HOSPITAL IS TOO FAR | Chimezie Okoro

1

The first time Mama balanced a tray of chin-chin and yellow okpa on my head and asked me to hawk it on campus, the security seized the tray and asked for Mama to come. She did come, with her wrapper tied in a knot at one side of her waist, like the way her brows were knotted. Perhaps if Mama had not lunged for the chief security officer’s collar, shoving her head against his shaven chin, shouting, “You will show me how well you beat your wife at home today,” and if I didn’t stand astonished, instead of fleeing with the okpas, his boys would not have kicked the tray off my head and squashed the okpas with their boots, laughing unabashedly at Mama, whose wrapper had come undone. When the CSO extricated himself from Mama’s hold, he smoothed his uniform, his shoulders taut, and banned us from entering the Rivers State University campus.

But of course we returned, in a manner only Mama considered a miracle. As we drove through the campus gate, safely shielded in his BMW, two men in lemon vests swiftly lifted the barricade; the rest waved theirs in the rain, chanting, “Prof, Prof!” Professor Kachi’s black window didn’t roll down to pass them a bribe via a tight handshake because they seemed to know his car. That noiseless BMW with a floral sticker at the driver’s door. He honked twice, then added a long, generous honk.

He never undermined small things, this professor of geology. It was from the way I sold him my okpa in town days back, dropping on one knee and propping the tray on the other. It was theatrical, but I did it anyway because my friend Lanre had already filled me in on this professor. Earlier, as he discovered us drenching by the roadside, he had delicately pulled up and led us to the backseats, which, thankfully, were acrylic upholstered.

Still driving, he asked Mama if she knew anyone on campus. “Yes, sah,” said Mama. In the rearview mirror, he smiled at me and Baby, who was sleeping in my arms. Baby sneezed. Mama leaned in to wipe the snot. Professor quenched the AC. “So, who’s that?” he asked, taking a turn onto Senator Francis Ellah Road.

“My late sister’s husband, Baba Halima.”

Baba Halima was Professor Kemka’s driver, Mama added. He was a pinched-face man with skin the texture of wrinkled dates, but he wasn’t our uncle. He was Lanre’s. Even though Lanre called him Baba, too, nobody seemed to call him Baba Lanre and it didn’t matter to either party, or so Lanre said.

Baba Halima’s wife was neither Mama’s sister. I don’t know why she lied to the kind professor, but I knew why she painted her dead in her tale. It was Mama Halima who lent my mama the capital with which she bought the first basket of oranges I began selling after our ban. It was a business that shrank faster than the oranges themselves did. So, she delayed the due date several times. But one dew-laden morning, when Mama was discarding the remainders of the overripe oranges, she materialised in her hijab like a masquerader, demanding the interest, which Mama hurriedly repaid with an earsplitting slap.

Realising that the world, absolute and uncaring, allowed them the room to fight to exhaustion, they resolved to trade insults. Mama called her wazobia: “You go marry all the tribes for Nigeria,” Mama clapped. She said we were baboons swinging into different shacks without supplies, as though merely changing trees.

Although it was the truth, she didn’t have to wound our denial. We were only a rising statistic of people who owned shack homes. Those days, the general consensus among the shack dwellers was that the government gleefully demolished the shacks to erect hospitals, schools, or roads, or any other facility for which the officials overestimated and looted the budget, and whose completion was infeasible.

Perhaps painting Mama Halima dead asserted Mama’s victory. In any case, it was another thing to lie to this professor, who, as Lanre told me during that last campus hawking, had driven in and rescued some two girls from a storm of students who’d caught them touching themselves in the hostel. The girls, pressed to that tight corner, bowed their faces to avert recognition and the blows, and then broke into tears.

The news was that the professor in line for Dean of Student Affairs had sped past in his Ford, a tacit fomentation to the ruckus. That was what Professor Kachi termed it, and I told Lanre as much, because it was just then the campus security and Mama were negotiating the okpa fight.

Now, Professor Kachi scaled a bump; I felt the car absorb the jolt. The road ahead was lined with wet trees, washed gold by the headlights. The ride progressed smoothly, unlike the one from Omoku to this city, in which Mama kept yelling at the driver that she was widowed and left to fend for two children whose uncles had abandoned them. It wasn’t remotely true she was a widow. Because, as far back as then, I believed Papa was still breathing this rainy air somewhere in Lagos.

The car crept to a halt in front of a campus bus stop. Across from it was a gated house brilliantly glowing behind the sheets of rain. It should be where Baba Halima lived, in the boys’ quarters, of course. Mama hoisted me onto the elevated slab. Professor Kachi looked on.

“I could honk—”

“No worry, sah,” Mama interrupted, grabbing our bags out of the boot. The gate squealed. “See, he dey come.”

But that night, Mama herded us to an open lecture hall instead because the gate had only squealed to let out a woman taking out a trash bag before the professor’s car progressed. We spent the night there, mosquitoes trumpeting, Mama swatting at them with her damp scarf, and Baby fussed until daylight poured in.

---

Mama’s name was Uloma. A home. Not the sorts with garages and gardens of flowers and trees, but the ordinary ones you drew back in kindergarten: a square house with a triangular roof and a mom and a dad and their two kids standing together in the foreground. That was it. Uloma. A complete home. Soon after Papa left without contacting us from Lagos, Mama called me into the square that was her room and asked me never to call her by her name. That her home was incomplete and, speaking prospectively, we’d be homeless.

When that time comes, she went on, we won’t go back to her village, a village where girls shy of marriage were pregnant for boys who were equally shy of marriage. It wasn’t that she’d married Papa against her own papa’s blessings or that she was the only child of our deceased grandparents. It was simply because she didn’t want to go. She didn’t belong there anymore, she said.

Before Papa’s job at the transport company was terminated—during that time, our lives were sweetened by the cartons of condensed milk he brought home on his rotation breaks—the plan was that I’d sit for NECO and WAEC concurrently before JAMB. There was no telling of clear success in both, Papa advised. Such was the thing in those days: to trick the system. But soon after he left, Mama pulled me out of school. She was falling behind with the fees, the principal sternly said.

Plus, Mama’s certificate wasn’t a university degree; the places she tried out said so, as though possessing one did guarantee a job. So, she tucked it at the bottom of her box, where, once, her Georges and Hollandais were crammed with the scent of camphor. She sold them to raise money for Papa’s trip. She was no longer the mama who used to lodge me between her legs and braid my hair, massaging it with coconut oil. Because that Mama soon began to ply a blunt razor over my head until my scalp would itch with sweat and blood. Then she’d scrub the antiseptic juice of Awolowo over it. And that Mama had begun to mope around the square house, wordless but nodding morosely when spoken to. Sometimes, she sat, pensive, cradling Papa’s framed photo on her lap. In those moments, I wondered if she was worried, like me, that Papa’s memories, his gentle touch and quaking laughter, were, instead, fading into a deathly void.

One time, she lasted far too long in the trance. She recovered with a pant. “We’re going to Port Harcourt.” She refused to drink the glass of water I offered her. “Morning bus,” she coughed. Though her plan seemed futile, it surprised me that I didn’t make this known to her. Instead, I acceded, with the loyalty of an apprentice.

II

“Sorry, sah,” Mama begged as we chanced upon him in the Faculty of Sciences.

“It’s of no consequence.” His voice was reposed. Then he added that he knew Professor Kemka like the sunrise. “Fine woman, professor of African literature,” he remarked. “If she had a driver, she would have asked me to conduct his pre-employment interview with her.” He laughed.

But Mama kept curtsying in apology. We’d been scouting for komkoms we’d later sell to Madam Inukwa, so I only stood watching her plead, the sack of komkom in my hand and Baby strapped to my back. Her customers called her “Madam Inukwa” because, well, she screamed, “ịnụkwa,” each time we haggled over the payment: “Ịnụkwa, who says empty tins and bottles cost that much?” She’d cackle. “How much will the unopened ones cost?” That morning, I was crestfallen to find that there were only three komkoms in our sack, but Professor Kachi’s laughter did something to me: it melted the ice in my heart and obliterated my worries.

In daylight, his features were infallibly remarkable. He had a coiffed beard, a few dustings of it tinged grey, the kind of beard you rarely needed to oil but fingered so often. His left eye was murky behind the crystal-clear pair of glasses he wore. He wore a kaftan as pristine as the angels in Jacob’s dream.

“You don’t have to kneel,” he said to Mama, mildly upset. “Thank you.” He didn’t confuse th for t, as most teachers. 

“Tank sah,” said Mama and I in one breath. 

 Before manning a noisy class that quieted immediately at his arrival, he rubbed my hair and leaned in to gently tug at Baby’s cheek, but Baby shyly buried his face in my back.

We didn’t see him again until the evening he informed Mama he had secured a shop for her at the Campus Shopping Complex. Mama rented it out. Stacked our items on the makeshift table under the umbrella tree in front of the faculty building. I was astounded by his approval.

He reasoned things the way Mama did: she’d profit more from the subleasing and wouldn’t have to work strenuously to tackle the skyrocketing bills. Besides, we needed to be within the grasp of the students in lecture halls, and who could tell if this professor wouldn’t wake up one morning and suddenly have a change of heart? She voiced her doubt only when the professor’s BMW was distant.

She bribed the CSO and added more items to our stock: bananas and toffees that shone, enticing buyers—at least Mama said they did. After he cleared the debt, Mama Halima and Mama formed a truce that supplied us with some coolers of jollof rice and fried drumsticks for sale. To chase the food down the gut, we offered our customers chilled La Casera.

The Yahoo Boys also prowled around the stall, prodigious in their orders and reeking of fraud money. I expected them in fancy eateries with TVs, but of course they were there to buy susceptible girls takeout in exchange for conversations.

For once, Mama was doing something with purpose. No longer problematic. No longer that Mama who stole the herb from our neighbour’s cassava farm one hungry night. “Hospital Is Too Far”, she called it, and as I settled my eyes sceptically on her, she responded in Ogba, “Because a teacup of it a day keeps the doctor at bay.” She was simply not that Mama anymore. Because this Mama’s troubles had paled in comparison to the unbridled gratitude she hummed about.

The following week, he pulled in with a nylon bag embossed with THANK YOU…SHOP WITH US AGAIN. He dropped it on the makeshift table. The clanking sounds came before the rustle of the bag itself and then the thud. Soon, the sweet smells began to waft out. As I peeked into the bag, a collection of tins and tubes peeked back at me: Milo, sardines, and, of course, some bottles of perfume.

“She will be needing those,” he said, passing me a bottle.

Mama snatched it and smiled sheepishly. “I go keep dem for her.”

In those early days, Mama was self-conscious. She pencilled her brows ever so often and lined her lids with kohl, which made her face look elusive yet perceptible, like a mirage. She’d begun wearing pleated skirts with matching V-neck tops. I could only notice all these indifferently.

“How we go repay you, sah?” Mama smiled, and I mouthed, “No how,” before Mama turned and looked at me. It was an instruction, the look.

“Carry Baby go play,” she ordered finally.

That day, the sun was the sort that dried up a spittle as quickly as it’d make you sweat. So, I hurriedly ran to the other umbrella tree. It hid me from Mama’s glare but was near enough for me to catch snatches of their loud conversation.

It wasn’t that she wanted to be inappropriate with him— of course not under the gaze of the students milling about. Because this Mama had learnt some shame after the okpa fight and a thicker blob of it once Professor Kachi entered our nameless lives.

---

During break, he arrived bearing some udara and stories of the university before it fell from grace. Just a day earlier, I had thought him a reserved man—strikingly small in a white dashiki. But now he spoke with a liveliness that contravened his smallness. He told us that the education system in the eighties was so intentional that white men chaperoned their classrooms and ceiling fans were installed in the hostels, where each room was occupied by two friendly scholars and sanitised by a janitor.

Even as he reminisced about the good old eighties, he mentioned the philanthropic confraternities that soon turned into secret cults, granting their members the temerity to threaten a professor at gunpoint for grades. On second thought, they merely deflated the said professor’s Peugeot 505 tyre. Or, as they commonly do these days, they simply attempted to bribe him. Now, he was recounting another incident that happened earlier today. “I told the young lady to open her Bible,” he recounted, sitting on the small bench behind the makeshift table.

Mama settled on the other end of it and informed a girl she’d called it a day, as she did whenever he came around.

“If you continue to drive them away”, Professor Kachi remarked, “how will you make money?”

Mama smiled, chastened—an awkward smile I expected only from Baby.

“So, I told her,” Professor Kachi continued. ‘You say you’re the leader of the student fellowship group, yet you don’t know your Bible condemns indecency? Are you here to proposition me?’ She couldn’t look at me, just as I expected. I quoted her second Corinthians: ‘Thy body is a temple.’” Mama smiled fervently at his probity. I managed to conceal mine but my heart stretched with reverence.

Once again, Mama ordered me away. I snatched the udaras with me because, behind his back, Mama would put them up for sale. From my usual haven, I funnelled their conversation, which detoured to university politics.

“The new generation of universities are shunning the strike,” Professor Kachi bemoaned. “That’s an atavism plaguing the academic union like recurrent earthquakes.”

Mama nodded slowly, lost for words like me.

He was saying something inaudible when Baby tottered to the udaras.

We’d suck on the udaras and spit out the seeds, I told Baby. Afterwards, I’d crack the seeds open between my teeth, extract the sticky pulps and clip them onto our ears as mock earrings. Or maybe I’d save the seeds to teach Baby his sums.

Abruptly, some hairy hand hugged me tightly from the side. The feel of the hold was familiar; nonetheless, I leapt to my feet because Baby shrieked from Lanre’s surprise entrance. He’d begun to drop by the makeshift stall, almost as steadily as the professor did. Every other time, he went about the staff quarters to wash cars: Professor Ajie’s Corolla, Professor Belema’s Camry, and Doctor Ndubuisi’s Lexus. 

“Is that not Professor Kachi?” A familiar expression flitted across his face. “Let me go and —”

“Mama doesn’t want us there. Don’t ask why.”

“Let’s go to Engineering instead.”

The faculties of Engineering and Sciences were twin buildings, bordering a scattering of moringa trees and the Faculty of Education.

There, lectures had been dismissed. We scoured lecture halls, rummaged underneath their desks for komkoms. “A sty is tidier than this hall,” Lanre muttered in pidgin. “Wait until you see the hostels,” I laughed.

And then we perched on the concrete bench under a neem tree. Through the branches, the sky was a purple-blue pastel, and the sun a pale ball. From the balcony of the red building named Parliament, the wind swayed to the drumming and singing of the Theatre Arts department’s early-evening rehearsal.

“They’re far from home,” Lanre observed. My face must have betrayed my frowning, because he quickly added, “I mean faculty, not home home o.” I wasn’t, after all, offended. Because how could I be offended? He was Lanre, my full-lashed Lanre.

“They say this world is so small,” Lanre was saying now, “and yet it’s big enough for rich people to travel across oceans for luxury.”

Whenever he got this way, I was drawn to the essentiality of life. So, I told him: “Papa used to say, ‘Your palms can only grab a mouthful at a time.’”

“I don’t mean to sound greedy.”

I glanced at Baby over my shoulder. Reached and pulled a twig from his hand. He didn’t seem to notice and so didn’t throw a tantrum. “And, yes, the world is small so we can stick with our loved ones.”

His eyes trained on me, slightly amused, chuckled. I lowered my eyes on Baby yet again. He was playing with the fidget spinner now.

“Don’t you think it’d be better to stick ourselves in soft pillows and beds, not the cracked skins of our loved ones?”

I shrugged, an expedient answer, and didn’t call him out on grammar. Much better, not more better.

Afar, a couple stormed out of a class, a boy trailing after a girl. A few other students followed suit, whipping their phones out. There was a muteness to their argument. But Lanre lent his voice to them, comically. When the angry girl lifted a hand to the boy’s face, Lanre said, “Stop!” A braid flick: “Oh please, you’ve probably done more than just having drinks with that other girl.” I laughed at his dramatisation.

The boy began to roll his trousers up, sinking to one knee. She still stood there, arms folded across her chest, glancing sideways at the kneeling boy, as if his pleading was like gossiping, a practice she was ashamed to admit she enjoyed, which had only brought them here. The small crowd had exploded when she suddenly spun and slapped him with both hands. The two-tone sound lanced the faculty; Lanre’s sound effects ceased. The singing and drumming dissolved. He steeled himself, gingerly touching his cheeks, watching her hurrying away, crying. Then his shoulders quaked with manly tears.

I stifled my laugh, but Lanre choked his out. And it’s this moment I still remember eighteen years now, when I think of Port Harcourt, the busy university town: the sudden stillness on campus, Lanre’s Adam’s apple ringing with laughter, and love swelling in my stomach.

---

“That’s the problem with our country,” Professor Kachi chuckled. I lowered Baby by the foot of the makeshift table. It was an anecdote about one of his students who mispronounced rock as lock and the whole class erupted in laughter. “When the tongue of an Anambra man fails him, we ridicule him. However Americans twist ‘party’ into ‘parri’, we begin to dance.”

We laughed.

“Ah, Baby, you’re back,” he said, only then acknowledging our presence. 

He crouched and smiled at Baby. For once, Baby didn’t recline from this amenable professor. He giggled instead, then mumbled something incoherent. Professor Kachi smiled with understanding. “Children—such a blessing.” Straightening up, he patted my forearm, our permissible contact those days.

Mama rambled on about sales, courting his attention by dusting his briefcase, which was ostensibly new. They walked to the parking lot, where jacarandas formed a canopy of purple flowers over the BMW. He slipped into it and turned the ignition. Under the engine’s soft gargle, he spoke to Mama, glancing occasionally at me, one hand on Mama’s shoulder; Mama nodded earnestly, her eyes narrowed. She waved until the car diminished from view, and then she shot me a pleased look.

“You’re going to the staff quarters this weekend,” she said in Ogba. Her voice came off as a decision.

III

I imagined the staff quarters as a place where ideas needed by professors to write books arrived fully formed—ta-da, the magnum opus! It was a serene neighbourhood with about a dozen yellow bungalows standing on either side of a tarred road. Professor Kachi’s house was situated in the corner of the stretch of buildings: a modest house ringed by a fence entangled with lush ixoras. The other bungalows had barbed fences, too, but looked naked with no flowers.

That Sunday, the neighbourhood looked deserted—the chaplaincy buses had practically collected the residents for Mass.

At the corner of the roadside, I caught a glimpse of a rattling hedge. Picking up a pebble, I edged closer. Behind it was a boy, a Ghana-must-go bag clasped between his underarm. He whistled me over.

“Are you stalking me, Lanre?”

“Apparently no.” Then, with shiny eyes: “You’re…beautiful.”

“Haven’t I been beautiful all this time?” I managed, because we didn’t say sort those days.

Silence.

I was wearing the turquoise dress Professor Kachi’s money had purchased, my beauty bone naturally jutting out. Mama had layered a mild foundation over my dark skin so that it gleamed when the sun struck it just at the right angle.

“You’re just in the right dress for the escape to Lagos.”

“Lagos?” It was now my turn to be stunned.

“I bought tickets. Our bus leaves in half an hour.”

He even bought tickets, wow. “I can’t go to Lagos.”

“At Lagos”, Lanre pressed, “we’d jump into a keke, one of those three-wheeled vehicles that’s no different from a bicycle but for the tarpaulin roofing.”

He said these details as though I’d never seen a keke napep once. As though it was a convincing factor. “Olanrewaju, you’re from Osun, not Lagos. Who do you know there?”

“It’s Lagos we’re talking about.” He balled his fist and hammered it into his other palm. “Once we get there, we’ll find our feet in no time!”

“Papa is gone, Lanre,” I cried out. Until then those words had felt false. “He’s not with us because of Lagos.”

 Lanre looked less garrulous and more lugubrious. But it wasn’t for long.

“We don’t have much time,” he crooned, and it stung me like a whip that, for once, my Lanre did not understand.

I pulled back from him.

Once again, he spewed the benefits of this blind escape. But how could I leave when Mama had told me of the future the bright professor had in store for me? A life of plenty and certitude. “No!”

His sternum towered over me. He hugged me, stepped back to examine me one last time, and hugged me again for long. He smelt of Mentos. I stood there, letting myself be hugged, moving only for breathing. “You will live,” he croaked, capitulating. Then he turned around.

Watching him leave, I felt a pang of sadness because I couldn’t tell if he’d live, too. I imagined Mama. There is no reward in running away with a boy, she assured me. You did just the right thing by choosing us.

---

I rapped on the door as Mama had instructed: twice, then a pause—the way you do before entering an office. But no one answered. No BMW home.

Minutes later, I heard footfalls behind the door. Then the door clicked open. “Come in.”

The professor had mentioned him to Mama, just as she did while applying pink gloss onto my lips. Although she substituted kohl for mascara, she said, “Nwa ma nma, he will like it just so,” and I muttered, “Eh?”

Inside, the boy walked like the terrazzo was a tarred road on a sunny day: his gait redolent of a woman’s grace. I walked just as fast to catch up. The living room walls were lined with art, framed portraits and trophy awards of the professor’s. His graduation photography had the largest grin. His left eye hadn’t gone bad yet. He looked like the scholars whom Lanre and I always saw heading for night class, rid of all campus distractions. Their skin didn’t glisten like those ones shooting YouTube videos during class hours.

“You mean these lecturers teach at night?” I’d asked Lanre, bewildered. He laughed indulgently at my sheer ignorance and said, “No, they’re going to study till dawn. Besides, the lecturers seldom teach, much less hold evening lectures. Although Professor Kachi is an exception.”

In the back of my mind, a niggling sadness reared its head. Stop thinking about Lanre, I cautioned myself. He’d be better off in Lagos. After all, he’s Yoruba.

When we wound up in a white space, “The kitchen,” the boy said. The air was soaked with the scent of curry, thyme, and, of course, egusi.

Behind him, I puckered my chest and hip and did the walk, pointing at various objects. In the silence: the koi-koi of my heels. Those few hours were wonderful, at least the hours before the professor arrived.

---

When the BMW pulled back in, some precipitation was falling and the houseboy had fluttered to the market. I was tending to the pot of egusi on the stovetop. Mama had taught me one or two aspects of cooking this kind of soup: Sprinkle the egusi powder just when the soup starts to simmer, she’d said. No, salt comes last if you’re using onugbu; otherwise it should be the primal ingredient in the case of ugu.

A few hours dripped by, and there was no word from the professor. He must mistake all that clattering and clanking down here as the houseboy’s. But right in the middle of my thoughts, he entered the kitchen, not startled by my presence, asked about Mama, and disappeared even before I could reply. Like he had an urgent lecture to resume. Swift as he was, I noticed no paper in his hand. Unsurprised as he seemed, he could have appeared with it’.

The night before, Mama had told me I was coming there to fill out some pre-admission papers for the university staff secondary school, and when Baby said his first words, he’d be enrolled in its kindergarten. That was the plan. “Big professors do it,” she said. “They help poor people like us achieve our dreams.” And that was education, in large classrooms with air-conditioning. “Take for instance, Professor Ifeoma Okpara,” she continued. She was the generous woman who built a market in her hometown. Mama concluded. And what daughter doubts her own mother, her forward-looking mother?

IV

He called for me when the sun had begun to tear through the rainclouds, reflecting itself as minuscule red dots in the raindrops behind the kitchen louvres.

His room was suffused with a sickly light, given the drawn beige curtains. I could only recognise his form sitting by the bedside. On his radio, a stranger spouted songs, as if their audience across the waves and frequencies were hard of hearing. Or perhaps he had turned the volume up high that way.

In whatever case, he asked me to lock the door behind me and sit in the area of the bed where he was patting, the sound muffled. He was smiling and I was also smiling, only that mine was a smile laced with an air of confused politeness. Across his flat chest were sprinkles of grey hair. They tapered toward his groin and escalated over veins.

“Come and sit here,” he repeated, his tone impatient and unconscionable.

I noticed his eyes sizing up my chest. “Soon they’ll be as big as pomelos.” He fingered his beard. “Don’t worry; it will be quick … but sweet, of course.”

At first, I said no, dread in my voice. But even at that age—twelve—I knew it meant turning down his offer. It would mean going back to Mama with empty hands. What happened next is what haunts me today. I shuffled forward, my steps fraught with indebtedness.

“Good girl.” His hands went to work.

All that time, I was mute, and all the same, I kept hearing Mama’s voice: You made me proud. He was breaking me. You’re doing just well, the voice came through again. It’s our small token of gratitude. Soon, her voice melded into the professor’s, the same laboured words behind my ears: Who will believe? I spun the words in my mind until they became mine. “No one”, I repeated his words.

All too soon, I was willing him to stop, wishing I had never come, that I had breathlessly eloped with Lanre. For a longer moment after he finished, I stared up at the ceiling that was so white in the near darkness that I felt dirty. Then I curled up beside the head of the bed, shaking.

He went to the drawer and retrieved a brown envelope.

“This one is yours,” he said without looking in my direction. It slipped off his grip and spiralled to the floor. An offering. Then he glanced at me silently, his eyes hard and opaque, nothing like shame in them. The bathroom door creaked to let him in, leaving me to myself.

The curtains were parted now, like my body, and I felt a sharp cold nipping at me down there. I could grab the envelope and leave; I could wait for him to emerge anew. But slowly, I slipped off the bed and into my dress, and just when I approached the corridor, I met the houseboy, his eyes round. I pushed past him with a force that shook me as well. Perhaps that’s what the body does when it’s broken: it amasses strength so that it becomes impervious. “Did you spill oil on your dress?” he called out as I scrambled toward the front door.

V.

Outside, the sun was callow. The naked bungalows shivered. I ran past the ixora fence, not pausing to pluck their star-leafed stalks and suck at the nectar, like I’d planned when leaving. I didn’t wipe the redness dripping down my thighs either. I don’t know why.

Who will believe… Mama would lecture me on the consequence of such allegations. She would burst into a profound Ogba, rapidly and untainted by English, because it’s the language that bestows such seriousness to things of this sort: “Mechi onụ!” Shut up.

Stooping under a moringa tree, I began to make dreams:

I imagined that Lanre had pressed a note into my palm in that moment of our hugging, a note with cramped sentences so that I squint to read the words, and then I find out it’s a complete warning: You will live if only you avoid Professor Kachi.

And that Lanre’s note also included his Lagos address.

I imagined, vividly, that I scoured my way to his place. He doesn’t allow me to fall away from his embrace. He doesn’t ask me what has happened all these years, because somehow he knows. I let my imagination surprise even me, because as he pulls in with a car the next morning, the house suddenly transforms into a mansion. This one imagination, though titillating, stung me with shame.

“Is this your car, Lanre?” I gush. “Your BMW!”

“No, you’re my BMW—my Beautiful, Marvellous Wife.” This imagined Lanre teases the way I remembered my Lanre teases.

Only then do I think of the lettering on the professor’s as Be Mysteriously Wicked.

But all these years, Lagos hasn’t shown Lanre to me, and my fervent hope of running into Papa has waned. If Papa had never left, there would be no escape to Port Harcourt. And if Port Harcourt didn’t happen, I wouldn’t have met Lanre and Mama Professor Kachi—and most importantly, I wouldn’t have seen the ixoras’ redness seeping out from between my legs.

These days I also imagine the professor, sitting at that table, transcribing his ideas into a magnum opus. Suddenly, as Mama barges into his floral home with probing policemen, his ideas vanish even before he thinks of escaping. Or perhaps the policemen pull Mama, handcuffed to his doorpost, like most arrest scenes in Nollywood films. But they could as well prove incompetent and watch as Professor Kachi hurls himself out of the window while Mama dwindles behind bars. Perhaps no one will attempt an arrest on him, because even Mama had said that big professors like him have a friend at court.

I also imagine another unsuspecting girl and her mama or papa, both handicapped by age. I think of him doing all those things to her. Most of the time, my thoughts veer out of sanity, and the girl becomes a boy. The boy incapacitates him with a punch.

Above all, I think of the Hospital is Too Far. I think of the distance from an actual hospital, and somewhere in all that thought, I know that even if I chew its taproots and guzzle the tea, I would never be cured of the guilt I feel for leaving Baby behind, for not saving him from Mama.

As I continued to run, I didn’t contemplate Mama’s innocence. Even till today I have not asked.

Toward the campus gate, a wind stirred the whistling pines lining the road. They shook off water drops. I stuck out my tongue to taste them, to taste freedom, before disappearing into Port Harcourt.

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