The rants of an antsy girl

17/02/2020

Monday

An offering of excruciating mundane. Cheers!

When I sit up from my bed abruptly, it reads three on my bedside clock. Quickly, before I slip back to reality, I caress it's soft plastic edges and drink in it's measured chimes. Our late aunt Aiye, gave us as a little girl something. I don't know why, but I think like that too. I genderdize things; I group them into genders. This clock, is female because it is a girl something. When I think of the clock, I think of aunt Aiye, I think of yellow and fuchsia flowers, I think of Always sanitary advertisements on television. It reminds me of how much I have failed my anticipations as a young child, how much love I have lost because of just being me.
Aunt Aiye was my mother's younger sister; stories swam in her warm brown eyes, smiles tingled on her full lips. Her grace was beautiful. I cannot now remember what it was that made her have an aura of freedom and freshness around her.
‘She rammed into a flour truck. She was prepared for her death like fish in batter.’ My mother had told my Dad. She hadn't known, and she still doesn't, but I heard her. I dreamed dreams of Aunt Aiye baking like battered fish– they stopped after we buried her remains.
My armpits are drenched in sweat, my eyes hurting from forcefully tearing them open.
I put on my slippers and walk into the bathroom. I am sick of these recurring dreams. My throat is sick of it too– sore from excessive screaming.
As I sit on the toilet, I see in the dim light of the bathroom, a cockroach, so brown and twice the size of my thumb, moving it's antennae about, walking with measured cockroachy steps.
I muse.
Even in a house like ours, where the walls will not fall in the toughest of rains, where the baths have the recent of recent bathroom technologies, Cockroaches still make nests.
In my dream, I hear Mr Akhere's smile as if it is audible and I run through a dark damp corridor till I get to an open air where there are several Hausa men roasting Suya. They bless God for providing them with meat from Mr Ofortokun.
I know my parents hear me because unlike the small room, my room is not sound proof but they pretend not to.
They pretend not to know I'm eating at the table with them yet they insist on it.
None of them says to me, ‘Joan, pass the sugar.’ or, ‘Stop clanking your cutlery so rudely!’
Nothing.
I want to kill the cockroach, but I change my mind and leave. Who am I to kill a cockroach luckier than I am. A cockroach who well deserves luxury house than I do.
I read my texts now, old ones, one from the mystery texter, dozens from Efosa.
Frankly, he caused the jeopardy I am in now so I ignore him.
When I come down after breakfast, my parents are walking to the lounge door, exchanging furtive words.
They see me and my mother presses herself through the lounge door.
My Dad breaths deeply and turns to me. He pockets his hands and lifts his head in that crisp, dignitary way he does when he wants to assume his Ofortokun stance.
‘Ebiekutan.’ he says with a firm smile. For the first time, I notice his graying beard, well trimmed from the sides of his face, full and surprisingly well groomed. They compliment his big, shiny bald head.
His cologne too; a spicy kind of smell that clogs my nose as soon as I inhale it.
I wonder how I have never really noticed these things.
‘Good morning.’
‘Your mother has her hands full,’ An uncomfortable wheeze. ‘So she had to quickly slip by. Meanwhile, Mr Akhere says you are doing quite... No, VERY badly in your academics.’
‘uhm–’
‘I'm not done. May I break this to you that JAMB date has been fixed?’
My heart falters and stops beating for a milisecond.
‘What?’
‘Also, Akan's autopsy's reports have finally arrived. I'll have a look at it while you stay focused and make good use of your time. Excuse me.’
A certain desperation fills my heart and I grip his arm, rumpling his well ironed jacket in the process.
‘Joan!’ he barks.
I grip even tighter and kneel down briskly.
‘Daddy please listen to me. I really need you to listen to me.’
He tried to leave my grip but I a uncompromising.
‘Have you gone mad, Joan? Leave me now or I'll slap you nonsense.’
‘Daddy...’ my voice breaks. It is unlike me, but my throat tightens and my nose begins to run. It is embarrassing but I am unwilling to let him go.
From my side eye, I can see AJ and the other guys peeping from the tech room.
‘Let me go. Joan, if you don't, leave me now, I'll break your head open!’ he booms.
I know somewhere in me that I will not let him go. The darkness inside my chest, pressing on me everytime I lay down, causing me to scream myself hoarse. The fear of having a father and not really having him.
‘Daddy please I want to learn fashion designing! I don't want to do pharmacy! I don't want Mr Akhere teaching me anymore! I'm tired Daddy, please...’
I cannot hold it in anymore and I shake with tears. It is like they are coming directly from my heart. Its not relieving, but its like I am paying a due.
The moment I want to blab on and tell him about the mystery texter, he calls Kamaru and other guys. They take me from him.
I want to put up a fight, but a feel a kind of weakness that is not bodily.

...

Mr Akhere walks about the room, his shoes living small brown stains of brown on the tiled floor. He stops every now and then and gives me a sinister smile, like he knows something.
What if he knows about my dreams and how I hear his smiles?
Finally he approaches me and runs a long, crooked finger across one side of my face.
Goosebumps spray across my skin and I hear the dry contact of my breath on his patchy black skin.
‘Are your scared of me?’
I swallowed, my hands begin to get clammy from the impact of fisting them for long and I wipe them on my jeans.
He brings all of his fingers to each sides of my face and caresses them, slowly. When he reaches my chin, he jerks it up and smiles down at my face. Oddly, I start to worry about how exposed my throat is. He can easily run a sharp blade through it: it would be quick and clean.
‘I hope you did not spill? I hope you haven't told our little secret?’He presses. His breath smells like over warmed beans.
‘What... What little secret?’ I squeak.
He leaves my face and goes back to sit heavily on his seat.
‘You well know. If you by any chance tell about our secret,’ He stares hard, his eyes boring holes in mine. ‘You father will surely disown you. I promise you this.’
He turns back to the wooden centre table and flips pages of his understanding chemistry. I am sick of Chemistry.
‘Chemistry.’ He sighs like he is reading my mind.
Something drops in my mind.
‘Excuse me.’ my voice comes out stuffed.
‘Yes,’
‘Please help me leave the house.’
He looks at me, an unreadable expression, wrings his hands absentmindedly and smiles a small smile.
‘What do I get in return?’
Wordlessly, I get up and undo the button of my blouse, they fall at my feet when I'm done.
He raises a bushy eyebrow and smiles amusedly.
‘You are surely a box of surprises.’

...

Efosa meets me at Nadia Bakery, opposite the great school that held the keys to my happiness.
I buy two cups of ice cream.
‘You really shouldn't have bothered, seriously.’
I cross my legs and give him a knowing look. He laughs in subtle embarrassment and digs into the ice cream.
‘I wonder whose idea it was to use such small spoons for ice cream. It's so upsetting.’ He complains. It is half hearted though because he has a white moustache on his upper lip.
He tries to get me to talk. I try to, bit the words don't fit in my head.
‘Whats bothering you Joan? You have a lot of explaining to do and you just sit still and quiet, eating ice cream from a tiny spoon.’
‘Look, I'm fine.’
‘You never got to tell me what happened to you that day of the incident.'
I absentmindedly touch my swollen eye. It is less painful now and gives a small throb every now and then.
'I asked Kamaru to fix in a camera.'
Efosa looks transfixed, confused, perhaps wondering where my reply was veering to.
'To fix... fix.. what are you talking about Joan?' he asks.
'Look, Efosa. I don't know if you have gotten the gist, but I don't want to talk. I'm not entitled to tell you everything single thing that happens in my life.'
It came out before I could think it through and stop my mouth from spewing. Efosa looks like he has just been doused cold water.
'I am sorry Efosa...'
He shakes his head sadly and looks away, the passing cars, the crossing students, the roadside traders.
'You know, it hurts.'
My insides grip. I fear for the words that we come out after these ones. Why did I open my mouth at all?
'It hurts so much to think that I genuinely care for your well-being, I am inside your life and then you treat me as a rag—'
'Efo—'
'No Joan! Don't call my name because it not helpful at this point. To think that all the time we have spent together, it has just been about you. Your family, your problems. You, you, you!'
He rubs his Temple.
'It is not like that, Efosa.'
'Then it is like what?' softly, 'Like what?'
'Tell me Joan, how much you know about me. My family, my life. God! I doubt you even know if I am in school for crying out loud!' he bangs his fist on the plastic table and a glassy sheen cover his eyeballs. People are starting to look at us.
'Stop this Efosa.' I say in a fearful whisper.
'No, you stop this, Joan...'
People are whipping out their phones to record.
'...Leave your self centeredness for once and look at the lives of those around you. People God has blessed you with, people who others will kill to have. Look at me if we really are friends, what is going on in my life? What does my mother say about our meetings and why does she limp?!'
For a split second we hold eye contact and the whole world does not matter, it dawns on me then. I have not been a good friend and Efosa is expectant.

I'm sorry. My mind says.

I'm sorry, but for long I found solace in self centeredness and thinking of how I have been wronged and even now I cannot think of leaving it.

Efosa sees this in my eyes and he gives me the coldest look he could've mustered. For a split moment, his dimples seem to have scurried off, the dimples that made him so approachable like a baby.
'You need to move on from this phase of being the victim. It is getting pathetic.'
Then he left. He just left.
As I turn to look at the audiences, they quickly drop their phones and try to pretend and act normal but I know.
I am beyond distraught.