The Sponsor

Fred

It's the way boys were built, their heads were hard. It showed their virility and hardness and it was in that way that Mama Wairimu didn't say anything when Fred started smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol when he was still in primary school.

She felt that he was now on the path to becoming a real man. She would sometimes leave a bottle of Jack Daniels carelessly in the house just so he could stumble on it and be more of a real man.

He switched from cigarettes and alcohol to khat for a while. It was a disgusting habit. It gave his mouth a disgusting green color and sap dripped from his mouth. He started keeping a questionable company too. 'Boys will be boys' Mama Wairimu thought and it was in that way that she did not say anything. Mzee Ajabu would have said something but he was closing another business deal. Opening another woman's legs.

He picked up bhang right after he joined campus. He had been a kid who performed exemplary well even with his distractions but after a few puffs of bhang he now felt he had a future in music and dropped out of college. You would think that would have been the straw that broke Mama Wairimus back but it didn't, instead she supported him even though she knew that her son was more interested in the glamor of being a star than in the drudgery of getting there.

She still didn't raise alarm when she realized he was using powder. It's just a phase she convinced herself with a glass of wine in hand. She had gone to his husbands bedroom and seen the watches missing and she had immediately replaced them with knock offs. She knew her husband wouldn't raise alarm. Not with all his travels and strange bedfellows.

Alarm came when she walked into the closet and her husband safe was wide open with nothing in it. There was maybe three million shillings in that safe and she placed her hands on her temples. Her head burning up.

She ran into Fred's bedroom. She knocked. She had not been in that bedroom since Fred was a teenager. He liked it that way. She knocked again and again until he decided to turn the knob. The door was unlocked and it opened easily. A stench hit her like a hummer, then shock overwhelmed her after she scanned the goriness in the room. It looked like an abandoned dumpsite.

There was white powder on the table and her son lay like something lifeless on the bed. She approached and Fred started chocking, white froth coming out of his mouth. She ran to her phone and dialed their family doctor and in twenty minutes she was seated behind an ambulance the doctor giving her an earful.

"You're lucky, he could have died from a drug overdose. His heart was almost shutting down."

She looked at his son on the stretcher pale like stale milk. Tubes running in his arms like a network of electric wires and a gas mask on his face and she felt paralyzed. It was then that she realized that when boys wanted to be boys you shouldn't allow them.