”You can’t treat me this way and expect to go scot-free,” Mary said with tears in her eyes. She was angry and miserable as well.
Billy regarded her with a caged look on his face. He already knew she was pregnant and had been playing hide and seek with her but on that fateful day, she had arrived early seeking to waylay him and had, as he left his room at cockcrow.
”I know you think I am trying to avoid you but that is far from the truth. I have been asked to be at work very early for a briefing,” Billy Gosa, a twenty-five-year-old Agricultural Extension Officer explained.
They grew up together in the same neighbourhood. They even went to the same secondary school and had been close pals until after university when they graduated from being mere friends to bedmates.
”Liar! You changed towards me when I told you I was pregnant,” she said as bitter tears streamed down her face.
He looked at her beautiful, passionate face with resignation, gently took hold of her hand, and led her back into the room he had just come out from. He saw no point in running away now that she had caught him.
He sat down and pulled her down to sit on his lap.
”What are we going to do now?” he asked softly ”You know I love you but as you know, both of us just started working and it would be disastrous to think about a family now.”
”I know but I am afraid of going through an abortion if that’s what you have in mind,” she said in misery as her tears continued to flow.
He said nothing to that but held her and rocked her gently. She calmed down a little and apologised for screaming at him.
”It’s understandable considering the circumstances. Anyone would have done same or even worse,” he told her as his mind drifted to how she had often helped him with money even when they were just friends and had been struggling to find his feet after the demise of his father.
Now he was working as a lowly paid government worker while she was a Sales Executive at a manufacturing company. As he had already been caught, he saw no point in rushing to work. It was much too early to go anyway. They spoke, and he assured her of his unflinching support even when he was thinking about a way out of the situation. He felt he wasn’t ready to be saddled with a family. She shifted slightly and saw to her chagrin that he was hard and it was poking her in the buttocks.
”Eeiii, Billy Goat,” she said and sprang up from his lap when she saw how hard he had become, ”How can you be hard when we have this huge problem staring at us?”
He stared at her in surprise and realized what had alerted her. He readjusted himself and stood up too.
”You are lucky I am going to work otherwise, you’ll have seen that calling me ‘Billy Goat’ releases the Goat in me,” he said and comically pulled at the neat goatee he had of late favoured to give credence to ‘Billy Goat’ nickname, to which he usually responded with ‘mÉ›pim wo!’ which literary means I’ll crash into you.
She saw the smile twitching at the corners of his face and smiled too despite her circumstances.
An hour later, Billy was at work and Mary had also gone home to prepare for work. She quickly went about it, avoiding getting close to her eagle-eyed mother who might notice she was pregnant even though it was early days yet.
Maame Konadu her mother, a staunch member of the Catholic Mothers Association would surely die if she found out that she was pregnant out of wedlock. She avoided eye contact with her mother and refrained from getting close to her as much as possible.
At the Office, Billy was the first in. He was always the first to arrive. He loved his job and was very dedicated to it, especially the Lab where most of the research was carried out; from developing high-yielding grain seeds to implementing antidotes to post-harvest losses and crop diseases. He loved being in the lab where the microscopes and other instruments enabled him and others to examine high-yielding seeds and seedlings. He cleaned the benches, tables, beakers, filters and all the instruments to ensure that they remained clean and shiny. He cared for them the way a mother cared for her newly born. He was so engrossed in what he was doing that he failed to see the person who tiptoed silently into the Lab and embraced him from behind, her ample chest and crotch slapped flat against his back. He sighed contentedly before he turned around to face her. He wasn’t disappointed when he saw that it was Cecilia. She had been doing that anytime she found him alone and he had always pretended that he wasn’t aware of how her body always quivered against him whenever she did that. She looked into his eyes and saw a mirror of her own emotions in his. Hitherto, she stopped short of going any further with it but on that particular day, she felt emboldened to go a step further from what had always been the norm.
”Let’s go into the washroom. My body is on heat,” she said in a trembling voice and went into a cubicle to wait for him.
Mr Krampah, the aged District Manager of the District Extension Office of the Ministry of Agriculture was a 60-year-old man who was waiting to be asked to stay at post even though it was time for him to retire. He was hoping to be given a 5-year contract to continue with his job. In his view, all the university graduates in his outfit were a threat to his position as the Manager and had been on an everlasting state of alert to protect what he felt was his birth right from them.
He had also arrived early to deal with an urgent circular but had stopped at the doorway to his office when he perceived some movements from the washroom down the hallway. He discreetly put down his briefcase and walked noiselessly in the direction of the noise. He placed his head close to the door and heard moans and heavy breathing that suggested to his outraged mind that fornication and adultery were being committed behind the door. Suddenly angry, he rapped his knuckles heavily against the light-panelled door of the washroom and the movements and sounds within stopped at once. He stayed put behind the door in waiting as if he was on a mission to erase all forms of fornication from the universe. He waited as those in the room made frantic movements to wear back discarded apparel. Billy was the first to step out and had to squeeze himself past the outraged Manager who refused to step aside. He nevertheless smiled at the old man uneasily and vanished around the corner. Cecilia on the other hand took her time in there and flushed the toilet to sort of explain her presence there before she went out to find Mr Krampah standing in her way. She stopped, looked at him questioningly and slipped past him when he eventually moved away to make way for her.
He was scandalised. How could they do this to him?
”This is why the youth of today can never be trusted. How can they be trusted to take over from us the experienced men when the time comes for us to retire with this sort of behaviour?” he said as he sat behind his table, gazing at the ceiling fan that whirled in the middle of the ceiling.
 ”Why do they always put the fan in the middle when the table where one sits is by the window?” he asked as if it was the fan’s fault for the uncouth behaviour of Billy and Cecilia.
”Just because he’s called Billy Goat doesn’t give him the right to behave like a goat. I don’t blame him. It’s the fault of that brainless wimp of a girl who calls herself Cecilia the Comforter,” he mused in misery as if he had misplaced something valuable.
Maame Konadu, Mary’s mother was in a pensive mood. Her beloved daughter had been acting oddly and that got all her antennas up. It seemed as if Mary now regarded her as a stranger. She had been distancing herself whereas they were as close as a mother and her only daughter were supposed to be. And she had stopped asking for the special home-brewed remedy for her period for a couple of months now.
”No. It’s unthinkable for me to think about what my mind is beginning to make me think about, ” she mused with a shake of the head as she sat in the provisions store she owned in front of the house. She then fixated her mind on that boy they called Billy. They had tried to make her believe that they were mere friends and that there were no romantic attachments between them but she wasn’t fooled. She had seen the signs and their double talks which suggested that they could be more than the friends they paraded themselves to be. She didn’t want them to be anything more than friends as she felt he was unfit for her pious daughter.
”I really must speak with her,” she said tiredly with the resolve to get to the bottom of it.
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THREE MONTHS LATER
Billy was peeved, to say the least. He was peeved at Mr Krampah. He wasn’t amused at all. How dare he? What exactly was the man thinking when he made him a part of the two-man team that was going to teach the people of Mantsekrom about the modern trends in watermelon cultivation?
”I belong to the lab and not in the field,” he said fiercely as he pulled at his beard in protest.
He felt that Mr Krampah was biased against him. He was going to the large village with a veteran field man in what was going to be as it were, ‘take research to the farm gates’.
He went home early and prepared for the trip which was the next day. He espied Mary and her mother who were stoic faced waiting for him on his porch. As soon as he saw them, he knew that the game was up and that they were going to confront him about the pregnancy. He hid behind an electricity pole, backed away and made a U-turn, zig-zagged his way through a plantain farm which was a much longer route to the home of Kofi, a work colleague who had earlier left the office to attend to a personal problem. He pounded on the door desperately with his balled fist as if he was being pursued.
A bare cheated Kofi eventually appeared after a while and looked at him with annoyance
”Why, Billy Goat why?” Kofi asked unable to hide his anger at him for the disturbance.
Billy would have replied with a sarcastic reply but his tongue froze. For lying on the bed with her office uniform strewn on the floor with a bed sheet covering her body was Cecilia the Comforter. Someone he had said goodbye to no more than forty-five minutes ago.
”Billy Goat,” Kofi hailed, not knowing why he wasn’t saying anything.
”MÉ›pim wo!” he replied automatically but he didn’t put much force into it. He stared at the girl on the bed again, murmured some unintelligible words and quickly left.
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