• All the tricks in the book are thrown at clingy bae by perpetual bachelor
Image: PEXELS
Diary,
In my bid to rid myself of Ms Harper, the beautiful American woman from Chicago, now in Kenya and very intent on making a husband of me, I have devised (and executed) all manner of devious plots that I hoped would successfully send her packing, without making me appear like a heartless jerk.
You see, it’s not that I don’t like Ms Harper; any man would be a fool not to. It’s the idea of marriage that is repulsive to me, and good, decent women like Harper will settle for nothing less than the real deal.
However, every one of my ploys — from making her think food in Kenya is third-rate to introducing her to the underbelly of our seedier locales — has landed short, and, if anything, seems only to make Harper like me more. Then, a gem of an idea hit me the other day.
Shirley!
A few doors down the street from me lives another beautiful (probably the most beautiful) woman, called Shirley. Honestly, I believe I’d get married to her and settle down with a nursery of kids if she asked me. Problem is, she won’t and probably never will.
Romantically, she wouldn’t touch me with a nine-foot pole. In her own words: “I like you a lot, Tom, but if the entire world population was annihilated and the hope of mankind once more flourishing hinged upon you and I getting it on? I’m afraid that would be the end of mankind.”
“But it’s my ‘prolific dating’, as you call it, that puts you off,” I’d counter. “If there were no other women in the world, then…”
“Oh, no, Tom. It’s the history of your prolific dating that turns me off. And that ain’t going nowhere, is it?”
Still, the fact that every time Shirley thinks of me, her ovaries shrivel, has never stopped her from doing me a favour every once in a while, or I reciprocating in kind.
Like the one time I agreed to be her fake date in a sibling war with her sister. And in turn, she stormed a boring date pretending to be my long-suffering wife. Now I seek her once more to get me out of my quagmire.
“You say she’s a woman?” Shirley asks when I tell her of Harper.
“Yes,” I say.
“And you say she’s beautiful?”
“Very.”
She squints at me. “Let me get this straight. A beautiful Western woman puts herself at the beck and call of Tom, the great womaniser, but you don’t want her? I don’t believe this.” She starts tagging at my clothes. “Where’s Tom?”
“Excuse me?”
“You look like Tom and talk like Tom but you can’t be Tom. What have you done with him?”
“Stop it, Shirley. I really need you to do me this one favour.”
She agrees. We head to my house and I introduce her to Harper. “I’m sorry I never said this before, but Shirley is my fiancée.”
Harper smiles. “Polygamy is legal in Kenya, right?”