MY MOTHER AND I TREK TO HER CHURCH AT HER INSISTENCE, to see her pastor for my deliverance. She is worried about the many troubles that I have been getting myself into. They are as many as the white mushrooms that sprout at the waterside, she says, there for everyone to see, the latest being my theft.
After a long walk we finally climb up a gravelled road that leads to the church. My mother’s church is a woodwork structure with a tin roof standing on Ikeagwu Hill. The compound is painstakingly clean. Someone swept thoroughly and took time to weed the wild morning glory that sprouts everywhere. I’m reminded of early mornings when my mother leaves the house with a hoe and a broom. A small signboard reads THE LORD’S SELECTED in white lettering against a lemon background.
I spent a few days at my sister Oyimaja’s place after escaping Ogbareka and returned when I sensed that tension had subsided, only to be told that Ogbareka had been to our house with a machete to look for me.
“He accused you of stealing his pods. Did you?” my mother questioned me.
My silence told her that I was guilty. I have a feeling that Ogbareka was going to forgive me for stealing his pods and then he suddenly changed his mind when he recognized me, the son of Agala. My father did not become village head because he was the son of Ngwu. It is a legacy of hate that had us, Ogbareka and I, stumbling over farm ridges, now falling, now rising again, until he got snagged to a cobweb of thorns and crashed down like a cow with a deep groan and lay flat on his belly.
“We may not have money, we may lack food, but I did not raise you up to steal from anyone, especially people who hate us so much and are looking for the slightest opportunity to humiliate us,” my mother lamented.
Ogbareka dragged my father to the village council of oha to be shamed and fined for my offense. Too angry to say even a word to me when I returned from my flight, my father walked away with agitated legs, his thin back shrunken against me. He will need to provide two large jerry cans of palm wine to cancel the one jerry can Ogbareka had given to the council of oha when he passed the adjudication of the case of theft to them. My father will most certainly lose the case. He will be heavily fined if he loses, and given a deadline to pay up. They will fence his land off with omu, the tender palm frond that symbolizes sacredness and casts the spell of mystical authority in the community, to restrain him from farming on it until the fine is paid and the sacred motif taken down. The land may be sold to recover the money should he fail to pay by the deadline. But as our only piece of land has been sold, he runs the risk of losing our house, all on account of my idiocy.
We enter the church and sit on old plastic seats. Everyone is wearing a lemon vest, including the pastor, who is wearing his over a grey jacket. He stands on a platform curtained with blue linen like a photographer’s studio. He is talking in a big, amplified voice. Sometimes he breaks into tongues, his wide mahogany face bathed in perspiration. The congregation is small, but the entire church is bustling with tongues. He begins to move from one person to the other. He lays a hand on their foreheads and causes them to fall on the dirty linoleum floor, supposedly shoved down by anointing. The whole drama seems unreal to me. A few enthusiastic ones take it to really dramatic heights, screaming and rolling forth and back on the floor. When it comes to my turn, I wait for the pastor, excitement roiling in my head like wine. The pastor lays a clammy hand on my forehead. My heart beats fast in anticipation of being swept off my feet by a powerful force. The church is buzzing like a swarm of bees roused in their hive. I know my mother must be watching us with anticipation, with half-closed eyes. But nothing happens after some minutes of the pastor holding my forehead and praying in tongues. His hand tightens around my forehead, waking in me a suspicion that he is going to try to trip me as he steers me backwards like a car in reverse. But I hold myself rock-solid against the steering. I can feel anger rushing to the tips of his fingers, digging deeper into my flesh. He is wasting his time reinforcing, I tell myself, but then I realize with a sense of panic that if he kicks me down, his congregation will not know the truth, because their eyes are tightly closed. They will believe that I was felled by the Holy Spirit in the man overcoming the daemons in me. I clutch the ground tighter with my feet. It is fine if an invincible force knocks me down, but I am never going to allow anyone to muscle me down and claim the credit. We scuffle from one end of the wall to the other. And all the time the church resounds with more tongues.
He stops, exasperated. We look at each other like two wrestlers who are equal in strength, panting, trying to recover our breaths, to explore the other’s weakness.
“Brethren.” He dabs his sweaty face with a handkerchief.
The church stills, voices fading away in a dying echo.
“Nine daemons have taken possession of this brother’s body.”
A murmur of horror passes through the congregation.
He begins to count the daemons while the congregation screams, “Holy Ghost fire!”
The daemon of disobedience
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of drunkenness
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of fornication
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of lying
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of stealing
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of idolatry
Holy Ghost fire
The daemon of affinity with the dead
Holy Ghost fire
Ogbanje daemon
Holy Ghost fire
Mami Wata daemon
The church is rumbling by the time he exhausts the list.
“Brethren, open your mouths wide, shut your eyes tightly, and pray for him in your loudest voices.”
The church explodes again in tongues as he resumes his little act of deliverance, redoubling his pressure to bring me down, kicking, punching, and shoving, his frustration turning him into something of a monster. The praying grows into hysteria, everyone jumping and howling. I begin to feel for my mother. I have avoided looking in her direction. I know she is humiliated. I know she is willing me to overcome the daemons and succumb to the will of God. A burst of alleluia rends the air as I allow myself to be felled, sliding onto the linoleum floor for my mother’s sake. The pastor heaves a deep sigh of relief.
“Thus says God: therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old things have passed away; behold, the new has come into being.”
I lie down on my back, feeling dizzy, wondering where nine daemons were accommodated in my small body, where they fled to now that I have been delivered. And then I allow myself to be helped to my feet by the pastor.
“Young man, you have your mother to thank for bringing you to a living church,” he says. “Go home and sin no more. Brethren, let us not forget to remember our brother in prayer.”
I straighten out and survey the congregation and my mother’s illuminated face as Sisters are embracing her for a successful deliverance, and Brothers are shaking her hands, a feeling of conquest in the air.
We hardly arrive home from the church before it starts raining at a most unlikely time of the year. The village gets soaked, looking grey and fragile from my window. The rain recedes, then comes again, starting a fresh cycle of violence each time, with lightning flashes and explosions of thunder. I think of the creek that must be overflowing, the farms that must be swamped, and Ogige market, which must be flooded out. Heavy rains will come every season. We’ll hear stories of people being carried away by floods after a downpour. They’ll get swept all the way down to Alor-Uno, where they’ll be fished out dead.
The rain finally recedes around late afternoon after a hard downpour, but the sky is still roaring, still grumbling like a lion baulked of its prey. It is cold through and through, and my body yearns for the warmth of a woman, for raw flesh. With my reputation in the village—an outlaw who lusts after married women—no sensible girl will agree to go out with me. My penis will grow turgid, and then it will go limp again, like a weed in the Harmattan.
I set off well after twilight. The road is full of mud water and darkness. I pick my way with the help of torchlight, but Ogige market is full of yellow headlights that swallow my own little light. Peace Park is sitting in half darkness. It is empty, but the emptiness symbolizes dozens of commuter buses conveying travellers to and from other parts of the country. It is quiet as if recovering from the exhaustion of the day, like a lunatic chained down after hours of frantic madness. I cross suya spots manned by caftan-clad Hausamen snuggled close to crackling charcoal fires. They show their kola-nut-stained teeth at passersby. Patronage is low because of the rain. Old Park is full of roast chickens, red and inviting in their coating of chili pepper and tomato, in the glow of oil lamps. Their sellers, swathed in thick clothes, are huddled behind their tables like economic refugees.
I cross the road, looking left then right, and then I enter the shortcut that leads to Lejja Park. I avoid small areas lit by electric bulbs in front of shops that have not closed, docking and sidling like a creature of shadows. I don’t want to be seen by anyone from my village to avoid another scandal a few hours after I was delivered from the old ones. I negotiate the end of a wall and come face-to-face with a dark-skinned lady. On seeing me, she hitches her body up against the wall, raising one high-heeled leg, her miniskirt sliding back to show me a fleshy lap. Her lipstick is so red that it highlights her glistening dark skin. She is wearing a pink spaghetti-strap top. I can see the straps of her red push-up bra with her protruding breasts. She flaunts a full-lipped pout at me with her head tossed back, knowing that her hook has caught a fish.
I slide into the room after her. It is my second time coming here since Nnamdi Adaka initiated me into the bordello, but the first time I have the courage—or the desperation—to face any of the pouting, half-dressed women lounging around. The room is narrow and dimly lit by a coloured electric bulb. A six-spring iron bed with a thin mattress is covered with a light blue spread. A clothesline hangs low with the weight of her clothes around an old cream wall, with cooking items crowding the right corner of the room. The smells of alum and shampoo fill my nose. She throws her arms around me. I am taller. She looks up at me with a questioning smile. I know the rules from Nnamdi Adaka’s schooling. First one is “Pay before service.” She lists the rest: “Six hundred naira for full-strip without condom, five hundred for half-strip, and additional one hundred for delayed orgasm.”
They all have price tags like products in a supermarket. I go for half-strip without condom. Nnamdi has told me that he hates condoms, that they don’t give you full satisfaction. She hitches her skirt down, my body trembling for her as she lowers herself on the bed. I unzip my trousers to free my erection and step up for the check, another rule I learnt from Nnamdi. It nods repeatedly with impatience, my penis. She grabs it and toys with it, hissing her disappointment at its smallness. At full erection it is no longer than the squat red banana that grows in the garden behind our kitchen. Her touch sends electric currents through my body. She presses expertly, forcing a sob from me. She is very professional, mechanical. Satisfied I have no STD, no milky pus obeying the will of her hands and rushing up to the tip of my penis, she lets go, leaving me a gasp away from coming in her hands.
“Remember. If you stay too long, you will pay extra hundred,” she says curtly as I kick out my trousers.
“No problem.”
She moans to acknowledge penetration, widening then contracting again. A few famished thrusts and it is out, quick and gushing. It is all over, as casual as a chicken dropping its dung and moving on. She shoves me away, suddenly hostile, but Nnamdi had told me that side of them, hustling you out so they can bring in another customer. I step into my trousers overcome with tiredness, with disgust.