“Hey, didn’t you call a cab? How are we supposed to get there?”
“You see, miss, I just felt like identifying with regular city people today.”
“You should have told me earlier. My flatmate is a make-up artist, now all this effort on my face will waste with the sun.”
“Trust me, it will be fun,” I said.
The disappointment in her tone was so evident, palpable even, but I couldn’t be bothered now. Femi, the guy in whose two-bedroom flat I lived at Ajah (I was yet to save enough to rent my own apartment) had headed to the mainland with the 2009 Toyota Camry I had planned to impress this girl with, and my Taxify account was devoid of any credit. In any case, I had no long-term plans with Lara; we were simply going to hang out, maybe see a movie, (hopefully) come back to “my” place, and that would be it. A one-off.
I had met Lara one day on a bus heading home from CMS. I was “between jobs”, and I had done a bit of knocking at several large offices on Lagos Island, handing in physical copies of my résumé while hoping that the front desk officers would not dump my credentials beneath the rest of their office files, or worse still, gift them as wrapping paper to some nearby suya seller. Six months without a job was nothing to giggle about, and, frustrated with the indifference of HR personnel to my mails, I had decided to be extra.
I had noticed her curves as she climbed into the bus and took position two rows in front of me. The black blouse revealed some cleavage, the navy blue skirt accentuated her hips, and the jet black braids amidst her light brown skin threw me into a state of “kuku kee me”. I waited for the directive for all passengers to alight before I approached her, and when she asked what I did for a living, I quickly blurted out the words “I work at an advertising agency on Broad Street”.
We exchanged contacts, but she kept giving monosyllabic responses to my WhatsApp messages, until one day, weeks later when I got a “hey you, how’ve you been?” from her. I think it must have been the day I updated my WhatsApp story with a photo of me posing in Femi’s car.
“About the Toyota, it’s been giving me issues, so I took it to the mechanic”, I said in a low voice as the bus we boarded a few minutes earlier whizzed past Chevron Drive, in a bid to nip any questions concerning the car in the bud.
“Today is Sunday. Should we go to Silverbird?”
“No Lara, let’s try The Palms. We have a wider range of options there.”
We arrived at The Palms a few minutes later, Lara’s makeup already showing signs of imminent melting. We walked past KFC and took a seat at the customers’ section of Coldstone Creamery. I had not deemed it fit to display any kind of chivalry, but if Lara noticed this, she did not show it, staring thoughtfully instead at the different flavours of ice cream on the menu.
“I love the Oreo when it’s broken inside, really nice”.
I saw her eyes brighten up as she grabbed her order, only stopping short of immediately scooping a spoonful. I slowly picked my cup of plain Vanilla and placed it on my end of the small round table.
“How much would that be?”
“It would cost you five thousand naira for both cups, sir”.
I had estimated the cumulative cost to be three thousand six hundred naira, and I wanted to find out how the attendant arrived at that aggregate sum, but I looked at Lara, took a deep breath and whipped out my ATM card. The attendant slotted it into the POS machine, had me type in my pin, and looked at me as the machine displayed a “Transaction Declined” message.
“Maybe it’s network, try again.”
The ice cream was frosty enough, but the heat I had begun to feel was bordering on the unbearable. I handed the card over again, and it was returned with the same result. By now, Lara was almost done with what was in her cup. I quickly sent a text message to Femi, reminding him of the six thousand naira he had promised to lend me by way of a transfer, and he replied that he had forgotten to send it.
I presently had just two thousand naira in my account. Tope Alabi’s hit track “Aiye le o, Ibosi o” began to play in my head.
In a low voice, I told Lara that my card was having network problems, to which she replied, “and I left my four ATM cards at home!” I began to look around, trying to see where Coldstone staff kept their mops, brooms, and aprons, just in case I would have to work a few hours to recoup the sum before I saw Lara dig her nails into her handbag. She brought out a few rumpled five-hundred-naira notes and handed them over to the cashier amidst a largely visible frown. “Vex money” had saved the day.
“Lara, erm, thanks, you see, the way my savings account is set up, sometimes the network…”
“It’s fine, just have enough cash in hand next time”, she cut me short, smiling wryly.
The rest of the conversation was awkward from there. I could not even broach the subject of taking her home, let alone asking her out. The lame questions matched the forced replies, and the three-hour hangout I had mapped out in my head ended in seventy minutes.
“It was nice hanging out with you, L.”
“Ok.”
I was lucky to have enough money to board a bus back to Ajah and save for the conductor’s expletives, it was a pretty quiet journey.
“Guy, is this how you behave?”
“What?”
“Not even money for Keke Marwa?”
We walked to a nearby automated teller machine, where I withdrew the sum of a thousand naira and handed it to her. As she quickly snatched the two Azikiwe notes with her left hand and squeezed them into her purse, I figured that it would be futile trying to guilt-trip her with questions like “how will I survive this week?” The Lara that stood beside me at that moment couldn’t possibly be expected to care.
I looked at her face once more; the make-up had significantly worn off, and the tribal marks were beginning to show. The goodbyes were mutually mirthless, and as she crossed the road, I knew I would not be seeing her ever again.
