by Toni Kan
‘Stay here,’ Buzz said to the barman, as he picked up the dead man’s gun and gave chase. A door led outside. Buzz kicked it open, waited a heartbeat, and then poked out his gun hand slowly.
He felt the swoosh of air a split second before he felt the searing pain shoot up his right hand as a metal pipe connected with his hand and knocked away the gun. Cursing and grunting in pain, Buzz bent low to evade a second blow aimed for his head and then he was standing and staring at the Otunba, who was now wielding the weapon and trying to push Buzz as far away as possible from the gun that was lying on the ground between them.
‘Otunba, put the pipe down,’ Buzz said.
‘God punish your mama,’ the Otunba hissed and thrust the pipe at Buzz. It connected with his ribs and as the pain spread, Buzz reached into his left pocket and retrieved the short man’s gun. He raised it and saw the surprise on Otunba’s face.
Buzz smiled and squeezed the trigger.
Onions
I didn’t have new clothes.
My mother said she forgot. I remember that. I also remember that it was Christmas, and nothing much besides. Ah, but I remember that I was sad, so sad that the bile rose to my tongue and made my eyes dim. I was sadder than I had ever been and I had been sad a whole lot. I was so sad, I could reach out and grab a handful from the sadness that hung low like a dark cloud over my head.
I was a kid then, but old enough to know that I was the only one in the whole world who didn’t have new clothes. I also knew that our neighbours had prepared feasts while my mother had prepared nothing.
And of course it made me sad and angry, like the run-away preacher in the bible who slept under a tree and woke to find it had withered.
It was Christmas and everyone was at a feast from which fate and circumstance had banished me. It was a cold morning and instead of getting up, I lay huddled up on the thin mat that had long ceased to protect me from the cold of the floor.
When I rolled over, my mother kicked me on the shin. I jerked my leg away and opened one eye to spy on the world. The world I saw was a small, cluttered room with a thin sliver of light cutting it in two.
My mother was awake and scuttling about like an excited rat. She rattled tins and pots, swiped at mosquitoes and cursed each time she missed. I opened the other eye and the world exploded. The world is a small place for the one-eyed. ‘Good morning, ma!’ I tossed at her as I rose and headed for the door to piss.
‘Who are you leaving the mat for?’ My mother’s voice came at me like a hungry policeman with a baton. I stopped, turned and folded the relics of what had once been a mat. I stuck it under the bed and walked to the toilet.
My mother was in a foul mood so after I pissed, I dallied outside, like a ghost surprised by sunlight, to watch the other children being scrubbed for church.
‘Dele, I’ll show you my Christmas clothes!’ Seni yelled at me as he tried to get the soap out of his eyes.
‘Okay,’ I threw back, and fled.
I didn’t have new clothes and it was Christmas.
I sneaked back inside, like a thief, but my mother saw me. Our room was so small, you had to be invisible not to be seen. Sometimes I felt like we were sticks of cigarettes and the room was our pack. And when my mother got into a foul mood, it contracted to the size of a matchbox.
‘Oya, go and wash your stinking mouth,’ she flung at me as I leaned on the wall and watched her exertions. The day was yet a virgin but my mother was sweating like a woman in labour.
I picked up my brush, filled up a cup, put a dash of salt in my palm and went outside. Outside the sun’s shy smile had grown bolder, so I sought the shade of the eaves. I brushed my teeth and cleaned my tongue, feeling my mouth awaken to the sting of salt.
As I gargled, Seni appeared in jeans and a T-shirt. He wore his old tennis shoes. ‘I don’t like my new shoes,’ he announced as he caught my gaze. I didn’t know what to say, so I went on gargling.
‘Are you coming to church?’ he asked. I shook my head and gargled some more. He said something else, but I missed it because of static in my ears and then, just as suddenly as a crazy rain, my eyes began to spit tears of pain and shame.
I spat out the water and ran inside, leaving my friend to wonder. He didn’t like his new shoes. I didn’t even have new shoes.
My mother let me be, which was a good thing. I sat on her three-legged bed and watched her. She emptied cans, counted the small bundles of salt she had set aside the previous night, checked how many onion bulbs she still had, and stood facing me. But she didn’t see me. She wasn’t even looking at me.
I knew the look: the long, melancholic stare that shot through the tattered boundaries of our lives to traverse the craggy terrains of a sad past that sired a present that was even worse.
We didn’t have a future. It was too much to hope for. We lived for the moment. The next minute was like an age and we had to journey to it on the ship of willpower. Despair had gnawed away at our hope and turned it to dust.
I sat there and watched her until the dull light left her eyes and she let off the long hiss that signalled the end of her contemplations.
My mother turned suddenly and grabbed my hawking tray. Panic seized me. She started counting and throwing the onion bulbs onto the tray and I opened my mouth to speak, but no words would come. Tears stung my eyes like the salt that woke up my mouth every morning.
There were twelve bulbs in all. She pushed the tray towards me and said: ‘Get up and go. We need the money.’
That was when disgust laid healing hands on me and unstopped my tongue.
‘No, Mama!’ I screamed, the tears falling down my face.
‘Take it, and go. We need the money!’ she yelled, boxing my left ear. She knocked me against the door and kicked the tray to me. I picked it up and fled outside.
When I turned to look, she was standing at the door and yelling, the veins on her neck standing out like cobras poised to strike.
‘If your father didn’t drink himself to death, we wouldn’t be like this!’
I walked out, the tray on my head, through the sea of children who had dammed themselves on both sides to allow me to pass. I walked past them, blinded by tears and anger, into the sun.
I walked past the thronging spectators at the festive arena, past children hurrying to church in their new clothes and past men already drunk and staggering.
There was a feast of joy all around and I was the lone mourner. I had a tray full of onions, a shirt full of holes, a voice that refused to call out my wares and eyes that rained tears.
I stamped through the streets, watching gaily-dressed children glide past, and I died in instalments. There was no joy, no sadness. Only emptiness. I made no noise. No one would buy my wares. No one bought onions on Christmas day. I walked on, until I came to a big house with a big fence and a big mango tree.
I sat down in its shade, put my tray beside me and scanned the street. It was quiet. A dog barked once or twice and the wind bore vagabond strains of a sad song to my ears.
I sat there and thought of the father I didn’t know, the one who drank himself to death. I didn’t know how somebody could drink himself to death. Though once, because I was hungry and there was no food to eat, I kept on drinking water until my stomach bulged and my eyes dizzied, but I didn’t die.
My mother drank a lot, too. Not water. She drank a lot of gin. It made her thin and she looked like a witch. Then one night she woke me up with her screams.
‘Call the landlord! Call the landlord! I’ve got crabs in my stomach!’
I fetched the landlord and our neighbours and they ferried her to the hospital. I thought my mother had gone mad. But they said she had an ulcer and asked her to quit drinking or die.
She said she didn’t want to die and she didn’t want to stop drinking, either. They asked her to choose. I think she made the wrong choice because she is dead now.
I heard footsteps and I looked up. A man was going past. I knew him. He used to come and see my mot
her when I was younger. He was one of those who slapped my mother’s buttocks, and my face if I stared. He slept over a couple of times but I didn’t like him because he snored too loud.
I waved and said, ‘Good morning!’ But he just walked on. He didn’t remember me, but I remembered him. ‘Grown-ups don’t remember much,’ I told my mother once and she said it’s because they have too many things to think about. When I asked what things, she laughed and said, ‘Like children who ask too many questions.’
That’s one of the rare occasions I recall seeing my mother laugh. I liked the way she laughed, soft like the tinkling of bells, and she had a nice smile that was as bright as a big chunk of the sun.
But the pain, the despair, and the drink made her forget how to smile.
The shade was soothing and I soon fell asleep. I slept for a long time because the sun was way up above my head when I awoke. I gazed about in sleepy-headed confusion. Something had forced me awake. A sound! I looked down the road and saw him. He was rolling along on his wooden trolley and pushing himself with his muscular arms.
I watched him approach, the cranky noise of his trolley waking up the somnolent afternoon.
He was squat, all trunk and no limbs. And he was gaily dressed, in the mood for Christmas. He had a huge smile plastered on his face as he trundled past me: a cripple dressed for Christmas and trundling along on a trolley he propelled with his dusty hands.
I watched him fade to a speck in the distance and gleaned the ripe ears of a simple truth.
Hunger gnawed at my insides and I remembered the meal Seni’s mother had promised me the day before. I picked up my tray and dusted my shorts. I knew where I had to go. Home! It was Christmas and I was tired of being a stranger at life’s feast.
I began the walk home. I knew my mother would beat the hell out of me. I knew I would cry like hell. But I didn’t care.
It was Christmas.
The Devil’s Overtime
My mother wanted to see the world, but I was like a noose around her neck, a piece of rope that tethered her to the village, a swollen foot that would not let her run with the wind and take flight.
She used to sit outside my grandparents’ house, chin in palm, while her eyes stared into the distance wondering what could have been. I’d sit and watch, even though I pretended to be playing with stones. Sometimes, when I thought she had fallen asleep, her long drawn-out sighs would remind me that she was not asleep, just lost inside her own head.
She was happiest and saddest when an old friend, who had left the village, returned with tales of the city and how wonderful things were there. My mother would be full of questions, the way a boil is full of pus, and when the friend left, my mother would lie on her bed and cry.
My mother didn’t speak much to me. She made sure I was clean and fed and out of the way. I didn’t mind, until my grandparents both died two months apart. That was when I began to notice that my mother really didn’t want me around.
My father lived two villages away. My mother said he was my father, even though he never, ever, spoke to me, nor called me a son.
‘See, see your useless father,’ my mother would say when she took me with her to the market to cut my hair.
But my father would laugh and say, ‘When will this your madness end?’
Whenever he said this, my mother would curse him and push me hard, urging me to move fast as if I was the one who made him refuse to acknowledge that I was his son, and while we stumbled along, the man she called my father would blow cigarette smoke into the air and laugh.
Everyone said he was my father because, according to them, we looked alike. He was dark like me and he had bow legs like mine. He also had ears like mine, the wide, open ears that made my classmates call me “Batman”. I guess my mother had hopes that, one day, my father would finally take a good look at me and acknowledge that I was his son after all.
I was nine years old when my mother said we were going to Lagos.
‘If you don’t run, can you count the miles?’ she asked me as she buttoned my shirt, and I shook my head. ‘You see? One day I will wake up and I will be sixty years old and I will ask myself, “What have you done with my life?” Will I say, “I had a baby boy whom his father rejected”? Is that what you want me to say?’
‘No,’ I said, and she sighed.
‘It’s not easy for me. If I was alone…’ she said, and left it hanging.
I was getting used to it all now: her constant ‘If I was alone, life wouldn’t be like this.’
When my grandmother was alive, my mother didn’t bother me too much with what would have been if I hadn’t been born, because every time she did, my grandmother would hiss and say to her, ‘Did anybody force you to spread your legs for that good-for-nothing?’
I didn’t want to go to Lagos but I also wanted to, because the fact that I was going there had brought me new-found respect. My friends looked at me like I was going to the moon.
‘You will see big bridges and houses taller than trees,’ someone said.
‘And the roads; they say you can’t cross them because there are like a hundred cars passing at the same time,’ said another.
‘You will tell us about it when you come for Christmas, abi?’ another asked.
I nodded and looked away. I had lied to them that we would be staying with my uncle, even though I had no idea where we were going to live. And I didn’t know whether we would be coming back for Christmas.
It was my father who came to pick us up on the day we left for Lagos. My mother and I sat in front, while the market women sat at the back with basins stacked high with their purchases. We looked like a family taking a leisurely ride. That is, if you took a picture of us in front and cut off the women at the back.
My father smoked with his left hand, while his right hand gripped the steering wheel. My mother sat me in the middle and, all through the ride, stared fixedly out of the window.
My father did, at least, acknowledge my presence on the short ride to Asaba, where we were to board a bus for Lagos. When he finished smoking his second cigarette, he flicked it into the bushes and pulled out two tablets of tom-tom from his breast pocket. He popped one in his mouth and offered me the second. I was reaching out to accept it when my mother slapped it away. My eyes clouded with tears as I stared downwards, focusing on a hole in the floor of the car, through which I could see the road.
‘This madness of yours, when will it stop?’ my father asked her, before lighting another cigarette.
The luxury bus smelled like new shoes. My mother and I sat in the middle. I had the window seat, from where I could watch the hawkers selling everything from biscuits to gin, wrapped up in sachets. There were very many people hurrying and trying to catch their buses.
A fat woman, who’d arrived late, ran after her bus, which was already leaving the park.
‘I have paid. I have paid,’ she cried, waving her ticket above her head with her free hand while the other hand dragged a travel bag along. The bus squealed to a halt; the conductor jumped down and, cursing her, pulled open the boot at the back. As he took the woman’s bag, it snapped open and spilled its contents. Falling on her hands and knees, the fat woman began to pick up her stuff, a bra here, a blouse there. Behind her, the conductor picked up the biggest pair of panties I have ever seen and was waving them above his head as people laughed.
‘What’s funny?’ my mother asked, giving me the look, the one she gave me before she slapped me and made me see stars. This time she didn’t slap me. She just looked at me, said something about my father, and hissed.
‘I want water,’ I said a few minutes later as our bus made its way out of the park, but my mother just glared.
‘You want to piss inside the bus, abi?’ she asked, but I was smart enough to say nothing.
I looked out of the window as the bus hurtled on its way to Lagos, eating up the distance like a carnivorous monster. My mother did not look at, nor speak to me. She stared straight ahead, her eyes unblinkin
g. I ignored her, too, wishing my grandparents were still alive so I wouldn’t have to make this trip.
‘Take,’ my mother said and gave me a sausage roll and a can of Coke. I said ‘Thank you’ and ate, chewing on the stringy sausage roll and sipping the tepid drink.
As I ate, I did not tell her that what I really wanted to do was whip out my pingolo and piss, for fear that she would hiss and slap me. Instead, I held it in, sweating and moaning softly while my bladder threatened to burst.
Finally, we made a stop at a place called Ore and everyone got down so they could piss and stretch their legs. ‘Forty minutes! Forty minutes, o, or we go leave you for this place!’ the conductor screamed, a vein standing out on his neck.
I ran to a bush and pissed for almost twenty minutes, or so I thought, because the stream of urine seemed to go on forever in a warm fountain. I slept for the rest of the journey and only opened my eyes when my mother hit me and told me we were in Lagos.
Lagos was madness. Watching the crowds, the innumerable people stuck in what I supposed was perpetual motion, almost made me dizzy. Looking at the people in Lagos was like looking into a gigantic whirlwind, but instead of bits of rubbish, what we had inside was an eddy of human beings.
We got down from the bus at Ojota and, grabbing my hand while the other one held onto the new travel bag she’d bought the previous week, my mother led me a short distance to where we boarded another bus, a small yellow one. I sat in the middle with my mother, beside a fat woman who smelled of fish. Her bottom was so big it kept pushing me and whenever I wriggled to create space, she would look at me and hiss.
We drove onto a long bridge that snaked over a shimmering mass of water. Somebody behind me was telling a young woman with him that it was the Third Mainland Bridge.