A year. Then she could take no more. Even when I begged. In my fifteen-year-old imagination, I’d already carved out a future for all of us. For better for worse. But she had seen enough. In the beginning, I wanted to leave. After twelve months, she wanted to leave.
So, on the 19th of August 2017, we moved. It was during the day. Bright, sunny, for all the neighbours to see. Favour and I nearly broke our backs carrying our sofas down the stairs. Mummy carried all she came with. The curtains, the bed, and even the malfunctioning generator. He hadn’t returned from work, but some of his children were around. Love even helped with the packing. Aworan was crying. Eli, the two-year-old baby, looked lost and curious. Big Faith had taken Hope to a prayer camp. I wished they were around to see that our existence didn’t depend on that monster they called their father.
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Mummy had hired a truck to move our things, but when the movers saw him approach, they halted and requested permission from him to continue. He gave a tired nod. He called Mummy upstairs. I stayed close by, in case he tried anything funny like in the books. She came back, shaking her head.
I went back downstairs. Love came seconds later, holding a loaf of bread.
“Daddy said do you want bread?”
I could have said no. The bread could have been charmed. Poisoned. Cursed.
I gorged my mouth with it, though. Your curse can’t do me anything.
As a parting gift, I gave Love my crocheting pin. I left my book, Everywoman, which I had bought with my hard-earned savings, for Big Faith. I left Hope nothing, I guess. Since I do not remember, it means I left her nothing.
We got into the truck and it coughed to life. I looked back and Love was crying. The most real tears I had seen since I met her.
I didn’t cry back.
In the truck, Mummy told me in Yoruba, “Right was crying real water from his eyes. He was now begging me saying, ‘Who will take care of my children?’ Am I a nanny?”
I almost laughed.
The truck drove us to that church Mummy went to weeks ago before she was admitted into the hospital. Perhaps the hospital was the last straw.
******
Mummy dumped all our belongings at the church.
“I need lati kuro leko patapata.” We need to leave Lagos completely. A pastor had instructed her. “So, it’s either Abuja or Port Harcourt.”
O…kay.
On Sunday 20th August 2017, we travelled to Abuja. I told mummy if she waited till Monday, the traffic would be suffocating. But I was scared.
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At the park, we bought awful plates of rice and ate. I remember vividly. Mummy said she added the meagre alimony to the money her friend in Dubai sent to her so we could abscond. We’d only packed essentials. The bed and other major furnishings were left at the church. Later my mum’s elder brother would go and move them to his place. They would rot there.
As the bus drove, I thought, we are leaving the hub. Mummy might have made plans, but I was uncertain.
We arrived at Abuja past 2 a.m. It was raining. Her cousin sent a taxi to pick us up at the park. His apartment was nice, except for the toilet. He was generous, stuffing the refrigerator with local thick, unsweetened, yoghurt. He bought Kilishi, that spicy beef jerky, and Coconut bread. We ate like kings. I was relieved, till Mummy said we were moving.
“He reported me to his mother, that I came to abandon children with him. But he knows I’m working.”
Mummy had gotten a job at a hotel. So she usually worked the night shift, over days, coming home rarely. Perhaps Uncle Rayo felt burdened. We had large appetites, after all. Or maybe we crowded his space in his room and parlour self-con.
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Then our reality crashed. When you stay with family, you don’t know how poor you really are till you move into your own apartment. The lines were beginning to crack between mummy and Uncle Rayo, so she began apartment hunting.
We moved in September, after my birthday. September 29th, I think. From Karu to Mararba.
No need for big words. I just sighed when I saw our true reality; what mummy could really afford. They called it Round Compound. A large expanse of land with round huts in a circle, within another set of round huts in a circle. Each hut was divided into two rooms which were rented separately. Rusted corrugated iron sheets. Cold cement floors. Dirty short children running about, stones nicking their feet. Women gossiping loudly, then softly when the matter concerned someone close. Someone carrying a stained potty to a toilet.
I wanted to swallow the sun.
My two brothers were enrolled in a school nearby. I wanted to cry when Mummy almost went on her knees just so they would accept my brothers without the school fees.
“I will pay, I promise I will pay.”
“That is what most parents say. They say they will pay, but after the term, they take their children elsewhere without paying the school fees.”
We had done that many times. And I was sad because I knew we would do it again.
And we did. After Favour wrote his Junior WAEC, we moved to Statehouse, Ruga. Whilst owing school fees. Since my father left before Flourish was born, we have been changing schools every year. I changed school every year from Primary three till I graduated. Every year, because house rent expired every year, we had to move every year.
Just one month after turning fifteen, I began job hunting. Our situation forced me to be confident. Then, I didn’t think of it as suffering. I still don’t think of it as suffering. It’s just that my mates with whom I had graduated were not trekking from Mararaba to Nyanya, entering every shop, plaza, and restaurant, dropping phone numbers in search of a job.
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I entered a cybercafé to type my CV. The woman looked quite tired with life, from the way she dragged herself to put on the generator, to the depressed sluggishness of her voice. I went back to the plaza I was asked to submit my CV. The man said he didn’t need a sales girl but boarded two bikes and took me to a plaza inside Abacha Road. We entered a children’s boutique. Wow. I had to turn down the job, though. The pay was 12,000 and Mummy said no. Considering transportation.
She told me to go back to the cybercafé. To learn how to use the computer. Something most kids learnt at home or in their secondary school. Mummy scraped sweat to pay the 15,000 Naira in pieces. The first good deed my tutor did for me that day, Tuesday, 10th October 2017, was to send me to the hair salon in the opposite lane. I came back with my forehead eyeing the sun.
Suffering builds. Hardship straightens.
This Creative Nonfiction was published in the September 2022 edition of the WSA magazine.
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