Chapter 1
As soon as the sun goes down, hiding it’s orange face behind the semi dark, greying clouds. it’s dark enough to play.
•••
Lagos state
At about 5 pm, the birds are all oiled up, trimmed and pruned. They come out to play. Iya Pato’s bar, at first glance, is just a large rusty caravan with odd color paintings of lewd sayings where the tired construction workers can have a glass of ogogoro and hot peppered pieces of ponmo to just cool off. But looking round, really intently, you’ll find that there’s a beaded curtain that leads to hell or paradise depending on who’s looking.
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Barely furnished rooms and thread bare mattress in the red dim light.
For as little as 500 naira, you can get to pound a piece of fresh flesh. Every evening, the construction workers pile there, taking turns, taking numbers, powered by the false feeling of ogogoro excitement. 4 rounds, 2000 naira less than their daily take home of 4000 naira. Indeed! Something must kill a man.
For the girls: Faith, Ose, Lola, Kpeme, Vero, Katherine, and Eloho. Iya Pato’s was just a step in the journey, an inevitable rite of passage, the wilderness where they all must pass through.
It is not what you think. They aren’t forced to work here, iya Pato is not a wicked madam that uses them as slaves yet pays them peanuts.
This na Lagos, “we dey hustle”. Apart from the room charge which is 1000 naira per day, the girls are entitled to their earnings, their time, and customers.
Amongst the girls, Eloho is the youngest and perhaps the prettiest, if you liked tall, dark skinned girls, she had the looks of an exotic Sudanese princess. Long face, pointed nose and rich dark hair. It was hard to believe she is Nigerian. She would have passed fully as a model if not for the over fullness of her chest and roundness of her waist. The agent had told her after paying a hard earned 10,000 naira “you have to loose weight, to fit into dresses you know. .. these fashion designers like lepa” which translated to “I can’t help you”.
Maybe she could do better, but it was easier to make money as a working girl. You’re in charge of the show, everywhere and elsewhere the men still want to fuck you and they are in charge. Your oga, the landlord, your uncle, even the preacher.
All the girls think Iya Pato is God sent, they owe her a lot. It is better to be working from a safe house than off the streets. Lola can tell you that “it’s cold, too cold and you’re scantily dressed waiting and waiting and waiting and walking, on the bad days, the policemen come, pack all of us into their van, beat us, take all our money and still want to fuck. They say we are illegal but they don’t mind if we pay the registration fee. Yeye people”
Katherine’s case is a tale of a long struggle, her mama, her brother, her sister and her twin children. Losing her father at an early age plunged the entire family into the poverty drain. She stopped schooling and began hawking fruits, it was there she met oga loco.
Oga loco was a nice young carpenter, nice enough to always buy the entire oranges off her tray on the days when business was bad, saving her the hot lashes her mother would have prepared for her bare unripe buttocks. Oga loco carpentry shed was cosy. A large bed of sawdust where she and other underaged hawkers gathered to rest their aching feet. From buying the oranges, Loco moved onto the real oranges, ate them and discarded them like trash. Katherine was three months with child, barred from visiting Locos workshop. He and his boys even swore she was crazy and that he Loco had never even seen her pants, he didn’t even like fat girls.
Katherine’s mother that could barely feed her family off the proceeds from the fruit trade could not even afford a proper abortion if she even wanted to. One candle lit evening, after series of failed concoctions in their small one room apartment, Katherine mum ‘mama Katy’ told Katherine the sad news “my Pikin, this tree wey you plant, E go grow o and you go chop the fruit.”
With child comes responsibilities, an additional mouth to feed meant more energy put into hustle. With big belly and swollen feet Kathy went on to be a cleaner. Life would be better earning 4000 naira per month. Unfortunately, Kathy wasn’t paid. Her Madam insisted that she was missing her gold necklace, a gold necklace she placed on the dressing table, the dressing table in her bedroom, her bedroom where only Kathy and her had access to.
The tummy kept on growing despite the hardship and hunger that abound and yet there wasn’t any silver lining in sight. Kathy went back to selling oranges but life wasn’t any sweeter.
Suddenly the babies came, two bouncing babies. she set up a small business selling used clothes from donations gotten from her neighbours and well wishers. Things started getting a bit better. But eventually life happened, a new government banning road side hawking removed all possibilities of making enough money.
Unlike Katherine, Vero always had it in her. If anybody was ever born to work the streets it was Vero. Pretty, hot headed and without a care in the world. She came to Lagos on her own at age 16, with only the clothes on her back. Worked her ass off to earn every naira she had, built a small house in port Harcourt for her parents on her back.
Vero had dark eyes, those kind of dark pupils that seem to tell a story of the hard life they have seen, dark, captivating eyes that if you looked deep enough you could read the sorrows: the days where a John used her all night and yet refused to pay in the morning. There’s nothing to do except fight cause a scene, risk public embarrassment then still go back home empty handed.
Friday nights are usually the best days. There are enough guys who come out to flex, some young and unmarried living the ‘wasting their youth stage’ many very married escaping their sour spouses and the smell of children at home.
They weren’t all the same. Some were drunk, loud and bold but couldn’t get it really up. others too shy and tried to read permission from your face. Those ones were the easiest, time was ticking by and soon it would be an hour. The worst ones were the ones that talked too much.
My name is Faith, I was born some years ago in a small house to a small family, I shouldn’t be here naturally but life has it twists. My parents were neither poor nor rich, we ate two times a day, they were neither religious nor faithless, but caring and kind. I wasn’t really much of a bookworm. I was a long faced child with eyes that made lot of people think I had it in me. Random people on the streets never failed to complement my eyes, they were a strange shade of bright blue that looked full of wisdom.
So I guess it was my choices that brought me here.
Chukulee 