Stuck In The Gecko's World

I don’t hate Gecko. How could I? I mean, God must have spent quite some heavenly time to mold and breathe on that one, too. But waking up every morning to find that creepy, lazy troll on the wall by my head is just too much for me. It stirs up nightmare, you know? 

No wonder I often found myself in some nondescript desert, trapped in this particular nightly sight in which this odious skeletal figure in turban chased me with a long dagger dripping with blood, I think, screaming, “I want brood! Gimme brood!” And, I running like I’ve got two bags of cement tied to my thighs.

I have never had the gut to stand and ask why it needed the blood, and particularly mine. Call that fear if you will. I’m only human. Besides, I hear fear is a more permanent human emotion than courage. And courage hasn’t ever existed where there isn’t fear.   

Having fled the religious chaos of Kaduna city with nothing but the clothes on my back and a bag of letters I was to deliver to a branch office across town – which by the way, lie by the corner half eaten by rats and God knows what else –just anywhere that could offer a roof and a semblance of security was all I truly desired. And perhaps that was exactly what my uncle tried to offer: a roof and a semblance of security in his home.

I was just getting to know Keffi town.  Although a safe hundreds of miles from Kaduna, Kaduna still awoke a tremor in my soul. The sights of the horrors I witnessed still made me jittery. Did I mention that I was a Masters graduate working as a post boy? Well, that wouldn’t matter, would it? Such story does not fail the heart these days. Anyway, I was going to get a promotion before the gods once again left one of their many wars to man.

Upon my arrival on that fateful day, I noticed there had been a huge change. My uncle had built himself another home, a five-bedroom duplex this time. And the former one, a bedraggled single-room where I stayed with him, his wife and seven children still lurked a few meters behind, like a heap of bad luck. I was so relieved. And then, I must have felt happy for him too, until a little later. Relieved for the fact that, unlike the last time I stopped by on my way to my now smoldered job, we all won’t have to tolerate another season of suffocative torture in that tin of a house like handled sardines.

My heart sank when he took me around to the heart-broken house after I had narrated my ordeal, and told him I would need some time to find my feet. With a bold smile on his face, he told me that was to be my sleeping quarters while I stayed. I thought I deserved a better treat; at least, I was a nephew.

“These children need space,” he told me in a rather annoying gentility. I gaped at him. Uncle Thomas? What a human manifestation! My uncle was poorer than a church rat. His fart was louder than a rock blast. His children have a genetic copy of that, too. And I prayed for salvation every moment I lived with them, and now he talked to me like he was some royalty? I was heartbroken. If my father, his elder brother, was alive I would have called him to bring back the Uncle Thomas that once shared his only room with me. No being unreasonable, but this is Africa. We were created to share things.

The room was moderately large, ascetic, heart-sinking, cracked and holed here and there. A worn-out single bed where my uncle made all his children, a table and a chair at both ends of the room, made up for all the missing furniture. There was a window with a curtain half its size, and a calendar on the opposite wall, hiding a deep crack. My uncle smiled broadly, dropped a packet of rat poison and a can of insecticide on the table as he introduced me into the room and left. The smile I tried to put on could not form before I saw his back; I guess the need too was gone, because I felt my face go deadpan instantly.

I honored the sigh of despair that rose from the depth of my soul and tried to assimilate the environment further. Although mine was a humble abode at the end of a run-down street in the city of Kaduna, I felt like I have been thrown into a hole, in retrospect. 

Suddenly, the eerie silence that followed my uncle’s departure and my resignation to fate began to crack-up. A squeak in the ceiling, and a rustle of the calendar on the wall that dated back two years, I remembered I brought it the last time I visited. I felt I was been watched. Looking up, a rat peered out of a hole in the ceiling. 
A gaunt wall gecko sauntered from behind the calendar, wriggled its snake of a tail. A big cockroach screeched out of a crack along the door and back in a flash. I had been thrown into a zoo! I realized my uncle left those arsenals behind for a reason. And it clearly wasn’t out of altruism. I was the uninformed exterminator.

                                                                                                                     

Apparently our entrance had interrupted some sort of normalcy in the house. From the look of their eyes, those pests have become used to running the place as some jungle territory after the departure of my uncle and his crowd. And now: who the hell is this? Their glistening, tiny, black eyes seemed to demand. My eyes wouldn’t leave the gecko. I don’t hate geckos but I certainly wouldn’t have one for pet or a co-occupant or I will kill – sorry ancestors. Not really.

Well, that day, I made a move; the rats withdrew. The sound up there told me there weren’t just one dozen of them. But the gecko stayed put. It stayed, wagging that disgusting tail with such stiff, unwavering intensity. It could have risen to my face if it was further endowed. I yanked off one my shoes to smash its tiny a skull but then remembered the story we were told as little children in Ugbosi. It was about a man who killed a wall gecko and never had a child. Such things still happened, you know? I thought to myself and refrained. Oh it should have been such a fitting retaliation for that recalcitrant reptilian did dare me. 

Anyway, the gecko did stand there urging me to give my gut a boost. In one of those stories it was also said that if you woke up one morning and a chicken ran after you, that it was only common sense that you made good use of those legs you’ve got for free. For, you never knew, it may have learned how to bite the night before. I decided to take a walk of the compound. There were other things to see. After all I just came into town.

That night I could not sleep. The mosquitoes buzzed like choppers and their raids as persistent as the Janjaweed. The rats chattered ceaselessly and played their romance game. Did you know they squeaked when they made love? Right before my very eyes, the center of the room became an arena for marathon sex, the males where particularly notorious. 
I guess I knew better than put the light off. Meanwhile the gecko found no other place but the wall perpendicular to my bed, my head’s position, to perch and wriggle that bloodless tail. At some point the rat fiesta got overwhelmingly loud. I got up and chased them back into the ceiling. I discovered three seemingly exhausted males wriggling on the floor. Was this some kind of sexual elation? Since they were clearly oblivious of my threat I let them be. 

Finding nothing to block the hole, I tore the outdated calendar off the wall, squeezed and molded it into a ball and then used it to plug the hole, hoping that would do the trick. On a second look at the wall I realized I had ripped off the gate to the gecko’s paradise. But who cared? It was understandable if animals were in some place because there were no humans. But here I was. Hello! What in the world happened to all the bushes and rocks and all the grounds that could be burrowed out there, anyway?

I looked at the time. 12:30 midnight. I was tired so I went back to bed, changing my head’s position to the feet’s to keep a good distance from the good-for-nothing gecko. I could feel the stabs of mosquito proboscis through the cover cloth but I endured. 

I could not have slept for one good hour and a half when I heard some scrapping noise. Chips of wood from the ceiling rained on my face. Startled, I jumped off the bed. A mischief of rats were vigorously eating another hole through ceiling, this time right over my head. My shock smoldered to anger. But when I imagined what it would be like to have rats jumping on my face through the ceiling, the anger dissipated. I went over and removed my blockade on their initial hole which was a bit off the bed. 

The calendar was badly ruined so I couldn’t give the gecko’s gate back. I sat on the tip of the bed, face in hands, to reconsider my position. Was I not supposed to be on top of the food chain? It was then I remembered the rat poison. I had my Eureka moment. The euphoria almost seized my heart.

From that moment my lovely mind began to entertain even more sinister thoughts. Though Mr. Conscience preached ‘thou shall not kill animals thou will not eat,’ the situation at hand seemed more reasonable.  I could handle rats with a little irritation to my conscience but not the gecko. 
I can’t remember the consequence if a woman did kill it, but I was a man and impotence certainly held no good prospect for a forward looking young man. But who made this ‘shit’ sacred? I thought. Then another though struck my mind. What if I killed it killed it ‘unintentionally’? Yes, unintentionally.

The insecticide worked quite well, the mosquitoes were mostly gone. They were no jokers. They fed even in the afternoons. After two days the can ran dry because I had to concentrate my sprays on that particular crack on the wall where the calendar used to cover. The gecko had to die unintentionally.

However, after emptying half of the can into the crack on the first morning, the daft lizard emerged later in the evening seemingly unperturbed. I pretended not to notice and went to sleep, still maintaining my new position. The rats have refused also to eat the poison I planted in five strategic corners in the room, preferring instead to nibble at the letters I came with. I was a defeated force; I could see it in the way they looked at me.

When I returned from working with my uncle at his poultry every night and opened the door, I had to also wait for order to be restored. First, the gecko had to leave the bed in such a deliberate saunter. Got to the wall, crawled majestically into the crack and then reemerged, head and forelegs. And the rats would appraise me for a while before jetting into the ceiling through the hole. 
They have since abandoned the project of boring a new hole. The cockroaches were almost extinct, thanks to the insecticide, but for a few isolated reincarnations whenever there were crumbs the rats felt too big to pick.

The other day I came back, upon opening the door I met an oblivious mischief of rats gathered at the floor of the room, they seemingly surrounded something. On a closer look I realized they were all alone. So what in the world could the rodents be up to? Askance, I threw a searching look for the coldblooded ‘lazy one’ that steals my bed. And there it was as usual, on my bed, which was not a surprise, only this time it appeared to be presiding over the rats. It wouldn’t even budge to my presence. My blood ran cold. Apparently I was not yet welcome in my own uncle-given home. I tactically withdrew.

If you plan to take over this house, I thought, just remember all those times I’ve allowed you steal my sleeps; whatever evil scheme you conspire to execute; just remember all those privileges I have let you enjoy in this house. As I closed the door behind me, I heard an unusual kind of squeak from the rats, it was clearly sardonic. I walked on.

Hours later, when the coast was clear I returned, unbearably drowsy. As I slept, my mind wrestled with animal revolution. What if they sprang an attack on me, what chances did I have? I had tried to talk to my uncle for the umpteenth time in weeks  but he appeared to be getting a hard-on from having in the rundown house, so I gave up on that and turned to the sun and the moon and whatever could impress on time. 

The mosquitoes have returned in their swarms, they also seemed to heave acquired an ability to shake off any form of insecticide I deployed. I even tried Otapiapia and ended up with severe headache and catarrh.  So I reached a new height in human thinking: Let them be! The big idea was: mosquito, in the worst of circumstances, needed less than a drop of blood each in one attack. So I figured; I only had to eat enough vegetable and beverages to make-up for whatever ounce they may suck collectively, I would be okay. And they would be okay. So long as they kept their malaria.

The only thing I could not make peace with remained the incorrigible gecko. I just could not bring myself to it. It’s penchant for my bed had only grown in spite my frustration. Even though the rats found my bed an appropriate place to defecate and urinate and make love and what not; the thing is, I never met them there! They showed some respect. The chicken, they say, never forgives one who pruned its feathers on a rainy day. If I were a chicken, the gecko was that one who would have made me ruthlessly vengeful. Every single day that passed my craving to unintentionally assassinate the gecko quadrupled.  

Finally my day of opportunity did come. I returned home, glad that it was not on my bed when I peered through the keyhole. I opened the door, and suddenly something fell on the floor with a thud. It was the gecko. I caught a sight of it wriggling with its back on the floor. Instantly, I pretended to miss a step and stamped my foot in such a barrage of fury and...Who said the bastard wasn’t fast? Oh my day would have been made. Before I knew it, it was already under the table. 

Disappointed and angry, I cleared the rat droppings on my bed, and sat down. Then the horror of thoughts hit me. What was that gecko doing at the door by the way? Perhaps it nursed a sinister plot against me, too. So it’s true; those you plan against also plan against you, consciously or unconsciously. With a deep sigh, I rested my case. 

How would I have explained to God that I was killed by a frigging gecko, that I just could not complete my earthly mission because a gecko sprang a surprise on me? I decided to no longer pursue it, even though it remained unrepentant, and despite of my truest feelings. The endless lovemaking of those sex craze rats did produce more results – new sex craze offspring. The mosquitoes became my nightly halo till dozed off in helpless surrender; I guess I became something of saintly item. But something good was in the making. My company had shifted its operations to Abuja, and I was to pack to the new staff quarters in one week. My days as a post boy had also ended.

©Jude Ifeme

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