WE ARE ABLE Episode 13 and 14
We got well inside Bode’s room but he wasn’t there. Mother adjourned to the toilet to look for him. It was futile.
“Bode! Bode! Bode!” my mother must have shouted, going by the look of her mouth. She was shaking visibly. Maybe Bode had answered the call of her mother, I thought.
“She must have gone bodily to meet her mother in the herbalist’s place?” my mother said.
“In this dead night?” I replied. “I don’t think so.”
“Hmm…hey, I’m afraid Rose. What are we going to tell John now?”
“Like how? Did we do anything to him?” I said and frowned.
“Daddy won’t take that from us, I hope you know him,” she said.
“Enh, but how is this our concern?” I replied, bending to peep under the bed to find him. He wasn’t there.
“Even Toyosi would do anything to put us in trouble,” she said. “She would take us to court and ask us to provide her son by all means.”
I threw down the pillow, perhaps he was hiding underneath it. I opened
the wardrobe and even pulled out the drawer. We were both acting
nervously as though we were running mental. How possibly would someone
fold himself into a wardrobe? That thought didn’t strike my head.
My
mother even raised the mattress up and left it out of order after
discovering that Bode wasn’t under it. The last place we would go search
for him was my father’s room. We feared the man so much.
“Bode!” my mother was calling as she left for the parlour. She returned to say Bode wasn’t there. We have virtually checked the whole flat except my father’s room.
“Maybe we should go and check him in your room,” I said.
“No,” my mother disagreed at once. “Your father will suspect us if we do that.”
“So what’s your suggestion?” I asked.
“Let’s just retreat and return to your room to continue our sleep and do as if nothing has happened. Tomorrow morning we shall be sorting it out.”
“Alright then,” I said, stepping ahead of her. I can’t wait to be on my bed again because I am tired. But this time around I would make sure I don’t sleep with my two eyes closed to avoid being called in the dream. I would rather sleep like a duck, I thought.
“Rose, don’t go yet,” my mother signaled to me. “Let’s tidy up the room we’ve scattered.
I rushed to the wardrobe to arrange Bode’s cloth as they were earlier, then I found a calabash.
I was shocked. I tapped my mother to call her attention. She was shocked too when she saw it.
She shook like a leaf blown by a gentle breeze. Her mouth convulsed.
“Who put that there?” she was asking. If she hadn’t spoken with sign language I would have thought that she wasn’t directing the question to me but to someone else. How would I know who put the calabash there? The thing was merely half-filled with sand.
My mother feared that it would implicate us if father should discover it there later, so she picked it up after doing sign of the cross over her face and shoulder so that she could go and throw it far away. As she got to the entrance of Bode’s room, someone appeared at the door. It was John!
For minutes I felt the quietness of disability. Mother was shedding hot tears, father was pointing to her face; Bode was staring under father’s armpit in horror. My heart whispered, ‘I am disabled’.
A slap was done to my mother’s cheek. It must have reverberated going by the impetus in my father’s arm. His biceps was on the high at that point. The calabash fell off her grip and got smashed. Father pinned her to the wall and Bode came after me too. He sent a strong bite to my right side. I couldn’t raise my arm. I dare not do that.
When they were done with us after dealing with us like thieves, father locked us up in the room. I was left in the dark as regard their conversation. Mother could have begun the explanation, but our hands were both tied with ropes. They had even removed the bulb in that room so as to leave us in total darkness. There was weeping and gnashing of teeth in the belly of the dark. It was hell!
We spent two months in the dark. Actually, it wasn’t two months but it seemed so because of the torment we were passing through. Maybe we had a shorter day and a longer night, who knows.
The day began to dawn gradually and the blanket of darkness left the face of the wall clock. I checked the time; it was 5:25 am. The door flung open and three souls trooped in, Toyosi, John and Bode. They were leering wickedly at us. We are dead!
Toyosi began to unleash the content of her mouth. She pounced on my mother and then came to me to do the same. She taught me a lesson I never learnt. She smashed my head on the bed wood. She was pointing at the smashed calabash, the scattered bed, the opened wardrobe and every other thing my mother and I have scattered during the course of our search for Bode. My common sense told me that she would use them all a evidence against us in the court of law.
By 7am we were still in bounds, only that we could now see each other. They had shut the door once more but our hands were still tied. My father tied them purposely to render us incommunicado. I leaned my back against the bedside and raised my legs up in the air to communicate with my mother. I managed to ask a question with my legs. She understood me vividly and she was shocked. Now how would she give me a reply? She couldn’t demonstrate anything with her own legs. It was a surprise to me when she nodded to signal to me that she wasn’t able to do that. She couldn’t control her toes to make any sign, but I was finding it so easy to do. I used my knees as my elbow whenever it was needed. I could easily fold all four toes and let the fattest one lie straight, but my mother couldn’t dare it.
Episode 14
We remained in the house until 9am when my father returned with some police with Toyosi. They loosed my mother and replaced the rope on her hands with handcuffs.
I screamed. No one paid attention to me. John pushed me out of the way. My mother was led away despite all the gesticulation she was making.
Rachael my aunt came to time. She was shocked when she saw my mother on handcuffs. Her head gear toppled over and fell on the table in the sitting room. She put her hands on her head.
What was the count charge against mother? Who would let me know? My father began to point at my face. His face was coarse. He must have been shouting, going by his Adam apple which was bouncing up and down in his jugular.
My aunt held me by my right wrist and began to pull me out of the house. It was as if my father had instructed her to take me with her. I weep when I saw my mother being sandwiched into the police peacock van.
“What happened?” I asked my aunt.
“Let’s get home first,” she said.
As soon as we arrived Aunty Rachael’s home, she changed her clothes and got prepared to go out.
“Where are you going aunty?”
“To the police station,” she said.
“Aunty, what’s my mummy’s offence?” I asked.
“Wait for me to return,” she said and began to hurry away.
I folded my arms. My eyes had seen too much already. To die is better than to live. If only I have my life in control I would rather have taken it.
Tears poured out of my eyes; maybe blood I didn’t know. I wiped my tears with the back of my left hand. I felt lonely.
It was getting to 11am before my aunt returned.
“Welcome,” I said in haste. “What about mum?”
“She’s–she’s there…” my aunt said and burst in tears. “Rose, tell me…tell me…what really happened?”
I narrated the whole event.
“It’s your fault, Rose, yourself and your mother’s fault. I–I told you Toyosi is dangerous, you didn’t listen to me…”
Rachael patted me on the back. She told me exactly what the charge against my mother was.
“Rose, do you know what really happened? Your father charged your mother for attempted murder.”
“What!” I screamed.
Rachael told the story to detail: Bode saw a woman sitting beside a herbalist and moving her hands over a calabash of water. He said that the woman he saw was your mother. His own image was inside the water they were looking at. Bode woke up and rushed to meet his father in fright.
“Hmm,” I sighed with my hands when my aunt ended the story. “Aunty, that woman Bode saw is his own mother, not mine.”
“But who in this world will believe that?” Rachael replied me. “It was your mother and yourself they heard your voices in the night calling Bode’s name; when your mother made use of sign language to call Bode to death in the spiritual, the boy didn’t respond because he is ignorant of the sign, so you resorted into calling his name in the physical!”
“Aunty!” I shouted in sign language. “Do you believe that?” I was in great shock. My mouth remained open wide as I expected a response from my aunt.
She burst into tears and arched her back. She grabbed me and folded me in her bossom. My head was right below her bony chin. Her long hair carressed my unclad shoulders. Her tears fell in drops and then in excess on my body. They were cold. She disentangled. I knew she was about to use the sign language–the British sign language:
“I don’t believe every bit of their story, Rose, but no one else wouldn’t believe it; indeed Bode had the dream because he fled to his daddy’s bedside: your mummy wasn’t beside your daddy at that dead of the night, where was she?”
“Em–em, she was beside me on my own bed,” I said.
“And what were you both doing in Bode’s room in the dead night? They said your mother wanted to kill me physically when he didn’t die spiritually, that was why you were in his room. They said you didn’t find him and then resorted into searching his room, perhaps he was hiding somewhere in the corner of the room–so you scattered his bed, his wardrobe and everything in there in desperation.”
I sobbed. I didn’t seem to see a way out of this.
“And lastly, your father said he found your mother carrying a calabash. Rose, what’s that for?”
“We found it there,” I said.
“Did you people do all these things at all? Why did you go scattering Bode’s room?”
“It was true we were looking for Bode, just because of the dream I had; it was the same dream Bode claimed he saw, but it is a blatant lie that it was my mother who did the sign language in it; rather it is Bode’s mother, Toyosi.”
“Toyosi?” How? Why would she be calling her son’s name?” she asked.
“Yes she’s the one. She was asking me to tell her my name in sign language; I told her Bode’s name instead, remembering that you have asked me not to tell her my name if she asked. Then she was calling her son’s name in the dream unknowingly.”
“Hmm. Now I understand, my aunty said.”
We were silent for some minutes.
“So what next?” I asked.
“Your mother would be charged to court for attempted murder next week.”
I screamed and fell to the floor.
