CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Obinna was seated on a chair in the balcony outside his room that overlooked the lawn, his BlackBerry in one hand, a glass of sherry in the other, his eyes looking out at the night. The screen was glowing as the network searched out the YouTube videos he had requested for. He looked down at the phone in his hand, and there were the most popular videos in the country displayed on the screen before him.
A small wave of emotion travelled through his spine when he saw that the number one video was captioned: Interview with Adamma about her separation with husband. He sighed, and then he clicked on the Enter button so he could stream the video. When the video started to play, he put down the glass of sherry and glued his eyes to the screen.
It was a ten-minute video, and there was Adamma, her face filling the screen as she smiled at the woman who was seated cross-legged with her in what looked to be a small parlor. The woman was a face he recognized as one of the most famous TV presenters in Nigeria.
‘I know that you must be really busy, but I am quite glad that you’re here to talk to me,’ the petite screen dragon said in a low, soothing voice. ‘Now, how does it feel to have entered the doors of matrimony and decide to walk back out again?’
Adamma gave her a slow smile. ‘My dear, I never chose to leave the home of my husband; I was a victim of circumstance and that is all there is to it. We just had to be away from each other for a while because it seemed not to be working out anymore. So there.’
‘But you’ve been away from him for a while, and he’s known as one of the most eligible men around in the crème of Lagos society. What if another woman were to get him for herself?’
Adamma laughed heartily, and Obinna knew from his experiences with her that it was one of her pure laughs of enjoyment. ‘You see, what I must tell the woman is good luck. Believe me when I tell you that no other woman will ever be good enough for him. You may think that I’m boasting, but it’s far from that. I was the only woman who was able to hold him, and the hold I had over him survived the years that we’d been away from each other. Like you know, he was unaware that he was the father of my kids and there was no way for him to have known that since I was the only one to be able to give him that particular news. I know him too well, and no other woman can ever know him the way I do and be able to hold him down the way I do.’
Patricia smiled sweetly, apparently moving in for the kill. ‘But that’s not really what we’re here to discuss, is it? There are news flying around all over the internet about you, being spread by a woman who says she has inside news about you and your marriage, and also about what she says was your life before you were discovered. I hope I am not discomfiting you in any way?’
Adamma shook her head emphatically. ‘No, that’s not possible. I came here because I wanted to talk about this and put an end to what everyone calls rumors about me; let them know the real truth. Della_ for she’s the woman who is responsible for this_ said that I was a whore, that I danced naked for money for the pleasure of men.’
‘Well, did you?’ the other woman asked gently.
Adamma looked up, and the camera zoomed into her face, lighting up her luminous eyes. ‘Yes, I did dance in a club for the pleasure of men who had the money to pay to watch me do my act.’
Obinna gasped, and only distinctly did he hear the sympathetic murmur that came from the mouth of Patricia as the beloved singer dropped the bombshell that nobody was supposed to know. How could she have done that? Why?
‘I was a dancing girl who was driven to the clubs by the fact that she had no father or mother to help her through her teen years. Do you think it’s easy for a young girl to grow up without the love and the care of her parents? And yes, it was a huge secret that was kept under wraps so that the image I was building up for myself through my music would not be tarnished in any way. I had kids, yes, and it was in that club that I met my husband who was responsible for my pregnancy though he was ignorant of the fact at that time. I had to succeed in life, and if dancing half naked was what it took to be able to be able to take care of myself so that I could survive in the world, then so be it.
‘What you may not really understand is the fact that there are a lot of persons who have quite nothing and really have to suffer to make ends meet. I was a dancing little bitch for a group of men who had the money and the lewdness and the time it took to come and watch me do my act. Yes, there is nothing to be ashamed of; and that is not because of the fact that the work I did was so good and morally upright but the point I’m trying to make here is that I was never a thief. I stole from no one . . .’
The camera were once again at her face and there was a burning light in her eyes as she stared right into those lenses, and Obi felt as if her eyes were looking straight at him, burning straight into his soul, accusing him of what he’d inadvertently done by unwittingly unleashing Della on her. And it was all because of the quest he had to dominate her and make her subservient to him. And those eyes . . . God, those shocking eyes that were the embodiment of tragedy and sorrow, love and sensuality. How she was using it all to her advantage; the scandal was almost unavoidably going to render her as the most talked-about thing in the tabloids and the gossip spreads, and the album sales would roll in, the invitation to all the happening A-list parties would come flooding in like a dam.
I am sorry, Obi thought at the face of the woman who was speaking out from the screen of his phone. How could I have done this to you? You were mine and we could have had it all; why did you have to run away from me?
All of a sudden, he was yanked out of his reverie by the shrill ring of his Android phone which was reposing on the table before him. Angrily, he turned off the video and grabbed the offending phone without bothering to look at the caller ID.
‘Yes?’ he snapped.
The soft, stunned voice of his doll of a secretary floated out of the earpiece of the phone. He could almost smell her cloying perfume. ‘Sir, where are you? The reporters are about to beat down the doors of the office and are demanding to see you because they all think you’re here now.’
‘What is it this time?’ he snapped impatiently.
‘Apparently, your attention-seeking soon-to-be ex-wife has gotten herself entangled once again in speculative gossip,’ the young woman sniffed, and the disapproval which was etched in her voice was unmistakable. ‘I hear that the woman has decided to get herself involved in some transnational charity and she’s looking for the patron who will give her work some credibility. Apparently, the woman has named you.’
‘What did you just say? She did what?’
‘I think you’d better call her yourself in order to find out what she’s been up to. Right now I have to fend off the calls from the persistent jackasses who are crawling right all over me right now.’ She disconnected the call.
The moment Obi put down the Blackberry on his other hand, it flashed to life, and the caller ID panel showed that it was his wife that had deigned to call him. Well, speak of the devil, and here she calls. He thumbed the connect button. ‘Adamma.’
‘Obi, darling, how nice of you to pick my calls,’ came the soft voice he’d have recognized anywhere, even in his sleep. ‘Well, I need your help again. As I am quite sure you know, something has come up and I need your help.’
Obi sighed; he could feel his heart hammering with anticipation in his chest as he felt to himself that he hated this woman, this wanton, foul-mouthed, feisty sexy bitch who could dare to call him up when they had a lot of issues to handle between them and seek for his help. It’s because she knows that I can never refuse her, he thought glumly. This woman is manipulative, though she was extremely fun when the mood was upon her icy-cold beautiful spirit. But I will show her yet.
‘You and I have got to meet because we have to talk,’ he told her. ‘I saw what you’d done online. That was not smart of you to have done because you know that it could affect the kids.’
‘What kids?’ she countered in her amused, bored voice. ‘They are mine, and for your information, they asked me to do the interview because they could not stay and see their lovely mother suffer for the indiscretions of their father who was too stupid to let the past be the past and forget the fact that he was a playboy and stay married to the wife he had blackmailed into marrying him. You unleashed Della on me by going out with her when all you had to do was to tell her that the relationship you had with her was over. You never could control your cock, could you?’
Obinna was incredulous. This woman had never ceased to amaze him. His twins_ telling her what to do and she’d done it? ‘You manipulated them into agreeing,’ he accused her, and he knew that his voice had risen a notch.
‘I did not have to, darling,’ she snapped coldly. ‘All I had to do was come back from the studio and break down in my room and for the twins to rush in and see me in that sorry state. You know that my kids love me more than anything in the world and will not see me suffer, so they had to tell me to do what I had to do in order to get the situation back under control. Hence, the interviews, and then the increase in popularity and Google hits, increase in my albums sales. That was very nice of your whore to do what she had to do in order to get me out of the scene and for you to hate me. Is it working?’
‘We have to meet,’ Obi blurted out, surprising even himself with the declaration of those words. ‘My secretary called me to tell me that you have something you’re working on which you involved me in. We have to talk about that.’
Adamma laughed out loud. ‘My dear, you’re so clueless; there’s nothing to talk about. According to the media, you and I sat down together and agreed that you were going to be donating a lump sum of money to the charity for homeless kids which I’m currently working on and which you had agreed to help out with. Oh, the kids do thank you for your generosity. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go because my masseur is pinging me to come in for my session with him. And please do not go making an ass out of yourself by not being amenable to the young lady I had just sent to collect your goodwill cheque from you for those lovely kids down in Tanzania.’ She hung up.
Obinna held the phone in his hand as he felt the fury welling up within him at the audacity of this ridiculous woman who could wield such power in her little fingers so effortlessly. He was trembling, and he hated the fact that she was the only woman who had the capacity to control him, rendering him so utterly helpless and frustrated, like some impotent jerk that could do nothing. Gosh; what a bitch.
Blinking back the fog that had clouded his eyes as he’d thought about his wife, he thumbed the screen of his phone back to life and then went online, to the site which was maintained by Adamma. Scrolling through the pages, he discovered that indeed there was a charity she was involved in. There were a lot of pictures, and he clicked through them, his gut wrenching as he looked at the faces of kwashiorkor-ravaged kids whose skin hung on their skeletal frames like death masks.
And there was the celebrity wife, photographed as she carried some of the children in the orphan shelter and had spoon-fed a sickly-looking, completely malnourished little boy, and there were tears in her eyes. It was undoubtedly real, and Obinna found himself being moved by her humanity, this cold, heartless bitch who had tortured him for well over a decade with her beauty and her charms which she could turn on and off like the flick of a light bulb.
The truth was that she was real, at least to the people she wished to help and shower her generosity upon when the mood suited her; and to him she had chosen to be a real bitch, the real ice queen who had to freeze into such coldness when she had to contend with him. Unaffected, haughty to him when the bitch switch in her brain had been turned on, with her airs of cold superiority and untouchable frozen beauty which had been dramatically maintained over the years on the big screens, she was the perfect nemesis for him. And he would deal with her in his own way.
She wanted his cash, right? Then she was going to have to come and get it herself.