With a force no one thought he could muster, Ikenna hauled the dead man off the seat of the car. The man fell out of the car with a thud, blood spattering on the ground from his broken face. I screamed and began to cry.
“Keep quiet, Ben!” Boja cried, but I could not stop; I was very afraid.
Ikenna got in the driver’s seat and Boja sat beside him, Obembe and me in the back seat.
“Let’s go,” said Ikenna. “Let’s go to Daddy’s office in this car. Close the doors quickly!” he cried.
With the key in the ignition beside the large wheel, Ikenna started the car and the engine roared and blared into life with a prolonged groan.
“Ike, can you drive?” Obembe asked, trembling.
“Yes,” Ikenna said. “Daddy taught me how to some time ago.”
He revved the engine, pushed the car backwards with a jerk, and it went dead. He was about to kick-start the car again when the sound of ammunition in the distance kept us at a standstill.
“Ikenna, please drive it,” Obembe moaned, flapping his hands. Tears had begun to course down his face, too. “You asked us to leave the school, now we are going to die?”
There were bonfires and burning cars everywhere, for Akure was singed that day. We’d neared Oshinle Street on the east of the town when a military van filled with soldiers in full combat regalia sped past. One of them noticed it was a boy at the wheel of our car and tapped his friend, pointing in our direction, but the truck did not stop. Ikenna maintained a steady course, accelerating only when he saw the red clock-like arm of the speedometer move to a larger number, the way he’d always watched Father do it every time he sat with him in the front seat when he took us to school. We verged onto the road, staying close to its shoulder until Boja read out the sign Oluwatuyi Street and the small one beneath it with the inscription Central Bank of Nigeria. Then we knew we were safe and had escaped the 1993 election uprising in which more than a hundred people were killed in Akure. June the 12th became a seminal day in the history of Nigeria. Every year, as this day approached, it seemed as if a band of a thousand invisible surgeons, armed to the teeth with knives, trephines, needles and extraordinary anaesthetic materials, came with the influx of the north wind and settled in Akure. Then at night-time, while the people slept, they would commit frantic, temporal lobotomy of their souls in quick painless snatches, and vanish at dawn before the effects of the surgeries began to show. The people would wake with bodies sodden with anxiety, hearts pulsating with fear, heads drooping with the memory of loss, eyes dripping with tears, lips gyrating in solemn prayers, and bodies trembling with fright. They would all become like blurred pencil portraits in a child’s wrinkled drawing book, waiting to be erased. In that grim condition, the city would retract inwards like a threatened snail. And by the dim squint of dawn’s light, northern-born inhabitants would exit the town, shops would close and churches would convene for prayers of peace as the fragile old man that Akure often became in that month would wait for the passage of the day.
The destruction of that newspaper shook Boja greatly; he could not eat. Again and again he said to Obembe and me that Ikenna had to be stopped.
“This cannot continue,” he repeated many times over. “Ikenna has lost his mind; he has gone mad.” The following Tuesday morning, after a clear sky had bared its teeth, Obembe and I had slept late, having told stories into the rump of the night. Our door forcefully jerked open, rousing us to a swift awakening. It was Boja. He’d slept in the sitting room where he’d been sleeping since his first struggle with Ikenna. He came in looking sullen and cold, scratching every part of his body and grinding his teeth as he did.
“Mosquitoes nearly killed me last night,” he said. “I’m tired of what Ikenna is doing to me. I’m really tired!”
He’d said it so loudly I feared Ikenna might have heard it from his room. My heart raced. I looked at Obembe, but his eyes were on the door. I sensed that, like me, he was looking to see what might come next through that door.
“I hate that he doesn’t allow me into my own room,” Boja went on. “Can you imagine? He doesn’t let me into my own room.” He beat his hand on his chest in a gesture of possession. “The room Daddy and Mama gave both of us.”
He removed his shirt and pointed at places on his skin where he felt he’d been bitten. Although shorter than Ikenna, he closely followed him in maturity. Signs of hair growth had appeared on his chest, and actual hair now webbed his armpit. A dark shade trailed from under his navel down into his pants.
“Is the parlour so bad?” I asked in an effort to calm him, I did not want him to continue because I feared that Ikenna could hear it.
“It is!” he cried even louder. “I hate him for this, I hate him! No one can sleep there!”
Obembe cast a wary glance at me and I noticed that, like me, he was consumed with fear. Boja’s words had dropped like a piece of chinaware, its pieces scattered about. Obembe and I knew something was coming, and it seemed Boja knew, too, for he sat down and placed his hand on his head. Within minutes, a door opened from within the house, creaking aloud, followed by footsteps. Ikenna entered the room.
“Did you say you hate me?” Ikenna said softly.
Boja did not reply, but kept his eyes fixed on the window. Ikenna, visibly stung (for I saw tears in his eyes), gently closed the door and moved further into the room. Then, casting a spear of a scornful glance at Boja, he took off his shirt, in the custom of the boys in the town when about to fight.
“Did you say it or not?” Ikenna shouted, but did not wait for a reply. He pushed Boja off the chair.
Boja let out a cry and rose to his feet almost immediately, panting furiously, shouting: “Yes, yes I hate you, Ike, I do.”
Most times when I recall this event, I plead frantically for my memory to pity me and stop at this point, but it is always futile. I’d always see Ikenna stand still for a moment after Boja uttered those words, his lips moving for a long time before the words “You hate me, Boja” finally formed. But Ikenna uttered the words with so much power that his face seemed to lighten with relief. He smiled, nodded and blinked a tear.
“I knew it, I knew it; I have only been foolish all this while.” He shook his head. “That was why you threw my passport into the well.” A look of horror had appeared on Boja’s face at those words, and he made to speak, but Ikenna spoke on in a louder voice, switching from Yoruba to Igbo. “Wait! Were it not for that malicious act, I would have been in Canada by now, living a better life.” And as if every word Ikenna said—every complete sentence—struck him, Boja would gasp, mouth agape, and words would begin to form, but Ikenna’s “Wait!” or “Listen!” would drown it out. And some strange dreams, Ikenna continued, had further confirmed his suspicions; in one of them, he’d seen Boja chasing him with a gun. Boja’s face twitched at this, his face flushed with a mixture of shock and helplessness as Ikenna spoke. “So, I know, my spirit attests, to how much you hate me.”
Boja walked springily to the door wanting to leave, but stopped when Ikenna spoke. “I knew,” Ikenna was saying, “the moment Abulu saw that vision that you were the Fisherman he talked about. Nobody else.”
Boja stood still and listened with his head bent, as if ashamed.
“That is why I’m not surprised when you now confess that you hate me; you always have. But you will not succeed,” Ikenna said suddenly now, fiercely.
He made towards Boja and struck him on the face. Boja fell and hit his head on Obembe’s iron box on the floor with a loud clang. He let out a jolting cry of pain, stamping his feet on the floor and screaming. Ikenna, shaken, took a step back as if teetering on the mouth of a chasm, and when he reached the door, he turned and ran out.
Obembe stepped forward towards Boja once Ikenna left the room. Then he halted suddenly and shouted, “Jesus!” At first, I did not see what Ikenna and Obembe had seen, but did that instant: the pool of blood that was filling the top of the box and trickling down to the floor.
In distress, Obembe
ran out of the room and I followed. We found Mother at her garden in the backyard where, hoe in hand and a few tomatoes in her raffia basket, she was talking with Iya Iyabo, the neighbour who had reported our fishing, and we called out to them. When Mother came into our room with the woman, they were horrified by what they saw. Boja had stopped wailing, and now his body lay still, his face hidden in his bloodied hands, his body in a strange state of tranquillity as if he were dead. Beholding him lying there, Mother broke down and wept.
“Quickly, let us take him to Kunle’s Clinic,” Mama Iyabo called out to her.
Mother, agitated beyond measure, hurriedly changed into a blouse and a long skirt. With the help of the woman, she lifted Boja onto her shoulder. Boja remained calm, his eyes gazing vacantly, as he wept noiselessly.
“If anything happens to him now,” Mother said to the woman, “what will Ikenna say? Will he say that he killed his own brother?”
“Olohun maje!—God forbid!” Iya Iyabo spat. “Mama Ike, how can you let such a thing into your head just because of this? They are growing boys and this is common with boys their age. Stop this; let’s take him to a hospital.”
Once they were gone, I became conscious of the steady sound of something trickling to the floor. I looked and saw it was the pool of blood. I sat in my bed, shaken by what my eyes had seen, but it was the memory Ikenna had conjured up that disturbed me. I remember that incident, although I was only about four at that time. Mr Bayo, Father’s friend in Canada, was returning to Nigeria. Having promised to take Ikenna to Canada to live with him whenever he returned, Mr Bayo had got Ikenna a passport and a Canadian visa. Then the morning Ikenna was to leave with Father to Lagos, where he was to board the plane with Mr Bayo, Ikenna could not find his passport. He’d kept the passport in the breast pocket of his travelling jacket and hung it in the wardrobe he shared with Boja. But it was no longer in that jacket. They were running late and Father, furious, began a frantic search for the passport, but they could not find it. Afraid the plane would leave without Ikenna, as he would need to go through a new process to get the passport and travelling documents all over again, Father’s anger escalated. He was about to smack Ikenna for his carelessness, when Boja, hiding behind Mother so Father wouldn’t beat him, confessed he’d stolen the passport. Why, Father asked, and where was it? Boja, visibly shaken, said: “In the well.” Then he confessed to having thrown it there the previous night because he didn’t want Ikenna to leave him.
Father dashed for the well in delirious haste, but when he looked, he saw pieces of the passport floating on the surface of the water, damaged beyond repair. Father piled his hands on his head, shaking. Then, as if suddenly possessed of a spirit, he reached for the tangerine tree, broke off a stick, and ran back towards the house. He was about to descend on Boja when Ikenna intervened. He’d arranged for Boja to throw the passport in the well because he did not want to leave without him; they would go together when they were older. Although I’d come to understand later (and even our parents did so) that this was a lie, Father was overcome at the time by what Ikenna had deemed an act of love, which now, in this moment of his metamorphosis, had become to him an act of ultimate hatred.
When Mother and he returned from the clinic that afternoon, Boja appeared many miles from himself. Blood-stained gauze, with cotton wool underneath, covered the gash at the back of his head. My heart sank when I saw it and I wondered how much blood he’d lost and shuddered at the pain he must have endured. I tried to understand what had happened, what was going on but I could not; the reckoning of these things was not cheap.
Throughout the rest of that day, Mother was a mined road that exploded when anyone stepped within an inch of her. Later, while preparing eba for dinner, she began to soliloquize. She complained that she’d asked Father to request a transfer back to Akure or move us down with him, but that he hadn’t. And now, she lamented, his children were splitting each other’s heads. Ikenna, she continued, had turned into a stranger to her. Her mouth was still moving when she set dinner on the table, while each one of us pulled out the wooden dining chairs and sat on them. When she put out the last thing for dinner, the hand-washing bowl, she began to sob.
Silence and fear engulfed the house that night. Obembe and I retreated to our room early, and David, scared of being around Mother in her harsh mood, followed us. For long before I slept, I listened for any sign of Ikenna but heard none. Yet even as I waited, I secretly wished he would not come home until the next morning. One reason was my fear of Mother’s fury, what she might do to him if he returned in this climate. The second was my fear of how, after they returned from the clinic, Boja had declared that enough was enough. “I promise,” he’d said, licking the tip of his index finger in a gesture of oath-taking, “I will no longer be kept out of my room.” And, to make good his threat, he’d retired to sleep there. I was afraid of the potential danger of Ikenna returning and finding him there and this filled me with the immense premonition that Boja would, someday, retaliate, for he’d been deeply wronged. And as my body yielded to the forceful closure of that day, I began to ponder how far the venom in Ikenna had travelled and feared where it would end.
THE LOCUSTS
Locusts were forerunners:
They swarmed Akure and most parts of Southern Nigeria at the beginning of rainy seasons. The winged insects, as small as the brown brush flies, would leap out of porous holes in the earth in a sudden invasion and converge wherever they saw light—it drew them magnetically. The people of Akure often rejoiced at the arrival of the locusts. For, rain healed the land after the dry seasons during which the inclement sun, aided by the Harmattan wind, tormented the land. The children would switch on bulbs or lanterns and hold bowls of water close so they could knock the insects into them or cause them to shed their wings and drown in the water. The people would gather and feast on the roasted remains of the locusts, rejoicing at the oncoming rain. But the rain would come down—usually on the day after the locust invasion—with a violent storm, plucking out roofs, destroying houses, drowning many and turning whole cities into strange rivers. It would transform the locusts from harbingers of good things into the heralds of evil. Such was the fate the week that followed Boja’s head injury brought to the people of Akure, to all Nigerians, and to our family.
It was the week in August when Nigeria’s Olympic “Dream Team” got to the final of the men’s football. In the weeks before that, marketplaces, schools, offices had lit up with the name Chioma Ajunwa, who had won gold for the ramshackle country. And now, the men’s team, having beaten Brazil in the semi-final, was now in the final with Argentina. The country was mad with joy. As people waved the Nigerian flags in the summer heat in faraway Atlanta, Akure slowly drowned. Thick rain, armed with a fierce wind, which had left the town in a blackout, poured through the eve of the night of the final match between Nigeria’s Dream Team and Argentina. The rain dragged into the morning of the match, the morning of August 3rd, and pummelled zinc and asbestos roofs until sunset when it weakened and ceased. No one went out of the house that day, including Ikenna, who spent most of the day confined to his room, silent except for times when his voice rose as he sang along to a tune on the portable radio cassette player that had become his main companion. His isolation had, by that week, become fully formed.
Mother had confronted him for the injury he’d inflicted on Boja, and he’d argued that he was right because Boja had threatened him first. “I could not have kept quiet and watched a little boy like him threaten me,” he’d insisted, standing at the threshold of his room even though Mother had begged him to sit down in the sitting room and talk. Then, after he’d said that, he burst into tears. Perhaps ashamed of this outburst, he ran into his room and shut the door. Mother would say that day that she was now certain that Ikenna was obviously out of his mind, and that everyone should avoid him until Father returned to bring him back to his senses. But my fear of what Ikenna had become was already growing stronger by the day. Even Boja, despite his ini
tial threat that he would no longer be cheated, complied with Mother’s directions and stayed clear of Ikenna’s way. He’d now fully recovered from his wound and the plaster had been taken off, revealing a curved dent where the stitch had been made.
The rain stopped in the evening, close to the time when the match was to begin. Once it drew near, Ikenna disappeared. We’d all waited for electricity to be restored in time to see the crucial match, but at eight in the evening, there was still a blackout. All day, Obembe and I sat in the sitting room, reading by the dim light of the grey sky. I was reading a paperback edition of a curious book, in which animals spoke and had human names and all of them were domesticated—dogs, pigs, hens, goats, etcetera. The book did not have the wild ones I liked in it, but I read on, drawn by the way the animals spoke and thought like humans. I was deep into the book when Boja, who had been sitting quietly all along, told Mother that he wanted to go see the match at La Room. Mother was seated in the sitting room playing with David and Nkem.
“Isn’t it too late now—must you see the match?” Mother said.
“No, I will go; it is not too late—”
She seemed to ponder it a little while after which she looked up at us and said, “Okay, but be careful.”
We took the torchlight from Mother’s room and went out into the darkening street. All around there were pockets of buildings powered by generators that buzzed noisily, filling the neighbourhood with a confluence of white noises. People generally believed that in Akure, the rich bribed the National Electric Power Authority branch to interrupt power during big matches like this one so they could make money by setting up makeshift viewing centres. La Room was the most modern hotel in our district: a four-storeyed building, walled around with a high barbed-wire fence. At night, even in the absence of electricity, the bright fluorescent lamps stretching from within its walls cast a still pool of light over a stretch of the surroundings. La Room had that night, as on most nights when this power interruption occurred, turned its reception hall into a makeshift viewing centre. A big signboard outside the hotel attracted people with a coloured poster with the logo of the Olympic Games and the inscription: Atlanta 1996. And indeed, the hall was full when we got there. There were people in every corner of the hall, in different positions, trying to glean a view from the two fourteen-inch television sets placed opposite each other on two high tables. The viewers who had arrived the earliest had occupied the plastic seats closer to the television sets and a growing crowd now massed up behind them, watching.
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