Anne often dreaded the possibility of handling her own family affairs after marriage without her mother’s assistance. As a single parent, she could handle a lot of things knowing her mother was always there, a dependable pillar. But all that would change once she got married. Would she be courageous enough to scale that hill with the required patience and finesse?
The idea of marriage appealed the least to Anne despite the insistence of Mike, her son’s father, and her parents. She never loved Mike beyond his money’s worth anyway. What happened between them, she considered a mistake - a damn trick of circumstance, which resulted in the birth of a son. Never would she allow a repeat of their episode of heady adventure for it would amount to a willing endorsement of own slavery.
She had been a resident in the Brotherhood of Father Manu for four years. During this period, a chronic cancer was healed of her. Anne often referred to the illness and subsequent healing as the reason for her long stay in the Brotherhood. Before her final conversion into the spiritual movement, she had met Netu Deo at a Brotherhood seminar in Gunu City in eastern Riagena.
The opportunity to chat with him at the seminar did not avail itself due to the regimented lifestyle of residents in the Brotherhood. But Anne saw in Netu Deo everything she desired in a man – a quiet disposition, gentle, approachable, charming, tall, light-complexioned, plus a sweet and soft-spoken voice. One look at the glaze of his sexy eyes and neat dentition as he smiled and talked with great humility with the other officials of the seminar, made her rupture pleasantly.
She could infer he was in a position of authority in the Brotherhood judging by the manner he conducted things within the scope of the seminar. She knew at once she would love to love him without reservation. Although it was their first encounter, he seemed an old friend straight out of different time setting and space.
As fate would have it, when she later became an adherent of the Brotherhood and opted to be a resident, she could not renege from a predetermined course. They fell in love almost at once as if they were only rekindling an old flame long smoldering. But their love had its peculiar constraints. Sensual relationships were forbidden by Brotherhood regulations. Love, by whatever definition, could only be expressed outside the ambit of sex for all residents. So she had taken it easy, nursing hope that the future would unite them in an unrestrained, permissive environment.
Things happened rather fast to her detriment and she found herself out of the Brotherhood in four years without Netu around to cushion the effects. In the interim, she had searched for a reliable shoulder to lean on at moments of anguish and hopelessness. Still ensconced in the Brotherhood, Netu was so sheltered from reality to know or feel the financial and emotional pains she went through daily.
She remembered Mike came into her life at this point just after her stint with the Brotherhood. Mike’s shoulders seemed comforting at the time for he paid most of the bills that accrued in her renewed bid to continue her education at the tertiary level. Like a patient angel Mike reared whenever she needed him. Her mother and the other members of the family encouraged the affair because it was convenient for their needs, but Anne knew her heart belonged to Netu. It ached for him and him alone.
In the second year after her exit from the Brotherhood, news of Netu’s exit reached her. She could not believe her luck. She thought of flying through the sky to experience his tender arms in whatever probable nook and cranny he hid himself. Yet she owed Mike an emotional debt for his efforts at rescuing her out of financial constraints. In spite of it, she could not resist the temptation to fantasize about her and Netu.
She succeeded in contacting him by chance through the assistance of a close friend of his. Her heart leaped with rare joy when she realized he was as curious about her whereabouts as she was about his. Their love flowered from the re-union and with strong wings, capered over diverse emotion fields.
Mike’s financial assistance in her life increased, especially when she discovered she was pregnant with his child despite all the precautions she had taken. This threatened her romance with Netu. Afraid she would lose Netu as a result, Anne had told him the bitter truth about her pregnancy. Netu did not flare at her as she had thought. Rather calm and understanding, he had said he would not stop loving her even with the baby from another man. She was swept off her feet by this unselfish clinging of Netu to the gift of love.
A year of inaction reared in their romance while she weaned her baby - partly due to the demands of the newly born child and partly due to the prominence of Mike in her life as the proud father of her son. Netu, however, kept to his words and accepted her situation as love’s inexplicable test and continued with the relationship with as much verve against advice. Mike and Anne began to drift apart, but it did not stop her chances of gaining favor from him at dire times. That favor Mike would not deny the mother of his son. And Anne had the better of two worlds with the sneaky arrangement.
In Mike’s dutiful magnanimity, which she called the prize for lust, she had financial solace. In Netu she knew genuine love and spiritual power. She needed both influences to keep her sanity in the turbulence of the world. She strove to maintain both at the expense of Netu and Mike’s welling passions. Only in respect of Netu the barbed idea of marriage was ever acknowledged as worthwhile. And portraits of her as Netu’s wife commanded her wistful revelries. Anything, anyone who stood in the way of her ambition meant something which invoked the monster in her to crush with all the strength and venom she could muster.
Now, Anne became restless with longing knowing she had missed Netu’s warm cuddles and lusty stares for almost a week. She wanted so much to hold and touch him all over again, feel Netu’s tender lips tickle her nipples and his soft hands dart over the undulations of her supple body evoking dream-like pleasures.
Smiling over her recollections of how she became entangled with Netu in a web of love, Anne swaddled after her mother to the dining table to fetch the milk cakes she would take along to Netu’s place. And she had put on the bustier dress with the double organza coat to impress him. He often disliked heavy make-up so she had applied faint mascara, lipstick, face illuminator and sweet perfume to stir his romantic sense. She figured he would be pleased with her enchanting poise.
The other members of the rather large Ofino family were chatting in the boy’s room. It made it easier for her to sneak out of the house. Their guffawing remarks often spoilt her romantic dreams. She deemed it safer to avoid them than cede to their incessant jokes which painted her as a double-timing faggot incapable of holding her own in love’s swift currents. Netu’s place in her heart, of course, had her family’s approval, but her relentless resort to Mike for financial aid worried them despite its convenience. Toying with the emotions of her two lovers’ at the same time felt out of place with her family members. There had to be a clear limit in everything, and her family reckoned she had exceeded hers.
Anne did not think so. To win in any game, the element of smartness was as important as the element of luck. She managed her double-timing well in being smart. And in being lucky, she had men she could easily manipulate. A simple story with a simple ending - she saw her chances and exploited them to the fullest.
Anne Ofino left the house in a hurry to the bus park. Saturdays in Remwill District - the sprawling suburb on a patch of land bordering Newland’s harbor on the southern end - seemed to Anne a mild echo of the hustle and bustle of weekdays as she walked. Even so early as eight o’clock in the morning crowds had begun to mill around the interwoven, dirt ridden streets. Unlike most weekdays the streets were filled with people, petit traders and food vendors who called out to pedestrians and commuters on top of their voices to sell their goods, the throng of men and women on the streets this day looked a lot more urbane in regal wears and patient strides. A rare sight in an environment such as this with dense population, Anne thought. Most of the houses were derelict or cramped up in the style of unplanned cemeteries, devoid
of the luxury of playgrounds and marvelous lawns.
Puddles, murky alleys and oozing sewage pipes, pungent dirt and gutters were routine spectacles for residents of Remwill District. Anne had seen these scenes most of her life. But in this core of filth, a paradox about Remwill District amazed her. Anne could only place its contradictions within the context that it exemplified a lotus flower which beauty and fragrance comes from the murk of human society. A lotus flower would never be seen in the choicest of places, always its roots are found firmed onto the dirtiest of lands or ponds or lakes. Its magnificence or beauty almost always sprouts through the specter of that filth. To her, Remwill District symbolized this contradiction.
It surprised her somewhat that in these derelict houses of Remwill District, stars had been born. On the puddle and dirt ridden streets, little children had played their little games and frolicked through the squalid conditions of their birth to stardom in and outside Newland in several fields of life. So many geniuses of Riagena had been born in this suburb and in a variety of ways it had stunned the human intellect as a highly improbable breeding nest for achievers in society.
Anne thought perhaps the harshness of the very conditions the people were born into toughened and drove them to overcome the sociological impediments they confronted daily going by their successes. She took this bearing from her own harsh childhood. She conceded if she and her siblings could face the odds so well with all the enormous problems they had had to surmount growing up in a family of ten with her dad as the sole bread winner, then it was possible for others to excel where the burdens were lesser or the zeal to survive stronger.
Anne pondered over this while meandering through the throng of pedestrians on the street and made it to Remwill District’s second major motor park half a mile down 9 Hope Street where her family lived. She took a cab from there to Diosh Park.
She also pondered while in the cab about the intimacy between her and Netu. He occupied her mind as the epitome of all she never had in other men: compassionate, benevolent, brave and loyal. Anne likened Netu’s knack for revealing the soft-center of his robust heart to the compulsiveness or earnestness of a religious convert. And he had his undeniable constituency in the broad plains of love. His impassioned spirit to selflessly give of his own time, money and energy often to cushion her plight and those of others around him left her gasping every moment spent with him about his intense personality, which had no parallel in the whole of her love life.
I have never loved any other man as much as I love Netu, she thought. But here is the flux of ironies in which I swim. I’m at a crossroad with the rearing conflict. How could two opposite seeds of reality, given life in the strange mercies of one womb, be so engaged in a brutal conflict of existence? How practicable is it for me to feel love and loyalty and in the same vein seek vengeance? I must be going out of my mind. No, it is the clique that has a warped mentality. They want me to destroy my lone source of peace and joy. I won’t. To hell with them!
Anne’s thoughts ran wild. How inexplicable and upsetting could her unwitting endorsement of the clique’s manifesto be? How did she get herself enlisted into this cult of renegades and their brazen schemes? In hindsight, her enlistment came close to twenty-five thousand years. Atlantis had been the grim stage of the clique’s unholy game, and the Locci put in place the weird props.
How senseless the motive of the Locci’s sad script of brutal drama? Anne cursed. Frustrated in no small measure, working in perpetual shadow of the Manu, a minority of Atlanteans had met with the desire to overthrow the Manu. Members of the Locci, conscripted in secret, were drawn according to their ambition and love for rebellion. The less willing and daring candidates were coerced through mysterious circumstances. But the Manu nipped their ego in-flight.
An unwilling candidate at first, Anne’s leverage in the Locci came via her flair for rebellion. This was good enough reason for her to be coerced and initiated into the Locci with fanfare. The rites of initiation took a more spiritual than physical dimension. Anne did not regret her wild engagement for obvious reasons. Her budding desire for intrigue was one, and the enormous diabolic grip the Locci had on the system through clandestine manipulations was the other. The Locci became the sweet answer to her inner crave. She embraced it without reservations.
The Locci’s nemesis, however, came in the person of Tonka Manu – their sworn adversary. The Locci and entire Atlantis vanished in a deluge caused by the rage of Tonka thereafter.
The memory of the end of the Locci and the entire gamut of Atlantis would still linger thousands of years later in the minds of former Atlanteans. And the likes of Anne Ofino would reconvene and re-hoist the Locci’s flag, vowing to avenge the misdeed of Tonka Manu by tracking down any Manu that walked the surface of the PlayToy.
Anne shuddered in the cab. A paralysing kind of fear gnawed at her sense of calm. Her nervous gaze swept across the far side of the expressway, staring without seeing.
Damn the clique, she reflected in silent outrage. Why are they doing this to me? Why are they trying to deny me love in its unblemished form? Must they always purvey my future on a dreary platter? Why did they at all allow me to reckon with the sweet pulse of the heart? Now I’m stuck with cupid’s own son, and to revoke my feeling is nigh impossible. Yet I must swing by the immutable laws of the clique. How do I deliver their prize without endangering my heart and turning it into shards? No. I will not destroy Netu as ordered for the fact that I love him. I’ll protect him instead for he has taught me to love. The very reason I promised to treat him as my son, brother, friend, and lover. Damn the clique! Damn the consequence!
With this resolution, Anne felt a sensation of dare, and saw only the bright images of tomorrow’s dawn, one she would experience with Netu. A cool, self-comforting grin now smothered her melancholic posturing. Her glistening eyes riveted from the watch of the road’s far side and focused ahead with a hint of determination and foreshadowed joy. The cab approached Diosh Park. In matter of minutes she would be in Netu’s arms; the only place that meant something to her.
Chapter Fifteen
Anne Ofino walked into the living room of the three-bedroom apartment Netu Deo shared with Lata and John in OldHill an hour and half later, grinning like a bride waiting for her groom’s kiss.
Netu’s excitement over her elegance overshadowed his jokes about her choice of skimpy designer wears cut to flaunt her sexuality. Torn between pleasant surprise and the knowledge she had done this probably in his honour, Netu squelched a sweet whistling sound wide-eyed as she flung herself at him on the couch with hands outspread like a soaring eagle.
“This dress must have cost someone a fortune," he said breathlessly, balancing their combined weight on the couch.
"You like it?" she gasped, her hands forming a tender loop around his neck, her body pressing against his.
"Marvellous!" he cried, disengaging his hold on her waistline, studying her.
Anne’s face brightened with indescribable joy. She held his face with both hands, gazed into his enchanting eyes and kissed him, smearing his lips with her red lip gloss.
After she let go, Anne sat next to him, huffing and glowering. She rolled out a neat Kleenex from her handbag and wiped away the red lip gloss on Netu’s lips she had transferred via her kiss.
"I’m sorry about the lip gloss," Anne said. "I was too excited to take notice."
"Never mind," Netu replied, entranced by the round, fleshy highlights of the bustier dress on her chest. "How did you get this?"
"What?"
"This flamboyant dress."
"How did I get it?" Anne growled in mock displeasure. "I bought it for sure!"
Netu laughed in comical abandonment. "I never said you stole it. Probably robbed someone to get it. Ehn?"
“I robbed you perhaps to get it," she bantered, and then an instinctive reckoning with reality. "Where are your friends, Lata and John?"
"Oh, that reminds me - I brought some milk cakes along. Mama had extra for the week and obliged me some. She said you might need them."
"What a sweet mother! She was right, you know. I sure do need them. How’s she – your mother I mean?"
"She’s fine."
"And your siblings?"
“They’re fine too."
"And my pretty baby here is fine as well I suppose?"
Anne giggled. "You bet I am!" She briskly pulled out a bundle of toasted milk cakes from her handbag, her mother’s gift for Netu, and raised it for his appraisal. "Your milk cakes," she announced. "Want them right away or later?"
Anne rose and thrust the foil bundle into Netu’s hands. "Hold this for me while I get a bowl from the kitchen." She paced few steps away from him and then halted, sensing she could still induce some humor out of the situation.
A shrewd smile lighted Anne’s face. "And Netu, keep your itchy fingers off the milk cakes till I get back with the bowl. Did you hear that?"
“Cross my heart,” Netu said with dramatic effect, but grumbled afterwards, “Why the veto? I thought you said your mother sent the milk cakes to me to eat? How come you dictate to me on what to do with what’s rightly mine?"
"You’re wrong sweetheart. If I didn’t sanction you, there’ll be no leftovers for me – you’d swallow everything in a second. See?" she joked and swaddled off.
Her veto did little to put Netu’s appetite in check. When she reappeared, he had already munched a piece of the milk cakes.
Titan Race Page 33