LAKE OF MY HEART – CHAPTER 5

LAKE OF MY HEART – CHAPTER 5

When he came into their Homestead Home® den, she was in the bathroom cleaning up. She was in the ‘public’ bath room. She had been washing some items. The bath and shower room was the one for the two other bedrooms which used it as a communal one. The last bedroom had its own ensuite bath and toilet with a maze of fitted wardrobes. This was reserved for visitors.

He held his Nokia 7610 in his hand giving instructions to another agent. Real estate agencies had taken over the bulk of providing residential stands from the beleaguered city and town councils or boards. Private developers were partnering with banks to bring to book new residential suburbs providing a service. Here was an example of Homestead® Homes, Msasa Park and Letombo to name but a few.

“Naomi?” he said when he was through.

Home was a four bed roomed brick under tile rough cast house on six hundred square metres of residential stand. The main bedroom had an ensuite shower and bath facility plus a walk in wardrobe. For his love of sport and romantic movies he had had installed a 29-inch television, digital video decoder and other paraphernalia that included a Philips tallboy home theatre system. It turned the bedroom into a studio when his wife was not in.

Woe to him when he found his elder crew of two children watching Disney channels of CD/DVDs of their age. In the early days when the television set was one, it was tug of war. And his wife supported the children giving them rights to see television.

“Have you done your homework?” he would ask if he was lucky. “If you have, show me otherwise scatter.”

If the replied in the positive, he would use another arsenal. “Let’s see your reading cards and library books. You read to me.”

If they started reading to him, half his mind would be on the program he would be watching. Woe to him if it was a holiday. Then he would drive and watch soccer or sport in a club drinking beer.

“Why is it that you support the children in any argument?” he had asked one day.

“Whom should I support?” she replied.

“Your husband at least,” he had replied.

“Think of what it would mean to the children if two adults ganged against them? They would have no constitutional rights,” she replied. It made sense. “One parent has to support the view of the children.”

“Even if they are wrong?” he asked. “Think of what the children would think if we were to fight each other?”

“Trevor, we don’t need fight. Arguing within limits is alright.”

“What are the limits?” he asked.

“Whatever ‘wrongs’ we find in each other when one is pitied against the children can be discussed between us in the absence of the children. Out of their eye and ear shot we can argue. That way they will learn to respect us. That will also not read the current situation,” she replied.

“Current situation?” he queried.

“Like when we are not in good books. Like when you come home the next day at three in the morning,” she suggested. “Why do you bother coming home that time?”

“Like when you ask me to make my own breakfast?” he returned fire.

“Children have a right to watch television too,” she replied. “They also need to relax.”

She ignored his bait. She was as clever and cunning as a Barracuda in the Indian Ocean, or a blue marlin for that matter. Whichever was smarter was what she was representing.

“Are you pregnant?” he asked.

“Why should I be?” she asked.

“How can you be _____ seeing you have no husband these days?” he baited.

“Was there anything else intelligent we could talk about?” she asked.

“That’s not all.”

“You make correction and I don’t object. The other day you gave them a tongue lash about growing up disadvantaged sharing a textbook with six other students and them going to high school where they have three texts per subject per child! I did not oppose you did I? That was a valuable lesson though don’t get emotional when you compare.”

Had he got emotional advising children that they should read and do their homework?

“Did you do your homework as a child Naomi?” he asked.

“I have a degree,” she replied.

“So have I,” he replied. “When I grew up, television was out there and studies were done in the kitchen on a chair with writing and reading material on the table. Not doing reading or writing while watching Nickelodeon channel, never!”

“All work and no play make Jack a dull boy indeed,” Naomi stated.

“All play and no work makes Naomi’s daughter and son dull indeed.”

There was a fitted kitchen with a breakfast nook and scullery. The cupboards were wall to wall intermixed with tiles. There was a 4-plate fitted hob and a separate fitted oven. The kitchen had a mukwa finish. The ceiling was yellowwood. There was an airy and separate lounge that had a short attachment which had been converted by his brother in law into a tastefully decorated bar. It was sunken in nature. Access to it was by a flight of four steps down.

He used it as an open air office to work on his documents and tasks while taking beer if he chose to take his beer at home. There was a dining room with a serving hatch between it and the kitchen. There was an arch between a passage and the lounge.

The kitchen had a greyish silver double door 350-litre fridge/freezer unit. There were other utensils like a microwave oven. Two carports adjoined the main house with their own roof design. Between the carports and the main house was no man’s land enclosed on one side by a brick wall reaching above two metres and the other was an adjoining courtyard within a maze of burglar screens. Over the pathway was a tiled roof with a quarter Mexican wall finish the other side from which to move from the enclosed double carports to the entrance room.

The whole house was industrial common 9-inch brick wall under black tiles. He shuddered when he thought of all the financial brick walls he had endured when the houses was under construction. The loan had run out before the roof had been installed. The mortgage was now payable before he had been done with plumbing, electrical, flooring, plastering, glazing, tiling and roofing. Naomi had blamed him for mismanagement. She had run a temper for that setting goals for him.

He agreed that some funds had found themselves to liquor. Here they were a few years down the line with the construction project done away with. He did agree that the small loan Naomi had taken had helped him too. The advantage of an economy on a downslide was mortgage dues became affordable within a year as increments happened. Now banks had frozen new mortgage loan books leaving house owners to do it the hard way like he had done when he had painstakingly finished.

There was an outside door leading to the general garden. Instead of a garden there were dry patches because the water situation was so drastic. The water table had tumbled when too many boreholes had been sunk. Many wells had been dug including on his property which yielded water for emergency purposes. The shallow well on his property had been bricked up and covered professionally.

There was a plastic 10, 000-litre water tank squatting a metre above the ground on a corner of his property. It was connected both to the submersible pump in the shallow well and the municipal mains. There was a non-return valve connected between the municipal meter and his water mains pipe. It was so silly yet a magnificent invention. Something light and strong yet circular was fitted within a groove where it could only be pushed outwards by municipal water pressure. A set of springs kept it shut when there was no push added to which there was more pressure exerted when the tank was discharging water which meant no water left his property. It also meant he used the same tapes and pipes for the whole property.

There was a staff quarters with a tiny fitted kitchen a toilet and shower in one, lounge and bedroom with built in wardrobes. It had a tiny patio and was fit for a small family. There was a tenant there. He was not privy to the rental negotiations between his wife and the tenant. They did not trust him with rental income. Naomi though had trusted him in providing finances for construction. They feared the rent would feed his beer appetite. It wasn’t beer appetite that had had him opening a mortgage account.

“What?” she shouted.

“I think we need to talk.”

“Are we not talking?” she shouted back.

“In case you haven’t noticed, our marriage is heading for the gutters,” he replied walking towards the bathroom where she was washing.

The electricity was gone. He heard the sounds of diesel and petrol generators running outside their perimeter walls. This was becoming the new national anthem especially during the peak times like lunch and supper preparation.

Because of load shedding especially at night, daring thieves were siphoning electricity transformer oil leading to blow out and power failures for months on end. It was almost like different music serenades with generators of all sizes and fuel species competing for noise. There was the high pitch of the 700-watt petrol generators going down to the 2, 5 kVa petrol then the 4, 4 kVa throb of the diesel engines to the dull groan of the silenced 8, 5 kVa to 12, 5 kVa.

Then the view of women carrying buckets of water on their heads and men lugging them by the hand was becoming a custom especially in the high density areas. Both were in short supply and were cut off without prior warning. Larger residential stands like his either had a well, borehole or they were not connecting their municipal water to 20 or 25-litre containers or better still, tanks of various capacities in case of cut off, there would be an emergency supply. The next best thing after that was having a vehicle to ferry water from friendly neighbours.

“Let it go, damn you,” she replied. “Do I have to be petrified every time you come home? At least today you are sober. I didn’t smell the beer ten metres away.”

“During our courtship you had this knack of breaking off then coming crawling back”, he accused.

“Did I crawl back?” she shouted. “Did I ever?”

“Look who is talking,” he replied. “Once out, out forever and ever.”

“If it hadn’t been for my presence where would you be with your consumption of beer?” she asked. “And all other issues besides? If I hadn’t heckled you out of the company flat to this place where would we have been? If I hadn’t pushed and pulled and forced and frog marched you, would this house be still standing?”

That one was below the belt and true too! Some of his comrades that he had left in company flats there were still in company accommodation ten years down the line without a house of their own in sight. Many of his mates taking home a good salary who had entered into divorce and re-marriage negotiations were not doing very well socially. One way or the other beer had a habit of making misfits of even the best brains, if taken in excess. She had stood her ground on some issue.

“In Heaven,” he had replied. “If it hadn’t been for your interference I would have had a pipe fitted connected direct to National Breweries with a beer meter outside.”

“You would have had a nice looking tombstone after the bitches in the Avenues and other streets had had their way with you,” she replied.

“At least Glenville or Warren Park cemetery “A” are okay.”

He was responding to her taunts with a joke now. He always had plentiful of those, either learnt at the drinking holes or from customers or the internet.

“You are a brewery when you choose to. Right now you are thinking with your green bottle for brains.” She shot back. “Whatever little brains you have that have not been affected by liquor.”

“Why don’t we square off and fight over this?” he asked flexing his hands. “A really good fight would settle who is boss around here.”

“You as much as touch me and your mother will be here within the hour.”

“Who talked of parents?”

“Go ahead. I won’t raise a finger against you. You want to find a battering ram you have one here,” she turned away from him.

Her eyes narrowed to slits when she was angry. Her bosom rose and fell. Why was it that her stomach heaved up and down when she was angry? Was she giving birth? Where had the youth and exuberance gone to? One of these good days something was going to snap.

He remembered in his childhood a man kicking a woman into a dry ditch with fury. He had watched too many live domestic wrangles to be drawn into recalling those devils into his own home. He had watched a shouting match between a man and a woman. The man had given the woman a flying kick in the head. She went down like a potato. The man had served for attempted homicide. How many years he did not know but if it was his wife, she was pregnant within two years far before he was out of Gonakudzingwa Prison.

However, he did get angry. One time he had smashed a kitchen cupboard with his bare hands. Naomi and the children found themselves in a Mazda 323 heading away from his fury. The next day her maternal uncle had driven in to check out if there was a guerrilla training camp in their home. When the family had come back, three kitchen cupboard doors were missing, smashed to pieces they were later used for bonfires.

“Damn you, damn you _______,” she was saying.

“Bring my parents in and you will require plaster on both hands and feet,” he checked her speech. He smashed his hands together. “Damn you. Bring them in and you will rue the day you were born.”

“B_____,” she replied. “It’s just a figure of speech like s-o-b. It doesn’t translate to that in our different languages. Like the voetsak which you mispronounce here. It doesn't mean someone is calling you a dog. It's just that we got hooked to these wrong terms.”

“Whatever, you are so good at insulting me.”

“Look who is talking,” she flared up. That had touched the wrong nerve that of a hurting tooth. “Who has called me a harlot several times when you confessed that I was a virgin when we married?”

“Once out this time, stay out. You don’t want to talk fine. The house is mortgaged and it is collateral against a loan in case you have second thoughts,” Trevor replied. “There will be no sharing and that means no one takes the house unless they can pay the mortgage. You being a civil servant are earning less than a conductor of an 18-seat commuter omnibus. That issue of always having your children at your mother’s, there will be a legal fight for the children right down to the wire.”

“You are always thinking of yourself, typical, son of a _______,” she shouted back. “If I crawled back, why didn’t you boot me out forever?”

“Thank you for scolding both me and my mother always. You find a fault in me you always refer to my mother. You always dress like a harlot. I guess you think like one”, he replied. ”Do crawl out now and make my day. You will come back and find a German shepherd dog or Alsatian of a wife in the kitchen boiling mad at your intrusion.”

“Your sense of antique dressing perturbs me”, she shot back.

“Why do you bother dressing at all? Why not prance around with a G-string?” he shouted back. “That could suit you well and fine.”

“A swim suit two tier would do well,” she replied. “Would mind buying one for me?”

He entered his bedroom banging the door. He sat down and started writing down her faults.

1. Criticism – you are so critical of everyone except yourself and your parents.

2. Domestic - you think chores make you inferior in the marital arrangement. Why don’t you try competing with a housemaid, you are so jealousy and afraid those uneducated girls would hook up with the husband you keep in celibacy?

3. Sentimentality – you are a cry baby when rebuked thinking yourself to be ever correct.

4. Moody – that’s it, four to five days without talking to your husband always wanting your own way, no sex when in the mood. Then when the mood breaks, you blame me for being in a ‘mood’.

5. Jealous- you say you don’t care about me but why do you follow up on every call I receive from a female embarrassing me by calling back those people? Need I switch off my cell phone whenever I leave it at home? Why do you want to be close to me when I am on the cell or landline if you don’t care about me?

6. Angry – ever angry, it damages your health, no wonder the sugar and blood levels are forever rising. One day your blood vessels will boil. Moonlight Funeral Services do a very good job so does every marriage officer scattered around the country within a year of the ‘tears’.

7. Independent – you think you can swim in the sea with sharks after our marriage? Maybe it could suit you to be a divorcée, always available to one-night stands. Judging by your very V-neck or open necked blouses would suit you fair and fine as the way the Avenues red light district dresses.

8. Dressing – do you dress to kill or does every neighbour of mine know the size of your thighs, boobs and backsides and everyone sees your cleft? Why bother with dressing, walk out naked. Your miniskirts look like the skirts of a KG child at school. The mini dresses are a mockery to the garment manufacturers. How do they calculate how much dress materials women use when your dress uses less than a metre square?

9. I seem to remember I, and my siblings are seven in number. When did you ever take the children anywhere else but your own mother, sister or cousin? My side of the family does not contain demons. It contains humans with a loving touch.

10. Anger and moods lead to depression, depression leads to chronic dependence on medication that can lead to insanity. You go BONKERS, your little backsides moving up and down in a side street while you are picking bins! Check into the nearest sanatorium if you think I am joking.

When he was through with some of the faults, he printed them on his home computer printer before pasting them on the bedroom door. He did not worry. His children were at her parent’s place in Glen Norah A ‘kumasimbi’. That was the first turn to the north coming from Simon Mazorodze Road. Then he would turn left gunning the vehicle for about two kilometres through a road littered with speed humps and at certain times potholes.

He moved out. A client had asked to meet him at 1600hrs. Was it blessed for customers to leave other agents and insist on him or was it a pest? Was it that his previous customers were passing word of mouth about his professional approach? He drove to meet the client agreeing to conclude the sale on Monday. He drove to Glen Norah A to see his three children there for the holiday.

© Copyright tmagorimbo 2014