Dad's Retirement

“If this one were your first child,” uncle Essien began that all-familiar but no less irritating joke. I don't know how my dad found it funny. Was it for friendship? Was it the beer? Or was it retirement?

I hurried off with the bowl stained on its inner walls with palm oil residues from the egusi soup, the water in it now foamy and dirtier, with a towel dangling from my wrist. I hurried off from that dry joke of marrying me off to better my dad's financial lot, shared between two 55 year olds who just finished a plate of soup I helped prepare. More so because this had become a reference joke around my home since my eldest brother went to get the “list” from his fiancée's family, and they included generator and commercial tricycle as bride price. “Imagine the nonsense! I married your mother for just thirteen kobo,” my dad groaned.

Dad seem to have changed a lot since he stopped going to work at the secretariat three months ago. Everything irritates him, and he laughs extremely on those rare occasions he finds humour in anything, as if to compensate for past negativities. The hours he spent on the phone seemed to reduce with his statue, and the burrowing lines on his face got bumpier with his mood. A few days earlier I had to pretend I was deeply asleep in a fetal wrap on the armchair of his study, as he cursed into his mobile phone. I guess it was the accountant at his former office as he was demanding for his first pension after three months. Dad would be embarrassed if he knew I heard it all, especially after that burst off with my mum that very morning.

As we returned from church with mum I sat there staring at the display screen inside the long, blue public bus. I wasn't sitting on my mum's leg because one uncle said I was really beautiful and bought a ticket for me, went on to engage my mum and other passengers about the just concluded elections as the long queue progressed slowly to boarding. He was friendly and sounded intelligent. “What I know is that, if God didn't have a plan, no leader would be enthroned.” That was all I could remember my mum saying as she defended the new government that many people didn't seem to like. It was always mum against the whole world. The typical devil advocate.

I sat there on this seat my looks earned me and watched the countless advertisements that reeled, partly wishing there should be traffic on the road so the ride will be longer... on my comfy seat; and wanting to have lunch right away. Occasionally my mind floundered between the tension at my home of recent, and my Social Studies exams the next day.

I recall an advert of a pension fund management company beginning to play. I remember these kids talking about what retirement is. Retirement was when their parents stopped werrking and could spend time taking them on vacations round the world. Retirement was when their grandparent invested in their educations abroad. Retirement was really cool! Like sunglasses cool, they all claimed. These kids made retirement sound like what my dad needed right now, and what my grandparents should have if they didn't all die before I was born. Well except, my dad just got retired and he is irritated with life.

These kids wore pretty clothes and spoke like my cousins at Corona when they stopped by our house last Christmas on their way to the village. I remember my dad saying afterwards that fees for Olivia and Daniel in a school year was his salary and allowance for two and a half years. “Sheer desirability,” dad called it.

The screen went dead. I caught myself right about to growl “NEPA!”, an exclamatory ode to the unstable power supply in my country. But it turned out the busman just killed the engine because we were stuck at one point due to traffic.

Just then I started to rehearse the story of the advert as I will tell it to Bunmi on Monday after our exams. It will be another chance to poke fun at Amina, our classmate who spoke ashubi-shubi-English because her elder sister is schooling abroad. I remember that term when Amina came back from school and said we were all "village girls" because she had gone to the airport and she claims to have made friends with a white woman. “You wouldn't even understand a single word that lady spoke. None of you would,” retorted Amina as she tried to sound posh to us. Her dad was a commissioner with the government in her state. Many believed they were mostly corrupt and put aside extortionate pensions for themselves.

I got home that evening contrasting the fantasy of retirement I saw in the bus with the reality of retirement in my home. My mum had to pay for much of the work going on at our family home currently being built, from her salary. The morning prayer time in my home seemed to grow longer every day with the frustration of my dad. The newspaper collection is piling up more rapidly. And I have to move more and more bottles of Guinness stout each time I go in to sweep the study.

I laid there in my bunk bed, my brother's guitar strumming from the other side of the wall, tunes I recognised to be Neil Diamond’s “I am… I said” -- a favourite he took off my dad. I am tempted to wish I were old enough to be married, so maybe dad will get a rich son-in-law. This time I didn't want a sewing machine for myself, I just wanted my dad to be happier. I wished he retired like a TV ad said he should. I heard my brother starting to play Sound Sultan’s “Area” with his guitar, this time singing along. My lids were giving in, but I hated the thought of dreaming about everything I feared I'll never have: a retirement where my dad could go on a vacation.

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