I am about seven years old. It is a weekday. I wake up. I hear sounds from the sitting room adjacent to my room. It is unusual to hear so much noise in the two-storey house we live in. The lights are lit in the four-sided room I share with my siblings; Tayo and Tunji. Something is not right, I wonder.
I get down from the lower bed of the bunk I sleep in. I do not sleep above as my brother would sip some strange fluids in the night if I do. I walk to the door. I see Demola’s aunt, our next door neighbor by the parabolic dining table close to the exit, I see Deborah’s father who stays on the block opposite ours say something to a man I cannot recognize. ‘O ti ji’ (You have woken up), I hear my mum say as she walks over to me. She holds me by the shoulder and pulls me close to her. Her soothing touch gives my wandering mind some relief. She doesn’t tell me what the problem is, why the neighbours are in the house when the open windows tell me it is dark outside.
I hear comments that reveal a robbery has taken place. ‘Can it be here?’ I ask myself. I see my dad walk towards the door. He does not look at my direction. 'E je kin de odo awon olopa' (let me go to the Police), I hear him say to the people close to the door. He does not come back till the morning sun had risen, the time I would hear the unpleasant news. His light-green Peugeot 504 saloon car has been stolen. I don’t know how he found out it was missing or who told him. I would hear a story later that it was first pushed away from the sandy park he parked it the night before by some miscreants to a road about a quarter of a kilometer away from any suspecting eyes that might have looked at their direction due to the blaring sound the ignition would make at that hour.
I would also hear another story that pointed to a fellow who helped him buy the car about two weeks before. I would still go to school this day (that’s how I know it was a weekday) and stay in daddy’s arms in the evening.
'I made a report to the police and I have hopes they will recover it', he tells me. It was never recovered.
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