CHAPTER SIX: THE GIRL AND THE LAMP

Aega;

The words echoed in my head as I sat there on my bed dumbfounded, even after she had left and had made me promise not to tell anybody soul that I heard it from her. 

It never crossed my mind that my mother lived here. For how was she acquainted with them? How was she related to them? Was she a daughter, a sister, an aunt or a relation from a distance, a deep and twisted part of the family tree? The family tree. The part that no one would ever want to mention. The part that even gets Aunty Ruth scared enough to mention out loud. 

I couldn't sleep after hearing such a news. I sat hovering over my knees, arched my back as I rested my folded arms around folded legs scratching my chest as I breathed slowly but heavily enlarging the circle grip and shrinking it with every cycle of breathing I could summon. My toes dug into the softness of the bed as I thought deeply. About so many everything-s. And I also tried to think about what my mother was like before she had me and before her sickness. I tried to think about what my mother's life was like here in this room and the house as a whole before everything, before me. I gave the room another swirling look, hoping I would maybe see things from her own eyes. Trying to imitate her every essence of thoughts and reasoning. Maybe I would begin to understand why I didn't like it here either. I knew that if I didn't like it, then my mother probably wouldn't have liked it either. If ever she was a mystery, then her time here would be more than a mystery to me, seeing that she didn't tell me anything about this house or her time here or that I even had another family member. No stories or memories. She would just smile and sing all the time, just like the way I remembered her. Even as I closed my eyes and tried to picture anytime we may have had any sensitive conversation of any relation in particular. Nothing as far back as I could remember, and nothing looking ahead, except for the picture of the young girl I had seen earlier on the wall. Could that have been my mother? I thought. How young would she have been? 

All of a sudden its disappearance became more suspicious than mysterious, and with a hint of reasoning; being that someone in this house may have wanted me not to see the picture in the first place and had slyly taken it down when I wasn't paying attention. It felt like there was a conspiracy being at play. For I knew, my mother did have a good reason for keeping me in the dark about these people. I tried to recount my last day with her. Every single second spent in the room with her, before I was dragged away from her grip by my grandmother. I wished she had told me something then. 

This made me a little bit sad than alone in the room. I did feel a slight fill in the room just after realizing my mother had once lived in this room. As I sat on the soft mattress and blanket, I thought of images of her when she was younger like me doing the same thing and maybe having the same feeling as I was. It was mesmerizing to say the least.

The room was now dark with only light coming from the night sky and the soft wind blew into the room. I didn't give it any form of notice. I just kept on mesmerizing and fantasizing about the idea of my mother living in a place like this and how she would have looked like when she was my age. It did dawn on me that I never saw her picture on the wall, just like everyone else, if she did live here. Except for the picture of a young girl who had every chances of being my mother, if I had asked aunt Ruth or if I had seen any picture of my mother during her younger years. It bothered me, just as the picture of the girl that disappeared did. Then immediately, my mind sparked with a resolution, and a thought appeared. I jumped up in my bed. 

"What if the picture of the young was her!", I said to myself. 

Tried to picture them both, there was basically few similarities, but one was older and the other was younger and just as I had said earlier, I have never seen any picture of my mother in her younger days before but, there was a big possibility that she was the girl in the picture. I chuckled with amusement and my chest filled with warmth. I was happy for the fact that this made me feel happy, I felt not alone indeed. I just needed to find out somehow and who I could talk to about all this, and only two people came to mind. 

Then something happened. The room lit up brighter than the evening light. At first it didn't get to my attention. There was a sense of heat, different than the warmth I was feeling. An instant heat. I looked outside, it didn't come from the window place. It felt odd and crowded. I took in a whiff of smoke as I took a deep breath, smoke that would only come from something burning. I rushed out of bed to the window, took a hard and thorough look outside again, wasn't sure if my so-called eye defection was acting up again. Seeing things in black and white literally was a problem on its own, since it was one of the reason I never went to school in the first place. 

If the smoke from a fire didn't come from outside, it did come from something inside, from something burning inside. I took a sniff again and felt it coming from my back. It smelled like a rusted tomato tin can, kerosene oil and smoke. I turned around, looking for the direction with which it came from. The table! A lamp was lit up. Sitting there peacefully like it was there for a long time, like as if it were supposed to be there. 

I was a little bit shocked, then confused if I had by mistake left the lamp on after aunt Ruth had left the room. I took a good look at the lamp from a distance, standing by the windowpane, squinting. I did recognise the lamp, strangely to my surprise. I knew immediately that I had seen it somewhere. I began to ponder and wonder, searching my mind's thoughts as my eyes were fixed on the flames, breathing synchronically as it pulsated, in a heartbeat manner. 

Then it came to me like a flare spark. I had seen the strange thing earlier the day, when I first woke up. I frowned. But I remembered that it wasn't the only strange thing that I had seen, alongside the lamp was a girl too, if I remembered correctly. She was smiling at me. I instinctively started searching for the girl too. Around the corner of the room, at the other side of the table, where I last sat on the chair. At the corner of the room, next after the tip of the table's last stretch. The flame danced soothingly as it revealed the shadow siting in a chair. The flame's light flickered around and bounced vaguely on the image, causing an abstract appearance of a dancing shadow which was in cahoots with the flame's dances, over the image siting there, revealing the side of her face. It was definitely the young girl I saw earlier. Even when I squinted very hard, doubtfully and still, I was filled with certainty. 

She was sitting upright and facing the lamp, focusing on the flame. Her eyes watched with enthusiasm as the flame danced and then she began humming a song. Her index finger drummed rhythmically on the table. It felt familiar, the song, my body tingled with searchingness. The light from the lamp revealed her face but it was not clear enough, but I knew she was the one. My whole body was certain, my heart beats faster and heavier with every breath also agreed too. I stood there, by the window, my body stiff even as my head prompted me to move, I couldn't. My jaws gapped slowly but I couldn't let out any form of sound. I wasn't afraid, to my surprise. I was more staggered that someone was in the room with me all the whole time than the fact that she didn't acknowledge my presence. 

The humming of the song felt like lullaby and yet she hummed it sorrowfully, giving it a sense of a story hidden in the notes rather than its lyrics. I listened for a while, the smooth change in the tones and notes and the cluster of drumming harmonically created a melancholious atmosphere that filled the every-silence of the room. I was drawn in, like a moth to a flame. I had to see who she was. Really see. I moved slowly like someone who didn't want to be heard. Mistakenly, I stepped on something on the floor, it made a squeaky sound and suddenly, the humming stopped. I paused too. Her body shook quickly, like as if the squeaky sound accidentally interrupted her, bringing her out of a deep thought. She stopped, didn't move a muscle and slowly, she turned towards me. 

Now facing me, the light from the flames of the lamp hovered over from the left side to her right cheek and the once visible side got lost into the dark, but was still outlined, savagely. If I squinted harder. But her eyes were now clear as the lamp showed every distinct form of it. The corner right side of her nose, the outlines of her jaws and chin and most of all, her cloths were visible too. From where I stood, I could see the type and quality of the cloth she wore. Her clothes were old and worn out but still neatly dressed. Her hair was now brown and curly and greased well and her skin was pale according to the visibility of the light coming from the lamp. I gathered confidence as I continued with a new step, didn't try to react emotionally or facially, didn't want to cause any reaction from her. As I walked up slowly to the table, I wondered why I wasn't scared of her. Why I wasn't scared of what was in front of me. I weighed my consciousness and realised that I was more curious and optimistic than being scared with pessimism. As I got closer, I could see her whole view clearer and I could surely say that she looked familiar. More than familiar, she looked like the girl in the picture, from earlier. What a surprise! The day was yet to be over, bringing me new and fascinating things filled with clandestine. 

As I got to the table, I stopped and faced her. Few inches apart and eyes locked on each other's the whole time. Now that I was closer, I also realised that she was beautiful. I gazed admirably, lost in the moment. Observed the lid dent as the corner of her left eyes, the twitching at the other eye and how light and glassy her pupils were as it reflected the flame from the lamp. 

She didn't even flinch when staring down at me, the whole time that I was standing right next to her, no facial expressions yet. She sad just like the song she was humming. The song that somehow felt familiar to me, but I couldn't best place it. She then looked at me with a frown as I averted my gaze, then smiled and frowned again and then her brows folded into questions. She didn't know who I was and I didn't know who she was either but neither of us reacted to that situation. Which was in its own way an awkward moment of silence. But I was filled with questions, and I needed to break the silence, holding a little bit of fright under my paused breathing filling my chest to the point where I couldn't breathe anymore and still needed to say something. So I sighed heavily releasing it all out before I could began speaking.

"I've seen you before", I started. No reply,

"This morning", still no reply. 

Her eyes moved away from my sight as she then began to scan the room, now she looked more confused and scared to the point that she was fidgeting. She looked back at me, fear began to fill her eyes, it was glaring like as if she just woke up in a foreign and unknown place. Her eyes then stopped on the sight of my bed, she slowly paused and her face expression like as if she had just brought into being something familiar. She did, I think, with the way she reacted, she did find something familiar. She slowly stood up from the chair, turned away from the lamp and walked slowly towards the bed whilst scrapping the top of the table with her fingers. Her eyes looking now surprised and with a hint of joy or certainty. I just watched without uttering another word, indulging her presence and her act as it went on, unable to think of what to say next. She touched the sheet on the bed, took it in her hand, then to the other, squeezed it with both hands and then did the one thing that felt unexpected; she smelt it. Took an audible whiff, a long one, closing her eyes intimately and then paused and turned right to me and opened her eyes.

"What are you doing in my room?", she asked, slowly. 

This was the first time hearing her speak. Her voice sounded cracked and feeble and frail and I felt moved by them. I didn't know what to answer, but then as I opened my mouth, words began to come, pouring out involuntary, 

"You are the girl in the picture!", I started, "Did you take down the picture from the parlour?".

She snivelled, and then I noticed the watery eyes again, I was aback by them and as she stood, I found myself admiring her once again. She was a pale beauty and her appearance was brighter than the lamp or the night light. 

She nodded slowly in response to my question and then went back facing the dancing flame and her humming still holding the sheet in her hands. I walked up to meet her close to my bed where she sat down facing the flame. I bent slightly to see her sad soliloquizing face clearly. She was searching the room, unstably still. 

"Why?", I asked.

"It was only meant for him to see, not you or anybody else. Where is he?", she responded without staring at me. Her cracked but frail voice melted in me. It was clear that she wasn't confused of where she was but she was just looking for someone she couldn't find. And by the looks of it, it didn't feel like her first time doing so. She did look wary and tired from crying for a very long time, with tiredness round the corner of her eyes, like someone that hasn't slept for a very long time. She looked straight at me and then asked the same question she had asked before, "what are you doing in my room?". This time more demanding that the former.

"This is my room", I answered, confused.

"No it is mine", she insisted, not paying attention to me "-but we could share, mama wouldn't have to know". Now she wasn't making any sense, who is 'him' and 'mama', but she did sound sincere and her request felt accommodating. 

Her voice brightened as she smiled at me and then went back humming that familiar song. But this time the notes in her hums caught me at the back of my head and a lost memory resurfaced; of a figure humming the same song as she soaked clothes into a bowl filled with foams from soapy water, and me, sitting close to her dipping my hands into the soapy water trying to help but all I was doing was just getting in the way. 

At that moment, I knew who she was. I knew who was sitting on my bed, a different version but the same person indeed. I connected everything that Bolu said earlier, to what aunty Ruth told me before she left and to the picture that disappeared from the parlour wall. But the problem was that I didn't wanted to believe, I had seen her not many days ago and now a younger version of her was right in front of me. I gasped in disbelief. It was my mother!

If she was the same girl, I saw earlier today before aunty Ruth drew away the curtains, she was smiling then, what then has changed? I walked back to sit on the chair so that I could face her, I leaned on the table, elbow digging into the surface of the table and I could feel the splinters itching at my skin, feeling flabbergasted. The lamp shinning at my side as the light flooded the girl's front showing her full body. I took a good look at her, so that I could not only be sure but compare the both of them. She was thin and light skinned, even with my bad sights I could still deduce that and she had the same type of hair I was having now, but her older self didn't.

Mesmerized by her beauty, although I had never seen any picture of my mother from when she was young and now she appears to me in this version of her younger self. I didn't know why. I began to grow scared and the question of if she was dead rang in my head heavily, my heart began to feel heavy as the weight of the negative thoughts filled my chest gaining grounds. I began getting the sense of urge to know, I wanted to know if she was the ghost of my mother, if my mother had finally succumbed to the sickness in the hospital and if two days ago was the last time I would see her and had held her in my arms. I began to fear for the worst, but I still needed to ask. 

"Are you my mother? Are you dead and come to me as a ghost of your younger self?", I asked, with all the remaining bravado I could muster.

She didn't answer just gave me a confused reaction, tried to smile but couldn't, instead she chuckled, a quick one. It felt like she thought I was making a joke. I knew I wasn't, because what was the reason for her to appear here, at a time like this, in the same room my mother was said to have lived and the resemblance to the girl in the picture and not to talk of the slight resemblance to my actual older version of my mother. It was uncanny. I was obviously serious and seriously was I scared. More scared if it would turn out to be true. 

She stopped laughing when she saw that my reaction didn't change but a sterner look had come to my face and yet my heart was filled with hope of doubts that I might be wrong, more wrong that it felt like a prayer. 

"We are the same age, are we not? How can I be your mother?", she said with bold conviction. Then chuckled again. I searched her watery eyes, they didn't flinch not even in the midst of the flaming kerosene lamp. She had to be right, or she believed she was right. Either way, I knew her presence here was not ordinary.

"So why are you here then? why was your picture on the wall and why did you take it down?", I asked even though I still did have more questions to ask. She went back to facing the lamp as she began to speak,

"I do live here, you are the ghost not me", she said affirmatively clearing her throat before continuing "-and the picture was not for anyone to see except for him. He hasn't been back since he went to war".

I paused, startled, this conversation was getting confusing as words went by, every word that came out from her mouth was as confusing as the next. Who was this 'him' she kept mentioning. I wondered as I kept a watchful eye on her the whole time. She had gone back to searching the room and fidgeting again. 

If she was searching for someone that went to war, it would obviously be the man in the military uniform that had so many pictures of him on the wall or someone close. Maybe that's the person she was looking for, I thought as I watched her silently and she kept acting weird ignoring my presence as usual. 

"I need to find him soon; she is about to wake up. If she wakes up, I would have to go", she said hesitantly. Her hurried eyes wept sluggishly and her fidgeting hands dropped the clothes and was then laid on mine. I felt them, I felt her hands in mine. The coldness, it iced my palms, vibrated my bones and sent a cold shiver down my spine and settled in my belly. I had never in my entire little life have touched something that felt so out of life. It was revering and I quacked in her touch. Instinctively, I retracted my hands, but she grabbed on them rampageously not letting go. I became frightened. Almost screamed. She was scaring me as she looked at me devastated and scared too. 

I was getting more confused, "Who is waking up?", I asked frighteningly.

"The woman sleeping in the bed, she keeps crying and her memory is hazy and clouded as she keeps repeating the same words as she sleeps, and I can't sleep when she sleeps except when she awakes. So when she sleeps, I look for him and when she wakes I have to give her space. I think she needs him. So if you can find him she would sleep". She looked at me, at my confused face. Her eyes were now filled with fright and worry. She paused and then and then spoke again, but this time she felt sad and down,

"I don't think she has much time again. She is getting weak by the minute, you have to help me look for him, I need to find him, I need to relay a message to him or else she will keep disturbing me and I can't sleep and you will keep appearing to me. Which I don't want, ghost girl", she said. "I just want to sleep!", she cried.

After a while of silence, my mind racing as both of us breath harmonised, her cold feeling on my hands still hurt as she let go. Relieved of it, I rubbed my hands together conjuring warmth onto them as a looked away from her. I stood up, baked away from the chair and table and went for the door. My hands were on the iron knob, I wanted to run out and called for anyone. I didn't want to be the one dealing with what was going on in here. Not alone, if possible. But I stopped, my mind raced back to what she said, about someone not having much time, about her calling out some words. There was a stabbing feeling in my chest that felt like she was talking about my mother. The feeling nudged me to turn right back and face her once again. She was going to tell me one way or the other, I needed to know. I was going to pry it out her mouth if necessary.

"You said she doesn't have time, who doesn't have time. Who where you referring to?", I asked. She tried to speak, but fumbled in her speech, scrambling on them like someone looking for the right words to say. "Just tell me anyhow", I said to her, assuredly, I could try and take it if it were my mother. 

"You do look familiar", she began, "I saw you in her dreams, you both kept singing the same song over and over again, it goth stuck in my head. It was the only time she felt happy inside and I could hear her laugh and feel the warmth in her smile. But then she begins to think about him. I think she believes he could save her, but the last memory was of him leaving for the army." She paused and looked at me "I can't look for him. I know this is a dream to me and when I wake up I don't know if I would forget all this, but I feel like as if I am stuck in this world of repeat, I can't sleep even in my dreams. I need to sleep so I could wake up".

My heart almost collapsed in anguish as she confirmed my fear out right. My mother was really dying, but grandmother told me she was going to be alright. They have all been lying this whole time. I remembered the look on my mother, she also knew. I could sense it. I let go of the door knob, who was this person that could save my mother. I needed to know. If she can't find him, then I would by any means necessary.

My mind was made up, fastened and hardened. "Who is this 'him' would I be looking for?", I asked firmly and calmly. "There is only one military person in this house and he is just on the wall in the parlour, they said he hasn't come back from the war fighting for the country. How can I possibly find him, he is far away?"

She looked uncertain about what I just told her, she stood up from the bed and walked over to me, "I don't think that is the 'him' she was looking for, I think it was another man. She had met with him many times, I think she sees him like a god or healer", she said trying to peer into her own memory.

I was even more confused, was he also a military man too? a god? or a healer? Why did he go to war too? How then can I find such a person?

"I still don't know how I can find him", I said frustratingly. This time I wasn't just confused, I was but blank. I have never heard of such thing before. 

"Oh to find him is not hard at all". She beamed up suddenly as she spoke. A hope lit across her showing teeth, "you can use the lamp". She pointed to the strange lamp sitting on the table. I looked at her with confusion, she didn't mind. "Stretch out your hands", she commanded. I didn't at first, but she gave an insisting eyes and I obliged. I opened both palm as I watched her search for something on her.

"The lamp is about to go out, that means she is waking up!", she said as she deeps her hand into her breast pocket and brought out a match box and placed it in my hand. "Light this whenever you need to find your way to him, follow the direction of the flame. And don't lose the lamp it or finish the matchstick inside, there is only one box left and you are holding it." 

We both looked at the lamp, the flamedanced towards the window,

"Wouldn't you appear if I light the lamp too?", I wondered. 

"I don't know; I haven't done this before".

The silence grew as we watched the light slowly dimming. I took one last look at her, she did remind me of my mother. I smiled, for the first time since she appeared. I wanted to touch her again, the urged to do so came over me. But as I raised my hand, the light was snuffed out and she was gone with it. Just like that. The room went dark. Then silence filled the unoccupied spaces she left. I just stood there, feelings of loneliness again. I motioned for the lamp in the dark guided by the moon's light. Held it in my hands, it was empty, no kerosene. I would need that if I was ever going to find this strange man, this so-called god, this healer. I didn't put the lamp back on the table, instead, I hid it under the bed, didn't want to risk anyone finding it.

As I lay in bed, I thought about my mother, and my mind wondered until I found myself praying. I couldn't sleep, didn't know how too. My blood was rushing forcefully and my heartbeat was louder and I just stared out into the dark where the moon hovered and silently watched the light.