Blackass: A Novel

by A. Igoni Barrett

  ‘Nah because of oyibo you dey talk to me anyhow!’ growled the labourer in a final burst, and before the woman could retort he leapt over the benches, slapped aside the lace curtains with his food-smeared hand, and stalked out.

  ‘Where you dey go – pay me my money!’ the food seller screamed. She made to rush after the man, but Furo, horrified at the thought of a scuffle breaking out at the entrance of the buka while he was still inside, threw out his arm, grabbed the woman’s wrist, and spoke without thinking. ‘Please, madam, I beg you, let him go. I will pay for his food.’

  ‘Why you go pay?’ the woman demanded, straining against Furo’s grip. ‘That agbero chop my food finish, curse me on top, and e no get money to pay! Hah, no way o. I go show am today sey I be Okpanam woman. Abeg leave my hand!’ With a heave she yanked her arm free, then spun around and bounded through the curtains.

  Furo felt a twinge of relief as he returned the two hundred naira to his pocket. After glancing around the buka in search of an exit plan that didn’t involve wasting good money, he reached for the bottle of Pepsi the labourer had left behind. He wiped the bottle mouth clean and drank down the chilled cola as he sat waiting. When he heard sounds of the fight – shouts of many voices and the stampeding of feet – he set down the emptied bottle, picked up his folder, stood up from the bench, then strode to the side curtain and slipped out of the buka.

  Late afternoon, the red-faced sun slinking off west: offices shut and the shops shutting, the traffic hawkers multiplied in the frenzy of the day’s dying, the motorways choked with cars and the sidewalks with crowds, the zombie drag of feet drumming the earth. As Furo wondered where to go, he wandered around Ikeja, caught in this surge, the headlong rush of Lagos at the end of day. Inside and outside, from the pull of his thoughts to the push of his surroundings, nowhere was there respite from the muddle of images, sounds, smells.

  Inside, he thought:

  The streets of Lagos at night were dangerous for anybody, more so for him; and sleeping on the streets was an option only for the insane, the gang-affiliated, or the suicidal.

  Outside, he saw:

  Surly faces, ferocious stares, armies of swinging legs – a burst pipe in a roadside gutter. It spouted water in a fine spray, the ground for metres around churned into mud by feet.

  He thought:

  He couldn’t afford a hotel, and police stations were to be avoided. He would most likely be arrested as a foreigner with no papers.

  He saw:

  Splotches of faeces lining the ground beside a flyover whose concrete sides were plastered with posters of pastors and politicians; and, under the bridge, littered around, their edges fluttered by the draughts from passing cars, were torn newspaper pages, crumpled notebook sheets, discarded lottery tickets, streamers of tissue paper, all stained with shit.

  Inside:

  He was sure he could find a church, they were scattered around all corners of Lagos, but finding one that left its doors open at night was another matter. Even churches had learned the hard way that robbers in Lagos had no fear of the Lord.

  Outside:

  Hills of festering garbage at street corners, and mounds of blackish sludge along the edges of gutters from which they were shovelled out, and everywhere rubbish – punctured plastic, shattered glass, mangled metal, rain-pulped paper – covered the ground.

  Furo thought: There is nowhere to go.

  Near the end of a deserted street Furo had turned into to get reprieve from the stares and the noise, he saw a three-storey apartment block with a collapsed roof. The building was uncompleted, abandoned-looking – it seemed defeated by the ambition of a middling architect – and there was a clandestine gap in its fence of bamboo posts. Furo cast a quick look around to make sure no one was watching, and then he approached the fence, dropped to his hands and knees, and squeezed through the opening. The ground on the other side was thick with elephant grass; through the waving blades he saw islands of stacked concrete blocks, their sides and tops washed by the sun’s rays and dotted with sunbathing lizards. He rose to full height and listened, then picked up a rusted tin that lay at his feet and flung it through the open doorway of the house, and listened again. The house echoed with silence. The lizards raised their bright red heads to gleam at the intruder from motionless eyes, and stiffening their blue-speckled tails in readiness to flee, they communicated their displeasure at the disturbance by doing push ups on the baking blocks.

  Wading through the tall grass, which nicked his hands as he slapped the blades aside, Furo approached the building and entered. Desiccated mould, dust-heavy cobwebs, crumbling exoskeletons, flaking rust – the smell of neglect filled the large room he stood in. The floor was covered with cement dust in which insects burrowed; a shovel with a broken haft lay half-buried in the dust; a wheelbarrow missing its wheel was upturned in one corner; an opened cement bag lay under a window, its contents hardened into jagged rock. The holes punched in the walls for scaffolding rods and electrical wires gaped open, and the concrete slab that ceilinged the room was studded with wood chips, tangled wires, glass shards, the wishbone of a bird.

  The rest of the ground-floor apartment was in a similar state of incompletion, and Furo, after investigating for signs of recent visitors, mounted the staircase. His footsteps rang eerie in silence, and the creep of his shadow sent smaller shadows scuttling into darkened cracks. As he crossed the first-floor landing, he caught sight of a decayed carcass sprawled in the apartment doorway. Discoloured fur still clung to the bones, and traces of its mouldy odour hung in the air. For as long as the dog had lain there, and likely longer, the house had seen no human visitors, Furo was sure. He decided that the second floor with its fallen roof was too dangerous to explore. After giving the first-floor apartment a cursory once-over, he settled on the master bedroom, which was far enough from the dog’s remains to ignore its lingering presence. With his feet he cleared the ground of debris under the window that opened on to the frontage, and then he set down his folder, sank on to it, and drew up his knees, rested his head on them. He was trying to read the time from the sun’s position when he fell asleep.

  It was dark when Furo opened his eyes. He stared at his surroundings, confused about where he was, until he saw his hands, pale in the gloom, and he remembered. Something he hadn’t thought of – mosquitoes. Those Brit-massacring heroes of West Africa’s anti-colonial resistance: the un-acknowledged national insect of Nigeria. The air was thick with the malarial bloodsuckers. Bomber squadrons of them circled over his head, whined past his ears, tickled his cheeks with their wings, and needled his imagination. His skin itched from their strikes, and when he grew tired of slapping himself he stood up, leaned out the window, and stuck his face into the coolness of the night. The grass below swayed and whispered in the breeze; the muted buzzing at the back of his mind rose to the shrill of crickets. The street beyond the bamboo fence had faded into blackness. There was nowhere to go, he thought, the blackness was closing in. By now his parents would be wondering about his absence. His mother must have discovered he had left his phone behind, and first she would whinge to his father about how dangerous Lagos was and how could Furo be so stupid as to go out without his phone, and by ten o’clock, when she had abused his father’s tolerance to her own limits, she would start phoning her bosom friends with the same complaints before contacting his own friends to ask if they knew where he was. Eleven o’clock would surely find her keeping a lookout outside the front gate, and by twelve, while his sister searched through his bedroom for clues of his whereabouts, she would be fixed in front of the TV as she watched the midnight news for announcements of hit-and-run collisions and petrol tanker explosions and motor park insurrections. After that he had no idea what she would do. He had never stayed out this late without informing his family.

  Furo could imagine, though, the terror his mother would feel. He could see the look of long-suffering that slackened his father’s jaw and reddened his eyes. He could hear his baby sister’s anguishe
d sobbing as clearly as the swishing of the grass below him.

  It was too much.

  It was too painful to think about the pain he was causing others.

  He turned away from the window and sank down to his haunches. Closing his eyes to the darkness, he made an effort to return to sleep.

  But he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t replace the lid on the emotions bubbling within him.

  He wished he had someone with whom to share his burden. If only he could go to his mother and say, ‘Mummy, something is wrong, look at what happened to me!’ And his mother would take control just like she did when he was seven and caught chickenpox from school. She would pacify his fears with promises of ice-cream binges. She would strip off his clothes and bathe him in warm, Dettol-smelling water, then rub him down with calamine lotion and set him loose to run shrieking around the house, her little war-painted savage. But he was thirty-three, too old now for blind belief in a mother’s healing powers. And, also, the chickenpox only lasted a few days; the calamine lotion soothed him, and the white coating it left on his skin could be washed off. This was the right thing to do, going away, the unselfish path to take, best for all concerned, of that he was sure. For his was not a condition like cancer, where his mother would spend her life savings seeking a cure; or a condition that allowed for denial, say schizophrenia, where she would spend the rest of her life as his carer. At least for cancer his family would know that their misfortune was shared by others across the world, and for schizophrenia there was still the hope that once in while the son they recognised would emerge from behind the phantasmal fog of his mind. What he had was neither physical nor mental, not in a sense that made any sense, and so it was as inexplicable to him as it would be to everyone else.

  If Furo were only able to sit across from his family, he would ask forgiveness for not opening the door to his mother. He would tell his parents to not worry too much about him, that things were looking up, that he’d finally found a job, and he would even share any particulars his curious sister might want to know about his adventures; but the one thing he couldn’t tell any of them was how he felt about going back. That was another truth he now admitted to himself, that from the instant he opened his eyes this morning he had felt a momentum building inside him, a feeling of freefalling that had grown stronger with each decision that pointed him away from his family. Alone in the darkness of this abandoned building, and despite the stinging mosquitoes, in spite of everything he had suffered through, the mere thought of a reversion to his former stasis was anathema to him. To make this admission even harder was his awareness of how much his family, and his mother especially, would mourn his absence. He was her son, flesh of her flesh and blood of her womb, and grieve was what mothers did when they lost a child; but beyond that, he knew she also counted him as her second chance to succeed in everything his father had failed at. She had said as much all his life, in roundabout adages and through her straightforward actions. His was the fortune and fulfilment his father had never attained. That was a son’s duty to a mother who had sacrificed her freedom on the labour bed.

  It had always been Furo’s duty to achieve for his mother’s sake. He kept his part of this umbilical pact by always giving his best, if not at his studies, then at examinations, and, as the dice rolls in the crapshoot of academic success, his best, for a time, was enough to satisfy her. All through primary school he never took any less than sixth-best position in class, and in the second term of his second year of secondary school, when he came top in class for the first time in his life, he remembered how his mother took him straight from school to her office in Onikan and announced to her colleagues, ‘My small husband has killed me with happiness!’ From that pinnacle there was nowhere left to go but down the hill. He still gave his best, he always did, as he tried to hold the bar of achievement that the small husband had set for him, but for reasons only tangentially related to a flowering interest in girls and their breasts, Furo found that the higher he went in school, the less acceptable his best was for his mother. By the time he got into the third-rate university at Ekpoma (and this after two failures at JAMB) even his mother knew that his employment prospects were too far downhill to ever kill her with happiness again.

  It was his mother he feared the most. She lurked in his earliest memories, memories so full of her that they had to be her memories too. Even now he remembered how, as a child in nursery school, she would arrive to pick him up at the clang of the closing bell, and the sound of her voice mingling with the other parents’ in the anteroom always awakened a stiffness in his shorts. Back at home, while she boiled ripe plantains for his lunch – this memory predated his sister’s crying existence – and then asked him, as she scrambled the eggs, to tell her all about his day at school, his chest would swell to tightness from his eagerness to obey. She listened, really listened, because he would later listen to her describe, almost lisp-for-lisp, his playpen escapades to his father when he returned from work at night. Did his father listen? He watched TV. Not the Betamax cartoons that Furo wanted, but the local news. Every day, schooldays and weekends, he would oust Furo from his TV throne and switch to News at 5, News at 7, News at 9. He drank his beer as he watched the droid-voiced newscasters, his face getting sadder and angrier, his haggard eyes stuck to the screen even when he threw back his head to suck from the bottleneck; and now, thirty years later, Furo recalled how he used to wonder why his father watched so much TV when all it did was make him ugly.

  Furo couldn’t remember when he began to see his father as a failure. His awareness might have sprouted earlier than 1991, but in that year he knew that something was wrong when his mother, in addition to running the house out of her purse, as she’d done ever since she gave up housewiving and took up a banking job that paid four times more than her husband earned, also took over the paying of her children’s school fees, because, as she explained, his father’s entire salary was being saved up for a major business venture he was on the verge of starting. Several years and many pay cheques later – by which time Furo, in his final year of secondary school, had learned from experience to stop speaking to his father on any matter concerning money – his father resigned from his eighteen-year service at the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, handed in his official Peugeot 504 and vacated his government residence in Victoria Island, and after moving with his family into the house his wife had finished building all the way over in Egbeda, he finally embarked on the long-vaunted adventure: his chicken farm.

  The farm was an obvious failure from its third month of operation and Furo, who in the meantime had finished secondary school and taken up unpaid employment with his father while awaiting the results of his JAMB examination, was there to see the unravelling of the dream. His father’s troubles started with the ten-thousand-egg incubator he had imported from China. This backbone apparatus, his proudest and most expensive investment in the farm, floated into Apapa port seven weeks later than promised, and after another five weeks of begging for receipts for the paid-up custom duties and arguing over demurrage charges incurred as a result of the withheld receipts and bargaining down the amounts demanded as bribes by custom officials for the release of the receipts, the incubator at last arrived at the farmland in Iyana Ipaja, only to be unpacked from its crates and discovered as an empty shell that would never hatch a chick. On that unlucky day Furo saw his father weep for the second and third times in his life, the second being in the afternoon as he realised he had been duped, and then again at night as he reported the calamity to his wife. While soothing her husband, Furo’s mother had suggested what everyone else was afraid to say to a sinking man seeking straws, that maybe it was just a packing error, but she was wrong, it was not, as every effort his father made to contact the company in Qingdao only proved he was the victim of fraudsters, and in the end he had to give up all hope of ever recovering his money, because, as his wife explained to his children, the NITEL payphone costs were gobbling up his left-over capital and, besides, the wo
man who always answered his desperate midnight phone calls only responded in Mandarin to his threats of litigation.

  The chicken farm never recovered from that blow. Neither did Furo’s father, who kept the business open mainly as an excuse to escape the house every day. By the time Furo gained admission to university and departed for Ekpoma, his father’s business was nothing more than an in-house joke and his mother had accepted her everlasting role as the sole financier of everything Wariboko. She covered Furo’s fees as well as his sister’s; she kept the house in food and settled the utility bills; she bought his father a second-hand Peugeot 405 so he could do the household shopping while she was at work; and every December, when the wild rush for Christmas chicken quickened the hearts of failed farmers across the nation, she granted the loan for the few hundred broiler chicks his father bought and fatted for pocket change. Furo couldn’t remember when it began to dawn on him that his father had settled for defeat in a war he still pretended to fight. He likely knew earlier than 2009, but it was that year, after he returned to his mother’s house upon completion of his youth service, that he realised it was his father he pitied the most.

  It was his sister he envied the most. Her confidence in herself had always exasperated her older brother, whose self-esteem was further bruised by his awareness that her self-belief was in no way misplaced. She seemed able to accomplish anything she set her mind to. Even as children she would win her own battles in the playground and then rush forwards to help out with his; she learned to whistle before him, despite being five years younger; from when she was three years old, whenever she and he left the house together, she insisted on crossing motorways without his assistance; even into their teens, whenever they were both caned for some wrongdoing, her tears always dried first. Then again, she had never faced the parental pressure he did – a woman can find a husband to take care of her, but a man must take care of his wife, Furo’s father was fond of saying – and yet she excelled at her studies to the point that even their mother accepted that her daughter was the best chance the family had of producing a success story. Aside from academics, his sister had a ravening appetite for leisure reading, and she was the only one in the family who spent money on magazines and novels. Sometimes it seemed there was nothing she didn’t know. It was from her that Furo learned how to start up and navigate through a computer (this process occurring over the holidays she had spent transcribing his handwritten final-year thesis into digital format), and after he graduated and returned to Lagos to seek a job, it was she who urged him to join Twitter – which she wasn’t on but knew enough about to assist him with opening his account – as it was perfect for self-advertising. She had even appeared on national TV. She did this through her own efforts, and in the face of her brother’s scoffing dismissal of her ambition, by trying for and making the hot seat of ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ – which, by the way, she might have been if her boyfriend Korede, who was her ‘phone-a-friend’ lifeline, hadn’t failed her at the eleventh question. She departed the show with winnings of two hundred and fifty thousand naira and arrived home to a hero’s welcome from her parents, and, from her brother, as ever, adoring envy.