Sky Don Fall [Part II]

Part I

I wouldn’t say that I never knew my father, but it is a messy story I still don’t know how to tell very well.

I did know him. He was a chubby man with a wide space in between his front teeth. He liked reading The Guardian newspaper and had a soft-spot for Liverpool Football Club. He liked his tea milky and ate eba almost every night, sitting with his tray of food on a stool in front of him, bent over as he watched the evening news and held a one-way conversation with the TV anchors.

          The three of us lived in Gbagada before he left; and he didn’t really leave, at least not at first. I gradually noticed he stopped having dinner at home, and then I noticed only a few of his shirts hung in the closet in their bedroom, and then I noticed the few shoes left arranged under the window began to gather dust. He would come home after work and say he wasn’t going to eat today, but maybe tomorrow; he would tell me he liked the beads in my hair and ask if I had finished my homework and if I had my uniform ready for school tomorrow. He never really did leave. He left elements of his presence around. He just stopped coming home so often, for days and weeks at a stretch, and then he came home one night and said he wanted to have dinner and mummy told him to go back where he was coming from, that it was obvious he had chosen the family he wanted.

          We moved to Surulere a few weeks after; mummy threw out the dust-gathered shoes under the window and quit her job as a clerk at Oceanic Bank. She started working as an admin staff with a private secondary school in Aguda, and when friends asked her why she had left the bank, she said she had always wanted a slower-paced life, so why not make the change now? But that was obviously a lie, with the way she would sit in the living room after work, moping at the television; with the way she hid her sadness behind her glasses, as though I did not know that she cried most nights, eyes swollen and bloodshot in the mornings.

          But my father never did really leave. He drove me to Federal Government College, Warri on my first day of secondary school. He came for the prize giving ceremony when I won the prize for the best student in my set in J.S.3. He came for my S.S.3 graduation ceremony and bought me the most beautiful black chiffon blouse with a dragonfly broche on the left pocket; I wore that blouse till it faded and began to come apart at the seams.

When I got admission into FUTO, he sent me money – ten thousand naira – and told me he was proud of me and that I should be a good girl at university and pay no attention to any boy who had not paid my bride. That was the last text message I ever received from him. When the ten thousand naira ran out and I needed money for toiletries, I called him; his phone was switched off. I called and called and sent him countless text messages that were never responded to. I kept that last text messaged saved on my phone for years, until my phone was stolen at Balogun Market and I cried, not because the phone had any worth but because that text message had been proof that I hadn’t made him up.

          Mummy wouldn’t talk about it; all she said was that he had made his choice – and she wondered what had taken him so long – and was she not providing enough for me that I should be so concerned about an unfortunate man like him? She would not explain exactly what that meant – that he had made his choice - and I wondered why he hadn’t chosen us instead.

          My performance at school nosedived. I failed classes and had carry-overs. I met friends who dated mugus whose money we ate together. I dated boys who were into Yahoo and lavishly spent their money. I tried cocaine a few times and one morning, when I woke up half-naked in a shower cubicle with cold water pouring over me in the house of a man I did not know, and could not recognize my friends for the better half of two days, I knew that cocaine was not the drug for me. But I realized too late – a course that should have taken me four years to complete took me five and a half years and I was lucky to finish with a third class.

           My mother never knew about the life I had lived in Owerri and as we waited and waited for my call-up letter that never came, she began to put the pieces together. There was a class I had failed – Journalism and the West – but the lecturer was a pervert of a man who fantasised girls with big asses, so I slept with him in a dingy hotel room that had a creaky bed and dusty windows, the stout man breathing heavily and dripping sweat all over me. In the end, I barely made a pass. Anytime I remember the sorrowful groan of that bed, I want to spit in his face.

I had my certificate, sitting neatly in a plastic folder in my drawer, but at the back of my mind I feared Mr. Okoro had eaten his cake and had it, hence the way my body would quake with fear each time Doris called and said my name was not on the NYSC call-up list, quarter after quarter.