Nights of the Creaking Bed

by Toni Kan

  I was the only one outside when the police arrived. I gave them names. I pointed to houses. I knocked on doors. I watched men taken away, neighbours I had lived with for six years. Eyes glared at me but I did not care.

  Upstairs, I held my throbbing hand with the caked blood and wept for those two. I knew I was done with that street. I knew the street was done with me too, so after I cleaned my gash, I began to pack.

  And I was still packing when I heard the screaming.

  Someone had found the missing kids; unconscious but safe in the back of a broken-down bus where they had gone in to play.

  The Passion of Pololo

  Pololo walks into his room and stops dead in his tracks, the tennis racquet slipping from his grip.

  His mother is lying naked in his bed and atop her is a naked young man.

  ‘Mo… mo!’ he tries to speak but the word will not be formed. Like an angler’s hook stuck in a fish, it will not yield easily.

  His mother has scrambled off the bed now and what he remembers years and years later is the image of his beautiful mother, naked breasts heaving, one hand outstretched in a plea, a finger on her lips urging silence.

  Pololo stares, unable to articulate the words that want to burst out, unable to mouth the word he loves the most. He cannot say “Mother” because the word is marooned. Pololo has begun to stutter.

  They hear the knock and stiffen. Pololo stares at them, stares at their eyes widening into scared orbs in their faces, guilty faces beaded with anxious sweat.

  ‘Paul, is your mum there?’ his father asks. But Paul does not answer, cannot answer.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ his mother says, her eyes begging him to be silent.

  Paul hears, rather than sees, the swish of a silk robe and then his mother is stepping out and he is standing there, leaning on the wall and looking at the scared young man, the one who lives next door with his brother, the one Pololo calls Uncle Mike, the one who is studying medicine at the university, the one who has been teaching him how to drive.

  They stare at each other and as the young man’s face blurs through the haze of tears that films Pololo’s eyes, he can hear his mother’s trilling laughter as she asks his father why they are back so early.

  ‘My friends didn’t turn up, so I played just one set with Dr. Osondu. You know he’s not feeling so well,’ he tells her.

  ‘Come to the bathroom, I’ll run you a bath.’

  ‘You must join me,’ his father says and his mother’s shy giggle is a knife twisting in Pololo’s gut.

  The young man can hear, too, and when the sounds die and they both know it is safe to leave, the young man scrambles into his clothes and, opening the door a crack and peering out, flees the house, leaving his sandals behind. From now on, each time Pololo awakes, the oversize sandals are lying there, screaming at him like an insistent cry.

  She smothers him with affection. Guilt is a sturdy tree, with fragile branches that droop with tenderness. He knows. She knows. And by his silence, he has become complicit. It is them, now, against his father. The young man is a faint footnote on a forgotten page of their sad story. But there are things that are more difficult to forget, images that will never go away, heaving breasts that will never age, or sag, or droop.

  His father is surprised at his stutter.

  ‘Don’t joke with something like that Paul. It could become a habit, you know,’ his father says.

  His father insists on calling him Paul, his given name. Every other person calls him Pololo, the pet name he unwittingly gave himself when, as a four year old, he had first tried to write his name.

  A psychiatric doctor, his father is always polite. He treats everyone like a mentally-ill patient. His words are soft, cushioned to avoid giving offence. His voice is always low, modulated so that it does not startle. Pololo watches his father across the dining table. He wants to tell him that this is not a joke. He wants to say, ‘My tongue is fettered by a secret I cannot utter.’ He wants to open his mouth and scream and yell and lay bare his mother’s shame. But he cannot. The image that rears up in his head will not let him. He watches his very intelligent father and wonders how he can be so blind.

  Back at school after the break, his friends laugh when he tries to speak and the words will not bud. ‘Po..po..po..lo..lo!’ they jeer and laugh.

  He is thirteen now and, like his friends, has discovered sex. At night, they sneak out of the dorm and head to the bathrooms. They leaf through the pages of a skin magazine and then, lined up against the wall, pleasure themselves until the white tiles are slimy with semen.

  When they are caught, the principal sends for their parents. His father is away on a course, so his mother comes instead.

  In the principal’s office, his mother cries and Pololo knows that the tears are not on his account. She weeps for herself. Guilt has her impaled on a stake.

  ‘They are young men, we know, and they are growing,’ the principal is saying. ‘But if we let this pass, they will corrupt the whole school and we don’t want that to happen.’

  The punishment is twelve strokes of the cane at the assembly hall and a letter of undertaking from the parents that their children will be of good behaviour, failing which they will be expelled.

  His mother signs the letter and as he walks her to her car, she keeps dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief. When they get to her car, she looks up at him. Her eyes are puffy and swimming in tears.

  ‘Please forgive me.’ These are the only words she says.

  The next Monday, when he steps forward to receive his punishment, Pololo survives the ordeal by focusing on the image that threatens to blind him, the image that will not go away.

  After the bathroom debacle, his mother comes to visit him every Sunday. After church, she drives the forty kilometres to his all-boys school. They sit, swaddled in silence, in her car, while he nibbles at the food she has brought him. Pololo doesn’t feel like eating, never feels like eating any more, so he saves the food and when it is time for his mother to leave, he takes the food flask and goes to his friends who are waiting.

  ‘Man, your mother is beautiful,’ they always say.

  And each time, Pololo stops himself from saying, ‘You should see her naked.’

  And that is the image that torments him, the ghost that haunts him. The only thing he saw when he looked in those skin magazines and cradled himself in his palms: naked breasts heaving, one hand outstretched in a plea, a finger on her lips urging silence.

  Home on holiday from his first semester at the university, Pololo is awoken by a searing pain in his abdomen and upper back. He cannot sleep. He gulps down a cup of cold water and doubles over with pain. Fighting the pain without success, he knocks on his parents’ door.

  They drive him to the hospital. It is cold. The harmattan wind is howling and his father has the windows wound all the way up.

  ‘Easy, Paul,’ his father says every time Pololo sighs or groans.

  His mother is sitting behind and each time his father says ‘easy’, she strokes Pololo’s clean shaven head and mutters a prayer. Oppressed by the weight of the burden she bears, his mother has found refuge in the church and in prayers, but the touch of her hand sires goose pimples on his skin.

  The doctor is a family friend and lives at the back of his huge clinic. Pololo is lying on the couch when he enters in his pyjamas.

  ‘Hello Dan, Bettina. Long time. Now, what is the problem, young man?’

  Pololo tells him about the pain and the doctor unbuttons his shirt and presses down on his upper abdomen.

  ‘Here? You feel anything?’

  Pololo nods. The doctor presses further down and Pololo shakes his head.

  ‘And your back?’

  ‘Yes, here,’ Pololo tells him, lifting off the couch to show him where.

  ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘Yes. In school, but it wasn’t this bad.’

  The doctor moves from the couch to settle behind his huge table and pulls on his glas
ses. He flips open the family casebook a nurse has brought in and begins to write.

  ‘You drink beer?’ he asks and Pololo nods. ‘You smoke?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you have an ulcer and I am surprised. Does it run in the family, Dan?’ Pololo’s father shakes his head.

  ‘So where is this from, young man? What are you thinking about? Girls, eh? You know they say you don’t get an ulcer from what you eat, but from what’s eating you. So what’s eating you, young man?’

  Pololo smiles and says, ‘I don’t know, doctor.’

  ‘We will manage it and see how it goes. If it comes back, you have to let me know. But the alcohol has to go for now, okay?’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ he says, getting off the couch.

  ‘And you shouldn’t let things bother you too much. You are too young to have an ulcer. Think of all the beer you will be missing, eh?’

  Pololo gets a jab for the pains and collects his drugs from the nurse and they drive home in silence.

  He sits at the back, thinking about the doctor’s daughter. He has known Isabel since kindergarten where everyone used to ask whether she was his sister. They all said she looked like his mother and, a young lady now, she looks exactly the way his mother looked in pictures taken when she was their age.

  He didn’t see much of Isabel during secondary school except when the two families met at church or social gatherings, but once they met again on campus they had become lovers, and friends going through his picture album always mistook his mother for Isabel’s mother.

  The first night they made love, his first time ever, Pololo had screamed out “Mother” and from that moment his tongue was loosened and he would never stutter again.

  There were other girls after Isabel. But all the girls looked alike. It was as if he was replicating Isabel. They were all tall, dark, curvaceous and with big eyeballs. Just like Isabel, just like his mother.

  But whatever he sought in the string of girls who graced his bed remained just outside his grasp. He was like an adventurer seeking something that was always a step ahead of him. He knew what it was but could not fathom how to lay hold of it. But he knew that some day, his sojourn would lead him to that which he sought.

  His father is on a course and Pololo is home on vacation and alone with his mother when his fever overwhelms him. Through with dinner, she tells him to turn off the oven in five minutes while she takes a shower, or else she will be late for church.

  When Pololo pushes the door open, his mother has one leg on the stool by the dressing mirror. She is naked and cupped in her left palm is the cream she is applying to her skin.

  He is naked, too, and the distance that yawns between them is a space filled with sad memories.

  She stands still and watches her son with eyes hooded with shame and sadness, while her shoulders droop with pain and a burden that will not go away. She watches her dear son, his head bent, his intent clear, but she will not bridge that gap. She will not give him that which he seeks. She will not trade one sin for another. He must take that which he desires by force and against her will.

  Eternity is compressed into that moment when the past mates with the present and leaves the future stillborn with time enough for just one dream.

  She hears the door close and then she sits on the bed and cries for the son she has lost.

  My Perfect Life

  ‘Sylvia, this is madness, o! You know, this is madness. You are pouring hot embers into your own wrapper. What makes you think it won’t get burnt?’

  Auntie Bibi was right. I was indeed playing with fire and I didn’t see how I was not going to get burnt but I was also, on the other hand, feeling the kind of tingling aliveness I had not felt for a very long time. The way I felt, it was as if I had been asleep for twenty years and then someone had knocked and woken me up and, instead of lethargic drowsiness, I was feeling rejuvenated and alive.

  It was a Saturday and, like most women I know in Lagos, I had just finished my shopping for the month at The Palms. I had made my second and last trip to the car and was almost leaving when my eyes went to the message my husband had scribbled for me on the stick-on pad he had stuck on the dashboard of my car.

  ‘Don’t forget my roll-on, o!’

  Now, I am not trying to blame anybody for what Auntie Bibi called my “moral capitulation” but believe me, if my husband had not asked me to buy him his roll-on deodorant, I would have gone home and nothing would have happened and my life would have been one happy joyride.

  But he did and when I saw the message, I turned off the engine, stepped out of the car and walked back into the mall. And that was where I met this person from my past who swept through me like a hurricane, and wrecked my simple and well-ordered life.

  The last time I saw Seun, I was twenty years old and in my first year at the College of Education. He was the first man I fell in love with, the first man to, as we used to say in those days, see my nakedness.

  How did we meet? I had been going home for the Christmas break and Seun had offered me a ride from Abraka to Warri. Alone, I would never have met him because I never, ever, accepted rides from strangers. But I was in the company of two other colleagues, Cynthia and Greg, and Seun happened to be Greg’s brother’s friend.

  Seun insisted on dropping me off at home and coming to see me the next evening. I spent three weeks at home and Seun was a constant presence, visiting me every evening. By the end of the first week, my parents and siblings were all enamoured of Seun who used to bring the house down with his humour and jokes.

  When it was time to go back to school in January, Seun took me shopping and filled up the boot of his car, as well as my box, with provisions, cosmetics, goodies and clothes. I was the envy of my friends as we spent close to thirty minutes offloading all the stuff he had bought me.

  ‘I want to marry you,’ Seun said to me later that evening, as we sat inside his car and kissed.

  ‘Bush man, is that how people propose in your village?’ I asked, laughing.

  ‘This is Abraka. My village is Sagamu, in Ogun state.’

  ‘I know, Our Man from Sagamu,’ I said, mimicking my father, who wouldn’t stop calling Seun “Our Man from Sagamu” in reference to a paperback he had in his library.

  ‘I am serious. I have to go and see your parents officially when you come home for Easter. I will let my people know.’ I didn’t say a word. I just sat there and watched him talk.

  We had known each other for all of three weeks and even though we had not gone beyond kissing and his feverish fingers teasing my inner thighs, he was already talking marriage. What else could a woman ask for?

  Seun came to see me every weekend, driving from Warri after work on Friday and leaving late on Sunday and it was on one of those weekly visits that we finally made love.

  We had been dating for two months or so and that Friday night, after he had eaten and was set to go back to his guest house, I told him I would go with him.

  ‘Why?’ he asked and I felt the rising flush of anger.

  ‘Why? Is someone waiting for you at the guest house?’ I asked and it was his turn to get angry.

  ‘What kind of question is that?’

  ‘I am sorry,’ I began, placing a conciliatory arm on his thigh. ‘It’s just that I thought we should spend the night together. Every time you leave me, I am not myself. I can’t sleep because I keep thinking about you. And you know, it’s my safe period,’ I said, smiling up at him.

  ‘Are you sure you want to come with me?’ he asked, cupping my face in his palms.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You have to be sure, Sylvia. I am here for marriage not a fling, so I am ready to wait…’ I placed a finger on his lips to silence him.

  ‘I am ready, so shut up and let’s go.’

  I know it’s a crazy thing to say, but I wish Seun was the first man for every woman, because he was born to give pleasure. The first time we made love was over two decades ago, but that day when I saw Seun at The Palms,
I felt myself go wet and weak in the knees as I remembered that first night, how he had undressed me slowly and then kissed me all the way from my feet to my lips, stopping intermittently to pleasure my hard nipples.

  I remembered now how loud I’d screamed and then began trembling when he buried his face between my legs and brought me to a toe-curling, scream-inducing orgasm. I remember screaming so loud that Seun had got scared and stopped, refusing to finish what he had started until the next morning.

  I still remember how much pleasure Seun gave me that morning when we finally went the whole way and he brought me to climax after climax.

  Sex with Seun was an addiction and once we’d started, I finally understood why he had been asking me to wait. I just couldn’t get enough and I remember how I used to lie in bed at night dreaming wild dreams and waiting feverishly for Friday; and I remember the Friday he didn’t come how I almost died.

  I loved Seun. He was kind, gentle and in tune with me. I also loved being intimate with him, something my older friends said was a good mix. So, you can imagine how I looked forward to Easter when he would come to officially ask for my hand.

  But you know what Ola Rotimi said: joy has a slender back that breaks too soon.

  When I told my father that Seun had proposed and was coming with his people to see him, he cocked an eyebrow and said: ‘I thought you two were just playing, o! My first daughter cannot marry a Yoruba man. No way! Do you know what Yoruba people did to my uncle after the war? Never!’

  My father’s words were dangerous winds that knocked me senseless and I thought I would die. But of course I didn’t. I was alive, above ground and hurting like hell. Those who say heartache is a fable are mad. Heartache is a killer. It drains you and saps you of energy and the will to live. It turns your days into a living hell and leaves you overcast with gloom. I wouldn’t have felt the kind of pain I felt even if my father had picked up a cutlass and chopped off my arm. At least then I would have only felt pain until the doctors did their bit. But with heartache, there is no cure. You ache and ache and ache, with nothing to ease your pain or ameliorate your hurt.