We Are Able

Episode 42

Toyosi returned home sad after one month. John begged her
every now and then for forgiveness, but she wouldn’t listen.
Was there more to it which I didn’t know? Why did she keep
crying all days? Did she not get what she wanted? At least my
father had succumbed to her will by letting her abort the
pregnancy, so what more? I thought.
The day they reconciled was the exact day John took ill; that
was around September. John was admitted in a hospital as
Toyosi expended all her profit in treating him. Then Toyosi
begged me to go to the streets and beg for alms but I refused
blatantly. She couldn’t touch me now, perhaps she had already
realized that her nemesis was caused by her evil deeds to me in
the past. Toyosi said she would release my mother from if only
I could render that help to her. I had pity on my father who
was between life and death and then went begging in the
streets. Now I hung a laminated write-up on my neck too,
indicating that I was deaf and dumb and I needed help.
When Albert saw me begging, he called me a pretender.
“Did you not lie that you didn’t beg for alms that day,
pretender?” Albert spoke harshly to me. I was speechless.
This time around, it wasn’t Albert alone who saw me begging
but many of my former school mates too, including Bose, who
was my arch-enemy back then in the former public school I
attended. Each time I saw Bose mocking me, I would feel as if I
should strangle her once and for all, because she had done a lot
of evil to me in the past.
I could remember what Bose did to me while we were in
primary four. Back then, Bose came to me to say that she no
more wanted any fight with me, but she would want us to be
close friends since we were the only two people in the class
with the same surname, John. She is John Bosede and I was
John Rose. I readily accepted Bose’s proposal and we became
close pals.
Our friendship was sustained for the whole term until the
beginning of the next session when we got promoted to
Primary 5. Back then, when we were friends, I lost my bag in
which all my books were kept. Everything I had, including my
textbooks, where in it. I wept because I knew what my father
would do to me if he discovered that I had lost my bag and all
the new books I had in them. As expected, my father dealt
brutally with me for my carelessness and refused to get me
another bag and books for replacement. I had to do the rest of
my class without any textbooks and exercise books.
During the beginning of the next session, Bose began to come
to school with some familiar books (exactly the types of books I
had in my back the session before). I began to sense
something fishy because of her reluctance to borrow me her
books. I would have pointed accusing fingers at her if only I
had seen any cancellation at the back of those books because I
wrote my names on them those days; at least if they where
mine, she would have cancelled those names before writing
hers.
Something kept telling me they were mine because the writings
looked exactly like mine. But when did I write Bose’s name with
my own handwriting? Was I drunk while I was doing that? I
wanted to know the fact, so I continued to observe. I knew the
books were actually mine when I got one of her storybooks
one day. I saw some marks I did inside the storybooks and
now I was convinced. It had just occurred to me how easy it
was for her to alter the ‘R’ starting my name and change it to
‘B’. She wouldn’t have had any problem converting them at all
since the right leg of my letter ‘R’ were always curved
somehow, not straight. Thus, she changed my name ‘John
Rose’ to her own name ‘ John Bosede’ with ease, having added
a ‘d’ and an ‘e’ to it to make me never suspect her(Bosede was
the long form of the name Bose).
I was angry with her and took laws into my hands, fighting
with her after school hour one day, just because the teacher I
reported the case to ignored me for lack of clear evidence. We
fought that day and I defeated her, putting sand into her
mouth, contrary to the thought of everyone that Bose was the
boss then, because she could bully on both boys and girls alike
as a result of her rapid development.
The next day, her mother came to school with her and
reported the case to my class teacher (not Mrs Oyin) and I was
scolded and suspended for two weeks. I wondered why Bose’s
mother backed her daughter up in lies as such. Sometimes
parents could be the cause of their children’s bad manners, I
thought.
I was shy when Bose made fun of me and promised to bring
all our schoolmates to make fun of me the next day. When I
returned home that day, I told Toyosi that I didn’t want to beg
anymore.
“You must do it for your father, or you want him dead?” she
said.
“No, I want him to live, but…but I can’t just do it anymore; my
schoolmates are making fun of me,” I said.
“You have to do it if you want to see your mother alive,” she
said. I was weighed down deep down my heart, but I couldn’t
cry. She was the one doing the weeping.