Chapter 3 Meeting Mr.Nelson

When I learnt that Eugene's father also was my father, I began to pay closer attention to him, and a pang of envy started to take a strong hold on me. If we were children of the same father, then I deserved to have what Eugene had-the love and the care and the material possessions. His appearance showed that he was better taken care of than I was. He changed school uniforms more regularly than I did. He had better shoes. Everything of his appeared new all the time. He was dropped off and picked up from school by the man who was also my father, while I had to walk home from school.

My school was about two kilometres from home, and the amount of time needed to cover that distance depended on whether I was going home alone or with my friends. Even with friends, it depended on our number and what occupied our attention after school. Walking was not much of a big deal, but being picked up from school in your father's car came with some prestige, love and care, for which every child yearned. On a few occasions, my mother drove me to school. Her business kept her occupied most of the time, and considering the distance, I didn't hold any grudge against her for not doing what my father did with Eugene. As a single mother, she had a lot on her plate of hustle, but when she was available and when it was raining, she drove me to school. On some occasions, the father of my friend, Marian Myres, dropped me off in his Volvo before continuing home with his daughter. He was such a nice man, a gesture that made me miss my own father and envy Eugene the more. What helped me cope with this envy was what my mother told me about Mr. Nelson. When she told me Eugene and I shared the same father, I asked why she hadn't told me all along. Her response was that it was not necessary and would not have changed anything because my father did not really take care of me. He had abandoned me since birth, she said. She gave me a number of scenarios that corroborated her negative portrayal of my father. Mr. Nelson, she told me, had boycotted my naming ceremony. It was, and still is, a big deal. There must have been something unforgivably grave to cause a man to boycott the naming of his daughter. Whatever the reason was, she did not tell me. And nobody did. But my elder brother thought he had witnessed a fierce fight between my mother and my father shortly after I was born. Enoch was young and could not remember the exact details of the fight, but he said it had something to do with my birth and was so serious that it nearly resulted in fisticuffs. It was on the corridor in our house, he later told me, and they screamed at each other until my father stormed out of the house in anger. That must have been shortly before my naming ceremony. It was not the last of the fights as I later heard from my mother. My mother told me another story of her visit to my father's shop in Lartebiokoshie when I was still a baby. She had gone there for either provisions or money for my upkeep. When a misunderstanding ensued, she asked my father to take us home if he was not prepared to provide what she requested. My father jumped into his car and drove angrily and carelessly. We almost crashed on our way home, my mother told me. My mother said when she complained about the dangerous driving, especially when a baby was on board, my father continued to drive like someone on a suicide mission. She then told him to allow us to alight if he wasn't going to drive with care. To her surprise, my father screeched to a halt and ordered us out of his car. She had to find a taxi to take us home. Hearing these stories did not endear Mr. Nelson to me. I saw him as a total stranger, someone I had no connection with. He must have been the reason my mother wanted to abort me. He would not have abandoned me if he didn't hate me, I told myself. If he loved me, he would have lavished me with gifts and love as he did to Eugene. Beyond the early flood of bad testimonies, what he did when I tried to get close to him confirmed what my mother told me. On one of our school vacations, I told my mother that I wanted to visit my father and she allowed me to go. Mr. Nelson Okoe was a popular man around Lartebiokoshie in Accra. He was a businessman who loved to have fun. He was the type who threw parties at will and was seen in the company of those who did not subscribe to sacrificing the pleasures of this world for the afterworld. He was successful, and the means to fund that lifestyle was the least of his worries. That lifestyle came with intended and unintended consequences that transcended his personal behaviour. And it showed when I got to his house. He lived in a big family house, one of the biggest in the area at the time. It was a large family house with two one-storey buildings on the compound. (I remember his twin sister lived in one of the storey buildings.) A number of his children had visited him for the holidays and I was one of them. We were children from different mothers. I felt different from the rest of the children. They resembled one another and some of them resembled Mr. Nelson. But I looked different. I was tall and the rest were short. The only child taller than me was Eugene's elder brother, Nii Aruna. Nothing showed that the other children and I were of the same father. I did not feel any bond between Mr. Nelson and me. Nothing drew me to him. There was no fondness. Nothing. If I were to live with this man as my father, then I had to create that bond. I had to psyche myself up and accept that he was my father, despite the things my mother had told me about him. It was going to be difficult, but it was worth a try. Your father, they say, is your father. You can't trade him for someone else's father even if you don't like his looks or character. I, however, abandoned every effort I was making to create that bond when he clearly told me, without saying it, that I did not belong to his household. It happened in the course of my visit. I was in the living room with the other children when he called all of them to his bedroom. Their laughter and giggling filtered into the living room, where loneliness and neglect were my only companions. I wondered why he did not call me. Eugene was there. He had also been called into my father's room. When I went home that day, I told my mother that that was my last visit to my father's house. And I kept my word until decades later when circumstances compelled me to go back there. I remember one day, my father was driving past our house and stopped when he saw me sitting at the spot Miranda and I used to sit at. He rolled down and called me, but I refused to go. I remained seated and refused to utter a word, and, after some time, he drove off. I had asked him for a pair of shoes, and he had promised to buy me three. And that was it. It remained a promise, unfulfilled to date. I was more emotionally attached to shoes than I was to the man I called my father. People close to me know that I am infatuated with footwear. I have about a hundred pairs of them. That love for shoes began very early, perhaps, as part of the American hip-hop influence. For my father to deny me shoes meant more to me than he probably could imagine. It meant he didn't love me. It meant everything my mother said about him was true. What hurt me, even more, was the fact that I saw Eugene changing shoes often. He wore some of the best shoes. It was many years later that I realised Eugene's wardrobe was supported by his mother, who, like my mother, was a single mother. Like me, Eugene was not living with Mr. Nelson. His mother was different from the mothers of the other children of Mr. Nelson. At the time, I didn't know this. When I got to know that Eugene, like I, lived apart from Mr. Nelson, I still wondered why he loved Eugene but cared less about me. If we were both born out of wedlock, why would he love one and hate the other? To the best of my knowledge, I had not offended him. Even if my mother had offended him, why would he visit her sins on me? And what was the nature of the offence that made him despise me so much? It is difficult to miss what you have not tasted, but imagining what I could have had if there was a father figure in my life gave me a sense of loss. I was a child starved of parental love. My father was completely out of the picture, and even though my mother provided for me, I cannot pretend I had a strong bond with the woman who missed no opportunity to remind me that she had me by accident. I don't remember ever doing any homework with my mother. Perhaps, my mother was too busy and my father would have had time for me if I lived under the same roof with him. The worst part of the absence of a father was the improvised father figure at home. My brother Enoch played that role. It was a role assigned to him by my mother, and I was often at the receiving end of his disciplinarian duties. My elder brother was the man of the house. When I offended my mother and she had to beat me, she sometimes delegated that responsibility to him. It was an assignment he executed with passion, making me wonder whether he beat me so hard just to please my mother or he really wanted to instill discipline in me. He would lock me up in the room and hit me ruthlessly. I remember on one occasion, he beat me and stopped only when I told him I was menstruating. I couldn't tell exactly what he sought to gain, but if it was to make me submissive or subservient to their dictates, then he failed miserably. I was not a pushover. I was strong-willed and didn't let them cheat me at home. I made my position heard and did not allow my background or the rod of discipline and intimidation to force me to accept anything that ran counter to my beliefs, especially when I knew I was right. All of that made me wonder whether my father would not have treated me differently and whether he would have allowed that to happen to me if he was in the house. Looking at his behaviour at the time, however, I was convinced it could have been worse. We could barely stand each other even though we hardly met. Whatever caused him to invite every one of his children into his room and leave me alone in the hall might have been strong enough to elicit severer beatings from him than what I got from my elder brother. And as I grew, I was determined to find the answer, even if those who had it were unwilling to give it to me.