A disgruntled Senator from the thirty-third largest political party had decamped to form a brand new party of his own. Another billionaire had declared his intentions to join the presidential race. Exactly as I and my mother had warned Eugene, the Wild, Wild Western Nigeria was a-boiling. Apart from the usual riots and disruption of the voters’ registration process, this morning, yet another House of Assembly aspirant in Oyo State had been assassinated. This recent killing brought the total number of politically motivated assassinations in the country to twenty three. Within this election period alone.

Different public awareness campaigns had been encouraging people to turn out for the voters’ registration process. The posters, the announcements on radio and television, insisted that it was a civic responsibility and the only opportunity to make a change. Apparently, the public were responding well. A reporter had turned up at one of the voters’ registration centres in Enugu and was interviewing the masses.

‘How long have you been waiting here?’ she asked.

In the background, a multitude was buzzing around.

‘I’ve been here since 6 a.m.,’ the man replied.

‘That means you’ve been waiting for about ten hours.’

‘It’s my civic responsibility,’ he replied proudly. The haggard man had my father’s Nigeria-is-a-land-flowing-with-bottled-milk-and-jarred-honey tone of voice. ‘This current regime has done nothing for us and it’s time for change. I’m ready to pay any price to vote.’

Pity that such a well-spoken man had been taken in by all that hogwash. The only power to change anything that needed changing was the power of cash.

My cellular rang. I reached across the vast mattress and grabbed it from the edge of my sixth pillow. Real feathers. John Lewis, House of Fraser.

‘Where are you?’ Cash Daddy bellowed.

‘I’m at home.’

‘I’m just coming from the golf club,’ he said. ‘You know it’s not everybody who wants to join that they allow. I’m going to see one girl . . . that beautiful girl from Liberia who’s been begging to have a baby for me. Today’s her birthday.’

He paused. I knew he could not have finished.

‘Honestly, I won’t mind allowing her to have a baby for me, but Liberia’s too far. You know how these women behave. One day she’ll just wake up and tell me she’s taking my child back with her to Liberia and I don’t want that type of rubbish. You know they all have one kind of funny accent. I won’t spend long at the birthday. I just want to show my face and dash her some small pocket money. From there, I’ll go straight home. Come and see me.’

In Cash Daddy’s bedroom, I glanced around. Then I pushed the door of the bathroom. He was scrubbing himself in the shower.

‘Kings, Kings! How are you?’

‘I’m fine, tha—’

‘Have you heard from Dibia about the documents for your UK visa?’

‘Yes. He said they’ll be ready soon.’

‘Very good, very good.’ He looked me over from top to toe and wagged his finger at me. ‘Make sure you buy some proper clothes before we go. You can’t follow me around looking like this.’

Cash Daddy paused to scrub under his arms while I surveyed my shirt - new, but obviously not good enough. Well, truth be told, despite my Swatch and my Lexus, I had not yet completely relaxed into the habit of lavishing things like clothes on myself. Some of Wizard and Ogbonna’s shirts could have funded my siblings’ tuition for two whole semesters.

‘As soon as we come back,’ Cash Daddy continued, ‘tell him to start working on documents for your US visa. Those ones might take a little longer. You know the Americans are much more difficult.’

I nodded. I had heard that the American was the one embassy where no officials agreed to have their palms greased in exchange for visas or for keeping closed eyes about spurious documents. Even booking an interview date with either of their embassies, in Abuja or Lagos, could take several months. But Dibia’s skill was truly a gift from God. It had never failed.

‘Honestly, America’s the place,’ Cash Daddy said. ‘Not just that the people are very generous, you can’t even say you’ve ever been abroad until you’ve been to America. Kai!’

He stopped scrubbing and jerked his head as if trying to contain the weight of the memories that had just come upon him.

‘Is it the houses . . . is it the food . . . is it the roads . . . is it the women . . . ? You’ll see all types of women with all types of complexions; you won’t even know which one to choose. In America, you’ll understand why it’s good to have money, because you’ll keep seeing things to spend it on.’

He stepped out of the shower and yanked a large towel to start drying his body. Once again, I wondered how the scrawny urchin who had lived with my family all those years ago, had metamorphosed into this fleshy edifice. Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his five limbs were thick and long. I half expected his bloated belly to wriggle free of his body and start break-dancing on the tiled floor in front of us. It seemed to have a life of its own. He dropped the used towel on the floor and grabbed one of the many toothbrushes in a glass mug on the washbasin.

‘Come and put some toothpaste for me,’ he said.

I reached out for the tube of Colgate. Despite my extreme carefulness, his belly still brushed against my hand. He held out his toothbrush while I squeezed the white paste. When I had finished my task, I withdrew to a less discomforting distance.

‘By the way,’ he continued, in a more subdued and official tone. ‘I have an emergency meeting with the police commissioner tomorrow and I want you to be there.’

‘Do we have any problems?’ I had never accompanied him to see the commissioner before.

Cash Daddy grated his throat twice and spat.

‘One should remove the hand of the monkey from the soup before it becomes a human hand. The main reason for the meeting is for us to make sure that there’s no problem. He didn’t tell me much, but it looks like there are some places where we’ve made one or two mistakes and he wants us to take it easy.’

His cellular phone rang. I rushed to pick it up from the bathroom mat and held it out to him. Cash Daddy glanced at the screen and made a quick sign of the cross like a priest being pursued by the devil. I knew immediately that it was his wife calling. Something to do with the children. Conversing with his wife was one of those uncommon occurrences when Cash Daddy did more listening than talking.

When he finished, he chuckled, and asked if I had seen the latest photographs of his children. I had not.

‘Ah. I just got them. Come let me show you.’

He led the way out of the bathroom, stopping briefly at the door to scratch the inside of his thigh. He opened his bedside drawer and extracted some photographs. He handed them to me with the sort of smile that you have when presenting a beloved friend with a priceless surprise gift. I tried to appear commensurately keen.

In the first one, the five cherubs and their mother were all dressed up - the two girls in long, flowing frocks, the three boys in black dinner jackets and red bow ties, their mother in a clingy, sparkly red dress that made her look like a tall goldfish. He explained that they had all attended some ceremony in the eldest child’s school. This eldest son was enrolled in an exclusive boarding school in Oxford.

‘He even won an award,’ Cash Daddy beamed proudly. ‘Anyway, I’m not surprised. Whatever the python gives birth to must eventually be long. I know that boy is going to be great in this world. Greater than me even.’

The children all looked like distant cousins of Princes William and Harry. Graceful and illustrious. There was not the slightest trace of that untamed look on their faces, the look that neither diverse currencies nor worldly comforts had quite erased from their father’s countenance. I tried to imagine the distinguished accents that would come forth when they spoke.

Interesting - these offspring of Uncle Boniface, the money-miss-road, were the aristocrats of tomorrow.

Cash Daddy’s voice smashed into my musings.

‘I’ve told you to hurry up and get married,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you’re waiting for. The advice I always give young men is: once you start making money, after buying your first set of cars, your next investment should be a wife. You should have been married long ago.’

He was right. I should have been married a long time ago. I should also have been working in Shell or Mobil or Schlumberger and coming home to Ola every night. Unfortunately, that was life.

He inspected his physique in the full-length mirror. While he squeezed into a pair of Versace jeans and a silk Yves Saint Laurent shirt, he talked about business and some new ideas.

‘I’m also thinking of employing some more of these young boys who know more about the internet. The only person we have is Wizard. He’s good, but the boy is a thief. He can even steal from inside a woman’s womb without anybody noticing. And two things I can’t stand are people who steal and people who are disloyal.’

He turned away from the mirror and looked at me.

‘What of your brother?’ he asked.

I blinked.

‘I mean Godfrey,’ he clarified.

‘Never.’

‘But he appears quite sma—’

‘Never.’

He must have understood that the matter was very closed. He stopped talking and looked back at his image in the mirror.

My phone rang. It was my father’s third sister’s son.

‘Ebuka, please call me back later. I’m in a meeting.’

‘Kings, go on and take your call,’ Cash Daddy said.

‘No, it’s OK, I can—’

‘Take your call.’

Ebuka needed some money to buy his GCE forms.

‘But I sent you money to buy forms a short while ago,’ I said.

‘Brother Kings, that one was different. That one was for my SSCE. I’ve already bought the form and filled it. If you want, I can bring the receipt for you to see.’

‘OK, come and see me in the house tomorrow evening and collect some money.’

There was no need giving him my address. All my relatives from far and near now knew where I lived. There seemed to be a benevolent fairy whose job it was to pass on my contact details to any two-winged insect that flew past.

‘Brother, thank you very much,’ he said.

Cash Daddy was brushing his eyebrows and flashing his teeth in front of the mirror. His grooming was always lengthy before he got satisfied.

‘Kings,’ he said suddenly, ‘has it occurred to you that I’m now too big to be chasing dollars around? Come.’

He held me by the upper arm and escorted me to the window. He walked very close, almost leaning his chest against my shoulder. For a while, we stood and stared out of the glass panes without speaking. The window overlooked his front gate.

Almost all the buildings on Iweka and on farther streets were in total darkness. NEPA had struck. In the distance, I made out the bright lights of World Bank’s humongous house. Like Cash Daddy, he had a power generator. After a while, I peeped at my uncle. He had a faraway gaze on his face, like an emperor wondering by how much more he should reduce his subjects’ taxes.

‘Kings,’ he said suddenly, ‘do you sometimes feel as if God is talking to you?’

I gave it some thought.

‘No.’

He turned away from the window and looked at me.

‘Kings, don’t you read your Bible?’ He did not wait for a reply. ‘You should read your Bible often and memorise passages,’ he said, shaking his head slowly and wagging his finger at me. ‘It’s very, very important.’

Sermon over, he returned his eyes to the window and took in a deep breath.

‘Kings,’ he exhaled, ‘each time I stand and look out through this window, I feel as if God is talking to me. It’s as if I can hear Him saying that He’s given me the land as far as my eyes can see, just like He said to Papa Abraham.’

He paused and looked at me.

‘Kings, I’ve decided to run for governor of Abia State in the coming elections.’

The fact that I did not drop to the floor with shock was simply supernatural.