Brother Peter could not say exactly why sleep had deserted him these several days. He had gone to the neighbourhood clinic yesterday to check his high blood pressure and was told by the nurse that it was at its premium best. He was not surprised about the result, ever since he was diagnosed with High Blood Pressure twelve years ago, Brother Peter has taken his tablets religiously every day. Perhaps it was the air conditioning which was very cold tonight, because the power current has been unusually full these last few days. Or was it the four bottles of beer he took earlier in the day? Shouldn't beer help one to sleep rather than keep them awake? His wife, Mbue was sleeping soundly by his side. She always slept soundly, and had sometimes not noticed that the rain fell in torrents in the night, or that there was a clash of thunder while she slept. It's always took a diligent effort to bring her round to the nightly duty. Here was a woman who slept the sleep of the just and enjoyed the guiltlessness of the innocent. Brother Peter sighed audibly, letting out a lazy gush of breath as if in resignation to some inconquarable force. He closed his eyes again and tried not to think about anything, immersing his mind in an earthen pot of cold water, but incipient thoughts sneaked in again, intricate schemes of making money, thoughts of finding fortune and true happiness. Fleeting thoughts of the life he has led, the complexities of his situation and....Jesam! He could no longer close his eyes in spite of his best efforts. Jesam! He almost said the name aloud. In the pitch darkness, Brother Peter began to nod his head as if in final discovery of the cause of his emerging insomnia.
Jesam has grown in his life like a giant baobab tree, or malignant cancer. She was an enigma of sorts. Her voice was childlike and soothing. Her manners lait and smooth. She always appeared as a victim, drawing emotional sympathy wherever she went, without having to say a word. He had for almost two years been taken by the ambience of her silken ways and the overpowering emotions that only she can draw from him. He was jellyfish in her presence and will do her every wish that his time and money could muster. She would cower when he shouted, apologise when he queried, appear when he summoned and lie by his side upon his wish. When he called and found that her phone was switched off, terrible imaginations will fill his head images of her sleeping with another man will flash through his brain in carefully sequenced cinematographic scenes and he will barely save himself from fainting.
He loved her with a completeness that even he himself could not understand. She might indeed have been the very air he breathed and he was convinced that she loved him the same way too. Or did she? Jesam was not more than five feet two inches tall, slightly fat in built with a rotund belly that a mother of two children is generally permitted to have. Because she looked so completely like her mother, one of her few missions in life was to struggle not to be as fat as she was, since she was also short and fat in a rounded kind of way. But the more she declared this resolve, the more she implemented it in the breach because she did not have the discipline to exercise frequently or to stay away from food.