Category: Fiction

Kolade’s heart raced faster with each knock at the door. He stood up slowly, his heart in his mouth.

‘Who is it?’ he shouted, locked in his spot.

‘It’s me.’ A soft female voice responded, calming his racing heart. His shoulders lowered as he walked to open the door. Amaka, the landlord’s daughter who he’d met earlier was holding a covered food flask in her hand.

‘Amaka? He laughed awkwardly. You scared me.

‘Sorry,’ she waved, ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. I brought you lunch. You looked stressed earlier, so I assumed that you hadn’t eaten.’ she said, smiling sheepishly.

‘Amaka my angel. You never disappoint.’ He hurriedly stretched his hand to collect the flask from her hand. ‘What would I do without you?’.

She smiled at him again. Hurry up, pour it into a plate because I need to take the flask back and wash it before my mum gets back.

‘Okay.’ He hurried into the kitchen to pour the food into a dish and returned to give it her. With another word of thanks from him, she left.

He settled quickly, devouring the food ravenously, after which he returned to his cleaning.  About an hour later, he was done. He packed his bag, then sent a text to his friend. Just before he locked up, he questioned his plan to travel one more time, wondering what the consequence of his betrayal would be, and what would happen to him if he stayed. Uncertain as to when the return of those who broke into the house would be, Kolade knew he couldn’t wait any longer to get going.

His trip to Oshogbo was long, rough, noisy and dusty, but his heart felt hopeful. He felt shame that he was empty-handed, wishing he’d carried out the simple delivery, but he couldn’t change that now. At least, he was alive. That was better than being dead. He would see his mother and Sewa again.

The bus arrived the park at about 7pm, from where he took an Okada. Upon arriving at the front of their residence, he alighted and handed the rider the 100 Naira fare.

He walked into the cramped compound and greeted the elderly woman that sat in front of a massive flat. The house owner’s wife. Upon sighting him, the short plump woman jumped, ran to him and wrapped her arms around his slim frame.

‘Kolade? Is this you?’ she gushed. ‘Ha our Lagos big boy. Welcome my dear. How are you?’

‘I’m fine ma.’ He replied tiredly.

‘Ha that’s good to hear. So, how is Lagos?’

‘Lagos is fine ma.’

‘And em, so sorry about your mother o. We are all praying for her.’

‘Thank you, ma.’ He just wanted to get home.

‘You’re welcome my dear. I think Sewa is at home.’ She gestured towards the back of the flat. I heard someone opening the door while I was inside. Make sure you come and greet your big daddy when you’ve settled down o.’

‘Yes ma. I will.’

She let go of his hand, and Kolade turned to walk to the back of the house, to their own small flat which this seemingly nice woman and her husband had refused to maintain or refurbish for all the years they’d lived there.  He stepped up to the door and knocked once. The door flung open and a hand pulled him forcefully into the house. The door slammed shut behind him.

***

‘Nkem, I promise you that I’d gotten the medication, and sent someone to bring it to you. I thought it would be simple, but the guy turned out to be a fraud.’ Ugo’s voice was desperate. As it had been on call with his wife in the past few days. His strong exterior always caved with Family, in this case his wife and only daughter.

‘Nkem, I wouldn’t joke with Ada’s life. Why would I do that? You are all I have.’

He paused to listen to his wife’s spirited outburst.

‘You’ve been saying the same thing since yesterday, but I’m the one in the house with her, hearing her chesty coughs that have only gotten worse. I’m the one watching her helpless struggle to breathe. The doctor keeps coming with different things to test, but till now, they don’t know what is wrong. Obim, you call me paranoid when I say that the symptoms are similar to what we’ve been seeing on the news. Ugo,’ her voice broke, ‘I’m scared. At this rate, I don’t know how long she has left to live.’

‘Nkem, I promise you that we would not lose Ada. I’m not playing any games with our daughter’s life. I just couldn’t risk sending any of my guys to you for fear that the person feeding Obinna information would get wind of it too. After your sister’s death, I can’t risk it. Nkem, please I beg of you, hold on a little while.

I would find that boy. I have his family’s address and would send my boys there to find out what they can, but don’t lose hope Nkem. Give Ada a kiss for me.’

He dropped the call and paced the length of the room, running his hand through his hair. This Kolade boy chose to mess with the wrong man and with his daughter’s life. A life for a life was his principle, and all he’d given Kolade to do was a simple errand to save his daughters life. That was the debt he owed. Now Kolade owed him two lives. In his absence, his mother and sister would do.

Ugo fiddled with his phone as he watched the dark busy street from behind the railing of the second floor of the building where he stood. He debated if it was too early to call the woman to confirm if she’d received the package he sent. It’d been 3 hours since Kolade left him, so the delivery should’ve been done by now.

He would wait one more hour to make the call. Then he would know if Kolade was the honest man he’d thought he was, or merely a boy stupid enough to cross him. He hoped for his sake that it was the former.

He pulled a picture from his chest pocket and stared painfully at the wide smiling face of a girl. His daughter.

‘Don’t worry Ada,’ he said, ‘help is coming shortly.’

***

Kolade walked up to the gate of his house, tired from another day of job hunting. He was thankful at the very least that it’d been an uneventful day, unlike yesterday which had been a nightmare. His conscience still pointed guilty fingers at him for the delivery he’d failed to make, but he shook it off.

The news of his mother’s hospital admission had been the push he’d needed to accept Ugo’s deal yesterday. He’d left Ugo resolved to make the delivery, but after walking to the junction in severe pain, he decided that it was better to do it today, so he’d headed home instead. He’d been in too much pain to risk going to a random address on Lagos Island at night. Upon getting home, his curiosity had pushed him to open the bag. It was only reasonable that he knew what he was carrying right? He’d made the right call and if you’d seen the contents of the bag as well, you couldn’t blame him for not letting himself go on a wild goose chase.

So, this morning, the first thing he did was to head to the bank to send the 20,000 naira he’d received from Ugo to his sister to settle part of his mother’s hospital bill. He’d gone off thereafter to a few companies to drop off his CV, but called it a day by noon so he could go home to rest and give his wounds more time to heal.

​He made to unlock the gate, but it opened at his slight push. That was strange, as everyone in the compound knew that the Landlord hated his gates being unlocked.

‘It must’ve been an oversight by one of the neighbours,’ he thought. He locked it behind him when he stepped in. Then made his way to the one-bedroom apartment he was squatting in with his friend. He retrieved his spare key from his bag, and slid it into the lock, but the door gave way before he turned the key.

‘Strange,’ he thought again. His friend was out of the state and wouldn’t be back until next week.

‘Ahmed,’ he shouted as he stepped into the house.

He froze in his tracks at the sight, his eyes slowly registering the chaos in front of him. He stepped out of the house in a panic and slammed the door shut, panting heavily to slow his racing heart. The house had been ransacked. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the door open again and stepped in fully. Carefully stepping around the scattered books, furniture and shattered photo frame on the floor of the living room, he followed the trail of destruction into the room. It had also been ransacked.

‘What could have happened?’ he wondered. Nothing looked stolen. The electronics were intact, but it looked like someone or people had upturned every possible nook of the house in search of something.

‘Ha!’ His heart caught in his throat as realization dawned on him.

‘No, it couldn’t be!’ He ran frightfully back to the living room. That was when he spotted a note sitting on the reading table in the living room. He picked it up.

‘WHERE IS MY BAG?’ it read. He dropped the note suddenly like it scorched him. Heat spread quickly through his body. He looked at the note again and saw that there was a phone number written under the text. He picked his phone from his pocket and started to dial it. But he stopped just before pressing the call button, deciding instead to first check if the bag was still intact.

He hurried over to his Landlord’s house and knocked at the door maniacally. The Landlord’s youngest daughter opened the door. She was barely over 13 years but stood almost as tall as him.

‘Bro Kolade? Se ko si? Se wa okay?’ she asked.

‘Yes, yes, everything is okay.’ He tried to peep around her. ‘Ehm, I came to collect the bag that I gave your cousins yesterday.’

‘Oh, the toys abi. I thought you said you bought it for them as parting gift. They’ve travelled back to the US today. Or you’ve forgotten that they were travelling?’

‘Ha mo gbe!’ his knees gave way under him.

She rushed to him, her eyes wide with concern. ‘What’s wrong.’

‘Nothing’ he shouted. ‘Sorry, I meant nothing.’ He got up and dusted himself, walking back to his apartment shakily.

​He shouldn’t have opened the bag yesterday. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have found that it was just toys that were in it. He may have still delivered it even if it was just a test or prank like he’d thought it was. He wouldn’t have decided that it was a farce and Ugo was only toying with him. I mean who would pay 200,000 naira to anyone to deliver children toys? But as he walked back into the scattered apartment, he started to think that maybe there was something else in the bag that he hadn’t seen.

He picked up the note again when he got back to the house, and after some minutes of contemplation decided against calling the number. What was he going to say?

‘Hello Ugo, thanks for the 20,000 naira, but your bag has travelled to USA?’

After seeing the havoc wrought in the house, he hated to think of what could have happened to him if they’d met him in the house. He wouldn’t call the number, he might as well write his death sentence with his own hands. Instead, he rushed around, picked his travelling bag and started flinging his clothes and other essentials into them. He would go to Osogbo today. He was done with this Lagos life.

Once done packing, he looked around the house and thought it was only fair that he cleaned up for his friend. Afterall, this was his fault. So, he dropped the bag and started tidying up. Soon after, a knock sounded at the door. He looked up, and as the knock continued, his heart raced faster with each count.

​Next Episode drops on Wednesday 15th April

​

Finally, his feet moved, but it was too late. A hard slap landed on the back of his head, sending him stumbling forward.

‘I’m not a thief,’ he stuttered but nobody heard him. ‘I didn’t steal the phone, he shouted desperately.’ This wasn’t how he was supposed to die.  

In response he got another sharp slap to his head, a violent push and a fierce kick to his mid-section that forced him to his knees. No one was asking questions, nor was his voice heard above the shouts when he tried to speak again. He tried clawing his way out, but the loose sand gave way beneath his fingers when a strong foot stepped on his back, pinning him to the ground.

He struggled to breathe but the air he found was stale, dusty, and bitter. His sight started to blur, but he forced himself to look up, desperate to find a way out. In his search, his eyes met that of a man who stood some distance away from the crowd. He stood like the biblical Saul at whose feet the men who’d stoned Stephen dropped their robes.  The man watched Kolade keenly, unmoving, as if waiting for him to speak.

A hard object slammed forcefully against Kolade’s head, which fell to the ground helplessly. He tasted blood and his vision blackened, but in one last desperate cry for mercy, he stretched out to the man. Then everything went blank.

***

Kolade jerked awake to hands violently shaking him. He coughed and sucked in a deep breath, desperate for air. Two strong hands held him up and another tapped his cheeks in quick succession.

‘Wake up!’ Startled, he stared through a haze at nothing for a few more minutes until his sight cleared. He was sitting on cold tiled floor, dripping wet and wearing only his singlet and pair of boxers. Everything felt surreal, and for a split second he felt like he’d just come out of a bad dream. He looked to his side and saw the same man from his dream sitting opposite him.

Then it hit him.

‘I almost died!’ He blurted.

The man in front of him nodded at him, or so he thought until the two other men let him go and left the room.

Kolade now looked around the room. It was a medium sized barbers’ shop, complete with mirrors and revolving chairs. The man sat on one of the chairs, the back of his bald head reflecting on the mirror behind him.

‘Does your head hurt?’ he asked.

‘Yes Sir.’ Kolade replied with a wince.

‘It’ll get better, and please cut the Sir. Call me Ugo.’

‘Okay Sir..sorry Ugo.. you saved my life Sir!

‘You can say that.’

‘Ha thank you sir. Eh, I could have died. God will bless you and your family sir and preserve you. I owe you my life.

Up to his last statement, Ugo had listened patiently, but now he got up chuckling.

‘Here, here, don’t get ahead of yourself. I don’t take debts lightly.’

Kolade could see his frame better now. Ugo was tall, broad and fit. His brown skin competed with the smoothness of the wood finishing in the room. The line of his black short hair cleanly framed his forehead, defining his thick brows. The soft wrinkles under his eyelids put him in his forties, but he could easily pass for a man in his early 30s.

‘Lightly Sir! Kolade exclaimed when he finished his perusal. ‘This isn’t light at all. Kolade went flat on the floor in a prostrate, defying the searing pain in his limbs and head. ‘I owe you my life.’

Ugo chuckled again.

‘Kolade,’ he called.

‘Sir? You know me? How?’ He stuttered, sitting up.’

‘Yes, I do. Your name is Kolade, from Oshogbo, a first-class graduate of Economics. It looks like you’ve been in search of a job for a while, am I right?’ He chuckled again, then handed a brown envelope to Kolade.

‘This is yours.’

Kolade collected the file cautiously. It was his CV, and of course, it had all his details.

‘I have a job for you.’ Ugo announced.

‘Sir?! Kolade sat up straighter. ‘Ha God is smiling on me. They always said it would get bad before getting better, but I didn’t know it would be this fast. First you save my life, then you offer me a job. Sir, you will never know lack.’

‘You haven’t even heard the job offer.’ Ugo was starting to sound impatient, so Kolade reined in his excitement.

‘Of course Sir, I was just about to ask.’

‘Again, it’s Ugo. He walked over to a cupboard and pulled out a small black bag, the size of a child’s lunch pack.’ He dropped it on the floor by Kolade’s feet then spoke again.

‘The job is simple. You would deliver this bag to an address that I would give you. Upon completion, I would pay you 200,000 naira in cash.’

‘What?!’ Kolade lost his composure. ‘Two hundred Thousand Naira Sir! To deliver this bag! Please sir, what’s in the bag?’

‘I’m not done. Under no condition should you open the bag, or tell anyone about this discussion, not even my boys outside. You look like someone I can trust, so I would give you a forward payment of 20,000 naira, because you look like you need it. You’ll get the balance when you’re back here. Do we have a deal?’

Kolade stared in amazement at Ugo, whose expression relayed nothing but dead seriousness.

‘This guy dey craze’, Kolade thought. But the strength of his desire to jump on the offer surprised him. Thankfully, his voice of reason was stronger. This was Lagos, and he knew nothing about this strange man, or the bag. What if the payment for his debt was to have him used for money ritual? God forbid!  A normal human being would have just said amen to his prayers and let him go right? But this one wants him to make a delivery. Not in this life would he do such.

He opened his mouth to start talking, but a phone rang, stopping his speech.

Ugo picked it off the table beside him.

‘This is yours too. Your sister has been calling you non-stop, so you may want to receive that.’ Kolade collected the phone to receive the call and lifted his phone to his ear as a terrible feeling suddenly filled his chest.

‘Bro Kola,’ his sister was hysterical. It’s mummy o! We’re in the hospital, uncle Gbade helped me rush her here. But I don’t know what to do, nobody is telling us anything.

‘Sewa,’ he called her with forced calm. ‘Calm down and tell me what happened. Ki lo se mummy?’

‘Ha Bro Kola,’ she shouted, ‘Mummy is unconscious. She wanted to go to the toilet, and she just slumped right there in front of me.’

Kolade felt the blood drain from his face, his headache becoming blindingly fierce. This could not be happening.

‘Oh God’, he cried out, ‘please let this be only a bad dream that I would wake up from. Please!’

She was a small girl with a big heart, a junior secondary school student who stood unnoticed at the center of a large field.

Her school’s inter-house sports competition was coming up in a couple of weeks, and the school field was a bustle of activity. The atmosphere was charged with excitement, and students were joining different sports teams in preparation for the event. She went around the field to scout for a sport that’ll catch her fancy. Shot put and Javelin throw seemed out of her league, long and high jumps didn’t seem like her thing. Parade and football? Those she found fascinating.

They had enough girls marching for the parade already. So, she went to watch the girls who were practicing football. They had just started and were taking turns shooting the ball into the net. It looked like so much fun and she wanted to be a part of that. More so, joining their team would surely help them win.

She hopped eagerly and with little thought approached the girls…the bigger, mature girls who had flesh in all the right places.

‘Can I join you? I’d like to play.’ She said.

Their reactions were immediate and in sync, like a scene from a well-rehearsed play. One scrunched her face impatiently, a look of scorn crossed the feature of another, and another snickered, while others merely stood watching as the replies shot at her.

‘You can’t play.’

‘You’re too small.’

‘Is it those tiny legs you want to use to kick the ball?’

‘Do you even know how to play?’

She replied, ‘I can learn and I’ll practice.’

But they shooed her. Her heart fell, but as she turned to leave, an idea flashed through her mind. What if she showed them that she could do it? What if she kicked the ball right there into the net? Yes, they wouldn’t have a choice but to let her on the team. She could do it, she could kick the ball into the net.

So, she approached again, though a little less confident than the first time, but more eager to prove herself. The girls were reluctant at first, but she persisted till they gave in, with the air of ‘let her do it so we can play in peace’.

They set the ball in front of her feet and left the goal post clear. She breathed deeply and looked towards the post. She breathed a second time and looked at the ball. She breathed yet a third time, charting a line from the ball to the goal net, and in one swift move kicked the ball hard.

She missed!

A few weeks later she was prancing around that same field. The competition was in full gear and she couldn’t see a thing. She ran behind the throng of people, trying to catch a glimpse of what was going on. when that didn’t work, she squeezed, shoved and pinched, moving among the shifting bodies, till she found a spot with a clear line of sight. She watched the parade, then she watched the football game. Her house lost the game and she was sad, because despite what they all said, she was confident that they would have won, if only she was part.

In the years that would follow, she wouldn’t play football, but many other life chances would come. As the opportunities arrive, those questions of doubt would raise their voices. Yet with the same high spirits and confidence, she would silence those voices by taking her shot. She would hit her mark and even when she misses, she would learn and try again!

In these times, her shots would tear through the goal net, leaving behind the mark of a winner.

She’s that small girl with a large heart and a winning shot.