Source: thatgirlbelle.wordpress.com
It annoys! Yes, it does! Was I an American, I would say fuck, and fuck, and fuck all over again! I would even put shit as jaara. Waking up to father playing Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World makes me want to do some outrageous thing. I want to lift the DVD player off the scarcely filled shelf. I want to fling it at someone, anyone across the room. There is no other person but father and I want him to see that the world is indeed far from wonderful. It is only wonderful when he sinks his butts into our malnourished sofa. Good sofas, I know, are stuffed to fullness: their bums, cheeks and all. They don’t creak like ours, even when you do it on them. I know that because I have done it so many times with our landlord’s son on their couch. Ours is not a couch, it is a three-sitter, one that could take five medium-sized people. Father sits proudly in the middle of the three-sitter every morning while his poverty occupies what is left of the spaces to his right and left. It’s a wonderful world.

Father’s pipe toes and froes the path from his fingers to his lips as he hums Armstrong. Father’s all I’ve got, and his absence when I need him most proves why he has no woman in his paltry life. He has whores though, the one-night stand types that quell his lust only for his poor man’s recompense. There are times I feel I am no different from these women; that I have the same blood flowing in me. One of them probably had me and ran away. Dad is not a keeper.

I am like dad’s women; we rarely act differently. Where we do, they are inconsequential. Segun, our landlord’s son, after thrusting me back and forth always has the naira note that removes the fear of hunger-stricken days from my mind. Twice a week. He slips a crisp note into my bra before I leave his room each time. Father knows this though he pretends not to; I don’t feed off his money.



The morning’s light is not done sweeping the night’s shadows. I walk past father and towards the window to part the blinds. The new day shoots its gleam into the room and the room is awash with brightness. The shadows lost their nerve and they, with astonishing immediacy, begin to seek refuge wherever light was shy of. Under the chairs and shelf. Into father’s pipe and through it, into father. I press my head to the iron proof by the window while the breeze of the morning flushes into the room. My eyes traverse the street before them. The road, clothed in tar runs with a snake’s ambiguity, bending that way and this till it glides into obscurity. On its two sides lay houses of different sizes and oldness. Our street is a mixture of time’s binaries. Where we live is not one of the recent ones. Its landlord is its second and it is certain it would have a third. Our society could be embarrassingly philanthropic. Nothing is too small, bad or hard for it to pass down. Wives. Religion. Material things. Feud. So, father would, when in a sober mood, blame his father for handing down a voracious libido. I’ve got an ample share of it too. 

I detach my head from its embrace with the iron proof for some time to check if normalcy, like always, has happened. It is normalcy that is at work when father sleeps off, pipe in mouth as Louis Armstrong’s song remains on repeat, every morning. Father leaves home every afternoon to join other men, jobless like him, in filling potholes. They eat off the failed system that is our government. I glue my head back to the iron proof as I observe what is normalcy on the street. Everything, like Father is following a pattern. A routine. The drainages on both sides of the road, always fuck-thirsty, have opened their laps to the penetration of the morning sun. The sun, known for its dexterity in giving a head, laps up all the slimy liquid in the orifice.  Most houses around have their windows agape like ours, spit and other trash flying out. Garbage bins spill their guts into the drainages. That is man at work. The drainages exercise absolute perseverance while they wait for the day of reckoning, when they would pay men back in worse coins. When such times come, the atmosphere is bathed in the putrid smell of waste. Houses like ours vomit water and other belongings with every heavy downpour. The street is alive with its folks and their routines with them. Those who work do so, day and night. Those who steal do too. I do my thing too. We love. We cry and make love. We kill. We die. It’s the same life and the same people in pursuit of more. More money. More cars. Life’s luxuries and no lack.

Lack could be so daring; it sticks up a middle finger in the face of some of us. We don’t watch it do just that, we hustle. We hustle and yet lack. So while cars, new and tattered, rightly acquired and otherwise, impose their frames on the road every morning, children, poor like their parents, sac bags on their backs scamper to the sides of the road. Some fall into the drainages. It’s just the beginning of their hustle, a lifetime of it. When they climb out, their plates remain clutched to their chests. The chests brim with fear. I see its excess pour with the timid smiles they flash at their mates, as they press on their way. It’s not the fear of the rich. It’s the fear of obscure tomorrows; one which I share in.

I turn back to gift Father a full gaze. He is in the middle of a throaty, croak-like snore.  His sleep is like death, a peaceful one. Nothing but him could wake him. It’s his world, just his. So wonderful and yet, not one bit so to me. I know what I want; it’s the converse of what seems wonderful to father, a life so different, so fulfilled. And I’ll get it.

I’ll just take a walk, with my Ghana Must Go bag of course.

5 comments:

Nice one...

Please don't take a walk with your Ghana must go. It shall be well.

Haha...Ghana must go wey I don carry abi which one? Lol. Thanks for reading, Olayiwola Olanrewaju Metamofosis.

You ehn. Badt guy!

Oga Sam, wetin I do na? Thanks for reading, badt boss.

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