He found a motel the next evening. The disruption of his neighbor had proved a blessing, both in disguise and glare. If he could find a motel that paid him for his expert tonguing, then he could sufficiently combine the income that came from his work as clerk in the State Ministry of Finance.

 The motel’s reception was a misshapen lounge, having too many motley chairs. Ugo guessed that with their motley appearance, they were most possibly too hard to sit on. He despised caution as he walked to the wooden creation of a counter. It fit the description of the counters of the police station, wooden and hard and resembling what the police were known for. The counter housed a body-fitted cloth man, not dissimilar to the one that had bared Ugo entry into the Theatre.

 “Can I help you?” The voice did not lack similitude with the man who had withstood his entry.

 “I want to see the manager of this place.”

 “Why?” Ugo was scanned from head to bottom. Even though he had taken care to choose his attire, he doubted the acceptance it would command. Despite his doubt, he did not loose eloquence when he needed it.

 “I have a business deal to make.”

Alone with the manager, who smoked and drank and feasted with bare bodied women, Ugo tried to impress.

 “You have tried. Come to the bar tomorrow. I would allow you to play.”
Although he was too flabbergasted, he made fulsome thanksgiving to the manager. The man, clad in a stripped shirt of no eminent design, looked at Ugo more pointedly after the effusiveness of the latter.

 “I have good women here. You look like a starved man. Surely you can pay for one round.”

 “One round?” Ugo raked his head to find understanding, but found no dime of it. The manager laughed at the naiveté. He shouted a name, twice. A woman appeared, as bare bodied as the one that sat atop the laps of the manager. Ugo guessed her age at late-thirty. Her age did not summarize the expertise she showed in walking in the manner her job suggested.

 “Give him one round. He can pay,” the manager flimsily said. Next, the woman used a finger to beckon on Ugo.

One round started with her fishing around him, even in his discreet places. She found his wallet.

 “Give that to me.”

 “You don’t want?”

He considered the question. Do you want, he asked his sensuous being.

 “How much?”

 “You have little here. I can take all for one round.”

What he termed as gullibility did not end when she took all in his wallet. It ended when she was atop him, boring herself into him. Even though he wanted to think about the unprotected act she had engaged him in, he imagined it was he atop Angela. That solved all his worries. Seeing the face of Angela in the stead of the woman’s face, burdened with incurable pimples and acne.

~

Ugo’s raucous self was exposed after his trumpeting. The manager ordered for a drink for both of them. This time, women were absent. They began their talk from the one thousand naira Ugo would be paid, for starters.

 They ended in other matters. Because the drink had made their eyes red and their heads without control. Their table was littered with their booty, the famous and infamous brands of beer.

 “Strange things happen in our world these days,” the manager caroused. “You tell me that you are a monk and I see you with different reverend sisters everyday.”

 There was a sudden glimmer in Ugo’s mind. The manager had used words that rested in his subconscious.

 “What are you talking about?”

 “My brother, why are you getting angry. Do you have a sister that is a nun?”

 “I have.”

 “Tell her to resign. I see many of them everyday. Some even have the audacity to come here. The others go to my friend’s bar, drinking and flirting. I hope your sister is still a virgin. Abi, they tell us they would remain virgins till they die.”

 Ugo lost his ability to cogitate that minute. Somehow, he tied the whole theorem to Angela. He stood up like a possessed priestess, angry for her deity.

 “Sit down, my brother. You want to go and flog your sister? She is an adult. She can do whatever she wants. Drink some more.”

 He drank one more bottle.

He cried that night. The words of the manager did not leave him with the departure of the alcohol. It stayed. He wanted Angela to calcify into a diatonic scale of some sort. He wanted to press the flirty juice out of her. He wanted to refine her.

~

It was not the same when he walked into the bar the following night. The manager was standing at the door, as though he was waiting for someone. Loud music was playing inside, the music of Femi. It was that hit he had not had passport to hear at the Theatre. It blazed and blasted, resonant with praise for the government and their anti-corruption campaign. The same government, Ugo thought, that had appointed a known drug baron cum smuggler as Minister for Internal Affairs.

 “My brother, you are late.” The acquiesce of the manager was dotted with insincerity, as far as Ugo could fathom.

 “There was traffic on my way from work.”

The manager’s head was tilted to another quarter. It was chromatically different from the precision Ugo had known him with.

 “When am I playing?”

 “You would not be playing again.”

 “Why?”

 “The manager said so.”

 “You are not the manager?”

The head tilted again with chromatic difference as before.

 “You are not the manager?” Ugo repeated.

 “I am not. I am caretaker.”

Because they were standing at the door, Ugo easily found his way out.

The next day he felt pain in his groin, inflated when he tried to excrete urine. There was also a sticky substance he had never seen in his discreet region. He wanted to find out what it was. The neighbor next door ran a pharmacy that had been closed for its operation without permit.

 So he knocked on the neighbor’s door. Loud music blared from inside the door. Again, it was Femi’s music, his singing about the anti-corruption campaign. He banged the door on its several parts. It opened lazily, whining with the effort it had used in the opening.

 “Yes?” the neighbor said above the loud music.

 “Can I come inside?”

 “No.” he saw that the neighbor was struggling to avoid his gaze inside the room. Notwithstanding the female toes he finally saw, he concentrated on the hypocritical man, who said no noise and played loud music to impress his female guest.

 “I am having pain in my groin. Especially when I want to urinate. Do you know what can be wrong with me? Or a medicine that can stop it?”

 The neighbor laughed with seismic quality, until he felt he had made scorn enough.

 “My man, you get gonorrhea. You sleep with proshtitute?”

Ugo wanted to meditate on something else as he went to his door. But he kept meditating on the wrong way his neighbor had called prostitute and on the fact that he knew the name of his pain.

He heard the knock but pretended he hadn’t. It persisted. He hated the fulminating effect it had on him. He kept pretending he hadn’t heard, especially as it came few minutes after he knew the name of his pain.

 When the door was pushed slightly, he saw female toes.

 “Come in,” he said curiously.

He could not get himself to believe it was Angela that had opened his door. It is somebody else, he wanted to insist. But it was her. Her new aura, perceivable in the rosary she wound on her hands and the gown that hallmarked her chaste vows, was an aureole on her head. As though she belonged in the famous painting of the last supper, which had the disciples having a halo of light on their heads.

 But another presence was manifest on her. Apprehension. As it had been when he scared her in the dark.

 “Ugo, I saw your mother. She is singing in the market place, dancing. She is wearing nothing above her waist. You must do something.”

 His mother’s words the last time he visited her resounded in his memory. She had prayed that he become an animal who be unperturbed about being useful. It made meaning. He wanted to become that animal, to escape all. But he remembered something that minute. Something he had cried for.

 “I heard of what you do,” he said to the petrified figure with semblance to the image of Virgin Mary.

 “What?”

 “How you sleep with the priests.”

He had expected her resilient disagreement. But she stood and stared on. She calcified, that moment, to his mother, with her ochre eyes. She transformed from the fragile to the rigid; from her flowery state to the metal.

 At the consummation of his understanding of her new rigidity, he decided to walk away. Walk, to anywhere. Away from the name of his pain, from his mother, from Angela. He pocketed his hands in the baggy trousers and made to the door, even though Angela was standing inches from it.

 He perceived her cologne when he passed. She turned to him, with the frown and pain of a revealed. She was with her hands, tied together in ashamedness. Her rosary had fallen, sprawled to the floor in tiny beads.

 He was already at the door when the rosary fell.

 “Ugo, there is something else I want to tell you. It is about us.”

But Ugo was out of the door. He was away from her words. He wanted two things as he walked away. He wanted to be transformed into the animal his mother had talked about. And most of all, because he recently discovered how metallic he was and how much his life was as stiff as his trumpet, he wanted to become as squashy as a cornflower. There was a thriving cornflower behind his room, the room that he left Angela and the news about his mother.