I WAKE UP LATE THE NEXT MORNING. MY MOTHER pulls me out of bed, nagging about my oversleeping on a school day. Grumbling, I begin to get ready in a slow, unhurried way, refusing to bathe in protest, washing only my feet, my arms, and my face. Breakfast tastes like bamboo.
“Nnam Jisieike,” my mother says, addressing me as her father to encourage me, but in my mood I don’t think it’s a compliment to liken me to her dead, hair-sticking-out-of-nose father. “You will get used to school again, ooh.”
Her words draw a hiss from Machebe. “This is what happens when a full-grown man with a beard is treated and pampered like a little boy,” he spits.
I decide that it is too early to start arguing with him and set off to school with a note my mother squeezes into my palm. Machebe irritates me like a mosquito buzzing close to the ear, returning after each vain, painful slap.
The principal has finished conducting the morning assembly and classes are in full swing when I get to school. For coming in late, I get six lashes of the cane that should sting, but I feel nothing as they are being delivered on my buttocks. And then I am shown a portion of the garden to weed during break as additional punishment. I sit moping through maths, in a violent mood.
But then the English and literature teacher strolls in, a cheery soul in a washed-out grey coat and ivory tie. He asks me, the new student, to read aloud from Black Boy, a novel I have already read in the mansion in Lagos. It’s about a boy named Richard Wright who accidentally burns down his family house and gets beaten unconscious by his mother. His father abandons the family to live with another woman, and, without his financial support, the family falls into poverty. School is hardly an option for Richard, so he does whatever odd jobs a child can do to support his family. Not surprisingly, he gets into all sorts of trouble, spying on people in outhouses and becoming a regular at the local saloon—and an alcoholic—by the age of six.
Richard’s father is just like mine, I muse, as I read through the novel with ease to the amazement of my classmates. Maybe he would have run off, too, had my father found a woman who accepted him. He didn’t even raise a finger in objection when I went off to Lagos. He was so quick to offload me. Does he know I almost got killed in Lagos? Does he know what it feels like to be punched up for sport every day? And what it means to have your left ear bitten off by a madman or to bury a decomposing body, a body whose peeling skin stains your hands with oily fluids, whose smell violates your stomach?
I manage to get myself into trouble again when I sneak out to a joint near the school for a shot of monkey tail with the money my mother gave me to cheer me up. The school’s disciplinarian, a boy named Obi, smells alcohol on my breath and reports me to the principal. She is furious and orders fifty lashes of the cane to my buttocks. As the school’s disciplinarian, Obi has been given the power to nose out unruly students and punish them. Four strong boys are asked to hold me down on a long table. Obi comes forward wielding a big, long stick, face set. He is used to things like this, enjoys it. He devours me in the full view of the school. He sets my buttocks on fire to the excitement of the students, leaving scars of broken welts. I howl with pain until I lose my voice.
I virtually crawl home at the end of school. I have no appetite for lunch. Night throws its blanket over the village with one deft swing of its arm. Dinner tastes like stalks of dry grass even though it is only boiled water yam and palm oil. Sadness and anger compete inside me with athletic zeal. I feel like sinking my teeth into somebody, Machebe or Ejiro or Nza. The tomb is the only place where I find comfort. I lie on it, face up, and gaze at a half-clouded moon, my mind dreading school the next day, my thoughts many small moons imprisoned and freed again in rolling steel-grey clouds. I think of a piece of my ear lying in a foreign land, in the bush at Anukwu where I had thrown it away after a doctor certified it dead and useless. I wonder what happened to it, that part of me in Anukwu. Maybe a dog strolled up and made a lunch of it; maybe it went down the throats of dead-flesh mites. I think of the woman we buried, who killed a sacred tortoise, a god incarnate. I think of her congregation that sat aloof and sang hymns, the neighbours who distanced themselves and watched us foreigners bury her through shrub walls with pity in their eyes, because if they got involved they themselves would become contaminated like the woman. I think of Lagos and all the burnt, decomposing bodies of madmen, pickpockets, and innocent thieves; the fighting touts and the weird gatekeepers; Lagos and its smell of decayed dreams. Broken dreams. I wonder if another lean, muscular boy has taken my position at the mansion—Ejiro had said that Mummy always managed to get another boy. I imagine the new boy and Ejiro locked in a sweat-slick brawl on the lawn, and Mummy watching from a lounge chair, mirrored in the sparkling blueness of the pool water, and I am lying here sad but safe. I think of the Folashade tomb in its gold-edged, pelican-white beauty, and all the nice foods that I see only in my dreams now, and I conclude that I am a big fool. I am one big, indolent coward.
Finally, I think of Okike lying here with me beneath this beautiful tomb. For a moment, I feel at peace with the world, a feeling banished almost at once by a riot of thoughts. Okike had spent a few days at the creek before she was found, which means that her body had started to decompose. Had she started emitting fluids like the woman in Anukwu when they found her? Was she buried by strangers? I hadn’t asked my mother. Were the hands of those who buried her stained, like mine, with fluids that cannot be washed off?
I fall asleep on the tomb and dream of riches and shops stocked with goods from ceiling to floor. My mother comes out and wakes me up in the middle of the night.
“Enigmatic child,” she says, cupping the flame of her ochanja to prevent it from dancing atilogu dance in the wind. “I don’t know what you have in common with the dead, but I know I should not have allowed you to rebuild this grave.”
The night is deeply spent. It is quiet, dark, and cold. The moon has gone to bed. I follow my mother into the house. She continues to swear and accuse me of dangerously clinging to my convictions as a sloth clings to decaying wood. I lie on my mattress feeling warm, like a candle flame in my mother’s cupped hand, protected from the wind.