Читать книгу Black Sunday - Tola Rotimi Abraham - Страница 12

I AM SOMETHING

PETER

2000

I LIKED TO think that no matter what happened, my older brother, Andrew, and I would always be close. This was exactly the kind of thing I worried about, growing older, being on my own, my sisters leading happy, glamorous lives, my brother busy and distant.

Many times, it felt like Andrew and I were only one argument away from being enemies. Other times, we were the best brothers in all of Lagos. I made it my business to try, to make sure we always were getting along, fun and happy. We were best friends only because I did everything he said to do, and I did not mind every time he ignored me to go play with Solomon, Babu, and Eric. Each time he said something mean, I tolerated it, pretending the pain was from something else, like a stomachache from food I did not enjoy, beans or something like that. I stored the hurt for a while in my belly, then I found a place to let it out. Other times, he was the nicest brother, taking care of me.

“I am something,” Andrew said that day, to distract me from the pain he was inflicting as he was massaging mentholated balm all over my swollen palm. “I am tall in the morning, short in the evening, even shorter at night. What am I?”

“You are an old man,” I said, after thinking about the riddle for a little while.

When he said that was the wrong answer, I did not argue. I watched him pour boiling hot water into the bowl we use for washing up before meals. He pulled out an old towel he had tucked in the back of his trousers and sat on the floor before me.

“The answer is a candle. I am a candle,” Andrew said.

A CANDLE IS long, an old man was tall now shrunken, I wanted to say but did not. I grabbed the handle of the chair I sat on with my left hand, steadying myself as he pressed the heat of the rag against my wound. I did not cry out. I did not want Grandmother waking up and looking too closely at my hand. Better for her to sleep, I thought. Better for us that she sleeps as long as she wants to because then when she wakes, it will be easier to talk to her about money for Panadol painkillers.

Andrew leaned in with the full weight of his grip, applying pressure to my swollen palm. As he did, bloody pus oozed out in a slow and steady drip.

“Sorry,” he said.

“I am something,” I said, interrupting his pity. “I am light as a feather, yet the strongest man in the world can’t hold on to me for more than ten minutes. What am I?”

“You are water,” Andrew said. “Am I right?”

“No. Not really.”

“What is the right answer?”

“It’s air. Actually. Breathing air. No one can hold his breath for up to ten minutes.”

The air around us was humid and difficult to endure without murmuring. My scalp was wet and sweat was going down my face, even into my ears. My shirt was soaked with sweat, but I could not take it off until Andrew was done cleaning my palm. It was early evening, and we were boiling a half yam for our night meal. I could hear the slices boiling in the pot a few feet away from us because Andrew used the wrong pot cover, so the heat was escaping, and floating bubbles were bursting and spilling all over the stove. That was just one more thing for Grandmother to be angry with us about when she woke up.

It was as if she considered us two children instead of four. Our sisters were one person, the girls, and Andrew and I were one person, the boys. Whatever he did, I was equally responsible for and there was nothing I could do to escape it.

Once, Andrew had dropped his undershorts in the hallway when he was taking his house clothes out back to wash. He did not notice them quickly enough. Grandmother found them and lifted them with a broken plastic hanger, waving them around like a flagpole.

“Do you see what I have to live with?” she asked, screaming in Yoruba at no one in particular as she walked around the house. “Dirty smelling children. Underwear smelling like the penises of dead male goats, in the middle of the house where I get up each morning to pray to my creator.”

“God, is this not too much for a little old woman? When did I become the palm nut in the middle of the street that even little boys are stepping on me so mercilessly?”

For days, she continued like that. She did not allow any of us to retrieve the underwear from the place she had mounted it, in the center of the living room right next to the pile of Father’s university textbooks. Andrew waited until she left one evening to sing with a funeral procession for one of the commercial bus drivers in the neighborhood who had been killed in an accident with a delivery truck. He waited until the voices singing “Jesus, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, whosoever comes to Him shall never die” were a distant hollow, then he picked up his underwear and threw it in the trash along with the plastic hanger.

“This woman is pushing me to the wall. I am going to deal with her very soon,” he said that day to me, his eyes cloudy with not-shed tears.

Andrew was not massaging my arm fast enough to stop the cramping in my back. My face felt hotter and hotter, so I asked him to stop.

“Do you feel better yet?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “I am just hungry.”

Andrew stood up off the floor. He had the bowl and the towel with him. I let go of the chair and wiped my face with the back of my hand.

“The food should be ready now,” he said. He was looking in the direction of the kitchen, nodding toward it. “Do you need my help to get up?”

I did not. I was dehydrated, hot, and my throat ached, but I did not need his help. But Andrew must have misheard me, I thought, for he reached out his hand and pulled me up out of the chair. I stood up, my legs burning and my steps shaky, taking off my shirt and walking into the house in nothing but my undershorts.

The palm oil came out in thick droplets as Andrew shook the bottle over the plated yams. The heat of the yams melted the droplets immediately on contact till there was a small puddle of oil around the yams. Andrew sprinkled a small pinch of salt over the plate.

“My neck does not feel so good,” I said.

“Just eat this. Then I will go out to buy you Panadol Extra,” Andrew said.

“Just Panadol. Panadol Extra is for adults only,” I said.

“Panadol Extra is for stubborn pain. Children can have stubborn pain, too, you know,” Andrew said.

He had made the yams soft, just how I liked to eat them. I squished them with my fingers into the body of oil, watching steaming white yam take on the red of palm oil. I took a little piece of yam then molded it into a tiny ball and put it in my mouth. This is how I knew how sick I had become, because Andrew did not complain about the mess I was making.

Back when I was younger, back when we had Father and Mother, Andrew twisted my shortest finger so hard it came close to snapping because I was playing with our food. Mother screamed at him for hours after that and she stopped serving us in the same bowls, even though Father told her that it was perfectly normal for brothers to fight over such things. Rough play does not kill boys, it makes them stronger, Father said to Mother. You should have seen what my cousins and I got into growing up.

That was before they were gone, before it became so hard to remember what they looked like. Sometimes when I watched Nigerian movies, I looked out for ones with actors and actresses that were around my parents’ age. I did not remember them and so I imagined. It was easy to imagine Mother in a thick coat shivering in the London cold, her makeup bright and irreverent like Gloria Anozie in that movie. It was easier to imagine Father with a group of men arguing politics, his beard uncombed, short and thick like Sam Dede in any of his movies. I wondered about my ability to identify them in a crowd of people. I suspected that I would have been unable to pick them out, unable to remember any distinguishing fact about either of them.

“PETER?” ANDREW SAID my name. I opened my eyes.

“Yes? I am not sleeping,” I said.

“I am going to get you medicine now,” he said.

“Okay. Thank you,” I said.

He went into Grandmother’s room, where she was still asleep, and brought out one of her old duvets, covering my feet with them.

“I found some money,” he said. “I will be back right away.”