By Lechi Eke
Continued from last week – So Frances, the naive little Christian girl meets Felix in the University of Leeds…
Frances always stared at him for he looked like a dream – what with his chiselled features and surfboard stomach! He didn’t smile like Derrick, though. He was a more serious person and talked about what to do with his money and how to make good grades. He prayed openly in cafeterias and went to church on weekdays! They went out a couple of times and he wasn’t making any move on her. She was baffled, and getting uncomfortable with him. One day, he shared his life story with her, and ended with the declaration that he was going to end up a pastor for he was a pastor’s son and a pastor’s grandson. This dampened her spirit.
She didn’t know what to make of their relationship. She had come to England a virgin and was thinking of losing it despite what her mother told her at home. She had thought she would lose it with Derrick but was glad it never happened. Then she began to dream about losing it with Felix. One day he said to her, “Fran baby, you don’t have to lose it. You can keep it until the right time.”
Frances started. “What’s that? What shouldn’t I lose?”
“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I just saw you trying to lose something, and I felt like saying that to you. That’s all!”
There was nobody in England to direct Frances. She was on her own, and had her leisure time in her hands, to do as she pleased. And she found herself so desperately in need of losing her virginity. Girls around her were having fun, going out with boyfriends. They hit the clubs at weekends and smooched in the back of boys’ cars at night. They talked about their conquests and who was hitting on them. They were cool babes.
Frances had only Felix who was in love with himself. He talked football, he talked academics, and he talked about pleasing Jesus – all the things that interested him. He was the only one that came near Frances.
Something seemed to have driven away fun boys she could be with because apart from Felix’ good looks and his money, he was not fun to be with. Frances considered him self-centred. Some weeks he could be so busy with football practices that they would not sit down to talk at all, and when they did it would be about his interests. It took a while for Frances to realise what was happening – Felix took her as a sister! He wasn’t thinking about her as she thought about him. Besides in school, the other girls called him her brother! Frances gave up on him.
The thought of Jesus returning to earth was never far from Frances’ mind. It had been the grey cloud on her sky since she was a child. As she grew older, she realised that she didn’t want Jesus to come back to earth yet. Every year she would add as one of her prayer points for the coming year, ‘Please, Jesus, don’t come yet!’ She also didn’t want anything to do with all that prayer and church going she escaped from in Nigeria. She wanted a new life – an exciting life. To her chagrin, she was not getting any instead wherever she turned to she saw the sign Jesus is Coming Back!
“I think I’m sick,” she pinged her friend in Nigeria. “I’m always hallucinating – seeing everywhere I go, ‘Jesus is Coming Back!’ Initially, I thought they had such stickers all over the place until one day, I saw it on my burger. When I asked the vendor how come she placed such a sticker on my food and where she got it from, she couldn’t see it even as I was pointing at it. She looked at me strangely and walked away.” Frances’ friend had no solution to proffer. But, to Frances’ complaint that she wasn’t having fun, her friend asked her to define fun, and see if it fitted into what she really wanted in life. “Alcohol, sleeping around, heartaches and STDs don’t sound fun to me,” her friend said.
One day, a boy in Frances department actually asked her out just for a harmless drink she supposed, she thought she saw Jesus with his head bowed behind the boy. She immediately said no and fled from him.
Gradually, the realisation that it might be her mother’s fault dawned on Frances. Her mother’s prayers, her preaching, even her declarations that none of her offspring would miss heaven, were working on her!
Frances said to herself, “They’ve sold me to Jesus hence His spirit will not leave me alone!”
She and Felix sometimes met for quick snacks and drinks at a vending machine at the centre of the Faculty Lecture Block during school hours. This particular day, Felix clothing scared the living daylight out of Frances for Felix T-shirt was completely branded with the words, ‘Jesus is coming back soon; Jesus is coming back soon.’ Frances lost colour. After a while, she suspected that it was the mind tricks again – that there were no signs on Felix’ shirt.
“Are you alright?” Felix asked her concerned. She nodded weakly and decided to ask him, anyway. “Did you deliberately brand your shirt with all these Jesus stuff, or you bought it like that?” Felix looked down on his shirt and said, “Are you losing your sight? It’s a plain shirt – where did you see letters on it?” Instantly, Frances tried to cover up her ‘sickness’ as she had begun to view the situation. She smiled and said, “Gotcha!”
“Trying to make me crazy?” Felix asked. She joined him in a hearty laugh that didn’t reach her eyes. Then she asked him pointedly, “What do you think about the Rapture?” His face instantly clouded and he gave her a strange look. “What’s Rapture?” he asked.
“Thought you were a Christian? I mean about people disappearing from earth the day the trumpet would sound from on high…”
“Now, don’t be weird, there isn’t any such thing!”
“Seriously? You’ve never heard of Rapture?” Frances asked with fully dilated eyes.
“No,” Felix replied. “And, sweetheart, there isn’t any such thing as human beings disappearing. We’re not ghosts. Don’t make me afraid.”
“There is, Felix,” she said, and began to tell him about it with such vigour, and he listened with well-rounded eyes. When she finished, he said, “I guess you’d be among those who would disappear.” She shifted uncomfortably on her seat and opened and closed her mouth before confessing, “I’m not sure.”
“Why? You just told me that there would be no good person left behind here on earth after the Rapture. You said that the seriously wicked would take over the earth and that men would rape fellow men openly in the street, and there shall be bestiality and queers would have honour, and that law and order would break down… because the Holy Spirit will leave the earth with the saints!?”he cried.
“I fear that day,” she said quietly.
“Why?” Felix asked.
“I doubt if I’m ready, I doubt if I’m ready,” she said shaking her head sadly.
He leaned forward and reached for her chin as if he was about to kiss her, she shrank from him.
“Don’t kiss me!” she exclaimed. “This is serious stuff.”
“I wasn’t going to kiss you,” he said, “I just wanted to let you know that we two can prepare ourselves for it.”
“We two?” she asked.
“We two. I believe in you. We can be in the number of them who would escape the wrath of the One Who sits on the White Throne.” He sounded pensive.
As Frances nature was, sometimes, she understood events better after they happened. Days later, she found her mind reliving this outing with Felix and all the conversations. She began to suspect that Felix feigned ignorance of the Rapture. In fact, she began to suspect so many things about Felix.
The signs of Jesus returning were still all over the place. One late afternoon, she rushed into her room pressed to her panties for a pee, her roommate sitting curled up working her phone, but she soon rushed out again without relieving herself, with a loud scream.
“Why is that sign in our toilet? Where did you get it from?” she cried.
“What sign? I didn’t see any sign,” the Indian girl said coolly walking into the bathroom to see.
There was nothing there. Even Frances couldn’t see it anymore. As the two young girls stood staring with baffled looks on the WC Frances realised that her parents’ prayers were haunting her. She put a call through to them.
“Mum, what kind of prayer have you been praying for me?”
“All manners of prayer,” her mum replied promptly. “Has the Lord been saving you?”
“No,” Frances replied, “He’s been driving me crazy.”
“No way!” her mother shouted. “Jesus can never drive you crazy. I told Him to send you an angel to help you, to keep you company, and…”
When next Frances saw Felix, she asked him pointedly, “Are you an angel?”
“Of course I am,” replied the unsuspecting soccer player. “So, who are you?”
“A haunted girl. Stop in Jesus Name!” France cried.
“I’m feeling you,” Felix said in a serious tone. But, Frances thought he was mad.
In what ways Felix was feeling Frances, she bothered not to find out. She was shocked and unable to express herself. She felt uneasy. But now the jigsaw had fallen into place. Felix was her mother’s answered prayer.
“I prayed before I left Nigeria asking my Father God to give me a friend, someone I could talk to and express myself to and probably, you know… all things are possible… That orientation day I heard Him say to me, ‘That’s your friend and your country girl!’”
“You’re that deep? You’re a creepy fellow!”
“In Christ? Yes, I’m very deep! I’m in love with Jesus. I hope you’re Rapture-ready now? But creepy is what I’m not.”
Months later, Frances understood that there was nothing wrong with her. If she wasn’t seeing the signs, she would have messed up herself with her unbridled fleshly desires. She had seen fellow schoolmates derailed and running on tangent. There and then, she understood what grace means, she wasn’t better than those fallen pregnant, those testing positive to abusive substances and being suspended from school, those being rusticated for all kinds of serious offences, and those being cut short in accidents flying off the backs of boys’ power bikes in the middle of the night; it was grace that kept her! Mercy said No to her derailing. When she saw how good her GPA looked, she was so grateful for her parents’ prayers, and she twitted, “If you ever needed anything, ask God in prayer, He answers prayer!”
The end.
