Peppered Goat Meat

Photo credit: richeelicious

Someone told me that old people always talk about the past because they have lived more years than they have left so there’s nothing to look forward to; they rather look back at the memories they made. 

As much as I agree with that, it is however not peculiar to old people. I suddenly found myself always thinking of the past even though I’m not that old but for obvious reasons. I’d rather dwell in the happy past than live in the reality of our depressing world today. 

I remember mother’s shop, it was a provision shop but she made some finger foods to go with drinks occasionally and the most popular was the peppered goat meat. She was hardly there but always had a sales person. 

We loved to hang out there but she didn’t like it and would usually send us upstairs if she found us in the shop. I remember a certain time when Beatrice was away in Lokpanta, the sales girl asked if I could stay in the shop while she went to the salon, I gladly accepted and that was when I learnt the hard way why Beatrice never wanted us there. 

This gentleman walked into the shop one evening and began to ask of different things, “Do you have malt? Do you have beer? How much is this meat? How much is that?”

He asked me to wrap some meat and get him three bottles of different drinks. After I gave him all that he wanted, he asked if someone would follow him to collect the money. He said he lived down the road and was new in the neighborhood.  That was not a problem and so I asked my cousin that was somewhere in the compound to go with him down the street to get the money. 

After about five minutes she returned and said that the guy pointed at the building where he resided and asked her to come back for the money. 

At that point I knew the meaning of the word “scam” I had just been scammed. When the sales girl returned I told her what happened and that I was going to get the money myself, my cousin pointed out the house to me and I knocked on the doors of the four flats but none of the families knew who I was talking about. 

I walked back home with my head hung low, I was not bothered about what Beatrice would do. I knew she would be more concerned about our safety because she always told us about the dangers of going to unknown territories. She’d be more worried that something bad could have happened to my cousin or me. 

I was sad that I was played like a fool at over sixteen years.  I felt so unintelligent and vulnerable. We managed to keep the incident away from Beatrice but I lived with the trauma of being scammed. 

See, there were crimes in those days but not as bad as they are now. If it was now, maybe the scammer would have also lured my cousin to a place and murdered her for rituals. 

After that day, I stayed away from the shop and till date I’m obsessed with that building where the scammer said he lived. Anytime I go to Enugu, I drive up to the house nd somehow imagine that I would find the scammer whose picture has refused to leave my mind. I even have a picture of him in my mind as a sixty something year old. 

I may still find him and make him pay for the four pieces of peppered goat meat, one bottle of Monarch lager beer, a bottle of Maltina and a bottle of Crush. He even kept the bottles. Evil Scammer!