Ten

BEATRICE WAS RIGHT. A TIN BOX HAS NO PLACE HERE, I think to myself.

Although I see no moon from my window, the night outside the mansion is shinier than a night of full moon in my village. This place has its own peculiarities, like jet planes screaming overhead, and constant motorway traffic buzzing like bees when they travel in swarms over my father’s house towards the village backwoods and hills. Eke and I’d climb trees to harvest their honey in a clay pot. This noise of the jet planes flying past almost drives me out of my mind. In my village, I’d see an airplane only once in a while. As children, the distant drone in the sky would draw us outside. We’d gaze up at the tiny winged steel, appearing and disappearing in the far-flung clouds with a low, dull sound. We would wave at it, and appeal to its occupants to hurl down gifts to us. Here, the airplanes fly very low, as if they might crash into the tall buildings, the whole house reverberating like a continuous rumble of thunder.

At times the electricity goes off and plunges the mansion into darkness. Lagos will suddenly become quiet and mysterious. The woman I now call Mummy is not used to such troubled quietness, I can tell. It is like forcing a restless child to go to sleep against its will. Mummy’s big, fierce dog, named Ogidan, a beast she lets loose at night, will bark. Then the generator will start with deep breaths like a giant waking up from a slumber, opening its shiny inhuman eyes, its breathing normalizing in a steady hum.

Back home I heard stories of what happens to village boys who come to cities to work as houseboys to rich families. They are treated like garbage. They take care of snot-nosed children and deal with their soiled diapers and stagnant hosts of buzzing flies. They spend the whole day cleaning the house, washing dishes, and laundering heaps of clothes and bed linens. And then they get slapped and kicked for dozing off while waiting for the family to finish a late-night movie. One houseboy ran back to our village with a deep burn on his back. His employer had pressed a hot iron into his flesh as punishment for some offense. But I have a different job description. There are no children to take care of here. The garbage collector comes from time to time to clear the trash, and the launderer comes for Mummy’s clothes. Two weeks have gone by, and all we do, the other houseboy, Ejiro, and I, is clean the house and keep the garbage in the trash by the gate for the dustman. I should be happy living in the mansion and having very little work to do, but I keep fighting off a sense of foreboding. An adage my father often says hangs over me: “‘Take it all’ is never a gift.”

First thing every morning, Ejiro goes to the gym to lift weights. Then he swims in the pool. “It’s a ritual in this house,” Mummy says, insisting I, too, cultivate the habit of training. So now I lift weights. I wake up in the morning, train at the gym, take a swim, and eat a breakfast of tea, fried eggs, and bread; a lunch of jollof rice and chicken; and eba and egusi soup for dinner. They are my favourites. I didn’t eat eggs in the village unless I stole them. The neighbours’ poultry sometimes strayed into our territory to lay eggs, which I’d quickly grab and fry in secret. But now I have tea in the morning, eat rice in the afternoon, and then eba at night, and the next day I might go for a different menu from the assortment in the freezer. Mummy is a great cook. She likes to cook her own meals. It’s a hobby for her. We only assist her in the kitchen. She sometimes spends a whole day making a variety of dishes. She then keeps them in the deep freezer from which we help ourselves.

With so little to do, I sometimes spend the afternoon watching cars cruising along the streets from my window. My eyes linger on the tomb lying beneath my window in its rich glitter of white and gold. I sit on it sometimes, close my eyes, and rub my hand over the smooth, cool surface of the marble slab, thinking of Okike. And then I come inside, lie on my bed, and feel its softness on my back. I inhale the room’s clean smell with my eyes closed, pondering if the sit-at-home order has gained full momentum in my village. There is silence about it here; it seems like Biafra has no voice in Lagos. I am already missing the gamblers. Every afternoon I see Patty Onah and Oluoha in my mind locked in a fierce game of draughts. But mostly I miss Eke, and my family, and our moonlit meals. I wonder what my absence means to them. It might bring my mother relief, one mouth less to feed.

It is just the three of us in the mansion: Mummy, Ejiro, and me, not counting Abdul, the gateman, who sleeps in the small house built into the wall of the fence. The mansion is large, but Mummy is full of energy. Full of vitality. She fills up the emptiness with her loud Afrojuju music. Her friends visit now and again, women as large and energetic as her, noisy women who spend the whole day dancing, drinking, and shrieking. Maybe they are the ones she visits when she drives out in big lace clothes and high-rising headgear. From what I have seen so far, life in my village is hell. The hardest I work here is cleaning the house and helping Mummy in the kitchen. I even have access to the TV. The only time I watched TV in my village was when I could steal a glance through a neighbour’s window. But after a few weeks, I start to wonder about my wages. I want to know what I am working for. Beatrice didn’t tell me how much I would be paid as a houseboy. I want to know how long it is going to take me to gather enough savings to help my family out of poverty and build a tomb for Okike. I may even start a business of my own if I make enough. I don’t know how to ask Mummy such a thing, so I decide to get it out of Ejiro.

“You are still on probation,” he says with clenched teeth. “You will be paid well if you do well.”

I want to know how long my apprenticeship will last, and what will happen if I don’t do well, but he is gone even before I finish thinking. Ejiro is a pillar of wood. That is how best I can describe him. Nothing moves him. I am certain he doesn’t like me. He never did from our first eye contact. I can see his dislike for me in every detail of his attitude towards me. On one of my first days at the mansion, I had remembered the rosary my mother had given me, fished it out of my bag, and pondered aloud about going to church.

“Church.” Ejiro laughed until I started to feel stupid. “There’s no talk of church in this house. It’s a taboo. Mummy is Muslim. You are allowed only to be Muslim as long as you are in the mansion.”

I told him that my mother would have a heart attack if I switched from Christianity to Islam, the religion of the Hausa and Fulani. I had never even met a Muslim in my village.

“Your mother’s opinion is not wanted here,” Ejiro said, and stamped out, leaving me with that cold sense of trepidation.