My friend and I are hanging out at Rockefellers, a popular cosy bar in Abakaliki. A half-outdoor-half-indoor bar. There’s no wall separating the inside from the outside as they sort of merge into one another the way traffic flows into a main road from a side street, if you get what I mean. From where you sit, you can watch the kitchen area where young men and women busy themselves preparing barbecued chicken and grilled fish or meat and fried chips, while you sip a beer or a glass of Johny Walker or a Jameson Black Barrel.
The good side of this kind of bar is that, during the hot seasons, people sit out in the afternoon, and in the evening, when it gets cold, they go in. On busy nights, they play jazz and rock music and the bar is filled to the brim, and everyone is just happy to sit where they can find space and a table.
So, this evening while we sip our Jameson Black, we watch some girls dressed in skimpy gowns as they perch on tall stools, drinking from tall cocktail tumblers and singing to a series of karaoke songs, for it is a Saturday, and every Saturday night up until nine o’clock is a Karaoke Night. When the Jameson begins to do its slow work on us – like every triple-distilled Irish Whisky is wont to – I tell this friend of mine about my experience with a sex worker in Asaba.
In 2021, between May and November, I lived mostly in a cosy upstate hotel in the centre of Asaba. It was a good year, a busy year. I had a contract to build one of those beautiful duplexes you see in such cities as Abuja or Los Angeles. Most people do not know that I am a civil engineer because of my books, so when a book club in Asaba learned from Nnamdi Anyadu, the writer, that I was now mostly in their city, they were surprised. It was a year after the release of Colours of Hatred, my second novel, and it had just won the Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature. This club ordered copies for their members. I recall that we met in some small hotel to read and discuss the book, after which I drove back to mine.
It was late in the evening, around seven or eight o’clock on a Sunday in Asaba. Sunday nights were usually busy days for this hotel. In fact, from Fridays, guests took up rooms for events such as weddings. Mostly these guests were young people who slept away from home to be able to club and enjoy themselves. On my return from the book reading, I stopped at the expansive lounge of my hotel to sit a while before going up to my room, when I noticed this lady sitting on the sofa facing mine.
At first glance, she was an ordinary lady, in an ordinary-looking dress, on an ordinarily busy Sunday in Asaba. The lounge was busy as the automated doors kept swinging open every minute or less. I opened a copy of Colours of Hatred, which I had with me and flipped the pages, looking for a chapter to read and engage the time with. I am not the kind of writer who loves to read their own published work. After the tiresome uncountable rewrites that precede book publishing, I usually find that when the book is out, I lose interest in reading it. And seated in this comfy sofa of the expansive lounge in Asaba, I found that any attempt at reading the book was a waste of time. So, just when I dropped it by the coffee table beside the sofa and looked up, I noticed this lady observing me with keen interest.
She was tall, very tall. Her left leg was crossed on top the right, exposing smooth, lush legs, waxed and shiny, for it was oiled. But I had no way of knowing just yet. Seeing that I had caught her looking at me, she looked away, giving me enough time to study her. She was a beautiful woman, with a kind of beauty that grows on you. That is, the more you studied her, the more you realised how beautiful she was. She was fair, but it was difficult to tell if she was naturally fair or had acquired this complexion, as has been trendy these days. It was the time when Nigerian women were going crazy for fair skin and, more so, fake boobs and butts –hyped by such platforms as Instagram and TikTok. I saw she wore no brassieres. Do not ask how I knew this; it is the kind of thing I notice easily.
She wore a tiny chain on her neck with a small pendulum-like pendant, which accentuated her chest area and attracted attention there. She had on some leg chains. There were three of them, or it could be one but wound into three. They made her feet dazzle. I wondered if she wore a waist chain, too. In all, she was a beautiful woman, classy, if I should use that word. Our eyes met again and locked, this time.
She did not smile at me, and I did not smile at her. Why would I? I did not know who she was or what she was doing there. She could be waiting for a lodger to come down, or be a lodger herself who came for a wedding and was staying in the hotel. She could be anybody, even another man’s wife.
I took up the novel again and read a page or two; then, some young people came in, talking loudly. At this point, I picked up my key from the receptionist. Without looking at her, I could feel her gaze follow me till I passed by her seat and went to the stairs. By the time I got to the second floor, the elevator doors clinked open, and she emerged from it, which startled and surprised me.
Now, she smiled and said, “Good evening, sir.”
“Hello,” I said, for it is better to respond to a “good evening” with a “hello” when you are not really interested in a conversation, for a “hello” sounds emphatic and straightforward. Perhaps because of the way I responded, she did not say anything else; perhaps she would have said something if I had hesitated. But I had turned and hurried off to the end of the hall where my room was.
In my room, I showered and changed. I poured myself a glass of Jameson and chewed some groundnuts while sprawling on the expansive hotel bed. John Wick played on DSTV until around ten in the night just as I poured myself a second glass of Jameson before calling my wife. Around past ten, while chapter two of John Wick was starting, I dozed off.
While I slept, I had a dream. There were light but hesitant knocks on my door. The knock kept coming, and as much as I willed that it stopped, it persisted. Then, someone called my name, and I woke up. And true, there was a knock on my door. Tap. Tap-tap. Tap. Tap-tap … like a cat tapping at a door, asking to be let in. It was two in the morning. The television was turned off. I couldn’t remember at what point I did that. I rose from my bed and, without thinking or asking who was there, opened the door. My room was pitch dark, but outside, the large corridor was well lit. I could see clearly the person who stood there, and it surprised me to no end.
It was the girl of the night earlier, still dressed exactly the same way – in flat striped slippers, leg chain and – possibly waist beads or chain – skimpy, fanciful short gown, and a chain with a pendulum pendant on her neck. She looked as elegant as ever, perhaps more so, because I was now seeing her in a different light. She stood a bit back, a hand on her waist, the other fingering her phone, waiting, watching, a hint of a smile on her lips. She had intention, I could see.
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