Seeing the world around me
Dewy skin, glistening hair that curled at the edges and stuck to her forehead. Curly hair that framed a face with bright eyes that twinkled as if an undercurrent of mischief was constantly running. This was how I remembered her, she was beautiful. I wanted to be her friend. I wanted her to like me, in fact to love me like she loved her children. She leaned down close to me once, a greeting, a hug, as she acknowledged me standing next to my mother one day. She smelled of a heady musk, a feminine scent that was memorable. I never smelt it on anyone else and came to associate that memory with her. I later discovered that it was a Fendi perfume but she had become my earliest association with expensive taste.
My mother told me she was an activist. It didn’t mean much to me then and looking back now, I see how I associated her with so much else but not the word ‘activist’. This light skinned beauty with the dewy glow and twinkling eyes was simply to me the beautiful wife of a very rich man who could afford the time she spent with my mother. This accounted for her expensive appearance and smell. What it didn’t explain was her association with my mother.
I was a fourteen year old boy harbouring a partial crush on the beautiful woman who saved my mother’s life.
My mother was a simple woman, humble, warm, an introverted personality. She married my father at a young age, in her first year of university. She graduated with a degree in philosophy but I had no idea whether or not she aspired to any career. She was just mom for all of my childhood, caring for us, cooking, cleaning, instructing our live-in help Obiageli who was the same age as me. My father was larger-than-life, roaring in debates with his friends and roaring in anger when my mother forgot something or did something he didn’t like. He didn’t bother with university but he paid for my mom to complete hers. He went straight into business selling automobile parts and was reasonably successful at first. It allowed my mom to stay home and care for all four of us kids. By the time I was ten, there had been a series of bad deals and my dad’s business had become more staccato than smooth sailing.
My dad had always been in charge, I remembered that we always had someone on the lookout while we played outdoors in the evenings when he was expected back from the shop. At the first sight of his Mazda trundling down our street, they would yell “Daddy is coming!” And we would abandon all games, friends, toys and flee indoors where my mother equally panicked would begin to issue hurried instructions for us to tidy up the living room in the few short minutes we had. She would race back and forth herself, calling for Obiageli to start heating up the soup, to check that the kettle was on to boil water for his gari. There was adrenalin and there was a mild fear.
