Lying in bed later that night, Abel thought about what she had told him. He had considered Soni a rival; someone he had to battle for everything: their parents’ love and affection, academic achievement, sporting prowess, friends, girls, right from when they were kids.
It got worse after he lost two years to illness and they ended up as classmates. Abel was smarter, no doubt, but who needed smarts when you were kids?
What he’d wanted most was to be a boy like Soni. Abel wanted to break a leg or an arm, stub a toe, sustain a cut; something that would require him coming to school with his hand in a sling, his foot in a cast or a plaster on his face. He hankered after a badge of courage, something that would mark him, scar him, show that he was a boy – for what was a boy without scars?
Back then, a fracture was the coolest injury a boy could have. It signified boyhood because who ever heard of a girl with a fracture? A fracture required a cast and a cast meant people would beg to write or draw or inscribe something on it. As a moving billboard, you attracted everyone, especially the girls. But, most of all, a fracture meant one had been boy enough to break something.
But for a child who played more in the library than on treetops, a fracture was not likely unless he hurled himself down the steps leading to the huge doors of their local Catholic church; a thought that occurred to him many times.
Soni had no such issues. Their parents spent a lot on plasters, slings and casts. As soon as one was healing, Soni was acquiring a fresh badge of courage. Abel couldn’t help but be impressed and jealous.
It continued at the University of Jos, where Soni went about without boxers and, it seemed, a constant hard-on. Abel thought it was insane and stupid but the girls didn’t seem to mind. Soni ran through them like fire through hay and never forgot to leave his calling card above their beds: 9 inches was here.
Abel still remembered the last time they’d had a fight. It was Easter and he had just been paid his first salary, a measly fifty-three thousand naira. He had planned to send his mother some money, then buy a bigger mattress, but a call came in from Lagos and messed everything up.
Soni was in jail and had sent for him.
Abel took the night bus from Onitsha and arrived Lagos the next morning. It was a Wednesday morning and Ojota, where the bus let him off, was a mess. It had rained the night before and the ground was soggy and unsightly. Bedlam did not begin to capture the situation. Cars were revving and people were shouting as if in competition: hawkers belting out their wares, conductors calling out their destinations, itinerant pastors preaching about repentance, hell and damnation. Abel hadn’t spent five minutes in the city and he was already feeling he had stayed too long. It seemed as if a million people had descended on Ojota with one purpose: to make him feel unwelcome.
Soni was being held at Area F in Ikeja, so Abel boarded a bus at Ojota that would take him to Maryland. He alighted at the Mobil filling station and took another bus to Ikeja roundabout. They stopped at Unity bus stop to let off a female passenger. Two guys transporting metal roofing sheets were passing by as she stepped out of the bus. The edge of the sheets hit her, slicing off a piece of her forehead. Blood coursed down her face.
The conductor pushed her back in the bus and they sped off to the General Hospital. By the time Abel got off, her white blouse was drenched with blood and she was already feeling faint.
He took a bike to Area F and asked for the investigating police officer handling his brother’s case. His name was Sergeant Ilo. The policeman was in mufti and had on a tight, ill-fitting jacket. As Abel watched him shuffling papers in an exaggerated show of importance, he smiled to himself for the first time since he got his brother’s text message: if the policeman’s jacket was any tighter it would be a strait jacket.
‘Your brother’s case is serious,’ the policeman began when he finally sat down across from Abel.
The cramped excuse of an office reeked of sweat and deprivation. There were tattered files, cobwebbed corners, a rickety table and a chair missing a leg, but above all there was a pervasive spirit of desolation, of something irretrievably lost. Abel cursed his brother for making him go there.
‘It’s a case of OBT,’ the officer said, all solemn, as if he was a judge about to hand down a death sentence.
‘What’s OBT?’
‘You don’t know what OBT is?’ He went on without waiting for an answer. ‘What do you do for a living?’
‘I am a teacher; a lecturer.’
‘Where, what school?’
‘College of Education, Asaba.’
‘You are a teacher and you don’t know what OBT is, so what do you teach your students?’
‘English literature,’ Abel said and laughed, amused by it all. Why on earth was he supposed to know what OBT was and what did that have to do with his job or students?
‘You think it’s funny, abi? OK, go home and come back tomorrow.’ The officer got to his feet and headed for the door.
‘Haba, officer, I was just joking. No vex.’ Abel got up and stood between the policeman and the door. ‘Please sit down, OK. I don’t know what OBT is but I am sure you will help us, abeg no vex.’
The policeman regarded Abel for a while, his brow furrowed, like a child contemplating an insect crawling vainly up a steel surface. Then he went back to his seat.
‘Your brother tried to obtain funds by tricks from someone,’ he said finally. ‘He was arrested and brought here. You are lucky the woman does not want to press charges, but we can’t just let him go. He has been our guest for three nights now and he has enjoyed our hospitality. Someone has to pay for that, you know?’
‘I understand. What are we looking at?’
‘Obtaining By Tricks is a major issue right now,’ the policeman began, shuffling the files again. ‘You know, 419 has messed up our image abroad so government is not taking issues of fraud lightly, even though OBT is local. With one hundred thousand naira, you can get him out,’ he said and slammed the files back on the table.
One hundred thousand naira; that was his salary for two months, but he didn’t let on. Instead he said, ‘You know he is a first-time offender. You guys should treat him better.’
They haggled for a while and settled for twenty-five thousand, which was all the money he had on him, save three thousand naira he kept for his fare back.
Soni was smiling when he came out of the cell. He wore his shirt and trousers inside out.
‘Bros, no vex,’ he said with a giggle as he passed Abel.
Right there, in that dank corridor with its clammy floor that sucked at your feet as if unwilling to let you go, that corridor that reeked of sweat and piss and shit and an unusual cocktail of foulness, Abel watched open-mouthed as his brother took off his trousers in front of a policewoman who was passing by them, his manhood dangling long and free as usual. He watched him turn the trousers out the right way before putting them back on.
After he had done the same with his shirt, Abel trailed him to the counter, where Soni signed a sheet and was handed his wristwatch and bracelet.
‘Where is my ring?’ Soni asked, but the female police officer who had walked past them earlier just glowered at him.
‘Get out of here, mister man! Was it your mother that has been cleaning the toilet for you?’
Outside, Soni said he was hungry and they walked to the far end of the station, where a wooden shack sat like an outhouse. He ordered food, asking for three pieces of meat.
‘I have just three thousand naira left,’ Abel told him, fighting hard to keep his temper in check, rattled as he was by his brother’s insouciant air. Soni said it was OK and settled on a bench.
He ate with an appetite and Abel was struck by the thought that, if someone walked in and saw them, that person would assume Abel was the reason why they were at a police station. Soni did not seem to have a care.
The meal over and paid for, Soni stood up and motioned for his brother to come with him. He hailed a cab and negotiated a fare of one thousand naira to his place on Opebi, off Salvation Road.
The place they went up to was a cute, self-contained, one-bedroom apartment with a toilet and kitchen. It was clean and furnished all in black, from the bedspread to the rug and couch.
‘Welcome to my humble abode,’ Soni said as Abel settled into the settee. Then he ran out to go pay the waiting taxi driver. When he returned, Abel watched him undress and step into the bathroom. ‘You can put on the TV. You can watch CNN,’ Soni shouted.
Showered, dressed and relaxed, he sat on the bed opposite his brother. ‘Abel, I am sorry, but there was no one else to call.’
‘You have to stop this, Soni,’ Abel said, the frustration of the past two days, the money he had lost, the time he had wasted, the whole pot of complaints boiling over as a frothing lava of angry words. ‘Find a decent job. Look at you; what is this? You are now a common criminal. You need to find a decent job.’ Abel told him, all the pent up rage coming to the fore.
‘What job, Abel? Teaching? Wearing a tie to work in a bank? Is that the job you want me to find?’ Soni raged. ‘Do you know what people who don’t have godfathers do to get bank jobs? They fuck some of the girls in the toilet before the interviews. The toilet, Abel. Is that what you want from me, to sleep with old women so I can get deposits or work as a teacher and earn something that won’t be enough to rent a decent place? Is that what you want? Penury for all of us, like you?’
Abel lashed out to slap him. Soni grabbed his hand mid-air and was throwing a punch when he stopped himself.
‘Next time they arrest you, don’t call me. Call your rich friends.’ Abel snatched his hand away and reached for his bag. He was at the door when Soni’s voice stayed his feet.
‘Bros, please don’t go. Stop, please.’ Soni reached for his brother’s bag, snapping the strap in the process.
‘I have no rich friends, Abel. You are all I have. See.’ He pulled up his mattress and opened a secret compartment in the bed.
‘I have about a million naira here. If I sent someone, I would never see the money again. If I came home with the police, they would steal it. You were the only one I could call and I thought that when you got to Area F I would tell you where I kept it. I didn’t realise you would have the money. I am sorry but you are my big brother, Abel, the only one I can run to.’
Soni was crying now and Abel held him close, his own eyes burning with unshed tears.
When he had calmed down, Abel helped him count the money. He took out what he had spent and told Soni to open a bank account.
With the cash in the travel bag he had emptied, they trekked through a shortcut to Opebi road right behind the Sheraton Hotel and deposited the money in a savings account. It was Soni’s first ever bank account.