Must Read: BLACK MARIA (A Tale of Two Thieves) - Season 1 - Episode 6

7 years ago

Must Read: BLACK MARIA (A Tale of Two Thieves) - Season 1 - Episode 6

"Are you really going to do it?" The man's partner asked.

He still held the blade at the child neck when he replied, "I don't want to, but I have to do it."

"If you don't want to do it, then you don't have to do it." The partner replied as he brought out a cigarette box, took out a stick and lit it. He inhaled the smoke deeply as he sU-Cked.

"What about Chief?"

"To hell with Chief," the smoker replied, "This is a child for crying out loud. We have our own children, remember? And besides, the killing of helpless children is not our kind of job."

The man with Black nodded his head in agreement as he looked at the boy. The blood from the boy's neck had flowed on the knife. He took the knife away immediately. The he asked his partner:

"What are we going to tell the chief?"

"We'll tell him we've done the job, of course. I can see that you have cut the child, we'll show the bloodstain on the knife to Chief. Simple. He'll believe it."

The man with the knife faced the little boy and said, "You are a very lucky boy, you're not going to die today. If you want to continue staying alive, just make sure you never return to that house where we found you. Do you understand me?"

Black nodded weakly.

"Good," The man said and extracted a currency from his pocket, "Take this money, buy yourself some food and stay of trouble."

The men left him there at the bank of the stream, got into their car and drove off. Black lay there, with the money given to him firmly clutched in his fist. Even as weak as he was, he would not release the money without a fight; the money was his ticket to life.

Ten minutes after the men had departed, Peter dragged himself towards the stream and drank from it. Then with effort, he stood on his feet. He felt very dizzy and leaned against a tree. He waited for the dizziness to clear a little before taking some slow steps. Slowly but surely, Black walked to the open where food items were sold. He staggered to a kiosk and bought some hot buns. The snacks were delicious but Black didn't feel the taste; he just knew that he was eating something edible. The vendor gave him a return change for what he bought and Black walked slowly to a quiet place to eat his food.

He ate five balls of the buns and drank from the stream that would have received his blood had the men not show him kindness. He was feeling less hungry now but the fever still about him had not alleviated. He still felt weak and his temperature was high. He lay under the tree by the stream and thought about what had happened to him this morning. He thought about the evil Chief Salami. He thought about his parents. He thought about the men who had been ordered to kill him but had refused to do it. He thought about himself; he was thinking about what tomorrow would bring him when he drifted off to sleep under the tree.

By the time he woke up in the late afternoon, his voice was returning, and so was migraine. It was as if someone was testing a hammer on his skull. The headache was getting worse. He staggered to his feet and held his head in both hands, crying out loud. He cried with pain, cried helplessly, calling on his mother who would never come. He staggered back to the busy street; his body dirty and full of soot. The clothes he had stolen were torn and slowly becoming rags too. The other pair had been left in the house. He had forgone that, since he had been seriously warned never to return to the house.

As he wobbled down the street, people avoided him like a plague. No one showed him kindness; some considered him a little vagrant, others called him a mad child. Peter hated them all; they were wicked people, he decided. His parents had been kind to people in their lifetimes. They had even shown benevolence to total strangers, so why couldn't these people show him kindness in return? So, Peter concluded that his parents were the only nice people in the world. Maybe it was wrong to be nice after all.

He ate the remaining balls of buns with him. The food was only able to curb his hunger, not his headache. Raising his eyes up he saw a chemist's shop and went into it. The woman behind the desk looked down on him as if he were a maggot that had managed to crawl out of a latrine pit.

"Please ma'am. I have headache." Black told her.

The woman stared at him incredulously, as if he had just told her to find an ocean to jump into.

"Excuse me?" The lady said.

"My head is killing me, ma'am." Black groaned.

"And the oracle told you I'm the cause of the headache, right? Watch that wall, don't taint it with your filthy body."

"I'm sorry, ma'am." Black stepped away from the white wall and said, "Please ma'am. I need medicine for my headache."

The woman regarded Black for a moment and said, "Do you think we run a charity organisation here? You think this is the headquarters of WHO?"

"What's a WHO, ma'am?"

"World Health Organisation, silly."

"I don't understand what you mean ma'am. Please give me something to kill this headache, ma'am, before it kills me."

"All the drugs here are for sale, boy. Get your vile self out of here before the customers begin to complain.

Black was about to exit the shop when he remembered the money given him by one of the thugs. He quickly dipped his hand into his pocket and extracted the money. The lady collected some of the money and gave him a satchet of Paracetamol.

"Take two tablets now and another two in the night before you sleep."

"Thank you, ma'am. I'm very grateful." Black left thhe drug store. He returned to the stream and gulped down the drugs with some water. Then he leaned against a tree, his eyes shut. Soon, the placebo effect began to manifest and the headache was slowly relieving him. He wanted to return to his house, he wanted to stay close to his mother. He was worried about her, but he knew he could not visit her, he dare not.

Suddenly, the weather transformed; the sky was changing her garments, lizards were beginning to crawl into hole, roosters about to jump on branches, birds attempting to fly into thejr nests. Night was gradually approaching. It was during this process of atmospheric transformation that the thought about where to lay his head occurred to Black. He was definitely not going to pass the night under the tree beside the stream; the cold that would ravage his convalescing body, not to talk of the millions of mostquitoes that would feed on him before dawn.