Chapter 48: Chapter 48

CHAPTER 41

Teju woke up the next day with an empty self. The previous night, after his uncle had dismissed him for the night, his uncle’s third wife who had introduced herself as Ajoke had cleared a space for him in a vacant room which was now a storeroom. She laid him a bunk-sized bed on the floor. He was sure the bed was infested with bedbugs, so he asked for three extra wrappers and he was given. He spread two of these wrappers over the bed sheet. He used the third wrapper to cover him from the impending attacks of two breeds of bloodsucking insects- the mosquitoes and the bedbugs.

He did not find his sleep easily. In fact, he would not have found sleep even if he was beaten by tsetse flies. The thoughts that played like jazz music in his head were so loud, entwined and almost unintelligible like the voices of a thousand barbarians. The voices, both outlying and near crammed themselves in his head. Each of them was fighting in order to be heard like a horde of radios speaking discriminately. Teju turned and twisted in his bed. He experimented with every sleeping position he could access in his mental database.

The mosquitoes came in their unnumbered multitudes, playing their violins to the voices blaring out in his head. He slapped the air and clapped. He slapped his body parts whenever he felt the proboscises of mosquitoes penetrating even through the wrapper he had wound around him. He swung a piece of cloth viciously at the mosquitoes in the air. It was such a brisk and very unworkable reversal of fortune. Only two days ago, he had slept in his large snug bed that danced ballet to the rhythm of the grievous silence between Simi and him. But another type of silence had emerged and had shadowed his life superciliously. It was the silence of a naked emptiness.

Teju wanted to think. He wanted to meet with his fate after killing a senator’s daughter, even long before his fate had the slightest chance to find him out. He knew as much as it was necessary that the majority of crimes, which involved homicide, were never solved in the country. But then, the majority of these culprits did not go around killing the heirs of politicians unless they have a powerful backing. Anyone who sought to see the face of the tiger with a hurricane lantern would surely see the wrath of the tiger. Teju did not want to bask in the illusion that the tiger would spare him for any reason.

To him, he had vanished without a trace. He did not need to barricade himself with fear that trampling boots would come knocking at the door. Even with that, he had no inner peace, neither an inner war. It was just an empty feeling of being alone in a precarious wilderness. He had removed his SIM cards from his phone but had not chewed them. He had obliterated his Facebook and Instagram accounts, and all other accounts, with the exception of his email. But he would not log in into his email any time soon. To the best of his knowledge, he had vaporised himself. He had ‘unpersoned’ himself. He had better chances of keeping himself out of custody now that he had severed his connection with the wider world.

However, it seemed he still heard some outer voices beckoning him to justice in his head. He still heard, though indistinctively, the trampling of boots at the doorstep and the piping of the sirens. He still saw, though dimly, robust men and women in black and blue uniforms, looking stonily here and there for him. Everything practically became imaginable. He imagined that a bounty was placed on his dead or alive head. He imagined large banners or paper-sized bills with his face printed on them. It had a deadening and emergent caption underneath- WANTED. He imagined the banners and bills circulating across the country, including Igbo-ora. He imagined the screwed up face his uncle would put up in unmixed confusion as he held in his hands one of the paper-sized bills with his face on it.

He imagined himself blacking out of existence and existing records as though he was never born. He envisioned himself coming out of his non-existence to become a new man as if he was born an adult. He could christen himself with a new name. He would have a new occupation, a new educational background, a new identity and then a new lifewithout a woman. The thought of being without Simi for the rest of his life made his heart sink like a sword thrust in flesh. He imagined himself living as though nothing had happened or whatever happened was not sufficient to be paid any attention to.

He tried to sleep. He shut his eyes for a while, but he could not concentrate on the sleep he was trying to summon. Instead, a new-fangled set of thoughts came kicking around his head like naughty toddlers. He reached for his phone as his last resort and plugged his earphones to his ears. He browsed through his musical collections to find the set of music genres that could appeal to his nerves. His nerves needed a means of relaxation. He sorted out the slow tempo songs of Celine Dion and Michael Jackson, and the reggae of Bob Marley and Waje. He would have loved to include Asa’s rock and roll in the playlist, but he was too tired and anxious to get some sleep.

As he listened to each song in random sequence, his inner self which seemed to be scattered, started to coagulate into wholeness. The violin symphonies of the mosquitoes were drowned. The impending attacks of the bedbugs became negligible. He did not know when he dozed off. He only knew he woke up the next morning.

The sun was up when he opened his eyes to the actual realities that had come to stay in his life. The first thing that struck him as he laid on his back, watching the ceiling was that he had dreamed, just like always. But there was a thin line between him and his dream, and that thin line was the feeling of barrenness. He was drained from the inside. He could see with the corner of his eyes a bedbug scuttling away from him but he paid no attention to it. He could feel a strange wetness down his trousers. He brought down his hand and rubbed the wet part of his trousers with his middle finger. He felt some thick and slippery moisture there, and that was when he realised that he had had a wet dream.

He listened to his new but familiar world. It was the small world that shielded him from his threatening nemesis. He listened to the cooing of the brown pigeons at the window shades, the crowing of passing roosters, the bleating of wandering goats, and the clucking of local breed chickens eating around. He listened to the sounds of moving motorcycles on the street, the yelling of names, commands or threats by mothers to their wards. He listened to the hooting of ‘e ka a ro o’, ‘a ku ese ana’, ‘ooo’ between elderly neighbours.

He walked out of the room, stretching till his hands nearly brushed the dirt-absorbed cobwebs draping down the ceiling. The house was quiet, but he could hear audible movements in the backyard. The equanimity of the milieu charmed him. He walked down to the backyard to see who was at home and to give a deferential salutation to whoever it was. It was Ajoke. She was busy with cooking.

She was in a brown wrapper without a top. The wrapper covered her breasts down to her thighs, leaving her arms and shoulders bare. She wore a neatly plaited hair-do called suku. Each cornrow was sleeping on its own before coming together at the back of her head as if they were forced to fuse together. It struck him that she was youthful and beautiful in the most natural way. Perhaps it was because of her plaited hair which somehow pushed forth her oval-shaped face. She seemed friendly also with the way she sounded. It seemed she was more than pleased to be the one designated to keep his company at home. Whenever she bent over to pick an object on the ground or to open and stir the contents of the steaming black pot, Teju saw her bland and clay-coloured thighs. He almost had a sneak peek on what was under the wrapper. He wondered if the wrapper around her was the only thing between him and her stark nakedness.

From the little conversation he had with her, he had gathered that his uncle and his two wives have gone out in search of their daily bread. As he walked back into the house, going out to the veranda of the house, he wondered why his uncle had decided to leave his youngest and the most beautiful of his wives alone at home with him. It seemed like a very bad idea. He found a wooden bench cast against the wall. He sat down and lolled against the wall. The sun was still in the process of gathering its strength for the afternoon, and the whitish harmattan haze had receded behind the rays of the sun.

Teju took in the surroundings of Igbo-ora. He listened to the whispering of its gigantic iroko trees as they gossiped about what had happened in Igbo-ora while he was away. He pinned his ears back to the keyed-up chirping and singing of the birds, many of which were busy with nest-making on the large and welcoming branches of iroko trees. He was fascinated beyond doubts.

He watched with an earnest keenness the school children and teenagers trotting along the street in their different brightly coloured uniforms. They had their Spiderman or Pokémon-customizedschoolbags strapped to their backs or hung across their shoulders. They spoke to themselves in impeccable Yoruba. It filled him with his rare childhood memories. By seven o’clock in the morning, he was always dressed up for school, in his fading and rumbled school uniform, his brown rubber sandals, his brown-tainted white ankle socks, his little leather-made and washed out schoolbag and his plastic basket.

He usually waited for one of his classmates and best friend, Emeka. Emeka was a fair-complexioned boy who was born in Igbo-ora but his parents were from the eastern part of Nigeria. They both trekked to school. It was a Roman Catholic primary school called St. Peters, a complementary establishment for a St. Peters church. After school hours, they both returned home together with their school uniforms and socks bearing different shade of colours.

Sometimes, Emeka would go home only to return to Teju’s house for a meal of amala dudu or amala funfun with ẹfo sọkọ, and eja sawa. And some other times, Teju would go to Emeka’s house and he would be treated to a meal of yellow ẹba with ogbonasoup or Bangasoup, and pomo. They would do their homework and then go out to play ‘catcher catcher’ in the streets. Emeka was a swift runner, and Teju hardly caught him. However, if they played ‘ice and water’ with other children, they were always in the same team, be it water or ice. And they usually routed other teams, any time, any day, inasmuch Emeka was in the team.

Sometimes, they rolled car or motorcycle tyres through the streets. Emeka always outran him whenever they raced. He was faster and much stronger. He remembered his father sitting alone outside the house in his armed chair at sundown. He recalled his Dad looking with sad elderly eyes into the starry sky and listening to his Radio Nigeria-tuned radio. He was not one of those men that loved playing the game of ayo or ‘draft’ with friends. He did not talk loudly and drink beer with friends or visiting them. He preferred to sit alone and listen to how the military government were planning to return the government to civil rule.

He could see a group of women working on large plastic drums of fermented cassava, the scent of it oozing mildly. One of the women was a little separate but was inclined to the others in such a way that one could tell she was one of them. She sat over a large plastic bucket of fermented cassava, separating the unyielding fibres from the cassava. Another woman was spreading the fibre-free cassava lumps on a large plastic sheet for it to be dried by the sun. Some others were busying stacking the cassava lumps in sacks, after which they would tie them up and place big stones or heavy metals on them so as to de-moisturise them.

The drained cassavas would later be used to make fufu and garri. They were all talking about a funeral party they were to attend the coming weekend. They gossiped with such fast-paced and unsullied Yoruba that Teju could only grasplittle keywords from their conversation. At the far end of women’s compound, there was a shade made with tree branches and palm fronds. Under the shade were big pots, short wooden stools, and two hardened mud fireplaces. It struck him that there was an identical shade at the backyard of his uncle’s house. That was the kitchen of typical Igbo-ora indigenes.