Goldfish Bowl

Chapter 2

Hello, I am your biological father and I'd like to meet you.
- unknown, 3:56am

Alisha blinked down at the screen of her phone, half sure her little brother would burst into the room and announce that this message was all a big cruel joke but when she looked at her shut door and back to the screen, it was still there. This was not a joke.

When her mother's infidelity came into the light, it had raised a number of questions, how long had she had been having an affair? Were her children even her husband's? And the two weeks of wait after the paternity test was the longest of her life, the whole family was on edge, even their mother wasn't sure who wasn't who's. There were numerous stories and movies Alisha had watched, casting them aside as mere fun or a way to pass boredom where it turned out the children of cheating women were never their husband's. Alisha had thought that they were just that, stories.

Until a year ago, when a senior deaconess in their church fell into the same mess, it had taken the intervention of the church committee to stop the deaconess's husband from killing her out of anger. Even then, it had been funny, Alisha remembered sneaking into church meetings with Benito to catch all the juicy gists. She had never thought she'd be in the same situation.

On a sick level, Alisha had thought Toyosi would end up the bastard, maybe that would have explained why he was nothing like their parents, in looks or character. But it had been her, the unwanted child without a father, until now.

She wanted to scream and throw something. She never wanted to know the man who fathered her, it was why she had never asked her mother. Now that same man was seeking her out.

A knock on her door startled her.

"Don't spend all morning there, mummy and daddy are leaving soon." Asher's thin voice snapped. At fourteen, he reminded her of how she was at that age, angry at the world and desperate for any iota of love and attention from her father, she tried pleasing him by acing her examinations, then later by failing woefully when the first didn't get his attention, and she got it, she had gotten seven lashes of his belt and months banned from the television and afterwards he had gone back to ignoring her.

Then she cut all her hair and got a special deliverance service in church. It was the only rebellion she kept up till this day, her hair always on a buzzcut. It didn't suit her and she didn't care.

Now she wished she had something to tug at.

"I'll be downstairs in ten." She called out. "And next time, speak to me with respect, you damn boy."

She heard her brother grumble. "I'm telling dad that you called me damn."

Alisha shook her head bitterly. Asher's father wouldn't care what she did anymore, not when she was no longer his daughter, she had never been. She left the phone where it was on the bed and wandered into the adjoining bathroom, sparing an absent glance at the mirror, there was a new zit on her lower chin, red against her fair skin and her hair had grown longer than usual and were now in spikes, she ran a hand through it and shook her head, making a mental reminder to cut it again as she ran the shower.

She stripped down from her pyjamas and stood under the raining shower.

Some thirty minutes later, she was prim and regal, every bit the pastor's daughter, the role she was forced to play very well on Sundays. In the living room, her mother was fiddling with her perfect gele and snuck glances at her impatient husband who pretended to read the bible on the sofa he had sat in three days ago while he pretended to care for the family's predicament and ended it with a statement about doing what was best for the church.