She couldn’t believe her eyes. This ongoing episode of a danfo zoom-swerving the bend of the street, startling her into tossing the birthday cake up in the air — all of that and more — most certainly was not jazz. This she knew. But nothing seemed more like fantasy than watching her cake do an impressive death drop in the middle of Adeniran Ogunsanya Street. The cake for which she paid a 4500-naira taxi fare from Ikorodu! Talk less of the staggering amount she coughed up for the cake itself. How would she now confirm the legend of this famous baked heaven — crusted with a chocolatey peanut purée, iced with vanilla- and strawberry-flavoured whipped cream, and finished off with toppings of diced cherry aplenty — when it was now like roadkill in the middle of the street? Just before tears started welling in her eyes, it happened, that common, desperate urge to unleash honest words of provocation.
But she stopped herself, choosing patience instead. The well-strung chain of Yoruba curse words poised on her lips, she knew, would never be vociferated after the idiot. A simple lesson she had learnt the hard way. But, nearby, recharge card sellers and vulcanisers were bursting with generosity. Who knows, her reservedness might even have been the Power Horse energising their busy bodies.
“Ahn ahn! Olori buruku!”
“Ko ni da fun e o!”
“Abi oju eleyi ti fo tan ni?!”
The raining curses of “It won’t be well with you, blind idiot!” made her feel worse. So she peeled her eyes off the receding yellow bus and planted them on the brown mush that used to be her cake. Then, the growing heat of shame that had begun in her cheeks, started to spread to the rest of her face and body. The feeling reminded her of wild fires. And then also of that other shameful day 7 years before this.
“…verything all right?” The troubled voice of the cashier at the confectionery shop lassoed her back into the present. “Are you okay? Hope you di’n wound sha.” Her name tag read Anna.
“Wuh…? Um…no, I’m fine,” She managed to mutter.
Her disorientated swaying threw Anna’s mouth wide open, “Ah! Sister, you’re not fine o! Oya, oya, please come inside.” Anna turned to a twenty-something-looking woman close by, whose fastening eyes had quickly forgotten their task of hunting a shoemaker.
“My sister, abeg — ”
“Ah! Lemme help you. Oya, sister, put your hand like this…” Very quickly, the lady gave in to sympathy; or rather, gave in to Anna, to that mostly irritating, overbearing personality that we only come to appreciate in critical moments like this, for its laudable display of control.
“Ehen, God bless you, my sister.”
A few minutes after Anna and the other lady — “Ruki,” she’d repeated three times in her hoarse, whispery voice — had helped Her into the shop and into a chair, she stayed cradling her face in her hands, reliving the moment again and again.
“And we’re completely out of Chummy California o. Chai!” Anna’s recited words always ended the thought stream.
This time, though, She drew in one long, decisive sniff, and sat up, wiping her eyes dry. The cake was gone. And there was nothing that could be done. Anna had made that a little too clear in fluctuating tones of pity and plain exasperation, her colleagues saying very little under Anna’s seeming superiority. It wasn’t till very much later that She realised that no customer came in throughout the 25 minutes she was there. (Ruki had left after fifteen minutes reciting, “Sister, it’s enough now, please don’t cry again,” in more versions than She could remember.)
There was obviously no other shop selling a cake this much munched talked about. For, of course, that’s exactly where she would have been. She picked her wrist a fifth time, this time really checking the time. Thirty-two minutes to six! O dear!
She stood up. “I… I’m sorry for being an inconvenience. And, em, thank you for helping me out there.”
Fixated on the chair, Her swollen eyes avoided Anna’s. After searching and finding no other words to say, she repeated her thanks and made her way out of the shop. The cake was now no less than a dozen dreary lines of tyre tracks.
She sighed.
It wasn’t long before she got a cab and was on her way to Ember Creek in Ikoyi. In an hour’s time, she should feel much better. Okay, how about some poetry? she thought to herself. She could always rely on the calm writing poetry brought. So she took out her tablet and started to write.
* * *
Her name is Alero.
There is fire. Everywhere, there is fire. Her limp, bruised, sixteen-year-old body awakens to the suffocating billows. She is too tired to scream help. But she tries anyway. The first time, she feels the piercing ache in her rib and knows it’s no use.
Still, she tries. She won’t give up. She can’t give up.
She tries again. The pain is more cerebral this time, so she groans. A third. And the pain of bruised ribs heighten now. She feels it all over, starting from her head, rushing by the millisecond down the rest of her body, her body stiffening in terrifying agony. She opens her mouth, her lungs retracting wildly, then letting out the biggest yelp it possibly can.
Fire fighters are here now. The fires are fierce and hell-bent, but the fighters have gusto. And that do they have in abundance.
She is safe. But…
The doctor says she suffers major trauma to her arm. The one she’s used to protect her face from the guys who mercilessly beat on her. Her right hand. Her writing hand. “We may need to remove it,” he tells her parents in his thick Italian accent.
They begin to wail.
“But only depending on how serious it is,” the doctor adds. But that is no hope to them. How can it possibly be? Aren’t the burns and bloody bruises apparent enough?
Alero remembers everything. Not immediately after she came to, of course. But not long after. She remembers how they kept saying, “So you think you got words, eh, smart mouth? After we’re done with you, you’ll wish you’d stayed in that zoo you call a country.” They were all men. Italian, all 5 of them.
She remembers being absolutely confused. She has been indoors all day, feigning cramps. She would have joined the rest of the family, but she really just hates spending her summer waltzing around silly Europe, when her boyfriend Priye is back home in Lagos, lonely. She cries. Her parents see her, they think she’s overheard the doctor’s words. They rush over in tears. They cradle her comfortingly.
No one will be apprehended for this.
They all know.
* * *
She awoke to the cab driver retorting, “Sister o! Wake up, abeg! Which side for Awolowo Road?”
Her brain’s GPS quickly finished rebooting. “Over there, Number 32.”
She paid the cab driver, stepped out, and checked her watch before walking into Ember Creek. She already began to feel at ease. She had that new poem to prove it.
That first day I walked into Ember Creek, hers was the first face my eyes laid eyes on. But I would never know the deepest things which that face locked away in its charming smile.
After some awkward silences, I said my name.
“…Oluwatobi,” I said. She told me hers, then asked what I did. “I sing.” Then she asked me to sing something. I did. And her response was simple. Enchanted. And it was that enchantment alone that got me through my opening act, when Freedom Hall started at 7 pm.
That evening, on her way home, in the retro-yellow Lagos taxi, Paul, her fiancé, would call.
“Babe, hope you feel much better now.” Without letting her respond, he would add, “And if you don’t, I have something that will make you.”
She would hear the anxious smile in his voice and say suspiciously, “Love, you know I hate surprises. Just tell me.”
“Okay, just this once, since I actually care.” He would laugh. “I’m outside your house now. And I have in my hands, some delicious Chummy California.” A titter would follow.
She, on the other hand, would gasp, “You’re lying, Paul! Tell me you’re joking.” The driver’s head would shoot up in the rear-view mirror.
“For real, Babes.”
She wouldn’t believe her ears. She would then do some dance moves. Some of the new ones her little sister had been teaching her. No Alingo though; She absolutely hated P-Square.
When she would get home, she would race to the front door and through it into the living room. She would jump on Paul, he twirling her round, and then end the routine in a passionate kiss. During the kiss, she would think of the Eiffel Tower. She would think of Paris, which would make her remember Europe.
She would look up, Alero would be sitting on the sofa.
“Gosh! You guys, get a room already,” Alero would joke, making playful, kiss-faces.
She would still be messing around when her boyfriend Priye would emerge from the kitchen behind her, the cake balanced nicely on his upturned hands. She would know Paul had used his influence to somehow make this happen, to magically conjure Alero’s favourite dessert in all of the world! But that wouldn’t be what would fill her mind now. Forgiveness would be. A super kind. Alero’s kind.
“Happy 23rd birthday, Sis!” She would sniff, embracing Alero tightly, and then lovingly caress the scarred stump that used to be her little, look-alike sister’s right arm. “I love you, baby girl!”
Who Be Tobi? 