CAUGHT IN THE ACT

CAUGHT IN THE ACT

He sat outside the house, a stick which had been chewed half-way hung in between his dry lips, spittle sat at the corners of his mouth as he drove the stick deeper into his mouth, sticking out his tongue to do the same work on. He sucked up phlegm from all regions of his mouth and gathered momentum to spit it out. Woe betide anyone it touched. Its effect will be just as disastrous as one whom had been bathed with acid. Unfortunately, Mrs. Williams chose that time to leave home for work. Both their eyes met, held and travelled to the front of her skirt, her crisp grey skirt suit which bore the thick phlegm with some of it hanging down and dropping to her shining Jimmy Choos. Her jaw clenched as she balled her fist. It was a Monday morning. Why did he have to choose today to display his nasty character.
Otunba’s chewing stick did not stop its work. All he did was spy at her for a fraction of a second and continue. She took a roundabout turn and moved back into her apartment. It was a miracle her husband had been called on an emergency earlier that morning. The house was so quiet, at least her apartment. She had loved the home. Though she’d have preferred something more private, like a duplex or even a bungalow, she hadn’t minded the flat her husband had bought them right after they married. It was that privacy she needed that had brought her trouble with Otunba. He sort of saw himself as some kind of landlord because he bought the first flat and even bought more which he placed for let. But he wasn’t the owner of theirs. They owned theirs!
Right there in the living room, Bisoye got out of her soiled clothes and picked up her phone, calling in sick at the advertising agency she worked as a client-service officer. She flung her phone on the table and lay on the couch in her red, lacy two-piece. The one Bode had bought and Kolade loved to rip apart when they made love. She lay, facing the ceramic ceiling, just like the day it had all started.
She was still on her honeymoon-leave and Bode had scheduled they travel to the UK but as usual, work had come in the way so they had had to cancel. She couldn’t face up to her friends so she just decided to turn off her phone for the period and stuck strictly to the internet. It had initially seemed okay marrying a doctor but she hadn’t known it could ever get so lonely. Bode was a lot caring and attentive when they were dating than now when they were ‘happily married’. His phone never stopped ringing, like he was the only doctor in the hospital. That night, he had just returned tired from work. She had fed him and they just lay there in the living room. The mood had seemed right and they had started getting out of their clothes when his phone rang. One thing she was certain about was that he’d go into a mad rush of love making before he jets out, but he didn’t. He just got up, his glorious body glistening in the candle light, got into his clothes and left after a murmured apology. After he had had her engine revved up and running!
She sat in the balcony, bent on drinking herself to stupor. They were no friends to call-she was still on the pretence of being in the UK- no one to talk to and not a soul anywhere around. It was like she dwelt alone in the world until she saw a silhouetted figure move from the balcony besides theirs. There was a red light swinging from up in the air and falling to its sides. It was a male and he was smoking. She strained to see if she could get a clearer picture of him for she hadn’t known all neighbours when he caught her movement. He moved towards the banister. That was the closest he could get. She got up towards him, moving to her too.
“Hi”
She nodded, watching as his eyes bored into her night wear, she had just donned it on, completely nude beneath. If his hands could go further, they could have attacked her with venom, because her nipples rose wantonly. He was shirtless, a jeans trouser riding down his waist. He reached out his hands, they barely brushed hers but the effect was electrifying. She couldn’t quite remember if they had spoken or words had been superfluous, all she could recollect in her drunken state was his hard, taut body stretched over hers like wrung wire.
“Invite me in.”
The distance from the balcony to the main entrance was far enough for her to get back to her senses but all rational thoughts deluded her.
There was no room for second thoughts, no kisses, no foreplays. They both needed sex and they gave heavily. And she thought her husband was gorgeous! Kolade had a body made for women to stare, salivate and shiver. They had sex like she had never had in her life. He completely filled her.
“I’m so sorry we both got carried away.”
Reality had dawned and the shame was unbearable. He picked his trousers, the one she had assisted him in flinging to a corner of her living room!
He looked from her to the wedding photo frame. “My name is Kolade. I’m sorry I don’t make a habit of sleeping with married women but...”
“Get out!”
She had slammed the door just as he put his foot out and she cried, cried for her recklessness.
But it hadn’t ended there. Kolade came back for more and stupid as she was she needed the attention, the way his eyes made love to her, his touch which was as delicate as porcelain and his kind words. He was separated from his wife, not legally, but bottom-line was he was an unhappy, lonely man who convinced her till she began seeing herself as unhappy too even though she lacked for nothing besides Bode’s crazy schedules. It became so bad, that Kolade knew when Bode left home. He slipped in almost immediately; tearing at their clothes until that eventful day she had been stupid not to have bolted the door and then Otunba walked in on them, right there in the living room. He made sure he made eye contact with them both before apologising on entering the wrong apartment! For heaven’s sake it wasn’t a face-II-face house where you could mistakenly enter someone else’s room. And ever since then, it had been hell for her and well Kolade too because his wife it was who bought the apartment. She was on a course in the US and was back. She was also a cousin to Otunba which made the issue a lot dicier.
If Otunba tried blackmailing Bisoye, perhaps it would help rather than the public frustrations he meted out on her. Kolade rushed into her apartment one evening just as Bode left the home; he was in a state, saying Otunba claimed he couldn’t hold it up anymore. He was being a traitor holding that kind of information from his cousin. He wanted her to act like nothing of the sort happened, but even at that, it would take a miracle not to be out of her marriage barely a year after they just married. But she hoped, prayed and somehow waited for Otunba’s next mischief. She hadn’t seen Kolade too and it was already four days after he had come to hint her on the development.
Bode got home late after work. The moment she opened the door for him and saw his face, she knew something had gone wrong. Her insides took an elevator ride when Bode nodded his head and didn’t respond to her greetings. The chair made a hissing noise as he fell into it.
“I take it you didn’t hear Otunba was killed this morning? It must have been some hired-assassins. His head was bashed-in with a pole.”
That was enough for her to collapse, which she did.

Review of my book

In a world rapidly overtaken by technology in all its awesome forms, what role does superstition play in people’s lives? Does living in the city with its many glitters, sophisticated and urbane airs diminish the power of superstition in determining how people live their lives? These are some of the intriguing questions Oyindamola Affinnih’s new novel Two Gone... Still Counting tries to unravel
AMANI'S young and settled world in the city of London takes a turn for the worse when she overhears her parents agonising over her fate and how to undergo the most gruesome rite ever to straighten it before she is ripe enough for marriage. Her parents are Yoruba and Muslims; they all live in London. But they fear the worse for their daughter’s future and prospects for a successful marriage on account of a superstitious belief among the Yoruba of an incident that happened to her at infancy.

As an infant strapped to her mother’s back as African mothers are wont to do, she had slipped and fallen done. For the Yoruba, that is a taboo that brings the worse fate for the girlchild; it has the capability to ruin the men that would attempt to marry her. Indeed, if the abomination is not appeased and the poor girl set free from its clutches, the men the girl in question will marry will die to the eighth one. The only way to propitiate the powers that hold court over the abomination is for the mother to walk through a marketplace in full session naked as an act of contrition in carelessness.

It is such dire situation Amani’s parents find themselves, particularly her mother, who believes; her father not quite so. At Amani’s mother’s instigation and out of a mother’s concern for her daughters’ prospect for a successful marriage, father and mother, together with their two children Amani and Areef, their son, set out for Nigeria in what turns out the worse ordeal ever a family encounters.

They arrive their palacial home in Ikoyi and still agonise over how a sophisticated woman that shuttles between London and Lagos will subject herself to such primitive act of propitiation to save a daughter from a fate the mother brought on.
With the husband not quite in support, the moment to commit herself to the act of appeasement becomes delayed.
But something happens to thwart the calculation of their trip from London to Lagos. On their way to a friend’s party, husband and wife are cut down in a possible case of mistaken identity. This leaves poor Amani and her younger brother Areef in bitter grief. It also sets them up for the most gruesome ordeal that leaves them stranded in the next few years.

Their father’s brother Uncle Kolade turns out a monster and terrorises the living daylight out of the bereaved children. He takes possession of their father’s house and sends them to the boy’s quarters, seizes their passports and mets out the worse punishment to them. But Amani is smart to have taken possession of her father’s documents to his vast assets; it’s for this brazen act of denying him the documents to the brother’s properties that Uncle Kolade would punish them relentlessly.

Eventually, Amani and Areef find themselves some reprieve from the pain their uncle subjects them. Areef goes back to London to school, and Amani had to do most to get herself a life in Lagos as Uncle Kolade had defaced her passport.
Now, with her mother not being able to carry out the sacrifece of walking through a market naked to free her from the supposed curse under which she is placed, what becomes the fate of Amani and her prospect for marriage? Will she live under that curse forever?
Can the fate that befall the two men that cross her path be considered mere a fulfillment of the superstition or mere coincidence? This certainly seems arguable the way she treats the subject.

Nevertheless, this is the fate under which a young woman struggles as she tries to grapple with a harsh environment. Affinnih makes a strong case against the cruelty of relations, who deny bereaved children and their mothers a chance for a decent life in most parts of Africa, where the deceased’s property are shared among the extended family members at the expense of the nuclear family.

Affinnih’s Two Gone... Still Counting is most revelatory and explorative of a superstitios belief, the sort most Africans are still subjected in spite of their urbanity. Indeed, it’s an intriguing novel that exposes city dwellers for what they are: The are no different from their rural folks. Uncle Kolade’s behaviour is most evil. However, Affinnih dwells too much on their ordeal at the hands of Uncle Kolade to task the faculty of her readers. Their ordeal takes a third part of the novel. And, when it comes to unravelling her fate and her relationship with the two men she encounters, she seems to have run out of steam.

Nevertheless, Two Gone... Still Counting is superb narrative that will leave the reader breathless in its range and exploration of materials ordinarily taken for granted. It’s certainly makes for a joyful reading, and it shows Affinnih as a writer of promise.