Ireti woke up with a start in the middle of the hardly silent night, sitting up on the makeshift bed they had created out of the only sofa in the one room apartment she lived in with her family. She looked around her and picked up her phone to check if it was near morning.
The small screen of the TECNO “torchlight phone” brightened up and displayed 1:08. It was barely past midnight yet she couldn’t bring herself to sleep. Her feet swept on to the concrete floor covered in a patched up green carpet. The floor was a bit too warm as a result of the heat burnt out by the half a dozen of occupants in the room.
She turned to her side, her eyes meeting the closed ones of her sister with whom she shared the sofa. There wasn’t electricity supply so the army of mosquitoes had arrived the room, whizzing in in their numbers from the uncovered overflowing gutters that passed just below their window. Knowing she couldn’t risk stepping around her younger siblings who were deep asleep haphazardly across the floor, their mother’s Ankara wrapper hanging loosely over their feet, she sighed and returned to lay on her side, her eyes settling on her brother who made a low rumble, probably a mosquito ringing in his ears. He swath dreamily at his ear. Pesky insects, Ireti mused.
Recollecting the events of the previous week, she turned uneasily. She had written JAMB without the knowledge of her parents. Not that her father could care less about the expenses. He had stopped being responsible for her the minute she clocked nine and had gained admission into a government secondary school. The government had made secondary school education free and he couldn’t be more relieved. Relieved enough to get another woman pregnant in his hometown of Abeokuta.
As his first two daughters were off his neck, the succeeding three kids were hardly his affair. Except of course to receive yells and scratches from their mother who would eventually pay the fees every darn time. Now the results of her examination were out and she had passed as she expected. Passed enough to gain admission into a federal university to study Law especially with her outstanding WAEC results. She knew she had to proceed with her tertiary education, even if she had to wait two years post graduation to work as a schoolteacher and render help with the expenses of the house. It was when she realized she was getting dragged by the cliché of a system and might never get to go to the university that she had opted to take the risk. But now that she thought to it, her dreams crumbled before her eyes especially since the previous evening when she had broken the news to her sister and expected a cheer but her sister had shrugged off indifferently,
“You think you’re out of here because you passed JAMB? Who is going to pay your school fees? And for five years at that? After those five years, do you think you’d go to law school? Do you think you won’t end up as another ‘charge and bail’ on the streets?”
Opeyemi’s words had burned and her eyes filled with anger. She was right. Painfully so. She had not even completely paid back the tailor at the end of the street that had borrowed her the transport fare to attend her examination some days prior. Yet hearing the only person who had faith in her dash it into pieces, she couldn’t fight back the tears which stung her blinking eyes. As she turned to leave, her sisters next words struck her harder than lightning,
“Ireti, I’m still pregnant here and Segun said we can’t afford a wedding. You definitely heard daddy this morning when he said he will cut the baby in half when it is born. I can’t go home when he returns from Abeokuta. And I still can’t afford to pay for the ante-natal clinic.”
Of course her older sister was pregnant for the “vulcanizer” apprentice along the main expressway. Segun was a dropout lowlife who thought the first step he would take to change the world was to get her stupid sister pregnant. Now with her sister’s plain reminder, she knew her life was officially a mess. Ope was finally the “spitting image” of their mother, right down to having children out of wedlock for lowlifes.
She knew more than ever how gingerly she intended to hold on to hope. She couldn’t be her sister, pushing a big fat belly at nineteen with poor tailoring skills, or be sent off to live as the caregiver of a drunk woman beater and term herself his wife.
She couldn’t be what Opeyemi expected of her, as she was a fighter. Very soon to defend the rights they had stolen from everyone she ever thought to care for. She wasn’t bound to be a cliché. She would sweat blood to hold on to her hope.
Just as her name implied, she was going to live and die for that hope. She tugged at her wrapper and pulled it up
She was going into the university;
The first stop of her dreams.
Although she didn’t know how yet, she drift off to sleep, a small smile over her lips.
Photo credit: At original owners
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