It was twenty-sixteen or was it twenty-fifteen? She wasn't sure anymore, but when she thought about it these days, it did not really matter which year it was, aside that it was Christmas, for sure. You know how some specific details you'd think would stick to your mind forever disappear when you most need the memory of it … like a first kiss. Let me tell you about a first kiss. No one forgets their first kiss. You'd always remember who you had it with, where and when you had it; the minute details of the way the other's tongue travelled in your mouth or if it did not enter your mouth at all; if the lips were parted, and if there was too much saliva or not, like licking ice cream from a cup (such details most people never forget). But for her, she could not remember when she had her first kiss, who she had her first kiss with, and if she ended up sleeping with him.
Not that this detail of the first kiss really did matter, but there were other things she could not remember. So, that Christmas of twenty-fifteen or twenty-sixteen, she had gone to Hamas on Ahmadu Bello Way in the city of her childhood to buy a new phone for herself. You see, Jos during Christmas is a beehive of activities, especially Ahmadu Bello Way. It is like New Orleans during Mardi Gras, only that one cannot compare Mardi Gras with Christmas in such a city as Jos where everyone is conservative or claims to be conservative – the latter being the birth of Christ and the former unthinkable in such a conservative city.
That day, she could recall, it was extraordinarily cold – the kind used to explain the graveyard and folks would say, “As cold as a graveyard”. Not that she'd been to any graveyard before, but such was the kind of thing she liked to keep away from her thoughts, especially now that she was thinking about him being dead and all. Cold breeze lifted men's jallabiyas as they hurried to stalls selling tea and kunu and burukutu – stalls selling burukutu, especially. It did not spare the women for they fought with the breeze over their hijabs while pricing tomatoes heaped on wheelbarrows and onions on spread-out mats and black tarpaulins.
The sky was gloomy as if it would rain, but she could not recall if it did rain. Somewhere close by, she'd heard the muezzin's call for the Dhuhr and saw small boys hurrying to God-knows-where as they kicked this and that away. She'd entered the phone shop and saw him.
A tall man with biceps like Hulk Hogan, she recalled thinking at the time. But she took those features in the way a woman who liked a man but was too sure of herself not to appear cheap would. She was sure he did not notice, but she might have been wrong – no one can really be sure about these things. His bulgy eyes were deep brown in colour. She noticed that his lips were dark, very dark like it was dyed – like her afro she'd dyed a few days earlier in Abuja before returning for Christmas.
The man was wearing a denim jacket, perhaps because of the cold, and it looked good on him. She told him she liked the jacket, straight away. He smiled and peeled it off.
"Wear it."
She hesitated because when she mentioned she liked the jacket, she had just walked into the shop, seen the man and, to cover her sudden unease, muttered that she liked his jacket. Then, she smiled the way she did when she was being mischievous, but the man did not smile back, so that made her unsure. She liked the lines on his forehead; they made him look as if he was constantly thinking of ways of saving the world from impending catastrophe and now, she wondered if he'd known of what was to be. Back then when she thought of the crease on his forehead, there was the urge to caress them. But they were fleeting thoughts.
The man smiled, showing teeth blackened by too much cigarette and who-knows-what-else. He moved to the counter and sat on a tall stool, repeating the words.
"Try it on. Come on."
So, she took the denim and looked it this way and that, like a cat would survey a rat caught straying in the house. She had the urge to sniff the armpit area but resisted it. But there was the masculine scent coming off it as she wore it. It fit but was tight as she was on the big side. When she was a teenager, she had a compulsive obsession to sniff peoples' armpits. If her father returned from work and hugged her, she sniffed him. She sniffed her mother's armpit when she returned from the market and every other visitor in their house who hugged her, exclaiming how long it had been since they saw her, asking what she ate that made her grow so big. She graduated to sniffing clothes in the laundry basket and to giving her lunch to her classmates in exchange for a chance to sniff their armpits. It ate her up like a disease until she stopped. It was not as if she outgrew it, but she stopped, as if a switch was suddenly turned off and she found the compulsive behaviour irritating. Now when she hugged people, she tried to not place her nostrils close to their armpit area. You would have to have experienced such a thing as having the compulsive tendency to sniff peoples' armpits for a long time or some behaviour of that nature, to understand the irritation she developed for it, afterwards.
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