I stood in the heart of Ajagbá with anger like a juggled bottle of coke ready to burst because one of the Danfo drivers just spattered mud all over my once sparkling white go out dress. I have been pushed violently into an intense emotional state and for a minute, I conceived the idea of scratching his eyes out of his sockets but I am twenty-one years old, I could go to jail. All they serve there is stale food and prison coffee. Besides, I can’t even afford a terrible attorney so I left the features of his face alone and started to use my words.
“Hey! Get back here! Next time, drive like you own a license man!” I brawled.
He zoomed off like the road was one of the many properties he owned.
My anger towards the government for not fixing these roads that have become eyesores, the reckless driving of the extra size driver with his stupid car and sad tyres. Passersby looking at me like a human with two heads sticking out of the neck but I did well to look back with a face that made them a little less safe and a little sorrier. I was ready to take on the world. Well, just a part of the world, Lagos state. I had my dreams in one hand and my luggage in another. The wind was wild that morning, which made it hard for the hem of my dress to steadily lay on my body. Nothing was going to stop me, not even if a tornado magically showed up. If everybody is this gutsy, then my mother might have raised me against the glaring odds.
“Will this bus go to Lagos?” I asked the lanky man I met standing beside it.
“Where did you wake up?” He asked while walking towards me.
“Was it the pigsty or the shack? “
“Excuse me?” I asked, furrowing my brows inward with confusion.
I got so angry in both mind and body to not get the joke.
“It looks like you were defeated by mud, “ he points to my dress.
“Haha, very funny, now will you answer the question?” I spitted out those words with raw fire that might have burnt him.
“Easy, easy miss. Yes, this bus will leave for Lagos today,” he responded.
I proceeded into the bus without a thank you as I thought he deserved for keeping me in the hostile wind, some hostile treatment. I settled in, not nicely but somehow into the rickety bus that didn’t look like it’d make it past the boundaries of Ajagbá. It is all I could afford at the time. Scratch that, it was all I’ve ever been able to afford since my mother laid me beside the smelly dumpster on cow poop and candy wrappers then wandered off. And my father? Probably is only good at thrusting sperm into women. My parents have one thing in common, wandering off. Even before my lungs were formed, they already didn’t want anything to do with my first breath. The other fancy buses were made for fancy people. It’s their world and I’m just in it. The ninety thousand Naira Michael Kors, hundred thousand naira red bottoms kind of people. The kind I’d never be because I can’t even afford a Michael Kors rip off on black Friday and my shoes don’t slap the sidewalks, they pleaded for mercy and cried for help.
Two hours and numb buttocks later, the bus started to do what seemed like a move, I looked out the window, raindrops fluttering on it and the image that formed in my eyes, was the gigantic billboard that had the inscription of you are now leaving Ajagbá, drive safely, was blurred. That was it, departing from the not so perfect memories Ajagbá holds, every tear, laughter, hurt, pain, and grief. I was going forward to find Joy, not happiness because it only shows up every now and then. I wanted everything that happiness couldn’t be. A permanent thing.
“You should be feeling a little better. Can we have a decent conversation now?” The annoying lanky man asked. Apparently, he was heading to Lagos too but maybe for different reasons. Not everybody desired to take on the world, truth is, not everybody needed to. My eyes took him in, I had been overwhelmed with so much anger earlier I did not notice he had brown eyes that held specs of stolen sunlight. They were perfect, something I could neither conceive, nor comprehend. For someone who had lost complete faith in the male population of my generation, this creation was tickling my insides.
“Your words were vile and I apologise for letting them get the best of me.” I replied but I dipped my words into sarcasm first.
“You didn’t even let me finish; the pigsty was lucky to have you in it.
I pretended not to have heard but my face betrayed me and broke into a small smile.
“My name is Seb, what is yours?
“Isn’t that supposed to be short for Sebastian?” I asked.
“Yes, but I hate it.”
“I’ll call you Sebastian then.”
He looked at me with your “attempt to ruin my day just got aborted eyes” and said, “with the way it bounces off those lips, I hate it a little less now. So, your name?”
“Call me the bus girl.”
We went on talking about family and how great his parents are. How his father could give Superman a run for his money and how queen Amina of Zaria has got nothing on his mother. Then he asked the forbidden question, a question he shouldn’t want answers to.
“You’ve barely said anything about your parents. Aren’t they alive?”
“They’re…dead. I dished those words out uncooked. Cold, void of emotion.
It isn’t a lie; I was kind enough to cover up for them. Only in death should a parent not care for his child. I mean, that’s the only reasonable explanation.
He took my hands in his and squeezes them. A sign that he was sorry. Sorry that my living parents had died.
“So, you’re going to stay with a relative?” He asked.
“No, under the bridge. I heard people can stay there.”
Seb laughed, a loud laugh. Loud enough that the other passengers turned their attention to us but when I didn’t laugh with him, he folded his arm over his chest and tilted his head.
“Oh, shit. You’re serious?
“Yes. But if it is against policy, I totally get it. I will find an uncompleted building.”
His eyes widen, “You’re impossible ma’am.”
We are welcomed into the city of Lagos in the most hostile but usual of ways, horrible traffic, but asides that, there was something different about the atmosphere. The air felt different mostly because it contained clouds of exhausting fumes spewed by cars but it also smelt like opportunities and bad behaviour. Lagos looks endless, viewed from this part of it. It can pass as the biggest city my presence has ever graced. It is a huge city with over fifteen million inhabitants and all of those fifteen million people looked to have their heads buried in something. That is exactly what a busy bustling city like Lagos expects from you. The city never sleeps because it keeps the people awake. It has this contemporary modern feel that Ajagbá lacked.
I looked over my shoulders and saw that Sebastian was deep in sleep. Even in his sleep, he was perfectly pulled together.
After two long hours of traffic, brawling at drivers, getting snacks from the roadside vendor who almost shoved a fifty-naira doughnut in my face and getting down to push this good for nothing bus, we got to the motor park still on four wheels and Sebastian was awake. I smiled at him and he returned the favour. Although my parents have had a hard time parenting or have had no time parenting at all, I alighted from the bus with my hopes as high as mount Everest because I am Supergirl and I could easily get myself a cape but needed no one. I became super all the times I fell and got back up. I turned to Sebastian and he said,
“Common, I’ll get you a place to stay. It isn’t exactly the biggest place though.”
I no longer lived in a hundred square feet room with two roommates. I had moved to transitional housing with six roommates so whatever place Seb had for me should be a step up.
I followed him because having a place to stay sounded like big progress for my first day in Lagos.
“This is where I start over again. Now, Ajagba, get behind me.”
I muttered.
Read – Success has a Name – A Short Story by Ishola Kolawole, Nigeria
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