I Do Not Come to You by Chance (11 page)

‘What is this?’ I asked.

‘Those are the things we need for your father’s care,’ she replied. ‘Any item you don’t find at the hospital pharmacy, you’ll have to go out and buy it from somewhere else.’

The list even included intravenous fluids!

‘Does the hospital not provide these items? Are they not part of the bill?’

‘Every patient is expected to buy their own.’

‘Let me see,’ my mother said.

I gave the list to her.

‘So what would have happened if he didn’t have any relatives here with him?’ I asked. ‘Who would have had to buy these things?’

‘We never admit any patient who is not accompanied by relatives.’

Irritation had assumed full control of her voice. The last thing I wanted was for someone whom I had entrusted with my father’s life to be angry with me over such a minor issue. My mother also seemed to share this thought. She handed back the list and surreptitiously poked my thigh. That was my cue to shut up.

The nurse tugged at some wires and peeked under my father’s clothes before exiting the room. As soon as the door clacked shut, my mother turned to me.

‘Kings, please hurry up and go to the house and get the cheque booklet for our joint account. It’s in my trunk box. Bring it immediately so that I can sign some cheques for you to take to the bank and withdraw some money.’

‘I’d like to wait and see the doctor before I go.’

‘Please, go now. You know they admitted us on trust.’

On my way out, I walked past a nurse who was pushing a squeaking wheelchair. The wheelchair was stacked with green case files.

 

The queue at the bank went all the way out the front door and round the back of the building. If only my parents would stop being conservative and transfer their accounts to one of the more efficient New Generation banks. Thereafter, I went straight to Ola’s house. Apart from all the questions I was eager to ask her, she needed to know that my father was ill. Plus, Ola’s hugs were like medicine, and every muscle in my body was sore.

As usual, Ezinne was pleased to see me. She unlocked the glass door and hugged me warmly. I waited in the living room while she went inside to inform her sister about my presence. Seconds later, she returned.

‘Brother Kings, Ola is not at home.’

I peered at her.

She stood there, pulling at her neatly woven cornrows and twisting her foot from side to side with her eyes fixed on the floor.

‘Ezinne, go back inside and tell Ola that I want to see her.’

She obeyed.

Ten minutes later, Ola came out dressed in an adire boubou and with an expression on her face like an irritated queen’s. She was accompanied by one of her friends from school. The girl bore some coquettish-sounding name which I had forgotten. Either Thelma . . . or Sandra . . . or one of those sorts of names. They greeted me and sat in the chairs opposite.

‘My father was admitted into hospital last night,’ I said. ‘He had a stroke.’

‘Stroke? How come? How is he?’

‘I’m on my way back to the hospital. I just wanted to see you first. How are you?’

I thought she might offer to come along with me. Suddenly, she became icy.

‘I’m fine,’ she replied in a voice that was well below zero.

‘I was surprised when I went to your school yesterday and they told me that you were in Umuahia.’

‘Yes, I am.’

Her answer sounded a bit off point. Nevertheless, I accepted it. She was wearing the same Dolce & Gabbana wristwatch of the other day. The former red strap had been swapped for a brown one that matched her Fendi slippers. Ola looked glum and rigid, like a pillar of salt.

‘Ola, are you OK?’

Her companion flicked some dirt - noisily - from one of her red acrylic talons. Ola took a deep breath.

‘Kingsley, I think we should both go our separate ways,’ she said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, there’s no future in this relationship.’

She spoke so fast, with her words bumping into each other. Yes, I heard the individual words, but I genuinely could not make out any meaning from what she had said.

‘Ola, what are you saying?’ I asked.

The other girl hijacked the conversation.

‘What essatly do you not understand? She has told you her mind and it’s your business whether you assept it or not.’

This tattling termagant, like many of her compatriots from Edo in the Mid-West region of Nigeria, had a mother tongue induced speech deficiency that prevented her from putting the required velar emphasis on her X sounds. They always came out sounding like an S. I ignored the idiot.

‘Ola, please let’s go somewhere private and talk . . . please.’

Ola tilted slightly forward as if she were about to stand.

‘Abeg no follow am go anywhere, jare,’ the termagant restrained her in her more typical Pidgin English. ‘Abi him hol’ your life?’

Ola sat ramrod straight again.

The termagant appeared to be the commandant of this mission. Abruptly, she stood up and nudged Ola. Their task was complete. They had dropped the atomic bomb. Ola stood. I wondered why she was allowing this Neanderthal to control her like this.

‘Kingsley, I need to go out now.’

I bent my knees towards the floor and reached out for her hand. ‘Ola, please . . . at least let’s go into the room and talk . . .’

I thought I saw a twinge of pain in her eyes, but it passed by so quickly that I may have been mistaken. She turned and walked quickly from the living room. Shortly after, she came out dressed in a brown dress, with the termagant following behind her. The scent of their combined perfumes invaded the atmosphere. Each molecule stank of good money. Without looking at me, they walked straight out of the house. I followed like an ass.

‘Ola . . .’ I called. ‘Ola.’

She did not even look my way. Any passerby could have easily mistaken me for a schizophrenic conversing with invisible KGB agents.

‘Ola, please just give me a bit more time.’

With me lurking at her side, they stood by the main road and hailed a passing
okada
.

‘Empire Hotel!’ the termagant shouted.

The daredevil driver did a maniacal U-turn and stopped with his engine still running. Ola climbed on as close to the driver as was physically possible, leaving just enough space for the termagant. When the driver had perceived that they had settled as comfortably as the laws of space would allow, he revved his engine and zoomed off.

It could have been the sorrowful eyes that she saw.

It could have been the gloomy aura that she perceived.

Whatever it was, as soon as I walked into the hospital with my father’s provisions, my mother knew that darkness had befallen her opara.

‘Kings . . . Kings . . .’ she whispered anxiously and jumped up. ‘What happened? What’s the matter?’

It felt as if a gallon of 2,2,4-trimethylpentane had been pumped into my heart and set alight with a stick of match.

‘Ola . . . Ola . . .’

When I was a child, we had watched a documentary on television about an East African tribe who spoke with clicks and gargles instead of real words. I used to imitate their chatter to amuse Godfrey and Eugene. Now I appeared to be talking the same language, the only difference being that I was not doing it to amuse anybody.

‘Kings, it’s OK,’ my mother interrupted. ‘Calm down, calm down.’

She led me to the second chair and held me against her chest. I closed my eyes and wept - softly, at first, then louder, with my head and shoulders quaking.

‘Kings,’ she said gently, after she had allowed me to cry for a while.

I sniffled.

‘Kings, look up.’

I wiped my eyes and obeyed. I did not look her directly in the face.

‘Kings, what happened with Ola?’

I narrated everything. I mentioned the trip to her school and the visit to her mother, not forgetting the termagant and the Dolce &

Gabbana wristwatch. From time to time, my mother glanced in my father’s direction, probably to check if my voice was bothering him.

‘Mummy, I don’t know what to do.’

I looked at her. She did not say anything. Pain was scrawled all over her face.

‘I don’t think I can live without Ola.’

‘Kings. Kings, if she doesn’t want you because you’re going through hard times, then she doesn’t deserve you. Any girl that—’

‘Mummy, what can I do?’ I cut in. I was not interested in grammar and grand philosophy.

‘Kings, I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but I don’t think you deserve the way she’s just treated you. If she can do this now, then—’

‘I think I should go and talk to her mother again. This is not like Ola at all. I’m sure—’

‘Kings . . . Kings . . .’

‘If I can just convince—’

‘Kings,’ she said firmly, ‘I don’t think you should bother. That stupid woman already treated you like a scrap of paper.’

My mother’s advice was definitely biased. She was not a fan of Ola’s mother. She claimed that the woman had seen her in the market one time and pretended as if she did not know her.

‘It doesn’t bother me,’ she had said of the incident. ‘I’m just telling you for the sake of telling you, that’s all.’

Yet she had narrated the same story to my father later that evening and to Aunty Dimma several weeks later.

‘But how do you know she saw you?’ Aunty Dimma asked.

That was the same question I had asked.

‘She saw me,’ my mother insisted. ‘I even called out to her and she just gave me a cold smile and kept going.’

That was the same answer my mother had given me.

‘How do you know she recognised you?’

‘Is it not the same woman who came to this house on Kings’s graduation day to eat rice and chicken with us?’

‘Tell me not!’ responded Aunty Dimma, the queen of drama.

My mother got fired up.

‘God knows that if not for Kings, there’s no place where that woman would see me to insult me. As far as I’m concerned, she’s nothing more than a hanging towel. I’m not even sure she went to school.’

‘I’ll go and see her again,’ I insisted now. ‘Maybe she didn’t think I was serious the last time I went to see her.’

‘Kings, I don’t think you—’

‘In fact, I’ll go today.’

‘Why not—’

The nurse walked in.

‘Have you brought the things on the list I gave you?’ she asked.

I suspended my grief and searched around. The carrier bag with the items I had purchased on my way to the hospital was lying beside a deceased cockroach by the door.

 

Straight from the hospital, I went to the pepper-soup joint. Ola’s mother was busy attending to customers. She scowled when she spotted me, but said I could wait until she was free. If I wanted to.

As was usual for that time of evening, most of the white plastic chairs, clustered around white plastic tables, were fully occupied. The place was bustling with the sort of men who liked places like this and the sort of women who liked the company of men who liked places like this. There were giggling twosomes and jolly foursomes, there were debauched young girls and lecherous old men, with a variety of lagers and soft drinks, and cow and chicken and goat pepper soups served on wooden dishes or in china bowls. I recognised one of my father’s former colleagues. I wondered if the man had told his wife where he would be hanging out tonight.

My father never ate out. No respectable Igbo married man would leave his house and go outside to buy a meal to eat. It was irresponsible, the ultimate indictment on any wife - ‘di ya na-eri hotel’. Take my Aunty Dimma, for example. Long before she separated from her husband, moved to Port Harcourt, and subsequently became a religious fanatic, she was considered as one of the most incompetent wives to have ever been sent forth from my mother’s whole extended family. Generally, she was a lovely woman. She was kind, helpful, always the first to turn up and support us, even if we were simply mourning a wilted plant. But my father once commented to my mother that it was a miracle for anyone to remain married to her and not lose control of themselves.

Where could a husband start in recording matrimonial complaints against her?

She always left home in the morning before her husband and did not return before him.

She had wanted to employ a cook even when he had made it quite clear that he wanted to eat only meals she herself cooked.

She was always arguing with him about what was appropriate for her to wear and what was not. Once, she even insisted on wearing a pair of trousers to accompany him to a meeting of his townspeople.

Aunty Dimma had also been known to openly slight her husband and despise his role as head of the family. Like the time when she had gone ahead and bought herself a car even after her husband had insisted that she should continue using public transport until he was able to afford to buy the car for her by himself.

Despite all this, the most obvious sign that the marriage was in trouble was when the embittered man started eating out. Matters degenerated from that point onwards. Once or twice, my parents and relatives collectively reprimanded him for raising his hand to strike her. But behind closed doors, they all marvelled that he could stop at one or two slaps.

Sixty-five minutes later, Ola’s mother was still too busy to see me. Choosing to believe that she had forgotten, I walked up to where she was giving one of her girls an instruction by the counter and gently tapped her.

‘Mama . . .’

She looked at me and scowled.

‘You can see that I’m busy, eh?’

‘Mama, I promise it won’t take long.’

She glanced at her silver-strapped wristwatch. It looked brand new. And the stones looked valid, too. She was also wearing a narrow, glitzy bracelet with a matching necklace and pendant.