Take heed that you leave no area uncovered
They called her ‘madam’ because she was married and had two pre-teen children. However, hunger had driven her out of her home to fend for her family. It had laid relentless siege against her matrimonial home for two years. During which period the bottle of her moisturising lotion had gone dry; her underwear had become threadbare and torn; her clothes went out of fashion and even her storeroom became empty.
She and her husband, Dick, avoided each other’s eyes at home for embarrassment and the desire for sex had fled out of the torn mosquito-netted windows. Most days they brushed their teeth without toothpaste and rinsed their mouth with salt solution hoping that they would be shielded from mouth odour.
But from the way their neighbours kept their distance when talking to them, madam knew their breaths oozed some offensive odour. During this siege, bathing soap had become a luxury; so had toilet rolls and deodorants and all kinds of body creams, including cheap pomade.
Food also became a challenge. Garri became the family staple food – garri soaked in water with a little sugar on a wonderful day; garri with salt on a normal day and with nothing on terrible days. And the terrible days were many. In their home, D stood for day and dreary – they had mostly dreary days.
Madam stepped out to look for a job a day after she saw the mark near her mouth which came from in between her lips. It was the sign of some minerals and vitamins deficiency. Her husband told her that it was the last stage of malnutrition before it gives way to kwashiorkor. It made her very afraid.
She knew that it was time to put to work her personal efforts which she believed in and which she had never called to use since she married well and needed not to work. But she had constantly harassed Dick, her husband to put to use his personal efforts.
Madam had never believed in God or in people praying and fasting and disturbing God. Her belief was that when someone had a need, they should make personal efforts for it. For years after her husband finished his prison term, she had expected him to use his personal efforts to get his family back on their feet but to her disgust, he could not do anything.
Mercy, for that was her real name, although there was no trace of her name in her, had met Dick when she was in the College of Education reading Home Economics. He was loaded. Dick had a jaw-dropping flat in a highbrow neighbourhood, some sleek cars and a good job.
Mercy got pregnant by choice to ruse him into marriage, for the competition for his favour was stiff. She moved in without being asked and fought all other contestants and even Dick’s relations to a standstill.
That Dick had a girlfriend at the time who happened to be her close friend, who happened to have taken her to his apartment the very first time, did not bother her one bit. She was not one to let such little things border her.
Once confirmed in marriage, Mercy quit school. Double confirmation came when she gave him a boy; a second boy followed hot behind his brother.
The couple had joy; they had money-affiliated love – loads of it. However, Dick was foolish, he never saved, and that was the only thing Mercy found wrong with everything that Dick did at the time.
She had no clue how foolish her husband was. He was stealing and was reckless and wasn’t saving. That he was not saving somewhere very safe like in a Swiss bank was most painful to Mercy. They had posh cars; bought mansions in highbrow neighbourhoods – moved from one ritzy neighbourhood to ritzier ones; collected designer labels and graced top notch parties.
Not long after the second boy was born, the nightmare began. Dick was named as one of the twenty-two persons wanted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The long arm of the law grabbed him and he went in for a long haul and when he came out, he was cleaned out. The nightmare had just begun.
All their properties were confiscated. The houses, lands, cars, jewels and even household items were seized. Nothing was left for madam, not even a piece of gold ring or a kitchen blender! To crown it all, Dick’s name was blacklisted. No man dared employ him again.
He was known as the accountant with sticky fingers. At this moment in their lives, madam’s resistive nature came to bear. She had some cash tucked away somewhere in her mother’s account, then there were favours done to her younger ones and she pressed them to return these favours. But as the evil days were prolonged, madam ran out of these reliefs.
Friends and admirers fled and relations remembered when he refused to help. In those days, they could still draw sympathy from some former colleagues and some friends, after all hardly any of them could throw the first stone at Dick.
But the tiny thread of sympathy was weak and rapidly overstretched and soon snapped. They were on their own. Dick tried his hands on trade but alas, he was not a man for buying and selling. He tried his hands on motivational teaching, professional folk who could pay, shied away from him. He even tried the transportation business but it seemed the demons were after him for series of accidents and vehicle breakdown saw to it that no man trusted him with a vehicle and he could not buy any.
Finally, Dick became a labourer, an unwanted one because he was mentally empowered but physically unable. The engineers and site supervisors had no patience for a labourer who spoke good English but could not lift twenty head pans filled with a mixture of cement, sand and gravel in a day.
Now, Dick was at home. He sent for this friend and that friend begging for small cash, little food, anything to get his family by. Mercy who did most of the errands saw in people’s eyes how impatient she used to be with those who couldn’t make personal efforts to get needs in their lives met – they loathed her.
No one told her to stop pressing their bells. The children could not be enrolled in school – these children whose former week’s spending could pay for someone’s MBA.
Madam went to look for a job. It took days for her to find what to wear to the agency. All her good clothes were pawned and so were her shoes. The remaining ones were too old and worn. After several days, she settled for an old head-tie that covered her short kinky hair and an old synthetic gown that wouldn’t be good enough for her driver’s wife’s sleeping gown in her old life.
She looked like a maid when she finished dressing and with some little vegetable oil from a neighbour’s used ororo bottle in the general kitchen, she was able to make her face shine.
Off she went to an agency which she read about from a paper pasted on the electric pole near her house. The agency said they offered such services as “enrol you without a fee and share your salary when they got you a job.” It was such a relief for she had no money for agency fee. It was agreed, ten per cent of her salary. Yes, yes, yes, she cried. Let her get a salary first!
The job was a housekeeper/baby-minder in an affluent man’s house. The over-sized couple had a tiny baby that needed to be minded at home. The wife was a banker and the husband a top man in insurance. Mr and Mrs Smith were Christians at ease in Zion.
They were very busy and hardly had time for fellowship but were in the habit of forsaking the assembling of the saints. In all fairness to them, they never missed the Sunday service although they mostly arrived a little late.
Nonetheless, their pastor valued them for their generous offerings, regular gifts to him and his wife and heavy donations. They had waited for four years to have that baby so she was a precious child. Although, not as precious as the wife’s income for she was a huge salary earner and had a body to match it in hugeness.
Her stomach area was rotund and bulging, her arms podgy and her face puffy like one holding large quantity of water in her mouth. She never stopped eating. Neither did her husband. The two seemed to be afraid to leave their mouth idle. The husband’s saving grace was his height; he was very tall.
When their housekeeper arrived from the agency, they were at pains to call her by name because she looked older than the two of them so they decided to call her madam since she was a married woman. Madam in turn called her employers ‘Auntie’ and ‘Oga.’
The first day, Auntie initiated her into the world of the maid and the madam when she said to her, “Here, take these soaps, deodorants and lotion. I can’t stand body odour, that’s what I cannot stand. It makes me want to puke.”
to be continued…….
