Africa39 (40 page)

‘Try it,’ you said. ‘It is fantastic!’

Your girlfriends kept observing me. But Femi, the guy with the big nose and rabbit ears, smiled and said, ‘Order one. You will enjoy it.’ He would have looked handsome if you placed a hand over his nose and pulled back his ears.

I ordered homework.

Group discussion skirted from the looming ASUU strike to the stories of Buccaneers warring with Black Axe, and then to the female student who did juju with her vagina and slept with her abusive lecturer; he woke up the following morning screaming himself hoarse and tearing off his clothes.

Nenye said, ‘He has been admitted to a psychiatric ward.’

Mary said, ‘Suits him best!’

Kene said, ‘That’s nonsense talk! Perhaps she wanted marriage and he refused!’

Mary said, ‘Then, zip up if you can’t own up.’

Nkem said, ‘That’s one penis down. Next on the line please!’

Kene began to speak but Nenye gave him the talk-to-the-palm.

You, you hardly spoke. Something dark climbed into your eyes. I wanted to ask what bothered you, but Femi was saying these things to me: asking about my course of study and where my hostel was. I took one look at his ears and glared at him.

Nenye lit a cigarette. The girls lit theirs too. They smoked and puffed like firewood. I wanted to throw up. The speaker which hung from the wall began to croon Flavour’s ‘Ada Ada’. The tranquil song melded with the loud chatter from the group.

‘I love this song!’ Femi said, moving in closer, unfazed. ‘You wanna dance?’

I got up and went to the smelly restroom. When I returned, Flavour’s ‘Shake Ukwu’ was blaring from the speaker. You swung your bottle of Smirnoff Ice over your head, twisting your body in tune with the music.

Nenye said, ‘You guys are wasting this fine music,’ got up and began to dance. Kene joined her. You stopped swinging your bottle and dropped it with a thud on the table. You sat back, your gaze on the dancing couple for a minute, before you pulled out your own cigarette pack and began to fumble with your lighter. Your movement was cold. Your face was set in a grim mask. You finally lit a cigarette and puffed smoke in my face.

‘You are surprised, babe?’ But you were looking at the dancing couple.

Something was not sitting well with me. It was in the way you watched Kene. The way your eyes shot arrows at Nenye. The way my pee filled up my bladder. You jerked off your seat and began to dance, a slow rhythmic sway of your hips, from side to side, like tree branches during harmattan. Kene pulled away from Nenye and drew you from behind, moving with your slow rhythm, his body perfectly melding with yours. Flavour’s
Ashawo
switched on and your dance steps changed. You began a slow dance, your right leg raised and your crotch slapping against Kene’s thigh. Later, when the music ended, you became brighter and chattier. I wanted to just get up and leave, but my legs stuck to the floor.

Femi pulled out a paper and began to read a poem, something about love and obsession. When he ended, Kene said, ‘I hate it. It didn’t give me the fucking
whoosh
!’

Nenye read her own story. Kene scoffed and said, ‘Depressing.’

David read a story about students who died during a Boko Haram attack, and Kene said it was agenda writing.

You read a story about a girl becoming aware of her sexuality. It was almost about me. My eyes burned with tears. I held your eyes. And I realised this was love, this thing that always made words screw themselves over and leave me stammering before you. I wanted to say that the story was beautiful. But Kene beat me to it.

‘It reads like a personal opinion masquerading as fiction,’ he said.

I was offended. You weren’t. You smiled in that sincere way that was beginning to piss me off. And then you jotted down notes, making the fucker feel like he was the best thing to have happened to the group. I wanted to shake you until your teeth rattled. Then I wondered if you were in love with Kene.

Later, Kene read his own story. You could tell it was carefully written, studiously edited and languorously rewritten. But you didn’t take him on. Didn’t even see how he thought he sounded like God. Instead you sat there, the stupid smile tearing through your face and peeling your lips back.

‘This story is so antiseptic,’ I said. ‘I could as well soak my head in a bucket of bleach!’

Kene froze.

David gasped.

Nenye’s jaw dropped.

Femi began to cough.

I could feel Nenye’s disdain. I could see Kene’s hate. And the cold war began. We fought with our eyes, gathered guns and arrows and machetes and shot and slashed and attacked with our stares. All the while the air was swollen with anger and silence and hate. Others stood by and watched as the war raged. I would not budge for them, would not be intimidated by their rudeness.

Femi began to laugh. ‘I love this babe!’

I turned to you. But you were watching Kene. He took his time folding his paper into tiny squares, his eyes glued to his task, his shoulders struggling to stay high. Then you looked at me. Then you smiled. I gave you the eye and you got up and said we had to leave. They did not attempt to call you back.

We walked out of the club, our hands clasped together. Outside, in a dark parking lot, you pulled me in a hug. The breeze was cool against my face. I gulped in air, to keep from crying, but my eyes burned still. For the first time, it felt so right, this affection, this thing that obliterated reason, leaving me in that space where hope fluttered, weakly at first, and then determinedly as I inhaled your scent of flowers and soap and cigarettes and alcohol. It blossomed as I kissed your cheek and you didn’t cringe. It winged boldly, uncontrolled, as I kissed your neck. The trembling started in my stomach and then I was shaking. And then I was crying. And then you begged me not to cry. This was love. But it beckoned for a new name, so you would understand – because you were supposed to understand – that I wasn’t like every other girl. That I was meant for you. But you held my face, wiped my tears, called me, ‘My best-friend-sister’.

How do you weigh friendship? At what point should the other party begin to perceive that it has become something much more?

You lay on my bed, dressed just in your underwear, your head propped on the pillow, and you were saying something about the walls breathing fire, all the while your breasts hung atop your bra cups like large oranges on bottle corks. Liquid warmth swirled in my stomach. I was paralysed by it. I could not breathe well. I could barely hear you as you talked about visiting home; about your town, Abeokuta, and its rocks and dusts and little rusted-roofed houses. But I was staring at your breasts, at the bulge that was your nipple, wondering when you would ever get it.

‘You will love Abeokuta,’ you said.

‘I love you,’ I said.

You sat up. You held my hands. You said, ‘Oh, babe, I love you too. I want this to remain even after we marry our husbands and have our own children.’

It was then the anger clouded my vision. It raged, pulling down all my restraints and silences and hopelessness. You were supposed to be intelligent but how could you be so stupid, so blind? How could you not see something as simple as this?

‘I love you like a boy does a girl.’

You dropped my hands.

‘You are mad,’ you said.

‘Maybe . . . I . . . Papa always said there is something not right with me.’

You did not say I sounded stupid. Instead you cracked, your face crumpling and squeezing and morphing. You grew into someone else. Someone scary. You pulled the duvet to your chest. My initial bravado began to seep out of my pores.

‘You are homosexual,’ you said.

‘I am different-sexual,’ I whispered.

‘What the fuck is . . . When did this begin?’

Your voice, it was cold, cold, cold. I stared at my palms and the words would not come.

This is how I remember it, Bisi. This is how you left me: you pulled on your dress. You slipped on your shoes. You grabbed your bag. You picked up your phone. You walked out of the door, without a second look back. Leaving only the memories. Of things that used to be; of things that never would be. You never came back. Your number is unreachable. And weeks later, ASUU embarked on an indefinite strike action.

Bisi, it has been five months and fourteen days since you left. School will reopen next week and I know I will begin to know what hell feels like. I will see your big eyes again. I will walk alone now. I will hurt every day. But it will get to that point when pain will begin to take hold. And then, I would begin to hold my head high.

I will slip this letter under your book when classes begin. I hope you read it. So you would know just how I remember us.

from the forthcoming novel
The Wayfarers

Chibundu Onuzo

Everyone hates soldiers, even we, Chike Ameobi thought that morning. How will you enter a village and kill a young man because he cannot explain where he slept last night? The first time he had slept with a girl, he had no explanations for his mother the next morning.

They tied the boy to a stick and blindfolded him. The strip of cloth was so worn that when Chike passed it round the boy’s forehead, he could still see his terrified eyeballs moving. The villagers gathered to watch this riverside show. A few women were weeping demonstratively, throwing their hands to the air and beating their heads in the dust but for the most part, the audience watched in silence.

The boy was convicted on baseless evidence. One of their men had been killed last night in a patrol ambush. One attacker had been of slight build and wearing a red shirt that showed in the dark, even as he escaped. In the early hours of the morning, their C.O. had driven to the nearby village and demanded that the culprits be brought forward. Rounds had been fired in the air and a few men had been kicked to the ground but no one came forward, as was expected. They were about to leave, when his C.O. saw this young boy going down to the river in a red shirt and torn khaki trousers.

His ‘Where were you last night?’ had caused a series of stammering answers, two of which conflicted. Sergeant Bay
?
, who could barely see in daylight, had identified the boy as the assailant from last night and the military tribunal of one sentenced him to death.

The line of twelve soldiers began to step backwards. A young woman, perhaps his sister or girlfriend, broke away from the main group of mourners and rolled towards the boy, stopping just before his feet. She lay there with her face to the sky, keening like a wounded bird. It would have been better to shoot the boy in the head, quickly and quietly. It was such displays that stirred up hatred, folding it into the villagers’ souls.

Seven, Chike counted out loud. Whenever a firing squad was assembled, it was the shortest man’s legs they used to judge. Wherever he stopped after ten steps, the group readjusted. In battalions with crack shooting teams, it was the tallest used to measure. For a division like this, Y
?
mi
?
k
?
, with his stumpy bow-legs, was best.

‘Attention!’

They stamped unevenly, their feet syncopating the ground.

‘Aim!’

Their guns clicked in a rhythmless staccato.

‘Inemo go,’ the boy screamed.

‘Fire!’

The bullets from eight guns tore his chest open as the girl rolled to safety. One shot managed to find its way to the boy’s head, pumping blood out of his ears.

‘Cease fire!’

The boy’s body slumped forward as their guns came down, as if obeying the same order. The girl was dragged away by some villagers, sliding through the dust, unresisting as a corpse. Still on the ground, but weeping in a more restrained fashion.

Chike and Y
?
mi were chosen to cut the body down from the stake and bury it. His C.O. maintained there was nothing unconstitutional about them but still, he refused to submit the open-air trials to the legal expertise of others. The boy’s palms were still moist but his trousers were dry.

‘You didn’t shoot,’ Chike said as they lifted the body between them.

‘No. You, nko?’

‘No.’

Was it rebellion they were fermenting, Chike asked himself when they got back to base. He did not know. Unrest in the ranks was often the effervescence of weevily beans and maggoty rice. Tolerably fed and kitted African soldiers did not grumble because of ideas. Still, on many occasions, he found himself whispering his discontent to Y
?
mi, who, even if he did not agree, did not stop the words of his friend, an act convictable in their C.O.’s court.

Their Commanding Officer was an Ijaw man, inconceivable but it was so nonetheless. He had sat on the tribunal that convicted the Ogoni geologist who claimed the oil spills would make his homeland uninhabitable. Rock scientists do not often rouse people but this onyx-black man with his rushed, unpunctuated speech heated the Niger Deltans until they erupted on to the streets in protest.

Tear gas was thrown, property destroyed, shots fired into the crowd and a military court assembled to determine the sequence of events. As the only Niger Deltan, Chike’s Commanding Officer was held up as proof that disaffection in the region was exaggerated. Perhaps Opuowei Benatari had fought for the geologist on the other side of the panel doors the tribunal retired behind briefly but when the verdict of guilty was passed, he stood shoulder to shoulder with his comrades.