The Sponsor

Mzee Ajabu

Mzee Ajabu was bedridden at the private wing of Nairobi hospital. He was silent and unmoving. You could have mistaken him for a lifeless thing was it not for the machines that were beeping next to his bed. Pumping life into his veins. Holding his fragile heart and keeping it from shuttering to pieces.

Mama Wairimu stood next to her husband. She looked at him with a face full of sadness. You could not tell if she was sad because the comma had gotten a swing at her husband before she could or if she was thinking about her son, Fred. Even then she was plotting, scheming, looking for the slightest opening for a comeback.

Wairimu sat on a chair next to her dad. She was frail as if she was the one who was ill. Her mind kept playing back to her sister Olivia, then her father, then the state of the company. After the cuts were treated she had taken Olivia to Meadows Hospital. A mental institution in Nanyuki. It was plush green and well maintained. She had paid for her six months bill with the savings she had put aside to buy her first car.

She looked at her dad. She wouldn't have to pay for him, not with his comprehensive insurance cover. He thought about that, he had gotten himself a comprehensive insurance while his next of kin had the general one. She put that out of her mind. She did not need to get angry. She wondered if the hospital was well equipped to treat him and she made a mental note to look up overseas options and to touch base with Kitana on their viability.

"Mom, will you be okay," she heard herself say even though they were not at the best of terms."

Mama Wairimu stayed silent.

"I saw the empty bottles of wine, do you need help?"

"I will be fine, everything will be okay soon. You will see."

Wairimu started mouthing another sentence before the door flew open. Behind it was a stranger, in tattered clothes and a ragged face. A nurse behind him shouting, "You shouldn't go in there, you shouldn't go in there."

"Shut up woman. My dad could get you fired in a second. He's in there."

It was only after speaking that Wairimu recognised the voice, it was her brother. She had been told everything by their guard and she not only resented him. She loathed him with every fiber in her being.

"What are you doing here? Get out. Mom tell him to get out."

Mama Wairimu stayed silent. You could almost say she had the slightest hint of a smile on her face after her son walked into the door.

"Calm down sis, this is my dad as much as he's yours."

"You got us into this mess. Go to hell."

The commotion hit a crescendo and a nurse walked in and asked them to leave the room. "The patient needs his rest," she said politely. It was while they were outside that Fred started sobbing.

"I'm sorry mom, it was peer pressure. I'm broke I have nowhere to go."

Wairimu expected her mom to put him in check for everything he had done. To send him back to his pack of wolves till he atoned or the world taught him a lesson or two but instead she hugged him and told him to come back home. Wairimu realised that they were cut from the same cloth, she couldn't stay. She had to move out.