By Bode Asiyanbi Download pdf, mobi, epub
Rasaki knew something had gone wrong as he ejaculated but what exactly, he could not place. Was it the grandfather clock that chimed eight times at one o’clock, or the thunder that cracked the midnight air as the first spurts eased out? Was it the strange bird that began chirping on the silence of the night? He stared at his wilted member. He had jerked out too late. This withdrawal thing Osas suggested was not for him. It was like eating underdone rice.
“What…?” his wife said. “I’m safe…”
Her sweat-drenched breasts heaved in protest as he pulled away from her delirious grip. He did not respond. He faced the cracking wall of their one-room home, his face wrapped in a puzzle. It was not just about the niggling apprehension of pregnancy or the interrupted orgasm, he just did not like how he came.
He ignored his wife’s grumbling and thought himself into sleep. But if the manner of his coming frayed his mind, the dream that followed knifed it: his wife, after handing him a basket of baby clothes, crossed a small stream on a foot bridge. He followed, only to slip and tumble into the muddy water. He screamed out of the dream, sweating like a trapped thief. He could not place it, but he could sense it. Something had gone askew.
≠
“So you think it is funny abi?” He had told Osas the dream and the manner of his coming and all he had got was a sneer. He wagged a finger at Osas as the imp tried with little success to wipe the grin off his acne infested face.
“Rasaki,” Osas said. “It is called Withdrawal method. You are supposed to withdraw.”
“I couldn’t. It kills the whole idea of the action na. That is the most important moment. If I withdraw what am I suppose to enjoy? Na useless method. Useless like you.”
“Na you useless not the method. You fear too much and you lack self control. But you know, after Brozie and Zino, you need a male child so you no even need to…”
“Just shut up there if you don’t have anything to say. I’m talking serious matter you are talking male child. Those two girls are more than the size of my pocket.”
The sun was high up the powder blue sky. About a dozen okadamen were at its mercy under the ever busy Ikeja Bridge.
“…and you know this thing about my dreams,” Rasaki continued with a shake of his head.
He held the belief that his dreams always came to pass, after he had dreamed of his father’s death and his mother’s sickness way before they occurred.
“Guy, that’s impotent superstition.”
“I know when my dreams are serious.”
“To me, it means your wife will soon be pregnant. Reason it na? As you hammer your wife, thunder crack, rain started to fall, and you now dream that you carry baby clothes. Haba it is clear. I don’t need to be a prophet.”
The words must have spilled into earshot of other okadamen judging from the throaty giggles that broke out behind them.
“But Rasaki, no be just two girls you don born, you no sure say you need boy?” Rasaki couldn’t place who asked the question but he threw a response back all the same.
“You will feed all of them for me? Or pay their school fees for me? Idiots.” He hissed and moved his okada away in disgust.
“Why are you now going?” Osas tried to look serious.
Rasaki ignored him. He gunned the machine towards the main road, brushing past the grinning clown who jumped aside in time to avoid the charging bike. Osas cursed in a crude mix of pidgin laced with crooked Bini.
“Back to sender,” Rasaki retorted.
Osas was the only one he could call a friend. They had grown up together in Mushin, with its downtown tag and its slummy glory. After years of menial jobs in Chinese construction companies, they had started the okada business together. Osas had introduced him to the shylock who loaned them the money to buy the bikes with a spin-off agreement of paying off the loan every month at a satanic interest.
“Where?” he shouted above the traffic din, after a young lady threading the broken sidewalk like a rookie model had flagged him down. She wore a British flag made into a daring spaghetti strap chemise. As much as he tried he saw no sign of a bra but he could swear on his father’s grave she was wearing one; no breasts that size could maintain such a confident stability unless they have started coming with spinal cords.
“Odunsi down.” Her birdlike voice shook him off wayward thoughts. He doubled the fare based on her well-to-do appearance. He did not expect her to haggle. She did not disappoint him. He bent the okada sideways to allow her get her long smooth legs around.
“Which side in Odunsi down?”
“The church beside the river.”
“Church?” The word escaped him before he could muffle it.
“Surprised?” A smile played on her glossed lips.
Why won’t he be? Who would wake up on a Monday morning, dress up like an Abuja harlot and head for church? What kind of church would that be, and one beside that demonic river? He did not bother to deny, it was only sane to be surprised. He avoided a stray dog and hit the road. Her girded breasts rubbed against his back. It felt good.
“That church is a crooked church,” he said.
“Well, you are wrong. God is really using the man.”
God is using the man. Rasaki smirked. The usual zeal of a new convert. Sure, he believed there was a God. Of course someone would have made the heavens and all the things around, including man, who also went ahead to make things. But he believed that God, wherever he was, did not have the time to bother about some of the rats he had made. Pitiful rats like him. He had held on like a fanatic to this conviction for years and it was always a fertile ground for an argument with his church-going, pastor-worshipping wife.
“One day God will humble you,” she would say with deliberate unction.
“I am already humbled,” he would reply.
Driving a commuter motorcycle around town, one he had not even finished paying for, and many times waiting on her to support him with the stipend from her mushroom tailor business was, as a husband, the basest of humbling. He always hurled back the reply like an irritated shot putter. One day his wife ended the argument with the bible verse: Repent or you perish.
“So that you can go and marry your bald pastor, abi?” He had sneered. She refused to talk to him for a week after that, and since then she never preached at him again.
≠
He honked in desperation to get a rickety Volkswagen off his way. He failed.
“Pastors,” he said, his undulating voice filled with disdain. “Faking miracles and sleeping with girls.” He could imagine the pastor’s hand under her miniskirt. Kai! He shook his head.
“This one is different I tell you.”
“I hear,” he shouted above the whooshing wind. “Na today?”
The Volkswagen finally got into another lane, and he charged forward.
“So what are you going there to do on a Monday, digging deep or prayer meeting?” He smiled to himself. Digging deep, serious matter, digging deep. He shook his head and laughed at the thought. Digging deep, deep, deeper…
“I’m going to thank the Prophet.”
Interesting. Thank the man. In what way? He wondered with a crafty smile. He decided to mind his business. He ran into a pothole, she held onto him like a crab.
“My friend brought me here last week, the prophet prayed for me and just yesterday I got my miracle just exactly as he prophesied.”
Rasaki tilted his ears backward. “You said miracle?”
“Yes,” she replied removing a strand of hair from her mouth.
She had been trying to get into America for three years to join her fiancé but it seemed the embassy officials did not like the look of her face.
Maybe they have a bust size limit. The words were nearly out before he checked himself. “So the man prayed and they gave you visa?”
“Yes, yesterday. They didn’t even ask a question, not one question just as the Prophet had prophesied. God is really alive. And aside prophecy, he even interprets dreams.”
Rasaki nearly ran into a pregnant goat. He avoided it in time and stopped. Dreams. He remembered the unsettling dream of the previous night. He swallowed hard.
“Did you just say he interprets dreams?”
≠
Ijapa the tortoise says there are no coincidences in life.
≠
A wooden signboard displayed the church’s name in loud and colored letters: The Redeeming Church Of The Day Of The Most High Jah. The ‘Jah’ in bigger print. A solemn queue snaked from the entrance into an oxbow before disappearing into the back of the building. Rasaki counted eighteen big cars lined beside the river.
What are all these rich people looking for? Why don’t they just leave God alone and allow Him to focus His divine attention on miserable rats like him?
He courted questioning looks as he chained his Okada to a mango tree. It did not matter that it was in a church compound, since the church was inside Lagos, he was not going to take any chance. He hurried to Sandra (that was the name she called herself) who was already in the queue under the shade of a dying almond tree. The cyan river whistled in the distance, some funny looking stray birds chirping at its bank. Rasaki asked her if she knew the story of the river. She didn’t, so he told her.
Odo Iya Alaro, loosely translate to ‘the river of the dye-maker’, named in dubious honor of a village dye-maker, who after learning of her husband’s infidelity, smashed her pot of dye into pieces and jumped into the river, never to be seen again. The dye gave the river a blue-green color and it was believed that if a man ate food cooked with its water, his manhood would wilt when in bed with any woman other than his wife.
Sandra’s eyebrow narrowed.
“You don’t believe?”
She smiled through her thick lipstick. He further told her how his friend, Osas, after ripping off the clothes of a voluptuous petrol station attendant he had lured into bed one rainy Sunday night, nearly ran mad after his thing refused to rise to the occasion. He begged, cajoled, and threatened the offending scallywag. It just hung limp like a diseased plant. But when he got home the thing threatened to tear apart his zipper at the sound of his wife’s voice. Immediately, he knew what she had done. She didn’t confess until he had nearly strangled her.
Sandra’s mouth fell open.
“And the thing doesn’t have cure o,” he said, concluding with flourish.
That night, as he played peacemaker between Osas and his wife, he had thanked God his own wife was a born-again Christian and so would never attempt such a criminal experiment. That would have been the end of his Friday night jollofing at Efe’s house. Efe. He scratched his crotch on instinct. He had never seen such a wild girl. Her hips alone were enough to…
“It’s our turn,” she said, tapping him out of his adulterous voyage.
≠
Prophet Josiah sat on a velvet stool, his satin white gown immaculate, his bony hand gripped at a wooden cross. A silver mace rested on his thighs. He could not be more than thirty.
Sandra fell to her knees, thanking him for his divine insight and kindness. Still on her knees, she handed him a packet of a thousand naira notes with both hands and with her head bowed. Rasaki thought he didn’t see well; his wind-reddened eyes bulged like a tree frog’s. One hundred thousand naira? That would buy his motorcycle with extra change for six months of cold beer and Sikira’s point and kill peppered fish, at a calculation of three bottles of beer and five bowls of fish per night. A gift at one sitting? His eyes were nearly running out of protesting sockets when the Prophet directed his silver mace at him and shot him a gaze which he returned. Concerted shivers ran through his wiry frame. The lightness in his head lifted him off the marble floor; drowsiness took him in wide arms. When he opened his eyes he was flat on the floor.
“What happened?” He shook his head as Sandra pulled him to his feet. The silver mace was still aimed at him. He ducked behind Sandra.
“Rasaki, your barn will be filled. I say your barn will be filled. Dreams are reflections in the mirror, Rasaki. They look real but can you touch them? Son of man, they should only guide you. All I see is nothing but a miracle for you. Thus says the Lord.”
How did he know his name was Rasaki. How did he know he came because of a dream…? Before Rasaki could give words to his thoughts, the Prophet pointed the mace to the door.
“You will return here in thanksgiving. Peace be unto you.”
He was outside before he could respond. He forced Sandra’s grip off his arm, his gaze still fixed at the door. “What just happened?”
“I told you. He is God’s true prophet. You’ll come back to give thanks.”
Rasaki unchained his machine like a sleepwalker. He revved the engine, gave the church a long look, before disappearing into the jungle of Lagos in a plume of bright blue smoke, his head ringing with horns, screams, and a voice chanting: your barn will be full, your barn will be full, your barn will be full.
≠
Talking of miracles, Rasaki’s wife had with the patience of a honey gatherer been waiting for more than two years. She had prayed for her second child, Zino, to be a boy, even making special miracle offering during special church services. She had failed to hold back tears when she had delivered another girl. She had never for once given an ear to Rasaki’s declared contentment with two daughters. She knew her mother-in-law was not happy, from the thin smile on her face when Lola told her the sex of the second child. Lola was convinced it would only be a matter of time before the old woman dragged Rasaki down the path of a second wife. He had already acquiesced to her insistence on naming their children Issoko names, after her tribe, way after they had decided on Yoruba names, his tribe. That made it very clear. Rasaki would never say no to his mother. Deep within her, Lola was convinced that her third attempt would be a boy, so when she got pregnant, late in the eight month of the year, she was overjoyed, but did not know how to tell her husband. She bided her time, waited on the Lord until the opportunity came, one cold Friday night.
Rasaki’s hungry hand had found its way in the marital darkness into her loose blouse; something that had not happened for weeks. He was either not in the mood or their two children were awake. She swallowed hard, said a little prayer and, with both hands, held his hand there.
“What?” he murmured, his finger circling a reluctant nipple.
“There is something I want to tell you.”
A brief silence weighed on the words.
“Go on.”
“I’m pregnant.”
Rasaki went deaf in one ear; he turned the second. “I didn’t hear you.”
She repeated herself, releasing her grip on his now clammy hand. His swollen libido wilted. The room became hot. No, she must be pulling his leg.
“It is a joke.”
“It is not.”
“But you told me you were safe.”
“Yes, but God had other plans…”
“Do not bring God into this!”
Silence, darkness and tension were a terrible mix. Rasaki sat up on the bed.
“You have to do something.”
“Like what?”
“You are asking me? I won’t allow another child to come into this world to suffer, not until I have money!”
“God will provide.”
“I say don’t bring God into this. Na God sleep with you?”
Lola sat up, her face set in a rare mask of determination.
“I understand only one thing. You want to know?”
She was not the one speaking, Rasaki assured himself. He was hearing things.
She raised the flame of the kerosene lamp, turned and looked into his eyes.
“I’m not killing my baby, you hear?”
≠
Lola’s chest heaved in determination.She thought he would only be very angry, not suggest an abortion. Abortion? Jehovah forbid. Murder. Sin. And not when her Pastor had prophesied that her pregnancy was a gift from God. For the first time since their rough and tumble shotgun wedding four years back, she had looked him in the eye and stood up to him, and in this contest, there could only be one winner. She made sure the sleeping girls had not rolled off the mat as they always did, blew off the light and turned her back to him.
≠
Ijapa the tortoise says if the brave and the coward drink the same hemlock of fear, the manner of deaths will be different.
≠
“When you push a goat to the wall it will fight back. I don’t blame your wife.” Osas wiped offending froth off his mustache. They were at Sikira’s nighttime bar; the fun-loving poor man’s saviour, cheap beer, cheap food, and cheap girls.
“So it is me you blame?” A sour Rasaki was on his second bottle.
Osas tilted his glass and poured in the beer with great care, watching as the golden liquid swirled amidst thousands of sparkles. He stopped just as the overlying foam bopped over the edge of the glass and down its side. He wiped it off with his tongue and smacked his lips. He winked at the doleful Rasaki.
“Drink beer this man and stop killing the night.”
Rasaki shook his head and continued on his previous frequency. “And you can imagine, I looked for condom that night. It was not where I kept it. This is witchcraft, better one.”
Osas spluttered his drink in the laughter that rocked him. “Guy don’t make me choke on beer.”
“How will I take care of another mouth in this poor condition? I hate to see my family hungry. I can’t endure it. I can’t. I’ll rather just die than be unable to provide for them.”
“Guy,”Osas had a mischievous smile wafting across his lips. “At least you are expecting a miracle from your prophet.”
Rasaki hissed, anger and despair welling up in his tipsy brain. “Yes, you are very right,” he snorted, “the miracle has come, and my barn is full, full boku with trouble.”
Bar noises crept over the conversation. Rasaki threw back his head and took a long sip. His face gathered into a frown. The beer tasted like diluted urine mixed with vinegar. He shook his head like a tired old man. Even beer? When beer starts to lose its taste, everything else starts to go sour. Everything.
≠
Rasaki watched as his wife’s stomach grew in robust defiance. There was an almost divine determination about her; conducting herself with aloof dignity, intelligently guiding communication with him to the basic minimum. She was neither antagonistic nor confrontational, yet she dared him daily with innocuous spiritual songs, and by holding surrogate conversations with him through the children, who by a certain inevitable inclination had gravitated towards her. There was something celestial, something vehemently beautiful about her rebellion. And when, eight months into her pregnancy, she called him one night to help dab her swollen stomach with warm water, he surprised her, himself and his lineage’s stubborn and vindictive streak. He stood up like a lame duck, boiled water on the coal stove and performed the maternal ritual with a sudden sense of bitter relief, he knew he had lost. The next day he came home with a baby’s cot and set it in a corner of the room. The look in Lola’s eyes was not of victory, it was a poignant mix of pity, love, and gratitude. For the first time in many months, they slept in each other’s arms. For Lola it was heavenly, but for Rasaki, something beyond his grasp; something strange and unsettling had just depressed the pause button on his life, and shrunken his manhood to grub size.
≠
If you could ask Rasaki to describe the rainy Sunday evening his phone rang while at his sick mother’s bedside, with his daughters Brozie and Zino, he would describe it as flawlessly as Wiltshire would paint a convoluted cityscape after a glance. The call was from Lola’s pastor.
“You need to come now; your wife is in labor.” There was nothing divine about the voice.
He left the children with Osas’s wife before speeding like one deranged to the hospital. He got to the maternity ward sweating as if the Okada had ridden him and not the other way round. The doctor was talking to the pastor outside the labor room. Her water had exploded during an evening prayer session, effectively putting an end to the spiritual shock and awe.
“Where is my wife?”
The pastor, a short bald man, who Rasaki never really liked, looked to the doctor for support.
“You cannot see her now.” The doctor’s mouth had a Charlie Chaplin smile, making it impossible to read his emotion.
“Why? What is the problem?”
“There is no problem, at the moment.”
“The Lord is with her,” the pastor chipped in.
Rasaki looked from the pastor to the doctor.
“Why didn’t you register her for antenatal care?”
“It was too expensive.”
“Too expensive?” The doctor shook his head. He made to talk but changed his mind.
“Should I stay… I mean wait here?”
“No need. Come tomorrow morning.”
A confused Rasaki watched him disappear into the labor section. The pastor put a hand on his shoulder.
“Everything will be alright. Our God is a God of miracles. He is with her.”
“He better be,” he muttered. “He just better be.” He headed for his motorcycle.
≠
He was at the hospital before the first cock crow. A nurse told him to sit and wait. He didn’t have the strength to argue with her, after a long night spent rolling on a bed damp with sweat. Once the nurse was out of sight, he entered the Doctor’s office.
“Where is my wife?”
The doctor was quick to pull him aside.
“She is fine. Everything went well. Sit down,” he said, nodding to a plastic chair.
“Sit down?” He was not sure the doctor had spoken to him. “How is my wife?”
“She is fine.”
“And the child?”
“The children.” The doctor smiled.
“Children?” Rasaki’s heart leapt. “Twins?”
The doctor shook his head and smiled again. “More…you are indeed a lucky man.”
Rasaki, trying to read the doctor’s face, held on to the wall for support. He had told this woman, he had told this woman he didn’t want this pregnancy. Triplets. He was done for.
He seemed to have said it aloud because the doctor put a hand on his shoulder and smiled. Rasaki braced his ears. This is not happening.
“Octuplets, the first in the country.” He said with a great amount of pride. “We had to cut her open…and the children need further treatment to…”
Rasaki’s dimming brain was struggling with primary school geometry. Hexagon is six sided, heptagon is seven sided, octagon is eight sid… Octuplets. Eight. Lord. The ceiling began to spin.
≠
Rasaki opened his eyes to a different world. There was a magical essence to the air and laughter seemed to echo on passing words. His shirt had been unbuttoned and a nurse was fanning him with a plastic fan. He looked down at the baby care items he had accumulated. He shook his head; a bitter laugh escaped his dry lips. He looked up as if seeking for answers from powers beyond him.
“I want to see my wife,” he croaked.
The nurse got out of the way.
≠
Behold the handmaiden of the Lord. Let it be unto me, according to your word.
≠
A pensive air of reverence enveloped the ward with everyone regarding him as a football academy kid would regard a Ronaldo. He ignored them all. Standing by her bed, he watched her in muddled silence. Sick-looking tubes ran from under the blanket into two bags of urine-looking liquid which hung on a rusting pole. He placed a trembling hand on her forehead, her eyes flickered open and then closed again. She looked so peaceful. The intense smell of antibiotics in the ward reminded him of sorrow and pain. Hand on chin, he walked out of the ward.
The sky which had darkened with hidden whispers opened its bowels on him. He ignored the deluge, kicked his motorcycle into life and powered it out of the hospital. The rain, helped by a gusty wind, thumped him. To add to his travails, an eternal convoy of government vehicles with wailing sirens raced into the compound, spraying him with torrents of mud water.
“It’s not their fault,” he muttered as the convoy passed. “Ti iya nla ba gbeni sanle, kekere a maa gori eni.” When a big problem wrestles one to the ground, smaller ones will trod with glee.
Some distance from the hospital, he turned into Yaba bypass and rode slowly into a roughly constructed thatched shed under the bridge, Kasala Republic; where everything from a newborn’s placenta to an Italian tachometer had a price. It didn’t take long for him to emerge from its hideous interior of guns, drugs and undesirables. He patted his swollen pocket in cold reassurance and headed for home on foot. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started; the sun sneaked out from behind the exhausted clouds and a black mockingbird on a bent electricity pole began an ear piercing note. That was when he remembered he did not even ask to see the children.
≠
Ijapa the tortoise says the world is one big prison. Why does one stay put they ask him. Fear. He mutters. Of what. Death? No, what lies on the other side.
≠
Rasaki’s thoughts were on cartwheels as he got home. Osas’s wife had dropped off Brozie and Zino on her way to the market. He was not expecting to find them home. He told them to go and play with the neighbours.
“We are hungry,” Brozie, the eldest, said. She always spoke for the other who was picking at the cracked floor with her big toe. Rasaki counted out some money. More than enough.
“Take, go and buy bread down the road. Both of you.”
She flashed him a dimpled smile and ran out, dragging her younger sister, who was about to say thank you, by the arm.
≠
Rasaki watch them run down the dirt road through the small window. He wiped away the slow smile forming on his face as he remembered his wife. He couldn’t think ahead as much as he tried. There was nothing ahead. He saw nothing. He dipped into his discarded dashiki and brought out a thick wad of naira notes which he threw on the table. His phone rang. It was the doctor. He ignored it, his lips taut like a banjo string. He ran his eyes through his miserly cloth collection scattered on a wooden rack, he settled for a black tunic. A lone condom fell out of its pocket. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His eyes fell on the baby clothes Lola had kept inside the cot. He remembered the dream of the swaddling clothes and what happened when he attempted to follow her over the river. A knot tightened inside his head.
As he placed his phone on a hastily written note on the table, it rang again. He made for the door catching his reflection in the broken mirror set on the cupboard. Unsure, he stepped back, took another look at his face. His head didn’t seem to belong to him anymore.
The only other time he had ever lost his head was the day he had opened the door to see his father’s body stuck like frozen fish on a hand-carved bed. A fun-loving comedian, his father was one of the many the postal service had prematurely retired. He spent the rest of his years depending on his trader wife for survival, always sitting in front of his half-finished house, planning on his never-to-come pension.
And there he was that glorious Palm Sunday when he saw an itinerant drug merchant who prided himself on the cure for any sickness; cancer, impotence, mouth odor, headache, bad dreams, bad luck, anything. The old man asked if he had a remedy for his chronic arthritis.
“Of course,” he said, settling down to display his satanic wares.
After taking the death peddler’s twenty naira concoction of Paracetamol, Vitamin B, Chloramphenicol and six blue tablets shaped like skulls, crossbones and punctured hearts, it took mortuary services ten minutes to peel him off the bed hardened with body fluids the following day. His mother and her holy friends had raged, cursed and hollered mountain moving prayers of revenge and intercession. But he was too far gone to hear them, and he was obviously not Lazarus. Rasaki lost his head. He sought out the death peddler and would have beaten him to death but for the intervention of a traffic policeman. But not after he had crippled him with an iron bar. This time, Rasaki had no one to seek out. He had no one to cripple.
He closed the door behind him.He paused. A dark lizard ran across his path, he jumped back, stopped, muttered inaudibly to himself and stepped out of the compound.
“Daddy.”
He turned. Running down the road were his children. Brozie was swinging a small nylon bag. He stopped. He waited for them to get to him.
“Where is mummy?” the younger one breathed.
“In the hospital. I am going to see her.”
“Has she born?” asked Brozie.
Rasaki nodded. “Now go inside and eat,” he said. Either hand on the small of their backs, he urged them in.
“I want to go with you,” whined the elder one. The younger one started to cry.
“Tomorrow. Now go inside.”
He watched them go in with morose steps. He waited for Brozie to shut the door before heading for the junction where he would get a taxi. He took a quick look back at his house. And there by the small window were his children, watching, holding at the railings like prison bars.
≠
There is no armour against fate? Ijapa the tortoise asks, what if fear is fate.
≠
Camera lights flashed like furious lightening, journalists scrambled for passing moments as the General Hospital Lagos became a hotspot of gossip and nosey pilgrims. A woman from the backwaters had placed the country on the world map.
From the maternity ward window, Lola watched as Osas’sOkada sped off in a silent trail of grey smoke. She could not say if it was in a dream that she had seen her husband pawning his Okada. She had called his number. No answer. After hours of biting her nails, she had harried the equally agitated Osas to help drag her husband from wherever he was. She knew he would go berserk at the news. That was why she told the doctor not to tell him until she had delivered safely. She knew her husband like the back of her hand. And she also knew he had gone to look for money to pay the mounting hospital bill.
But how much she wished he was by her side when she was wheeled into the humbling presence of a curious government entourage. As the bearded man held her calloused palm in his over-fed hand, tears welled up in her tired eyes. She had shaken her head in disbelief as the doctors beamed at each other, the nurses had cleaned tears off plain faces and the hospital had buzzed with a certain manner of activity that had not been seen since the Biafran war, when punctured hope, shattered patriotism, and broken bodies had swamped the wards like lost bees.
≠
Osas sensed something amiss when a black bird fluttered off the wooden window as he approached Rasaki’s house…. Killing his engine with a swift motion that masked his disorientation, he watched the errant bird disappear over a sea of rusty rooftops into the polluted Lagos horizon. He was still in shock. Eight boys? He could not bring himself to imagine his friend’s state of mind the moment he heard the news.
He entered the house; the long corridor of the face-me-and-face-you rooms was clogged with broken furniture, disused cooking utensils and dirty clothes. Rasaki’s door, which was the first from the entrance, was ajar. He entered.
“Rasaki?” he called out.
It was an action that was more on impulse than reason. Rasaki’s apartment was only a sour damp room. He looked around; the room gaped back at him. It had the rotten wood smell of stale hope. Brozie and Zino were asleep on the torn mattress, a half-eaten loaf of bread between them. Zino had a line of dried tears on her face. His eyes fell on Rasaki’s phone, a note and the roll of money on the table.
As he swept the money into a black polythene bag, his phone vibrated into life. Lola.
“Have you seen him?”
“I’m on my way,” he said and hung up. He didn’t know what else to say. He decided against awaking the children. He would have to call his wife to pick them up. He closed the door with care.
He made to switch off Rasaki’s phone, changed his mind, and instead opened one of the blinking text messages. It was an hour old, from Lola. He muttered a curse as he read.
The sun sneaked out from the back of a distant church spire as Osas coughed his Okada into life, the content of the text groaned like agidigbodrums in his head: “Come now, Minister of Health is in hospital, he is taking children to hospital in Abuja, and me and you, come now now. And please don’t forget to bring my anointing oil and bible.”
Osas threw Rasaki’s note into a roadside drain but a strong wind picked it before it landed and took it right into a bread hawker’s face. He was too disoriented to say sorry, as Rasaki’s note did. Even if he had said it, of what use would it be?
~
Ijapa the tortoise wonders, what if man sees everything behind his mountain?
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Bode Asiyanbi, born in Osogbo, Western Nigeria, was educated at Obafemi Awolowo University and Lancaster University where he holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing. He is a two-time winner of the BBC African Performance Playwriting prize. His short stories have been published by The Kalahari Review and The Munyori Literary Journal. He writes radio drama for the BBC Media Action. He lives in Nigeria where he is working on his first novel.
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Also in this Issue
Short Stories
Poems