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Kambirinachi

DURING HER THIRD YEAR AT QUEEN’S COLLEGE, Kambirinachi befriended a gaunt, wide-eyed girl named Mercy. The poor thing suffered frequent and harrowing crises because her blood cells—distorted by inherited abnormal hemoglobin—took the shape of razor-sharp sickles and clumped together to block the small vessels in her wisp of a body. On top of that, she was just really quite strange. She mumbled to herself often, with her eyes closed. Kambirinachi worked, to no avail, to decipher the meaning of Mercy’s murmuring.

“What are you saying?” she would ask, interrupting Mercy’s quiet babbling.

“Eh?” Mercy would respond, her face, meticulously scarred with diagonal lines flaring from the corners of her small lips like wings, a picture of innocence.

“Just now now you were saying something,” Kambirinachi would insist.

“I wasn’t!” The girl really didn’t know she was doing it.

Kambirinachi wondered about Mercy; she didn’t recognize her from before before.

Were they the same? Was she lost? Had she forgotten?

The other girls accused Mercy of witchcraft, which was typical of teenage girls. Yet Kambirinachi was astonished at the extreme points of emotion that their collective pendulum hit. Mob mentality, groupthink, call it what you like, but one day their classmates would be moved with sympathy for Mercy the sickler—they’d offer to take biology notes for her and fetch her buckets of water to bathe in the morning—and the next day, after she’d suffered a seizure or screamed from the acute pain of a crisis at the chapel during morning Mass or after lunch break, they would again be sure that she was an Ọgbanje, or a witch, or possessed by an evil spirit. She was just sick.

Once, at break time, not too long after one of Mercy’s crises, the girls who’d chosen not to go spend their pocket money at the tuck shop behind campus eyed her. Mercy often spent her breaks asleep with her head on her desk, cradled in the nook of her elbow. The girls whispered silly things like, “Better not wake her up, or she will do juju for you.”

“She’s not a witch,” Kambirinachi said, her small voice calm and even. “You people should just leave her alone.”

“Who was talking to you? Anyway, how do you even know? Are you a witch as well?”

“Maybe.” Kambirinachi shrugged. “Maybe I’ll cut you in your dreams, and you’ll never be able to climb out of sleep.”

The girls squealed, aghast. They rushed out of the classroom shouting a trail of prayers behind them:

“Tufiakwa!”

“God forbid bad thing!”

“I reject it with the blood of Jesus!”

“No weapon fashioned against me shall prosper!”

“Back to sender!”

SOMEWHERE IN THE FOUR HOURS BETWEEN the French and physics exams in the middle of the junior secondary school certificate exam week, Mercy was in sick bay, writhing in the throes of a violent fever that came upon her suddenly the night before.

The school nurse called the bank where her mother worked as a secretary. The nurse did her best to sound calm, but her voice shook. “Mrs Awoniyi, we are going to rush your daughter to the general hospital this afternoon. Please, ma, will you meet us there so that they can admit her quickly?”

Kambirinachi was sitting on a plastic chair with her legs folded underneath her small body, the skirt of her blue pinafore tucked under her knees, neck-deep in physics revisions. She was in the dappled shade of a mango tree by the science building with several of her classmates, cramming the Assumptions of Kinetic Theory, when she looked up and saw Mercy waving at her from across the quad, a big smile on her face.

Kambirinachi smiled and waved back. “I thought you were in sick bay,” she said.

She said it again louder when Mercy didn’t answer.

“Mercy!” Kambirinachi shouted. “The nurse let you leave?” Kambirinachi’s classmates looked at her, at first annoyed at the distraction, and then puzzled.

“Who are you talking to?” one of them asked.

“Mercy.” Kambirinachi gestured toward their classmate, who stood not even twenty feet away, beaming. She had never smiled so big. Her royal-blue pinafore was, for the first time Kambirinachi had seen, impeccable.

“You’re funny. There’s no one there.”

“She’s right there,” Kambirinachi said, turning back to see Mercy slowly walking backward, away from them, her face flickering and dimming. Then Kambirinachi understood.

In the humidity of the following Monday morning at general assembly, the principal announced Mercy’s death. The wailing and crying that ensued lit a flare of annoyance in Kambirinachi: her classmates were cruel to Mercy when she was alive; what exactly was the purpose of this performance of grief? She felt relief on Mercy’s behalf; her body had not been kind to her, had not been able to contain her.

Kambirinachi did not cry. She celebrated that Mercy was free.

FOR THE LONG HOLIDAY BETWEEN HER FINAL YEAR of junior secondary school and first year of senior secondary, Kambirinachi went home to Abeokuta. She packed up her Ghana must go early that day and spent the morning cleaning her aunty’s flat. She swept the dark carpet that covered her bedroom floor, washed and mopped the poorly tiled bathroom floor. She scrubbed the toilet with bleach and scoured the discoloured bathtub. In the kitchen, she cleaned the cupboards after politely asking the black, seed-sized cockroaches to leave, and she rearranged the tins of powdered milk and plastic tubs of provisions. Afterward, she bathed in the freshly cleaned tub, oiled her skin, dressed, and waited for Aunty Anuli to drive her home.

The moment she saw her father sitting on the wooden bench on the veranda of their crumbling bungalow, his shoulders drooping sadly, his whole body thinner than she’d ever seen, Kambirinachi knew that something was wrong. She smelled the sickness on him, sharp and sour, when she embraced him. It had only been three months since she’d last seen him; what was working so quickly inside him to undo his body?

“Bigger and taller every time I see you,” he said. Even his voice was tainted with the stink of whatever illness was coiled and rotting inside him.

Kambirinachi felt fear like needles down her spine and small bitter bursts in the back of her throat.

“Papa, what is wrong?”

“Ah ahn, tortoise, nothing o!”

He called her tortoise for her precociousness. After the wily character that stole birds’ feathers to fly and join a feast in the sky. He angered the birds with his greed, so they pushed the tortoise out of the clouds and he fell to the ground, shattering his shell. Like Kambirinachi on stolen time, waiting waiting to be pushed out of the clouds. But she wouldn’t be the only one to shatter.

SHE WAITED UNTIL EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, after her mother left for her provisions shop in the army barracks, before the sun was fully awake with its limbs stretching hot across the sky. She tiptoed across the cold, damp concrete floor of the kitchen toward her parents’ room. The brown wooden door was just barely open, and she peeked in to see her father’s thin body face up on the old wood-framed bed. His breathing was ragged and loud. She walked toward the bed, careful not to wake him, stood above him, and slowly and steadily, she sank her hands into her father’s chest, from her fingertips to her wrist. And then, with all her strength, she drew the sickness out of his lungs. He was fast asleep until she pulled her hands out, then he awoke with a loud gasp, his face broken open in shock.

Kambirinachi ran outside to the backyard. She shook her hands to flick the sickness—black tar that stunk like rotten meat—into the open gutter. The filthy, stagnant muck splashed onto her bare legs, so she rinsed it off with water from a large plastic drum they kept to collect rain. Leaning against the drum, she looked into the water at her reflection, who blinked languidly at her.

“What will the consequence be?” she asked, but her reflection only looked away, with something like contempt on her face.

Kambirinachi went back into the house and knocked gingerly on her parents’ bedroom door.

“Kambi, is that you?” her father called out, his voice groggy with sleep. “Yes, Papa.” She stepped into the room that she had fled only moments before.

Her father was sitting upright on the bed, looking around him in a daze. “Your mother has gone?” he asked, on the edge of a big yawn.

Kambirinachi nodded. Already the smell of decay had left him. “What are we going to eat this morning?” He smiled big.

Ikenna had left a pot of palm oil stew with catfish on the stove, so Kambirinachi peeled and boiled sweet potatoes in salted water. They ate with their hands, listening to the radio in silence that was occasionally interrupted only by her father’s laughter; he found the advertisements hilarious.

The voices didn’t begin to hound Kambirinachi that day until after her father left the house. He’d decided to surprise his wife at her shop, wanted to tell her that their daughter’s return had cured whatever it was that ailed him. Ikenna had taken the pickup, so he travelled to her by bus.

Kambirinachi was lying on a worn red-and-blue raffia mat in the living room, drawing in her school notebook. The moment her father shut the rusty burglar-proof gate behind him, she was overcome by a blank, a savage empty. A yawning hollow, a brief pause, only for an instant, before the howl of voices rushed through her whole self, like harsh, forceful harmattan winds.

Give it back!