THE RETAKE EXAM LOOMS LIKE A DARK CLIFF.
My sister Oyimaja and I had a long talk when I fled to her house to escape from Ogbareka. “You are destroying the image of this family.” Her breath rasped in her throat, her slow, lingering gaze falling on me, withering me.
I had not been so scolded in a long time.
“You are going to retake the exam.” She panted with exhaustion from scolding me. “Right now our mother is very angry with you. I made inquiries and was told you can sit the General Certificate of Education in place of the West African Senior School Certificate Examination you failed, which would require a lot of money to reregister for. The qualifications are the same. I have stored palm oil I was going to sell for my children’s school fees. I will give you part of the money to purchase the forms.”
The exam is only two weeks away now. The closer it gets, the more anxious I become. I remember Amechi, a fellow who forged my transfer letter back to Community Secondary School when I returned, a 400-level undergraduate of the university. Uwakwe had introduced him to me. Uwakwe had told me that he also helped students to cheat in exams. “He is an orphan and trains himself with the money he makes.”
Now that I remember Amechi, I rush off to Uwakwe’s shop to fix a meeting with him. I don’t care if I don’t sit the exam myself as long as I pass. I am desperate to make things right again. But I also have to think of the risk of failing if we are caught.
Amechi puts me at ease.
“You have nothing to worry about,” he says as he stuffs the money I pay him in his shabby jeans pocket, his manner impatient, his eyes shrewd. “We will buy off the invigilators if they get difficult. Don’t worry. You will get value for your money.”
On the day the exam starts, a blowy February day, I set off to the Girls’ Comprehensive School with anxiety niggling at my mind. The season has been full of winds and dust smells, but it is now settling, the Harmattan almost quiet. I arrive at the girls’ school, which is separated from the Seminary School by a high fence. They raised the fence to high heavens, maybe to restrict girls living in the dorm from getting mischievous with seminarians and would-be priests. I walk through a rickety gate into a large and unkempt school compound full of old buildings and weeds. The school smells like a latrine, the Harmattan wind blowing the smell in waves across the exam hall from the surrounding bushes, where the villagers relieve themselves after pulling down the wire gauze fence.
The school compound is crawling with mercenaries hanging about, waiting for the exam to begin. The first person I look for as I step into the premises is Amechi, my mercenary. I spot him leaning against a cashew tree. His presence should be reassuring, but I’m filled with unease. I walk over and edge a little to the other side of the tree so that I can watch him from the corner of my eye. He is about my height, about my size, and about my age, probably a little older. I should have already graduated like him but for the years I lost as a sickly child with pneumonia, as a fighter in Lagos, and as a migrant worker in Anukwu. My eyes linger on him, from his white sweatshirt to his blue jeans and a pair of red loafers. Everything looks so new he probably got it all with the money I paid him.
We are supposed to get started around eleven. The mercenaries will throw in the answers on pieces of paper through broken windows. They will try to outsmart the invigilators, who will wear mean faces and chase them around. But then the tension will ease off as money exchanges hands. The scowls will then vacate the faces of the invigilators, and the mercenaries will work in a friendlier atmosphere.
“Meche,” I say in a low, resolute voice, using his nickname. “There’s something I want to say.”
He turns an inquisitive face towards me.
“I’d like to write the exam by myself,” I hear myself saying. “I am not asking you to refund anything. Keep the money, but let me do this alone.”
He stares at me for a long time. “Are you sure?”
“I am.”
“Fine, if that’s what you want.” He shrugs and starts to walk away, then turns around. “You really think you can do this?”
I assure him that I can, and watch him amble towards the gate and out of sight. And then I walk into the exam hall. The decision to write the exam by myself flew into me like a virus.
The exam period stretches into its third week. By the end of it, I am thoroughly exhausted. But I am happy it has ended, and I go out celebrating on the day I write my final paper, coming home drunk and slumbering on Okike’s tomb, waking up at dawn wet with dew.
“Are you celebrating another bad result?” Machebe hisses at me, but I know when I should pretend to be more mature than he is, so I ignore him to avoid the fight his chest is thumping for. In any case, I am so dizzy with hangover I know I won’t achieve anything in a fight.
The hangover worsens into a headache, forcing me to go to Uwakwe’s shop for a dose of Panadol. Uwakwe is sitting alone in his shop. He is leaning his muscular arms on the counter and whistling to a clear tune from his radio, chin cupped in hand. Around him tablets and capsules are displayed in dusty packets on shelves, but I know that many of the packets are empty. Just over his shoulder a doorway with a thin threadbare curtain conceals a bedroom I know to be crowded with bottles, cups, plates, clothes, and other household items. The curtain is skewed, and I can see another curtain of the same light blue colour and thinness, the same degree of dirt cordoning off an iron bed, a sort of theatre where girls lie down to have their fetuses plucked out of them. His peak season usually begins a few weeks after Christmas. His victims are the gullible village girls who succumb to young men returning home for sex, misled with promises of a tangible union. Many of them end up impregnated and dumped. They flock to Uwakwe’s shop and grace his theatre bed when they miss their monthly cycle long after the young men have left the village and gone back to the city.
“Have you heard?” Uwakwe whispers to me from across the counter.
My ears prick up for a piquant bit of gossip.
“Ikuku bought a new car, an okwuotoekeneze, and members are wondering how he raised the money.”
“Are they suspecting that he used the collections to buy the car?”
“Yes. As we speak, someone has been sent to the headquarters to find out if he actually remits the collections to them as he claims.”
The news upsets me. I find it hard to think of Ikuku as a cheat, a corrupt leader. But then a strong sense of relief floods over me. I am happy I summoned the courage not to cheat in the exam. All the same, my dream appears to be crumbling, my life disintegrating. I walk back home feeling restless, the headache gone, giving way to anxiety and despair. Even after making a wish to Okike, I find it hard to rid my mind of my feelings of insecurity.