MUMMY SUMMONS US TO FIGHT AGAIN AND AGAIN. SHE does this anytime boredom weighs heavily on her wide shoulders and hunger for excitement lines the rims of her eyes. On one occasion she summons us to the garden, where she is drinking with her friends. We are asked to fight for the three of them, each of whom is nursing a glass of wine and swaying to Afrojuju music blaring from an MP3 player, laughing and watching us beat each other without mercy. I often watch her with pity from my window or other cryptic angles. I am struck by her secret helplessness, her misery. She is a woman who has everything that life could offer yet lives in bondage. A prisoner of her own habits. I may be a captive in her house, but, hopefully one day, I will walk through that gate free; I only need to watch Abdul long and hard enough.
But the days flip into weeks, and the weeks roll into months and nose towards the end of the year. I have a pile of money in the wardrobe after many fights. I manage to win one. I am able to maneuver Ejiro into a lock that leaves him farting and gasping for his life. But I come out of the fight with a twisted arm. I savour my first big win with a period of convalescence reading Black Moses, struggling to make meanings out of unfamiliar words and sentences. I fall in love with the story after I find out that it is about a revolution, about conflict and tension between northerners and southerners in the Republic of Congo. It reminds me of our Biafra story. I come across a curious word, imperialism, which I first heard from the grizzled little man at Uwakwe’s shopfront. In one of their debates, he said that the colonial masters had preferred to hand over power to a northerner because they didn’t want the southerners, and especially the easterners, whom they thought bright enough to recognize their suspicious intention of continuing to take advantage of their former colony. Eke and I had become so excited about the word imperialistic that we resolved to go to university to learn more words like it.
I also fall in love with the character Moses even though his surname is a whole paragraph that I have to skip after almost chewing my tongue trying to pronounce Tokumisa Nzambe po Mose yamoyindo abotami namboka ya Bakoko. I probably like him because he reminds me of my brother Machebe while I see something of myself in the character of his friend Bonaventure, a weak, cringy, cowardly boy who dreams bad dreams all the time of people dying. He is paranoid, hates his name, and depends on others to fight for him.
After I finish Black Moses, I start to read the second novel I find in the wardrobe, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger. I quickly warm to the story, picking up the book whenever I find myself in a bad mood to amuse myself. He is so hilarious, the protagonist Holden Caulfield, so confused and disillusioned. I don’t think I am half as mischievous as him, and even if I was, who could blame me? Anybody would do the same in my position.
I’m at the part of the novel where Holden goes home. Where he gets cold outside and sneaks in. He inspires me. I know my family will be unhappy with the way things have turned out in Lagos. Machebe will be mad at me, the same way Holden’s sister, Phoebe, snubs him, but I can always start all over again, just as Holden plans to apply himself at his next school. So I walk up to Mummy in the back garden, where she is eating apples and nodding to Afrojuju music from her MP3 player.
“I want to leave, Ma,” I say.
She takes a bite at the apple. “Leave? To where?”
“I want to go home.”
She bursts into laughter, her shoulders shaking, her mouth full and buttery, and then she stops laughing. “Why do you want to go home?”
“I can’t fight anymore. Ejiro says you can get another boy who can.”
She laughs again. “Yes, he is right. I can get another boy at the snap of my finger. But I pay you well, don’t I?”
“I don’t want the money. You can have all the money you have given me. I haven’t spent any of it.”
“Don’t be a coward.” She swallows neat, smacks her lips. “Ejiro is a boy like you. Don’t let yourself be intimidated! You’d be a fool to abandon a home like this for the poverty of your village. I know your family needs the money.”
“I would rather be poor than die fighting,” I insist.
She stares at me long and hard. “Okay. Go, if that’s what you want. I am not stopping you, but I will not be held responsible for whatever happens to you at that gate.”
She turns her back on me and resumes eating her apples and nodding to her music as I walk away crestfallen. Abdul’s ruinous face appears and vanishes again in my dew-eyed vision, his stinking brown teeth bared in scorn.
I try a hunger strike. I figure she will let me go if she realizes I might starve to death. I go to bed hungry yet determined, but then I wake up in the middle of the night with an ache in my stomach. It is so acute it drives sleep far away from my eyes. I sit up the rest of the night listening to the choir of worms in my stomach. In the morning, I hide behind the dining room door and swallow my spit as Ejiro eats a breakfast of scrambled eggs, in that surly manner of his. Later, the smell of lunch sets my whole body on fire. I can’t take it anymore, feeling I might go mad if I don’t eat, so I rush into the kitchen and polish off a large plateful of rice and chicken.
I sit on my bed in my room and revise my escape plan. I can see Abdul from my window beyond thick ixora hedges. He is holding his transistor radio to his right ear and nodding to some flute-flavoured Hausa song. Every morning, he sits there by the gate and cleans his teeth with a long chewing stick. And then he smokes, and listens to his radio, his mouth moving furtively with kola nut. He says “Sanu Nyammiri” and scowls at my back if it is my turn to take breakfast to him. After eating, he smokes again and again. Sometimes he naps on the bench. But he is restless in his sleep, scratching and yawning, swatting at flies and waking at the littlest noise.
He spends the rest of the day in more or less the same way: eating, smoking, and napping lightly, so escape during the daytime is out of the question. I explore the nighttime option. The surroundings are too bright, too well illuminated at night to go unnoticed. But then I remember the powerhouse. A young mechanic comes once in a while to service the generator. There is a control switch on the side wall that, if turned off, disconnects the automatic changeover switch and renders the transfer of power to the generator impossible. There is a ladder always leaning on the wall of the powerhouse. Ejiro uses it if there are any minor repairs to the house that require a ladder. It’s tall enough to take me to the top of the wall. With the alarm disconnected from the central control system, it will be easy for me to scale the barbed-wire fence in total darkness and land on the ixora hedge on the other side. But there is the dog to watch out for. I had completely forgotten Ogidan—aggressive, with a big black head, wide shoulders, and narrow hips. He is shaped like a lion. He has an ugly face and long overlapping ears. I don’t want to think about his teeth. Ogidan may not recognize me in the shadows. What he is capable of doing to an intruder is better left to the imagination. It is too dangerous to try to scale the high fence. Even if I succeed in disabling the central control system, and in beating Ogidan, I will still face the risk of being shot by one of the neighbours. It seems that every landlord in the neighbourhood has a gun. Mummy has one, too. She fires warning shots into the night every now and again to deter robbers. I realize how impossible it is to get away from this place unless providence smiles at me. But then a sudden idea brings me to my knees.
Raising my hands high to the ceiling, I cry out to Okike, imploring her to take me out of this hell disguised as a mansion.
After a few moments, a woman walks into the room and offers me a white handkerchief. She walks out again into the corridor. I must have shed a few tears of frustration. There’s something familiar about her floral-patterned lace dress. Her steps are light, almost immaterial. On her way out, she leans against the door frame and begins to slide down. Her body is racked by spasms, like that of an epileptic in the pangs of a seizure. She foams at the mouth. And then she stills. I stare on in shock as she rises to her feet again and smooths out her dress. And then she hurries down the corridor.
I wake in my bed. Rising, I walk to the door and peer down the empty corridor. No trace of a woman in a lace dress with floral designs. I walk back into the room and sit on my bed. She was so real. Suddenly an idea leaps into my head: feigning epilepsy. I am up on my feet again and pacing the room. What if I pretend to have epilepsy to frighten Mummy? She might panic and get rid of me. I know how much epilepsy is dreaded. Someone in my class had it in primary school. Everyone avoided him because it is believed to be contagious, deadly, and without a cure. But I will have to practice how to fake a fit like the woman in my dream without hurting myself.
My arm has healed. Mummy gave me painkillers to aid my recovery. And Ejiro is too engrossed with training to care about what I am doing. I guess he is trying to come to terms with my victory in the last fight. The look I see in his face says, Enjoy your victory while it lasts. I will make you eat lawn grass in our next bout.
I start to practice a fake fall, standing at the centre of the big bed and letting myself down on the mattress the way I had seen my epileptic classmate drop in his many fits, clumsily at first, but more deftly after many rounds of rehearsals. And then I move the rehearsals to the floor of the room. I find the foaming at the mouth repulsive, but I have to do it to be convincing, letting drool ooze disgustingly down the corner of my mouth. After days of practice on the floor of my room, I perfect the skill of sliding to the floor and jerking spasmodically, saliva drooling down the corner of my mouth.
The opportunity to display my new talent arrives when Mummy calls for a glass of water at the lawn, where she is luxuriating in rich afternoon sunshine. The glass of water tumbles from her grip as I set the drama in motion, twirling then crashing suddenly. A small scream escapes her throat. The next minute, she is shouting Ejiro’s name as if a big long snake has loomed into sight. Ejiro’s frantic approach is heralded by the quick stamping of feet. I give them some minutes of melodrama before I slow the spasms, and then still. I open my eyes and notice they are watching from a distance. I sit up and wipe the saliva gushing out of my mouth.
“Are you telling me you have had epilepsy all this while you have lived in my house?” Mummy asks.
I nod a reply, feigning shame and fatigue.
A look of disgust leaps into her eyes. “Does anyone else have it in your family?”
“No. I got it in primary school. A boy in my class had it. He farted during one of his fits, and I caught it.” I had also rehearsed the lie.
“Are you saying it’s really contagious?” The wrinkled look of disgust turns to wide-eyed alarm.
“My teacher said it can be contracted if you breathe in the fart of a victim when he is having a fit.”
With a wild flare of her hands, she asks, “Are you sure you did not fart just now when you were having the fit?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She slumps into a seat. “Maybe?”
I bring myself to my feet and walk inside to wash myself and have a good laugh. Ejiro is waiting in my room when I return from the bathroom.
“You scared Mummy,” Ejiro says. “But you did not fool me. I know you lied. You don’t have epilepsy. I would have known long ago if you had it. You lied so Mummy will send you away. Deny it.”
I stare at him, dumbfounded.
“Mummy may have believed you, but she doesn’t let go easily, especially if a boy is strong and resilient. You are a strong boy. One of the toughest I have had to fight, which makes it more exciting for Mummy. She will not let you go just like that. She will bring a doctor to make sure you really have epilepsy. I have thought about telling Mummy that you lied to her, but I am not going to betray you.” He pauses to savour the suspense he has created. “I want to help you even though I think you are a coward. If they divide this country into three, the Niger Delta will fall into Biafra, so we are . . . well, brothers. Mummy believes everything I tell her. I will tell her you really have the sickness if you give me the money you have saved.”
Ejiro’s proposal is a tsetse fly that settles on my scrotum. If I strike it, I will crush my testicles; if I let it be, it sucks my blood.
Obochi, a pretty maiden from Idu village, sets out in search of snails with two friends, not knowing it will be the unhappiest day of her life. Obochi enjoys snail meat, although her mother, Ijedi, despises it because it leaves a sour taste in her mouth, especially now that she is expecting a baby, and her father, Omenka, thinks that only gluttons eat the unclean, slimy meat of a snail. Obochi doesn’t care how her parents feel about snail meat, doesn’t care that her mother forbids her from using the house pot to cook her snails. All she cares about is combing the bush with friends on her free days in search of snails, and then cooking and enjoying the crunchy taste of the meat. Sometimes she returns with a good harvest, sometimes with little or nothing for her troubles. When the harvest is good she cooks and eats some of the snails, and then she sells the rest at the local market and saves the money. Today happens to be her worst harvest. The girls have been roaming the bushes with little to show for their efforts.
“Let’s go home,” Nnedi says, pouting with frustration. “I am tired.”
“Me too.” Obeta, fair-skinned, is flushed with exhaustion.
“Girls. Why don’t we search a little longer?” Obochi says in a persuasive voice.
After a long, sweaty trek, her brown skin flushes a smooth, wet loam. Slender with coils of red and black beads around her waist, Obochi thinks herself very beautiful, breasts pointed like spears, a ripe and desirable maiden. Her friends are sweaty, too, and tired after hours of walking from one bush to another, peeping into damp corners and turning over fallen leaves for hidden snails. They are torn between going home and continuing the fruitless search in the hot sun. Obochi is in the mood for adventure, so when her friends turn and head back home, she merely giggles and continues her search. She walks on in the burning sun, resting in the shadows and moving on again until she arrives at the edge of a large forest. She has never come this far in search of snails before, passing the last village in her community and crossing the boundary into another. She contemplates the dark, grim forest, her sense of adventure feeding on the cries of shrews, the babbling of monkeys, and the chilling laughter of hyenas. A snail hunches its pointed brown shell at her as she tilts the first leaf. She reaches down and quickly picks it into her sack. She tilts more dead leaves and finds more snails. For every damp leaf she upturns with her stick, a fat snail is hidden beneath it; every tree has one stuck to it. A squeal starts in her throat, but she clasps her mouth to smother it as she grabs the snails with both hands, throwing them into the sack quickly until it fills up, and she has difficulty tying its mouth to keep the snails from spilling. She barely manages to lift the sack to her head as she begins to trek home, sweating and groaning under the weight of her incredible harvest. The snails are so many that she decides she will take the surplus to the market to sell.
By the next day, she is counting the coins she has saved from her harvests, which multiplied with yesterday’s sales. Over and over again she counts, whistling with surprise at how much she has been able to save over the weeks, peeping outside to make sure her siblings are not watching her as she tucks the money out of sight somewhere in the wattle of the hut. If her brothers see her hiding the money, they will surely steal it from her.
“Nne dalu,” she says to her mother as she sails outside to where Ijedi sits under a walnut tree in the small, shadowy compound peeling cassava roots, her belly protruding out of her scrawny body. “You are working too hard, Mother.”
“Ke maka afia.” Her mother’s voice is thin and inaudible. “I trust that market was good.”
“Market will never be good with those middle-women blocking us from selling directly to the white men.” Obochi settles on a stool and starts to wash the peeled white cassava roots into a pot of water. The roots will be left in the large clay pot for a few days to ferment.
Ike, her mother’s lastborn, a naked toddler, is busy wandering the compound. He picks up a fallen leaf, walks to Ijedi, and stretches his little hand towards her. Ijedi takes what he offers her and smiles her thanks. Encouraged, Ike then scoops up some sand, walks back dutifully, and empties the sand into Ijedi’s palm. He then takes off again in search of another gift, ignoring her protests.
“You should be thankful that the women are there to buy the snails and take them to the white men in the city,” her mother says. “How many people in this community would eat snails, not to talk of buying them?”
Obochi shrugs with despair. She is the second of six siblings: four boys and two girls. When her mother was pregnant with Ike, Obochi had hoped her mother would have a girl. When she had Ike, Obochi had been disappointed. While Ike is only a sweet baby now, she hopes the child her mother is carrying in her womb is a girl and not another brother, another rascally boy who will grow up and use his strength for mischief rather than to help the family, and who will attract endless complaints from neighbours whose trees are robbed or whose children are fought.
“I wish you would have a girl to strike a balance, nne.”
“I’d love to give you another sister.” Ijedi’s voice is conspiratorial. “But it’s almost certain it’s going to be a boy, the way the baby is kicking at me.”
Obochi’s lips form a pout. But then she spies her father as he walks home wheeling a bicycle up the long approach to the compound in a shade of trees. He is returning from a long meeting of his kinsmen with a flushed face, one of the few men in the village who owns a bicycle. Ike waddles towards him. He gets himself lifted up onto the frame of the bicycle and rolled in.
“Nnam ukwu,” Ijedi says. “What kind of a meeting would keep you out all day on an empty stomach?”
He apologizes. “Too many issues to be resolved among obstinate kinsmen.”
Ike whines in protest as he is lifted off the bicycle, and then he breaks down in tears. It takes a coin gift from Obochi to silence him. Omenka leans the bicycle against the kitchen wall and walks into the house.
“Go and serve your father his food.”
Obochi returns to continue the conversation with her mother after serving her father his meal as Ike comes back with yet another gift, the bicycle fuss receding with his short attention span. This time he picks on Obochi, whimpering to get her attention. She reaches out a distracted hand and collects the gift with a cold, crawling feeling in her palm. She looks down sharply and finds a baby chameleon swaying in her palm. With a cry she flings the reptile away.
“What on earth are you doing with a chameleon?” she scolds.
Startled by the harshness of her voice, Ike bursts into tears.
Ijedi hisses, says chameleons are a bad omen. At this stage in her pregnancy, all she does is hiss, snap, and scratch her hair. Her belly is almost touching the ground, growing out of her small-boned body like the bill of a pelican.
The chameleon disappears in the carpet of fallen dry leaves at once, blending into the surroundings—a rich, saturated tone of grey.
The next day, as Obochi settles down on a clump of dry grass to watch her father eat the food she has taken to him at the farm, her mind wanders again to the chameleon her brother had picked up, and her dream the night before in which her father was bitten by a snake.
“Esogbula.” Omenka eats slowly, dunking each slice of yam into salted palm oil in a calabash vessel before taking a bite. “Dreams are nothing.”
Obochi looks skeptical.
A few bites of the yam are enough for Omenka. In the evening, he will indulge himself a few shots of ekpetechi to release his knotted joints, to prepare his muscles for work the next day. Now and again he takes a long drink of water.
“I will be back.” Obochi decides to go fetch firewood. “You have to finish the food, though,” she says, her tone mandatory.
Omenka grins at her. “I will try.”
She moves to the other side of the farm to gather firewood. A bunch of berries, brown and luscious, catches her eyes. She walks over and plucks them. They are something for Ike when he comes bounding towards her at home, shrieking his welcome. Her skin tingles as her fingers come in contact with the berries people call “ram testicles.” She chuckles as she puts the berries away, giggling to herself, thinking that they look exactly like a boy’s balls.
She walks back with a handful of firewood tucked into the crook of her arm. Her father has finished his meal, to her delight.
“Thank you for finishing it.”
“It was a good, delicious meal,” he says.
She turns pink in the face. She always feels excited when her father praises her cooking. She begins to pack the clay dishes into a raffia basket along with the firewood. She lifts the basket onto her head and begins to walk home.
Ijedi is sitting half naked in her accustomed position on a raffia mat under the walnut tree tearing her hair when Obochi returns from the farm. Obochi takes a stool and joins her.
“My father praised my cooking,” she says, blushing.
“It means I taught you well.” Ijedi rips at her hair.
Obochi moves her stool closer. She probes into her mother’s hair with her fingers in search of lice. “You are tearing it to pieces.”
“I feel like getting rid of the whole thing.”
“It is badly infested.” She plucks a louse, crushing it between her thumbnails. “I will have to treat it with faifai.”
“You will have to wait for the baby to come first. I can’t stand the smell of faifai.”
Obochi can tell that her mother is almost due by her mood swings, her weight loss, her drooping eyelids, and the way she drags herself around the house almost naked. They make little conversations. Ijedi talks about the weather, complaining of the heat, and the long-awaited rain.
“I’d like to have the baby before the rains start. I don’t want to leave the weeding of the farms entirely to you and your siblings—” She finishes her speech with a sharp wince as she snatches up her outstretched left leg with a suddenness that alarms Obochi.
“O kwa agwo,” Obochi screams when she sees the snake getting away, a thin, green tendril slithering towards the garden.
Her siblings rush back home at the sound of her alarmed voice. Her voice also attracts some neighbours, mostly women, for the men are at the farm working.
“Go bring Odo. Mother has been bitten by a snake!” she yells at her brother. “Tell him to bring his snakebite antidote right away. Hurry, and do not come back without him. Run!”
The boy tears off.
“Her water has broken,” observes an old woman. “Somebody should go fetch the midwife urgently.”
Obochi dashes off.