With you I laughed. I worry about other things too: that your mother will grow old hating me, that she will count her grey hairs and hold me responsible for each one. I worry you may marry a man like me, that life will beat the importance of knowing yourself out of you. I fear your anger and emptiness within you long after you have stopped calling for me. I have cheated you and myself.
I no longer have the strength to be mad because it has been sapped by a tree sprouting roots somewhere. Wherever I am I will be running from myself. Imagine no day without night, night without the day; there is no end to this. It is an empty well running through the homes of underground creatures we never see, a tunnel through the chests of farmers toiling the land, it is the hidden void where our dreams pile up like dead bodies. It leads back to me. As for the brass head, please get rid of it. Give it to a beggar man to sell, throw it in a river or gutter. I should never have brought it into my house; if you keep it you will bear the burden of the cursed and pay in a currency not found on earth.
Today is so ordinary Queenie. You are playing by the outside tap, counting coins for your bank by the white sugar cube wall. It is the worst day of my life. It is the last time I will see you throw your arms up so trustingly to me, or hold a terrible crayon colour drawing that I will say is perfect because it is. Or attempt to measure your laugh, something that cannot be done. You cannot tell that tomorrow your world will be different. Right now the mayguard is lazily swatting flies from his face, no longer pretending to do his job. The house girl is peeling yams in the kitchen. Aunty Eunice is hanging clothes on the washing line, a yellow vein shot through the sky, which is throbbing, swelling with lost years to come. Your mother is standing at my shoulder. Life carries on, Queenie. When you have ceased asking questions and my name has turned to dust in your mouth know that:
I am the father whose feet you danced on, I am a million broken stars at your fingertips, I am the night sky’s discarded brother, I am a blanket made of rain. I am the conscience searching for your footsteps; I am the Harmattan wind whispering secrets that will fall into the foamy hem of the sea and wash up on the beaches of other countries as rough pebbles and hollow seashells.
I am beating.
I am
I-
Benin
My guide Nosa didn’t talk much but when he did, he made it count. He seemed to be casually efficient with everything; expressions, explanations, even arguments. Illustrated by his curt dismissal of a driver he’d cut across earlier in traffic, swatting the irate man away like a mosquito. It was sweltering; the heat made my skin clammy and my white, cotton blouse clung to me. Anon and I sat side by side in the back seat, restless from the hot material, woozy due to the occasional jostling and headiness of being in Africa. Our palms grazed ancestor’s heartbeats.
Dust swirled into the scenes around us; the long stretch of granite strip twisting like a concrete snake in the heat, its offshoots holding items of luggage for passengers yet to collect them. Bike riders swerved in between vehicles, car horns blared loudly as the traffic continued to build. Buses and vans blocked each other off in the rising din. In the car side mirrors, barefoot children sporting adult mouths sold bottled water, groundnuts, plantain crisps, and bread. Mothers carrying babies tied to their backs listened to their adult tongues pressed against the hollows of their spines. We passed the odd huge billboard now and again.
The brass head was stashed on the floor between my legs, at the bottom of a black bag, the rustling of a British Airways tag its only companion. I watched Nosa’s hands on the wheel, the lines of scarring across his knuckles and chest. A young girl chasing our car tried to sell me stones I’d already swallowed, rough and warm, they turned in her hand. When she shoved them in her pocket, they became new beginnings falling against humps in the road.
Nosa adjusted the rear-view mirror, throwing a quick glance my way. “Are you alright? We can stop if you need to be sick.”
“No, let’s keep going. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, even if we get there by evening. Carry on,” I instructed. Anon sat quietly, scrawling the name Adesua in the dust on the window. The flying plastic man Nosa had tied to the rear-view mirror spoke to us in our mother tongue.
Nosa’s long, elegant fingers gripped the wheel as if it was an instrument. His dimples deepened as he waved over a heavy set, big bosomed woman he knew. He bought a calling card from her. She thanked him, popping her gum, flirting and calling him a gentleman. We stopped for gas. I watched him from sly lids filling up our black Vauxhall Cavalier that had seen better days; his lean, handsome face broke into the contained expressions I was getting used to. He mopped his forehead with a white handkerchief, tucked it into his pocket, whistling as he angled the pump deep into the petrol slot.
“Do you think we could stop by a 7-Eleven at some point?” I asked, blocking the light hitting me with a hand over my eyes, acutely aware my English accent sounded even stronger in these surroundings. He laughed, features transformed in amusement.
“This isn’t London. We don’t have 7-Elevens and shops every twenty minutes. Why can’t you get what you need here?”
“They don’t have what I need here,” I replied, fidgeting in my seat, refusing to confide that the warning pains of my period had hit my stomach that I was worried I’d bleed on his seats.
Instead, I asked, “How did you get those scars on your chest?”
“Oh that,” he said nonchalantly. “Armed robbers cut me there and in my stomach on this route one night, left me for dead.”
I wanted to ask what an Economics major was doing hauling passengers back and forth over a route that had nearly killed him but I didn’t. Instead, I watched the map Anon drew on the window fading a little, as the day got darker.
Clay
It was her dead babies that led Filo out of the palace. She’d been feeding the chickens on the grounds when she stopped midway, yellow grains spilling from her palms into the mouths of her children, who’d gathered around her in a semi circle. The chickens went silent. Her babies began to cluck. Filo understood their new language. This was what Kalu the medicine man had promised her. Watch for your children, they will come back to you. They will lead you to your future, he professed, laughing in the rainwater that fell over their naked bodies.
Kalu had been her secret companion since the day she’d found him in that clearing in the forest, half-starved and clutching a handful of white bones to his chest. After she nursed him back to full health, they continued to meet away from the watchful eyes of the palace and planned the unravelling of the Oba, the king who had cheated them both. It was Kalu that helped her call the spirits of the previous kings. And it was Kalu who told her what was deemed to be her weakness was actually her greatest strength. Nobody would suspect the mad wife of setting the wheels in motion, of turning them with a sure finger. Filo sent her babies to cause the very thing her Oba had mocked her for.
At night she slept in her quarters rubbing her stomach, watching it grow, pregnant with the silent silhouettes of her children. She called to them, clucking her tongue and chasing their lost features in the night air. She and Kalu built their likenesses from clay, painting their mouths blood red, giving them white bones to hold as they were dispatched all over the palace, a quiet, invisible army dogging the Oba’s footsteps, toying with his perception, shattering in his vision.