TWENTY NINE: Hero complex

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It was March 28th, fifteen hundred hours Zambian time.

What had started as a sunny, warm and bright day had turned dark, cold and overcast without warning. Before the organisers of the Mkushi Agric Expo could figure out what to do, the heavens opened. A heavy downpour swept across the grounds, sending visitors and exhibitors scrambling for cover.

A group of young people squeezed into a booth showcasing a variety of hybrid maize seeds. The young woman in charge of the booth seized the opportunity, enthusiastically introducing the company’s products and fielding questions from the captive audience. She was mid-sentence when her eyes landed on a young man leaning against the pillar at the edge of the booth, staring out into the rain with a distant, gloomy expression.

She paused. Turned to her colleague beside her.

“Hey, can you take over for me?”

Her colleague nodded. She stepped away from the display and walked over to the gloomy man, tapping him on the shoulder.

“Hey, stranger.”

The young man turned. His eyes brightened immediately in recognition of the short, slim and cheerful girl standing before him. He reached out and pulled her into a hug.

“Chibesa. What are you doing here?”

She stepped back and proudly pointed to the badge pinned to her white blouse, grinning.

He read it and raised his eyebrows. “Commercial Sales Manager. Nice. Congratulations.”

“Thank you.” She tilted her head, studying him. “And you? What have you been up to since graduation?”

“This and that.” He shrugged, glancing back at the rain. “I bought a farm with the award money. Just trying to put things into place.”

Chibesa crossed her arms and looked at him with the particular expression of someone who was not buying it.

“So that is why the school’s heartthrob is giving off Lex Luthor vibes?”

He chuckled, a little sheepishly. “I am?”

“Hmm.”

He was quiet for a moment, watching the rain sheet down across the expo grounds. “It has been a sunny couple of weeks. I just wasn’t expecting the heavy rains, especially now that we are getting ready for harvesting.”

“Oh I see.” Chibesa patted her chest dramatically. “Here I was thinking you were worried about your white moonlight, Yolanda.”

A flicker of something crossed his face. Guilt, maybe. Or the particular discomfort of a man whose feelings have been named out loud without his permission.

“Yolanda and I,” he said carefully, “there was never anything between us.”

Chibesa studied him for a long moment. She had known Benson since their first year. She knew the way his jaw tightened when he was being careful with his words. She knew the difference between a man who felt nothing and a man who felt too much and had learned to keep it contained.

She sighed softly and patted his shoulder.

“Good. Keep it that way.” Her voice was gentle but firm. “She is trouble you do not want to get mixed up with. I wouldn’t want you to end up in jail for her actions.”

He turned to look at her properly for the first time since she had walked over. “Chibesa, what is going on?”

She looked at him with something close to pity. “You really don’t know.”

“Know what? What is going on?”

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked away briefly then back at him.

“Ah, forget I said anything. Look, it was nice running into you but I have to get back to the—”

His phone rang.

He pulled it out. A string of numbers, none of them registered in his contacts. He frowned at the screen.

Then a message popped up.

Benny its me yolanda please pick up.

The change in him was immediate and unmistakable. Chibesa watched it happen in real time. The slight tension that left his shoulders. The way his eyes softened and sharpened at the same time. The nervous energy that only one person in the world had ever been able to produce in Benson Phiri.

He moved his thumb toward the answer button.

Chibesa reached out and grabbed his hand, shaking her head.

“Is that Yolanda? It is her, right? Benson, don’t answer that. Please.”

He hesitated. One second too long.

Yolanda’s voice came over the line anyway. “Benny, hello, are you there?”

Chibesa cut the line herself and pulled him away from the crowd, toward the quieter edge of the booth where the rain drummed steadily against the canvas overhead.

He glared at her. “Why did you do that?”

“Because she is wanted.” Chibesa kept her voice low and even. “Multiple counts, Benson. Murder. Fraud. She is all over the news.”

He shook his head immediately. “Landy, no. There has to be a mistake.”

She looked at him with the patience of someone who had expected this exact response. “A mistake? Benson, she hired someone to harm her own daughter just to free herself from Gershom.”

“Where are you getting that from?” His voice rose slightly. “Landy is not like that. You don’t know her. Gershom was abusive to her, she was—”

“I know you are infatuated with her,” Chibesa said quietly. “And I know that right now she cannot do anything wrong in your eyes. I understand that. But Benson, listen to me.” She waited until he met her gaze. “Her father-in-law is dead because of her. Last week she stabbed a man in the neck who was trying to hand her over to the police. He died. Another man in the same vehicle died too. She is not just a woman in trouble. She is a woman leaving bodies behind her.”

The rain intensified briefly, filling the silence between them.

“I don’t know why you haven’t heard any of this,” she continued, “but consider yourself lucky. Everyone associated with her is in trouble. Her mother. Her cousin. People who had nothing to do with anything. Don’t walk into her trap, Benson. Please.”

He was quiet for a long time. He stared out at the rain-soaked grounds, at the wet red earth and the grey sky pressing down over Mkushi. A muscle worked in his jaw.

“She is my friend,” he said finally. “I cannot just abandon her because everyone else says she is guilty. Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty?”

Chibesa looked at him for a long moment. There was no anger in her expression. Only the particular sadness of someone watching a person they care about walk toward something they cannot be stopped from walking toward.

“Don’t let your hero complex ruin the good life you have built for yourself.” She patted his shoulder once, gently. Then she turned and walked back toward the booth, shaking her head as she went.

Benson stood at the edge of the canvas, watching the rain.

His phone rang again. The same string of numbers.

He stared at the screen until it stopped.

It rang again.

He stared at it again.

It rang a third time. A fourth.

On the fifth, he switched it off and put it back in his pocket.

He stood there for a long time after that, hands in his pockets, watching the rain thin and the grey sky begin to break apart at the edges. Around him, the expo slowly came back to life. Exhibitors straightened their displays. Visitors emerged from cover. The wet red earth steamed faintly in the returning warmth.

He thought about Chibesa’s words. He thought about the girl he had watched from across lecture halls for three years, the one who had never once looked his way, the one who had walked through university like the whole world was a stage built specifically for her. He thought about the message on his phone screen.

Benny its me yolanda please pick up.

He pulled his phone back out. Switched it on.

It rang before the screen had fully loaded.

He answered it.

He listened.

When she finished speaking, he was quiet for a moment.

“Where are you?” he asked.

She told him.

“I will be there tonight,” he said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

He ended the call and stood for another moment in the clearing warmth of the afternoon. The last of the rain dripped from the canvas above him. Somewhere behind him, Chibesa was back at her booth, talking about hybrid maize seeds with the easy confidence of a woman who had her life exactly where she wanted it.

He thought about what she had said.

Then he picked up his keys and walked to his truck.

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The drive from Mkushi took four hours on a good road. Tonight the road was wet and the headlights caught the mist rising off the tarmac in long, pale ribbons. Benson drove in silence, no radio, no phone calls, just the sound of the engine and the wet road beneath the tyres.

He was not a man who made decisions lightly. Everything he had built since graduation, the farm, the store, the café, the quiet and steady life he had constructed from the prize money and years of careful work, all of it had been built on the same principle. Think first. Move second. Don’t let emotion outrun your sense.

He had broken that principle exactly once before, in his second year, when he had spent an entire semester trying to work up the courage to speak to Yolanda Nyoni. He had watched her from a distance, admired her from a distance, and ultimately been invisible to her from a distance. It had cost him nothing but his dignity and a semester’s worth of distraction.

This was different.

He knew it was different.

He drove anyway.

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© Ponda