Illustration by William Igwilo / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of ARTS / fiction DEPT.
Illustration by William Igwilo / THE REPUBLIC.
the ministry of ARTS / FICTION DEPT.
At last, he slid out after what appeared like a long time. I waited for the tickling sensation that had set my body on fire to subside, wanting to lean over and hold him tightly. After sex, a man feels like a piece of log unless I feel strongly for him. On this night, however, I craved to nestle in the arms of this stranger, a man I had felt nothing for less than an hour ago, but who now evoked something in me.
First, he did not respond to my greeting after beckoning me into his vehicle. My second attempt at engaging him fell flat. I had said my name and hoped to hear something. From the bluish illumination on the vehicle’s dashboard, I saw him nod in a way that appeared more in tune with the rhythm of the music playing on the stereo.
There was a good reason I always wanted to engage. The tone of the voice said a lot about a man. Beyond the words, I tried to read their character from how they spoke, to discern humans from the beasts. Not that I could change the outcome, but it prepared me for what to expect and how to take it. Sometimes, I wonder which is better—to be surprised by a predicament or know it ahead of time and suffer it mentally before confronting it in reality. My life had been an even blend of both, and I couldn’t say which was better. However, I still needed enough clues to predict the future, even if that future meant a few minutes away from the inescapable traps of the life I had chosen. Or rather, the cruel trap life had chosen for me.
Almost all the important decisions of my life ran counter to my wishes. They were mostly swim-or-sink choices, and when you’re in such situations, you lose agency in your choices. You yield to the capricious dictates of the universe and swim where the tide is bearable. The sensible thing to do is to get to safety first and decide which way to head. In my case, each riverbank of safety was soon menaced with so much danger that I had to continue swimming for my survival. It had been like what I once heard an elder in my village say: ‘If what is chasing you has not stopped, you don’t stop running.’ I had run into beasts, like the fat-headed young man who nearly beat me to pulp until I lied to him that my client, who was a big man at the National Security, knew where I was at every time. My only crime that night had been my insistence that I wouldn’t allow him in without a condom.
Before we began this night, the benevolent man had at first reminded me of the beast. He rejected the condom I offered him. My body ached with the memory of that dreadful encounter, and relief arrived when he produced his own pack of condoms.
‘Thank you,’ I sighed. ‘But I also have this.’ I held out a lubricant.
‘I don’t need it,’ he said, but I heard, I don’t need a lubricant to fuck an ashawo!
Those words from the fat-headed bastard still rang as clearly and loudly as the Catholic church bell in my village.
‘How were you born, natural birth or through a C-section?’ I had asked him.
‘Natural birth,’ he said. ‘Why do you ask?’
I didn’t answer. I had wanted to tell him that if his mother’s vagina which granted passage to his head wasn’t a storm drain, then mine was tight enough to require lubrication before penetration. But he had already demonstrated enough capacity for cruelty, so I kept my thoughts to myself. With a patch of saliva at the tip of his manhood, he revealed the sadist in him, and I sat in warm water for days afterwards.
That was what this strange man triggered when he rejected the lubricant. After we undressed, I knelt before him, grabbed him where it pleases most, and started to stroke while reaching for the tip with my tongue.
‘Relax. This is sex, not theatre,’ he said with a note of irritation. That was very unusual of an able-bodied man about to be given a treat, I thought. I gave up on any initiatives, unsure how else to please him. He took charge of the night.
‘I hope you enjoyed it,’ I managed to ask him when he returned from flushing the condom, masking my embarrassment. Perhaps, to him, I was a piece of log.
‘I did,’ he said. ‘I hope you did, too.’
‘No woman could have faked all that.’ I chuckled. ‘In fact, this is the first time someone has made love to me.’
‘Were you a virgin?’
‘I didn’t say this was my first sex.’
I wanted to tell him more, that he was tender and caring in a way I had never experienced. He didn’t appear interested beyond this point. He made to go to the washroom, but as if jolted by something he shouldn’t have forgotten, he returned with a folded tissue and wiped me clean before reaching for his things. This got me teary, and my longing for him moved from my groin toward my heart.
‘Please, if you want an all-night treat, you can have it at no additional cost,’ I said. There was something besides his good looks and coital expertise that drew me to him, even though I knew that yearning was stupid.
‘No, thank you,’ he said with a hue of irritation on his face as his boxer shorts moved over his penis, which had recoiled and looked more disinterested in me than its owner.
‘Would you take my number? You can call anytime you need me.’
‘No. I don’t do the same lady twice.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t want to be emotionally attached to a woman again.’
‘Meaning you’ve had a bad experience?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘Is that why you are here?’
He nodded.
‘That sounds too familiar over here. I’m yet to meet a man who admits he comes here just to explore.’
He continued to dress up in silence. I watched him as he wore his polo shirt and his sneakers.
‘How much do I owe you?’ he asked as he tied the lace of his second footwear.
‘It’s five hundred cedis,’ I said. ‘I feel guilty taking money from someone like you, but I badly need it to top up and pay my fees before the deadline in two weeks. This is my last semester, and I won’t be here after paying my fees.’
‘Are you a student?’
‘Yes.’
‘Where?’
‘Legon.’
‘And you’re doing this because you need money to pay your fees?’
‘Unfortunately, yes,’ I said, hoping for a sympathetic word from him.
‘That’s a common storyline over here,’ he said and chuckled, a mocking smile staying much longer on his well-trimmed face.
I wanted to convince him that my story was true, but when I opened my mouth, words could not form. Tears fell. He ignored me.
He asked that I dress up if I wanted him to drop me off where he had picked me up. He sounded irritated, and I did not speak until we sat in his car. He had touched my soul, and I wanted to tell him something from my heart, something I wanted him to hear and heed to my parting plea, if that was—as it was proving to be—our last meeting.
‘Can I tell you something?’
‘What is it?’
‘Actually, they’re two. First, I didn’t lie when I told you I’m here because I want to pay my fees. I don’t expect you to believe me, but that’s the truth.’
‘And the second is?’ His patience seemed to be running out.
‘It’s about you.’
‘What about me?’
‘I don’t know whether what you said is, indeed, true. But if it is, whoever caused you the pain certainly did not take away your humanity. You’re a good man. Here, I’ve always been treated like a commodity. It may well be that I am. You’re the first to treat me like a human being. A man like you doesn’t deserve to be here. Allow yourself to heal and love again.’
‘Are you done?’ he asked, his tone indifferent but sturdy.
‘Yes, please.’
I wrote my phone number and name on a piece of paper and reached out to him. ‘If you ever change your mind,’ I said, extending it to him. ‘Here, I’m called Kate, but my name is Akua. The second number is my permanent phone number; the first is what I use only here.’
‘I’ve told you I don’t do the same lady twice,’ he said in a voice that did not rise but retained all its rage. My heart sank, and my outstretched hand numbed. The pain of his rejection was compounded by what sounded like an order to leave the vehicle. I groped for my phone, handbag, and the few things I had left on the seat while I searched my bag for the pen to write the phone numbers.
Outside on the street, I brooded over the gloomy end to the rather pleasant night while waiting for a taxi to hail back to campus. It took my mind a while to register the private car that stopped before me, the driver signalling me to come over. I ignored him and moved away in the opposite direction without looking at the vehicle or its occupants. The driver reversed to where I stood and waved me over.
‘I’m not working,’ I said, walking on.
‘It’s me,’ I heard a familiar voice and moved closer.
‘I don’t know how much you owe,’ he said, handing a white sealed envelope to me, ‘but I hope this helps.’
Before I found the words to thank him, he was gone.
***
shop the republic
shop the republic
I was still waiting to hail a taxi back to campus when Amaka walked up to me, her breath thick with what I suspected to be the strong concoction of alcohol, aphrodisiac and weed that was sold near the pork and tilapia joint. Like the many things my low profile at Lagos Avenue did not permit me to discover, I didn’t know why they called the mixture Atemuda, the Twi word for judgement day. Its patrons, like Amaka, attested to its potency as she joined me in the darkness behind the giant tree near Abedi Pele’s residence, the most pronounced landmark at this section of Lagos Avenue. I had met her on the same spot on my first day. Amaka appeared to know everything about nightlife in East Legon. On learning that I was new, she had offered a long, unsolicited but welcome lecture on the dos and don’ts of the street. I summarized them in my head: pretend you don’t know him, even if he’s your mother’s lover. You’re here to please and not be pleased. If you want good sex, go somewhere else. Yours is to endure. Feel lucky if you enjoy. I held my breath or turned away from the mini clouds of smoke she puffed from something that didn’t smell like the cigarette I knew.
‘You no dey smoke?’ she asked in a pidgin heavy with the unmistakable Nigerian accent I had picked from Nollywood movies.
‘No,’ I told her.
‘So, you no dey drink or sniff, too, abi?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘You want to do dis work with clear eyes? You go die o.’
I was about to ask why she thought it was impossible without drugs, but she went ahead of me.
Amaka would have gone on and on, but a middle-aged woman strolling with the gait and grace of an important somebody called out to say hi. Amaka quenched whatever she smoked by pressing her fingers tightly at the burning tip. She tossed it into the back pocket of her skimpy shorts before crossing to the other end of the street to meet the woman she called Madam, pulling me along. She told Madam I was a new girl, and she was about to tell me to register with her when she appeared. Madam asked me preliminary questions and asked Amaka to excuse us so she could engage me further. In her, I confided my true identity. She wanted to know whether I had thought through what I was signing up for.
Indeed, I hadn’t. It had been three days of dizzying reels of drama, and if there was any thinking at all, it was my resolve that venturing onto the street wasn’t the worst option available to me. The journey to that resolution had begun Sunday morning at church when the chairman of the welfare committee told me before service that the church could not give me the loan I had requested to pay my fees. Later that day, I stormed out before the service ended, vowing never to return. This was during the ceremony to unveil the customized Lexus SUV the church had acquired for our pastor, and a brand-new Benz, whose model I couldn’t tell, for the pastor’s wife. I dropped my Bible in the litter bin outside my hostel when I returned to campus. With the deadline to pay my fees or drop out of school approaching in four days, I needed to look for my own solution. The God I had thought I served faithfully had failed me. Through his church and pastors, he had, more than once, turned away when I needed him most.
The following Monday, I headed to Parliament House to see the MP for my constituency. I had met him while visiting my grandmother in the village, and he gave me his number and asked me to call him. I didn’t like how he drooled over me, so I stayed away. But today, I couldn’t ignore him. I sat for five hours in his lobby after he had seen me, heard my story and asked me to wait. When his secretary was gone, he dismissed his driver for the day, saying he would work late. Half an hour later, we were on our way to an unoccupied house in East Legon. He asked about my education, what job I wanted to do after school and how he could support me. I had thought he was taking me back to campus until he turned into East Legon. That night, I was confronted with saying no to him and ending my education, the only ray of light in my gloomy world. I was starving to death, and he offered a lifeline of food whose poison would take time to kill. I had a choice to reject it and die or eat and hope for a cure before the toxins completed their task. In the end, I didn’t say yes or no. He didn’t ask and didn’t appear to need my permission to proceed. It was, perhaps, a norm. And he expected me to know. When the humiliation was over and we got back into his car, he handed me some folded banknotes. I would not have counted if he hadn’t asked me to meet him at the unoccupied house at exactly 8 p.m. the following day for the rest of my fees. What he gave me was only a quarter. I wanted to tell him it was cruel of him, but when I opened my mouth, different words emerged.
‘Is this what you do to all ladies who come to you for help?’ I was beginning to shake with rage.
‘Did I force you?’
‘Is that the question you heard?’ I told him.
‘Young girl, you must be careful,’ he said, pointing a finger at me. ‘The fact that something has happened between us doesn’t mean you can disrespect me. And if you’re the type who open their mouths too widely. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
I still cannot tell where I summoned the courage to throw the money at him and ask him to stop so I could get out of the car. The door slamming behind me drove me into a stagger. I gazed down the broken road—up the left turn was Lagos Avenue. Still shaken, I walked on, his warning of the consequences of my speaking still loud in my ears. I made the journey to campus on foot, mindful not to deplete the only money left for my feeding for at most two days.
At last, I reached my hostel, broke down sobbing. My roommate was out, paving the way to execute the only plan formed on my way back. In the past, that thought had tiptoed on the fringes of my mind, but on this night, it occupied the centre seat with a weight and mass that blocked out any other possibilities. I yanked a piece of paper from my foolscap notebook, but more tears fell on it than words. In the end, I only managed to write two lines: ‘Naa, sorry for putting you through this traumatic sight. Tell my grandmother I thank her and that I’m sorry I disappointed her.’
I placed the note for my roommate on her bed and quickened my pace to forestall any intrusion. I tied one end of my nylon sponge around my neck, stood on the wooden chair, and tied the other end to the ceiling fan. I closed my eyes and kicked the table aside, and the world ceased to exist. When I opened my eyes, again the chair I’d kicked lay between me and the fan that tumbled down with me. Like a tethered goat dragging along its anchor, the sponge was around my neck, the other end still tied to the fan. I quickly unknotted it and set about cleaning the debris of bat faeces that came down from the broken ceiling. For an inexplicable reason, the mess mattered to me more than my failed mission. It was in the process of cleaning up that I started to think of myself as a coward. The fact that it was a trait I resented in my father started to build a strong resolve in me. Instead of running away, I would confront life my way. Then, the pretty girls I had seen at Lagos Avenue earlier that evening came to mind. If they had survived, then I, too, would.
And that was all that I told Madam.
‘Where’s your father in all of this?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know my father,’ I said.
‘How so?’ she asked, beckoning me to the pavement close to a closed shop.
‘It’s a long story,’ I said, hoping to tell it as succinctly as I could without missing the vital details.
shop the republic
shop the republic
My mother didn’t tell me anything about her life till her breast cancer deteriorated, and she returned to the village almost a ghost. She died a month later. Whatever remains I gathered about her life came from my grandmother. My mother had come to Accra as a domestic help to a rich couple from our village. For the reward of her labour, they promised to sponsor her to learn a trade. Both parties kept their side of the bargain until a man came into my mother’s life. Between the shop where she apprenticed to become a seamstress and her hosts’ house, some young men lived in an uncompleted building they were constructing. My mother would greet them on her way to the shop and back. With time, she struck up an acquaintance with one of them named Kofi. She started to stop at this uncompleted building longer than usual, especially on her way back home, until she missed her period and told Kofi about it. The next time she went back, his colleagues said Kofi left without telling them. My mother didn’t hear from him again and could not look for him because there were thousands of men in Accra born on Friday and named Kofi. My mother went to the village to deliver me and returned to the city to hustle when I was old enough to be prised away from her breast. Till her death, she didn’t earn enough to care for me.
‘So, how did your grandmother raise you? Was she working?’ Madam asked.
‘I was raised by a pastor who said I had a promising future and took me in.’
‘Was it a prophecy?’
‘No, I came first in the class his wife taught?’
‘And why did he abandon you?’
‘I fell out with him in high school, when he forcefully had his way with me. I resisted him the second time. Not long after that, his wife accused me of witchcraft, and my grandmother said I should return home. I didn’t tell her what had happened.’
Madam asked that I meet her the following day with my student identity card and proof that I owed fees. At that meeting, she gave me an interest-free loan from the girls’ welfare fund to pay my fees. I am to work and pay it back later. She had also told me that if I was indeed there because of hardship, then I should quit if I pulled through with my education.
‘Not everyone can be lucky like me,’ she said.
She didn’t tell me what her luck was, but every girl at Lagos Avenue possessed a different version of her story. She had bumped into a rich man and given him the wildest satisfaction, and he signed a fat cheque that changed her life. So went one account. Another said a white man who had tasted what he didn’t know existed returned to his country and transferred enough money so that Madam would abandon the trade and come over, but she used that money to settle herself in Ghana and cut ties with him. There appeared to be no consensus on how Madam made her fortune, but the girls agreed that she was a good woman. When prominent politicians were going to conferences or political rallies, they relied on her to give them escorts. They paid her for her service, and when the girls she recommended offered her anything from their payments, she would not accept it.
On the night the strange man gifted me the envelope, Amaka disappointed when I told her I was closing early. I didn’t tell her the treat of a lifetime I’d received from the unlikeliest place. I didn’t tell her the envelope I’d received. I apologised for deserting her company and started to bargain with the taxi driver, who mentioned three times the usual fare from East Legon to the Legon campus of the University of Ghana.
***
I got back to my room after midnight but had to wait a while. My roommate, Naa, was there with a man. I tore the envelope once I got into my room, and my heart almost stopped when the hundred-dollar bills spilled onto my bed. I counted ten of them, more than enough for my fees and upkeep until I completed. A prolonged ‘wow’ escaped my gaping mouth. My head began to shake in disbelief, tossing off warm tears onto my heaving chest. Naa entered so suddenly that I could only do one of two things—mask my tears or hide the cash. It wasn’t a difficult choice.
She asked if everything was okay. I told her I was fine and went to bed, the envelope wrapped in an old dress and placed under my mattress. I couldn’t sleep immediately. First, I replayed the night’s encounter with the strange man. I had heard that angels sometimes appeared in human form, but I banished the idea before it took form. If God wanted to send an angel my way, why would he choose a brothel and not the church in which I’d served him? Would an angel have had sex me? And which angel would be that skilled in making love the way he did? Did Mary’s pregnancy result from a spiritual insemination or a spiritual intercourse? I could not tell. What lay within my control was how to proceed from that night. The gift from the strange man could pay the rest of my fees, with a handsome balance that could see me through school. I had less than two months to graduate, after which I would be posted for my compulsory national service. It was almost impossible to live on the national service allowance and as the president of the Unemployed Graduates Association of Ghana (UGAG) had been quoted on social media, it was easier to swim across the Atlantic Ocean with a cement block tied around your neck than secure a job after school. I was not out of the woods. I could not see beyond the heavy fog of uncertainty that hovered before me. The adversary that had pursued me my entire life might only have paused to rest its limbs and would resume the chase. But I’d made a promise to myself and must keep it. By daybreak, I had decided not to return to Lagos Avenue, the commercial street in the most expensive neighbourhood in Ghana, that also houses high-level commercial sex trade at night. The only reason I contemplated returning there again was the possibility of meeting and thanking the strange man. But I decided against it. He would not believe I was there because of him. Besides, my chances of meeting him again were slim.
shop the republic
shop the republic
Then, a month later, Madam called. I knew why at once—the night before, I had heard that police had raided Lagos Avenue. If that good Samaritan hadn’t come my way, I probably might have been paraded in front of the cameras and made it to the front pages of the tabloids that screamed: POLICE ARREST 54 ASHAWO GIRLS AT LAGOS AVENUE.
I answered the call, tensed, worried she would assign me a task I no longer wanted to do. Though I felt indebted to her, I was determined to reject whatever lucrative job she had for me. With many of the girls locked up in police cells, I imagined she had run out of options and needed me for a customer who could not be disappointed.
‘I am happy you’re no longer in this,’ Madam said after hearing my story. It was our first meeting during the day. She looked more beautiful than I’d thought. Diamond bracelets and bangles dangled on either wrist and most of her fingers were bedecked with matching rings. She looked exotic and appeared to have a good taste for fashion.
‘I can’t thank you enough for your support,’ I said, folding my arms around my chest. The chill had dried my sweat and was beginning to eat into my pores.
Madam reached out to lower the blower speed of her Lexus V8, with a customised number plate. She had parked outside Zenith Bank, one of the many local and foreign banks that jostled for the attention of Ghana’s wealthiest on this side of Lagos Avenue. With too much on my mind, I couldn’t keep the initials on her customised number plate, with which to guess her name. The number on the plate ended with 2018, indicating that the fuel guzzler, a status symbol among the Ghanaian elite, had been acquired the same year. As the air conditioner reduced to a silent whisper, the flashy dashboard only displayed the names of artistes and their songs playing at an inaudible volume, she continued.
‘You’re the first girl to keep her word and leave after solving the problem that brought her there.’
‘Wow! I hope you didn’t doubt me when I first told you why I was here.’
‘I didn’t doubt your story, but I didn’t think you’d leave. There were some whose fees and other financial needs I paid for when they said they came here because of need, but they never left. I thought you were one of them.’
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Trust me, I would have paid your fees and kept you from here if I’d known you were different.’
‘You still saved me. I couldn’t have met the deadline to stay in school but for the loan you gave me,’ I said. Her phone vibrated, interrupting whatever she wanted to say.
‘Give me five minutes, sir,’ she said with urgency and returned to the subject of our meeting, letting me in on the client who needed my service. ‘I know how it is to act against your will, but I’m begging you to do this for the girls. They spent last night in various cells and will spend the rest of the weekend in custody if we don’t intervene.’
That wasn’t the first time the police had swooped in and detained the girls. And it wouldn’t be the last. The commander, crime officer and other top divisional officers, she said, had to be seen in order to secure their release. The welfare dues mainly went into settling such matters, but the divisional commander demanded something more, and that’s why she had called me. I couldn’t say no, but no matter how hard she pushed, I rejected payment for it.
She drove me to a nearby hotel where the police commander was waiting in room 105. She said I shouldn’t give him the faintest clue that I knew who he was. To assure him of his anonymity, she said I should tell him I’d want to return with him to Italy, for the two had agreed that he should be identified as a Ghanaian businessman domiciled in that country.
He was a short man in his late fifties. He looked scruffy, with an uneven set of teeth that had yellowed from apparent neglect. When he took off his shirt, the buckle of his belt was hidden beneath a layer of flesh that had fallen from a potbelly in its advanced stage.
The man was like others—unremarkable. He spoke of his jobs, his Italian business, love, luxury. I was there just to please Madam so I listened with my fading eyes. At my indifference, his hardness started to recoil, and he went limp.
I sat beside his naked body, stroked him, and took him in my mouth in an attempt to revive him. He exploded even before he fully hardened. It came so unexpectedly that it splashed on my face. I was in the washroom washing my face when I heard my phone ring. The number was unknown, and I wouldn’t have answered if I weren’t looking for an excuse to escape this humiliation. It often took an eternity for such men to stand again, and I didn’t want to leave with aching jaws, especially when he had already reached his peak.
‘Hello, may I know who this is?’ I said into the phone.
The commander was looking at me.
‘Just for confirmation, can you mention something that would make me believe this isn’t a prank call?’ I said and listened intently. I paced away so that the commander couldn’t hear what the caller on the other end of the phone was saying. By the time I asked for a Google location to be sent to me on WhatsApp, I was visibly shaking.
‘Is anything the matter?’ the police commander asked, looking concerned.
‘Yes, my grandmother, who brought me up, has been rushed to the hospital, but I think it’s worse than what they’re telling me on the phone.’
‘I’m sorry to hear this,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry,’ I said, pushing my boobs into my bra and reaching for my dress.
My phone was still pressed against my right ear when I stepped into the lobby and made for the entrance. The man drew my attention through the hotel security. He was the one whose call I was returning. I wanted to hug him, but he remained seated and gestured to the empty seat next to him.
‘How did you get my number?’ I said, after overcoming the shock.
‘Are you kidding me? How could you leave it in my car and not expect me to see it?’ he said.
‘What! You won’t believe it, but after you rejected it, I didn’t know I left it there. It might have fallen while I was getting my stuff out of the car,’ I told him, hoping he wouldn’t think of me as a liar.
‘Well, I heard of the police swoop, and I thought about you. I had always thought about you, but I didn’t think it was the right time to reach out until I saw someone like you enter while I was meeting a business partner. I wasn’t sure, so when my meeting ended, I decided to call…Sorry for the interruption.’
‘There’s nothing to be sorry for. You actually saved me,’ I said, wondering if the commander had seen see me when he came out. ‘Can we step aside—maybe in your car—and talk? I don’t want him to see me.’
‘Who?’
‘The man I was with when your call came,’ I looked at the entrance to the hotel.
‘There’s nothing to talk about. All I want to say is thank you for your advice. I didn’t return to Lagos Avenue again and am now less bitter.’
He was standing up, and I wanted to tell him that I, too, hadn’t returned to Lagos Avenue after meeting with him. But Miklin Hotel, where we were having the conversation, was on Lagos Avenue, so I offered to explain.
‘You owe me no explanation,’ he said. He rose, and I saw his frame again, all of him. It was all I could see as he made through the revolving door at the entrance, without another word⎈
