THE VOICE IN THE DESERT

JUST GEOGRAPHY

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 08:29:11 +0100

A class in geography

Nigeria is a ponderously large country—in land mass and in every other sense. But you’d never know it, cooped up as you are in one little corner of the country. We all maintain our own little slices of the nation, hardly venturing beyond our neck of the woods, whatever that expression means.

Take a drive through the northern part of the country and you’d see what I mean. On September 26, 2006 after leaving camp we breezed through Minna on our way to Kontagora. Of course leaving Paiko had its own amazing set of problems but we were all headed for our respective places of posting which had put camp romances asunder and all else could stay afloat until we settled.

Driving through the norther region is an unrivalled lesson in geography. I never knew what Zungeru looked like before RN433 purred through it in Fatherland, but now I know the sleepy little town like the back of my hand. It is filled with people easily scared and excited by crime. I once escaped being robbed in the town on my way to Minna two months later in November. Unfortunately, while I was safe behind the stickup the robbers attacked someone I had come to know even though nominally. Mrs Obi, a peer-education trainer from NYSC and an NACC patron. Later I would get to know more of her.

Back to geography class. The landscape is breathtaking. If there is one thing the north has over the other regions of Nigeria, its panoramic, beautiful landscape—rocky formations rising on all sides and tumbling over each other like tiny cancerous bumps ready to regenerate once cut. The fields of green ears of corn (maize and millet) sweep endlessly before you as if there is no tomorrow. When they turn straw or brown in the dry season the beauty of straw is even more astounding. To see such is to be one with nature at least and God at most. A poet could lose himself watching such wonder and come up with a masterpiece at most or at least a piece that would rival most masters. And the quiet is sheer bliss, broken only by the occasional roar of automobile engine as your vehicle rushes past another.

The only thing breaking this great swathe of Mother Nature is the long black tarred road snaking out ahead and behind you. You could drive for hours and hours and see nothing but green or staw fields (depending on the season of the year) for endless hundreds of kilometres. Not a soul, human or beast.

The human settlements by the roadside are few and far between and are commonly pastoral, bucolic simple fellows who are too busy tending the lone family cattle and gathering the family’s maize and beans to spend two heartbeats drinking in raw beauty. They live with it everyday, they don’t see it. And those who don’t—like us—are too busy trying to find our way to soak up the sights.

I know that, because when Uwa asked whether there were tourist attractions, I said, no there wasn’t. As if none of those qualified as attraction. The sight was beautiful but I couldn’t see that anybody would drive five hours along lonely roads only to park and stand by the roadside to gaze upon endlessly sweeping fields of green and straw. No, sirree.

The time of travel and the landmass to cover once made me want to pat OBJ on the back and tell him he was doing an unenviable job. But I didn’t. After all, I know a few countries that have more landmass than Nigeria and whose presidents still have one head even though they control countries large enough to span several time zones. Russia, China, India, USA, Canada.
Population is a different thing, mind. Some of those countries have more people than Nigeria, others less. But the north definitely has less.

Uwa said that was why the infrastructure remained intact: because there wasn’t anybody to use them, and I believe him. That made Ndubuisi conclude that elected officials here in the north really have no work to do, compared with their counterparts in other regions. Again, he too was right.

But to see how those officials maintain already provided infrastructure needs another change in geography.

Comments

yellow alert for my sallah self

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:55:58 +0200

You will not get a photograph to seal the moment. But the memory will linger like a distinct yet fading daguerreotype, sealed into your heart long after the old white-and-black has ceased to be fashionable. You will come to know the name of the season in different languages—hausa babban sallah (big sallah), Arabic eid-el-kabir(the big holiday)—is apt to a point. It will be a time when you will discover so many things that may not be true to type.

If you reside in bigger cities like Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, the Sallah will be more public in those parts of the city populated by Muslims and people of northern descent. Don’t expect the same populous celebration in the backblocks like Kontagora. In fact, the opposite.

Especially if you live on the outskirts of the town. You will find that your neighbours who’d never seemed to know that most people closed shop on Sunday s will toe the line. Their shops, even those ubiquitous automobile repair shops that ever stay open till the late of night, sometimes all through the night, will be firmly shut and deserted.

So will the roads be. And you would think a war had broken out and everyone had fled and left you behind. Only motorbike operators and their flashily dressed pillion passengers will note to you that you are still safe.

You will walk for minutes without seeing a singly soul. Otherwise the only souls will be a pair of lovers, the guy holding the girl seated on his thighs, billing and cooing and so busy whispering sweet nothings on one of the broken concrete park benches. They won’t even notice your coming. If you applied more stealth than a roaring caterpillar you could catch them doing the deed flagrante delecto.
You will ask yourself whether you are sure this is the Niger that was supposed to be Shari’a compliant and Kontagora was supposed to be one of its backwoods where conservatism runs high. But the hormones running amok will tell you otherwise.

You will understand that wearing a hijab doesn’t mean a girl hasn’t got hormones that run wild at the thought of sharing a park bench under trees in the heart of a deserted park with a guy she imagines looks somewhat like Ramsey Noah. And that donning a scholarly-looking jalabiya doesn’t mean a guy can’t eye the sweet-looking girl in another guy’s arms in the middle of the kasuwa (market).

That’s for the indigenes. The non-indigenes, especially the non-Muslim Yoruba and Igbo will positively knock your socks off. Islam and Shari’a only place restrictions on people’s hormones not bleed them of their juices.

It’s a grab-what-you-can-while-you-can thing, for exactly eleven minutes later you will see the park lovebirds, a vision of sky blue blouse and skirt and fishnet hijab, flying past you on the pillion seat of a motorcycle.

Deeper into the heart of the town you will find life, all of it, crowded around gidan sarki, the emir’s palace or quite literally the house of the king. It will look like a trade fair and amusement park rolled into one. There will be boys and girls innocently screaming gleefully while gulping yoghurt and kunun, older boys strategically positioned as to catch sight of the cutest sweeties strolling around pirouetting birds flaunting themselves before the niggers, as the admirers are routinely addressed. And there will be men without the women. The roads will be chock-a-block. Everyone will have an innate sense that the killing power of vehicles has been taken out and neutralised. They—man and beast alike—will throng the road and even edge vehicle out.

Stand back and you will see a sea of beings—all similarly dressed in the same style of jalabiya: all new, all sparkling, big shoulder-to-ankle gowns over string-waisted trousers and new sandals or shoes. The only difference among the clothes will be their colours—the brighter the shades of colours you can identify in the multitude, the newer the robe.

The air will be thick with dust pounded upward by thousands of feet (two-and four-footed0 and the smell of cooking food and frying meat, especially the raw kind. That will be a common recurring decimal. In every block there will be a man using a sharp blade slightly curved near its tip to snip the last traces of muscles off sheepskin and bundling them into piles for transport and processing later. By counting how many white sheepskins—one for each slaughtered sheep—you will know how many livestock gave up their lives so that everyone could be happy at Sallah. You only are able to count because the skin is taken off for tanning and leather making. With Christians, you can’t figure that because the Christians consume everything—flesh, skin and bone sometimes.

But there will be things to take your mind off the scene even if for a second. A lonely curtain dealer will tell you you should try attending his church even once, as though it would change his life. He’ll tell you about an aboki, a friend, of his, a corper indigene of Kontagora and serving in Oshogbo, who forced him to converse in hausa because English was like cruising the Mediterranean and the Red Sea at the same time. He’ll wonder aloud how the English-challenged corper every understood his courses at university, how he manages to teach students during his service posting at Osogbo and how he’ll cope with working life. He’ll conveniently forget that this guy, despite his deficiency at Turanci—Hausa for that excruciatingly difficult language English—will end up a local government chairman sooner, if he’s about the only male to attend university in his hometown, than later.

You will meet people who have no reason to be inebriated, Shari’a being ever present and all.

People who will feel too big-boy to gather at the fair at gidan sarki; who would rather organise—binge? drinking?—parties at Safara and the barracks, one of the two places plus the Prison staff club where alcohol is available.

An aunt who doesn’t live in her marital home, whose son is so sex-crazed he’d sleep with anything in hijab and his cousin describes as so uneducated he wouldn’t heed the advice to use a condom during some of his Shari’a-frowns-upon-this-but-I-just-can’t-help-but-do-it escapades. Yet the cousin doesn’t know how he prevents the easy lays from getting knocked up; he only knows none has ever got pregnant.

You will question further and he’ll start to say something like avoiding getting girls in the family way by noting their menstrual period. (And you thought only enlightened city couples and singles knew about Billing’s Way.) He’ll tell you he can identify that period because there is a perceptible foul smell—a pollution, he’ll call it—around girls during that period, and it is so strong he can tell a girl with the curse simply by sniffing the air when one’s just walked past.

The day will fly by, fast and furious. Darkness will fall, punctured in several places by yellow light bulbs. Night will bustle until 8 or 9 and you will find six persons on a bike—three on pillion and two before the rider. The night air will be chilly as you walk through the dark, and you will feel even a sense of safety, as though Kontagora hasn’t yet discovered crime yet. You’ll feel safer in a Kontagora that in Benin City where you’ll always fear being jumped walking along a dark empty road. As you approach base in the dark, through neighbourhoods that resemble rabbit warrens, your steps will become brisk, jaunty, enlivened by the cold biting your hands and feet. You will want to disappear off the road and materialise on your warm bed or mat. You will wonder whether this is all there is to babban sallah and how really different it is from normal days.

Comments

happy sallah

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:52:15 +0200

On the first day of Christmas, my dear lord said to me....yaddah, yaddah, yaddah...

We all know that song, or some parts of it anyway, and the feelings it evokes.

Imagine my feelings when last night I heard a presenter on ART say the words, “On the eighteenth day of Ramadan....”

I never consciously thought Muslims kept track of how many days into Ramadan they had gone.

Now that’s a mistake. The muslims around me do keep time: they keep track of how many hours they have spent without food, and how many more hours to go before the fast is broken for the day.

They also keep track of how many more days have to go before they can throw off the fast, have a big break and kick up their heels celebrating eid-el-kabir.
The mistake is this: the muslims around me don’t necessarily represent the true image of islam. There are ordinary followers of faith among Christians. Islam has its own category of nominal followers.

Back to the presenter. He spoke Arabic, or so I thought, seeing as I was watching him on a TV set inside a restaurant whose owner decided it was much civil to leave the volume turned so low the pictures on screen made you feel like you were watching those old soundless movies.

Apart from speaking Arabic or something like it, subtitles were provided on screen by ART. At least, that’s what the credits said.

This presenter was fully bearded and bespectacled, endowed with pinkish lips that made all the ladies in the restaurant sit up and take notice. He had charisma. I turned sideways to my companion and mentioned that the presenter was the Pastor Chris Oyakkhilome of the Muslim world. My companion easily agreed.

The word God kept flashing across the screen, and it took the sharpest of eyes to discern that the presenter was a muslim speaking to the muslim world. My companion placed him in a world of his own. I thought that was wrong, kind of. The word God, and the few times the word was represented by the masculine pronoun capitalised (He and Him), wasn’t the preserve of Christians. Come to think of it, it was an English word. The fact that the name Allah never made it into the subtitles didn’t help things with my companion. The name of the Prophet, however, made it onscreen a couple of times.

Prejudices aside, when the programme ended a few minutes later, it left me with the same feeling I get when I watch Christian programming on television.

Comments

IS THIS FANBLOODYTASTIC?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:18:35 +0200

Swearing (in some languages, chiefly English) has the power to shock a listener into paying attention.

But this can only when it is used carefully.

When speech is unnecessarily sprinkled with swearing, the concept loses its power to arouse thought and grab attention: it becomes not just insulting but a demonstration of a vocabulary-challenged speaker.

At least, that is the way I feel about it. Not that we are always right though.

People have different reasons for choosing to swear. Some think they look cool when they spout so many F-words. Others feel they are really communication.

Of course, they could be doing just that—if they have the right audience, or if they are sensible enough to check.

So to swear some eighty times on a forty-minute television programme? Well, duh! What does the guy really want to say?

You may add your comment on BBC WORLD HAVE YOUR SAY pages

Comments

The F-word is lovely, just fan-bloody.tastic

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:39:31 +0200

Swearing (in some languages, chiefly English) has the power to shock a listener into paying attention.

But this can only when it is used carefully.

At least, that is the way I feel about it. Not that we are always right though.

People have different reasons for choosing to swear. Some think they look cool when they spout so many F-words. Others feel they are really communication.

Of course, they could be doing just that—if they have the right audience, or if they are sensible enough to check.

So to swear some eighty times on a forty-minute television programme? Well, duh! What does the guy really want to say?

You may add your comment on BBC WORLD HAVE YOUR SAY pages

Comments

IS THIS ANOTHER WELCOME BACK?

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:31:42 +0200

Hello, hi, chodiye, jai mata di chodiye.

I’ve never known exactly what that means but I’ve always wanted to use it.

I guess this could go for another welcome-back entry on this blog.

I really haven’t been that active for the past weeks—few and several and everything in-between.

That’s because I was in the middle of changing jobs—workplace, rather, since I’m still in the media business of writing, reporting, editing.

Precisely what I have been doing before now except that I now have a place with somewhat steady internet connection, which means the entire blogdom will be reading more frequently on these pages.

So once again, welcome back to THE VOICE IN THE DESERT.

Comments

filadelfia

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:39:31 +0100

She always saw death in the blue ocean.

Drifting beneath the water surface was like floating in the air. Free. Boundless. The underwater beauty was breathtaking.

Reaching through the fluid space before her, she put out a hand, waving it like a flag in front of her nose. The watery resistance was minute. Her hair floated above and around her head like a black halo. In the calm water, everything around her was the bluest sea blue. Except for the moving dots of life that darted through the blue expanse. Angelfish. Seahorse. Turtle. A blade of seaweed projecting upward and swimming around her feet.

She clutched a handful of seaweed and pulled hard on it. it came away in her grip and she lifted it to her face. She couldn’t smell it. But she felt it, wanted it. she turned and began swimming to the top.

A caldron of bubbles churned right in front of her. Through the ballast, she saw the moving dot; it was rapidly gaining on her. She couldn’t swim away fast enough; she’d never had fins. Instead, she turned upward and speared to the top of the water.

Her head broke the surface and she gasped for air to fill the vacuum in her lungs.

The bubbles were rising to the surface of the water. She turned from that direction and made frantic but useless efforts to swim out of its path.

Behind the bubbles was a flapping tail and fin. In a straight line, it rushed at her, seemingly aimed right at her middle. In a heartbeat she would feel the impact, feel strong sharp canines bite into her body, feel her guts being ripped through, taste the salty water that would rise to choke her with her own blood.

She felt none of that.

The line of bubbles, tail and fin missed her body by an inch but the edge of the fin slapped against her tummy. She gasped more from surprise than actual physical pain the bubbles and fin were moving so fast they created a vortex in their wake.

The vortex sucked her in. Unable to cough out the water that had flowed into her mouth, she panicked, lost her balance in the raging vortex and floundered.

Back into the depths of the ocean.

Blue. Panic. Blue. I’m going to drown. It’s so beautiful. It’s so scary. I don’t want to drown.

She bumped into a hard form. Hard skin, harder than flesh, scraped against her body. Scales. The vortex had stopped raging. Now she felt detached from her body, felt like an observer. Like a baby, her body settled into the crook of the two strong arms.

Somebody had caught her. Now the saviour placed her on the sandy beach by the ocean and fanned air over her face. She coughed up water and came awake.

The merman looked at her disarmingly. Two amber-coloured glassy eyes, like twin lighthouses piercing the darkness of a raging storm at sea, burned into her face. They were steady, unflinching, unblinking, set in a craggy face hewn out of rock, bespangled with drops of seawater. A thin line slit his lips and his voice roared forth like thunder in the open expanse of white sandy beach by the ocean.

“Come with me…”

“Dorynda.”

She turned to the voice, which sounded different from the thunder she’d heard. But the face was the face of the merman. She screamed.

“Dorynda…?” the voice called her name again. This time there was no roll of thunder. She focused harder and the mist over her eyes lifted out of the room. Detective Forson observed her quietly. “Dorynda…, what happened?”

“I drowned…”

“Drowned,” the detective repeated.

“I was drowning.”

“You’ve been in this interrogation room for the past two hours, telling me nothing worth my time I might add,” the detective said in a tone of ringing disbelief. “I can’t see any water, I can’t see you flailing in any thing even remotely connected with water.”

“Detective, I can practically taste the salt water in my mouth,” she said.

“Bullshit! For someone in the kind of shit you’ve got yourself in, you are so full of shit.”

“I’m not kidding,” she stated, needing desperately to be believed.

“Neither will prison be, if you don’t come clean. Your friend Selzing, at least you admit he was your friend, is dead. He was last seen with you, together. Two people have already confirmed that they saw you two walk out of that nightclub together. Now what I want to know is, what exactly happened after you left that nightclub?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed her response once more.

“Of course, you do,” Detective Forson shouted at her, angrily pounding the table with a fist. “I have been told you two were a hot pair, have been an item for a pretty long time. The entire clubhouse knows it. I also hear you have wanted to cool it, Dorynda. Your boyfriend Selzing told a friend of his that’s what you were trying to do. He didn’t want that, it seems, and yet you couldn’t get your hands completely off him.”

“It’s the other way round,” she shouted, startled at the depth of revelation that delved too deep into her privacy.

“That’s the point,” the detective said with a wicked smile. Dorynda winced. She’d fallen right into the trap the detective had sprung. Years of interrogating suspects had taught Forson well, and he prodded deeper, laying out bits of bait for her to bite. “He came onto you. Except it wasn’t the way you wanted it? Is that right? Did he get so rough you had to hit him? Or is violence part of your sex games? What happened that night?”

Dorynda buried her face in her hands and sobbed. Nervously, she bit down on her lower lip and let the tears flow unchecked. “I didn’t kill him,” she sobbed. Pulling a rigid self-control into place, she stopped crying. If the detective wanted to know the intimate dirty details, she would oblige him and free herself. “I must have spent about an hour, I think, with him.”

“Doing what?”

She maintained steady eye contact for a while before she responded. “Practising the Scented Garden routine from a new Kama Sutra sex manual he’d bought the week before. He wanted me to do things to him. You know, things that the manual says will bring people closer. And I did all of it. Then he got up, lit a joint, and began smoking as usual. I had to get back to the club. So I got up, pulled on my dress and told him I had to leave. He didn’t see me to the door like he usually did. He just lay there puffing his joint. But he was alive when I left the apartment. That’s all I know about that night before the police came over to the club and dragged me down here.”

Detective Forson knew better than to take this man-killer for her word. He’d seen too much handiwork of her ilk to blow every sense of sympathy he could ever feel. Besides, every murder needed solving regardless who was involved, beauty queen or drag queen.

The only interruption he’d had for hours came from the door. A cop entered the interrogation room, bent and spoke into his ear and promptly walked out. Forson straightened in his seat. His face looked petulant as he hitched his chin toward Dorynda, keeping her within his gaze.

“This is by no means solved, young lady,” he said authoritatively. “I will be talking to you again soon enough.” Laying a hand over hers to forestall her as if she would have bolted from the room or as if to buy her confidence, he added, “And don’t be making plans to go anywhere either.”

On his way out the door, he brushed against the man in three-piece suit. There was an inscrutable look in the man’s eyes. Surprise? Relief? Anger?

The man in the suit walked into the room and closed the door behind him. a cold wind blew through the room. It grew cold, got colder still and vapour began to puff from Dorynda’s nostrils and mouth.

“I’m your lawyer,” the man said. He had his back to Dorynda. As the walked the length of the interrogation room, the space shrunk around Dorynda, so tight it pushed her breath out of her body.

“I’m sorry…but I don’t know you.” Vapour poured out with each word and frosted in the air.

The man turned now. It was the face of the merman. “I told you … years ago … a long time ago … I’ll do anything for you.”

Dorynda shot off her seat so fast it fell over backward.

“I made that promise when you gave yourself to me. And it is a promise I swear to keep.” He covered the distance between them. From his height, looking down at her, he made her feel like a prey caught in a lair. He was the predator set to eat her up but wanting to play first with his prey before devouring it. The lawyer’s brown eyes turned to burning shards of amber in the merman’s face. “Why did you want to hurt me?”

“Hurt you?” she stuttered, backing even further away as far as the wall behind her would allow. “I don’t even know you. How can I hurt you?”

“Like you did with your husband…” he said in the roll-of-thunder voice of the merman.

“I don’t have a husband.”

“Selzing.” It was now the polished refined but angry voice of the lawyer in three-piece suit.

“Selzing was my fiancé, not my husband.”

“Like you are doing with the cop,” he ended, his voice reverting to the merman’s.

Panic filled her. It suddenly struck her that she was hearing too much than she could safely live with. Or this just wasn’t the right time to hear how Selzing had died.

He pushed forward, propelling her into the wall behind her. An electrifying blast of cold shot through her body at the contact of his body on hers. Behind and all around them, it began to snow in the room. Fast, rough and howling.

Her teeth chattered like castanets. But she wasn’t cold. Vapour streamed out of her nostrils and wordlessly parted lips. Vitality flowed out from her limbs. She looked helplessly vulnerable before him.

And then his voice, the familiar one from her memory, shocked her. “Come to me…”

As fast as though she’d been whipped into action, she docked from his embrace and darted out the door.

Outside the interrogation room policemen were shovelling an inches-thick blanket of snow from the corridors. They were all talking and barking orders. no one seemed to have noticed her. The voices became the same spine-tingling roll of thunder etched in her memory. It spoke the same thing. “Come to me…”

“Dorynda…”

The voice came from behind her. She turned and looked through the glass of the interrogation room. The merman wasn’t in there anymore. And she hadn’t seen him come through the door either. But Detective Forson stood behind the glass, his faces pressed up against it, clear in places where his breath had hit, spots that were now frosting over. Snow had filled the room now. And the cold had whitened his face. His eyes were open and stared straight at Dorynda. The detective was dead.

And the men, all of them with the same face and voice, stopped shovelling snow. They began to walk toward her, chanting those three frightening words.

She spun on her heels and bolted out of the police station. Snow tumbled out the door after her.

Outside, it was raining hard. The street was wet and slick. Streetlights and car headlights reflected off the patches of water on the street. A car hurtled past and sent water from a puddle flying at Dorynda.

“You chump,” she cursed after the rapidly departing pair of red taillights. Now she was wet, she might as well walk in the rain.

Like someone had pushed a switch, the cars dematerialised from the street. It was empty, dark, wet. She stopped dead in the middle of the road and her heart pounded in her ribcage with dread. She seemed alone in the world.

At the end of the street her eyes could see, she saw the figure materialise out of the shadows, like a mirage rising in the middle of a hot sun-beaten road, like a plume of grey suffocating smoke.

The figure of the lawyer, the merman, the man.

She turned to flee toward the opposite end of the street. But he was behind her. She twisted around, and was already running before she could see whether the apparition was still there. She bumped right into him.

“You can’t run away from me. I have come through ages to find you.” He took her hand, lifted it with the ring on her third left finger and his eyes turned amber. He slid the finger right into his mouth. Dorynda was too weak to resist. His hold on her was like poisonous sleep medication. But when her finger slid back out of his mouth, the ring was no more.

“I’m back,” he said. “Now your husband is out of the way. He tried to interfere in our destiny. So did the cop. They are gone. We can be together forever.”

“You killed Selzing?” she demanded, struggling to find her voice.

“I killed him your husband … before … in our last life. He wanted to stop us from being together. In every lifetime, if he tries to keep us apart, I will kill him over and over again.”

Rigid with fear, Dorynda couldn’t speak.

“They have all been trying to make you forget,” he said, bringing his face down to hers, so close he touched her nose with the tip of his, ran his fingers over the slender column of her throat, watched the blood pulse through her jugular and looked like he was straining at a leash to keep from devouring her. “If you look deep into your soul, into the part of your self you have locked away … you will find us. Let me show you.”

“Show me what?”

He passed a hand over her face. “The story of us…”

Both of them were there. Their realm. The beach. Completely naked apart from the loincloths that swathed their middles. A god and his goddess. Cavorting in the sand.

She scooped warm sand into both palms, lifted her hands and let the grains flow onto the cleavage of her bosom, smoothing the warm sand grains with her hands. He joined her, a porter working on beautiful pottery, and worked the grains of sand around her rock-solid tits, moulding her to fit his palms. She strained against the abrasion and muscle of his palms and her legs turned to water.

With both hands, he scooped up seawater and sand and dumped the payload onto her tummy. They looked ancient and picturesque among the ferns that sprouted by the sea. He rubbed the sand over the cleft of her thighs, his fingers glanced the mound of hot flesh.

A flame of lust erupted between them. He reached for both her arms and pulled them above her head, holding them in the sand. With his body leaning into hers, between her thighs, she was primed. Like a contortionist, she lifted one leg over his back and her toes caught the strap that held his loincloth in place. She got rid of that piece of encumbrance, set his loins free to join hers.

The juncture was combustive and fiery, their substances of life meshed as one. Their bodies were cast as one, a pair of moving, writhing snakes in the sand by the sea, rippling, arching, undulating, and savage.

In the lush green around them, a sabre-toothed tiger crossed paths with a mammoth. Both poised for a fight to defend their territories. The sabre-toothed tiger snarled; the mammoth trumpeted.

But the growl of carnal animal pleasure that tore itself loose from the vocal cords of the merman and tumbled from his lips frightened both animals. They knew who ruled the domain. They fled.

Laughing, she rose and ran into the water. She was waist deep in the water when he caught her and held her. The laughter bubbled deep between them. When he lifted her into the air, she wrapped her legs about his waist and locked her ankles behind him. He bent her over backward so that her hair dipped into the water and spread out around her head like a fan.

In the moonlight, they were perfect, two pairs of amber eyes staring into each other’s soul. One hand supported her arched back, the other played with her flesh. She straightened and lowered herself, inch by hot delicious inch, onto the stiff hard flesh that prodded under her bottom. Satyr and water nymph. Two forces joined as one. Nothing could put asunder.

He moved his hand from behind her and ran five fingers down her face, branding her, marking her for eternity.

In the wake of his fingers down her face trailed five red lines of blood. Only then did he notice the jagged blunt blade buried deep in her back. Only then did he notice the man who had risen from the water standing behind her, puffing with glee, gloating over his deed.

He pulled the blade out of her back and drove into the man’s right eye. Both scuffled. She floated in the water as they fought. She watched her lover reach for the blade and drive it into his opponent.

He had victory. He’d lost his beloved. He had nothing else to live for.

He slashed himself in the chest, a long diagonal line from the left shoulder to the right hip, then another diagonal from the right shoulder, and another slash over the muscles of his stomach. He ran the blade across his throat. Blood spurted in a warm red jet into the water.

She lifted her head then and screamed his name: “Filadelfia!”

Too late. In a final act of self-immolation, he drove the blade into his stomach. She knelt beside his body, cradled his head to her chest and mourned.

Again, the hand passed over her eyes.

Five fingers trailed five paths of tears down her face. Two fingers lingered on her lips, disappeared into her mouth. She was on her back on the rain-wet street. he was on top of her. She cradled his head between her thighs, writhing, mindlessly surrendering herself to his mouth, arching, her hips when he released her. When he moved forward, his face hovered over hers so close only the film of frosty breath between them remained. He was staring down into her face, recording every contour for memory.

His amber eyes were expressive windows into his soul. “It is going to be different this time.” His words broke the spell he’d cast over her.

“The man…” she said in a voice that sounded so unlike hers. “The man you killed in the sea.”

“Your husband. He wanted to stop us. He didn’t want for us to be together.”

“And you killed yourself?”

“So I will always be reborn when you come back to life. We’ll always be together. We take different life forms in each lifetime,” he said in his lawyer person. The wet-in-the-rain three-piece suit lawyer form she had seen shifted into the image of the satyr, then the naked savage with the loincloth around his waist, and finally to the amber-eyed merman. “But we are always the same.” The hard length of his heat burned a searing path up her thighs despite the cold of the rain and the wetness of the macadam beneath her body.

There was a drumroll of thunder as he penetrated her body. Right in the middle of the empty street. Her body arched up to meet his when moments later his life force spewed out to join with hers. The suited lawyer/naked savage/amber-eyed merman collapsed on top of Dorynda.

Bliss. Peace. Rain. Cold. Mist howling through empty streets. No movement. No stirring.

Silence.

“Filadelfia,” she said in the tremulous passion-soaked voice of the woman on the beach. Dorynda lifted the lawyer’s head off her chest. But it was the merman’s face she saw. A line of blood ran across his forehead. “What are you going to do?”

Disengaging from her, he rose and turned his back on her. He reached behind and clutched at the base of his neck. Then he pulled his scalp clean off his skull baring the facial muscles, as they would be in an anatomy dissection class.

“Stop it,” she screamed at the horrendous sight, willing it to go away. It didn’t.

She was still screaming when he ripped his entire skin off and stepped out of the bloody mass of skin like he would step out of dirty discarded overalls. Then he tore off his facial muscles. Nasalis. Frontalis. Mentalis. Procerus. Platysma. One by one until the lobes of his skull showed and the disrupted vessels leaked blood all over.

His bare jawbones moved when he spoke to her. “I have to do this,” the bare teeth said, the eyes of amber set deep in their sockets unblinking. “It is my destiny.”

His body was a bleeding rangy bundle of muscles, red where the vessels remained intact, white where the tendons, cartilage and bones were visible. He reached down and stripped the iliacus and sartorius muscles from his thighs, then the femoris, rectus and gracilis. Each hand worked on the opposite arm, ripping off the biceps, triceps, deltoids, pectoralis from his chest, the serratus from around his ribs. The muscles of his buttocks dropped off to join the mass of bleeding flesh on the ground.

He reached into his ribcage, ripped out his heart and placed it in her hand. “Let this always be with you, because it is yours for all eternity,” the skeleton in front of her said. When he bent to kiss her, Dorynda was too frightened to pull away from him, blood and bones and muscles and nerves. “Sure as the sun rises and the moon sets and it rains, we shall meet again … in our next lifetime.”

The skeleton crumbled before her. She clutched the warm still-beating heart, with blood frothing out of the vessels. She heard the sound on all sides. Sirens blaring from police squad cars and lights flashing in her eyes and a voice bellowing through a bullhorn.

“Your hands above your head,” the police ordered her over the bullhorn. “Now, Dorynda.”

And another voice, more muted, spoke in her ear. “Come with me…”

Comments

son

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:32:44 +0100

Feeling the stir, D’Onah looks down at the sleeping figure in the bed. He smiles his welcome-back-to-earth smile. Nari slowly opens her eyes. It has been thirty-seven hours since the surgeons wheeled her out of the theatre, enough to get D’Onah thinking about her and nothing else.

“Took you long enough to come awake,” he says.

Nari smiles sheepishly. “I didn’t mean to…How long have you been here?” Ever the caring daughter he never had. “You didn’t go to work.”

D’Onah reaches to touch her hair as she tries to sit up. What is work when something greater than life itself is happening? He shakes his head no. “Just relax, no fussing. The doctors said you needed the rest.” She reclines back into the bed gratefully, a sigh forming around her mouth. “I have seen him. He’s beautiful.” At her look of incomprehension he hitches his head toward a corner of the hospital room. She follows the direction to the crib. “Now I have a grandson…” D’Onah pulls the crib closer to the bed and lifts out the baby.

“Can I hold him?” Nari asks shyly.

You’re really a child, aren’t you? D’Onah thinks. Out loud he says, “Of course. He is your baby, and he’s been waiting for some feeding for a long time now.” You had no business getting knocked up in the first place. But not it’s happened, he shrugs, what can I do about it? A child is a child regardless of how it is conceived, regardless of the father. Father. The word sticks in his crop like a stone. Son. That is even worse. Both words appear as one in his mind, and he detests the thought. Styne.

He passes the baby to Nari carefully, like he’s made of porcelain. It is a little disconcerting to imagine. First time he’d witnessed a birth had been that of his son, an awesome event that had along the years become one big regret; now it is his grandson, and the feeling isn’t even close to it.

“Papa…?”

It takes him some moments to realize someone is referring to him. He weathers Nari’s questioning gaze at him with concern as he snaps back to the present. He tries to look like everything is okay. “You look like the real thing, my dear girl.”
Nari isn’t fooled. “What is wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Did he…”

“No,” he says forcefully. His mind conjures up an image of Styne. Heaven forbid. He’s spent too much energy putting some distance between them and the man to think about that. He shudders to think the devil he’s running from is none but his flesh-and-blood son, the nightmare of his days and Nari’s. “Nothing of the sort,” he manages with a twinge of guilt. “Don’t worry. I took care of everything.” He gauges the fear rising in the young girl’s eyes. To his relief, the baby belches faintly, giving him time to look at something else.

The door squeaks open. D’Onah’s guilt builds slightly at the sight of the man now standing in the room. The gulf between them yawns, not just in personalities and goals but also in everything else.

“Sanmi, how do you do?” D’Onah says without condescension.

“Could you excuse me? I have to speak to my daughter,” says Sanmi without regard for anything else.

D’Onah’s paternal protective instinct rises. “I don’t think she is in a good condition to speak with you right now. She just got out of a major operation, and…”

“It’s okay,” says Nari in a small voice behind him. That is enough for D’Onah. It reminds him he’s not her father after all. He wants to feel hostility toward Sanmi but he brings himself in check. They have nothing in common, not even the three-piece agbada and perfumed cap that speak so much presence for Sanmi.

Sanmi looks down at his daughter a twinge of bitter regret buried beneath some helplessness and a desire to shake some sense into her. “Are you okay?” he watches her nod wordlessly. SHer cool goads him. “You can at least speak to me when I talk to you.”

“I’m sorry, papa…I don’t know what to say…the right thing to say. That last thing I want right now is to say something that would not sound right to you after everything that’s happened.”

The boldness with which she speaks startles Sanmi momentarily. He isn’t quite sure if this is the same little girl he’s known since her birth. “What has got into you, Nari? You were always a silly acting young girl, but…now…I am strongly tempted to…”

“Papa, I don’t mean to be rude to you, but at least, after everything that’s happened, I would be no doing no good if I didn’t at least speak the truth, or speak my mind.”

Sanmi’s voice hardens perceptibly. “You sure are speaking your mind. That’s what you get living with a man like…that.” He hitches his toward where D’Onah is standing by the door. “Does he also teach you to be sassy to your father? To run away from home…?”

“I didn’t run away from home, papa.” Nari rises to defend herself. “You said I couldn’t be your daughter anymore because I got involved with Styne.”

“No one who gets involved with a scum of the earth like that is worthy of being my daughter.” He rushes on as D’Onah makes no move to defend his son’s reputation. Nor does Nari. “I warned you from the first day what would happen if you got involved with a stupid boy like that, let alone let him get you pregnant. I wouldn’t even be here in the first place if it hadn’t been for your mother and sisters. I can’t believe that despite everything I tried to do for you and your sisters, despite all of that…”

“Papa, I never said…”

“Don’t you interrupt when I am talking,” Sanmi snaps angrily, glaring at her. “Doesn’t he teach you any manners at all, since you obviously haven’t learnt any before?”

“I think it is time you left.” D’Onah’s voice cuts through the moment like a knife through butter. “She’s had a rough day already, if you don’t mind, and I need for her to get some rest.”

Sanmi looks at him with a sneer. “I sure won’t be told what to do by you.”

“It’s for your daughter’s benefit.”

“Good thing you realize she’s my daughter. Why don’t you take your misplace paternal concern and mind your scum-of-the-earth son instead of trying to tell everyone how to treat their children? Your son needs it more. If it weren’t for him coming into this stupid girl’s life I wouldn’t be having this detestable conversation.’

“True.” D’Onah feels the admission drop from him. “I am sorry but I can’t be held responsible for my son’s transgressions. It is pathetic enough. The most I can do is try to make the best out of it, not bury my head in the sand. So if you have nothing more to say other than get her upset…”

Realization sinks into Sanmi. His voice drops to a hoarse whisper. “Are you out of your mind? Do you know the implication of what you just said? I should have you arrested until you produce that son of yours. I mean it…” He turns to Nari. “Okay, I have had enough of this dysfunctional family. Nari, up. You are coming with me. He can share the baby with his son.”

“No, Papa.” Nari is resolute, forcing her father to consider her closely.

“Did you just say no?” he asks unbelievingly. “What has he done to you to turn you against your own father?”

“He did nothing but accept me the way I am. Something you never had the time or patience to do.” Nari sits up, her gaze but reverent. “I know I made a mistake, papa, a mistake I can not forgive myself. But at least I hoped you would find it in your heart to forgive me and accept me. That is too difficult for you to do. I don’t want to go through the rest of my life feeling like a stranger in your house just because of one mistake I made in my teens, or have you throw that in my face at every slight opportunity you get. And if you cannot find it in your heart to forgive me, if my baby has no place in your life then I have no place in that life either.”

“Are you giving me an ultimatum?”

“You should leave,” says D’Onah quickly, before things start getting out of hand. “It’s better now.” He holds the door open for Sanmi. Sanmi battles against his pride, but his daughter resolute features tell him she is not going back on her word. He leaves her.

“Are you okay?” D’Onah notices the tear slide down Nari’s face. Just then she wipes it on the back of her hand and looks up with a smile and says she’ll be fine. “I have to rush home for some things. I will be back in the evening.”

“No need. You need some rest yourself….” Nari’s attempt at persuasion fails. Instead she says, “I’ll be fine. I am not afraid anymore. I know he won’t be coming, not here.”

When he’s gone Nari lets the nurse take the baby from her. She asks to use the bathroom. The nurse offers to check it before leading her into the stall.

Time just marches on endlessly. An eerie calm descends in the bathroom, so calm Nari could hear the sound distinctly. She listens hard, pressing her ear against the door.

“Nurse?” she hears nothing for a while. Then suddenly a bump and thud fall on her ears, strange noises for nurse. “Who is that? Anybody there?” she drags her hospital robes around herself and steps out the stall. The nurse is sprawled out on the floor of the bathroom. Her breath catches. It is happening again, she thinks, the stalking she’s been running from.

Styne is suddenly in front of her, barring her escape out the bathroom. He looks at her like she’s a long lost treasure. “Did you miss me?” he says in a menacing voice. She is speechlessly rooted to the grounded as her nightmares unfold. It all happens in a flash: she sees Styne’s fist come straight at the bridge of her nose and her head jerks back, then forward, and she feels everything blacken out.

She recognizes the surrounding. Only a couple of times had she been here with Styne. Styne…?

She feels like she’s drowning as the cold water rushes over her, plastering the unflatteringly shapeless hospital robe to her gaunt frame. The water shocks her senses to the sound of a wailing baby. Her baby. She struggles to side, cursing to hell the pain from the stitches the surgeon had had to put on her after the C-section.

Cold terror sweeps through her as she sees the baby in Styne’s arms. He doesn’t cut the figure of a father holding an infant. “I have a baby, a son,” he says solemnly.

Instead horror and maternal instinct force her out of the bed. She lunges toward him, reaching for the baby. “Give him to me.”

“He’s mine too.” It is a declaration. “Same as you are my woman.”

She covers her ears in denial. “No, I am not your woman, Styne. Give him to me.” as she reaches for the baby, he backhands her across the mouth, knocking her to the floor. She scrambles to her feet, tasting blood in her mouth. For now not even the pain from the stitches can deter her. She has too much at risk to fear. “Hitting me is not going to change my mind, Styne,” she challenges him, a mistake. “I’m not your woman, not anymore.”

She notices the change in him, sees the red come into his eyes, sees the pupils darken with mysterious violence. For an instant she regrets annoying him and begins summoning the courage to attempt an apology. His fist in her middle knocks the wind out of her lungs. She feels like her insides are about to go apart; pain rips into her soul as she goes down to her knees, clutching her belly.

When he punches her a second time he knocks her to the floor. She feels blood run into her head and out of her nose. She feels death, still as he whips out his pocketknife. Is he going to slash my skin life before? She doesn’t think much until the knife snips the hospital robe clean off her. Oh, God, save my baby, she implores, unable to utter a word. She’s too exhausted to scream as Styne invades her body.

“Say it,” he commands her menacingly, slapping her again and again. “You are mine, you’ll always be mine. Say it, you bitch.”

With him sex is incomplete without violence. She stills herself against his strength, not giving the satisfaction of even a groan of pain. She can’t even manage that.

Styne gets off her, miffed more than ever now at her at her lack of feeling. A consoling smile steals across Nari’s bloody face, only moment before he runs into the wall. She collapses in a heap. The smile is still on her lips as Styne’s booted foot comes down on her neck.

Somewhere in the space above and behind her, she hears the wail of the baby, her baby. She can’t move a limb, can’t do anything to rise and reach out to her baby. She tries to speak. Blood comes pouring out of her mouth and nostrils.

Her last thought is: God, save my baby.

The baby wails on. D’Onah reaches first for the girl. He lifts her limp hand, raises a bunch of blood-soaked hair from her bloody face. He retches heavily, with a sinking feeling of despair. He has no time to prepare before the chair whips into his back, rocking him forward. When he turns, his assailant is there on his chest.

“Styne, you piece of shit.” His voice hardens with rage and hate. “You killed her.”

“Yes? I didn’t mean to.” Just as the shock from the response begins to sink in, he adds, “And I’m not sorry. If we don’t stay with our son together, then neither of us will…She deserved to die.”

D’Onah has never so challenged in his life, so angry. “I regret that you came from my loins, Styne. I despise the day you were conceived. I detest every moment I spent in my life calling you my son.”

The anger spreads in Styne’s face. “That was exactly what got your wife killed. Yes…” he taunts as he gets his father’s attention. “Did you ever imagine how that accident under the tree happened? Branches don’t just snap off, do they? It takes more than the wind to do something like. Let’s just say I helped nature a little…”

He doesn’t finish the statement. It takes D’Onah a second to realize what he’s hearing. To think he’s just heard how his wife met her death, at the hands of her own son. He rushes into Styne with the full impact of his body.

Prepared, Styne swerves slightly then adds some force to shove his father into the wall. He catches him by the shirtfront, throwing a series of punches into the old man’s chest. When he lets go, D’Onah sinks to the floor, clutching his middle.

“Styne,” he manages through teeth painfully clenched. “You are a disgrace of a son…All my life…I hoped that one day…just once…you would turn out…better than what I thought…”

“Shut up.”

“Where did I go wrong? Is there something I was supposed to do as a father that I didn’t do…why has my life with you been filled with so much grief? What on earth could your mother have done to you…to cause you to kill her…?”

Styne comes over to him and pulls him up by his shirt. “How about I let you join her, old man, and put you out of your misery?” he drags D’Onah by the shirt…toward the window, a floor-to-ceiling pane.

Short of the window, D’Onah puts his weight behind Styne and rams the man into the window. He hears the sound of shattering glass, then a more distant shatter of glass as shards break six floors below.

Styne hangs to the floor of the room, his legs dangling beneath him in the air, outside the broken window. He looks up, an urgent plea in his eyes. “Daddy, help me up.” He grabs at a support; the glass lets loose in his grip. He transfers his support to a stout portion of the ledge from where the glass had been dislodged. His fingers hold onto the glass that cuts into his hands. He hangs on for life. “Daddy, please… You are not going to let me fall.”

“Says who?” D’Onah looks at him with running, burning hate in his eyes. Suddenly he is like a stranger. “Why should I help you? You wanted to kill me a while ago.”

He guffaws uneasily, teeth bared in anguish. “Daddy, did you really believe I would have done that?”

“I don’t believe a lot of things. But that isn’t one of them unfortunately. Seeing what you just did to Nari…” his voice catches in his throat. He looks at the lifeless body on the floor, then the wailing child in the bed. He walks to the edge of the window and looks down at Styne with a cold, haughty expression in his eyes. “Styne, I hate to tell you this. But I have thought about this for a long time and I have just come to a decision. I am sorry…but your son is better off without you.”

There is dismay in Styne’s eyes. D’Onah lifts one foot, and then presses it down on one hand that clutched onto the glass, pressing it further into the jagged edge. The pain sears the nerves and brain. Styne screams, hangs on for longer, enduring the pain. It is a battle of wills.

Then he lets go. Arms flailing, lips cursing, he descends through the air until a thud announces his arrival on hard earth six floors below.

D’Onah bends to move the bloody hair out of the Nari’s face. He touched the bruises. “I’m sorry,” he murmurs reverently. “You didn’t deserve any of this.” A tear formed in his eye. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier. Sorry for everything you’ve had to go through.” He stands, goes over to the bed and picks up the wailing baby. A tear drops on the infant’s face. He cradles the infant close to his chest and whispers, “What is going to happen to us?”

Comments

TANGO

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 02:20:08 +0100

“The problem with being the strong-and-silent type is that everyone rides roughshod over you.”
“I have a faint, very faint niggling suspicion that you may be referring tome.”
“Who else?”
“I wish a had a dirty nasty thing to say to you.”
“You’ll be making a record if you didn’t—one of the firsts.”
“You’re saying I’m nasty?”
“Let’s not do this again.”
“No, we must. That’s the worst description I’ve had in recent times coming from you. Nasty?”
“That should even be tame, I think.”
“Tame? You know, honey, sometimes you are so full of insults. That’s a dreadful thing to say to a lady.”
“I never said I was a gentleman for a sec.”
“Not being one doesn’t stop you from acting from one, or at least treating others like one, like being nice, for instance.”
“Nice? Nice when you feel dirty and horrible inside. That’s the height of deception—deceiving your own self. But then a lady wouldn’t understand that. If I remember correctly, a lady is the epitome of phlegm—nice, pretty, mannered, unflustered in an ivory-tower world where everything is lovely and sweet. Just to long as there’s tea and cookies on a lovely day sitting beneath a parasol and picking scones with gloved fingers.”
“Parasol and gloved fingers? Oh really! This is the twenty-first century. That doesn’t happen to be the current indicators of ladyship. You are a caveman.”
“Just don’t expect me to pull out your chair for you, or hold the car door open, not even for a sec.”
“You know, you are right. There is a problem with being strong and silent.”
“Doing things and never complaining?”
“No!”
“Never bothering to complain, pretending all well.”
“You wish!”
“What the hell is it?”
“The swear word. You are speaking to a lady.”
“If I have to pass my intent across, I will damn well use the swear word.”
“Couldn’t you have found some other word? Or was that supposed to make me forget what I had to say?”
“As if that were possible for a sec.”
“The trouble with being strong and silent is that you equate silence with reason. You stay silent for so long you think that when you do break that silence whatever you say would be the binding writ. But you are wrong.”
“Which I painfully admit to being about so many things.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter.”
“No, let’s hear it.2
“You and who? I said, don’t bother.”
“You are not going to say, is that it? Are you hiding something horrible?”
“What?!”
“That’s the reason closest to mind?”
“You are unbelievable.”
“It stands to reason.”
“Don’t try to goad me. It won’t work. Hell, lady, you have a helluva lot of nerve. But then I know you are not a lady. Ladies are not nasty, manipulative, scheming species of the human race.”
“What is it, the thing you were wrong about? Don’t change the subject. I want to know. I demand to know.”
“All this vanity for starters.”
“Vani…vanity! You call this vanity, demanding to know?”
“It’s the way the demand is made and the circumstances surrounding it. Like being a woman confers on you the right to know every thought process going on in my head.”
“I just want to be able to tell when you are happy or sad or just plain goofy. Why would it be so difficult to share those emotions if you don’t want to hide something from me? You want to hide everything, keep everything secret. You love to be so mysterious about everything and yet you say women are complicated.”
“It’s not about mystery or secrecy. I could share the contents of my brain cells now and then. But sometimes I just want to…not share that much. I want to be on my own—think without shouting my thoughts from the rooftops, without getting the question, ‘what are you thinking?’”
“You are detached!”
“What?!”
“Yes, that’s right. That’s another problem you have—detachment.”
“I or men?”
“Detached, detached, detached!”
“Wanting some personal space is being detached?”
“Nothing touches you. You don’t touch anything. You are just there, on your own.”
“You are blowing it out of proportion. If I were as detached as you think, you think I would give you the time of day?”
“It’s in everything you do. Your head is so high up you don’t see anything even if they bit you in the nose. Eyes right all the way.”
“Wait a goddamn sec. What is it I don’t see?”
“You don’t know?”
“What?”
“You can’t tell…?”
“…Pulling a lock of your hair…”
“Was it this way last week?”
“What?”
“It’s been almost a week and you couldn’t tell let alone say anything about it. Too late now, but don’t bother. We do not want to hear.”
“You—”
“Honey, your jaw is on the floor.”
“You, you one half of the human species! You can be so vain.”
“Vain? That word again. Ladies are not vain!”
“Don’t cry.”
“Don’t cry? What do you think of yourself? That I would cry because of you? Because you think you’ve wounded my vanity, which is nonexistent, by the way?”
“Are you fishing for an apology? I would always give it out. Sorry…”
“Keep your sorry.”
“Oh, you are not taking it? Talk about vanity. What do you want me to do, grovel in the gutter like a worm and ask for your forgiveness? You can’t crucify me with those eyes, so stop looking at me that way, like I’m supposed to just wither and die when you give me that look. You women are all the same—vanity, vanity, vanity equal nothing.”
“That nothing, as you so quaintly put it, is not called vanity. Get that into your thick head. It’s called style!”
“Style! Give me a break.”
“It’s that thing we have that pulls men out of their shells, leads them to us, then we lead them down the road and leave them stranded.”
“Let me tell you something, my dear lady: the so-called thing you call style is no style at all. You don’t have any style: you can’t conceive it. You are a bumbling lot, goofing in whatever you do. We men named your mess style, we called your ramblings poetry, your clumsiness grace, your crusty makeup beauty.”
“So what if we are vain? Call all the beauty vanity, but you have to admit we do it with style. We are great at it.”
“Of course.”
“And our beauty has beclouded your judgement.”
“Excuse me!”
“Otherwise, you wouldn’t be spouting such nonsense as you are now. Your heart wouldn’t beat like a rail line; you won’t stay up all night in wet dream and spend all your waking hours daydreaming. You won’t come knocking on Papa’s door asking for his daughter’s hand. And why shouldn’t we be vain? Hair as black as night, skin as glossy as ebony and chestnut, voice as smooth and sweet as honey, breath as delicate as robust, fragrance as enticing as heaven. Why shouldn’t we be vain?”
“And all those a pretty face make?”
“Exquisite.”
“Oh, my dear lady, your graces and charms are only as valuable as we men decide to exalt you. Those so-called pretty skin and hair and eyes survive defilement so long as we spill our blood for it. They exist because of us, for us. We give you breath and life. Without us, you are nothing. Without us, would anyone bother to call a lifeless stone an angel?”
“You must be—”
“Wait a sec.”
“I don’t want those secs anymore. No more secs!”
“My God! You know what you just said?”
“Listen to me, you.”
“You listen to me.”
“I said, listen to me.”
“No more. We’ll talk about this later, if I have the time.”
“You wouldn’t—”
“Time up. Sorry. Bye.”

Comments

Govt car snatched, robber shot

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:48:16 +0100

The Special Anti Robbery Squad in Edo State on Friday recovered a vehicle belonging to the state government from a two-man robbery gang after a shootout which left a gangmember near dead in Ekpoma.

One of the robbers was shot during the exchange of fire. His still-breathing body was put on display before newmen at a briefing in the state police headquarters.

The snatched car, with registration number EDGH 131, attached to a special adviser to the state government was taken from a driver in the state capital Benin City after he was held up at gunpoint by the two-man gang.

Minutes after the car was snatched, radio messages went out over SARS’s information network, according to police public relations officer ASP Peter Ogboi who briefed newsmen on the incident. Using the information, a SARS unit intercepted the grey Toyota Corolla at the university town of Ekpoma, some 45 minutes outside the state capital.

One gangmember escaped in the shootout but sustained an injury, security officials believe.

At the briefing, police alerted residents around the university town of Ekpoma, especially hospitals, to look out for any individual with fresh bullet wounds.

The wounded man, who may have been got because he’d been driving the snatched car and was still breathing throughout the display before newsmen, had no weapon on him. Police PRO said the police had “reason to believe the man who escaped went with the arms.”

The police also says it suspects the gang includes a thried man, ostensibly resident outside the country and believed to have started the gang and continues to arm it, and to whom certain remissions are still made by his two counterparts in the city.

The police confirmed to newsmen that investigations will continue until both men still at large, including the wounded escapee for whom the police has begun a manhunt, are brought to book.

There has been no statement yet from the Government House regarding the recovered car.

Comments

welcome back

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 18:42:10 +0100

i don't know whether this is actually right, but i feel the title of this particular post should be what i have written above.

welcome back because i have been away for a whole year in the heart of northern nigeria, experiencing wht it is to be nigerian.

to be nigerian, this time, without cable television, electricity, pipeborne water, internet, the basic things that make life in the city go round.

those are what a citybred person would term as deprivation, but in the end, i didnt see it that way. i wasnt deprived. i just gave up certain things to get to the heart of rural nigeria.

i had a nice time doing it too. while i didnt know that saddam hussein had been put to death, i understand something of why my northern neighbours are seemingly hostile--because the southerners ordinarily believe them to be ordinarily so. and why they are seemingly foolish--because the southerner expects nothing less, even though the actually smartness is actually a stupidity that gets none nowhere.

well, now i am back. i have completed work on a novel i titled THE BEGOTTEN. there is another short story called CROSSING, which i have turned into a play. FATHERLAND is also in the works. and i am working on a soap opera script, that one i talked about. they will be out soon. bear with me, as you always have.

yours truly
dili san jules

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POSTMARK PAIKO (FULL VERSION): I SPENT 21 BRUTAL DAYS ON A MILITARTY TRAINING AND ORIENTATION CAMP SERVING NIGERIA. THIS IS THE RECORD OF THOSE DAYS!

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 12:22:07 +0200

DAY 1
The N-word

Is the moon different in Niger? First time I saw it in niger, it was before six in the evening and it was already full and round. I ask forgiveness if I expected it to be different. But in what way? It is still the same orb of silver I see everyday in almost any place.

The N-word makes it all different.
First I got the call-up for Niger and wondered, where on earth is it? Actually, it was—where is Niger on the map of Nigeria? The most I got was that it was IBB’s home state—if having perhaps the largest state linked with the most maradonic of past presidents made any difference.
My second thought was actually a disappointment. Strangely, I expected to be thrown farther than the belt in the middle—maybe some outlandish place like Sokoto or Borno, and I could switch places with Gladys Ichifitanure or Lawrence Isaiah. No.
Departure for Niger was filled with dread and anticipation.
Dread: what would camp be like? How many hoops would sardonic military trainers march me through? Who could survive?
Anticipation: camp was an approximation of life on some exotic Caribbean beach that doubled as destination for sex tourism. Camp would be fun, games, sweat, sex, booze—all the sins and vice a soul could bear before death—crammed into 21 days of depravity.
That pull of sin is strong. That’s why it was easy to stare through the bus window at the countless hills and boulders, at a landscape that looked like someone had sprayed pebbles as big as houses all over the place and you simply had to bu9ild your house on them. Isn’t that the rockiest foundation!
It was eye-opening in ways both good and bad. I haven’t seen much of the denizens and it seems there are more southerners than I can count northerners, even though Shari’a operates here.
Perhaps it is different in Niger, and maybe the moon has to be different too.

DAY 2
“My name is Brother Brown. And you are?”
the young man asked the question with the most open smile I had seen in the eight hours it took to get to Paiko. I had overcome my dread, and the last three-minute walk to get to the camp was a coup of sorts. So I responded, half thinking he was out to obtain me.
He turned out to be a fellowship recruiter, actually a music director with Redeemed. The other two men with him were colleagues.
“What’s the thing you need most?” another man, who I later was told was the president of the fellowship, asked. He was called Papa Wale: papa for president, wale for his first name.
I thought he expected my answer to be inevitably “Jesus,” and said nothing.
“Mercy,” he continued, answering his own question. “Mercy is what you need.”
It was kind of good to come into camp a day earlier. That way you could register faster once the camp opened officially. With opening yet to happen, many would be stranded. Not every one of us who came a day before was sure to get registered early, however, and the accommodation slots were so few many were left homeless virtually.
Redeemed has a family house, they told me, and anyone was welcome to stay there regardless of Christian denomination. And they promised, should I go with them, to convey from the family house in Minna, a 15-minute drive from Paiko, to the camp next morning so I could register early.
It was a blessing. The worst thing that could happen to anyone in a foreign land is to be stranded, with no place to lay your head while lugging your luggage about.
They had the same message for every new arrival they could get. They ignored—even laughed—at those newcomers with a strong overweening sense of independence who simply zoomed by as if they knew any better.
One camp official offered us newcomers temporary accommodation in exchange for our call-up letter, which we could get back in the morning.
We took him up and forgot the fellowship, which settled for later comers.
Once we settled down, the issue of security came up and we had to find a way to beat theft till morning. We’re still trying and looking over our shoulder. No hope whatsoever.

DAY 3
On Tuesday 5 September 2006 registration was hell. I stood from 7am to 1am and couldn’t register. Because I wanted to be first to register on Wednesday morning. I set alarm for 3.30am and woke up promptly. But so did at least a hundred others. The hall filled with a seething mass of desperate bodies queuing up for registration.
A few minutes before it commenced, soldiers came in and chased everyone out. It was unbelievable. Usually only uniformed corpers who’d through with registration should be mustered for drills. Seeing them squirm through the rigours of rising early and marching through the early-morning mist was supposed to be vengeance against them for successful registration while others stayed all night and slept in open classrooms and in open air.
However, the stupid soldiers ordered all and everyone out on parade.
Public relations officer Binta Shaibu made a few comments, taught the NYSC anthem and made the mistake of using the word “retire.” The word was taken literally, the civilians we were. She’d actually said, “when you retire…” and we didn’t hear the rest. We took off, all racing to get back to the registration hall first. It took four soldiers armed with 3-feet poles to send us back to the parade ground.
We hesitantly joined the morning jog—and found it both distasteful and exciting. Once the jog was over we ran back to the hall for registration and continued standing on queues. There were more people willing to cheat and jump queues than there were people willing to organise it.
Hours later I got to the front of six lines for registration.
Check in. Collect counterfoil. Check documents. Registration by state and discipline. Check filled-in forms. Collect ID and publications. Pick up kit. Reclaim luggage. Register for hostel accommodation.
I went for evening drill, queued up for dinner, took a bath and slept once in a long time.

DAY 4
The 21-day camp was one time I thought Nigeria could be at its most secular, where tribal and religious lines would dissolve and all graduates would be brats who’d make the lives of camp official and physical trainers hell; that God and humanity would be forgotten and any time spared from military drills would be used for fun, games, fooling around and hurried quickies all over the place.
Wrong.
You can’t know how shocking it was to wake up for drills at 4am on Wednesday 6 September to rain. We fretted at going out in the rain, half praying the soldiers would forget the drills.
Oh, no, the bugle sounded and we marched out in white shorts, shoes, socks and tee-shirts, looking like old pot-bellied cricket players.
I got the shocker on the parade ground. We mustered into platoons in three files and began singing and clapping and praying. It was shocking, to say the least. It lasted for nearly half an hour, then the Shuaibu lady came and demanded more prayers—Christian and Muslim, according to the camp timetable. The Christian prayer warrior got the reassuring support of everyone, the Muslim got scanty, scattered responses to his lilting Arabic.
The jogging began spiritedly. The first jog was a flop. This, the second for me, led by Sergeant Ayuba aka Airborne—or Counterforce, as he sometimes called himself—leader of 4 Platoon, was great. He was anticipated, though. Every crazy song he led got resounding refrains in chorus.
If you smoke, Abacha government no go worry you.
Dem don tire, dem don tire. Lazy corper, dem don tire.
See monkey…worwor.
Adamma adamma adamma.
Chop akara dey go, moi-moi no dey.
There was more clapping and loud stomping than actual jogging accompanying the songs.
Airborne is Calabar but speaks intense Hausa, and even looks it, so that when he mentioned being Calabar I had to look at him twice to make sure he wasn’t kidding.
“I am a military trainer,” he said to make it clear why he needed utmost cooperation from 4 Platoon. “I train soldiers who are not ready for combat, not civilian corpers who are less than paramilitary.” One girl who speaks hausa, wears a veil and manages to look Yoruba (actually her mother was) called us semi-soldiers.
“When I hit a soldier, I feel hardness. And that spurs me,” Airborne went on. “But if I hit you [meaning civvy corper] I feel soft, and I don’t like it. Hardness makes me happy.”
He really took on physical training with gusto. Once the PT was over and we got back from jogging, he commenced warming-down exercises, as he expertly called them, to restore stretched muscles and stop them from tearing. Many were dangerously close to experiencing that firsthand.
PT for nearly 2000 lazy grumbling corpers was no picnic, but each platoon was as ready to outdo the others as were the platoon commanders happy to see their platoon was better and exciting rivalry into the others.
From the front a-jogging begins/from the back a-marching begins/front the left a-jogging begins/from the right a marching begins.
Jogging no be punishment. Na our normal training.
No one knew how prophetic those lines really were then.

DAY 5
Camp Orientation Day is a day all corpers look forward to. It is more like a second matriculation that only happens once in a lifetime. The governor of Niger was coming and we’d for four days been rehearsing a march parade, salutation and stuff—morning and evening.
As instructed, we were on the parade ground at 8 sharp. Of course, the officials didn’t show up until two hours later. Gov Abdulkhadir Kure didn’t shot up. It turns out Niger is like a village chiefdom with retired generals, notably IBB, at its head. No public event is attended without due approval, even when it is deemed fit. So Kure sent a commissioner from his state cabinet and the commissioner in turn sent his permanent secretary.
Then things began and should have gone smoothly once the swearing-in was concluded, though some conveniently left out the part of the oath that said something about “paying the supreme sacrifice for the Fatherland and shunning bribery and corruption.”
But students will always be student, bloody civilians that they are. Many, once they decided they had tired of standing, squatted, uncaring that the governor’s party was still there.
The salute and three happy cheers for the governor were passable at best. Hip, hip, hip, and 2000 voices—more like 1700 to be exact were supposed to chorus hurray. Some substituted hurray with Kure, others put in “oleh”—pidgin for thief. The RSM (regiment sergeant major) said later that we disgraced him before his superior, referring to the camp commandant whom we also contrived to disgrace before the dignitaries present.
Captain Nurudeen Olalekan Sadeequ decided to lay down the law. We were commanded to sit on the grass in our immaculate paramilitary green-and-white NYSC-crested T-shirts. The captain barked “worship the ground,” and the RSM turned interpreter of army jargon to corpers commanded us to “stand on your heads”, then press-up.
And of course the bloody civilian ex-students were still rocking with peals of laughter and grumbling complaints. The drilling punishment went on luntil some sobre-minded, failing to see the mirth in standing on their heads, began to take the punishment to heart and shun their childish colleagues into cooperation.
With my arse poking in the air while my head anchored my body to the ground, I muttered, “Who send me go school?” and two girls beside me rocked with a seizure of giggles as uncontrollable as mine.
There was something striking about this captain that reminded me of Badmus and james, and made me want to base a plot on him. At least, a sane, rational, logical yet fantastic part of my mind—maybe it was the writer inside seeking another adventure—realised that. He looked cool as every newly commissioned captain just back from peacekeeping mission in Liberia ought to, and yet firm and totally in control. If he smiled, you went home with him. It was that enthralling. That was before he said he actually killed with the same face with which he smiled. One girl from UNICAL (Ruth Echa Ani was her name and she got wed midway through service to an army captain classmate of the infamous commandant, both of who had served under UNIMIL even though they didn’t know one another) whose father was in the army, explained to me how officers rose through the ranks from NDA—with its university-like 5-year programme—and the 9-month short-service for graduates who majored in professional courses and incidentally rose through the ranks faster.
We’d always convinced ourselves we’d dropped studentship and were officially corpers. The captain totally stripped us of everything human.
“From this moment on,” he said, “you will be addressed as cockroaches, slippers, wombats, or any other name the officers deem fit.”
“On no account should I grab you wearing anything other than the kit you have been provided.
“The field is a holy ground. I know many of you came here for sex. (Got that right!) If I grab you any where near this field …” He let the threat hang over our heads half spoken and more minatory that way. “I don’t make threat. Ask my men. I am not known for issuing threats.”
I think he intended us to deduce the obvious: that he didn’t issue threats he didn’t carry out. He had the habit of adding the clause if I grab you—if I grab your soul, and then letting the threat hang in the air unspoken. When we retired to our lodgings after each bruising session with him, we vengefully and mirthfully called him If-I-Grab-You behind his back.
“Several paths have been designated for your use. On no account must you use a path not designated for your use. If I grab your soul…”
“The mammy market closes at ten, I gather. Lights Out is ten-thirty. If I find you anywere near that mammy market at ten…
“From time to time I will be conduction impromptu parades. If you fail to attend any for any reason whatsoever and I grab you…
“For those of you who think you have balls—if I grab you. I don’t think there are hermaphrodites among you but some of you ladies think you have balls—if I grab you, I will squeeze your balls, those balls you think you have got.”
He had another intimidating habit. While he addressed the cockroaches he constantly paced in-between the lines.
“For those of you hide away in fellowship as a way of staying away from parades, know this: God has powers, but I have the power of God at my fingertips and I will not hesitate to use it. Hiding at fellowships when you are supposed to be on parade ground means you are in the wrong place at the wrong time. If I grab you…”

DAY 6
There wasn’t supposed to be PT on Saturday. Or so Airborne said. But the bugle sounded nonetheless. We trooped out onto the field like prisoners. Stragglers were frog-jumped.
Offenders guilty of offences ranging from wearing the wrong outfit to strolling to parade got “rolled”—which meant sitting, if you were lucky otherwise actually rolling, as the word said, in wastewater gurgling as thick as sewage from the camp kitchen. It didn’t matter if you had your whites on. In fact, the whiter your whites, you better a candidate you were for it once you ran afoul of Camp Regulations According to Sadeequ. You simply had to obey the commandant and then come out looking filthier than a sewer rat and so unspeakably fragrant you were the butt of general laughter. Of course, everyone sympathised with you later and prayed never to step in the shoes you’d just vacated. But it took a good deal of wise-arse bargaining and a hefty payment to the launderers to get clean again.
The commandant rolled someone today. No one was sure what he did except that his dressing wasn’t complete. The guy had on his white tee-shirt and khaki trousers and the commandant commanded him to roll in wastewater from the cooking areas of the eating houses in the mammy market.
There wasn’t much to do but stand and sing and jog, and the time made my feet ache inside my uncomfortably tight boots. They felt like they were going soft as pears packed in a tight haversack. And to think I’d have to have those boots on all day. The reprieve was only momentary: the few precious seconds that elapsed in changing from the white PT boots to the sturdy-soled canvass-instep ochre jungle. Simply, it was only a swap of one hell for another.
DAY 7
You’d never have though Muslims were ardent proselytisers. But drive from Abuja to Minna and you get a sense of intense proselytising and religious symbolism even along the highway.
Along the highway, at specific intervals, are white metal boards of four by three feet, each with carefully painted Arabic script.
Allah.
Allahu akbar.
La ilah illa Allahu.
The slogans flash by with a certain concealed intensity as you speed by. You don’t exactly see them as much as feel their subliminal impact etched onto your retina and brain.
Because Niger is a Shari’a state, it was to be expected. But not as road signs. But if that was a brand of proselytising, Shari’a or no Shari’a, the Christians did it one better. They easily made three-quarters of the camp residents.
Before drills every morning, the parade ground reverberated with loud Amens, Halleluyahs and Jesus, Pentecostal-style, echoing across the field of Abubakar Dada Senior Secondary School, which doubled as the camp, and at some distance bouncing off the hills surrounding Paiko. A lead charismatic picked a point of prayer and asked the crowd to pray. Everyone did the ardent supplication at once. The babble could only be silenced by the lead calling hoarsely “In Jesus’ name,” getting an equally raucous chorus of “Amen” before moving on to the next prayer point.
An uninitiated could think they’d wandered onto a field packed full with Pentecostal crusaders invoking the Holy Spirit.
Catholics and Anglicans ostensibly aren’t accustomed to praying in this fashion and I wonder they made of it. In not being given to intense Bible punching and Greek ranting, they had something in common with Muslims. The time used for prayers was disproportionate. The Christians took up nearly an hour, sometimes more; the Muslims’ murmuring in Arabic of few indistinct words lasted only minutes.
When Christians prayed the parade ground was reverently silent—except when the hour-mark was reached. When Muslims prayed, the parade could afford a modicum of reverence mixed not with snide remarks but with unintelligible murmurs that did more to insult sensibilities because of its forced unintelligibility.
The NYSC is a federal paramilitary outfit in a confessedly secular country. Yet you can have marathon praying sessions on military parade ground and fellowships sprouting all over the training-and-orientation camp. That leaves a lot to be explained about this country’s brand of secularism.
DAY 8
Ever since I read I Air Force Cadet I’ve wanted to join the military, in particular the Navy. Not as a lifetime career choice thing but on basis of a short-service enlistment that would last a few years so I could graduate just like Ola in the book and go on with additional experience.
Perhaps my greatest motivation was to get behind the curtain of secrecy that enshrouds military life. There was something exciting about that kind of life. When Sydney went for orientation camp in his time in March 2006 and sent home a barrage of text messages complaining about the rigours of regimental life, I thought he was crazy. It was no use whining on sms. What did he expect of military trainers? Not much, it seems. For me, it was particularly difficult because I wanted to diary my experiences at camp. Camp had no time to spare for thinking-and-writing processes, no moment to jot down even the simplest thoughts.
At 0330 we were awake and dressed in whites like cricket players, expecting the bugle with bated breaths at 0400 for parade. The parade itself lasted till 0700 when we broke up for bath and breakfast. The next parade was at 0900. We, about two thousand of us, spent the hours 0700 and 0900 queuing up for food.
Second set of parade, and the drills lasted till 1. then we broke up for lunch. Lunch was at 1300 but came at 1400 or 1430, and at 1530 the bugle was sounded for the next parade at 1600. You had to wash up before lunch and sometimes the bugle came before you could even get the food let alone eat it.
The third parade lasted till 1900, time for dinner, which you got at 2030 or 2100. Lights Out at 2230, but half an hour before that anybody found in the mammy market had the camp commandant to deal with.
There was allotted time for everything. And once the bugle sounded for a parade or some other activity, you just had to switch into mode for the latest activity. Everything else had to stop; nothing else dared matter. Even if afternoon meals actually began at 1400 instead of one hour earlier, the bugle for parade at 1530 meant you had to march, food or no food.
Now, it is sort of enjoyable. But there are times when I feel caged and can’t wait for the camp to end so I can do my stuff in the larger Niger society.
I guess the most annoying thing about regimental life is the routine—and for a civilian student, being told what, when, where and how was an insufferable irritation.
On Monday afternoon, the lunch alarm came at 1503. One guy was still trying to sleep the muster for parade sounded at 1545. The sleep-deprived young man flew into heights of drama more dramatic than the three witches in Macbeth.
“These bastards! I was just trying to sleep. I have been lying here and sleep hasn’t come. Fuck the military!”
The bugle sounded again to remind us it was time to hotfoot it.
“Shut up,” he screamed in frustration at the bugle blower who was making his life miserable at the moment. “Get lost! I don’t want to hear it.”
Later when he calmed down, he said if he’d known camp would be this hellish he’d have deferred his service and kept on deferring it until he was out of the country.
An Igbo guy dissolved into a paroxysm of complaints. He said it was frustrating because his camp activities had absolutely nothing in common with his discipline at university. The camp had confused his entire plans. He’d lost weight so much his parents couldn’t recognise him if they saw him. He couldn’t sleep. And the worst part that “scatters his brains”, he ranted, was the lack of sleep, since he was afraid to sleep for fear of being caught off guard by the bugle.
That which scatters his brains is the brain behind the design of the camp outfit. In the morning at 0400 when it is cold, we have to dress in short-sleeved tee-shirt and shorts; and in the afternoon, when it is sweltering hot, we have to put on khaki trousers and long-sleeved jackets the captain calls uniform.
DAY 9
Sule Ayuba once said blacks had cheating wired into their genotype. He was a military officer; he was our platoon commander and we were but corpers. Yet, he warned us, he would cheat if he had the opportunity. It was a chance, a call for extra caution.
He should have said students had quadruple DNA strands for cheating. They never seem to do enough of it. There was no dearth of people ready to lie, cajole and do anything to jump queues for registration, screening, payment, even and especially food.
Sometimes they always got in faster with their goals simply because they anticipated no fellow corper would do something as uncool as brushing them off. Anyone on queue would understand, the buddy-buddies they were, and cheats exploited the buddy-buddy feeling.
It was flagrant, considering a line of the NYSC oath that made reference to shunning corruption and bribery. One person answered that he’d stricken that line from his oath and quipped, “OYO”—on your own.

DAY 10
Airborne wasn’t the first person to say Nigeria had great plans on paper that failed at implementation.
Take Shari’a. Niger is a Shari’a state. I haven’t investigated in-depth the evidence to support that superficially, but it is apparent that there are more southerners visible than there are northerners. Or, if you took the region to represent faith, more Christians than Muslims.
The government seems to be reckoning without a youth paramilitary programme like that of the NYSC, where men would have to stand next to women in hijab on queues, where women hawk food to men in such close proximity and wear no head covering.
Are you sitting for this? There are cleaners employed to clean men’s bathrooms in the dormitories on a daily round while the men bath nude, as you can probably guess, in the shower stalls. These cleaners are all women. And just for full measure, on one edge of the camp is a spot (curious?) for green and dark bottles with liquid whose labels say contain 13 per cent alcohol by volume. And on Sundays, while fellowships go on, cars zoom into park to pick up the ladies, the guys have their phone memory cards full of porn. And dorm talk is the bawdiest you ever lived with.

DAY 11
Competitions began in the first week of camp. We presented a pantomime called Nigeria and its Many Problems or Water Don Pass Garri on the first Saturday night.
There were countless contests on camp. Miss NYSC, Miss Coca-Cola, Hot Legs, Bold and Beautiful, Mr Macho, Drinking Contest, Ayo Contest, soccer, drama, dancing, volleyball, cooking, quiz.
Platoon 4 (Ayuba calls it 4 Platoon, military-style; we call it Platoon 4, civvy-style—or Plantain 4 or Banana 4) began choosing contestants and arranging for future contests right after the drama went off on the first Saturday night.
Ruth volunteered to wax the pageant contestants’ legs, probably till they shone like a baby’s round bottom or the skinny pins of some olive-skinned thing of beauty soaking up the sun on some South Pacific island beach. One girl said she would teach them catwalking. Davies the drama director with a finger in every pie said he’d teach carriage and use of vocabulary. After all, the platoon’s potential entry for the Miss Coca-Cola contest although blessed with a complexion as ebony black as the liquid in a Coke bottle is cursed with a thick Igbo-accented tongue. As is the favour cat-eyed Miss NYSC when she speaks pidgin. Even though they looked like possible knock-them-dead contestants, the drama director had immense problems with their English tainted by their mother tongue.
Ruth, the girl with an army father, said she’d design and sew the costume to cut costs. I volunteered to sew if she’d do the cutting. That was perhaps the first time I would allow myself be drawn into platoon business. The second time I surprised myself by volunteering assistance for the cooking competition.
Then one bulky girl who constantly reminded me of Njide, my late and favourite cousin, said she’d enter the beer-drinking contest.

DAY 12
A drizzle next Monday morning would have put a damper on things, but didn’t. The jogging didn’t hold. When we came for HIV/AIDS seminar at 0900, it became warm and then gradually so unbearably hot that no one listened to the talk on voluntary counselling, testing and HIV/AIDS prevention anymore. We were roasting inside our khaki jackets and trousers in the sun. The drama presentation at the seminar fell on deaf ears and blind eyes.
Only the demonstration on condom use caught our attention. Everyone wanted to see with some prurient anxiety the latex slipping over a life-size wooden penis. The lewd comments about the penile model made it appear larger than life. The demo had barely started, the lubricant-impregnated rubber covering the friction-free smooth wooden penis when all began demanding their own condoms.
The demo people said we could get the CDs, that’s slang for the prophylactic latex, from the camp clinic later. That night we thronged the clinic for our compact discs.
By evening, a drizzle at 1600 broke up the afternoon parade and sent us scampering away, and we were quite happy to do just that.

DAY 13
On Tuesday I bet we wanted a repeat drizzle to send us back to our beds in the camp hostel. The drizzle came, lulled, then became a cloudburst.
There was no sign of going back. We jogged in it. We drilled in it for hours until we began to love it and fell all warm and aglow inside. A thin rainbow suddenly appeared and made everywhere look so much the colour of sparkling champagne someone said the Rapture was upon us.
We were cold when we finally broke. We rushed out of our wet clothes, bathed, put on dry khaki clothes that felt blessedly warm all of a sudden and lined up for tea so watery we needed to buy extra sugar and milk to make it drinkable to taste. But the warmth of the tea was welcome even though it came an hour late so that we chewed the bread on our way to drills at 0900.
We reported for man-o-war drills but gave up the time for Platoon 3, which had failed to complete theirs the day before due to downpour.
The soccer tournament commenced today. We would play on Friday.
Nigeria is a country where abandoned projects begin to take shape once a bigwig is scheduled to visit. On Wednesday there was no jogging but we did an impromptu cleanup in preparation for the DG’s visit. A lot of bigwigs came today, including topdogs from CBN, UBA, Union Bank, Diamond Bank and a guy who swore his textbook would help us pass job interviews of any kind at any company.
Before we joined the seminar of job provision in the sun, we did our man-o-war activities. Balancing Logs, Tunnel, Return-and-Gain or Swing-and-Gain, Spike Crawl, Wall, then a Mother Wall.
On a normal day, I should have scaled the little wall easily, but after having gone through six obstacles before the wall seemed too high or my limbs too weak.
Others were reserved for later: Jacob’s Ladder, Postman Walk, Scramble Net, Junior Tarzan, Burma Bridge, Tension Rope.

DAY 14
Tuesday at 2300, the tattoo parade signal sounded without a warning. The bugle had us all hissing and cursing and grumbling like old creaky automobiles. The bugle shocked me. I’d slept at 2000 and thought the bugle was the normal at 0400. But the phone alarm I’d set for 0345 hadn’t gone off. I thought my battery was dead. Others thought, more adventurously, that they either were dreaming or the dormitory was afire. We were still thinking and hissing when the soldiers began pounding on walls and doors like Nazi soldiers routing suspects out of the comfort of their homes in the dead of night.
There were highpoints, even in such distressing moment. Someone moaned, fearfully then but later vindictively, that it was like a robbery was going on. A girl chose those few twilight seconds snoozing and alertness to realise how bad it was to “rush” people from sleep: they could have heart attacks, she said. Another girl said she’d left her phone on her bed. Many came out in their nighties and slippers, and Udoye said the soldiers were rushing into the female hostels knowing full well what state of undress the girls would be in just to see “free breasts. Make them thank their God say them no see me. If them see me, I go talk o!”
The tattoo was for roll call, since some corpers couldn’t be accounted for. Guys got it firmly planted in their heads that the missing corpers had to be girls who’d gone with strange men to spend the night for paise. Runs girls, they tagged them, not the first time.
We returned to bed at 0100 and woke up promptly at 0400 for morning parade, roundly cursing the camp commandant. A few conspiracies to make his life hell were already bandying around walking-talking pairs by daybreak. It had been done on other camps where revolts succeeded and people would wonder why corpers revolted against a particular commandant. The conclusion would invariable be that he was one wicked, cruel son of a bitch.
The plotters thought platoon leaders should pull more clout with fellow corpers. I told them in passing even without knowing who they were (they were walking ahead of me and I had to pass them by anyway) that that was a no-brainer. They said nothing.
Anyhow the revolt had to be well orchestrated. A rebel voice would suddenly, when told to “ground arse” say, “Wetin sef,” and the revolt would ripple through the crowd, helped along by strategically planted rebels—and the next thing it would be corpers versus soldiers, an uneven match in number. And Sadeequ would be out of the camp.
Others were more willing to entertain amorous fantasies. On the night of the tattoo, a guy said boys skipping camp would be decamped, never girls. Girls knew where to touch the captain and even the formidable no-smiles camp commandant would be reduced to a whimpering, simpering, prattling baby all heated up with sexual passion. “Abi, them tell you say commandant no dey fuck?” the proponent asked brazenly. “Commandant na man. E get dick. Girls na devil” was the conclusion.
Someone opined later that morning that the commandant was being unyieldingly firm for some ulterior reason. If he ventured to tell a girl, the gist went, “come and see me,” that CHOSEN girl would go running at the double and spreading her legs wide open “as if them don work am keep,” a guy said. Translation: readymade. And what girl in her right senses, the general picture suggested, would dare refuse such a formidable man?
Once during cleanup one day, he walked on by and girls ogled his departing back—backside, rather. “God try for e body sha,” a girl remarked, a remark that became a for-girls-only chorus tinged with oohs and aahs.
Ayuba challenged the girls in his platoon: “Shebi una like the commandant, ba?” What answer did they chorus? Something like God had created the commandant on the best day of the week. No one knew what day it was for sure. Even boys were unnerved at the sight of his bare grabbing biceps of his upper arms.

DAY 15
Volleyball and soccer held today. We lost the volleyball game. Soccer was a losing battle right from go: 3-1 silenced me. After a pep talk and glucose binge, water and chewing-gum, it became 3-2, then 3-3, then moved on to penalty. The shouting, the chanting, the drumming, the mascotting, all were deafening.
Other contests seemed to be falling apart. Loudmouths were getting to our shoo-ins for Miss NYSC (which was later replaced with Miss Glo), Coca-Cola, Bold and Beautiful, Hot Legs. The loudmouths were trying to field their own personally favoured candidates to get in good with them. Rather, for the male loudmouths pushing forward female acquaintances, to get in good and hard into their flowery, satiny, silky pants.
All the initial contestants we’d been banking on began pulling out. And the boys didn’t want to relent on the bitching campaign, as though they could suddenly don boobs and catwalk on stage.
The girls were stupid to fall for the smear campaign and refuse to stand. Not that guys don’t know a thing about pretty girls and pageants, but girls don’t push their own ideas onto the male soccer team. So why didn’t the guys leave the girls well alone to their skinny legs and bikini business?
We won the soccer match and went wild, chanting. Ayuba! Ayuba! Ayuba! All the way across the field to the hostel. We shouldered him into the air.

DAY 16
Organising our entry for the cultural dance contest was a bitch of task. I suddenly became a timekeeper, which wasn’t too bad. I would ensure the dancers kept to the practised 8 minutes. The Efik lead singer was supposed to watch me for the countdown I would signal at 2-minute intervals. We arranged it that way.
We also arranged to meet at 1900 for a final rehearsal before the event at 2000. The turn-up was crazy. First, the rendezvous point was changed minutes to the meeting time and the drummers who’d been practising refused to show up. New drummers were picked and taught to make up a beat to match the rhythm of the Efik folksongs. A minute to appearing onstage we were still screaming and rushing around, getting our discarded shoes, slippers and shirts into safe keeping (in my care, that is), getting a singlet for one of the male dancers, taking the drummers blindly through the four song sequences. It was so hectic my head could have fallen off for the migraine pounding me silly.
Once Platoon 4 was called onstage we had no option but to go, prepared or not. Bashir, the platoon leader, made a thirty-second introduction that fell in with the allotted ten minutes. Ruth led the dancers out onto the stage. In a single file, their green wrap-around skirts and white blouses of cheddar were uniform, as was the sway of hips and busts. Lead singer and another Calabar who earlier promised to watch for my timing became so engrossed with the singing and dancing they forgot my humble timekeeper self existed. From somewhere in the wings, I tried to get their attention by screaming. They never even looked back up until the moment my voice went hoarse. Doris, the platoon’s representative on the socials committee, came around backstage to observe that the dancers were packed too close to the back of the stage. I had to somehow let them know the watching, rowdy audience and judges thought they were afraid to move to the front of the stage, or at least occupy the centre. My screams fell on deaf, singing, dancing ears.
Eight minutes wound up. Ruth, when the rest of the troupe had exited the stage, explained the origin of the dance for the benefit of the judges, since the crowd wasn’t really interested in such genetic material. Then she came offstage dancing and twirling her body in the serpentine, sultry way that only her Efik tribespeople are known for.
Judging by the resounding applause, it was a success. We came fifth in the tournament. Translation: we had to re-costume (with more flamboyance and at more expense), recoup, retrain and come for the finals. It was a plus even though we’d lost the drama qualifier.
At the end of the show, I grew heads at the applause and lost the hoarseness in my throat for some time. My voice was a gravelly croak. It was a success considering the dancing troupe was an ill-sorted bunch of unserious individuals whom you couldn’t keep focused on one routine for any length of time.
The success was both infectious and contagious. Even the issue of missing slippers, as we later discovered, couldn’t dampen it. But I doubted I wanted to go through the arse-busting rigours anytime soon.

DAY 17
It’s not easy cooking for people, especially if they never bothered to appreciate how much you work your fingers to the bone: the two thousand thankless bodies that each platoon had to cook for in turns. Platoon 4 had to do so on Friday. Again the bunch picked to do the chore on the platoon’s behalf was ill sorted and there were more people more interested in stirring a pot of boiling soup while posing for the camera, video and still, than actually working. None of the grime and soot to ruin that special Kodak moment.
The smoke billowing from the six, seven fireplaces was thick, black. The flames had to be kept roaring. It was hard bone-baring work, which made me appreciate what the kitchen staff of women had to do everyday all day for the 21 days of camp.
Breakfast was ready on time—six 40-tonne iron tripod pots into which we dumped 800grammes (two cans) of Cowbell each and an equal amount of powdered milk to go with 1300—we counted!—bread loaves.
Lunch was a basinful of okra made into soup in a 50-tonne pot to go with four bags of yam flour made into amala in those six 40-tonne pots filled with water.
For dinner—rice—an equal number of pots and seven big bowls of tomatoes ground to fill the 50-tonne pot. The work was back breaking, as was keeping the fire going. We did it so well and soon it was the women’s turn to admire the hard work involved in keeping the fire raging under the cooking pots. Yet I praised the women and their work the more. Next time I queue for food, I silently promised myself, I will not diss the dish or make snide comments about delays or taste or quality. I vowed unqualified acceptance of whatever the women spooned into my food flask.

DAY 18
The scene is breathtaking. On top of the rock, the entire earth falls back into a vista of green. Sitting on the rocks feels like sitting on the highest point on earth and Niger rolling before you becomes your world, your footstool and you the king.
On the right is greenery broken only by a dark tarred road fingering through the green like a snake. The green is a verdant ring of grassland. Few round-topped trees dot the landscape like mushrooms or broccolis. A phone network mast is incongruous in the middle.
The scene throws backward into a range of mountains more like huge stones God left in Niger. Leftward it flows into a closer mountain and continues in unbroken green and mushroom trees and verdant green rug. (Several roads, earth and tarred, wind through the landscape. There are two more phone masts.) It continues all the mind-blowing way to the extreme left.
In the foreground hundreds of the village’s square-shaped houses and a water tower squat at the base of the mountain.
From the bottom upward, lemon grass, grasses and legumes blossoming with wild flowers carpet the side of the mountain and grow almost over the smaller rocks all over the surface.
On top the sky meshes with the green vegetation in the distance.
People are praying, singing, buying and selling on the mountaintop. Business is brisk; sellers tacked at least N10 on the price of everything. Calls are going out to relatives and friends, cameras are clicking like mad. All traders at mammy market came ahead of us.
And people are zonking out. Soldiers have to take their unwieldy packages of unconscious inconveniences down the mountain on their backs or shoulders on Red Cross stretchers.
It is amazing. A few people pleaded sick and stayed away from mountaineering and we thought we were brave to be going on it, but flaking out wasn’t part of the deal. And seeing the local children surefootedly scaling the mountain like a bunch of mountain goats makes the weakness of the unfortunate corper more agonizing.
We’d began the ascent very earlier before the sun’s rays warmed the mountainside and lifted the dew from the night before. We were still on top when the sun came up and, being close to the sun made us feel hotter and swelling. It took hours for the long chain of hand-linked humans to get down, but we felt we’d conquered the mountain. After that only a few the following mornings would still look at it at assembly—sorry, at parade.
Getting down was the hardest part. We’d gone up steep faces of the mountain using a rope secured to a rock. No one knew only a stone securely held us from plunging back down to our deaths at the base of the mountain until. We found that only when we got closer to the peak.
We took another route, supposedly of less resistance, on the way down the sheer side the mountain, stepping gingerly on clumps of stones, hands linked in a human chain. It was hairy. I would have felt easier if I had both my hands free and to myself, but the confinement in my opinion made descent hazardous. If I crashed for any unfathomable reason I would fall into the guy ahead and send him tumbling into the guy in front of him. The domino effect I would set up would maintain its momentum and have each one of us concertinaing down the sheer face of the mountain until one body wedged us and stopped us reducing to shattered bones and bloody pulp.
That happened only in my dark imagination. But one guy did fall, though. He was zonked. He dashed his head against rock and fell bleeding. In his inebriation, he said soldiers were silly for allowing alcohol sellers up the mount. Girls drank but neither got drunk nor fell. a conclusion was on every lip: the guy was stupider than the soldiers for exceeding his intoxication limit. Earlier on parade before ascent, he’d been caught with a glass and bottle of gin by the camp commandant.

DAY 19
Bold & Beautiful contest was a row. The hall had never been packed more full. Everyone shouted invectives and slurs and encourage, depending on their mood, as each girl made her entrance. The chants changed with each girl.
A B C D E F G H … I. This referred to a girl so slender she looked like the letter I.
Over age, over size. For a girl on the plump side. Read: gross.
You too dey. For a girl they considered phat.
Mummy de-de, oyoyo. For a girl they considered subtly nubile and obviously more fit for a mother than a pageant, especially if she was big.
The entry score music also changed with each contestant, and changed the mood of the crowded audience. The voices were chorusing the song African Queen more than the DJ was playing it. African China would have died for the reception.
This guy gave jokes so dry the crowd couldn’t wait to boo him off the stage. That moment came when a group of four girls came on to present a riff on Rihana’s Baby, come share my world. Why not? The quartet of females had on slinky black trousers, thin white blouses that outlined all natural and enhanced curves. They knotted the lower hem of the blouse high above their navels, baring a swathe of swarthy skin, glittering enticingly in the dark and fuelling the raging testosterone. They did things with their enhanced anatomy. The hip swaying and bucking and twisting, Rihana style, were all calculated to titillate.
The contestant girls gave eye-opening answers. One didn’t know the full meaning of NACA. Another said Tony Blair—or was it Nelson Mandela? Even that part is unclear—was secretary-general of the UN. (Don’t know how Kofi Annan swallowed that.)
The girl from Platoon 4 weighed in second runner-up and somehow that was enough for my, for us. But I am wondering whether both girls who wanted to stand for Platoon 4 were both named Ruth.

DAY 20
All hell broke loose on the morning of September 22. We were told about night inspection that would involve us dressing up our bed for the soldiers to inspect. Only it didn’t turn out that way.
At 0200 most were yet to sleep. Others had only just slept off when the rouse began. We marched out, panicked, after the RSM’s initially entered (though an apologetic one) to tell us to clean up.
Sadeequ demanded a thorough clean-up of our surroundings, a cleaning roster, roll-call of all corpers in the dorm and a waste bin to be situated to one side of the dorm door, all of which he’d be back to inspect, especially the cleaning, in half an hour.
“Permission to carry on, sir?” asked the hostel leader.
He granted it and left.
Clean-up began and was completed in a huff. Then things turned sour. First, Anfal the hostel leader, said to contribute money for a dustbin. Some agreed, more refused. Someone said it wasn’t our place to buy waste bin or even any form of clean-up, that money had been provided by the federal government for all of the camp’s administration.
It was only unfortunate that the politically adept smooth-talking GPC Nwokoro, the state coordinator, and his cohorts had eaten up everything. Angel said we were graduates who’d spent aluta-ised years at university and should be able to stand for our rights and ourselves.
Everyone was shouting at the top of their voice, espousing reason to not be treated like babies, resentful of being woken up at 0200 for something as droll as a cleanup, resentful that a camp administration was only inflicting the cleanup as punishment after Minister for Intergovernmental affairs, youths and sports, Dr Grace Ogbuche, lambasted the camp authorities.
Rationalisations were all over the place. In minutes the camp was like a university campus spoiling for Aluta. Everyone was spoiling for mass action.
It began on the score of seemingly brutal military drills, everything Capt Sadeequ had ever donee.
We confronted and corralled him, drowning out his once militant voice as he tried to speak reason. He wouldn’t climb onto a higher pavement to address us; if he did that, he would expose himself to stoning. Better to stay in the heart of the seething crowd. So he remained in the middle of the crowd, at the same level so if some hotheads at the back of the mob threw stones the coolheads close to him would be pelted as well.
His once commanding voice was hoarse. When he eventually began to speak, he began with “Gentlemen and ladies” not “clowns.” The shouting and jeering silenced him.
He couldn’t leave for his safety with the entire camp rowdy. The rowdy bunch however began to split into factions, some against, some for. But after an hour of screaming and jeering nothing meaningful had been said. The good levelheads favoured constructive talk; the bad roughheads said Sadeequ had nothing to say that they wanted to hear.
Sanding and stoning and watering began. But then he’d pulled away and we—the good group that didn’t want him lynched that night—hived off along with him, while he laboriously explained the Nigerian factor, the disparity between on-paper and on-the-ground realities, the politics of corruption (or the corruption of politics) and gift money [the minister’s hundred-grand gift] the essence of bugle timing, the instilling of military training and discipline, the indispensability of name calling in military circles. During his training, he said, they were called worse names—addressed even by the given name of their mothers. Think of would-be military officers going by names like Mabel and Cynthia.
Some reasoned along with him. Not all understood that a military camp was supposed to be just what the name says—timed, regimented and intentionally designed to be uncomfortable.
He called us clowns, he explained, not derogatorily but because we made him laugh, exactly what the name suggested. At that statement, a fresh aluta erupted, all screaming for his head. And while he explained in that circle of bodies, he looked pitiable, human. I pitied him. We even shepherded him away to save him from being lynched. He’d never been to a university, he explained later when he came to be interviewed at OBS. That’s why he seemed lost in the aluta crowd. And his only mission in Liberia with the UN, keeping peace and working with refugees, hadn’t prepared him for an alutaised mob.
Everything military and mysterious about him was stripped off like a veneer, demystified and humbled. He lost the soldierliness that had kept him impregnable.
Before that, it took time for us to understand he wasn’t responsible for our welfar. Actually none but one of the grievances made out to the coordinator concerned the commandant.
Camp administration by night denied knowledge but claimed responsibility by morning. Sadeequ was gone, it seemed. With all the clamouring all night, what could have been expected and what more could have pacified the mob? Nwokoro had written to the Brigade Headquarters that he wanted Sadeequ out. by this time we were still seething and so incensed that we did an about-turn and screamed that he himself had to go. He almost had a heart attack standing right there before us, uncomprehending. It became we-want-Sadeequ all over the place. With the captain’s senior officers from the barracks right there while we screamed for him like a demented bunch, it is uncertain what they thought but the clamour must have hyped their estimation of him.
Everyone should have known he was a shy guy. Ruth said he actually about-turned girls and spoke to their backs to avoid looking them in the eye. He never made eye contact.
He confessed to being a shy guy but he preyed on that very weakness in others because it made him feel more in control.
The self-effacing expose was just too much for any military officer, I felt ashamed for him. Especially when I heard, or thought I heard, tears in his voice and saw it in his eyes as the coerpers overwhelmed him that night.
I guess shouldering him in front of his seniors who’d come to relieve him of his duties and for damage control salvaged his career reputation, which had temporarily plunged and instantaneously being tarnished in the eyes of the brigade top brass.
He said he wasn’t happy with his present duty in the army. He was a physicist who wanted to make things. He had this mantra; “At the end of the day, the only thing you have is what’s upstairs, in your head.” He wanted to make things with his hands. In the armies of advanced countries, like the US, he said, the greatest advances in science and technology begins in military labs before filtering down into civilian use. He was disillusioned. He weas changed to the man who was everywhere and with everyone.
We said we would declare Sep 22 Corpers’ Day, sort of like Independence Day. Ours was the third camp nationwide to stay a revolt and a formidable Batch B. the victory got to our heads. We boasted about how we could uninstall and reinstate any commandant.
After that the camp became a campus. No soldier shoppted you, no grabbing, no frogjump, no carrying. Everyone did as they pleased. Bugles sounded and hours after the hour people were still strolling out leisurely. Mufti was all over the place. Of course, trust us to abuse freedom like we seemed to believe Sadeequ had abused power himself. He came one of us—and on thing was clear: we loved him. His human side wowed many into stupidity and sentimentality and girls brimmed with sympathy and puppy love.
I just don’t like the feel of the camp anymore.
Deji had been going on and on about camp and service and trekking, but his last message said he’d had enough. I wonder what that meant.

DAY 21
Endurance trek held on Saturday 23 September. The moon had been sited in Saudi Arabia and muslims were to stay behind on camp as well as the sick and the weak.
The trek became a jog. We jogged the first phase of the distance to an unknown destination. It took 2 hours and 2 minutes. We broke, rested, ate, drank.
The second phase stretched longer but was shorter timed. We practically raced through in one hour, pushing the man-o-war and soldiers into running and forcing everyone else in the long file of humans to run. Which was treacherous. The terrain was unfamiliar—we jumped into the air to leap over water puddles before we even saw the marshy ground ahead of us; we squished through marshes, waded through water, peeled through tight bush with arms stretched skyward above our heads.
Soldiers couldn’t stop us anymore. The last few minutes as the camp swung into sight were a riot. We raced, panting. We loved it. To think, only yesterday we’d stubbornly, childishly declined to go on the trek.

DAY 22
On Thursday we went for the dance finals and came fourth from a previous fifth position.
The next night, Micah appeared for Mr Macho. It was a hormonal thing. Young hunky men baring their all and all and making girls shriek and squirm in their seats while guys passed lewd comments and bawdy remarks. He made one highlight: ripping his shirt off his body on stage. But he came seventh.
Chidimma finally got over the dirty comments she’d been getting in the badmouth campaign, finally making up her mind to represent the platoon. She contested for Miss Coca-Cola and, despite being darker than coke, came eighth.
Bashir Bello, the platoon leader, was under pressure—fire, really—to give account of platoon expenditure and balance accounts. There are some expenses Ayuba made that Bash didn’t understand, he said, and couldn’t explain it to a platoon set to tear him apart. And it would be bad—for him, that is, for going through the agitation—if he didn’t touch a cent of the money. Actually, the money wasn’t even in his charge.
“Wallahi, I am afraid,” he told Ruth and I the night before he was to open up the books.
I sympathised with him. Leadership isn’t easy, especially with the kind of people we are—civilian students, now corpers who think university confers a right never to be cheated at anything.

DAY 23
You couldn’t imagine the sort of places the endurance trek took us through. Forests so thick I could see a potential hero/heroine character streaking through like some real-life Guyver pursued by a bunch of military grunts desperate to put several bullets through him. it was ripe jungle for a war story. Hillsides so scenic they were unbelievable. Brooks you could cross in one pace. In some places you couldn’t walk without your legs brushing against bush.
The natives we ran into along the trek path were friendly with a dash of piquant, unquestioningly curiosity. They took seconds off sitting outside their tiny huts, working their farms and washing their clothes in the little brooks meandering across the rocky land to say Sannunku all the way. Yaya yau. Barka da rana.
The huts were round as the innuits of the Eskimos, round as dwellings of old, made of sun-dried thatched reeds, a parabolic hole for entrance in front and a door fashioned by tying dried reeds together. Only one entrance led inside. Above the door was a high little window only big enough to hold a six-year old mischievous brat bent on climbing out it. The hut was scarcely 7feet high and the door was half that height. You had to bend at the waist to get in the doorway. If you sat on your haunches, the top of the doorway just about touched your head.

DAY 24
Miss Glo contest came up on Saturday night, almost the last social event on camp. There were very high stakes from the start. Reason; the sponsorship was by Globacom and Equatorial Trust Bank. And it turned out to be a quiz contest instead—four rounds of questioning. Girls entering pageants expect to be questioned somewhat and many will do their part to make certain they don’t come across on stage as beauty without brains. But four rounds of questions were over the top. If the girls know they were coming out for a quiz, a comedian said, no thought of mind-blowing prize would have made them enter the contest.
Either the scoring was based less on the answers the girls gave or Platoon 4 was compensated. If the judges scored on the bases of composure, confidence, knock-them-dead appearance, then platoon 4 could have won. The girl contesting on our behalf had all that and one more. She’d been modelling and knew enough runway and catwalk tricks to remind me of Toni Coldsweat.
The dispute began when only the first and second positions remained for grabs and Platoon 4 was still standing. When the second was mentioned and it was obvious Platoon 4 was going home with the bacon, shouts of “Ojoro” rent the air. Everyone was screaming that she didn’t deserve it, and it came as a surprise even to us her platoon members. After all she failed to give reply to the full meaning of NEEDS and the colour of the camp pickup truck. But it was our first and only first position in any contest and we erupted into jubilation, hugging and snapping photos and dancing, and the new Miss Glo acted like a real beauty queen. She hugged very daintily, fanning herself with her fingers, rushing for a Fanta while everyone gave her some air before she really decided to be a true pageant winner and faint.

DAY 25
Now I understand why Bash was afraid of the audit. Everyone was screaming blue murder and Bash had to cautiously, almost reluctantly, mention each item on the list while waiting to be pounched upon. He was prone to taking offence when asked to repeat a certain item. There was this annoying guy who came after everything had almost concluded and said it was null and void because he, his royal majesty his nibs, hadn’t been there. He’d warned he couldn’t make it that day, that the audit should have been held the next day so he could attend and that he must be on the committee for Campfire Night.
All platoons were at war over their finances. There was just a lot of embezzlement that people couldn’t stomach: cooked figures, trumped-up expenses and ridiculous prices—N400 pair of shoes, N10,000 recharge card for calls, N5000 for each pageant contestant. Wonder what those embezzlers will do in office if less than 100 grand in 21 days touched them off to show their true colours.
It is difficult to believe the same people screaming and bawling lewd comments at Miss Glo on Saturday night as the contestants filed out would be enraptured with the gospel the next morning.
First they bathed, dressed to kill, struggled for food on queue and zoomed into service to praise God. And the enthralment was utter. A pin could have been heard dropping to the floor. The hush was total as bawdy minds listened raptly to the gospel.
Amazing how quickly people can change. Everyone’s got some mercury in them.

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ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS, FORMERLY DESIRE

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:46:47 +0100

There was a loud bang outside. It wasn’t right outside the window, but I knew it would have come from the next street. The gang was loud enough o have scared some people, because at that instant Gladys ran into my room, screaming, frightened.
“Thieves,” she said in a small voice. “They are shooting. God, who have they shot now?”
Because it was just seven on this Thursday evening I couldn’t imagine that any robber would be brave enough o strike an area when everyone as still up. Men were still returning from work; women were still returning from market; boys and girls were starting to rove in pairs and seek out secluded street corners for those quiet talks they would never have during daylight. Especially because it was Thursday and the latest edition of Super Story hadn’t come on air yet, any robber brave enough to strike at seven should be brave enough to stand lynching.
Gladys was still whimpering. She turned off the light in the room closed the curtains, stood at a corner of the window and peeped through the end of the curtain. “Can’t these thieves let people spend their Christmas in peace?” Suddenly she let go of the curtains and shouted “Blood of Jesus” as another bang sounded outside.
“What is it, Gladys?” I asked in a tired voice. I thought perhaps the single bang had come from a gun, more like a police gun. The property owners and residents of my neighbourhood had ordered extra security for the area. And they paid good money every month so that five police officers could always keep an eye on the neighbourhood every evening. After a recent spate of robberies in nearby streets, the extra security seemed as good as telling would-be robbers that this particular street was out of bounds.
Maybe the deterrent was working, because in the lat two months no robbery had been reported. That’s why I found it unimaginable that robbers would strike at seven on a Thursday evening. More likely, those police officers had fired a couple of warning shots to bring some to attention who wanted to prove uncooperative. But who, I thought desperately. A bike rider who would not stop and show his particulars? Or a pair of lovers caught exchanging sweet nothings in a dark street corner?
That second possibility amused me for a while until I realised that my sister was actually praying in a desperate to God, covering our entire family with the precious blood of Jesus, putting up a ring of consuming fire around our house, and striking the robber blinds with such blindness so severe they could never dream let alone think and plan to rob God’s children. She was about to say Amen but screamed another Jesus as the third bang sounded. It was so loud, and so powerful. Only a gunshot could have sounded like that. But as the deafening bang receded, I could hear a dim babble of voices, excited children screaming with glee in the next street. The sound of those voices brought relief. I said, “Gladys, stop behaving like a child. Nobody is shooting anybody.”
“Is there something wrong with your ears as well?” she asked, angry perhaps because I wasn’t seeing the gravity of the supposed danger we were in.
“My ears are fine. What you heard was a banger.”
“Banger,” she echoed.
“Yes, banger. You know, knockouts? Those little sticks I used to buy that looked like cigarettes?”
Another bang sounded. Gladys looked foolish for appearing so scared before her kid brother. Then, like the superior big sister that she was, she left the curtain and said in a very superior voice as she left the room, “So why haven’t those policemen done something about it? Bangers have been banned. I heard it on TV last week. Those children should be arrested for constituting public nuisance and danger to public safety.”
Yes, they should, I thought as she went to tell of an incident when a banger stuck inside a bottle had blown the bottle apart and sent pieces shards of it flying in all directions and wounding passers-by as well as the kid who had set up that little killer knockout in the first place. That went for the traders who sold the bangers to the children too.
But all that was talk. So many bans have been slapped onto some goods. Rice. Turkey. Second-handcars, for which the government said the country had become like a dumping ground for inferior good. But these goods still filled the country.
They should be arrested, I thought rather amused at the thought myself. The traders and millions of children for whom Christmas bangers were a form of self-expression. The louder the bang the better.
When I was young, I would buy little firecrackers, sixteen a pack, and light them up. They sounded like rapid-fire gunshots from those cheap old Indian films. These days, the banger manufacturers in Taiwan, ROC—as the product labels said—reduced the number of bangers from sixteen to three a pack, made each one bigger, and the explosion louder. In fact, so loud and sounded as real as an explosion or a gunshot next door.
Three bangs went off in rapid succession, followed by a whiz that reminded me of a rocker launcher in a cartoon, and then six more bangs and a chorus of young voices screaming, cheering and comparing notes.
It was just a few days to Christmas, but for them Christmas was not Dec 25. Christmas was the air, the season. It struck me then that I still had not felt Christmas stir in the air. At the sound of those bangers, I knew it. Christmas was around the corner. I could breathe it in the air.
** ** ***
That feeling was gone by morning. I woke up to a dry, dusty, hazy, cold Harmattan morning—the kind of mornings on which I would have done anything for a hot bath and hot breakfast. At if that wasn’t bad enough for a young fit but almost bedridden 24-year-old, my mother came right into the room without first knocking on the door and announced that she was heating water for my bath and that breakfast was ready. Over the last few days, I had learned to expect her next words to be whether I wanted the breakfast before the bath or the bath before the breakfast. Instead she surprised by saying, “I shall get a taxi to take us to the hospital as soon as you are ready.”
It was unlikely. Ever since the accident and after discharge from hospital I have remained an outpatient. I only went in for checkups every other day or so in the company of my father. Mothers were something else.
I asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
He had to rush out for an early meeting about the security. The police summoned all the property owners. I think it has something to do with those children shooting bangers.”
The thought of going to hospital with my mother stunned me. But I said nothing.
** ** ***
I said nothing because there were so many things that were not in my power to change. I didn’t want to, couldn’t, change my mother or the hospital. But I wanted to change my doctor.
The doctor who conducted my medical was a woman, more likely a young woman. Not that having a young woman doctor treat me was something wrong, but this one, well, she looked as though she’d only graduated two years before me. And she knew her job. At least she could play around with the medicals jargons in a way that made me, a young fresh almost bedridden graduate of chemistry, appear silly…words like cerebrospinal something or other, fibular compaction, deep vein thrombosis.
If I had my way, that young woman would have no business being my doctor. In fact, if I had my way, I would have avoided the accident that landed me in hospital in the first place.
Who would have thought that a young graduate waiting to be called, like all youths, to serve Mother Nigeria had been so exhilarated on graduation day that he’d done one very stupid thing that nearly crippled him?
I still remember speeding along the expressway in the company of friends in a friend’s Volvo. We were going nowhere, just taking a ride but speeding all the same. One moment the wind was whipping against my face. In the next moment, I was s creaming as the Volvo plunged into a crash barrier along the expressway and a lorry helped the Volvo along its merry way to destruction head on in the trunk of a huge tree.
I remember waking up and looking into the eyes of what I thought was a very young pretty doctor, the same eyes that now peered at me through a pair of plain glasses.
I winced as she pressed against my sore ribs. Was that part of the check-up, or did she do that to see whether I could stand the pain?
She said in a very controlled voice, “I know your ribs are sorer than you are leading me to believe.” I shrugged as if to say, you know better. “But then your ribs look even better to me than your legs do.”
I asked what she meant by that. That question made me seem knowledgeable, not like an average patient who thought the doctor knew best and never questioned a doctor’s decision or sought second opinions. But inside I was scared of the possible meaning.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she asked how sore my legs felt. I told her they felt like a carpenter from hell was perpetually hammering away at them.
“Let’s see how much you can move them,” she said, looking with intense scrutiny at my legs in a way that made my feel more exposed than was usual in a doctor’s examination room.
“No!” I snapped it so quickly she looked at me in surprise. Then gently I added, “I can’t…. They hurt. So much…feel so heavy.”
She nodded understandingly, made some notes on her pad and said in a voice that made it clear she was in control despite my reluctance, “I will schedule another x-ray for you with Radiology. For your leg, that is. I want to see how well the bones we put back together have remained in place. It seems to be suppurating on the inside. Depending on what shows up on x-ray I may have to schedule another surgery to get rid of the internal pus. That may explain why it hurts so much.”
I took that like a hero. “Are you saying I may have another surgery?”
“Mm-hmm.”
That I didn’t take like a hero. It was three days to Christmas, and it was no time for getting cut open in an operating room.
** ** ***
At home, I tried everything to get around the surgery. I made a little slit in my knee with a blade and pressed on both sides. Blood oozed. After the second day, when no pus still flowed, I gave up.
The tension of Christmas was growing stronger by the day. The day I gave up on my knee, Gladys came home with a huge package wrapped in gift wrapper. It was shaped like the wicker basket in which Baby Moses floated down the Nile, and was so equally important that Gladys kept it so close to herself. She came to meet me on the veranda and tore off the Sellotape on the gift wrapper.
It was a basket all right—filled with a packet of corn flakes, a bottle of peanuts, a tetra pack of fruit juice, a bottle of wine, tins of milk and cocoa powder, a box of chocolates and cookies, two cans of corned beef. Generally, the sort of provision she sued to take to school as a student at a girls’ boarding school only two kilometres from home.
I asked whether she was planning on going back to school, which was an irony, for she worked as a marketing idea sub-executive at an employment agency.
She grunted. “School? Puh-leeze. This is supposed to be a Christmas hamper from my boss. Everyone at work got this. I mean, did he think I was so hard up for cash I couldn’t afford fruit juice and corn flakes and groundnuts?” When she pushed the basket aside dismissively she added, “When you think about it, it seems like I am going back to school.”
“What were you expecting?” I asked for lack of something better to say. “Baby Moses in a basket?”
** ** ***
The next day, Dec 24, Gladys still felt disappointed with the contents of her hamper. She agreed with my argument that her boss had sent that hamper in good faith, probably unaware of the contents since hamper makers may have assured him enough goodies were loaded inside. She conceded that the gift from her boss could have been from the bottom of his heart but that there was more room at the top for more. She planned, during her shopping that day, to make up for the all the deficiencies. That meant cutting the time she would spend for home shopping to buy clothes she’d probably wear only once. She would visit every designer boutique she could think of, and the bend-down boutiques as well. I wondered how she would combine that itinerary with shopping for Christmas lunch.
Christmas lunch was a 24-hour task. No two people wanted to eat the same thing at Christmas, and our parents wanted to see that on this one special day everyone got what they wanted. That meant four courses for four different meals for the four souls in the house.
Gladys zoomed out full of great hopes for what she’d buy. When she wasn’t back by eight that evening, my mother started to worry. Father calmed her down. She forgot about the Christmas vigil service she was supposed to attend.
Outside children thronged the streets. Bangers exploded. I could hear the strains of Jingle Bells and Jogodo on my neighbour’s CD player.
Despite the noise around, at eleven my mother rose from her seat and said she’d heard something. I said it would have been more alarming if she didn’t hear anything for all the noise outside. I felt too weak to talk.
Ignoring me, she opened the door with a surprise, then furiously put both hands to her chest as though to ward off some evil. She cried, “Jesus almighty. Gladys, Gladys, Gladys…How many times did I call you? Where have you been all day, this girl? Do you want to kill me?”
Father tried to mediate, but mother rushed on, saying she’d thought something had happened…
“Thought what?” said Gladys, catching her off balance.
“Are you blind? Can’t you see? Or you don’t see all the missing people that have been used for rituals?”
“God forbid,” said Gladys, running a hand through the air above her head and making a loud fillip with her fingers. “Not me and you.”
Father finally said, “We thought something bad had happened to you.”
“Something happened.” Gladys hitched up the hem of her skirt, revealing a cut with a bruised shin and a bandage over it. As mother gasped wordlessly, Gladys explained briefly, “The traffic was heavy. I decided to take a bike. The okada man ran into a bus.”
Mother cursed the bus driver. “You mean the bus driver ran into the bike,” she said.
“Whatever. There was an okada, a bus and a running into. It doesn’t matter who ran into whom.” With that, Gladys left her package on the floor of the sitting room and went to get others outside.
For once Mother forgot to thank God for her daughter’s safe return. She itched at her daughter’s rudeness. But I didn’t hear her reply, because I drifted into a world of my own.
** ** ***
When I regained consciousness I was lying back down on an operating table in an operating room with a bright light overhead. That young doctor had two nurses behind her as she spoke to me. “Can you hear me?” she said.
I nodded weakly.
“What have you been doing? Have you been cutting up your knee with a blade?” She didn’t wait for a reply. One nurse inserted a syringe needle into the intravenous line attached to my arm. I felt numb. A strange taste rose in my mouth. My senses seemed to have never been more alert, as the doctor said, “Your parents are outside. They have a message for you.”
When I asked what, my voice sounded weak, like a low rumble in a nightmare.
“They said Merry Christmas,” she said and turned away from me.
I felt too weak to think clearly. The doctor and both nurses put on their green robes, secured the sashes behind, put the cap and mask in place and looked like astronauts in the little theatre.
As she turned to me, I said, “Do you want to spend your Christmas Day in an operating room?”
She looked at me over the rim of her green surgery mask, seeing me for the first time, I thought, like a human being, not a guinea pig on her operating table about to go under her knife.
She replied, “I have to be in here as long as you are in here.” She put another syringe full of yellow liquid into my IV line. “Sometimes the day doesn’t matter. Only the living can celebrate Christmas. That is what I have learned to believe…” In a small voice that chilled me she added: “If this gangrene fully sets in like I am suspecting it will, we may have to amputate your leg. I guess you may say its either Christmas or amputation.”
My stomach churned at the weird options that dangled before me. My eyes grew heavy. My head rolled of its own accord to the blinding light overhead. I could taste the drug creep up in m throat from the IV line.
I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was unconscious or conscious, dead or alive. Which did I want?
For most people Christmas was the fun of the season. It was driving through streets choc-a-bloc with traffic, lined with shops decorated with blinking fairy lights and coloured shiny papers and lights of greens, blues, reds and yellows.
It was wishing I could be very generous to my Jehovah’s Witness neighbour when he came visiting with his family and hoping he would not touch a morsel of all the food that would be offered them.
It listening to my girlfriend scream at me: “You are doing it again. Every December you cook up one excuse so we can quarrel, so you won’t have to buy me anything at Christmas, so that you can wait until January to make peace.”
It was listening to my neighbours scream at each other over Christmas clothes for their children, listening to the sound of sizzling onions, smelling the burning hair of goats roasting in open fires around the neighbourhood.
Now, which did I want? I thought to myself, very solemnly, “I want to live.”
And then I realised something.
Christmas was nothing.
Nothing but desire
As I began to drift away, a voice in the room, a voice that could have been that of the doctor, or one of the nurses, said: “Merry Christmas.”
I couldn’t even reply, “Same to You.”

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ALL WE WANT FOR CHRISTMAS,

Fri, 13 Jan 2006 10:46:19 +0100

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FAT DECEMBER PART 9

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:21:43 +0200

It was 1:06. Christmas morning. The crank phone call was no crank. But the man poured out his soul. Browne listened patiently until he became irritated. “I am going to do better than throw you out of my house. I will call the police and have you arrested. First you plan with your bunch of idiots to kidnap my daughter. And when they screw you out of two million naira you turn around, here and try to tell me someone in my family planned this whole thing?”

Chollong was undeterred for his soul. “Mr Browne, I know what I am talking about. I drove the getaway car. I was at the church when the wedding…the other wedding was held. Everything was planned, believe me.”

“Why are you telling me this? Your friends turned on each other and screwed you?”

The study door opened. Eman walked in. At the sight of him Chollong froze, his mouth dropped open in shock. “It’s him,” he pointed agitatedly, furious. “You did it all.”

“Yes, I shot your friend,” Eman affirmed. “And I will do it over and over again, you rat. Did you bunch of ninnies think you would get away with it?”

Browne didn’t have time to prepare. The bang shook his frame. But it made a hole in Chollong’s head, leaving a messy red splatter behind him. Browne looked then at Eman. “You shot him?” he cried as realization dawned on him. “Oh, my god, you knew each other. You were the one he was referring to.”

“You don’t take hints fast enough.” Eman sounded full of himself. “Now where were we?”

Outside it was lively, not calm. Christmas eve crackers and bangers let loose into the sky. Children shrieked. CDs blared. Carollers belted their melodies. Despite the happy chaos Eryka heard the distinct sound of a gunshot. She rushed to her feet, hurrying downstairs.

“The whole time, Eman, the whole time I trusted you, loved you like the son I never had, like the son I wanted, gave my only daughter’s life over to you. You turn around and stab me in the back.” Browne was filled with venom.

Eman grinned at the old man. “Don’t be so disappointed. This is business. Just making me a little money. It would have come from the firm sooner or later. Why not sooner than later.”

“For just two million?”

“Two million?” Eman repeated in a mocking drawl. “Nah. How about eighty-three point one four and six zeroes. Does that sound familiar? Of course. It is everything you are worth. Everything Eryka will be worth.”

“You are out of your mind.” Brown spat vitriol. “There is no way in hell I will let my daughter marry you after this.”

“Oh she will.”

“And how do you plan to tidy things up? Take her out too? For twenty-two years how could I have been stupid? I thought you cared about her.”

“I do. That’s why I will let her mourn you. Look at the big picture: after she marries me tomorrow morning she’ll find her old daddy dead. Of course she’ll mourn. But then she’s an only daughter and it will too hard on her, and she’ll be so distraught she won’t be interested in marital bliss anymore. She will harm herself and get out of the picture. Simple. Neat. Problem is: you have gone and brought things a little bit forward. But what has to be done has to be done.” Shrugging, he levered the cocked gun at Browne’s chest and fired once.

He heard two screams. Browne’s was more a groan. The other was from the doorway an instant before the chair slammed into the back of his head. The gun fell from his grip.

His look of surprise passed from father to daughter then turned to scorn. “Just what do you think you can possibly achieve by that?” he asked Eryka. He tore into her with a backhand, making her head follow with a slight spray of blood and curtain of dark hair.

Eryka fell away from him, gasping for breath. Her chest heaved like a swelling sea, her fingers clawed desperately across the rugged floor of the study. The force of his slap had knocked the wind out of her and getting it back seemed impossible.

“What, you can’t breathe?” Eman taunted. “You need inhaler?”

“Don’t…don’t…let…don’t let my little girl die, Eman. I beg you.” Browne’s voice brought Eman around. “For the sake of the friendship I shared with your father. Take everything…anything…you want…I can’t possibly stop you now.” He coughed harshly, feeling blood ooze over her chest, running from his mouth. “But don’t let her die.”

“I won’t, I promise to spare her life until we get married in the morning.” With pleasure he touched the blood oozing from the gash in the back of his head and looked at it like it was a war trophy.

“Over your dead body.” The voice came from behind him, firm and etched with anger. Eman looked around and into the barrel of his gun. Eryka’s hold was firm if anything, but he hardly shook with fear.

“What are you going to do with that, young lady?”

“The same thing you wanted to do to me and my father.”

“Humour me…you don’t have the guts to do anything. You’ve never been able to do anything in your life, so drop the heroics,” he said, advancing on her.

She backed away. “Don’t come near me, or I will shoot,” she warned. “How dare you think you could turn our family friendship into a murder spree and get away with it?”

“That’s a stupid thing to ask.”

“Yes. Because I just can’t believe I have been this stupid to think I was having one hell of a fairytale life.” Tears stung her throat. “For a while there I actually thought I had put you through misery by getting abducted. But you planned the whole thing…One big fat December.” The tears flowed down her cheeks; she wiped some off her face and mouth. “You used them, all of them, and me and my father. And then you took them all out one by one.”

“Stop spouting all that righteousness bullshit and take that thing out of my face. Otherwise pull that trigger if you have the guts, daddy’s little girl.” His face looked forbidding as he came on to her.

“I said, don’t come near me. Or I will shoot.” she warned. She inched toward the phone on the desk and picked it. Dialled a number.

“Then try and stop me.” He advanced further. “Who are you calling?”

She kept the gun at his chest level as she spoke into the phone. Calm. Cool. Without a hurry. Everything well thought out in her head. “My name is Eryka Browne. Twenty Prince Sammy Close. I need an ambulance…my father is wounded…A gunshot wound. Robbers…Hurry. I just shot one of them.” She cut the connection. “Merry Christmas, Eman.”

He lunged at her. Between them a deafening clap sounded, followed by a deathly still. Eman paused in his advance toward her; a red patch formed on his shoulder and began to dribble down his front. The sight of it made him charge at her.

The sound came again. Again. This time fear made he finger stick to the trigger like doing that would stop him coming for her.

Eman stopped totally, his eyes suddenly going pale. His breathing was ragged, tortured by fading light. His knees seemed to buckle. He pitched forward under no force of his and sprawled out on the rug at her feet.

Her breathing returned with the thud of falling body. She heard the groan that came from Browne. It brought her back to earth. The gun dropped from her hand. She knelt down, cradled her father’s head in her arms.

Browne spoke through the blood in his mouth. “Are you all right?”

The tears spurted to her eyes. Hate. Relief. Shame. Disgust. “Daddy, I am sorry,” she sobbed. “You’ll be okay. The ambulance will soon be here.” She rocked his head like he was a baby, tears streaming down her face uncontrollably, dripping into his. The torture was unbearable while it lasted. His difficult laboured breathing pricked her ears. Then she wailed suddenly into the calm December morning air. “Somebody, help me.”

Outside, the Christmas eve fireworks continued.

THE END.

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FAT DECEMBER PART 8

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:20:33 +0200

Fear socked him in the vitals when he couldn’t find her in the cabin one afternoon. The few days he’d spent with her, secluded among the mountains, had been pure heaven. Now he saw hell. He shouted her name. No answer.

Her scream of terror knocked him silly. He raced toward the sound, heedless of his footing over the rocks. It was at the river. He stopped dead.

“Eso,” he screamed at the top of his voice. Eso had Eryka’s head under water. He lifted her out, smiled at him wickedly then sent her back under. Lannap raced toward him, into the water, caught Eryka by her dress and tugged. The wet fabric came away in his hand. He threw the force of his anger into a punch straight into Eso’s jaw. He let go of Eryka.

Lannap dragged Eryka to the bank and set her down, running frantic hands over her, searching for injuries. “Are you all right? Are you hurt?” His voice was hoarse. Eryka panted for breath. Lannap reach for the inhaler that had dropped onto the ground and stuck it between her lips, forcing her to pull.

She gasped. “He…he…” Her breath came in choppy waves of exhaustion. Her face was pale. “He tried to rape me,” she finally got out. Suddenly her eyes darted to his head. He didn’t get the movement fast enough.

Eso whammed the stick into Lannap’s head with anger and force, knocking him sideways. The stick splintered. Lannap’s head oozed blood.

“At least I would have got something for my troubles,” said Eso haughtily. “But oh no, you come and stop the fun. You can’t screw me both ways. I won’t take it. It didn’t have to get to this, you know? I told you nothing was coming from BC, but do you listen? Not a chance. You are too wrapped up in playing husband to notice the bastard is taking us for a ride.”

“Eso, shut the hell up!” Lannap demanded. “Look what you did to my head.”

Eryka looked from one man to the other in confusion. “What is he talking about? Is there something going on between you two?”

“Haven’t you ever asked yourself what the hell you are doing honeymooning in a remote holiday cabin at the base of the Vogels, so far away from anywhere?” Eso threw at her. “You better tell her, Lannap the ever protective husband, because it is all over.”

“What is all over?” she shrieked weakly, rising to a sitting position as both men faced up to each other.

“Shut up, Eso,” Lannap swore, swinging another punch into Eso, forcing his head along the path of the blow.

Eso whipped out his gun. “Don’t you ever tell me to shut up.” He lowered his arm to take aim.

It took only a flash and Lannap rammed into his middle, both men keeling over into the water. Bubbles rose furiously to the top from their struggle. Eryka held her breath. The shot reverberated through the water and into the air. Then all went still. She couldn’t tell who had shot the other.

It seemed endless moments later. The water swelled. A head emerged from the water. Lannap. He had the gun in his hand.

Eryka backed away from him as he stalked toward her. “You killed him…Are you going to eliminate me too?”

“Don’t be scared of me. I wouldn’t hurt you.”

“The kidnap was for real, wasn’t it?” She relieved everything in her hand, filled with shame and fear and disgust. “You planned everything from go. Planned the sham wedding in that church by the roadside, overseen by your friend. He was beginning to get uncomfortable about something. Like the other night. You had to take him out.” It wasn’t a question.

“No. He attacked me first. You were here. I was only defending myself. And your virtue?”

“My virtue?” she echoed, backing further away. “Why would you care when all this while it was the money you wanted.”

He caught her arm and twisted her to face him, the gun stuck against her cheek. There was blood on his mouth. He left some on hers as he brutally kissed her. “Yes, I wanted the money. That was then. But now…I have fallen in love with you. I don’t need…’

“Let her go,” said a voice from somewhere behind her. Lannap looked over her shoulder and his face registered recognition.

“Eman,” he said once, and then froze. Eryka froze too. The bullet whizzed toward her and then all went still. She waited for that moment when she would feel the heat drain from the impact. Lannap looked at her, lowered his gaze to his middle, to the bright red fountain that spewed. He returned his eyes to her face, then fell into her, knocking her to the ground.

She struggled to get out from under his dead weight. A hand reached out to her. She caught it. Eman lifted her to her feet. She couldn’t meet his eyes. Self-disgust filled her. What shame she had brought on him, her father, her family. How would she ever right it?

“I’m sorry,” she said in an inaudible voice.

Eman simply crammed her into his arms for that fleeting second, kissed her hair. “It’s over. Let’s go home.”

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FAT DECEMBER PART 7

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:19:35 +0200

Companionship. Novelty. Unpredictability. They made up for everything. Days ran. Nights crawled. She was a changed woman. Suddenly nothing seemed to matter anymore but the unknown, unforeseen present. Sunshine. Green grasses. Fresh air. Blue sky. She dressed for dinner with Lannap. Red wine. Moonlight. A profession of undying love.

Lannap came across the clearing to the hut. Stopped dead in his tracks. “Eso, what the hell are you doing here?”

“Has it gotten to that?” Eso looked away from the window. Beyond it, inside the room, both men could see Eryka pulling on her dress, slowly, seductively. “I am not supposed to be here? I forget. I am trespassing on honeymoon property.” His gibe suddenly turned serious. “But then there is something more serious than little nightly trysts, don’t you think, Lannap?”

“Get away from that window.” Lannap’s voice fell to a hard whisper.

“Oh, playing the protective husband already? Well, before you get carried away, there isn’t any good response from Benin City. My confidence is starting to shake. I don’t know about you but Chollong feels the same way. We both think it is nearing time to abort mission.”

“Shut up,” Lannap whispered furiously.

“What sort of answer is that? Is this girl getting to you already? Damn it, think with your head not your pisher. We have to do something really quick.”

Lannap clamped a hand around Eso’s arm and pulled him away from the hut. Several feet from the door he stopped. “Whatever it is you have to do, don’t bring it here. You’ll ruin everything. And don’t let me catch you gawking at her through the window like that again.”

“Is something wrong?” They were so caught up in each other they didn’t hear Eryka come up to them.
Eso’s eyes raked her over. “No, nothing. A little men’s talk. I was just about leaving. See you later, Lannap, and don’t forget what I said. It will get to that sooner than later. And you better be in on it.” He walked away.

“In on what?” asked Eryka. “You two looked like you were about to kill each other.”

Lannap led her away toward the side of the mountain, by the bank of the river, where moonlight spilled like a cascade. Nothing was wrong, he said with a winsome smile. “Do you know I keep falling more and more in love with you every passing day?”

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FAT DECEMBER PART 6

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:18:27 +0200

Browne looked at the phone, expecting the call again and again. “Do you think they will keep to their word?” he asked.

Approaching him Eman pushed a fortifying glass half filled with brandy into his hand. “Don’t torture yourself. They will call. They need the money.”

“You seem so calm.”

“Someone has to be calm to take care of things and you. So just take it easy. Was the bank any helpful?”

“Helpful?” Browne asked incredulously. “It is my money. What the hell does it matter to them what I do with it? They can inform the CBN and EFCC for all I care. I have to save my daughter…She’s all I have got in this world. If those bastards need just two million for me to get my daughter back, I’ll gladly give them three.”

The phone beeped on the table. Browne lunged for it immediately. “Hello…? Of course I haven’t been talking to the police. I did everything you asked me to do. When do I get her? I have to speak to her, to know she’s all right.” His voice strained with emotion. He kept eye contact with Eman, some times staring at the blank wall as his eyes misted over from the tension. Eman laid a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I don’t give a damn what your intentions are,” Browne barked suddenly into the phone, irritated. Then he calmed down. “Don’t I have a…No, this isn’t about that…Please…I just want my daughter back.”

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FAT DECEMBER PART 5

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:16:54 +0200

She did. Twenty-nine kilometers later. Half an hour later. In a little roadside church. Officiated by a thin-voiced minister in grey suit and dog collar.

It felt heady, liberating. No plan, no thought beforehand. Just by the seat of her pants. It felt great not to do anything by rote, for once to let something she didn’t know beforehand happen to her. She let herself savour the feeling, the freedom, and the irresponsibility.

The car drove on northward, eating up kilometers to nowhere she didn’t want to know.

It felt like camping out all over again. The remoteness of her surroundings, hundreds of kilometers from Benin City. Beautiful. Serene. Perfect for vacationing. Or for a honeymoon.

That thought struck her like a charging bull. For the first time she thought about home, her father. The diaphanous lace she had worn beneath her wedding gown that morning looked sheer in the moonlight that shafted into the little hut nestled in the heart of the remote woodland at the base of the mountain.

Lannap assessed the picture from his stand in the doorway. It was a sexy package in the eyes of any bridegroom. “Can you imagine how I am looking at you, what you are doing to me? I could eat you up.” He stalked her like a male on the scent of a female. When he touched her, she shivered. “Are you cold?”

She nodded quickly. “And tired. And worried about my father.”

“Don’t be. This is our wedding night. Isn’t it proper to think of nothing else? Besides, you are safe and fine.”

“But he doesn’t know that. I don’t have my phone, and I haven’t noticed any phone masts around here.”

“That’s because there aren’t. It is the selling point of this ranch. Nature at it finest, rawest; technology a distant thought…everything…apart from you…and me…tonight.” He drew her flush against him, whispered into her ear and then bit the lobe. “Can you hear? My nerves are tingling…I am aching…It’s all for you. Let me love you, Eryka,” the last a sexy growl brushing against her skin, literally, calculated to stir her. And it did.

She caught her breath, suddenly feeling winded. “I can’t handle this right now, Lannap. It is all too much. I don’t want to start on this and fall short.”

“Do you consider that less of a man I couldn’t keep your mind on me and nothing else?”

“No. It’s just…I feel breathless, that’s all,” she conceded, even though it made her look weak. She felt weak. She reached for her inhaler and drew restorative breaths, a chance release from his embrace. “And cold.”

He drew his own steadying breaths, giving up. “Why don’t you write something I can post to your father in town tomorrow.”

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FAT DECEMBER PART 4

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:16:01 +0200

Browne was sure of it as she led her down the aisle on Saturday. The cathedral wasn’t full; only family and friends from Browne & Eman made the congregation. He felt pride rush through him as he lifted the veil to kiss his daughter.

“You are gorgeous,” he said, tears forming in his eyes. “I wish your mother were here on this day to see you. It would have made her very happy.”

“It’s what Mummy always wanted and hoped for.”

He nodded quickly. “I never it would be so difficult to give away one’s daughter in marriage. But…I have to do it.” He let the veil down over her face and led her toward Eman.

The way Eman took her hand seemed to seal her fate. The swelling organ came to a stop. The priest’s voice washed over her as he read the liturgy. He could have skipped some lines: as far as both families were concerned, this was a match made in heaven. Who could have anything against the joining of these two?

Silence.

The shot shattered it like a bullet piercing through glass. Shrieks of terror. Screams. The group at the altar froze. Two masked men walked down the aisle toward the to-be-wed couple; both kept their guns trained on them.

“What is going on here?” Browne was almost showing frustration. He faced the two masked men. “What do you want?”

“The bride,” said the first man.

The priest put himself beside Browne and faced the man with the gun. “Do you realize this is the house of God? Don’t you have any reverence?”

“My God says this wedding is not to hold today.” Keeping the gun on Eryka, the man reached out and grabbed her, pulling her toward himself. She fought him. He put his gun against her temple and she went ice cold with fear.

“Don’t hurt her.” Browne screamed at the top of his voice. “What is it you want? Anything, but just let my daughter go.”
Her captor pulled Eryka up the aisle. “Stay by your phone,” he tossed at Browne.

Browne rushed after them. The man pulled Eryka further away toward the church exit and into a waiting car. He got in after her. His partner got in on the other side of her. Another stepped on the throttle and nudged the car through traffic. The car sped like a wasp.

Eryka sat still. Torn between uncertainty about her recent past and the terror of her present. Don’t look at them, she told herself, or they’ll think you are braving them.

The man lowered the gun from her temple now and looked at her profile through his mask. “You seem awfully quiet.” His voice sounded familiar. Eryka didn’t look his way. “Is that the gratitude for saving your life?”

Eryka turned to him. He had removed his mask. “Lannap,” she screamed, both in relief and shock. “What…what are you doing?”

“I just saved your life by stopping your wedding.”

“By kidnapping me? What were you thinking?”

“Was there any other way? I can’t just walk up to Mr Browne and say, I love your daughter and you are making a mistake marrying her off to your friend’s son, can I? Besides, I had great help. Eso, Chollong, this is the thief of my heart I have been telling you about.”

Excitement and uncertainty boiled within her. She knew not where she was going, what she was doing, but she’d never…. She suddenly reached around his neck, held him tight and kissed him hard. “You are wonderful,” she breathed.

He returned the kiss with an insistent drugging ardour. “I told you you'd never marry him.” He stroked the roof of her mouth with his tongue until she clutched onto him for support as he ran a dangerous hand over her body, drawing her nerves taut. He whispered against her lips. “I love you. Marry me.”

She did. Twenty-nine kilometers later. Half an hour later. In a little roadside church. Officiated by a thin-voiced minister in grey suit and dog collar.

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FAT DECEMBER PART 3

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:14:13 +0200

The car screeched to a halt in front of the stadium. Without a doubt she knew who the maroon car belonged to even before Eman beckoned to her the way he would ten years ago when he would drive to her school in his father’s car to fetch her. Now she wasn’t just his neighbour’s little girl; she was his fiancée.

She got in beside him. “I didn’t know you were coming to get me.”

“I was just driving past and remembered it was your day at the stadium. And besides”—Eman jerked his head in the direction of the dashboard—“you left your inhaler behind.” He looked through the windscreen and minded the traffic in front of them as he ploughed back onto the road.

She reached for it. “Thank you, Eman.” Thank you for having to think about everything for me.

“You look drained. Are you sure you should be swimming that much?”

“I’m only asthmatic, not terminally ill. I can still do certain things, and I intend to learn how to swim.”

“Don’t get touchy, Eryka, honey,” he wheedled. “It’s only because I care about your health, that’s all—and more.”

“I’m sorry.” She felt like a beast. She looked at the man who would in a week be her husband for life, turned away in confusion.

“You must be hungry. It’s almost lunchtime. I have a standing reservation at Casa de Pedro.”

“Not really. I have to meet your mother. She said there was something we had to talk about before the wedding. Women’s things and all that. I’ll take a rain cheque, if you don’t mind, for this once.”

“I really want you to spend some time with me instead. You’ll be marrying me, not my mother.”

“What’s the harm in a little wait while I meet your mother? It’s only until Saturday and I will be spending all my life with you?” She noted the smile that spread across his features in profile. He was still her dear friend, but beyond that…it wasn’t that she didn’t know more. In fact, she knew a whole lot: knew what sort of wife she was expected to be.

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FAT DECEMBER PART 2

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:11:49 +0200

Eryka shut the painted steel door of the locker and gasped as a pair of hands caught around her. A rough-haired chin nuzzled her neck from behind.

“Lannap, what are you doing? This is the ladies’ for heaven’s sake!” she chided.

“Why did you walk away like that from me? Is something wrong, or does seeing me do to you the same thing seeing you does to me?” Lannap held back and gazed at her. “I hope so.”

“Dream on.”

“Don’t wake me up.” He kissed her cheek; she turned away. “Did I cut myself shaving or am I that repulsive this morning?”

“Are you through yet? Why don’t you dress up?”

“What, you think I am going to jump your bones in a ladies’ locker room?” Lannap sounded amused but serious at the same time. He began dressing up.

“Would you have done that if I had known you more than a week, or would you do it because of that?” Eryka arched a brow at him in question. Turning away without waiting for a response, she stuffed her clothes into her bag, slung the bag across her shoulder.

Lannap tugged on his jeans. “You seem in much of a hurry to get away from me. Is there something I did, something I didn’t do?”

“No.”

“Then what is the matter this morning?” he threw at her.

In a subdued voice she said, “We have to stop seeing each other?”

He sucked in dry air to steady himself. His voice sounded flat. “Why?”

“I know it sounds…I don’t know how it sounds myself, but it is something I have to do. I’ve only known you a week, but…I…there isn’t much I can say to make sense, is there?” she stuttered ineffectually.

He repeated his query. “Why?”

Eryka looked him straight in the eye this time. “Because I am getting married.” She noted the look of utter disbelief in his eye. “In one week…I know it is a bit sudden…”

“A bit...?” His face hardened, his voice grated in her ears. “How long have you been leading me on like this, letting me believe there was something, some hope for me? Yet the whole time you were holding out on me?”

Eryka felt forced to the wall. “I wasn’t holding out on you on anything. I just…couldn’t. It isn’t something we talk about everyday of our lives. I have known Eman all my life…”

“Who?”

“Eman? He’s…”

“I don’t want to hear it,” Lannap snapped angrily, moving away from her.

“Lannap, I didn’t lead you on. I really like you, a lot. But I have known Eman all my life.”

Indeed, it had begun like a joke between her mother and Eman’s. Eman’s mother joked that her neighbour’s little daughter would make a fine wife for her son. Eryka’s mother played along.

What had started as gossip between two close neighbours soon involved their husbands. Chats over the fence as both women returned from shopping. Pleasantries that inevitably included “how is my wife?” Little bits of attention and teasing remarks that used to make Eryka long to disappear, that got worse as she budded into a teenager, terrifying when Eman happened to be around the corner.

Now her mother was long dead and gone. The little innocent marriage talk seemed real as hell, the only final thing Browne had left to do for his daughter before joining his wife. He would cement his friendship between the Emans and the Brownes through their children. That Eman’s family consented all along made it bad enough. But that she and, maybe some times Eman, took it for granted, was worse. Until now.

Lannap let her talk him through years of teenage denial of impending marriage. “Do men like that still exist, men who let their parents choose their life partners for them? Like Eman? It’s unmanly for this day and age.”

“I didn’t mean for you to say such things about…” She began to defend her childhood friend all of a sudden.

“Do you love him?”

She did a double take. “Is that any of your business?”

“It is now, since I became involved with you.” Lannap was suddenly firm, his anger gone. “Do you want to marry him?”

She looked at him like he was a stranger. “What are you trying to do to me?”

“I want to know where I stand with you. But first I have to know what you want? Do you want this marriage because you owe your family an unspoken duty to marry the son of a friend of the family?” he goaded.

“I don’t want to marry anybody,” she spat, suddenly annoyed at everything and herself. “It isn’t that I have anything against Eman, but, for once I want to live my life, not play it. Everything that happens to me is always planned. I know what every second will be like. That’s role-playing, predictable existence. And that’s not what I want. I want to live each minute in suspense, not knowing what they will bring until they actually come to me. I want to stop seeing my life like it was a book I have read over and over and over again I know where all the punctuations are.”

Lannap gazed at her with surprise. “Wow, that was some soul cleansing. So what now?”

“And don’t go asking me where you stand in my life, because…because…” She was unable to finish her statement. “I am sorry. I have no choice, and I am afraid I am not giving you any either.”

“You don’t sound like a girl about to be married, Eryka,” said Lannap, his eyes hooded in thought. “At least not to Eman. More power to him.”

“Excuse me?!”

“Congratulations.”

Eryka turned away sharply, cursing. “I am sorry I told you all that, especially for myself. I will be married next week. I guess this is the last time I will be seeing you in a long while.” She walked away from him, out the door, through the stadium’s thoroughfare, ignoring his voice behind her saying he didn’t mean it that way.

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FAT DECEMBER PART 1

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:10:06 +0200

From the waist down he was breathtaking. Poised high on the lip of the diving board, he looked like a sea god come to play, Neptune in swimming trunks. Both arms stretched out beside him, and then lifted above his head, he curled his toes over the lip of the board and, for one last moment looked straight at her. Eryka Browne realized she was staring and looked away. He let go.

In freefall he was a rapidly moving blur of blue pants and bronze body against the clear December sky, limbs gracefully stretched out in front.

Lannap plunged into the blue water with a swoosh, dipped to the bottom of the pool then speared underneath the surface like an irrawady aiming straight at her. Eryka scrambled out of the pool, clumsily picked up her towel and stalked away.

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FAT DECEMBER

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 21:08:12 +0200

WHAT IS THE WORST THING THAT COULD EVER HAPPEN TO A GIRL ON CHRISTMAS EVE?

FAT DECEMBER.

FAT DECEMBER IS A STORY, ONE OF THE FIRST I EVER WROTE IN MY LIFE WHILE TRYING MY HANDS AT SHORT STORIES.

AND NOW I WANT TO SHARE IT IN SERIES WITH MY BLOG COMMUNITY.

ENJOY THE INSTALMENTS.

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CHILDREN OF VENGEANCE

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 04:12:57 +0200

“What did you just say?” asked Edwin in a wheezy voice, made so be disbelief. He came out of the police station on the morning his bail was arranged, accompanying his wife home.
“I said what you heard.”
“I doubt it.”
“I checked my account and it showed nothing, nil, zero naira.”
With a slight laugh Edwin shook his head. “There must be a mistake. We’ll get to the bank right away and rectify it.”
But the bank told them the same thing, and after hours and hours of haggling, Edwin was bushed. They came home in the afternoon and he was still angry at everything.
“This is not going to be another trick of that idiot’s. He doesn’t know the code. I’m getting the new lawyer to sue that bank with my last dime.” He stormed into the house as he spoke and was going toward the steps when Yvonne called.
“There are some visitors here,” she said.
Two smart looking men greeted hem at the door. “Are you Edwin Igwe?” said one.
“Not another arrest,” he wailed. “I just got out of gaol.”
“No, not another. On the contrary we are from National Mortgage Bank, and you are on our property. We have a court order to evict you at once.”
Yvonne held the door for support while Edwin found it difficult to breath with a sense of detached amusement.
“Really? I have never seen mental patients in smart suits,” he said tactlessly.
“This property was mortgaged for a loan of twenty-one million naira with the bank, sir, and that includes your store stocks—both of you.”
“Our stores?” the difficulty was now due to shock.
“Your wife’s superstore and your spare parts store, sir, and this house to boot. We are here to ensure you comply with the court order. Can we come in?”
“Wait,” he said helplessly, his throat constricted painfully in his attempt to restrain his emotions. Behind him Yvonne was giving vent to hers in full force. The wracking sounds of her sobs tore through him like a hot knife. “Wait a minute…Are you telling me that we mortgaged out house?”
“Yes.”
“For twenty-one million?”
“It’s impossible not to believe the papers, sir. I believe that before this court order was acquired due notifications were given.”
“It’s got to be a mistake.”
Yvonne spoke haltingly from behind.
“Are you…saying…that we have lost out…both our businesses and our house?”
“Don’t say that, honey. It’s not true.” With a mechanical gesture, Edwin slid an arm around her body. “I believe the order those not say we have to follow you now. Why don’t you give us till tomorrow to get in touch with our lawyer?”
“Although, I seriously doubt the usefulness, we shall let it be.” As the door closed the acrid smell of smoke drifted into their nostrils. There was no sign of the children in the house.
“Edgar?” called out Yvonne. “Yolanda!”
There was a loud clink of metal from the garage and both made into the spot only to rush into swinging wet wood each…
It took a while for them to come awake, but they did and the most revoltingly unwanted sight met them. All the children had been handcuffed together, then the end cuffs had been secured to the window grille so that they formed a line with each other but couldn’t move away from one another. On the far edge of the garage, a stove burned with a frying pan beside it on the floor. It seemed weird combination, and presiding over it all were Claude, Dione and Brimilda.
“Hello, Edwin and Yvonne.”
Both looked up only to face the cold metallic nozzles of revolvers.
“Did you miss us?”
“Mummy,” Chas shouted from the garage. “Mummy.”
“Chas, I’m right here.”
Clicking his tongue, Claude grinned. “How appealing. Mother-son unity.”
“Why are you doing this?” she cried.
“Why am I doing this?” He rose from his stoop where he had handcuffed her to the nearest bar. “We have no Mother to call ours that’s why, You think I’m a killer? No. Heaven forbid. I’m not. You made me one, when you took my father’s life and our mothers’. You set us away from the love of our parents and gave your children all you could, emotionally and financially, with the money you took from us, a legacy our father left us. You didn’t even have the decency to pay our fees for us, and now, I thought I’d see how you like it all taken away from you. The house. The business. The money in the bank. Everything.”
“You are bluffing,” spat Edwin from where he was cuffed on the floor. “I am? You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Yvonne, does the word “YONE” ring any bell at all?” said Dione to the woman who paled beyond recognition. “Sure it does. It’s password for your account which I transferred to an anonymous account”.
“What for?”
“Stop that stupid line of questioning, Yvonne. It wasn’t yours in the first place.”
“In that case,” said Claude heartily, “I’m sure the word ‘TIO’ sounds familiar to you, Edwin. Your password that sent two million seven hundred and six thousand, three hundred and fifty-two naira into the hands of the real owner. Me,” he gloated.
“You have made your point then?” asked Edwin.
“No, not yet.”
“Why don’t you just get out?” shouted Edgar.
Claude sauntered in there to him. “As a mater of fact we will go now, since we have claimed our things, but the lives of Matthews and Ezeh and his son are not enough, are they, Edgar.” He punched him in the face and he spat blood. “As a matter of fact we want you to know what its like to be orphans, to feel some that we felt when your father killed our parents.”
“But we had nothing to do with it, “begged Lewis in tears.
“So did we, but your father didn’t look upon us. He took it like a monster and left us on our own. We were so young to cope but at least you are old enough, and here we shall end the feud that started a generation ago in this family.” He paused. “I guess you know what its all about. Your father and your mother, with the help of Barrister Mathews and Captain Ezeh, killed all our parents; our mother; our dad and Brimilda’s mother.” Going out abruptly he dragged Edwin across the floor into the garage with the aid of the cuffs and dropped him. Yvonne was dragged in also.
“You see that frying pan? It contains tar. You know what I’m going to do?… I’m going to put the tar into the pan, put it on that stove and let the fumes choke you all to death in here, but not before Edwin confesses to his crimes.”
Turning he picked up an axe by the wall and Brimilda ran out and came in with a long heavy pestle. Edwin’s eyes filled his face at the sight but he was too confined as it was, and could only gawp stupidly.
“Well, Edwin, tell your children what you did to our dad and mothers,” he urged.
“They need to know, if only this will end the feud, and you better do. It might be your only saviour.”
“Go and join your father,” screamed Edgar.
“I will,” laughed Dione heartlessly. “We will, but not before we make you feel some of the pain we felt.”
Claude looked down into Edwin’s eyes pathetically. “Uncle Edwin,” he sighed, and memories flooded, tears into his eyes. “I can’t tell you how much it hurts inside, even after the years gone, to think that you did it, but you did. I cant make things right. They say two wrongs cannot make a right. Maybe they are right, but I don’t care. You took away some lives callously, and now you pay.
“I’m going to chop off your fingers with this axe to make you feel pain and then pound you with this pestle, crush every little bone of wickedness in your body to make you cry out to heaven, to cleanse your soul with your tears and blood if heaven will accept you, which I seriously doubt,” he said, lifting the axe in the air. His eyes followed the arc of the axe above the head and word rushed from his lips. “Please don’t do it, Claude, I beg you!” He was helpless now, at his mercy.
“Why?”
“Please,” shouted Yvonne.
“You are as guilty as him”
“Please, for our sake!” The agonised plea came from Yolanda, tearfully wrenched.
“Your father didn’t look back for our sake, so why should we?” Dione snapped. From her hold, Yolanda looked at her with imploring eyes. “I beg you Dione, for the sake of God.”
“Keep God out of this.”
“I’m sorry, Claude,” cried Edwin suddenly, silencing his children for a while. “I am terribly sorry. Please forgive me.”
Yolanda’s mouth hung open. “Dad, you really did it?”
It was a mistake.” Which it was.
“So it is,” hollered Claude, bringing the axe down to his index finger. Edwin howled in raw tears and sent his family into tears. “That wasn’t a mistake, Edwin. It wasn’t. Killing my father was no mistake, and certainly not the three of them. It’s annoying not to say the least about it. Mistake indeed!”
Edwin groaned and groaned and Claude swapped the axe with the pestle. Lifting it, he brought it down on his head, sending gush of blood from his nose with a swing on his head, and knocking his head to the floor in a pool of blood.
Yvonne shrieked in fear and shock and the children wept for them.
Turning he brought the head of the pestle on Yvonne’s knee. “Take that you wicked woman. You can’t stop me from killing you because you didn’t stop your husband from killing our parents before now.”
“Claude,” cried Edgar, thoroughly humbled by the scene of blood and raw pain been delivered to his parents. I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” he sneered, “clinging after another man’s wealth, living in the lap of luxury while we ate sand and subsisted on water.” He delivered another blow of the pestle on Yvonne’s other knee, and the sound of crepitation was heard. The woman screamed open-mouthed, but then her mouth shut in grief and agony and she could only try to bear the pain.
Claude delivered another on Edwin’s hands and Edgar shrieked away from the sight of his father’s finger on the floor. Maddened both by the constant pleas and his own tears, he sent Dione out of the room angrily. “Get out, Dione, and take Brimilda with you.”
They all wept for their life.
“Pay your last,” he warned them seriously, and to their horror he lit the stove, deposited the pan on the fire and as the first plume of smoke, acrid, choking, lethal bluish-green smoke lifted into the air, he stood over Edwin and Yvonne with the pestle shedding tears and lifted it above his head.
Chas coughed in the corner of the room from the inhalation of the smoke and as if in a slow motion, they all screamed as he brought the pestle down.
“No-o-o-o-o-o-o!”
But it was too late. The pain inside him couldn’t bear that and they were all crying at the same time, his voice choked with tears and grief uprooted all over again. The pestle came down, chanting, “Here… Pain… Agony… Misery… Pain… Death… and… Pain…”

Holding onto his sisters, they went out as the smoke billowed thicker and stronger and he went on to inform the police that he had killed someone.
He towered over the huge figure on the bed in the hospital room, looking down at the worn face. Edgar turned slowly and saw him, then hate began to pour into eyes but he was too weak and they were too dull to show it effectively. He couldn’t speak yet; he had suffered from third degree burns and inhalation of poisonous smoke.
“Don’t think I came here because I love you, Edwin,” he said arbitrarily. “Nor should you think I’m sorry about what happened because I’m not the least bit. The trouble, I say, should end with us, but that’s not to say I’m offering the olive branch. It was offered once and you passed up the chance. Knowing your nature you might see this as a challenge. May be you are right, but then remember that you are nothing on me when it comes to that.
Our fathers didn’t do well, but it doesn’t warrant your fathers killing our parents, does it? He never even cared what happened to us, whether we drowned or sank. Take it or leave it, but I wont be that cruel to you. I want us live and remember what happened to us all, how we lost our parents due to one man’s greed namely your father, and to keep the posterity from repeating this mistake of ours.
“I don’t want you to come out of the hospital and start appealing for aid on TV, or leaving on the streets like we used to. We have had a taste it ourselves. I’ve rebought the house, Edwin, and I’m giving it to you as a gift from us because it was rightfully mine and not yours. But it’s a gift, not a bribe, and heaven forbid it to be a compensation; Money cannot save people or thongs right. It’s just to keep your arses off the streets. Also, I…we have put up a fund with the two million and blah, blah, blah, naira I took from your father into a fund for you. You can feed and go to school fine.
“As for other things, we shall see about it later on, But that’s all for now. We are going away from here, Edwin, to try to live down the memory of what your father did, and I suggest you ponder your life before you return to your waywardness. I have to go now. Say Hi to your siblings, and all that. Try concentrating on getting well.”
He was already out of the room but it took a long while for the words to articulate from Edwin “Think you,” but it was just a whisper.

With a last goodbye the door shut Roxanne outside and pulled away. She stood waving for a while and her hand fell to her side wearily, languidly. The car stopped abruptly, the reversing lights on as it came back to stop by her side.
Claude leaned out of the car briefly before stepping out. He stood just in front of her, watching her face intently for a while, forming the words.
“Roxanne, we would like you to come with us,” he said, sending a spurt of laughter from her mouth. “We could start right afresh all over again; go back to school and you could become a model like you wanted.”
She shook her head in tearful wistfulness. “I thought you’d never ask me,” she sighed and threw her arm around him. Both rushed back into the car and it pulled away.
It had been one hell of a mission but it had been hectic as well to the point of being dangerous, teetering on the brink of all that was evil but he didn’t want to think about it. That was the only way he could survive it all.
When the car drove past the house he thought it was a good name after all: the Igwes. Only if they tried to make a go of it.
When at last their plane headed into the blue sky of December he looked out his port onto the city where the agony had started and ended, presumably and felt a shudder. Was this a victor? He doubted it was. But later he would try to unravel it all. Later.

Looking away from the pictures on the wall, Yolanda sighed heavily. Her father, mother, uncle, his first and second wife, whose history and tragedy she now knew still remained in her mind. Joining Edgar at the window that gave onto the gravesite, mounds of red earth below, he too sighed. This victory wasn’t even pyrrhic. They had narrowly escaped the hand of vengeance, a spited vengeance of the loved ones. It had been more of a lesson of pain and agony, lecturing them against greed and hate, but had it been worth it? They would never know until they could read from their own lives if it was a veritable lesson.

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DAUGHTER OF WOMAN

Tue, 21 Jun 2005 03:46:26 +0200

Mabel took off the padlock, grabbed the door handle and pulled. The wooden double doors swung open with a creak. With one foot she moved the wedge into place.

Inside the shop, in eight neat rows, sat five hundred and sixty bags of packaged water that the distributor had delivered the night before. Eleven thousand two hundred sachets in total, all waiting to be moved outside and sold off within five days.

If only all the stock was hers. Unfortunately not. But her daughter Venya came to the shop everyday after school to hawk some sachets. Sometimes she was ale to hawk off four bags a day and that made a lot of difference. At least since her police husband had been transferred hundreds of kilometers away, from where there was no hope of receiving any message let alone money.

Now Mabel wished Venya was here. But Venya had to go to school and the holidays were still another eight weeks away.

She sighed as she brought out the first bag of packaged water, dropped it by the door, the looked out onto the road.

Yahaya was still there, stopping passing buses.

Across the road was … Venya. What could she be doing so far away from school?

Mabel wanted to call out, but Venya hurried away and disappeared into the chemist. She must have hurried the chemist attendant along, for she reappeared from the chemist, went across the road, got into a bus and was gone.

Male wanted to give her daughter some space to grow-if that was the only way to keep Venya from satisfied enough. Mabel feared Venya would one day refuse to hawk water just to punish her, and she’d be able to do nothing about it.

At the same time her curiosity boiled. She couldn’t wait to know whether her daughter was ill and didn’t tell her.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At two in the afternoon, Venya came from school. Mabel watched her daughter closely. Venya seemed drawn, not her usual chatty self. She ate little lunch, then grabbed a big plastic bowl and filled it halfway with sachets of cold water. She bent to lift it to her head.

Mabel spoke up then.

‘Venya,’ she said in a calm voice, ‘you don’t look well. Why don’t you rest a while?’

Venya was surprised her mother had asked her not to hawk this afternoon.

‘If I don’t sell…’ she began to say but trailed off when her mother shook her head in disagreement.

‘My daughter is more important to me,’ Mabel said. Then she waited until Venya had reluctantly taken a seat before saying, ‘I saw you go into the chemist to buy medicine.’ She noticed that her daughter had come bolt upright. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were ill, eh, Venya?’

Venya was silent. It was almost customary not to answer such questions about her health right away. She looked everywhere but in her mother’s face.

Her mother prodded gently. ‘Can’t you say how you feel?’ She felt Venya’s neck with a hand. ‘You don’t seem that hot.’ Then drawing closer she said, ‘My child, tell me, what is it?’

When Venya looked at her mother tears had filled her eyes. Her mouth trembled, no words came out. Her mother urged her on until finally she said in almost a whisper.

‘I went to the chemist and told him that I needed some medicine. I thought it was a fever. He said…I was…pregnant.’ Her voice had dropped lower.

Mabel had to hold onto the edge of the seat, or she would have dropped to the floor in a dead faint. It seemed like her life had just turned over. As Venya spoke on in tears, it seemed her life had got worse.

She itched to drag Venya out onto the street and beat her silly. But then she told herself that wouldn’t change anything. So she calmed herself and finally asked who was responsible for it? It had to be one of the boys in Venya’s school and that boy’s parents would have Mabel to deal with.

‘Yahaya,’ Venya said in a tearful voice.

The name hit Mabel like a blow. ‘Yahaya?! That stupid soldier who can’t speak simple English? Venya, are you crazy? He’s your father’s age. How come?’

The questions poured out. Venya wept. Mabel was crying too. She looked out the shop. Outside, a few hundred metres away, stood Yahaya, a rifle across one shoulder. One hand rose to flag down a passing bus, then lowered until it touched the bus driver’s hand through the open bus window. Then the bus crawled on past. Yahaya dipped his hand into a thigh pocket on his camouflage uniform, and then he turned his attention to the next bus on the road.

Now Mabel knew that when he wasn’t extorting bus drivers he was getting young girls pregnant, girls who hawked water to make ends meet. She felt infuriated.

She dashed out the shop.

‘Mama,’ Venya called out to her, crying. ‘Mama please, don’t go there.’

‘Shut up,’ she yelled back at her daughter. ‘o you know what you are asking? Should I let him get away with it, just sit in silence and fear and say nothing?’ Her voice trembled with rage.

Mabel darted into the road and almost got run down by a red-and-yellow taxi before it screeched to a stop. The driver leaned out of his window and yelled curses at Mabel.

In her confusion, Mabel hardly heard the man. She rushed across the road.

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The screech had caused a knot in traffic now. The soldiers looked her way as she approached them.

Yahaya swore loudly. ‘Woman, are you drunk? You are lucky I know you, or what I would have done to you…?’

The words stung Mabel. ‘I really wonder what more you could possibly do to me. So it is not enough to get free sachets of water from my shop without paying for them. You also had to get my daughter pregnant. A girl your daughter’s age.’

As she spoke the scowl on Yahaya’s face hardened. She thought he was starting to look really guilty, like a child caught stealing from a pot, with soup up to his elbow and not a way to deny it.

‘You can’t deny it, can you?’ Mabel screamed.

One of the other soldiers who had come around them asked whether she had any idea who she was speaking to. For one fleeting second, she realised her dread of this moment had disappeared.

That Yahaya hadn’t yet denied the accusation did not surprise her. But his next words shocked her.

‘Which of them is your daughter?’ he said like it was nothing.

‘My God,’ Mabel swore, ‘you can’t even remember my daughter? How many of these little girls have you been forcing to see the colour of your boxers? Don’t you have any shame at your age? Is this why your brigade sent you out here, so you can impregnate every little girl selling chin-chin and pure water in the street?’

‘Woman, mind your mouth!’ Yahaya said at last, gravely.

Mabel looked at the man in uniform, then spat at his feet in disgust. ‘Shame on you. My husband serves this country as you do. God only knows where the force has sent him to, but I can swear on my daughter whom you have defiled that he doesn’t go about sleeping with girls his daughter’s age. You are a disgrace to the military. I hope you get knocked down by a speeding bus while you are reaping where you did not sow.’ She spat again and turned to leave.

Yahaya held her back by the arm, forcing her to face. ‘Woman, you spat on my boot,’ he said flatly. ‘You have to wipe it.’

‘Will you take your filthy hands off me?’ Mabel cursed loudly. She rushed on for the benefit of the crowd that had collected around them. ‘I will make sure this never happens to another girl in this area. I shall get all the other mothers and lodge a complaint with your commanding officer and have you stopped from getting out here.’

‘Go ahead, do your worst,’ Yahaya taunted. He even grinned. ‘But I will tell you one thing. I did not defile your daughter. Someone else did that before me. Maybe you should think about those other people before you stand here and make your daughter look like a pure virgin.’

Mabel had never felt this insulted in her life. Her hand lashed out, striking the soldier across the cheek with the resounding force of her fury.

Yahaya was a violent man. The drivers he had forced to roll in mud were lucky living witnesses. He wasted no time striking back at Mabel’s face. Only the boos from the crowd stopped him from lashing out further.

Mabel’s cheek burned from the slap.

‘You will not get away with this, you disgrace of a man,’ she swore. ‘If my husband were here…oh God…’ Her voice broke as she began sobbing.

Her husband wasn’t here to handle things anymore, and she would salvage what was left of her daughter’s pride. She stormed down the road, flagged down a taxi and took off.

Behind her the crowd had begun to rise to her cause. One of the soldiers lifted his gun and fired a bullet into the air. The crowd thinned away suddenly.

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For three days Mabel was consumed by a thirst to inflict as much harm as she could on Yahaya, even if she couldn’t match him muscle for muscle. She turned her attention to the brigade, ready to barge through doors if she had to. What more could they do to her? She was hardly in the shop.

In her absence Venya ran the shop perfectly.

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Four days after that revelation, Venya still avoided Yahaya like the plague. She made sure she never ran into him. This afternoon she didn’t have to.

Traffic was heavy, but there were no soldiers on the road. The quickest way to make fast sales in the sweltering heat was to weave through the narrow spaces between the unmoving vehicles. By the time she made it to the head of the long line of traffic, there were just two sachets in her bowl. Which meant she would need a refill.

But she saw the cause of the traffic jam. It wasn’t a crash. A bus had been fired at from behind. Accidental discharge, the newspapers liked to call it. She saw the holes made by what would probably be the bullets as they came in through the back glass. All the passengers that had been on the bus had now got down and joined the crowd in shock. Only two passengers remained in the bus, in the seats they had taken when they had got on the bus just minutes ago. There was blood all over the inside of the bus. But both unlucky passengers still sat in their fixed positions…dead.

Venya could already imagine how this picture would look on the front page of the papers the next day and the bold, black headlines that would run underneath the photograph.

Some voices in the crowd of sympathizers were saying something about the soldiers having disappeared.

Suddenly the bowl on Venya’s head crashed to the tarmac. One of the passengers was her mother.

THE END.

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