The Line in the Sand

Sola Odemuyiwa

cover-from-lee-13th-oct-2015

 

PART ONE

ONE

 

Dele Verity snapped her sticky eyes wide open in terror, heard Dad’s gentle snoring next door and puffed her cheeks out in relief. Phew, only another bad dream, but the really really sick news is we’re still here. Separated from her parent’s bedroom by white plasterboard, and no larger than the shoe cupboard Mum had in Zadunaria, her bedroom opened on to the front room. She sat up, in a bed so tiny Dad called it a crib, leaned away from the sloping ceiling, fetched the two-plug extension with a sleepy foot and stamped. The pilot light flickered on and the standing fan in the corner grumbled into life, lifting grey buds of dust off its rusty cage. But before Dele could settle into the breeze, the wagging tails on the balls of fluff flopped back down and the fan wheezed to a halt.

‘Electric people, God will punish you, oh,’ she heard a woman shout from the back street. A parrot re-tweeted the woman’s cry.

‘Shut up you or I’ll screw your beak off,’ said Dele with a wry chuckle. She knew that it was not yet half past five because Eddy the civil servant’s smelly bath suds had not gurgled through the shallow gutter running under her bed. A snort came from next door, then a cough and the sound of Dad’s shuffling feet, but Dele didn’t want him to come with her today. She was a big girl now.

She put on her dressing gown. Her door creaked as she prised it open. She crept across the front room, eased her new yellow bucket from under the sink and opened the front door. It opened straight on to the street and the rotting rubbish tips gave the cloying morning air a smell like bad breath. In the dim light Dele could just make out the ghostly muezzin, in his white gown, with white megaphone in hand, as he rattled open the corrugated doors to the mosque.

She knew she had to hurry because the man’s calls to his faithful and Pastor Kalistus’s plaintive prayers in response would soon get many out of their beds. So, wedging her feet further into her slippers, she leapt off the sandbags Dad had laid against the floods and skipped down the street, using the bricks wedged in the mud as stepping stones. But, to her dismay, Little Mama had beaten her to the standpipe.

The Line in the Sand Description:

Jane and Wale Verity and Dele, their twelve year old daughter, meet Sandman after a military coup. In revenge for Jane’s colonial past in Roko, Sandman frames Wale for murder. He rapes Dele. Jane is killed.

Ten years later Sandman is a cabinet minister and Dele is a lonely medical student, yearning for her missing dad and for revenge. She meets Mrs Lagbaja, an elderly patient and passionate parrot lover. One night Mrs Lagbaja disturbs trespassers in her house and finds that while she was away her prized African Grey parrot, Confucius, has acquired a profane vocabulary. Mrs Lagbaja is still trying to make sense of these events when Sandman ransacks her house and removes Confucius. Distraught, she turns to Dele for help.

Dele sees a chance for revenge. “If the eye picks a fight with even the tiniest grain of sand it must end in tears” she says. But will Dele’s grim quest for retribution claim her too? The Line in the Sand is a powerful story about the deep human need for justice.

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