Unless the Most High intervenes immediately and personally, my palace, which has taken me a decade of dedication to put into the magnificent status it was as of last week, will never be the same again; if the damage caused in the last week of Queen’s detention is anything to go by.
When Makena, our decades-long Comptroller of Palace Affairs (CPA) forced my Queen into a strange business handshake, the terms and conditions dictated that Queen had to remain within the palace compound for her own security while Makena was to take over the supermarket for as long as it would take the Maboys to forget Queen’s face and the story of my attempted murder. Talk of selling fear!
And so, for the sake of her own security and the security of her supermarket, Queen has been cooped up in the palace since Wednesday evening. Knowing Makena for who she is, there will be no kiosk, leave alone a supermarket, to talk about in two weeks.
Now, although I cannot allow my Queen’s investment to go down the drain, I had planned to buy time to make her very scared. I would then jump into the mix, macho style, to prove my manly and husbandly indispensability. This would have become our marital north reference that would make Queen respect and love me for a long time to come.
But Queen’s incarceration affected her so fast that intervention was necessary sooner than I had planned. Although I am trying to show my manly and husbandly hand in her much needed salvation, heavenly intervention is her only way out of the looming unprecedented disaster.
You see, from my deep understanding of Queen, the incarceration caused her psychological, political, financial, legal and marital stress in that order of importance to her.
Psychologically, Queen is a person who spends her days talking to many people at the supermarket and chamas . Removing her from that social para para is killing her silently. Politically, she would not meet the chama women and that would give Mhesh’s wife a golden opportunity to take over as the chairlady of Aberdare’s largest chama .
Financially, surrendering the running of her supermarket to Makena simply means closing it. Legally, Queen feared that the rumours that reigned supreme at Happy Valley would attract the attention of the police. Queen couldn’t imagine such an embarrassing scenario.
Finally, as usual, our marriage came last. Since the day of the ‘attempted murder’ I had not spoken to her about the incident and so she wondered what was cooking in my head. Signs that Queen was not herself started emerging the very next day.
That Thursday evening marked the start of the end of the honeymoon for Simba, the palace mongrel that meets me at the gate, and our cat, which keeps me company as I drowsily take my supper in the evenings. Simba escorted me to the door. But when Queen opened the door, she hit Simba so hard that I felt the blow was meant for me.
A while later, the palace cat met a worse fate.
“It is no better than its friend Simba. I had better be alone here,” she replied.
It did not require a professor to tell me that I was being accused of being absent when I was required most.
On Saturday evening, the dog and the cat kept their safe distance. But the glass jar that she used to carry water for washing my hands and the hot dish that carried the food were not as lucky. She dropped both of them in what was a real case of severe absent mindedness. “What is wrong with you? Are you really normal?” I asked her. She did not answer.
Then Sunday came. Queen did not go to church and instead the church came to her at the palace. To show me the seriousness of the matter, Makena wrote a message to me that afternoon. “Ile mipango ya kukumaliza haijaisha. Kanisa iko hapa (That plan to finish you off is still on. The church is holding a service here).”
I did not entertain her fertile imaginations. I just wrote, “Thanks.”
That Sunday evening as I drowsily took my supper, my critical attention was drawn to the words of a song that Queen was singing:
From the tone and mood of the song, I knew that Queen meant every word of the song. I was not going to lose her in the name of teaching her a lesson. I was going to bring the whole nonsense to an end, once and for all. Makena, here I cometh. Run and run very fast.
