The Man Who 'Preyed'

I wrote this story about a year ago - it is loosely based on a true story related to me by a close friend. I am now publishing it  today with her permission.

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The grownups at the table were in deep conversation about things that *Toral didn’t understand. They had been sitting in the garden restaurant for hours and Toral was bored. She watched enviously as the other children chased each other and played in the grass. If only she wasn’t so shy, she would have been having as much fun as they seemed to be.

After what felt like an eternity, Toral’s mother turned to her and said they were leaving. Relieved and eager to get home and finish the Enid Blyton book she had been reading, Toral followed her parents to the car. As they pulled out onto the street, she looked out the window and began to daydream as her parents chatted away.

Toral’s attention snapped back to the conversation in the car as she realized her father had raised his voice and her mother had grown quiet. He was saying to her mother that she wasn’t supportive and that he was just doing what he needed to do for his family. Toral’s heart pounded as she watched the side of her mother’s face from the backseat, praying that she wouldn’t start to cry. Her father so often would speak to her mother so harshly that she would end up in tears, making Toral feel awful for her. She turned to look out of the window as Toral’s father continued to rant. Toral felt a lump in her throat and the tears welled up in her own eyes.

A few minutes later, Toral’s father steered the car into the parking lot of an unfamiliar compound and parked the car in front of an old building. They were evidently not going home just yet. Her mother turned around to look at her and said, ‘Daddy needs to see someone here. Then we’ll go home’. Toral reluctantly got out of the car and followed her parents into the stuffy building. As they walked up two flights of dimly lit stairs, she tugged on her mother’s skirt and asked, ‘Why are we here? I want to go home’. Toral’s mother looked down at her and sighed, but said nothing. Her father led them down a hallway and into a room that looked like a scantily furnished office. The paint on the walls was peeling and the room smelt musty. A greasy haired, dark skinned Indian man sat behind a desk at the far end of the room. He had a round red spot on his forehead. As he stood up to greet Toral’s father, she noticed that he was wearing what looked like an oversized dull brown shirt over a white sarong and sandals on his feet. He spoke rapidly to her father in an Indian dialect that Toral did not understand. He turned to Toral’s mother and said something to her to which she responded by nodding politely, although she did not smile. Then he turned to Toral and smiled, displaying a set of very yellow teeth with dark stains on them. Toral cowered behind her mother. She did not like the way this man looked at her with his dark, beady eyes. Toral’s father put his arm reassuringly around her shoulders and said, ‘He is going to pray for our family.’ Toral didn’t understand why they needed this strange man to pray for them when they were surely capable of praying for themselves, but she did not dare question her father.

The man pulled up two chairs beside his desk for Toral’s parents to sit down, facing each other. She stood beside her mother as the man and her father spoke to each other. She watched as the man walked over to where her father sat, closed his eyes and began to chant in this language that Toral didn’t comprehend. He then placed his hand on her father’s head as he continued to chant, and then on each of her father’s shoulders. The man had his eyes shut the entire time, almost seeming as though he was in a trance. Toral’s father kept his head respectfully lowered as this ritual continued. A few minutes later, the man opened his eyes, turned and walked over to Toral’s mother. Before he began his chanting he looked piercingly at Toral and she immediately moved away from her mother’s chair to the middle of the room. The man proceeded with the same ritual, placing his hand on Toral’s mother’s head and then on each shoulder, all the while chanting with his eyes shut and his head tilted back slightly.

Toral knew she was next and she was dreading it, but she didn’t see that she had any choice. Sure enough, a few minutes later, the man turned around and walked towards her. He stood in front of her, quite a bit taller than her – as most adults were. She could smell the nauseating mixture of betel leaf, tobacco and sweat as he breathed heavily. From the corner of her eye, she could see her mother sitting in front of her, to her left. She couldn’t see her father as the man was obstructing her view, but it felt somewhat comforting that she could see her mother.

The man began to chant. Toral kept her head lowered as the last thing she wanted was for her eyes to meet his again. Before long, she felt his hand on her head. A couple of minutes later, his hand had moved to her right shoulder. ‘Only a few more minutes,’ she said to herself, trying not to cringe as his hand brushed past her hair and settled on her left shoulder. But his hand seemed to be slipping. In complete horror, Toral felt the man’s hand slide down her shoulder, towards the middle of her chest. Before she knew what was happening, he had slipped his hand into the neck of her dress.

Toral’s feet were glued to the ground. She felt paralyzed. She wanted to push the man away, to punch him with her little fists, but she had been raised to respect all adults – especially those whom her parents, especially her scary father, expected her to respect. Gripped with intense panic, she looked at her mother, her eyes imploring for help. She was certain that her mother hadn’t been watching as she would have already jumped to Toral’s rescue. But she was wrong. Toral’s mother’s eyes were already on her - a look that couldn’t be explained. The second Toral’s gaze met hers, her mother hastily looked down at the floor in front of her. 

Complete disbelief. Shock. Helplessness. Fear. Betrayal. All kinds of emotions ran through Toral as this terrible man continued to molest her within a few feet from the two people who brought her into this world, whose job it was to protect her as a child when she was unable to protect herself. The tears streamed down the twelve year old girl’s face as she looked at her mother, silently begging her to look at her again. Toral needed her mother to see that she needed her to help her child. But she just sat there. And did nothing. Nothing.

 

*Name has been changed to protect identity

Tumble

It was eight thirty on a Tuesday night. I stared at my laptop screen blearily. If only I could feel this sleepy when I needed to sleep, and not when I was up against a deadline. After weeks of intermittent insomnia, I was constantly tired and I just wasn’t being as productive at work as I should. As a result, I often found myself bringing work home just to get it done on time. As the screensaver appeared on my laptop screen for the third time, I decided I would have to take a catnap before I could get any more work done. I set the alarm on my cell-phone for nine thirty and crawled into bed.

I could hear the faint sounds coming from the TV downstairs where my mother was no doubt watching one of her favourite soaps. My father would be home soon from his evening prayer session. I felt a pang of guilt as I thought about how little time I had spent with him over the weekend.

Over the past few years, I had been watching my father slowly deteriorate physically, following his second debilitating stroke. He used a walking frame to move around and was relatively independent but getting up the stairs to his bedroom was now becoming his biggest challenge as he couldn’t always lift each leg high enough to take the next step. The doctors had spoken to us about what they called ‘tough love’. As tempting as it was to do things for him and help him up the stairs, we were encouraged to allow him to try to do things for himself. It meant being patient and allowing him to get up the stairs in his own time. And although it was now taking him much longer and was much more effort for him, he always managed to do it on his own.

As he was also having increasing difficulty walking, he would sometimes lose his balance while moving around the house on his walking frame, and end up in a sitting position on the floor. Both my mother and I would be rather alarmed each time this happened as my father was now seventy. But he would look up at us with a sheepish grin on his face, not unlike a child’s, and simply ask us to help him up. He never let his disability get to him. However, once he was on the floor, it was quite the task to pull him to his feet again as he was not a slight man and didn’t have much strength from the waist down.

I briefly debated waiting for my father to get home so I could chat with him for a while but the temptation of sleep was too sweet to resist at that point. I pulled the warm duvet over me and almost immediately drifted off into a deep, dream-filled slumber.

After what felt like only minutes, I heard my mother’s voice calling me. Surely it wasn’t nine thirty yet. Had I slept through the alarm? I just needed five more minutes. I felt my mother’s hand on my arm, nudging me, as I heard her call my name again. This time, I heard the urgency in her voice. I bolted up in bed and looked at her, my eyes searing from the light. She stood beside my bed, her eyes wide with fear and tears that streaked the sides of her face.

“What’s wrong, Mama?” I shrieked in panic.

“Dad fell… tumbled down the stairs…” Her words, uttered in between gasps of air as she hyperventilated sent me into hysteria. I jumped out of bed and shoved my mother out of the way as I flew toward the stairs. I heard my mother sobbing behind me as she followed me. As I rounded the corner of the flight of stairs, I saw him… lying motionless a few feet from the foot of the staircase. My heart stopped. I tore down the remainder of the steps, holding back the wails that threatened to escape from my mouth as I feared the worst.

I stepped over his stationary body and crouched beside him so that I could face him, not sure what to expect. His eyes were open but they stared blankly ahead at the skirting board at the base of the wall. “Daddy?” I whispered, as a tear escaped down my cheek. At the sound of my voice, my father looked up at me, an expression of utter confusion and fright on his face. “I lost my balance. I don’t know how it happened.” His voice was steady but the expression on his face remained. A wave of relief came over me as I quickly composed myself and wiped my cheek. “It’s okay, Daddy. Everything’s going to be okay. Did you hit your head? Where are you hurt?”

It was nothing short of a miracle. He had not hurt himself seriously and nothing seemed to be broken.

It took me about twenty minutes to get him to a standing position, all the while pleading with him to let me take him to the hospital. But whilst my father’s physical form might have worsened, his stubbornness was just as strong as ever. I helped him up the stairs as carefully as I could, my mother trailing behind me, a lot calmer than she had been. With her help, I got my father into bed and asked him for the umpteenth time if he was certain that he wasn’t hurt. His words were reassuring but I could tell that he was still shaken by the incident. I stroked his face and kissed him on the forehead before I turned around and bolted out of the room. I made it to my room just in time as the tears came hot and furiously down my face, my body convulsing beyond control…

Mama

I stepped outside and took a long, deep breath as I shut my eyes, feeling the cool breeze against my face. I had just walked out of a business meeting at this beautiful golf and country club located on the outskirts of Nairobi. The grounds were spectacular and the air was crisp and clean. It was too bad that I had to go back to the office before I could wrap up for the day.

As I got into my car and pulled out of the parking spot, I decided that I would come back on a weekend – and perhaps bring my dear mother along for one of our mother-daughter dates. My mother, whilst struggling with her own health problems as she aged, cared for my disabled father and didn’t get out of the house much. Occasionally, when my father would join his fellow senior citizens for a community-organized outing, I could steal my mother away for some quality time together and have a good girly gab. She would definitely love this place, what with its plush gardens and peaceful ambiance.

I made my way through the snail-paced traffic back into the city. The roads were being constructed and the numerous diversions caused major snarl-ups. I turned up the radio, bobbing my head to the rhythm of one of my favourite ‘80s songs. I could see my exit just up ahead to the left which, fortunately, seemed to have flowing traffic. As I belted out the lyrics to the Stevie Wonder song, I realized that the passengers in the stationary bus beside my car were watching me with smirks on their faces. Thankfully, the car in front of me moved forward and I hit the accelerator.

Just as I negotiated the corner onto the clear road, I heard the sound of my cell-phone ringing. I switched gears and looked briefly at the phone. It was my mother. I was not generally in the habit of answering phone calls whilst driving, but I turned the volume of the radio down and hit the speaker button on my phone. “Hello?” There was no answer. The phone display indicated that the call had ended. I hit the call button and turned on the speaker again. I wanted to tell my mother about the golf and country club.

“Mama?” My mother had picked up the call but wasn’t saying anything. “Mama, can you hear me?” Then I heard her quivering voice on the other end say something that I couldn’t make out. My body tensed up as I responded in a firm but steady voice, “Mama! What’s wrong? What happened?” I had grown somewhat accustomed to receiving panicked phone calls from my mother about something or the other happening to my father. I would invariably rush home to them, keeping level-headed and calm so that I’d be able to deal with the situation swiftly. My father had already suffered two strokes and I was always terrified that one day I would receive the dreaded call from my mother to say he had had another…or worse. What I wasn’t prepared for, however, was what I was about to find out.

Her words were punctuated with erratic breaths… “I f-fell… hit m-my head… bleeding s-so m-much… p-please… p-please c-come quickly…”

Some of what transpired between then and the time that I got my mother home after four hours at the A&E is a blur. These are the things I do recall: I remember driving like a maniac, overtaking cars that seemed to move at a sluggish pace. I remember calling two friends to see if they could get to my house before I did. I remember calling my mother back, screaming hysterically on the phone for her to stay with me, sobbing in horror as she sounded like she was fading away. I remember getting home and somehow managing to calmly but swiftly get my mother into the car and speeding off to the A&E. I remember my mother clutching my hand as the doctor sutured the nasty gash on her head. I remember smiling reassuringly at her as she lay on the hospital bed, watching me for signs of panic at the sight of the wound.

That night, after I got my mother all cleaned up, I sat with her until she felt calm enough to fall asleep. I then got her into bed and kissed her forehead, telling her that all would be well. As I settled down under my own warm duvet, all I wanted to do was fall asleep and forget that this day had ever happened. But as I shut my eyes, I started to feel an uneasiness set in and the images began to reel through my mind… the look of terror in my mother’s eyes when she looked up at me as I flew into the house… the sight of blood dripping down the side of her face from underneath the towel that she clutched at the side of her head… her navy-blue dress, soaked in the dark liquid… the splotches of red glistening all over the terrazzo floor… the water that just didn’t seem to run clear from a washcloth that I used to wipe my mother’s face and around the stitched up wound…

As my body began to convulse beyond my control, I knew that these were images that would lay ingrained in my memory forever.

Best Friends

Sarah and I clutched our towels around our bathing suits, squealing as Danny chased us around the pool. From her sun bed, my mother lifted her head, shading her eyes from the bright sun with her book, and called out sternly to us to be careful. Sarah and I collapsed onto a sun bed, giggling while Danny pulled one of the thin cushions from another sun bed to the edge of the pool and lay down with his right hand dipped in the pool, mischievously threatening every so often to splash the cold water onto us.  

It had been a glorious three days. We had hardly spent any time inside the hotel. I was so glad that Sarah’s parents had agreed for her to come away with my family on a beach holiday. And I was secretly even happier that Danny just happened to be there with his parents too. I had had an enormous crush on him since the sixth grade and although it had been an entire year of turning bright red each time he so much as looked at me, neither he nor Sarah knew how I felt. Although she was my best friend, Sarah had a way of making me feel like most things I said or did were laughable. It was better that she didn’t know about my crush on Danny.

As the azure pool glistened in the sun’s golden rays, we took turns at jumping into the pool to see who could make the biggest splash. We would start off a distance away from the pool’s edge, running towards it and finally take the biggest leap we could, hugging our knees mid-air, just before we hit the water. Sarah managed to capture everyone’s attention (as was the case most of the time) with her immaculate underwater hand-stands. I could tell that Danny, in particular, was impressed and that this seemed to please Sarah greatly.

Before long, my mother was beckoning us to get cleaned up and changed for lunch. We promised Danny that we would meet him the following day for a game of water polo and then ran barefoot back to our hotel room. “I don’t want this holiday to end!” Sarah moaned as she stood at the balcony window, looking out onto the beach. “We still have another whole day left before we have to go back”, I replied optimistically but I too felt the sinking feeling that our holiday was coming to an end too quickly. For me, it meant fewer opportunities to see Danny, once we were back at home.

Sarah and I washed up, donned our shorts, t-shirts and flip-flops, and made our way down to the hotel’s dining room. My parents were already seated at a table, waiting for us. As we approached them, my mother looked at me and exclaimed disapprovingly, “Look at how dark your skin has gotten! Didn’t you use any sunscreen?” I looked down at my arms and legs and realized that I was really tanned. I never understood why that was a bad thing. I thought my skin looked so beautifully dark and flawless. I looked over at Sarah whose skin had a light bronze glow all over, except for her nose which was a reddish brown. She gave me a look of triumph as though to say, “I managed not to mess up like you did!”

I sulked through most of the lunch, perking up only when my father said that Sarah and I could have some money to go and get our hair braided on the beach. We hastened through our meal and excused ourselves from the table, dashing out into the sunshine again. We scampered past the pool and through the little gate that led onto the beach, whipping off our flip-flops and letting our feet sink into the powder-soft sand. The great big leaves of the palm trees swayed in the wind as the ocean drew closer with each wave. The almost-translucent crabs darted across the white sand, seemingly daring us to step on them. Some distance ahead of us, a man with a stick led a camel down the shoreline, a little boy nestled between its humps, his little legs dangling high off the sand. Beach vendors dotted the hotel’s periphery, their beautiful paintings and carvings laid out on a background of sand, and their exquisitely colourful sarongs flapping in the wind. As Sarah stopped to pick up a shell, I spotted two ladies sitting under the shade of a palm tree. A piece of cardboard stuck in the sand with the words “RASTAS DONE HERE. WELLCOM” written untidily across it told me we had found our hair-braiders. I called out to Sarah and we walked over to the women to get our hair makeovers.

Almost three hours later, we were finally done. We stood up, shaking off the pins and needles in our legs, and looked around. The tide was out and the beach had emptied out considerably. Sarah and I took a little walk along the strip of sand that had been under the tidal waves earlier that day, digging our toes into the wet sand, trying to unearth pretty little shells. Once we got closer to our hotel, we sat down on the soft sand and watched the waves breaking against the reef in the distance. I absent-mindedly picked up a handful of sand and let it pour through my fingers as I daydreamed about Danny.

A man’s voice behind us startled me back to reality. I looked over my shoulder and saw a man, wearing a cap, holding a bunch of leather bracelets and wooden key-chains in different shapes. Sarah began to engage him in conversation about the price of the key chains and so he moved in front of us and crouched down to face us. There was something about this man that unnerved me. I pretended to be disinterested in the conversation, looking out to the ocean, but from the corner of my eye, I could see that he kept turning to look at me.  I drew my knees in and hugged them. He was making me decidedly uncomfortable. Sarah, completely oblivious to my discomfort, asked me if I wanted to get a personalized key-chain. “No!” I snapped in response. I wanted the man to go away. Couldn’t she see that I was uncomfortable? As he stood up to dig into his pockets for some paper on which to write Sarah’s key-chain order, I took a good look at the man. He had protruding veins that ran over his smooth ebony skin, from his wrists, over the bulging muscles in his forearms and disappeared under the sleeves of his loose, button-up shirt. Hanging from underneath his cap, were short braids, not unlike those we had just gotten. His eyelids were droopy, as though he was sleepy and in his mouth, he chewed on what looked like the end of a twig.

He looked up at me suddenly, catching my stare and I felt a surge of panic shoot through my body. His eyes… they looked like dark beads set against a thick yellowish backdrop, taking me in, bit by bit, through their droopy eyelids. I looked away quickly. I wanted to get up and run back into the hotel compound but my body wasn’t listening. Sarah chatted away, answering the man’s questions, each of which he asked in a drawling voice, slowly averting his gaze every so often to look at me. I stared directly ahead of me at the ocean, praying that my fear was not apparent to him as I grew increasingly nervous.

He asked Sarah where we were staying and she pointed to the hotel behind us. I wanted to scream out and shake her and tell her to stop giving this stranger all this information but I could not seem to get my voice or my body to obey my mind. I began to tremble. The beach was now practically void of any people, save the man with the camel. All sorts of thoughts raced through my mind. I began to have flashbacks of an incident that occurred when I was nine years old, and a drunken man had accosted me outside a restaurant’s restroom. I shuddered as I closed my eyes and saw those eerie translucent-green bloodshot eyes boring into mine.

“You, you look like a tourist because you have a white skin,” the key-chain vending man said to Sarah, “but your friend – she look more like me.” I could feel his stare burning into me. “Me, I prefer this colour…” He reached over and slowly but deliberately stroked my thigh upwards.

That was it! My body finally kicked into defence-mode as I shoved his hand away, got to my feet and with all my might, kicked the fine sand into his eyes. I didn’t even stop to look at Sarah as I then whirled around and bolted for the hotel entrance. Just as I approached the incline to the open hotel gate, I felt my left foot hit something hard and before I knew it, I was laying face-down in the sand, my ankle resting atop a piece of driftwood. I hoisted myself back up again, and as the tears came hot and furiously down the sides of my sand-covered face, I heard the distinct sound of Sarah’s laughter behind me...

His Eyes

Katie ran across the grass and up to her mother, her ponytail flapping about like the tail of a horse swatting flies. “Mummy, did you see? Did you see how high I can swing now?” Her mother smiled tiredly down at her. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon and the playground area of the family restaurant was teeming with screaming little children. “Can I go on the merry-go-round now?” the little girl asked her mother expectantly. “Not now honey. We have to get home soon.” Katie reluctantly waited as her father took out his wallet and pulled out some money to pay the bill for the lunch they had just had. She looked forlornly at the other children gleefully whooshing around on the merry-go-round and wished that she could stay on.

Katie’s mother took her hand and followed her father across the garden towards the parking lot of the restaurant. They reached the car and Katie clambered into the back seat, pouting slightly. As the car pulled out of the parking spot, she suddenly felt the urge to use the bathroom. One glance at the stern look on her father’s face as he drove out onto the main road told Katie that she was better off holding it until they were home.

As they drove down the road, Katie tried to distract herself by reciting the poem they had learnt a few weeks ago in school over and over again:

Solomon Grundy
Born on a Monday
Christened on Tuesday
Married on Wednesday
Took ill on Thursday
Worse on Friday
Died on Saturday
Buried on Sunday
And that was the end of Solomon Grundy

After she had recited the poem for the fourth time, she leaned forward and tugged on her mother’s sleeve, “Mummy”, she said in a soft voice. “Are we almost home? I need to pee!” Katie’s father looked at her through the car’s rear-view mirror exasperatedly and asked, “Why didn’t you go at the restaurant?” Katie slumped back in her seat and didn’t answer. She was all too familiar with her father’s temper and was too scared to say anything else to aggravate him.

They must’ve still been a while from home, because Katie’s father pulled into a gas station that had a small restaurant. Katie’s mother got out of the car and opened Katie’s door. “Hurry up, now!” she said, as Katie scrambled to get out of the car. They walked towards the restaurant which had dark windows and the smell of roasted meat coming from it.

Katie’s mother stopped a man who was standing just inside the door of the restaurant and asked him where the bathroom was. The man looked disapprovingly at Katie and then nodded towards a corridor past a few tables. There was a man sitting at the bar with a glass of a yellow frothy liquid. A couple of tables with a few more people seated, using their hands to pick up pieces of meat and bite into them. Katie’s mother led her down the narrow corridor and then left towards the door with the silhouette of a woman on it. The door opened into a tiny single stall with a wash-basin. Katie’s mother tugged on a toilet-seat cover from behind the toilet and placed it on the seat. “I’m waiting for you outside – hurry up!” she said to Katie as she slipped out of the stall and Katie went in and shut the door.

Thankful to finally have relieved herself, Katie stood up and yanked the flush handle and then turned around to wash her hands in the wash-basin. The hand-drier was too high for her to activate so she wiped her hands on the back of her dress and opened the door of the stall.

As Katie stepped out into the corridor, about to make her way back into the restaurant, a raspy voice behind her said, “Hello, there!” Startled, Katie whirled around and found herself staring up at a man. His legs didn’t seem to be able to support him very well because he had his hand on the wall of the narrow corridor. He wore an old jacket over a t-shirt and a pair of stonewash jeans. His yellow-tinged skin was covered in stubble and his lips were dry and cracked. His curly hair looked tangled and unkempt. But his bloodshot eyes were what frightened Katie the most. His eyes were of an almost translucent quality. His pupils were like two tiny black dots in a sea of semi-transparent green with bright red veins running haphazardly towards the pupils. He stared at her hauntingly, as his lips curled eerily. Katie froze. She felt her heart thumping against her chest but she couldn’t bring herself to move.

From somewhere behind her, another man’s voice sounded, “Hey, Maurice! What’s taking you so long, man?” With his creepy eyes still boring into Katie’s, the man replied, “I’m enjoying the view from here!” He spoke with difficulty, slurring on every second word. As though it had been given permission, Katie’s body began to respond. She spun around but she felt the man grab her arm and whirl her back around as she saw those eyes fixedly staring at her again. They seemed to pierce right through her and she felt her vocal chords let out a blood-curdling scream.

Her mother must have been right at the end of the corridor because it seemed as though she had appeared in seconds. She grabbed Katie’s other arm and pulled her from the man’s grip. As she dragged Katie through the narrow passageway, she turned her head to yell obscenities at the man. Once they were outside the restaurant, Katie’s mother knelt down and stroked her daughter’s face. “I’m so sorry, honey... I’m so sorry”, she whispered, pulling Katie into an embrace. Katie shut her eyes tight but all she saw was the terrifying man’s eyes staring menacingly at her…