by TJ Benson
‘Look you, this boy,’ she said, pulling his ears. ‘You think we were confused when we named you two? I am your mother, you hear me?’
‘Ma, it is time to go,’ he said, unfazed. ‘Time for evening dining.’
And it was true. The bell rang that moment. She looked at the other parents watching them. ‘Shebi, you know I gave birth to you.’
‘Mummy, people are looking.’
‘I may not look like it – I don’t have big breasts or a big stomach – but I did. I carried you for nine months. You are mine, you hear? You belong to me.’
‘Mummy, please, in the name of God—’
‘I carried you for nine months—’
‘Ma, visiting day has finished. See, other parents are going home. I was solving SS 3 maths but I stopped when you came. Now my mates have solved more and gone further than me. Visiting day is over, Ma.’
She swung her hand but he caught it before it hit his face. ‘Jesus, Macmillan! Macmillan, you want to fight me!’ Her handbag slipped from her shoulder and she untucked her flowery blouse from her skirt. ‘You want to beat me!’
A teacher rushed in between them. ‘Madam, what is going on here?’
‘Nothing, nothing. I was just talking to my son.’
The man looked at Max in confusion, then awe. ‘Madam, you mean you are the mother of this young man?’
‘Sir, I insulted my mother and so she wanted to beat me.’
The man’s face contorted in anger. ‘How can you insult your mother, on a visiting day?’
‘It is fine. Let me just talk to my son,’ said Sweet Mother.
‘No, no, no, don’t worry, he is going to detention, after his twelve strokes at Monday assembly. We have strict rules in this school, madam.’ He turned to Max. ‘Pick up your things and follow me to my office. Visiting day is over for you.’
‘No, sir, you don’t understand. He didn’t insult me. We were just—’
‘Visiting day is over, madam. Don’t worry, we will handle him properly here.’
Max followed the man without glancing back.
When Max got home for the holidays he was surprised to see how much his brother had grown. André’s face had become more raw: thick unruly eyebrows that almost touched; lips, which he kept licking, almost as red as a wound; skin the colour of tangerine flesh with little brown freckles on the nose, and a head full of curly hair that resembled their father’s. When Max opened the door André was on the furthest chair near the writing wall, picking out the chords of ‘Sweet Mother, I no go forget you’ on his guitar, and Max realised he had lost his brother forever. This boy had grown beyond his care and was now at the mercy of their parents. He, Max, would never be able to protect his baby brother from the sickness of romance – an epidemic that was afflicting his classmates, even the brilliant boys – and God knows what else.
‘You are playing well,’ he said when André was done. Dropping the guitar, small cat eyes widened in surprise, André got up and ran to him. Max braced himself for the impact of his brother’s hug but when he opened his eyes André was merely picking up his school bag. ‘You should be careful o; the bag is heavy,’ Max warned but André dragged it to their room without a word.
Max soon found the source of his brother’s melancholy: Ladidi, the girl their mother had spoken of on his school visit. She was in the kitchen, mopping the floor, and he swore in his heart that he would never go close to her or let her come between any of his family. He didn’t know she had already listened to André’s tales of how Max had rescued him from his homicidal dreams and that she had confided in André that she had a crush on his brother even though she was yet to meet him.
Max’s family didn’t come out for evening gossips, Block Rosary or Saturday General Sanitation. The parents did not send their children with food for the neighbours at Christmas or New Year or Easter. Indeed, nobody from the last house on the right ever went to any neighbour to borrow seasoning or salt. So the Quarters people tried to penetrate it – Baba Halisu with his passion for football, Sister Nkiruka with the gospel of salvation, Freetown Street kids with their never-ending drama-game of death (because children have short memories, ah what a gift), Rukayat with her knitting and Mr Sly with camaraderie and alcohol before the suicide, but they all failed. The only person who might have succeeded was Boniface, the blind man of Freetown Street, but he had no interest in them. He never made the mistake of losing his way to the last house on the right. ‘Those Satan worshippers,’ he cursed each time he returned from a latrine trip to the forest. ‘My God will vindicate me!’
Mrs Titilayo, their next-compound neighbour, managed to scale the low fence she shared with them one Sunday morning, pulling a cable with her. With pliers she attempted a crude electrical connection to the house with its ancient underground circuit so that she would never have to worry about Nepa bills or power outages that were ruining her frozen-fish business. Having the wire hang over the fence was too obvious, so she had to disconnect her wire, throw it back, then perforate the old sandcrete block at the base of the fence with her skewer (which she used to separate frozen fish stuck to one another) to create an eye through which the wire could discreetly pass. She finished before any member of the house returned, and when she went back to her house, exhausted, and flipped the switches, she was rewarded with the ziiing of her refrigerator and the low, yolky light from the bulbs powered by an electrical flow older than the country itself.
While she luxuriated in this new old light, her pregnant goat, having watched her mistress and learnt that scaling a fence that high was possible, tried it and with a little digging of hooves succeeded on the first attempt. Disappointed by the absence of yam slices or plantain peels, the goat chewed on the wire, exactly where its mistress had used pliers to join and twist cables together, severing the connection. It was electrocuted to death by the time the family came home.
The father rolled up the severed wire and threw it over to Mrs Titilayo’s fence and hoisted the dead goat onto his shoulders, parading it from house to house, Max and André in tow. The February heat that changed their lives had not returned then. Everyone denied owning the goat and everyone knew it belonged to Mrs Titilayo. They didn’t bother going to ask her because he didn’t want to lose his temper, and she never came to claim the dead goat.
A pair of twins identical only in foolhardiness were the first to connect Hotel Taboo to the occupants of the last house on the right. Before this discovery they had seldom walked Freetown Street but could be found roaming other streets in the Quarters, meeting people dressed in oversized clothes like them as they progressed to the junction. They had red bandanas tied round their heads and paraded their Walkmans for all to see. Of course, the Walkmans weren’t for them; those were simply the only things they had ever succeeded in stealing. Notorious for undertaking the most impossible acts of robbery, they were as foolish as they were dangerous.
At twelve they had got the impulse, while cutting grass as punishment for coming late to school, to scale the fence and rob the bank in the next compound, armed with their cutlasses. They were stopped, of course, but one of the security men who restrained them lost his thumb in the process. Two years later, as the new head of state passed the main road with his entourage of soldiers, the twins rushed through the crowd and attacked one of the soldiers in the rear, knocking him to the ground, and began to wrest his rifle from him. They were flogged until they let go, and when they did one of the twins had some of the soldier’s left ear in his teeth.
At the police station they explained, after calm had returned to them, that they had needed the guns to rob a bank. They shared their belief that their first attempt had failed only because they were under-armed. The policemen choked with laughter and locked them in separate cell, but by morning orders were given that they be released.
Some foreign observers who had come to monitor the transition of government circulated photographs of the boys being beaten by other soldiers round the world overnight. The police didn’t release the o
ne who’d bitten off the soldier’s ear so the other one, fearing that his brother had been killed, seized a girl two years older who had come to sell rice to the police officers behind the station, and really would have raped her so that she could sire a child for him and continue their father’s lineage had the policemen not heard her cry for help.
Now they were grown young men who instilled fear in people with the aura of their stories. Nobody knew where they lived or who their parents were. All anyone knew was that the stories were true and false. It was said they had learnt the dark arts of hypnosis from the dance troupe that had visited years before and mesmerised people free of their property. The twins usually performed a trick on chickens when they were hungry – they would sneak into the backyard of a compound, snatch a chicken by the wings, swing it round and round in the air before it could screech, then flap it around, and when the chicken froze in shock, they would sneak over the fence and disappear.
Anyway, this particular afternoon people saw them walk down Freetown Street to the last house on the right and turn back abruptly up the street. Nobody ever talked to the family in the house so nobody had warned them. The twins had found André outside the fence, hooking the index fingers of both hands in an effort to hypnotise a bird down, so one twin reflected sunlight into the boy’s eyes with a tiny mirror while the other snuck up behind him and dug his fingers into André’s shoulders. When André fell the twin whispered something to him then slapped him awake before joining his brother to walk back up the street. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t have seen it. A casual bystander would only have seen them stop at the last house on the right and turn back up the street.
André ran home immediately, laughing, scratching his body. He went straight to the drawer in his father’s bedroom where the Taboo keys were kept, without knowing they were kept there. As he rushed out of the house, guided by an invisible compass, he ran into Max, who slapped him hard across the face, and he woke up.
So, after waiting in vain, the twins returned to the house in the smoky black of night. They tried scaling the high fence at the back into the compound armed with their cutlasses and a soldier’s rifle. When their heads bobbed up above the fence to take a sweep of the compound with their preternatural eyesight, André was staring through the window and saw them. His heart didn’t pound with fear. He didn’t flinch when they were abruptly pulled down and fed with sand to muffle their screams, then dragged off into the night by the reclusive cannibals of the forest. He didn’t see them. All he saw were mysterious shapes, but then those were the days he was adapting to the absence of his big brother. Those were the years he was starting to master his nightmares.
Plagued by insomnia, André happened to jump out of bed to pee a few nights after and out of his window saw Baba Rotimi with a whip, leading a horde of over thirty sleepy people staggering backwards down the road into the forest. He lay back down and allowed terror to stifle his scream. He never told anyone.
He noticed how daytime was starting to misbehave when Max gave in and followed him to band practice in Taboo, but he feared that if he mentioned it, Max would call him crazy and stop playing instruments with him. André was the only one who heard the static hum of the return of electricity when it first came in ’98, the paralysing buzz of the resurrected kitchen fridge that persisted for so long that he was certain rapture had come to them. Well, why wasn’t he flying? He breezed through each room in the Madhouse, oblivious to the faded yellowish glow that washed the walls to confirm no family member had left him behind. Max was still thinking of ways to explain to his family that he wanted to study medicine, not music; Ladidi was sitting by her window thinking of Max; Sweet Mum was in her room thinking of how to resolve a pre-colonial domestic conflict so that a white master could marry his Nigerian slave; and in the parlour the father thought of her.
Unsatisfied, André went out and knocked on every door on the street to conduct an impromptu census. ‘Your Papa dey haus? Mummy nko?’ And he’d rush off to the next house in haste, leaving in his wake questions that drowned in the gentle rain.
Perhaps this was another reason why the illegal occupants of the street houses were worried: electricity during rainfall was already a mystical occurrence in the country; then factor in the number of years it had taken for electricity to return; then add a census by the son of a man believed to be under the care and jurisdiction of the government of the United States of America, a government perceived to be superior to their military head of state. Other neighbours took the inquiry as a formal acknowledgment by the reclusive household, maybe, to find out how many neighbours would need to be given Christmas hampers or food.
André was the only one who sensed the coming of the girl who would change the lives of everyone in the house forever. He suspected it in the fragrance of the undying Queen of the Night that blossomed in front of what would be her window when she arrived. He sensed it as music in the air and worked feverishly on the portable keyboard the choirmaster brought to the home for practice all the way from Abuja, for the man’s affection for Aunty Jolade and suspicion of André’s genius transcended practicality and logistics.
It was on one of these afternoons, as he practised and breathed the air thick with a promise of something wonderful to come, that the door opened and a girl with a complexion the colour of egg shells walked in shyly after Sweet Mother. She was the missing conclusion to the piece of music he had been agonising over for months, the ending of the piece he would never complete. Ladidi.
Max wasn’t excited when he came home for the next holidays and saw his father. It was as if he had forgotten how his father had been removed from the household. Max didn’t ask any questions, just orbited parallel to his father in the house, coldly polite. He had given up Music Club for Science Club and knew he would break their hearts when he told his parents that he wanted to study medicine and not join André in their dream band. He had stopped practising at the Taboo Club ever since his father had been abducted by the soldiers because he feared the club didn’t really belong to his father.
‘Everybody wants to be a doctor!’ moaned the father at dinner. ‘Why not be something else? Obviously you are talented in music but I know you don’t want to have anything to do with your brother. But you can write like me or paint like your mother.’
‘I want to be able to take care of my family one day.’
A murderous gleam crossed his father’s face but Max pretended he didn’t see it and kept eating.
Years later, on the phone with his father after failing med school finals, Max would detect a hint of pleasure in his father’s voice when he shared the news, and end the call. When he called again to inform them he had switched from medicine to pharmacy, his father sighed on the other end and said, ‘When will you leave school and start living life?’
Twice in Macmillan’s life did he try to live like the rest of his family.
Twice.
The first time, he attempted weed. His parents had gone on one of their blind trips for weeks. He became an excessive smoker, growing mute and scattering ash on everything. Smoking in the bathroom, while shitting on the toilet, using the soap dish as an ashtray. Using plates after he’d finished eating from them as an ashtray, surprising his university fellowship sisters who visited with the end of his joint: while they preached, he leant forward in rapt attention, then suddenly pressed the glowing end to their cheeks and exploded in laughter if a girl screamed in pain. André once complained about the terrible cooking of the sisters, who figured no one cooked in the house, so Max went over to the pot, shook the ash from his joint into it and left the kitchen, nude. He lived in perpetual nudity and resisted pleas from André to stop smoking.
Eventually, André packed his things and left. It was this leaving that triggered Max into panic – amid the foggiest clouds of marijuana he still couldn’t forget the helplessness and agony of missing his brother in the outbreak of the Miss World War. He found André in the Abuja Park and persuaded him to come back home. André said
he would, on the condition Max stopped smoking. Max refused. Everyone in the house had gone crazy; why couldn’t he? André climbed onto an okada and left him there, so Max hailed an okada to follow him. He shook his head when André’s okada turned onto the dirt road that led to Taboo.
‘When you give up weed,’ André said, dragging his wheelie bag into the hotel, ‘you can come for me.’
Max returned the next day, stormed André’s room and snatched his wheelie bag. André followed him to Sweet Mother’s Peugeot and took the key to drive them home. The change in the house was devastating: it had been cleaned and mopped so thoroughly that there wasn’t a lingering smell of marijuana in any corner or a leftover stub in any dustbin. ‘Welcome home,’ Max said over his shoulder as they walked in.
The second time he tried to be like them, he attempted grief.
Overwhelmed with the ache to escape into the unknown, he took a blind trip for the first time in his life after a doctor had given him the news of his impending death. He had taken himself to hospital because the two-decades-long suspicion that he was dying had become too heavy to bear. And after referrals and multiple tests he got the confirmation he had always expected, ever since that night when he had been lured out of his house with drums as a child.
When the third doctor confirmed it from his scans, he staggered out of the hospital, a bitter taste mushrooming in his mouth. He was to die at the age of thirty-three. The same age as Jesus. What had he done with his life?
He boarded a bus without being able to hear where it was going, paid the conductor what was asked of him. As the road unrolled past, he kept thinking thirty-three, thirty-three, thirty-three. His car keys pinched his thigh when the bus sank into a pothole, and then he realised he had abandoned his car in the hospital garage. He looked at the brown envelope on his lap that contained his brain scans and test results, and flung it out of the window into the bush. Other passengers looked at him strangely but returned to their preoccupations.
