Chapter Two - Face of Fire

Morenike

TW: Death, grief, abuse, suicide, murder

Life is unfair; it tends to favour some people over others. At least, that is what most people down on their luck and struck with misfortune think. Alternatively, life can be likened to a giant scale of justice, maintaining balance. Good and evil, rich and poor, light and dark, words and their opposites—everything must exist to keep the earth spinning.

There are several agents in charge of ensuring the balance, the chief of which is destiny. The Yorubas believe in Ori, the deity of destiny. Muslims believe everything has been predestined. Christians and every other religion in the world have their own beliefs and faith regarding destiny.

I, Morenike, am an agent of destiny. And my job specifically is to reduce the suicide rate because the scale of the dead now weighs heavier than the scale of the living. And I can tell you, it's not a pretty job. One: because I can’t save everyone, and two: for each person I fail to save, I carry the burden of the sorrow and despair that led them to take such drastic steps.

I am not a god, neither am I a spirit. I am only human—one that has been chosen by destiny. And it was just my luck that of all the tasks I had to be assigned, it had to be one that had to do with death. Destiny didn’t think to assign me to keep the balance between the rich and the poor. It had to be death.

Why? You might ask.

Well, I am no stranger to death and misfortune.

My parents were the first to teach me about death. They left when I was thirteen. They died in an avoidable accident: a container that should have been screwed on tightly wasn’t, and it fell on their car in traffic, killing them both. Their car was condemned and their bodies were unrecognisable.

So off to my aunt, we were shipped, me and my two younger siblings, Olayemi, my immediate younger brother, and Folasade, my little sister, and the baby of our house. The rest of the story is as cliche as these kinds of stories go.

Living with my aunt was hell. Her resentment towards us was palpable, and the cramped, filthy conditions of her one-room apartment only added to our suffering. My parents had been regular civil servants trying their best to keep the mirage of being middle class alive, and my aunt was even poorer than they were. She lived in a one-room apartment with her husband in an infamous face-me-I-face-you building in one of the worst slums in Lagos.

My aunt was an agbo seller and her husband was a bus driver, he drove one of those precarious yellow busses called Danfo. My aunt sold her concocted chemicals disguised as herbal drinks at the same motor park where her husband, loaded his bus which wasn’t really his bus, it belonged to another man, Baba Ola, the park’s chairman, king of the thugs and touts in the area. His word was law and my uncle drove one of his many busses and delivered a commission to him every night.

My uncle, whose real name I never knew, was known by his alias, Ojuina, which literally translates to 'eye of fire' or 'face of fire.' He was indeed a terrible inferno that should never have been born into this world.

Aunt Yemisi harboured hatred towards my late mother, her older sister. They were the only two children of their parents and while they were both provided with equal educational opportunities up to secondary school level by their parents, Aunt Yemisi had never been one for the classroom. She mixed with the wrong crowd and even at one point became the leader of said crowd and eventually failed out of secondary school.

My mother went to university but she had to fund her way through school. And it was at the university she met my dad.

Now, you might be wondering, why Aunty Yemisi hated my mother. They both made their own choices, after all. The short answer is that my mum had had the life Aunty Yemisi wanted. A stable income, a loving husband, and children—and I think this was the one that hurt her the most, Aunty Yemisi could not have children, while her sister had gone ahead to have three. How bloody inconsiderate of her!

You see, that is the thing about the balance of life—some people will have and some people will not.

And boy, did Aunty Yemisi take out her frustration and hatred on us. We lived in the same room with her and her husband. The bed was separated by a curtain. My siblings and I slept on the floor, while Aunty Yemisi and her husband slept on the bed behind the flimsy curtain.

We could hear their intimate moments, as they made little effort to be discreet about it. And because Ojuina was a hopeless drunk who came home at odd hours smelling like a brewery, we witnessed their many fights. And on several occasions, they both violently took out their anger on us.

It didn’t take too long for my brother to get influenced by the ghetto life. Aunt Yemisi had begrudgingly enroled us in a public school but couldn’t care less how well we did or if we even attended.

Soon my brother was flunking school, and nothing I did could help him. Eventually, he stopped going to school and started hanging around the park with Ojuina, and began to work as his bus conductor.

One day when Yemi was thirteen, he was burnt alive with a tire around his neck by an angry mob after he was caught picking pockets at the park. I was fifteen at the time and we had only been living with Aunty Yemisi and her husband for two years. That was my third introduction to death.

Before then, six months after my parents’ deaths, my sister, Folasade had died from complications from pneumonia because Aunty Yemisi had refused to take her to the hospital when she fell sick. Her excuse was that she couldn’t afford it.

Instead, she had invited one of her friends who was a 'nurse' to give her some drips and malaria medicines, they had assumed her sickness was malaria. And when that hadn’t worked, my aunty had force-fed her some of her herbal concoctions claiming it would do the magic. The very next day, Folasade died.

No questions asked, her body was removed and buried somewhere in the ghetto. Even I only knew my sister had died from pneumonia many years after the fact, when I had the capacity to Google her symptoms.

And just like that, it was only me.

Aunty Yemisi had even bothered to hide her relief. She proclaimed loudly that God had seen her situation, seen her poverty, and had taken my siblings away to lessen her burdens.

And I remember thinking to myself, if God had indeed seen her poverty, why had he chosen to give her death instead of wealth? Of course, I didn’t get an answer to my question, at least not immediately.

I continued going to school but I failed badly, I was depressed, I was angry, I was suicidal. I thought life had dealt me the worst it had to give, but I couldn’t be more wrong.

One day, Ojuina crashed Baba Ola’s Danfo because the fool had been drunk driving as usual, luckily for him, he didn’t have passengers on the bus because he was done for the day and was on his way back home after wasting his daily income at Mama NK’s beer parlour on both the beer she sold and the women she provided.

He had crashed the bus into a tree and the entire front of it was written off. Yet, somehow, he had managed to survive the crash. It would have been better for him and me if he had not survived. Because being alive meant Ojuina had to pay Baba Ola for his damaged vehicle.

But Ojuina was a trifling lowlife who had no savings because he spent them on whores and alcohol. And his wife was no better because how much did she make from selling her poisonous herbal concoctions most of which were meant to cure back pain, and piles and increase men’s sexual prowess?

But if Ojuina didn’t have money to give the imposing and fearsome Baba Ola, he had something else to offer in place: his eighteen-year-old niece, his ward by circumstance.

To be continued…

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Thank you for reading this week’s episode. If you missed the first episode, you can read it here:

This story, as you may have noticed is written in multiple POVs, it will make sense as we go on.

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