Kissing and Broadcasting It
Once again, Richard James pressed his innocence.
“Look, Corporal, I’m being unlawfully kept here,” he warned, adding a “You yourself know it!”
The disclosure yielded nothing. It could not trouble the fixed glassy stare at him by Corporal Yelwa, who had chosen to plant an alert pair of eyes on him. Thrice, Richard tried and produced touching sighs that should have melted an ice of a heart. That of Yelwa wickedly failed to defrost and in frustration Richard fell to a manufacture of indignant, rebelling hisses. The hisses were his longest in five years and had a lot of an Indian Snake’s to them. Irritatingly, from where he stood, Corporal Yelwa was still wordlessly watching all his twists and turns, as though he had plans to later mimic “the fake ones”. A bulging, hulking near seven-footer Yelwa looked! And he was doing his surveillance job in the gifted expert’s tradition. His ever conquering, brownish eyes harshly trained on Richard James’ Albino’s seemed to be counting their blinks and not ignoring their squints. Also, they were observing their occasional withdrawals into their sockets.
Who knows, thought flustered Richard, The Corporal’s eyes might be as much interested in his fast disappearance from Planet Earth?
On the whole, Corporal Yelwa P., whose P. Initial could have been a Patrick’s, Paschal’s or Pius’ First Names, proved himself a warder that could be seriously considered for the more trickly duties of a spy and upon recruitment sure to continually drop on the waiting trusting palms of his superiors usable info…
In and out, a warder who disallowed compromise of work rules by others while on duty and made none himself!
Only last Friday, 21st September 2018, when the chained inmates of Grigaga’s Maximum Security were offered the comforting chance to breathe The Non-Manacled Air outside their prison yard through a half-hour trek to a Manual Labour Site for some strenuous business, Corporal Yelwa had made a point of keeping up step with Richard en route, soon by his side, hawk-eyed in his vigilance and sooner directly behind him breathing down his neck! Whatever treatment he had been receiving he honestly deserved! The impudent Rioter user of a fully loaded pistol!
Does it matter that the pistol wasn’t automatic? A locally arranged one? To complete a ten-year jail term The Idiot must. No! Rot in our Maximum Security Grigaga!
To Richard James, already displaying worried lines in his knit brow, getting the hell out of his hellish cell is an idea worth giving the sincerest trial, whether its assured success remained a laughable impossibility or not.
All over again, he looked at Corporal Yelwa, the rooms in his mind ready to welcome tens of risky things he might give an attempt. Painfully, he remembered that The Beret-Dangling Corporal had already been with him some half hour ago in connection with his routine duty of dropping him his junk food and having him eat it wolfishly or else forfeit its remainders to Grigaga’s Waste Dump.
With rapidity, Richard was becoming restive, feeling unjustly detained and justifiably depressed. A Jigsaw Puzzle is another punishment, albeit a mental one.
“But why is he back, the Evil Warder” Richard’s mind heartedly fought.
“Wouldn’t every honest witness of the Corporal’s last arrival have said that he’d called back rather too soon?”.
For some three minutes, Richard pondered this, in his mind turning it over and over but could not ferret out any explanation for it.
As things stood, with Corporal Yelwa’s insistence on his having to eat his meals fast or lose them to The Prison’s Garbage Heap, he had to shamelessly devour them, matching with his hands and jaw the speed of the tyres of a Ferrari car. On each particularly successful moment of emptying his plate of served meal in time, he would with his still unsatisfied tongue give the metallic or plastic thing a neatness that often meant less labour for The Prison’s Dish-Washer. It would have been silly of an inmate not to have speedily attacked his served ration, as officially all Grigaga’s Prisoners were not entitled to a breakfast.
Then, all of a sudden, Corporal Yelwa’s lips convulsed and the ejected message one whose owner was hundred percent sure of its correctness and in any case would not want its recipient to ever challenge.
Both Corporal Yelwa and his lips would want Richard James or James Richard to simply understand that Recaptured Escapees from Grigaga Prisons always regret every single minute of the rest their stay on Earth.
“That’s right, Officer,” braved Richard, almost as soon as Corporal Yelwa’s lips had ceased their convulsion, sincerely adding that he had been repeatedly warned by fellow inmates that in maximum security Grigaga, escape is an idea of fools and idiots!.
Goodness Heaven! Who had told this piece of shit to vouchsafe me a reply? Yelwa wondered, shaking with fear of what he could have done to Richard three or four years ago just for this show of bravado. Not further back than the said four years, when he was still A Full Monster with a temper as full in monstrosity, he would have for this blameless or mischievous remark by Richard promptly encircled strong choking arms round his neck for some decided punitive minutes.
He, Yelwa, had not asked for Richard’s helping reply. At best, the reply was a disguised insult to his person and in reality a stylish mockery of the first sacred warning to Grigaga’s prisoners with an escape – experimenting mind. If Richard had had a true regard for their prohibitive counseling he would have played The Mute Listener while he reiterated it. It had to be, therefore, A Frozen-Like-An-Iced Fish Corporal Yelwa that spent a full minute looking at the Richard he had just heard. In his distinguished eyes flickered a harming hatred while the eyes themselves stripped Richard’s mind bare of its concealing cloak exposing his waxing hopes of one day effecting a jail-break in Grigaga.
Oh! How he would have loved to butcher up the flesh of Richard for interested nearby vultures and brother scavengers! He wouldn’t mind the alternative of repeatedly hitting the eyes and teeth of Richard, until the former become hideous to look at and the latter badly misshapen.
In the end, no single head spinning blow for Richard, although Yelwa seemed to have cunningly inched closer to him just for that purpose. Instead, from a meter distance away from Richard, he dropped a hollow laugh he soon filled up with a from-the-buttom-of-the-heart vow to leave the guilty legs of an escaping prisoner as well as his easier-to-hit broad back to lodge an intended killing bullet in his occiput…
“And Mr. Richard, if for one reason or the other, it can’t be your occiput” continued corporal Yelwa… “It’ll have to be that which connects your head to your high shoulders!”
With this helpful piece of goodwill disclosure Yelwa turned and left Richard’s cell, on his face the satisfaction of one who had just had a wonderful conversation with a hearty friend.
Behind Yelwa’s back, Richard James just went down like a dissolving sugar cube on the bare floor of his cell sitting while an overpowering dismay sat heavily on his face. So, Corporal Yelwa had repaired to his infuriating cell solely to tell him this! Display his knowledge of the fact that a prisoner on murder charges is only to be trusted in the least like a rat carelessly left in a fish-laden room.
“But my two hands are a hundred percent clean!” raved Richard, promptly inspecting his hands in question for physical signs of a contradiction of the claim, his face retaining the incredulous look it had been wearing for minutes. For two weeks now, he had been flying it like a flag for the visual witnessing by the warders and fellow inmates of Grigaga Prison. Also, he had formed the odd habit of spontaneously raising the issue of his innocence and asserting it before any uniformed Khaki within the perimeter of his cell… Always a torrent of words about the unlikelihood of his hurting a fly let alone a member of the human race with A Soul!
Three weeks back, while being whisked off to the police station for interrogation spiced up with torture, he had continued to hammer home his having been unjustly implicated in their Student Rampage.
The frankest of truths: he wasn’t the student demonstrator, who had armed himself with a locally made pistol but live bullets.
The uncanny muteness of the duty-minding cops on either side of Richard on their transiting pickup van was enough to doubly panic him. And terribly frightened he was with goose pimples on his as frightened skin. Richard’s full recovery was not to be until some quarter hour had elapsed. Just then, he was all impulse to once more try saving his endangered skin by heatedly asserting his innocence. But this time he was denied a dog’s chance to do so.
“Heh Guy! You hold your peace” the shorter of the two cops threw at him, on the cop’s face readable signs of danger… Richard was spared a rather rough-worded assurance by the taller cop that he would be given A World of Chance at their station to state in writing his own version of the story. The cop guarantor promptly capped the order with an “Is that Okay?”
Richard, who had not yet quite sensed the no-nonsense mood of the shorter darker cop tried revisiting the issue of his being unduly stressed out collected for his effort a stinging slap across his left cheek that reddened it and half-puffed his left eye ball. From then, the left thing began to do a contradictive focusing job that entailed duplication and sometimes triplication of crossed people, houses, streets and objects.
In the next thirty-six hours, he was in Maximum Security Grigaga Prisons cooling off his baton-thrashed-now-inflamed buttocks on the unhygienic damp floor of Cell B31. A not-bailable inmate.
Uncomfortably made to believe that he would sooner or later die and rot in Grigaga, Richard unconditionally accepted the necessity of his escape from the prison. Overnight, he was turned into a desperate seeker of a faultless Jail Break Master Plan.
At first, disappointingly, Richard could not think up any scheme. Even after a full week, he could not contrive either a complex or simple escape plan that might vomit him well outside the enclosure of Grigaga.
Then, magically, on a Sunday, 8th October, 2017, in what must have qualified as both a drama and true quest for self-rescue, Richard carefully began to reflect on where The Gateway to his Desired Freedom lay.
Momentarily, he shot a glance at the concrete walls of his cell in a sizing - up bid, then threw another at the ceiling of the cell. This too did not last long for his having recalled that Grigaga Prisons had not the normal ceiling with hollow chambers, which one could open a sliding or adjustable part of it, creep in and, hunched, crawl off towards The Direction of Freedom!
Then, it shall have to be this door through which Corporal Yelwa strides in to drop me, my niggardly meals and intimidation”
Richard was irrepressibly sure of this. Ungovernably too sure of it!
”Just this door looking back at me. No other outlet…”
Nearly, Richard, got himself smiling victoriously but checked the urge. Smiling should be a ridiculous advance celebration of a feat which had yet to be brought off. And come to think of it, he hadn’t up till now a single true act of bravado he could proudly tag his name on of those with Elements of The Macabre, unless he should include his braved risky dash towards a dogonyaro tree for its anti-malarial leaves on some Sunday Midnight in defiance of lurking snakes and irritable scorpions. At that juncture, the electrical readings of Richard James’ mind had peaked.
Mainly, this was from his fervent desire to do something fast about his ordeal. Of all the looming lazy options, he finally fell for a surprise life-ending physical attack of Corporal P. Yelwa at the very moment he bends down to drop him his evening ration of “Eat-me-if-it-pleases-thee”
Oh! The tremors all over his body and his fast throbbing heart, as he increasingly toyed with the idea! Progressively, his kicking the idea out of his mind began to be unlikelier and unlikelier and the chances slimmer and slimmer…
And what should he do next when the warder goes down?
Definitely, he would flee from the country, cross her borders through neighboring republic of Benin, ahead to Togo and lastly to Ghana. There to receive and shield him is his affluent maternal uncle, who has been floating enterprises worth millions of Cedi. An apprenticeship in his business empire wouldn’t be bad at all, if it guaranteed a still kicking heart… The same thing as a still kicking hope!
Weak and drowsy, Richard, long battling with a myriad thought fell to sleep and, splendidly, into his wished dream of a sought prison escape made good at last! A convincing dream it was, as it wasn’t a mere breaking loose from Corporal Yelwa by his person and next disappearing through the now unlocked cell door. First he had pounced on the groin of the tall warder to attack the thing with teeth and claws, the next minute, also pulling at The Unfortunate Thing as though longing to wrench it from its thigh positioning. Unsuspecting Corporal Yelwa, who some minutes ago had stooped to drop him his evening’s ration, was left completely senseless on the floor. Then, with enough of a relaxed mind not to rush anything, Richard stripped The Corporal of this starched sparkling khaki uniform, put it on, began to whistle The Corporal’s choicest tune and, obliging his sprawled body his own version of their warders farewell salute, boldly made for the cell’s waiting open door to walk out of same leaving behind non-alerted fellow warders.
How unforgiving Richard felt when he came to, his eyelids open and behold, it was a dream! A sleeper’s unconscious mental film show.
Richard became a human agitation and nearly too a breathing bundle of helplessness. He had just remembered the often credited thought that the goodly dreams are liable, in real life, to reverse the shown pictures.
“God! Then, it means that I’m remaining in this hellhole forever” Richard cried, his teeth gritting, “Or later will be asked to leave it when it’s pretty useless to do so because then I’m pretty old and pretty useless!”
Without consciously intending it, Richard mentally summoned in his B31 cell a Dominica Michael Ex-girl friend of his and did not think he liked the plastered insisting smile on her lips.
”God! With the smile she looked to be in paradise”.
Richard knew or felt that he could comfortably pen down a close-to-two thousand worded opinion essay about Dominica Michael’s smile.
Of course, a jubilant smile which had sprung from its owner’s satisfaction with his present circumstance as an inmate of The Heavily Guarded Grigaga Prisons.
“Sure… Sure”, concluded a reflective Richard, whose doubts had just left him…
And if her unusually arch smile had broken into a laughter, it would been more than fitful, more than riotous and still more than A Witch’s…
The laughter, definitely, would in ears ring maniacal and importantly crush the fellow for whom it was meant like a weapon…
But what really had he done to Dominica to have deserved this piece of unsettling prejudice? Mightn’t any honest observer try for as long as he wished to finger out what wrong he had occasioned her and still fail at last? As far as he knew and could see from the realities before him, he had simply tried to “feather his nest” and defend his own…
Ridiculously, Dominica Michael had been breathing open threats of making his life on campus “utterly miserable” for having kissed her and sped off to the press to mention that he had!
“Funny Catholic Dominican Letitia Michael?!
For what other campus guys had been doing between The Half-Christian Church Goers and The Full Communicant who should be believed on how Jesus Christ had looked while on Earth.
…And his supposedly rash action wouldn’t be the last! But his Dominica he had heard had returned a verdict of “Guilty” to him with her faceless, nameless co-members of the jury, on his handling of their love affair and okayed his hanging on tree!
Well, hasn’t it Been The Protective Lover’s smart custom of sometimes releasing by a decent fraction the much or little he had indecently tried and successfully brought off with his girlfriend behind closed doors in order to –Yes!- discourage other guys from edging nearer the same woman.
That’s right! It’s a question craving a reply from both Dominica Michael and other Members of their Jury…
“If only she would be frank enough to accept the truth.
Just then Richard’s B31 cell door opened to swallow three new warder callers.
“Sacred Mount Sinai!
How is he going to deal with Three Corporal Warders? Overcome three baton-brandishing stalwarts…? Also, men with holstered pistols they wouldn’t have the least problem fishing out fast?
Richard James, soon to be twenty-two-years-old, felt his Finished Story of a Life. His new name is “Sorry”. He released sighs and two other genuine grieving sounds that might have been aptly interpreted as the water baptism for his new Sorry Name. All along, he had been a finished business and has just now grabbed that truth!
Disturbingly, he now has not one but three separate genitals of three non-clustered men to pounce at for the roughest of twists and turns that should knock them out and him leave the freest door out of his Cell B1 Of course, right now, all will be impossibility by a zillion times! Simple Day-Dreaming…
No way and no how a twenty-two year old green horn at combat with only a screen movie’s knowledge of China’s Kung Fu and Japan’s Judo could bring off such a final savage finishing of his dare-devil opponents.
Fast-sinking Richard James was spared the ordeal of further harassing his helpless psyche by one of this three warder visitors, deciding at last to break the two or three minutes-long silence after their entry. The man’s words to Richard was compositely a disclosure to him that Grigaga Prison no longer has anything to do with him. Plus an order to him to walk out of the cell and leave for good.
“Leave for good?! besought a vastly shocked Richard.
“So, I had said, “the mustachioed man responded fast for its militancy and likelihood of quickly ridding them of the sight of a young man, who they had in truth unlawfully detained and grossly assaulted. Corporal Yelwa himself, in a voice Richard would have been the last to associate with him, wove in for his benefit that he should first try his home and announce his presence there and if he still wished repair to the campus that got him into Unnecessary Trouble.
A brilliant flash of coaxing excitement across Richard’s face and cheeks, its bigger electrical currents already coursing through his arteries and veins! However, it was still A Helplessly Curious Richard and to a great length A Suspicious One who feared that Corporal Yelwa and his two pals had just schemed to funnily end his existence by firing him a from-behind-silencing shot while enjoying his just acquired false freedom.
Not sure of anything, Richard remained unmoving and Corporal Yelwa nearly wanted to tell him gruffly that he was the one keeping them from locking up Cell B31 and getting on with other business of theirs
“Hey Guy,” Corporal Yelwa flung at Richard, managing some pleasant tone “Now, that we’ve accepted your innocence, why act the guilty? Richard was forced to acknowledge the outlandishness of his present realized. He would be immensely glad if Corporal Yelwa, or any of his two colleagues explain only by half The Magic behind his unexpected restoration to a free being.
This humble earnest plea of Richard’s was simultaneously rejected by the three warders with the three uniformly wearing the appropriate disobeying countenance for it...
But just then, with only a couple of intervening second’s Corporal Yelwa, with his suddenly protective lips launched into a brother’s counseling session on behalf of Richard, he finished off with an advice to him “To not kiss a woman, if he wouldn’t keep the story to himself”
“I…I beg your pardon, Sir” blurted Richard whose mind with simply that last remark had begun to work like a jackhammer
Ready was Corporal Yelwa in this new well-wisher-mood to heed Richard’s entreaty packaged in a pestering voice. But before he, Yelwa could assemble another sentence, the warder who had yet to even cough snatched the job from him. To Richard it ought to be enough of a won battle and victory that A Woman of His Fancy had offered to spread her legs for him… No need whatsoever, to make the triumph more triumphant by openly recalling the event, let alone pointedly or sketchily discussing it with one’s course mates or friends on campus.
“If I were the woman victim” said the man to Richard promptly acquiring the severest of faces for the message just at the edges of his lip “I would wash you like a garment and hang you in the sun like a garment to speedily or gradually dry you like one!”
A more sudden-than-less slump by Richard James, a part of his head hitting the nearby walls of Cell B31. But even in his near unconsciousness Richard, just made richer in a type of knowledge, parted his lips for a feeble exclamation release of “DO-MI-NI-CA MI-CH-AEL”
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