Get a sneak peak! Enjoy this excerpt from the newly released novel Survival Scars: Chapter 1 - An Uneventful Life

  

Chapter 1

 

An Uneventful Life

 

 

Anna sat on her bed again as she usually did every morning, and stared half dazed silently at the lone bulb hanging loosely from a dangling wire at the centre of the ceiling. There was no electricity. This didn’t bug Anna at all. In fact, it was expected now. The electricity had been epileptic for months normally settling more on the darkness than the light. She had come to rely heavily on the faint flicker of light that seeped in through the slightly parted red and white curtains that hung above her bed as her alarm to know that another long day had come to add to her unending list of long boring days.

 

Silence.

 

Then on cue… the thoughts crept in…

 

‘What am I going to do today? …Why am I like this? …When will my situation change? …How much do I even have? 2k…3k? …When will I ever open a bank account? …I need a job. …Any job. …Wait… not any job. …A God sent job. Amen! …I’m tired. …Just tired’. A tear ran down her cheek. ‘I’m so so tired.’…Anna finally let out with a strained low breath.

 

Anna lived alone in a single room unit. She would have to share bathroom and kitchen facilities with the neighbours. Her room had white walls and concrete floors which were covered with a brown wall to wall carpet. There was a single-sized mattress on the floor, in the corner pushed up against the wall. Placed in no real position was a black standing fan. She usually shoved it to any corner of her room until there was electricity, then she would move it around till she found a “sweet spot” for it to blow cool breeze on her. On the left was a wooden table and chair. Anna had decorated and hung her oval mirror above the table. Her mirror had terribly chipped edges, but Anna didn’t care. That space would double as a reading corner when she would search the papers for a job, and a dresser when it was time to look pretty. On the right side of the room, Anna had placed a kerosene stove under her wooden wall clothes rack. You would think that an unwise decision, to place a stove under hanging clothes… But in truth, that stove had taken a stand of a dusty antique ornament as Anna had not used it to cook anything in months. How could she? She barely had enough money in her pocket to get through the day. Her staple meal was a hundred naira Agege bread with fifty naira groundnuts. If it was a good day, Anna would buy a bottle of Fanta and call it a balanced diet!

 

She had moved to Lagos after completing her NYSC [1]program in Sokoto State. Coming from the East, that was quite an experience for her serving up North. Nothing fazed Anna though. Lagos had seemed like a golden plan at the time. The city where you can find your level and where anybody fit make am. What Anna didn’t anticipate was that after NYSC, she would be plunged into the ocean of unemployed graduates roaming the streets. No clue of how to stand out from the crowd. To be singled out as worthy to be part of a thriving workforce and earn good money.

 

‘Money’ she thought. That would put some meaning into her seemingly meaningless existence.

 

Anna recalled her university days with the false sense of maturity in her mind and the world in front of her. Bright and shiny like a new coin. Feeling “sharp” with her negotiating skills which in reality could be termed as glorified begging or as more popularly known …“taxing”. She always had money. How wouldn’t she. She never worked for it before. Money was simply handed to her whenever she “taxed” around. Shame? What shame? Taxing was as normal as breathing to her. Didn’t matter who gave her the money. Family. Friends. Proposed lovers or “Toasters” as they were usually called, whether she liked them or not did not matter at all. As far as they pampered her. It felt like a privilege almost. It never dawned on her that money would be hard to come by…. Until now. What a rude awakening, Anna thought as she got up to start her day. She couldn’t get mad at her situation. She had gone past that phase. In fact she was flipping through all the emotions surrounding her predicament. Excitement. Anxiety. Hope. Patience. Doubt. Faith. More hope. Indifference. Frustration. Anger. Disbelief. Self-pity …and now, Anna was simply Sad. Too sad in spirit. Too sad in strength. It weighed in heavier than lead pressing down on her chest till breathing became tasking. Anna was a fighter underneath it all. She was determined not to get to a depression, and knowing the truth that head and heart could oftentimes disconnect, she prayed every day for the strength to hold the connecting strings together.

 

“I must not snap!”

 

Yet the thought of being a failure constantly tormented Anna. It edged off the little confidence she had left in herself. She knew it was wrong. She knew she should be positive and think happy thoughts. After all, “God will make a way where there seems to be no way”… right?

 

“I must not snap!” 

 

But eleven months, two weeks and three days of dribbling between jobs with low salaries, to withheld salaries and then no salary at all… for months… ‘Confidence? …Where is it?’ Anna searched.

 

Another long uneventful day had begun.

 

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Eeeeeeee Feeeeeeeeeee! Yelled the lady that owned the tuck shop across the road. Mama Ify had started again as she did every morning. She was calling her daughter Ify again. Probably to nag her about some odd chore Ify hadn’t done.

 

“It’s 11.30am” Anna mused. “Where could Ify have escaped to already this morning?” On a second thought, if she was in Ify’s shoes, she might pull the disappearing act as well once in a while. Anna chuckled. Mama Ify must have called that name for a good one minute dragging each syllable endlessly, much to the discomfort of the entire street. It didn’t bother Anna one bit. Coincidentally, Ify was also Anna’s Igbo name, but she preferred to be called Anna. At first not by choice as that was what she grew up knowing. Then it stuck. She decided not to use her native name much because apparently, Ify was a fairly common Igbo name for girls. Anna had subconsciously learnt to ignore answering to it. If she hadn’t, she would most likely get a whiplash from reacting to every person she heard calling the name Ify. Anna had conditioned her ears to only answering to her name Ify if the voice was her moms’. Somehow that was the only voice she responded to easily.

 

Mama Ify, the neighbourhoods’ daily network news. It was a gift. Somehow, everybody spoke to her about everything. She may have a brash, nagging and grating voice, but Mama Ify had a good listening ear and huge warm arms to comfort you should you ever need them…

 

Mama Ify… This thought suddenly prompted a rumble in Anna’s tummy. Looking at her mobile, she noticed it was 12:45pm. “No wonder I’m starved!” Anna said. She quickly went to the table and picked up her life’s savings of three thousand naira which was neatly tucked between the pages of her bible the night before. On a second thought, she placed back two thousand, five hundred naira in the bible and stepped out to Mama Ify’s tuck shop. 

 

“Anna my darling!” Mama Ify said loudly through the sunniest of smiles. She was sitting on a wooden bench in front of her shop where she observed everything that went on in the street. It was almost impossible to think that so much noise had been caused by those lips on her face just minutes before. Mama Ify looked …peaceful. For a second Anna completely forgot her worries and with a respectful slight bend of the knee, Anna smiled back greeting

 

“Good Afternoon Mama. How are you?”

 

“I dey my daughter. We thank God. Do you want to buy the usual?” Mama Ify asked as she slowly stood up from the bench to attend to Anna.

 

“Yes please. The usual. But no Fanta abeg. Give me pure water please.”

 

Mama Ify looked at Anna for a split second but said nothing. She went into her shop and brought out the Agege bread and groundnuts. Then she quickly pulled out a bottle of 7Up and gave it to Anna.

 

“Ah! Mama. I don’t have hundred naira for the 7Up oh.” Anna said while trying to accept only the bread and groundnuts. “I just want the pure water thank you. See your money here.” She stretched out her hand revealing a two hundred naira note. The exact amount for her request. Mama Ify smiled and shoved the 7UP in Anna’s hand saying

 

“Abeg! I ask you for moni? Take am. Na gift from me. I know say you need am. Just take it as good luck for the day ok.”

 

Anna was shocked. It might just be a 7Up drink, but this represented far much more than a gift to Anna. It was hope.

 

“Thank you Mama. Thank you so so much for this drink. God bless you ma. God bless you a thousand times.” Anna kept repeating to Mama Ify, eyes very wide and slightly misty. Wow! Anna thought as she walked back to her very modest quarters. “Today is a good day after all!”

 

Anna sat on her wooden chair and placed her meal on the table, said a short prayer and started eating. Groundnuts never tasted so good Anna smiled to herself as she chewed on a mouthful of the bread and groundnut mix. ‘G-burger.’ Anna chuckled to herself at the name she just thought up. ’Yep! G-burger sounds befitting. Can’t have such a long relationship with you and not know your name.’ she thought as she reached for her drink. “7Up is just the thing”… Call it strange, but Anna had developed an odd habit when it came to drinking the fizzes. She loved the sparkling burning sensation it gave to the back of her throat whenever she guzzled it down in a rush. You can imagine that this habit wouldn’t leave much drink to last the meal. So she came up with a ritual that would prolong the life of any fizzy drink while she ate. It began with a short and highly controlled sip at the beginning of a meal with a firm resolve to fight the urge to guzzle on, and the rest was left for the long self-gratifying sip at the end of her meal. It never got old! And this meal was no different.

 

Just as she had her last bite, the phone rang. She didn’t recognize the number. Anna thought ‘should I interrupt my long awaited and well deserved fizzy drink sip? This sip is my favourite part of the meal!’ The phone rang on with total disregard for her thoughts, and just as the tune reached its peak, Anna rushed over and picked the call,

 

“Hello.” “Good Afternoon…” said the lady in the phone in a calm sweet voice. “Am I on to Miss Anna Kalu?” she continued.

 

Anna was a little sceptical in responding. It was never advisable to give in to calls from unknown numbers in these parts of the country. Anything could happen. She’d heard stories of people being “jazzed[2]” over the phone. She didn’t want to be duped. Then she thought… ’Duped? Of what?’  She only had two thousand and eight hundred naira left after her G-burger expenditure. In fact she pitied the unfortunate person that would dupe her. “Na one chance he don enter,” she grinned, and with that, she replied confidently…

 

“Yes that’s me. How may I help you?”

 

The calm voice went on, “I am Yetunde calling from Honeycomb Marketing Solutions. We received your resume for the post of Marketing Executive and we want to congratulate you as you have been shortlisted for an interview at 1pm this Wednesday at our Ikoyi Office. We will send you the details via email.”

 

Anna was silent for a second.

 

“Miss Anna… Hello can you hear me” Yetunde gently called Anna until Anna finally replied rather disjointedly

 

“Yes ma. Okay ma… I can hear you ma. I will check my email now ma. Thank you ma.”

 

“Great then. So see you on Wednesday then Miss Anna. Good bye.” and the phone clicked off.

 

Honeycomb? For the life of her she couldn’t recall the name of the company. She had applied to what seemed like a million jobs over the past eleven months for every post from a personal assistant to the CEO of an oil company to a service girl in a bar… at least it was an elitist bar she thought as consolation when she applied… Wednesday… that’s just the day after tomorrow! Anna looked at her phone again… “I need to know what the hell I applied for first!” as she flipped though the emails in her mobile phone. Luckily she still had some data left. She searched Honeycomb… then Marketing Executive… ‘Damn!’ she thought… ‘How many marketing exec jobs have I applied for?’ as she scrolled down the streams of emails. Then there it was. An email she sent five months ago for this job she had an interview for come Wednesday. She immediately scanned through to read what she had told them were her greatest attributes for the position. She then browsed their website. She had learnt the hard way that it was near idiocy to go to an interview without knowing a thing about your employer.

 

“Right. Where’s my pen and note pad? It’s time to research this company!” She started taking down pointers about Honeycomb. Then an email came in. It was from Honeycomb.

 

“So it’s really real!” Anna said as she opened the email to read. She stood up abruptly and started dancing and praising God for the opportunity. Laughter… all she wanted to do was laugh and dance. Joy and happiness filled Anna’s heart! She sat on her chair… then flung herself onto her mattress… then stood up again and jumped and twirled around… Anna’s mechanical numbness had melted away and she gave in to the overwhelming feeling of appreciation for the miracle that had just happened.

 

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she forced herself to calm down. “I’ve only got one day to prepare.” She made her to-do list-

No.1 - Photocopy CV.

No. 2 - Photocopy credentials- NYSC cert, Uni cert, Secondary sch cert… ‘Do I need my primary school certificate as well?’ she thought. ‘…and do I have any extra experience anywhere?’ she racked her brain a bit trying to think of more valuable documents she could add to her list to make her more appealing to her would-be employers. ‘Microsoft cert. Got to show them I am computer literate… and what was that online course I took? …Oh yeah. …Creative Writing cert’, she penned down. “Guess that’s it then!” Anna searched for her documents and put them in a file… “Oh yeah…” she remembered “how can I forget?” she added,

No. 3 – Brown envelope, and

No. 4 - passport picture. 

 

Anna went to her make shift bank account… her bible, and pulled out a thousand naira note. “Gees man!! She shrieked... “If I continue like this, I won’t even have enough to take me to the frigging Honeycomb place.” She felt nervous all of a sudden.

 

“I must not snap!”

 

She remembered. “Just take it a step at a time. God will make a way.” With that, Anna picked up her credentials and slammed the door shut.

 

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At the cybercafé Anna grazed the room to see if she could spot the person who would help her with her photocopies. Her eyes fell on a rather lanky looking guy with the glasses wearing what looked like a poor imitation of a Man United t-shirt with faded blue jeans and black bathroom slippers.  He was bent over another client working on some project or the other… The client looked immensely confused but the client tried to mask it with a fabricated confidence that came through as unwarranted anger. ‘Poor lanky dude.’ Anna thought. To work for such people must be tasking. Anyway that wasn’t Anna’s concern. She just wanted to be interview ready and if that meant that she would have to drag that lanky dude by the ear to do it at the same time save his life from that mad client of his… then so be it!

 

‘Bringing in business and acting the saviour. This day has truly turned for the better!’ Anna giggled to herself as she walked straight to “Lanky” dude.

 

“Hi. I need to photocopy some documents. Can you help me please?”

Lanky looked up and adjusted his glasses to get a better view of Anna’s face. He smiled and straightened up saying “Yes. Come with me.”

 

The mad client looked outraged and was ranting some distasteful language which Lanky dude calmly ignored with such skill it made Anna wonder if Lanky was actually the one to be afraid of.

 

“Black and white is twenty naira, colour is fifty naira per page” Lanky said as he stopped at the photocopying machine and opened it making a gesture towards the documents in Anna’s hand.

 

“Black and White.” Anna replied. She wasn’t about to spend additional money if she could help it.

 

As Lanky worked on the copier machine, Anna looked around. Outside there was a sign reading Passport Picture. She quickly handed Lanky the rest of her papers.

 

“Take this hundred naira first. I want to go next door and take a passport picture. I’ll be back to pay you the balance.”

 

Lanky just shrugged and continued his business without looking up. ‘Strange lanky dude.’ Anna thought and walked out the cybercafé to the shop next door with the passport picture sign.

 

“I want to snap my passport picture. Four please. Wait and take” Anna said to the guy holding the camera. He looked at her and said,

 

“Two hundred naira”. Then he pointed to a wooden stool that was placed in front of a large red silk cloth that hung as some sort of backdrop for the pictures this guy took. He then turned round to grab something and when he was turned round, he handed Anna a Tony Montana white powder bottle to rub on her face. See this is the norm as the weather is pretty humid. It’s normal to walk in with a greasy looking face - not advisable to snap in that state for sure. Anna never liked this white powder thing. Often times rubbing it over a sweaty face left terrible white streaks when it dried and sometimes made your face look unnaturally white in the pictures. What’s worse is that the photographer wouldn’t even give you a heads up if you were zebra faced and would rudely snap the picture regardless. People almost ALWAYS looked hideous in a passport picture. Anna didn’t want that to be her fate. She must make a good impression on her interviewers.

 

“No thank you.” Anna said as she sat on the wooden stool. Luckily she had a handkerchief in her pocket which she used to dab the sweat off her face. She noticed a broken mirror on the table beside her and quickly used it for a quick “face-check”. Then she posed for the “wait-and-take” picture.

 

The guy was swift in snapping. Then he went through a door Anna hadn’t noticed for a few minutes and then came back out holding the pictures and a pair of scissors. He then proceeded to cut the four square passport pictures out. He put them in some small paper pocket that looked handmade and passed it to Anna. She looked at the irregularly cut pictures and thought “Well they’re straight enough to me”, and handed the guy his two hundred naira and walked out.

 

Back at the cybercafé, Anna went to meet Lanky.

 

“My balance is fifty naira” he said dryly.

 

Anna took the copies and checked to make sure the right pages were stapled together in the right order. Then she asked him, “Do you sell A4 envelopes? Brown.”

 

“It’s fifty naira. So everything now is hundred naira.”

 

Anna paid Lanky, arranged her documents in her hand and walked out of the cybercafé.

 

On the way back home, she saw Mama Ify and the famous Ify herself. Anna doubted there was anybody on the street and in fact 2 streets down that didn’t know her name. Mama Ify made sure of that with her every morning howls. Ify was sorting out some of the stocks in the shop.

 

“How you dey Ify?” Anna smiled as she reached Ify.

 

“I am fine aunty” Ify replied dully as she continued the mundane task of arranging stocks. Anna knew Ify was bored stiff and would have given anything to go play football in the next street with the other ten to twelve year old kids currently screaming and sounding like they were having a heck of a good time. But Ify knew better than to wonder off with Mama Ify on the loose. Her eleven years of existence had taught her life lessons she’ll never forget. So stock piling was the game she sadly played this evening.

 

Mama Ify emerged from behind the shop, smiling her usual warm smile at Anna.

 

“Mama Ify! Good evening ma. I got…” Anna cut short her words. She wanted to tell Mama Ify about her job interview, but somehow it has been some weird belief that one should not talk about your fortunes yet to come before they arrive for fear of jinxing it. Anna rephrased her words instead, “I mean …that your 7Up bring me good luck today oh! Thank you so much ma.”

 

“Good evening my daughter. Thank God oh. I am happy for you. More good news to come!” Mama Ify replied.

 

“Amen! I claim it!” said Anna as she continued on towards her room.

 

It was now dark. Possibly around 10pm now. Still no electricity. Still not expecting it either. Anna lay on her bed.

 

Silence.

 

Thoughts crept in… but this time they were thoughts full of hope. A smile. Eyes glistening… A happy tear. She said a silent prayer to God.

 

‘Today turned out alright.’ She thought… “There is hope.”

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[1] National Youth Service Program involves Nigerian graduates in national building and development of the country

[2] hexed