Household Gods and other narrative offences

by Tade Thompson

  ‘It isn’t, ore,’ said Kola. ‘You just need to know how to work it.’

  ‘You mean work in it.’

  ‘Be patient.’

  ‘Patience won’t pay the landlord.’ Tito took the last pull on the cigarette and flicked it away.

  Quietly, Kola said: ‘You could always play Sentry.’

  ‘What’s Sentry?’

  *

  Tito’s opponent shook hands. ‘Moses Awe.’

  ‘Tito Ebunorisha,’ said Tito.

  Moses was a big, lumbering man with an abundance of facial hair and a smile. He wore an old tee shirt that barely contained his muscles. The protocol on talking during bouts was unclear. It was not forbidden, but Tito had been told to avoid it.

  A digital clock counted down and when it hit zero, they started.

  Playing ayo is straight forward. Each player started off with four seeds in each of their six pits. The first player would empty one pit and sow a seed in each subsequent pit in a counter-clockwise direction, including the opposing player’s pits. If the last seed fell in a pit causing a total of two or three seeds in the opponent’s house they were captured. Since there were only forty-eight seeds the first player to capture twenty-five would win. The strategy was in counting and anticipating where both yours and your opponent’s last seed would fall. Moses was clearly a serious player because Tito could see him counting. Didn’t matter. Winning at ayo did not mean winning at Sentry.

  Tito was a middling player and sowed without capturing for two rounds, setting up a bigger harvest. He was thirsty and looked at the frosty plastic of the water bottle. There was a certain inevitability about drinking. Drink the water, empty the bottle, fill the bladder, empty the bladder. Tito glanced nervously at the hallway that led to the toilet. He resisted the urge to drink.

  Buzzers sounded from some of the other tables as games were won and lost. Tito himself lost the first round.

  Didn’t matter. He was still awake.

  *

  Tito and Kola climbed the stairs to the next level and found themselves on a walkway that linked several of the blocks of flats, all painted the same dull grey or dirty light blue, all without ground-floor flats. Difficult to tell in the yellow glow of the street lights. They passed rows of identical doors till Kola pointed out the one they were looking for.

  ‘Remember, don’t mention his experience. You’re here as a supplicant, looking for guidance,’ said Kola. He had said this over a dozen times already.

  ‘Why didn’t you seek his guidance?’ asked Tito. He was slightly out of breath, tired from a day of loading goods in a warehouse, unskilled cash-in-hand work.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ said Kola. ‘Besides, it wouldn’t have made a difference. I was disqualified. Good luck.’

  Tito bumped fists with him and knocked at the door while his friend’s footfalls faded away. The door sprung open and a woman stood there. She had a head scarf tied carelessly and a frown etched into the features of a face that might have been beautiful otherwise. Barefoot, in faded dungarees, she was taller than Tito, and wiry. She looked to be in her mid-forties.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m looking for your husband,’ said Tito. ‘Mr Kanako.’

  ‘No, you’re looking for me. People just assume I’m a man,’ said Kanako. ‘Come in.’

  There was a musty smell to the place, but it looked clean and neat. No shelves, but books piled together like blood clots in random parts of the front room. A television was on displaying the face of Robert DeNiro frozen in the act of eating a boiled egg. Kanako sat on a comfortable chair and picked up the remote control, as if threatening to continue her show if Tito did not entertain her enough. She put her legs on a footstool and he noticed the skin of her left sole was gnarled.

  Tito handed her the gifts he had brought: Schnapps, a bag of kola nuts and two bags of plantain chips, all of which he had had to travel to the Brixton Market to get. Kanako accepted them without comment. She cracked and unscrewed the lid of the Schnapps and took a grateful pull. Her Adam’s apple bobbed up and down and when she came up for air a quarter of the gin had gone.

  She exhaled and the furrows formed by her wrinkles became shallower. ‘You want to know how to win at Sentry.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Tito. ‘I don’t have any money now—‘

  ‘I know you don’t. Otherwise you wouldn’t be playing, would you?’

  ‘I will pay you when I win.’

  She laughed, a sound like the grinding of maize in a hand-operated mill. ‘I’ve never heard that before.’

  *

  Moses won the first four games and aside from scratching his head every few minutes, Tito could not see any sign of fatigue. If anything, winning appeared to boost the other man’s wakefulness. Tito, on the other hand, already felt a low-level struggle with his eye-lids.

  And his bladder was full. There was no doubt about it, no avoiding the Gents. He raised his right hand and an usher came to his table and took a photograph of the gameplay in case of a dispute. Moses winked at him. Tito fucking hated people who winked.

  He slipped into the men’s room quickly and closed the door. It was your standard artless public toilet. Three stalls, six urinals, a couple of sinks, the smell of either urine or ammonia-laced cleaning products. Dripping water somewhere, and a hiss, forceful flow through a pipe, ubiquitous to such places. It was like being at a riverbank without the river.

  Tito found it difficult to breathe. He forced his feet to move towards the stalls and he checked each one. When he established privacy he reached inside his pocket and placed a small statuette on the white porcelain of the sink. It was an ugly little thing, and showed a humanoid creature carved from wood in a forced squat. The eyes, ears and mouth were outsized and the head was in such an awkward position that the chin was close to the feet. It looked like someone taking a shit.

  Tito turned on the tap and caught some water in his cupped hands, then poured it on the fetish. Important not to put it under flowing water. Insulting. Don’t want to incur wrath.

  He turned away from the malignant thing and rushed to the urinals. He unzipped quickly and voided, closing his eyes with the pleasure. He would have sighed if he hadn’t been interrupted by the clicking behind him. He did not dare look and the stream of piss dried up. He gulped air, but did not have enough.

  The hand on his arm was hot, dry, hard as wood, and unpleasant. Each movement was punctuated with clicks and snaps. Tito did not look. He knew what was coming. A creak like an old door opening, then dozens of needles of pain in his arm, accompanied by rending of muscle. He almost opened his mouth. Almost.

  The creaking and clicking segued into snapping in a horrific medley and he felt warm fluid drip down his arm. Fuck. It was chewing. Chewing what it bit out of Tito’s arm.

  ‘Open your mouth. Eat.’ The voice was gravely, produced by two nightmares rubbing against each other rather than vocal cords.

  Tito obeyed and it was like bark, bitter, impossible to chew. Yet he chewed, and he swallowed. Bad as it was, he felt the pain in his arm subside and electricity flood into his brain. He was awake and alive.

  Afterwards, he washed it down with water and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. He saw a shadow in the reflection-something near the ceiling. He spun, but there was nothing there. He pocketed the fetish and left.

  *

  ‘You’re a house slave, aren’t you?’ said Kanako. ‘Omo odo.’

  ‘How do you know?’ said Tito. ‘Does it matter if I am?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘I…I’m told you won at Sentry.’

  ‘Maybe. So what? You want to know how I won?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There is a price.’

  ‘How much?’

  Kanako laughed. ‘It’s not money, you yam head. There are other things in life. Like life itself.’

  ‘What do I have to do?’ asked Tito.

  ‘Have you ever heard the saying, “the better man may win; but the winner is
bound to be the worse man.”?’

  ‘No, I haven’t.’ Tito hated proverbs. His father had been full of them. Not his father. His master.

  ‘Now you have. Expect to understand the full meaning of it.’ She drank more of the Schnapps, coughed and rose. She held her side as if her ribs were injured. ‘When you do, remember that it was you who approached me.’

  ‘Are you in pain?’ asked Tito.

  Kanako shook her head. ‘Why do you want to play?’

  ‘I want the prize.’

  ‘I know you want the prize. What I’m asking is why you need the money.’

  Tito thought about his life, about cleaning toilets in his master’s house for as long as he could remember, about eating leftovers after his host family had gorged themselves, about sneaking into the rooms of the children and reading their books when they were out, about a lifetime of wearing cast-offs, about not being a real person but a kind of living stress-ball whipping-post to be used whenever his master and mistress were unable to cope with their moral poverty; Tito thought of these things and said, ‘I just want the money.’

  *

  Moses yawned a few times in quick succession. His concentration was slipping too. He had opportunities to block Tito’s wins by emptying the right pits, but he didn’t, and lost four games. It was four-thirty a.m. on the first day. The crowd had simmered down. They could come and go, or catch it streaming over the net on websites with secret URLs, but the middle of the night was the middle of the night. A number of seats were empty and about half held sleeping patrons. This was not unusual.

  Moses miscounted his seeds and laid out a series of five consecutive pits with two seeds in them, but only one seed in the last. Tito followed up by sowing in each of the pits, ending up with a total of thirty seeds. So sleepy was Moses that he had started playing another pit before realising that the game was lost.

  Tito won the next five games without effort. Moses struggled with his eye-lids and went to the toilet once. The rules allowed you to splash water on your face, but you could not drink stimulants. When he returned and sat Tito caught a whiff of disinfectant. He had a strange vision of Moses drinking cleaning products in desperation and he laughed.

  ‘Something funny?’ asked Moses.

  Tito shook his head.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I’d rather not talk, if that’s okay with you.’ Conversation could be a joint strategy to stay awake until other tables had given up, but Tito knew Moses needed it more.

  They both laid out the seeds for a new game, but before they could start an usher came up to Tito.

  ‘You’ve been selected for review,’ said the usher.

  *

  Dr Clarke checked Tito’s pupils for reactivity.

  ‘Turn your eyes to the left,’ she said. ‘Uh-huh, now the right. Thanks.’

  Tito felt her proximity and found it uncomfortable. Her perfume, the quiet fall of her breath on the hairs of his face, the shifting of fabric, the sheer femaleness of her disturbed him. He had to distract himself from the stirring it began in him. He remembered that this person disqualified his friend for some reason.

  ‘How shall I win, doctor?’ asked Tito.

  She sighed and stepped away from him, back to her seat. Zero flirting from her side, but she was a woman and he had not been with one for an age. He shifted his thighs.

  ‘You need a guide,’ she said.

  ‘You mean a teacher. I’ve already consulted a previous winner.’

  ‘No, a guide is different. Long-distance runners focus on something else to get them through the race. You need some mental locus that will take you out of the task. Do you have a girlfriend?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Boyfriend?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Relax, I didn’t mean anything by it. There’s nothing wrong with it and some of the players that come through here have told me—‘

  ‘I am not a homosexual, doctor.’

  ‘Fine. What I’m saying…okay, listen. My granddad was in the war. He was an intelligence officer in a destroyer off the coast of Portsmouth and they got hit by a U-boat torpedo. They all abandoned ship and he had this big, top secret malarkey attached to his wrist. Shore was two hundred, two fifty metres away and he was not a great swimmer, but he started swimming. The case kept dragging him down and he jettisoned that after some minutes. As he swam he heard the screams of the dying all around. His arms started to go stiff and land was too far. He saw beside him a dog, a retriever, swimming alongside. The dog had been a mascot, he could not remember who it belonged to, but the lads liked it, called it Thug. As he made for land, for life, he kept checking on Thug, who kept up. Together, exhausted and wet, they made it. Thug died right there on the pebbles, just gave up, and my grandfather said he cried more than he had ever had. He said Thug saved his life.’

  ‘And this animal was his guide?’ said Tito.

  ‘Exactly.’ Dr Clarke checked her monitor. ‘There are no drugs in your system, Mr Ebunorisha. You can go. Good luck to you.’

  *

  This time the fetish seemed to be taking a gouge out of Tito’s back. The tearing seemed to catch on something before it continued. Oh, God, it hurt.

  ‘Turn,’ said the voice. ‘Eat. Quickly.’

  Tito broke a tooth on the first bite, an incisor. Pain lanced upwards through his head and his eyes opened. He squeezed them shut instantly, but a grey-brown image fixed itself in his memory. He ate, and the dental pain disappeared. His bladder was so full, he could feel it pushing against his lower belly. The gap in his back muscles filled out and it no longer hurt.

  And wakefulness. Blazing, bright wakefulness coursing through every cell of his body.

  *

  Fifty hours of continual gameplay.

  Akeke was back, talking about lack of sleep. He spoke about some dolphins who sleep one cerebral hemisphere at a time, giving the illusion of staying awake perpetually.

  Moses was bleeding from the mouth. He had taken to biting himself in order to stay awake. Interesting, as such strategies go, but not effective. He had bitten the tip of his tongue and his inner cheek. His eyes were barely open and his jaw was slack. His hand was poised over a pit but the seeds in his hand had dropped. He did not notice. Tito saw him as a perfect artefact of the moment, a representation.

  A dark shape slithered across the ceiling and Tito looked up, and screamed. The sound woke Moses. ‘What?’ he asked, staring around.

  ‘Lack of sleep can cause hallucinations,’ said Akeke.

  There was nothing on the ceiling.

  Tito’s bladder swelled, and demanded to be relieved. Again. In addition he had a constant, low-grade headache right behind his forehead, like a psychic aftertaste. His body was numb in the parts the fetish had eaten away. It felt like they were not his own. Some parts were entirely without sensation while others tingled, itched, or had pins and needles. He sowed five seeds and took six from Moses’ house, then, with great reluctance, he asked to go to the gents.

  *

  ‘If you won, how come you still live here?’ asked Tito.

  Kanako laughed. ‘Everybody asks me that sooner or later.’ Her words were slurred now, edges of consonants taken off by the spirit.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I spent it.’

  ‘All of it?’

  ‘You’ll come to understand, young one,’ said Kanako. ‘Tell me, can you stand pain?’

  Tito remembered being whipped by his father, twelve lashes of the koboko on his back for a minor infraction. Welts, weals, broken skin, blood on his shirt. Not his father, his master. He always mixed them up. One day, when he was fifteen, he resolved not to cry and held his peace until the twenty-fifth lash.

  ‘Yes, I can stand pain.’

  ‘Good. Good.’

  Kanako produced a small carved mahogany statuette. Ugly.

  ‘Never hold it with your left hand, never place anything on it, never place it in flowing water. Cup your hands, get the wate
r and wet it from there. Then close your eyes. There will be pain, but no matter what, keep your eyes closed. Do you understand?’

  Tito picked it up and brought it close to his face. It had a slight stink.

  ‘What is it called?’

  ‘Does it matter? Do not let it get thirsty but do not drown it.’

  ‘How will I get it in there?’

  ‘They do not mind good luck charms. You will have frequent medical examinations and drug testing, but as long as you don’t have a coffee sweet or an amphetamine lollypop you can bring whatever you want in. They’ll search you for weapons or anything that can be used as a weapon.’

  ‘People bring weapons?’

  ‘Strange things happen when people can’t sleep. Perceptions can be distorted, judgements impaired.’

  *

  The lights were too bright.

  Tito could feel all his nerves light up, from the tips of his fingers, back to his spine, up to his brain. If there was a power failure he would glow in the dark with the eyes being the focus of blazing beams of illumination. His eyes might as well be propped open with struts, and he saw everything. He had no inclination to blink and the eyeballs dried out, so he kept drinking, even though…bladder, toilet, fear.

  He played ayo automatically now, brain completely disengaged. He won game after game until Moses collapsed. A cheer went out from the stands, but Tito was not interested. On the other tables, which he had ignored till now, three other players remained. The ushers took Moses away and brought the player in waiting to Tito. A short, dark, skinny boy called Jide who plunged into harvesting Tito’s seeds. He was clearly good at ayo and counted the pits with ease. You could gauge the skill of players by how quickly they conceded hopeless games. This player could predict the outcome of a game after ten turns. He won every game. Which meant nothing because he yawned twice a minute, while Tito was all things bright and wonderful.

  Shadows flitted across the ceiling. Tito was used to them now, vague, indistinct shapes, suggestions of dark movement that loved his peripheral vision but shunned his direct gaze.

  Tito played, but pictured his father-no, his master. Dying. He had suffered a stroke the week before. He dribbled from the right side of his mouth and could not shut one eye. He could barely grunt, although he seemed to understand what was said to him.