THE LEAP2

PART 2

(Short story)

The morning was cold and even the sun was still in bed. Akubuike sat on the old scruffy back seat of an old Peugeot 504 saloon car which served him as his bed. He is dirt poor. He is motionless and lost in thought. The only sign of life in the room are the sound of mice nibbling on something in the corner of the small room, and the cold breeze which played with his slacked shabby white singlet with a dusty brown map of his chest from the fall. A Gale of thought hovers through his mind.

Body aching, stomach rumbling and head pounded like a talking drum- he knows this is a hangover. His father is an alcoholic and sometimes his mum had to send either him or ije to bring him home from the bar down the street. Ndulue was popular for his big grammar. He became jobless after the Enugu state government shed off non-indigenes from their pay roll. He moved with his family, away from the staff quarters 12years ago to the slum in ugboye, and after so many years gave up hope on employment. He manages to make enough money to pay for half of his daily booze from his vulcanizing spot at the junction and apparently enjoyed a credit facility with no limit at Mama Adaugo’s beer parlour, from where he accumulates debts. All his evenings were spent at mama Adaugo’s bar discussing and dissecting the government of the day and its selfish corrupt policies, stories of the first and second Republic, or the myth of the failed ideal Biafran State; whose course he fought for alongside his comrades, and some other equally passionate topics like is football. He apparently memorizes every moment of every game, and to the delight of both young and old he demonstrates certain movements in his analyses. Akubuike hardly had enough change to spare for watching any game. He is a bus conductor. Despite his good grades in SSCE, he spends his day clinging dangerously to the door of different commercial danfo buses shouting his voice out to the near and far to attract passenger plying through his popular old-park route.  All his earnings he contributes to his family's support and to offset some of he’s father's bills whenever Mama Adaugo comes storming-in in her usual hurricane manner with her sons to collect her money.

Aku loves football, so he make up for the games he’d missed it by listening to his father while he entertained, narrating events and argued statistics about the games played and yet to be played at the bar. Aku has become so attached to Chelsea FC in the English premiere league, irrespective of the fact he know next to nothing about them. Most of his friends claimed to be fans too. Once he was laughed to scorn when he wore a shirt with the name Robben crested on it. He never saw him play before or how he looked, but to belong, he bragged about his awesome performance in their last game, ignorant of the fact that the player left the club a few years ago. He was never really forgiven for that mistake, the name Robben stuck to him as a nickname among his peers.

The day before was one of those days when Ndulue talked soccer. It was 9:30 pm and the moon had assumed its post when Akubike set out to bring his father home. While waiting for the father to summarize, he was offered a beer by a man in the audience who wanted the entertainment to go on a little longer. He pulled out a seat and sat to it. From one bottle to a few more he went, soon he became stone drunk. It took Ije and her drunken father about half an hour to carry him home at a few minutes after midnight. A journey a strolling young couple would have completed in 10 minuets on a flower field. They both had their bowels and intestines emptied all over her. A flush with a full bucket of water welcomed them before they stepped inside, courtesy of Mama Aku, his mother. 

They all live in one of the streets by the edge of the notorious slum neighborhood in Abakpa overrun by zinc shacks and hovels. In the infamous ‘face me-I-Face you’ setup that the area is known for, they occupy two rooms. Half of one Akubuike’s mother used as her food mart, the other half as kitchen. The second serves as the living area containing the seat where Aku slept, a rolled up blue nylon mat leaning on the corner for ije surrounded by a cluster of battered plastic buckets and jerry cans, and the old foam which used by their parents is folded to a corner to provide room for the day. They are first in the row of rooms whose rusty roofs inclined towards the opposite door, both donating to the narrow drainage with no definite boundary in the middle. The entire rooms in the building all shared the same bathroom and toilet.

The only neat and painted building in the scruffy brown neighborhood is the bungalow occupied by Mma and her family. Her parents both work for the community bank at the bus stop. Being the richest in the poor slump, Akubuike thought her father rode a very high horse and had plagued his entire family with his hubris syndrome with his irrational intention of wiping the poverty mentality off his children’s eyes. Poor Mma being the only daughter and the last in the stack of five ‘well behaved’ children isn’t spared in her father’s iron hands of discipline. Akubuike feels Mma also has a soft spot for him but wouldn’t dare to show it for the sake of peace at home.

Religion is a pinnacle of Akubuike’s household, as Roman Catholics, his mother made morning mass attendance a routine that must be strictly adhered to. Despite Ndulue’s heavy drinking, he never woke up late for it, and would never condone absence from any one either. Akubuike doesn’t enjoy this and would always comply grudgingly as it wasn’t in his attitude to disobey his folks.

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It is 7:23 a.m. and Akubuike steps out through of the St. Theresa’s main exit leading the slow moving crowd dragging their feet, and jabbering as they disintegrated into smaller groups to their various destinations. He was late to church, and had spent the last 15 minutes watching his mum and ije dance, gleefully swing their hips uniformly to the music played by the choir. Thoughts hovered waved through his head like a swarm of bees around sweet nectar, but he thought about nothing in particular. He didn’t hear the music play, the bees must have knocked off every note played and every word sang. The dream is still fresh in his memory, and the clarity isn’t helping him get a glimpse of the beautiful morning. He strolled aimlessly, adrift in thoughts.

His hangover has eased off and he breaths better, the pains from the fall still lingering. The time is 8:35 a.m., he has spent has wondered off physically and in though. Returning to the park, he has missed his bus to the hands of a fortunate early-bird conductor. He waits for another bus to hop on and fetch money for the day. Fruitless. This is his first time miss a bus for the day’s work, and a bad time too. Ije is the family’s hope for a ray of sunlight. His mum nurses the idea that when Ije finishes school and get a good job, she will attract worthy suitors, rich suitors who will elevate the family from the sludge. Aku believes that too and works tirelessly to achieve this dream for Ije and his beloved mother. Ije is pretty, smart, and still very young. Everyone looks forward to her being a lawyer or something great. The fantasy began to fade when Ije spent two years at home after her SSCE due to lack of funds to pay for her JAMB exams to gain admission into the university. This is the fourth year now, and she had turned 22 and had successfully passed her JAMB and was shortlisted for admission to study for a degree in law Ibadan. At last, something to cheer up for. Their joy was only short-lived when she came back from Ibadan with her school requirements. She was asked to pay fifty thousand naira (N50, 000) to secure her admission and a host of other payments amounting to  a hundred and twenty thousand naira (N120,000.00), putting aside personal funds for accommodation and feeding since her school is hundreds of kilometers away in the western part of Nigeria. The only have until the end of October to pay the fees, leaving them only six weeks complete all the necessary payments. The family has exhausted all their borrowing options to pay the rent which had been pending for two years, and they still had a year’s payment to complete or risk eviction. 

His father cares little or nothing about the situation, he simply wanted her to get married off and ‘get the hell out of the house’. Haven taken it upon himself to raise the funds for Ije, Aku has built up a personal saving of almost forty-five thousand naira N45, 000 from the seven hundred and fifty Naira N750 daily contributions which he banks with the Akawo daily, and the Four thousand five hundred naira (N4, 500) hidden in the broken ceiling at home, and cannot afford to take his foot off the pedals now. His mother little effort sums up to feeding the family and nothing more.

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It is 10o’clock and thoughts have brought the headache, and his legs hurt from standing. He walks out from the busy liberty park and into the less hovered Iseke Street. There in front of a little construction site, he sat on a bench under the shed of a young pear tree, the only tree in a few blocks, hauling his aching right elbow with the other hand. He lying on his back, he covered his face with his handkerchief and shots his eyes, hoping to gallop off to Shangri-La. 

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Noon, and it’s a beautiful cloudy day, Iseke street is calm and Akubuike has had no troubles finding sleep, he of dozed peacefully. Tiny sounds of conversation filter in and out from the distance, footsteps after footsteps crushing and pulverizing pieces of earth as people and hawkers up and down the streets. Opposite where he lay stood the bank’s entrance which enjoyed a scanty traffic of human and vehicular traffic through the gate. 

His body jerks to the jamming sound of a car’s door slamming shot.

“Thank you very much, Bye! I love you!” the lady screams excitedly as she waved to the man driving away on a black sport car who also has his hand waving at the sky through the window. She looks cheek, dressed in skinny blue jeans pants shy above her ankle, under a loose-fitting black blouse that look like it was made from a square folded diagonally with the neck hole in the middle, with an eye-catching brown embroidery round its neck and down its pointing front, on her armpit a big brown leather bag that complements her 5 inch stiletto.  Akubuike studied every detail as she elegantly crossed the road and gaits into the bank.

“Some people have everything going for them," he mutters, taking off his washed up blue jersey and slapped over his shoulder. Looking at himself, he heaves a muffled sarcastic laughter and continues in his soliloquy. “I’ve never even seen the inside of a banking hall before, big dreaming Akudike!” Pounding his chest and laughing hysterically like a man deviating to lunacy as he spoke, a drop of tear escapes his flooded eye. 

The lady reappears at the bank’s exit looking somewhat paranoid as she hurries off down the street. Akubuike watches her curiously for a while as her image shrunk into the distance. He jumps to his feet and stalks after her, trailing her as she took the turn into the lonely street Ibe Street. She stops suddenly and hurriedly pulls out her cell phone and starts dialing. The muscles on the back of Akubuike’s neck start contracting; a sudden urge and anxiety creeps in. He wants to do something but has no idea what it is. He increases his strides forward shortening the tail and revealing himself. His body trembled, and his heart pounded hard, and he feared she could hear the pounding from 10 meters away. His accelerates continuously as he approaches her. He is afraid of what he is about to do; reluctant, but his body drags him forward. He finds himself jugging. From 2 meters he can perceive the fragrance of her perfume. 

He can hear his heart say “It was time”. A dose of breath and he make a dash at the handbag in what looked a sprint across the unsuspecting victim, he grabs the hand bad and make a run for it.

The terrified lady starts screaming in such high pitch that Akubuike can hear it rip his heart apart.