PETER
2000
I LIKED TO think that no matter what happened, my older brother, Andrew, and I would always be close. This was exactly the kind of thing I worried about, growing older, being on my own, my sisters leading happy, glamorous lives, my brother busy and distant.
Many times, it felt like Andrew and I were only one argument away from being enemies. Other times, we were the best brothers in all of Lagos. I made it my business to try, to make sure we always were getting along, fun and happy. We were best friends only because I did everything he said to do, and I did not mind every time he ignored me to go play with Solomon, Babu, and Eric. Each time he said something mean, I tolerated it, pretending the pain was from something else, like a stomachache from food I did not enjoy, beans or something like that. I stored the hurt for a while in my belly, then I found a place to let it out. Other times, he was the nicest brother, taking care of me.
“I am something,” Andrew said that day, to distract me from the pain he was inflicting as he was massaging mentholated balm all over my swollen palm. “I am tall in the morning, short in the evening, even shorter at night. What am I?”
“You are an old man,” I said, after thinking about the riddle for a little while.
When he said that was the wrong answer, I did not argue. I watched him pour boiling hot water into the bowl we use for washing up before meals. He pulled out an old towel he had tucked in the back of his trousers and sat on the floor before me.
“The answer is a candle. I am a candle,” Andrew said.
A CANDLE IS long, an old man was tall now shrunken, I wanted to say but did not. I grabbed the handle of the chair I sat on with my left hand, steadying myself as he pressed the heat of the rag against my wound. I did not cry out. I did not want Grandmother waking up and looking too closely at my hand. Better for her to sleep, I thought. Better for us that she sleeps as long as she wants to because then when she wakes, it will be easier to talk to her about money for Panadol painkillers.
Andrew leaned in with the full weight of his grip, applying pressure to my swollen palm. As he did, bloody pus oozed out in a slow and steady drip.
“Sorry,” he said.
“I am something,” I said, interrupting his pity. “I am light as a feather, yet the strongest man in the world can’t hold on to me for more than ten minutes. What am I?”
“You are water,” Andrew said. “Am I right?”
“No. Not really.”
“What is the right answer?”
“It’s air. Actually. Breathing air. No one can hold his breath for up to ten minutes.”
The air around us was humid and difficult to endure without murmuring. My scalp was wet and sweat was going down my face, even into my ears. My shirt was soaked with sweat, but I could not take it off until Andrew was done cleaning my palm. It was early evening, and we were boiling a half yam for our night meal. I could hear the slices boiling in the pot a few feet away from us because Andrew used the wrong pot cover, so the heat was escaping, and floating bubbles were bursting and spilling all over the stove. That was just one more thing for Grandmother to be angry with us about when she woke up.
It was as if she considered us two children instead of four. Our sisters were one person, the girls, and Andrew and I were one person, the boys. Whatever he did, I was equally responsible for and there was nothing I could do to escape it.
Once, Andrew had dropped his undershorts in the hallway when he was taking his house clothes out back to wash. He did not notice them quickly enough. Grandmother found them and lifted them with a broken plastic hanger, waving them around like a flagpole.
“Do you see what I have to live with?” she asked, screaming in Yoruba at no one in particular as she walked around the house. “Dirty smelling children. Underwear smelling like the penises of dead male goats, in the middle of the house where I get up each morning to pray to my creator.”
“God, is this not too much for a little old woman? When did I become the palm nut in the middle of the street that even little boys are stepping on me so mercilessly?”
For days, she continued like that. She did not allow any of us to retrieve the underwear from the place she had mounted it, in the center of the living room right next to the pile of Father’s university textbooks. Andrew waited until she left one evening to sing with a funeral procession for one of the commercial bus drivers in the neighborhood who had been killed in an accident with a delivery truck. He waited until the voices singing “Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, whosoever comes to Him shall never die” were a distant hollow, then he picked up his underwear and threw it in the trash along with the plastic hanger.
“This woman is pushing me to the wall. I am going to deal with her very soon,” he said that day to me, his eyes cloudy with not-shed tears.
Andrew was not massaging my arm fast enough to stop the cramping in my back. My face felt hotter and hotter, so I asked him to stop.
“Do you feel better yet?” he asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I am just hungry.”
Andrew stood up off the floor. He had the bowl and the towel with him. I let go of the chair and wiped my face with the back of my hand.
“The food should be ready now,” he said. He was looking in the direction of the kitchen, nodding toward it. “Do you need my help to get up?”
I did not. I was dehydrated, hot, and my throat ached, but I did not need his help. But Andrew must have misheard me, I thought, for he reached out his hand and pulled me up out of the chair. I stood up, my legs burning and my steps shaky, taking off my shirt and walking into the house in nothing but my undershorts.
The palm oil came out in thick droplets as Andrew shook the bottle over the plated yams. The heat of the yams melted the droplets immediately on contact till there was a small puddle of oil around the yams. Andrew sprinkled a small pinch of salt over the plate.
“My neck does not feel so good,” I said.
“Just eat this. Then I will go out to buy you Panadol Extra,” Andrew said.
“Just Panadol. Panadol Extra is for adults only,” I said.
“Panadol Extra is for stubborn pain. Children can have stubborn pain, too, you know,” Andrew said.
He had made the yams soft, just how I liked to eat them. I squished them with my fingers into the body of oil, watching steaming white yam take on the red of palm oil. I took a little piece of yam then molded it into a tiny ball and put it in my mouth. This is how I knew how sick I had become, because Andrew did not complain about the mess I was making.
Back when I was younger, back when we had Father and Mother, Andrew twisted my shortest finger so hard it came close to snapping because I was playing with our food. Mother screamed at him for hours after that and she stopped serving us in the same bowls, even though Father told her that it was perfectly normal for brothers to fight over such things. Rough play does not kill boys, it makes them stronger, Father said to Mother. You should have seen what my cousins and I got into growing up.
That was before they were gone, before it became so hard to remember what they looked like. Sometimes when I watched Nigerian movies, I looked out for ones with actors and actresses that were around my parents’ age. I did not remember them and so I imagined. It was easy to imagine Mother in a thick coat shivering in the London cold, her makeup bright and irreverent like Gloria Anozie in that movie. It was easier to imagine Father with a group of men arguing politics, his beard uncombed, short and thick like Sam Dede in any of his movies. I wondered about my ability to identify them in a crowd of people. I suspected that I would have been unable to pick them out, unable to remember any distinguishing fact about either of them.
“PETER?” ANDREW SAID my name. I opened my eyes.
“Yes? I am not sleeping,” I said.
“I am going to get you medicine now,” he said.
“Okay. Thank you,” I said.
He went into Grandmother’s room, where she was still asleep, and brought out one of her old duvets, covering my feet with them.
“I found some money,” he said. “I will be back right away.”
When he was gone, the house began making those empty-house sounds, the ones you hear only because everything else is quiet—water dropping from wet clothes recently hung on the line, a fly sizzling after contact with the metal body of the kerosene lantern, the curtains dancing in the breeze, the wooden doors shifting on loose metal hinges.
In the early evening quiet, our tiny house felt like a large expanse of forest with sounds from unseen sources I had to decipher to keep from being frightened and overwhelmed. In my little corner of the forest, I was like a squirrel in a hollow hole in a tall tree, all the outside sound first filtered, then condensed and magnified. I had to try to guess, to know and explain to myself what each sound was, to keep from being afraid of it.
When you’re the youngest in the family, everyone tries to protect you. They lie to you, they cover for you. You learn to do your own investigating. You have to be both persistent and invisible. Sometimes it seemed like there was a duvet of silence over all the important stuff about our family. There was no one willing to lift it up for me, to let me see for myself what it was all about.
When we first moved to Grandmother’s house, it took me three months to figure out that Father was not just job searching in Abuja.
When we walked around the streets, I liked to walk behind Andrew. He had no idea I was being slow on purpose. I hid it well. I stopped to pick up stones or write on dirty cars or hurl stuff at stray cats. But what I was really doing was waiting for Andrew to go ahead of me, so I could walk behind him, keeping him in my sights.
If he walked away from me, at least I would have seen him leaving. I wouldn’t have been left to wonder if someone had snatched him and made him a houseboy. Or if he stepped on a charm and dissolved into liquid or picked up money off the floor and became a tuber of yam.
Andrew returned with the painkillers and a small bag of roasted groundnuts with the skins still on. He smashed the pills into a stony powder then stirred it into a thick mix, adding about two teaspoons of water. It tasted like drops from the stalk of the bitter leaf dipped into classroom chalk. When I was done swallowing the medicine, he sat next to me eating his groundnuts.
“Here,” he said. “Take some.” He was stretching out a fistful of nuts to me.
“Take that away from me. My mouth is too bitter.” I said. “I may never eat again.”
“Do you know what I was thinking when I was walking home just now?” Andrew asked.
“No, I do not,” I said.
“I was thinking about porridge,” he said.
“What type of porridge?” I asked.
“Any type,” he said. “I think porridge is the worst food in the world.”
“Because it looks like poop?” I asked.
“Nope,” Andrew said. He did not laugh, so I wondered if he knew I was joking. “Only beans porridge looks like poop. Asaro does not.”
“Tell me what you were thinking,” I said.
“I was thinking about stories. The stories about porridge I know. In at least three of them, terrible things happen to people after eating porridge,” Andrew said.
“Are they real life or just ordinary stories?” I said.
“It’s in the Bible, okay?” he said. “That makes it real.”
“Are all the stories in the Bible?” I asked.
“Just the one about a boy who had worked all day hunting for meat for his family and when he came home he was tired, but his brother was making porridge for lunch, so he was excited—”
“What type of porridge?” I asked.
“I have no idea, maybe the type you make with grains, milk, and cheese. What is terrible is how much the older brother lost because he agreed to pay what his younger brother asked for the porridge.”
“What should he have done?” I asked.
“He should have just waited till his brother was done and served himself. Worst thing that will happen, they fight like men,” Andrew said.
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Do you remember that story of the tortoise dying because he ate the medicine the Babalowo made for his wife, Yarinbo?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“Another tragic porridge story,” Andrew said.
“That was medicine, not porridge,” I said, laughing a little.
“It was porridge. Irresistible porridge. That is why it was so tempting to the tortoise,” he said. “When I get married, I am never letting any woman send me on stupid errands. A person can meet their death just like that, no warning given.”
Our front gate opened, then banged shut. From the antiseptic smell slowly filling the air, I could tell it was Sister Bibike coming home from the hospital where she worked as a cleaner.
“My favorite tortoise story is when Tortoise goes to heaven,” I said to Andrew.
“Really?” he asked. “You know that it ends with him being thrown down back to earth, right?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “But before all that, there was a feast and he ate till he was full and bursting, and the angels waited on him.”
Our sister hovered over me for a few seconds, her large work bag dangling from her shoulders like a third limb. She placed the back of her palm, clammy from the humid evening, on the right side of my neck.
“You have a serious fever,” she said, her voice filled with the forced calm of a nurse.
“I just gave him Panadol. He is getting better,” Andrew said.
“Look. Andrew, come over here. Look at this. Look at your brother’s face,” our sister said.
The two of them bent over me, the smell of chewed groundnuts mingling with the smell of medical disinfectant. It was like being in the rain with an umbrella too feeble for the wind. It took too much effort to hold on, there was sense in letting go, giving in to the wind.
“My back. It hurts. Bad.” I screamed as I gave in to the wind. It was liberating, comforting.
“Mama!” our sister shouted toward the direction of Grandmother’s room, where she still was asleep. “Andrew, run down the street to Aminat’s house, see if Alhaji Sule is home so he can drive us to the hospital.”
My brother stood stunned for a second then moved away from his spot above me.
“Hurry,” she said. “And if he isn’t home, ask Aminat to lend us five hundred naira. We have to go to a hospital far away from here where no one knows us. So we can run away if the bills are too expensive.”
I heard the gate shut with the loud precision of a gunshot. Andrew was out before the import of our sister’s words hit him. Grandmother was helping to lift me up, and I felt like I was sinking into the floor no matter how hard they tried to lift me.
In the corner of my eye, I saw an old tortoise, his shell cracked in several places, smiling a tired smile.
“How are you feeling?” I asked in a voice I did not recognize for its cheer.
“Better now that you are here,” the old tortoise said.
We studied each other in silence for several minutes.
“Was it worth it? Falling from the sky? The anger from your friends? Your imperfect shell?” I asked.
“Have you had food from heaven?” he asked. “Have you had everything, every kind of food you ever imagined spread out before you, an expanse as wide as the sea?”
“There would have been enough for all of you to share, you should have just waited,” I said.
“No, there wasn’t. Don’t you get it?” the old tortoise asked. “That was the moral of the story, that there was not enough for all of us.”
“And you had it all. And you were punished for that,” I said.
“But I survived,” the old tortoise said. “I am still here. Where are all the others?”
The hospital was the teaching hospital affiliated with Lagos State University. The children’s ward smelled like a buka—like fried meat, heat from woodstoves, and jollof rice. There were more guardians and parents than there were sick children. They hovered over them like musical mobiles attached to the cribs of babies, soothing their restlessness and cajoling food and drink into tight lips.
By my side, what was left of my family smoothed into something firm, thorough and lasting, like starched clothes dried in the open sun.
It began with my grandmother, who said to the doctors who were urging her to leave my side, “I am going nowhere, I have heard you people kill poor children, so you can give their organs to rich people.”
My sister Ariyike, who read from the Bible over and over again till the rhythm of her recitals became the rhythm of my dreams:
“You will not allow your Holy One see corruption.
You will protect my soul from Hades.
Therefore, my heart is glad.
My glory rejoices.”
My back settled into the stiff sweetness of the hospital mattress. Unlike on the woven mat Andrew and I slept on at home, I rested in the hospital. I felt my muscles relax, become compliant as I lay down.
It was my sister Bibike who explained to me:
“You are getting fluids as well as antibiotics. They expect to be able to save your entire arm.”
It was my brother who said to me, “You are going to be a footballer anyway, you do not need two hands to score goals like Yekini.”
When you are the youngest child in a Lagos family, you are the custodian of the most precious unacknowledged hopes. Every sentence to you is a prayer, every sentence about you is an expression of possibility, everything you hear is love. I did not know this at first. Around the time I was learning to use my left hand to draw superheroes, I learned to listen for those hopes like words from a new language.
The boy on the bed next to me had a clean-shaven head and a full body cast. His mother, a plump woman with two bluish green tribal marks underneath each eye, made a contraption from a metal hanger to scratch his body with. As she scratched underneath his feet, she reported all that was going on in their family.
“Fadeke lost her tooth yesterday. And she nearly swallowed it. Thank God your daddy was with her, he caught it right in time.”
She passed along to us his uneaten meal, long-grain rice sitting on a bed of tomato and carrot stew, pieces of fried beef and cow skin in a second bowl.
“I am something,” Andrew said. “If you do not have strong teeth, you cannot eat me. What am I?”
He dipped his hand into the bowl, picking up both pieces of cow skin at the same time. This was how I knew everything was going to be all right: my brother was eating food meant for me, and I was laughing with him.