There were two framed photographs of Cash Daddy hanging on the wall above the television screen. One was taken, apparently, while he was playing golf. In the other, he was sitting on a magnificent black horse. How on earth had my uncle managed to manoeuvre his super-size onto the narrow saddle?

There were five young, equally well fed men sitting around the dining table. They ate silently, but eagerly, making sloppy, kissing sounds as they licked their fingers.

Shortly after I sat down, Protocol Officer - the very same one of the other day - descended the stairs.

'Cash Daddy is ready to see you,' he said, and waited.

I stood up quickly and joined him at the foot of the staircase.

'Good morning,' I said to the feeding men as I walked past.

The tantalising aroma of edikainkong and onugbu soups whispered to me from the huge tureens before them. The men grunted nonchalantly.

Protocol Officer led the way. At the third-floor landing, he opened one of the doors and entered a large bedroom. He continued to where two men were standing beside another open door within the room. The men shifted to create space for me in the narrow doorway.

Inside, Cash Daddy was crouched on the toilet seat. Apart from the boxer shorts rolled around his ankles, he was as naked as a skinned banana. Imagining that I had barged in on a most private moment, I muttered an apology and was turning to leave, when his voice flashed like lightning and stopped me in my tracks.

'Kings, Kings! How are you? How is your daddy doing?'

I ducked my eyes and replied that my father was still in hospital.

'What of your mummy?' he continued. 'I hope you told her that I greeted her.'

'Yes, I told her. She said I should thank you very much for your gift.'

He ignored me and spoke to the other men, apparently continuing with a discussion that had begun before I arrived.

'Don't forget that we're supposed to see Police Commissioner by Monday. Make sure you don't forget. When one sees a dog playing with somebody it's familiar with, it looks as if the dog can't bite. I don't want the type of situation we had the last time to happen again.'

I tried taking advantage of this diversion to make my escape - and bumped into Protocol Officer, who was firmly entrenched in the getaway route behind me. I gave up and stood still. Cash Daddy was still speaking.

'That seven hundred and fifty-five thousand dollars has to be ready before weekend. There are some things I can afford to play with but not things like this. Have you made arrangements with-'

Cash Daddy broke off his speech. He contracted his facial muscles and made a low, grunting noise. He relaxed his face again and took in a deep breath. I heard the dull thud of solid hitting the surface of water. This process was repeated three more times before he was finally satisfied. Then he stood up, yanked some tissue from the roll strapped to the wall, bent slightly forwards, and wiped. Cash Daddy tossed the used tissue into the toilet bowl and flushed. Before continuing with what he was saying. Starting from exactly where he had stopped.

'. . . with Sonny and Ikem about the government official we'll need for the Japan transaction?'

The man on my right confirmed that the arrangements had been made. From the corners of my eyes, I looked at each man standing beside me. None of them appeared to be the least bit discomfited.

The stench had started disorganising my brain cells, when Cash Daddy pulled up his shorts and made his way towards the door. Honestly, it is such a pity that some people just never learn. The number of times my dear mother had berated Uncle Boniface in the past for using the toilet without washing his hands. We parted to let him through and followed into the bedroom.

The bedroom had the exact same personality as the living room. A wide canopy bed, plush sofas, humongous television, huge refrigerator, crystal chandeliers, exotic vases, elegant photographs of him taken in different poses and at different grand events. A closed-circuit television screen that showed coverage of several different parts of the house, in different segments of the large screen, stood directly opposite the bed. Cash Daddy planted himself on the thick mattress, lifted a handset from the bedside stool, pressed a button, and yelled into the mouthpiece.

'Bring my food! Right now!'

A fat man on one of the CCTV screen segments went into action in what looked like the kitchen. Another one of the screens clearly showed the front gate and everybody coming in or walking past. Aha! Via his CCTV, Cash Daddy must have sighted me coming into the house and then yelled his instruction to the gateman, using this same handset.

Cash Daddy stretched out his chunky legs and slapped a harmonious tempo on his belly with his hands.

'I'm so hungry,' he announced. 'Kings, sit down.'

I sat in the chair directly in front of him, while the other men remained standing by the bed in silence. Suddenly, he stopped the music he was making with his belly and looked as if seeing me for the first time. He frowned.

'Kingsley.'

'Yes, Uncle?'

'What is this you're wearing?'

I scanned myself in utmost terror. What could it be this time?

'Kingsley, am I not talking to you? What is this thing you're wearing?'

My brain was as blank as an empty bottle.

'Kingsley.'

'Yes, Uncle?' I whispered.

'Are you sure it's not a carpenter that constructed your shirt? You'd better be careful.' He raised his index finger and wagged it at me. 'Be very, very careful. One day you'll be walking down the street and the police will just arrest you because of the way you dress. It's only the fly that doesn't have advisers that ends up in the coffin with the corpse. Don't say I didn't warn you.'

The fat man arrived with a tray of food which he placed on one of the side stools. He readjusted the stool to suit Cash Daddy's position on the bed.

'Do you want to eat anything?' Cash Daddy asked. He did not wait for me to answer. 'Cook, bring this man some rice, chicken, goat meat, beef . . . Just bring him everything you have in the stew.' He turned to me. 'I want you to eat well. You're too skinny.'

I did not bother telling him that there was nothing he could do for me in that area; I was destined for perpetual skinniness.

Cash Daddy plunged into his meal.

'Go,' he said to the waiting men.

His rice bowl, as large as a bathroom washbasin, was filled to the brim. The rice was served with a bowl of tomato stew, a separate bowl of assorted meat, and a one-litre packet of Just Juice. He held his spoon like a shovel and clanged his teeth against the steel each time he shoved food into his mouth. While he chewed, I could look right into his mouth and watch the entire process of the solid rice granules being crushed. With his free hand, he pushed the pieces of meat to the very back of his mouth and tore them apart with his molars. Then he spat the unconquerable bones straight into the tray with such noise and force that no doubt was left that his upbringing had definitely been lacking.

'How is your daddy?' he asked, after a particularly loud belch.

In a few sentences, I told him everything the doctor had said and the reason for my visit.

As I was speaking, my uncle continued giving full concentration to his feeding without looking at me. At some points, I wondered if he was even listening at all.

It turned out that he was, because when I finished, he started relating his comprehensive thoughts about how he was sure the nurses intentionally kept a patient in a coma for longer than necessary so that it would look like they were busy earning their wages. While he was talking rubbish, my eyes strayed to the array of shoes somewhere on the other side of the room. I was mesmerised for just five seconds. Still, he caught me.

'What are you looking at?' he asked.

I panicked. Had he realised that I was not really listening to him? How was I going to escape from this latest trouble?

'Are you looking at my shoes?'

I felt as awkward as a cow on ice. I did not reply.

'You haven't even seen anything.' He laughed. 'If you go into the next room, every single thing there is just shoes. And not one pair of them costs anything less than a thousand dollars.'

I kept looking at him.

'Go on. Go out and look. I know you're hungry, but after looking, you can come back and finish your rice.'

I put down the tray with my half-eaten meal on it and left. My uncle was right. The entire space was covered from wall to wall with racks. Each rack harboured shoes of a different shade and different make. There were green shoes and yellow shoes, and red shoes and turquoise shoes. Every single member of the class Reptilia Reptilia must have been represented in that collection. I finished looking and returned to the bedroom. must have been represented in that collection. I finished looking and returned to the bedroom.

'Have you finished looking at my shoes?'

'Yes, I have.' Then as an afterthought, 'Thank you.'

He nodded heartily and began another marathon monologue about his footwear. From there, he extended to the topic of his wristwatches and then to his designer clothing.

When his three bowls had nothing left in them but stubborn bones and fingerprints, my uncle lifted the Just Juice packet and poured the liquid directly into his mouth, pausing from time to time to spread his mouth open and belch out a noise that sounded like a frog in heat. I half-expected him to gobble up the empty packet as well. Instead, he flung it onto the tray. Then he shouted for Protocol Officer, who came and doled out some money retrieved, this time, from inside the wardrobe. I received the naira notes thankfully and left.

The next day, my father was transferred to the Abia State Teaching Hospital, Aba. A week later, he awoke.

Fifteen

To think that one person's waking up from sleep could cause the sun to rise and the stars to shine in so many hearts. I was especially glad for my mother, whose constant night-and-day vigils had paid off. She had been right there when it happened.

Contrary to what soap operas have taught us to believe, a person who wakes up from a coma is first disoriented and confused. So my mother could not say exactly how long it was that my father's eyes had been open.

'It was around 11 a.m. or so that I raised my head from a brief nap and saw him staring at the ceiling,' she said.

Like people who dream without ever expecting their dreams to come true, at first she had dismissed what she saw as the wishful thinking of a desperate wife who had spent the past many nights sleeping on a raffia mat on the floor of her husband's hospital room.

'Next thing, his eyes just turned and started looking at me,' she continued.

Then he opened his mouth and said something in Igbo.

'Ha abiala? '

My mother became worried. The only times she heard her husband speak Igbo were when he was dealing with the villagers. He never spoke it to her, he never spoke it to us, he never spoke it in our house. Even the house helps from the village were banned from speaking vernacular. In due course, though, my mother realised that it did not matter what language he was speaking. The fact was, her man was awake and talking.

'I started jumping about and screaming for the nurses to come,' she laughed. 'Honestly, you should have seen me. You would have thought I'd gone mad.'

But she was afraid to touch him. When the nurses came in to investigate, she hovered around the bed and waited with her hands clasped against her chest. Finally, one of them noticed her reticence and assured her that her touch would not push him back into oblivion. My mother then sat beside him on the bed and stroked his hand until I arrived.

The rest of the day, my father stared as if seeing for the very first time. He stared at the ceiling, at the nurses, at me, and at his wife. Apart from one or two insignificant phrases in Igbo, he did not speak and did not acknowledge anyone when he was spoken to. His breathing was also not much different from when his eyes had been closed. The doctor confirmed that his left side was slightly paralysed and that he might not be able to regain his communication skills for some time. He also explained that it was common for patients just waking from a coma to speak languages that had been relegated to the archives of their minds.

'The most important thing,' the doctor said, 'is that there has been some major progress.'

Each day brought some new improvement. The catheter was removed. He could walk to the bathroom while he leaned on my mother's shoulders, taking one slow step after the other. He was able to eat some solid foods which my mother fed to him with a small plastic spoon as if he were a baby. She never complained. Not even when he spat unwanted food onto her clothes.

Time and time again, my mother said that she owed everything she was in life to my father. Prior to his arrival, tradition had placed her as one of the least important members of her family. But when this most eligible bachelor asked for her hand in marriage, her ranking increased overnight. Her elder brothers even sought her opinion regarding arrangements for their father's burial. Her union with my father, despite having suffered its own unique variety of roughness, had created a warm, secure environment for her because one thing had remained constant: her husband loved her and she enjoyed loving him in return.

I made quick arrangements for Godfrey, Eugene, and Charity to visit the hospital to welcome their father back to our world. One by one, they walked up to his bed and held his hand.

'Daddy, how are you?' Godfrey said.

'Daddy, we miss you,' Eugene said.

'Daddy, when are you coming home?' Charity said.

As soon as they touched on his daughter, a faint glow seemed to light in our father's eyes and the right side of his lips appeared to twist slightly upwards. That was when we knew for sure that he was aware of us being there.

Owing to the distance from Umuahia to Aba, my siblings could no longer pop into the hospital as casually and as regularly as before. Neither could my mother come home as often for a change of clothing or to inspect her shop. She packed some personal items and became a permanent resident of the hospital. Depending on the kindness of the nurses on duty, she had her daily shower in one of the hospital bathrooms. Regarding family visits, we agreed on an arrangement where the less significant participants in the hospital drama would sort of take it in turns. That particular morning, it was Charity's turn and I took her along with me to Aba.

My mother was dozing off on the bedside chair when we arrived. With an excited yelp and a fervent shoulder shake, Charity woke her up. They hugged and kissed and cuddled as if they had not seen each other in months. I observed my mother's eyes casting their spotlight on Charity's armpit. The hair had overgrown again. My mother removed her eyes and let the matter pass.

Charity sat beside my father on the bed, holding his hand tenderly, as if she were afraid that it might fall on the bed and crack.

'Daddy,' she said, 'we've started reading Macbeth in school and we had a test last week. I made the highest score because I was the only one in class who knew the main significance of Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking scene.'

She paused and smiled. The blank expression on my father's face did not change.

'We've also started Organic Chemistry,' Charity went on, 'but I'm not really enjoying it. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to tell which one is a straight chain and which one is a compound chain.'

My sister looked distraught. I was tempted to tell her that I would teach her how to work it out later, but decided that now was not the time. Charity continued chatting - about school, about her test scores, about a documentary on the Nigerian/Biafran civil war which she had watched on television - without bothering that he was not responding. Watching her evoked memories of when I was a child, when my days were never complete until my father had carried me in his lap and told me a folktale.

While Charity was still talking, my mother got up. She gestured discreetly with her eyes, like a crook, indicating for me to follow. I allowed some seconds to pass before leaving.

My mother had stopped somewhere just outside the ward. I walked over and stood beside her.

'Mummy, is something wrong?'

'No o, nothing is wrong. Just that Boniface was at the hospital this morning.'

'Really?'

'Hmm. I was equally surprised.'

She said that she had been cleaning my father's teeth when the nurse on duty informed her that a visitor was waiting in reception. Without checking the clock, she knew that visiting time did not begin until about five hours later. Apart from my siblings and me, any other visitor who ventured near the ward before visiting time received a bark and a bite from the nurses. This time, the nurses did not seem to mind.

'When I came outside, I saw a group of nurses whispering with excitement.'

They kept quiet when they saw her. The nurse who had come to inform her pointed with a significant smile. Uncle Boniface was standing there in the corridor with five men in dark suits and dark glasses.

'He apologised for not coming earlier,' she said and smiled.