Thoughts and Actions are Different
At school I joined the rest in our class for the first lesson. The subject was Food and Nutrition but my concentration was zero from a challenge also of Food and Nutrition. A hard punching constipation! It just would not let me be, making me pitiably restive. This was to be expected. I had neither used our toilet nor neared it for close to forty-eight hours! I mean for the more solid waste discharge business.
You may now guess how endurable any gaseous escape from my bowel would have been! Christ! How I had kept fervently praying that I would not fart - would not break the wind - before the lesson was over. Unfortunately, I did, though fortunately the evacuating sound was nearly noiseless. It was the far less embarrassing anal hiss constipated persons and normal bowels pray for, when they are in an assembly.
Still, all hell was let loose! From that very moment the freest breathing became impossible in our classroom and with that effective class control by the subject teacher, Miss Anom Bennett!
Gosh! A suddenly admitted lawlessness in a once quiet room seeking to raise Good Cooks of meat-filled peppery soup.
Nearly, every classmate of mine became helplessly rude to the next person, nearly each wiring an accusing glance to his or her neighbor, some wanting from the other an unconditional apology for the air-poisoning. Our Food and Nutrition Pilot, Miss Bennett was readier than the rest to fish out the culprit. Right there and then, she turned a threatening detective, in place of student’s agreed sniffs of one another’s rump, ordering that the fellow behind the broken wind speedily admit to the act or face mystical attacks from her with India’s Hare Krishna Incense at midnight or Satan’s 300 AM! Vengeful Prayers. From my keen gazes at Miss Bennett’s eyes at the time she voiced her rash plans for the tight-lipped offender, she could never at last, bring them off. At eighteen years, I had begun, nicely to betray the gift of both a face and mind reader. In any case, rather bogus if not outlandish was Miss Bennett’s choice of threat for the student behind the effluvium. Such was my relaxed spirit that I even joined my guiltless classmates in searching for the culprit and finally deciding that it was a eighteen-year-old boy seated beside me.
Doubly strangely, Effiong Duke did not challenge any one of us on the point and later rather preferred to keep looking at me with a knowing smile while receiving Miss Bennett’s decreed six stiff strokes of her freshest cane. With the psychologist in me, I did not need a half soothsayer to tell me that Effiong had all along rightly guessed that I was for the real culprit. Just that he would not for the whole world of Modern Buildings expose me before the rest or painstakingly argue his own case.
In a matter of three minutes some shameful tear drops had fallen off my eyes and not long a jet stream of them that made me wish I had their stopping handkerchief. I could swear that Effiong’s action had a message as clear as the sky. Straight and simple, he could collect stripes meant for me like Christ had done for Mankind at The Golgotha, with the difference just Christ’s further interest in dying on a cross…
On the spot, my solemn vow was ready to speedily consent to any marriage proposal by Effiong. Effiong, later back to his seat with a bruised right palm, became a subject of unusual admiration for his husband’s spirit of protection!
“Yes! The whole of me is for Effiong Duke,” I whispered for my private listening pleasure. Even if the guy should choose disagreeable weak signals for his marriage proposal. But I should be the happier fiancée, if Effiong walked up to me with surer steps to ask for my hand in marriage. Painfully, I had at sixteen years had an impassioned love affair with a boy of my age and soon with another, who was by two years my elder and the second relationship still crashed like the first: I believe for my having rushed into both affairs after receipts of Mere Adventurers’ Signals from the two scallywags! “Hopefully, Effiong’s own faint signals shall still produce sweeter results!” I predicted basing this on his heroism of muteness at a time a movement of his lips would have finished me off.
At home, the incident plus my intentions was the first news I broke to my mother and for reaction she burst into cacophonous laughter! The longest I had ever heard from the forty-six year-old woman.
“Mama!”
“Yes, My Daughter…”
My mother was still struggling with derisive laughter and its convulsions. But why of all outbursts did she fancy this embarrassing one?
“Why?”
Patiently, I was waiting for a becalmed Mrs. Priscilla Miller to ask the question against a curiosity that might kill me, if it was not satisfied. From my Priscilla mother I rather heard the word “Children” humorously repeated thrice and a remark about how often irresistible their company is.
“Little wonder Pedophiliac are limitlessly crazy about them; don’t hesitate to carry their cross but nearly all the time risk some unethical behavior towards them from awkward passions!
A flat disappointment!
My Priscilla mother could not see the urgency of an understanding of my feeling for Great Effiong – Doubly Great! Soon, from her I just got an uncomfortable medic’s survey of possibly the latest improvements my bosom and hip had made, her brow much knotted!
But in no time, her mirth was back and she said, then, to address a point, which she was sure I needed.
“Jennifer!” she just called out, as though from me greatly distanced.
“Yes, Mum,” I softly replied, as though her ears were but a whisper’s separation from my lips. I think the effect of this on her was unacceptable and her could-have-been-prompt next remark was rigidly held back. However, this was for a couple of displeased second and the destined-to-fall- from -her-lips were ready to do so. Not unexpectedly, it was on The Effiong Subject I had raised. Marriage should still be the last thing an eighteen-year-old gives a thought after a received nice gesture or a wonderful favor from either a fellow teenager or a man.
“I’m sure, Jenny, you know where your wonderful Effiong belongs”
Gosh! Without mercy kicked in the teeth by no other than my Mama, content to do so meanly! I remember in the heat of that moment I ended up daringly muttering “Really Mama” or something like that and the next thing the loudest fuelled-by-suspicion outburst from her over my having begun to mess around with boys and with shameless, men for every faked tender concern.
“Pooh! You should’ve predicted this Jenny… Actually the silliest topic a female adolescent ever mentions to her Mum and thoughtlessly you brought it up for your own Mum with her already “unavailable sympathy!”
“Then, it’s time for Prophetic fulfillment,” decided I, now that I’m a proven bitch! Some whore.” To my own natural mother barely more acceptable than whores in hateful brothels.
First, some attention-gripping pace-around the spot of reflection by me trying to help myself with the thinking cap I had on the matter put on and, next, off I bounded towards the route to Effiong’s family house, even as the 4:45pm sky of the moment had as its clothes mushrooming wretched clouds, not a single supportive smile for the trackless idea I had just okayed. What I clearly saw was the sky’s broad smile and its laughing children, not the mushrooming tattered sky-high off-white cotton wools rubbishing that moment and asterisking my sanity. What I would say to Heroic Effiong, if he graciously opened his door to my servile raps on it could never to me be a cause for worry.
“As easy as I’ve come, Effiong, to sincerely thank you for a saved shame; and for your willing receipt of the unbearable strokes my own right palm or the left’s had deserved!”
And there I would stop, pause, also deliberately if not genuinely keep smiling like his appreciative servant but importantly keep fixing him a look of a wayward woman, who is ready to go to hell with him and later repair to Earth, if he will be the pilot or horse rider…
I hoped, also half-prayed Effiong’s mother would not be around. “And that would be simply beautiful!”
Mothers from History were the barriers not fathers. I would speedily invade and occupy Effiong’s mother’s kitchen: nutritionally take it over or militarily for richer smiles of satisfaction Effiong had never given after supping… Of course, I would, if there was already a prepared but cold food, microwave it but if none forever teach Effiong’s mother through Effiong some unforgettable lessons of cookery I had learnt from our cruel but truly competent Food and Nutrition Teacher, Anom Bennett: how to edibles superbly fry, boil, par-boil, steam, roast, grill and bake… Carrots I can chop up, vegetables dice, pastry roll out, fruit mash, cheese grate, dough knead and eggs whip! Before I finally leave, Effiong should be able to leave me with sweet pains in my thigh or alternatively join the stigmatized group of men who can’t read handwritings on a wall!
“Hah! What noise it that?” I was constrained to ask, actually, myself, shortly after hitting the entrance to Effiong’s Avenue but the passer-by closest to me took up a respondent’s role with an initial “So, you haven’t heard?”
“Heard what, please?” I quizzed dramatically glad about having been given a chance similar to that of one seeking reliable directions to a new host’s abode.
Something that makes a young woman less a bitch or smart crook. Honestly I had only been moved by fury to be against my mother.
“Better on the side of Virgins by half than on the side of bitches… By either full or half.”
Soon I was educated on the cause of The Great Din. There had been some careless or carefree flogging at Colossus Model Academy and an Effiong recipient is unstoppably reacting to it, now twitching like an epileptic, next panting like an Asthmatic.
“Honestly, Sister, nobody knows which of the two chronic challenges Effiong had, had as companion… But you could go there to find out things for yourself.”
I was ninety nine point nine percent convinced that I should without delay face the direction back home. Reaching our house, I would also without delay start fighting Effiong’s condition with powerful prayers on bent keens… Much later, I might revisit the question of whether I should marry him or not…
But it wouldn’t be wrong if Effiong became for life, my future husband’s trusted friend.
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