Eartha

1| Eartha

Again, Mr Goat-Droppings tapped his dirty, slippered feet on the vehicle engine and popped the annoying cane into his mouth for another squelchy bite.

Eartha grimaced and cursed at her luck of a seat partner for the nth time.

At least, he could have left the window seat for me, she thought bitterly. That way I wouldn't have to endure this brashness.

The man, oblivious to the discomfort she was going through, took another huge bite of the sugar stick, filling the air with the annoying sound again.

Eartha turned her nose away to her right side. Almost immediately, she regretted doing that - she had turned to her mother again.

The said woman noticed the turn to her direction before she could amend her gaffe. She looked out from the nameless book she had her face in and graced her daughter with a stare.

'Eartha, are you alright?' she asked, looking down at the young girl from her nose now, the disapproval still evident on her face.

Eartha nodded mutely and stared ahead, not wanting to look at her mother again. She didn't have the time to let herself be bothered by the hurt and disapproval that had been balanced, as precariously as a mouse on a bowl of pap, on her golden-brown face. So, she busied herself staring at the back of the driver's head.

To her relief, the woman just cast her one more glare and returned her attention to the anonymous book.

She released a breath she didn't know she had been holding and tried to relax back in her seat, but found no space to. Goat-Droppings had sat back completely, taking up her space with him, so that he could almost touch his angular shoulder to Mother's if he leaned the enough distance. So, she settled for sitting up straighter, prepared, anyway, for the back pains that was sure to come later on.

She slowly reassessed her surroundings as much as she could from their front seat in the commercial bus. They were four on their own seat, and the last person, beside the vehicle door, was an emaciated sixty-ish old man with cloudy gray-black eyes and a hawkish nose (those had been the most distinct features that had jumped out at her when she first gazed upon him). And she found the eyes to be scary.

Goat-Droppings squelched again and Eartha tried to tamp down her blossoming irritation. Did he have to have such repulsive and tactless table manners?

She had developed an affectionate dislike to him since that first time he had entered the loading bus and asked her to relinquish her window seat to him.

The girl stopped herself from hissing at the memory, just in time.

And it's Mother's fault o! She grumbled inside. If she hadn't told Eartha to move over for the agbaiya*, as she had called him, she wouldn't have budged from the seat.

To add insult to injury, he reeked of poultry, like he had been soused in chicken water before he came to the bus, and his too-white eyes scared her. How can somebody have so bloodless eyes?

His head was an abandoned, black forest. No, the man wasn't a natural dread , but he seemed to have misplaced his comb for a long time now, resulting in the dark, matted clumps that stuck to his head, and didn't look dissimilar to a gather of wet goat-droppings.

The shrill ringing of somebody's Nokia chin chon phone saved her from remembering more gross details of the human beside her.

'Helo!' the owner of the phone stressed in heavily accented Yoruba. She was seated at the very back of the bus and didn't seem to care who heard her.

Mother seemed to have been disturbed by the call too, because she dropped the book to her laps and hissed softly.

Eartha bit at the inner of her cheek and busied herself with the hem of her gray, pinafore dress. If she were a betting person, she'd have bet that she knew exactly what was going on Mother's mind.