Nights of the Creaking Bed by Toni Kan

Author:Toni Kan [Toni Kan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781911115854
Publisher: CASSAVA REPUBLIC PRESS
Published: 2019-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

There was a riot. The college was shut down just two weeks before our final exams were due to start. The strike was one month old when I realised that I had not seen my period. I told Goddie and he was so ecstatic he swept me off my feet and danced around my small room.

‘You will give me sons,’ he said, dancing around me. ‘Look at your hips. These are son-bearing hips.’

‘Goddie, I said I haven’t seen my period. I didn’t say I was pregnant,’ I told him, but he laughed.

‘What do you know? Tomorrow, we shall go for a test, but I already know the result: positive. I can tell a pregnant woman from a mile away.’

The test was positive. I was eight weeks pregnant and, to celebrate, Goddie took me to a Chinese restaurant on Victoria Island and then, for the first time, he spent the night in my house.

‘Now that I’m pregnant, you have to see my uncle,’ I told him. ‘Please,’ I said, nuzzling his neck.

‘Okay, okay. Just give me time. Let me talk to my people who will go with me. You have to choose the right time to break this kind of news.’

I gave him time, reminding him once in a while and not really pressing it because I did not want him to get angry. Then, one Saturday in my fourth month, he came and said his people would come to see my uncle in two weeks’ time. ‘But we’ll go and see the doctor first,’ he said.

The doctor was a tall, dark man who wore very thick spectacles. He told me to lie on a bed in his office and, while Goddie looked on, he examined me. Then he rubbed this gel on my stomach and placed something cold and plastic on my tummy.

‘Look at that screen. See, that’s your baby. That’s the heart. See how it’s beating. And it’s four months old,’ he said pointing to two dots on the screen.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’ Goddie, who’d been looking on in silence, asked.

‘Hmmm…. You know, it’s never exactly accurate, but let’s see.’ He rolled the stuff over my stomach, then looked up and said: ‘I think it’s a girl.’

‘Wao!’ Goddie laughed. ‘Let me get my wallet from the car,’ he said as he rose from his seat.

I lay on that table for close to ten minutes, my top bunched up beneath my breasts. But Goddie did not come back. The doctor asked me to get up.

‘You can wait outside. I have other patients waiting,’ he said.

‘But we haven’t paid,’ I said, setting my foot gently on the floor.

‘It’s okay,’ he told me and it was the pity in his eyes that set off alarm bells in my head.

I picked up my handbag, slipped my fat feet into my slippers and turned the knob. Goddie wasn’t in the waiting room. Fighting to suppress the rising panic, I pushed the entrance door open and stumbled outside. Goddie’s car was not there.

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