I hope - now scratch that! - I wish you, my ogas, will be forthcoming with criticisms. I'm typing this with my phone. I've got a lil problem with my notebook.

Femi - his full name was actually Oloruntobiloba Igbahilofemi Marcus Oguntuwashe - but, he hated it... he hated his full name and he hated his short one -

Femi rose that morning without knowing that it was going to end for someone - him. He hated his name, and that started it. He was drinking with his best friend, Chukwudi (who, of course, liked his own name) , chewing tobacco and bawling his brain out.

"He told me," he shouted again, "but I'm telling you, he's a fool!"

Chukwudi agreed that there was a fool in the matter. The only difference was that he felt the fool was sitting right in front of him.

"Stop calling him a fool," Chukwudi said. "He's my father!".

"So what?"

"So stop calling him a fool!"

Femi chewed tobacco and drank

"I'm sorry," he said, " he's a big fool."

Chukwudi felt like killing him on the spot. If he had, this whole story would have been pointless.

.

Igbahilofemi had several reasons to dislike his name, and several reasons to hate his mum: he was not given any option - none - to have his birthday like all other normal human beings. He was given birth to on the 29th of February. His mum, then, went ahead to name him after the date she met her husband, his father.

Let's go back to the story.

Chukwudi wanted to kill Femi. Femi was, after all, insulting his father. If he had done this, this story would not get written.

While they were there drinking, Hugo came in. Hugo (please, hold your breath!) defined halitosis.

His breath stank. He stank. Nobody could hold this against him if he did not take the dictionary, Oxford, and turn it upside down on this little assemblage of alphabets: ugly. Hugo's mum had fortitude. She was born strong, solid and upright. However, she broke down when she saw the bundle she had given birth to. When the man who gave her this punishment came into the labour room, she actually turned to the midwife and asked her - in very lucid, clear and most annoying English - what was wrong with HER. The midwife, Mrs. Fehintola, who thought Hugo's mum was her worst case yet (after all, she gave birth to something that took all of twenty eight hours), told her she was only sick. She just gave birth.

Hugo looked like his father.

Please bear with me if you've endeavoured to open, as I have, like two million and seventy seven times (respect to Jesus) this post. I'm not posting this as fast as I hope I should 'cos I'm using a phone. My notebook, much as I like the damned thing, chose this moment to prove better than I am.

When Hugo came in, Femi stopped talking. He turned to someone who had not been paying attention to them.

'When was the last time you took your bath? Seriously?'

The man looked at him, looked at the fellow in front of him, looked again at Femi and tucked the meat in his hand in his mouth.

Hugo knew he was the one insulted.

If not for Chukwudi, please remember, this whole story would have ended.

'Hugo', Chukwudi addressed everybody in the bar, 'this beast thinks you smell.' Naturally, that was what he thought too, but why place any weight on it?

'Who?' Hugo asked. He had always been insulted on the heaviness of the miasma emanating from him. Nobody - not even Shakespeare, if he woke up today - could trip him on that score. ' Femi?'

Femi, who hated his mum, all insults and his name, rose with the fluidity that must gladden the heart of K.K. Ovosun and wasted his entire drink on the very ugly face of Hugo.


Afterward, the events that took place were in this sequence: a loud noise, like a shot, rang out; Femi toppled over without any theatrics; the cup in Chukwudi's hand dropped to the floor, remarkably retaining its glassy, unbroken essence but losing over 99 percent of its content; drops of alcoholic beverage fell from Hugo's chin with pleasing serenity.

following

When policemen came - they came in the persons of Inspector Samaila Yisa, Sergeant Paul Chisom Ankwobi and Constable Titus Bala - they were not prepared for the problem that confronted them. Ordinarily, they were told that someone had been shot and they were ready to apprehend someone - after all the i-diot who did the shooting did not have the immediacy of rationality nor the sharp decision-taking needed by all criminals to run away. But, right here at the point of the crime was a young man - truth be told, not good looking (but who said even ugly fellows couldn't, as well, by their actions, by their presence, stop one from breathing?) - crying and begging the deceased to wake. People standing ten kilometres away were pleading with the law to take its course. This ugly addendum to English Language turned Femi to a word used in past tense.

This was, come to think of it, an easy case.

The inspector, the sergeant and the constable hated one another with something akin to bile. If Cromley, Jesus Christ (I think), could hate someone who handed him over to death, then, that kind of hatred must be similar to what these agents of the law had for one another.

I typed I.d-i.o.t.

Am I that drunk or what?

However, the constable could not say no to the sergeant (who was his better) nor could the sergeant say no the inspector (who was his oga) nor could the inspector say no to the ASP who thought they were all too drunk for their own trouble and put them in charge of a case that not even three fools - three muckracking, soiled and unbelievably asinine bastards (which was what the ASP thought of the three) - could fail to solve.

These three policemen, unknown to the ASP (who was on a different case at the time), were together on a case that was botched. Each of them believed the other was the reason for it. None of them was ready to admit that someone saw him holding his gun, sitting at Iyalaje's place and drinking the last of his six senses out. Yet, they drank on their way to the case, botched it, shot at nothing (including criminals they saw in the air), blamed one another, went back to the station, lied to everyone and told whoever was ready to listen that they had a very good day.

Therefore, when they got to where Hugo was writing an entirely new script on remorse, they paused, felt sober, agreed that they should allow the young man his moment of grief. Nobody, the inspector thought, could be happy that he shot his friend.

When they finally decided that it was time to make this - well, abominable introduction to crime-making - this criminal continue his uglier grieving in a cell, they took a moment to reflect. The constable thought the sergeant was drunk. The sergeant thought the inspector was drunk. The inspector thought the ASP was drunk for assigning these two SOBs to him.

Hugo thought everybody on the scene was drunk!

He believed Femi had been shot but there was no gun in evidence.

'Where's the gun?' He wiped his nose. He asked the inspector. The inspector realised that he just might have taken a tad too much of Iyalaje's tansho. He ought to be the one asking the questions.

He turned to the sergeant.

'So, where is it?'

The sergeant thought the inspector was not only drunk, but foolish. To mask, and also master, this interesting level of foolishness exhibited by the Inspector, he turned to the constable.

'Give oga the murder weapon, the gun. You heard him."

Constable Bala took two steps away from the sergeant, thinking that the drunk had started again.

'Which gun?' He asked.

The sergeant spent five seconds staring at his subordinate before turning to the inspector. He smiled.

'Oga,' he said, 'this boy is a fool o. He no even know say when dem shoot someone na gun dem use'.

The inspector looked at the constable and made a mental note that the boy should be demoted. For a moment, he thought there was nowhere else - no place else, no other level - to reduce the boy to.

Hugo had not drunk. Nobody, at that instant, could convince him otherwise. However, he believed he was still more sober than these nincompoops trying to arrest him. Even in his jadedness, he did not allow his understanding of premise and conclusion to be corrupted. The plot was clear.


The sergeant was fixated on the affair of the gun.

'Oga, talk now,' he told the inspector. 'Tell this, this - ' he measured the constable from the hair of his head to his toenails, 'this boy to bring the evidence.'

The inspector took another look at the constable and thought the ASP should be demoted. Giving him this boy was indeed the summit of the indescribable.

Constable Bala looked at his two seniors and told himself that he was a better man.

The police - as represented by Inspector Yisa, Sergeant Ankwobi and Constable Bala - did arrest Hugo, seeing as the man implicated himself and they did not have a better culprit. Hugo's mum - that stolid, solid, upright and strong woman who gave meaning to fortitude - explained to her husband that the whole thing was a joke. The man did not have to be told. He knew. He caught the s-t-up-+id boy in the very practical, not particularly jocular act of stealing - yeah, stealing! - his #100. The wife, who could have told anybody that the interpretation best given to the matter, the money stolen and, in fact, her husband, was in a word ludicrous - thought the husband was taking the matter with the sort of levity that could see the boy very close to the hangman's noose. Thus, she sought Simon Nwankwo.

Simon Nwakwo was the best student in his class - no one told him, mind you. They told his father.

"Your son," said his class teacher, "has the best eyes in my class."

The father keyed in immediately to the word 'best'. Come to think of it, the boy was his son. He, the father, was the best in his class too, the best in, like, everything other than brilliance.

"He should be. I pay his school fees regular like."

"Yes, he is," the class teacher was conceited enough to be persuaded that she had a large audience of one, and smoothened her slightly wrinkled skirt. "He has the best eyes, but they look at only wrong things."

Simon's father guessed he hadn't heard correctly.

"If he is the best," he reasoned, " and he has the best eyes," he adjusted his spectacles, "why, then, did you score him zero in aptitude?"

"I gave him zero because he's not apt enough to stop his eyes from looking inside the skirts of girls!" The comment was buried and utterly sunk in a lie. She caught Simon once. She caught him staring in her own skirt.

Simon's father, for the second time that hour, thought the boy was his son. Who could blame a young boy for looking inside the skirt of a girl? He did it all the time when he was young.

"Not good," he shook his head, "not good. He deserves a real knock on the nogging."

The class teacher, Miss Imota, adjusted her skirt. Like father, like son, she thought. She just caught the man's eyes (embedded, as they were, in silicate) straying beyond the most cloying kind of depth - straying into her most pivotal and, of course, private region.

"That's why I gave him zero."

Simon Nwakwo made the best use of his eyes and became a Private Investigator. Before Hugo's mum approached him with what she assumed to have the devilish uncanniness to deprive her of her earned subscription to the product of nine months of irrepressible unpleasantness, Simon had, in the process of his engagements, won three accolades, a broken tooth and thirteen black eyes.


* *

.

Simon's class teacher was too busy making sure that the bespectacled specimen of anthropological disorder - handsome, though - sitting in the seat opposite her did not have the better of her privates to remember to tell the man about what she, the class and the whole school regarded as the boy's singularly vexatious habit: lying. The boy lied with the ease of a pro. He lied when he had a cause for it; and, he lied when the lie was least warranted. If Miss Imota had told Simon's father about the boy's remarkable talent for prevarication, the man would have had another occasion to think the boy was his son. Which boy did not lie? Which man did not? He didn't seriously think he told Miss Salimot (his new girlfriend who could not lay claim to the ownership of the brain that the good Lord gave a bug) the truth when he said his prick rose earlier than he did in the morning. The little erroneous appendage rose, but with an effort.

The senior Mr. Nwakwo departed that morning with only the best intention of cursing the sh-it out of Mrs. Stritatu, his widowed neighbour, who then had the infuriating habit of kicking his cat all the way to Antanarivo every evening.

*

Simon rose from his meeting with Hugo's mum, giving her a partial compliment of what someone told him was the best turning of his visage: a frown, and told his hands:

"I will undertake this difficult case!"

The mother was happy. She did not see the heart of the man nor see deeply into his thoughts. He was quite satisfied that he had been given a case that would chisel off all of one hour from his available working time. He would then bill the woman for, maybe, a hundred in order that she might appreciate the difficulty of the case.

"Thank you, sir!" She rose.

"Have no fear," he said. "He's bound to be released into my care." He thought if the boy was released, it was, probably, into the care of the most anxious hand of the law.

"I'm glad that you'll see this through!"

See?

Of course, he would see it through, but what nuance was capable of achieving something that no English, nor any African, word was capable of achieving? What gesture of his could best tell this woman that he had this inkling that her son would be done a great favour if treated to the bullet? Hanging not only took time, but also painful, not only to the hanged but similarly to those watching. He totally detested hanging.

"No problem at all."

*

Simon Nwankwo's interest in music inclined a little too steeply toward radicalism: he liked Olamide (even though it was his enduring belief that the boy was infringing too liberally the rule of musical aestheticism, not to talk of understanding, with the generous infusion of Yoruba into virtually all his songs), he could abide Ruggedman ( even though he agreed with those who asserted that the guy was too acerbic, but, music he could sing) and he loved M.I. (even though he had never taken the pains to remember what the letters stood for). These were his people in the universe of music. He had no consideration - no time, no patience, in fact, no tolerance - for P. Square (sissies), Tuface (one-dimensional), Iyanya (too amenable), D'Banj (treacherous), Wizkid (no versatility) or Banky W (couldn't place the guy). He loved his music to be hugging the outer limits of the zone established by the society for musical acceptability.

Therefore, that day, as he ignited the engine of his car in readiness to take it (or let it take him) in the direction of the state headquarters of the police and - by extension - Hugo and his exceptional maladroitness, he slammed on a selection of the accepted. M. I.'s voice came on forcefully to upset the sonic distribution of the interior of the car.

Simon Nwankwo, the private eye into whose care Hugo's mum, in both her haste and her trust in her son, had entrusted the life of Hugo thought M.I. belonged in the class of the Beattles - or even Buddy Holly, Kurt Cobain, Morrison and - damned right! - John Lennon. He thought those Grammy's overlords needed to bivouac in Africa - in Nigeria, specifically - with their awards and do the right thing for a change. They should give the awards to the fellow who deserved them, and here he was, coming out of his speakers with pain-dulling, assholes-kicking, fools-trampling lyrics with the discipline and regularity of a well-drilled regiment. But, would they? Those ninnies wouldn't, and that was the fact.