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The compound was silent. This was normal because everyone had gone out on their respective businesses, both honest and dishonest. The street where the house was located was equally quiet. The street was not a busy street to start with, and since it was a week day, it was even quieter. A car passed by occasionally, breaking the silence of the environment but the break was temporary. Once the vehicle passed, the silence descended like a heavy blanket once again.
Chilo yawned and stretched like a lazy cat on the floor. She rolled on her stomach and rested her chin on her folded arms. As much as she loved the solitude, sometimes the silence got to her. Lying on the battered settee in the other side of the living room, her three year old brother dozed fitfully. She and her brother were the only occupants in the compound. Her mother had gone to work while her older siblings were away at school. Her parents couldn’t afford her school fees so she had to stay behind and babysit her brother. She tried not to think too much about school and books. She had finished primary school the previous academic year. Mother told her not to worry, that Jss1 wasn’t at all what it was hyped to be. As soon as Daddy got a job, she would enrol in one of the best schools around, so she wasn’t to worry her little head about school and what not.
The problem was Mummy had been singing the same tune for a long time now. The first term of the new academic session had passed, the second term too, and now, the third term was almost rounding up and Mum was still saying the same thing. Well, she didn’t want to make too much of a big fuss about it. They were going through hard times, as Mother reminded them every minute. Most times, the family only ate when Daddy went out to go hustle. Mum was a teacher in a public primary school and to say her salary was peanuts was an understatement. Sometimes Mum didn’t go to work because she couldn’t afford the transport fare. Those days when she stayed home, she sat stone faced in the parlour and waited for Daddy to come home from his job hunting. A lot of the times Daddy came back home very late at night. As soon as he stepped into the house, Mum would ask “how far?” Daddy would wearily sink into the one of the raggedy arm chairs in the living room, sigh and reply “nothing yet”. Mummy would sit still for some minutes, silent and contemplative, then get up and grimly enter into the kitchen to go bring out whatever dinner she had been able to hustle up. On good days, dinner consisted of watery soup with tiny bits of crayfish floating around in the concoction and eba made from sour garri, the type people called Ijebu garri. Whether the garri was truly processed in Ijebu land, she never could tell. One day while grimacing and swallowing the hard mounds, she had asked her mother. Mother had simply told her to shut up and eat before her elder siblings, who were rushing the food, finished the eba. On bad days, dinner was a full cup of water.
Chilo yawned again, loudly enough to wake her brother. He stirred restlessly and went back to sleep.
Yesterday had been a good day. They had had jollof rice and fried fish for dinner. Whenever they had rice for dinner, it meant Mum had just been paid her salary. The salary usually didn’t last more than a few days, most of it going into settling into debts that had been incurred during the course of the previous month. “Give Nne Ebuka this money, tell her I am thanking her and it is for the dericas of beans and garri I bought from her last month”, or, “Here, go and give this money to that shylock Nasiru. Tell him it’s for the soap I bought last week”. Nasiru was the neighbourhood aboki. She didn’t particularly like him, ever since the day she had stood in the burning afternoon heat for thirty minutes pleading with him to sell her a bar soap worth ten naira. “Please sir, Mum will pay you tomorrow”, she had begged. And begged. And begged yet some more. Nasiru had ignored her and when her whining had become too much, he had ordered her to leave his presence, saying that when Mum had the money TOMORROW, she could come buy the soap. Eventually, tired of begging, she had gone back home. When she relayed Nasiru’s message, Mum had hissed with disgust and had gone rooting around the house for loose change. Eventually, Mum had come up with four naira fifty kobo and sent her back to Nasiru to buy Omo measured into nylons instead. They were going to use the detergent for bathing and washing, no matter how little the quantity was. It took another ten minutes of pleading with the unyielding trader to accept the four naira fifty kobo she bore because measured Omo was sold for five naira before the man had grudgingly accepted it and sold the detergent. How Chilo disliked him. Soap, sugar and sachet milk worth two naira and five naira respectively was all he was good for, she thought darkly.
The sound of the gate leading into the compound opening woke her from her reverie. She was a very imaginative child. Most times she lived in her head and had little use for friends. She could stay in her bed and walk to and fro the surface of the earth in minutes while twiddling her toes and drawing imaginary shapes with her stubby little fingers in the air. Mum often called her ‘Ogbanje’, because which normal, healthy, ten year old child would sit down facing the wall and staring into it like as if she was watching a very interesting cartoon, while her peers played under the moonlight? This incident had happened some months back. Mum just refused to understand that she hadn’t felt like playing with other noisy neighbourhood kids and the brick wall of the compound fence which hadn’t yet being cemented by the landlord held more fascination for her than playground games. She had rolled a piece of log hewn out of a fallen tree to the wall and sat on it, facing the wall. She had the used her eyes to trace funny patterns she imagined she saw on the bricks. That stone jutting out from that corner looked like bird poo. The joints between each brick looked like the patterns of strings from Mother’s hair net. She had been wondering where the agama lizards she saw darting into holes in the wall lived. Were their living quarters like the one she and her family shared? Did the lizards have chairs, a centre table and a television set? Did the lizards do That Thing, like she had seen her aunt and uncle doing when she had gone to spend the weekend with them the previous year? She had stared in open mouthed fascination through the key hole until, grunting heavily, uncle had rolled off aunty. Sweating, he had tied a towel around his waist and had been heading to the door where she stood hunched over the key hole like an evil monitor spirit. Suddenly remembering where she was, she had gathered her wits and fled to the room where her and her cousins slept. Uncle must have heard someone running because he had headed straight to their room. He had entered the room, swept the beam of the flashlight he held over the sleeping forms, lingering on her for what felt like HOURS in her fevered mind but in reality was most probably a few seconds, before finally clicking it off. Satisfied he had quietly closed the door and padded to the bathroom. Seconds later, she heard water running. How peculiar . . . She had ruminated on what she had witnessed, but something held her back from asking her parents later on because some how, deep down, she sensed that they might not like it.
She had been in the middle of her musings, her eyes still fixed on the wall when her Mum had walked out of house to take some fresh air. On sighting her still, small form sitting alone, facing the wall, Mum had asked her what she was doing alone all by herself while her mates played outside. Didn’t she want to play? Was she ill? Chilo had shrugged her shoulders noncommittally and resumed staring at the wall. Mum complained that she didn’t quite understand why Chilo always behaved like an Ogbanje child, and on seeing that the little girl refused to budge, had left her to her wall gazing.
Somewhere in the compound that she and her family shared with four other tenants and the caretaker, she heard a door open and close. Idly, she wondered who had come in. It was probably Prince, the caretaker. He usually came in and went out at all hours of the day. Everyone called him Prince. She had always assumed Prince was from a royal family, hence the name ‘Prince’, until the day she had seen him writing with charcoal on a piece of plywood “Prince of Electronics-The master Electrician”. He had been painting a new one because the old sign that hung on a sturdy stick driven into the ground outside the compound had faded off completely, that was why she had never noticed the words written on them.
Her feelings towards Prince were ambivalent. He could be charming, playing and jovially cracking jokes with everybody. Those were the times she liked him the most, the times when he made her mother laugh. Mother would relax and the hard lines on her face would smoothen out, allowing her beauty to shine through. Mum was very pretty when she wasn’t frowning and people often commented that she, Chilo, was the spitting image of her mother.
The times she disliked him were when he wanted things done in the compound and he gave directives like a petty dictator, but he never barked her way. If he wanted something done specially by her, he would hold her hands and whisper to her. Sometimes he held her by her buttocks, or when there was no one around, her b.r.e.asts. His touches made her uncomfortable but she didn’t know how to tell him to stop because she didn’t want to be disrespectful towards her Mother’s age mate. It often embarrassed her because her bre.a.s.ts were rather developed for a ten year old. Full, firm and jiggly. A nosy neighbour had called her mom some weeks back and advised her to buy Chilo a bra because “the child is maturing faster than her age”.
She hissed with irritation. Some people never minded their own business.
She sighed and looked up at the wall clock. It was 12.30pm. Time to go do the dishes. If Prince, who didn’t like the sight of dirty plates, saw the heaps of plates stacked untidily by the tap, he was bound to complain. Father had told her and her siblings not to give Prince cause for complaint because he was doing them a favour by allowing them stay on in the house without paying. Their house rent had long expired but since the landlord was not in the country, he could afford to give them a period of grace until they could find the money for rent. It was almost a year now and they were still ‘living under grace’. Yep, that was Prince alright, Mum often said when he was out of earshot, her mouth puckered like she was sucking on a lime, Tyrant Lord of Grace. O, we must never cross him, or the heavens will fall!
She dragged herself off the floor and headed to the back of the house where the tap was located. She had stacked the plates in an untidy heap by the wall and some had even rolled towards the centre of the compound. This was most likely the handiwork of her baby brother, who imagined himself some sort of soccer star. Another Rashidi Yekini in the making. He was very fond of kicking plates and cutlery around, and not even repeated ministrations from Mother’s Rod of Fire, as she called the hateful rubber hose mother used to trash her and sibs, discouraged him from kicking his way to his dreams, the crockery be damned!
With a sigh of frustration, she set about gathering the scattered dishes. It seemed the little brat had been at his element that morning, because the plates were scattered far and wide. She had just picked the last spoon where it lay in a corner covered with sand like something a lunatic had used to dig trenches, when she heard the door of the room behind her open. She stiffened. Prince lived in the boy’s quarters behind the main building, so it meant she was home alone with him. O shoot, she was going to be subjected to another question and answer session, spiced up with the occasional grope on the more sensitive areas of her anatomy.
“Good afternoon, Uncle Prince”, she greeted turning to face him. “Ehen, nwunyem, how are you?” he answered, smiling at her. This was another thing she disliked about him. She just wished he would stop calling her ‘nwunyem’, which means ‘my wife’ in Igbo language. The thought of being anybody’s wife embarrassed her greatly, and marriage to Prince, with his thick lips, muscular, hairy arms, dark, medicated aviator glasses and conk ‘igbotic’ accent was totally inconceivable. Let him go look for his age mate, she often thought angrily.
She expected him to come sit by her to chat, as he was very fond of doing, but strangely enough, Prince didn’t leave his door post. He stood there like a muscular, hairy apparition, watching her every move with a single minded focus that she found very unsettling. He didn’t utter a word, but stared and stared and stared. As she bent down to start washing the dishes, she was painfully aware that part of her young bosoms were showing through the top of the pinafore she wore. For the first time, she wished Mother had gotten her a bra, but how could she bother with such inconsequential things as female undergarments when they could barely feed?
Under Prince’s intense scrutiny, she washed the plates as quickly as possible. She didn’t want to remain pinned under those reptilian eyes that stared at her from behind semi-transparent lenses. She was gathering the dishes to take back to the house when he broke the silence.
“Nwunyem is anybody at home with you?” he casually asked her.
“Yes,” she replied, wondering why he was asking.
“Who?”
“Oliver”. Her brother’s name was Oliver.
“What is he doing?”
“I dunno o. I left him sleeping”
She lifted the basin containing the stacked dishes and was about to move to the main building when he called her back.
“Chilo, drop those plates here and come back, I want to talk with you”. Reluctantly, she dropped the basin by the tap and moved back. Prince left the door post and sat down on a bench that rested by the wall. He then motioned to her. “Come here,” he said, and stretched out one thick hand to her.
She hesitated, and then forced her feet to move forward. She stopped a few feet from him and waited expectantly. “Come closer,” he crooned softly. She unenthusiastically crossed the remaining feet and stood directly in front of him. “Why are you afraid? I won’t eat you”, he said, chuckling mildly. He took hold of her damp hands, turned her around and sat her down on his laps. His thighs felt unpleasantly stony beneath her buttocks.
“I don’t know why you are always very jumpy around me,” he began. “You have to learn to trust me, because I am your uncle and will never harm you”. Even as he was speaking, he was already rubbing her exposed knees gently. She wanted to ask him what family tie made him her uncle, but she was too discomfited by the hard hand massaging her knee, so she decided to save the question for a more convenient time.
He adjusted himself on the bench ,and between the time it took for her to inhale and exhale, his hand, like a slimy, insidious snake, slithered up her tummy and enfolded it itself on her right bre.a.s.t.
She shuddered . . . |
