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Kambirinachi

QUEEN’S COLLEGE IS AN ALL-GIRLS SECONDARY SCHOOL IN YABA, Lagos Mainland. Kambirinachi hadn’t visited Lagos in her present incarnation, but she remembered it vividly. She had seen it many times. One time before before, she borrowed the body of a taut and agile dancer at Fela’s Shrine in Ikeja. She longed to feel the thing that made bodies move so exquisitely, with such blissful urgency. Feet stomping, hips swinging, waist and ankle beads jiggling and clashing against each other, transforming the dancers into human shekere, percussion in time with the musicians’ cries, chest and body undulating in rhythm to Fela’s instruments. It had been quite the time.

Now, she was in Lagos again but confined to the school compound (confined to a breathing body that required sustenance and upkeep in fastidious ways that she had not anticipated, particularly now that neither of her parents were present to scold her).

Kambirinachi had cried until she fell asleep as her mother drove her along the dilapidated Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. She’d woken up to the creaky grumble of the pickup’s engine and the sound of her mother chewing roasted groundnuts from a cone of newspaper nestled in the folds of fabric on her lap.

“Kambi,” her mother had said. “You’ve woken? We’ve almost reached.” Ikenna handed the half-full cone of nuts to Kambirinachi. “Take.”

“Thank you, Ma,” Kambirinachi said.

She repeated it when her mother dropped her off at her aunt’s two-bedroom flat in the dusty staff quarters of the school campus. Ikenna gave her a small wad of faded green twenty-naira notes.

“Keep it well o,” she said, voice stern, eyes soft. “Don’t let anybody steal it or push you up and down, okay?”

“Yes, Ma,” Kambirinachi said, but Ikenna was worried. Kambirinachi was so small for her age. Chineke! she thought. So small and so strange. These other girls will eat her alive!

She turned to her sister, Anuli, who leaned against the pickup with a pitying smile curving her plump black-lined lips. Ikenna’s expression asked if she was doing the right thing.

Anuli nodded slowly. “Nwanne mu nwanyi enyela onwe gi nsogbu. She’s with me. Don’t worry, eh?”

Kambirinachi looked unblinking at her mother’s face, until tears spilled out of her eyes. She tried her very best not to think about the next time she would see her, lest the voices of her Kin return to drown her.

She asked, “You will come in two weeks?”

“Yes, Kambi, me and Papa will come in two weeks.”

THAT WAS A MONTH AGO. Her parents hadn’t visited in two weeks like they’d promised, but they had phoned Aunty Anuli to say they would be there that coming weekend, on Visiting Day. It was a difficult thing to refrain from thinking about the future, especially when the present was so … tedious. Kambirinachi found it tiresome, navigating the social landscape of secondary school, while also trying to understand advanced math and memorize the periodic table. Kambirinachi excelled in part because of her ability to tip herself over like a cup of water and become absorbed in any given moment, but mostly because of her deep terror of the voices. She had already earned a reputation as an efiko, a nerd. She had heard what some of the other girls whispered about each other, the causticity of their words. She did not want to be on the receiving end of that, so she kept her madness, her magic, quiet. So quiet that it was painful.

She was in Dan Fodio House, named for Sultan Usman Dan Fodio of Sokoto. Kambirinachi knew of Dan Fodio from before before. She’d played with his dazzling Fulani Muses—most Muses are dazzling; that is how they inspire. They shared stories of his sheer brilliance, throwing around the term “revolution” quite a bit, but Kambirinachi was preoccupied with his poetry. She started to remember, she laughed about it quietly, and then she stopped, for fear that she would incite a visit from the Muses, her old friends. It had been too long now, and they might condemn her choice to live out this fragile human life. No, they certainly would; it was an unnatural thing.

The thing she loved, the thing she knew would help her manage the waves of tedium interspersed with the angsty melodrama and cruelty of teenage girls, was art class. And Mr Obasa, the junior school art teacher. Kambirinachi patiently sat through forty-five minutes of art history and theory so that she could unleash her mind in the half hour of drawing practice. In still life, she would follow Mr Obasa’s instructions: “Draw what is in front of you.”

It took several classes for Kambirinachi to remember that the things she saw in front of her were not always apparent to others. Not everyone could see the rot before the rot, growing in small scaly patches around the large green and yellow mangoes arranged on the fabric-draped stool. That kind of decay told Kambirinachi that the person who picked the fruit, whoever they were, had a head full of ill intention. But Mr Obasa appreciated her “imagination.” He was impressed by her talent. Only eleven and she had a distinct style, somewhat bizarre and vaguely disturbing but distinct, nonetheless.

AUNTY ANULI LIVED IN A SMALL TWO-BEDROOM FLAT on the ground floor of one of the several bedraggled five-storey blocks of flats in the school staff quarters. She lived with her husband, Ugo, and their six-year-old son, Junior. The three of them slept on the queen bed in the master bedroom, and they used the second room to store all the foodstuffs that overflowed from the kitchen cabinets, some old furniture, and a navy blue and red portmanteau filled with sequined George wrappers and embroidered silks from their wedding a decade ago. The day before Kambirinachi’s arrival, Aunty Anuli asked Ugo to cram as much of their things as possible into the cluttered closets and stack the rest against the wall to make room for the new twin mattress she had bought for her strange niece.

Kambirinachi was grateful to be sleeping at Aunty Anuli’s place instead of boarding on the other side of campus, where if you weren’t claimed by a senior student as a school daughter, you could be awoken before everything alive in the world to fetch bucket after bucket of water for the seniors in your dormitory. Kambirinachi still had to fetch water some mornings, when there was no power for the water pumps. Three full buckets: one for the kitchen, one for Junior, and one for herself. She was slow, but Aunty Anuli never complained.

The thing is that Anuli was afraid of the girl. Even though Ikenna had stopped referring to the child as an Ọgbanje, Anuli could not surrender the thought. She was a pious woman, insisting that her husband and son join her at the crack of dawn in prayer and devotion. On the second or third morning of prayer, she caught Kambirinachi with a vacant look in her wide-open eyes, mumbling something indecipherable under her breath. Maybe she was only praying, but Anuli found it unnerving and decided it was best to leave the girl alone. Best not to anger the thing.

Kambirinachi let the month blur by so that when Visiting Day arrived, she burst with joy at the sight of her father’s face and threw herself into his arms. For Ikenna, the distance had made her fonder of her strange child. Kambirinachi tried to commit every single detail of the visit to her knotty, mosaicked memory, so that when the day was over, when her parents had driven back to Abeokuta, and the fear started to slither into her mind, beckoning the voices to join in, she could go back and savour a particular moment. Like sitting in the pickup, on her father’s bony lap, her mother smiling, and the taste of Mr Bigg’s fried rice and chicken in her mouth.