The day was incredibly hot, as had been every preceding day for as long as the long suffering cared to remember. The air that overhung the rusting rooftops crackled with the licking flames of an invisible conflagration, the heat waves billowing down upon the naked earth, submerging everything, even life itself.
In the unrelenting oppressiveness of the baking concrete streets the yellow dogs lost their mongrel minds, and leapt baying to their deaths in the receding depths of their masters� water wells. Redneck agamas, basking belly-flat against the steaming house walls, were shortly lulled into aestivating comas by the luxuriousness of their sunbaths. The sole surviving vegetation, their sulphureous leaves drooping in abject despair, slowly wept their life-blood away. Tonsured vultures dropped dead in droves from the clear blue skies, the heat and the weight of their gorged bellies proving too much for their greedy hearts; their scraggy carcasses were immediately swooped down upon by frugal compeers and devoured, dandruff flakings and all. And then all over the city the red dust rose in choking clouds, drawn from a scorched earth by the sun�s maleficent glare.
It is on a day indistinguishable from this that we are introduced to Boniface Doa, a portly young man with a golliwog face and ears like a trophy-jug�s handles. He lay spread eagled and smouldering on a rumpled bed, his sweat-sheened body gloriously naked but for the snaking glint of a gold necklace. He had been driven into the bedroom some time ago by an intolerable sense of ennui, but whatever hope he had nursed of getting some sleep was rapidly melting away in the stifling heat. As the warmth of his breath bouncing off the sweat-soaked sheets was beginning to scald his cheeks, he turned over onto his back, folding his arms beneath his head. With eyes drowsily slit, he took in the dust particles drifting lazily in the shafts of shimmering sunlight that the louvre-glasses flung at an inclined angle into the shadowed room, the spots on the ceiling where they came to rest reflecting faint but faithful replicas of the rainbow spectrum. Silence shrouded the rest of the world, a silence so complete that Boniface Doa�s straining ears were inundated by the sepulchral clamour of the wall clock�s tick-tick-tick, and the flip-flops of a lethargic heart. The heat was � fond responsible for this quiescence: even the birds and bees had flown for cover.
Boniface Doa sniffed to clear his nose, this as the air was heavy with the alcoholic reek of rotting fruit, the smell rising in waves from the littered ground just beyond his window where the heavy-laden mango tree dropped her burden in sporadic avalanches. Needless to say, the heat in no way allayed this heady onslaught, and the total absence of wind ensured that Boniface Doa was not granted even a moment�s respite.
Like the death-stiff crocodilian gaze-stalking frolicking butterflies, Boniface Doa lay perfectly motionless in the hope that sleep would once settle unto his gaping jaws, never to flitter again. It was in this predacious state that he heard a door slam shut in the distance, followed moments later by the near splash of running water. The sounds floated over from the Orjinta�s, his next-door neighbours. Mrs. Orjinta he knew left the house bright and early every morning for her shop, and as he had exchanged pleasantries with her husband that morning as he drove off to work, Boniface Doa was almost certain that the housemaid was the only one home. Though the girl was barely two weeks into the berth he had already met her once: the six-day power failure from which half the city was still suffering had brought her to the water well in his compound. He had drawn six bucketfuls for her on the day � he was then grateful for any chore that would take his mind off the tedium of unending leisure, as now.
With the false promise of slumber finally abandoned as hopelessly irredeemable, the air in the room flung off its last restraints and settled unto Boniface Doa�s skin like a hot balm. He turned onto one side and then the other in an effort to relieve his growing discomfort, but a chance glance downwards awoke him to the fact that his state was not one resolvable by toss and turn. He had been aware of the incipient stirrings but did not till now ken the extent of its fervour. He was already swinging one leg off the bed when he remembered that the last of his hair cream had been used up the day before.
He fell back with a low groan, and then lay helpless as his imagination was hijacked by the pulsing as it grew in length and strength, until, unable to hold back any longer, he lowered his hand, cooing sounds bursting from pursed lips as he stroked and soothed the fervid malefactor. To no avail. He next thrust his hands into his armpits, and as he clamped down hard he thought: You are lying on a deliciously soft bed on a hotter than hot afternoon when out of the blue it strikes you � isn�t it the greatest irony ever that the word �fuck� was bequeathed humanity by the priggish prudish puritans � for unclean carnal knowledge that they hung around the pilloried necks of apprehended fornicators � but has since shed its puritanical cloak of chastisement to emerge mot juste for an act that is sweet and pure... Boniface Doa retracted his moistened hands and abandoned himself to the sweet torture of impure fancies.
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west, but the incandescent orb now hovering overhead seemed in a supreme dilemma as to which path to burn through. To the south of its indecision black storm clouds gathered and fumed, and then spread across the celestial aspect like Mongol hordes. A gentle breeze wafted through the heat haze, stirring the leaves of the �bitterleaf� plant that the hem of Boniface Doa�s jellaba caught against as he crept towards the dividing wall between his house and the significant other. As his heart beat a brisk tattoo against the wall�s rough surface he experienced a moment of returning reason; but then the damning thought of what lay beyond this last barrier swiftly overcame the spell, and the reel again began to run. Boniface Doa stood on tiptoe and peered over the wall.
The girl was half bent over and facing away from him, and she was wholly engrossed in the huge pile of laundry that lay on the ground before her. Boniface Doa watched her quivering behind for an eternity of seconds with a sound in his ears as of rushing air, and the dull ache of deep craving in his belly. With a wordless acknowledgement of his increasing indebtedness to the maxim �thought is detrimental to the deed�, Boniface Doa grabbed the top of the wall and in one clear leap vaulted into the other compound. His landing however did not play according to script, and he came down on a bar of soap and just managed to keep his feet, badly wrenching his left ankle in the process. The girl, startled half out of her wits by this sudden appearance of death in one of its many guises, was about to beat a noisy retreat when she caught sight of Boniface Doa�s pain-contorted face, and checked her flight. Her gaze was however nasty with suspicion as she slowly backed away from him � from bitter experience she knew what his drop in portended.
Hobbling forward painfully, Boniface Doa raised a hand in apology even as his unapologetically lascivious gaze swept over the girl�s buxom figure. She looked older in build than her tally of years, and sturdy enough to dam a veldt buffalo. She was clad in a diaphanous thigh-length wrapper, the ends of which were gathered in a loose knot just above the swell of her breasts. She was barefoot, her toes curling into the dust in preparedness for flight. Boniface Doa drew to a halt a few feet from her warning glare, and spoke.
�My name is Boniface Doa. You remember me? The water... the other day? What is your name?�
The girl made no reply, and then Boniface Doa remembered that she spoke no English. He had overhead her mistress remark that she was from one of the neighbouring francophone countries. Responding to this development with a speed born of desperation, he bugled up and inspected whatever smatterings of French remained from his high school days, and eventually forged ahead with: �Mon nom est Boniface Doa. Comment... comment tu...�
�Comment tu t�appelle,� the girl offered, a smile for the first time tugging at the corners of her mouth. And after a pause she added: �Bola.�
Jumping at this first sign of thawing Boniface Doa unleashed a barrage of pidgin French, his hands flapping about in an awful caricature of sign language.
�Merci, mon chere Biola. Vous est tres beaute, oui! Vous est bon bon et magnifique, oui! Impressment...�
He finally gave up, having run the gamut of his parleyvoo, and as the zany display had succeeded in its intended purpose of reducing the girl to laughter, he decided to go one better and grab the cow by the teats, literally.
It was, as these things go, a miscalculation: the girl shut her mouth with a snap and shoved him away, further twisting his swollen ankle and leaving him painfully aware of looming failure. But he couldn�t fail, he couldn�t afford to. Not after burning so many bridges. He, rejected by a mere housegirl � he would never live down the shame of it. Never.
The girl awaited his pleasure with arms tightly folded over an outraged bosom. Her face gave nothing away. Boniface Doa took a doubly tentative step forward, his face reflecting the pain that thwarted not his purpose. The girl took an uncompromising step backwards, and Boniface Doa, his bladder churning with frustration, considered rushing at her. But for his foot.
�Wait,� he begged, his voice as soft as a fallen angel�s. �Please wait.�
He drew up to her, and then quickly sidestepped in an attempt to blindside her, but she whipped around with a ferocity that left his head spinning, and faced with her air of mocking challenge he ran out of pluck and ideas. But his desire remained, and burned brighter, fanned by the thick smell of hot sweat and musky woman-places that rose tauntingly from her cleavage.
�I like you very much,� he muttered, his ears ringing from the strength of his feeling. And he raised his hand to stroke her cheek, but with a snap of her neck she knocked it away. He drew closer, undeterred, his chest almost touching her draped breast-tips and his breath fanning her hair-line, and he tried to encircle her waist with his left arm; but she shoved him away. He twice repeated the same move, and was each time rebuffed. He changed tack, and tried to lift her truculent chin with his right hand, but she pushed that away too. The standoff that followed this last rejection was punctuated by a silence of bellows breathing, and the two antagonists glowered at each other, one defiantly, the other in petulant cajolery.
As the seconds crept away with any hope of his success Boniface Doa suddenly saw in the brown depths of the girl�s eyes a reflection that a moment before wasn�t there, and almost immediately his heart constricted in a silent eureka. He raised his hands up and behind his neck and unclasped the gold necklace. It was a love-gift from a forgotten sweetheart, but disregarding that trifle in the heat of the moment, he extended the flashing circlet towards the girl�s neck, her gaze dogging his every movement. She did not recoil from his touch and he quickly completed the transfer, letting his hands rest for a moment on her bare shoulders and then trail down to her bosom, where they nestled. He pressed his frame against her, melting into her softness, her heat � quivering, groping, caressing. She now and again let out soft gasps at his frenzied mauling but on the whole remained silent as his hands and mouth exacted remuneration. And as the heat reached fever pitch he fell with her to the parched earth; but he banged his swollen ankle in the fall and bellowed out in red-eyed agony, all passion draining from his body in an instant; and at that moment the wind-storm descended with a roll of thunder that juddered the earth, and drowned out his moans in a shower of dust and grit; and eons and eons but seconds later the heavens opened up and cried the heat away.
