Anne: Lost in Transit

Chapter 12

My life is beautiful. I watched Ebere fail at his attempt to sing the lyrics to my favourite song for the fifth time. The karaoke machine showed his fifteen percent score, he threw the microphone down and walked back to the couch. I held my laughter as I got up to turn off the karaoke machine.

He was blaming the machine for not working properly that’s why the rhythm was too fast for him to follow.

   ‘Really?’ I asked releasing my laughter.

   ‘You know you're very annoying.’ He said wrinkling his nose.

‘How? You can’t sing to save your life.’ I got serious. ‘You have a call from—’ I met his eyes before continuing. ‘You know who.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Do you want to ignore?’ He rubbed his closed eyelids with his palm.

‘You know, somethings in life are only for once a lifetime.’ He shook his head. ‘Anne do you get me? My mother went through hell when my father died. You don’t know how grateful I am to God even if I'm not a believer that my family moved on from what could have killed us. Your mum was lucky to have children old enough to take care of themselves. Frankly, I’m unperturbed by what he wants!’

   I swallowed and rubbed my hands together. ‘Maybe he wants forgiveness.’

   ‘What? Forgiveness?!’ He scoffed. He was surprisingly calm when he spoke again. ‘It’s pretty late now. Even if wants to return my dad’s properties, I don’t need it or rather, we don’t need it.’

   ‘He…he…said he wants to return everything, including the house.’

   ‘What will I need a house in Enugu for or money that my family needed for schooling when we’re now all graduates? All my mother’s children are thankfully doing well. My mother is so busy travelling round Nigeria. Anne, she’s hotcake now! We have to call her ahead and literally beg her to postpone her trip before we can visit her. This isn’t me being stubborn, if we were still young and broke, I would not look back and take the money.’

   ‘I’m sure he knows that, but what if it is for something else?’
Ebere threw his head back laughing. ‘You’re sounding naïve babe. People like him want forgiveness when the doctor tells them they have ten more days to live so they try to put their affairs in order, make remedy with whoever they have wronged. Or, let me see, maybe a pastor has told him that the reason he’s not making progress is because of what he did to his late brother’s family years ago. I shouldn’t need to say it but there were days we went without food at a time. We depended on our neighbours or the houses my mother cleaned to give her foodstuff or she snuck leftover to be thrown out and brought it home. You can’t imagine the half of it.’ He shrugged. ‘The worst part of it was that he was the pastor of one of the biggest churches in Enugu. Every Sunday, we’d trek several metres just to get to his church so he could believe my mother was really wretched and no matter how destitute we looked, he never gave us anything good. The Sundays she didn’t come to church were worse, we didn’t get anything.’ I walked back to the couch and sat beside him without holding or trying to comfort him, I just sat and let him keep talking. ‘Anne, I'm not the bad guy here.’ He held my right hand. ‘To see a man, spend my father’s money on cars, trips abroad, I just—I just—’ He removed his hand from mine, got up and walked to the window. ‘To see the hypocrite, stand on the altar every Sunday and tell the church how much of a provider God was every time he sold my father’s properties to buy a car was sickening. Ah! You needed to have been there. Such a spectacle! In all these, I didn’t hate God,’ I winced as he said that last part. ‘I just hated the idea that God did not strike Him like in the Old Testament but let him go on. God didn’t seem like a fair or just God to me.’

Closing my eyes, what had transpired in my own family flooded my brain. His was a lot worse, in fact, some might even say mine was a blessing compared to his. No matter what, we had the same conclusion, none of us had been helped by God. Whatever justice we got, we’d worked for it on our own!