Smile, Jesus loves you

Good Morning All,

This is a brand new piece of fiction from yours truly, inspired by the good people of Zenith Bank Plc. I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

— O.O

He had to smile. He couldn’t stop smiling. The smile he plastered on his face. The same smile he had been holding up was all he had left. He clutched the Western Union teller in his left hand.

The 70 pounds sterling he had scribbled in the space marked ‘amount expected’ meant a whole lot more to him that it would mean to either you or I. If you converted that amount to naira using the exchange rate of 1 – 240.58 like the teller at the western union office in Croydon, less the 2.10 pounds they charged for the wireless transfer it would come to Sixteen thousand Three Hundred and Eight Naira, Twenty two kobo. Three Hundred and Eight Naira, Twenty Two kobo more than he needed to give the doctor to save his daughter’s life.

She was 16, his daughter, a growing child, forced by his failures, not as a father but as a business man to live in an area that had more drug dealers per square metre than policemen but in Lagos, that could be anywhere. She had told him more than once that the bad boys on the street kept toasting her but she just ignored them. He had commended her courage, encouraged her to keep mute whenever they spoke to her, not to dignify their catcalls with acknowledgment, four nights ago, they had gotten tired of being ignored so they stopped asking and forced her. 6 bad boys had cornered her a little way from home and while people hurried past a few feet away, they defiled her in turns, when they were done, they shoved a bottle up the path they had just created and left. She dragged herself home by her forearms, the people who passed her on the street some of whom had only weeks before lauded her carriage and grace, ignored her plight, the more kindhearted ones bending momentarily to stuff naira notes in her palms.

She should have spoken but she couldn’t, there were no tears even and as soon as she got to her compound she prompty fell unconscious, oblivious to her discovery only moments later by the resident busy body who had taken it upon herself to abandon the goat meat peppersoup she was preparing to chase away the beggar who had probably been attracted by the aroma of her husband’s dinner.

He had rushed out to screams of ‘Papa Nnenna’. Out of the solitude that came with clinical depression, out of the dim interior of the the shabby one room he shared with his wife and daughter. Out of the memories of a time when his home had more rooms than occupants.

At the hospital, the doctor had said she was bleeding internally, it was a vicious attack, reprehensible. Man had fallen so far. The perpetrators were animals. Wickedness of the highest order. He needed to operate, to sew up her injuries, it would cost Sixteen thousand naira only and they needed it soon. Till then all they could do was give her painkillers.

He begged and pleaded, forgetting the pride he once had when he was the one people begged and pleaded with, when he raised people up and tore them down, till life tore him down. In weeks he had lost all his property, sold his home and now, when barely a year ago he could have made sixteen million materialize in minutes, he was begging an infantile doctor to give him time to find sixteen thousand.

The doctor refused. He expressed his pity, said he wished humanity hadn’t fallen so far that young men could do such a thing. Said Nigeria needed God to intervene but he didn’t agree to do the surgery on credit.

He was smiling as he went from door to door, to friends and family, begging for money he had freely given to them, to their children in the past and they would all avert their eyes and tell him of their problems, how they wanted to help but they would need a few days. A week. If only they had more notice. They passed him around, one sob story after the other till he called Obinna.

He had trained Obinna, sent him to England to study and Obinna had promptly forgotten to keep in touch and so he had gone to the UK to find his brother. When he first saw Obinna, the young man had his head between a hooker’s thighs, his greeting was a slap, after he left he refused to fund Obinna’s education, he did not send the younger man the allowance that had hitherto funded his education and his taste for storebought intercourse and even though everybody pleaded with him, he didn’t shift ground. He wasn’t smiling then.

Obinna had eventually learnt to be responsible, he had to, to survive. He had sent messages of his progress at first but his older brother ignored them, eventually the messages dried up. As he dialled the number, he prayed Obinna still used the same phone, it had been over a year since the last message.

Obinna answered on the third ring. He told him what had happened. The younger man rushed out and sent the money by Western Union. Now he was in the bank, waiting for his Sixteen thousand Three hundred and Eight Naira Twenty two kobo to save his daughter’s life.

He was smiling. He smiled as they passed him from desk to desk, traded banter, left him to attend to ‘more important’ customers, occassionally someone passing would stop and offer him a perfunctory apology. He kept smiling. The officer who finally attended to him led him to the manager’s office which had been empty all morning and to the manager who had been fiddling with his phone and only then did the manager attend to him. At intervals, while waiting from a response, he would pick up his phone and laugh at the latest message from the person at the other end of his private information highway.

2 hours 15 minutes and 23 seconds after stepping into the bank, he emerged clutching the funds that meant more than life itself, he rushed back to the hospital, ignoring the scorching sun, the life around him, he was all purpose, all he could do was get to the hospital, and smile. He didn’t stop smiling.

In the doctor’s office the young man behind the desk called it a tragedy, a truly said affair, she had given up the ghost only one hour before, the internal bleeding was too bad, she lost a lot of blood. Nnenna was a pure soul who had been killed before her time by a group of young men with morbid sexual fantasies. She died too young but God knows best. As the deceased’s father stood there, tears rolling down his face, the resilient smile gone, the doctor stood and stretched a hand, “Smile Sir, Jesus loves you”.

He smiled. When the glass paperweight cracked the doctor’s skull, he had not even realized that he had picked it up. The doctor hit his desk, as dead as the young woman whose last words, spoken to 6 irate youth well past sanity, had been “Please, I beg you, don’t do this to me.”

Her father left the doctor’s office, walking out of the hospital as the nurses raced in the opposite direction. At the bank, he smiled at the guard, at customer service, at the teller who recognized him from earlier in the day when he requested to see the manager, they let him pass without objection. The manager was still caught up in his conversation when the paperweight caught him on the jaw. He did not die immediately, but he could not speak and because he could not speak, he could not scream. He fell to the ground, terror in his eyes scanning his office for anything to save him, nothing could have, even if he had remembered the panic button attached to the underside of his desk.

The first scream came as he left the compound. The guards manning the gate ran the other way, forgetting their panic to secure the premises. Nobody remembered the panic button till the police had arrived 2 hours later.

When they found his body, Baba Nnenna was sitting, the glass paperweight in one hand, a picture of Nnenna in the other, a half empty glass of battery acid on the floor beside him. He was in his room, his fortress of solitude, with his memories of a time when he could have saved his daughter’s life and the thoughts that this latest failure to provide meant he did not deserve to live. His head was tilted back so it looked like he was asleep, Sixteen thousand Three Hundred Naira was balled up on the floor beside him, he was still smiling.