Uncle Goodluck

After the baby was born, I still wouldn’t tell anyone how it all happened. Mummy’s friends and the ones that pretended to be her well-wishers recommended the prophet at the marketplace, the one with waist-length dreadlocks and dirty nails. They assured her that he could see things and could tell a baby’s father, complete with his location and his hometown by merely looking at the child. So he came to the house one evening and in the presence of all who had gathered to watch, he rang his bell around my head and after series of jibijibiji, he divined that it was a spirit husband who took on flesh and visited me every night in my dreams.

Mummy cried and cried, rolled on the floor and asked God what she did to deserve such a fate. But whenever she started her one-man show, I hissed and turned away. As if she didn’t have a hand in all these.

In the beginning, I was nine. Mummy would say, Go and greet Uncle Goodluck, whenever he came to our house. He was always hungry. By way of greeting, he would say to Mummy, Madam, the Madam, anything for the boys? Mummy would chuckle and say, Goodluck, you will never change. You like food too much for your own good. And without being asked, Uncle Goodluck would take a seat at the dining table and start drumming his fingers patiently.

When I set the table before him, he would wink at me and say, Ifunanya my wife, see as you are shining and looking succulent like ripe paw-paw. I did not like it whenever he called me his wife. It made me painfully shy and I would run into my room and hide in the wardrobe.

Mummy would call out, Ifunanya! Ifunanya! She would come to my place of hiding and say, why are you acting like the wires in your head are touching? He is only a neighbor trying to be friendly. Often times, after I served another plate of meal, Uncle Goodluck would say, My wife, won’t you eat with me? In my place, when a woman serves her husband, she has to taste the food so that the man can be certain it isn’t poisoned. This joke always cracked mummy up. Goodluck, your people are a strange lot. Still, Uncle Goodluck would take a piece of meat and bite it into two and feed me one and hail me, My wife! my wife!

As the years went by, Uncle Goodluck would visit too often even when mummy was not in the house. By then I already knew how he loved his eba: made with scalding hot water, hard as Olumo rock such that when he swallowed—those morsels as big as a boxer’s fist— his Adam apple would jump up and down and his eyes would shut like he was being strangled by food.

 One day when I was in JS1, I was seated on the floor watching television. I had done my homework and Uncle Goodluck was seated on the sofa, picking his teeth nosily. The man and woman in the movie hugged and kissed and clung to each other passionately, and I quickly switched to another station. But Uncle Goodluck said, My friend, put that thing back. Why are you pretending as if you don’t know what they are doing? And he came to the floor where I was seated… and kissed me.

I fled to the bathroom and brushed and brushed and brushed my mouth, brushing away his sour taste from my tongue. I wanted to tell mummy when she got back but she had warned me not to watch that particular station that showed adult things.

Thereafter, Uncle Goodluck started bringing some videotapes to the house; tapes of adults doing very, very bad things and would force me to watch them with him and make me do those things to him.

Mummy never suspected and I did not find it useful to tell her. It was two months after he got a new teaching job in a far away town that I stopped understanding my body. That was when everything changed.