This book is a work of fiction. Characters, names, and events as well as all places, incidents, organizations, and dialog in this novel are either the products of the writer’s imagination or are used fictitiously – not portrayed with geographical and historical accuracy.
THE PLACE BEYOND HER DREAMS. Copyright © 2021 Oby Aligwekwe.
Published in 2021 by Éclat Books Ca. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-7751064-4-9 (Paperback)
ISBN: 978-1-7751064-5-6 (E-book)
ISBN: 978-1-7751064-6-3 (Hardcover)
Cover design by Stefanie Saw
Author photo by Mina Dacosta
Visit: www.obyaligwekwe.com
“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”
-Mark Twain-
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Acknowledgments
About The Author
Also by
Also by
Chapter One
I HAD JUST turned ten the day Okem came to live with us. Everything was positioned as it had been every Saturday since I moved in with my grandparents. My grandmother was in the study tinkering with her sewing machine, I was at her feet hemming a sleeve, and my grandfather was entertaining visitors in the sitting room.
Startled by a burst of laughter from my grandfather, I dashed to the sitting room, which was separated by a narrow hallway from the study. His body vibrated. He slapped his knees with such intensity he’d failed to see me standing next to him. Turning to look in my direction after he noticed his visitors—a man and a woman—staring at me, he hurriedly beckoned to me.
That gesture—my grandfather ushering me into his magnificent presence and allowing me to sit on the softly cushioned chair next to his—used to be the highlight of my days. I moved forward to settle beside him, and right before my back hit the chair, I discovered the source of his amusement. The boy. A mere boy, standing in the corner, holding a straw fan.
“Repeat,” my grandfather said, pointing and waving his index finger at the boy.
The scraggly boy performed a contorted dance, twisting his body and strumming his fingers against the fan, pretending it was a guitar.
“Wasn’t that funny?” my grandfather asked, chuckling and looking down at me.
“It’s funny, Papa,” I agreed, trying to suppress a giggle.
“Have you greeted our guests?” my grandfather’s voice boomed in my ears—a reminder to comport myself accordingly.
“Good evening, Sir. Good evening, Ma’am,” I said, bowing my head slightly.
“Good evening, little one,” the woman responded.
I placed both hands on the chair, crossed my legs, and scrutinized the couple. The woman, with her oval face and full pouty lips, seemed well-mannered, though she spoke strangely. I recalled where I’d heard the dialect and cringed. She was from Ide, a town embroiled in boundary clashes with Ntebe, my picturesque hillside town. It was then I realized my grandfather had not been settling a domestic dispute, which made the strangers a little more interesting to me. He also couldn’t have been addressing a boundary issue with Ide, as I was never allowed near him when the chiefs met to discuss boundaries. He always said it was strictly for adults.
The man sitting next to the woman—Ozumba, they called him—appeared jittery, constantly scratching his balding head. He avoided looking at me, but I couldn’t fathom why. Perhaps he wanted me to leave. He tugged at the sleeves of his matching embroidered brocade outfit, which seemed a little too tight on him.
* * *
As my mind went around in circles pondering the purpose of their visit, as I’d become accustomed to, I caught a glimpse of the future—a small flash of Okem’s face staring intently at me. Before I could make any sense of what I’d seen, and figure out if it was good, bad, or completely inconsequential, my grandfather called me back to earth. Okem had taken the seat next to the couple and proceeded to watch me. I followed his gaze and noticed he’d been admiring the sparkly red shoes my grandfather got me the last time he visited London. “Dorothy’s shoes,” Papa had called them. They reminded him of the ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.
“Hello,” I said, grinning and waving my hand slowly when Okem looked up and gave me a faint smile.
“Hi,” he responded, leaning uncomfortably into his seat and locking his ankles.
One look at his clothes told me he was of a lower status. His intonation didn’t help matters. Before I got the chance to complete my assessment, my grandfather announced, “It’s concluded. Okem will stay with us. We’ll take care of him like our own. There’s no need to worry. He’ll go to school with all the other kids in the town, and in the future, he may even become a doctor and make you proud.”
Hearing my grandfather tell total strangers that their son would come to our house and distort the dynamics I’d only just become accustomed to, created the tightest feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember wondering why my grandfather had not forewarned me.
Right then, I heard my grandmother calling.
“Ona...Ona.”
I excused myself and left the room. After a few steps, the image I’d seen earlier came back to me.
“Grandma,” I called, taking a second to stare at her delicately aging face. I admired the way the wrinkles formed a crescent around her mouth.
“Yes?” she answered, raising her brows.
“Do you approve of that little boy coming to live with us?”
“Of course I do,” she responded with a slight chuckle. “Your grandfather and I discussed this some days ago. I didn’t think you’d mind. We thought you’d be happy to have someone to play with after school. Consider him a gift from us, and you’ll feel better about the whole situation. And he’s not a little boy. Okem is at least two years older than you.”
“What?” I shrieked, mostly because she considered him a gift when in my mind, he was coming to steal their affection away from me.
“These people were kind enough to bring their boy to help around the house. In return, we’ll make sure he’s taken care of. He’ll have a roof over his head, good food, and proper education. You’ll be nice to him, won’t you?”
“I’ll try,” I said with a humble sigh.
“Promise?”
Holding up my right hand, I agreed, not knowing what I was signing myself up for.
* * *
It didn’t take long for Okem to adapt to our household. Every day, we walked to school together and played games after we came home. In the first couple of months, other kids whispered and made fun of his gaunt looks. My girlfriends joined in the bullying also. Okem hardly cared until one of the kids called him a “glorified house-boy.” He fought the unfortunate child and ended up getting both of them bruised and disciplined in the process. I remember clearly when things
slowly began to turn around. Amah, my best friend at the time, had come for a visit. Pointing at Okem’s shoes, she’d said, “Is that from the second-hand store?” in the most condescending tone I’d ever heard.
My heart had skipped a beat. I wished Amah hadn’t spoken, but she never let anything slide.
Before I could ask Okem to ignore her comment and focus on the dark clouds building up on the horizon, threatening heavy rain, he turned to Amah and responded calmly. “Were you speaking to me?”
Amah hissed, trembling slightly and looking over her shoulder.
That incident had forced me to start seeing Okem in a different light. He carried himself with a certain amount of pride and confidence that was odd for someone his age. Soon, the other kids noticed and began to accord him some respect.
* * *
I first moved in with my grandparents over a decade ago. My mother worked for a secret international government mission, and my father was the personal assistant to one of the top officials in the military. My parents traveled all the time, sometimes, for weeks on end. Living with them had been a security nightmare, or so my mother claimed. They were often targets for people who wanted access to the important officials they worked for. Growing up as an only child, since my parent’s jobs didn’t allow them to be in the same location most of the time, my grandfather convinced them to bring me to live with him and my grandmother.
My grandfather, or ‘Papa’ as I liked to call him, was a titled man—a chief. His usual attire, a red cap with three feathers stuck on one side, distinguished him from others. Men and women came into his presence daily to resolve all kinds of disputes, mostly domestic ones. I had always loved visiting my grandparents in their gorgeous country mansion in Ntebe. High ceilings, marble floors, polished stone pedestals bearing images of historical figures, and an orchard filled with mango trees and many varieties of oranges. What was there not to love? I couldn’t remember a Christmas holiday I didn’t spend with them, but when my mother told me I would leave my school and my friends—the ones I had played with for so many years—because I needed to move in with my grandparents, I sobbed for days. It didn’t help that they had given me the news only two days before they shipped me off. A week before I traveled to my grandparents, I had woken up crying after one of those dreams that ended up being an account of a future I was soon to experience.
In my dream, I was an unaccompanied minor on board a Nigeria Airways flight. The pilot and the air hostesses had treated me nicely, making sure I had extra treats on the plane after they saw my swollen eyes—the aftermath of non-stop crying. My shipment to Ntebe had happened in the same way.
My grandparents, having heard about my misery, were distraught upon my arrival. I could hear my grandfather’s heart shatter when he saw the pain in my eyes.
“Ogini Ona? What are you crying about?” he had asked.
I remember looking at him with tear-filled eyes. He had knelt before me, all six-foot-six of him, and covered my hand with his before raising my chin and staring at me with the kindest, most revealing eyes I’d ever seen—a moment I clearly remembered from my dream. At the time, I had thought his eyes were blue, but I later noticed the screen on the window that gave their brown shade a sapphire hue. He had winked at me as though he’d once shared that moment with me in another reality.
From that day onwards, my grandparents treated me like a princess. They gave me double my usual allowance and exempted me from chores, but only for one week as my grandmother didn’t want me to be completely spoiled. Before long, I made friends at my new school and settled into a new existence. This new existence included Ifedi, my nanny, who my grandparents brought to live with us soon after I moved in. I liked Ifedi the moment I met her. She was older than me by at least ten years, but she was child-like. She braided my puffy hair in a new style every week, massaged my feet until I fell asleep, and ate my leftovers so my grandmother wouldn’t scold me for wasting food. I liked her mostly because of the folktales she told me every night. I always assumed she concocted them to impress me, but I loved them anyway. Unlike the strict nanny I had when I lived with my parents, Ifedi brought so much excitement into my life.
My gift, or should I say my strange ability, to now and again catch glimpses of the future, was a welcome retreat at times. At other times, it presented an excruciating burden, so much so that I fought to force my brain to shut down to forget what I’d seen. Since my first experience at the age of seven, the uncertainty always caused me to stay on the edge in the other dimension and never really go inside to explore all it had to offer. It didn’t matter if the revelations came through dreams, visions, or astral projection; I often faced the dilemma of trying to decide what predictions to share. Not everything I’d ever seen occurred, but many day-to-day occurrences ended up feeling like a déjà vu. My grandfather often caught me with that faraway look in my eyes. Intuition. That was his term for my gift. Several years later and uncountable trips into that realm, I now know just how far off his description was.
* * *
The love I had for my grandfather grew over the months, and soon he could not do certain things without me. He would not eat his nightly meal if I wasn’t by his side. Dinner was his favorite time for dishing out words of wisdom. He would ask Okem to bring an extra plate on which he would place pieces of fish and meat for me to munch on while I watched him eat. At intervals, he would look up from his plate and smile as I wiggled in my seat, giggling and telling stories about my day, stories that Ifedi had told me, or the things that had happened in school. My tales always amused him. One time, he almost choked as he laughed, and my grandmother came in with a horrible scowl on her face and demanded that I go to bed.
My grandfather had swiftly recovered when he heard her command.
“Leave her alone woman,” he’d said, lifting the cup of palm wine in front of him and taking a gulp.
“She has school tomorrow. Look how late it is,” my grandmother had countered.
“A few more minutes won’t push her to the bottom of the class. Will it, Ona?” he’d asked, gently placing the cup on the table and looking at me for confirmation.
My grandfather was suave. I remember thinking that when I grew up, I would marry a man like him. Once, I had told him that. That must have been the happiest I’d ever seen him.
Chapter Two
ONE MONTH AFTER my eleventh birthday, the desiccating north-east harmattan winds blew a flurry of red dust and some dirt as I walked into my grandfather’s compound. I sprinted in the opposite direction as I feared the tornado would carry me away to some unknown land where I could never see my grandparents again. It subsided as quickly as it had started, but it left behind particles of dust and dirt, making it hard for me to see. I managed to observe the blockage caused by cars parked haphazardly on the road facing the compound and extending into our driveway. It then made sense why my school bus driver had asked me to alight a block from my home. I was not happy about the fact that I had to walk. The dust had turned my white stockings a reddish-brown, which meant I wouldn’t receive my usual compliments from my grandfather, who often marveled at how my clothes always remained so clean even after a full day at school. Every day, I removed my stockings during the break period and put them back on after I had played with my friends—that’s how important their cleanliness, and my grandfather’s praise, was to me.
I got closer to the gate and discovered there were more important things to contend with than my stockings. A throng of visitors was inside the compound, some seated on benches, others leaning on their cars, and several more whispering in little circles. No one had noticed when I walked in. I felt invisible and remained so as I crept by the men and women that blocked the entrance to the staircase and every single stair, all the way to the landing.
I pushed and shoved countless times until I finally made it past the hallway that led to my grandmother’s private parlor. Stopping for a moment to catch my breath, I started to hear crying; something had gone seriously wrong
. Not crying from just one or two people, but enough people to create an orchestra of moaning and wailing that grew louder as I drew closer. I placed my forehead against the frosted glass partition that separated the room from the hallway and noticed a swarm of people looking down. The door refused to give when I turned the knob, so I banged as hard as I could before someone hurriedly opened it.
“Oh, dear. Look who it is,” one of the visitors said.
The moaning suddenly stopped as everyone, except for my grandmother, turned to look in my direction. She kept her head down.
I was now certain something terrible had happened. My grandmother, my usually composed and immovable Grandma was sitting on her couch, flanked by two women, their hands interlocked as though the whole order of the universe would be disrupted if they let go of one another. Her chest heaved wildly as she took in air in large gasps. Someone whispered something into her ear, causing her head to shoot up. I recoiled in horror when I saw her eyes, startled by the stark red taking over the whites, as red as the harmattan dust I had just left behind. She squinted to look at me and then let out a loud wail as she rested both hands on her head. I ran to her side, and she wrapped her hands so tightly around me, I thought I would suffocate.
“We’re done for,” she sobbed, shaking her head wildly and staring at the ceiling.
“But—”
Before I could form a sentence, the woman on her left tugged at my hand while the one on her right protested and pushed my shoulders, forcing me to sit beside my grandmother.
“Let her be,” the second woman ordered. “Where’re you dragging her to?”
“But we can’t tell her now. It’s too fresh,” the other one countered.
“When do you want to tell her then? The moment she steps out of here, someone else will tell her. She's not a little child anymore. We have to tell her now.”
They went back and forth a few more times, acting as though I was invisible or even worse, stupid. I already knew something terrible had happened. Amidst the chaos, all I was thinking was that I could bear almost anything as long as it had nothing to do with my grandfather.
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