Foot dragging daddy
Danger week had come and gone without mishap, phew, but another soon loomed and Ade would rather have his teeth flossed by a rabid wolf than attend the gynae clinic with Yeni that roasting Saturday afternoon in Lagos.
‘Where are you? Asleep? Come on, ah, nearly one month it takes you to find a place to park,’ said Yeni, annoying him with her tap of his knee. ‘My mama will tell the whole of Lagos if we are late. And Chief will not be happy.’
Ade did not want to hear that Yeni was “late” either. He slapped the gear stick from side to side. ‘I did not arrange for that car to push in to the space I was waiting for and the sun was in my eyes,’ he said.
‘After all my money you spent on those stupid shades, how come you cannot see in the sun?’
Yeni caused such a scene over the price in the shop in Cape Town that a toddler nearby exploded into tears. ‘I will pay you back for the bloody shades,’ he said, voice thready with his frustrations.
‘I don’t like this your attitude…’
‘Which one do you like so that you can buy it from Amazon?’ Ade said and tossed a couple of chalky antacid tablets into his mouth.
Yeni made a petulant sound and offered her palm. ‘Oya now pay me for the shades, as you are now Bill Gates.’
His bluff called, Ade killed the engine and ducked as an old classmate from Zaria sauntered past. But for his self-inflicted injuries that could have been him, Ade, in a fancy suit, closing the door of a flash car with a flourish and floating away on clouds of smug self-satisfaction.
‘Good, Dr Opa is here,’ Yeni said and leapt out of the car. Sticky oven-hot June air invaded the car. Ade found a threadbare note in his shirt pocket for the beggar hovering by the car. Allah, hope you see me doing my best.
Seemingly untroubled by the heat shimmering off the concrete, Yeni pranced along the carpark, the languid sway of her pleated red skirt a beguiling counterpoint to the frenetic cadence of her glittering black shoes. Statuesque, she had the classic oval Martins head and clear bronze-red skin, and eyes which looked up to no one, her thick hair, worn shoulder-length with gaudy thick extensions, and her long curved neck, all like her mother’s. From her father she inherited her height, six feet if an inch, as tall as her younger brother, Bola and two inches taller than her thick-set husband, Ade. Resisting the urge to bound after her and thrust his chest at the door like a finishing line, as was his wont in his days as a champion hurdler, Ade hobbled along a stride behind, his calves aching from his uneven sole inserts. It could have been worse. Fucking blind, he could have ended up with a penurious gargoyle.
An old woman stopped to shake her head at him. Ade cringed in her pitiful gaze. Face your own backyard madam, then, to shake off his disquiet, lengthened his awkward stride to bask in the admiring glances at Yeni from a bevy of bridesmaids as they tumbled, cachinnating, out of a limo.
Across the carpark’s perimeter road, the famous giant Dr Opa bronze clock hung, like an uvula, from a blinding arch twice a man’s height. As Yeni waltzed past, the ivory minute hand in the image of a red and yellow caduceus, clicked to a minute past the hour of ten. ‘Where is your watch?’ Yeni said, pointing at Ade’s wrist, the glittering beads on her hair extensions clinking over her proud shoulders. Ade lifted his sleeve to show her the fake designer watch. He’d pawned the other to some white man at the Club. She clucked with grudging content, like a prison warder, but with that admonitory cast of face that never seemed far behind her default pout.
The scent of air-conditioned opulence greeted them inside the glass tower. Dr Opa, wearing a trademark glowing suit, green for fertility, leapt from behind a massive glass desk. ‘Welcome ma, how is Chief? Tell him I asked for him oh, don’t forget, oh.’Squat and barrel-chested, the doctor had a head shaped like the body of a Buddha, lumpy, with dark close-cropped hair and thick grey sideboards. From the green walls of a room the size of a basketball pitch hung diplomas, testimonials, photographs taken of a beaming Dr Opa with distinguished colleagues, of Dr Opa with grateful patients and their babies, of Dr Opa with politicians and of the good doctor in Atlanta, London, Cairo, Jerusalem. The doctor rubbed his hands together, fizzed back across the room to leap on to his green leather chair. ‘I will like to take photo with you one day.’ He laughed to Yeni, but his eyes dimmed at Ade. ‘Mr Julius. How is life in Kakirikiri, sorry, at Kakirikiri?’
Ade seethed. Dr Lickpockets thinks he is funny. His hand went up to knead his now reshaped nose, an old habit, but he stopped and scratched his chin. ‘I am mainly based at KIYO, the youth offenders’ centre,’ he said.
Yeni nudged Ade in rebuke. ‘Don’t mind him doctor. Julius is security consultant. On recommendation from Chief,’ she said with a dirty look at Ade’s pair of chinos. She wanted him to wear a lace outfit so that he did not look like an ordinary driver. Ade returned her stare. He did not want to wear lace because the choice of what to wear and when to go to the toilet was one of the few freedoms he had left. Besides, lace did not keep his balls hot enough. But wouldn’t it be just typical if he’d killed all his potential descendants with his double underpants strategy.
‘But they are inside the same compound and for sake of clarity are you not a prison warder?’ said the doctor, putting a stress on Ade’s real title.
Ade’s toes flexed at the put-down. ‘We also have a few doctors in service.’ He could not resist adding, ‘some as inmates.’
Dr Opa turned to Yeni. ‘What some of those officers know about prison welfare can fit inside the eye of a needle. This Lagos,’ he said with an expansive mien. ‘Why did they send only pretty waterfalls, Bach and Beethoven on the Voyager probe to represent life on this planet when they could have sent pictures of our constipated and garrulous city or some of your prison? Don’t they not know that if they attract ET it is we Africans they will take first? Plus our mineral wealth. By the way which Afediyabamba are you? You resemble one I know but maybe not so fair in the face.’
Was the man just fishing or trying to catch him out? ‘It is a rare and ancient Zimbabwe name. Sailors and traders came and stayed and here I am the result of these accidents of trade and history,’ he said, affecting a wistful air by dropping his mouth and voice. How long could he keep up this act?
The doctor beamed at Yeni. ‘Ah, such is love, such is love.’
Ade ground his teeth. Wrong diagnosis sir, not even close. Get on with it Dr Lickpockets. What of these bloody results? The power cable creaked. Doctor Opa turned the screen round for Yeni to see. Ade craned his neck, his tongue leathery dry. He grabbed the table with a trembling hand and stole glances at Yeni. Somehow, in her haste or anxiety, she had painted her nails in different colours: the equivalent of Queen Elizabeth II turning up for the opening of Parliament with frizzy black hair extensions from Lewisham hanging from her tiara. He hoped Yeni had enough water to drink, what with all this stress she could have one of her fainting turns. Some sort of syncope the doctor said. Vaso something. But it did not kill.
Dr Opa pointed at the screen. ‘Sorry ma, chromosomal studies in Italy caused the delay.’
Ade affected sage-like percipience but did not know what the grey wriggly figures meant. He chewed on a minty antacid. Pass or fail, he faced the same old conundrum. If she could not conceive, he could not just abandon her, unless she let him go, a prospect as unlikely as the unilateral nuclear disarmament of the United States. If her results were good, he would have to continue to hit and hope not, go on treading that fine line between mutually assured frustration and his immolation, until he found a way out. When he came to think of it, neither Ranti, nor Teju before her, had any of the false alarms that some of the other boys reported after an inadvertent failure of prophylaxis. What if the fault rested with him? Would Yeni fatally dump him for raising false expectations, or would she get somebody else to do the insemination and keep him on a leash for appearances whilst he continued to suffer his claustrophobic isolation away from Iya and Ranti? One thing he did know is that he did not want a child with Yeni and were it not for the fear that someone might recognise his wizened foot or that they might not be able to restore him to full working order for Ranti one day, he would have had a vasectomy.
‘Fantastico, my Paulo always does a great job. We were together in Milan in May, last month in fact. Have you ever been to Milan in May? Madam you must take him one day. Milan in May, take him one day, get my lyrics, say? Better than this rap stuff you hear everywhere?’ The doctor grinned and shoved the screen aside. ‘Forget surrogates. The words should not even have reached my back teeth. One day like these my other friends,’ he waved at the walls, ‘you see their photos, those turkeys,’ he said, pointing at a photograph of a farm on the wall to his right. ‘They belong to me, bought by Chief Delumo, the goats by Chief Olaniyan and his classmates, one day you will join them in-’
‘Hope not the turkeys,’ said Ade.
Dr Opa chuckled. ‘You chose well madam. A man to make you laugh. Of course I did not intend to imply that you will suffer the fate of poultry. I meant that one day you too will have a bouncing baby. No, not one, but two. What do they call two babies in a cot? Dicotyledon,’ said the doctor and laughed with calibrated servility.
Yeni thumped the table. ‘Alleluia, me Yeni, for this Lagos, borrow another woman thing? No way. In Jesu’s name.’
‘Don’t worry. But madam you need to be patient. Not five minutes since you returned from overseas.’
‘Doctor, you can take your time with patience. I don’t have time for her.’
‘What of mine? My results?’ said Ade.
‘Did I not say?’ said the doctor. ‘Sorry my friend. We saw two hundred million of the little fishes, swimming in hope, but today is just the Heats, maybe next time the Finals and Gold medal, enh.’
Why didn’t Lickpockets say before? The news untangled the knots in his throat. Yeni swung her knee into his and winked at his groin. ‘Come Julius you and me we have things to mash together.’
He winced. How far was it to danger week? How long did sperms last in a double under-pants strategy? Three or four days? Heaven forbid he had long-lasting sperms, like those energy-saving light bulbs they sell at the Palms Shopping Mall.
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