It was a Sunday morning after a home match. Michelle ma Belle and I were on holiday in Newcastle. I was at the dining table with my back to a warm radiator and staring at a crossword puzzle, benumbed by the 1-3 humiliation at St. James’s Park of Newcastle United by a newly promoted Bournemouth. Should you, a middle-aged man with responsibilities, not have weightier matters on your mind the look on the face of Michelle ma Belle implied. Did she not get what it was like to have what little hope of your team staying up strangled by the appearance of a centre-forward more likely to trip over his own net than disturb the opposition’s? Our no 9 had lumbered on, looking terrified of the shirt on his back and from the groans and screeches that greeted him so were the crowd to see him in it.
I ignored your granny and hunkered over the crossword puzzle again, feigning sudden insight and, to pique her envy and curiosity, making phantom entries behind my crooked palm. But her battered clamshell phone rang, sounding like a duck’s spirited attempt at a tragic aria and before I could warn her about the moss Michelle ma Belle dashed out onto the patio for better reception. I made a mental note to finally scrub the decking because we have reached that time of life when one slip could spell life’s full stop.
‘Aw, that’s lovely, great news,’ I heard her chime.
Your mum was pregnant and from the date you probably looked like a crayfish. Don’t fret. We’ve all been through the same fishy amphibious saurian ancestral stages. It’s evolution innit.
Shortly after this great news, fate, as we say in Lagos went and, “throw sand for my gari.” A large part of my gut caught cancer and despite surgery the consultant gave me twelve months tops. At least I had you to look forward to whilst my life faded away.
Months passed. You grew and I receded. One evening, as the sun crouched behind a broad cloud, and our pond koi munched the expensive grub my pension bought them, I crept through the kitchen door for a clue to what I was allowed for supper. My favourite, couscous garnished with Palestinian dates, had been banned by Michelle ma Belle on grounds that they went straight through me and she’d have to clean up after my windrush or shitrush. For the definitions of windrush see previous publications.
The kettle boiled in a corner and a plume of steam rose behind the head of Michelle ma Belle as she turned round wearing a long flushed face. ‘Ring John,’ she said in a doleful voice.
‘Why?’ I snapped in apprehension.
‘Ring John,’ she insisted.
As often happens when I was nervous, my arms and legs began to itch. I peeled off one of the three shirts I was wearing and wiped my prickling face with it. Why three shirts? Because I had quite a few left over from my working days and was going to enjoy them before the end.
I called John who said your mum had been admitted for observation. You were bouncing about too much for the midwife’s liking. One day you were lying north south, the day next east west, one day bottom up the next bottom down. ‘They’re thinking of a section,’ said my son, your dad.
‘But that’s an operation,’ I cried.
‘I gathered as much,’ John said, with the mix of scorn and reproach he reserved for his nitwit dad.
I handed the phone to Michelle ma belle. When she finished, she sighed, scrubbed her forehead with the back of her hand and trudged up the stairs. Was she coming back downstairs “to watch something” later. She did not reply. I didn’t have the energy to repeat the question or argue the toss. What little time we had left together was not for trivial rows. There would be bigger rows to plough, such as who would should inherit the pair of cuff links Michelle ma Belle bought me for my birthday.
I made a cup of coffee and as is my wont when stressed, retreated to the study to tap wild minded amphigory from my cranky laptop. After two pages of wide ranging gobbledegook a coherent thought thundered to mind. This man, have you got scabies on your brain or what? Months to live and you faff about like a nincompoop. Why not write your petty a story about you for when you are not here? Oops bidindi, why had I not thought of that before? Much as I didn’t want to be reminded of my fate, it seemed an excellent idea. As a babysitter, I’d told my charges many stories. Surely I could stretch to one for my little pettys. I retrieved my phone, plugged it in to charge ready for news from the hospital and began to write. I don’t know when your mum and dad will allow you to read this, but I think I’m aiming it for the 5-6 age range. If someone on “socials” or your nursery teacher, or a correspondent for corporate media, or some pedant, proclaims with great authority that Lagos didn’t float its own currency until five minutes after I said so, or danfo buses were painted a lighter shade of yellow ochre, tell them grandpa says, to quote or paraphrase Sebastian Barry, it’s not effing history, they should go and jump. That in such a story “gist sef must to dey inside small.” What is gist? Look it up. On second thoughts, it was the coffee in me talking, never ever talk trash to your teachers as they may work for the armed canine division of border patrol in their spare time. And before I start, if you want me to write of the changeable chatoyant hues of the moonlit canopy refracted through the silken cartouche draped over the cold chrome handle of a weeping child’s cot, you should close this book and go to the library. That’s if libraries still exist when you are six.
