Chapter 2

" Mommy we both know that is not true, I took after you in everything. " Kiishi had argued and they had both laughed.

It was not only the children that trekked to school that caught her attention, there were also the houses mostly similar to each other and she would imagine the madam of the house who will be a robust woman with a wide stomach which she will use a waist strainer to try in vain to make it appear smaller and she will have a boy as help because she cannot for the life of her imagine a girl in her youthful glory cleaning the house and serving her husband his meals because she thinks her husband will bed this girl help and she is too scared to lose her position as madam of the house.

This madam will have a big shop outside probably somewhere in Lekki where she will sell overpriced clothes and make false claims that all her clothes are shipped from abroad even though that ' abroad ' is sometimes just ' Lagos market. '

Or sometimes Kiishi will imagine a young madam who is not a wife but a madam all the same who is the baby mama to some famed musician or politician but will lie to all her neighbours that her husband is doing business overseas and that is why he is never at home.

Sometimes she will imagine that a group of young men no more than thirty years of age were living in the house and they are into ' yahoo ' and every day for them is a party and they will wake up this morning with a girl they had met the previous night but have vague memories of and tomorrow and the next it will be a different girl.

There was also the gatemen who opened gates for their ' ogas ' and ' madams ' and she will wonder if perhaps his name is Musa or Wasiu or Dele and she will wonder about the dynamics of affairs between the madams and the gatemen. She will imagine that this Musa who opens the gate for ' oga ' unfailingly every morning by 6:00am is in fact the one who is responsible for madam's gradually swelling stomach.

She will also examine the women and men sometimes old, sometimes young jogging every morning. The young men with their tight fitting t.shirts and running shorts and she will feed her eyes with their athletic bodies, she will even sometimes close her eyes and imagine what it would feel like to run her fingers on those taut looking biceps. Then there were the middle aged and old men wearing the same outfits only of a looser kind to hide the damage beer and age had done with their body.

Then the women with their almost sheer leggings and tank tops jogging along the street with measured steps. She will sometimes wonder if they saw the streets as some runway and if perhaps they fancied themselves in a fashion parade and the prize will be given to who had the largest ' ass-ets ' and all under the pretence of losing weight.