Birthday Drive
We turn off Admiralty Way, me, Mom, and Mr A, a taxi driver, in Mr A’s taxi, and start the drive back to the house to pick up my brother. It is a detour, actually, from our trip, Mom asking upon Mr A’s suggestion if we should bring him to Cactus minutes before, me agreeing because why not, and we left a closed-by-5 Eye Foundation where we had come perhaps a few minutes too late to do a test for new glasses, my birthday present.
As we turn the corner, my eyes from where I sit with Mom on the left-hand side at the back of the car glance at a building, and as I marvel that glance becomes a long stare until the building is out of sight unless I want to rouse myself further into an uncomfortable position. So Evercare Hospital has finally been built. While it was being built, it felt like years, I feel myself exaggerate. Perhaps months, to be realistic, I reason with myself after. Just cement in a large structure, the type of structure you use to play tic-tac-toe, or X and O, whichever rings a bell, but with more boxes. That’s how it had been, for eternity, it seemed. But finally built it had been. I have not gone out in a while. I have vocalized this to Mom a few minutes earlier as we turned round at the gate, and she agreed, saying it was good for me to, once in a while. The tall, white building seems very new to me, especially the parking lot easily spotted as we drive past it with several cars occupying it, and red ‘EMERGENCY’ lettering, perhaps over an entrance, that my eyes notice at the last second as the building shrinks away, out of detailed view, to the right of the rear window. In hindsight, on the way to Eye Foundation, or perhaps after reaching the house, for that is when I moved to the front, I had noticed the building, though not with the same magnitude of attention, I suppose. I remember looking more at the clouds through the wide view sitting in the front now offered, the massive billows and shape of them, the masterpiece it was, then to the buildings on the left side of the road, and thinking It’s a nice hospital. But I guess it’s how it runs that matters. A hospital with such good facilities — at least, from what I’d seen on the outside — that doesn’t work well would be such a waste.
We pick up my brother, and eventually, on Mom’s insistence, my sister as well — who both take such an amount of time to come out and into the car, and then stay in the car, that it causes Mom, and then me, to worry that we don’t have enough time — and we set out to Cactus. We run onto the Expressway, then into brief traffic Mr A tells Mom he didn’t expect.
We pass an uncompleted building, far away from the highway, of course, behind a fence, similar to the state I thought the Evercare Hospital would forever remain in: brownish, yet colourless in its bareness. On it is — a banner? It seems to be made of a fabric of some sort, and covers the entire front of the building, the expansive fabric tied to the building at the corners of the squares the structure makes, its somewhat transparent material revealing the squares without much trouble. On it was a Martell advertisement, for alcohol of some sort, maybe beer. I wondered how they made it cover the entire building, the effort involved, how they printed the words on it onto that fabric. As we slowly crept past it, my perspective of the ad widened, for I saw there was another one, not just that one, a slimmer one, on the side of the building too.
It is in this traffic I remember Mom behind me calling Grandpa on Mr A’s phone to talk to me. MTN has not been working for Mom all day and her phone has been rendered useless for calls — debilitating for a network, I think. “No number registered,” she had read from the result of an action she was trying to make off her phone at one point, and I saw a system notification faintly as I had peered over. I hear Mr A recall a friend of his who also uses MTN having the same problem, though I cannot remember if it also happened today and if Mr A could not reach him, or someone else, or vice versa. We are lucky Grandpa uses Airtel. I have the call with Grandpa, pressing the phone close to my ear, still having to call “Hello?” once or twice. I enjoy his birthday wishes, say “Amen” in the right places with genuine gratitude and happiness, am patient with his slowness in speech and frequent exclamations of “Hey!” The call ends abruptly when, unable to hear him for a second, I hear a female voice on the other end saying, “Please recharge your phone.” Mom has finished Mr A’s credit, and says so herself, for it is not the first call she’s made on it today, though Mr A takes no offence and we joke, when she offers to pay, about how “we work for Mr A in this Lagos.”
It is also in this traffic we happen to pause behind a small white Mercedes, the same size as the car in which we move now, one row to the left in front of us. “4MATIC,” I hear Mr A say, the way one says things they see or think rather absentmindedly, with a certain sound — a sing-song melody, for example, or, right now, a breathy, direct but slightly elongated, seemingly-focused tone — and a humorous conversation stems from it. I can see the 4MATIC Mr A reads, the lettering on the car partially broken off, perhaps with time, with its traces on the car showing in its absence, and it reminds me of Mom’s reference to a Mercedes 4MATIC in her book, The Son of the House.
“Do you know,” Mr A tells Mom, “this Mercedes car — they sell it tokunbo 21 million?”
“Which Mercedes?”
“This one in front of us.”
“This small car! 21 million?!”
I chuckle from where I am in the front with Mr A. Mom exclaims “Hey!”, the way us Nigerians do in surprise, asking how much a new one would then cost. Mr A suggests it is nice nonetheless, isn’t it Kelechi? I agree. Nice is really, honestly what I thought of it when I first saw it. With the white colour and the red, come-on-at-once lights on each side that the driver turns on and off at an amusing frequency as the car pushes forward at the sight of space ahead of it, then stops, then jolts again. It is a nice car.
Mom and Mr A discuss this newly-shared information, Mom in comical disbelief, Mr A chuckling as he cites the rise in prices to explain it. Mr A uses cement as an example, though the only thing I remember while he is talking that is distinct is my lack of attention to it, and perhaps the figure 300 mentioned as its initial or present price. Mom later talks about her promotion at the university to Professor and her asking “Where’s the salary?” — “It’s just that you’ll be carrying name to answer”, is what she has resigned herself to, though in a laughing voice still. Or perhaps she was repeating what her friend had said. One of them. Like I said, distinctive is the way in which my attention faded in and out.
We drive deeper, the white Mercedes still in view in front of us for a bit as the cars in our block of traffic break free and move forwards towards the toll-gate, which we pass without having to pay, or check with any security, for the spaces for them are all empty. They have been for a while. I wonder about that. I also wonder, as we get closer, if I have been to Cactus before, as we turn into a corner off the busy road with a pale yellow gate or wall I know I have seen before. Mr A clearly knows where it is, as he assured Mom earlier when she asked, and does not appear to require or solicits directions once throughout the whole journey. The faint confidence about my knowledge of it dwindles away as we drive further into behind the corner, revealing extensive roads we have to turn into. As we pass a security man who waves us forward, a black BMW thunders towards us, I remember thinking, going the opposite direction, requiring Mr A to steer to the right of the road. I am shocked at the massive parking lot we turn into, at the amount of cars there are, at the amount of space there is for it before the boundary to the sea, how big a parking lot this small corner I have seen so often could have behind it. Though I probably already know this by the time I see a bunch of light blue balloons hanging from some terrace, it is only when we step out onto the entrance with ‘CACTUS’ carved into the lower part of the building, or enter the building, that I know for the sure the answer to my ever-lingering question, one I have asked myself longer than this trip, that I have asked myself periodically whenever my mom and siblings say they went to this place: no, I have never been to Cactus before.
I have another phone-pressed-close-to-my-ear conversation, this time with Grandma, and I focus intently on hearing her words. I consider putting the phone on loudspeaker, but a man adjacent to where we stand on the floor preceding the entrance, also waiting for something, represents why I do not. I don’t want my conversation to be heard by everyone, though there is nothing secretive about it really, and I am sure the man can hear my “Amen”s in response to Grandma. Luckily, this conversation is not abruptly cut off by a need for credit, and we say ‘bye’ before I end the call and hand the phone to Mr A this time.
Inside — there is much to tell about inside.
To be continued — read part 2 here: https://kelechionuobia.medium.com/birthday-drive-part-2-7e297806d927
