speeding trailer
This is the final part of a gripping story about a desperate young lady entangled in a baby-making web. Story by Charles Opara

Continued from Part 2

OBG strolls into Doctor’s study in her bathrobe and lingerie. It’s midnight. Most are asleep. Doctor is hunching over some papers on his desk.

“Would you like to check me for pregnancy complications?” she teases. Doctor usually tells his wife a patient has a complicated pregnancy whenever he plans to sleep over at the maternity.

“Not tonight, I’m busy,” he says. “I want to know what things to move and what things to leave behind and sell later.” He frowns at a list.

OBG stretches on the bed. “I miss Amara so much. How I wish I had fallen sick. I would have been free too. You said after three kids. I’ve had five.”

“You don’t know what I did for you,” he says. “You are lucky you didn’t end up like Amara.”

“What do you mean?”

“Babe, I’m busy. Not now.”

OBG rises to leave.

“Do you remember,” he says, “the time you asked me if I knew clients were using condoms with the patients?”

“Yes. You told me not to ask questions.”

“I saved your life.”

She sits on the edge of the bed. “How?”

“I told my nurses to leave you out of it?”

“Out of what?”

He takes off his reading glasses. “Look. I’m not a perfect man, so don’t judge me. I’ve made some mistakes. I listened to bad advice and turned this place into a brothel. We were so broke then that I could have become a street hawker to make ends meet. That was the period when your friend fell sick.”

“What are you saying?”

“I didn’t test the clients for STDs like I usually do. I simply gave them condoms and trusted them to use them.”

“Did Amara die in hospital?”

“They weren’t taken to hospital, Babe. They tested HIV positive. Try to understand. How could I give them that kind of news? Plus, they would have to be on anti-retroviral drugs for the rest of their lives. They were bad market.”

“So what did you do?” Obiageli asks tearfully.

“I let Unaka take care of it. Look. I know I did wrong, but I did you good. Always remember that…”

Obiageli races out of the study.

“Come back here,” Doctor shouts after her.

Obiageli coughed and gasped for air. Unaka had released her.

Dumebi stood behind Unaka with a penknife tipped in blood.

Unaka pressed his fingers against his ribs and raised them to his face. They were smeared with blood.

Arinze conked Dumebi. The other nurses did the same.

“Why will you do that? You want to kill him?” they said to her.

“Mummy,” Dumebi wept.

Dumebi had saved Obiageli. Now she was in danger. Or was she? The nurses often beat her for not cleaning up after her menses, for not doing her chores, or for not shutting up. Dumebi was beaten a lot. They would beat her and then they would leave her alone.

She was the only patient yet to become pregnant. The only patient whose parents visited.

She said it was her parents who brought her to The Maternity. They wanted her to learn how to sew. Amara thought the nurses kept her because she was an easy lay. Nurses weren’t allowed to impregnate patients without Doctor’s approval. They could score with a condom, but only if the girls consented. Rapists lost their jobs. (Doctor’s wife made sure of this.) Unfortunately, Doctor’s protection did not extend to Dumebi because he didn’t see her as one of his baby-making specimens. Amara said she had begged Dumebi to tell her parents what the nurses did to her when they next visited. But Dumebi didn’t listen. And it wasn’t because her parents would have become prisoners too if the nurses got wind of it—she couldn’t have known this; she wasn’t that smart—but because it was a guilty pleasure for her. “She needs our prayers,” Amara had said.

The nurses kicked Dumebi as she lay on the floor. No one paid attention to Unaka, who cocked his pistol and aimed it at Dumebi.

Obiageli was like a headless chicken. She had had their throat slit and would run around for a bit before she slumped and died. She was wounded, confused, frantic, and sure to die. She had nothing to lose.

She rammed into Unaka, dragged him through the trailer doors, over the slack rope, and into a whoosh of winds that dulled the senses like a yawn.

A twinge in the brain brought back her awareness. She was bouncing about a bonnet, unable to control the physics of her drop—she had collided with a windshield and was about to roll off the car. She shut her eyes, believing she would never open them again.

Her left shoulder hurt. She had fallen on her side and was now lying on her back. The car that broke her fall, a silver Toyota Corolla, was parked on the side of the road. The nurses were screaming—the trailer was crawling up the hill and the nurses peering from the doors were yelling (perhaps for the driver in the truck to stop). Two nurses jumped off the trailer, which was moving at an almost stationary pace.

“My leg,” someone howled.

It was Unaka. He was further downhill, clutching his knee in a pool of blood. Between them, a gun glinted in shades of grey. Obiageli had never held a gun before, let alone fired one. She imagined it would feel more empowering than anything she had ever held.

She was right.

She raised it. Pointed it at Unaka’s back. And wondered whether to use two hands or one.

She fired.

She missed.

The shot rattled Unaka, who belly-crawled into the nearby bush. Next, she turned to the two nurses who had jumped off the trailer. The driver of the Toyota saw her aiming the gun in his direction, got back in his car, and screeched off. She banged out a bullet meant for an approaching nurse. Birds in a tree scattered like shards in the sky, their rowdy caws turning melodic. The two nurses scuttled back to the tractor-trailer and clambered in. The Toyota overtook them and disappeared over the summit. The tractor-trailer had stopped. (The driver probably contemplated a long U-turn on the narrow two-lane.) After a while, it continued up the hill.

The bushes to the side of the road stopped at a kola nut farm. Beyond that, red-earth hills ravaged by slate-grey boulders and a tropical wilderness formed the skyline. A pond glinted tan-green in the hills.

An engine purred in the distance. She edged off the road and staggered to her feet. An old white bus clanked past with a gaggle of passengers.

Unaka hobbled between evenly spaced kola nut trees. She fired at him and hit a trunk. Her aim was better.

“Where is my lipstick?” she shouted. “Don’t waste my time.”

Moving through the trees and firing, she steered him away from the road, away from motorists. She was literarily doing the very thing Sister Confidence told her never to do: chase a boy. And she would chase him until she ran out of bullets.

Sister Confidence sits with her knee bent, a foot on the seat. “You need to learn how to use boys, OBG. That’s a girl’s power.” She leans forward, hugs her knee, and applies red nail polish to a toenail. “Make him think he is your oga whereas, it’s the other way around.”

The acetate smell of nail polish fills the room.

Obiageli is lying on her side on the tiled floor. “How, Sister?”

“By looking good and sending blood to their thingy. If they say come, you go. Don’t worry. They will do the spending.”

Obiageli laughs.

Sister Confidence strokes her pinky toe with the nail brush. “We have been using them since the beginning of creation, but they don’t know that.”

“Sister, ah-ah. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“Why not? Didn’t Eve use Adam? Who picked the fruit from the tree? We allow them to be family heads because we want to live in families that include husbands for us and fathers for our children.”

“Correct.” Obiageli grins.

“They are the cheap, rugged, heavy-duty but simple machines. We are the expensive, delicate, complex machines that handle the kind of work that requires finesse,” She covers the vial of nail polish with the nail brush’s brush cap and lowers her leg. “What can the human body do that is more complex than carrying a child to term? We are higher in grade. Still, we need each other. Unfortunately, it takes finesse to live together in peace, so we submit. Or appear to submit. I prefer to call it committing to our dreams. But when those dreams turn to illusions, it is then that they will know who the real boss is. They don’t operate like us because finesse is not their thing.”

Sister Confidence had introduced Brother Sylvanus to her. She said he was a guide who took migrants to Europe. And even said she had paid for her travel.

“Where is my lipstick?” Obiageli screamed at Unaka. “When I tell you to do something, you do it!”

END

charles
Charles Opara

Charles is an IT programmer, short story writer and speculative fiction novelist who enjoys the flow involved in creating both programs and stories. In 2015, his horror short “It Happened” was shortlisted for the Awele Creative Trust Prize and in 2017, another story ‘Baby-girl’ was long-listed for the Quramo National Prize in his country. His short stories have been published in magazines such as Flash Fiction Press, Zoetic Press, and Ambit Magazine. His collection of short stories, How Hamisu Survived Bad Kidneys and a Bad Son-in-law, is published by Fomite Press.

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