There Was A Beautiful Girl I Used To Date In The Days Of Yore by …Jude Idada

There Was A Beautiful Girl I Used To Date In The Days Of Yore by …Jude Idada

I had met her one sunny afternoon at a compound up the street, where we all bought cooking gas.

She had come in with her driver and had dazzled me with her looks and saintly aura.

I had made a beeline for her and to my surprise she had told me with a shy smile that she knew me. She said I was ‘lawyer’s son’ and she usually watched me walking down the road with my entourage of friends.

I was impressed and encouraged. The glint in her eyes was enough green light. I dove in.

We hurried to know as much as we could about each other as the driver hovered over us like a distressed eagle.

He succeeded in tearing her away that day but time proved kind to us.

Through deft moves and beguiling stealth we cultivated a blossoming friendship.

We were both giddy teenagers caught up in the joneses of Lagos.

I was in Command secondary school Kaduna, she was in Apata International school in Isolo, Lagos.

I was a boarder. She was a day student.

Holidays were our paradise.

We did all doables and more.

Her dad was feared.

We called him Baba Muchacha.

No one could visit her at home.

Except me.

He believed I was a good Christian boy who spent his saturdays knocking on doors preaching the gospel of the Lord.

I will go to the big metal gate of the house with my mom’s dog eared Bible, dressed in a spotless white shirt, black tie, black pants and polished black shoes. My handkerchief will be peppered with mentholatum.

I would knock on the gate. He would come out on the balcony and in his deep baritone. He would call out in Yoruba.

“Ta ni?”

“Its me Sir. Jude Idada from the Christian Evangelical Ministry.”

“Oh my son, come in.”

I would put my hand through the little flip open hole on the gate and unlatch the bolt from behind.

When I stepped into the compound, his normally frowning face would be plastered with smiles as he beaconed on me to use the side staircase and come upstairs.

He was a rich man but the house was as austere and spartanly furnished as he was. Baba Muchacha didn’t believe in pleasure or luxury. Little wonder her mother, a more worldly and rambunctious woman even though rail thin, spent most of her time with her older siblings in England.

She was the last child and would usually stay hidden in her room until her father called out to her loudly to come to the upstairs living room and listen to the good Christian boy talk so glowingly and brilliantly about the bible.

I never failed to deliver.

In a calm and steady voice I would talk ‘bible.’

He would smile and nod as he sat across from her and me, shaking his head and interjecting at intervals…

“You see these are the kind of boys you should have as friends not those Apata good for nothing hooligans.”

She would look down at the floor to hide her smile. He would take it as subservience and docility.

“Please carry on my son.”

I will carry on.

Then before I ended it with a prayer, I will take out my mentholatum infused and perfumed handkerchief and wipe my face, lingering on my eyes.

My eyes will burn and tears will cascade down my cheeks while I lifted up my arms and spoke earnestly with God.

Even with my eyes closed and on fire, I could feel how mightily impressed and deeply touched as he watched me communicate with God.

He would usually retort at the end of the prayer with a loud Amen. She will whisper an a faint amen and he would order her to say it louder until he was satisfied.

He never knew that the tracts I handed her had love letters inside them.

He never knew that every time I said ‘Jesus loves you’.

It was a code that meant ‘Jude loves you’

He just loved me for who he thought I was.

And she pretended to detest me.

Which made him insist that I come to the house more often. He would force her to become as much as a model child as he believed I was, so much so that he encouraged me to come over and study for jamb with her. And the more I came over, the more relaxed he became to the extent that he would leave us alone for hours while he busied himself downstairs and sometimes left the house all together.

We hardly ever studied.

We instead studied each other’s bodies and experimented until the day in her bedroom when with the help of a jar of vaseline and R. Kelly’s ‘Sex me,’ I ushered her into womanhood.

There was less blood and tears than I had expected.

Instead she seemed to have thoroughly enjoyed the pain.

Her faher had no clue that his overly protected baby girl had eaten of ‘Adams apple.’ neither did he know that upon his bed in his giant bedroom, my erected self and her lubricated self often played daddy and mommy while he tinkered downstairs under the open hoods of his a thousand and one cars in his fleet of taxis.

He didn’t know that the weekend he had left her all alone because he had to rush unannounced to their hometown in Abeokuta, I had slept over.

He didn’t know that she had started calling me ‘Daddy’ that weekend and had insisted that I used her father’s belt on her.

She wanted a reenactment of scenes of her father punishing her.

She would bend over the arm rest of the three sitter couch in the living room upstairs, fully dressed and promise me she would not misbehave again while I laid the belt onto her up raised butt.

She would cry and wiggly and then with a scream that shook every muscle in her body she would collapse on the couch and promptly fall into a deep sleep.

The first time.it happened. I was confused and afraid. I tapped her until she woke up and looked up at me with dreamy eyes. Then she spoke in a slurry voice as she stood up.

“He flogs me harder than that. Lets do it again. Flog me harder.”

And she assumed the position.

And I flogged her harder.

And she called me Daddy and begged me to stop until once again she howled like a wolf and collapsed into a fitful sleep.

We were 16 at the time.

We had no clue that what we were doing was a fetish and it had a name.

We just knew it was a secret that no one should know about.

It carried on and we pushed the envelope until one day when her father announced that she would go join her sisters in England.

We didn’t even say a proper good bye, as she left two nights after that, before I could get back from Kaduna where I had gone to collect my results.

Her father became cold as ice to me after she left. It was like I never existed. I suspected he found out about us somehow. But was never sure.

Years passed and I lost touch with her.

I heard she got married to an influential london boy and they have a son.

When I went to my old neighbourhood in Lagos some months ago I saw obituary posters of her father on their gate.

Baba Muchacha had died.

I felt sad and guilty.

I had betrayed his trust.

I hope somehow he forgave him.

I hope he understood that I was just a head strung, adventurous, randy teenager.

May he rest in peace.

And even while he does may he not know that upto this day, every time I see a broad black thick leather belt, with a giant two pin bronze buckle, I can not help but think about his daughter.

May God forgive me.