OPURUM WALKS ME THROUGH A CORRIDOR TO THE counter where Nnamdi Adaka is waiting, the last person I expected to see. He laughs at my stunned silence.
“Small Ojukwu. You get beta friend wey come bail you from dis wahala,” Opurum says with a note of sarcasm. “If you like go do Biafra again. Dem go charge you for treasonable felony. May be you no go get dis kain luck nes time see person wey go bail you.”
I walk hand in hand with Nnamdi into the still morning air. The vendors are opening up for the day’s business to begin the sale of stationery, beer, cigarettes, provisions, and items of confectionery outside the police station. It feels very strange walking with Nnamdi down the treed road and hearing him explain that he bailed me out with the money he hoarded from other students.
“But . . .” I search for words. “I mean, why did you do it?”
“You didn’t want to come out?”
“No! That’s not what I meant,” I say quickly.
“I did it because we are one,” he says. “We are all part of the movement now.”
“Thank you,” I say, stunned.
I wish I didn’t have to face my family. My mother takes a long, sad look at me as I approach and cries out, “Nnam, have you been eating the food I brought to you? Why do you look so skinny?”
She says I look like something meant for others to wipe hands on after a meal. I know I look thin from hunger and sleepless nights, and from those bloodsucking bugs, but I didn’t know I had become a hand wipe. I wonder how Patty Onah and Oluoha survived living like that for so long.
“They took the food you brought,” I say.
“Don’t worry, nnam. We have some beans and crayfish. The general overseer of my church shared foodstuffs out to poor members.”
I have an aching feeling that those things were meant to be shared out to poor widows—that my mother had pretended to have lost her husband. But home feels like Mummy’s mansion after weeks of enduring hunger pangs.
“We have to meet this friend of yours who plucked you out of the jaws of a lion,” she says about Nnamdi Adaka.
My mother pampers me, feeding me with yam, beans, and crayfish. Machebe stamps all over the place, furious at the reception I am getting from my mother, reminding me of the story of the prodigal son I had read from the Bible in school.
Weeks after I return home, the exam result is released. I am full of dread, knowing there is no way I could have passed. While I was in detention, I missed the English Language paper. It is compulsory to pass English, and, even if I pass all other subjects, the result is nothing without English. I will be able to retake the exam next year, but before then I have my family to reckon with.
In school, when I reluctantly go for the result, I see classmates I have not seen since I was arrested. I had hoped to see Grace, but she is not there. She has gone away with her new husband. I’m told they left soon after the exam period to the big city of Kano, where he lives. I miss her. I hate the fact that he has taken her to Kano, which Ikuku says was one of the sites of the anti-Igbo pogrom. More than half a million Igbo people were believed to have been massacred, leading to the Nigerian civil war.
Lioness is sitting in her office, all roundness and teeth. I hadn’t liked her at first. I had considered her a wicked principal, but now I am leaving her school with a sense of loss and remorse for all the times I thought so.
She hands me my result, watching and half smiling as I walk out of her office.
The way home is the same—through a footpath that cuts across village squares. We used to cut corners, sometimes following crusted farm ridges with towering palm trees that end in a crown of leaves. Suddenly, I am aware of it, an individual scent provoking a powerful memory—the haunting, hunger-provoking Congo music and the burning sun.
I struggle to fight a clutch of melancholy deep in my belly.
My mother is anxiously waiting for me. She promised to slaughter one of her chickens and use it to cook pounded yam and ogbono soup to celebrate my success. My father promised to get some palm wine for the celebration. Everyone is eager for me to return.
“Is everything well?” My mother tries to read my expression as I walk into the house. She can get very anxious, always renouncing that inevitable dark moment when something really terrible will happen to us, her children, not because she is not prayerful, but because it is destined due to my father’s sabotage, his conspiracies with small, insignificant gods.
I put my result away and eat my food; dollop by dollop the huge cone of pounded yam goes down until it disappears. I fall upon the lap of chicken my mother has put in my soup. I have been given the biggest portion: a lap and the neck. I sink my teeth into the lap and chew slowly with my eyes closed. My father’s palm wine tastes sour, but after I drink many cups of it, it begins to taste like honey. Oyimaja arrives for the celebration with her four-year-old son and her new baby girl sitting on her hip, her clothes thin and shapeless as usual. My mother had sent for her to be part of the celebration since the whole idea of going back to school was hers.
Boyi, Oyimaja’s son, eats himself silly. His cheeks balloon with food. His chest gets soiled with soup. He walks around like a pregnant duck, his belly protruding against high-defined ribs as he swallows and shoots out his tongue again to lap up the snot that oozes down his nostrils. Ugh!
Uncomfortable with too much food, he bursts into tears. Oyimaja unclothes him down to his little black penis, hooked to his groin like a thick thumb. Without warning he sends a jet of shit spattering to the floor. It is followed by a long sigh, as if he has climbed down a height, and then he falls back on the food.
I am getting lightheaded on the wine already, and I am not too interested in Boyi or Babie, his little sister, or Bingo, who, drawn to the smell of shit, wanders in with a swarm of flies. I don’t care that the dog laps up Boyi’s shit and licks his anus clean, or that Babie is busy sucking her mother’s flaccid breasts to fibers on her chest, but I am worried about the trouble that will come when the truth about my results is made known. I feel guilty eating and drinking in merriment, but I feel I shouldn’t spoil everyone’s mood by announcing a bad result.
I watch my father laugh with a note of triumph as he downs more cups of wine. Lately, we haven’t been hearing much of that no-holds-barred laughter of his that makes you want to laugh, too. My supposed success has come as solace for him from all that has happened to us. The evening goes pleasantly until he clears his voice and says, “Dimkpa. We have eaten and drunk to your success in the exam, now is the time to let us know in detail how you were able to ambush the lion in its den and return home with its carcass.”
“I have a better idea.” Machebe cuts into any explanation I might have to give, his voice belling away with mischief. “How about he shows the result round? Allow us to see things for ourselves?”
His suggestion stuns me more than Nnamdi Adaka’s vicious tackle catching my ankle, or his bailing me out. I rise to my feet, and, swaying slightly, I wander into the house to fetch the result from my tin box. I know that I can’t bluff my way out this time. Machebe may not have gone to secondary school, but he can tell the difference between a “P” and an “F” on a result sheet, and I failed my English Language paper with a capital “F,” because I missed it while I was in the police cell. But I know they won’t accept that as an excuse. What was I doing getting myself thrown into a police cell in the first place?
It’s painful watching my family as they struggle to come to terms with my bad result, the fact that failure is their reward for selling our only land to send me to school. My mother is too shocked and angry to speak. She ignores me completely as if I cease to exist. There is no punishment greater than my mother sulking and not speaking to me when I misbehave. She sings a melancholy song, the one that resonates with sadness anytime she sings it, her mood almost driving me out of my mind.
The days pass slowly; quiet days filled with dust and heat and liquid sadness.