The Wife ESCAPED!

Caro’s movements were slow, deliberate and determined as she beat down the tall grasses in her path to make way for her to reach the main road. The path she had taken the previous night may have been better, but she feared that the second of the two boys who had come to ‘hammer’ her the previous night would be waiting on the road with a gang. She was now cutting out another path that would lead to a farther part of the road. She would have loved to sleep at the uncompleted building till the morning was bright, but nightmares inspired by the deadbody lying close to her drove her to her feet and forced her to continue her exodus to a Canaan she knew not.

When she hit the main road, her next objective was finding the nearest water body before daylight. It was a difficult task. She was a stranger here and since her arrival in Lagos, she had not set eyes on any natural body of water whatsoever. How and where she was to begin her search, she had no idea. She simply walked along the road away from the area of the uncompleted building, keeping an eye out for a sign, any sign that might indicate the presence of a stream, lake, river… in fact, any moving water.

As she walked, she could not help but feel the disadvantage of not having a watch. If only she was a boy, it would have been natural for her to wear watches. Her younger brother had a watch, bought for him by a visiting uncle and she would never forget how he checked and announced the time at every single opportunity. Eventually, he became the clock of the house, there being no other timepiece around except their neighbor’s spider-resident archaic clock.

They hardly had much to do with time anyway; her parents had lived and taught their children to live a life of routine and their very souls marked the time on their behalf. Their bodies were in sync with the clock of nature and they read as accurate a time from their surroundings as others did from clocks or watches.

As these memories floated around her mind, she couldn’t help but miss home. Home being her siblings, of course. She would never forgive her parents for selling her to Iron Fire like a bar of homemade soap. She wished she could have said goodbye to them (her siblings). She had to admit that she had been selfish when making her plans for escape, but it was necessary. If she had done any less, she would not have succeeded and that… wait! Was that the sound of falling water?Property of Nô)(velDr(a)ma.Org.

Like a bloodhound on a strong scent, Caro followed the sound away from the road and found herself near a high-walled compound. The falling water was from an over-flowing tank beside the compound.

She was about to thank her stars when she saw someone… a woman with some buckets, trying all she could to get them full with water as fast as possible. As she placed an empty bucket under the scattered flow, she turned her head and sighted Caro. She kept her eyes on her, staring at her with an expression that Caro could not see due to the darkness. The lights on the compound’s fence were turned away from their direction. Caro knew that standing where she was was suspicious, so she simply continued moving, toward the woman.

As she approached, she could see that she was not really a woman, but a girl like her albeit older. With a confident stride, Caro walked past her as if her destination was up ahead.

“Aunty,” the girl called. Caro turned. “Abeg you fit help me?”

Caro was quite surprised that she wasn’t addressed in Yoruba which was what seemed to be the first language of everyone in Lagos. She had tried to learn the language from her few Yoruba friends back at school, but she found it hard because she hated the sound of it. Recovering from her surprise, she went back to the girl and gave her a helping hand with the bucket.

“Thank you,” she said when it had been balanced on her head. Caro watched her walk off into the darkness. She had left two of her buckets behind, one of which was already getting full. She would surely come back for it later, but before then…

Caro snatched the bucket’s handle and rushed into the nearest bush. Doing things in bushes was one thing she was not a stranger to.

Plucking several large plantain leaves, she flattened the grasses around her and laid them on the ground. Then she took off all her clothes, making sure to check that the little money she had left was intact, and rolled them into a tight bundle (ensuring that her underwear was in the inner core) and laid it on the leaves. She then proceeded to put a little distance between herself and the bundle to avoid getting it wet and then began one of the fastest baths of her life.

She had had faster ones before. There was a time when she was in elementary school and she had woken up late and as a result had to finish bathing in record time before her mother would flog the living daylight out of her. She ended up going to school with soap on her head.

As Caro bathed, her eyes were all but everywhere. She was not only afraid of getting caught by the owner of the bucket, but also by any attacker or even the compound’s security guard. She threw the water onto her body using both hands, (another thing she wasn’t a stranger to), focusing on washing her armpits and private part. It was easy since she had no hairs in those areas. She had not even started menstruating yet, but she looked like a grown woman except in height.

She wasn’t short for her age: 14. But she was short for the age she seemed to be: 18, 19.

After her bath, she quickly shrugged into her clothes, again checking her money and thanking her stars that the bath had gone smoothly and uninterrupted. She picked the bucket, took it back to its position under the tank and with one last look around, smoothened her dress and made her way back to the road.