New Normal

 

Linda rose lazily from the bed to adjust the louvers and increased the fan speed to its maximum. It swirled angrily, ruffling a sheaf of papers on a table that sat at the center of the single-roomed house. She reached for them, put them together, and placed a padlock on top to keep them in place. Then she went back to bed. As always, it was a searing hot day. One never really got accustomed to such crazy temperatures, she thought to herself. It was a quarter to noon. She still wore her light blue lace nightie. Her friend Mercy was by the sink, nearly four meters away. She had a floral lesso wrapped under her arms and knotted behind her neck making it look like a bare-back dress. She was doing the previous night’s dishes which had started to smell. They had just woken up. They had gone partying the previous night and had arrived at 2:00 am, inebriated. Mercy was feeling nauseous as she always did every time she had one too many. The last time she had thrown up so bad that she had sworn to never ever taste alcohol.

“That guy had really liked you.” Linda remarked, yawning. Her breath still smelled heavily of alcohol.

“Which guy?” Mercy asked, feigning ignorance.

“Come on, Linda. How many guys did you speak to last night? Looked like you had liked him too. You two were getting cozy. So unlike you, huh!”

“Or was it the drink?” She added.

“Why would you say that?” Mercy asked.

“Well, it’s just that you never really give attention to guys in clubs. That isn’t how I know you.”

“Mmmmh, we exchanged contacts.” Mercy replied with finality.

Linda knew better than keep referencing the previous night’s events. They had been close friends for five years and Linda had mastered her friend’s cues. Or, she thought she did. But she had noticed that lately, Mercy had changed, had become more elusive, distant, and drank heavily and regularly. She wondered if she knew.

“So how is Mark?” Linda asked.

“No idea. It’s been a minute.” Mercy answered rather curtly, and then dashed to the bathroom. She retched but nothing came. “Fuck!” she whispered as she came out. She poured a little water into a plastic tumbler and took two slow sips. She found it therapeutic.

“What do you mean? Aren’t you guys still together?” Linda pressed, oblivious to Mercy’s hangover.

“Last I checked,” Mercy allowed between breaths, “… he had a thing with an intern at his workplace. And… and, she’s pregnant. For him. Or something.”

Mercy had a way of catastrophizing things. This too, she had made up. But it was a fact that they were indeed drifting apart.

“Pregnant? Who’s pregnant? For whom?” Linda asked with renewed eagerness. She even rose to sit up on the bed, causing it to creak a bit.

“You heard me.” Mercy answered.

“Okay!” Linda said, with a sigh sensing the coldness in her friend’s voice. Even though it bothered her, she tried to conceal it.

“By the way, shouldn’t you know? Don’t you guys talk?” Mercy asked in an accusing and confrontational tone, which also surprised her.

“Mercy!”

“Sorry. Well, I meant I thought maybe he had told you. What l am saying is that all is not well. I think we are breaking up.” She said.

“Wow.” Linda interjected.

Mercy shifted her gaze towards Linda and searched her face momentarily. She wondered if it was glee, what she saw on her friend’s face.

They had been friends for five years. For as long as Mercy had been in Mombasa. It was Linda that had helped her to settle down. She helped her find an affordable house, and gave her a fairly old mattress to use until she had bought hers. She had also lent her a stove that lay idle in her house and one Sufuria. They had first met at Mercy’s new workplace and clicked. Even though Linda moved to another school within the same town after one term, their friendship continued to flourish. When Mark came visiting for the first time, Mercy introduced them to each other. Linda and Mercy shared everything including intimate relationship stuff- and especially that. With time, they realized that they saw eye to eye on many things. Linda was two years Mercy’s senior. While Mercy was slender and with a chocolate complexion, Linda was plump, shapely and with a flawless fair skin. She also had thick eyebrows that didn’t need highlighting. She was effortlessly beautiful. Once, when hanging out with both Mark and Linda, Mercy caught Mark staring at Linda’s cleavage. It incensed her. They had a bad over it later that night.

“Please switch on the radio.” Mercy said as she went back to doing the dishes in earnest. The hangover had eased.

Linda stretched out her hand to press the power button which was within her arm’s reach. She turned up the volume a bit then she slid to lie on her back and started scrolling through her phone.

As Gary Barlow’s “Back for Good” played on Classic 105, Mercy reflected on her life for the past five years. On one hand, there was her relationship with Mark that had been seemingly thriving in the beginning but was now on edge. On the other hand, there was her teaching job that she had started to develop a strong dislike towards. She felt empty; like a shell, as though she was being helplessly tossed and torn apart by forces she had no control over.

 She had moved to Mombasa five years earlier to take up a job as a teacher of English at a multicultural school that followed the British Curriculum. While working as a Teaching Assistant at a smaller school that followed a similar system in Nairobi, she had come across an advert on the net and thought to give it a try. After a series of interviews, she had landed the job. She would be Grade 2A Class Teacher and would teach English in both Grade 2A and 2B. She loved the job abundantly at first. She had never before taught or imagined teaching such an eclectic class. Hers was a class of vibrant 7 and 8 year olds from varied cultural backgrounds. She had only read about kids with blue eyes in books. Then there she was, several years later, teaching kids with blue eyes. The class had 24kids, 10 of whom were Africans, 6 Caucasians and 8 Indians. African girls wore cornrows or braids but there were two who had what looked like permanent dread locks. Indian and white girls wore pigtails, ponytails and fringes liberally. All the boys mostly kept their hair short. There was just a slight variance in the other stream.

 That the kids were both smart and inquisitive made her job easy, fulfilling and interesting. She looked forward to seeing them every morning. To hear their hearty response to greetings. They were also bold and never shied from correcting their teacher when they noticed, say, a spelling mistake. Once, while teaching adjectives, Mercy had misspelled the word ‘inappropriate’. One girl named Marion, shouted from the back of the class,

 “But Ms., that isn’t how you spell Inappropriate.”

 “Oh darling, you are so smart. I’m sorry.” She said with a smile while erasing the word. She then asked the class to spell the word correctly. And they chorused in voices loaded with energy: I N A P P R O P R I A T E.

 It had been fun at first. Until it wasn’t.

She had remained the Grade 2A class teacher for the five years in the school. Which is to say, so far she had taught 5 groups of kids, 10 if you considered the streams.  Nothing much changed as far as routines as well as the nature of the kids went. The class size ranged anywhere between 24 to 26 kids each year. Over time, she grew weary of engaging sometimes entitled parents, issuing countdowns and detention threats to kids when they erred. Also, writing almost the same things on the whiteboard every morning, sometimes just replacing a few words bored her. Besides, with time her work load had increased. She had been added two more subjects after one teacher left the school, which meant she would spend more hours planning. Sometimes, her school work spilled into the night, affecting her sleeping hours. That compounded with the fact that that year, her class had a boy who often bullied others. Who also blurted randomly and hardly sat still during instruction. All the classroom behavior management techniques she applied proved futile. She had escalated the issue to the deputy head teacher at some point, who to her chagrin, only asked her to keep trying. She thought him despicable.

She grew irritable would no longer appreciate the kids’ inquisitiveness. Some of their questions would often be met with a smirk, or a lopsided smile.  Three times she had contemplated tendering her resignation. But she had bills to pay. And even now, the thought really bugged her.

She had just finished doing the dishes when Linda announced that she was going to take a shower. Her phone battery had ran low. She put it to charge and placed it on the bedside stool before grabbing a towel and going to the bathroom. Mercy, who was then feeling both hungry and tired, had decided to take a short rest on the bed before thinking of what to fix for lunch. She was kitchen averse and even just thinking about what to cook was is in itself taxing. She wanted to tap the screen of Linda’s phone to check the time when the screen lit up with an incoming message. The message was from an unsaved number. She was going to leave it alone had the last two digits of the sender’s number not caught her attention. She looked closely, shaking, she nearly broke a sweat. She dragged the screen to reveal a few more details. The message read,

”I can’t stop thinking about you.”

It was from Mark.