RANDU's JOURNAL

DADDAY'S GIRL...Part 2

That was the plague. Now my driver’s license reads adult but I am very much a child.

Visiting day was approaching and this time Mama wasn’t gonna make it. Expecting nobody else to pay me a visit I went to the music room on that dreary day and yes we blasted rock. There were few of us that day in the room playing imaginary guitars and drums and life had never been any better. At midday Nell came to fetch me to meet her family and have some of the coveted good stuff from her Mama’s kitchen.

Making my way back to the music room, what I like to call the fiction of my life happened. I was just seconds away from the drama of my life and you know me; I hate anything that remotely resembles drama. Papa’s car! Yes my old man had come to visit me. Papa never came on visiting day ever. Oh! Never say never after all. Thank goodness, I was daddy’s girl after all, how foolish of me to have doubted it.

‘Nell, come Papa is here!’ I shouted at her.

I literally sprinted across the field like an athlete; this was the happiest day of my life. I slowed down as I approached and thought that maybe I should give him a scare way he used to when I was little. Then viola! “Gotcha!” I said. Oh my gosh! Edwala? Papa? Noooooo…… surely I was dreaming and I would wake up if I shook myself hard enough. I shook myself but the dream wouldn’t go, I wasn’t waking up, hard as I tried. Its one of those nightmares where I am drowning and I forgot how to swim.

They were there, outside his car seated and having a jolly good time. Nell tapped my shoulder looked at me and then at the man who looked so much like me and then at Ed and almost threw up. I started walking away; Papa was saying something about Ed being his daughter whose mum had passed at child birth. Nell shouted something at Ed and as for me, I had drowned already.

At that moment, the kind Marie exited my being. Edwala was no longer a beauty but a monster with an uglier name to boot. Who named their child Edwala anyway?! How could Papa do this to me? I was a floating mass. Papa was with the girl of his dreams. I was in the suffocating embrace of a nightmare. My dreams were shattered into a million pieces. I had always strived to make Papa proud of me but what for? Who was this man? What good were my dreams anyway? Did it really matter?

That day I said goodbye to blissful childhood. Ed’s greener grass sort of a life was greener, while mine on the other hand was the Namib Desert, sort of. To think that I had desired Ed’s life, I was throwing up. Worse, to think that she was my step sister and that daddy loved her best, I wonder how my heart survived that heart ache! After writhing and retching in pain and misery, a new me was born. Did I say there was nothing to write about me? Alas, there was plenty and, this was just the beginning of my junior high school.