Ifue and I had been friends from childhood days; in spite of our character dissimilarities we aligned just enough to complement each other’s idiosyncrasies. To know Ifue is to love her. She was a boisterous personality, quite hedonistic and had the look that was easy on the eyes; a chocolate skinned beauty, with a bulgy set of eyes that accentuated her oval face. Slightly on the short side, but her perky breasts, broad hips and tiny waist framed her petite figure with the flawless finish of that of a mermaid.
Even if I had dementia, i would never forget one of her most daring adventures in our form three in Secondary School. How Ifue managed to distract her father and picked his car key from the centre table in the same living room that he was watching a TV programme, remained a mystery. All everyone could recall was that the entire Kingsway Street in Aba, where she resided with her parents, was thrown into a state of pandemonium when a reckless vehicle crashed into people’s shops, knocked down a middle-aged man leaving him with a fractured limb and a teenage bread hawker who escaped death only by the whiskers. No one, not even Ifue herself could explain how she ploughed the car out of the garage. The aftermath of that misadventure could only be imagined. A brand new BMW car turned a total wreck; her parents ended up with humongous bills hanging on their necks, no thanks to their only child. And the mistress of disaster? Thankfully she came out from the wreckage without any hurt, not even a scratch. And that was not the only mischief she got up to, she once fled home, leaving her parents very panic–stricken, only for news to filter into town days later that she ran to her granny’s house in Onitsha, Anambara state, over 300 kilometres from the city of Aba where we resided; said she was tired of her mother’s “drama”. No one has ever understood nor pretended to understand her antics. However, the car crash episode, in my books, had to be one of the most unconventional absolutes for a teenager.
Having attended the same Primary and Secondary School as Ifue, enrolling in the same tertiary Institution was a no-brainer. I had gotten sorely bored-stiff and the prospect of jetting off to the University in a couple of months’ time was sheer ecstasy for me. Home was hellish; Mama was getting unbearable by the day.
“That skirt is too short Ogoh” mama yelled, and moved the telephone receiver off her ears.
Couldn’t she just give an instruction without screaming from her lungs? I muttered under my breath. I was amused at the way she yanked the telephone receiver off her ears as if it had caught fire, without even a warning to whomever she was engrossed in a conversation with, just so she could yell at me for wearing the skirt that she bought for me herself.
“Mama, did you forget?” I asked, with a mischievous smile playing across my face.
“Forget what?” she asked, and covered the mouthpiece of the telephone receiver with her right palm, with a look that reminded me of a child who had been denied candy for being naughty.
“That you bought this skirt for me?” I said.
“First and foremost, wipe that silly smile off your face, you don’t ever smile when your elders are talking to you” she said.
By the way, the skirt causing the hysteria was right on my knee cap, but it needed to have been a little below my fibula, else I would be attempting to desecrate our culture and put my bride price value in jeopardy, just like I was already doing.
“So? It wasn’t this short when I bought it, just go and remove it, period” she said, with a tone of finality and continued her phone conversation.
“No problem, but can I wear it this one last time, I’m already late for a salon appointment and I can’t iron another cloth because there’s power outage” I muttered.
“No! She barked. The reverberation in her tone sent me scurrying out of the living room.
I grew up in a primitive home, I could scream it at the rooftop, where Trousers (including pyjama), figure-hugging clothes, anything above the knee, were perceived as downright immoral and sexual and un-African and too Western to project the proper African culture and values, thus; they were contraband in the house. It took the intervention of my Aunt, Mary, who came visiting us from the United States to convince my parents to allow me wear the pyjama she bought for me, and even at that, I was sure not to touch it with a hundred metre pole any day I fell out on Mama’s good graces. The sad reality was that, the older I got the more intense Mama’s pregnancy scare for me grew, and the lower my moral quotient dropped in her eyes. Why not? When I admired only the things, including snappy dresses, considered an aberration for an African child who hadn’t been railroaded into “westernization”. And I would always ask, why couldn’t the cosmic regulatory bodies oblige me the nagging wish to swap places with the likes of Beyoncé, Halle Berry, Vivica Fox, etc, whose complexions were not very different from mine? My day-dream, even at night-time?
Getting into the University seemed the one-way ticket out of the choking rigidity at home, so from the moment my admission in The University of Port Harcourt was confirmed, I began to count every single tick of the clock down to the day I was finally set loose to ample freedom.
