News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  “You’re bad,” she mumbled. “Very, very bad...”

  “Sorry,” I said, retreating, in case she was about to backhand me. I also knew better than to interrupt her while she was working, especially towards a tight deadline. Momsi was so short the top of my head could touch her shoulders, but her reach was like an American basketball player’s. She stopped pedaling.

  “Sorry for what?” she asked.

  I took a step forward. She was resting.

  “Are people bad by nature?” I asked.

  “Who told you dat?”

  She spoke fluent pidgin, but at home she settled for a diluted version whenever she spoke to me. She could have been a primary-school teacher. She’d dropped out of training college to marry Popsi. She might have had to because she was pregnant, but she would never admit that. “I wasn’t an illiterate when he met me,” was all she ever said about their wedding.

  I repeated the answer he had given me and she eyed the faded gold-brocade curtain that separated my parents’ bedroom from the sitting room, and made a sound I can only describe as a “hm”

  “Will you,” she said, patting her machine, “CLEAR OUT OF HERE BEFORE I CHANGE MY MIND ABOUT YOU?!”

  I ran out of the front door before her voice went into turbocharge. My head was too big for my body; so were my hands and feet. I was shoeless and almost broke my toe as I jumped down the stairs of our block. Our flat was on the first floor and I could hear her when I reached the ground level.

  “See this pikin, oh! How many times have I told you not to disturb me, eh? I’m sitting here working myself to death! And you, Mr. Esprit de Corps, what have you been telling your son this time?”

  Popsi was the only policeman in Lagos who was too proud to take a bribe, she said, and that was the cause of her suffering. She went on about how difficult he was to work with and how he thought he was superior to everyone else on the force. That was why no one would promote him. I could imagine her, bags under her eyes and cheeks trembling.

  I escaped a serious thrashing that day, but I still remember the dream I had for the first time that night. In my dream, Momsi is sewing the wedding train. She is in our sitting room. There is quiet, for once, and the room smells of burned beans. The walls are brown from the soot of her kerosene stove. The wedding train keeps getting longer. It reaches out of our front door, slides down the staircase, crosses the compound of the barracks and passes through the side gates, creeps into Mammy Market, where police wives sell provisions, circles Falomo roundabout (Church of the Assumption Way) and rises over Lagos Lagoon, like the bridge. It reaches Victoria Island, edges through the traffic on the streets and ends up in Bar Beach, dips into the sea and rides over the Atlantic. I walk on it, trying to keep my balance, knowing I could fall at any moment and drown—I can’t swim—but nothing like that happens until I reach the shore of a foreign land, where I wake up. The ending is always the same.

  Sometimes, the easiest answer to give is a story. At least, that is how the prophets handle moral issues in the holy books. I am now old enough to know there is no point asking my parents about right or wrong, but when I was thirteen, I probably wouldn’t have. We were still living in the police barracks; I was still stuck in that stunted body of mine while I was beginning to discover that my mind didn’t have to be.

  I was heavily into Genevieve Nnaji, the only Nollywood actress worth my while. She was the face of Lux. There were billboards of her everywhere in Lagos. At night, I fantasized about lambasting her. I was no innocent, but I was facing my studies. My hard work had got me through my Junior School Certificate exams a year earlier than I was supposed to sit them. It was my biggest accomplishment so far. English was my strong subject. I thought I might end up as a newspaper columnist, like Reuben Abati, and work for the Guardian or This Day.

  I was in my fourth year of secondary school. My school was one of those in Lagos, state run and free ed, which meant zero education for people whose parents couldn’t afford to buy books. I was not one of them. There were not enough desks or chairs, especially on the odd occasion when everyone bothered to show up to classes. Our classrooms had no doors and our windows no panes. The buildings were not painted. They looked like a series of piled-up cement blocks. But I’d had an excellent attendance record all year, even though my class teacher, Mr. Kolawole, was the worst in school. He was also my English teacher. He may have been in his mid-twenties, but he was already balding and what was left of his hair was in tight, greasy Jheri curls, so we called him Koilywoily.

  I was one of his favorite students. He saw potential in me. I could have wept when he told me that. What that meant was that he could whip me whenever he felt like it, in the teachers’ mess, on my yansh, and I had to say, “Thank you for disciplining me, sir,” afterwards. He had this expression on his face, post-caning. I could never come up with the right word to describe it, but it was the same expression on our president’s face when he held a press conference about the pollution problems in the Niger Delta and told the people there to go to hell.

  I would ask myself, Why? Why?

  Why couldn’t I have just a mother that whacked me, or a teacher that whacked me? Why both? The worst part was that I couldn’t even complain to Popsi about either one, no matter how severe the beatings, because he would ask, “What did you go and do?”

  Koilywoily was perverted. I was convinced he was because of the way he squared his shoulders when he walked, and because of his grimy collars and skinny yansh. He drove a red, fairly used Daewoo and parked it by the teachers’ mess so other teachers who couldn’t afford cars would be jealous. The teachers’ mess was so small that I couldn’t imagine what would happen if all our teachers were present for once. Where would they sit? How would they mark papers? There was barely enough room for Koilywoily to cane me. On the morning I sneaked out of school, I was scared he was going to corner me in there again.

  “Idowu Salami,” he said in his nasal voice.

  “Yes, sir,” I answered.

  He was taking the class register. Like every other Idowu, people called me ID.

  “A salami is?” he asked.

  “An Italian sausage, sir.”

  “Speak up!”

  “An Italian sau...”

  I had to go through the same routine with him, whenever the spirit caught him, and if I didn’t give him the correct answer, he would cane me.

  Koilywoily knew whom he could pick on. He knew I would not lie in wait for him somewhere outside the school premises and jack him up. There were boys in our school who would do that. Big boys with beards, who could tear him to pieces, like a roasted ram. They were area boys. They came to school for fun, with implements, to break into the office or teachers’ mess. One was recently expelled for hoarding a spanner in his shorts. How anyone could even walk straight with a spanner in his shorts, I didn’t know. But he did, and he would have unscrewed the tires of our principal’s van and sold them, had he not been caught.

  Girls, too. There were girls in school who would deck Koilywoily if he dared to touch them with a cane. They would slap his face so hard he would lose all sense of hearing, or sleep with him if he was interested. That was going on as well. It wasn’t prevalent, but one or two were prepared to offer themselves in order to pass tests.

  I had to piss after Koilywoily took the register that morning, very badly, so I ran all the way to an area behind a half-finished building. Boys who couldn’t brave the toilets pissed there. Girls had no choice, but I’d caught one or two lifting their skirts. There was graffiti on the walls: Hip-hop Rules; Bandele Woz Here; Man Must Shit. I was unzipping my shorts when I saw Augustine sneaking in through a section of the chicken-wire fence that had been cut open by truants like him.

  The bobo was strange. He was absent most days but, whenever he did show up, his uniform was starched and pressed, as if learning had become a festive occasion for him. His neatness reminded me of Popsi’s and I was curious to know where he spent his time when he wasn’t around. It was t
he final term of the year, exam term. Everyone had to buck up and study hard.

  “Tss,” he hissed.

  It was hard to shrug off my junior-boy mentality. A year ago, I would have had to answer, “Yes, Senior Augustine.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t wanna bother you or anything,” he said.

  I had forgotten about his American accent. His eyebrows joined over the bridge of his nose, which was as narrow as an oyinbo’s. I noticed that only because I had inherited Popsi’s nostrils, which were as wide as River Niger.

  Augustine was in his final year and failing all his Senior Certificate subjects except for English. He scored as high as ninety percent on his English tests—or so he said. He had a reputation for being a liar who was no good at lying. So, if he said “Good morning,” you could guarantee that it was nighttime and the world was coming to an end. He was a fabulizer. His mouth was sweet to listen to, though, and his ears were as thick as land snails. His classmates called him Yankee because he spoke with an American accent and everyone knew he could not have traveled an inch beyond the borders of Lagos, let alone overseas.

  “Is it true you gorranainenglish?” he asked.

  “What?”

  He covered his lips with his forefinger as he spoke, as if to make sure his lies remained hidden. I remembered a gist about him: how he’d told his ex-girlfriend that he had connections at Virgin Nigeria and the Nicon Noga Hilton. He had promised to take her for a romantic getaway, for Valentine’s Day. The nearest the girl got to the Hilton was when she discovered that his father had applied for a job there as a cook, and the closest connection he had to the airline was that he was a virgin. She told her friends.

  “Did you get an A in the English JSC exam?”

  “Yes.Yes, I did.”

  I raised my hand like one of those effico classmates of mine who couldn’t wait to give correct answers.

  “So your vocabulary is good, huh?”

  His front teeth were chipped and looked like a W.

  “Well...”

  Only when I was fantasizing about having sex with chicks. In which case, my vocabulary just flowed: lambaste, discom-bobulate. What did he want? He was wasting my time. My math teacher was on sick leave again and he had set us exercises. I didn’t plan to do them until I got home, but I needed to get back to first period. I had people to play cards with, gist to catch up on.

  We were in a secluded area. There was an almond tree where students plucked fruit at break-time. A laborer was walking by with a bowl on his head. He was wearing shorts alone and his skin was covered in cement dust. “Do be quick,” I wanted to say.

  “I’ve got a proposal for you,” he said. “Would you like to earn some dollars?”

  “How?”

  “You’ll have to learn how to get on the internet. Have you ever heard of the internet?”

  He pronounced the word “inner net” and was rubbing his hands together now. Who did he think I was? Some backward bobo?

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever used a computer?”

  “Nope.”

  I’d never even touched one. Our school didn’t have a computer, even though we had a subject on our syllabus called “Intro to Tech.” The last class we’d had was on word processors and facsimiles.

  “You can earn dollars working with computers,” he said. “Would you like to?”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out two twenties. I hadn’t swallowed since I’d owned up to getting an A in English, and now I had too much saliva in my mouth.

  “Yesch,” I said.

  Then I remembered I had English with Koilywoily that afternoon. I didn’t have to think twice. I asked him to wait, hurried back to class and told Dolamu, who sat next to me, that I’d vomited on the wall and now I had severe shivers.

  “Since when?” he asked.

  We called him Dolamumu, because he was one—a complete mumu. He was repeating his fourth year again. He couldn’t spell. He transposed letters.

  “Please,” I said. “Just tell Koilywoily I’m sick.”

  I left the classroom hunched over. Only one teacher stopped me in the corridor, our biology teacher. She had taught us about the reproductive organs and this term we were on the digestive system.

  “Salami, what’s wrong with you?” she asked.

  “I’m experiencing vomiting and diarrhea, ma”

  “Eh? Go home! Don’t spread it!”

  She hurried away from me. She’d also taught us about hygiene. The woman was pregnant again. She had been pregnant ever since I’d known her, and she was skinny to top it all.

  Had Augustine not shown me those dollars, I would have dismissed him as a jiver. I would have gone back to class to say yes, the gist about him being a liar at least was true. But he showed me the lalas, and here was the problem: my parents had never told me, “Don’t do such-and-such when someone tells you to come and make money on the internet.” I was sure they hadn’t heard of the internet. To me, it was an abyss. They had warned me many times before to stay in school, though, and I was smart enough to realize that what Augustine had called me to do wasn’t as clean as he appeared. On the other hand, he had shown me hard currency and, by the way my eyes bulged when I saw it, he might as well have unzipped his shorts and rolled out his jomo all the way to the ground.

  We busted school that morning. We sneaked out through the chicken-wire fence and tried to blend in with the rest of the Obalende crowd, even though we were in uniform and carrying schoolbags. A few other truants like us loitered around the shacks displaying leather slippers, DVDs, broken televisions and secondhand suitcases. At the top of the street was an upside-down wheelbarrow next to a pyramid of mangoes. We bought meat pies from the corner shop; their sausage rolls were too flat. I finished off my meat pie before we reached St. Gregory’s School.

  As we approached Keffi, there were fewer hawkers around. They were selling manicure sets, glasses for drinking and for seeing. A sign on a wall read We thank d Lord, and another, Prayer moves mountains.

  I asked Augustine why he had approached me.

  “I’ve seen you around,” he said, “heard about your skills. I need a partner. I’ll explain later.”

  The bobo was somehow amusing, especially the way he covered his mouth.

  “By the way,” he said, “what are those beads on your wrist? Native insurance?”

  “No.”

  They were. I was the youngest in the family and there was such an age difference between Brother, Sister and me that I wasn’t allowed to call them by their names. The twins, who were born before me, had died when they were babies. They convulsed, which may have been as a result of cerebral malaria, but Momsi believed that someone put a hex on them. Someone who was jealous of her sewing business, she said. I used to wonder; had I been that jealous of her success, I would have tried to ruin her business rather than try to kill her children, but I had to wear the beads she bought for my protection and I hated them because they looked bush, extremely local. We were in the new millennium after all. Anyone cool was wearing those colorful plastic bands saying peace or love or stay strong. They were cheap and plenty, plenty in the bend-down boutiques on the streets.

  Augustine took me to an internet café in Keffi. Outside the café, a group of Hausa traders were hawking padlocks and medicine. One had a cauldron with ashes and raw goat meat on skewers, ready to roast into suya. The building was residential, like most on the street, but they had been converted into shops and beauty salons, and there was a bukateria next door, where workers from businesses nearby came to eat.

  Popsi often talked of a time when there were commercial hubs in Lagos. I couldn’t imagine that, a hub. Now, there were hubs everywhere. That was the reason for the increase in crimes, he said. But this was the only Lagos I knew.

  Augustine bought a phone card from a woman who was sitting under a yellow umbrella on the street corner. He had a cell phone, which he pulled out of his pocket. I wanted a cell phone lik
e that, one that I could whip out like a gun. I listened as he talked.

  “Hullo, oga? It’s me. Yes. It’s me, Augustine. What is the format? I said, what is the format today, sir? OK, OK, Monday then. I’m recruiting. I said, I’m recruiting right now, sir. Yes, this one has brains in his head.”

  I pretended to be interested in a hawker who was roasting plantains across the street. Her plantains were haphazard on her grill and she waved the fumes away with a piece of cardboard. My stomach growled. I was still hungry.

  “Sorry,” Augustine said. “That was my oga I was talking to.”

  On the gate of the café was a painted sign saying No 419ers. No internet Scammers AKA YahooYahoo Boys.

  The front door was shut. The protective iron-grille door was open. The sign had been screaming at us but, as soon as we were inside, I could tell it was for someone else’s benefit. I had not been in an internet café before. The place looked like a classroom in a private school, with wooden desks arranged side by side, but I knew that every single bobo I saw sitting before a computer was a Yahoo Yahoo. They could pass for office clerks, some of them, with their shirts and ties. Others wore sports clothes with logos like Nike and Adidas. One bobo was in school uniform, like us. There was even a chick. She had a gold-colored hair weave and a Red Sox cap.

  Augustine paid for internet time and led me to a table by a window, also with protective iron grilles. I pulled a chair from an empty desk and sat next to him as he pressed buttons. I was nervous. The café was like an examination hall. Actually, more like a typing examination. No one was talking and all I could hear was the tap-tap-tapping of their keyboards. Augustine spoke quietly enough to remain below the sound. He moved an oval object on a black pad on the table. “This is what is called a mouse...” The screen came to life. “This is what is called logging on...”The screen blacked out, returned in dazzling colors and patterns, then settled into a page. “This is what is called the internet...”