We are Able Episode 34 and 35

We are Able Episode 34

Toyosi was shocked when she discovered that I had sold all the eggs in the room where she stored them. That day, I didn’t stop at three crates. I kept on going back home to bring more crates until fifteen crates of eggs were sold by us.

Toyosi rushed to me and asked in fury, “Where are my eggs?” I signed a response back to her. She was amazed. I had ‘sounded’ incredible.

“And where is the money?” she asked, to be sure I was saying the right thing. I put a hand into my waist wallet and gave her all the money in it.

That evening, Toyosi had to take it upon herself to get some crates of eggs in replacement, which she expected me to sell the next day.

John was amazed when he heard about it. If only he had the time in his control, he would trail me from behind and know the secret. But he dared not skip job for a day. Even Toyosi too would have done that, but unfortunately for her, she could not.

The sales continued. The strategy was really working to the extent that some good Samaritans would tell us not to bother given them change.

Now I had discovered Toyosi’s lie. Did she not say that she was omnipresent? Did she not say that she was seeing me anywhere and anytime? Why didn’t she see what I was doing to sell that much?

So, Toyosi seeing me with Moses that day was a coincidence, I thought. Then my thought of fleeing the home once and for all ravished my brain, but for Biodun’s sake, I would stay. How would he feel without me? Biodun won’t survive not ‘seeing’ me around for one month let alone forever.

On the first day of putting our idea into use, just when we were leaving, a young boy came close to us. He was an egg buns seller. Biodun made the boy’s intention known to me and I accepted the idea:

He said his name is Chinedu. He wants us to help him sell his egg buns, since eggs and egg buns are more or less the same commodity

So, what is our bonus?

I told him to pay us #3 per egg buns we help him sell. He would be putting two showglasses before us everyday.

How many buns would be in each showglass?

Fifty I guess

Then it means we shall be having around #300 daily if we sell all

Exactly!

That’s a good business! Let’s do it!

Chinedu began to drop his showglasses before us everyday, since it would save him the stress of walking about under the sun for hours to have them all sold.

People around that corner loved us so much. They wouldn’t want to patronise other people except if we had nothing left to sell. Biodun even said he overheard somebody saying that she was challenged by our lifestyle; despite our limitations, we could still overcome it and work for a living by ourselves unlike the many people hanging around without any loss of there organs, yet begging for alms.

We were so much blessed to the extent that some people would give us alms even when we haven’t requested for them. At first, I wanted to go against such, but Biodun said we shouldn’t reject it. We could use such money, added to the money Chinedu did pay us, to refresh ourselves before returning home each day.

That is not alm, but freewill offering, Biodun said. The ones they give in Church, are they alms too? he added.

Despite the fact that Biodun couldn’t see, he appeared very clever. I used to wonder how precisely he did give descriptions of objects he hadn’t seen before. I was shocked when he was describing the pillar of our house in a composition they were asked to write sometimes back. Biodun said that things he felt with his hands and those he heard with his ears tend to stick to his memory rigidly.

Even Laide who could see could not spell words better than Biodun, although she had her own strong point too. Laide, though lame, could swim better than me. I discovered that when we had the opportunity to learn how to swim in the school I once attended with them.

John began to avoid me, perhaps he knew what I could do. My audacity had risen to a level of egoism. I would let my father know that I wasn’t useless as he had portrayed me. I addressed a note to him:

Daddy, you said I am useless but now I am proving you wrong. You said I couldn’t sell a crate of egg so I am useless, but I have sold more than a hundred in four days. What do you think? Am I still useless? What else do you want me to do to show you that I AM ABLE? Perhaps after doing that, you might reconsider bringing back my mother.

John was speechless when he saw the letter. He came to where I was and gaped at me for a while, his face muddled up in total confusion.

I didn’t go scotfree for my action. Toyosi came to my corner to beat me up, having glimpsed the note I addressed to her husband. I charged at her impulsively. I didn’t know where that effrontery came from. I had snatched the cane and thrown it away before it lashed my body. Toyosi herself was scared. She just left me alone and went away.

I wondered what came on me. It was only two times I had displayed a kind of wild behaviour before her ever since, and in those two times she capitulated. Maybe she was even afraid of me somehow, I thought….

My partnership business with Biodun continued, but it was shortlived however. Everything ended in six days, though Biodun had promised to extend his companionship to nine, and not eight working days anymore. No one would detect this since the excuse Laide gave his classteacher was that he was ill.
That fateful sixth working day, we ran out of luck. As usual, since the time Chinedu began to pay us for the sales, we paid visit to cafeteria to feed ourselves everyday before returning home. We would have fun, chatting and eating until around 5pm. Then we would hurry home so that Biodun’s mother, who arrived home 6pm daily wouldn’t discover our secret.

It was already 6pm before I realized that we had stayed too long having fun. I tapped Biodun on the wrist to alert him that it was time to go home. Biodun had no problem understanding me because we have both taught ourselves some common touch signs formulated by us both. Pulling his ear meant something as well as pulling his legs. Covering his blind eyes with my hands also meant something. I had even explained some sign language to Biodun, despite the fact that he was blind, such that whenever he needed to tell me some simple common things, he would swing his hands before me in the sign language I had taught him and I would just understand him.
When I tapped Biodun’s wrist, he thumped up in fright. Biodun pulled out five fingers to signal to me if it was 6pm already. I held his hands and pulled out one more of his fingers. He knew what I was talking about. We had already stayed late. Biodun picked his walking stick and began to rush ahead as if he would go all the way home by himself. I hasted to him and held him by the arm.

We arrived home around some minutes to 7pm. We needed nobody to tell us that we were doomed. As we entered the compound, we saw someone, a lady. I first thought she was Mrs Omotayo, but when she came closer, I discovered she wasn’t. It was Taiba.
Taiba was angry with us. She held Biodun by the hand, snatching him from me and began to hurry away. She was saying some things I didn’t understand, but I inferred that Mrs Omotayo wasn’t around yet. She must have been saying something concerning losing his job if Mrs Omotayo had returned earlier.
We were lucky, I thought. Quickly, I put the empty crates in the room where Toyosi did store them and bolted out at once. I needed to follow Biodun into their apartment, at least to avoid Bode’s troubles. I knew he would have been lurking around for me to do me bad. As predicted, he had put one of his legs on the passageway in the apartment, expecting me to stumble over it and fall, but he was making a big mistake. I made his leg a stepping stone instead of the stumbling block he had intended it for. He screamed as he tended the leg, but I was off.
I sat comfortably on the sofa, tightening myself on my heartthrob, Biodun. Laide was looking at us as if she was jealous. She had a saucer before her face as she sipped something I had no idea of. Maybe it was ‘Eve’ drink I wouldn’t tell. She was peeping at us from one side of the saucer.
Just five minutes later, Mrs Omotayo entered and three mouths greeted him. I bent my neck to show courtesy, but she was furious at us all. It was a great shock seeing her in such lugubrious state. What exactly came over her? I thought.

The next ten minutes were moments of cluelessness for me. Who would tell me what really happened? I just had to watch as she spoke and pointed to us one after the other. In the end, she came for me and began to pull me out of her apartment.
I was left in the dark about the issue until early the next morning when the whole family set me at the centre to make a laughingstock out of me. John laughed and laughed such that he had to quickly hold on to the wall beside him to avoid falling. Bode wasn’t backing out too. He brandished his milk teeth before me. Eventually, John gave me a note he had taken his time to write. I read:

Rose, my useless daughter, this is a reply to the note you wrote to me earlier, claiming that you are useful because you can do business more than even the normal people. Now, your secrets and lies are out here. Rose, what actually led you into begging for alms? Did we not feed you three square meals right from the day I thought to lessen your burden up till now? So why did you choose to beg for alms instead of being satisfied with what we give you here? Or are you doing it to impress us that you are able as you claim every now and then? So, you have been delivering alms money for us as the returns of your sales all these while. Stop deceiving yourself, Rose. You can never be able. Accept the fact that you are useless and that’s it. You should have begged for alms alone, but you included blind Biodun in it and implicated him. You would need to see how that woman beat his children black and blue yesternight, not sparing her housemaid too, because they all had hand in your foolish plan. If not for Toyosi, that woman would have sent Taiba her househelp packing that night if not for Toyosi’s intervention.She is very angry for your foolish act of making a beggar out of her kid. Rose, you are doomed!
Fear greeted my heart as I ended the letter. I couldn’t hold back tears; they flowed down like a fountain. The only friends I had were now gone in a flash. How would I survive not seeing Biodun again, or rather, how would he survive a year without me? I thought. The more I wailed, the more they laughed. No one would believe that the so-called alms were ‘freewill offerings’ as Biodun put it earlier. However, I wondered who saw us and informed Mrs Omotayo of the whole thing.
Bode and his father strolled away still laughing at my calamity. Little did they know that their lasting laughter would be the last they would make and my heartrending tears would be the last for me as long as we remained under the same roof.

Episode 35

It pained me to the marrow that Mrs Omotayo would no more look at me with good eyes, having believed that I took her son out to beg for alms. To her, begging was a taboo. She hated it so much. She really lived by it because she hadn’t had any course to come to our apartment to seek any assistance whatsoever, but she had forgotten that she came to beg for me when her son, Biodun, was becoming sickly.
Toyosi crowned it up that Mrs Omotayo even vowed to harm me if she set her eyes on me. I was scared of stepping out of our apartment because of her. I had wept all the tears I thought I had in my lachrymal gland, so there was not a reason to cry anymore.
I set my crates of eggs on my head and headed for my lonely spot beside the road to start my trade. As usual, Chinedu came to drop his showglasses, but it didn’t work. Where was the voice of Biodun to call people’s awareness to what I had to sell? I was dejected and confused. When Chinedu came two hours later, he was disappointed at the little sales I had recorded. He just took up one of the showglasses and left. He came for the other one later, without paying me any commission for the ones I had sold.
I couldn’t sell more than two crates, thanks to those who knew me earlier. Those ones just came to the spot directly to buy the eggs. When they asked me where Biodun was, I just waved speechlessly at them.
Around 3pm, Albert came close to where I was. He was a student in the SPECIAL SCHOOL where I was attending with the children of Mrs Omotayo earlier. Albert signed to me that he was the one who reported Biodun’s deed to his class-teacher.
“Why did you do that?” I signed to him in annoyance and he replied me.

“Is it right to beg for alms just because we are disabled? Did our teachers not warn us to abstain from any act that would make people pity us, thereby making us look inferior? Yet, you were the same person who took it upon yourself to preach it in the school those days, but here you are, begging for alms.”

“I am not begging for alms!” I told him in annoyance. He laughed.

“Am I blind? I saw you yesterday with my two eyes; you were both begging for alms aside what you were selling. People gave you money without picking up an egg,” Albert said.

“We are not!” I signed to him but he signed back to tell me that I should shut up.
I got angry. I rose up and locked him up by the collar of his shirt. People were already gathering around us. Earlier, they had been captivated by the way we were moving our hands to communicate. But now, they had to rush to us to separate us.

“You are a hypocrite!” Albert told me. “You don’t practice what you preach. You said we are special and we are able and we shouldn’t in any way draw up people’s pity towards us, yet you were doing it in broad day light. So good, nemesis has caught up with you.”

I submitted to the elderly people around us who separated us, else I would have shown him my true colour, I thought. I wanted to weep, but I laughed instead as I went back home around 7:30pm with two full crates of eggs. I came with four in the morning but two was left, whereas the day before, I successfully sold twenty crates with the help of Biodun. Indeed, two heads are better than one, I thought.
I thought Toyosi would have arrived, but I was surprised she wasn’t home. Even John too was not at home. I wondered where they were. Taiba saw me and turned her head away from me. She didn’t want to have anything doing with me in her life anymore, perhaps heeding the warning of her mistress.
I walked briskly into the apartment and I was more surprised when Bode was absent too. What could have happened? I put the crates of eggs aside and went back to the parlour to have my buttocks on something, the sofa. I stretched my legs and put my right hand over the back rest. In a flash, I had disappeared in the spirit to the dreamland.
My dream was not sweet at all. It was something unspeakable. My mouth trembled when I woke up. I shook like leaf. The same friend who brought food for me on New Year Day, Mrs Omotayo, was the one I saw chasing me about in my dream. Now it wasn’t Toyosi anymore, but Mrs Omotayo, why couldn’t she forgive me? I thought.

To my surprise, it was 9pm and my guardians had not returned. I was afraid to sleep alone in the whole house. How would I be able to do that when Mrs Omotayo had crept into my dream to torture me too? I wondered why my enemies seemed to be more than my friends. I really missed these three people, Hannah my mother, Mrs Oyin my class-teacher and Rachael my aunty. My heart yearned to have them back. I wished I could hook up with them in the dream and never wake up again. Even, the last dream I saw my mother in it, she was asking me to come with her to the land of the dead.
I picked up a pen and a paper and began to write something down, a poem. It would soon be May 29, next two days, so I needed to write something about it, though I was not expecting anyone to read up my write-up. I had just finished writing a poem about the Children Day which would fold up in the next few hours from now.
I prayed a little prayer before I slept, confessing my sin of fighting. It was not my fault that I fought with Albert, I thought as I prayed. Was he not the one who started it by lying to my face that I did what I didn’t do?

I imagined how Biodun would be feeling right now. I felt for him. If only I could hook up with him in my dream tonight, I would be glad. When I finally slept off around 11:30pm, I hooked up with someone other than Biodun and that was Bode. As usual, he was tormenting me. He was even bigger than me in that dream. I was like a two-year old girl before him, yet in the real life, he had quite a small stature compared to mine.
When Bode gave me a punch on the face in the dream, I screamed and woke up, only to discover that I was alone in the parlour. Where is the whole family? I thought. Sleep had been deleted off my face by fear. I didn’t want to sleep, else I would see something more horrible than the one I saw in that nightmare. I was going to make the TV my companion, perhaps I would be kept company by those ‘dumb’ people on the screen (or maybe I was the one that was deaf). As I switched on the TV, a horrible creature brandished its teeth before me as if it would jump out of the screen. I screamed. Nobody told me that I had to switch the thing off before I did.
I slept off around 2am. When I woke up, it was in the cruel hands of Toyosi I found myself.

“Since when did you begin to sleep in the parlour?” she signed vehemently at me. Her sign skill was good. I didn’t have the idea how she was able to master the language as such, since it was only a little I taught her back then.
“Get out of here!” she signed at me in annoyance and I fled. When I turned my head backward, I discovered that she was weeping. I was shocked. What could be the cause of her tears? Did anything happen to my father or Bode? I sensed that someone had died, perhaps it was her husband who was abroad, I thought. Maybe he had plane crash on his return to Nigeria. I kept on flipping through the leaves of the imaginary magazine of thought in my heart.

As I soon learnt later, it was all about Bode who slumped when he was on a swing playing with his friends the day before, which was the Children Day Celebration. Bode’s head hit hard against the swing and he bled to unconsciousness. That was the same day I was asked to hawk, not regarding that it was our day (Children’s Day).
John my father didn’t return home because somebody must have to stay with Bode in the hospital. Toyosi who returned early the next morning had only come to prepare something for her son.
If not that I asked her where Bode and my father was, she wouldn’t have told me. I had pity for them when I heard the misfortune. Was it not the same Bode who was healthy and kinky just the day before? Wasn’t he the one who made fun of me the most? I thought. I silently prayed to my God to spare Bode’s life because I would not wish anyone dead.
John and Toyosi lost their joy. They had to spend many days without going to their places of work, all in the name of wanting to cater for the health of their sons. With the confused look on the faces of the illegal couple, I thought they had repented, therefore I approached them to ask them if they would let me come with them to the hospital where Bode was, but my father refused blatantly. As for Toyosi, she had softened. Her eyeballs had popped out, just because of incessant tears.
I watched my father’s wealth gradually fading. I could do nothing but pity. Maybe God is fighting for me, I thought. But this war seemed too much for them to bear. Bode had already spent a month in the hospital, between life and death.

As if that was not all, Toyosi’s womb began to swell up. I thought it was another ailment until I got to know, somehow, that she was already pregnant for my father. They were confused, not knowing what exactly they would do with the pregnancy. If I hadn’t seen the doctor’s report where she kept it, I wouldn’t have discovered this. She was two months pregnant.
John and Toyosi began to have some quarrels regarding whether the pregnancy should be kept or aborted, because any moment from then, Toyosi’s husband would return from South Africa where he was. John wanted the pregnancy kept while Toyosi wanted it aborted. John believed that a bird at hand was worth two in the bush. Since they didn’t know if Bode would survive it, then John had easily passed him for two birds in the bush and ironically, the one in the womb would be the bird at hand.
The confusion was much for the illegal couple such that they even resorted to physical fight. John threatened to visit Toyosi’s home at her husband’s return and tell him the truth of the whole matter if Toyosi aborted the pregnancy.
I was surprised that John could regard a foetus still in the womb that myself, a child who was of legitimate birth. John lost his job and depended only on whatever Toyosi earned from her business. Whenever Toyosi refused to give him something, John would come to me and collect some of the profits I made from the egg sales and whenever Toyosi returned, she would pour out the content of her mouth, but who cared? I had no ears to hear her shouts.

The two began to behave like Tom and Jerry. They would pick offences at the slightest provocations. Toyosi threatened to abort the pregnancy without my father’s consent but John threatened to kill her if she did.
Amidst their piteous state, Toyosi received a letter. Her husband would be returning to Nigeria in seven months time, which would be February of the following year, 2001. Already, Bode had completed three months in the hospital without improvement.

Mrs Omotayo had become my enemy. She would turn her face away from me anytime she saw me. I even took a step to apologise, but she refused blatantly and shouted at me. I wondered why it seemed too difficult for her to forgive me.
Toyosi’s fear was that her husband would come when she would be eight months pregnant already, then it would be too late for her to abort the pregnancy and she would eventually lose him. Toyosi didn’t want to lose her husband because he was very wealthy, so she needed to abort that pregnancy on time.

South Africa? I pondered. That was where John’s younger brother went and never returned to Nigeria till date. I had missed him so much because Uncle James, as he was called then, was a very good friend of mine. Sometimes I had wondered why he wasn’t wicked like John my father. I remembered how Uncle James used to get angry at my father anytime he was maltreating me. He would nearly punch John on the face. Even the day I saw him last, it was through a hot brawl he left our house, threatening to jail my father for ill-treating me. That day, John slapped his face and he raised his hand too to send a hot slap on my father’s face in return, but when my mother entered the room, he retreated just for her sake.
James, who had been staying with us all the while because of accommodation problem, was sent packing by his elder brother. When my mother was pleading with John to let uncle James be, that wicked man slapped her and pushed her out of the way, accusing my mother of having sexual relationship with his brother. Uncle James left eventually. The day I saw him last, he only came to secretly tell us that things had eventually worked out for him and he would be travelling to South Africa. He told us to keep it secret from John his brother and my mother did. That was the last time we saw him; the only times I thought of him was whenever Toyosi was talking about South Africa where her own husband had gone too.

Surprisingly, Bode recovered from the illness and was discharged. It was then that John my father agreed with Toyosi to abort the pregnancy. She did and took ill for a whole month. All she could do was cry all day. John also cried along as well as Bode, but it was I alone that wouldn’t cry though I tried to, but tears wasn’t just going to come out of my eyes.

*******TO BE CONTINUED*******

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