FROM LONDON WITH PAINS

CHAPTER FIVE

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

Y'ello! Y'ello! Well, you've come half way. Still wondering how she died? Keep wreading dee!

I appreciate your beautiful effort of reading this far. Yeah i know, not everyone might like my story. Thanks for stopping by to say hello to my story ;)

Adaora found their journey to Enugu long and tiring. She had to endure two days of nausea and sleeping in a queer position.

It was her first time traveling for such a long time, by bus. In fact, her coming to Nigeria made her do a lot of things for the first time, just like her first time eating a Nigerian delicacy of Banga soup and garri. She had no idea whatsoever how to eat it, so she watched her relatives as they ate theirs and followed suit. First, she cut a small portion from the mountain of garri which was heaped on her plate. Then she molded it into a fine smooth ball. She put a hole in its midpoint, dipped it into her plate of soup and tried swallowing it, as she had seen them do. But she choked on it. She had to chew it before she could swallow.

It was also the first time she had fetched water from a well. Although she wasn't allowed to draw the water by herself, for fear that she might fall into the well and drown. They only allowed her to carry the buckets of water back to their flat. The first day she carried the buckets upstairs, she developed pains all over her body and was given a few days break from carrying water.

Also, Lagos was the first time she had been to church since her father's funeral. Her mother never went to church either. She spent her Sundays reading news articles, sleeping or visiting her colleagues. But Lagos seemed to have ignited a new sense of spirituality in Adaora's mother. To Adaora's dismay, her mother was almost always ready to attend any church program she was invited for, making sure she dragged Adaora along.

Enugu was not as raucous as Lagos. There was red dust everywhere, giving white cars a brown look. Adaora was relieved to be out of the bus as they chattered a taxi to their new Enugu home. She keenly looked at everything and everywhere the taxi passed.

There were a lot of old rusty looking cars on the road as well as yellow tricycles. The houses she saw were mainly storey buildings with fences around them.

Enugu is okay mom, except for some dreadful looking places I saw. I guess I'mgoing to like it here.' She smiled at her mother.

The taxi driver drove into clean and peaceful street, with trees lining its sides like a boulevard. He stopped in front of a red gate and announced that he had arrived.

Her mother alighted from the taxi and looked about her, as if trying to determinewhether they had stopped at the right place. She nodded and slipped the driver some naira notes after he carried their luggage into the red gate, which her mother first unlocked.

Adaora took a cursory gaze at the compound once they were in. she went straight to the bungalow's glass door and pulled it. It was open.

She gaped as she looked across the sitting room.

'Mom!' she screamed. 'Mom!'

'Yes baby, what is it?' Her mother answered as she brought in their bags.

'Wow! My favorite sofa! How did...' Adaora made to ask how their furniture got there, but her mother reminded her that she had shipped their furniture down to Nigeria, before they left.

'Although your dad was a Cameroonian, I urged him to buy some land here because it was cheap then.' Her mother informed her.

'Wow!' Adaora was still exploring the sitting room and touching everything.

'If he hadn't enough savings, we'd be stuck in London now,' her mother sighed.

'Don't you miss him?'

The question took Adaora by surprise. She had not expected her mother to ask. In all honesty, she didn't think she missed him much. All she could remember of him were from his pictures.

Her father had died in an auto crash a few years back. She barely got to see him as he was always at his place of work. He came back late at night, when she had already fallen asleep and left before she woke up.

Her mother and many other people cried at his funeral. Adaora had cried only a little. But so as not to look odd, she shed a bit more crocodile tears. She felt bad that she had not gotten to know him so well before his demise.

'Yes, I do.' She loathed lying to her mother, but had to do so. They embraced each other. Comforting each other.

They settled down in their new home. To Adaora's satisfaction, there was a functioning water system and the power supplied functioned for at least 12 hours a day, unlike the epileptic power supply she had witnessed in Lagos where 3 hours of electricity a day was a luxury, enough to charge ones phone batteries.

Her mother immediately located a nearby church. Soon she joined the women's fellowship and other church groups, asking Adaora to join church groups as well.