Sunday had been quiet. Maimbo had requested to skip duties at the pavilion in the show grounds so as to attend church but also skipped church.
“I am tired, bana Junior,” she told me. “I need some rest. This show thing is taxing.”
We went to Soweto market and bought beans, kapenta, dry fish, bondwe, cabbage and a whole lot of other foodstuffs, particularly dry rations.  It was a slow day that was generally boring.  Dinner was early.
Just as Herbert Mutabi was reading the 19:00 hours news with Chitalu Mulenga on Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation television we were eating nshima with dry fish and impwa.
I retreated to my bedroom straight after, stuck head phones into my ears and listened to radio till I dozed off.  I was avoiding my brother in law, Jack Lukhalo a.k.a. Sir Jack. Somehow, I thought I would easily give away my relationship if I sat there in the lounge with husband and wife.
Monday morning Maimbo left for the show grounds, taking her two kids with her.  She said they would spend the day with the Kitemboyas, a Kenyan family in Sunningdale with whose kids the children went to school together and sometimes themselves spent time at our home playing with the Lukhalo kids.
I had helped Lister with tidying up, quickly doing the lounge and the dining areas, before sitting down to watch a movie on M-net.  Sir Jack emerged from the bedroom at approximately 08:30hours and asked for Lister, who came from the kitchen wiping her wet hands on her apron.
“I forgot yesterday,” he said, reaching into his pocket and bringing out a K100 note.  “The doctor says I should take ginger tea.  I should have bought it as I was coming home but this…ma busy you know.  Kindly dash somewhere and get me ginger tea.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Lister taking the note out of his hand.  He headed back into his bedroom and as Lister also headed towards our room to change, he shouted out across at her “Please do hurry up, Lister.  I need to get to the office.”
“Yes sir, I will be back soon,” she responded.
Lister had been gone about twenty minutes when Sir Jack came out of his bedroom again and beckoned to me.  I was in turmoil again.  This was not right. At a certain point and very soon for that matter it ought to end.  Yet the same hold he had on me from the first time he had proposed to have sex with me still magnetized me and drew me from the seat where I sat.  My confused state of mind must have shown on my face because he stared at me and asked if anything was the matter.
Yes, everything was the matter, everything in this set up was abnormal, evil and undesirable but I shook my head to signify that all was well.
I followed him but hesitated when he headed towards his bedroom which he shared with my sister.  He beckoned again.  I walked on as he held the door open letting me in before shutting it behind us.
I was stiff, my heart restless and grinding hard against my rib cage.  Discomfort competed with excitement.  I was never capable, it seemed, of brushing off this tall handsome man.  Much as I fully acknowledged that this was not the right thing to do, much as I knew this was the epitome of betrayal, my mind and body were paralyzed to the point where I just followed his instructions.  As it had been two days ago, I again threw off my attires, baring my all for a man who was supposed to be exclusively for my own sister, and this time, totally substituting her by lying down to his sexual service and satisfaction on her own matrimonial bed.
&&&&&
I was fast learning to live with my guilt, spending that evening with Maimbo and her husband and the kids in the lounge, chatting and laughing as if nothing was out of place.  I told myself for as long as I lived in this house, I would do everything within my means to stop sleeping with my brother in law, but that it might take a while.  I consoled myself by going over his refrain in the morning that the world was full of such activities in millions of homes.  He assured me there was adultery in churches and offices, fornication and incest in homes, and all sorts of similar activities in parks, in cars, name them.  I shouldn’t unduly worry as long as Maimbo didn’t discover, because only what she knew could hurt her.  I told him it might be all right for as long as he didn’t make me pregnant.
“I am very fertile, mulamu,” I confided.  “Bashi Junior had me only ONCE and I became pregnant.”
“Don’t become pregnant,” he said as if ordering me.
“What if I do become pregnant?” I pushed.
“You won’t.  But we can cross that bridge if we do get there.”
&&&&&
Tuesday, he went for work without appearing interested in me.  Wednesday, he again emerged from his bedroom and shocked me with a request that I dash and get him some garlic polony for his breakfast.  He offered no explanations as to why he needed that particular stuff, pushing the money into my right palm and said I should hurry up.
I was immediately very troubled.  The other day, he had sent Lister, the maid, away to buy ginger tea and had, as soon as she had left, gotten busy having sex with me.  Was there a possibility he wanted me out so as to this time have sex with Lister?  I told myself this couldn’t be, that I was just becoming possessive and therefore unduly suspicious.  I remembered too that there were a number of times in the fifteen months I had been around that he had said since Lister was busy with other chores, could I go and get him one thing or another.
Yet that, in my mind, was beginning to take the shape of a new dawn, a realization that this man might have been sleeping with Lister all along and had just now added me to the triangle of women in the house with whom he was enjoying sex.
I went to our bedroom, changed and threw Junior onto my back before wrapping him in chitenge.
“Ba Lister, I will find you,” I said as I walked past the kitchen.  I stealthily took the keys out of the outer door, threw them into my handbag and closed the door behind me.
&&&&&
I walked out, past the gate of the perimeter fencing that enclosed about eight semi-detached housing units of which one was the one we lived in.  Outside the gate, I hesitated to go further.  My heart was thumping with anxiety.  Somehow, I wanted to get back there, in the house, and find that all was well, that Sir Jack was not sexually engaged in any way with Lister.  I wanted to prove myself wrong.
Somehow, though, I was totally restless, fearing the worst.  I asked myself what I would do if I entered that house twenty minutes later and caught Sir Jack red-handed with Lister!  Sir Jack was not my husband.  Yes, he was my sister’s husband but I could not accuse him of impropriety because I had ceded that right by sleeping with him myself. I realized that I only wanted to discover them in the act out of my own possessiveness over the man, and also as a way of satisfying my own sexual ego – if they weren’t doing it, then it would prove he was after me for my own good looks, not out of his lecherousness.  He, by sleeping with me, had given me self-belief again that I was a good looking woman.  But if he was sleeping with that bony and shapeless Lister, that wizened little woman without hips and whose chest was so flat you could play neat-passing soccer on it, then his attentions on me were nothing but deception, his  attentions demonstrated no more than the apex of lust which he periodically disposed off vulnerable women like me and Lister.
I walked back. Towards the flat.  Briskly. In a hurry to get to the bottom of this whole charade. I opened the kitchen door quietly. Then stealthily, on my toes, I headed towards the bedrooms.  I tiptoed a bit in my haste to find them in the act.  The two bedroom doors were a mere two meters apart.  From our bedroom door I could hear it.  Inside Sir Jack’s bedroom!  Lister was loud.  She left you in no doubt what she was feeling.  She must have been on cloud nine. With my sister’s husband. With the husband of her boss! In her employer’s bed having sex with her employer’s husband.
I was so furious I felt like bursting in to stop the infamy.  I wanted to scratch out Lister’s eyes and hit Sir Jack where it would hurt so much for cheating on me. Cheating on my sister.  Taking turns on all three women who lived under his roof.  The bastard! The beast!  The fool!
I stood there as if hypnotized by Lister’s loud moments of bliss.  Suddenly, it was all quiet.  I tiptoed away from the door, not sure whether I wanted them to see me and know that I knew what they had been up to or dash off to the shops.
I decided to get out.  As quickly as I could.  They shouldn’t see me.  I must first decide how to deal with this. So I dashed out and walked out again, towards the shops to buy the polony which I now knew Sir Jack never needed in the first place.
How I felt like climbing him and eating out every body part on him!