Kigali was that kind of man who moved from woman to woman after every ten years. His total number of children was seven. At 66, he loved to cast himself as the victim of manipulative women. He claimed women emptied his pension savings, leaving him dry via aggressive spousal and child maintenance money demands.
“Sheila cleaned my pockets out; Lority was the love of my life until she made me raise a son whose paternity was falsely said to be mine; Gladys has no gladness in my heart anymore…” he shouted once every week, sobbing over a pint of Irish stout beer.
Apart from being a serial womanizer, Kigali was an alcoholic and a darling of the local Londoners bar. This was because his sob story was adored by many people who took time to listen to him. What was fascinating about Kigali was that he was never short of a woman to stay with, sometimes for six months, sometimes six years, sometimes two weeks, whenever he wished.
Juliet, the mother of three of his seven kids, had recently kicked him out of the family house and banned him from taking anything other than his five pairs of underwear, a bread bin, and an empty sack of whiskey bottles.
“Kigali, you’re going to be on the streets—how will you even survive this winter?” Admire, his close friend and a mechanic, teased him, genuinely worried.
“I’m going to be in another warm house soon with a loving lady running me a bubble bath,” Kigali replied, munching a half-lit cigarette at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re crazy! Which delusional lady would open her doors for you? ” said Admire.
Kigali kicked the dust, rolled his eyes, and strolled away without bidding his friend goodbye. In a week, events unrolled exactly as he said they would, to his favor. Admire spotted him downing a mug of dark brown coffee on the stairs of Marjorie’s apartment. Marjorie, the maverick lady who never left her house, had a relatively comfortable life. She had her own state apartment, emotional disability grant, and a sizable $80,000 trust fund left by her late grandmom.
She had no child and no husband. She was a godmother to two white cats and now a sort of provider to Kigali, who boasted of having fallen in love with her.
Kigali had quickly moved into Marjorie’s apartment and had been lavished with new clothes and new smokes. He would make a show of doing his morning jogs past the house of his recent ex-wife just to shove it in her face.
“I love you, Marjorie—I know this is still too early for you to process—but you have always been the love of my life,” Kigali serenaded her every morning during the first week of moving in.
“Oh, my lovely spoon, Kigali. And your ex-wife?” Marjorie asked.
Kigali rubbed his index finger on a half-burning cigarette and cursed.
“Juliet never loved me—she expected me to hand in my day’s earnings daily,” he said.
“Oh, poor you, my love; she lost a good man.”
“Yes, she lost me,” said Kigali, topping out a whiskey bottle at 6 am before breakfast.
“Will you pass me that plate of cereals, and you know my eggs must be half done, right?”
“Of course, my love—your eggs should be on point, soft yolk, toast bread burnt to maximum, and the coffee weak but smooth with no foamy edges,” she said.
Kigali and Marjorie’s affair was moving at such lightning speed that for two weeks he did not go to Londoners pub. His friends assumed that, as a man in a new honeymoon phase, he was down to pleasing his new live-in lover. So the assumption went on.
After twenty days, Kigali suddenly showed up in the pub with a small bag of clothes in hand and no money to order a pint.
“Marjorie kicked me out and said my snoring triggers her PTSD,” he said.
“Aha! Loverboy!” the whole bar said, erupting in gross laughter.
Kigali bolted out of the bar with his bag of clothes, humiliated by the mockery and, of course, Marjorie kicking him out of his home.
“It was too good to last,” Admire said when he met him at the city’s Union Station.
Kigali was pretending to be a blind beggar just to shag a couple of dollars from railway men who had netted their December bonuses.
“Drop the act. Don’t you have some shame?”
“I’m in a tight situation, Admire, but I need this money. There is this lady, a widower; we are in the talking stage. Adeline is her name…”
Admire scratched his shoe on the tarmac and tapped lightly on Kigali’s cheeks.
“You’re unbelievable,” he said.
“What, now?” Kigali was annoyed at his friend’s judgement.
“Adeline, the widower of the railway conductor who just got her late spouse’s pension payout?”
“Look, it’s not about the money…” Kigali said, his lips trembling.
Admire cursed under his breath, his words unintelligible as he walked away from him. Adeline had been married to Admire’s late uncle for 30 years; he was his mother’s only brother. Kigali’s modus operandi dawned on him.
Kigali was a lazy man, a bedhopper who jumped from woman to woman. His trick was dastardly but brutally effective. He targeted vulnerable middle-aged women who had no men. Who were either widows or suffering from emotional disabilities. Women who were on state welfare money, had state housing, or were receiving their late husbands’ pensions. His targets had no children, and he would move in with them, pretending to be in love just to get the easy life.
When his act was exposed, he could jump to the next woman. Admire had to act quickly and warn his aunt Adeline before she became Kigali’s next victim.
