The Runaway

I successfully dodged the last hit of the ‘omorogun’. I’d endured almost an hour of sporadic swats of the belt and NEPA wire. In the last ten minutes though, my mother’s hurt and disappointment had transformed before my very eyes into unadulterated anger. Anger and frustration that her first born child had changed into this maniacal mess of screams and streaming snot. So I leaped over the dining table into the kitchen, slid out the rod that held the door and ran off into the rising run. I ran towards Falana Shopping Complex. I didn’t stop running until I got to the rear entrance of Eyinni High School. Then I started to walk, walk off to London where my father was waiting to rescue me from my mother’s unreasonableness.

I wasn’t always the enfant terrible, the one who was traced home from the game house for stealing a video tape of porn. I wasn’t the truant child. In all but one session of my primary school, I topped every class. My hopelessness with Mathematics didn’t matter- English language was my forte, and it helped me understand every other subject. Imagine my confusion then, when as the most brilliant pupil of Reverend Akinpelu’s school, my mother refused to register me for the Common Entrance examination. All my friends were registered for Federal, Navy and private school examinations. Mr Adika, my primary 5A teacher managed to convince my mother- on the last day of registration- to enter me for the state examinations. I was relieved, that finally, I would be resuming in JSS 1, even if it was GCI. Even back then I knew I would ace the exams and ace them I did! Only for me to find out that my mother had spoken to someone at Ministry of Education and had changed the school choice from Government College Ibadan to Ibadan Grammar School. I was sad. That sadness never left me until I ran off into the rainy June morning five years later. Finally I had freedom. Finally I was escaping this overbearing mother of mine…

But it wasn’t always like this. Myself and my two siblings from my benevolent step-father were the model kids of the neighbourhood. Iya Jide’s children were the best dressed and best spoken. You see, my father had left my mother few months before I was born. Neither of them has told me what happened that made him leave, but as an adult today, I can imagine why. My father, the Otunba of Barking and Dagenham, is a baby boy extraordinaire- who is incapable of allowing things like parenthood disturb him from chopping life. He enjoyed a good brandy. He enjoyed eja tutu. And he enjoyed women. A lot of them.

I almost never saw him. I knew of him, but I know I saw him a grand number of three times before I went off to secondary school. The last time I saw him was in 1992 when he brought me a pair of blue sneakers. Unsurprisingly, the shoes didn’t fit so I passed it on to my sister Cinderella, who in turn passed in on to my cousin Tusky D who then in turn passed it back to my brother COJ.

Not that my mother overtly cared. She had a fantastic job at NAL Merchant Bank. Apart from her cadet blue Dastun 120Y, she was also entitled to a white Peugeot 504 whenever we needed it. Before Babangida annulled the 1993 elections, we wanted for nothing. We vacationed at Eko Holiday Inn and had Sunday brunches at Segi’s. But no sooner did Abacha take over power did things go downhill, rapidly so. The first inkling I had of our fast degenerating status was when my mother announced that we had the choice of using either margarine or jam, not the two. In time, jam disappeared and with it, peanut butter. Margarine followed and we had to use Blue Band. The last straw was when one Saturday morning, I woke up to find a few of my mother’s friend in our living room, all of them speaking in hushed tones, telling her “Don’t worry, God is in control. At worst you will move back to England. In two years you would have saved enough to come back for the children.” They stopped talking when they saw me. I found out later that my mother had been retrenched the previous day. No prior notice; she was among the staffers that Head Office sent a pink slip. Thank you for work so far, but your services are no longer required.

The Abacha years were brutal. I saw my mother go from a corporately dressed professional to a clothes trader. With the meagre gratuity she got from the bank, she invested in a fabric business. Every month she’d leave me and my siblings at Mama Ayuba’s house across the street and head off to Aba. She got a shop in Aleshinloye to store the taffeta and guinea and Hollandia and London wax. Still her trusty old panel van was the shop. We got by quite okay until she got duped. Someone bought nearly ten dozen bundles of Hollandia on credit and vanished into thin air. But my mother was resilient and approached Alhaja Selimo for advance supply. Six weeks after she collected the materials, she took ill. Ulcer it was. My great-uncle Alhaji Bada saved us. He was the MD of Femi Johnson & Co and had access to better healthcare than my mother’s recently cancelled Group Medical HMO insurance covered. But Alhaja Selimo didn’t care, and when my mother couldn’t repay her, she came to create a huge scene at our Castle of Mercy flat one Saturday morning.

All of this, I didn’t quite understand. I didn’t understand why my mother turned down Oba Olashore’s offer of a year’s scholarship and sent me off to a public school. I didn’t understand why my siblings went to Oluyole Private School and Nickdel College respectively and I was stuck in Ibadan Grammar School, with classmates that reeked of raw fish and adi agbon. I didn’t understand why I was sent off to the hostel with a metal pail and a torch and full nylon bag of garri while Nickdel’s school fees was four times mine. It was my mother’s fault though: she never told me that my father never paid a dime of my school fees.

In his absentia I’d made my father into a hero. I knew he worked at Nigerian Airways so I thought of him as a pilot. Each visiting day, I daydreamed of him landing a helicopter in the middle of the assembly ground. I imagined myself receiving a letter from him during Friday’s assembly. One day that dream came true, but it was not my father. It was his younger brother KT, who had been looking for me for years. We had moved house, my mother was no longer in the employ of the bank which she’d been for years and our telephone line had been permanently TOS’ed. But he knew that I was attending my father’s alma mater and sent off a letter to PO Box 21, Ibadan. When my name was called out that Friday morning, I grew taller. That was my proudest moment as a child. I peered at my peers as I walked to the front of the assembly as picked up the envelope addressed to me.

The rest of my JSS days were hell. I was the youngest and the tallest. Unfortunately I was also the lankiest so I was easily spotted and bullied. Whenever morning duties were being allocated, I always got pit latrine. I’d cry as I scrubbed off feaces from the cement flooring. The day I accidentally swept a viper off the edge of the latrine, I ran back home. Waded through the Ogunpa river and trekked to our house… My mother was alarmed, but she took me back to school. Baba Ewe our housemaster took pity on me and did not punish me. But I would run back home many more times, with my mother driving me back each time.

I discovered Nintendo around JSS 2. Along with Senior Nator, Ogbevire and Amego; I knew where the school fence was uncompleted. We would wriggle through the bushes and play Mortal Kombat and EA Soccer at College Crescent. One fateful day, we ran into Reverend Adekanbi, our terrifying chaplain whom we were convinced was Satan himself. Those three were let off as they were ‘finalists’ while I was paraded during night assembly as the truant destined for hell.

I wrote several letters to my father, using the address of our family house on Cardoso Street, Mushin, Lagos. I never got a reply. I kept dreaming of the day he would come and rescue me from all of this mess. It never happened.

One month before the 1998 session ended, I was summoned into the Vice Principal’s office. In there sat a man that seemed very familiar but whom I knew I’d never set eyes on. VP asked me for my father’s name and I said it. He asked for my grandfather’s name and I said it. The man sitting by was in tears, saying ‘Omo wa ni…He’s my brother’s son’. It was my father’s third brother AT, who was sent by my grandfather to find me. He bought me meatpie and Tandi and gave me one hundred naira. He promised to come see me again before school closed. I was ecstatic. No longer would I feel like I was a nobody. I had a father, and he sent his brother to me, or so I thought.

That week, our new principal, a demon of a man by the name of Reverend S.O Oke announced that contrary to what we enjoyed under the recently retired Canon GB Daramola, students who were owing school fees would not be allowed to write third term exams. I relayed the message to my mother. Like a magician, she produced the three hundred naira and sent me back the following day.

My friend Akeem was disadvantaged. His mother had died at childbirth and his father had married two other wives so he was just a ‘floater’ in their home. As I got back to school, he told me he had raised half of his school fees by working as an alabaru in Molete and could I lend him one hundred and fifty naira. I gladly obliged, hoping that somehow I’d make the money back. I’d seen people who started playing MK2 with ten naira and won five hundred. So off I went, to DI Systems right next to Molete bridge with the remaining one hundred and fifty naira that was left from my school fees. I started betting with twenty naira. I lost every round.

How would I write exams now? How do I explain that I spent my school fees? It sounded like something Deremi, the thuggish son of our landlord would do. Needless to say, I was not allowed to sit the first paper (I think it was Agric or some minor subject). Some evil spirit convinced me I had nothing lose, after all my father’s brother had found me and I would soon be on my way to England.

As fate will have it, my mother chose that very day to come see me in school. She asked for my examination script and I gave the very first answer than came to my head: they didn’t print on paper this term, the questions were written on the board. I knew I was in trouble the minute I said that because her face froze and she said ‘That’s impossible’. Before I knew it, she had stepped out of the car and marched off to the direction of the staff room. I ran after her saying, ‘Mummy ko need. I did it well’. In few short strides she got in there. Shebi I should have confessed right there and then? She accosted my class teacher and that one declared that I wasn’t allowed to write the exam because my fees were outstanding. I disagreed. For the next thirty minutes I kept insisting that I gave the money to her. The poor woman swore that I did not. When she saw that I stuck to my lies, she said she would pay the money but that I should also swear with a bible that I truly gave it to her. It was at that point that my liver failed me. I confessed that I did not in fact pay and had spent it. With enormous shame, my mother backed down, apologised to Mrs Akande and her colleagues, and then marched me back into the car.

The following day was a Saturday and I was awoken by the stinging hits of a belt. My mother had given me the Friday night off and had begun her beating at the break of dawn. It became a dance, a macabre one. She lashed out with a belt and I ran from the bedroom to the living room to the dining room where eventually she laid eyes on the round-headed turning stick that was on the sideboard. Beyond the stars I saw each time a blow landed on my back and arms and neck and wherever, I saw bright lights. London here I come!

To be continued.