A nose surgery waits and waits
Angus Charles' face was one hundreds or passers-by could not look at for a length of time. Not at eyes, a nose and lips like that of a person, who still visited his lawyer for a case still in court.
Simply, Angus was the type, who picked a chance to fight back a true or assumed offence. His temperament inevitably bred critics from his old sworn enemies. Later, his newly made enemies joined the party.
Not long, his closest friend, Vitalis Clifford began to think like his old and new enemies on the issue. Vitalis Clifford was three years older than Angus Charles, who himself had clocked twenty five. As at the 19th November of COVID 2019, Angus' enemies had in number soared to a thousand youths.
To the credit of Vitalis, he was a plain-speaking type. The plain-speaking thing he did display beyond the perimeter of his father's nice-looking laughing house to a distance measurable in miles. Angus Charles knew about this. He knew that Vitalis often lingered his judgmental gaze at people and situations, before he formed his final opinion about what's what.
Yet, his usual reply to Vitalis' remonstrance with him over his overreactions to things was either a comic fainting fit or as comic sudden kick of an invisible football outside an invisible football pitch. Again, not once, not twice had Angus had to deny the accusation of intemperance like a politician trying ahead of an election to protect his name against harming scandal.
Perhaps, Angus would have maintained his claim of being The Misunderstood, if their banks CCTV had not filmed an ugly scene he had created at the expense of their Bank Manageress, Mrs. Emily Dum.
The occasion was some half hour after a heist at their Pillar Bank PLC Ozaga on Friday 27th December, 2019. To many Ozaga residents, it was a Friday that deserved a room in The Hall for the World's Historic Black Fridays! On that day, all the safe but still scared staff and customers of the attacked Pillar Bank were all gathered at her front building, some sitting down, some standing, others pacing round but almost all of them robbed of speech. Only a dozen lips of the hundreds there bothered to reply to the anxious questions of an attracted crowd, Twenty-five-years-old Angus, then a year old in Pillar as a staff, was also at the venue.
Unlike the rest, Angus was gritting his teeth and still battling with full shock; quite clearly, brooding over the worst that could have befallen him. The mask-wearing bandits had kept firing hopeful shots at the bullet-proof bank, all to no avail. A reflective one or two minutes during their fruitless gun fire and the bandits bounded off from the scene with their masks hiding their defeated faces for consolation. No staff nor customer of Pillar saw the fleeing five-man squad but whoever had would have rightly guessed that it would never surface again at the bank for a repeat of her baptism with close to one thousand bullets of AK47.Fifteen minutes after The Bank Robbers' Good-Bye, the self-imprisoned-still trembling-staff and customers of Pillar Bank were for the first time assured of the departure of the god-forsaken shooters but none of them stirred from his or her decided bunker inside the bank. Even, ten minutes after a reassurance of their safety by a pampering voice, they uniformly refused to step out of their trusted bunkers inside Pillar. In the end, it took a voice that first sounded like a seducer's but with no result became a compelling one of a legitimate security, who had begun to run out of patience with a bunch of paranoid characters, to get the still Panicking Family of The Pillar Bank PLC to file out of her...
Then, Angus Charles from his straddling position sighted their Bank's Manageress, Mrs. Emily Dum and in just three minutes his resignation letter was ready! Walking up to Emily, Angus dropped the briefly worded thing on her left palm, as Emily's right one held her just removed eye-glasses. For his effort, Angus wrung out a 'JEESUS!' from the shocked lips of Emily now having her glasses on. The title of the unsealed letter she had not found funny at all.
"Mr. Angus," Emily Dum managed, a brave heart
"Yes!" replied Angus with full hatred.
"Won't you first tell me what this is all about?" pleaded Mrs. Emily Dum. Unmoved, Angus asked to know from Emily what had just been dropped on her left palm.
"You... You mean the sheet of paper I'm now holding," asked a half-stammering Emily.
If it was a trick by Emily, Angus Charles was exasperated with everything under sun including Emily Dum's pleading smiles plus her initial show of frank curiosity.
"Manager, if somebody should ask me, I'd say that what you're holding, right now, is my resignation letter!"
"Oh! Sure ... Sure", affirmed Emily trying to sound relaxed and seem it. However, she let Angus understand that the letter was a little sudden and a little embarrassing...
"And a little annoying, Manager", added Angus in a helpful tone.
"Then, why choose to pen it?" probed Emily, from head to toe looking an urgent seeker of a priceless information.
"Sorry, Manager, I just remembered my neglected but fertile farmland in our village", Angus disclosed, wearing the rhyming anxious face of one, who needs to patch up a bad tear while there is still time. Angus had hoped that this remark would silence Emily for good or stop her from stretching her planned fruitful dialogue on the matter. Strangely, Mrs. Emily Dum, with not a shred of special interest in Angus, did not pick any quarrel with this disguised insult. To her, it was a piece of sadder news after a sad robbery attack on Pillar Bank PLC that the same would soon lose one of her young dedicated staff to Agriculture.
In his, indignation, Angus overlooked Emily's glowing praise of his person. Rather, he made the Bank Boss try to accept like one whose happy married life depended on it that his speedy resignation from The Pillar Bank PLC for his dumped farm-land would speedily start for him a life of food sufficiency. Hopefully, too, he Angus shall revive his dying dream of helping the feeding of fellow Nigerians who had been starving for years.
"Goodness Heavens!,"
Mrs. Emily Dum's lips just freed the expletive. Her patience, up till then intact, had begun to show signs of snapping any moment from then. Emily first betrayed this with a blunt reminder to Angus of having exchanged with him the pleasantries of friendly colleagues in the morning hours, not the faintest hints by him at his resignation plans.
"And so what?" stormed Angus a sneer on his lips.
On her part, Emily Dum had dumped her Good-Natured play acting.
"Angus, I'd swear that this is all about your precious life having been nearly lost to those Gun Bastards about an hour ago... You don't dare deny it!"
Angus Charles was no longer breathing with relative ease, his face that of a litigant, whose case was still producing him in the courtroom. To Angus, it had become urgent letting Emily Dum know that she, too, was looking completely fried while the luckless heist by the Bank Robbers lasted.
"True Mr. Angus! But, unlike you, I've refused to go the ridiculous length of scribbling a hasty resignation letter... or haven't I?"
"Rubbish!" snapped Angus, to whom this disclosure meant nothing.
"So, Mrs. Emily Dum, you can't see that the life of Jesus Christ began just when that of old Simeon was about to end in a fore-ordained contrast?"
A real regrettable mile by Angus Charles. He had thoughtlessly disregarded what a woman with ego could do under the circumstance, sure that her male challengers is no match for her anytime, any day, anywhere.
Emily, point blank, told Angus that she would keep hating him for as long as she still had her old Simeon's breath of life. On the spot, she endorsed Angus' handwritten resignation piece and assured Angus that she would not later officially ask for a typed copy.
Meanwhile, the Pillar Bank's CCTV, strangely not hit and smashed by the shooters, was dutifully filming the cheerful dialogue between Angus and his female bank boss.
That very day, Angus Charles came to be known as Resignation Letter Writer, his old and new enemies happy to discard his Angus Charles First Name and Last for references to him.
"No! Not my own Angus will accept this rubbish!"
Angus Charles swore he would be vulgar and rough to any lip he caught voicing the hateful New Name. For a matching of threat with warning action, Angus along the peaceful roads and streets of Ozaga, started showing off a right fist with suspended blow!
Unfortunately, this could not shut the offending lips while the more fearless lips of his stronger enemies still addressed him by it and licked themselves like lips which had tasted the exceptionally sweet!
Really, a worrisome problem for tackling by Angus Charles. Days, weeks and months flitted by and the new name nickname simply stayed. Later, Angus found the heroic villain's defiance to embrace the name by taunting his callers of same with a 'Shame on them', if they ever stopped. His laughing enemies all loved the hurt lips he would sometimes bite in public, from it guessing an inward rage. They were all itching to see an Angus that would slump and die trying to contain his intemperance...
And Angus nearly died, when one of his stronger enemies told him to his face that his seeming punitive searches for persons, who still called him resignation writer were his camouflage for a starving jobless graduate's fresh hunts for employment.
"And trust me, Resignation Letter Writer, this time, it's going to be a classroom job with chalk and lesson note!"
Thrice had Angus, mocker claimed, looked intently at a roadside secondary school he was passing by while brandishing his killer right hand for those who called him resignation letter writer. That same day, through transferred aggression, Angus Charles fought back his mocker, his victim a fellow walker of a lonely road in their Ulor Suburb of Ozaga. The young man had walked up to Angus as a friend and with a placed companion's hand on Angus' left shoulder asked his opinion about the strangely few feet ten treading the track.
"First, you take your smelly hands off me", flung a fuming Angus at the man, whom he further told that he would not answer his question, until he had had a long shower.
Almost as soon; a damaging publicity caught up with the incident. Angus' victim, twenty-two-year-old Levi Ossi, had made sure that he sang like a canary over the incident, when Vitalis Clifford learnt of it he was promptly at the door of Angus for a discussion of the matter under Assault;
"But wasn't it Assault, too, the man's placing of a hand not asked for on my left shoulder?" Angus threw back to Vitalis "And you know: in US, Britain and France the very act would've produced the molester in a court room".
Resignedly, Vitalis said to take up the bigger subject of Angus' image and its rebranding through closeness to God.
"You know, Angus, there are many churches and chapels here in Ulor: even Prayer Houses!
Vitalis Clifford had made a point of sounding like a breaker of Good News.
"But only last month you'd wanted me to directly attach myself to God", Angus recalled, apparently wishing to repeat what he had clearly heard from Vitalis not quite three weeks ago. Of a truth, Vitalis had made such a declaration seventeen days ago, Angus urging to always judge The Holy Bible the best satellite link to God in Heaven. Now, for Vitalis this is Angus simply trying to frustrate a Salvation Business on his behalf!
"God! can this guy have sworn not to be a mixer? Like his Mother?"
A long stare at nothing in particular in Angus' room by Vitalis followed by repeated slight shrugs of his shoulder. Right there in Angus' one room, Vitalis' mind summoned his fifty-nine year-old mother with her surveyor's eyes in an angular face scrutinizing every new caller of her son at their door step. All the time, Angus' mother's eyes were failing the first thing about hospitable reception of her only child's close friends while her lips never felt they should shape words of apology for the failing. For more than a minute, Vitalis' mind tried matching Angus in the room with images of his mother, Mrs. Roselyn Charles.
Before three minutes it had wholly surrendered to the notion that Angus' habitual contortion of his face was a mother-transferred thing.
"Now, I can say so with a megaphone".
Vitalis recalled that it was on the eve of a Christmas of some five years gone that Roselyn had had to keep shaking the lifeless body of her dead debtor to the tune of a hundred thousand naira, bitterly warning her against repeating the default in her next incarnation of the flesh.
A real hostage of the dreaded Dreadful Unforgiving Spirits Vitalis Clifford was convinced that Angus Charles was not unaware of the incident. In his mind sprang up thoughts of an Emergency Prayer for Angus' turn around. From the prayer should come revelations from God whether He had plans for a Transformed Angus or would leave him to remain The Difficult man...
Then, with a wandered look at the items in Angus' living room, Vitalis' attention was grabbed by a set of glass cups on a table close to his seat, all of them at level with his shoulders. Why the glass cups should seize Vitalis' interest at that moment he could not say. It was after some calm seconds that the reason unveiled itself and he, Vitalis, was hugely thrilled.
"Honestly, Angus, you or I can finish water in a glass cup of much bigger size than the ones on your table".
Vitalis had not thought it outlandish to raise the subject nor even point to the glass cups.
"Anybody claiming that I couldn't, "Angus asked duly doing his best to appear standoffish.
"No, Not at all, "replied Vitalis smiling a reassuring one.
Vitalis had to open up to Angus. He had heard that two or three glasses of slightly cold water quickly taken after a provocation would make one no longer raise an agitating matter.
"Oh Yes! I've heard of it, too, "Angus affirmed in a voice he dropped a bit, his flat face a signal of his disinterest in the topic.
But Vitalis Clifford would not just let go. He was to a great length surprised.
"So, why haven't you been giving the idea a try", he pressed from Angus. "... At least for the sake of some nice change?"
"That's to say, bitterly, that you, Vitalis Clifford would, want your bosom friend, Angus Charles, to be walking around with a metallic or plastic water bottle".
A look of helplessness by Vitalis Clifford. Vitalis could do no more than fix searching eyes on Angus Charles. Eyes for rediscovering a fellow they had first discovered more than a decade ago.
Then, came Vitalis low-voiced rejection of what he was sure was Angus' rejection of a change of life for the Good.
"No...No."
Although, he, Vitalis Clifford, had been, for ten years now, an ulcer patient, time and again running to his doctor for emergency treatment, he shall for twenty-one days be saying prayers with a daily twelve-hour fast on behalf of friend Angus! Yes, it is a decision which is by more than fifty percent risky for Gastric and Peptic Ulcer Sufferers let alone Duodenal Ulcer Patients. Still, he shall neither give it a long or short thought...
And so did Vitalis Clifford pray and fast on behalf of Angus Charles, as though it was a Life-and-death matter.
Sadly, some simple three days to the end of the 21-Day Supplication, Angus Charles had become a human disfigurement from a poured acid that narrowly missed his targeted eyes but badly corroded surrounding skin and subjacent nose. Angus Charles faceless attackers did not forget to victoriously drop on his floored writhing body a piece of paper bearing the motive of the attack.
"Very simple: to save Resignation Letter Writer the sight of people, for whom he has been keeping a suspended blow!"
"Holy Ghost!" were the words Vitalis lips produced, when news of the atrocious act got to him.
"Gosh! I say 'No'."
But even as Vitalis kept shaking like a leaf in a windy weather, he swore, for reasons of safety, to maintain sealed lips over his prayers with fast. It was much persuasive that his prayers with fast had unleashed the miserable tragedy especially, as it was an act of self-denial of a duodenal ulcer patient.
Either as deception or out of regrets, Angus' attackers, thirteen in all, became also the persons, who were steadfastly dropping bulging money envelopes in his beggar's bowl for funds for a face lift in Britain's Birmingham. Angus' Acid attackers were all agreed on the point that no one who owned some conscience would go as close as two metres to his blistered nose and do nothing about it money-wise...
So, without fail, a Rhinoplasty Surgery for Angus' nose - now a hideous spectacle! Incidentally, Roselyn Charles had twice slumped like a knocked-down boxer after gazing at it too long. Angus himself, on the single occasion he had looked at it intently, just hated himself like he had never done! It was simply unthinkable he would repeat the act...
Soon, an unpleasant development from Angus' side, both health wise and financially. Not quite a month after his acid attack, he began to find solace in a full glass of whisky after a full glass, with or without soda. At some nights, Angus could afford to walk into a pub for a long or short imprisonment of his grief in throat-scalding whisky or brandy - also, as part of waiting for the face-lift business in Britain's Birmingham to be brought off! Not long the acrid smell of cigarette, once hatred by Angus with a passion, became an excusable unpleasantness. The smell is now very free to waft into his nose and sneak into his clothes as a 'secondary smoker'.
A watcher of the unfolding events was likely to sum up that Angus' long cultivated vigilance had left him or that he had dumped it, except his delayed replies to greetings from a passer-by five or more seconds.
Expectedly, Angus Charles new status as an alcoholic translated into occasional dipping of reckless fingers into his Face Surgery Fund, then close to a half million naira. Now and again, Angus would pinch some five thousand naira or six or seven from what should have to average the naira equivalent of Eight Thousand US Dollars, if a Nose Job on his behalf would be performed at far-away Birmingham...
The following month - and it was unbelievable - Angus Charles began to wonder aloud if he truly needed, as a child of God, The Nose Job in Britain by her waiting surgeons for being some kind of challenge of God's foreordained fate. Such was Angus' conviction about its being wrong that he began to see same in the context of Cloning: the frowned - upon Genetic Engineering. Nearly, Angus wanted to think that each time a burnt Nigerian Face rushes to overseas for its lift, Satan has gained temporary control of what should be permanently in God's Hands. Vitalis Clifford, fully fed up with Angus' outlandish thoughts and trifling with serious matters, would not want him to part his lips for more.
"Angus, we'll be changing back your nose for you, "said Vitalis as if Angus was already in an operating theatre and he The British Surgeon. "But to have it back you'll have to stop touching the money for it," Vitalis made haste to point out.
Also, Angus should for the sake of his sanity curb his drinking of whisky in pubs or, preferably, leave it completely.
"For water instead", Angus completed for Vitalis, for the first time in nearly in years bursting into laughter from a fancied joke at his expense. Every item of news worth the name circulates fast and good. Nothing ever had been hidden under the sun. Easily, it got to the ears of Angus' enemies-turned-secret sponsors of his Nose Surgery in Britain that he had been steadily tampering with the money fund for it and they summoned an emergency meeting over 'What Next to Do'.
"What are we still debating?" quizzed thirty-one-year-old Obed living but three blocks away from Angus Charles, "The guy for which we asked for this conference doesn't pity his bad nose any longer and we're doing just that for him!".
The next contributor to the discussion and to Angus Charles Fund, Mr. Woke Justin, was glad that this first speaker had set the stage for him to rubbish the very call for a meeting on the subject. Angus Charles himself had begun to disapprove of the idea on grounds of his Christian faith and unwillingness to offend God.
"I'm sure the question that begs of us a hurried answer is whether touched sympathizers should worry their heads more than the victim does his over his condition".
Justin Woke did not forget to advise his about-to-disperse colleagues to sometimes watch the final destinations of Angus Charles' evening walks.
"I mean: whether they eventually end in a prayer house or in a pub...You should know what I mean".
To this peals of convulsive laughter by men who had begun to think themselves stupid trying to help Doubly Difficult Angus Charles. Mr. Justin Woke looked like he was ready to pour another acid this time with accuracy, on Angus' eyes, if he should produce himself at his Fund Collection Point on a day following an appearance in a pub for several glasses of whisky!
"Satan knows that I shall... And this time no stories of a half miss!"
Gone deep-skin was Angus' two months-old passion for whisky and sister Brandy. Watching watchful eyes could read his craving for the two in his hungry steps towards the pubs he would knock at their doors and part their curtains after 7.00pm for whisky's consolation or Brandy's sympathy.
Somehow, for a full week, Angus dared an absenting of himself from his Fund Collection Point for his Nose Reconstruction in Britain's Birmingham. But tried as he did, he could not be as absent from the point a following week while he kept breezing into his choice pubs for some glassful of The Sympathizer. In that week, he had forfeited to whisky a couple of thousands that made it unwise not to resurface at his fund-collection point.
A last-minute change of mind by Woke Justin to once more attack Angus Charles with acid. He would only pass him by making sure that he was not spared anything that resembled a badly torn naira note. As for the other twelve panelists of the House, they could see that they had needed not gather for a decision on Angus' case.
Most likely it is going to be a long waiting by Birmingham's Nose Surgeons for a notification plus the dollars for Angus' Nose Reconstruction.
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