Nights of the Creaking Bed

by Toni Kan

  ‘It’s the longest bridge in Africa,’ the man said. ‘They say it takes four days to walk from one end to the other.’

  When I looked up, my mother was peering at the man with an expression that said she didn’t believe him. I knew that look. It was the look she had had on her face when her friend came back from Italy and told us how she had married, and divorced, a white man.

  Five years have gone by since I arrived in Lagos with my mother on a giddy Saturday afternoon, but I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I remember it the way I can taste the salt on my lips, residue from the corn I have just finished eating.

  We got down at Obalende and my mother turned to me and said, ‘Hold my hand.’

  She said it as if I had done something wrong, but I searched my head and couldn’t remember what I had done to make her angry, so I held her hand and walked beside her, breaking into a short run at intervals to keep up.

  My mother had been to Lagos before. In fact, she had lived in the city for two full years with an uncle, but he died suddenly, knocked down by a truck as he tried to cross the expressway.

  ‘It was bad luck. The devil really exists, you know. Paulina had made all the plans for us to go to Italy together, and then Uncle Stanley had to go and let a truck kill him. I came to the village with his wife. We were waiting for the mourning period to end when I got pregnant. How can you tell me the devil doesn’t work overtime?’

  I heard my mother tell this story once to a friend visiting from Jos. Her name was Justina and she had a limp that made it seem like one part of her bum was bigger than the other.

  I was sitting behind the door and doing my homework while they spoke. If my mother had seen me, she would have chased me away. That night, after Justina left, I listened to my mother talking to my grandmother as they prepared dinner.

  ‘Mama, see this world is not fair. See Justina with her short leg. When we were in school, nobody thought she would find a husband. See, now she is married with two children and her husband even bought her a car and sent her home with a driver.’

  ‘The cow without a tail,’ my grandmother said, turning to look at my mother. ‘It is God that chases the flies away on its behalf.’

  Justina is dead now. She was killed when Muslims attacked Christians in Jos. They said she was pregnant when she was killed and that the attackers stopped her car, beheaded her driver, ripped her stomach open and kicked the foetus around like a football.

  When my mother heard this, she sat down, rested her chin on her hand and stayed that way the whole day, muttering over and over again, ‘This devil knows how to work overtime.’

  And that was the thought in my head, too, the day my world, as I knew it, came to an end.

  The bus we were on got to Marina and my mother stepped down beside me. While we stood there, still trying to find our bearings, the bus roared off, leaving a cloud of acrid white smoke behind. I looked up and the sign atop the long building with fancy blocks in front of it said “General Post Office”.

  My mother and I crossed the street and, as I walked beside her, she said to me, ‘We’ll go to Mandilas, so I can buy you some clothes.’

  There were rows of shops selling clothes, shoes and belts and it seemed everyone was talking at the same time.

  ‘Fine girl. Come buy jeans,’ someone said, tugging at my mother’s arm. I thought she would slap his hand away, but she smiled indulgently and kept walking.

  ‘See. Fine blouse. Wear am go church na so so vision you go dey see,’ another man said.

  It was a blue blouse with a dragon design embroidered across the front. My mother stopped and asked him how much it cost. I watched as she placed the blouse against her body to see whether it would fit and I wondered why she had stopped to haggle. Was it the promise of visions or the beautifully-rendered design?

  My mother bought the blouse and we walked on, stopping at three other shops to buy three shirts, two pairs of jeans and a pair of canvas shoes for me.

  ‘Take the long sleeves,’ my mother said, urging me to take a blue, long-sleeved corduroy shirt the shop owner was offering me. ‘You will need it when it gets cold at night.’

  We made a few other purchases, mostly bras and panties and frilly things for my mother. Then, finally, she asked me to go with her so we could find something to eat.

  My mother ordered rice, beans and plantain for me.

  Then, while I ate, she gave me some money.

  ‘Hold this money for me,’ she said. ‘I need to buy something. Wait for me when you finish eating.’

  I took the money, nodded, and then went back to my food. That was the last time I saw my mother.

  People were milling about, rushing and hurrying in that relentless motion that defines Lagos, while I sat on the steps of the food seller’s shop and cried, turning my head from left to right and back again, hoping to see my mother materialise before me and ask why I was crying, before slapping my eyes dry of tears with a sharp: ‘You didn’t see me and then you start crying? What’s wrong with you? You think you are still a baby? Come on, wipe your tears, let’s go.’

  The way I was feeling then, I wouldn’t have minded one of those slaps. A slap would have been far better than being alone in a busy street in Lagos.

  But my mother did not appear, and when the shops began to close as darkness fell across the market, I began to shiver from cold and fear. What was I going to do when everyone left and darkness fell? I had no idea.

  I pulled out the corduroy top and began to pull it on when, in a moment of startling clarity, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. ‘Take the long sleeves. You will need it when it gets cold at night.’

  Had she planned it all the while? Had my mother decided, like a desperate goat, to gnaw off the rope that tethered her so she could roam free in Lagos?

  I set the bag down and began to skim through its contents. Aside from my clothes and shoes, my mother had left me one thousand naira and a note that had only one word, the final piece of the puzzle: “Sorry!”

  That was when I stopped crying. I stood up, dusted the seat of my trousers and set out for the main road. I walked to the post office, crossed to the other side and joined a few men and boys waiting to buy akara.

  While I waited for the bean cakes to turn brown, I worked out my plan. I would sleep, wake up the next day and go to Ojota, where I would take a bus home. Once my father saw me without my mother and once I told him the story of my misadventure in Lagos, he would do something. What it was he would do, I had no idea.

  I paid for my akara with the leftover change from the food seller’s. Then I bought a canned drink and found a spot in a dark part of a car park to eat.

  As I ate, I saw a man chase a young girl past me. He pushed her against the wall and tugged at her wrapper, which unravelled like a loose bandage.

  ‘Don’t by-force me,’ the girl said, laughing as he tried to take off her panties. Pushing him gently away, she stepped out of her panties, then turned her back to him. The man bent her over as he let his trousers fall. I looked away as they became one, but I couldn’t shut out the sounds the girl made.

  I finished my food and walked up and down the street. There were still cars around but by the time I made it back to the post office, the street was deserted and men and women, whom I suspected were mad, were lying in front of the building. There were a few children too, mostly boys, and they were huddled together and playing a game of Whot.

  I found a space a few feet from them and sat down. I took a shoelace from one of the new shoes my mother had bought me and tied up my clothes and shoes into a bundle. Then I put it under my head and fell asleep.

  When I woke, the sun was up. I was stretching and yawning when I realised that the bundle I had kept under my head was gone. I sprang up, crying in disbelief. I dipped my hands in my pocket. The one thousand naira had gone, too.

  I started screaming, running into the early Sunday morning and looking for the thief who had stolen my shoes. I found him by the
woman selling akara. He was one of the boys I had seen the night before and he was wearing one of my new shirts.

  ‘Thief!’ I screamed as I got to him. ‘Give me my shirt!’

  I was reaching out to grab him when his fist connected with my left eye. I fell and then he was kicking and punching me until I was curled up in a ball and screaming at him to stop. He spat and walked away.

  I lay there hurting, dusty and sobbing but nobody looked my way. They came, they bought their akara and they walked off, as if I were a piece of rubbish left by the roadside.

  ‘Come,’ someone was saying. ‘Stand up.’

  I opened my right eye. There was a boy, dark, skinny, about my age. He was standing there with his arms outstretched. I took his arm and he pulled me up. Then he led me to a tap at the end of the park.

  ‘Oya, wash your body,’ he said, stepping out of his clothes as he spoke. I looked around first to see that no one was looking. Then I did as he did. Scooping water with what was left of an old bucket, I had my first bath outside, right there in the park.

  His name was Michael and, after we had showered, he asked me to go with him.

  ‘Are we going to your house?’ I asked, hoping to find an adult who would help make sense of all the madness.

  ‘This is my house,’ he said, waving expansively. ‘I dey live here for Marina.’

  ‘Where your mama?’ I asked, also switching to pidgin.

  ‘I no sabi,’ he said, stopping in front of a stall to buy a tin of Robb. ‘Rub am for your eye. It is swelling too much.’ I thanked him and applied the ointment to my swollen eye.

  ‘See, first thing you must know be dis, this is Lagos and there is no paddy for jungle. You see, you be JJC and I want to take you to a man who will take care of you or else one day you go wake up and somebody don steal your head,’ he said, and laughed. ‘You go dey pay the man, o, but at least nobody go steal your thing again, you hear?’ He stopped so suddenly mid-stride that I bumped into him.

  ‘So, who be dis man?’ I asked, as we began walking again.

  ‘Im name na Baba Ejiga and im na Area Father.’

  The Area Father, Baba Ejiga had one eye and he was smoking Indian hemp when we got to his shack, nestled under the bridge at the crook where the sea lost the battle to the metal and concrete pillars which propped up the bridge.

  ‘Mikolo, who be dat?’ he asked, his one eye darting furiously from me to Michael. It moved so fast that I had difficulty looking away.

  ‘Na JJC. The bobo just land and e never begin shine im eye.’

  ‘Hey, wetin be your name?’ Baba Ejiga asked me.

  ‘My name is Daniel,’ I answered and he lowered his head and sighed.

  ‘Na Aje-butter you carry come for me,’ he said and shook his head. Then he looked up at me and spoke fluent, unaccented English.

  ‘How in God’s holy name did you get here and where did that nasty bruise come from?’

  Staring at him, at his itinerant eye, the matted hair, the ramshackle shack and the joint in his left hand, I couldn’t reconcile the voice with the man.

  After I told him I’d been abandoned and the victim of a robbery, Baba Ejiga was silent for a heartbeat. Then, he shook his head and said to Michael, ‘Mikolo, this one na bad market, o, very bad market,’ he said, as if I was not there.

  He raised his joint to his dark lips, drew long and hard, and then held it out to Michael who took it, sucked on it, inhaled, and handed the joint back. I watched in wonder, my mouth hanging open. Michael couldn’t have been much older than me.

  ‘Carry this JJC waka. Make you show am way. If anybody worry una, tell dem say this JJC na my person.’

  That was how I came to live on Lagos Island under the protection of Baba Ejiga. We slept on the streets, usually outside Baba Ejiga’s shack, while he frolicked inside with one of the many women who never seemed to tire of him.

  In the day, Michael and I prowled the market looking for women to assist with their purchases. We were mules, young ala-barus who eked out a living from the pittance they let drop. Sometimes we stole from them, pilfering items from what they’d bought. Most times they never noticed, though sometimes an eagle-eyed woman would catch you and bitch-slap you into the gutter.

  We were children, so it was easy for people to forgive us, to put it down to hunger or the devil working overtime, as usual. There were many children living rough on the streets of Marina and we marked our turf, sometimes fighting battles for control. The adults let us bloody ourselves while they sat and watched, amused, as we morphed slowly into what they had long become, little devils with fangs for teeth and claws for fingers.

  Once in a while, one of the older boys would be caught stealing: a radio from a parked car or a handbag from a woman exiting the bank. Many of us would give chase and when we caught up with the thief, we would descend on him, kicking and punching him until he was down. Then, someone would find a tyre, another would pour petrol and the hapless thief would go up in flames.

  And every time I watched that senseless orgy of rage and violence, I would wonder why we were so quick to land that blow and kick out at one of our own, someone we knew and lived with. Was it out of a feeling of betrayal and anger that he’d let himself be caught, thus tarring all of us with the sludge of shame? Was that what fuelled our rage?

  Often, we retired early, bathing in the park or running across to the old quayside where we washed in the briny waters of the Atlantic. It wasn’t uncommon to come out of the sea and find your clothes gone, hidden away or cast into the sea by another boy you had offended without knowing.

  While the other boys laughed, the unlucky one would walk back naked to wherever he kept his change of clothes. We didn’t possess too many things. We were light travellers, unsure of what the next minute held, and that was why all we owned we hid in our stomachs. Our stomachs were our treasure houses because they were easy to transport and no one could steal the food you had eaten or the drink you had taken.

  We ate well, saving only the little we needed to pay Baba Ejiga or entertain the young girls who flocked to us like flies to shit. I avoided them, but Flora would never let up, always coming to sit by me while I read old magazines I picked up from the streets or bought when I had extra cash. Of all the boys who lived with Baba Ejiga, Michael and I were the only ones who could read.

  ‘You dey fear woman?’ Flora would ask me every time I refused to accept the little things she brought me on her way home from hawking on the streets: a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines or condensed milk.

  We became friends the day I took ill with malaria and she ran all the way to Obalende to buy me Fansidar and folic acid; and later in the evening, when I had stopped throwing up, she bought me jollof rice and dodo.

  ‘I know you like jollof rice and dodo,’ she said, wiping the sweat off my brow.

  We talked. She was from Delta state, like me. Like me, she had never known her father and like me, her mother had left her at an early age, but hers had drowned.

  ‘You know, when a woman drown she will lie face up, but a man will lie face down. That is how you know whether the dead person inside the water is a man or a woman,’ she told me in her shaky English.

  Once we became friends, Flora spoke English instead of pidgin to me. She lived with her aunt who was married to a warden at the prison quarters in Ikoyi and, once in a while, I would walk with her all the way to Ikoyi and then take a bike back to Marina.

  One night as I saw her off to her own block, she pushed me against the wall and kissed me, surprising me by her impulsiveness.

  ‘When are we going to do it?’ she asked.

  ‘Do what?’ I asked, lowering my gaze as my heart hammered in my chest.

  ‘Do what? Ah ah. Sometimes, I feel that you are fearing woman.’

  ‘But you are not even a woman,’ I said.

  ‘Who said? I am thirteen years and Janet is twelve but she is doing it with Michael.’

  ‘Michael is older than me.’

  ‘Ehen, it
doesn’t matter,’ Flora said, and reached for me again.

  This time, our kiss lingered and Flora was moaning and I was feeling her breast when someone slapped and punched me. We sprang apart and a huge man started punching and slapping Flora as she ran, and kept calling her a whore.

  The next day, when I saw Flora she had a black eye and a cut above her upper lip.

  ‘Na my auntie husband. He was angry because he wants to by-force me and I don’t agree,’ she told me that night as we sat at the back of the car park and kissed. This time our kisses were long and languorous and gentle because I was careful not to hurt her lips.

  ‘God will punish him,’ I said, with impotent rage.

  Even though Flora wanted us to, I never summoned up enough courage, so we spent our times together kissing and sometimes, when no one was nearby, she would lift her dress and let me fondle and kiss her small breasts.

  Then one day I waited and waited and she didn’t come to the Marina. When I still didn’t see her after three days, I sought out Janet and asked where Flora was.

  ‘Why u dey ask me, no be u pregnant am?’ she snapped at me. Flora was pregnant.

  That was when I began to drink.

  Without Flora, and with nothing to occupy me in the evenings, I started drowning my sorrows, sitting with other boys and men in front of the women who sold kai-kai, the local brew, drinking my life away.

  I didn’t smoke cigarettes or hemp because they made me light-headed so I sat there and drank shot after shot of kai-kai. But while everyone else got drunk, I would remain clear-eyed and sure-footed. Soon, my reputation spread and people came to see the eleven-year-old boy who could down a bottle of kai-kai and still walk straight.

  Michael was the one who told Baba Ejiga and the one-eyed man, always eager to make a quick buck, began arranging drinking bouts for me with men who would square up against me and end up being carried away by friends, after they had lost their bearings and their bets.

  I never found out what it was that made me incapable of getting drunk, but it made me popular, and the women who sold drinks would offer me free drinks because they knew that my presence at their stalls would attract customers.