Rasaki
knew something had gone wrong as he ejaculated but what exactly, he
could not place. Was it the grandfather clock that chimed eight times
at one o’clock, or the thunder that cracked the midnight air as the
first spurts eased out? Was it the strange bird that began chirping
on the silence of the night? He stared at his wilted member. He had
jerked out too late. This withdrawal thing Osas suggested was not for
him. It was like eating underdone rice.
“What...?”
his wife said. “I'm safe...”
Her
sweat-drenched breasts heaved in protest as he pulled away from her
delirious grip. He did not
respond. He faced the cracking wall of their one-room home, his face
wrapped in a puzzle. It was not just about the niggling apprehension
of pregnancy or the interrupted orgasm, he just did not like how he
came.
He
ignored his wife’s
grumbling and
thought himself into sleep. But if the manner of his coming frayed
his mind, the dream that followed knifed it: his wife, after handing
him a basket of baby clothes, crossed a small stream on a foot
bridge. He followed, only to slip and tumble into the muddy water. He
screamed out of the dream, sweating like a trapped thief. He could
not place it, but he could sense it. Something had gone askew.
≠
“So
you think it is funny abi?” He had told
Osas the dream and the
manner of his coming and all he had got was a sneer. He wagged a
finger at Osas as the imp tried with little success to wipe the grin
off his acne infested face.
“Rasaki,”
Osas said. “It is called Withdrawal method. You are supposed to
withdraw.”
“I
couldn’t. It kills the whole idea of the action na. That is the
most important moment. If I withdraw what am I suppose to enjoy? Na
useless method. Useless like you.”
"Na
you useless not the method. You fear too much and you lack self
control. But you know, after Brozie and Zino, you need a male child
so you no even need to..."
"Just
shut up there if you don't have anything to say. I'm talking serious
matter you are talking male child. Those two girls are more than the
size of my pocket."
The
sun was high up the powder blue sky. About a dozen okadamen were at
its mercy under the ever busy Ikeja Bridge.
“...and
you know this thing about my dreams,” Rasaki
continued with a shake of his head.
He
held the belief that his dreams always came to pass, after he had
dreamed of his father’s
death and his mother’s
sickness way before they occurred.
“Guy,
that’s impotent superstition.”
“I
know when my dreams are serious.”
“To
me, it means your wife will soon be pregnant. Reason it na? As you
hammer your wife, thunder crack, rain started to fall, and you now
dream that you carry baby clothes. Haba it
is clear. I don't need to be a prophet.”
The
words must have spilled into earshot of other okadamen judging from
the throaty giggles that broke out behind them.
“But
Rasaki, no be just two girls you don born, you no sure say you need
boy?” Rasaki couldn't place who asked the question but he threw a
response back all the same.
“You
will feed all of them for me? Or pay their school fees for me?
Idiots.” He hissed and moved his okada away in disgust.
“Why
are you now going?” Osas
tried to look serious.
Rasaki
ignored him. He gunned the machine towards the main road, brushing
past the grinning clown who jumped aside in time to avoid the
charging bike. Osas cursed in a crude mix of pidgin laced with
crooked Bini.
“Back
to sender,” Rasaki retorted.
Osas
was the only one he could call a friend. They had grown up together
in Mushin, with its downtown tag and its slummy glory. After years of
menial jobs in Chinese construction companies, they had started the
okada business together. Osas had introduced him to the shylock who
loaned them the money to buy the bikes with a spin-off agreement of
paying off the loan every month at a satanic interest.
“Where?”
he shouted above the traffic din,
after a young lady threading the broken sidewalk like a rookie model
had flagged him down. She wore a British flag made into a daring
spaghetti strap chemise. As much as he tried he saw no sign of a bra
but he could swear on his father’s
grave she was wearing one; no breasts that size could maintain such a
confident stability unless they have started coming with spinal
cords.
“Odunsi
down.” Her birdlike
voice shook him off wayward thoughts. He doubled the fare based on
her well-to-do appearance. He did not
expect her to haggle. She did not
disappoint him. He bent the okada sideways to allow her get her long
smooth legs around.
“Which
side in Odunsi down?”
“The
church beside the river.”
“Church?”
The word escaped him before he
could muffle it.
“Surprised?”
A smile played on her glossed
lips.
Why
won’t he be? Who would
wake up on a Monday morning, dress up like an Abuja harlot and head
for church? What kind of church would that be, and one beside that
demonic river? He did not
bother to deny, it was only sane to be surprised. He avoided a stray
dog and hit the road. Her girded breasts rubbed against his back. It
felt good.
“That
church is a crooked church,” he
said.
“Well,
you are wrong. God is really using the man.”
God
is using the man. Rasaki smirked. The usual zeal of a new convert.
Sure, he believed there was a God. Of course someone would have made
the heavens and all the things around, including man, who also went
ahead to make things. But he believed that God, wherever he was, did
not
have the time to bother about some of the rats he had made. Pitiful
rats like him. He had held on like a fanatic to this conviction for
years and it was always a fertile ground for an argument with his
church-going, pastor-worshipping wife.
“One
day God will humble you,” she
would say with deliberate unction.
“I
am already humbled,” he would reply.
Driving
a commuter motorcycle around town, one he had not even finished
paying for, and many times waiting on her to support him with the
stipend from her mushroom tailor business was, as a husband, the
basest of humbling. He always hurled back the reply like an irritated
shot putter. One day his wife ended the argument with the bible
verse: Repent or you perish.
“So
that you can go and marry your bald pastor, abi?” He
had sneered. She refused to talk to him for a week after that, and
since then she never preached at him again.
≠
He
honked in desperation to
get a rickety Volkswagen off his way. He failed.
“Pastors,”
he said, his
undulating voice filled with disdain. “Faking miracles and sleeping
with girls.” He could
imagine the pastor’s
hand under her miniskirt. Kai!
He shook his head.
“This
one is different I tell you.”
“I
hear,” he shouted above
the whooshing wind. “Na today?”
The
Volkswagen finally got into another lane, and he charged forward.
“So
what are you going there to do on a Monday, digging deep or prayer
meeting?” He smiled to
himself. Digging deep, serious matter, digging
deep. He shook his
head and laughed at the thought. Digging deep, deep, deeper…
“I’m
going to thank the Prophet.”
Interesting.
Thank the man. In what way? He wondered with a crafty smile. He
decided to mind his business. He ran into a pothole, she held onto
him like a crab.
“My
friend brought me here last week, the prophet prayed for me and just
yesterday I got my miracle just exactly as he prophesied.”
Rasaki
tilted his ears backward. “You
said miracle?”
“Yes,”
she replied removing a strand of
hair from her mouth.
She
had been trying to get into America for three years to join her
fiancé but it seemed the embassy officials did not
like the look of her face.
Maybe
they have a bust size limit. The words were nearly out before he
checked himself. “So the
man prayed and they gave you visa?”
“Yes,
yesterday. They didn’t
even ask a question, not one question just as the Prophet had
prophesied. God is really alive. And aside prophecy, he even
interprets dreams.”
Rasaki
nearly ran into a pregnant goat. He avoided it in time and stopped.
Dreams. He remembered the unsettling dream of the previous night. He
swallowed hard.
“Did
you just say he interprets dreams?”
≠
Ijapa
the tortoise says there are no coincidences in life.
≠
A
wooden signboard displayed the church’s
name in loud and colored letters: The Redeeming Church Of The Day Of
The
Most High Jah. The
‘Jah’ in bigger print. A solemn queue snaked from the entrance
into an oxbow before disappearing into the back of the building.
Rasaki counted eighteen big cars lined beside the river.
What
are all these rich people looking for? Why don’t
they just leave God alone and allow Him to focus His divine attention
on miserable rats like him?
He
courted questioning looks as he chained his Okada to a mango tree. It
did not
matter that it was in a church compound, since the church was inside
Lagos, he was not going to take any chance. He hurried to Sandra
(that was the name she called herself) who was already in the queue
under the shade of a dying almond tree. The cyan river whistled in
the distance, some funny looking stray birds chirping at its bank.
Rasaki asked her if she knew the story of the river. She didn’t, so
he told her.
Odo
Iya Alaro, loosely translate to ‘the
river of the dye-maker’, named in dubious honor of a village
dye-maker, who after learning of her husband’s
infidelity, smashed her pot of dye into pieces and jumped into the
river, never to be seen again. The dye gave the river a blue-green
color and it was believed that if a man ate food cooked with its
water, his manhood would wilt when in bed with any woman other than
his wife.
Sandra’s
eyebrow narrowed.
“You
don't believe?”
She
smiled through her thick lipstick. He further told her how his
friend, Osas, after ripping off the clothes of a voluptuous petrol
station attendant he had lured into bed one rainy Sunday night,
nearly ran mad after his thing refused to rise to the occasion. He
begged, cajoled, and threatened the offending scallywag. It just hung
limp like a diseased plant. But when he got home the thing threatened
to tear apart his zipper at the sound of his wife’s
voice. Immediately, he knew what she had done. She didn’t confess
until he had nearly strangled her.
Sandra’s
mouth fell open.
“And
the thing doesn’t have cure o,” he
said, concluding with flourish.
That
night, as he played peacemaker between Osas and his wife, he had
thanked God his own wife was a born-again Christian and so would
never attempt such a criminal experiment. That would have been the
end of his Friday night jollofing at
Efe’s house. Efe.
He scratched his crotch on instinct. He had never seen such a wild
girl. Her hips alone were enough to…
“It’s
our turn,” she
said, tapping him out of his adulterous voyage.
≠
Prophet
Josiah sat on a velvet
stool, his satin white gown immaculate, his bony hand gripped at a
wooden cross. A silver mace rested on his thighs. He could not be
more than thirty.
Sandra
fell to her knees,
thanking him for his divine insight and kindness. Still on her knees,
she handed him a packet of a thousand naira notes with both hands and
with her head bowed. Rasaki thought he didn’t see well; his
wind-reddened eyes bulged like a tree frog’s.
One hundred thousand naira? That would buy his motorcycle with extra
change for six months of cold beer and Sikira's point
and kill peppered
fish, at a calculation of three bottles of beer and five bowls of
fish per night. A gift at one sitting? His eyes were nearly running
out of protesting sockets when the Prophet directed his silver mace
at him and shot him a gaze which he returned. Concerted shivers ran
through his wiry frame. The lightness in his head lifted him off the
marble floor; drowsiness took him in wide arms. When he opened his
eyes he was flat on the floor.
“What
happened?” He shook his
head as Sandra pulled him to his feet. The silver mace was still
aimed at him. He ducked behind Sandra.
“Rasaki,
your barn will be filled. I say your barn will be filled. Dreams are
reflections in the mirror, Rasaki. They look real but can you touch
them? Son of man, they should only guide you. All I see is nothing
but a miracle for you. Thus says the Lord.”
How
did he know his name was Rasaki. How did he know he came because of a
dream…? Before
Rasaki could give words to his thoughts, the Prophet pointed the mace
to the door.
“You
will return here in thanksgiving. Peace be unto you.”
He
was outside before he could respond. He forced Sandra’s
grip off his arm, his gaze still fixed at the door. “What just
happened?”
“I
told you. He is God’s
true prophet.
You’ll come back to give thanks.”
Rasaki
unchained his machine like a sleepwalker. He revved the engine, gave
the church a long look, before disappearing into the jungle of Lagos
in a plume of bright blue smoke, his head ringing with horns,
screams, and a voice chanting: your barn will be full, your barn will
be full, your barn will be full.
≠
Talking
of miracles, Rasaki’s
wife had with the patience of a honey gatherer been waiting for more
than two years. She had prayed for her second child, Zino, to be a
boy, even making special miracle offering during special church
services. She had failed to hold back tears when she had delivered
another girl. She had never for once given an ear to Rasaki’s
declared contentment with two daughters. She knew her mother-in-law
was not happy, from the thin smile on her face when Lola told her the
sex of the second child. Lola was convinced it would only be a matter
of time before the old woman dragged Rasaki down the path of a second
wife. He had already acquiesced to her insistence on naming their
children Issoko names, after her tribe, way after they had decided on
Yoruba names, his tribe. That made it very clear. Rasaki would never
say no to his mother. Deep within her, Lola was convinced that her
third attempt would be a boy, so when she got pregnant, late in the
eight month of the year, she was overjoyed, but did not
know how to tell her husband. She bided her time, waited on the Lord
until the opportunity came, one cold Friday night.
Rasaki’s
hungry hand had found its way in the marital darkness into her loose
blouse; something that had not happened for weeks. He was either not
in the mood or their two children were awake. She swallowed hard,
said a little prayer and, with both hands, held his hand there.
“What?”
he murmured, his finger circling
a reluctant nipple.
“There
is something I want to tell you.”
A
brief silence weighed on the words.
“Go
on.”
“I’m
pregnant.”
Rasaki
went deaf in one ear; he turned the second. “I
didn't hear you.”
She
repeated herself, releasing her grip on his now clammy hand. His
swollen libido wilted. The room became hot. No, she must be pulling
his leg.
“It
is a joke.”
“It
is not.”
“But
you told me you were safe.”
“Yes,
but God had other plans...”
“Do
not bring God into this!”
Silence,
darkness and tension were a terrible mix. Rasaki sat up on the bed.
“You
have to do something.”
“Like
what?”
“You
are asking me? I won’t allow another child to come into this world
to suffer, not until I have money!”
“God
will provide.”
“I
say don’t bring God into
this. Na God sleep with you?”
Lola
sat up, her face set in a rare mask of determination.
“I
understand only one
thing. You want to know?”
She
was not the one speaking, Rasaki assured himself. He was hearing
things.
She
raised the flame of the kerosene lamp, turned and looked into his
eyes.
“I’m
not killing my baby, you hear?”
≠
Lola’s
chest heaved in determination.
She thought he would only be very
angry, not suggest an abortion. Abortion? Jehovah forbid. Murder.
Sin. And not when her Pastor had prophesied that her pregnancy was a
gift from God. For the first time since their rough and tumble
shotgun wedding four years back, she had looked him in the eye and
stood up to him, and in this contest, there could only be one winner.
She made sure the sleeping girls had not rolled off the mat as they
always did, blew off the light and turned her back to him.
≠
Ijapa
the tortoise says if the brave and the coward drink the same hemlock
of fear, the manner of deaths will be different.
≠
“When
you push a goat to the
wall it will fight back. I don’t
blame your wife.” Osas
wiped offending
froth off his mustache. They were at Sikira’s
nighttime bar; the fun-loving poor man’s
saviour, cheap
beer, cheap food, and
cheap girls.
“So
it is me you blame?” A
sour Rasaki was on his second bottle.
Osas
tilted his glass and poured in the beer with great care, watching as
the golden liquid swirled amidst thousands of sparkles. He stopped
just as the overlying foam bopped over the edge of the glass and down
its side. He wiped it off with his tongue and smacked his lips. He
winked at the doleful Rasaki.
“Drink
beer this man and stop killing the night.”
Rasaki
shook his head and continued on his previous frequency. “And
you can imagine, I looked for condom that night. It was not where I
kept it. This is witchcraft, better one.”
Osas
spluttered his drink in the laughter that rocked him. “Guy
don't make me choke
on beer.”
“How
will I take care of another mouth in this poor condition? I hate to
see my family hungry. I can’t endure it. I can’t. I’ll rather
just die than be unable to provide for them.”
“Guy,”
Osas had
a mischievous smile wafting across his lips. “At least you are
expecting a miracle from your prophet.”
Rasaki
hissed, anger and despair welling up in his tipsy brain. “Yes,
you are very right,” he
snorted, “the miracle has come, and my barn is full, full boku with
trouble.”
Bar
noises crept over the conversation. Rasaki threw back his head and
took a long sip. His face gathered into a frown. The beer tasted like
diluted urine mixed with vinegar. He shook his head like a tired old
man. Even beer? When beer starts to lose its taste, everything else
starts to go sour. Everything.
≠
Rasaki
watched as his wife’s
stomach grew in robust defiance. There was an almost divine
determination about her; conducting herself with aloof dignity,
intelligently guiding communication with him to the basic minimum.
She was neither antagonistic nor confrontational, yet she dared him
daily with innocuous spiritual songs, and by holding surrogate
conversations with him through the children, who by a certain
inevitable inclination had gravitated towards her. There was
something celestial, something vehemently beautiful about her
rebellion. And when, eight months into her pregnancy, she called him
one night to help dab her swollen stomach with warm water, he
surprised her, himself and his lineage’s
stubborn and vindictive streak. He stood up like a lame duck, boiled
water on the coal stove and performed the maternal ritual with a
sudden sense of bitter relief, he knew he had lost. The next day he
came home with a baby’s
cot and set it in a corner of the room. The look in Lola’s eyes was
not of victory, it was a poignant mix of pity, love, and gratitude.
For the first time in many months, they slept in each other’s arms.
For Lola it was heavenly, but for Rasaki, something beyond his grasp;
something strange and unsettling had just depressed the pause button
on his life, and shrunken his manhood to grub size.
≠
If
you could ask Rasaki to describe the rainy Sunday evening his phone
rang while at his sick mother’s
bedside, with his daughters Brozie and Zino, he would describe it as
flawlessly as Wiltshire would paint a convoluted cityscape after a
glance. The call was from Lola’s
pastor.
“You
need to come now; your wife is in labor.” There
was nothing divine about the voice.
He
left the children with Osas's wife before speeding like one deranged
to the hospital. He got to the maternity ward sweating as if the
Okada had ridden him and not the other way round. The doctor was
talking to the pastor outside the labor room. Her water had exploded
during an evening prayer session, effectively putting an end to the
spiritual shock and awe.
“Where
is my wife?”
The
pastor, a short bald man, who Rasaki never really liked, looked to
the doctor for support.
“You
cannot see her now.” The
doctor’s mouth had a
Charlie Chaplin smile, making it impossible to read his emotion.
“Why?
What is the problem?”
“There
is no problem, at the moment.”
“The
Lord is with her,” the
pastor chipped in.
Rasaki
looked from the pastor to the doctor.
“Why
didn’t you register her for antenatal care?”
“It
was too expensive.”
“Too
expensive?” The
doctor shook his head. He made to talk but changed his mind.
“Should
I stay... I mean wait here?”
“No
need. Come tomorrow morning.”
A
confused Rasaki watched him disappear into the labor section. The
pastor put a hand on his shoulder.
“Everything
will be alright. Our God is a God of miracles. He is with her.”
“He
better be,” he muttered.
“He just better be.” He
headed for his motorcycle.
≠
He
was at the hospital before
the first cock crow. A nurse told him to sit and wait. He didn’t
have the strength to argue with her, after a long night spent rolling
on a bed damp with sweat. Once the nurse was out of sight, he entered
the Doctor’s office.
“Where
is my wife?”
The
doctor was quick to pull him aside.
“She
is fine. Everything went well. Sit down,” he
said, nodding to a plastic chair.
“Sit
down?” He was not sure
the doctor had spoken to him. “How is my wife?”
“She
is fine.”
“And
the child?”
“The
children.” The doctor smiled.
“Children?”
Rasaki’s
heart leapt. “Twins?”
The
doctor shook his head and smiled again. “More…you
are indeed a lucky man.”
Rasaki,
trying to read the doctor’s
face, held on to the wall for support. He had told this woman, he had
told this woman he didn’t want
this pregnancy.
Triplets. He was done for.
He
seemed to have said it aloud because the doctor put a hand on his
shoulder and smiled. Rasaki braced his ears. This is not happening.
“Octuplets,
the first in the country.” He
said with a great amount of pride. “We had to cut her open…and
the children need further treatment to…”
Rasaki’s
dimming brain was struggling with primary school geometry. Hexagon is
six sided, heptagon is seven sided, octagon is eight sid…
Octuplets.
Eight. Lord. The ceiling began to spin.
≠
Rasaki
opened his eyes to a
different world. There was a magical essence to the air and laughter
seemed to echo on passing words. His shirt had been unbuttoned and a
nurse was fanning him with a plastic fan. He looked down at the baby
care items he had accumulated. He shook his head; a bitter laugh
escaped his dry lips. He looked up as if seeking for answers from
powers beyond him.
“I
want to see my wife,” he
croaked.
The
nurse got out of the way.
≠
Behold
the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be unto me, according to your
word.
≠
A
pensive air of reverence enveloped the ward with everyone regarding
him as a football academy kid would regard a Ronaldo. He ignored them
all. Standing by her bed, he watched her in muddled silence.
Sick-looking tubes ran from under the blanket into two bags of
urine-looking liquid which hung on a rusting pole. He placed a
trembling hand on her forehead, her eyes flickered open and then
closed again. She looked so peaceful. The intense smell of
antibiotics in the ward reminded him of sorrow and pain. Hand on
chin, he walked out of the ward.
The
sky which had darkened with hidden whispers opened its bowels on him.
He ignored the deluge, kicked his motorcycle into life and powered it
out of the hospital. The rain, helped by a gusty wind, thumped him.
To add to his travails, an eternal convoy of government vehicles with
wailing sirens raced into the compound, spraying him with torrents of
mud water.
“It’s
not their fault,” he
muttered as the convoy passed. “Ti iya nla ba gbeni sanle, kekere a
maa gori eni.” When a
big problem wrestles one to the ground, smaller ones will trod with
glee.
Some
distance from the hospital, he turned into Yaba bypass and rode
slowly into a roughly constructed thatched shed under the bridge,
Kasala Republic; where everything from a newborn’s
placenta to an Italian tachometer had a price. It didn’t
take long for him to emerge from its hideous interior of guns, drugs
and undesirables. He patted his swollen pocket in cold reassurance
and headed for home on foot. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it
had started; the sun sneaked out from behind the exhausted clouds and
a black mockingbird on a bent electricity pole began an ear piercing
note. That was when he remembered he did not even ask to see the
children.
≠
Ijapa
the tortoise says the world is one big prison. Why does one stay put
they ask him. Fear. He mutters. Of what. Death? No, what lies on the
other side.
≠
Rasaki’s
thoughts were on cartwheels as he got home. Osas's wife had dropped
off Brozie and Zino on her way to the market. He was not expecting to
find them home. He told them to go and play with the neighbours.
“We
are hungry," Brozie, the eldest, said. She always spoke for the
other who was picking at the cracked floor with her big toe. Rasaki
counted out some money. More than enough.
“Take,
go and buy bread down the road. Both of you."
She
flashed him a dimpled smile and ran out, dragging her younger sister,
who was about to say thank you, by the arm.
≠
Rasaki
watch them run down the dirt road through the small window. He wiped
away the slow smile forming on his face as he remembered his wife. He
couldn’t think ahead as much as he tried. There was nothing ahead.
He saw nothing. He dipped into his discarded dashiki and brought out
a thick wad of naira notes which he threw on the table. His phone
rang. It was the doctor. He ignored it, his lips taut like a banjo
string. He ran his eyes through his miserly cloth collection
scattered on a wooden rack, he settled for a black tunic. A lone
condom fell out of its pocket. He didn’t
know whether to laugh or cry. His eyes fell on the baby clothes Lola
had kept inside the cot. He remembered the dream of the swaddling
clothes and what happened when he attempted to follow her over the
river. A knot tightened inside his head.
As
he placed his phone on a hastily written note on the table, it rang
again. He made for the door catching his reflection in the broken
mirror set on the cupboard. Unsure, he stepped back, took another
look at his face. His head didn’t
seem to belong to him anymore.
The
only other time he had ever lost his head was the day he had opened
the door to see his father’s
body stuck like frozen fish on a hand-carved bed. A fun-loving
comedian, his father was one of the many the postal service had
prematurely retired. He spent the rest of his years depending on his
trader wife for survival, always sitting in front of his
half-finished house, planning on his never-to-come pension.
And
there he was that glorious Palm Sunday when he saw an itinerant drug
merchant who prided himself on the cure for any sickness; cancer,
impotence, mouth odor, headache, bad dreams, bad luck, anything. The
old man asked if he had a remedy for his chronic arthritis.
“Of
course,” he said,
settling down to display his satanic wares.
After
taking the death peddler’s
twenty naira concoction of Paracetamol, Vitamin B, Chloramphenicol
and six blue tablets shaped like skulls, crossbones and punctured
hearts, it took mortuary services ten minutes to peel him off the bed
hardened with body fluids the following day. His mother and her holy
friends had raged, cursed and hollered mountain moving prayers of
revenge and intercession. But he was too far gone to hear them, and
he was obviously not Lazarus. Rasaki lost his head. He sought out the
death peddler and would have beaten him to death but for the
intervention of a traffic policeman. But not after he had crippled
him with an iron bar. This time, Rasaki had no one to seek out. He
had no one to cripple.
He
closed the door behind him.He paused. A dark lizard ran across his
path, he jumped back, stopped, muttered inaudibly to himself and
stepped out of the compound.
"Daddy."
He
turned. Running down the road were his children. Brozie was swinging
a small nylon bag. He stopped. He waited for them to get to him.
"Where
is mummy?" the younger one breathed.
"In
the hospital. I am going to see her."
"Has
she born?" asked Brozie.
Rasaki
nodded. "Now go inside and eat," he said. Either hand on
the small of their backs, he urged them in.
"I
want to go with you," whined the elder one. The younger one
started to cry.
"Tomorrow.
Now go inside."
He
watched them go in with morose steps. He waited for Brozie to shut
the door before heading for the junction where he would get a taxi.
He took a quick look back at his house. And there by the small window
were his children, watching, holding at the railings like prison
bars.
≠
There
is no armour against fate? Ijapa the tortoise asks, what if fear is
fate.
≠
Camera
lights flashed like furious lightening, journalists scrambled for
passing moments as the General Hospital Lagos became a hotspot of
gossip and nosey pilgrims. A woman from the backwaters had placed the
country on the world map.
From
the maternity ward window, Lola watched as Osas’s
Okada sped
off in a silent trail of grey smoke. She could not say if it was in a
dream that she had seen her husband pawning his Okada. She had called
his number. No answer. After hours of biting her nails, she had
harried the equally agitated Osas to help drag her husband from
wherever he was. She knew he would go berserk at the news. That was
why she told the doctor not to tell him until she had delivered
safely. She knew her husband like the back of her hand. And she also
knew he had gone to look for money to pay the mounting hospital bill.
But
how much she wished he was by her side when she was wheeled into the
humbling presence of a curious government entourage. As the bearded
man held her calloused palm in his over-fed hand, tears welled up in
her tired eyes. She had shaken her head in disbelief as the doctors
beamed at each other, the nurses had cleaned tears off plain faces
and the hospital had buzzed with a certain manner of activity that
had not been seen since the Biafran war, when punctured hope,
shattered patriotism, and broken bodies had swamped the wards like
lost bees.
≠
Osas
sensed something amiss when a black bird fluttered off the wooden
window as he approached Rasaki’s
house…. Killing his engine with a swift motion that masked his
disorientation, he watched the errant bird disappear over a sea of
rusty rooftops into the polluted Lagos horizon. He was still in
shock. Eight boys? He could not bring himself to imagine his friend's
state of mind the moment he heard the news.
He
entered the house; the long corridor of the face-me-and-face-you
rooms was clogged with broken furniture, disused cooking utensils and
dirty clothes. Rasaki’s
door, which was the first from the entrance, was ajar. He entered.
“Rasaki?”
he called out.
It
was an action that was more on impulse than reason. Rasaki’s
apartment was only a sour damp room. He looked around; the room gaped
back at him. It had the rotten wood smell of stale hope. Brozie and
Zino were asleep on the torn mattress, a half-eaten loaf of bread
between them. Zino had a line of dried tears on her face. His eyes
fell on Rasaki’s phone,
a note and the roll of money on the table.
As
he swept the money into a black polythene bag, his phone vibrated
into life. Lola.
“Have
you seen him?”
“I’m
on my way,” he said and
hung up. He didn’t know
what else to say. He decided against awaking the children. He would
have to call his wife to pick them up. He closed the door with care.
He
made to switch off Rasaki’s
phone, changed his mind, and instead opened one of the blinking text
messages. It was an hour old, from Lola. He muttered a curse as he
read.
The
sun sneaked out from the back of a distant church spire as Osas
coughed his Okada into
life, the content of the text groaned like agidigbo
drums in his head: “Come now,
Minister of Health is in hospital, he is taking children to hospital
in Abuja, and me and you, come now now. And please don’t
forget to bring my
anointing oil and bible.”
Osas
threw Rasaki's note into a roadside drain but a strong wind picked it
before it landed and took it right into a bread hawker’s face. He
was too disoriented to say sorry, as Rasaki’s note did. Even if he
had said it, of what use would it be?
~
Ijapa the tortoise wonders, what if man sees everything behind his
mountain?
~~
Bode
Asiyanbi,
born in Osogbo, Western Nigeria, was educated at Obafemi Awolowo
University and Lancaster University where he holds a Masters degree
in Creative Writing. He is a two-time winner of the BBC African
Performance Playwriting prize. His short stories have been published
by The Kalahari Review and The Munyori Literary Journal. He writes
radio drama for the BBC Media Action. He lives in Nigeria where he is
working on his first novel.
~~
~~
Also in this Issue
Short Stories
Poems