ASKING DIRECTIONS ALONG THE WAY, I FINALLY ARRIVE at a bus station in the heart of Lagos. Thankfully, I still have Machebe’s money, which Ejiro never got to know about. The streets are humming with traffic, car horns, and police sirens serenading the vastness of the night, lively and illuminated. I walk to a yellow kiosk and ask a light-skinned girl with lips painted bright red for a ticket to the east.
“You are lucky,” she says, smiling at me. “You are buying the last ticket.”
I don’t consider myself lucky, but I forgive her ignorance. I pay for the ticket, sure she is the one in luck. I can see she is relieved to be going home. She looks fatigued. The bus is being loaded with travelling bags and sacks of goods. A long yellow-and-green bus. Touts are making a lot of noise, and people are shouting to be heard. It is getting colder. I walk to a tea shop and order a dinner of tea and bread, watching as the Hausaman shovels spoonfuls of Milo, powdered milk, and granulated sugar into a plastic cup. He pours the tea into two cups and passes the liquid between them a few times to cool its hotness before passing the cup to me. The tea has a syrupy taste, not at all like Mummy’s rich creamy tea, but it warms me, rekindles my last memories of the mansion, which I will take with me to my village. From the tea shop I can see the bus driver. He interests me. He is standing away from the bus, smoking and watching it being loaded, a light-skinned man in khaki shorts, black sandals, and a towel hanging around his bare shoulders. He is tall and fleshy. Folds of flesh ring his belly and his neck, not in any way that is obscene, but in a way that shows he is eating money. In a way he reminds me of a long-range agric pig.
We begin boarding the bus around 10:30 p.m. The driver’s name is written on a copper nameplate above the wheels: AKUBUILO. We take off around 11:00, Akubuilo easing the long bus into the road, flowing into the sea of darkness spotted with yellow floodlights like a tributary. The traffic is heavy and drags along like a snake with a broken spine. Hawkers of bread, sachet water, and soft drinks move up and down the long lines of vehicles like scroll bars on Mummy’s computer as they stop and push their wares into car windows at passengers. I sit quietly and watch the scrambling going on all around me, knowing that at this time my village will be asleep. I entertain my eyes with the psychedelic neon signs advertising businesses: insurance companies, banks, shipping companies. Mummy’s children overseas would send her things through FedEx and DHL. Enormous billboards of pretty ladies in ads and politicians with double chins recede into nothingness as Akubuilo’s headlights swing, picking them out.
The traffic eases up. Akubuilo moves smoothly, slowing down and swerving this and that way to avoid potholes. Cars coming from the opposite direction appear so small that it seems he will crush them like a big foot dragged over an ant. The passengers are mostly Igbo traders travelling to the east with heavy sacks of goods. The journey is flavoured with Osita Osadebe’s highlife music. I shut my eyes and allow his fine, throaty voice to sandpaper my ears, the voice that blends with the wailing engine, the roaring road, and the heavy thud of percussion instruments.
Machebe is standing outside the front of the house when I finally reach our compound at sunrise the next day. A lightning bolt of anxiety tears a path through my stomach. I did not expect that he’d be the first person I’d see upon my shameful return. He watches me with a blank expression as I approach. My mother emerges from the house to my relief. Upon seeing me, she stops. And then Usonwa and the twins come tearing out as my mother shrieks a loud note of surprise at seeing me. And then my father appears and stands in the doorway, his mouth curling in a mocking smile. I can see from his stance that his hip injury has slightly disfigured him.
“Come quickly inside.” I didn’t realize my mother would be so dramatic. “I don’t want the neighbours to hear you.”
I know the neighbours well. They are like the swarming termites drawn to the light of the oil lamp; one by one they will fly in until the compound is carpeted with their watercolour wings. I know that at the sound of my mother’s voice they will come nosing into our compound. The moment the story of my sojourn drops from my mother’s mouth to the ground like a crumb of food, they will swoop on it like ants, take bits from it, and carry it elsewhere to share with their friends. Some will have the crumb salted and peppered to make it more delicious.
Dinner is cocoyam and akworakwo, a peppery sauce. Ugh! This homecoming, I am beginning to feel bad about it, about the cold walls of my room and the mattress that’s so flat it feels the same as lying on the hard, bare floor.
“Lagos is a swarming mass of ants, and you can’t tell a red ant from a fire ant,” I begin, narrating my well-rehearsed story to settle everyone’s curiosity, about the mansion and the luxuries of life in Lagos, the delicious meals of chicken and mutton and beef.
The twins stop eating to mope at me, noses beginning to run from the hot pepper sauce. I can feel them savouring the chicken dish in their imagination.
“You should see my madam,” I say. “Mummy is what we call her. She is beautiful and an amazing cook. We have the mansion to ourselves, Mummy and I, and the other houseboy.”
“She doesn’t have a child?” my mother asks.
“Her children live overseas,” I explain as Bingo comes sniffing around me in the company of flies.
I ignore the sickly-looking dog, counting her ribs at a glance. We have always had a dog in this house—from Ugodu to Ekuke, and now Bingo, who eats shit with glee, with a body covered in scabies. She once defecated into our pot of soup. My father beat her until she lost her voice from crying, and then she sat away from us afterwards, and watched my father with sad eyes.
“Bingo is not at all like Ogidan, Mummy’s dog,” I say.
“What kind of name is that for a dog?” Usonwa says. The most excited about my return, she eats absent-mindedly, staring at me with bright little awed eyes.
“Ogidan is as big as a lion. His body is covered in hair as soft as cornsilk. He won’t eat any food if it is not fresh or if it has a sour smell. In the morning, we feed him a whole bowl of milk, which he quickly laps up before a breakfast of beef or mutton.”
“Beef and mutton for a mere dog?” my father chips in.
The best meal that Bingo gets is soured food from my mother once in a while, if Usonwa forgets to warm a meal and it becomes dangerous for us to eat. Otherwise Bingo survives by eating excrement and hunting lizards and mice.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s not all. The first thing you see as you step into the mansion is a big white marble tomb that tells you Mummy’s husband is sleeping in heaven.”
There’s a moment of silence while my family digests the incredible story of social imbalance.
“Dimkpa,” Machebe says, speaking directly to me for the first time.
His voice, like the jarring notes of a cracked gong, unnerves me. He has never been the talking type. Tigers don’t purr, they roar.
“Let’s say you have had the chance to live in a mansion with a gorgeous woman who lets you do nothing but eat, swim, and feed milk and mutton to a dog that is almost a lion. My question is, why did you come back home? Or are you just visiting?”
I have dreaded this question. I can’t tell anyone the real reason I fled Lagos; I’d only be advertising my cowardice. How can I justify running away from a house filled with luxuries simply because I was scared of a boy my age, and then coming home empty-handed? I’d be taunted forever.
“We were enjoying all that, and the luxury of watching TV and sleeping in a bed that is as big as a hut, and as soft as cocoyam paste,” I start in a tone so unnatural I almost resent my own voice. “I even read novels and worked out in a gym, if you know what that is.” The pauses in my narration are deliberate. I am careful not to sound too glib. I can imagine Machebe’s hackles rising, a tiger about to leap on its prey. “And then all of a sudden Mummy puts the mansion up for sale, because she is relocating to America to live with her children.”
The room hisses into silence, like a burning cigarette dropped in water. I can almost hear the soft crackling-fire sounds of my mother’s ochanja. And then the only sound is of my mother scratching her hair in obvious disappointment.