BROKEN THINGS
Isieke remembers the first time she went to
a party, the loud music and stuffy air filled with the stench of alcohol and
sweat and bodies touching in ways they should not touch so publicly. She
remembers struggling to breathe and struggling to understand rhythm, she was
fourteen. There was so much she didn’t yet understand about the world, but so
much she already did.
Now she sits in a bar, dancing colours shape themselves like a kaleidoscope as they wash over her. She sits alone, waiting but not really waiting. She thinks of broken glasses and stuffy rooms, she thinks of thrill and excitement, she thinks of herself at fourteen and wonders if people come back again like her grandfather used to say. If she could come back again as herself but not relieve the life she had lived.
“Excuse me, do I know you?” She turns towards the voice, clutching the drink in her hand stiffly. He is tall, Lebron James tall. She inhales the expensive smell of perfume on his skin and inspects the fabric of his chequered dress-shirt and smiles.
“Maybe. it is really a small world and I have a bad memory with the infrequent things in my life.”
He chuckles, it is deep and throaty and
masculine. “Hi I’m Victor.” He says.
“Isi.”
“Lovely name. are you here alone? Because
it is hard to imagine a beautiful girl like yourself sitting alone in a place
like this.”
“I actually came here with my friend but I haven’t seen her for almost an hour so it is safe to say she’s ditched me.”
“So, you’ve been alone?”
“I’ve had company and conversations but none of them have lasted this long.”
“Well now you’re just sweet talking me.” He laughs, the tiny crinkles at the corner of his eyes are endearing and Isieke wondered why she was staring at the entrance instead of the beautiful man in front of her. She wonders where Lydia had gone to, if she was okay and then she thinks of herself in secondary school, how she had always been the one too sceptic to dance, too sceptic to mingle and always wondering about Lydia and she felt like she was fourteen again. The worst part was that she wished she didn’t feel this way, yet she couldn’t shake it no matter how hard she tried.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the beautiful man with skin as brown as cocoa and voice as smooth as jazz. “I have a test tomorrow and I really need to get back home. I’m sorry.”
“Oh.” He looks disappointed, and slightly irritated. Isieke wonders if it was the fact that she was a student that slighted him more than the fact that she was leaving.
“Can I give you a ride?”
“I came with my car.”
“Then can I at least have your number?”
“Why don’t you give me yours instead, I promise I’ll call.”
He smiles crookedly as he hands it to her.
“Please call.”
“It was nice meeting you Victor.” She hurries out of the bar, tugging at the hem of her dress which was barely reaching mid-thigh.
Outside, she calls Lydia who picks up after the fourth ring and says she’s spending the night at Lanre’s. Isieke does not know who Lanre is and she does not ask. She drove to her apartment thinking about her first cup of alcohol and how she had vomited profusely and woken up the next morning with the gut-wrenching stench of dried vomit and stale alcohol. She thought about things that mattered and things that did not. Of the green-mossed wall in the backyard of her childhood home, of silence and laughter. Of rains and old wells, of life and death.
Isieke was Fourteen when her father left her mother for another woman. It was before she started partying and drinking and vomiting in the mornings. He had never truly loved her mother he had said, theirs had been a marriage of convenience, arranged because it had been necessary then. But now he could marry for love. Love? What did love mean? She hated him for this, she hated him for love, a thing that was supposed to be good yet could cause so much pain. She hated him because she blamed him for her mother’s anger.
As she lays in bed, she picks up her purse and inspects the card, it is crisp and holds the sharp detailing of corporate business life and wealth. She would not call, she knows this. It would end up in the same place as with all the others. She knows she will never know love but she mocks it by asking it to find her. Sometimes she believes in compensation, hers is her beauty perhaps. A thing so undeep yet apparently powerful and she was angry that she weighed it as she did. It is with the same anger she held on to life. A distant anger that searched for hidden places to lurk and empty places to consume.
A few months later when school vacates for the end of session holiday, she goes to her mother in PortHarcout. It is raining when she arrives at Mandu street, slanting silver ropes slamming into the loose earth like cannon fodder, ploughing the already deeply entrenched gullies. The wild overgrown garden in the backyard is full of whisper and the scurry of small lives. Her mother held her deeply as they shared an embrace. They talk about small things. Where Mama Chidinma went after her shop burnt down. Who was dead, how many times it had rained that week, but they never talked about her father. It hung in the silence and small talk and bank credit alerts like white chalk on blackboard.
There are things that shape a person,
little by little they gather and chisel and smooth and mend until something
once circle has become square. Isieke felt that way about her father’s choice
to leave them. It had broken and chiselled and smoothed her and her mother in
different ways only that they hadn’t mended. They would never be the people
they were before it all happened. But sometimes she wonders If marriage was
supposed to be the absolute for a person, if one was supposed to know they
would spend their entire lives loving the same person. And she wants to believe
that her father’s only mistake was the consequence of his decision which he could
have only controlled by staying.
Isieke was fourteen when she got pregnant, it was only a few weeks to her fifteenth birthday. She remembers the taste of fear and despair and anticipation on her tongue like courage alcohol. She had not understood what it meant to carry a child in her womb for nine months, she had not even understood what it meant to have a womb until she was pregnant. She had just started senior secondary school one at the time, she stopped going to school. She remembers Lydia coming to the house in her wine-red and white uniform and telling her pregnancy wasn’t that difficult, although an abortion would have been easier and less consequential. Her sister had had an abortion after all, so she knew. But Isieke’s mother was a devout Catholic, she would not hear of an abortion. So Isieke carried the bulging weight of a child growing inside her for seven months until she would have a miscarriage.
She remembers sitting on the veranda starring at the fireflies that wheezed past with their glowing behinds, and listening to the crickets singing songs of things unknown. She remembers a few of her friends from the neighbourhood and Lydia sitting beside her. ‘Sorry’ they said. ‘God knows best.’ ‘It must have been painful’ ‘at least now you can come back to school.’ Isieke had sat there amidst all the murmurs and subtle laughters and she had wondered if these people did not know how happy she was that the child had not lived and how she felt guilty for her happiness. She would never wear the red-wine and white uniform again. Things had chiselled.
Inside their spacious house with high ceilings and tall walls that attempted to keep things in, Isieke was amused by how much of everyone’s business went outside those tall walls.
“Isieke, come help with the vegetables, I gbo”
Her mother cooks coconut rice and vegetable stew with catfish on the brand new Scanfrost stove her father sent for Christmas, a meal that reminds her about how things were before she was fourteen. Of laughter and meaningless tears. Of Super Eagles games and family devotion. Of broken silences and empty words. Of the things Isieke knows she will never know again. Thinking on these things, there had been no sign of her father’s unhappiness. He would dance with a woman he said he didn’t love and smile as he held her? Perhaps her mother’s kinswomen were right, maybe the other woman had used charms tied in red cloths and pubic hair to entrap her father. But it did not matter anymore, it did not matter now. She watches her mother as they eat, her eyes hollow and wandering. There was a time when Isieke used to think she was the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, now she is offended by her as she was.
The night is clear, but bathed with indolence and brooding expectation. Isieke and her mother watch a Colombian soap opera on the flat screen hung on smooth white wall. There is a lot of kissing and sexual hunger and dramatic tears. Her mother is smiling at something a man with a draw-in moustache just said, Isieke watches her.
“Mma,”
“Hmm?” she does not look away from the television, from the olive-skinned people with long straight hair and colourful eyes.
“We should travel.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere from here.”
“When?” She looks away from the television, at her daughter, a residual smile hanging lazily on her lips and eyes full of longing and hope. Isieke knew how much havoc time had cost them both and she hangs on to that glimmer of hope in her mother’s eyes.
“Ochi.” Tomorrow.
Hi, this story isn’t as lengthy or detailed
because I had expected a couple of true life accounts from you guys in my inbox
but sadly I got only one and she barely gave me anything beyond and I quote. “Gets
pregnant and has a miscarriage at fourteen after father leaves to marry another
woman.” Every other detail has
been provided by myself through sheer imagination in under a couple of hours
before posting this, I am grateful from the seeming well of creativity that ran
as I wrote this and also to the lovely young woman who gave me this story to tell.
Do realise that this segment would not
thrive without your contributions and if you have no story to send me do tell
your friends, your siblings, your relatives and anyone you can about this
platform so they can participate.
Thanks for your continued support and I
hope you are touched by this story as I was. Ahinya.
3 comments
Wow, creative writing at it's best. I think I will have to send the description of my story soon, can't wait to see how you will be able to pull off an intriguing piece as this.
ReplyDeleteThanks Patrick, I'm glad you enjoyed it, I can't wait to share your story and I am deeply humbled by your kind words.
ReplyDeleteFinding out what you had to work with at the end makes me just wanna start clapping............ unfortunately I'm in a public area and I'd rather not be thrown out so I'll just say Ékúśhe
ReplyDeleteEager to hear your thoughts!