Shattered Beyond Repair (Episode 1)

Tomilola sat down in the single room apartment where she lived with her mum. Her father had left when she was five; he just packed up and left with his belongings one day. There had been no quarrels, no exchange of words between her parents but he left them and they never heard from him again. She had just woken up from sleep and was just sitting there wondering where her mum could have gone. It was about 3pm in the afternoon and she was beginning to get hungry. She got up and opened the cupboard where her mum always kept food but there was no food in any of the pots. She went to the container where garri was kept and she was lucky to find that it still contained two handfuls; she put the garri in a cup and added some water. She left it to soak for some minutes so that it would rise. As she was about to start taking the garri, her mum came in. She carried a bunch of plantains and some other foodstuffs in a Bagco sack. Tomi left the garri and went to help her mother to arrange the foodstuffs in their appropriate places after greeting her. There was rice, beans, bread and garri in the sack. Tomi was happy when she saw the bread because she had only wanted to manage the garri before, it wouldn’t have satisfied her but now, she had something else to eat.
Tomi’s mother was a jack of all trades. Due to her inability to complete her secondary education, it was difficult for her to get a good job that would pay her well. Despite all the obstacles she faced daily, she made sure that she tried her best to take care of her only child. In the mornings, she would go to Mama Adunni's store to get her own portion of bread to sell for the day. Mama Adunni had a large store for retailing bread and she had a lot of vendors. She piled loaves of bread on a round wooden tray with margarine and mayonnaise for each of her sales girls everyday except on weekends. At the end of the day, she pays them twenty percent of their total sales. Sometimes, she gives them bread and that was why she had come home with bread today.
After selling bread, Omolanke; Tomi's mother would go round all of her laundry customers’ houses and wash their clothes. They had a fixed amount that they paid according to the types and quantities of the clothes. When she finished washing all the clothes, she came home and rested before going back to the bus-stop in the evening around 7pm where she sold sausage rolls, soft drinks and pop-corn. She cooled her drinks by immersing them in a bowl filled with ice which she bought everyday.
Though they didn’t have enough, they did not lack. Tomi who was now thirteen, attended the government secondary school that was situated at the next bus-stop to theirs. It was not really far and she trekked to and from school most of the time. She was in JSS3 and her mother had promised her that by the time she finished the class, she would have saved enough money to send her to a private school. This made Tomi excited and she resolved to study harder so that it would be easy for her to gain admission into a school of her choice; it was easier to get admitted into another school if your grades were high. It wasn’t like she even needed to because she was very intelligent.
Lanke and her daughter looked so much alike and people always teased them by calling them twins. They behaved like sisters; sometimes even wearing the same clothes. They had no problems with their neighbours where they lived in their ‘face-me-I-face-you' bungalow which consisted of six rooms. They all lived as one family in peace and harmony; the tenants loved one another.
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Lanke had gone to the bus-stop as usual to sell her goods but Tomi had stayed back to write an essay assignment that was due for submission the following day. A conductor called out to Lanke to give him a bottle of LaCasera and as she was running to give it to him in the moving vehicle, she was knocked down by a danfo whose brake had failed. She gave up the ghost before she could be rushed to the hospital. People wailed, passengers put their hands on their heads and lamented. Awele whose stand was beside Lanke's own and who lived in the next compound to hers rushed to the house to inform Lanke's neighbours of the tragedy that has happened. The neighbours brought Lanke's body home with the help of some people at the bus-stop.

To be continued...