12.
It was that month of September when the roofs burned and the homeless suffered. The hot season when the sun slapped the hair on people’s neck and feet. In Ajegunle, the canals were damp and it sexed a foul odor around the slum that Collins lived. Alone, in his one room apartment, he rolled from side to side, allowing his sweaty skin to find a cool spot in the worn-out bed spreads. The pot of beans, which had not been washed, emitted another foul odor that made his nose runny. The mesh of this stink was so pungent that even the clothes in the house were beginning to absorb this taste. The tap in the street had not run for days and Collins and his wife had decided to put off washing until the weekend so as to save water. It had been two weeks since the young couple engaged in their first civil war. It had been so loud. Collins squelched whenever he remembered how the children cried and how the neighbors banged the door until he got a headache. By the time Collins opened the door, Ofure’s face was already bloodied, rolling and leaving stains on the floor. She had cried so much that her mouth just lay open while her cries came out voiceless.
In the evening, Ofure’s mother was summoned and since Collins had no kin in Lagos, the oldest tenant in the house, Pa Chuka took over the meeting. The meeting was short and quiet, save for the regular wince from Ofure whenever she tried to agree with what was said. The men took over the narrative of the meeting. Ofure had acted irrational. She was not the first woman to be blessed by God to feed her family and she shouldn’t have shifted her weight around. She should have waited until her husband had eaten and talked to him quietly, instead of calling him a thief and poisoning the young children’s mind against their own father. Collins was told to look for a Job and avoid taking his stress on his wife. Pa Chuks promised to set a linkup between Collins and the bricklayers who were building factories in Apapa. Three days after the judgment, Collins started a job as a workman for the bricklayer. For the week that the job lasted, he broke a hundred and fifteen bricks and at the end of the week, he was dismissed without pay. That was days ago. This week, another opportunity came from his grudging wife, who had told him between wince and anger that she had seen an open vacancy as a cleaner in a factory. Collins had blushed with shame and retorted,
‘Do you want to disgrace me further? So, you want people to say, look at them, both husband and wives, they make their living by cleaning other people’s dump’.
Collins knew that if his father had not sent him off cruelly, he wouldn’t have married from a poor family. But still, his current state left him uncomfortable. A voice within him said,
‘So you want to sit and eat while your wife, a woman, takes over as the breadwinner?’