An Eventful First Week

CHAPTER FIVE

An Eventful First Week

“If I give you four apples, and I give you another four, that is eight apples, abi?”  Ibukun asked and Tade nodded. “Good. So when I take away two, how many will remain?”

Tade stayed quiet for so long, staring at his fingers, Ibukun thought that he wouldn’t answer. And then he ventured timidly, “Erm, five?”

Ibukun could barely stop the sigh of frustration that threatened to escape. It was a hot Saturday afternoon, and even braving the fiery sun and going out of their small flat to get what little air the atmosphere had to offer had very little profit; Ibukun still felt sweat running down her back. It was her first free day in weeks; her mother had ordered her to stay at home and help Tade with his homework, and she had gratefully accepted. But she didn’t know it was going to be this tedious. Rather than just telling him the answers, she wanted him to understand, but that was proving to be almost impossible. They were on just their second question and almost an hour had gone by.

“How did you get five?” Ibukun asked, trying her hardest to be patient.

“Four plus four is eight, and eight minus two is five.”

Ibukun could not stop the sigh this time around. Tade was in Primary one, and was repeating the class for the second time, after repeating the previous class, Nursery Two, too. She wasn’t sure if the fault lay with the standard of the public school he attended, or with Tade himself, but Ibukun guessed it had to be both of them. The school was okay, but Tade needed to attend a kind of school were the students were not that many, and the teacher had a personal relationship with their pupils. If only Tade could get a scholarship into a school like that.

“Five? Calculate it,” Ibukun handed him the rough book and watched as he drew eight lines on it and cancelled two. “Oh sorry, six,” he said, smiling his sweet apologetic smile.   

Ibukun shook her head and went on to the next question. She couldn’t remember much about when she was eight, but she was pretty sure she hadn’t needed to draw lines to add or subtract numbers. She had tried her very best to help Tade; forcing him to learn the multiplication table, coaching him, giving him extra homework, but nothing seemed to be helping. What he learned one day he forgot the next. Once when she had been utterly frustrated, she had gone to a cyber café close to her mother’s stall and searched the internet for what could possibly be wrong with him, but abandoned that soon after. She refused to accept the possibility that her brother was dyslexic. It just couldn’t be. 

Two long hours later, they were finally done. Ibukun gladly packed up and went inside their apartment in the Boys’ Quarters. Formerly, there had been another occupant of the apartment next to theirs; a cook who had left years ago with his wife, so that presently, only Ibukun’s family stayed there. The compound was so big, and the noise from the main house so little, that Ibukun often felt they were isolated from the rest of the world. 

The apartment was hot, and musty. Whenever he was home, which was almost all the time, Ibukun’s father insisted on closing the curtains, no matter how hot it was, for reasons Ibukun didn’t understand. The smell of cheap beer was also a part of their lives; it was the smell that clung to their father like perfume. For those reasons the place looked even smaller, and sometimes, Ibukun much preferred staying outside most of the time.

“Hey, where is your mother?” her father barked as soon as he saw them. Caring Dad was gone days ago. He was back to normal now, and the normal Mr Omotosho failed to remember his children’s names, so he called them “hey”.

Ibukun would have liked nothing better than to ignore him, but that momentary rudeness would surely harbour consequences, and so she just mumbled something nonsensical that she herself couldn’t have deciphered at gunpoint.

Her father didn’t bother to ask her to repeat what she had said before asking another one. “What have you been doing outside since?”

“My homework,” Tade said in a small voice. Many times Ibukun wondered how someone like her father could have someone as sweet and innocent as Tade as a son. Even with the insults and beatings he had suffered at the hands of their father, it was still obvious that he yearned for the love of the man that did not deserve it. 

“Your homework,” he growled back. “At this age you need your sister to teach you your homework. I wonder why you’re so senseless.” He said the last bit in Yoruba.

Ibukun bit back the hundred retorts that sprung to her lips, and pushed past him, holding her breath and dragging Tade along, to the bedroom. The apartment was divided into a living room, a bedroom, a small kitchen and a smaller bathroom. Most times Ibukun, Tade and their mother slept in the bedroom, while their father made do with the living room, but sometimes he passed out in the room, and since Ibukun could not stand being in the same room with him for long so she slept in the living room on those days.

“What do you want to eat?” Ibukun asked Tade as she put his books away.

“Nothing.”

Ibukun turned around to face him. Anytime Tade refused food, Ibukun knew something was wrong. And sure enough, he was huddled in one corner of the room, tears in his eyes. She went to him and hugged him wordlessly. His encounters with their father’s rough tongue often left him almost as shaken as his encounters with their father’s belt.

“Why is he like that?” she heard him whisper tearfully. “Jacob’s daddy is not like that. Jacob said that his daddy always cooks for him every day, and his mother is the one who beats him.”

Ibukun had long accepted the fact that her father’s presence was more of a hindrance than a help, but Tade’s struggles got her sad. Ibukun knew how happy Tade got anytime their father gave him the slightest bit of positive attention. He really needed a father’s love, or at least, a father who didn’t hate him. “In some houses the daddy is wicked and the mummy is kind and in some houses the mummy is wicked and the daddy is kind,” she said. At least in her experience that was how it always was. There was always a parent that the children preferred and one that the children would rather not be in the same room with. Was there really any family that the children were totally comfortable with their mother and their father and on the same level? She didn’t think so.

Tade was thinking along the same lines. “So someone must be wicked and someone must be kind?”

Ibukun didn’t talk for a moment, and then she nodded. “Yes, that’s how it’s meant to be.”

After a while, Tade went to bed for his afternoon nap, and Ibukun paced around the room, rearranging and straightening things up. She had planned to go out of the apartment to read, but even the fact that she was behind in reading didn’t make her less adamant about not wanting to see her father, even if it was just in passing. After she had arranged the clothes in the wardrobe for about the tenth time while waiting for the sound of the front door opening and closing which meant that her father was on his way out, and not hearing anything, she grabbed the package that had lain on the bedside table since the day before and tore it open.

The package had been given to her by the Vice Principal on the previous afternoon. When the woman had sent for her, Ibukun had been scared out of her wits, certain it had had something to do with her yelling at Niyi that week. She was not proud of the episode, but had been so angry at both the girl and her dog she didn’t really care what happened. Patching up the remnants of her sole loyal uniform had been both hard and heart wrenching for Ibukun, particularly because she had never thought she would need another uniform for the rest of her time at AHS, and more importantly, she could not afford it. Her mother had been hinting that it was best if she didn’t think about JAMB till the year after she wrote WAEC, but Ibukun knew she was likely to turn insane if she stayed at home for a year with nothing to occupy her mind but her father’s ramblings and housework, so she had been saving up as best as she could, even though her savings were next to nothing. 

So when Niyi had come over to apologize, all the pent up anger and frustration had just flown out of her. She was sure selling the leash on Niyi’s dog would fetch enough to cover her WAEC and JAMB fees, and here Niyi thought a pretty apology – offered in private, by the way, when the actual event had taken place under the eyes of half the students in the school – was going to cover it all. Niyi had come to apologize on Wednesday, while the unveiling had taken place two days before. Ibukun had already had to wear the torn uniform for two days and hear the jitters from everyone she passed by in school, sometimes, even the teachers, before it had crossed Niyi’s mind to apologize. 

But even with how good shouting at Niyi at felt, Ibukun had still felt a little guilty, because Niyi had looked genuinely hurt. However, Rebecca, who had accompanied Niyi to see Ibukun at the library, had just waved her insults away and chided Ibukun for upsetting Niyi, which had gotten Ibukun even angrier. So it was easier to forget Niyi’s reaction and remember Rebecca’s.

So when the VP had sent for her, Ibukun had immediately thought of the whole affair, scared to death that her scholarship was about to be withdrawn. It had been clearly stated in the terms that she’d read six years ago; that any inappropriate behaviour would lead to the end of her scholarship at AHS. And Ibukun had done her best to live by that rule. Well she supposed she had always been going to crack someday. Anyway, Niyi didn’t seem like the type of person who was going to report a matter like that to the VP, but Ibukun never knew with her classmates. She had thought she couldn’t possibly despise the lot of them any more than she had; but the previous week had proved her wrong. 

The meeting had been very brief; the VP informed her that Niyi felt very sorry about destroying her uniform and had purchased new ones for her. Ibukun herself wasn’t too sure about how sorry Niyi was; the girl didn’t bother to meet with them. But the VP had said nothing about the incident that had gotten Ibukun so scared; she had only ordered Ibukun to accept the uniform, let bygones be bygones and made sure she wore it to school starting next week, or she would be sent back home, which wasn’t even fair. Her classmates would just assume that she had gotten a new uniform at last, not that Niyi had given her one, but it didn’t make Ibukun any happier about it. Ibukun supposed she ought to feel grateful, but the fact that Niyi had so much money even the ever-strict VP was her pawn made her feel pissed. She had told the VP to thank Niyi, because she had been very sure she wouldn’t talk to the girl still.

Removing the new uniform from the package, she was surprised to see they were two pairs, and they were perfectly her size. Obviously the VP had taken care of that, too. The brand new blue blazers seemed almost foreign to her; it had been years since she’d held one that wasn’t threadbare. She examined the skirts, the shirts, and her heart skipped a beat when she saw the hat. She had stopped wearing her original hat in SS2, when it had gotten so old it was almost falling apart. She couldn’t hide a smile. At the very least, starting Monday, she wouldn’t look so poor anymore, and the sniggers would stop, at least to an extent.