We Want a Divorce

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Clothes, everywhere. Clothes removed with an urgency of passion that now seemed spent. Two lovers lying on a poster bed. Bed in a hotel room with its balcony door open. A sultry wind beckons at the soft curtains, raising it ever so lightly, like a practiced voyeur’s peep.

Two naked heterosexual lovers. Young man engrossed with his cellphone. Middle-aged woman enjoying a cigarette. The air is that of opulence. It does not feel transactional, this affair, but it definitely is illicit.

One hour earlier, precisely a minute before noon, a middle-aged bespectacled lady wearing a beige skirt suit and remarkable brown brogues had checked into a hotel room. Fifteen minutes later, she opened the door for a young man who looked in his late-twenties.

Then clothes fell. They helped each other get rid of the clothes with such practiced urgency. There was a method to their movements and there was an ease too.

When he squeezed her buttocks, a gasp escaped her. She closed her eyes and hands went in search of his member as if she had kept it where she groped.

It was their first time at the hotel room and it would be their last. They needed to stay out of the news, out of the prying eyes of those who made the pleasure of others their business. Besides, he had a marriage to save and she had a reputation to keep.

They had met at a dinner with his in-laws. He and his wife and his daughter had arrived late for two reasons. 1. They lived in Shagamu, although they often claimed they lived in Ikorodu. 2. His beat-down Toyota Avensis had a leaking radiator and there had been traffic.

His wife had introduced him to her as a distant cousin but called her aunty, perhaps because she was older. The Vaughns were definitely rich and cosmopolitan but they held strong to aspects of their Yoruba values, so that when Aunty Remi wanted a post-prandial smoke, she excused herself and edged elegantly to the balcony.

He watched the different shades of scorn on the face of her relatives at the grand dining table. His mother-in-law hissed before her cutlery fell to the ground with a clanging sound. He had finished his meal and wanted some of the cool salty breeze on the balcony too.

She felt his presence once he got to the balcony door. She was first startled but she recovered quickly and then offered a reassuring smile. She took a good drag into her lungs and issued a plume of smoke out of her nostrils first, then let the rest jet out through an aperture of pursed lips.

He was uneasy but he spoke all the same. He said something that felt stupid the moment it left his mouth.

“Why do you smoke?”

She didn’t look at him when she said, “Why don’t you smoke?”

“Pardon?”

“I asked why you don’t smoke…” She paused so that he could put his name in her sentence.

“Boye,” he said, “I used to smoke.”

“So why did you kick the habit?”

He looked at her and looked towards the dining table where his in-laws and wife busied themselves with dessert.

“Your wife? Lara?”

He nodded.

Later that night as they journeyed back to Shagamu by way of the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, his mind was with the car engine. He listened diligently for the slightest offensive sound knowing that a refill of the radiator was due once they passed Ibafo.

“What were you and Aunty Remi discussing?” his wife asked, “It was rude that you went to join her.”

“Nothing”, he said, “just small talk.”

“Aunty Remi said she is moving back to Nigeria. Did she mention that to you?”

“Yes, she wants to start a branch of her business here”

“And you said you people were doing small talk. That is not small talk”

Their daughter made a grunting sound and they both looked behind the car, ending that conversation.

This was more than one year ago. Aunty Remi had since moved back to Nigeria to establish her company. Boye had become her manager. The branch in Nigeria had declared a profit three times that of the London office. And Boye had moved his family to Ikorodu proper.

“Do you love her?” she asks issuing out a jet of smoke. She is smoking The Business Club, a fancy name for a dessert cigarette. They had once laughed about why she smoked post-coitus and post-prandial. She had said, matter-of-factly, that sex was food.

He had asked what that made him.

She looked at him in the most guileless way and said, “Carrot.”

They laughed for days.

“Do you love her?” she asks again.

“Do I love who? Lara?”

“Nope, Sara”

“Who is Sara? Oh Sara, at the office.”

Sara, the office receptionist, is a young lady with an OND in Accounting and a spread of buttocks that did not match her pimpled face. She was the last person that should come into a post-coital conversation between two illicit lovers.

“Do you love her?” the question comes again with an assured resilience about it.

“No. I don’t know.” he says. His voice is shaky and his hands are sweaty.

“Boye, you are fired,” she says.

He is motionless. He watches her as she stands. She picks her clothes from the floor and is soon fully dressed, save for her red thong, lying on the floor like a snake-skin slough.

She takes her bag from the bedside table and walks toward the door before she stops and says, “and we want a divorce.”

Published at Afreada

“A Quest for Sobriety”

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1.

The quest for Olo’s sobriety begins one Friday night while his wife sits in a creaking armchair in their living room, staring intermittently at the ticking wall clock, waiting impatiently for him to return home to his dog-nose cold dinner.

Amope or Alice, as she likes to be called, is dressed in house clothes, a worn negligee and three yards of an Ankara fabric wrapped around her waist. Her loose clothes obscure her protruding belly. She looks over her shoulder at the dining table laden with food flasks, cutlery and a plastic bowl half-filled with water. She shakes her head and shrugs in time to the gate’s creak. Moments later, she hears a key turn in the door lock and her husband staggers in, reeking of beer.

“What are you doing up at this time of the night,” he asks, bolting the door.

“I should be asking you that question,” she says, still sitting but not sitting still; her legs are vibrating.

Olo mumbles, looks at her, at the wall clock, at the fluorescent light that illuminate the living room, then squints. He begins to say something and then stops.

“Your food, abi?”

“No, I am not hungry.”

“How can you be hungry,” she springs up. “Tell me, how can you be hungry when your stomach is full of all the peppersoups in town? I leave work very early to go to the market to buy vegetables, fish, oil, yam. In spite of my state, I pound yam soft as an ear lobe and you are here saying you are not hungry. You must be hungry. You must summon your hunger from wherever you hid it; this food is not going into any waste bin.”

She removes her wrapper and doubles it over, swings it around her waist and ties it firmly, battle ready; her eyes train on her husband and the white curtains adorning the doorway.

Olo knows he has lost this fight even before it begins. He walks a few paces back and falls into a chair with a sigh. “Oya, go and bring it.”

She bats her eyelids at him for about three seconds then proceeds to the dining table. She mumbles something about unfortunate husbands whose heads have been swiped by the intimate side of other women’s wrappers and heads into the kitchen.

Moments later, she emerges from the kitchen bearing a tray of steaming hot food. As she walks towards her husband, she hears his snores. He has sunk into an armchair, arms splayed, feet shod; the stench of alcohol rends the air.

“Ologunlade,” she says, setting the tray down with a sigh. She rocks his shoulders carefully to nudge him from the alcohol-induced slumber, to no avail.

She shakes her head, her mind churning and churning at the unfortunate downturns of matrimony. This is not exactly what she had in mind when Olo approached her that day at the out-patient clinic sporting a genial smile and an oversize white coat, asking her for her name and age and marital status.

She sighs and disappears behind the white curtains.

2.

Alice’s scheme for her husband’s sobriety hatches in her dreams, for she wakes up the next morning with a start. In less than five minutes, without considering weekend house chores or even the possibility of the mandatory environmental sanitation that is held on the last Saturday of every month, she waltzes out of her room dressed in a blouse, wrapper and head-tie of the same batik fabric.

Still splayed on the chair, lifeless save for his whistling snores, is Olo, her husband of two years. His last night’s dinner still lies on the stool, untouched, probably rancid, but this is the least of her concerns. She hisses as she adjusts her wrapper and steps into the brand new day.

Alice walks a short distance to the junction and flags down a languid taxi. The poor taxi’s chassis cringes as she lowers her weight into the passenger’s seat. She attempts and fails to shut the car door three times. It takes the timely intervention of the frustrated driver, who over-stretches his hand across her gravid belly, to shut the door properly. Door firmly shut, the old Datsun, whose road performance may be attributed to a resilient mechanic’s industry, coughs ashen bellows of smoke as it crawls towards her destination.

It takes Alice three hours of vehicular travel and another long winding walk to arrive at her destination, Pa Ologunlade’s compound at Owena. She is greeted by that rustic smell of village life. A cat using a wooden bench as a runway on the balcony appraises her. She unbolts the small door at the entrance and walks into the living room where she finds her father-in-law’s trophy wife admiring herself in a mirror the size of her palm.

Ayike stops and frowns. She leers at Alice like she would Olo’s mother. Olo’s mother was one of the kept women from Pa Ologunlade’s railway days; heydays when he flung his wild oats between the legs of nubile girls whose villages were along his train’s route. How ironic it is that Pa Ologunlade’s legitimate children have not turned out well; his first son attempted and failed severally to sell his father’s only house to an Agro-allied NGO. His first daughter, a retired tailor and twice a widow, recently moved back to her father’s compound when her late husband’s family flung out the lightest of her personal belongings after a Saturday family meeting. Worse, she’s also barren. This rather confounding turn of events irk Pa Ologunlade’s wives and they regard Olo’s mother with such potent and long-suffering envy that it has invariably been passed down to her daughter-in-law, wife of the illegitimate star son of Pa Ologunlade, the retired railway worker.

With both hands sitting on the upper edge of her wrapper, Alice greets her father-in-law’s latest wife, a mere girl, certainly her younger sister’s mate. Without anticipating any form of response, she proceeds to ask after her father-in-law. Ayike, busy in the mirror, points in the direction of the backyard.

Smoke whorls from Pa Ologunlade’s tobacco pipe, obscuring his lean frame in the reclining wooden chair. The octogenarian indulges in a post-prandial smoke as his daughter-in-law kneels before him. His response nearly goes down the wrong pipe, making him cough and sit up and pat her back while still coughing arduously from a cancerous growth that will eventually rid him of his life.

“Sorry sir, sorry sir,” Alice says with clear-eyed concern. The old man puffs again from his tobacco pipe.

“Amope, my daughter, how are you and your husband? We see you today. I hope there is nothing wrong. Or did your husband send you with the usual,” he smiles the suggestive smile of a corrupt corporal.

“Not at all, Baba, your son is well, everything is fine. For now.”

“For now?”

“Yes Baba, for now. I have come to report your son to you.”

“Has he stopped giving you food money?”

“No.”

“Did he stop shaking you vigorously in the embrace of night?”

“No.”

“Ah. Was he rude to our in-laws?”

“No Baba, he wasn’t.”

“I see. He dares not. He knows the kind of father who sired him.”

“So what has he done?”

“Baba, he keeps late nights. He indulges in too much drink. He returns home drunk, stinking of other women.”

Pa Ologunlade bursts into a spasm of laughter that makes him sit up again from his reclining position. Just when Alice thinks he is done, he riles into it again, laughing the knowing laugh of the wise.

“Permit me to thank you for that needful laugh, Amope. You see, I don’t seek to make a mockery of your report or trivialize its importance. But I find it really funny. Let me ask you a question. How many wives do I have?”

“Three, sir,” Alice says, showing three fingers.

“And how many concubines?”

“I say this respectfully, sir but I can’t say.”

“Exactly. There are some things you shouldn’t say as a wife. These women whose smell you perceive on your husband, do they come to harass you at your home?”

“No.”

“Did they waylay you on your way from the market?”

She shook her head.

“Perhaps they pounced on you at the market and ripped open your blouse.”

“No.”

“So you see. These women are lesser than you and they know their place as such. Why don’t you also be the Elephant that does not see the…”

“But…”

“No buts Amope, have I lowered myself to the level of sharing talk time with you?”

“I am sorry, Baba, forgive me.”

“Did you perchance hear about your husband’s grandfather, my father?”

“No I didn’t.”

“He was a warrior, a hunter and fiercely handsome man. Tall and sexy, women loved to kiss the contours of his rippling muscles. He lived well. Married many women, sired many more children and died at a ripe age. On the evening he was to answer the call of the gods, he walked outside to welcome the late evening palm wine tapper. He drank to his fill and died while his wives pounded his yam. A drink was his last meal. Amope, my daughter…”

“Sir.”

“Amope.”

“Sir.”

“Go home to your husband.”

3.

Meet Olo, Alice’s husband, again. He is still lying on an armchair in his living room, snoring away his Saturday. He will wake up soon enough with a splitting headache and a mouthful of sputum and a spell of nausea. He drank too much last night. He drinks too much every night.
He is a medical doctor, by the way. Dr Jacob Abidemi Ologunlade. Ibadan-trained. Illegitimate son of a retired railway worker. Mothered by Ayoola, now an aging woman who used to be a heap of smiles, fawn of breasts and a spread of buttocks. Her smile is notched in its centre by a gap, a gap that comes alive when she smiles and her cheek dimples also show. That smile stirred the loins of a certain railway worker four decades ago; that smile erupted effortlessly when she held a clear bowl of water for him after he had consumed goat-meat dripping with stew that evening at her mother’s palmwine shed.

He smiled his thanks and she grew pitifully shy. She walked away quickly and her buttocks quivered, stirring the railway worker’s loins even harder. The railway worker decided, in the whim of the moment, that he must keep the night in that small village along his train route, damning all consequences: his waiting wife stirring hot Amala in an earthen pot in her kitchen, his colleagues at the railway station in the next town, everything.

Nine months later, while his illegitimate son was being born, he was pounding a train towards Jebba. It would take about another month for him to meet his circumcised son. He had come harmlessly to eat stewed goat-meat and drink a sweaty bottle of beer. He sat down and wiped sweat from his face while his order was being taken. Instead of an order being placed in front of him, a slightly plump Ayoola came in with a crying baby, her mother hovering behind her, their faces ominous and accusing.

The railway worker prostrated for the grandmother of his son and took the baby in his hands, welcoming him to his life with such joy, even though this would be his second son. He promised to be responsible for the child and respectfully rejected her mother, telling Olo’s grandmother that their transaction was nothing short of a moonlight play that had not dragged into daybreak.
Olo had the typical childhood of the son of a kept woman. He had several ‘uncles’ who frequented their house, offering him crisp notes and falling into the embrace of Ayoola behind closed doors. He remembers the repressed sounds he heard while straining his ear to the door. His mother usually begging for mercy; for a long time, he did not understand why she did not call on him for help. More confounding was that she returned from behind the door smiling, at peace with ‘uncle’.

Olo rode through western education on both the back of his uncles and on his own resilience. His first headmaster was an uncle. So was his principal who introduced him and his mother to the then Registrar of University of Ibadan. He still remembers how his mother had asked him to give himself a tour of the campus while she addressed some pressing matters with the Registrar.

His first bottle of beer was an uneventful experience. It was at a house party in medical school; a small can of Becks beer that tasted like piss. He had fought the urge to spit it out.

His second bottle was more interesting; he had gone to visit a buxom postgraduate student who lived at Agbowo. She had been very free with him, wearing flimsy house clothes and touching him lingeringly. She offered him a hot bottle of small stout. After their post-coital pants, she had told him she needed him to last long.

His third bottle was different. He strayed into a bar, lost in thought about his dwindling grades at school. The fourth bottle quickly followed. Olo, the illegitimate only son, had a conversation with himself over a bottle of beer and something, everything in him, changed.

Olo stirs in the chair and throws out his left leg, a meaty stick cue, which hits the stool laden with his dinner and sends everything crashing down.

4.

Alice does not go home to her husband. She stands outside her father-in-law’s house as if it were a crossroad, her thoughts hazarding directions, her options a hodgepodge of impulses, snipped conversations, recurring actions.

A bleating pregnant goat waddles by. Alice looks up, but quickly looks down again, for the sun scorches her face. She begins to walk towards the junction, the corners of her mouth drawn out in deep, deep thoughts.

She wants her husband to become more responsible. She wants him to herself. Okay, well she can’t have him to herself all the time by the nature of his job, but how about most of the time? Can’t he come home on time smelling of pharmaceutical drugs and a whiff of soap, can’t he? Can’t he come home with a rouse in his loins? Can’t he look at me with eyes pregnant with desire once again?

Though she is pregnant, she is culpable of sexual desires, which she is entitled to by virtue of marriage. She remembers how long it took her to conceive. Her husband would return late at night with barely enough energy to eat dinner. Afterwards, he would start to snore and, by morning, he was off to work again.

Alice does not want to be a single mother in the guise of a married woman. Her complaints have risen above the purview of her father-in-law. She decides quickly who she should consult next.
She boards another taxi heading to her mother’s town.

Alice’s ingenious scheme for her husband’s sobriety detours into a visit to her mother.

5.

This is how they met: a plump lady is walking out of the STI Clinic with a cellophane bag as a dapper doctor in an over-sized white coat is walking in.

They meet at the door. At the same instant, they stop for each other. Then they move towards the door together. Then they both step aside. Then they laugh.

He waits. She wriggles out of the door; the door’s diameter is her exact waist size. He watches the sinuous movement of her one-piece brown plaid gown. He looks at her fair face, into her deep brown eyes.

He is lost in thought as to what illness brought her, so that even after she leaves the door vacant for his use, he is still buried in his thoughts.

Something grips him and he changes his footsteps to walk briskly in her direction. He taps her shoulder and smiles again.

“You again,” she says, turning, amused.

“Yes. Me. Again,” he sports a boyish smile even though he looks quite funny in that oversized white coat.

“Are you a doctor?”

“Are you a patient?”

She laughs again. “I came to get my drugs,” she shows off her opaque cellophane bag.

“I am a doctor. I work here. What is your name, how old are you, are you married,” he spews out questions.

She smiles. “Which one do I answer first now? I am actually rushing to keep an appointment.”

“That is too bad. I guess I will run into you again, at a good time.”

He does, later that evening. He is heading to his favourite beer spot when he spots that same brown plaid gown. She is surprised when he taps her shoulder.

“See. I told you,” he smiles cheekily as he cajoles her into accompanying him for a plate of pepper soup.

6.

“Go to the market and prepare his favourite meal,” says her mother.

Those are the exact instructions that Alice intends to carry out to the letter.

She goes to the evening market on her return from her mother’s place. The market is in full swing and the prices that soared high all morning and afternoon have begun their nose-dive.
She stops at the meat section where butchers in dirty singlets sharpen cleavers absent-mindedly. She buys the cartilaginous chunk of a female cow’s back. She moves to the fish stall and buys a huge, smooth-skinned frozen mackerel. She goes to the vegetable section and picks three bundles that she requests to be shredded. Then she walks to the stall of the wrinkled women selling locust beans. She buys dried fish; she hesitates when she sees dried stock-fish, but decides against it; Olo does not have a stomach for them. She picks fresh red peppers and a handful of tomatoes to suck in some of their raw hotness. The vegetables will suck in the rest, she thinks. She buys some grey mushrooms beside the yam stall where she picks a slender tuber of yam. On her way out, she retrieves her shredded vegetables, and just as she steps out of the market, she sees a coiled stretch of brown ponmo, the brittle kind that gives when bitten into. She buys it.

Upon arrival back home, she knocks on the door twice before retrieving her keys from her handbag. She finds her husband watching television.

“What are you doing at home,” she asks as she drops her perishables on the dining table.

“What were you doing outside?” he answers. “Today when I decide to stay at home, you are nowhere to be found.”

“I went to see Bisi. She lost her mother yesterday evening.”

“Eyah. A pity. What happened?”

“She died after her evening meal. She was old enough to go. She had seen her grandchildren and her first great grandchild is on the way. She might as well be on her way back.”

Olo laughs. Alice laughs. And for a moment, it seems all their marital angst dissipates.
She yawns.

“Let me fetch you cold water; you must be tired. Grief saps energy. So do condolences.” He disappears behind the white curtains.

She drinks to her fill and smiles. “If only you can stay this way. Be here every time I need you.”

“If only you can be patient.”

She looks at him admirably. “Even patience runs thin sometimes.”

She leaves her seat and sits on his lap. She begins to toy with his chest hair. He rids her of her headgear. And in very small purposeful actions, their clothes come off.

7.

Alice cooks Olo’s dinner naked save for her batik wrapper draped over her breasts. She boils the meat in a broth spiced with fresh peppers so that the tenderized meat will taste slightly hot. Thoroughly washed and shredded vegetables spend about a minute in boiling water. She cleans the ponmo with the blunt edge of a knife and rids it of the dirty inner transparent layer. She soaks the locust beans in water and breaks the lumps so that the stones will drown under the water. She sets palm-oil in a pot to boil. She adds the gritty blend of onions, pepper, and tomatoes. She pours in dried fish, diced ponmo, locust beans and boiled mackerel to the simmering stew. She pours in the tenderized meat and its broth and covers the pot. She cuts the yam tuber in huge chunks and sets them in a pot to boil.

She pours in the vegetable into the simmering stew. An aroma rends the entire kitchen.
“Add this powder while cooking his vegetable soup,” her mother’s instruction comes to her again.

She looks furtively at the kitchen door and pours in the powder into the vegetable soup. She stirs and stirs until every particle blends with the vegetable soup. She quenches the gas flame and brings out the mortar and pestle.

She pounds the hot yam chunks to a white mass soft like an earlobe. She wipes her sweat with the edge of her wrapper.

She emerges from behind the white curtain carrying a tray full of casseroles, walking on egg shells in the direction of the dining table.

She hears a sudden grunt and becomes physically terrified. She looks back and finds her husband snoring. She sets the tray down on the dining table.

As she looks at her sleeping husband, she is suddenly overwhelmed by affection. She pinches the dining table-cloth hesitantly, then drags it with a sudden burst of energy that sends everything crashing down.

Amid the cacophony of crashing crockery and casseroles, Olo, still groggy, asks, “What is that?”

“Your dinner,” Alice says.

Published at JALADA

Easy Junction – The story of a corper getting into trouble

/in

It is quite unusual to find a young man racing on his feet out of the village that early on a Monday morning barring the chance that he has a rendezvous with the gods. The village, like most Eastern villages, is far from the expressway as if intended to be left alone, unperturbed by the wild fire of civilization and industry. The walk down to the expressway usually takes lot of sweat and all of sixty-minutes, but Dunsin wants to make it in twenty.

Dunsin, a fair complected young man in his mid-twenties, adjusts the small rucksack he carries impatiently as he hurries along. He is better known throughout the village as Corper; his fair skin sets him apart, an insignia that ensures his popularity. He is currently undergoing the compulsory one year National Youth Service Programme. He teaches Christian Religious Studies at the Grammar school, his Primary Place of Assignment.

He should be heading in the direction of the school, but he arrives at the junction where he should detour and walks on. It is too early to be at school anyway. Life in the village, unlike in the city, begins slowly, listlessly. His students are recalcitrant late-comers, arriving at school assembly ground long after the National Anthem had been sung, so there is no real reason why he should be in school that early. His feet quickens toward the expressway, pregnant with ambition.

******

Monday night was our last in camp. We had very little sleep. The damn soldiers were on a rampage, chasing people out of Mammy market before lights out. I almost challenged one of the fools who had nudged me. Kewe stopped me.

I had to say a quick goodbye to her. Not exactly what I had in mind. I wanted us to walk down that path they said led to the stream. I wanted us to sit on its bank, listen to the crickets and frogs sing beautiful choruses to the gurgling stream. I wanted to kiss her lips. I wanted to caress her breasts. I wanted to slip my fingers down her underpants.

But here we were, left with just a second to bid ourselves good-night. Our hug was a brief gesture; there was no lingering, I could not feel her taut nipples pressing through her firm brassiere. The stampede of soldiers’ feet dissolved our brief hug. We ran for cover to our hostels, racing to our wafer-thin mattresses for a few hours of sleep.

We were expected to be awake two hours after mid-night to return our mattresses. Those selected for the parade were expected to rehearse one last time. We, the loafers, were expected to watch and cheer.

I woke up with a start. A quick bath and I put my entire load in the rucksack. I returned my bug-infested mattress. I obtained the small slip that would fetch me my posting letter. Then I went in search of Kewe.

I did not find her. The whole camp, about two thousand five hundred Corp members clad in ceremonial wear, were returning mattresses. There was a lot of commotion. Lots of noise and shouting. There was also a lot of cuddling.

It was three a.m. The Orientation Broadcast Service was playing love songs through huge speakers; an anchor’s voice intermittently interrupted the music, reiterating the somberness of the mood, the end of the three weeks orientation camping.

Lovers and friends huddled together, sniffing themselves like dogs, perhaps for the last time. It suddenly dawned on us that this phase of our life was over. Unfortunately, it was the shortest and, by far, the most interesting. We knew the fate coming for us. The fate of nondescript mammy wagons and placards of twenty-one local governments. The fate of teaching in hinterland secondary schools. There will be no Mammy Market. No loud music. No catfish pepper-soup. Just a solitary and religious confinement for another ten months.

I sat on the parade ground like other Corp members, puzzled about where Kewe was. I hoped the dude, one of the clerical staff of the Corps I paid to arrange our postings to the same local government, would deliver. The anchor’s voice in the speaker interrupted my thoughts; he was saying something about saying goodbyes that we might never be together again. Then he said he was going to play a song for the lovers; nothing Nigerian, something old, something popular. There was a short reign of silence and an undertone of shuffling. Then the famous opening strings of Temptation’s My Girl rent the air.

I hummed along with the song. Then a soft palm occluded my sight from behind. The light fragrance was unmistakable.

Kewe sat beside me and kept her head on my shoulder. She looked fair and beautiful. She almost felt like an apparition. And just to be sure that she was not one, I put an arm around her and huddled her closer. I said a short prayer.

The rhythm of his shuffling feet and swaying rucksack reminds him of the Endurance Trek, one of the activities of the orientation camping. But unlike the endurance trek, here he is the only one. He glides through the village square which is still asleep. The sculpture of a middle-aged man’s bust with a sneer for a smile stands in the middle of the square.

Dunsin stops. He hesitates. He walks to a closed shed and stands a recumbent bench. He sits. A crease of frown dominates his forehead.

Last night, a loud and urgent rapping on his door had broken into his solitude. The weak batteries of his transistor radio had finally left him with a meaningless buzz. He could not remember when power came last and he did not expect it. His Nokia phone was dead. He was too tired to walk to the village square to charge it for a small fee.

He opened the door and a fair girl courting puberty came in. Her hair was cut low like most of his students. He knew something was wrong immediately he saw Obiageli. Her face was the untidy mess of someone who had recently cried.

“What happened?”

“Uncle, it is Ada.”

He hesitated. A frown etched on his forehead, “Ehen, What happened to her?”

“She tried to abort it”

“Abort what?”

“The baby”

“Where is she?”

“In the hospital. They say she has lost blood.”

“Blood. Who? When? How did this happen?”

“I don’t know, Uncle. Her brothers are coming to your lodge tomorrow morning.”

Dunsin had broken into sweat and despair. His thoughts flashed before him like strobe lights. Graphic images of the Nzeribe family. Ada’s well-formed fair thighs. Her hefty brothers with hulk hands and shoulders and their menacing mien. Their sprawl of a compound with palm trees and numerous graves.

He turned to look at Obiageli; she had left.

He slammed his door shut. He rested his weight against the squeaking door. He sank to the floor and sobbed for the first time in years.

******

The stupid Mammy Wagon laboured listlessly on the pot-hole riddled asphalt, its smooth tires reluctantly kissing it. I woke up from my slumber of languish only to find out that we were still on the road. The obese driver’s neck folds bobbed to the bumpy ride. I looked around and I saw other Corp members sleeping.

What could we do? Our fate was the destination of this slow vehicle. We were bored by the journey. We could as well be bored for the rest of our lives. Sleep sometimes came easily in the face of helpless adversity.

Kewe’s look of disappointment stuck to my mind. She opened her mouth in despair when she received her posting letter. She neatly folded it and burst into a spasm of sobs. I held her, saying nothing. I could not find the words to comfort her. I cursed the dude who had assured me of close postings. I cursed him again as the cadence of the mammy wagon’s engine changed; we were going up a small hill.

The unceremonious journey came to an end at the local government secretariat building. We were officially welcomed with garden eggs and shea butter and a smattering of Igbo. We put our names down and were told to report to our Places of Primary Assignment.

My village was a thirty-minute walk from the expressway. There were no bikes (there were never bikes) so we trekked, the five of us, posted to the school. The school had washed walls and many broken windows. We were ushered into the principal’s office. It had the rancid smell of stale vomit. The worn rug on the floor looked damp.

The elderly man stood up to address us. He said he had been dealing with Corpers for fifteen years. He lauded the youth service scheme and his school. He warned us about the female students, especially those in the senior classes and their tendency to seduce. We laughed in spite of ourselves. He shared subjects among the five of us (I got C.R.S) and ordered us to be taken to our lodge. The lodge was another thirty minute walk.

******

He stands from the bench and walks on determinedly, heading out of the village in giant hurried steps. He knows his chances are limited. But the instinct to run is overwhelming. So he sprints. His shoes hurriedly digging prints on the red path.

He courses past another village and detours to another path that leads to the main road faster. The abandoned beautiful houses look desolate, lifeless, empty. It only becomes occupied at Christmas, when the villages blossom with life.

His feet touch asphalt soon enough; everywhere is still, quiet. He keels over by the road, pouring sweat and breathing a tad fast.

Soon enough, a rickety bus comes his way. He hails it and hops in.

I have been bored for more than five months. Life in this village is pastoral, tethering on the cusp of death. The rural-urban drift had snuffed out vibrancy from the town’s soul. And everyone who had stayed behind had a reason or two that could not be divorced of some kind of misfortune. They were all in the village for a kind of recess. They were always sure of a grand return to the city.

And every so often, there was always another death. It was almost always a young person, less than fifty years old. A big sprawl of the deceased picture etched on an obituary banner. The obituary banners were usually exhibited at the village entrance. The picture was usually a graduation picture with a flash of teeth and a promise of life.

Every damn week there was another burial that began on Wednesday. The funeral rites, regardless of the deceased age, would last several days until the casket was interred six feet below and buried. And forgotten.

The reign of death alarmed me. I thought to myself that it was important to tread softly in such a place where death was so commonplace. The days were however painfully slow in their progression and the nights were hot. We went about our quotidian life with ambiguous ease so that the days would progress faster. And at night, we went to Easy Junction.

Easy Junction was the watering hole in the village, where men of all age groups gathered to chew roast game and drink watered palm wine over a game of draught. The men were usually past middle-age and its crisis, waiting for either their next meal or death. And in those five months we spent, one of them had died.

Mazi Okolo.

He was a rapturous singer of Highlife music until his band abandoned him on a case of misappropriation of funds. Now he was the best draught player known for his sonorous songs when he was winning a game and his uncommon prowess in guzzling palm wine. The eve of his death was a typical day that passed with his usual bragging rights and a fair share of palm wine. He went home, slept and never woke up.

And life continued with sluggish abandon. The draught players continued to play. The Easy Junction continued to thrive.

Sometimes when the evenings had been blindfolded by night, when the benches at Easy Junction had been deserted, when the palm wine gourd was precariously low in its content, I would stay back to listen to the permanent customer of the Easy Junction.

Obiwu was a small man in his forties, a plumber who had struck ill-luck in the city and had retired to the village to become a drunk. He abandoned his wife with three children in the process. He spent his days in deep sleep and at night, he showered and walked diligently to Easy Junction for his day’s spell of wine and entertainment.

“I used to be a Rastaman back then in Lagos”, he once boasted, claiming to have been one of Majek Fashek’s bandboys, “I used to work the drums, you know”, pausing to puff from his glowing cigarette, “I can drum anything man”.

His eyes roved to the round buttocks of Onyinye, one of my students, whose mother ran Easy Junction.

“I can even drum that ass” Then he guffawed shamelessly like he was not old enough to be her father.

He told me one midnight, “They are trying to trap the youthful minds by confining you to a place where your minds become redundant. Just look at you now, what is your benefit in this village whose sons have journeyed to several far distances to secure their daily bread?”

Many times, dismissing the drowsy effect of the countless cups of palm wine I have had, I wanted to argue that we were doing the village a service; but many times, my eyes would linger on Onyinye’s buttocks which had all the promise of her mother’s and none of its tiredness.

She, like Ada, had a succulent fair skin and the integrity of her cone-shaped breasts stood defiantly upright without the aid of brassieres.

It was one of those evenings seemingly insignificant in the life of a Corper. The sun was sluggishly setting westward and I was thinking about how long it had taken seven months to pass.

I had lesson notes to write and my note was sitting atop the Holy Bible and I could not just gather the momentum to put my brain to work.

I heard footsteps and I looked in the direction of the sound. It was Ada, the fair pubescent girl who was often discussed amongst Corpers. She walked with an assuredness reminiscent of Kewe.

I had not heard from Kewe since we left camp. The rumour was that she had redeployed, that she had chickened out of the intensity of our bucolic postings, wandered off to a better place where the pastures were greener, out of the vicinity of little huts and quiet villages where life was easy and cheap and effortless and almost purposeless.

“Good evening, Corper”, she greeted. She looked quite bigger than when she was in the school uniform; her features accentuated by the clasp of her fitted home clothes. Her hair was cut short, as the school regulations instructed, and I could just imagine how much of a beauty she would be if she let her hair grow.

“Nne Kedu? Did you come to visit us?”

She smiled at my attempt at speaking Igbo. “I came to see you.”

“Me? What have I done to deserve your visit?”

She smiled again and sat beside me on the wooden bench. She smelt fresh, like she had just taken her bath. A vague scent of soap lingered as her body edged precariously close to mine. Her breast brushed my shoulder and I remembered Kewe again. Those fiery kisses, those hot kisses. I could hardly resist the urge that was streaming down my loins.

I looked at her and I saw lust in her innocent eyes.

The night came upon us in my room. We were naked and moaning and writhing from pleasure. Her succulent nipples found my lips often, as we moved slowly with passion and poise. I shivered as I climaxed and her piquant cry rose as I dug deeper into her recesses. My hand found her mouth and my finger slipped between her teeth. She bit me.

Minutes later, spent, she picked her clothes from the floor where they had been scattered, peeled by the urgency of passion.

I remained in bed naked, ashamed of myself. I had done what I had been warned against. It was bad enough that I slept with my student and, worse, I loved it. The sex was consensual, unprotected and pleasurable. It lit up life in the village with such uncanny brilliance.

“I am leaving”, she said, fully clad.

I looked at her and I knew I was enthralled.

******

That night, after dinner, my colleagues and I had a talk about the Nzeribe family. I was told about her six brothers, the hefty men who were known for fomenting trouble in the village.

“You need to see them”, someone said, “They look like the well-fed Cannan men in the Bible”

“One of them is even a musician, the eldest”

“They all wear dreads like they are members of the Marley family”

There in the bliss of the night and the sweet relief of whistling wind and the stillness of everything around, my colleagues were making small talk for my benefit about the Nzeribe family. Their information was the popular hearsays that have been interpreted to them by friendly indigenes and they were relaying them to me for obvious reasons: that I should be careful about my dealings with Ada.

I wanted to lie that nothing had happened between us but I knew our helpless cries of passion were conducted through thin walls and heard by cocked straining ears. Sleeping with our students had been a taboo at first, but slowly it had become an indulgence male Corp members permitted, to the chagrin of the females amongst us.

It could have been envy on their part for they were not particularly good-looking; neither did they care for their bodies. They were more concerned about forgetting their allowances in the banks and living the parsimonious life.

Naturally, as in a commune, none of the males was open about their sexual intentions. There were preferences that waned with time and preferences that also blossomed with time as we got to know each other better. What was constant was the numbering of the days we had left in that god-forsaken village.

******

The rickety bus approaches Ekwulobia. He smiles. He alights from the bus at the Onitsha Bus Park. He takes a seat near the front of the next bus en route Onitsha. He looks behind — the bus has space for just one more passenger. He clutches his rucksack tight, his hands rummaging its contents — his credentials, original certificates, a change of cloth and his toothbrush. He rests his head and covers his face from the rising sun with his hand. His eyes close as he says a short prayer.

He looks up just in time to see a black sedan waltz to a stop beside the park. He strains to look inside the car and he sees Obiageli and six hefty men in dreads. His hand moves from the glare of the rising sun to his face like an improvised shield.

The last passenger hops in and the driver beside him kicks the engine into life. The weather-beaten bus hurtles out of the park towards the roundabout.

He looks behind through the side mirror watching six hefty men cross the road to the Bus Park.

He sighs and clutches his rucksack tighter.

Published at Kalahari Review