I didn’t get home till six that evening. First, I had to bear a forty-minute traffic from Heritage bus stop to Wuse market; a distance I could have covered in less than fifteen minutes on foot. It was a very abnormal hold-up by Abuja (and I’m not talking Maraba and Nyanya) standards, and on getting to the Wuse terminus, it was clear why.

The incoming lane had been closed, cordoned off by flimsy red-and-white tape while a handful of tractors, and the construction workers milling around them in their neon-orange reflector vests, set about their business, repairing and reconstructing stretches of road that to me seemed in perfect condition as I headed to court that morning. I suppose it was just routine maintenance, but what I didn’t understand was why these oafs would choose today, a Monday of all days, to do their maintenance. The World Economic Forum On Africa had held in Abuja the week before, and it didn’t make sense to me that these Pakistani construction company workers didn’t take advantage of those three days while the entire city was shut down, to spray bitumen on the blacktop —like it is the most delicate task in the world —and trudge around with their hard hats like they are doing a photo shoot for a tractor and equipment sales brochure.

I was still seething, thinking of the apparent brainless state of a lot of the world’s population, when I found myself in another traffic jam, this one even much worse. Before this I had waited ten whole minutes at the top of Wuse bridge before one of those green and white cabs going to 3rd Avenue, Gwarimpa came by; it took another ten minutes for the cab to fill up, while I baked in the back of the car —a Golf coupe —with window controls that didn’t work. Now to bear all that, and find myself in another terrible traffic jam, could only mean my planetary influences were in anything but perfect alignment.

Thirty-minutes of vehicular crawling and two near collisions later, we were at the source of the go-slow: a seventeen-car pile-up; by far the most expensive accident scene I have ever seen. It was an amazing sight, really; the sort of thing I’d only ever seen in Hollywood movies —and I’m not talking low-budget, straight-to-DVD flicks.

Clearly, a tipper laden with sand had crashed into a Range Rover that crashed into a Jaguar that crashed into a new model G Wagon, which broadsided a 2014 M-class, and so on. Between the cost of repairs for all those cars —which damages ranged from not-so-bad to terrible —was, I’m sure, enough money to offset Majek Fashek’s debts, keep him constantly laced with cocaine, and still revitalise his music career. I felt bad for whoever was behind the wheel of that tipper, who if he had any sense should have bailed, and by that time should have been halfway to the Cameroonian border.

I wanted to take a picture of the accident scene as our car picked up speed, but my phone was dead —damn Blackberry battery. Thankfully however, it was smooth riding from there on out.

Once home —at my aunt’s where I am staying for the duration of my attachment program —I headed to my bedroom to get out of my sweaty clothes, and then dived into the kitchen.

‘Oluchi is there anything to eat?’ Oluchi is my aunt’s house-girl.

No answer. Her ears were plugged, and I suppose she was listening to those her heavily auto-tuned Igbo gospel songs that spoil speakers, and sound their worst when you hear them on chinco phones like hers.

‘Oluchi!!!’

‘Ehn!’ She gave out, yanking out the earphones and looking alarmed, before turning round to find that it was only me. ‘Oh, it’s you sef’ she said. ‘I even think it is Mummy that is calling me.’ “Mummy” is what she and the other domestic staff in the house call my aunt. I’m the only one who gets to call her “Aunty” and get away with it.

I didn’t care for Oluchi’s bad grammar or her diminutive tone but she was for all intents and purposes HOD Kitchen Department, and I needed her services in that instant, for which I easily stifled the Grammar Nazi in me.

‘Is there anything to eat?’ I reiterated.

‘No o’ she said with a long fatalistic sigh, like though her not having made something for me to eat was due to some unforeseen circumstances beyond her control. She looked almost apologetic, and by this time I was nothing short of livid.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I snapped. ‘I thought I saw something in the pot just now when I came in.’

‘The food I make is for only me and mommy, and it have finish. I just eat the last one.’

‘What rubbish is that? Didn’t you know I would be coming back?’

‘I don’t know na. I would soon make night food, oh? Sorry please.’ And then she started doing the most annoying thing while I was still standing right there: she started whistling the tune to “Adi’m Well Loaded.”

I hissed and stormed out of the kitchen, back to my room where I laid on the bed, then stood up; sat on the swivel chair, flipped open the court attachment logbook on my reading table, then snapped it shut. I was hungry. And angry.

Can you imagine this stupid girl, I was thinking. It’s like she doesn’t know the sort of high pedestal on which my aunt places me. Clearly, she doesn’t realise I’m VIP in this house, and I can get her in a lot of trouble with my aunt, and with just half a complaint.

It was the same thing with Maria, her predecessor, who was the one in the house the last time I had been in Abuja for my friend’s call-to-bar in November last year; Maria who had gotten more than she bargained for one morning when she just came and dumped bread and tea unceremoniously in front of me, when unknown to me there was sardine, mayonnaise, peanut butter, chocolate spread, and all the likes lying in a cupboard in the kitchen. Unfortunately for her, my aunt had walked in on her, right in the middle of her German service —cook onye ocha—and she got the scolding of a lifetime, while I watched and tried my darnedest to look like a victim. Of all the things my aunt said to Maria that morning —and they all sounded like music to my ears —the most beautiful thing of all, which I would always remember with fondness, was when she said: “Chiedozie is my son. And if you disrespect him in this house, you disrespect me.’ Gbam! That was the sort of awakening Oluchi needed; a motion on notice.

My aunt stays in the main house with Oluchi, while I stay in the guest house with the troop of distant relatives and some of my aunt’s acquaintances that keep coming and going week in and week out. Spending a night at my aunt’s seems to be some rite of passage for all our village kinsmen who come through Abuja. Me, I don’t mind so long as I don’t have to share a bedroom with some stranger. And I don’t.

Now the groceries and other supplies stay in the guest house, and that’s where the main meals are cooked, but my aunt’s bungalow is where the treasure is. Her refrigerator is always stocked with cookies and chocolates and cakes, especially cakes. Her pantry is like an alcoholic’s wet dream: cartons of Hennessey and Camus, red wine and Laurent Perrier champagne. And I have carte blanche and unrestricted access to all of it.

So my plan then was to head to my aunt’s bungalow —and as per her usual schedule, I knew she was most likely in her living room, on the couch opposite the TV tuned to CNN, Channels or BBC; stroking her shy cat Peggy. I was going to root in the refrigerator for something to stuff my face with, and then I’d join her on the couch, easily looking my hungriest. As usual she would ask me: ‘Iri go nni?‘ Have you eaten? And I would shake my head, and when she asks why, I would just shrug and say: ‘Oluchi said there was nothing in the house for me to eat.’

She would say: ‘What?’ I would shrug. And then she would rise and head out for the guest house, while I follow right behind her. Bedlam! That was the plan, and I could almost see the scene playing out in my head as I reached and tried to yank the front door to her unit open.

Nothing. The door didn’t give. I tried again, going from mischievous back to frustrated in a heartbeat. The door was locked! I just couldn’t believe the day I was having. Nothing was going my way.

I stalked back to the guest house where Oluchi was still tinkering in the kitchen. ‘Oli, why is mommy’s side locked?’ I snapped.

‘She have go out na. Mr. James just open gate for her now.’ Mr. James is the gateman.

How come I didn’t hear her leave when one of my bedroom windows was just by the car port? Was I that hungry that my hearing had become impaired too?

I hissed again, and returned to my bedroom, frothing at the mouth with rage. Let me just say that if I was a steam-pot, I would have been shooting lava out of my ears. My stomach was yawning and grumbling, and it didn’t help much that I was lying on my front.

That’s it! I snapped inwardly. It’s not like I can’t cook sef. And with the theme-song from Sarafina playing in my head, I stomped into the kitchen, opened the fridge and started rummaging.

Oluchi stopped what she was doing and watched me as I took inventory of the fridge’s content: Eggs. Check. Left-over stew. Check. Carrots and broccli. Check. Left-over beans porridge. Never!

I took two eggs out from the crate, broccli, carrots, and the stew in a Tupperware container; then I got three packs of Indomie hungry-man packs from the pantry.

‘What are you doing?’ Oluchi asked.

Burying you alive in an unmarked grave, I thought inwardly, but said nothing.

‘Ehn? Edozie, what are you doing?’

Something about the look I gave her must have made her realise she was in mortal danger because she shrunk back from my burning stare, and visibly relaxed. When she spoke again her tone was softer, more respectful: ‘I’m just asking so that I wee know if you wee still eat this night.’

I didn’t respond. And she knew better than to press.

I made my Indomie in peace and wolfed it down like it was my last night on deathrow. It was only after I had finished eating that I remembered Miguel’s troubling short story on Walter’s blog.

The similarities between details from that story and Enkay’s account were disturbing at the very least, and it made me really curious. But then again, what were the odds that Miguel Chude was a homicidal psychopath, who like the textbook psycho specimen, feels invincible enough to document his kills; and that I, who had read his diary instalment, mistaking it for fiction, would just happen to know someone who had seen his victim’s lifeless body on the road where he had dumped it? It all just seemed too convenient.

I picked up my phone and pinged Walter.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE: http://dkstan28390./2014/06/09/disturbia-episode-ii-the-lair-2/