The concubine of a government official (Part V)

It has been about four to five years since Lucy and I last spoke.

I still have her phone number – and once in a while, I call it. It never goes through. But I should tell you, dear reader, I miss her dearly. No, don’t be mistaken; it was never intimate – entirely intellectual.

And gossipy. An anthropologist and cultural studies major, I love gossip. Not for its veracity, of course, but for the world it makes visible – as Luise White has told us in her book Speaking with Vampires.

Lucy Nabunya didn’t just speak to vampires, she literary slept with one. What began as a random encounter, ended in about five-seven times of coffee, and some of the most engaging, reflective and witty conversations imaginable.

Indeed, I have many Lucy-Nabunya stories, and depending on the mood of the week, I will be telling them one by one.

“You remember Tinah, the girl I was mistaken for when they picked me from Hoima?” Lucy started when we met on another scheduled coffee.

“Yes, I do,” I said to her, “the girl whose bottom was being tapped for Shs 700k – a teacher’s salary!” I added to make sure she understood I recalled Tinah.

“Exactly, you know what, that girl is one of those people my lover added on the government payroll,” she added.

“No way… your man’s hookers are on the government payroll!” I said in utter disbelief. “Yes, Tinah told me herself,” she said. “No. You met Tinah!?” I said, even more confused.

We used to meet in this café hidden somewhere in Kololo. It has a cool ambience, and seems heavily patronized by folks in security circles. Lucy knew some of them, and they knew her too. She had washed her hands clean, you know. Or her coochie clean?

She ate and slept with the powerful. But the place is fairly private and is good for private conversations. But that notwithstanding, every time Lucy was about to drop a bomb – a big revelation – she often lowered her voice.

“It turns out that before that mistaken identity, Tinah had had a long affair with my lover,” Lucy started in a low voice.

“Men, you are a special breed: All is coochie for you – clean, hairy, shaven, crocked, smelly… for you, coochie is coochie,” Lucy philosophized.

“Tinah is a typical bar girl, the type that look sleepy all the time. She is also pale either from drinking or skin lightening creams,” Lucy described her co-hooker.

“She has a firm behind…I must give her that. But the Sulphur she uses on her hair smells like rat poison… she is okay, but looks generally unkempt.” At this point, it looked like Lucy was speaking out of co-wife-co-hooker jealousy.

But she maintained her usual demeanor, and charm. Throughout our coffee meet-ups, it was clear Lucy understood that there was no love with a hooker-buying corrupt politician. They are gangsters. It is all business.

“Politicians are like hookers,” she used to say, “emotionless, remorseless, and pretentious.” “But how did you meet her, Lucy,? I’m curious,” I said impatiently. “Tinah is actually my friend. We talk often,” she said.

This confused me even more. “My man still believes I am a hooker from Hoima but with an aunt in Kampala. My law firm sends me to Hoima often to continue with that case of oil land grabbers. But my man thinks I am always returning home. So, one day, he called me to help a friend of his. Guess who it was; Tinah,” she said.

“And hookers tend to have no hard feelings. It is like having a stall selling tomatoes in the same market. You are all selling the same things,” Lucy said. “But you aren’t a hooker, Lucy.”

“I had to learn. It is a hooker’s life for all of us. They call it hustling but is surely being a hooker – you jump on top of anyone or anything with money! It is the economy, my friend. But for me, it is like stealing back – using my coochie superpowers!” she said and we both laughed out hysterically.

“Anyways, being more educated – my lover believes I dropped out of university in my second year – he asked me to help his friend with securing a new ATM card. She had lost her ATM card, and Tinah had never entered a bank building,” Lucy recalled.

“Having helped this girl get her money back, we became fast friends. I did not even have to ask, before she started talking about how good and generous her man was.”

“It was a Friday night when my lover first procured Tinah’s services. Having taken her number, he called her a day later. This was Sunday morning. But Tinah had gone to church. But with a big client on the line, soon after her communion wafer, she jumped on the nearest boda to go save a man’s life.”

“You cannot commit two crimes – sell coochie and don’t go to church, I like Tinah, already,” I said jokingly.

“Don’t rush. Let me finish the story,” Lucy scolded me. “But when Tinah reached our lover’s hotel, he was despondent. Being a Christian himself … is he Pentecostal …. I think… there was no way he was going to drag a girl from church straight into sin. Instead, they sat down to talk and he asked her about how she ended up in this job. Tinah had lost both parents, and was currently a single mother of two. But she looked sumptuous, I should say,” Lucy added.

“Both must have been crying by now,” I chipped in. “So, our lover, in his typical generosity, agreed to pay her but not use her services that Sunday morning. Tinah started crying, appreciating his goodness. But Tinah, being a good Christian, was not ready to take free money, especially since she had come to save a life,” Lucy said cheekily.

“What!” I burst out. “If you aren’t using me, are you going to call another girl? Tinah had asked our man,” Lucy said.

To which our man said he would figure out how to calm himself down.

“Can you imagine this girl told our man that she could not allow him to commit a sin of pleasuring himself while she was around!” Lucy asked rhetorically.

We both burst out laughing. Mbu, our good man painfully agreed to use Tinah’s services. But touched by her plight, he took her details, and the next time he returned to Hoima, came with an ATM card. Tinah had a monthly salary.

She doesn’t know how much money there is, but says this man is the best thing to ever happen to her. She withdraws Shs 300,000 every week, but has never found the account empty.

I am not sure she knows she is a government employee – of some really good rank.

yusufkajura@gmail.com

The author is a political theorist based at Makerere University

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