The Spider King's Daughter

by Onuzo, Chibundu

  I lunge at her,

  When I toss the gun into the water, it makes a splashing noise before sinking to the bottom.

  ‘Abikẹ!’

  They both say my name and I can tell from my father’s voice that he did not wish to prolong the issue.

  I look at the gun, its shape undistorted by the clear water and for a moment, panic threatens to overwhelm me. Then I remember Mr T’s Plan C for if I did not kill Olumide and he did not kill me.

  ‘You must not go home,’ he had said. ‘It is the first place they will look for you since the girl knows your house. You must find another Abẹ Bridge and disappear into Lagos for a few weeks, maybe even months.’ My mother and Jọkẹ may think but the worst but it would not be forever.

  How had Abikẹ, the grandmaster of Frustration, missed that the boy I called my hawker did not exist? My pride is the thing most bruised.

  The distance between myself and the open door will take less than a second to cover. They do not call me Runner G for nothing.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  Her voice, toneless and painful, stops me.

  ‘There’s no need to ask such a question,’ my father says, taking another step towards the hawker. ‘I’ve told you. One of my rivals sent him.’

  Even now that I know I will never see her again, a part of me still cares for her opinion. There is still time.

  ‘Abikẹ, your father murdered mine.’

  I give him the benefit of the doubt and this is all he can come up with?

  ‘Who was your father?’

  I know my father. He is capable of murder but not for everyone.

  She does not believe me but still, she is asking questions. ‘Look, I have proof that he murdered my father and proof for other things as well. Do you remember the woman I worked with, Aunty Precious. She was sold into prostitution by your father. He’s a murderer and a pimp. I have proof. Signed letters, witnesses, documents.’ But she is not listening, or rather she is listening but she is not hearing.

  ‘You tried to kill me because my father killed your father.’

  ‘You don’t understand. You asked me to come here, you led me on, you confused me.’

  That first day on the road returned to me. I had been sitting in the back seat, we had caught eyes and without my beckoning, he had walked towards me already aware of who I was. I remembered his suggestions. Have the party outside, make sure your parents are there, keep the noise and the people who might stumble on us sealed in a canopy.

  ‘Who sent you?’

  Had she heard anything I’d been saying? One last time, I would explain. ‘It wasn’t about you. My father—’

  ‘It wasn’t about me?’ I shriek, despite my effort to keep my voice calm.

  ‘No it wasn’t.’ Not when I came to your house this evening. Why did you have to mention my father? Why couldn’t you just have said goodbye?

  ‘You tried to reach my father by killing me and it wasn’t about me?’

  I will always be the quickest route to Olumide Johnson for the Michaels and hawkers of this world. Looking for something to hold, I see my stiletto lying by the pool. With the full upward thrust of my hand, I smash its heel into the side of his face.

  I react without thinking.

  My father moves fast.

  Before I can wrest the shoe from her grip—

  The hawker’s arms are pinned behind his back.

  I struggle but he is stronger. I kick but he forces me down till my knees are touching the ground.

  ‘Abikẹ, it seems you want to play with your food.’ He twists his head until he can see his watch. ‘Hurry up. I have things to do.’

  She grips the arch of the shoe and looks straight into my eyes. There is no Abikẹ in that gaze. Only her second self, Abby.

  You slithered into my confidence.

  ‘Your father killed mine,’ I say. ‘He is a pimp, he has killed others, he—’ The heel lands in my mouth and drags along my gums.

  You deceived me.

  The stiletto slits down the front of my shirt, scattering buttons and exposing my chest.

  I threw a party for you.

  Systematically, she lands wherever my skin is torn from our first struggle. I cannot plead with my eyes, they are swelling.

  I changed my name for you.

  Once, she winces after a blow to the temple that makes me scream but the shoe and her left hand never stop moving.

  You deserve whatever happens next.

  Through a narrowing slit, I see the blood on my shirt.

  Abruptly my father shoves the hawker forward and his face thuds into the ground. ‘Enough. You have learnt your lesson.’

  I wipe sweat from my cheeks.

  ‘What should I do with him?’

  I try to rise but Olumide presses his foot on my neck.

  Looking at the blood dripping on to the white tiles, then the mouth that it is coming from, I do not know what I want my father to do to the hawker.

  As the pressure from Olumide’s foot pushes me into unconsciousness, I remember Jọkẹ and my mother and how I left them in the flat. They will wait one day, then two, then a year, then a decade, never knowing what happened to me.

  ‘Release him.’

  My eyes flutter painfully open. ‘What?’

  My hands push against the floor but his shoe moves to my neck, grinding me into the tiles.

  ‘I said release him.’

  Hope begins to rise through me. Perhaps I will see them tonight.

  ‘Abikẹ, don’t be silly.’

  I lie still.

  ‘It’s bad enough that you let him deceive you. To reward him and the people that sent him by letting him go?’

  Still she does not answer.

  ‘Abikẹ?’

  A second, lighter foot joins his.

  ‘The people that sent him think killing him is the worst you can do.’

  He laughs, a deep, uncontrolled laughter of a man who is very amused.

  ‘What do you intend?’

  I strain to hear what Abby will say.

  While I am thinking, my father kneels, the full weight of his body pressing down on the hawker’s back. Slowly, he bends until his mouth is hovering over his ear like an insect over a flower.

  ‘Emmanuel Toyosi Sodipo,’ Olumide whispers. ‘You look just like him.’

  Whatever my father says, the effect is immediate. The hawker’s back arches, his legs struggle but he is pinned down.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I just told him something he needed to hear.’

  ‘What?’

  My resolve falters.

  ‘What did he say to you?’ I say prodding the hawker with my foot.

  I lift my head, struggling to speak but Olumide kicks me down and my teeth bang against the slick, metallic tiles.

  ‘Abikẹ, I don’t—’

  ‘One of you answer me!’

  ‘He killed my father,’ I finally manage, my lips pushing against the floor and slurring the words.

  ‘What? Let him speak.’

  The pressure on my head is reduced. ‘He killed my father,’ I splutter, ‘and he just said his name. That was what he said just now.’ The effort leaves me coughing blood on to the floor.

  ‘Is this true?’

  One ear is pressed to the ground and I hear Olumide walking away before I feel that he is no longer on top of me. I twist my head to see him standing in front of Abikẹ, his body almost completely blocking her.

  I look up and his eyes are hard. ‘Abikẹ, I’m only going to tell you once. This boy was sent by a rival.’

  When had he become so sure? A few minutes ago it had only been a possibility. ‘What did you say to him just now?’

  When he answers his words are slow and sharp and clear. ‘You either believe me or you believe this boy.’

  I see the figure before they do but I cannot tell who it is, blood hazes my vision.

  I see him but I do not know who he is. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ my
father says.

  Who is it?

  ‘Get out and forget what you’ve seen tonight,’ he paused before adding, ‘for your own good.’

  ‘I should forget?’ a male voice says in a rasping tone I have heard before.

  The stranger steps forward and I recognise him.

  ‘Did you think we wouldn’t find out?’

  ‘Get out of this place,’ my father says, turning from my half-brothers and walking towards the hawker.

  ‘We heard about your new will,’ the voice says, closer now.

  My father stops. ‘And so what?

  ‘You can’t cut us out like that.’

  ‘And who is to stop me?’

  ‘Me.’

  When the bullet enters my father, he stands up straighter, his shoulders broad and menacing and for a moment it seems he is invincible. The boy shrinks. I wait for my father to deal with him but nothing happens. His raised arm hangs in the air and then he topples into the pool, a thick ribbon of blood swirling from his chest.

  The boom of a gun resounds, a heavy object falls, plummets, crashes past my ear and smacks into water.

  I want to scream but there is no time for screaming. The empty hole of the gun is staring at my face.

  ‘Give me a reason not to shoot,’ the voice says. It is male.

  ‘I’ve read the will. If I die, next in line are two charities and his old university.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘Kill me then but just know you’ll be doing it for charity.’

  He smiles when I say this and I see his teeth are like mine, small with his gums drooping lower than normal.

  ‘Who is that?’ I hear him say.

  He points at the hawker.

  ‘Someone I used to know,’ I say, gathering my clothes, unembarrassed by his stares.

  ‘Is he the one that did that to you?’

  He points at my neck.

  ‘Go and see what I did to him,’ I say, slipping my dress over my head.

  I feel someone standing over me but when I try to look up, his face is covered in moving lights.

  ‘Why are you looking at him like that? Do you know him?’ I ask the boy who is still staring down at the hawker now that I am dressed and ready to go.

  ‘He looks like a friend of mine.’

  I see the hawker’s gun still lying at the bottom of the pool where I flung it. ‘Please get that.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Then shoot me. I am too tired.’

  There is another splash.

  He comes out of the pool holding the gun.

  ‘Take off your clothes and wring them,’ I say, ‘or else a trail of water will follow us.’

  He strips to a tattered pair of underwear. Now he is the one that looks ridiculous. I scan the room one last time.

  ‘Let us go and discuss. We’ll go to my living room,’ I say curtly. The tone of our relationship must be set now.

  As I slip into unconsciousness it becomes so obvious who the second person is, that the realisation almost pushes me back into consciousness. Almost.

  We leave the pool room with his weight between us. When I switch off the light, my father is left floating in the darkness and for a moment I falter but it is only a moment. He would want it this way.

  Epilogue

  abikẹ

  ‘Speak to Dosunmu,’ I say for the fifth time today. I worry that I am growing too dependent on him but Dosunmu is the only one who knows anything about the companies and loyalties and factions I have acquired by being my father’s sole heir.

  They would not take me seriously at first. I am an eighteen-year-old woman who has chosen to run Johnson Corporations instead of going to university. They did not know that for seven years I had learnt more from playing Frustration than any of them had ever learnt in a textbook.

  I studied the picture that had arrived from Dubai. Hassan was rounder now; a small mound was beginning to rise under his shirt and he was smiling with one arm slung round the neck of a camel. He had been superb in the witness box. In monosyllabic answers, he denied everything the prosecution levelled at him but refused to explain how his fingerprints had gotten on the gun, what the gun was doing in his room, why his diary was filled with pages detailing his hatred of his oga.

  ‘Aunty. Shop is doing well,’ I read off the back before running the photo through a shredder.

  It would not do for the wrong person to see this picture of a man supposedly dead by firing squad. Newly promoted Commissioner Julius might want a second bribe for sneaking Hassan out of jail the night before he was meant to be shot. I would have to make sure Hassan stopped sending these.

  At first, I considered letting Wale reap the consequences of his actions. I thought of the scandal. Johnson fratricide. Johnson kills Johnson. Father vs Son. So in exchange for him persuading his brothers to give up their claims to my inheritance, I allowed him to walk free. I did not leave them penniless but it is clear that what they have is from my magnanimity. To think the fool believed my father would leave his billions to charity.

  I considered making the hawker take the fall. One testimony from me would have damned him but again – the scandal. No doubt he would have brought up the issue of my father having killed his. Perhaps other allegations would have been raised and they might have stuck. Johnson killer. Killer Johnson. Pimp Johnson.

  Suggesting Hassan was genius. Not that everything Dosunmu suggests is genius. He thought we should have found the hawker and at least threatened his family. I was not interested. The more I thought of that night, the more I was unsure who to believe. Was he sent? Did my father murder his? Dosunmu thought my questions irrelevant. Either way the hawker knew too much but were he to speak, he would have implicated himself. To save his family, he would remain silent and lose his integrity. It was a gamble but almost a year has passed and my way has proved right.

  Dosunmu will find in the coming years that I am not my father, though the more I understand the webs my father wove, the more I respect the man. Sometimes, I wish he were the one explaining the rudiments of a rigging to me instead of his stooge, who after years of double dealings cannot speak in plain English.

  Sometimes I think I even miss him. It should have been him standing behind me when I saw my first supplicant. If he had been there, this Bank MD would not have had the temerity to glance past me and ask, ‘Dosunmu, what is going on here?’ Yet, despite this posthumous esteem, I am not my father. There are industries formerly affiliated to Johnson Corporations that I have severed all contact with. As I have explained to my inherited stooge, they tarnish my brand.

  That the hawker was right about the trafficking does not mean my father is guilty of murder. There is no record of it, not that he would have been stupid enough to leave one, but Dosunmu denies it.

  ‘It was fortuitous that Sodipo died in that accident. It put an end to the case he was building.’ That was all he would say. When I pressed he replied, ‘Abikẹ, don’t waste your time on the past. We have more serious issues on our hands now.’

  I noted the ‘we’ but I let his slip pass. He was right. I had more serious things to worry about. Some of my father’s companies were trying to force me out of my position as CEO. There was no time for wondering who killed the hawker’s father. Even if he had been telling the truth, what then? Would I drop everything to go back to a boy that had almost strangled me to death?