An excerpt from the recently published Once Upon Our Childhood available globally at your favorite online book retailer and in print for international readers on Amazon! Local print release coming soon!
PROLOGUE
Four girls sat on the concrete ledge under the gum tree–two at each extreme end, creating a bracket around the other two in between. Three stood up slowly, one after the other, from the ledge and drifted away into the distance until she was alone, left behind hunched down on the right side of the ledge.
She looked down at her clenched fist, determined. This time, she was prepared. This time, nobody was going to stop her from drifting away into the distance too. She sat and waited, her fist still clenched.
After a long, unbearable moment of waiting, she saw him at last. Her monster with two faces, faces she had never seen, faces masked in chilling black silk.
She stood to face him. Her heartbeat pulsated loudly and rhythmically, as though along to the sound of an ukulele, as she and her monster squared away as they always did in a time-old dance. The dance of death.
He moved abruptly but did not catch her unawares this time. She moved too like lightning in the opposite direction. She tore through the night on a wild and empty landscape of nothingness, the cruel, acrimonious wind her other enemy as it pushed back against her as if in cahoots with the original enemy.
Even so, she persisted. There would be no victory tonight but hers. He was gaining ground, however. She made her first mistake when she looked over her shoulder to see how far behind he was, and her second when she tripped over her feet. She recovered but too late.
Cold hands grasped her arms and knocked her down. Her back to the ground, she stared up, the breath escaping forcefully through her pinched nostrils as her monster stood over her, the two masked faces leering.
He made to move but stopped in apparent confusion at the object lying in her now outstretched palm and the smile of victory playing on her face.
Did she think to attack him and live to tell the tale? She answered the voiceless question hanging in the air as her monster was suddenly drenched in spurting rich, red blood that was not his own.
…She woke up with a loud gasp, drenched in copious, tepid sweat. As she regained her bearings, her shoulders sagged in defeat and her hand clutched at her now aching heart.
Glancing over to the other side of the room, she slipped out of bed, careful not to make a single sound. Indeed, aside the slight creak of the bathroom door as it was pushed close gently and then, a second or two of rustling, not a sound could be heard…not really.
It was three in the morning but the ears of the half-asleep dogs downstairs pricked at the humming coming from one of the bathrooms upstairs. It was faint, quite faint, but there it was.
“…laugh, kookaburra, laugh. Kookaburra, gay your life must be.” She was humming the rhyme as two silver buttons of tears escaped down her cheeks, as she expertly moved the edge of the razor from left to right on the exposed skin, as she winced at the sight of the dripping rich, red blood that was her own.
CHAPTER ONE
Lara
At eighteen, my friends and I struck everyone as your typical, run-of-the-mill teenagers–the invincible sort who thought the world their very own oyster, you know, who thought they knew everything there was to know about themselves, about each other, about everyone else around them, about life.
We are here to tell you how we faked that illusion by creating prettily embroidered stories of our individual lives and how each of those stories ripped apart at the seams at the same time. It was all once upon our childhood.
My name is Omolara Kharan, and I am the irascible daughter of Mr. Julius Kharan and Ms. Oluwadara Abbey (ex-Kharan, ex-Wilder). Cue mock applause for the love episode: Portugal meets Nigeria.
Now, this would have been the very mundane introduction to what would have been a very mundane story, had life not taken the wheel. What wheel, you say? Let me finish, will you!
If this were an elementary English composition class, I would be at liberty to describe in colorful detail the big, almond eyes which unequivocally do not reek of innocence, the long jet-black hair which has never seen fit to curl, the heart-shaped lips that have told one too many lies, etcetera, etcetera–all of which belong to me, of course.
Thankfully, this is not an English composition class and for all my many perceived flaws–She lies! She smokes! She drinks! She dresses like that renowned streetwalker in her heydays! She never listens!–I am not a braggart. Suffice it to say, I am one of the most beautiful people that I have ever met.
I recently turned eighteen and by my calculations, have spent roughly four years in this hellhole of a country getting to know the father and two brothers I never knew I had.
Stop.
Rewind.
So, four years prior, my mother, Dara Abbey, newly divorced from her second husband, James Wilder, had seen fit to yank me from the country I had always known as home–God bless America–because it was becoming alarmingly clear that she might have done a lousy job of raising the kid.
The kid in question had a mouth immune to antibacterial soap and a severe allergy to discipline and that, mind you, was putting it nicely. Some jail-time in the motherland (pun completely intended), Nigeria, would do the kid good, Ms. Abbey reasoned.
How could she have predicted that she would end up running into her first husband, the father of the kid, and her two older sons, the kid’s brothers, in Lagos of all places? After all, she had left them in Amadora, Portugal a long time ago or so she had thought!
Well, what do you know? Dear Ms. Abbey was inevitably faced with the thankless task of briefing the hapless kid that um, you know, Daddy isn’t so, um, dead after all. No, he isn’t. In fact, he has got two living replicas of himself!
Yeah.
The peace has been some long tumultuous four years coming. Mother and father have partly reconciled their differences (or at least, appear to have done so for the sake of the kids), and sister and brothers have bonded tightly. The kids live with Mom one week and with Dad the next. It is not the typical one big happy family, but it will do.
Besides, the kid’s potty mouth is not so potty anymore and the blazing Lagos sun did turn out to be a slight panacea for that allergy to discipline. So yes, while Omolara might not exactly be the perfect kid and probably never will be, but hallelujah, her soul just might have been saved from the devil.
Fast-forward.
Now that I have impressed on you my beauty and wit, let me tell you about my best friends. Folasade Adeyemi is sitting beside me with her tongue racing at 1,000,000 mph as it is wont to do. She is the one with the wide expressive eyes, atypical razor-thin lips, and a head full of black-brown hair.
If she were a couple of inches taller, Fola would be fielding questions all the time from overzealous folks as to why she was not a model. Not that I blame them–she walks with a formidable stride that lets you know darn well that she has always been on top of the world and will always be.
Miss ‘Daddy-is-a-bloody-rich-telecommunications-mogul’ is the most unabashedly spoilt horrors I have ever met in my lifetime and boy, that is not saying much! Her daddy obsessively makes too much money to make up for the time he never has for her, his mini-me son, Folasayo, and his consultant-manager wife.
Picture multiple properties on Banana Island alone and exotic trips abroad every single school holiday and you’ll develop an acute understanding of what constitutes the rather boring norm in the Adeyemi household.
To be fair, her being unapologetically spoilt stems from her being a fragile and weak baby, albeit one who has grown up into this bossy, domineering but relatively naïve teen.
Still, I love her more than I love my adverbs. She is one of my best friends, so she must be getting at least one thing right. She was one of the first few friends I made when Mom and I first moved to Lagos, and I could never forget how open-heartedly she had embraced me despite how surly I had been in those early days.
I love the fact that she has the greatest sense of humor and that, like me, she is always up for anything over the top. She loves being in the thick of things, and she can also be compassionate and caring and loving…when it suits her. That said, it is bemusing to me how she can be so worldly on certain things and so hopelessly green on others, but I’ll dish more on that later.
Abi is sitting on Fola’s left side, chewing on bubblegum like a cow chewing cud on overtime–Abieyuwa Omonitie. Cute and curvy with the smoothest chocolate skin you ever did see, Abi is too friendly, so inquisitive, and she flutters from topic to topic like a parrot with ADD. All of that isn’t bad…some of the time.
She is always tuned in to the latest school or celeb gossip and is ever willing to go out of her way to do things for the people she considers important to her. She can be overly sensitive too. Who cried while watching ‘The Sound of Music’ for heaven’s sake? Oh? Let’s move on then.
Abi also happens to be one of the most extremely naïve people I know–she’s even more so than Fola–which is not such a bad thing either. Fine, I’ll cut the crap. Our darling Abi’s naiveté and idyllic outlook on life is more surprising when you consider that she is the product of a bitterly broken home.
Her daddy, a now apparently retired wife batterer, has long since remarried and lives with his new family in London. Dear old Daddy forgets more than half of the time that he has an older daughter that he left behind and when he does deign to remember, a paltry box of stale Godiva chocolates suffices.
So dear old Abi is stuck with toxic and bitter old Mommy in a rickety aging two-bedroom apartment on Lagos Island, and bitter old Mommy barely manages to pay the rent working as a teller in a bank in Yaba.
She is mad at men and life in general, so she comes back and takes it all out on poor old Abi who has the batterer’s eyes. And while poor old Abi continues to get angrier and angrier at bitter old Mommy, she insists on holding dear old Daddy higher and higher on the pedestal he totally does not deserve. Yes, the worst.
I love Abi to death, but I hate that she is, simply put, too easy and trusting. She tends to take things at face value all the time and that worries me because people who do that, more often than not, learn their lessons too late. I know I did.
Sitting on my right side and gazing absentmindedly into space, like she always gets caught doing, is Bibs. Lebiba Gana is the token silent, reserved and level-headed member of our best friends’ club. She is secretly my favorite of the lot.
She is startlingly beautiful in an uncanny way, unquestionably the most gorgeous of us four. Her skin is a gorgeous burnt caramel color tone and she has these dark, piercing eyes that are shadowed by these ridiculously long lashes. They make her look like she’s got a lot to hide.
Her father, Alhaji Gana, has three wives and eleven publicly acknowledged children. Wife One, Alhaja Fatima, has four children of her own–twenty-six-year-old Ibrahim, twenty-four-year-old Sani, seventeen-year-old Aminatu and fifteen-year-old Habiba.
Number Two, Hajia Maryam, Lebiba’s mother, has eighteen-year-old Lebiba, her younger thirteen-year-old sister, Hauwa and the little three-year-old Abubakar.
Youngest-Wife-Pending-Wife-Number-Four, Hajia Ameera, has thirteen-year-old Asma’u, ten-year-old Habeeb, seven-year-old Muhammad, and the eleven-month-old baby girl, Halima.
For fear of a headache, I must cry off on detailing the long list of the other unofficially acknowledged children. It should be enough to say that their large family house in Victoria Island is crammed full of kids, and maids, and nannies, and tutors, and relatives, and more.
My head pounds at the thought alone but at least, the Gana family has the luxury of being one of those peaceful polygamous families mostly because Alhaji, the patriarch, brooks no nonsense.
Everyone likes Bibs. She smiles. She listens–God, she listens. She rarely gets angry, she is always brokering for peace, and she never, ever has a bad word to say about anyone. Her favorite saying pretty much sums her up–it’s all good. She says that all the time.
Bibs has always been the hardest one to get through out of my three friends. Secretive and solemn in a way only she can be, you can’t help but think that there’s much more to her than meets the eye.
And that’s the lot of us–Lara, Fola, Abi and Bibs. Four totally different personalities from totally different backgrounds with totally different stories and yet somehow, we make our friendship work.
I like to picture our friendship as a see-saw, you know, with me on one wild, crazy extreme, Bibs, the exact opposite of me on the other end of the conundrum, and we have Fola and Abi in the middle for balance.
Come Monday, we’ll begin our second year of Advanced-Level courses (A-Levels, to keep it simple) at Gatesbridge Co-Ed and once the year is up, we will be going our separate ways.
I’m heading to college in America. Bibs and Fola will be heading over to university in England. Abi might stay on here, or perhaps her father will grow some balls, defy his new wife, and ask her to come over and join his new family in London. Miracles do happen.
Despite the impending separation, we’ve sworn to be friends for life, which is all nice and dandy but given that I tend to overdose on reality, a rather depressing belief strikes me every now and then–time moves on, so do people.
My mom barely remembers her chief bridesmaid, never mind the name of her best friend in college, and I seem to emulate all the shit she does. You know, like lying. Like lying daddy dearest right into a non-existent grave before resurrecting him like he was Lazarus.
My, I’ve done an excellent job of coming across as quite the jaded individual but hey, we’re all jaded, albeit some more than others, no? We only differ in expressing how jaded we are. Some, like me, act out. Others like Fola and Abi live like they wouldn’t even recognize the word if it were flashed before them in bold scarlet letters. Still others, like Lebiba, hide it.
So, there we have it. There ends what was supposed to be the mundane introduction to this story–a story which, as I have explained, was going to be a perfectly ordinary yet prettily embroidered tale about the four of us before life went ahead to do what it does best.
You know the one about throwing a curveball and all? Yes, it did that and then some.
© Lara Brown, 2020
Worlds via Words 