"Sign here!" I commanded, in a stiff voice. He was much older than I, by about 10 years, and I should have shown him more respect. But he had done the unforgivable and was to pay dearly.
Many years before in my peasant past I had lived near my uncle in the village. I first met this man during those years when he came to visit my uncle, working on some books with him. I moved my family away from the confining village to Mombasa, where I had prospered. My wife, far from the humble girl I had met, liked and bulldozed into marriage, became a well-filled out woman with computer skills which I paid for her to obtain in college. She was now well-respected especially in church circles for her dedicated work with children. She had risen to become a national trainer with the Boys' and Girls' Brigade. I felt immensely proud of these achievements, knowing that I had had a strong hand in it all.
It bothered me quite a lot that she did not give me the respect she should have, for did I not lift her from an insignificant, poor, almost abandoned girl with no future, and given her status?
Some time last year, increasingly bothered by her poor attitude towards me, and her sharp tongue, I began to wonder if she had taken a lover, unlikely as that seemed even to me at the time. I sneaked into, and installed an app called Cheaters on her phone, so that it would send reports to me of all her phone calls, sms, WhatsApp activity and browsing history. I was shocked to discover that she had turned against me, talking ill of me with her lover. I was further astounded to uncover the identity of this man. How could she go for a man 10 years my senior? I found myself almost wishing it were a younger man whose prowess in bed she had sought. But no, it turned out to be the fellow I met at my uncle's, and who was still stuck in the village we had left behind so many years before.
Many weeks passed, while their messaging became more and more explicit, he telling her how he was going fulfill her as a woman, sexually. I was infuriated. What more could she want after everything I had sacrificed to give her, especially from an old withered, very lean fellow who had not even mastered the art of feeding after this long? Should I wait until they were rendezvoused in a hotel room and attack them with a panga? Should I hire a gang of thugs to beat them both up until they became invalids? There were times when his messages became exciting even to me, and I had a hard time dragging myself to the reality that this was another man telling my wife, my own wife, these things, and probably doing them to her.
Or should I take the revenge I read somewhere that you should let the man who sleeps with your wife keep her? No, I wanted something more satisfying to me. A friend of mine unwittingly gave me an idea. He had a lorry that brought fresh produce to Mombasa, from places beyond that village of my remote past. Since I sold lorries, why not buy one myself, and make this oldie serve me? He needed money, that much I knew from his chats with my wife. He could go to farms in the uplands, buy fresh vegetables from the farmers and bring them down. He would have no way of lying to me about his whereabouts because the vehicle management systems on the trucks my company sold would broadcast where it was at any given time, yet he would know nothing of it. Perfect!
"I will arrive at 10 so we will have more time together," he wrote in one of his messages to my wife.
"I will be all ready for you, my darlin," she messaged back.
My truck had been on the road for a few weeks by this time, in the hands of a distant cousin. I planned this would only be for a short duration, before I offered it to the oldie. I would sack the cousin noisily, letting my wife know all the reasons for this action. Family members are rarely the best partners for a business venture. True to form, he lied to me that he had not left the farmlands while the systems showed him to be in Kawangware market. He then rushed back to the farmlands to arrive in Mombasa a day later than he should have. I sacked him on the spot and had the lorry taken home to my wife whom I told the details of the parting of ways. I was convinced the cousin had been selling some produce in Kawangware, keeping the money in his pocket. I fumed.
"So," I told her, "I now need a driver as this truck cannot be parked here gathering dust when it should be earning back the money I spent."
It was no more than week later that my wife told me one evening. "Do you remember Tim, friend of your uncle?" She had just come back from one of her trips to Nairobi to oversee the building of a water project we had started some months earlier.
"No, which Tim?" I asked, while inwardly resenting him for putting the horns upon me.
"He used to visit Uncle often. I even think they did typesetting work together."
"I think I vaguely remember something like that." I kept up the pretense of not knowing whom we were talking about.
She went on to tell me how she had recently met him in Nairobi after many years. He was looking disheveled and obviously down at heel, though still with some of his old pride. "Maybe he could drive the lorry?"
The two cheats had fallen into my trap neatly! She thought I did not know the two of them were in daily contact, maybe even sexually when she was upcountry. I hoped that she was kept so busy that it did not actually happen. I could not be 100% sure.
"I am not sure about giving my truck to such an unfortunate," I answered disdainfully. "Does he even possess a driving license?"
I made a few feeble protests then told her she could verify his ability and availability, after giving her a figure for his pay, a percentage of the sales. I saw their conversations on WhatsApp as they talked about the truck driving and it was agreed that one weekend he would also travel from upcountry to meet me and get a contract of some sort signed, during which I felt justified in not showing him the proper respect.
"Sign here!" I commanded, in a stiff voice. He was much older than I, by about 10 years, and I should have shown him more respect. But he had done the unforgivable and would pay dearly.
I was beginning to think I had made a smart move in bringing the oldie into my employ, since the trips were making increasing profits. I had been so keen on monitoring him and the truck that I forgot to check my wife's phone activity. I had congratulated myself on having removed the two from each other's clutches, the oldie being on the road much of the time. I was puzzled to find, when I checked the Cheaters database, that the records had stopped coming in more than two weeks previously. Had they discovered my sneaky little app? That was entirely likely since she had studied computer software. But between my job and monitoring Oldie's activities, I had no time left to check on the wife. It irked me that my own wife was using skills that I had paid for to thwart my efforts.
The water project had reached such a point that my wife needed to go up more than twice or thrice a month. On one such trip Tim had just finished delivery to Mackinnon and Kongowea markets when she was ready to leave. Without my reports of my wife's phone I never knew how it had been arranged but I absolutely refused to let Tim give her a lift. They pretended to look puzzled by such an unreasonable man who would not let his wife ride on his own truck. But it continued to bother me that I could not always time my wife's trips so that she would be in Nairobi when the truck was in Mombasa. The possibility remained that they met on their upcountry trips, and without my surveillance app on her phone I had now lost control.
I became almost desperate wracking my brains to find a way of stopping this adulterous liaison without seeming to have brought trouble on my own head by employing the fellow. Then out of the blue the idea hit me. My uncle was still living in the same place, running his book editing business for Longman's Kenya. They handed him manuscripts, which he turned into textbooks. I would try to find out about my oldie and his family on a visit to my uncle.
Without letting my uncle into too much information I found out from him that Tim's wife sometimes helped in typing out the few manuscripts which came handwritten. When Tim had told him he would not be doing typesetting work for him, because he was going to be driving a truck, my uncle had suggested that his wife could use the same computer to type out work for him; she did not have typesetting skills. "I felt that I had not lost all," said my uncle. To my furiously plotting mind that also meant he had her phone contacts.
I now set out to find that information out without alerting my uncle that I had any interest in her. My plan of revenge was coming along rather nicely.
"You have a rather neat phone, Uncle!" I admired his instrument.
"It is an iPhone that I asked my sister in the States to send to me, while I dumped the money into her bank account, from which she could transfer to herself in America."
"It is a good thing that banks have finally embraced technology," I said, while looking at his phonebook, wondering how he had saved Tim's wife's number. He was always very methodical in his life so it came as no surprise that he had saved the spouses' numbers next to one another, using their surnames; her first name was Susan.
I quickly made a mental note of the number and said, "I have heard of Siri. Do you use it?" Of course he was very proud of showing me how he used the voice control to accomplish various tasks.
