If Padlock had not been such a control freak, and had lacked delusions of infallibility, the devastation which befell her when she discovered the theft of her bobbin would have been proportionate. Singer’s cold indifference to her coaxing would have been in the realm of possibility.
How in the world could her bobbin go missing? A mere bobbin, and not the precious gray head, the clothes or the scissors, but the bobbin! The cold calculation of it! The devilish timing of it! The humiliating simplicity of the crime! Her head spun with bewilderment and incomprehension. She must have inserted her finger a dozen times into the empty bobbin hole. Once or twice, she almost mangled her index finger as she absentmindedly pedaled, but the hole remained empty.
She overturned every box, every container, she shook every piece of cloth and moved every stick of furniture, but the ultimate insult, the ultimate anti-miracle, continued to stare her coldly in the face.
If armed robbers or drunken soldiers had marched in, ordered her off her throne, taken her money and commanded her to remove the gray head, put it in a gunnysack and hand it over to them with a servile thank-you-for-robbing-me-sirs, she would have understood. Brute force and raw power she understood very well, and appreciated how they worked, but not sneaky wit; especially not when her Command Post still had inviolability written all over it. The excision of the heart from her machine, and the bloodless insult of it all, made her head swell dangerously with a murderous rage.
If Padlock had been a woman of words, she would have cursed holes into the roof and drowned the room in the saliva of her invective, but that was not like her. She just sat on her desecrated throne and let all the anger, the sorrow and the frustration course through her, not bothering to wipe away the despair which mingled itself freely with her tears. She wanted to do something terrible, something horribly cathartic, in order to wash away the debilitating feeling of human weakness.
What kind of animal, human or devilish, could do this just a week after she had beaten the piss, the goo and the blood out of two thieves? What kind of devilish maggot was stirring in this thief’s rotten mind? Was this imperviousness to pain or love of pain at work? She shuddered at the thought, at the fleeting possibility, that this monster could have burst onto the planet from her belly, carried for nine months in her womb and suckled on her breasts.
As if that line of investigation were too treacherous to pursue, she took the view that the criminal had come from abroad, exploiting her absence.
Padlock grilled us for what seemed like hours. The main question was “Who called while I was away?” She lashed us again and again with the same question, framed differently each time, twisted into all possible configurations, as she dug to conjure the thief from under the floorboards.
Padlock hardly knew what to believe when the answers came. She seemed to sense, for the first time in her married life, the emergence of a new product, hundreds of guava switchings later: a ball-less, timid-to-hell breed of shitter had emerged, the kind that could hardly say no to authority. She must have sensed hatred, fear and the fact that truth had become a suspect entity. This made her investigative duties that much more hazardous.
At the height of it all, with conflicting reports swirling in her head, she contemplated the possibility that Mbaziira, alias Loverboy, might be the culprit. Had she not brusquely asked him to stay away from her house? Had he not vehemently denied having had anything to do with the fated love letter, as any guilty young man would have done? Had he not called her accusations ungrounded and questioned her state of mind? And though he had not threatened to do anything, had he not left rather too quietly in the end? He had a motive and possible access. He, like nobody else, knew the ins and outs of the Command Post. Yet the children insisted that he had not called. Had he, then, come when everybody was away?
Amidst the confusion, Lusanani surfaced like a leviathan in the troubled waters of Padlock’s mind. A married woman who played with young boys had to have perversity carved all over her psyche, especially if she was married to a man old enough to be her father or even grandfather. In Padlock’s mind, those were indicators big enough to pinpoint a criminally unstable mind to which transgression was second nature. She was obviously a callous thief who had coldly befriended Padlock’s son in order to gain access to her bobbin, her son’s virginity and God knew what else. Lusanani’s husband had given her carte blanche to sin by declaring, “My wives never borrow money or anything else. I forbade them.”
Padlock could not believe her ears that day; Hajj’s words sounded like a huge smoke screen which shielded the sinister activities of his thieving young wife. She now hated and distrusted that bearded man more than ever. She deeply believed that he had something to do with Serenity’s dallying with Nakibuka, for it was still true that one’s friends said a lot about somebody. She wished that this man and his wives would move to some dust bowl, rotten slum or, preferably, dismal cave, where they would destroy themselves and their ungodly way of life.
Halfway through the investigation, I glowed with hope: yes, Padlock had changed, or was changing. She had exhibited great self-control; she had not touched anybody, and for the first time in living memory she seemed to respect our bodies, despite the terrible distress she was in. She could have lined us up and thrashed us till the skin came off our backs, but this time a new light seemed to have come on inside her head. Was there no way I could secrete the bobbin back in its cave and save her from further suffering? I figured that in the coming days I could find a way of bringing it back, say, by leaving it in a place where a shitter could pick it up.
The investigation was interrupted by the arrival of the good news that Lwandeka had been released after a short court case. Instead of lifting Padlock from the dungeons of her affliction, the news seemed to plunge her even deeper. It was as if, once again, her sister had got off easily and had not learned any lesson. Instead of filling with the joyous mood of a woman’s escape from suffering, the house was oppressed by the cadaverous smell of ill will.
Padlock resumed her interrogation in a meaner vein. All the previous days’ self-control had vanished. Her head was awash with the metallic sounds of a train derailing and crashing to bits.
“Did Lusanani come here?”
“Yes, she did,” I replied.
“What? What for?”
“To talk,” I said softly.
“How many times have I warned you to stay away from that woman? What did you talk about: letting her steal my bobbin?” Her voice was dangerously controlled, almost coldly indifferent.
“She did not steal it.”
“You did? Who else? After all, you were in charge of the house, were you not? Or did you let her do her own dirty work?” She was almost off her chair now, muscles taut, like a horse about to attack a high fence. “Who was responsible for looking after the house? Answer me!”
“Dad,” I said very slyly, to deflate her momentum and divide blame into more manageable parts, with the bulk at the address of her fellow despot.
Suddenly she was towering over me, blocking my view with the corrugated, trembling grayness of her garment. “You, you, you, you,” she puffed, bending over, her breath hot on my forehead. “You, you, you, you, and I said you.” For emphasis, she cracked me hard on the top of my head with her knuckles. It felt like a hornbill was up there pecking, pecking, pecking. I almost cried out. I reversed all my plans. I would never return her bobbin. I would never be reduced to the timidity of the shitters. Now she could rant, rave or go on a rampage and break my nose or arm, but the precious bobbin, made even more valuable by the scarcities created by my godfather, General Idi Amin, would remain under cover. It was mine now. I had earned it. If I ever failed to find a buyer for it, I would enjoy the perverse joy of seeing it swallowed by latrine shit and maggots.