At once, he scraped back his chair and made for her, fist ready. In an instant, she was also up, chair thrown back, both fists balled in readiness. I quickly stepped in.
‘This is preposterous, absolutely preposterous’, burst out Aunt Deline, the well known African detective, one Tuesday evening from behind the previous day’s newspaper. She had this habit of never letting go a newspaper until she had digested every bit of its content. It was as if she needed to bore holes in the papers.
We had just dined on the dish of vegetable and eba that I had concocted together with very few ingredients pepper, salt, maggi cubes and vegetable mixed in red oil. Even I felt it could be better but my aunt declared it was perfect.
‘It needed a generous dash of fresh or dried shrimps, to be sure, but who can hold that against you?’
That was her, always attentive to people’s feelings.
Suddenly, Aunt Deline sprang up from her chair as if she had been stung her. She had a habit of doing that when something irked her or stung her sense of justice.
‘Where are you going at this time, Aunt?’ I asked her, a little warily. It was a little past seven o’clock in the evening. The last time she got up like that, she had ended up fighting with a passing pedestrian, physically, even throwing punches. It’s a long story, one I’ll tell you sometime. For now, I poked around for my shoes.
‘To see this… this… so-called inspector and ask him what the police are doing about these kidnappings.’ I quickly got up and searched for the keys to the little flat that we shared. I exaggerate when I say we shared; it was her flat and I was her guest. The trouble was that I enjoyed staying with her so much I always seemed to be there, particularly when she was on a ‘case’.
‘What if he’s already asleep?’
‘He’ll wake up’, she said peremptorily. I found the keys.
Sometimes I wondered what she would do without me because she just never remembered things like keys. I suppose I secretly believed I was indispensable to her. The truth is…
Gbam! Gbam! Gbam! She was banging on the door of our neighbour. I was alarmed.
‘Auntie, this is not the inspector’s flat,’ I whispered in consternation.
‘Nonsense. Does he not live on this side of the building?’ she asked, looking at me like I was an idiot. Spatially, I was beginning to think my aunt was an idiot.
‘Yes, but one floor above us. And he has since changed flats, remember, to the one directly above us?’
The occupant of the flat she was banging on was a tall, aristocratic looking, elderly, cavalier bachelor called Mr. Ponle, who had slightly loose ways and hated being disturbed by his neighbours. I suspect he didn’t want anyone prying into his randy affairs with young girls. He had made one or two passes at me before but I guess my put downs had sufficiently put him down where I was concerned. Aunt Deline was anathema to him no-go area. Today, I really hoped he was too deeply asleep, or too deeply dead, to hear the commotion.
Too late. The door opened and he framed the doorway.
‘Yes?’, looking down at my diminutive aunt like she was a centipede that fetched up at his doorstep.
‘Yes what?’, asked the unrepentant knocker.
‘What do you want?’
‘Nothing. I wanted…’ She got no farther.
‘You knocked on my door to ask for nothing?’, he exploded, about to burst. I quickly stepped in.
‘I’m so sorry, but we knocked on your door in error. We really were going to another flat…’
He narrowed his eyes and gave the shot from the hip.
‘And you had no eyes on your head to read the name on my door before pounding it with your puny fist?’
Now, the fat was in the fire. There was no word my aunt hated more than that word puny. Perhaps, she hated it because it adequately described her, I don’t know. What I know is that if she gave me an allowance or food or bed or anything and I made the mistake of describing it as puny, I never heard the last of it. She would let me know in a thousand ways that the word altogether irritated her entire head by making sure it also irritated my entire head. In short she found ways of knocking my head with the word.
So, no one, absolutely no one, called her puny unless they were ready with their fisticuffs. Obviously, Mr. Ponle knew nothing of this. He was propelled only by his own irritation.
‘You… You… You dare call me puny?’I swear I could see her physically extending her height as she stood on the tip of her toes, arms balanced on her waist. In that posture, she was ready to take on the world.
Seeing her explode, the man retreated, nonplussed. I was disappointed. He was obviously better at starting fights than at sustaining them.
‘No, Miss Deline,’ he spat out, ‘you’re a giant’ before shutting the door most rudely in our faces.
My aunt looked long and hard at the door, honoured it with a most hearty hiss before turning to go up the only staircase that serviced the building. Still infuriated, she marched irreverently on everything that got in her way ants, cockroaches, flies, people… I trotted after her, apologising to them all.
At the door of Inspector Gogo’s flat, Aunt Deline knocked more softly this time. The door was opened at once by the inspector’s nephew who was staying with the family over the holidays. His wife was nowhere to be seen.
Aunt Deline charged in. ‘What in the name of all that is decent is going on in this country that everyone is being kidnapped left, right and centre and you and your ilk are just looking on?’ She delivered that last bit with a sweep of her newspaper-holding arm that took him in, along with his colleagues shown in a photograph displayed on the side-board behind where he sat at table. He was at his meal.
‘Oh,’ exclaimed Aunt Deline, ‘stock fish! I am partial to stockfish’. With that she drew out a chair, planted herself directly opposite him and drew the plate loaded with succulent, steaming cuts of stockfish in red pepper sauce towards her. The inspector sighed in great exasperation.
‘Eni,’ he intoned to me in his deep voice, ‘you’re a nice girl. But I can never understand why you allow yourself to be seen with puny, fake academics like this who…’ He got no further with his supposed joke.
I had seen Aunt Deline’s hand suspended in the air as she tried to take another bite of stockfish and look at him straight in the eyes. No, she wouldn’t. Yes, she did. Quietly, she laid down the stockfish cut in her right hand … and I don’t know what happened next. I only saw that her hand flashed out and the inspector was holding his lip and moaning.
‘That’s it; no more stockfish for you,’ and she changed her seat far from the moaner, taking the plate with her. I was too shocked.
‘Auntie!!! Sir, are you hurt?’ One tends to ask irrelevant questions when in shock.
‘She punched me!’ he managed to get out. Aunt Deline munched on in silent relish.
At once, he scraped back his chair and made for her, fist ready. In an instant, she was also up, chair thrown back, both fists balled in readiness. I quickly stepped in.
‘Inspector no, remember you are a policeman! Auntie no, remember you’re a lady!’
Both of them stopped in their tracks, looked at me and burst out laughing real hard, holding their sides. I didn’t understand.
