The Music Deal (Episode 16: Final)

Read Episode 15 HERE

Around nine-thirty when I got to her house, I saw a beautiful young lady, Rachel, standing at the balcony. I had met her on one of my visits to Blessing. She wore a short, an armless vest and held a phone in her hand. It was obvious she was yet to take her bath but she still looked beautiful nonetheless. I don’t know why I always meet beautiful girls, it was almost a curse.

“Blessing was not a student of U. I. to my knowledge,” she said after a few minutes of our discussion. “She came here few weeks ago, maybe about a month.”

“What did she tell you she came to do?”

“Well,” she said, “we don’t talk that much but she once told me she was a member of a music group, that they came for a series of performances in Ibadan. When I saw you, I thought you were a member of the music group.”

“So who owns the room she stayed?” I said without confirming or denying her accusations.

“According to what I heard,” she said, “the son of the landlord owns the room. But in the two years I’ve spent here, I’ve seen almost ten occupants of that room but never the son of the landlord himself. And they always come with the key so who are we to stop them?”

“How often did you talk with Blessing?”

“Not much,” she said as if she was happy to pour her heart to. “Most times, she’s out going to meet her music group and is always on the piano which is kind of weird.”

I put my hands on my head and walked towards the other side of the balcony. I began walking back towards her but saw a bench by the wall and my legs became suddenly weak, too weak to walk. I sat on the bench and despite the cool breeze blowing in anticipation for rain, sweat broke out of my face.

“Is there any problem?” Rachel said.

“No no no,” I said as my palms clapped my face and I stood up again. “Ah ah yes yes. Actually there is. She’s a thief. She stole my money.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand,” I lied, ashamed to tell her the true figure. She opened her mouth in surprise, but quickly covered it with her hands as a housefly flew past. I tried calling the three phone numbers again. Switched off. All three.

Everything started becoming so clear to me. She had not lent me twenty thousand naira but conned me of hundred thousand. And I thought a miracle was happening when I reminded my father on Sunday about my second semester tuition fees and he sent me forty-one thousand naira for my tuition and initial packet money on Monday.

I borrowed twenty thousand from my brother, Festus who paid in on Tuesday and my elder sister, Victoria who paid on Wednesday to bring my bank account to a hundred and one thousand naira. I had seen it as God’s way of telling me that music is my way, never as devil’s way of accruing debts on my weak neck. Eighty thousand naira in debts. Shower of shame fall on me. Fall on my stupid head.

I had been too stupid to get ensnared in her wiles. She was a far better psychologist than me, exploiting my weaknesses to the maximum. I wanted to be like 2face but I was too foolish. Now I had to resume school the next week and pay tuition fees, and survive. How am I going to tell people? Some problems are difficult, or worse, shameful to share.

“Bro Festus,” I said as he picked my call.

“Yes,” his tense voice betrayed an expectation of bad news for I had discarded his nickname for his real name.

“I need to borrow forty thousand more.”

THE END