Joined Together by Kerosene
Can Venus be false? Play a mean trick? Be pretentious and encourage young hearts to behave likewise? I mean like a football kick themselves around and go ahead to do so to the essence of love?
Let me briefly leave aside the young hearts themselves. Sometimes, they act the strangest of scripts- actually, the Devil’s script- by suddenly choking to death the same relationship they had been nurturing both eagerly and tenderly! Does Venus not keep in her Goddess-of-love mind that there might be witnesses to such embarrassments-Nay, sure witnesses to the embarrassments: - Watchers, Lookers, Viewers, Observer’s… Bystanders?
Goddess of Love ought to have reckoned with all the solemnity the matter deserves that Third Parties in love with Love Unions had begun to give their approving nods to the romance, when it got butchered on slab and sent to the cooler. Otherwise, we all shall be constrained to hurl at Goddess of Love Venus The Charge of Apathy to Love Affair and thus The Useless to lovers both The Sighted and the Blind.
Ah! I cannot help recalling Richard and Veronica: A false Romeo and fake Juliet, whom Venus had further failed by not salvaging their excitingly begun love affair. Perhaps, if Venus had done so in judicious time, Richie and Vero would not have enacted that much eye-catching romance and later hooking up to Mr. Daniel she met in another city and Richie a Tina at Ibadan.
As was later admitted by Veronica, her path and Richard’s crossed in their teens, when, they were sixteen and seventeen, respectively. Then, she was in a queue at a filling station that still had kerosene, when others had exhausted theirs and the commodity unhelpfully scarce! She could vividly remember that her 20-liter jerry-can was merely eleven containers away from the fuel pump taking care of all the customers, the next moment, a clever commotion at one station that disrupted the line of their jerry-can which when it was reformed saw her own can now twelve containers away from the pump.
“Who’s the owner of this blue rubber that has displaced mine? Please, identify yourself!”
Veronica was ready to toss the rubber out of the snaky line, if its owner remained faceless and voiceless. Indeed, her intention was to assign Eagles Wings to the blue rubber after a third repetition of her question and no reaction followed it! Nicely, things did not get to that stage. Her second stern repetition of the question produced Richard, who in the humblest voice opined that his rubber rightly belonged to its present position, except that he would not hesitate to remove it upon her resolute command to do so. Whether Richard’s attestations were a lying trick or not, Veronica could do no more than keep staring at this young piece of male attraction, diplomatic in manners, magnetic of air and with a winsome smile. Richard himself, suddenly disinterested in being attended to, first went ahead to re-install her can in front of his, assuring her that he had done it open-mindedly.
That was it! Sixteen-year-old Veronica started acting “sophisticated!” she did not stop stealing glances at Richard, her heart pumping faster blood into its chamber and out, her thoughts a bit crazily chasing images of a matrimonial home in which Richard was the father of all her four children. Somewhat pronounced were Veronica’s reaction and their accompanying emotions that not many persons at the venue lost sight of their value. Without doubt, the only other name or designation they would have welcomed and also rubber-stamped from that moment for addressing Veronica was ‘Mrs. Richard’.
In a space of forty-eight hours - a little more than twenty-four hours actually - Veronica had espied her Richie Idol, and then increasingly invading her thoughts and sneaking into her day-dreams, were just living two streets away from their Plywood Street - At No.66 Hardwood Street.
“Oh! How easily reachable My Idol cast in the mould of a man!” all the same Veronica’s satisfaction with Hardwood Street’s nearness to their Plywood’s was not reflected on her good judgment of Hardwood Street residents.
“Christ! Nearly all of them: Adult, Infant - harder than Hardwood itself.”
A Correct Veronica, but mainly The Adolescent living in Hardwood Street: they had continued to brazenly present themselves as A Bunch of Womanizers and Sexual Harassment Vessels and Gamblers and Smokers of Weed in out - houses or behind closed doors.
‘Christ!’ How could A Dove the courage find to worm it way into A Sea of Ravens… Very Black Ones!”
Incidentally, Veronica had had to endure the bitterest of cajolery and worshipful insolence from these miscreants, as she walked Hardwood Streets in new blue jeans trousers she could swear was not unusually tight and Clustering Hardwood Teenagers just could not let her be with their endless screams of “Baby, your tight jeans trousers are merciful letting you walk…”
“You’re just the girl I can marry right here along Hardwood Street… with or without wedding rings!”
“Baby, I love you, I love you but more your See-Through Blouse!”
Having been as much moved by their meeting at Ogar Filling Station, Richard himself had gone in quest of her, surfacing flesh and blood in their 66 Plywood House.
“Oh! The Good-Luck of Vero’s father’s absence at the time of his visit!”
It shone on the young doting lovers, plus an Understanding Mother, who in her own youthful ways can have been a Smart Crook!
At the back of Veronica’s father’s house, she and Richie could hold a light-hearted chat, exchange several meaningful glances, embrace many times, try shy mouth-to-mouth kisses and melt once more in each other arms.
At the age of nineteen and twenty, Vero and Richie had enacted countless passionate scenes such as might be read up in romances or seen in films of Fabled Love: long nights together, brief sizzling romances, a-breathing-down-each-other’s-neck and sharing each other’s exciting moments and grief.
Soon, the one family got to know each other, with the only thing left being for their children to pull them together for good by solemnizing their union.
This was not to be! That year, Richard got admission at far way Ibadan to read Engineering and Veronica the same at the University of Jos to pursue Marketing. Relationship-killing Separation and Distance had walked into the scene! And tried though the pair did to keep in touch with each other through letter and calls they could not sustain this noble action after a Tina walked into the life of Richard and further touched a part of him he didn’t know existed, and he began gradually to shrug off Vero’s memory. The latter, on her part, had no qualms deleting Richard’s name and phone number from her handset, Reason: “It wouldn’t be the wisest thing to do after the Danny she met on campus had set a ‘glowing spark’ in her heart.
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