The Waiting Game

chapter ten

The tension in the room was too thick for a butter knife to cut through; Joshua thought a bigger knife might suffice. He glanced down at the knife in his left grip and regretted his decision to attend his mother’s birthday dinner. His mother might have sent hitmen after him, for the Phillips’ appearances would forever mean everything to him.

Two years after the murder of Remilekun Phillips, one might think that his family would fade into obscurity, it turned out the opposite, the press was still after them like sharks drawn to blood, waiting for one of them to slip up and give them a gory headline. The few times Joshua returned home for birthday dinners were strategic, the Phillips wanted to give off a united front. The truth was that they were shattered to the tinniest pieces and cutting themselves on glittering shards.

Without the patriarch to head them, his family was a messy lot. His sisters had adored their father’s image and the shine it gave them. Joshua’s father hadn’t been typically abusive, he’d never laid hands on them but he’d pushed them to extreme ends be the best. At all costs, Remilekun didn’t care about being fair.

Remilekun had paid for Eleanor – his eldest daughter – to write her JAMB examination in one of those centers that helped exam candidates cheat just so she could score high to study Law. He’d hired thugs to hurt Amina Khalid so she would be physically unable to take her final Orion exams because she was a threat to Joshua becoming Orion’s leader. He expected nothing but perfection from his family and when he couldn’t fix flaws, he cast out his blood. Joshua hadn’t seen his older brother in years because Remilekun disowned the boy for being autistic. He knew that Gbenga Phillips was doing alright away from his family; he also knew that he’d declined returning home.

His sisters didn’t care about that, they’d only cared that they couldn’t get away with the things they used to anymore. So they blamed him for killing their father. Joshua didn’t care much about what they thought but his mother did, she very much wanted them to be the happy family they had all pretended to be while Remilekun was alive.

Dinah painstakingly tried to draw Joshua into conversations with his sisters.

“The food is really good here, Lenny, remember when we had dinner here to celebrate your engagement? Korede brought you the most thoughtful gift.” She’d said an hour ago. Lenny hadn’t spared Joshua a look, she’d muttered a low yes to their mother and all efforts to draw her into conversation ended as swiftly as the attempt.

So Dinah had turned to Joshua, “Korede, your nieces are getting so big, you should come over and see them more often.” Joshua had rewarded her with a jerk of his head and if he had been some other tactless person then he might have screamed some variation of God forbid. He didn’t hate his nieces; in fact, he’d been a doting uncle to them up until their mother found out about what he did and rebuked him from seeing them again. A small loss, but it didn’t matter anymore.

A few minutes into dessert, she’d all but given up, the tension should have been smothered now that they’d eaten but Joshua noticed Eleanor asking for several refills of her wine glass each time the waiters stepped into the private dining room. She was close to wasted and now stabbed at the piece of chocolate lava cake with her dainty dessert fork. She was making a mess on the small white dish, the bright velvet cream in the middle of the cake looked a little like blood and Joshua imagined that she visualized stabbing him.

For the better part of the night, he’d managed to keep his cool; he answered his mother’s questions easily and ate the food even though it was the last thing on his mind. For the first time, he felt a flicker of irritation directed at Eleanor. He despised whiners.

He watched her now, pouring the sparse content of the wine bottle into her glass, the slosh of the liquid meeting the glass sounding like tiny darts hitting a surface.