BIMPE’S BOYFRIEND ... 1

*It was a greyish Tuesday in the University College Ibadan as Dr Akinjide ambled towards the University Health Services hall, ready for duty this morning. He looked carefully at his Tissot wristwatch, it was 8:35 am.

He looked around and saw a speckle of 100Level students awaiting hospital registration. Silently he mused “Lord knows why they call some of these: “Freshers”. They look very primordial, perhaps best to call them “antediluvian”, but that’s the Vice-Chancellor’s headache. For me, money must be made and lives saved.”

He cast his mind back to Monday, a fortnight ago when the Chief Matron, Konnolly Arit brought in a rosy-cheeked baby girl swaddled in a pink shawl and already turning blue. Apparently “Madame Konnolly” as he fondly called her, had found this lovely being in a Coaster box just a few inches between Prestige Bank and Komolafe House. If she had dithered, the child would have been swept into the drains.

He ran a quick check of the baby; she had a blackish patch across her belly: some sort of birthmark and one of the most infectious smiles. Getting her out of wet clothes, he prescribed some medication, sent his driver home to bring over some of the old clothes for Ayomide: his 5-year-old daughter and passed the child on to the nursing staff.

But he was quietly seething “A seven-day-old infant in a biscuit box? Has the world gone totally bonkers in the name of consensual coitus??”

The baby was fine and later passed on to Oremeji House, where he volunteered to pay the monthly fee and penned his name down as “Father” and named her “Angélique” after his dead Cameroonian mother.

The day also began his interest in the 50-year-old matron. He saw her visibly shaken and for a professional, in tears, when she brought in the child. For Madame Connolly, showing emotions was strange as she always admonished her staff to avoid idle chatter during the “dry period” when patients don’t come in and to maintain professional comportment at all times. To which many secretly rolled their eyes and hissed loudly once she was out of earshot.

“Dr Akinjide, Dr Akinjide”, a flowery being wearing excessive makeup, a bronzer that made her nose look like a shimmering other-worldly part of her, tugged at his coat and brought him back to Tuesday. He frowned furiously, blinked and tried to decipher who it could be.

It was Naomi Ocan. His neighbour’s daughter. With a bespectacled male friend holding a file with a “Jesus wept” kind of face.

“Oh, what a pleasant surprise!”, he said without making an attempt to change his rock-hard composure.

“Yes Sir, it is. It’s such a pleasure to see you. Today’s my first day here and I’m starting in the Geology department this semester. This is Nonso my new friend from Sociology. We are both Freshers”, Naomi said excitedly.

“Okay, I hope you guys have a great day. I’m going in to work…”

“But sir, I was hoping you’d show me around and help me feel settled, you know Mum is ill and Dad is…” she puffed her cheeks and her eyes became full of tears.

“What the flipping heck!” Dr Akinjide mused internally and his bottom lip began to quiver involuntarily in a stream of inaudible French. A tap of the fingers snapped him out of his internal soliloquy.

He beamed and said “Good Morning”, it was Madame Konnolly after all. The woman who could do no wrong. They discussed lightly the day’s work ahead and she requested some minutes to discuss some official business later in the day.

Dr Akinjide mused “Only minutes…”

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Connolly lived in a rustic neighbourhood in Alaguntan in Ibadan. It was a rather sedate one, manageably clean but with dusty, untarred routes. For a fitness enthusiast, it was a rather perfect 90 minutes from her house at 3, Akindire Avenue to the Alaguntan bus stop she frequented, whenever her 1980 Ford GT Carrera decided that the hustle and bustle to University College, Ibadan (UCI) were more than it could bear. Thankfully, this frequency had drastically reduced since she had a new Impala 500 engine fitted in. Not like her son, Friedrich hadn’t drummed it in her ears for over two years to buy a new engine or change the car; until Daria packed up one Monday morning at Sango, some few kilometres shy of the UCI gate, with a minor surgery looming.

She had cursed repeatedly in fluent Russian, as her rather bemused co-passengers looked on at this 5”8 “Oyinbo” woman, with short, small legs, trim, long limbs; the beginnings of a wrinkle forming on a square chin built on a faded milky veneer. Her small bust and pert derriere could have given her up as a former supermodel but childbirth and age had bestowed her with voluptuous hips and some love handles which she tugged at disdainfully after her exercise sessions in the University gym on Sunday mornings.

Konny was born in Malta to a devout catholic Nigerian father and a Russian communist mother. Her parents had met in Martinique while her father was on a business trip from Nigeria and her blonde mom was on a carefree week-long holiday away from her desk as a programmer at Gazprom. They married after a brief romance and Konny was an only child. Konny was however of capitalistic thinking and an atheist who hated travelling.

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What was meant to be a whirlwind romance turned into a love affair of fifteen years in Okokomaiko, a suburb in Lagos, southwest Nigeria until one Tuesday morning when Conny’s mother, Anastasia, a vodka and martini lover; decided she had had enough of the Nigerian milieu, served her father Chief Onwuka, divorce papers.

Her father, a strict disciplinarian and Italian leather shoes connoisseur wasn’t one to be easily ruffled. His love for Ana, the blonde 25-year-old Russian programmer he met at the seaside resort of Alpaca in Martinique, had taken him by surprise and he had decided to keep it. Although they never got married in the traditional sense, everyone knew the Queen of the Onwuka family.

When the “Big Jim” received his papers, he let out a guffaw of violent laughter, which to Ana meant that he deemed this to be a hilarious affair he couldn’t be too bothered by. He drew her to him, all of her 5”6 frames, warehoused in his 6”5 chests. He knew her buttons and he was determined to once again, press them. But this time Ana was adamant, she wanted a big wedding in the St. Petersburg Basilica and to return to Russia, for work and pleasure. The only other option was divorce.

Big Jim asked her for one week: to organise his business holdings in shipping, fashion (he was the biggest stocker of exclusive Italian leather wears in the country) and his steel business which was just beginning to blossom. So, within one week, with a healthy supply of suitcases: Ana, Big Jim and Conny both parents were relocating to Russia.

Conny did not know if she’d like Russia but she loved her mother and since her father had agreed, there wasn’t much she could do. At 13 years of age leaving her beloved secondary school, Ana Goretti behind, she was heading out to Russia to begin a new life, because of her parent’s crazy love. “Damn them!”, she swore under her breath, but looking into her father’s shiny black eye with big beads of sweat creasing his forehead, eyebrows and thick neck, smiling, she wondered; “Will I ever find love like these ones have?” ... Tola