Two months have passed since it happened. The traders have found more recent events to keep them preoccupied during the hours of ‘bad market’. The street louts have brushed off the incident and erased its memory like a bad dream. Our mutual friends talk of her in whispering tones – but I can still hear them and catch their stares. Once in a while, they advise me to forget her; “It is better that way”, they say. Guy Joe came to see me yesterday, “It’s time to move on,” he said. But I can’t, like a boil with roots stemming from my inside, ripping it out is bound to leave a deeper scar.
When papa passed away peacefully in his sleep, I was distraught, but then I knew that day would come. I had tried all I could to keep him alive, but I couldn’t stop death from taking my only parent. (Some say I killed my mother. I know she passed on when I was born, so maybe I did kill her.) Death had damned me, a young girl of eight, to a life on the streets. Even though papa was ill, I had done something; I bought him drugs, cooked his meals, and earnestly prayed for his recovery. That was my consolation.
Two weeks after papa’s death, I received my first hammering from Agberos with a stick that felt like an anvil. I was devastated, I was in pain, but again, I knew there were beasts on the streets. I’d seen my fair share of their evil. I knew it was a Darwinian rule out here on the streets. So, I doused the pain knowing I had done something; I shouted, I cried, and I fought. I accepted my fate the second, and the third, and the fourth… and repeated times after that, until I found myself under the protection of Stone Kode.
I paid my dues to Stone Kode; I begged, hawked and stole on my own until I met Pitimi. We had an instant bond and with time she became what Papa once was – family. We braved the streets together until that dreary Monday afternoon.
I have known losses: papa, my virtue, my earnings… but that Monday was different. Unlike the past, I couldn’t do anything when the slaps and the blows descended on me or when death took papa, but this time I could, yet like a pillar of salt, I simply froze and watched as my heart was torn into bits. I was numb.
When the dust had settled and the justice enforcing mob had dispersed, the young object of their self-righteous wrath lay bloodied in the dust. That was when the boil took seed.
When people talk about Pitimi, they talk of the street girl who was killed by an angry mob for pickpocketing. But I know a little more about her. I know that the twelve-year-old whose pretty dark face was hardened by her time on the street was a victim. I know that those fingers that dipped into the hornets’ nest that afternoon longed for days to hold a pen. I alone know that her utmost desire was to be a respected Nigerian woman living in a nice house. But despite having dreams, she had to eat, and hunger drove her to her death.
Goodbye, Pitimi.
Chimeremeze David Okafor believes in the definition of literature as a means of reporting the human situation. His poems and short stories have been published in Kalahari Review and the African writer. He was amongst the finalist for the July edition of the Briggite Poirson Poetry Contest. He blogs at Chimeemusings.blogspot.com