Arriving Baby and Headache
His name is Qleh Portion. Three weeks now he became the subject of a repeating late-night sour gossip in their Juventus Street. From the reports he had garnered only yester-night, the old hags had joined young women and younger teenagers in their ritual of sitting on low kitchen stools at evenings to discuss him as part of getting their dinner ready! Terribly upsetting it had been for twenty-four-year-old Oleh Portion who would sometimes audibly thank God with a lifted face for so ‘Wonderful’ a Portion!”
Good a thing, the sour gossips had not begun to sell violent ideas to his mind; only left he often feeling undeservedly treated, offended – wronged - and wanting to dismiss it as just one of those irritations. But - Alas! - A full three weeks he’s begun to eat unwished insults he might not erase from his memory while he still breathed Earth’s Air.
It all had to do with Phoebe’s love relationship with Damian whose kindest description would still in-corporate the words Reckless and Stupid” A time-and-again sexual meeting in which latex condom was purposely kept at a distance - not at all welcome - while Phoebe, unknown to her, was riskily misjudging the imperfection of her timing of the business.
That’s correct, Phoebe Oyiboka, not quite nineteen and still living with her parents had been daring brazen romantic escapades with Sydney Damian, on his own part not quite twenty.
For long weeks, the two, on The Popular Altar of Dating, kept sneaking out of their monitored bases at night falls for fun at agreed rendezvous, which on a day, would be a prepaid hotel room for some two hours use and on another the open fields or unlocked classrooms of old public schools with gates but accessible discontinued walling. Regrettably, the result of the releases by this “Romeo and Juliet” of their building blinding passions for each other was a gradually bulging tummy for Phoebe plus increased salivation people observed in her frequent spitting.
“A Thunderbolt” if you had asked the opinion of The Two. Sydney Damian had not quite made it to Twenty and Phoebe rather about to clock Nineteen. Just that they had made the lousy mistake of yielding, without preparation, to Itchy Flesh. Damian’s nineteen-year-old finger would rather too early be wearing A Wedding Ring and certainly Phoebe’s eighteen-year-olds! Indeed, if not for the rude setbacks both Damian and Phoebe had had in their academic career following their failure to reach their University’s Dream Department’s cut-off marks for their chosen course, they would not have been toying with the idea of arranging a face-saving shot-gun wedding. Disappointingly, Damian and in some measure, Phoebe were now staring back at the reality of having not been truly in love with each other for all their previous sleepless nights and, perhaps, too caught sight of the bigger reality that the persons we gasp for their valued time, attention and affection sometimes turn into a despicable sight or, at best, a consummate bore. It seemed likely by not a little degree that Damian and her Phoebe would cruelly fall at of love. All too soon; their mindset became that of a self-condemnation for having allowed what should not have been given a chance to become a monstrous fact and presence. Easily now, from his stolen glances at Phoebe, Damian would make out legs of undisputed clumsiness, far from straight and far from delicate-looking plus lips to too thick for A True Beauty. On her part, Phoebe could not check the bitterness from her chance discovery that Damian had begun a new relationship with another Sweet Eighteen or Sweeter Seventeen and, in fact, addressing both her financial and emotional needs. Overnight, it had become A Hard-Skinned Damian; mind cast-iron: one who could insinuate that he might not be responsible, after all, for Phoebe’s present bulging tummy… Well, hasn’t a Nick Amos living in their street begun, for some time now, to make determined entries into the scene with just plain hunger for what our women have wrappers over? Alternatively, Easy-Going Promiscuous Phoebe had been zestfully snatching some wished chances to sneak into the one-room apartment of neighbor Nick, recently of a culture of briefly stopping her along the way for an impassioned eulogy or deceiving dialogue…
Precisely, this was the picture of things, when both Damian and Phoebe met Oleh Portion separately for speedy grants of two anxious requests of The Same Ancestor. On this, naturally, Phoebe had preceded Damian, her own fervent wish a hurried link with An Understanding Gynecologist, who could expel a fetus which had already left its First Trimester for its Second and his payment for rendered services would not be his overriding interest. In the case of Damian, he would forever feel indebted to Oleh Portion, if he lent him The Thirty Grand a Para-Medic Diagnostician in their street had named as The Friendly Amount he would collect to quit The Baby Tenant in Phoebe’s uterus. Oleh Portion, who strongly disliked the phenomenon of Doting Friends turning Fair-Weather’s could not stifle an urge to find out from Damian how he, who had stopped knocking at his door and producing his feet at its steps, could choose to resume the two with Man’s Most Reckless Request for his granting hands. Oleh Portion had made sure he flung the million-dollar-question at Damian with the fitting contorted look for it. To Damian, this genuinely meant that Oyiboka Phoebe had not yet rapped her knuckles on Portion’s door for the same matter and trouble. This though did not make Damian the happier for it. He had simply trusted Phoebe’s earlier visit to Oleh Portion for a sure grant of quick loan of The Baby-Evicting Money.
“God! Oleh Portion can and should still rescue me from this sensitive but solvable problem!”
Damian would settle for nothing short of Portion’s sincere empathy on the matter, for having already full sensed his awkward situation.
Sensibly, Portion continued to cry off and said to channel his God-Given Energy to a peaceful resolution of Damian and Phoebe squabble so that they might prejudice cast aside and prepare for their arriving baby but neither of the two would hear of it. A blatant refusal to heed persuasive words dropped for that target by Portion!
“It’s either you want to help me or you don’t,” Damian kept repeating with a Catholic’s keenness that left Portion in no doubt any longer that he would not take ‘A No’ for an answer.
So, it was that Oleh Portion settled Phoebes Abortion Bill through Damian, also vicariously daring other expenses Phoebe had incurred in the process… A timely interruption of unwished maternal roles for a baby likely to be disliked by its father and clearly not liked by her either…
And there he had since been - Oleh Portion, Twenty-Four, Bank Staff - a recipient of all sorts of swipes in their Vernacular and Foreign Languages from near and distant sketchily informed acquaintances. Right now I’m talking, Oleh Portion’s latest name is Terminator!
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