The young girl was quiet as the taxi bounced along the pothole-filled road. It was another hot, dust-filled afternoon in Benin and she was grateful for the wind that came in through the window of the vehicle, cooling her hot and sweaty face. The taxi whizzed past roadside traders and children balancing trays of various wares on their heads. She shifted the schoolbag on her knees and felt a wave of envy for them. Their lives may have seemed hard in comparison to hers, but at that moment she would have gladly traded her school uniform for a heavy tray of bananas and peanuts.
The taxi slowed down, caught in traffic, and a few hawkers ambushed the car.
“Aunty, buy banana!”
“Oga, buy plantain chips, very sweet one.”
“Buy your butter bread! Buy your fresh butter bread!”
“Pure water! La Casera!”
The other passengers in the taxi busied themselves purchasing some of the offered items, but the girl in the uniform kept her eyes cast down, thoughtful. A gentle voice roused her from her thoughts.
“Baby girl, please help me with something. Nothing is too small.”
She looked up to see a woman looking in through the window, her eyes pleading. There was a baby strapped to her back with a faded wrapper, and another one clutched the front of her dress. The woman and her babies looked sickly and malnourished, eyes large in dirty, hunger-ravished faces.
The woman made a gesture at her mouth. “Please help me so I can buy food for me and my twins. God bless you.”
The girl looked away abruptly, keeping her gaze straight ahead as the passenger beside her stretched out a hand and gave the woman a crumpled naira note. Guilt churned in her stomach, not just because she had not been generous enough to give the woman a stipend, but because of her own secret.
A stab of pain went through her loins and she remembered the leering doctor from the week before, grinning as he stuck the shining instruments into her most private regions to remove the forbidden seed growing in her. she had cried as she left the small, illegal clinic; not just from the painful cramps that gripped her lower abdomen but from the guilt the abortion had left her with. She had paid for the sin of loving before it was the right time to do so. Seeing the beggar with her twin babies had reawakened the raw wound of her guilt. What if the doctor was a quack and had ‘destroyed her womb’ as usually happened to girls in all the Nollywood movies she loved to watch? Was she now a murderer? No, if she had taken her shame to her parents, her father would have been the murderer. He would have definitely killed her.
Her thoughts turned to her lover. Tall handsome and romantic D-boy. He had been so grateful when she agreed to terminate the result of their lust and had promised to reward her with something special. She was meant to see him that afternoon, after school. He was the only thing anchoring her to sanity now. she could not wait to tell him all her fears and worries.
When the taxi stopped in front of her school gates, she clambered out and walked in with the other arriving students, her steps slow and measured. No one would guess the weight she was carrying on her shoulders.
It was a weight no 16 year old should have to bear.
Later that afternoon, she would wait at the usual rendezvous to meet her lover, but he would not show up. And after many failed attempts to contact him on his mobile phone and a final visit to the small room where he lived, she would have to face the reality that her precious D-boy, her young Corper, had fled in fear after impregnating her. She stood in his empty room and wept bitterly at the level of the betrayal, her heart and mind broken by the depth of his disloyalty.
When she left the room where her faithless lover had taken her virginity, she had a curse and promise on her lips. No matter how long it took, she would find D-boy.
And when she did, he would pay.
2016, Lagos.
Doctor Chidinma Ude walked quickly along the halls of the corridor that led to her office. Her day had been hectic, as usual. A practicing psychiatrist, the private clinic she worked at had seen an unusual deluge of new patients just that day alone, mostly teenagers. She shook her head as she flipped through the patient file in her hand. The incidence of drug abuse among the young generation was beconing alarming, and she had spent the whole day handling hysterical patients and their parents. It was shaping up to probably be her worst day of work since she started work at Fountain Spring Psychiatric Hospital.
She stopped in her tracks as a nurse called out to her. the young girl hurried toward her, one hand holding her small white cap to her head. Chidinma prayed it was not another emergency.
“Doctor, please, your attention is needed. It’s a new arrival; he just came in…”
Chidinma felt a frisson of irritation run through her. “I’m done for today. Tell Doctor Chukwudi to handle it, I was just on my way out…”
The nurse shook her head, eyes wide. “Madam, I think you need to attend to this yourself.”
Chidinma’s frown deepened. The nurse had worked in the hospital for close to a year, and the doctor knew the young woman wouldn’t try to alarm her needlessly. “Well, why do you think I need to?”
Her eyes widened at the nurse’s breathless reply.
“It’s your son, ma. It’s Nonso. He’s here.”
Without sparing the nurse a second glance, Chidinma turned around and hurried back towards the reception area of the hospital, her heart pounding.
What had happened to her son?!
To Be Continue
Check back By 3pm For The Next Episode.
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