Hell Mary

Chapter Fifteen

Her aunt scrunched her face in the manner disappointed people did. She wrapped her arms around her wrapper that draped freely over a single strapped singlet and stared intently at Mary. Due to the fact Maureen's friend, Aunt Pauline as Ashley fondly called, was a regular visitor, Maureen thought it unnecessary to hide up any extra revealing flesh or pad her cheeks with make-up.

"Ezioku? Do you mean this?" Maureen asked.

"I mean it oh! You need to watch your maid very well oh," Aunt Pauline replied, sipping loudly from her glass cup.

"-and here my husband is trying to take my maid to Ashley's school," Maureen added, flicking her fingers in disgust. She said 'my maid' repeatedly as though Mary had no identity and in an awkward third person conversation even though Mary was standing right there and had asked gently if she should pour more drink.

"Mba, No, I'll pour for myself," Aunt Pauline replied instead, dismissing Mary's presence with a wave of her hand. Mary thought quite often that Aunt Pauline visited more often than expected because she had lost her husband and indeed she was right. Pauline always returned back to her house with a full drink extra and many other things Maureen freely released after talking for long hours about who insulted her at work or about someone she tagged unfortunate. That was the time Mary had learned that the young girl Aunt Pauline talked about, attended a secondary school at the outskirts of their large town. The name sounded primitive and local and she imagined a falling ceiling with an array of teachers and their missed classes without any accountability, and a sandwich of students packed up in a classroom.

"Oh! Mary?" Her aunt asked, "What is it? Is anything wrong with Ashley?"

"No ma, Ashley is fine. Ma please I need an inhaler. Ma I can't breathe most times and it is as if something blocked my lungs," she said.

"Inhaler kwa? I will use inhaler and buy inhaler for you as well? So this is how you used to call my husband when I'm not there right?" She asked.

"No ma!" Mary replied. A cough throbbed her chest and she wanted to spit out the thick mucus that she felt was hanging there in mockery over her air sacs. She coughed so her aunt could hear and trust she was telling the truth, but her aunt had instead digressed so deeply on the fact that she disturbed Dominic. It didn't help that Mr. John's phone speaker was left on and shuddered with her rants as the phone vibrated. She felt Maureen's presence in her oblique form, raising her hands in the air to slap her. She would feel numbness at first, then adjust to the pain. A scar might be left, but that was it- another memory that would be left to narrate someday.

The other end of the call went off and a beep told her it had been cut. She slowly pulled out the phone and placed it on his table, pushing her knee out and thanking him before leaving. Her shoulder pressed against the many others that stood in and around the staff room, awaiting their turns to call home. She brushed through Martins, who was in a disturbingly long call with his mother outside the staff room. He would giggle, drawing curves with his squeaky black leathered shoe on the cold cement as he spoke about everything. He asked about his father, the ministry and the Oil and Gas business run at the sides, he asked about her health when she coughed once and about Sola in the university. He wanted her to bring his outfit for the End of the year dinner party and begged she added one of Sola's exquisite black gowns that had faux black diamonds knitted to it. "It is for a friend," he said.

*****

Ashley trudged to her class with two full polythene bags that smelled of richness and a branded white bag. The visiting was over and evening had descended, leaving the school sparsely filled with parents. The class was empty and so she walked in, with the intention of trying out the clothes her mother had selected for the dinner party. It would be a lot easier to try it out there and seal it up until the weekend so that everyone would gawk on it for the first time than trying it out in the dorms and letting every girl's eye become overly used to it.