Chapter 1
Next Best Thing by Ben Murigu
Marvin Gitau lay on his side with his back to me, his breathing careful, measured—too deliberate to be real. Suddenly our bed was thorny, cold. No longer the warm inviting hub that offered respite for two bodies finally spent.
I lay perfectly still, mortally afraid that even shifting the Vitafoam mattress slightly might break whatever fragile truce his body had long struck with itself.
I counted the seconds between his breaths, aware that I was doing the kind of arithmetic that no university don ever teaches—calculating safety, gauging despair, weighing love against fear. Against caution.
And I wondered, not for the first time, which of us was truly holding the other together. Propping the other. Anchoring him. Shielding him.
* * * *
I knew that breathing—I’d learned it over eight years.
Eight years is a long enough time to know a man.
But not enough for a man of my intelligence to make the grievous mistake of confusing familiarity with permanence, of declaring our love indefatigable just because it has weathered a million hurricanes.
For the eight years that we had successfully pretended to be both amiable roomies and bosom buddies, we’d survived secrecy and endured Christmases coloured with polite smiles and evasive replies.
We’d waded through casual cruelty of relatives who’d wished to know when he planned on finding himself a wife, settling down; and suffered the quieter cruelty of pretending that those questions—paused laughingly—were innocent. Harmless. Not at all intrusive.
What we had not survived, however—what we were discovering then—was coercion disguised as tradition, wielded by people who loved him conditionally and unapologetically.
* * * *
The signs were there alright; I saw them three weeks before he spoke to me about his pain, a whole twenty days before he finally found the courage to open up about his dilemma.
It was all in the Falcon Bank diary he gifted me on New Year’s—the red one, that no-one ever saw: his inexplicable loss of appetite, the curious way he pushed food around his plate, apologized for not being hungry, blamed end-year work pressures for his stress; the way sleep escaped him, how he lay awake at night staring at our drab bedroom ceiling and slipped out of bed at two A.M. to sit on the sofa downstairs as though a vengeful ghost haunted him; the manner in which his sudden silence irked me.
See, my Marvin—an Econ major recently promoted to Branch Manager-Kitusuru Branch—was neither loud nor wordy.
But, in his own quiet way, he kept me in the loop—office politics, client oddities, traffic absurdities.
He did it for me, because of my need to feel connected to the world outside; the much more lively universe that my hectic online writing work so forcefully shielded me from.
Slowly, that narration that had kept me going for the longest time, stopped. He went mum, became a man living inward, completely sealed off, conserving energy like some seasoned astronaut keen on rationing oxygen. Preserving his life.
Sex disappeared last. Quietly. Gently. With apologies that seemed rehearsed, felt heavier than rejection.
“I’m just tired,” he quipped.
“I’m not in the right headspace, sweets.”
I told the Kamba in me that it was temporary, much like the sweltering January heat. Convinced myself of the need not to personalize it. Cautioned my madly whirling brain against reading too much into it and ruining any prospects of a hasty resolution of the no doubt precarious matter.
* * * *
When he finally told me on Friday night, it came out sideways.
We were sitting on the edge of our unmade king-sized divan bed, socks still on, neither of us quite ready to turn in yet, to call it a night. He stared at the wall as though the words were written there and he just had to read them aloud.
“They’ve set a date,” he said.
I wanted so badly to speak, but I held my tongue. Waited impatiently.
“The twentieth—next Saturday.”
Still, I waited.
“The dowry’s been paid.”
I felt the room tilt.
“Four million—paid in full,” he said, chuckling mirthlessly, “without my say-so, minus the groom’s consent.”
* * * *
What really ticked me off was the way they’d teamed up, banded together to frustrate him.
It wasn’t just his usually impossible mother this time; it was the aunts—three of them, living in the States, armed with the callousness, the arrogance, that dollar possession ultimately precipitated in most of our compatriots.
They were pros, those three women. Bullies who’d long mastered the art of distance: staying far enough to avoid the daily consequences, but hovering close enough to force obedience, enforce compliance.
They hadn’t asked him if he wanted to marry her. They’d simply conferenced in, informed him that he would. At the hallowed Holy Family Basilica, no less.
Suddenly, there existed a woman. Twenty-six. Pretty. University-educated.
Same tribe, Kikuyu; same county, Kiambu.
Same class. Same neighbourhood. Kitusuru.
A devout Catholic woman selected not for love, but for fit. Picked solely because of the obvious optics, favoured due to the undeniable success aesthetic.
Everything aligned perfectly—except the bitter, honest truth that no-one but us knew.
* * * *
What struck me most was not their cruelty, but their calm. Their composure. No shouting. No threats. Zero drama. Just facts, neatly laid out like an invoice.
This is what was expected of a good son. A God-fearing thirty-four-year-old man.
They didn’t need to say the rest. He knew it already.
If he refused, he would lose everything: the palatial six-bedroom house we lived in, the silver BMW X7 he cruised around in, the six Falcon Bank personal accounts he operated. The safety net that made adult life feel manageable. Doable. Survivable.
* * * *
People talk about choice as though it exists equally for everyone. As though dependency doesn’t warp the ground beneath your feet. As though money isn’t a language of command.
Legally, yes—he could refuse.
But power doesn’t dwell inside the law. Not really. Not when it comes to these ruthless moneyed folks. To them, power is wielded like an axe—and it resides in leverage.
And Marvin—my Marvin—had none.
* * * *
“They won’t listen,” he said matter-of-factly. “They’ll cut me off.”
He said it flatly, like some stiff-neck met weather forecaster.
I realized then how tired he was, how fatigued he had been—not just physically, but psychologically as well. Mentally. Emotionally. Existentially.
Tired to the proverbial bone of living our lie. Of explaining, of resisting, of caring. Of being pressed under the stubby thumbs of four powerful women. Being scrutinized permanently, under review constantly.
I wanted so badly to denounce their folly, to rage on his behalf; I desired so desperately to dismantle the whole structure—culture, class, hypocrisy—brick by freakin’ brick.
Instead, I sat quietly, my calloused hands supporting my ton-heavy head; because outrage required energy that I, unfortunately, no longer had.
Marvin?
He was dispirited. Decapitated at the knees.
He rightly felt the decision had already been made, and all that remained was the endurance to stay unhappily married. The fortitude to remain sadly wed.
* * * *
Something shifted then—not in him, but in me.
That night, I fully understood, was no longer about the wedding, or the dowry, or even our relationship. It was about watching him like a hawk, and keeping positively engaged. Happy, but on check.
I moved quietly, deliberately. Pills flashed down the toilet. Alcohol moved down to the forever-locked basement, and the key tossed into the backyard. Phones fully charged.
I did not announce any of these actions—protection needed no audience.
* * * *
For days, I was worried sick. Careful not to doze off, not to veer off.
See, Marvin had joked about dying before. Twice.
The first time, we were seriously zonked and arguing over something small, something childish—chores, I think. He laughed, exasperated, and said, “Sometimes I think it would be much easier if I just wasn’t here.”
The second time was months later, after a family gathering at the family home just a spit-throw away from our not-so-humble abode. “Maybe I should just sleep and not wake up at all,” he said lightly.
We’d laughed. We’d moved on. But I’d not forgotten—jokes of that nature don’t just disappear. They lodge themselves somewhere deep inside your head, waiting to be awakened, seeking to be noticed, hoping to be confirmed as real.
Lying beside him, listening to his careful breathing, those jokes rearranged themselves into something else entirely.
They became warnings that I’d so foolishly—so woefully—dismissed.
* * * *
That night, he climbed into bed and turned away from me without a word. No silly quip about drooling, snoring. No kiss goodnight. Just the silent presentation of his bare python-tattoo-filled back.
I lay there, staring into the ominous darkness, my mind circling the same terrible question:
What happens if I say the wrong thing?
If I told him to walk away, and he collapsed under the unyielding weight of familial exile—wouldn’t that be on me? If I asked him to go through with it, and he disappeared into a life that, in the end, suffocated him—would that not be my doing too?
Slowly, in my nakedness, it dawned on me…
his ingenious plan. Maybe that was the Lit major in me suddenly going on overdrive but Marvin—a master manipulator in his own right—was, in a sense, preparing to abdicate.
Consciously or unconsciously, he wanted—nay, needed—me to, ultimately, make the choice for him.
To make things easy, by either leaving in a huff just so he could convince himself that he could’ve survived the onslaught if I’d stuck it out, or staying so that he could subtlety blame his seemingly endless parental and economic woes on my stubbornness.
He didn’t say it aloud. Not explicitly. But it was there—in the way he’d so deftly emptied himself of decision, handed the proverbial hot frying pan to me with shaking hands.
For a moment—God forgive me—I considered it.
Ponderously weighed the pros and the cons of telling him exactly how I felt.
Letting him know, right there, right then, that I would stand by him no matter what.
That I would accept being—remaining—secret.
That I would fold myself, shrink my bruised ego enough so it could eventually fit into the fine margins of his suddenly sanctioned life.
But beneath my nobility, my temptation to play the heroic lover, was something darker: fear. The crippling fear of seeing him torn to bits, piece by piece, by the avalanche of rejection, and knowing, deep down, that I—Victor Mutuku—caused it. Let it happen.
The morbid fear of losing him.
Being lonely. Being alone.
* * * *
Love, I finally realized sometime that very night, can stay alive—survive very harsh climatic conditions, much like the cactus; but then it would be compelled to morph into something else entirely. Some new tree, prickly and unsightly.
I leaned closer and spoke quietly.
“Marv, I know you’re awake,” I said. “You don’t have to pretend with me.”
He didn’t turn. But his breathing stuttered somewhat.
“I love you,” I continued. “I’m here—I’m not leaving you tonight. But I can’t decide your life for you. And I can’t pretend—smile, or wish this particularly stinky situation away.”
The words stung, no doubt; but they hung between us a while, fragile but necessary.
Marcus Gitau disappeared, went very still.
I didn’t rush to soothe him. I didn’t backtrack.
I did the next best thing—I let the truth take charge; boldly permitted it to stand on its own two firm feet, right there in the dark, as though it were some ambitious toddler that was finally done crawling.