IZIGORA

Chapter 10

Kobi yawned as he stretched his long body out on the king-sized bed in the darkness of his bedroom. His singlet was drenched in sweat. He lifted his head from the soft, thick pillow and looked out the window. He couldn't hear the sound of the generator from the houses of his neighbours but he could see the light in his closest neighbour's house.

Getting up from the bed, he took off the shoes and the socks he'd fallen asleep in and walked towards the open bedroom door to turn on the lights. Yawning once more, he closed the curtains and turned on the air conditioner. Dropping the remote control on the bedside table, he peeled off his clothes as he headed for the adjoining bathroom.

He literally purred as the cold water hit his body. There had been a fatal accident involving a truck and a coaster bus two days earlier and most of the victims had been brought to the hospital he worked in since it was closest to the accident site. All hands had been on deck and Kobi was on call for 49 hours straight without sleep.

Done with his bath, he returned to the bedroom, a blue towel wrapped around his lean waist. He picked up the clothes he had taken off and tossed them into the hamper, making a mental note to wash them in the washing machine the next chance he got.

He picked up his phone noting that the battery was dead. He plugged it to the charger and turned on the phone. Seven missed calls. 4 had come from his mother, one from a good friend Sev-Av and three from the hospital.

There were days when doctors had to be on call for over twenty-four hours and without the opportunity of catching a nap but no matter how many times it happened, one's body never got used to it. It was a few minutes past eight which meant that he had slept for four hours at a stretch.

He dialled the hospital's number, putting the call on speaker. There was no emergency but they had called earlier to inform him that Izigora was back on admission at the hospital. Dr Abel-Tariah was attending to her in his absence since Kobi wasn't on duty until the following evening.

He was informed that her husband had also been brought to the hospital with a penile fracture and was currently in surgery. He didn't even want to think of how that had occurred but it could be as a result of several things: a nasty fall on an erection or a snap in the course of sexual intercourse. Since Izigora was also on admission, he figured her husband had tried to force himself her in spite of her condition.

He sighed as he ended the call. He called his mother.

'I promise to come into Lagos this weekend, mum,' he told her as he lifted a few folded t-shirts and selected a black and red t-shirt. He also pulled out a folded black jean and walked towards the bed which occupied half of the bedroom. 'Thanks for the reservation but you shouldn't have bothered.'

'I should,' Eucharia Beluchi countered. 'I rarely see you.'

My-only-son-syndrome, Kobi thought rolling his eyes.

Kobi and his siblings had grown up in Lagos, far away from their home state, Enugu. His late father Okezie Beluchi had been doing business on the mainland while his wife lectured at the University of Lagos. Okezie had passed on two years earlier at the age of seventy-eight and after being married to Eucharia for thirty-seven years. He had died after a brief illness.

What was it they said about the only or first son being the unofficial husband of his widowed mother? That was the case here. However, the nature of his work meant Kobi didn't have much time to come visiting as often as his mother would have loved and he was certainly not relocating to Lagos.

Two of his siblings, Chidera and Chinwendu were married and based in Lagos and so were there when their mother needed them. Kobi also avoided Lagos for another reason: his mother's not-so-subtle attempts to get him hitched. Eucharia didn't wonder why Kobi, at thirty-five, hadn't settled down yet, she merely tried to find the right woman for him.