Anna Grace Awilli
One of my boyfriends introduced me to wine. The memory of its taste has never left me -it was so good!
If the demons of alcoholism in my father’s lineage had introduced me to alcohol through wine, I would be a certified drunkard by now. Unfortunately, and fortunately, they were too incompetent and started with beer instead. Its bitter taste put me off of alcohol altogether -that is, until said boyfriend introduced me to wine.
That first taste of beer at the age of 10 was the first and last time that I tried it. Which is funny because prior to then, I had drunk all sorts of alcoholic drinks. I come from the Northern part of Uganda and let’s just say that up there, there is no difference between water, milk, and alcohol -the goal is to stay hydrated.
In fact, all the alcohol I ever drank in my life, I drunk it between the ages of 7 and 10, some of it seated with my father and drawing from the same pot with a long, thin wooden straw, its dipped end wrapped in a small, white, filtrating muslin.
It was wired into me like clock work, the Saturday afternoon alcohol routine: arrive home, take off shoes. Peel off socks and fix them in said shoes. Enter the house and pace the cold cement all the way to the bedroom. Place school bag at the head of my bed. Take off uniform. Put on home clothes. Go to the kitchen. Pick the jerrycan with the cut off mouth to make a wider opening, and run to Plot 12A, opposite the abandoned storied building at the end of Gower’s Road. Collect the maruwa and come back home. Boil hot water. Wash the straws. Add hot water to the maruwa. Go and play. Suck from the straw -sometimes.
Many years later, sometime in the mid 2000s, I do not remember exactly when, I was sent to buy alcohol and I refused. The nuns at the school I was attending at the time had taught us about being assertive. I waited for it: the blows on my back, palms across my face and bicycle wire lock behind my thighs- it never came. I was never again asked to buy alcohol. That is, until many years later into adulthood when my boyfriend came over to visit and asked me to buy some wine, which I did.
We drank it on the patio of the apartment that I was renting at the time. It overlooked the city which, during the night, its bright lights in the distance danced through the lens of my thick eye glasses. I am shortsighted. That means that I cannot see things that are far, right? But why did he try to convince me that the picture I saw in his phone was not that of a naked woman? That was most definitely Sheila that I saw. Surely, even if I was drunk, I was not too drunk to recognize my own sister’s body, was I?
I grabbed the wine bottle and smashed it against the wall, then I went at him with it, its broken edge the crocodilian jaws of my spite. “Stop talking! Just stop talking! I am not stupid, okay?!” I screamed.
I raised my hand, broken bottle edge to his head and went: One. Two. Three…counting my breath and stopping myself from doing something that I knew I would regret. It was a cold realisation that slithered down my spine and jolted my drunk mind to wide-eyed sobriety. The demons in my father’s lineage were not incompetent after all.
While all these years I thought that I had escaped alcohol by their incompetence of making me taste that off putting beer, they had kept the wine to introduce me to something worse: violence.
#fiction
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