Road.Tripping.

 

I didn’t know how much longer I could hang on. I closed my eyes and then opened them and tried to focus, but all I could feel was the pain. Please God, help me make it out of this alive. I willed the words to come out of my mouth but instead, only silence. I looked at the clock in the front and wondered how many hours we were from Port Harcourt.                                                                             

I frantically tried to convince myself I was overreacting. What kind of loser died from a full bladder? Myself didn’t listen. I looked at the clock in the front again…

14:40.Please I need to ease myself          

The words we were trained to recite in primary school when we needed to take a piss. In this instance though, it would just piss off my captors, because we left a public restroom less than thirty minutes ago.                                                                   

Don’t overthink it, just say it.                                 

 JUST STOP!!!                                                           

 And the car just…stopped. My heart flew to my mouth.

I know I didn’t just say that out loud. There was no way, I briefly entertained the possibility that I had stopped the car with the power of my mind, or with my chi, or maybe I was the last in a long line of powerful warlocks and my folks at home didn’t tell me for my own protection.

The Beard turned around and looked me squarely in the eyes.                                                    

I looked right back, focusing all my mental energy on turning him into axe body spray.                          

 My warlock theory just didn’t hold water              

But I wasn’t ready to accept that just yet              

 “Let me buy ukwa”                                                      

 I thought “abeg do fast so I can get home faster”

So I said “okay”.   

The man got  down and I watch him weave his way through a sea of traders, sweaty, arms outstretched, calling,  grasping at whatever article of clothing they can lay their hands on, but mostly his jet black, magnificent beard, very much like zombies.          

“You sabi road?”

Zombie market.

“You’re the one I’m talking to”

If I knew the road then I, and not you, will be driving.

“Oh I been think say you still dey for phone”

“So you sabi pidgin sef? I think say you no go ever sabi am”

Cheesy was looking at me out of bloodshot eyes and the driver seat. One of my biggest fears was and still is that I’ll grow up and my eyes will become like that. Neither of my parents have bloodshot eyes, so my fears were completely unmerited. Nevertheless, I avoided the plant like alpha avoids beetle after an argument, on Sundays, in the mornings and on weekdays.

I looked out of the window, away from those eyes, at the beard haggling with a trader. Five minutes had passed. A very long time for one measly bottle of ukwa.

Beetle used to say pidgin was the first language I learnt, even before English. Beetle lies a lot. But I do know pidgin, yes. My pidgin skills have sharpened to a point by a colony of house helps. 18-ish girls that defied the laws of nature to speak English when my parents were around, but the universe was always restored to order once my parents travelled. 

 I picked up calabar pidgin from Gift, who followed us to church for bible study every Thursday and got pregnant while in our house. I know, it sounds like the kind of thing you watch on super story but I’m for real. When she left she called her boyfriend, a thug and they both stood outside the gate raining curses on my mom.

I picked up a little Akwa-Ibom from Uduak, and by "a little", I mean the word for “egg” in Akwa-Ibom.

Nsen unen.

That’s eight letters, four syllables and two words just for one egg. Confused? Don't worry, so is the egg.

 Then there was Ebere whose only crime was sleeping with a candle still lit. Nothing happened, but Beetle said she almost set the house on fire so she had to go.

 They seemed to have come to an agreement, the beard and zombie #7KA1. He handed her a crisp 1000 naira note from a wad of similarly crisp 1000 naira notes and smiled. She extended her dry, furrowed claw-hands and collected it, then smiled. The beard smiled again. I felt like throwing up. The beard was visibly impressed with his negotiation skills and cheesy did nothing to puncture his ego.

“Uncle how much did the bottle cost?"                                

I didn't want to hear his reply. Even if he somehow managed to supress his accent and patronizing tone, thereby hiding his American-ness from one sense, all the other senses immediately picked up on it. The beard looked, smelled, felt and probably tasted American (he even got one of those super strong, super ugly casings for his IPhone. Hello? In Nigeria we don’t hide or disfigure IPhones), when you add that to the fact that Nigerian women market women are psychic, sensing weakness, fear and of course money, (just like zombies, in a way) you got the feeling that he was Daniel, walking into the lions den. You know, if it had real National Geographic lions, and not those giant pussies (figurative and literal) the real Daniel encountered.

He would go back to the land of the free to tell the tale of this epic escapade in an African market, with emphasis on how he priced a six hundred naira bottle of ukwa from one thousand naira to nine hundred and seventy five naira. Equipped only with American allure, and a truly epic beard.  Amateur.

2:50.Still no silver lining to my dilemma. I have what my family doctor calls "urinary incontinence", to normal people that means my bladder and I are not on speaking terms.  I like to imagine he got that diagnosis after receiving a very strongly worded text message (from you know who). Anyhow sha, I've decided to stand up to it today. For if your faith be as a mustard seed...

2:55. “many of these drivers don’t care for the lives of people on the road”

A lorry had just passed us and cheesy was delivering a mini-lecture on how the behaviour of Nigerian drivers is a reflection of a failed government, while a woman on the radio was explaining why Nigerians who normally don’t give two shits become expert sociologists and political analysts when in the presence of Americans.

A few years ago an uncle returned from the states and a cousin, who was living with us then, when we went out was just giving him the 411 on all the problems in the country, ending each sentence with “so that’s how it is here ooh” As if she was giving him reasons to take her back with him. He left a week later. He did not take her with him.

Cheesy had moved on to police extortion at checkpoints, the woman on the radio called it “the duplicity of Nigerian folk”.

3:15. Cheesy kept his foot on the pedal of the car and the stories he told the beard.                            
It seemed the moral lesson of each one was “Nigeria is a corrupt place”. He told stories of police brutality, exam malpractice, oil bunkering, embezzlement and the like. Gradually, I became Interested. Because cheesy was telling exaggerated stories. He was describing Zimbabwe.                                                                     

 I was witnessing the birth of a new George R.R. Martin

“Do you want some?”

The beard was looking at me. I tried to read his face. Maybe he too didn’t believe cheesy and thought he should shut up.

“Thank you”

For a moment I was tempted to say no, so I could enjoy watching him misplace like four teeth in his beard trying to finish one thousand naira ukwa but himself. (If you’re not looking at the time stamps, which is something you should be doing, he bought that thirty five minutes ago) I gladly carried his burden.

3:30.We went past a police checkpoint without so much as being looked at twice. I felt like telling the beard something, but cheesy was still talking so I decided to let it be. I felt I should let him form his own impression and not anybody else’s. I tried the car stopping warlock/telepathy/chi trick with Cheesy but he didn’t budge.                                                             

 And so he kept on talking. Another police checkpoint loomed large in the distance, and I focused all my energies on shielding our car from the gaze of evil forces.

We went past it.

Then I saw George R.R. Martin peering at me curiously through the rear view mirror.

I made a mental note to ask him for his autograph the moment we got home, because it would be hard when he became a famous fiction author.

I cannot categorically say how these thoughts crossed my mind, my working theory is that some urine escaped from my bladder into my bloodstream and got me high.

3:55. “do you know the road here?”

 I did know the road, because I’ve only been on it a hundred times, but what Cheesy meant was “what way do I go?” and to that, I’ll be damned if I knew. Still though, I looked out of the window and pretend to study the landscape, and after what felt like an adequate time-lapse said…

“Go straight”

“Are you sure?”

I wasn't but I had already said "go straight" and I am a man of my word. A part of me wanted to say no, (the superior part actually) because not knowing the road is not something you should never be ashamed of, you can always ask for directions. That’s what God created those people selling gala and plantain chips for.

“Yes, go straight”

My bladder sent me a warning shot.

to be continued...