‘What?’

‘Here’s something I got for you.’

For once, Cash Daddy was as speechless as a stone. He kept looking at my hands without touching the bag. Finally, the shock covered the whole acreage of his face and passed. He shook his head slowly and took the bag from me.

‘This boy, your head is not correct,’ he said quietly. ‘There’s something wrong with you. Why didn’t you use the money to buy garri for one old woman in your village? How can you be spending your money buying me things?’

He started walking towards the house. After a few paces, he stopped and turned.

‘I was just thinking about it,’ he said. ‘Do you know that this is the first time in almost fifteen years that anybody has bought anything for me? Just like that… for no reason?’

He smiled like a delighted child and continued towards the house.

Thirty-seven

Charity had taken the weekend off school for the special occasion. Her suitor was paying me a courtesy call this Saturday afternoon. From my bedroom window, I saw that Johnny a.k.a Nwokeoma was not infected with the ‘African Time’ epidemic. He had arrived a whole seven minutes before his 2 p.m. appointment. To make sure that nobody mistook his brand new Honda for a tokunbo, Johnny had left the protective cellophane wrappings on the seat covers and on the headrests. Like many people, he would probably never tear the covers off but leave them to wear out with time.

My sister rushed outside to welcome him. With fury, I watched them embrace. I was daring the man to take their body contact any further when they held hands and sauntered happily into my house. Charity had him seated comfortably in the living room, then came upstairs to announce his arrival. I had been pacing up and down in my bedroom for the past thirty minutes, wondering what to say to him when he turned up. Still, I allowed an extra forty minutes to pass before coming downstairs. I did not offer any apologies for keeping him waiting.

Johnny presented some ‘wine’ to formally initiate me into his intentions. I received the two bottles of Rémy Martin cognac and placed them on the stool beside me. Since I was not particularly desperate for my sister to leave the house, I was not going to ask for a wineglass and sip from the drink immediately.

‘I’m delighted to finally meet you,’ he said. ‘Charity holds you in such high regard. Very soon, you’ll meet my family as well. They’ve all met Charity and they’re also looking forward to meeting you.’

The man greatly amused me. He was tall, thin, slow, hairy, with heavy linear eyebrows that looked as if they had been cut out of a thick rug and pasted onto his face with cheap glue. Each time he shifted his head, I half-expected the eyebrows to drop onto the floor. His look was stiff and sluggish, like all his mannerisms. When he began a five-word sentence, I could have walked up the flight of stairs, gone to the bathroom in my bedroom, turned on the tap, washed my hands, turned off the tap, descended the stairs, sat down, and he would still not have finished speaking.

But there is some good in everybody: beneath his burdensome eyebrows, Johnny was quite handsome.

‘I hear you’re a banker,’ I said.

‘Yes, I am,’ he replied as if each word had a phobia of the next one coming after it. ‘I’m head of operations at the Standard Trust Bank in Okigwe.’

For a second, I relished the many advantages of having an in-law who worked in a bank. In our line of business, it always helped to have a banker on your side.

He went on to say that he had a degree in Business Administration from the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. He was Roman Catholic, his parents were civil servants, and he was desperately in love with my sister of course. Plus, he was thirty-four years old!

At that moment, Charity walked in with a tray of refreshments. The corners of the man’s mouth expanded to his ears in a smile. He stopped speaking while she adjusted the centre table and deposited her offering in front of him. He fixed gleaming and delighted eyes on my sister from the moment she entered the room, while she was opening the bottle of soft drink, till she twisted her tiny behind and left. There was a strong possibility that his eyeballs would have popped out of their sockets if she had not left when she did.

I felt like bruising his handsome jaw with my fist.

‘If everything goes according to plan,’ he continued, ‘we would be married by August.’

He was a British citizen, you see, and had enrolled at the London School of Economics. The postgraduate course would be starting in September. He wanted Charity to come along with him as his wife.

I listened to him broadcasting his well-calculated plans and thought to myself, what a fool.

He kept talking. His voice started sounding as annoying as a toddler crying on the plane during an all-night flight. I stopped listening and started wondering. Finally, I reached a conclusion. There could only be one reason why my young, intelligent, beautiful, naive, unassuming, impressionable sister would want to marry this cradle-snatching slug. He had a British passport. This Anglo-Nigerian was her ticket to a better world – a marriage proposal attached to a magic carpet.

The whirring noise in my ears suddenly ceased. The man had finished his ditty. Out of curiosity – strictly out of curiosity – I asked him one last question.

‘What about her education? What will happen if she gets married now and has to leave the country?’

Of course he had that all planned out, too.

‘That’s not a problem. She can transfer to some schools in London. Or she can just start right from the beginning. It all depends how long we’ll remain in the UK.’

I nodded. The man was not such a fool, after all.

‘I plan to go and see your mother in Umuahia by next week,’ he said.

Because I was opara – and in my father’s absence, the head of the family – he had come to see me first.

When he was ready to leave, Charity accompanied me in seeing him off. As his brand new Honda slid out of my gates, she took my hand in hers and looked up shyly. She was anxious to know what I thought of her beau.

‘He’s OK,’ I replied as we walked back into the house. ‘He’s quite OK.’

‘Do you know that he’s a British citizen?’ she asked, her eyeballs swollen with visions of a magnificent future in El Dorado.

‘Yes. He told me.’

We sat in the living room, pretended that we had both forgotten about Johnny, and watched a Nollywood movie about a girl who was engaged to a boy that she did not know was the child her mother had abandoned by the riverside twenty-three years ago. Just as Charity was slotting in Part 4, I invited her into my bedroom. We sat side by side on the bed.

‘Charity,’ I began, ‘how did you say you met Johnny?’

‘I met him through a friend at school,’ she began excitedly, almost out of breath. ‘In fact you even know her. Thelma.’

Who on earth was Thelma?

‘She was one of those who came with us on my matriculation day. The one that sat next to you at the restaurant.’

Ah! The girl whose breasts were as big as if she were nine months pregnant with twins, who had kept digging her foot into my calf. And winking each time I looked up, oblivious to Godfrey slobbering across the table. The only reason why I did not follow up was because she was not my type and I did not want to just fool around with my little sister’s friend.

‘Oh, yes. I remember her,’ I said.

‘She’s known Johnny’s people for a very long time and she says they’re from a good family.’

In other words, his family were neither osu nor ohu. None of their ancestors had been dedicated as slaves to the pagan gods of any shrine, none of their ancestors had been slaves to other families. And so we nwadiala, freeborn, were not forbidden from marrying amongst them. The first thing my father’s sisters had wanted to know when I told them about Ola was whether or not she was osu. But with Johnny, I had other concerns.