I HAVE ALWAYS HATED MATHEMATICS. I SCOWL AT Nza as he paces the classroom, stopping by the blackboard to write numbers and symbols with chalk. And then he starts to explain them away in his sharp, loud voice, but I only get more confused listening to him spout so much numerical gibberish. It almost drives me mad. In one of his classes, he walks towards me, ignoring everyone else, all the raised hands. My heart beats fast. He stops and points at me.
“You. Tell us the LCM of 4, 6, and 8?”
I curse myself. “But I didn’t raise my hand,” I say in protest.
The pretty girl giggles; the whole class joins her.
“I know. Stand up and give us the answer,” Nza insists.
I raise myself slowly to my feet and remain like that. The class giggles again.
“Your name first,” he says. “I can see you are new in my class.”
“Dimkpa Gbaghalu.” Saying my name sparks off another round of giggles, maybe because of the thick consonants or its sheer virility. I have always wondered why my mother chose such a strong masculine name for me. It would have better suited Machebe, who is muscled and driven.
“How old are you?”
“I am eighteen years old.”
The class roars again.
“Quiet,” the teacher bawls, and the noise tapers off. “Give us the answer, Dimkpa.”
I stare at him, my mind blank.
“Come on, give us the answer.” He looks outraged that an SS1 student doesn’t know the answer to a common arithmetic question.
I remain silent with my head bowed in shame. The class is quiet now, my classmates sitting in disarmed silence, their unsettledness finding expression in feigned coughs and paper rustling.
“Come forward, kneel down, and raise your hands if you don’t know the answer.”
I do as I have been told, coming slowly round to the front of the class, and kneeling down with my hands raised.
“If anyone in this class answers the question correctly, he will give you six strokes of the cane,” Nza says.
A wilderness of fingers shoots up into the broken ceiling. He settles for the long, thin fingers of the pretty girl, Grace. She answers the question correctly, smartly, and gets applauded. Nza insists I lie down on my locker and take six strokes from the girl on my buttocks in front of the class. I do as I have been ordered. Grace takes the stick from the teacher. She hesitates.
“I will ask someone else to flog you instead if you don’t do it,” warns Nza as Grace dillydallies.
Emboldened by the fear of being flogged, Grace raises the stick and delivers a weak stroke across my buttocks.
“That’s a lame stroke.” He grabs the stick back from her, orders her to stretch out her palm, and hits her hard. Girls are not flogged on the buttocks.
She yelps as the cane sinks into her palm.
“That’s how hard I expect you to hit him.”
She takes the stick back from him and unleashes hot strokes on my buttocks, fear driving her energy and courage. The class shrieks with excitement. After delivering the last stroke, she drops the stick and flees the class.
“You are quite old for this class,” the teacher says as I walk back to resume my seat on his orders. “So I expect you to work hard or I will have you demoted still.”
I trek home in the harsh sun after school, nursing my shame and resenting the teacher for disgracing me before the class, for causing my classmates to give me the nickname “Papa.” Nnamdi Adaka, the rascally boy, coined it, and at once it found an echo with the class. The average age of the class hovers between fourteen and sixteen, so at over eighteen I am easily the oldest.
I arrive home tired, hungry, and angry to meet a lunch of cocoyam and grey soup again. My mother has cooked a lunch of cocoyam and grey soup all week long. Who does that on her son’s first week at school? I make sure she sees the anger and frustration on my face. I don’t care if it spoils her mood, if it takes the tangerine off her voice. I had expected her to cook something delicious for lunch. I consider rejecting the food, but I am famished, so hungry I could eat cockroaches.
I stroll down to the cave after lunch. The sun is strong and hurts the back of my neck. The sky is blue, as stainless as steel, an expanse that looks surreal against the bright green of the afternoon hills. But in my mood I don’t care if there is no sky at all. I look out at the kerosene hills not caring what they might contain. Since my childhood, I have heard people say that the hills are filled with kerosene, and that one day the government will come and start drawing it out, bringing electricity and pipe-borne water to the community. Each time I see the wooden electric poles lining the village roads like figures of distress, some hollowed out or inclining dangerously, I remember the kerosene hills and the government’s promise. The poles were raised by the villagers who had to tax themselves heavily in their failed project to draw electricity to the village. Yet every season the ridge of hills gets covered in fine, thin blades of green grass that wave in the breeze like a boy’s spiky hair. Every season the grass ripens to a golden colour, and the villagers fetch it and use it to cover their roofs before mischievous boys set the hills ablaze, yet the government is nowhere to be seen. Maybe somebody made up the story at the gambling den.
I feel humiliated, and in a foul mood. I am too old to return to secondary school. I am sure now that going back was a bad idea. I didn’t understand anything of what that maths teacher had explained. Everything was puzzling and blurry, like Oshodi market crowds. Why didn’t the English and literature teacher ask me a question instead? I am sure I would have done better with a question on those subjects. And now I am off on the wrong foot.
I jump down, landing in the cool water with a splash that startles a sparrow into a panic flight. I am never going to like school or Lioness or Nza or Cat. I am still trying to decide who between the two I dislike most, the principal or her vice? I see the principal again in a tight green gown patterned with black symbols resembling inverted commas, reminding me of how inverted my life is. The gown strains on her belly, which bulges like that of a pregnant goat in my father’s pen. I see her pacing the assembly ground on high heels, a robust, hairy hand fisting her hip, calves bunched. The heels of her small, neat feet are polished to a clean, flush-coloured shine. I see her as she walks proudly around with an easy and slow swing of her hips.
I am tired of eating cocoyam and grey soup, tired of living in a chicken coop. I am tired of seeing the wrinkled old tobacco-smelling faces of my father’s treacherous kinsmen in our house, tired of hearing them call him out to an evening in an ekpetechi spot. “Agala, Agala,” they call from the approach as they stroll in, wary of my mother’s reproachful eyes. I am tired of hearing my father talk about his youthful valour anytime he has had one shot too many. He remembers his times as a young wrestler, and how he had battled the biggest and the fiercest of wrestlers from other towns; his times as a masker, the Omabe festival, and the mystery surrounding the leopard motif. I am tired because it all amounts to nothing. Because when the time came for him to be village head, they ripped him off. No one remembered his talents and contributions to the masking cult, his patriotism, and the risks he took to wrestle dangerous opponents from other villages to uphold the pride and dignity of Oregwu.
Why did I even think of school as an option to making money for my family, all because of a mere dream? I should have realized that my dreams happen in opposites. If I dream of eating a large plate of delicious food, I will wake up the next day with nothing to eat. If I dream of riches and prosperity, I will wake up in the destitution and pennilessness of my father’s hutch.
I walk back home, my mood worsening with my father now in the picture, and my heart growing as cold as a dog’s nose. I am tired of seeing the self-righteous faces of those old, boring church women who come to our house to look for my mother. They talk about tithing when we have nothing to eat. Everything irritates me the way pepper irritates a man with sores on his tongue.
Machebe is waiting at the door. He demands to know why I threw his clean shoes down on the dirty ground. I had found Machebe’s pair of brown moccasins on the tomb earlier when I returned from school. He had washed and placed them upright on the tomb to dry in the sun. My anger had fumed like petrol poured in a fire at the sight of the shoes on the tomb.
We exchange red eyes and a few hot words.
“You are eaten up with envy because father sold some land for me.”
He sniggers. “It’s not about returning to school. It’s about passing your exams, about achieving something to justify selling our only parcel of land for you.”
“Stop, you two,” my mother says in a frustrated voice.
I ignore Machebe and walk away. I don’t want any of his tigerizing this hot afternoon. He is the least of my worries now.