Everyday Akin watched helplessly as The Terrorist took over his house. It had an annoying, fluttering sound that gave him the creeps. He tossed and turned. Try as he did to get back to sleep, Mama Bisi's electric generator would not let him. He could hear her loud TV set in the dead quiet of the night; only broken by the loud actors' voices. The generator kept making hammering noises like a mad carpenter. Akin could not imagine how that piece of machinery managed to power anything because every once in a while it roared as if it was being throttled by some invisible force. By Jove! Won't this woman ever SLEEP, Akin thought, as he was almost at the proverbial last straw.
Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash
He could feel his powerful arms, all sinewy, grasping at Mama Bisi's throat as he strangled the living daylight out of her Nollywood-obsessed mind until nothing was left but peace. Akin needed to sleep because he had some work to do the next day.
Calling what he does work sometimes made him feel like jumping off the Third Mainland Bridge and ending it all. It had been four years after leaving school, after studying Civil Engineering at the University of Technology, Mandiba. It was a course he enjoyed even though money was tight at the time. His aged father who married his mother as a sort of midlife crisis rebellion was barely able to scrape together his pension to pay his tuition fees. His feeding and upkeep were left for his mother. His mother, uneducated, tried her best by selling virtually everything known to man to send Akin upkeep allowance.
Seeing the suffering of his mother, Akin stopped asking for money and became a 0-0-1 champion: A term students used to describe students who ate dinner only, skipping both breakfast and lunch. He was not on a diet neither was he anorexic. His appetite was excellent, but Akin had to skip meals to enable him to manage his little and sometimes non-existent allowances. His body was a mass of wiry muscles: muscles he gained from lifting many head pans of mortar as a labourer serving more skilled masons in some random construction site.
He even developed a forced bald spot on his head due to carrying the hard pan of mortar on this head for a long period of time. Thankfully, when he stopped the job, the hair grew back. It would have been weird to see him balding at 20!
He graduated with a poor grade and that was understandable as he missed many tests and classes in his foray into the job market to earn his upkeep. Initially, during the first two years in the University, he thought he could combine being a full-time student with being a full-time labourer. The latter won that fight.
Two years after graduation, he was still sending applications for suitable posts, yet none employed him. One morning, he received a phone call and it seemed to him that luck was beginning to shine on him. He left his mother's house and got a residence in an apartment weirdly referred to as "face-me-I-face-you" house. That was a type of tenement that the low-income workers live. He got a job as a bulk teller in the bank. The pay was low, the hours were long, and the work was tedious. But the workers were expected to dress very well as image was considered very important in the banking business.
Counting other people's dirty, foul-smelling money was not his idea of a job. But it was better than working in the sun in some random construction site.
But like some good things in life, or not-so-good thing, it ended almost as quickly as it had began. Somehow, bills got missing out of several bundles of cash, and the whole staff working in the Bulk Teller division were let go with their tails between their legs. His exit from the job he half-hated taught him a lesson he thought he knew: be grateful for blessings! His little savings quickly ran out as he was forced into the labour market once again. After walking around and dropping CVs, he received a call from a construction company. He was overjoyed. He arrived at the place, only to realise they were looking for non-disabled men that have some education to "help" around the site. The pay was better than it was during his school days. He grudgingly accepted. He had worked for three months now and was yet to get an invitation to interview with any of the other numerous online, and offline applications he had applied.
That night he was home trying to sleep. It was a Friday night, but the little terrorists that he had as neighbours were busy jumping and dancing, making his tired body stay awake even though he needed nothing more than sleep. The generator and the loud TV of Mama Bisi were not helping matters either.
Suddenly he was fed up. He was angry. It was a murderous rage. After the last one jumped and landed near him, he stood up and walked purposely to his "wardrobe". The wardrobe was just a piece of a wooden plank about 4 feet long, secured to the wall where he hung his few clothes. It was in one corner of the barely 10ft by a 10ft room that he called his bedroom.
A brief rummage through the pockets of the canvas-like material shoe organiser revealed his weapon of mass destruction. He picked it and walked purposely back. Thankfully, at that moment, the public power supply accidentally was restored. Yes, it has to be an accident as the area had not experienced such benevolence of enjoying the electric power they paid for. His landlord, like clockwork, always collected his part of the shared energy bill from him every month.
As the bulb in his room came on, tiny cockroaches and other creepy crawlers scampered to the safety of the dark. But it was too late as Akin unleashed the horror. The insecticide aerosol, sprayed with more force than was necessary, was there to kill themall. After about a minute, Akin realised his hand was still depressing the actuator. Die! He screamed inwardly, his frustrations, failures, bad luck, the noise from Mama Bisi's TV, the annoying noisy generator, the hot room, his indebtedness, all flowed through his finger and the aerosol bottle, annihilating the monsters that terrorised him and by extension subduing all the circumstances that conspired to make him an unhappy man.
After about two minutes he released his hand from the actuator and watched. A particular cockroach was at its back. In death throes, it spinned. Akin observed as it struggles to live. It kicked. It turned. The whole legs were up. It was dying. After about three minutes of carefully watching it. It died. Akin finally found peace, well that is until the utility company took away the power as they must or Mama Bisi's little monster machine takes over.
Whatever happens from here onwards, I am grateful for what I do have and I am determined to be happy, he thought. He closed his eyes to sleep again and subconsciously listened for the whirring sound that had become the bane of his existence. He heard nothing. The sleep came quickly and there was peace finally.
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