Salt instead of sugar. Iveren loved looking as though she had given the family its first son. It looked good as they lined up in church. But she had no milk for him. Jacob Terhemba Shawo spent his first five years loveless in a war.
My father died three days before Matthew’s first child was born. Matthew and his wife brought her to our house to give our mother something joyful to think about.
The baby’s Christian name was Isobel. Her baby suit had three padded Disney princesses on it and her hair was a red down.
Matthew chuckled. “Don’t worry, Mamamimi, this can’t be Grandpa, it’s a girl.”
Raphael smiled. “Maybe she’s Grandpa born in woman’s body.”
Matthew’s wife clucked her tongue. She didn’t like us and she certainly didn’t like what she’d heard about Raphael. She drew herself up tall and said, “Her name is Iveren.”
Matthew stared at his hands; Mamamimi froze; Raphael began to dance with laughter.
“It was my mother’s name,” the wife said.
“Ah!” cried Raphael. “Two of them, Matthew. Two Iverens! Oh, that is such good luck for you!”
I saw from my mother’s unmoving face, and from a flick of the fingers, a jettisoning, that she had consigned the child to its mother’s family and Matthew to that other family, too. She never took a proper interest in little Iveren.
But Grandmother must have thought that they had named the child after her. Later, she went to live with them, which was exactly the blessing I would wish for Matthew.
Raphael became quieter, preoccupied, as if invisible flies buzzed around his head. I told myself we were working too hard. Both of us had been applying for oil company scholarships. I wanted both of us to go together to the best universities: Lagos or Ibadan. I thought of all those strangers, in states that were mainly Igbo or Yoruba or maybe even Muslim. I was sure we were a team.
In the hall bookcase a notice appeared. DO NOT TOUCH MY BOOKS. I DON’T INTERFERE WITH YOUR JOB. LEAVE ALL BOOKS IN ORDER.
They weren’t his alone. “Can I look at them, at least?”
He looked at me balefully. “If you ask first.”
I checked his downloads and they were all porn. I saw the terrible titles of the files, which by themselves were racial and sexual abuse. A good Christian boy, I was shocked and dismayed. I said something to him and he puffed up, looking determined. “I don’t live by other people’s rules.”
He put a new password onto our machine so that I could not get into it. My protests were feeble.
“I need to study, Raphael.”
“Study is beyond you,” he said. “Study cannot help you.”
At the worst possible time for him, his schoolteachers went on strike because they weren’t being paid. Raphael spent all day clicking away at his keyboard, not bothering to dress. His voice became milder, faint and sweet, but he talked only in monosyllables. “Yes. No. I don’t know.” Not angry, a bit as though he was utterly weary.
That Advent, Mamamimi, Andrew, Matthew and family went to the cathedral, but my mother asked me to stay behind to look after Raphael.
“You calm him,” Mamamimi said, and for some reason that made my eyes sting. They went to church, and I was left alone in the main room. I was sitting on the old sofa watching some TV trash about country bumpkins going to Lagos.
Suddenly Raphael trotted out of our bedroom in little Japanese steps wearing one of my mother’s dresses. He had folded a matching cloth around his head into an enormous flower shape, his face ghostly with makeup. My face must have been horrified: it made him chatter with laughter. “What the well-dressed diva is wearing this season.”
All I thought then was, Raphael, don’t leave me. I stood up and I pushed him back toward the room; like my mother, I was afraid of visitors. “Get it off, get it off, what are you doing?”
“You don’t like it?” He batted his eyelashes.
“No I do not! What’s got into you?”
“Raphael is not a nurse! Raphael does not have to be nice!”
I begged him to get out of the dress. I kept looking at my telephone for the time, worried when they would be back. Above all else I didn’t want Mama to know he had taken her things.
He stepped out of the dress, and let the folded headdress trail behind him, falling onto the floor. I scooped them up, checked them for dirt or makeup, and folded them up as neatly as I could.
I came back to the bedroom and he was sitting in his boxer shorts and flip-flops, staring at his screen and with complete unconcern was doing something to himself.
I asked the stupidest question. “What are you doing?”
“What does it look like? It’s fun. You should join in.” Then he laughed. He turned the screen toward me. In the video, a man was servicing a woman’s behind. I had no idea people did such things. I howled and covered my mouth, laughing in shock. I ran out of the room and left him to finish.
Without Raphael I had no one to go to and I could not be seen to cry. I went outside and realized that I was alone. What could I say to my mother? Our Raphael is going mad? For her he had always been mad. Only I had really liked Raphael and now he was becoming someone else, and I was so slow I would only ever be me.
He got a strange disease that made his skin glisten but a fever did not register. It was what my father had done: get illnesses that were not quite physical. He ceased to do anything with his hair. It twisted off his head in knots and made him look like a beggar.
He was hardly ever fully dressed. He hung around the house in underwear and flip-flops. I became his personal Mamamimi, trying to stop the rest of the family finding out, trying to keep him inside the room. In the middle of the night, he would get up. I would sit up, see he wasn’t there, and slip out of the house trying to find him, walking around our unlit streets. This is not wise in our locality. The neighborhood boys patrol for thieves or outsiders, and they can be rough if they do not recognize your face. “I’m Patrick, I moved into the house above the school. I’m trying to find my brother Raphael.”
“So how did you lose him?”
“He’s not well, he’s had a fever, he wanders.”
“The crazy family,” one of them said.
Their flashlights dazzled my eyes, but I could see them glance at each other. “He means that dirty boy.” They said that of Raphael?
“He’s my brother. He’s not well.”
I would stay out until they brought him back to me, swinging their AK-47s. He could so easily have been shot. He was wearing almost nothing, dazed like a sleepwalker, and his hair in such a mess. Raphael had always been vain. His skin Vaselined with the scent of roses, the fine shirt with no tails designed to hang outside the trousers and hide his tummy, his nails manicured. Now he looked like a laborer who needed a bath.
Finally one night, the moon was too bright and the boys brought him too close to our house. My mother ran out of the groaning gate. “Patrick, Patrick, what is it?”
“These boys have been helping us find Raphael,” was all I said. I felt ashamed and frustrated because I had failed to calm him, to find him myself, to keep the secret locked away, especially from Mamamimi.
When my mother saw him she whispered, “Wild man!” and it was like a chill wind going through me. She had said what I knew but did not let myself acknowledge. Again, it was happening again, first to the father, then to the son.
I got him to bed, holding both his arms and steering him. Our room was cool as if we were on a mountain. I came back out into the heat and Mamamimi was waiting, looking old. “Does he smoke gbana?” she asked.
I said I didn’t think so. “But I no longer know him.”
In my mind I was saying, Raphael, come back. Sometimes my mother would beseech me with her eyes to do something. Such a thing should not befall a family twice.