My people have a common proverb: when the bee stings someone, he takes off when he sees a mere housefly. That exactly is how I am feeling now. No. thanks to the bitter experiences I have been having for two years now. I am a very hardworking man but like every human being knows, every day is not Christmas.
Sometimes, we have a drought and adjust our lives to what the situation and time are bringing. My business is experiencing a lull but I have the belief that in due course, it will pick up. I have experienced it before but not as bad as I am now but I have faith that this too shall pass away.
The only person who does not believe is Betty, my wife. She is the only person who laughs when I tell her that very soon, I would be smiling again. Two weeks ago, she almost wrestled me to a standstill at the gate of our compound because I did not bring the N20,000 for our son’s school fees.
“Where do you think you are going, Sam?” she had asked, running after me.
‘What makes you think a full-grown man like me does not know where he is going?” I asked her.
“Please, I do not want to quarrel and attract the attention of people now. Just let me be”.
“I will let you be when you bring the N20,000 for Junior’s school fees. Otherwise, you are going nowhere”, she said.
“Betty, I will not get the money unless I go out and you know that very well”, I replied.
But she burst into laughter. “Look at you. Even if you go off for five days, will you bring the money? I have been paying their fees, paying the rent, buying the food for the past years and you are just going out and coming back without anything. Are you the only person whose business refused to grow? Am I the person who ran down your business?”
“Is it my business that you are saying it refused to grow? This business trained you to become a lawyer? Betty, your mouth is foul and one day I will get up again. I know the God I am serving; He will get me up very soon”.
She burst into laughter again. “People like you who did not go to school cannot do much in business. You think people who went to the university to study Business Management are fools? When you refused to go to school, how do you think you can manage big business?”
By this time a couple of neighbours living in the compound had come out to appease her. They would calm her down. And she would use the opportunity to tell everyone how I constituted a nuisance, wanting to do nothing other than waiting for her to pay all the bills. That is my dilemma.
Sometimes it goes beyond this. I remember the day we were invited to a house warming party, thrown by a colleague of hers. I initially did not want to go because I have been severally embarrassed by Betty on such outings but that friend of hers, Linda, specifically begged me to attend. So I took the bull by the horn. But like all such encounters, we ended up quarrelling bitterly before we got home. What did I do? I poured salad cream on my jollof rice instead of the salad. That’s my mistake!
“Why do you always like to disgrace me?” Betty almost shouted.
“What is disgrace,” I asked her coolly so we do not attract attention.
“Why are you pouring salad cream on the rice instead of the salad? When you do not know something why don’t you just ask so that someone will explain to you,” she said and before I could talk, she seized the plate of rice from me. That act of hers ended up bringing me out in the public as someone who did not know how to eat salad and rice.
We also ended up quarrelling for one week, for what Betty termed ‘disgracing her in public’. She ended up taking me to the cleaners, talking about the advantages of school, and how people like us will never get anywhere in life without certificates.
“Betty, remember I am the person who trained you in this your school;’ I had said.
“There you go again. You are always boasting you trained me. How much money did you pay? Say it, let me write a cheque and give you! You trained me? Why did you not train yourself if it was easy? You did not go because you are not brilliant, simple. Okay, I know exactly what to do”, Betty said that day. And she knew exactly what to do like she had hinted.
The next day when she was returning from work, I saw her with one big brown envelope. I thought it was part of the files she received from some of her clients but I was wrong.
Betty came to meet me where I was sitting down in the living room and dumped the brown envelope on me.
“Sam, I have bought you JAMB and GCE forms. I want to train you too because you make noise everyday about training me in the university. You are going to complete the forms so that I will train you too. Do you want me to enroll you in extra mural classes? You should say it now”, she was making a mockery of me. At 47, what kind of GCE and JAMB examinations will I do to gain admission into the university?
“I want to prove to you that there are two sides to education-the money and the intelligence. You had the money but not the intelligence. I have the intelligence and now I am getting the money”, she boasted.
“Please Betty, let us not start because I do not have the energy to quarrel”, I told her.
“I am not quarrelling “, she said. “You are the person telling me every day that you trained me in school. I want to pay you back for all those things”.
But what she has been doing is a clear indication that some women have very short memory. I remember how I met Betty. I remember the kind of unspeakable penury and squalor I met her in. But today, she has thrown her memories to the dogs. She has obviously lost sight of where she was coming from.
…To Be continued
