Abuja
The sun had turned the box-like room into a desert temperature, with its heat seeping through the dirty curtains. Even though I opened the window all the way before going to sleep, the heat in the room still overwhelmed me. Last night I came home late as usual. I haven't slept properly for the past few weeks. When I opened my eyes in bed, the horns of passing cars on the street were echoing. I tried to close my eyes and sleep, but the result was unsuccessful.
As I got out of bed, I opened the dirty white curtains with both hands wide. Little Nigerian children were walking to their school, hand in hand, across the road, when I peeked my head out the wooden window. There was a stop right next to the sidewalk where the children walked.At the stop, people were waiting for the bus to arrive. They were construction workers, each with black bags in their hands.
When I looked away from the window and glanced back into the warm room, empty tin cans were lined up in the doorway and on the right side of the bed. Apparently, I had too much to drink yesterday. At that moment, my eyes fell on the cigarette pack sitting at the bedside. When I took the package and checked the inside, there were only two branches of cigarettes in the package. I was happy for a moment when I saw two branches of cigarettes.
I took one of the cigarettes and lit it in bed and started smoking. For a while, I tried to finish the cigarette without moving in the bed. The room was now smoky as well as hot.Since there was no ashtray around, I poured the ashes of the cigarette into the bed.
When I took out my phone from the charger plugged into the socket and looked at the screen of the phone, it still showed 27% charge. It was insane that it showed 27% charge. This is what it would be with a second-hand broken charger. There was no one calling or texting on the screen that entered the password. I put the phone back on the charger again.When I landed at the market, the first thing I would do would be to get a properly working charger.
When I scanned my features through the broken mirror, the undersides of my eyelids were red. My short cropped hair was like wheat blonde. When I looked at my hair in the mirror, it was greasy and messy. When I turned the head of the faucet and turned it, the water was not flowing from the faucet.
At that moment, the sentence "Damn it" came out of my mouth in anger. Where I live is in the suburbs of Abuja far from the city centre, I was living on the second floor of an old four-story apartment that was ready to be demolished. Since the houses in this region did not have sufficient infrastructure facilities, water and electricity were often cut off. Despite how many times I wrote letters and complaints to the municipality about this problem, they would come maybe weeks or months later.These slum people of Abuja were worthless to them.
Two weeks before I knew the taps would be cut off, I had filled two plastic cans with water to the brim. One of the bins was full and the other half was water. As I lifted the can, I poured it into the blue plastic basin. The water was not cold, but hot enough to take a shower. I didn't even know when was the last time I took a shower.
Frankly, I think he is a dirty, unkempt and messy person. I opened the fridge and took one of the tin beer cans right in front of me, opened the lid and started to sew on my head. While trying to dry my hair with a towel on the balcony of the kitchen, I was trying to finish the beer can on the other hand. Beer was good for my thirst.
"Three police officers lost their lives in the clash between the gangs and the police in the Northern Districts of Abuja."
The voice on the radio was the voice of the announcer presenting the news programme. Apparently, the streets were busy again last night. While the voice of the man presenting the news was going to switch to the other news, the sound of the radio was cut off. The electricity was cut off again.
