BEGINNINGS

It was always the same each time I walked into Campus Sheraton. All eyes were on me. The lights were dim but my eyes quickly adjusted to the darkness. A necessary skill for survival in this jungle I had thrown myself headlong into. There were different tables with different sets of boys and few girls. My people sat at the usual corner and had sighted me the moment I walked in. There were 5 boys and 2 girls at the table. Drinking and smoking. I walked over as people at other tables stared at me. Predator and prey I was.

A chair had been pulled out for me before I even got there. Yes… I was that important. I shook hands with everybody then lowered my lanky frame on the chair. I looked at everyone there. Apart from the 2 girls there who I didn’t particularly know, these were my people. Tony ‘Enshin’, Emma ‘Soco’, Gattuso, Cigar-cigar, and Paul ‘tortoise’. There were packs of cigarettes on the table so I took a stick of Benson and Hedges and lit up. As I slowly inhaled and exhaled, they just looked at me smiling. Tortoise called one of the girls serving to get me a bottle of big stout. As my right hand man, he knew just what I needed.

Since the ban of sales of alcohol and cigarettes inside UNIBEN by the new Vice Chancellor Professor Anao, Campus Sheraton was the only place that still sold such inside campus. It was a restaurant with space behind where the drinking and smoking took place. Sadly, those weren’t the only things that took place there. The truth was that if you were not a made man, you could not sit there. It was the focal point of all fraternity activities inside campus. It was the place where the men that mattered in each fraternity in campus hung out to affiliate with brothers and reason together with the influence of alcohol while hoping to get scraps of information from other tables. As expected, few conflicts could arise but where always quickly quelled.

“Sparrow wetin de play? E get as you take de this evening.”

I smiled wryly and looked at Tortoise. I knew why he asked as I wasn’t my usual talkative self. The rest guys just looked on as they knew me enough to know that my silence was often a harbinger of problems to them. Truth was Tortoise and I were not supposed to even be sitting with them if protocol was to be observed. They were men who had already made name at Ugbowo when we were still in secondary school. But from the moment we became brothers, our pair was so troublesome and stubborn that they had little choice but to bring us nearer to the upper echelon. We were termed ‘potential worthy tools of the brotherhood’. I didn’t really care to analyze what they meant. All I knew was that I had mouth in the campus.

Hmm..sumhw folowin