by TJ Benson
Everything is new after rain. The air is rinsed, fresh to the taste. Things are clearer. If you are lucky and you have a family, you might behold something in their faces you have never seen before. Streetlights really glow, when you can find them, and the ring of a laugh travels further. Rain brings the season of relief. It uncoils the taut countenance the dry season has wound people into. The perfect remedy for February’s heat. It comes sometimes in March, sometimes April. Plants that survived stop holding their breath. Everything is softer; even a mother’s scold carries a moist lining. Feet can wiggle in the mud and André takes off his shoes to try this. It is squishy-squishy and he starts giggling. When his feet wiggle deeper, clay getting between toes, he bursts out laughing. Rain lubricates laughter.
The streets are empty. The small houses on either side have their curtains drawn or their windows covered with cardboard to prevent what he luxuriates in from coming in. So he is alone in the world. At the corner of his street he stops to examine a small ditch where erosion has left miniature ridges, delicate fish scales of sand. He squats and pokes one ridge to see if it will laugh.
The sky rumbles, so he jerks up and runs all the way home, his heart a frozen weight in his chest, freezing his blood anytime he dares to think of stopping for air. There is the occasional flash of lightning and ah, to get home before one strikes him! Older children say that ever since lightning struck Mr Sly last year, his head went kolo. He started beating his wife and drank plenty ogogoro. André runs and runs.
The house is open and empty when he gets there and whenever it is empty and open like this you can feel the rush of people who have lived here in the past.
‘Mummy!’ he calls, shuttling from room to room, from kitchen to her studio, then to the backyard. ‘Mummy, where are you?’
Thunder strikes just then and he rushes inside before everywhere flashes white with lightning. Shadows on the wall chase him to the living room, where he finally falls behind a chair, folding his body up, wrapping his arms round his legs, burying his face into his thighs and grinding his teeth, waiting for it to be over.
There is someone shivering beside him. He looks up to see a boy just like him, wearing the same blue-check shirt and blue shorts and black sandals, except this boy looks more terrified and is about to cry.
‘What is your name?’ André asks, forgetting his terror for a moment.
The boy lifts his head from his lap. ‘I don’t have name.’
‘Liar. Didn’t your mummy give you name?’
He shakes his head.
‘What are you doing in my house? This is my house. Go to your house. Don’t you have house?’
‘I am fearing.’
‘The rain?’
He nods.
Thunder claps and the windows flash white, and they scramble back into their foetal positions, panting.
‘Let us make rain stop,’ André decides once the rumbling subsides. ‘Let’s sing.’ He begins, ‘Rain, rain, go away.’
The boy joins in, ‘Come again another day.’
‘Little children want to play.’
The boy looks up at André. ‘I am not a little boy.’
André considers this for a moment. ‘Okay, let’s sing another one. Do you know “The Day Is Bright”?’
The boy nods so they sing,
‘The day is bright, it’s bright and fair. O, happy day, a day of joy.
‘The day is bright, it’s bright and fair. O, haaappy day of joy.
‘Mama Jollof rice!’
They both explode into giggles after belting out the last line. If a child added that last line on the assembly ground, a caning would be the reward. André tried another song.
‘Paw-paw is a kind of fruit! Paw-paw is a kind of fruit!
‘Sweet like sugar, yellow like Fanta,
‘Everybody likes paw-paw!’ they shrieked.
By the time Max got home from extra lessons, the house was empty again. It still carried that ancient air from decades of use, and André was nowhere. When the father and mother returned, he told them and the father was furious: ‘Where were you?’
‘We were doing extra lessons. I told him to wait for me; I told him, o he will not hear word. Rain was falling sef. I went to his class and his Aunty Jolade said he has come home already.’
‘Then where is he?’
‘Leave Macmillan,’ said Sweet Mother, putting his school bag onto the chair, strangely calm, and Max could tell this was because of The Thing. ‘André is missing and it is not his fault. We need to call the police. Or contact your people in the military.’
By 9 p.m. ‘the military’ had scoured the town for ritual killers and child kidnappers. André returned a few minutes to ten, shuddering with clenched teeth and saliva dribbling at the corners of his mouth.
‘Jesus!’ screamed Sweet Mother, as if she only just realised he had been missing. She leapt out of the father’s embrace and swooped down on him at the door, squeezing him tight as if she would squeeze him back into her belly where he would be safe. She held his face between her palms; his cheeks burnt with fever. ‘You want to kill me, ehn? I did not kill my mother but you want to kill me?’
‘Where were you?’ The father was already looming behind her. Max stood as far and as near as possible. ‘What happened?’
‘I escort my friend to his house.’
‘Which friend?’ the mother shrilled, undressing him on the spot to check for any wound, any broken bone.
‘The one that followed me back from my school. Rain was falling so he came inside to hide.’
The mother and father exchanged looks, then led him inside. The father showered him while Sweet Mother went to the kitchen to make some food.
Nobody could see Max was suffering with remorse.
‘What is his name?’ asked the father as the mother laid him down to sleep after a meal of hot akamu spiked with mashed ginger for the fever and sweetened with mashed coconut.
‘Me, I don’t know o,’ he yawned and stretched his little arms on the bed, and promptly fell asleep.
Max couldn’t sleep that night. He was scared that the moment he shut his eyes his little brother would disappear. He only pretended to be asleep when his father closed their bedroom door after Sweet Mother had left. A nasty fear, the fruit of the premonition that had plagued him ever since that night he followed the music of the drums, grew ripe and heavy in his chest. ‘You are responsible for your life’ their father had told them. Had he poisoned his brother with the thing those women had put in his mouth?
The next day Max started an investigation at school to find out who had followed his brother home. With his powers as head boy he was able to find out that no child in Primary One had followed André the previous day after the rain because none of them lived on Freetown Street. Max was restless.
‘André!’ he said suddenly in maths class the day after.
Mrs Bimpe swallowed her anger. ‘That is not the answer to minus two plus two.’
‘Sorry, ma. Zero.’
‘You’d better pay attention in my class. This is Primary Four work and you’re writing common entrance this year.’
‘Yes, ma.’
That night Max forced himself to sleep but it wasn’t a peaceful one. He kept tossing on the bed. He couldn’t focus on the blurry flash of watery images that made him restless, nor could he force himself awake. In semi-consciousness, he turned his efforts from waking to focusing on the images. He saw his little brother fall from a multi-storey building and jolted himself out of the dream into the night heat before André could hit the ground. Instinctively, he turned to his real-life André, who was squirming on his own bed, his arms and legs flailing, his little face contorted in fright, breathing heavily. Max dived into his brother’s bed without thinking, grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him awake.
‘I was falling,’ André said, and wrapped his arms and legs round his big brother’s body tightly, shutting his eyes, making the dream go away.
They slept like
that for the remainder of the night, tangled in each other’s arms, inhaling each other’s troubled breath. André wanted to tell their parents about the dream the next morning but Max said no. André conceded to Max’s logic. He had been lost and found just yesterday. No need to upset them again.
Actually, Max insisted they shouldn’t tell in order to avoid having to explain how he had entered his brother’s dream, because he didn’t know. He didn’t want to be taken to all those scary deliverance services for children in Rock of Ages. Mariama, the most beautiful girl in their class, had had her hair shaved the previous term after she had been taken there for deliverance from marine spirits. Everybody knew what had happened to her but no one asked her. No one talked to her any more, not even Busayo and Habiba, who once worshipped and braided her rich-black long hair. She never returned after the following holiday. He and André were never going to Rock of Ages. The dream thing was purely a coincidence and that was that as far as he was concerned.
Slowly their lives returned to normal; Sweet Mother went looking for a job, Father went to manage the hotel, and they spent their Saturdays reading Enid Blyton (Max) and Queen Primer English (André) or passing a ball in the front yard and waiting for Nepa light to come.
One night he was in the backseat of a car with André driving and a boy he could not see in the passenger seat. Now this was madness – how was André tall enough to see out the windscreen? How could his hands reach the steering wheel? It was these discrepancies that made him realise this was a dream; he would otherwise have been carried away by the authentic quality of sunshine streaming into the car. The crisp texture of the oneiric air he inhaled would have kept him deceived in the forever ride in the forever dream.
He also realised that this dream did not belong to him.
He was in André’s mind again.
As he was wondering what to do, the person in the passenger seat called their attention to something outside and Max saw the profile of the face before their car hit an object and started tumbling. They were too stunned to yell as their bodies fell against the car roof, fell backwards to crush against the back seat. Panic and raw, sour fear ate him up, felt more real to him than the bodily pain, because something told him they were running out of land, that there was a cliff ahead.
Just as their car tumbled into air, Max remembered this was a dream and snapped out of it. He fell back into his bed in their hot bedroom, and with the torque of the nightmare dived into his little brother’s bed, took him in his arms and rolled both of them to the ground to save him from the accident.
‘Accident,’ André explained, panting, face sprayed with sweat.
‘Who was that boy in the car with you?’
André’s eyes widened. ‘Did you see him? Did you see him? Did you—’
‘I say, Who is he?!’
‘He is my friend. The one that was hiding with me when rain was falling-falling.’
André curled up in his brother’s arms and went back to sleep. Max held him and before he fell back into sleep, the face of the friend he had seen in the passenger seat from the dream floated to him. It had been calm, cold even as the car lost control. It was André’s face. But it wasn’t André so he couldn’t sleep. He was terrified.
The next morning they tried to tell their parents.
‘Max used to be saving me inside dream. Yesterday I was inside accident but he enter my dream and save me.’
Max shrugged at his parents, ‘It’s happened before.’
The parents, who were still in bed, not entirely awake, begged for a few hours to think about it. In the end they didn’t believe André and Max, and André moved into his brother’s bed permanently.
This was just as well since an old man came to stay with them for a while and the father suggested they give up a bed for him. They came home from school one day and saw him sweeping the compound. Father told them this man was their grandfather. The man didn’t speak and they were sure he hated them but he washed everybody’s clothes. He simply could not keep his hands still; they had to be busy doing something. He cleared the cobwebs in the entire house, hammered the leaking roof at the back closed, pruned the overgrown Queen of the Night and dusted the windows. It was as if he would drop down and die if he was forced to stay still. Sometime in that inevitable undeterminable hour before morning when André woke up to pee, he would find the old man sitting on the kitchen floor, back against the wall, staring into the darkness, one foot tapping on the terrazzo in time to the music of the night.
Sweet Mother came up with an idea, those sleeping vegetables. Now that the garden had been groomed, they prospered furiously, spreading like spinach over other crops. The father was excited. What were those vegetables really – some mutant strain of spinach? Anyway, the children were terrified. The last time they ate those vegetables in soup they lost an entire day to slumber. There was no way they would wake up from a sleep induced by those vegetables, and now André was having homicidal dreams. What would happen if his friend decided to come?
‘I told you, it is just your imagination!’ said the mother. ‘Better behave; your grandfather is old and he needs to rest. We need to help him.’
‘And it’s been so long,’ added their father, giggling.
So they all ate yam porridge with the leaves for breakfast. Sweet Mother made sure everyone ate; this way, the old man would have no suspicion. While he was washing their plates she locked the back door. The whole house would sleep once the vegetables started kicking in so she spread a mat for him in the storeroom. As she walked out of the kitchen to the corridor, she turned back to look at him, impressed at his lack of curiosity. When she tried turning the key in the lock of the kitchen door to trap him inside, it refused to yield. Rust. She could still hear the clatter and clang of pots as he continued his washing-up. She forced down her panic and worked on the keyhole. She was already getting drowsy, couldn’t bear falling asleep on the corridor floor, so she gave up on the keys and crawled to their bedroom where her husband and the kids were already sleeping.
Nobody in the Quarters knew where Mallam Sani lived, but he always appeared early in the morning, patrolling the streets with the whine of his horn till dusk (which, rather than inviting people, warned them of his arrival), hawking his tiny vials of perfume which he had concocted with secret fruits and barks of trees and special petals of flowers and cinnamon and cheap vinegar. Like most people in the Quarters he usually avoided the last house on the right but he was having a bad sales day and the entrance door was slightly ajar.
‘Buy bottle, big bottle, sweet bottle, small bottle pipty-pipty!’
No one came to answer him. He knocked on the already half-open door and was surprised when it swung wide open for him to enter the house. He had opened this door on purpose. If asked, well, he had knocked, hadn’t he? He walked into the living room, piping ‘Big bottle, small bottle, sweet bottle, pipty—’, but no one answered him. He was desperate enough to go into his customers’ bedrooms if necessary. Ramadan was coming. How could he prepare for that with no money?
He turned at the end of the living room and was briefly surprised at the blast of sunlight coming from the kitchen’s open door. Two bare legs on the ground peeped from the doorway so he bolstered himself and turned into the kitchen. ‘Big bottle, small—’ He found a man stark naked on the ground, head twisted sideways from the upper body resting against the dead fridge, and exclaimed ‘Wayoo Allah!’ before losing balance himself and falling onto the naked man, shrieking and struggling out of the dead man’s embrace as his big bottles and small bottles cascaded over themselves and crashed to shards, erupting into an explosion of different smells in Sweet Mother’s kitchen.
He managed to finally wrench himself from the dead man, sweep up shards of his broken bottles into his wooden case and flee before Sweet Mother woke up from the slumber of that mysterious vegetable she had introduced into her porridge the previous day.
Disoriented by the power of the vegetables, she walked into the kitche
n nude and free for the first time since her second child was born, and was shocked to see her father-in-law on her kitchen floor, dead and perfumed.
She woke her husband up, overcome with remorse. ‘I think … I think I killed him.’
‘Come on, come on,’ he chided her, leaning back to yawn.
‘Jesus, how could I do such a thing! I already know he was an old man; why would I—’
‘He is not an old man. He had me before finishing secondary school. And he has been dead to me.’
‘How dare you say this in front of the children!’
‘It is the truth and you know it.’ He inclined his head to study his father’s face while Max’s heart jumped up and down in his chest. André stared at them with mild curiosity.
‘We agreed to raise these children in truth.’ The father winked at them before deciding, without any sorrow, ‘We’ll just bury him at the back of the fence.’
‘Haba, doesn’t he deserve a proper burial in your village?’
‘No.’
She shook her head in dismay and started turning away from him but he caught her arm.
‘You know why.’
She sighed and went to get a bucket of water and a rag. The children stood transfixed until she returned and bent down to scrub. But no matter how hard she or the father or either of their sons scrubbed, the perfumes remained. That particular spot would forever smell of wood and oranges and other sweet scents and bitter ones too, as long as they lived in the house.
Only André had seen Mallam Sani flee from the house through his window. His brother had woken him up from another death-dream and was rocking him like a baby when his eyes fell on the window and saw the man, but he didn’t know what to make of it. He would grow to think of death whenever he perceived the scent of strawberry or balmy citrus in the air, and whenever Max saw a dead body in medical school years later, he would be assailed with the unmistakable fragrance of roses and vanilla and the bitter choke of Biro ink.
Because of the mother’s use of sleeping vegetables to postpone hunger and the painting and the gardening work that could never be exhausted and the writing on the wall and the long wait for Nepa to bring back the light which was a phenomenon the children had never witnessed in their lifetimes, there was once a pot of tomato stew nobody could remember making. Yet everyone felt responsible for it. No one who stepped into the kitchen could resist the temptation to light the cooker, add a pinch of salt and stir. Even André, who was barely taller than the gas cooker, managed to stand on his toes, lift the lid off the pot and contribute his own quota of salt after Max had put it on to boil. The pot of stew outlived its normal lifespan outside a refrigerator this way. It didn’t occur to anyone to eat it with bread, which was the only processed staple food they could afford those days. There was a day nobody entered the kitchen because of vegetable sleep and so the stew was forgotten. If anyone had pressed their ears against the closed kitchen door they would have heard it simmering with malevolence.