Fallen Angel

Memoirs of a Kept Woman

    ENO MATTHEWS is a sweet, loving young girl from Ikot-Ekpene, a town in Akwa-Ibom state, where she lived with her parents, who were low level labourers. Her family’s meagre finance does nothing to take away her joy of living. She hopes and dreams of a prince charming, who would sweep her off her feet and make babies with her.

    Things change in her family, when her father sustains a leg injury from an automobile accident. Her father commits suicide, after months of living with an amputated leg. After her father’s death and due to the financial burden of catering for the family, her mother accepts the first marriage offer on Eno’s head, and secretly marries her off to a man in his forties named AKPAN. Eno feels betrayed when she finds out what her mother did, but for the sake of her family, she accepts to go to Uyo where her new husband, Akpan lives.

      Akpan is a man who is badly behaved and given to debauchery. Still, he believes a woman should go to her husband’s house with her virginity intact. It is this same reason he marries a young girl from a remote town, and not his mistress, whom he has been seeing for years. When Eno goes to her husband’s house, she is welcomed by her husband’s mistress, INYENE. They become friends, but will become arch enemies in the future. When Akpan finds out that Eno is not a virgin, he becomes angry and turns into an abusive husband. Even when Eno falls pregnant, her husband still abuses her sexually and physically. Consequentially, she loses her pregnancy and her womb.

        Driven by her loss, Eno changes from a simple, loving girl into a damaged girl who abhors men. She feels broken beyond repair and worthless. Determined to pay back men like her husband, she escapes from the hospital with Inyene’s help and relocates to Lagos. Eno transforms herself into a gorgeous and sophisticated woman, with a British accent.

        With her new image, she finds and manipulates men with sex and wit. She breaks them until they bend to her every whim. When she meets DANLADI, a wealthy oil magnate, who was in his fifties and had lost his wife, she manipulates him until he falls in love with her. Her goal is to sap Danladi of his wealth, but she does not expect to fall in love with him, which she does. When Eno falls in Love with Danladi, she sees the hope of leaving her past behind forever, and starting a new life with him. She accepts Danladi’s proposal to marry her, and forgets her ugly past in the pool of Danladi’s love.

         The past comes calling when she meets her husband at a store where she had gone with her fiancé to buy wedding accessories. He threatens to expose her past and the fact that she is still married to him. He blackmails her and demands for one more sex before he leaves her. It is obvious he is up to something, but Eno outsmarts him. Eno is desperate to hold on to her love for Danladi, and she knows if her past is revealed, Danladi would send her away. So, she murders Akpan, and sets herself free to marry again, this time for love.

     Her sins will catch up with her, as she is exposed by Inyene, on her wedding day. Everyone finds out her secrets and she is banished to prison. In prison, she believes Danladi loves her too much to abandon her, but after waiting for months without him coming, she gives up and resigns to fate. She pens out her memoires to while away the life imprisonment she had been given. She does not realize that love covers a multitude of sins, and hope is still alive.