Two Worlds - Season 1 - Episode 68

Episode 4 years ago

Two Worlds - Season 1 - Episode 68

The Thursday rains landed on the ground with same thuds of snows hails hitting the Canadian roads. The Toyota’s wipers swept the waters off the windscreen but didn’t sweep off the penetrating cold, which rested on her skin and breached into its once tiny pores.

The downpour waned into droplets and gradually diminished, leaving its haze on the windscreen. Jide wiped the haze from his side with a rag. He threw the rag on the dashboard and returned his hands to the steering wheel. Lauren picked up the rag and wiped the haze off her front. The wipers swished at the dots of water clung to the screen.

A police officer tapped the bonnet and directed Jide to the road’s shoulder. Lauren wondered why the officer did that. Nothing in the car was wrong. If he was checking for papers, he had stopped the wrong man. Jide never drove without the necessary papers.
Jide whined with a puckered face and steered to the shoulder. He parked and rolled his window down.


The officer stalked to his side and pointed his nightstick to her. “She’s on no seatbelt.” His English had a hint of Yoruba, like English hiding under a blanket of Yoruba.
She glanced at her middle. The officer was right. She was not belted. Anything but that would have been better. She fixed her seatbelt and prayed it made the officer walk away.

It didn’t.

The officer gawped at the wallet on the dashboard and fined. He didn’t state an amount, but told Jide to drop something reasonable so that they would not waste time talking too much. Lauren wanted to ask the man what amount was reasonable and what amount wasn’t and who called the standards for the reasonability. She did not ask because of the manner the officer spoke, his Yoruba-accented English. He did not speak the careful English every Nigerian tried to speak when around her, and this said something of him, that he could pounce on her if she dared question him, and would not take her foreignness for an excuse like the ideal Nigerian would.

She broke the rules. He ought to be at her window and not Jide’s. And she could afford to give him something reasonable.

Jide picked the wallet and brought out three thousand notes. He gave it to the officer and fixed his hands on the steering wheel. The officer looked at the money, almost sneering at it, as though it was too unreasonable to come from a rich man like Jide who had a white girl in his car, because in Nigeria, a poor man couldn’t know a white, and anyone who knew a white ought to be able to pay a fine above three thousand naira. The officer attempted to say something, but before his words could come out, Jide rolled up his window and steered back onto the road.

A scowl had its place on his face. What introduced that, the officer or her?
“They always find ways to extort,” he said. “I pray I find myself in a position to deal with them.”

He looked at her and she blinked away. She was not supposed to blink. She was supposed to look straight to his eyes and listen to what he had to say.

She transferred her eyes back to him but had already lost his gaze. The windscreen stole all of it. “I normally wear the belts. I just forgot today.”

“They ought not to fine. The worst should be to give you a ticket, if they are organized enough. The officer was hungry.”
“Are we close to the station?” She tried a new topic.

“We should be there in the next five minutes.”

The signboard pointed to a green and yellow array of bungalows. Jide drove there and parked at the parking lot, or something resembling a parking lot.

Half of the eyes inside the building aimed at her, and the exceptions were closed. She had never been to a police station, Canada or Nigeria, but she never thought it could be as empty as this. A uniformed officer wearing a dark eyeshade lay on a bench. His eyes couldn’t be open, not with the way he lay like a lifeless man, and a part of Lauren wished he could actually be lifeless, so that tomorrow he would not be alive to stop a good man driving on the street and ask for something reasonable.

She sat on a pew and watched Jide have a long chat with the police officer on the counter, who had thick, black horizontal tribal marks, carved three times on both of his cheeks. Words like oyinbo escaped from their discussion, same word people in school said around her, same uncouth word. Their chat ended and the man made a call. Jide signalled her to walk with him.

“You two debated on if I should be granted access?” she asked.

“He was simply catering for his pocket, and relented when he saw I wasn’t going to succumb.” His lips barely moved, and those words certainly did not come from the good side. Whatever happened with the officer angered his bones and deprived her of the little cheer that used to be on his face—the little she had hoped to be brighter on the sight of Richard.

An officer led them into a room with nothing but two windows, a fan hung on the broken ceilings, and four white chairs that were scattered about the room’s edges. She put three chairs in place, and they sat and waited for Richard. She peered through a window for a glimpse of the cells, praying they should be nothing like the ones in the internet. At least, Richard’s shouldn’t. Richard walked along with an officer. His hands weren’t cuffed and he wasn’t wearing a jumpsuit.