Chapter Four

Back in 1976, when the beautiful Rosalie Johnson was twenty, she had met Chinua Johnson at a friend’s birthday party in Surulere, Lagos State. By then, she was already a popular Face in the national dailies and the TV screens, and her beauty had totally captivated him and entranced him, ensnaring him in a chain of irrepressible desire that bound him to her more strongly than iron binds ever could. His pursuit of her attention was relentless, and finally, she had to succumb to him, and their romance moved at such a fast pace that before she knew what was happening, she was already pregnant for him.

To him, the notion of becoming bound to her was unspeakable, and it had caused such a big problem between them, culminating in a bitter battle of words of threats between Rosalie’s wealthy father and Chinua’s equally affluent family. Rosalie’s father had a lot of clout and guts, and the man wasn’t ready to see his daughter give birth to a child out of wedlock. He made it abundantly clear that Chinua must marry her or be ready to have both him and his entire family destroyed.

And for the persons that knew the man well, they knew that he was not a man that was given to idle threats; once he said he was going to do something, then there was nothing in this world that would stop him from getting and doing what he wanted to do. If you were the unfortunate person that he’d turned his attention on, then you were dead meat.

The man prevailed, and Chinua and Rosalie contracted a customary marriage back home in the East, and it was the most colorful marriage ceremony ever to be celebrated back there. The gift that Rosalie received from her father was the merger of one division of the Brian Group of Companies which was threatening to swallow up everything in its path with the Johnson Empire which paled in significance. Because the man was not a fool, Rosalie kept the controlling stock of the company that had been merged with the Johnson’s. Chinua wanted her to give up the stocks to him, but she’d bluntly refused to do so.

There was a big church ceremony in Ikeja, with all the lavish trimmings that money can buy, and the marriage was the talk of the crème of Lagos fashionable society for several months afterwards.

‘And that was the beginning of my problems,’ Rosalie had told Henry. ‘Your father was furious that I had dared to refuse him the control of my stock. He had thought I was depressed, or it was because of my pregnancy, but he failed to understand that I was only safeguarding my own interests. I could never allow him to have such control over me.’

And so her life was a living hell. Her husband swore never to give her a marriage at the Marriage Registry which she craved, and he hated her guts for defying him. His attitude towards her was one of indifference. He stayed out late at night; he refrained from eating her meals, slept in a separate bedroom and treated her like a stranger.

When Rosalie went and complained to her father, the wily fox told her, ‘Do not wash your dirty linen in public, my dear.’

It was a warning and an admonition to her rolled up into one package in that simple sentence. She had learnt her lesson, and, determined not to wallow in self-pity; she got herself involved again in TV, doing commercials that were so popular. By 1978, she had gone back into the Beauty Pageant world after her two-year hiatus, and her winning streak continued. She was the toast of the NTA.

Chinua, a very jealous man by nature, had his indifference towards her petrify into a harshness that culminated in violent quarrels between them, and subsequently, fist fights. By 1986, he had started to slap her even for the slightest perceived slights, and she couldn’t turn to her family for help, neither did she confide in her friends. She played the role of the dutiful wife and a woman who remained undaunted even in the face of the worse danger she had ever encountered in her whole life. She was the gracious, graceful hostess whenever Chinua threw his lavish parties, and his guests were always pleased with her charm and intelligence, her beauty, and her perfectly preserved form. At those parties and in the Society pages of the papers, they were the perfect couple, but behind closed doors, she lived in bondage.

By the year 1990, when Henry turned thirteen, the real beatings started. Once, right in the full view of the extended family members of the Johnson family, Chinua hit Rosalie across the mouth. Two weeks later, he mercilessly beat her up because there had been a little delay with his dinner. He tore up her expensive Chanel gown, dislocated one of her fingers, and kicked her so thoroughly and viciously that she could hardly stand for three days, and gave her bruises all over her chest and her back. Henry was then too little to be of any help to his mother, and his teary complaints to his maternal grandfather earned Chinua a mere warning.

But the fact was that the mere warning from the man that was Rosalie’s father was more than enough to stall the man from his continued mistreatment of Rosalie.

For some months later, they lived in relative peace. There were the usual quarrels, the smashing of plates, but Chinua refrained from hitting Rosalie. Then, in the middle of January 1991, when they quarreled bitterly over Rosalie’s inability to conceive again after the birth of her only child, Chinua struck her in the face.

They were in the dining room－ Chinua, Rosalie and Henry were eating when the quarrel broke out－ and when Chinua punched her beautiful face Rosalie flew to her feet, grabbed a ceramic bowl in which reposed chunks of fried turkey, and smashed the thing over his head. For a moment Chinua sat in stunned silence, and a trickle of blood ran down his forehead from a cut in his head, and then he flew up in a fit of fiery rage and grabbed his wife. Through the hours she put in her gym working on her body, Rosalie had a trim, strong body, but she was unfortunately no match for her possessed husband. One heavy clout knocked her to the wall, but she was extremely quick and light on her feet; she flew at him, one clenched fist smashing into his jaw, sending one teeth and a spray of blood out through his mouth. However, his heavy punches knocked her flat.

Henry was there, a witness to the shocking brutality of his father. He watched in paralyzed horror as his mother was knocked to the ground, and then Chinua lifted a heavy brass chair and began to hit her prone figure with it. Over and over did he hit her on the back with it until Henry snapped out of his lethargy as his sanity snapped and he grabbed a knife from the table, flew at his father, and then he stuck the thing in Chinua’s thigh. With an enraged bellow, Chinua knocked the boy off of him and the chair dropped from his hands. Rosalie was lying there on the floor at a grotesque, unnatural angle, blood trickling from her mouth to the floor, her clothes soaked with her blood. She looked dead.

Chinua picked up the telephone and called the family doctor. ‘Come as quickly as possible,’ he said into the phone in a calm, eerie voice. ‘My wife is lying here on the floor and I think I killed her. There’s also a knife stuck in my thigh.’

Rosalie was hospitalized for a week. There were eight stitches done to her back, one on the back of her neck, and she had contusions all over her body, plus one under her left eye. When she was discharged, she called her father, and this time he did not display his habitual indifference. The insult was too great; Chinua Johnson had to be paid back in full. Seven hefty young men came to the mansion and beat him till he almost went into a coma. They would have broken his bones had Rosalie not called a stop to it.

And the truth was that Rosalie had almost been tempted to let them do it; break his bones so he could learn the biggest lesson of his life and learn how to treat her like a human being. But she knew that she would never want to have her husband emasculated in that way; the insult to his sanity would be too great.

Henry loved what they’d done to his father; it would serve the bastard right to hit his mother again. It was then that he realized that he could hate his father with an animal intensity that almost scared him because he knew that he could kill the man. All it would take was one slip, and his father would be dead and there was nothing more there was to it.

It was Chinua’s cruelty and his tenacious love and pity for his mother that formed his character. His father inflamed in him a cold hatred for violent men and an unreserved tenderness for women. He loved women with a tenderness that bordered almost on reverence; they were not to be touched. That was what he suspected had formed the basis of his homosexuality. But then, he could never be sure of anything because things were not written in black and white.

Chinua’s act of brutality against his wife hardened Henry, turned him cold and almost unfeeling towards the man that gave him life. He became noticeably cold and very distant towards the man, arrogant to his paternal relatives because they knew of their brother’s cruelty and had never bothered to call him to order. He felt sheer contempt for them and he never bothered to disguise it and he was sure they knew it. They tried to pamper him with gifts, they tried to make amends, but he would have none of it. He was an only child, and therefore the gifts that poured in from his parents were more than enough for him. Instead, he turned his attention towards working out his body so that he could be strong enough to save his mother from the clutches of the lunatic she’d married.

Sometime in 1993, Chinua hit Rosalie again because a servant had dared to burn his shirt with a pressing iron. She did not retaliate because she was just recovering from the flu. Instead, she sat there stoically. She had never looked more beautiful or sad, ever. At that moment, seeing his mother so broken and helpless, Henry ran to the kitchen, picked up a knife, and returned and stabbed it at his father. His intent had been to kill the bastard by sticking the object in his head, but the man had thrown up his hands to shield his face and the knife went into his hand, sticking in straight to the bone.

‘If you ever lay your hands on my mother again, then I am going to kill you,’ Henry said to him in a voice of icy coldness, his demeanor one of frozen ice. ‘I will let you beat her, but afterwards, when you’re in your bed; I’ll drive a knife into your skull and kill you. You won’t even know what had hit you.’

They stood there staring at each other, father and son. Chinua appeared strangely calm even with the knife sticking in his hand and the blood that trickled down to the floor. Finally, he let out a bellow of laughter. ‘You’re the true son of your father,’ he said, and there was obvious sincerity in his voice. ‘And I know that you’ll make a very good businessman one day. However, what you’ve done is unpardonable, and I will not let you go unpunished for it. When the time comes, I am going to make you pay for this. I promise you that.’

And Chinua never hit Rosalie again. He would rave and rant like he was always apt to do, but he never physically assaulted her again. Instead, he channeled his aggression into infidelity and acquired a string of beautiful lovers for his use. He took them with him on his business trips abroad and plied them with very expensive gifts. Occasionally, he bought gifts for Henry and even started to involve him gradually in the affairs of his business empire although Henry was still very young－ barely seventeen. The young son felt the shift of the family power to him, but he was very wary of his father because the man’s threats still rang like bells in his ears, a constant reminder that he still owed Chinua a pound of flesh. Chinua Johnson was a man who never forgot nor forgave a slight, and since he’d promised retribution, Henry knew that he meant it. There was to be no middle ground on that score.

Now, six years later, Chinua was about to fulfill his promise: he was going to erase the name of his only son from his will and turn his entire wealth over to some nameless, faceless stranger who had mischievously gotten herself knocked up so she could wrap the Johnson family fortune around her pinkie finger. Henry burned with fury against his father, and he knew that he was going to fight his old man tooth and nail for the wealth that was rightly his. The family wealth had soared to unimaginable proportions because of how much Rosalie Johnson had contributed to it, and for him to be denied that wealth was to cheat him out of his birthright.

He had to do anything to stop his father from carrying out that objective even if it meant killing him to do so.

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