*Day Six*
Dear Marwa de Mugu,
These new pictures of Mr. Ashiru… I have been laughing since morning! I can see some new wounds on the poor man. I’m not surprised that you had to flog the combination number out of him: our marriage could have survived the money he was hiding from me, but not his will.
I saw the Rolex there but I can see that your ransom has gone up again. Well I won’t even pay you fifty thousand naira anymore. I have to be honest with you: as soon as I got your first letter, I went to my Igbo pharmacist friend in Ikeja and used the money to fix a CCTV over her counter. There are five or six pharmacies in Lagos that sell my husband’s injection, but when I read your bomber boy’s first letter very well I realised that even if his two parents resembled human beings, at least one of his grandparents must have been a gorilla. True true, when the time came, guess which all-night pharmacy (in the whole of Lagos State) your whole gang went to at 2 o’clock in the morning? You must be the one they were calling Desalu, not so? That ugly scar on your face must be the reason for your Marwa de Machete nickname. Sorry o. I know this is your first kidnapping. It’s not easy, abi? You should go back to armed robbery. Even monkeys can make money from armed robbery, but kidnapping is not a good job for mugus.
Anyway, back to our business (I can’t tell you how much I found in the safe because my maths is bad… and it is a private divorce settlement anyway, none of your business). So because he confessed that he had plenty of money in the safe, your final, final, final ransom is now fifty million naira, eh? I’ve told you: it is greed that’s going to kill you. That’s why you were calling me ‘mugu’ and ‘ashawo’, not so? From Mr. Ashiru’s pictures I don’t know if you’ve found your ashawo yet, but me I am definitely nobody’s mugu. Tell my ex-husband that as well. Tell him that after twenty-five years of marriage I still can’t believe he was planning to leave our house to a mistress and a bastard son. Okay, so he was the one that ate the bribes and it was his name on the C of O… but who queued up for weeks and weeks at GB Ollivant, buying cement and iron rods? Who fought labourers and greedy tipper-drivers for the three years it took us to build… kai, but love can make a woman stupid! For twenty years I hid the medical report that confirmed that it was his K-legged sperms that made us childless – just because I didn’t want my husband to feel like a half-man. – And then he goes out and finds a mistress that presents him with somebody’s bastard to call his son! Anyway, give him this medical report, it is my going-away present to him. From now on, money will be my own husband, and if my love for him tries to comes back I will bring out these your pictures again and remember how I married a worm by mistake. I also have some going-away presents for you people (because I’m a woman of my word). You can’t sell them for much, so just give these trinkets to the women in your lives. Because I really, really pity them. And, sorry: I told my pharmacist friend that she could double the price of the injection, that you will be desperate, but – that Igbo woman – she went and tripled it.
Release Mr. Ashiru immediately, Mister Mugu. You have beaten him enough, thank you, and I really want him to see the hole in his safe. I am not afraid of his brother’s connections with INTERPOL. It isn’t their business to bring back runaway wives, and Mr. Ashiru can’t tell anyone I have stolen his millions, because EFCC will first of all ask him where he got them from in the first place. I am leaving for the airport now, so my housemaid will be tying my yellow headtie this night. But if Mr. Ashiru doesn’t answer me from his house when I phone from London, his brother will get your Nollywood Pharmacy video and copies of your letters. (And you know how efficient the Police can be, when they really want to work.)
By the way, thank you for your silly letters. I didn’t really want to live as a second-class person in a Moslem country, and I don’t know how I could have applied for asylum during my stopover in London without all those threats to machete me and serve my pieces to your dogs.
Idiot.
Sisi Eko.
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THE END