Tobi Ogundiran - [BCS309 S01]

by The Many Lives of an Abiku (html)

  Baba Seyi looked at me. “Hmm. So you’ve decided to stay.”

  “What?”

  “The last time you were here, I bound you to your flesh to keep you from dying. You have remained with us only by the spells holding you, and that, effective as it is, is not enough. It is why you are still visited by your spirit companions. But now you have lived with your family and have grown to love them. So much so that you’ve come to the decision to remain with them.”

  He paused here, and I had the feeling he was waiting for me to say something. “Yes, Baba.” I thought of my parents, of Dotun. I thought of the look on their faces when I gained back my body. It was a look I never wanted to see again. “I have.”

  He nodded, contented. “Take off your clothes.”

  I did not hesitate. Gooseflesh erupted over my skin the moment I peeled off the last layer of clothing. Baba Seyi placed me behind the fire before shuffling over to the large drum. He thrust a hand into it and came up with something brown and sticky—clay. And then he began to mould, chanting an earth song as he coaxed the clay into a shape.

  I didn’t know how much time passed. It felt like a minute, but it well could have been years. Time this high up the mountain was irrelevant. But after some time, Baba Seyi stepped back to reveal a clay image, eerily lifelike. It felt, oddly, like looking into a mirror; from the position of uneasy repose to the small mounds that were my breasts. The image was me in every way except for the face, which was smooth and featureless, a blank surface.

  “Where is the face?” I asked.

  “You see, I wondered how Rewa was able to steal your body,” said Baba Seyi. “You are, after all, not the first abiku I have dealt with. They all have spirit companions, but you... this Rewa seems to have much more potent hold and connection to you. And then I realized: she is your ibeji.”

  I was stunned. “My twin?”

  “Yes. You have taken turns in coming to this world, each living for a short while before dying to allow the other come. Except for now. You have... overstayed, and she is quite displeased.”

  It made sense now. I remembered asking her why she could manifest in a whole body but the other companions were just faces on the walls. She had only shrugged and said she was special. But then I also remembered her saying she wanted my family for herself. But didn’t I know? Hadn’t I realized, in the back of my mind, that she looked exactly like me?

  Baba Seyi nodded at the clay image. “I will attempt to invite her into this vessel.”

  A sister. I would have a sister. The prospect excited me. I turned to see what Rewa thought about it, but she was nowhere to be found.

  “I—I can’t see her.” But that wasn’t right. Rewa didn’t always make herself seen, but I could always feel her and now... there was a Rewa-shaped space in my heart where she always dwelt.

  Baba Seyi frowned. He sniffed the air and started to clap his hands and chant, stomping his feet into the ground. He stopped suddenly, his eyes growing wide. “No.”

  That one word was a spear through my heart. Before I could open my mouth to ask what was wrong, Baba Seyi took my hand, and we appeared in the town square beneath the iroko tree.

  Baba Seyi was hurrying in the direction of my house. “Quickly, girl!” he called over his shoulder.

  I darted after him, a million thoughts hurtling through my mind. Through the chaos of it all I kept seeing Rewa’s black eyes, kept hearing her spiteful hiss: you will regret this.

  I expected to find the exterior of the house in disarray; the roof on fire, the walls caved in—anything to denote Rewa’s wrath. But everything was just as I left it. Nestled between the fishmonger’s hut and the seamstress’, it stood serene. Deceptively serene.

  Baba Seyi hovered by the door, unable to enter. I brushed past him, calling for Mama, Baba, Dotun. Anyone.

  I found them at the dining table. They sat transfixed, staring at the gesticulating griot of the cantikle, watching as bright sparks shot out of her fingertips to bathe the otherwise dark room in a wash of colours. Where before, the griot’s movements had been fluid and graceful, now they were the choppy and strained movements of arthritic joints. She had a painful expression on her face.

  Rewa sat in my chair, dressed in my best clothes, her dark eyes alight with malice. I did not want to think how she was there, how she was real.

  “Rewa, please—” I started, but she held up a hand.

  “Shush, now,” she said in a sugary voice, “we’re watching the performance.”

  I truly saw the faces of my family members then. They wore slack, nearly vacant expressions and their eyes—oh, gods, their eyes!—were white.

  The griot’s song sounded strangely detuned and warbled, and when she finally cut off mid-rendition, the silence that came after filled the air like a blanket of despair.

  “Ah,” said Rewa, wiping a tear from her eye, “wasn’t that beautiful, Mama?”

  I watched, numb with horror as Mama turned her head ever so slightly, settling her white eyes on a spot just above Rewa’s head. She nodded.

  “Rewa...” I croaked. “What have you done?”

  She drummed her tiny fingers on the table. “I have taken your place.”

  “You—you don’t need to take my place. You’re my sister—” her eyes snapped towards me and I rushed on—“I remember now. We’re twins.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “You remember?”

  “Yes!” I cried. “We had a pact! I wasn’t supposed to stay this long. I—I left you, and I know that is bad, but I understand everything now, because I would feel bad if you did the same to me.”

  A genuine look of hope appeared on her face. She pushed herself off the chair and rushed to hug me. “Oh, I’m glad! You finally remember. You have no idea what it was like waiting and waiting for you to come back to me.” She pushed me back and searched my eyes. “I thought you were going to send me away, that’s why...” She looked over her shoulder at my family who sat immobile, staring blankly into space. “Wait. How do you remember?”

  “I—it doesn’t matter.” I said quickly. “We made you a body so you could come and join me here. But it looks like you have found a way.”

  She gave me a mischievous smile. “I always find a way.” “Oh, we’re going to have so much fun together. Just like old times!”

  I gave her my widest smile, darting a glance to my family.

  “We’ll find another family to torment.”

  My smile faltered. “Another family?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “I thought you wanted to stay with this family.”

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said, leading me to the table. “Besides, where’s the fun in that? We were never meant to stay in one place.”

  “But...”

  She stopped to look at me. “Do I sense hesitation, sister?”

  “No.”

  A knife materialized in Rewa’s hand, which she pressed into mine. She nodded at Mama. “Kill her.”

  “What?”

  “Kill her,” she repeated, watching me closely.

  It was a test, I knew. And it was one I would fail. Even as I struggled to find an alternative, to say something, Rewa yanked the knife from my hands and plunged it into my Mama’s neck.

  “What, you think I’m an idiot?” she said calmly as my mother buckled and thrashed like fish out of water. “You have been a very bad girl, Sola, and you will pay the price.”

  The door opened, and my siblings—my real siblings—filed into the room. They were the lesser of us and had fashioned bodies for themselves out of anything they could find. Straw, wood, cooking pots and pans. Their faces were wood, the same wooden faces that had spied and tittered at me from the walls of my room. Grotesque aberrations of human forms, they moved in unison.

  “Bad Sola,” they chanted in voices of metal and wood and straw. “Bad Sola. Bad Sola.”

  Hands reached out to grab me as Rewa yanked out the knife and turned to attend to my father, cackling with pure delight,
her thin sonorous chant of “Bad Sola” adding a musical texture to the droning of my siblings. It felt like a dream. A bad dream from which I would soon wake up, shivering and sweating but otherwise safe, safe in the knowledge that nothing could hurt me, that my mother was alive—

  Something grabbed me. I looked down and felt the sudden urge to burst into maniacal laughter; a soup ladle, the same ladle Mama had used to pour soup into my plate, was now the arm of one of my siblings. It curled around my wrist in a vice-like grip while the sibling in question twisted his wooden face into a malicious smile.

  I smacked his head with my other arm, screaming in pain as my fist connected with the hard wood of his head. Hands snaked out to grab me before I could recover, pinning me to the spot. Gods, they were strong. Too strong. They lifted me off my feet and bore me to the table, still chanting. My father sat drooling, and when I saw that Rewa had carved out his eyes, I fainted.

  The pain woke me. Hands of spoons and wood held me to the table as Rewa carefully sliced the knife through my skin, cutting out my—

  My markings!

  “Be still, now, sister,” she said when I started to struggle. “I am going to free you.”

  Free me, no! I didn’t want to be freed. The markings were the only thing keeping me tethered to the world. Without them... I would be spirit again.

  I screamed as Rewa plunged the knife into my skin, meticulously hacking away at the flesh. “Please, Rewa—I swear I’ll do anything—please—”

  Rewa was deaf to my pleadings. She hacked, her eyes alight with malicious glee.

  One of my siblings, who had fashioned for himself a body out of my mother’s cloak, leaned in. “Finish it,” he said to Rewa.

  Just then, the roof caved in with a resounding crash, and in swooped the largest owl I had ever seen. It landed on the table just above me as my siblings scattered about. It turned its head to look at me, and I could see myself reflected in the huge glassy orbs that were its eyes. The left eye was a little slow. A lazy eye.

  “Baba Seyi,” I breathed.

  “Go,” He growled, and when I lay there stunned and transfixed, he spread his great wings and screeched. “GO!”

  I fell off the table and bolted out of the house, Rewa’s formidable shriek of fury chasing me down the street.

  I reached the town square when I noticed my feet were no longer touching the ground. The world took on that bluish-grey hue I had now come to recognize, and I rose, as if buoyed by an invisible wind.

  No.

  I flailed, grasping for something—anything—to keep me tethered. As I turned around, I saw my body lying facedown in the dirt, saw my bloodied arm where Rewa had hacked away at my flesh.

  Lying next to it was the torn patch of skin with my abiku markings.

  The world fell away, breaking off like little flakes of burning parchment, until all that was left was the void.

  V: Rebirth

  First there was darkness; the cold, numbing darkness of the void. Then voices—whispers, really, a thousand sibilant words slithering over my skin like snakes. Then warmth.

  —I am alive. I am me, festooned in a cocoon of water—

  Then I am born. I see a face, teary-eyed and exhausted, the face of a new mother.

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