Edwin Okolo

I remember my father as a wall of sound.

I was always listening for him. My arms wrapped tightly around my little brother’s shoulders as he rumbled through the house, the steel toe of the shoe on his limp foot dragging against the cement floor. Doors creaked open, slammed shut. It was futile to hide from him, but I tried. I tried because I was thirteen and didn’t know better, and in our house, you either hid or you ran, or you gave in to his rage. His rumbling would grow louder as he followed us through the house, towards my mother’s old room, the bloated belly of our house. I would squeeze my eyes shut, breath tightening in my chest. He never entered her room. Especially now that she was gone. There was too much of her in that room, it frightened him.

That night, the last time I would ever see my father, he hesitated outside the door before crossing the invisible boundary. Dragging his foot behind him, he began to tear his way through what was left of my mother’s life. Her clothes were a mountain on the bed and mulching the floor. Broken electronics poked out from the mess, silently bearing witness. He turned the room upside down, even taking time to upend the heavy orthopaedic mattress they used to share. Then he came for the closet, panting heavily as its wooden doors broke in his hands. Layefa had slept through everything, but the smell of him, my father, woke him up screaming.

“Papa, please!” I begged, even though I knew it wouldn’t change anything. He dragged us out of the cupboard, me by the scruff of my neck, brother by the arm, through what was left of my mother’s detritus, out the corridor, to the car idling outside.

It was almost midnight, but neighbours drawn by the commotion came to watch. I could see them squinting through the holes in our fence. I fell on my knees and grabbed hold of my father’s leg like I’d seen my mother do too many times.

“Mama will come back, she promised.”

I tried to find his eyes, but they were vacant even as they glared down at me. There was no emotion, only resolve. He pushed my brother into the back seat of the car, held the door ajar for me.

“Enter,” was all he said.

I should have fought, but the neighbours were watching. I’d rather die than give them one last show.
The taxi turned into a street lined with neatly trimmed trees and a quiet untainted by the low hum of generators, and I realised we’d been ferried into a different life. This had happened before; we’d come here, had a taste of this, and had it taken away.

I shook Layefa gently, raised him upright.

“We’re here,” I whispered.

The car stalled in front of a wrought-iron gate, a three-storey building peeking out from over its spiked crown. A small woman stood in front of it, her arms crossed over her wrapper tied high around her chest. In spite of her size, the massive gate seemed less imposing than her face. She pulled the door open, and scooped Layefa into her arms. He panicked for a second, but I met his eyes and gave the smallest nod. She grimaced as he wrapped his hand his around her neck, settled his head into the crook of her shoulder. I stared back, astounded that a face slightly weathered but still identical to my mother’s sat on this stranger’s face.

It hadn’t occurred to me until that moment that there was life outside my mother, and our house, and Layefa. This woman, my mother’s sister, was evidence of another life.

She made me miss my mother, Auntie Philo. She had all my mother’s tics. She spoke like Mama, shared her mood swings, her pettiness. She held on to the smallest slight for weeks, letting the resentment simmer. She had my mother’s beauty, her hair, her smile. But Auntie Philo had also built a life for herself outside of her home, something my mother was never able to manage after the accident.

The other difference between Auntie Philo and my mother, I thought, as she led us through the house showing us what we were forbidden to touch and never to do, is that my mother had spent her life holding onto everything she owned. Auntie Philo held on to nothing. The floors were bare, the walls too. Even the chairs in the house were little more than skeletal frames, covered with cushions like muscle on bone. All her bedroom had was a miniature vanity mirror and a handful of suitcases piled by the door. She followed my gaze, shrugged when she saw what I was looking at.

“You can take one,” she said, “they’re all empty.”

I found out later the suitcases belonged to her husband, his absence a question she refused to address.

Her only concessions to extravagance were the kitchen that sparkled with tile and shiny chrome, and the television, a monstrous square that covered one wall. Aunt Philo loved her television. And Layefa, who had never seen one, was drawn like a moth. Our aunt led me to the guest bedroom, my newly chosen suitcase in tow, and offered it to us officially. Then her face soured as she turned to the room opposite ours.

“Stay out of your cousin Edith’s way.”

We took aptitude tests. Auntie Philo drove us to the school even though we could have walked there. I think she was trying to make an impression on the teachers. I understood what school was, as an abstract concept, yet watching girls my age wrap their arms around each other’s necks, their joy tangible as they gathered their skirts and chased each other across the dirt playground, showed me just how much I didn’t know. It frightened and fascinated me. The tests also frightened me. I read through them and realised I understood them, but only in the way I understood school. My mother had never bothered with subjects, or sums, or continuous assessment. I answered the questions as best I could, turned the test over and awaited judgement. The woman who read through our answers kept pausing to look up at me. I fidgeted under her gaze.

Auntie Philo drove us to a restaurant afterwards, bought us lunch to celebrate. Layefa had got in, they were putting him in primary one. A class lower than he should have been, but not too far to catch up.

Auntie Philo took my hand and tried to make her voice light. It didn’t work.

“They say you’re intelligent, but have the literacy level of a seven-year-old. They wanted to put you in primary two, but I refused.”

I nodded, swallowed. “I will find you a teacher, someone who’ll come to the house for evening lessons. A year should be enough to get you up to speed. Things will be different here, you will be safe.”
She seemed to be waiting to for me to say something, so I gave a small smile and nodded.

We ate our food while Layefa made plane sounds and guided his fork through the air. The silence festered, following us like a bad smell as we left the restaurant and drove home. We pulled into the compound, and Layefa bolted out of the car and into the house to go find Edith. Auntie Philo didn’t follow. Her hands were closed around the steering wheel, veins rising on her arms. When she spoke, her voice was a rasp.

“She never took you to school?”

I tried to imagine my mother in a car, weaving through traffic, waving as I stepped through school gates. The image was too alien to conjure.

“She never left the house.”

Auntie Philo seemed to sag in her seat, and her hands went up and hid her face as sobs coursed through her body.

“I didn’t know, my God, I didn’t know.”

I taught myself to sleep deeply. It took months, but I taught myself not to worry, not to listen for my father’s limp, not to think of my mother drowning in the detritus of her life. I taught myself not to worry about food or clothes or electricity. I taught myself to abandon my chores, to watch TV instead, or whatever children my age did. When school came I wanted to be ready, I wanted to blend in, I wanted to have “normal” stories. Auntie Philo let me get away with it most of the time. Edith, though, was another story.

“Mama, you’re spoiling her,” she’d say within earshot and glare at me. And Auntie Philo would ask me to do what it was Edith was nagging about.

But I never gave any lip about walking Layefa to school. It was the only time we spent together, and I savoured it. I told him about our mother and father, all the good things I could remember. She had an eye for beauty before the accident. She sought it out. The two of them worked in a hotel, Radisson Blu. That’s how they met. It was a dead-end job, shifts as night staff, but she didn’t mind.

She used to say, “I get to walk past some of the beautiful people, I touch paintings someone has paid millions of naira for. Everything there is carefully thought out, even the vases are carefully picked out. The nights are silent and I am surrounded by beauty. ”

They were living in the house Papa inherited from his elder brother, so they didn’t need that much money.
I never talked about the accident. Papa drove one of the big delivery trucks for the hotel. She was in the passenger seat when another truck came slamming into it. They were in the hospital for weeks. He came away with a limp, she at first seemed fine. The hotel let them go with a joint disability cheque. They might as well have given her a noose. Even before the accident, my mother had trouble holding it all together, but now she seemed to come unhinged. She bought things with the money, stupid pointless bric-a-brac. By the time my father realised something was wrong with her, the money was gone and the habit formed. Not just her disability cheque, but all his savings from their joint account. That was when he started drinking.
Layefa had taken to this new life here so easily that I worried he would forget how we came here, and why.
I feared that something would happen, and this would all disappear like wisps of smoke.

I watched Edith and her friends from behind the curtain that hid the rest of the house from the living room. Portraits of my mother and Auntie Philo looked down on them from the walls. They were all sprawled on the sofas, playing cards, pretending to know more about the world than they did. They were the physical embodiment of youth.

“They’re all crazy. She and her sister. Freaks. Pussy that drives men crazy runs in our family. My father was smart, he ran. The other one, Keren’s father, that one just stayed there like a gbef and let that woman destroy him.

“My mother’s OCD will force her to organise shit into neat piles, but at least she’s clean. Keren’s mother was a little piglet, bringing in trash from outside to pile in their house. One small car accident, the bitch hit her head and turned into a schizo. I heard when they came to take her away, they had to dig her out from the rubbish. That’s why Keren’s father went crazy too. All that dirtiness…”

I felt her gaze turn on me, even before I saw her head move. Quick as a snake she crossed the room and caught me before I could flee to my bedroom. She dragged me into the living room, in the midst of her friends. Their eyes bored into me like tiny drills.

“Keren, my mom said you were there when they came to take your mom to that hospital. What was it like? I heard her bones were like twigs, she was too crazy to say no. Didn’t she shit herself?”

I stood there, unable to find words. Edith’s friends waited in quiet anticipation, angling their bodies to watch me more closely. I fought the urge to cry even as my eyes misted, and I clenched my fingers at my sides, pressing my nails into the soft of my palm so hard they left marks.
Then the tall, skinny boy stretched out his hand, dragged me to him, and patted his lap. I didn’t think, I sat.

“Leave her alone,” he said.

Edith raised a brow, but she backed down and returned to their game of cards. I sat on his lap, still as a doll, and pretended to watch them play and when I felt him, for the first time, hard against my thigh, I wished I hadn’t. I wished for Mama or Auntie Philo, or my father, anyone with enough authority to wrest me free, chase them away.

Edith was sitting on the sidelines, like me.

She hadn’t gotten into university, for the second year in a row, and there was a year-long wait ahead before she could try again. That was why she and her mother fought all the time. Auntie Philo had decided she would be my tutor. Edith hated it, because it meant she couldn’t leave the house in the evenings, go out with her friends. So they came to her instead: Negene, Francis, Anny and Sam. They arrived at two o’clock, almost religiously, following the exodus of primary school children let out of school. They came for the television. Everything looks better on a big screen. They were the first people even remotely my age that I got to spend time around. So I skulked, snapping up the crumbs of affection they fed to me. My reticence meant I was a weight around Edith’s neck, and she was eighteen and angry at the world. She instituted a siesta for me and Layefa, forced us to lie in our room and stare at the ceiling until they left.

Auntie Philo was never around. She left for work before dawn, came back after dark. I knew no one, had no friends, didn’t want to make any. A small part of me hoped my father would come, his limp magically healed, his eyes clear. He’d be remorseful, sweep me and Layefa into his arms, take us back home.
Of all Edith’s friends, I think Negene noticed me long before I did him. He was the first to learn my name, pronounce it properly. The rest grunted in my direction.

I had caught glimpses of him, his legs splayed on the floor because Auntie Philo’s chairs were too tiny and utilitarian to contain all of him. He always smiled, held my gaze. He looked at me like he could see beneath, inside me.

After the day Edith derided my mother for their amusement, he came for me, waited in the doorway as I put Layefa to bed. He took me by the hand, led me to the living room, and squeezed himself into a chair.

“What is she doing here?” Edith asked, glowering at me.

“She’s a big girl,” Negene said. “She wants to hang out with us.”

I sat in his lap and we watched as Edith, Francis, Anny and Sam played Monopoly, paper money switching hands. Then he draped his pianist hands over my knee, casually, though under me the rest of him was still as bone. Then his hand moved higher, to my thigh, then finally under my skirt. And Edith watched, from the corner of her eye. She watched as I whimpered on top of him, tried to knock my knees, deny access. She glowered, her lips a taut line. I could see her anger rise. But she held it in check, met his eyes and held them as his hands moved faster and faster. Then his hand withdrew, slithering like a sated snake.

“Are you done?” Edith said, still holding his gaze.

She didn’t look at me.

He laughed, a full, happy sound. I hated everything about it, even its timbre.

Edith turned away. That seemed to hurt her more than everything else. He put his hand, the other one around my waist, absently ran frets over my belly. And I stayed on his lap.

This was how we woke from siestas, to the sound of Auntie Philo fuming. It must have been happening for years, because by the time we came to stay, Edith didn’t care. The sound of Auntie Philo’s car driving into the compound was her cue; she’d slip out with Negene and the others, and return when Auntie Philo was in front of the television, or in bed. Auntie Philo would barrel through the house, fuming about the same things. The dishes unwashed, dinner unmade, how Edith seemed to care about nothing. Most nights she would simmer, muttering under her breath as she did the chores Edith had abandoned. Slowly her rage would come to the boil, expressed in her taut spine, her hunched shoulders silhouetted by the glare of the television. She would stay that way till she grew tired.

But that night, she came home already bubbling over, and marched straight for Edith’s room. Usually Edith was out the door by then. But that night, her luck ran out.

Seeing a grown woman consumed by rage is a different kind of terror. Whatever her hands could reach, Auntie Philo put to use. Brooms, the wooden spine of a mop, high-heeled shoes, the belt drawn from her waist. Edith never screamed. She tightened herself into a ball, the meat of her arms crossed to shield her face. Aunt Philo devolved to teeth and nails, tussled with Edith on the ground, barely human sounds coming from her.

Her rage eventually burned itself out. And afterwards, they sat heaving in opposite corners of the room, Edith’s eyes shining with tears.

“Do you know the things I did for her, the things I suffered so she would never have to?” Aunt Philo said, her voice so raw it hurt to hear the words. “I worked so she could go to school, I stayed in that house even though it was hell. Even though our father beat me every day. I could have left, I had a business. But she was just a baby. Do you know what she did? She left the first chance she could. She ran away. After I had spent all my savings to pay for university. The money I had wanted to use to escape him.”

Aunt Philo was crying now, unashamed, like a child.

“Even now, I’m still picking up after her. I am always picking up after her, raising her children. This is how she started, like this. This life that you think you have mastered, that’s exactly how she started.”

“I am not your crazy sister!” Edith screamed at Aunt Philo, her eyes wild. “I am your child! Your only child. Do you know what my father leaving did to me? What it’s doing to me? Do you even care?”

“You are worse than her!” Aunt Philo screamed back. “She was a horrible, selfish person, but at least she accepted that, she didn’t play the victim.

“You think you’re the only person that your father destroyed by leaving? You think I didn’t just want to curl up somewhere and not exist when he disappeared? Do you think I want to work like a dog, get humiliated in the office so I can pay for your education – that’s if you ever do pass and come home to wash plates? Are the things I ask of you too much? I gave you everything I didn’t have growing up. Everything! And you’re throwing your life away because you think it makes me suffer?”

Then she laughed, pulling herself to her feet.

“What you are is evil,” she said quietly, with the kind of malice you reserve for sworn enemies. “I look at you sometimes and wonder how you came from me. You’re wicked, you’re a… a sadist.”

Edith didn’t cry till Auntie Philo was gone, but once she started, she didn’t stop. It haunted me, her sobbing, and the things Auntie Philo had said about my mother. Nightmares of that terrible rage turned against me robbed me of sleep.

Edith began to do the dishes.

He didn’t do it all the time. Often we just sat and watched TV. It was enough for him that I was there. Francis and Anny fought in Auntie Philo’s living room, broke one of the side tables. Anny abruptly stopped coming to our house. I learnt how to stay still when Negene touched me.

I thought I knew all there was to him, until that day.

“Small oga, you’re late today, oh,” he said to Layefa, meeting him at the front door. I froze where I sat, in his favorite chair, pretending to be part of their circle.

Edith looked up, rolled her eyes and pointed to the bedroom.

“Before I count three, Layefa, siesta, now.”

Layefa’s face fell. I’d stopped picking him up from school and I had no idea why he was late. Negene helped him out of his school bag, carried the thing like it was a purse. He matched Layefa’s short steps as they turned the corridor even though he was twice as tall.

“Let’s get you out of your uniform and into bed.”

I looked at Edith, stared until she noticed that Negene had followed Layefa. She watched them, a hunger coming into her eyes.

“He can change his clothes by himself, Negene,” she called. There was no bite in the words.

“Okay,” Negene replied and kept walking.

I hesitated for a moment before I followed.

They were by the bed, Layefa standing with his hands over his head as Negene pulled off his vest. I swung the door hard so it slammed against the wall.

“Layefa!” I called.

He sighed in relief and came to me. I undressed him, helped him into his house clothes. I was used to Negene’s stare and I had become inured to its intensity, but seeing it directed at someone else made my skin crawl. I shuffled Layefa around so my back shielded him from Negene’s gaze. Small mercies. I guided him to our bed, tucked him in and lay beside him. Negene sat on the edge of the bed, listening as I shushed Layefa and whispered him to sleep.

Then he crawled into bed with us.

I’d seen to it that there was no awkwardness in my movements as I rolled Layefa to the side of the bed, put my body between his and Negene’s. He watched me make the switch, an amused smile tugging at the ends of his lips. He leaned in, holding my gaze like you do when charming a snake. He put his lips to mine.

He’d swindled me, laid out the bait, set the trap. And I had rolled myself right into it. The classic bait and switch.

I hoped wildly for the groan of Auntie Philo’s car, the click of her keys in the front door. I even wished, impossible as it was, for the sound of my father’s clunky limp. I heard Edith, her feet slapping against the concrete floor. She stopped in front of the door.

“Keren?” she said quietly.

Negene put his hand over my mouth, gently but firmly. His hand was wide enough to cover the lower half of my face. I stayed as still as I possibly could. Her footfalls grew fainter as she retreated back to the living room, and my heart sank.

I knew then why Edith wouldn’t help me; she couldn’t. The game was rigged against her, against us. Negene was her friend, she’d brought him into our house. Auntie Philo would have never believed that she didn’t know that he would do this. Not after all the rebellions, after their fights. What worse way to hurt your mother than let bad things happen to the people in her care?

She too was trapped by her mother’s perceptions.

Layefa.

If I talked, no matter what happened, I’d get taken away from him. Or worse, he would get taken away from this life, with school and uniforms and sanity. My year was almost up, I could almost see the classrooms, touch my uniform, feel the cotton undershirt against my belly. The newness of all of that. I… I couldn’t.

My mother had gotten out. So had Auntie Philo. Maybe Layefa could get out too.

Negene reached down, breached the hem of my jeans.

I did nothing.