by Adaora O
Copyright © 2019 Adaora O
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: 0116 279 2299
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks
ISBN 978 1838599 102
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd
To every human swimming against the tides.
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Epilogue
1
Half awake, Chinny frowned at the first crow that always heralded the start of her day. Since she turned seven years old, she had always dreamt about a day when she would be able to sleep for as long as she liked. In her opinion, the cry of the supercilious cock always telling her it was time to pull her frame off the bed and begin her day did not signal a happy life. Her discomfort with life as she knew it grew progressively and today, ten-year-old Chinny not only wished she slept longer, but also looked forward to when she would go to the city and become one of those sophisticated ladies in the magazines which Ejiofor, her friend of eight years, brought back home at Easter and Christmas.
She cried so hard on the 4th of January as she watched Ejiofor go after his mother and sister into his father’s car, on their way back to the city after the Christmas holidays. For days, the tightness in her chest and the lump in her throat refused to go away as she recalled her friend, waving through the window, saying, “Clean your eyes o? We will come back at Easter o?” For some inexplicable reason, Ejiofor believed adding ‘o?’, a local variant of ‘okay?’, at the end of every statement provided the warm blanket of comfort needed for any situation. This often confused Chinny because, on most occasions, it only made the warm blanket feel wet and heavy.
Chinny almost jumped out of her skin as the second crow rang through the air. She had to wake up. The cock, as usual, did not show any signs of getting off her case anytime soon. So, although every cell in her body shrank in protest, she hauled her frame out of bed. Her father Dede had cleared his throat once and his next reaction would be to reward her with an incentive for having second thoughts about their early morning devotion. It often came wrapped in a curt slap on her back or a nearly hard knock on her head. However, once Chinny made it to her parents’ room for the morning prayers, she seldom remembered the sting of the light slap or knock recently served her, since prayer time for Chinny only provided a change in location for courting the concluding part of her sleep time. ‘Sleep courting time’ served as a psychological cocoon that spared Chinny the agony of sacrificing precious sleep time on the altar of morning prayers. But the lifespan of her cocoon suffered an unforeseen end, many thanks to her mother’s bright idea of alternating who led the songs often sung in worship before the Bible reading and prayers. To say that this turn of events did not go down well with Chinny would barely scratch the surface of the depth of her torture. In her opinion, her brother’s more than occasional absence from home blessed him with the evasion of this painful morning drill.
With the prayers over, Chinny wore her ankle-length kaftan, picked up her chewing stick from the cup on the stool beside her six-spring bed and headed out. It was time for the first of her four trips to Mr Oko’s house. He installed a brand-new borehole two days ago, which meant clean water just came closer to home but at a price. As soon as she opened the door, the eastern early morning harmattan chill, typical of the month of January, slapped hard across her face.
“Chimoooooo!” Chinny exclaimed dramatically, calling out on God for help in the eastern Nigerian dialect – Igbo – in the way she always did when met with anything shocking. Stepping back and quickly shutting the door, she went to her room to pick up a wrapper from beneath her pillow. Now snugly wrapped, she headed out again, took a bucket from the side of the house and walked off to fetch her first bucket of water for the day. As she chewed vigorously on her stick, she thought, Next week, I will buy myself a toothbrush and toothpaste. Ejiofor says they are better for cleaning the teeth. She trod along but this time with a determined bounce, forgetting the harmattan chill that was still very present.
“Chi,” as her mother called her, “is this your third bucket?” Chinny poured out the bucket of water into the drum beside the kitchen door.
“Fourth Nne’m,” she responded. Chinny always referred to her parents or anyone she held dear as ‘Nne’m’ or ‘Nna’m’, depending on their gender, meaning ‘my mother’ or ‘my father’ respectively.
“You must stop before you pull out your arm from its socket. I have told you to always carry this bucket on your head. It is a lot easier,” her mother chided.
Chinny gave an over-emphasised nod and with a playful glare said, “Thank you! You want my head to fall into my body, so I can look like Sempe the village clown’s twin? The heavens forbid!” Ama smiled fondly at her daughter’s awareness of beauty. Chinny typified beauty by all standards. More refreshing to Ama was the almost equal allotment of time her daughter gave to her quest to enhance her beauty and her pursuit for an enriched mind. She wondered if fate would be more kindly to her daughter than it had been to her.
As the weeks went by, the evening breeze became less brutal than its morning counterpart. The shadows came out to play and Ama dished the okra soup she just prepared with the antelope meat Dede bought on his way back from work. Tonight, his favourite soup would go with cornmeal. Before now, cassava meal always accompanied soups in the Onas’ residence. But since Chinny came across a piece of information in one of Ejiofor’s books, she took to opting for soup alone for dinner. The book claimed that cassava meals contained four times the starch found in cornmeal dishes. It took weeks of Chinny’s near starvation for Ama to find out the reason behind her child’s behaviour. Today, her parents thanked her for this enlightenment. It was now clear why the entire Ona household bid farewell to cassava meals. They since observed that getting out of bed in the mornings following a dinner of cassava meal always required considerable physical, emotional and mental effort, compared to the mornings after cornmeal and soup.
Ama secretly admired her daughter’s interest in the nicer things of life. She set the plate of cornmeal and okra soup on the tray and called out, “Chi! Ask your father if he would prefer eating inside or outside.”
“Inside,” Chinny
shouted after a couple of seconds and went to take in the tray to the dining room where they all settled for dinner. Dede did not say much as he ate. He could be described as a man of deep introspection, but today’s silence indicated that something worried him. Ama suspected her husband now considered himself a failure as the head of the home and his steady withdrawal confirmed her suspicion. They ate in silence, relishing Ama’s good cooking. Brooding mind or not, Dede’s taste buds were in excellent working condition.
“Nna’m?” Chinny ruffled the silence.
“Yes, my child,” said Dede while chewing with relish on a piece of meat.
“Remember you told me I would go back to secondary school this year?” Her voice bubbled with excitement.
“Mmhh.” Dede nodded, grating the meat between his molars. There were soft tendons in this piece of meat and Dede liked tendon-wired meat in particular. Ama guessed that the reason for her husband’s meat preference might be economically motivated. Tendon-wired meat cost soothingly less than lean meat. Chinny reminded her father that school resumed two weeks ago and told him of the soon-closing payment window. She wanted to return to school to begin class two.
Mrs Johnson, the school principal, had told Chinny to stay home and promised to reserve a spot for her until her father paid her school fees. This was after Chinny showed up at the school gate for five consecutive days following her unceremonious withdrawal from school, only a couple of days before her class one third-term examinations. When Dede informed Mrs Johnson of his decision to withdraw his daughter from school, as her elder brother Dubem had finally passed his secondary school entrance examination, the school principal became confused and emotional. She argued that Chinny, being the brighter of his two children, stood a better chance at education. But Dede’s decision was final and the fact that Chinny passed the entrance at one sitting while Dubem passed the same examination only after his third attempt did nothing to sway him.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked her, not really expecting an answer. “I can afford to send only one child to school. Knowing that formal education is the only way to succeed in life, would you consider my picking the female over the male a wise choice? There is a high probability of her leaving to start her own home as a woman soon, married to a man who may someday tell her to remain at home and care for his children irrespective of how much money her father has spent sending her to school.”
Mrs Johnson had no defence but tried a final shot. “But there have been male children who turned out to be irresponsible men, refusing to be useful to themselves, their families or society. Their level of education or the lack of it regardless,” she said. That was it! He was pitching his tent in his son’s favour.
How dare this woman imply that my son would be a failure? Dede thought as he stormed out of the principal’s office.
With the nagging issue of which child to send to school put to rest, Dede went home happy, not realising that while his day had just turned cheery, the rest of Mrs Johnson’s was spent in depression. Chinny was a special child, being a girl notwithstanding. If her hands were not spilling with the responsibility of caring for her own children after her husband decided to live out the rest of his days with her former housemaid, abdicating the responsibility of caring for their four children, she would have taken Chinny under her own wings.
“Eeh? Nna’m?” Chinny shook Dede out of his reverie, her face aglow with dreams and hopes of fulfilling them. Her often boisterous disposition made it difficult for Dede and Ama to feel the absence of their son Dubem, who had just started his secondary education in Udu town.
Dede’s next words were as sharp as a million needles, descending in savage brutality on his daughter’s heart which, before now, was a brightly coloured balloon, inflated to its maximum capacity and content to float over the sunny field of life. She looked on with sad eyes as her father told her he still did not have the funds to send her back to school. “The money I make from the sawdust factory is not enough to cater for you and your brother. I do not want to bite more than I can chew,” said Dede in a choked and resigned voice.
“But Nn… nna’m… nna’m, I… I… I got the admission first. I was already in class one before… before Dubem passed his own exams,” Chinny stuttered. Her sockets gave way to her emotions as the tears began to pour unrestrained. Ama’s eyes brimmed over while she cleared their dinner dishes. “Nne’m, please explain to Father. I will not need to pay boarding fees!” Chinny implored her mother’s retreating figure, her cracking voice echoing in the quiet living room. When her mother looked back with a tear-stained face at her daughter and continued to the kitchen in quick steps, Chinny’s eyes became like those of a kitten in the sudden company of many poodles. She turned back to her father and began in a rushed voice to explain. “Mrs Johnson. Mrs J… Johnson, she said I can go to school from her house. Nna’m, please understand. I really want to go to school.” She paused, her eyes wide with expectation as her father’s head hung in thought. But a while later, he shook his head and mumbled that even the tuition without the boarding fees would be the last straw to break the proverbial camel’s back. Chinny cried out in exasperation and ran off to her bedroom to cry some more.
Angry sobs escaped her clenched mouth. With her face buried in her pillow to muffle the sound, Chinny slid between emotions. Hatred. Pity. Anger. She tried the blame game. Why did her brother take up her slot? But try as she did, Chinny could not invite Dubem into her ‘blame-party’. She remembered he seemed reluctant to go to school. He took it a notch higher and begged their father to allow her to remain in school while he found a way to defer his admission. Dede’s response to his son’s suggestion was a resounding slap across the face.
It was unfair for her parents to decide who went to school based on the size of their pockets. They should create bigger pockets. “If Father had a decent job like Ejiofor’s, he would not have been in this dilemma,” she moaned.
Thinking about her mother made Chinny more frustrated. Better formal education thrown in the mix of her mother’s life experiences would certainly make a difference. Without a certificate of any form, Chinny thought it impracticable for her mother to get a job that did not require her sitting at a stall for hours, beckoning on disinterested people to buy fast-wilting vegetables. Why in the world didn’t she go to school? Desperate for answers, Chinny grasped at straws of logic before she turned the blame on herself. Her unreasonable ambition stared her in the face. She would concentrate on constructive ways to increase the extra income she already added to that of the family and, if fate smiled on them, there would be enough funds for her schooling. But until then, the song about going to school would become one to be hummed to herself alone. Her decision brought more pain to her chest and drew fresh and fast-flowing tears from her eyes. Defeat hung over Chinny’s entire being like an imposed oversized cloak.
Stopping herself from drowning in her own thoughts, Chinny suddenly sat up and, with the back of her hands, wiped the tears away from her eyes. She began to tap the pad of her right foot in that fast and animated rhythm always indicative of a bright idea lurking in the corner of her mind. Rubbing off the last trace of tears from her face, she broke into a half-smile as she got up and took out a box of books from under her bed.
Ama walked into her daughter’s room just as she sat back in her bed and a startled Chinny shifted and threw her cover cloth over the box.
“Are you still crying?” Ama asked her favourite little girl.
“No Nne’m.” Chinny braved a smile.
Ama moved the poorly concealed box of books away to sit beside her daughter. Putting her arms around her she said, “I know how you feel child. I felt the same way a long time ago. You know, my father was wealthy in his day and as the only girl among his three children, he doted on me. He belonged to the unpopular few who believed all children were created equal by God. This made him decide to give me as many opportunities as my brothers got. Throu
gh him, I understood the true value of being a child and learnt to pay no heed to anyone or anything suggesting otherwise. This stance did not afford my father many faithful friends. And like my mother said, even though they hated and jeered at the values he stood for, calling him a fool behind his back, they presented themselves as friends for the gains they could get from associating with him. Of course, he was not foolish enough to believe everyone loved him. But being human, how few his true friends were, remained unclear to him.
“In due course, he sent me to his brother, four towns away from home to get a secondary education in a school considered the best school at the time. To cut the long story short, without telling my father, my uncle turned me into a food vendor at a construction site. He lied to my folks about what I was doing, while collecting funds from my father for my supposed education. He took all the money I made at the construction site. But that did not deter me. I read every educational book that I set my eyes on, hoping I would soon be sent to school. Four months after I left home for school, or so my family thought, my father set out to visit me, in spite of all the messages I sent home. In the letters I sent, I told them of the wonderful progress I was making in school and asked my parents not to bother making the long journey as I lacked nothing in my uncle’s house. Unknown to them, I never sent home any messages. My uncle made sure of that. All the letters my folks received were sent by him and his wicked wife. Sadly, my father did not get to his destination. He died in a car accident. It was during my unavoidable visit home for his burial that my uncle’s mischief shone through his haze of deception. One puzzle yet to be solved to this day is that two days before the burial, my elder brother disappeared without a trace, leaving my mother, my younger brother and I to face my father’s family alone. This left my mother shattered. She developed a stroke which she never recovered from and died three years later.”