Favor

I ran as burning sticks, rocks, and dust rained from the sky.

I ran ducking, lighting as smoke riddled with burning flesh plunged down my nose. 

I ran past dirty-water-swollen twisted limbs. 

It was dark when I crept out from under a shed amongst the rubble-filled landscape. Ignoring the rumbling crater within, I succumbed to the darkness. 

I was safe from boots here. 

Startled awake by a gangling of voices from far away, I crawled through the gutted windscreen of what daylight revealed wasn’t a shed after all but the carcass of a car. 

Four, five, maybe seven days behind me is the smouldering that used to be home for a while. I went to school and learned to read and write on a fading rectangular blackboard cradled between my thighs, where I felt the smooth skin of my first and second pencils, where my pencil bled into white sheets of paper, and Mallam Yinusa nodded yes when I raised my hand. 

Before, boots jumped out of trucks…and crashed on the earth…leaving dust clouds in their wake. Before Amid and I peddled the streets from dusk to dawn, our bowls were at times filled with people’s generosity, and when they looked away, the bins were bursting with leftovers. 

There were many black, shiny, ugly things held together by spools of  twine wrapped around the men in green uniforms and helmeted feet. I wiggled my naked toes at Amid, ‘Their feet must be inside hell.’ 

The pounding of boots in my ears is constant when the sky is not raining fire and soot, like a low-grade fever, as I rock on the ball of my feet, head tucked in my chest. 

Boots kick doors open. 

Boots cause screaming. 

Boots stand in blood.

I ran till the black clouds became blue blankets, and birds started chirping—another chord to the pounding between my ears. I ran till the ground held no more debris, till air no longer carried death. I ran till blue waves rose to welcome. Tethered to the shore were the two fishes—the mother, Medusa, and her son, Orion, nestled her side, just like Amid said. I boarded through a hatch near the rudder. ‘If it’s hot…or warm, it’s not the place to hide’. 

The sailors drank a lot of alcohol, often abandoning their meals. 

That was a blessing. 

I was afraid of being discovered a couple of times when they found my shit, ‘Which of you fuckers took a dunk on the floor…!’ 

When Medusa docked, I crawled out her belly undetected onto a land sprawling with people…like it was at home. Before boots. Fear loosened its grip on the shores of this new place, under the same heaven, with no fireballs raining from the sky…no thunder barking in my ears.

I squinted out the sun…took a deep breath, and moved forward.

*

I wandered the street, hands outstretched, baked dark by the merciless sun, shooed away from glistening vehicles, egging forward in traffic; sometimes, I got a little that filled my belly. At times, I didn’t, but what I got was enough to make me try again. And again. Till Edozie. She scampered off a keke napep, wide hips, thick thighed and armed, draped in a purple and yellow Ankara boubou, plum lips quizzically pursed as she looked me over with unreadable brown eyes. 

Mallam Yinusa had brown eyes. Brown eyes that caught fire under the noon sun. I followed her, as Amid and I followed him on that first day he bought us goat cheese and manya kuka. On the second day, he bought t-shirts and shorts from the stickman in the market square. 

She glanced a couple of times over her shoulder and stopped in front of a hole in the wall separated from the streets by a beaded curtain, a stone’s throw from a police checkpoint. 

She asked my name. I didn’t speak but quickly took in the dirty space—tables crowded with empty beer bottles, dirty bowls, and, most importantly, I smelt the food. I pointed at the floor and tables and gestured with my hands—I would clean for food. She cocked her head to the side, contemplating my offer. After a minute, she shrugged and steered me into her kitchen.

I served lagers, cleaned the tables, swept, mopped, and took up residence when the last customer left on a raffia mat under the drip drip sink in the corner of the kitchen. The squalor was a definite step up from the farthest memory I could muster. Memories I wished to throw away with dirty dishwater but couldn’t because Amid’s lopsided, mischievous smile resided in the oily suds.

  At night, mosquitoes buzzed around my head, and my ears replayed the thunder from far away. My dreams were plagued with spurts of red from Mallam Yinusa’s head on the boots planted beside his body, Amid’s hand over my mouth in the cramped wardrobe where we hid, and Mallam Yinusa’s ‘Whatever happens, don’t come out!’ 

*

I never spoke but keenly watched her every move. When she sighed deeply, her broad chest heaving, hands akimbo, I knew she was irritated. When she kissed her lips, a frown between a pair of thickly pencilled eyebrows; it was because she was tired. I would bring her a cup of water and gesture for her to sit. ‘Ah, this your boy na good pikin.’ The customers would say. She would smile wide, exposing her gapped tooth, pat my shoulder, and mouth her thanks. 

She named me Favor and told everyone I was mute, and because people assumed mute meant slow, I didn’t dispute it. 

I saw what Boots did when Amid spoke. 

A month after providence brought us together, her business partner/lover, tall and bald and dressed in an efficient safari suit, arrived. 

Her smile grew more effusive, heavy knuckled hands fluttered back and forth, adjusting her dress under the too-small apron secured above her backside, her voice razor cutting through the melee as she pretended not to pay him attention. When she swung her ample derriere past his table, he smacked the twin cheeks—the slap reverberating in the parlour. She scrounged her face in mock anger, lips pulled back, baring teeth, “Kingsley! What is wrong with you? Can’t you see my customers are here?” He would jeer cigarette-stained teeth back at her, then purse thick lips together, making noisy smooching noises, “Let them look! Na me get am!” 

She ignored his lecherous glances at the young boys that wandered in, hoping for free meals or alms, but not when it stayed on me. 

‘I see you looking at my boy…. don’t try it.’ Her words were barely above a whisper but wafted through the air as the aluminium bowls encrusted brown from pepper soup residue slipped off my hands into the cold, soapy water.

‘I only asked him to bring me a cup of water…’ His voice wobbled without the usual bark. 

Her voice had a sinister ring as she laughed low, ‘You must think me quite foolish. Anyone with eyes can see you salivating when he is near. If you try it…it won’t be like the last time…I will kill you!’

‘He is a child…

‘Has that stopped you before?’

At night, when the floors were scrubbed clean, crockery stowed away, and chairs piled high on top of tables, I lay—curled up under the blanket Edozie provided that first day. I watched rats scurry across the cracked, chipped floor, their whiskers and limbs electrified by the quiet, and the sentry light from the police checkpoint across the street spilt through the window above the kitchen sink, providing adequate illumination. Every day around midnight, one of the policemen would barrel down to the shack and shine his torch into the enclave; Edozie’s pepper soup warmed their bellies. 

She was never robbed. 

*

In my second year, the groping started. 

With an influx of prosperity, she opened another location and left me to man the first. I was slick and fast, planting myself between a customer and doorway if one tried to slip away without paying, and clapped my palms at those who lingered when I was ready to close. A couple of times, I banged pans together when a customer grew belligerent; a policeman darted across the road, grabbing the drunk by his collar and emptying his pockets until I nodded my satisfaction after counting out money for the product consumed. 

Kingsley would come in, pretentiously seeking Edozie.

  ‘She isn’t here…let me sit and see how you manage.’

He sat near the kitchen door, fingers sniping at my calf, arm, and flanks when he thought no one was watching and my hands were occupied, never free to swat away. Once, I dropped a bowl of water, ‘Wetin do you?’ He leered before gulping down half his bottle of lager. 

  ‘Leave him alone!’ A regular shouted above the blare of horns and human traffic. 

‘Wetin I do am?’ 

The regular grabbed an empty bottle off an adjacent table, ‘You touch that boy again. I go break your head. Oloshi!’ 

Kingsley lurched, scurrying out the door, unsettling his chair and several empty beer bottles. 

‘Useless man!’ The regular heckled after him. 

Several weeks later, after closing, I was bent over the sink washing the last of the bowls when an immovable weight crushed me against the sink, pinching my navel against the ceramic bowl. With my arms covered in suds, fear wrapped its talons around my body, and my mouth opened in a silent scream. His breath was rancid with alcohol and the recognizable spice from Edozie’s pepper soup. ‘Shhh…I like you, fine boy.’ Rough fingers yanked at my fly, pulling at my penis, thick jabbed into my buttocks.

‘What are you doing?’ Edozie’s shrill voice cut through pounding boots in my ears. 

A cool breeze hit my rear suddenly as I was free. The cacophony of pots crashing dispelled the silence. 

‘You sick bastard. He is a child…you…you…’ 

His slurred voice and her scream were drowned out by the blares of horns from a queue of trucks waiting to be cleared for passage at the checkpoint. 

The scuttle was brief. 

There was a grunt. Heaviness fell at my feet as wet splashed across my face.

  My bladder gave way, and urine pooled around my feet. 

The air was putrid with dirty dishwater and death.

Gentle hands turned me around. 

She cradled my head into the warm vat of her blood-soaked chest, ‘Sorry…sorry.’

*

‘So you saw it all happen…from the door…ahh, this man is wicked o.’ The policeman, who ate seconds of soup, repeated, a toothpick hanging between black slack lips.

‘Yes. He had a knife to his throat….’

‘Eyah…I have read your statement, Madam Edozie.’ 

I stayed seated in the corner, staring at my feet.

‘Thank God you came in when you did. And you, oga, you saw it too?’ The policeman turned to the regular. 

‘Yes…it’s not his first time…’ The regular’s contempt filled the room like incense. 

‘Imagine that kin man…see this fine woman…yet it’s a child he prefers. Ko ni da fun!

‘Straight to hell…no roadblocks!’ spat the regular.

After that night, she moved me into the three-bedroom tenement she had shared with Kingsley. I had a bed and a room, but my limbs were heavy and sleep-distorted by fettered feet, sneering tobacco-stained teeth, juxtaposed with blood-soaked boots.

There were whispers…and pointing.

I was no longer invisible. 

Everyone saw what I wished stayed hidden under the crawl space, in the soot-covered kitchen corner, under the drip drip sink.

Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash.