

“What was she warning you about?” Mapalo found himself asking before he could think about it.

Lwanga looked up. The smile morphed into a sinister grin.

“That life ends. And before it does, you should understand what it means.” He paused. “I didn’t understand until this morning. Now I realise what she had been telling me all along.”

Lwanga drifted into thought, his eyes fixed on a point in mid air. The presence had returned.

“Tate, what is it?” Mapalo asked, tracing his father’s line of sight.

“Yes.” He nodded gravely. “The president of America has nukes. Everybody knows that.”

He stood and walked toward the door in stiff, deliberate steps.

Mapalo sat up on the couch and watched his father disappear through the kitchen doorway.

The sting of tears ravaged his eyeballs. He mechanically lifted the blanket to his face and pressed against his eyes.

His father’s episodes had always come and gone. Some lasted hours others months, but in the past year they had been more frequent and troubling. Lwanga would leave mid-sentence and come back as someone else entirely, and sometimes the someone else stayed so long that Mapalo forgot what his father’s real voice sounded like.

It was only the two of them now, bound by blood across worlds.

“Men don’t cry,” Lwanga ordered.

Mapalo hadn’t heard him come back. He lowered his hand and found his cheeks wet. He wiped them under the blanket.

Lwanga lowered himself beside him on the couch. Now calm and present, with a clearly shifted persona.

“There are things you must understand,” he said. “Every man grows into a father, whether he has children or not. People will still need him to be one.”

Mapalo said nothing. His expression shifting to confusion, and then instantly, understanding.

“You become a father to your friends. To lost people. To your family.” Lwanga smiled faintly. “Even to your wife.”

“Father to my wife?” Mapalo said slowly, the corner of his mouth twitching anxiously.

“Why do men call the women they love baby?”

Mapalo made a face. He didn’t answer because he could hear it coming. The slight shift in tone, and the way his father was holding himself.

“ because?” he coaxed.

“Man doesn’t know what you’re talking about fam.”

The accent.

Mapalo lowered his eyes. He didn’t see it coming after all. Zambian joker they called this personality, after the famous local influencer, though this personality spoke with a south London accent for some odd reason.

“ Not this one”, he lamented inwardly. This one lasted weeks.

When he was younger he thought it was a game. The voices. The different walks. The new names. But his mother had explained it one evening at what passed for a kitchen sink, her voice low and careful.

“Your father doesn’t pretend to become people. Sometimes he just gets lost inside them.”

Back then, Lwanga could still go about his day with normalcy. He went to work, paid the rent and the school fees. He smiled at the neighbours, and invited the men over to watch repeats of the football games over the weekends. That was when the television set still worked. That seemed like a lifetime ago to Mapalo.

The characters stayed longer now. And they had more often surfaced in public. It was absolutely humiliating.

A concerning warmth rose from the pit of his gut boiling upwards into his chest. He blinked rapidly as the sting of tears returned tenfold. The muscles in his throat stiffened, mimicking the effect of sumptuous, well cooked sweet potato stuck in ones throat. His breath trembled, as he, with great effort tried to subdue what he now identified as rage. “why should I?” the thought filled his mind. He after all hated each one of them for stealing his father away from him. He hated the professor, who gave lectures on African political history to anyone within range.

The revolutionary, who believed the struggle was still ongoing and said so at every opportunity.

The drunk ex-soldier, who sat in silence for days at a time and then wept without warning.

And once, for nearly a year, a soft-spoken pastor who wept at football matches and quoted scripture over breakfast. He didn’t mind that one.

His mother had known how to be with each of them. She had patience that Mapalo hadn’t understood the depth of until she was gone and he found himself with little of his own. He ripped his thoughts from the dark recesses of his mind.

“If a man is supposed to be a father to a woman,” Mapalo said carefully, “does that mean he takes care of her the way he would a child?”

He opted to help his father through the insanity the best way he knew.

“Man thinks that’s deep,” Lwanga replied, shaking his head. “But man still has no idea what you’re talking about fam.”

“Then what are you trying to tell me?” Mapalo spoke with frustration. His hands trembling.

The expression on his father’s face changed. The lightness left as he sagged his shoulders and lowered his head slightly.

“I couldn’t protect her.” He said it quietly.

Mapalo looked into his father’s eyes and saw the torment in them. “ Which one is this?” He thought.

“I should have seen it coming,” Lwanga said. “First they take the history. Then the culture. Then the mind. Then the land. And when people fight back—” His voice hardened. “They get called thugs, gangs, terrorists and finally rebels, and the rebels will never become freedom fighters until you and I write our history, we can start tomorrow.”

Lwanga paused, his eyes filled with passion, as he rose his right fist above his shoulder.

“It’s time we took our home back. Not with guns. With wit, and with wisdom.”

He leaped to his feet, completely animated he moved to the centre of the room, and spread his arms wide. Head thrown back and eyes raised to the ceiling.

“I bring wind and sun, yet few appreciate me. I give fruit and I bury the dead.”

His voice grew deeper, and theatrical, aimed at an audience only he could see.

“I am life and death together. I am married to night and cheat with day. I am diseased. I am dying.” He turned and pointed directly at his son. “Because of you.”

“I don’t understand,” Mapalo said.

“You don’t understand, yet you suffocate me.” His voice rose. “You tear out my soul while begging me to save you. I gave you life, and now you destroy me. One day the earth will grow tired of carrying you.”

“Tate.” The tears were running freely now. “You’re not a planet. You’re my father!”

“Men don’t cry.” Lwanga bellowed.

“You’re all I have left.” His voice broke. “Please. Don’t leave me too.”

Lwanga stopped all motion as though frozen in time for a few seconds. He looked at his son. Really looked at him. His face changed slowly, the stiffness leaving it. His body moved freely again, not animated, just normal.

“My Gift,” he said quietly. “My Mapalo.”

He moved steadily to the couch and sat beside his son. He placed his hand on Mapalo’s shoulder with a firm grip.

“I will never leave you.” His voice was rough. “An absent father is like a president who abandons his people. Both fail the future.”

Mapalo smiled through the tears.

But Lwanga was somewhere else by then.

Immersed in the serendipitous visions of his recently deceased wife, he stretched out to touch her face.

“I’m a lucky man,” he said.