THE HARMATTAN TIGHTENS ITS HOLD ON THE VILLAGE, now brittle-dry, now peppery. Sometimes the mornings are calm and cold, but they build up to howling afternoons and hammering nights. Lips get cracked and then broken. Cold baths become an ordeal. Wounds become taut and painful, but they heal faster, and tight braids get torn loose by eager fingers to ease off the pain girls feel. The wind unclothes trees, creates dust devils, and gets artistic with the fine red dust rearing and spiraling skywards over the village roads. The whole thing leaves me hollowed out. I should have hired a wheelbarrow as the Christmas season closed in. I should have braved the scented, cold Harmattan mornings and set off early to Ogige market to carry loads, and not have succumbed to this strange lassitude. It is driving me nuts. My family’s poverty and my mother’s broken-heartedness aggravate me beyond words. When I am not sitting on the tomb scowling into the afternoon sunshine, I ogle the village women: the newlyweds and the mothers of one or two whose buttocks have filled out with flesh and whose bodies bear the fresh allure of honeymoon or lactation. I resent the old women who go about bare, exposing their flaccid breasts, which disgust me.
Christmas is dull, affected by the mood in my family as a result of my failure, although we eat rice and meat, and drink wine like any other family in the village. Ihebube and Ebube have to forgo their Christmas clothes for lack of money. My father slaughters the last goat in his pen to make up for this. He does not want the twins sneaking over to the neighbours to salivate. My mother cooks stewed rice. She fries the stew many times over because it keeps catching fire each time she tries to bleach the palm oil. Finally, it hisses aloud with onions and sends a strong scent to the neighbours.
The empty days bore me out of my mind. My obsession with young, fleshy mothers becomes one crazy, monolithic animal instinct to ogle Enujioke, the pretty wife of Odo, the nagged little man who whistles each time he crosses in front of our house on his way to his bicycle mechanic workshop. If whistling were a sport, Odo would win Olympic medals. Nobody in the village whistles better than he does, with clear resonant notes that can be heard from a distance. Enujioke is young and full of energy for a man of Odo’s age. She is a mother of two, nursing a seven-month-old baby. She walks around swaying her hips in a suggestive manner. She always stops to smile at me, her gestures provocative.
Only a shrub wall separates my aunt Ogbom’s hut from Odo’s compound. Pretending to visit Ogbom, I hide in the shrub fence and watch Enujioke after Odo goes to his workshop every morning. She is mostly home alone with the children. When she is not idling around in the compound, she wanders from house to house with a bowl of melon seeds tucked under her arm, gossiping and making new friends or enemies, her laughter spiraling over the village.
Today I know that Odo has gone off to work when I hear him whistling by our house on his bicycle. I wait for the silvery notes to fade in the distance before strolling over to his compound. I have to summon the courage for what I want to do with a swig of ekpetechi stolen from my father’s bottle hidden under his bamboo bed. Some children are playing in the wide compound enclosed in a shrub fence. The children always smell of dust, sweat, and sores. Enujioke plants herself at the door with a smile, a hand fisting her hip, which is arched invitingly. I bring soap and water with me. The shrub fence screens off my little act of pleasure. I must have shut my eyes in momentary ecstasy.
Suddenly Enujioke’s loud voice startles me out of half orgasm. I open my eyes to find her standing right before me, looking scandalized. I may have made groaning noises that gave me away. Growing up, I used to dig rat holes with Eke. The sound of our digger would tell the rat we were closing in on it, and in panic, it balled out of the hole and triggered a hot chase from us. I take off now like a rat ambushed in its hole as Enujioke’s screams rend the air.
I know that a big scandal has broken. I know that Enujioke will tell the whole world how she found me touching myself, and, for many days, I will be tied to her laughter when it spirals high over the village. For days she will toss me about like a paper in the wind.