IT WAS LOVE

IT WAS LOVE

It was love.
 
 He was very sure of it.
 
Ok, maybe now he was.
 
Back then he didn't know what it was. And he had paid dearly for it.
 
All he knew was that it was a wonderful feeling. And he never wanted it to end. But it had.
 
He had been an introvert before he met her. He had just one friend all through his first year in secondary school up till that day in SS2. He was so introverted he couldn't even walk across the quadrangle in the block of classrooms where his class was. His friend knew his timetable and always came to walk him to the laboratory whenever he had a lab class.
 
Maybe it was fate.
 
Or was it?
 
Well, whatever it was he had heard that she had been involved in an accident over the holidays. So when he saw her sister at dinner that evening, he had asked after her as a matter of courtesy. Her sister had said she was much better and would be back before the week ended.

And that was how it all started. She had walked into his class the week after. She said her sister told her he had asked after her. From that day on, there wasn't a day which went by without her coming to his class to see him. They would talk for hours on end and not even notice the time go by. There was this particular day he still remembered vividly. The principal had announced that their mid-term break would start that day during morning assembly. They had both decided not to travel till the next day and had gone to sit in his class to talk. They had talked from about 8am till well past 6pm. They had talked about everything and nothing. Time had virtually stood still.

What they had was unspoken. He never asked her out and they never talked about a relationship but they both knew that they were a very important part of each other's lives.

What they had was innocent, and that was the beauty of it. He couldn't even remember holding hands with her. The connection they had didn't need any physical forms of expression. So while the rest of their mates in school were sleeping with their girlfriends, he wrote her poems and told her about his family.
 
And then adolescence happened. That crazy time in your life when you didn't know who you were or who you wanted to be for that matter. And with adolescence came the mood swings and depression.

He began to push her away. It wasn't because he didn't care about her anymore. It was just that he needed time to figure out a lot of things. But he never told her that. He just kept on withdrawing day by day until a chasm had grown between them. Maybe if he had told her where he was at that point and what he was going through, she would have understood why he needed the space he was putting between them. But now he would never know.

And then she had written him "the" poem. The last they would ever exchange. Years later when they were in the university she had showed him that poem again and he had felt a stab of pain and regret that almost brought tears to his eyes. He realized that the day she wrote him that poem was the day he had lost her. He could not remember all the words but one phrase had kept on ringing in his head even up till this very moment. "Goodbye is the hardest word…"
 
By a jape of fate, they ended up sitting side by side during their final exams. She finally opened up to him about how hard it had been for her watching him slip away. He wasn't one given to tears (had never been and still wasn't even now) but he had come very close to them that day when he realized what he had lost.
"I used to see you when I looked in my mirror during holidays". "I could never wait to get back to school just so I could see you again". "Everyone in my house wonders why I don't talk about you anymore and I just tell them you are fine"
Each of those words struck him like a hammer blow. It had taken everything in him for him to focus well enough to write the paper they had for that day.
 
But fate had not had enough. They ended up in the same university where he spent the greater part of four years trying to get back what he had so stupidly thrown away. His friends from secondary school never failed to remind him how stupid he had been to let her out of his life. His new friends in the university were of the opinion that they had to invent a new word for a new kind of stupid to describe him. And he agreed with all of them.
He could still talk with her for hours on end. He still had so much fun whenever he spent time with her, but he knew he had lost her heart.
 
He had it, and he had lost it.
 
"It can never be the way it was", she would say. "You hurt me too much for me to trust you again. And even if I did, I could just decide to break your heart one day just to get back at you for all that happened".
He had told her he was ready to risk her hurting him as penance for what he had done if only she would give him another chance but she hadn't.
 
Now he looks back and wonders if he didn't try hard enough.
 
Had he given up too easily?
 
She had someone else in her life now. A friend of his actually.
 
The only comfort he has now is that he knows she's with someone who'll treat her right. Someone who'll never hurt her. Someone who knows what she's worth.
 
But it also leaves him with a question which never seems to go away: If everyone deserves a second chance, how come he never got his?
 
True story? Fiction? A mixture of both? Guess correctly and win N1,000 airtime on any network of your choice. Send your answers to jamesikuku@gmail.com (First correct response wins the prize).
Please read and share with your friends!
Ikuku A. James

BANKS COPS AND ROBBERS 2

Then he heard footsteps. Someone was running in his direction, and then he heard other footsteps right behind the first. His first thought was to keep quiet and lie very still. After all, this was Lagos, and poking your nose where it didn’t belong especially in the middle of the night could get you killed. He had decided he wouldn’t move and just let whoever it was run past him when the door of the bus swung open. That was the moment he had met Marcus and that was when his life changed forever. Marcus had climbed into the bus and held a knife to his throat, threatening to kill him if he so much as made a sound. They had both laid on the floor of the bus until Marcus’ pursuers were gone. A few minutes after the last footsteps had receded, Marcus climbed down from the bus, smiled at him and thanked him for saving his life. He pulled out a wad of 1000 Naira notes and tossed them at him calm as you like, as if he did not just threaten to slit his throat. That was the first and last he saw of Marcus until their paths crossed three months later. *********************************************************************************Emeka had just finished talking to one of the branch’s high net worth customers and was walking him to the door of his office when he saw the commotion at the counter. At that point it had deteriorated into a three sided shouting match between Sanni, John and the cashier. Emeka put on his ‘’how-may-I-help-you-today’’ smile and walked to the counter.
 ‘’Hello young man, I’m the manager of this branch. My name is Emeka. It seems you have a problem they haven’t been able to help you with, right?’’, he said to John. ‘’I most certainly do’’, John threw back at him. ‘’I don’t understand why you charge me for everything and when I ask for my money all this young lady can tell me is that there are procedures to follow to get my own money. Please just close the account and give me my money right now’’.
 Emeka turned his smile up a few watts. ‘’You don’t have to close your account. I’m sure we can work something out. Please come into my office’’. Emeka walked John to his office and after offering him a seat, brought out a bottle of wine from the refrigerator beside his desk and poured a glass for him. ‘’You know, we don’t just close accounts like that. There’s a lot of paper work to be done and we also have to explain to our head office why the account was closed. They see it as a failure to properly manage our customers and that doesn’t look good on my appraisal’’. The minute John heard that, he knew he had leverage. Maybe it was only a little but he was going to hold on to it with all he had. ‘’Well, the only thing I am interested in now is the fact that I don’t have enough money to go home’’, John said sipping from his glass of wine and trying to look as gloomy as possible. ‘’How much will it cost you to get home?’’, Emeka asked. ‘’Five thousand Naira’’. Emeka reached into the bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a bundle of notes. He counted out five thousand naira and handed them over to John. ‘’I’ll just instruct the cashier to debit your account for the 4,400 Naira you have. Have a wonderful trip back home and enjoy your holidays’’. Emeka leaned across his desk to shake hands with John and that was when all hell broke loose. *********************************************************************************Sanni had left the banking hall and was back outside supervising the parking of vehicles when he saw the tinted Peugeot 406 salon car. At first, he thought it was a government official because it didn’t have any number plates. He started to walk towards the car. These government people had money and they liked it when you deferred to them. The last thought that crossed his mind was that he could probably get a very good tip if he played his cards right. He was only about two meters from the car when the back door on the passenger’s side opened and the young man with the AR15 assault rifle stepped out. The bullets threw him halfway across the parking lot and he was dead before he hit the ground. There was a space of about three seconds when time seemed to stand still and then it was utter mayhem. The customers at the ATM scattered in different directions all screaming and shouting and falling over one another. The man with the gun turned and fired at them as they ran away. Three of those running were hit in the head and died instantly a few more were wounded and lay on the ground moaning or screaming. One man had his intestines hanging out and was still crawling along the ground trying to get away. One of the two remaining guards was trying to scale the fence when the gunman turned and sprayed a volley of shots into his back. He flipped from the wall like a rag doll and fell face down on the other side of the fence. He twitched a couple of times and then stopped moving. The mobile policeman attached to the branch was at the back having lunch under the shade of a tree when he heard the first shots. He grabbed his rifle and dove for cover behind the branch’s bullion van which was parked next to where he was sitting. He crawled from there to the wall from where he could see what was happening in front.
 The scene that greeted him made him sick to his stomach. There were four men and a woman all armed with high powered rifles walking towards the entrance of the branch. They stopped briefly and spoke in low tones and then two of the men began to walk towards him, while one of the others put a bullet in the head of a customer who had been shot in the stomach and was crawling with his intestines hanging out trying to get away. It dawned on him they were going to block off the rear exit. He scrambled away from his position behind the wall, sprinted for the fence at the back and vaulted over it without breaking stride. There was nothing he could do here on his own and he dared not use his radio to call in for help for fear that they might hear him. He just hoped the situation did not deteriorate any further before he got help. *********************************************************************************John was reaching out his hand to shake Emeka when he heard the first few shots go off. When the screaming and shouting started he immediately knew it was a robbery. It dawned on him that he had to get out of the branch manager’s office. He was most likely the first person the robbers would look for when they got into the bank. He ran out of the office and into the banking hall. Some of the customers were already lying flat on their faces with their hands over their heads. He was just going to do the same when there was a deafening explosion and the security doors erupted in flames and tangled metal. John looked up and through all the smoke and debris saw a woman lowering a rocket propelled grenade launcher. His next thought was a prayer. ‘’Baba God, abeg I no wan die today’’ (Dear God, please I don’t want to die today)

TO BE CONTINUED