It was those years we had conquered the primary exams and joined high school. We were the pride of the village.
The village cockerels, though we owned only one pair of nice trousers. Hormones raged, driving us to chase the village belles,
hoping to dump as much as we could before going back to another three month term in school. Condoms were not very common.
We did and told. So every young man knew who was doing who. And who was unlucky with who.
I was not among the lucky ones, that scored with every girl (thanks to shyness that left me tongue-tied when before a beautiful girl).
However, an age mate cousin (God bless you Becky!) ensured I got Kari by delivering her to our ‘cube’ and locking us in one Sunday afternoon.
She was to be my first love and I stuck to her like a tick.
This story is however about my best friend Peter and Wairimu, commonly called Nimu.
She was a petite yellow yellow with beautiful long hair that was usually done in four matutas.
And Peter could have died 20 times to have her.
His efforts however went unrewarded because Nimu feared to get pregnant.
Though she liked the attention young men turned her way, the fear of getting pregnant made her develop cruel survival skills,
becoming a prolific liar who made many a young man spend long unfruitful nights by their gate,
waiting for Nimu to come to them after the parents had retired for the night.
Cornered, Nimu would always be on her periods, or on ‘bad dates’, or yet another creatively made up, but mundane,
reason not to give in to the wiles of the young man. She would even tell you that she sleeps with your bigger brother just to escape.
The fact that she could not give in to Peter, or any other man, however, did not stop her from telling every other girl in the village
how Peter was her man and how they were ‘scoring’.
Nimu was the archetypal ‘karuga benji’ (a phrase coined by young men to refer to flirty young girls who would rather
jump through a thorny fence than give a lay).
It reached a time Nimu was driving my friend Peter crazy. While he could not score with the love of his life,
he could neither get some from any other girl because everyone knew he was Nimu’s boyfriend.
It came to be that laying Nimu had to be a harambee project, and so he enlisted our help.
It so happened that funeral wakes (maombolezi) were one community event nobody, even girls with the strictest of parents!,
would be denied to go. So we plotted, with my love, Kari, and cousin Becky that they would help Peter with Project Nimu.
Fortunately (!) there was a death in the neighbourhood and so they picked their friend and off we went to the maombolezi.
At around midnight, it was time to go home. It was a moonlit night. This night that Nimu was to be deflowered.
Becky and Nimu walked five meters ahead of Kari and I, as we held each other’s waists and whispered sweet nothings.
Peter, like a panther, lay crouched in the shadow of a K-apple fence, ready to pounce.
Peter pounced and grabbed Nimu by the hand and at the same time declaring it was him. Becky, perfect to the plot,
quickly moved ahead and left Nimu struggling with her man. We also passed them but waited a decent distance away.
What happened next was the biggest surprise of the night.
Unbeknown to us, the fence owner had trimmed the fence recently. The fence trimmings, with their more than an
inch-long thorns were scattered all over in the shadow of the fence. And that was where Peter was to launch
Project Nimu and nothing was going to stop him.
We could here Nimu complaining in a distressed tone, though we couldn’t make out the words and we all thought it was her usual trickery.
It later turned out that Peter was holding her to the ground and she was pleading that she had been laid on thorns.
Peter, the victim of many previous lies, could not believe her and was busy unshackling his royal sword,
ready to plunge into the long denied sweetness. But the cruellest surprise of the night was yet to come!
Peter had managed to roll down Nimu’s panties to somewhere near the knees. His sword was throbbing in his hand when he
lowered himself to find the pubescent mound of Venus…
What followed was a shocked ‘Wuui’ followed by the shout of my name. I quickly detached myself from Kari’s embrace and dashed back,
only to find my friend holding onto his now disappointed manhood, with a K-apple twig hanging on it.
He told me to help him remove it and as i pulled it out, a swift jet of hot blood hit me.
What followed was frantic efforts to stem the flow as Kari attended to Nimo. Quickly found handkerchiefs could not stop the flow.
Two hours after taking Peter home he fainted. It had now become an emergency.
I was to tell the unbelieving Peter’s dad that he was pierced when ‘helping himself’ by the fence before a vehicle was found
to take him to the District Hospital for stitching, blood transfusion and a weeks hospitalization.