Chapter 12: Chapter 12
The vibrant voice of Lighthouse Family’s I wish, filled the air of the living room that morning as Monica climbed down the polished stairs to leave for Ibadan. The sun outside, the colour of an overripe orange, was streaming into the room and gleaming on Helen’s face, who was aghast by Monica’s new, strange looks and cheap dress. Monica looked far too impoverished and peasant. She was nothing like the affluent and aristocrat daughter she always was. Where was all that high-class air and grandeur? They have all been swallowed by her new squalid looks; it made Helen think that a man’s opulence could best be displayed by how trendy and sophisticated he appears. For that brief moment, her guts faltered and her heart sunk.
‘Please take some of your stylish clothes with you. You look too peasant and wretched in these clothes,’ she protested; her face furrowed with disgust. Those words made the well-dressed maids to laugh. But Monica shook her head slowly in total disapproval. ‘What about taking a lot of money and at least one of the guards and maids with you? Are you sure you are up to this?’ she asked her agitatedly; her voice downbeat.
‘Don’t be so uptight, Mom. I survived these horrible times. I am stronger now. I don’t need any of the guards and maids. I have enough money with me and in my bank account. You know that has never been a problem,’ Monica said, fondling Helen’s shoulder soothingly.
‘It’s okay, if you insist,’ Helen said coolly. Monica took a quick glance of the lavish mansion and signaled the chauffeur to go out and start the car, while one of the maids dragged her bags to the car. She embraced her mother, and Helen pressed her hard again her chest and kissed her cheek.
‘Please take good care of yourself, you know you are all I have in this world,’ she cooed into her ear, in a tearful voice.
When Monica entered the car, and the driver backed the car out of the compound, Helen stood outside the house waving at her languidly, with tears dripping down her eyes as the car grew fainter and fainter and disappeared in the air. Monica shifted uneasily on the seat, undaunted by the herculean task that was staring at her in the face. The chauffeur was driving slowly and carefully, as they drove past the busy pedestrians and tricycles plodding on the roads. The glass of the car was wound up. Still she could hear the irritating noise of the people and the honking of vehicles. That was one of the characteristics of Lagos, its usual hubbub and bustling nature. The radio in the car was making a scratchy sound, when suddenly, a song burst from it. It was a soulful and touching song. It was Ed Sheeran’s PERFECT. It was one of Monica’s favourites. As she listened to the emotion-laden song, it made her cold and she cried silently at the backseat of the car. She had always known the truth that she was not the perfect girl or goddess. But she was not looking for the perfect man or asking for the moon, either. All she had always craved for was that man who in his arms she would be his goddess, his precious little darling, his priceless chinaware and everything. And that was not too much to ask for and neither was it impossible. And because she was entitled to it, she would find that love, that man and that happiness, no matter the costs!
The driver stopped at the raucous and bustling park, and Monica climbed down and brought down her bags. She walked down to the ticket booth and joined the queue and paid the fare, and she was somewhat excited that nobody in the park recognized her. The noisy and riotous park was filled with several hawkers who came to the buses to sell their wares and dangle a thing or two in the faces of the passengers. At the extreme of the park, a preacher man and a few of his zealous converts were doing an open-air preaching and sharing handbills. While another man stood by Monica’s bus with a microphone and was selling his herbal drugs to them. He was bragging about the potency of the drugs and how they have made several deadwood men potent again, and several barren women fertile. He showed them photographs of a woman carrying a set of twins his drugs have cured. A lot of people have almost become convinced by the man’s bogus claims and were putting their hands in their pockets to buy his drugs, when a man in the bus told them the man’s drugs have in fact, aborted a neighbor’s pregnancy and had almost killed her.
‘Look! Do not believe a thing of what he’s saying. His drugs maim rather than cure,’ the man said sarcastically. That accusation caused a short scuffle between the herbalist and the passenger. The sight of it made Monica cringe, as she stared at the passenger and the man open-mouthed. It was the first time she was seeing such a close free-for-all and boarding a public bus in her whole life.
The drive to Ibadan was exhausting and discomforting for Monica. She was squeezed between two fat women and it made the blood in her feet curdle. It also made her remember her mother’s usual words that she must learn how to never share her seat with a woman whose buttocks are larger than hers. The passengers, however, kept the bus astir. They talked about the fight between the passenger and the herbalist, and a passenger said it was only in a rudderless country that anyone can make concoctions and call them drugs and sell them in the open market without the regulation and approval of the Food and Drugs Agency.
‘A woman in my backyard makes her own milk and sells it with the tin of one of the popular milk,’ he said, laughing wryly. ‘We have reported her to the Agency. But every time, she returns to continue her heinous crime after bribing them. No one care about us in this godforsaken country.’ He scoffed and spat viciously out of the window.
‘Please what is the name of this popular milk?’ the man sitting next to him asked. The man looked at him steadily, and said: ‘You’ll not hear that one from my mouth.’ That made Monica and everyone in the bus to laugh loudly.
Then there was a fleeting silence in the bus as it approached a checkpoint. Angry looking soldiers caressing their guns, and with the shimmering guns held at ready, waved the bus down. The driver slowed the bus and advised the man answering a phone call to switch off his phone, or he would be in serious water and forfeit not just his own phone but the phones of all the passengers. The man quickly disconnected the call and put the phone in his saggy breast pocket, as the driver brought the bus to a grinding halt. The soldiers peered dutifully into the bus, looking out for anything and anyone suspicious.
‘You! Where are you from?’ one of the soldiers smoking cigarette asked a tall, lanky man with a fair face, and straight nose.
‘I am from Akwa Ibom,’ the man sitting at the backseat answered.
‘I see. Do you bleach your skin? You look like you are from Niger Republic,’ he said, tapping ash off his cigarette. The man remained silent; he cocked his head on one side and scoffed. After a thorough satisfaction from the soldiers, the driver pressed a crumpled naira note into the hand of one of them and drove on. Monica looked at the soldiers piercingly and shuddered at the indignity and incredulity of the men. And for a brief moment, she wondered if there was any person in Nigeria that was not crooked or bribable. The uncertainty of that left her both horrified and shamefaced.
‘These men are ruthless! They are lawless and wicked,’ a grey-haired man said, fuming. ‘What’s wrong with taking a phone call at a checkpoint? I have seen these soldiers order a group of young men to lie down in stinking and muddy waters. What was the crime of these young men for them to deserve such an inhuman treatment? They treat us like they don’t serve us and like we are beneath them.’
‘I’ve heard them say that the phone call thing in a checkpoint is because of security reasons. Not all of them are bad. Some are good. But one of them who should have stayed in the barracks or in the Sambisa forest combing for the Boko Haram terrorists snatched my neighbor’s wife, impregnated her and beat up her husband almost to death,’ a passenger at the backseat said, supporting.
‘I heard one of them peed in his pants when he saw the sophisticated guns of the blood thirsty herdsmen. These faceless murderers killed the coward like a helpless chicken,’ another red-faced man said, his mouth gushing with spittle. And there was another loud laughter in the bus. ‘It did not surprise me they butchered him. After all, we hear that these herdsmen have been trained to care for the lives of their cattle more than the lives of humans. Who give these men these weapons? This question still remains unanswered. It is the bad government we have that created all these monsters. It’s only here in our clime that soldiers mount roadblocks and patrol the streets, shooting, harassing and haranguing civilians. What are the jobs of our police then? Or are we at war?’
‘All these freakish things should not surprise you, my friend,’ said the passenger at the backseat, ‘have you forgotten that this country is an ‘Animal Farm’? This is where snakes crawl into offices and swallow millions of naira and steal their own share of the national booties. Rats roam the Presidential Villa. Play with the president’s tea and even poison it. Perhaps one day we shall also hear in the news that a troop of displeased baboons attacked the presidential convoy with sophisticated guns, with the intention of assassinating him. And with the president narrowly escaping and fleeing into the bush. These people can be very ridiculous! They must think we are all blockheads. And that we must believe all the garbage they tell us; hook, line and sinker.’ This time, the laughter in the bus was riotous, that even the driver laughed and did not see the big pothole in front of him. His swerving of the bus was not timely, as the bus juddered through the pothole.
The hilarity in the bus added lustre to the conversation and relieved somewhat, the boredom of the long and exhausting journey. There was of course some sense in the passengers’ conversation, but Monica chose not to listen anymore. She had always maintained a strange indifference in the affairs and the seedy politics of the country. Because she had always believed that no country in the world was corruption-free, perfect or lily-white. In fact, she had always cleaved to the belief that it was the white man that taught the black man what corruption meant, and how to live the flamboyant life. Once, she had asked a professor at Yale University: ‘How was Africa faring before the Europeans arrived on her shores and plundered and depraved her through slave trade and colonialism?’ The glaring answer to that question left the professor stuttering and then speechless. Yet it is them that are saying that Africans are ‘thieves and are fantastically corrupt.’ They are still the ones pointing their oil-smeared fingers at us. They are still the ones that are being hypocritical; the pot that’s calling the kettle black. They are the ones that won’t stop being nosy, and mind their own business and leave Africans alone. Instead, they are the lizards that are wailing louder than the bereaved. Even so, she had always maintained the unbiased view that it does not mean Africans should be cut some slack. They are the ones responsible for their own fate. Yes. Africa was after all the cradle of civilization, the culmination of natural and human resources, the place where the beauty and story of the world first began. Yet the plight of Africa is saddening. What then is wrong with Africa?
Fatigue and anxiety lined her face, when Monica looked out of the window and watched the long line of cashew trees bordering the road and the dust-laden and mangled car, with shattered windscreen and charred doors that were on the road, as the bus whooshed past it. The fat women sitting with her were now asleep and snoring, and saliva was slobbering from the mouth of the dark-skinned one. Then there was a hush in the bus as Monica smelt the dusty and peculiar scent of Ibadan. She was sure they were now close to entering the old and famous city. True to her thoughts, a passenger mentioned a close bus stop, and she heaved a huge sigh of relief. She was already feeling overly wearied and exasperated from the gruelling journey.
The dusty and rusty roofs of the buildings in Ibadan were still the same as they were when Monica visited the city, some ten years ago. She was amazed at the falsehood of the axiom that change was the only constant thing in life. She could disagree and say that Ibadan was an exception to that rule. As passengers began to alight from the dust-layered bus, one after another, Monica stared at the stinking gutters, the puddles of green water on the roads and the heaps of dustbins that filled the roads with giant maggots crawling out of them. She watched as flamingoes perched and pecked at the putrid and stinking wastes; with the rotten wastes smelling like dead carcass and hanging thick in the dusty air. She scrunched up her nose as she continued to pour out the saliva in her mouth in disgust. Her mouth became parched, as she wondered too, if the puddles on the roads were immune to the harmattan and dry weather.
She followed the driver until he reached the park. It was the final bus stop, he said to the passengers as he brought the bus to a screeching halt. Monica climbed down from the bus with her bags in her hands. She could feel the irritating and greasy dirt on her face; the strong curdle of blood in her limp feet and the salty taste of dust on her chapped lips. The park was busy as an anthill. It was rowdy and raucous. Screams and bellowing filled the dusty air, with passengers and drivers haggling fares. Hawkers swirled the park, selling beverages and sachet water. She looked around the corner and a hawker was shooing at the flies that buzzed about the park. She called him and bought a rubber of chilled water. She was feeling exhausted, thirsty and famished.
‘For where will I find a cheap hotel to stay?’ she asked him, in a near perfect Pidgin English. The hawker stared at her closely and smiled.
‘You be Johnny just come?’ he asked her, pointing at her bags. Monica nodded her head slowly, as the hawker smiled triumphantly. ‘Enter any keke and tell them HIGH LIFE HOTEL. Every keke man knows the place,’ he said, satisfied with his direction.
‘Thank you!’ Monica said to him as she dragged her bags along wearily. She waved down a tricycle driver and after a brief haggling; he drove her to the hotel. HIGH LIFE HOTEL was nothing like the flamboyant five-star hotels she was used to. The hotels she lodged were always with world-class chefs and plush restaurants with delicious continental dishes like: Baked potato and aubergines, Yorkshire lamb patties, baked mushroom and capsicum and spacious suites with a lush Italian-style décor. Nevertheless, this one was comfy at least. She walked up to the reception and paid for a room and dragged her bags into the small room. She slipped the shoes off her sore feet and dumped them in a corner, as she lay on the bed exhaustedly.
It was only after she heard the splattering sound of water in the bathroom that she rose from the bed and yawned, stretching herself languorously. She stood in the mirror and disrobed quietly, taking off her black camisole and admiring the firmness and succulence of her breasts and the redness of her tanned face. She entered the bathroom, turned on the spigot and had a good bathe, after which she strolled downstairs to the hotel’s restaurant to have dinner. She retired to her room afterwards and switched off the television and the light, as she warded off the irrepressible thought of her mother and nostalgia. She closed her eyes and fell asleep; her snoring raspy and fatigued.