"Now stretch your hand," Father Ekene instructed. "Good." He stretched his too and their palms touched. "Now grasp like you're holding an egg, an uncooked egg….slowly but steadily….yeah…good. Then imagine this egg has now been cooked, let your grasp be firmer, but not enough to crack the egg….no, you're too fast….slowly….good. What a wonderful student you are, Ivie. A round of applause, please."
The class erupted with hand claps.
"Now go and give your neighbour that handshake," the priest still insisted. "Instead of a hand, imagine you're holding an egg, uncooked at first."
Itohan repeated what she had learned and the priest jolted in laughter.
"Perfect. Am I not the prefect teacher? Have a seat, Ivie."
Itohan wondered if this one was a brother to Father Chibuike.
He was explaining. "I learned something interesting of late. Do you know that there's a colour pattern called RGB? It stands for Red, Green and Blue, the primary colours, but that's not the interesting thing I learned." He was smiling.
"In RGB colour pattern, each other has a number ranging from 0 to 255 and different number arrangements gives you different colours.
"If a colour has an RGB of (5, 60, 200), it means you're giving Red a number of 5 from the range of 0 to 255, Green a number of 60 from the range of 0 to 255 and Blue a number of 200 from the range of 0 to 255, and this arrangement gives you a colour, a very dark dark shade of blue.
"RGB(0, 0, 0) gives black colour, and RGB(255, 255, 255) gives you a white colour. With the RGB colour pattern, you can get almost any colour in the world, if not all. Isn't that interesting?"
A chorus of 'Wow' filled the class.
Father Ekene walked to the board and pressed a switch, an image of a Rubix's cube was projected.
"What is in front of you is a Rubix's cube and this is what you're going to draw and colour."
A student raised his hand. "But you have us just three crayons."
"Didn't you hear a thing I said? Or you think I told you about the RGB colour pattern for fun? There are six colours on this Rubix's cube; white, red, blue, yellow, green and orange, and you already have three. I want you to use the RGB colour pattern to get the rest, mix the colours until you get the right hue.
"You already have the answer for colour white, but mind you, you're not allowed to leave the space blank because it's a white sheet, you have to give me the colour white. Then yellow and orange."
A whisper of murmurs filled the class this time around.
"So we're saying we should keep mixing these colours until we get the hue for white, yellow and orange?" A student asked.
"As simple as saying it."
"But this is going to take forever!" Some students protested.
"Cry to God to bless you with eternity then. If you don't finish yours today then you'll have to come tomorrow, but don't think you're going to start from where you stopped," he shook his head, "you're going to start afresh. For every time you don't finish it, it ends in the bin basket and you start afresh the next day.
" The idea is to teach you patience, you need a lot of patience to tolerate me, and you need a lot more patience to get this right. By the time you're done here, you'll have it in you to handle a child throwing tantrums."
"That is mean!"
"Detention is not particularly a nice place. Avoid coming here if you don't want to receive mean treatments. Now shut up before I see your lips together. Get to work. Maintain decorum, I have far more mean ways of punishing delinquents."
In Itohan's head, she was standing in front of the priest, her hand was around his neck and he was choking, grasping for breath.
In reality, she picked up her pencil and started drawing.
——
Ivie's body ached.
Itohan's body, she had to remind herself, but since she was the temporal occupant, she had only herself to feel the pain.
Three days has passed and she hadn't had a single day of rest. She had wiped all the potraits hung on the wall, and there was a ton of them, she had cleaned the rooms nobody had entered for ages, the dust raising to fill the air as she swept, she even cleaned the poultry.
She was so immersed in work that she didn't find the time to plan her escape, and she hasn't been able to see Mother Jose!
She pulled out a cigar stick and lit it. She was in too much emotional and physical crisis to worry about what the nuns would say. She just wanted to rest.
And think.
She sat upright on the bed. "I mean, if they make me do everything now, what do I get to do later, don't these people think?"
She took a long drag on her cigarette, her eyes stinging with tears. She blinked them back, crying will not put ideas in her head. She had—a knock sounded on the door.
"She's dead," she shouted to whoever was at the door. She was wanted a minute of undisturbed rest, was that too much to ask?
It was Sister Rita. While the other nuns didn't bother themselves with her, this one had made it a habit. "Are you in there?"
"I am dead, I can't do more work."
"Mother Jose is here."
Ivie jumped out of the bed. "Mother Jose?"
"Yes."
"You're going to take me to her now?"
"I thought you were dead?"
Ivie stubbed out her cigarette, threw a bubble gum into her mouth and opened the door. "Seen anyone look more alive than me?"
Sister Rita eyed her thoroughly, a small friendly smile on her lips. "I doubt."
"There are so many paintings here," Ivie mentioned as they walked along the corridor. Her hand still felt numb from cleaning all of them.
"So many stories to tell."
"It looks like an ancient building." Even though the wall looked sturdy, there was something about the place that smelled the distant smell of home, an old home.
"It is ancient, far before I was born, far before even Mother Jose was born."
That long? "Then how did they manage to maintain the building until now?"
"Every once in a while maintenance comes." She stopped in front of a door and nodded. "Mother Jose."
Ivie had expected Mother Jose to be a frail wrinkled woman whose gnarled hand was fixed onto a walking stick. Yes, Mother Jose was wrinkled and frail, and she talked about it a lot, but she was a lot more agile than Ivie had imagined.