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| 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.
