In the following days, he asked me to recopy the same letter to Okwudili, to Ugochi, to Stella, to Ngozi, to Rebecca, and to Ifeoma.
Late one afternoon, we were sitting and watching television when Uncle Boniface returned from school and handed a sealed note to my mother. It was from his class mistress. My mother turned away from the screen and tore the note open.
‘How can she say you don’t have enough exercise books?’ she asked. ‘Is it not just three weeks ago that I bought some new ones for you?’
She awaited an answer from the scrawny lad standing beside her.
‘What happened to all your exercise books?’ she demanded.
Uncle Boniface looked at the floor and remained quiet. My father stood up and walked away to his bedroom. He never made any input when she was scolding the helps.
‘What have you done with all your exercise books?’ she asked again, snatching the bag that was hanging across his shoulder.
Uncle Boniface’s face darkened with dread.
My mother opened the bag and brought out his books. Three loose sheets fell out. She picked them up and started reading. With each passing moment, her eyes grew wider.
‘What is this?’
She looked up at Uncle Boniface and down at the sheets again. Then she turned to me.
‘Kings, what is this?’
I was in the last phase of demolishing a meat pie. My teeth froze when I recognised the exhibit in her hand. My mother dropped the schoolbag on the floor and flung the sheets of paper on the centre table. A chunky piece of pastry got stuck in my throat.
‘Kings, when did you start writing love letters?! Tell me. When? How? What is this?!’
I could understand her shock. My mother was not the most devoted of Roman Catholics, but she tried her best. She put her hands over my eyes whenever a man and woman were kissing on television; she asked me to go into my room as soon as she perceived that they were on their way to having sex; she once asked me to shut up and stop talking rubbish when I told her about a girl in my class who was so pretty. I could easily imagine the terrible thoughts that were plaguing her mind about where I picked up the lyrics and the inclination to write a full-fledged love letter.
‘Who taught you how to write love letters?’ she asked. ‘Boniface, what are you doing to my son? Tell me, what is this?’
With each question, she swung her head towards the person to whom it was directed. When neither I nor Uncle Boniface agreed to speak, my mother returned a verdict.
‘Kingsley, go and kneel down facing the wall and raise your two hands in the air.’
Eager to show repentance, I rushed to start my punishment.
‘Make sure that I don’t see your two hands touching,’ she shouted after me.
I knelt down by the dining table and obeyed her instructions to the letter. Then I heard her hand slam against Uncle Boniface’s head.
‘Yeeeee!’
‘Oh, you want to start teaching my son how to be useless, eh?’
I heard another slam.
‘Arggggh!’
‘You want him to be useless like you.’
Another slam. And another and another. Knowing my mother’s usual style when dealing with undisciplined house helps, by now she must have had the front of his shirt firmly in her grip.
‘Mama Kingsley, pleeeeese!’
‘Don’t worry,’ she replied calmly, but out of breath. ‘By the time I’ve finished with you, you’ll have a scar on your body that will remind you never to try spoiling my son again.’
He must have torn himself away from her grip and fled for dear life. She chased him into the kitchen and back out again. I turned briefly and saw that she had upgraded her weapon to a broom. With the dazzling agility of a decathlete, she chased him round the living room and cornered him between the television and my father’s chair. She continued trouncing him until my father came out of the bedroom.
‘Augustina, it’s all right,’ he said. ‘Don’t wear yourself out because of this nincompoop. Leave him alone.’
She abandoned the howling prey by the wall and went into the bedroom with my father. Shortly after, he came out.
‘Kingsley,’ he called, ‘come here.’
I followed. I knew that my mother had narrated the little she knew, and that he was now about to ask me to pack my bags and leave his house. Inside the bedroom, my mother was sitting on the bed, looking as if someone had died.
‘How did you end up writing a love letter for Boniface?’ my father asked.
I narrated my very minor part in the fiasco. With each new detail, my father’s face became more ferocious and my mother’s eyes spread wider and wider.
‘Pull down your shorts,’ my father said as soon as I finished.
I did. In my mind, I calculated the best place for me to spend the night after my father asked me to pack up. Perhaps I could go to the beautiful grotto in the Saint Finbarr’s Church and share the huge shelter with the Blessed Virgin Mary’s statue. They had told us in catechism classes that she was the friend of all little children.
My father held my two hands in front of me with his one hand and used my mother’s koboko to lash me with his other. I wriggled and screamed. After ten strokes that left me unable to sit upright for days, I was banned from communicating with Uncle Boniface whenever my parents were not around.
All these years later, my father still considered Uncle Boniface a pot of poo. So I could understand my mother’s reluctance to broach this subject with him. Still, I persisted.
‘Just talk to him about it and see what he says.’
‘OK,’ she replied. ‘I can’t promise that it’ll be today, though. I’ll have to wait for the right time. You know how your daddy is.’
‘Yes,’ I sighed. I did.
Seven
It was not just one of those days when everything seemed to go awry. That day, the devil must have ridden his Cadillac right across our courtyard and parked in front of our house. While brushing my teeth in the morning, I felt some foreign bodies in my mouth and spat out quickly.
‘Kings,’ my mother called from behind the bathroom door.
‘Yes, Mummy?’
‘When you finish, your daddy wants to speak with you.’
‘OK.’
‘Hurry up. He’s getting ready to go out.’
I stared into the sink and observed some bristles from my toothbrush drowning in the white foam. I would have to buy a new toothbrush from my next pocket money.
My father was dressed in grey suit and tie, and sitting straight on their bed. My mother was more relaxed on a pillow behind him. Ever since his retirement, apart from going to the clinic for checkups, he rarely left the house on a weekday morning. But last week, the announcement had been broadcast over and over again on the radio. There was going to be a verification exercise for pensioners.
The government was worried about several ghosts collecting pensions. People who left this world more than twenty years ago were still having monthly funds paid into their accounts, and the government was determined to certify how many people on their books were still breathing. Having the pensioners turn up in person and verified one by one seemed like the best method of confirmation, yet this was the second such exercise the government had conducted in the past fourteen months. Normally, my mother should have been at her shop by now, but whenever my father was going out, she waited so that they could leave the house together.
‘Yes, Daddy?’ I said.
‘Your mummy was telling me that you want to leave Umuahia,’ he began.
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘What are your reasons?’
I explained in detail. Exactly what I had told my mother, plus some.
‘Lagos is out of the question,’ he said when I finished. ‘Definitely out of the question.’
He went into a bout of coughing. My mother leaned over and rubbed his back.
‘Isn’t it possible for you to tell them that you’re not feeling well?’ she asked. ‘The way you’re breathing, I think maybe you should stay at home.’
‘Hmm. Have you forgotten Osakwe?’
The recollection caused a faint breeze of fright to blow through my pores and right into my marrow. Osakwe was my father’s former colleague who had been bedridden with some unknown ailment for several years. During the last verification exercise, his children had asked for an exemption, but the people at the pension office insisted that all pensioners - no exception - must appear in person. So the children hired a taxi, lifted their father from his sickbed for the first time in years, and carried him all the way there. They left the door of the taxi open and went inside to call the pension officers who came out and confirmed that Osakwe was still alive and pension-worthy. Shortly after the taxi began the homeward journey, the children discovered that their father had left this world.
‘As for looking for other kinds of jobs,’ my father continued, ‘I understand why you’ve decided to take this step. But we must never make permanent decisions based on temporary circumstances. Whatever job you might get . . . I don’t mind as long as you realise that it’s just temporary. You are still a chemical engineer.’
‘Yes, Daddy.’
‘When do you plan to leave?’
‘As soon as possible. I was just waiting to hear what you would say.’
He paused and thought.
‘You can go ahead and let Dimma know you’re coming.’
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ I said with a smile.
‘Why don’t you hurry so that we can all leave the house together? ’ my mother suggested.
With excitement, I went and had a quick bath. They were waiting in the living room when I finished dressing up. At the junction where our street met the main road, we stopped and waited. I looked at my mother with her man standing erect beside her and saw the pride radiating from her face. Even though his clothes showed too much flesh at the wrist and ankle, anybody would know immediately that he was distinguished. My father always looked like a university professor.
‘Ah!’ my mother exclaimed suddenly.
‘What is it?’
‘I forgot! Mr Nwude’s wife said she wanted to give me some dresses to mend for her. I promised her that I’d send Chikaodinaka up to their flat to pick up the clothes before I left the house.’
‘You should stop taking these sorts of jobs from people,’ my father replied. ‘If any of them needs someone to mend their clothes, they can stop any one of these tailors who parade the streets with machines on their heads.’
‘It’s difficult to refuse our neighbours,’ my mother said.
‘It doesn’t matter whether the person is a neighbour or not. You’re a fashion designer, not an obioma.’
My father appeared quite upset. I recognised that Utopian tone of voice.
‘Nigeria is a land flowing with milk and honey,’ he had said to one of his colleagues who was relocating to greener pastures in Canada and who had tried to convince him to join ship. ‘Just that the milk is in bottles and the honey is in jars. Our country needs people like us to show them how to get it out.’
With that belief, my father had given the very best years of his life to serving his country in the civil service. Today, retired and wasted, he had nothing to show for it. Except our rented, two-bedroom, ground-floor flat in Umuahia town. And the four-bedroom, uncompleted bungalow in the village. It was every Igbo man’s dream to own a house in his homeland - a place where he could retire from the hustle and bustle of city life in the twilight of his years; a place where he could host guests for his daughters’ traditional wedding ceremonies; a place where his family could entertain the well-wishers who came to attend his funeral. But that dream of owning a home had been relegated to the realms of ancient history when I gained admission to university.
Eventually, I saw a taxi and flagged it down. When the smoky vehicle braked, the people at the back shifted to make space. I held the door open while my father climbed inside.
‘Pensions Office,’ I said to the driver.
‘Bye,’ my mother said as I banged the door shut.
He waved. I waved back. My mother kept waving until the car was out of sight.
She continued in the opposite direction while I walked three streets to the closest business centre. I was the ninth person in the queue for the telephone. Things might have moved a bit quicker if not for the young man three places ahead of me who was trying to convince his brother in Germany of the rigours they were going through to clear the Mercedes-Benz V-Boot he had sent to them three months ago via the Apapa Port. The agents were demanding more and more clearing fees. Apparently, his brother thought he was lying.
When it eventually got to my turn, I wrote my number on a slip of paper and handed it to the telephone operator. The attendant got through to Aunty Dimma’s line after five dials.
‘That’s wonderful!’ Aunty Dimma sang. ‘Having you around will be good for Ogechi. She hasn’t been doing well in her maths.’
From there, I went to the newspaper stand round the corner. I had been buying newspapers from this same girl almost every week for about a year. Whenever my budget was tight, she turned away her vigilant eyes and allowed me to carry on as I pleased. Ola had once joked that the old girl had eyes for me. I selected a copy of
This Day
and saw that, in addition to Mobil and Chevron, a few insignificant companies were also hiring. I copied the relevant details before returning the newspaper to the stand.
Yes, Ola had asked me not to visit her in Owerri again, but now that I was aware of the source of her trouble - that her mother was bothered about my insecure economic status - I knew that an update would go a long way in allaying her fears. Ola might worry about my move to Port Harcourt, but in the long run, it would benefit our relationship.
Besides, women are from Venus. Like tying up shoelaces, they are full of twists, turns and roundabouts. They say something when what they really mean is another thing. For all I knew, right now, Ola was hoping that I would pay her a visit and wishing that she had not been so harsh on me the last time.