“How convenient for you.” I spat, walking back and forth between two gargoyles.
“Tell me who he is. I have a right to know. I know you know something.”
He looked down to the ground, the sadness in his face so palpable even the gargoyles concrete expressions may have changed slightly. “Your mother was raped. Your grandfather is your father. She went to see him and… I don’t think he was himself.”
“That’s not true!” I replied but horror was building inside me. That feeling of seeing something awful and being unable to look away. Pain shot through my stump, the taste of nausea filled my mouth. I ran to the side, vomiting into a hedge. Suddenly, certain things made sense; my mother sleeping in the afternoons, her emotional distance from me sometimes, the lies she told to save us from the truth.
Tears ran down Mervyn’s cheeks. His eyes filled again as he turned the chess Queen in his hand. His chest swelled as though a river of sadness would split it open and carry us both away. I trembled watching the look of despair on his face, the pain there. I felt sick seeing Anon appear between the gargoyles, reaching into their mouths to skim her hands over the secrets they knew. Something inside me seemed to be realigning, travelling somehow. A searing pain shot through my head, then my chest. The gargoyles turned their heads, hissing into the dark.
Mervyn placed one hand on my shoulder, gently raised me up.
A part of me was dying from the shame, another crumbling from the weight of it.
I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt like nothing, a tiny speck under a shoe.
“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, pulling away. I couldn’t thank him for saving my life, for stopping my mother from drowning me. I stumbled through the hallway, deformed again in the light, blinded by tears. Bath water ran down the walls, its sloshing sound slipping through the plughole, filling my chest.
Outside my legs buckled in the night. I left the pale chess Queen crying in Mervyn’s pocket and the gargoyles holding bits of a battered chessboard chased the small openings on me, widening in the cold air.
Echo, Belly and the Rubik’s Cube
When I arrived at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos I couldn’t bring myself to call Mervyn yet. I knew we needed to talk but I was still hurt and confused about being a hidden thing. Peter Lowon’s diary sat in my handbag. Outside, the driver of a yellow taxicab between mouthfuls of pineapple slices informed me the drive to Benin was long. I thought of my mother Queen. I imagined she took Peter Lowon’s diary and the brass head all the way from Africa to London, her only connections to the father whose footsteps she trailed as a little girl. I imagined she read the diary from cover to cover many times, knew it like the back of her hand; that when she passed her first school exams, she ran home to it and heaved bittersweet breaths of success over its pages. That she studied his scrawl and doodles, imitated them. And after she kissed the first boy who whispered chewing gum flavoured nothings in her ear and turned out to be completely useless, she weighed it in her hands and eyed it with resentment. He cursed her by leaving her that legacy. It was the curse of the broken-hearted, the way that only a father can.
Weirdly, I remembered it then: the black and white photograph from the diary. I fished it out, held it at the corner and stared at the faces, the creases. It hit me, I recognised him. Peter Lowon was the man from the café scene that trespassed regularly in my head, the one where I always struggled to hear what was said, the man who was both father and grandfather to me. He was out there, somewhere. I had met him once before. It was a memory after all, a fallen snowflake becoming a tear.
Peter Lowon Journal Entry July 1964
Dear Queenie,
I am a killer. I am a coward. I am your father.
If you find this, then you know I have gone. I was brought to this place and feared this day. The day you know what I have done. Please keep this diary, here are honest pieces of me I can offer you, hold them up to the light. I want to apologise for bringing shame on my family. I cannot make amends; I can only say that sometimes people do desperate things, terrible things. I ask for forgiveness. Queenie there are no good or bad people don’t let anyone tell you this, these lines are blurred daily. The bad we often see in others, we recognise in ourselves, bouncing off our own hand made mirrors. We are all flawed people trying to make our way. Should you choose to find me one day, I am out there waiting.
Tell your mother I’ve always loved her and I’m sorry for being the man she suspected I was. There is no blade to cut my weakness away, no shot to numb the darkness out. Would you believe me if I told you I am a prisoner of myself? I wish so much more for you. Queenie, you are me and I am you. This is the one thing I see with so much clarity; through you I was born twice. One day you will have your own child, and you will know a joy no words can describe, no mathematical equation can depict. It is pure, purer than water, purer than air, injections of life into the blood. And you will make mistakes too! Queenie I am in pain, the kind of pain that makes you run inside to bleed on your carpet privately. I worry that one day you will forget what I look like. I worry you will see me in the faces of strangers. See the black and white picture inside this journal? I am the one on the left laughing. In case you find yourself forgetting: THE ONE ON THE LEFT. Please keep it with you.
With you I laughed. I worry about other things too: that your mother will grow old hating me, that she will count her grey hairs and hold me responsible for each one. I worry you may marry a man like me, that life will beat the importance of knowing yourself out of you. I fear your anger and emptiness within you long after you have stopped calling for me. I have cheated you and myself.
I no longer have the strength to be mad because it has been sapped by a tree sprouting roots somewhere. Wherever I am I will be running from myself. Imagine no day without night, night without the day; there is no end to this. It is an empty well running through the homes of underground creatures we never see, a tunnel through the chests of farmers toiling the land, it is the hidden void where our dreams pile up like dead bodies. It leads back to me. As for the brass head, please get rid of it. Give it to a beggar man to sell, throw it in a river or gutter. I should never have brought it into my house; if you keep it you will bear the burden of the cursed and pay in a currency not found on earth.
Today is so ordinary Queenie. You are playing by the outside tap, counting coins for your bank by the white sugar cube wall. It is the worst day of my life. It is the last time I will see you throw your arms up so trustingly to me, or hold a terrible crayon colour drawing that I will say is perfect because it is. Or attempt to measure your laugh, something that cannot be done. You cannot tell that tomorrow your world will be different. Right now the mayguard is lazily swatting flies from his face, no longer pretending to do his job. The house girl is peeling yams in the kitchen. Aunty Eunice is hanging clothes on the washing line, a yellow vein shot through the sky, which is throbbing, swelling with lost years to come. Your mother is standing at my shoulder. Life carries on, Queenie. When you have ceased asking questions and my name has turned to dust in your mouth know that:
I am the father whose feet you danced on, I am a million broken stars at your fingertips, I am the night sky’s discarded brother, I am a blanket made of rain. I am the conscience searching for your footsteps; I am the Harmattan wind whispering secrets that will fall into the foamy hem of the sea and wash up on the beaches of other countries as rough pebbles and hollow seashells.
I am beating.
I am
I-
Benin
My guide Nosa didn’t talk much but when he did, he made it count. He seemed to be casually efficient with everything; expressions, explanations, even arguments. Illustrated by his curt dismissal of a driver he’d cut across earlier in traffic, swatting the irate man away like a mosquito. It was sweltering; the heat made my skin clammy and my white, cotton blouse clung to me. Anon and I sat side by side in the back seat, restless from the hot material, woozy due to the occasional jostling and headine
ss of being in Africa. Our palms grazed ancestor’s heartbeats.
Dust swirled into the scenes around us; the long stretch of granite strip twisting like a concrete snake in the heat, its offshoots holding items of luggage for passengers yet to collect them. Bike riders swerved in between vehicles, car horns blared loudly as the traffic continued to build. Buses and vans blocked each other off in the rising din. In the car side mirrors, barefoot children sporting adult mouths sold bottled water, groundnuts, plantain crisps, and bread. Mothers carrying babies tied to their backs listened to their adult tongues pressed against the hollows of their spines. We passed the odd huge billboard now and again.
The brass head was stashed on the floor between my legs, at the bottom of a black bag, the rustling of a British Airways tag its only companion. I watched Nosa’s hands on the wheel, the lines of scarring across his knuckles and chest. A young girl chasing our car tried to sell me stones I’d already swallowed, rough and warm, they turned in her hand. When she shoved them in her pocket, they became new beginnings falling against humps in the road.
Nosa adjusted the rear-view mirror, throwing a quick glance my way. “Are you alright? We can stop if you need to be sick.”
“No, let’s keep going. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, even if we get there by evening. Carry on,” I instructed. Anon sat quietly, scrawling the name Adesua in the dust on the window. The flying plastic man Nosa had tied to the rear-view mirror spoke to us in our mother tongue.
Nosa’s long, elegant fingers gripped the wheel as if it was an instrument. His dimples deepened as he waved over a heavy set, big bosomed woman he knew. He bought a calling card from her. She thanked him, popping her gum, flirting and calling him a gentleman. We stopped for gas. I watched him from sly lids filling up our black Vauxhall Cavalier that had seen better days; his lean, handsome face broke into the contained expressions I was getting used to. He mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief, tucked it into his pocket, whistling as he angled the pump deep into the petrol slot.
“Do you think we could stop by a 7-Eleven at some point?” I asked, blocking the light hitting me with a hand over my eyes, acutely aware my English accent sounded even stronger in these surroundings. He laughed, features transformed in amusement.
“This isn’t London. We don’t have 7-Elevens and shops every twenty minutes. Why can’t you get what you need here?”
“They don’t have what I need here,” I replied, fidgeting in my seat, refusing to confide that the warning pains of my period had hit my stomach that I was worried I’d bleed on his seats.
Instead, I asked, “How did you get those scars on your chest?”
“Oh that,” he said nonchalantly. “Armed robbers cut me there and in my stomach on this route one night, left me for dead.”
I wanted to ask what an Economics major was doing hauling passengers back and forth over a route that had nearly killed him but I didn’t. Instead, I watched the map Anon drew on the window fading a little, as the day got darker.
Clay
It was her dead babies that led Filo out of the palace. She’d been feeding the chickens on the grounds when she stopped midway, yellow grains spilling from her palms into the mouths of her children, who’d gathered around her in a semi circle. The chickens went silent. Her babies began to cluck. Filo understood their new language. This was what Kalu the medicine man had promised her. Watch for your children, they will come back to you. They will lead you to your future, he professed, laughing in the rainwater that fell over their naked bodies.
Kalu had been her secret companion since the day she’d found him in that clearing in the forest, half-starved and clutching a handful of white bones to his chest. After she nursed him back to full health, they continued to meet away from the watchful eyes of the palace and planned the unravelling of the Oba, the king who had cheated them both. It was Kalu that helped her call the spirits of the previous kings. And it was Kalu who told her what was deemed to be her weakness was actually her greatest strength. Nobody would suspect the mad wife of setting the wheels in motion, of turning them with a sure finger. Filo sent her babies to cause the very thing her Oba had mocked her for.
At night she slept in her quarters rubbing her stomach, watching it grow, pregnant with the silent silhouettes of her children. She called to them, clucking her tongue and chasing their lost features in the night air. She and Kalu built their likenesses from clay, painting their mouths blood red, giving them white bones to hold as they were dispatched all over the palace, a quiet, invisible army dogging the Oba’s footsteps, toying with his perception, shattering in his vision.
That bright day at the palace, her babies came back to her, glorious in the light, speaking the tongue she’d taught them. They ate from her hands, led her past the swirling activities, past the guards they’d left temporarily blind and into the waiting arms of the day, touching the promises of the future.
And so the small procession of dead babies continued to cluck on the long, dusty trails they followed, telling Filo about the parts they’d played in the fall of a kingdom, changing into their chicken guises when Kalu’s whistles became warning winds.
Benin
“How far are we now?” I asked, pushing snapping branches away from my face.
My armpits were damp and the ache in my stomach had only intensified over the lengthy walk we’d had across seemingly acres of, rough, sprawling terrain. Two jagged people the Gods had carved in a hurry, crossing dense, wild forests that threatened to swallow us. We’d left the car parked on a thirsty, empty stretch of road. The small plastic man Nosa jokingly named Baba dangled from the rear-view mirror knocking against his reflection after I’d spun him one last time. A faulty water pump by our parking spot had given me nothing but hot air.
“Nearly there.” Nosa answered, talking through a stick of sugar cane. His long strides ate up the ground. He carried a shovel in his left hand as if it weighed nothing. The thwack thwack of the cutlass in his right hand cut a path for us. “The ground’s changing, this is royal land,” he said, slowing down a little for me to catch up.
The black bag slung over my shoulder bobbed against my side. Since the accident, most people either acted awkwardly or didn’t quite know where to look. Not Nosa though. “What happened to you, lion fighting?” he’d commented that first time I’d met him playing cards outside the Western Union stand by the bus depot. And somehow his lack of concern at offending me was refreshing.
Nightfall arrived. A flock of birds shaped like a plane’s wing flew ahead, calling out to their two-legged relatives. I knew when we got there because the air changed. It was thicker somehow. Dead kings had drained all the water pumps, which hissed in the heat. Nosa fished a torch from his pocket. Anon began to lead the way. She guided us to the gutted terracotta palace, glimmering in the night. The hairs on my neck stood to attention. We passed through old ghosts wandering the grounds, touching walls that resurrected under our curious fingers. Anon took us past the palace walls, past its chattering rooftops, waiting to tumble into the vast sky. We trudged deep into the dark, into a clearing in a hidden forest. Anon began to dance and cry over the land, her feet softening the soil. I knew then that she was dancing over her grave.
I fell to my knees, digging beneath her footsteps. Nosa had lost his sugarcane stick to a lonely ghost who was using it as an instrument, playing a melancholy tune into the lost kingdom. He followed suit, sinking the shovel into the ground. My hand grew bolder in the soil. We dug until my fingers ached and the past scenes from the palace became tiny broken objects in my peripheral vision. We buried the brass head deep in the ground. When we came up for air, Anon had stopped crying and was offering her limbs to the torchlight.
For the first few weeks, I slept like a baby. I felt human again. I’d gotten a one-way ticket so took my time rambling about. Sometimes in the early afternoon, I’d walk up to the local bus depot; weave my way between the vans and street vendors brandishing magician’s tongues, darting around in
every direction, unwittingly chasing the journeys of hands at the wheel. I’d catch a bus to one of several bustling markets. There, I’d barter with sellers to buy material and small wooden figurines I didn’t need. I’d stand at the edges listening to the din, pidgin in the punishing heat, sandals covered in dust, waiting for my mother’s tongue to migrate into the noise, bending in the light; moist with all the half-truths she’d told me.
I learned how to make goat pepper soup from Mama Carol who ran the boarding house I was staying at, a ramshackle white building where clusters of mosquitoes shaped like small countries sang on the netted, peeling green door before dying mid-conversation. I attempted to make the soup one day, but the goat’s head pressed its mouth into the gap, telling me the stones in Africa tasted different. Sometimes, on his way back from a run, Nosa would stop by. We’d sit out in the breeze drinking palm wine, discussing the house he wanted to build and how he found himself visiting the scene of his near-death, collecting his organs again and again as if they were passengers. We’d watch the scrawny local dog chasing its tail in front of other houses, before dragging random things to the side of the road.
I accidentally got a job helping the local tailor. It started when I sought advice about making items from the materials I’d bought. She let me use her back room. I began making curious things; small market scenes, interactions of people I’d spotted in the day, headless creatures stumbling towards a sun. It became a kind of therapy, producing objects in the hot back room with the fan blowing on my skin. And the yellow and black butterfly fish swam in the window as though it would survive in any surface. News spread. In town, people started to call me the one armed wonder.
London seemed a world away.
Butterfly Fish Page 31