Butterfly Fish

Tandem

Three months after I picked up the diary from Mervyn, I woke up one morning needing to know more. I fished the leather bound journal from my handbag. Inside the front cover the name Peter Lowon was scrawled on the page. The diary was teeming with paragraphs. A grey margin line became a needle sowing a stitch into my side. I saw ink arrows morphing into real arrows, hurling themselves at words, the wounded words would escape with letters lost from injuries, limping off the papers, leaving a trail of blue black ink to drip onto my palms. I could hear the chants of kids playing easing through my letterbox and the screech of impatient car tires. My phone began to ring, but I licked my finger and turned the first page of the journal into another life. I glimpsed a sketch on the back cover. It was a drawing of the brass head with words orbiting around it. I didn’t run my finger over it, in case it came to life.

Crying Fins

Adesua did not report Filo to the Oba. Instead the wall of anger she’d erected against her, crumbled on seeing the lost, vulnerable woman clinging to the brass head as though it held the answer to her problems. Adesua grabbed her arms and gently shook her. “Filo, ah ah, what has happened? Tell me, has somebody done something?” She’d pried Filo’s fingers off the warm brass.

But Filo would not speak. Adesua crouched down further till there was only the space between teeth separating them. She snaked an arm around Filo’s back in support, held Filo’s body while she slowly stopped shaking and the sniffling subsided. Outside in the distance the laughter of the palace inhabitants was heard. Adesua didn’t know it but the birds that had been repeatedly circling above Filo’s chamber, listened too. They heard Adesua’s anger, noted the confusion in her voice and still they did not move.

Finally when her concern burst through the roof and touched their heavy wings, they huddled their heads together, and waited. One bird fluttering down to the doorway would have seen the two women sitting with their knees raised to their chins, holding hands as if they were little girls on a farm rather than young women in a palace, their bottoms against the soft, weather-beaten earth, providing a temporary ceiling for the bugs and worms that scurried and slid layers beneath.

Meanwhile Adesua and Filo clung together listening to the sounds of the palace, bearing the weight of a silent thing, cloaked in a comfortable peace. Somehow within that chaos the two women had found a temporary relief. The silence crooned its intent, and unspoken words were exchanged through the small space between their raised knees and entangled fingers. They ignored the comings and goings outside the fragile bubble they were in, the noise from the rest of the palace that at times threatened to burst it. Adesua listening to Filo’s breathing even out again continued to hold her hand and waited. Not because she thought Filo would confide in her, but because she knew she wouldn’t.

Eventually, Adesua dragged her feet up to leave. By then Filo was staring blankly at her walls, but the corners of her lips were no longer pulled down and by the time Adesua walked away with the brass head tucked under her arm, Filo’s shoulders had ceased to hunch up. For the first time Adesua felt as if it wasn’t just a piece of art that belonged to her, but it was a real, live human trophy.

She left Filo’s quarters with a new, slick, uncomfortable knowledge. Of the darkness of Filo’s bedchamber, from the brown cloth she’d hung over the window to stop light flooding through. The wooden platter of days old half-eaten cassava and stew rotting in the far corner and the pungent, rotten smell that filled the room loitering just beneath their nostrils. Of the garments strewn across the floor, leaving a rainbow-coloured mess of materials you navigated your feet through to find a space. Next to the window, a once beautiful, wooden chair sat, chipped and worn. Bits of its top layer had been scraped off, leaving an awkward, bruised thing. It looked lonely, in a jumbled room where the mouth of the green bed mat grazed the terracotta walls.

Beside the bed area was a small, rectangular brass box on a wooden mantle, its one drawer half open, like a jaw dropping in shock. Inside it, you could see Filo’s jewellery. Glinting silver bangles, winking gold necklaces, dark maroon rings peeping coyly from the edges, a fountain of lime-coloured beads dripping out and down the side of the box. Beneath your feet, the hardened floor felt hot and unsettling. As if you were subject to its moods.

Unaware that the brass head had been found, the servants gave up looking for it. In fact, they secretly wished it were never found. Of course the Oba would rant at them and they would soak it up, as they always did. But that artefact seemed to brew nothing but jealousy and resentment.

It was sweltering as Adesua trudged back to the main palace, suspiciously so. She knew something was amiss. The air was thick with promise. Even the flies seemed skittish. Sun-stroked, burnished green leaves from the Iroko tree had abandoned their branches to scatter and rustle against the scorched ground. There were shouting, agitated voices mingling into a chorus of noise you couldn’t clearly decipher ricocheting through the air. Above the clouds seemed to frown before shifting, one moment a face, the next a half-bitten guava.

Adesua decided that night she must see the Oba. Her husband. A man she knew less well than her personal servant. Gone were the days when she felt like a young girl, and all she worried about was falling from tall trees or the scorn of her Papa’s tongue whipping at her when she was caught attempting to wrangle her way into wrestling matches with boys from the village. Now a new, sneaky awareness had arisen, simmering to the surface, a slow burn. There was no going back; she was the young wife of Oba Odion. A king’s bride, a coveted and envied position, but this did not give her comfort, it never had. And as she followed the winding path back under the half-watchful gaze of the guards who held their spears too loosely and their slack mouths even looser, suddenly a rock of fear lodged in her throat. She tried to imagine what this thing she felt was coming could possibly be. Moments later the tantalising smell of roasted fowl infused the air and filled her nostrils. She imagined the palace cooks with their sweaty brows and teeth-dented bottom lips flapping around each other to prepare the meal on time, while her visit to Filo still weighed heavily on her mind.

Oba Odion did not delude himself into thinking he was a particularly wise man. In fact, as a boy he had been laughed out of several challenges set by his father Oba Anuje. Oba Anuje would create a riddle for him to solve and then summon him back later in the day when the hum of the palace had died down to a buzz trapped in his ear. The boy Odion would watch as Oba Anuje gleefully rubbed his large, dark brown, calloused hands together as he stood before his father trembling, pressing his thumbs against the other forlorn fingers desperately trying to settle himself. Telling bulbs of sweat would pop out of his armpits before sliding down his sides to languish in the flesh above his hips. Inevitably, when he failed, Oba Anuje would stroke his strong, jutting jaw and nod his head as if confirming what he already knew.

Several times when this ritual humiliation occurred, a boiling, yellow thought would conjure a heat so strong, it spread from Oba Odion’s head to every part of his body. It lit him up, and he was shrouded by this gleaming yellow aura before his father. Even then his father knew. Oba Odion could see it in the narrowing of his father’s eyes till they became black slits and the curling of his top lip. Finally, Oba Anuje would roar, “Get out of my sight.” And Odion would jump out of the protective gold light, which then shrank, to a dot in the air.

He remembered his father’s room as it was then. The circular shape of it, with its fading sickly plum-coloured walls. Sometimes he thought he heard the walls laughing at him and whispering to the bronze masks that decorated them, to the sturdy, shining brass chair with its crisscrossing pattern that left holes just big enough to stick fingers through. To the long, polished wooden stick that often lay by his father’s feet. It had smelled like new sweat and something else. A sickly sweet scent that cocooned something rotten which subtly oozed through the walls. Many times Oba Odion had tried in vain to figure out what that rotten smell was. He never did.

As if by doing so he would kill a memory possessing too many lives, the first task Odion completed when he became Oba was to have that room knocked out and rebuilt. On several occasions Oba Odion found himself making decisions based on avoiding his father’s haunting disapproval, although this revelation did not show its face at first. It was only when it began to eat up the ingredients that made up his judgement that the Oba ceased denying this truth. When he caught himself gauging how Oba Anuje would have reacted in a given circumstance and then vehemently deciding to do the opposite, it became even clearer.

So when Sully stood before him and the council, Oba Odion found himself clinging to the young man’s words, plucking them from his mouth as though they were fruits. And what words! It struck him that this stranger had what could only be described as a gift. With spit and perfect intonations he weaved his tale, rocking on the balls of his feet, talking not just with his lips but his hands, shoulders and it seemed every part of his body. Shrugging dramatically, angling his head at all sides of the room, and pointing to his bruises he informed them that he was an explorer from England who had travelled to India and around Europe, the Americas and the far corners of the East along his adventures. That he had heard so many tales of the great Benin kingdom from the Portuguese he had decided to come see for himself, bringing copper, brass bracelets and other items to trade.

Oba Odion had judged him before he even opened his mouth to speak, in the moment when their gazes held and Sully did not blink, his eye not automatically dropping down in false humility, nor cowering to their corners. The councilmen shifted in their seats, as though somebody had rubbed nettle leaves there to itch their backsides. They drew long, slow breaths that puffed out their cheeks and short, shallow ones through dry, pursed lips. They drummed their fingers and tapped their feet, throwing cynical glances for each other to catch. They shot Sully clever threats posing as questions which curled above their heads in circular patterns before wilting on contact with his skin. When a tiny, fleeting smile cracked across the Oba’s face, the councilmen noted it. Clasped hands unclasped and their coughs fell at Sully’s feet.

Talking before the Oba and his council, Sully felt the heat of their gazes. He was pleased. He did not crumble nor lose his will. At that moment, he thought of purpose and how it could con you into a different direction, lull you into a trap. He could hear the comings and goings of the palace above a bubble of gas, which roiled and gurgled in his stomach.

Booming laughter, strangled shouts, what sounded like the blade of a cutlass slicing into a coconut shell. He imagined juice spitting as it split into two. He curled his fingers into his palms to stop himself from running to the large window overlooking the grounds and sating his curiosity.

“And you say you have no family?” The question from a councilman stilled him. He turned to face the culprit.

“No sir, I have moved from place to place since coming to Africa.” This was met with a rigid “humph.”

Beneath his chest Sully’s heart quickened and the cut on his lip began to burn as he forced a bright, deceptive smile. He wondered how long this ordeal of questioning would last, not that it worried him because challenging trials were part of life, just as long as they came to an end before you did. The Gods would see to that, but he knew that sometimes the Gods displayed a vicious humour.

The ground began to swim a little and he rubbed his right hand over both eyes to wipe the fatigue away. He felt as if his body was about to cave in on itself. So he chided himself, not here, not now. In his head, a whistling sound began to grow louder and take shape, slowly, till it became bigger swirls of white noise that blew out of his ears. He waited for Oba Odion’s ruling, as all the men did. And when it came it was this, “Welcome to Benin.”

Journal Entry December 12th 1955 Peter Lowon

I am not a sentimental man, but on this day, the eve of my 26^th birthday, I Peter Lowon have joined the ranks of the Nigerian army as a second lieutenant. So, I am tasting a kind of happiness that is hard to reign in. A few of us are in Lagos staying in the house of General Akhatar. Earlier this evening, my fellow officers and I celebrated in style, having been invited to another higher-ranking officer’s house party. There, we drank Guinness and watched the women shaking their waists in that effortless way that African women do. A few of my fellow officers mocked me, joked about the way I speak and my education at the hands of British missionaries. “Ah Ah Peter! Sometimes you sound just like a white man from the BBC,” one said chuckling into the mouth of his beer bottle.

Predictably, some of the men there were also high-ranking officers and generals. You could spot who they were even out of uniform. It was there in the respectful way others hailed them, and how they carried themselves tall, crooking their fingers at the houseboys and girls in someone else’s home to demand “come come, more beer for my friend.” As though it was their right. Watching them chuckling mid conversation and absentmindedly patting the fat wads of Nigerian British pound notes in their pockets. I can tell you that power is an aphrodisiac. It is an infection difficult to describe but you know you want to catch it, you like the reception it commands. I am a man of potential. I like to keep my eyes open because you learn so much from doing so.

At the party, I exchanged jokes with my group, hemmed into a darker corner of the room as more people arrived and the noise reached the ceiling. High Life music was keeping people shimmying, and one or two had conked out indiscreetly on the floor and on chairs. Something else was playing on my mind. I was on the periphery of the exclusive club of big players! So I was looking to see whose ear to bend. The British colonial influence is still visible in Nigeria but grumblings have continued. Things are changing here, and change means opportunities. Oil production is increasing, an exodus of people are leaving the villages to rush to the cities. In Lagos you see rusty Volkswagen cars defiantly pushing along the roads, their bonnets almost bursting open with engine noise. On some streets there are children and adults with their heads tossed back gulping Coca Cola from long, elegant looking bottles.

I am sharing this room with Obi and Emanuel, also new to the army and both of whom snore so loudly, it is a wonder this room is not vibrating. Lazy boys! They still have their party clothes on, Obi on his back with his arm carelessly flung over his forehead and Emmanuel nearly off his creaking mattress face down into the floor.

Right now the kerosene lamp is burning a steady, low flame of light as the night sounds of the city become fainter. I am leaning this journal against a short stool that wobbles initially before stabilising. It is only a stool but I like this flaw in it, so applicable to human beings and the new situations we often find ourselves in. There is something about being here and seeing how the rich live that makes you yearn for more. Here, everybody “wan chop”, so I want my piece as well! I cannot sleep; it is my excitement over what is to come that has me reaching for this journal, a parting gift from my father along with his letters. And his neat handwriting seeming to say: “ Be careful! Say your prayers, God is watching.”

This writing and reflection is giving me an appetite, I wish I could go down into the kitchen to help myself but since I am only a guest, I will have to bear the stomach rumblings till morning. To the left of our room is a stiff wooden door and hanging on a nail is my uniform, a dark green tunic with patrol collar, light coloured khaki-style trousers and a peaked, jaunty cap with gold braid. Something strange happens every time someone comes through that door. As logic would have it, I don’t expect it to make my uniform fall in a heap on the floor. Instead, I see the yanked door handle lift my uniform off the nail so it stands to attention before me. One sleeve of the green tunic raises to the cap in a salute. I actually want to try my uniform again right now, it fits very well, but if Obi and Emmanuel wake up and find me dressed in it at this time, I will be the butt of their jokes for days.

Somebody else is awake; I can hear their feet shuffling downstairs, the creak of a window sliding open. By the time that sound ceases, it has become a different window from the past. My mother is leaning out, reliable shoulders hunched up, bits of springy hair sticking to her sweaty forehead, screaming for me to come in from the streets. Usually, I would be loitering on a corner somewhere when I heard it, swapping marbles with boys who bore neighbourhood war wounds of freshly scraped knees and healed cuts. Or I’d be testing catapults from a safe enough distance on strangers who crossed my eagle-eyed view.

Whoever was moving downstairs must be trying to get back to sleep. I am admiring the round buttons on my tunic. They are spotless and a coppery colour, I polished them yesterday. They could be coins, like the ones my father used to give me to buy white Tom Tom American candy from the sweet seller that were so sweet your teeth hurt and gave your mouth a zingy coolness. Inside the copper buttons another memory is moulding itself to them. This time I am twelve or thirteen, my head is buried in a book as my father points out the inconsistencies in my arithmetic, teaching me the way good missionaries do. This lesson would then be followed by English. Then later on, sitting in a church pew wriggling my bottom in anticipation of the ending, of the clapping and singing out of tune. Obi has now turned onto his front, dishevelled, doing a very good impression of a tortoise. He sleeps too deeply; this is a weakness for an officer. I will make a good officer; I am controlled and swift to react in most situations. There is no way I could have failed the recruitment process. Tests, endurance exercises but more importantly, who is open to bribes.

I watch people because human beings are fascinating. A person’s body language can tell you what you need to know, even shows when they are weaker than you. Look at an unsteady arm and you will see a lie reflected there, a sweaty upper lip in a tight situation and sooner or later that person will crack from fried nerves. My most useful skill is my ability to adapt, something I learned early having been the child of Christian missionaries, a child with no real interest in faith whatsoever. Since it was clear that you couldn’t escape God because he was either watching you, having plans for you, or making a way (God will always make a way!), I decided to have a talk with him. When I was nine, I took him aside right by the guava tree that dipped its branches into our small compound. I warned him, don’t give me any wahala and you and me will be okay. Of course, I did not tell my father this. I believed he would have had a heart attack, his thin-rimmed, round spectacles steaming up, his body keeling over right there on our black and white squared linoleum floor.

I have made friends with Obi and Emmanuel, not because they are my sort of people but because you have to have team spirit in the army. You cannot be seen to be a loner or an outsider looking in. In fact I am not a team player, never have been and never will be.

Recently, I have taken to smoking cigarettes. I think too much as some form of a release. I like taking long, slow puffs of sin. I see myself at the army barracks in Epoma. The wide grounds with dark, unevenly, shaped buildings popping out of it like teeth. The identical hard beds set in rows and dressed in flat green sheets with thinly stuffed pillowcases. The thud of feet pounding in unison on the concrete during training exercises. The officers with bags containing stuffed, squashed versions of their lives spilling onto their beds and the floors. The black truncheons flashing in warning, tucked under the stiff arms of officers who look as if they’ve been swabbed in liquid discipline. The high wire fence surrounding the building that surely had the scrutiny of superior officers welded into it, and the taut, shrill, piercing sound of whistles that sent your socks rolling down your legs. The green and white Nigerian flag raised on a high, white pole flailing like a ship’s mast as if the grounds could set sail at any moment.

I am going back to all of that in a few days, to this new life I find hard to switch off from. But even within the confines of the barracks, there are signs of something wrong. The caretaker whose name nobody knows, his hair is grey with secrets. Every day he marches around the grounds dressed in full regalia making sure the buildings are as they should be. Yet he appears to be searching for something, bending to study the dirty bottoms of walls where there is nothing to see, sliding his hands under filthy, corroding pipes and boring his eyes into the front of the building. And when I greet him, “Mr Caretaker man, what are you looking for?” he responds in kind, “Just making sure everything is in order sir.”

There is the officer three rooms away from mine, who writes letters to himself every week before ripping them to shreds. People have been known to walk in on him attempting to stick those torn shreds of paper together with shaky hands. Besides, I am convinced worms are trying to take over the barracks. It began with seeing one some weeks ago crawling in a leisurely fashion on a windowpane, its pink body wriggling a slimy path. Since then I have seen more, crawling up the table leg in our eating area, slipping between the laces of an officer’s heavy black boot, curling and uncurling itself near a small puddle on the training base.

There is a small prayer room tucked away in the gut of the main barracks. It is sparsely decorated with thin, pristine white curtains and worn Bibles gathering dust on the wooden table. The few greying chairs croak when we sit down and the walls are a muted cream colour. Next to a high, square, stand, three fat white candles sit in silver holders. At the front of the chapel a robed, blue-eyed Jesus, arms outstretched, counts your guilty steps as you walk on. The officers, crass, loud, young men unaware of their ignorance, go in there, kiss the crosses dangling from their chains and feverishly voice their longings.

So far every officer I have met has a story to tell. This is to be expected; we are young, keen and hungry. There is something about putting young men in an enclosed, restricted environment that produces unexpected results. Not only the predictable strutting and competitiveness; it’s also how territorial some people have already become. Even over small, insignificant things like who misplaced so and so’s razor and who borrowed someone’s pen and forgot to return it. As if ownership of things keeps them sane.

It is nearly 3 am and I should really try to sleep. The ticking has stopped in my temples and the sounds of Lagos have dwindled to virtually nothing now.

Another thing; I have never set foot in England, but my fellow officers laugh, and tell me I have funny ways. And they call me the British gentleman despite my being a black African man.

Able Bodied Thirsts

Beyond the Benin palace gates, was a long, dusty, sweaty stretch of road that led to a vast clearing. One night, Adesua dreamt she was in the clearing trapped inside a twisted vine growing there. And at first, her voice was bold and loud. It shook the vine and its scraggly branches. But each day as the vine grew bigger her voice became smaller. She called out to passersby but they continued on their journeys towards the palace as though they could not hear her. The palm wine maker? Merely gave a shrug of his slack shoulders, relaxed from consuming too much of his own product. The court jester? Let go an audible cough midway through her cry as if to cover her voice with his. The tailor? Only paused to bite a chunk out of juicy, ripe pear, the aroma reaching her like a sweet, cruel taunt. She continued to cry, her voice like the murmur of a shrivelled thirsty leaf, inside the vine. But it only soaked up her tears. “Look what you have done!” she accused.

“No,” the vine replied “it is what you have done, have you forgotten? Each day you remember less and less.”

“Tell me why I am here,” she pleaded. The vine stayed silent, then said, “If you can remember why you are here you will be free.” So Adesua tried and tried… She prodded her thoughts till they formed a line, one behind the other, each peeping curiously over the shoulder of the thought in front. But the thoughts were all immediate, there must be another way to escape and her tongue felt irritatingly heavy. She was certain the vine was somehow tricking her. Then the vine said, “Since you have come, I no longer feel lonely.”

“Aha! I knew it,” she croaked, knocking her thoughts into a messy chaos just above the roots of the vine, and they clung to wherever the landed, jarred and frightened of being sucked under. “You caused this to happen. Don’t you know I am the bride of Oba Odion? I will have you pulled out and destroyed.” The vine laughed and rocked her sideways. She felt tiny and insignificant. Inside, the vine felt moist and warm. She stood and began attempting to tear bits off. “You can go when you accept what you have done; attacking me will not help you.”

When Adesua woke up she rushed around her chamber feeling her walls. There were cuts on her toes and she found herself craving the taste of sweet pears.

It is in the nature of beings to sometimes wield brutality with a gentle hand. A vicious blow can come from the most placid of characters, or a damaging whisper from the mouth of dear friend. Some motions once set loose outside of ourselves cannot be undone. It was with this thought in mind that Oba Odion made the decision to allow Sully to not only remain in the palace but appointed him his personal guard. The council fumed while the Oba appeared increasingly erratic, rebelling against their advice and making questionable decisions at which even a monkey would scratch its head.

A plan of action was required; the council members circled the palace grounds in fragmented groups, listening to everything that was said and endorsing it with silent approval. They scratched each other’s backs with ways to foil any more ridiculous decisions from the Oba. The plan was, they agreed, to present any decisions as though they were the Oba’s in the first instance. Wasn’t that what every good king sought from his council? They agreed to keep a watchful eye on Sully. It was no coincidence surely, they thought, that this stranger should find himself in the Benin palace. No, they could smell something was amiss, a subtle, sickly scent that wrinkled their noses and furrowed their brows. Meanwhile, the strange seeds the Oba discovered in his bedchamber continued to flourish in the place garden. They were above knee length now, and still shedding their leaves, their round, bulbous bluish heads still rotating watchfully over the palace. Their long green stems were a little bent, as though they leaned into each other to exchange conversations. But the plants were still bleeding; the soil beneath them tinged bluish green. They were moaning, low-pained groans that you could only hear if you bent your ear to the ground. But the Oba did not notice any of this. Nobody had.

Adesua waited till evening, when shadows fell across the sky. She wandered the palace grounds as she often did, just as the fireflies became restless, decorating the air with dots of green light that guided her to a sturdy, mango tree weighed down with fruit. In the palace garden, she sat at the base of the tree and listened to the sharp, shrill chirp of grasshoppers as they called to each other, jumping across the grass as though the waning heat still scorched their long hind legs. She followed their sound, crawling towards the bed of strange looking plants hemmed in by the sparse trees and high earth-coloured walls. On her knees, with her nose to the ground the waft of something rotten filtered through. As though the offending patch of earth had released a smelly belch and all it needed was the rain to come down to wash it away.

Omotole knew about the wish that had impregnated her, the desire for a son had danced its way into her womb. The Oba had done his share of work too but it was the sweet desire she’d kindled on their nights together that finally came to fruition. A son would firmly seal her position in the Oba’s life and the palace. Omotole had no real proof the child she was carrying was a boy, except that innate feeling in her bones, a deep tingling that began way down inside her stomach and spread right through her body. She could have consulted an oracle but there was no need. The stewing scowls she caught on some of the other wives faces before they vanished confirmed this. Only Adesua truly seemed unaffected either way and had congratulated her with an empty hug and a distracted smile. That one was an odd young woman, Omotole thought, recalling the way she bounded about the palace grounds, hiking her wrapper up to her knees. At times muttering to herself, a slip of uncontained energy.

Oba Odion was happy on hearing the news of her expectancy but these days he was not himself. Omotole like everyone else discovered he was regularly in disagreements with his council and becoming slimmer around his waist as if something was eating it away. Some nights he spent in her company would see him tossing and turning, at the mercy of some invisible hand flipping him from side to side, breath infused with the scent of worry. She asked him what was troubling him and unusually, he did not tell her. Instead, he lamented on how useless the palace cooks had become, that the spoils were making people lazy. A tiny gap opened between them, the Oba was now keeping secrets and Omotole’s mouth formed a grim, suspicious line at the thought. But she did not push; a man would reveal his secrets in his own time. Instead she would knead the worry out of his shoulders and use his back to plan her next steps. And she did not tell the Oba that on discovering she was carrying a child, small oval shaped blue petals had began to appear inside the moist pocket under her tongue.

Trouble was coming. So when Sully heard the whimpering of snapped branches behind his quarters, he sat up in attention. If it had just been the scurry of a monkey or some other animal, he would have ignored it, allowing the thought to melt away like a drop of water into a river. These movements were tentative, deliberate in their attempt to attract as little attention as possible. He had always had an ear for picking up even the most secretive of sounds; he had even heard the tiny wings of baby’s heartbeats fluttering in their chests. He crept out of the back window silently, landing in an unkempt yard flanked on either side by thick shrubbery and scattered sticks. He crouched low on the ground, spotting a woman’s back arched down way ahead. Her head was bent, fingers rummaging through dirt, so intent on what she was doing that only his hand grabbing her shoulder broke the spell and she gasped.

“Are you stupid?” Sully asked, thinking he had happened upon one of the servant girls. “Running around at this time?”

She jerked her body back alarmed. “I lost my beaded bracelet!” Then, “How dare you open your mouth to speak to me like that?”

Sully took in the thick, full hair jutting out of her head in tight springs. The long ripe body with her breasts looking like globes of fruit pressed against her wrapper while her black eyes spat embers.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked slowly, as though speaking to a child.

“No.”

“I am Oba Odion’s wife.”

“Hmm,” he said. “Which one are you?”

“My friend, do not ask me questions as if your father owns this land! Who are you?”

“You will find out soon enough.” He looked at her knowingly and said, “You will never make a good queen.”

“Insult upon insult!” she fumed “I will shame you and report you to the Oba first thing, you will be thrown out.”

He nodded then, almost amused. “Before you tell him, I will escort you back.” He took her arm gently and knew then that she would never sit still. He knew without understanding how he did, that she was a curious woman and recognised an adventurous spirit when he saw one. The scratches on her neck, the restless eyes all spoke of this.

On the walk back they both ignored the thing between them that had come alive and breathing, through the long, winding curves of the servants area, past the compact, terracotta apartment blocks where some councilmen resided and the empty, gutted courtyards and settled deep within them. Later, Sully would remember details; the glimpse of her naked ankles, the sound of laughter carried in the air, beads of sweat on her long neck that sat like jewels waiting to be plucked. At the entrance to her quarters she still glowered. Even if she had bathed then, she would not have been able to wash away the imprint of his hand on her arm. She did not thank him and he had expected nothing less but her haughty back disappearing into her haven.

Out of her sight he ran, thought it funny how you travelled to a place to find one thing only to discover something else, because it had truly begun now. He ran till his knees ached and he felt his feet take off the ground, careening forward till he couldn’t separate the expanse between the sky and the solid earth. And he thought he could grab stars out of the firmament, shards of silver light glittering in his palms.

Pupa: Stage 2

As a child butterflies fascinated me. One of my earliest memories is of catching one, placing it in a tall, empty hot dog jar and watching its purple wings skim the glass. And scraping my knee in our garden from a fall aged twelve, only for a blue butterfly to land on the bleeding wound that momentarily became its respite. Since then, I’ve never forgotten how a butterfly could flutter down and change the shape of a moment or the line of a body.

As Mrs Harris and I trudged up the steep London Road in Forest Hill, I thought I heard the butterflies in the museum breathing, waiting. Rain had washed our earlier expressions away. A bitter wind argued with clothes that flapped back and umbrellas were led astray from firm grips.

“Did you bring it along?” Mrs Harris asked, referring to the brass head tucked out of sight in my rucksack. She stopped, stuck her tongue out to catch drops of water. Her grey raincoat was soaked, beneath the hood at the front exposed shocks of white hair were damp.

“Yes I did.” I tugged her forward. “What are you doing?”

“I used to do that sometimes as a kid. Rainwater makes me see possibilities!” She answered, picking up the pace. Her eyes were alert and there was a spring in her step. I began to think maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to have asked her along. You never knew what she was going to say or do.

“I hope this is productive and creepy.” She said, wiping her brow.

I moved a fat, wet twist of hair from my cheek. “Why creepy?”

“Every now and then it’s good to experience uncomfortable things.”

From the corner of my eye, I spotted the green man leave a set of traffic lights to rescue a broken beam of light landed outside a betting shop. A frail woman stood beside the cinema handing leaflets to people. I tried to recall the last time someone disguised as somebody ordinary handed me a leaflet.

Finally we entered the large grounds of the Horniman Museum. A concrete path snaked its way through the middle, separating spotless areas of grass that bore a wet sheen. Wooden benches were sparsely dotted around. The gardens had been sectioned off due to renovations. Threading our way through mothers pushing prams, lovers casually meandering and the odd group of school children bunking off, we eyed the distant, sprawling green longingly. The air was cool and crisp. A white Victorian cast iron conservatory perched resplendently, accustomed to the gasps of appreciation coating its windows. Magical, it looked, as if a breath over the blueprint had instantly brought it to life. At the main entrance a rush of heat hit us, sweeping our grateful bodies. A flash of white wall greeted us inside as other bodies dripped back and forth to the reception area, where a woman in her late twenties took enquiries. The wooden floors gleamed so brilliantly you could pet reflections in them. In my mind’s eye I saw a scrawny immigrant woman flitting about efficiently at the crack of dawn, only to be rendered invisible by the time the harsh glare of the morning light had arrived.

Mrs Harris unzipped her raincoat, slung it over her left arm and blew a breath out slowly. “Do you want to ask for your acquaintance now?”

“Naw,” I answered, rocking restlessly from one foot to the other and swallowing a feeling of anxiety, a stone in my throat. “Let’s take a look around first.”

I’d been carrying the brass head around a lot, torn between wanting the option of getting rid of it at a moment’s notice and a fear that doing so would mean some terrible thing would happen.

We headed downstairs and wandered through rooms with subdued lighting housing different exhibitions. One held odd, foreign instruments made out of things like a can, strings and part of a saddle, as well as ancient harps, flutes, and guitars. Another was a photographic exhibition on birth and death. Images of new born babies held up to the camera’s eye and those of the sick who were fading, the tired lines on their faces plotting to sink into the taut skin of other bodies. In one I saw my own mother holding me up as a baby in one frame. Her Afro hair dented unevenly from leaning back against a pillow. I had barely any hair and my eyes were unfocused as though trying to adapt to seeing.

I edged forward hypnotised, tugged Mrs Harris along.

“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing at the black-framed picture on the wall.

“No. What am I supposed to have seen?” She answered, curiosity etched on her features.

Up close, the picture had changed. Another mother and daughter were now depicted holding each other with their faces pressed together laughing. They looked so happy, so assured of their time together. I felt foolish, cheated and sad all at once. A pain tore through my chest, a sneaky stroke from someone using a heated, metal spoke to poke from the inside.

“Nothing.” I muttered, silently admonishing myself. “I thought I saw my mother and I keep seeing things…”

Tears sprang. I blinked them away. I envisioned the exhibitions in their well-kept prisons breaking free one day, wandering the floors uninhibited, marching to a melancholy tune the instruments played that nobody knew the lyrics to. Mrs Harris ushered me away, threw an arm around my back offhandedly in a way that gave the impression she’d been doing it for years. “Don’t worry.” She said reassuringly. “I think this is part of the process, being confronted by memories when you least expect it.”

“It’s impossible for anybody to remember that far back.”

She shrugged. “Maybe you’re a rare case. It could be an old photo your mum had resurfacing. The mind can distort things when we experience extremes of emotion.”

“Could be,” I replied, mulling over the idea. “Only I don’t remember seeing a picture like that.” As we moved away, I peered back suspiciously at the framed offender taunting me. Now my mother had a large opening in her chest. In the top right corner of the frame, a bloody heart floated down slowly until it obscured most of my baby face.

Beneath the painted deception were lights acting as third eyes. Behind panels of glass tall, dark wooden cabinets housed all sorts of oddities: a large jar of tightly packed moles, feet curled against each other and eyes squeezed shut. Then an ostrich’s heart that was formed like a white baby octopus, glimmered, catching fractions of light. Varying sizes of monkey brains floated ominously in off-yellow liquid, threatening to enter our heads. In one corner on its own, was an elephant’s heart, bulbous and thick, bearing veins that shot around stunted rivers of dismay. A skeleton of a flying bat was still in its stripped beauty. A copper toned infant aardvark lay curled in its glass womb. Mrs Harris splayed her hand emanating warmth against the glass, leaving a wet impression from her blue sweatshirt sleeve. I thought I saw the baby aardvark uncurl and suckle on the watermark as we passed.

We roamed, blowing onto glass surfaces grey tunnels of breath that quickly evaporated. We stitched a strange tapestry of fingerprints, ums and ahs, hurried, excited sentences that ran into each other until one started and another finished the observation. We spotted the butterflies just as broken laughter filtered through, an indoor sun in disguise. There were thousands displayed in glass cabinets. Tiny slithers given fallen bits of rainbows as wings. Their names made me think of exotic places; Sapho Longwing, Banded Peacock, Orchard Swallowtail, Banded Orange Heliconia, Question Mark, Juonia Coenia, Spicebush Swallowtail, Battis Polydamas Antiqus, White Admiral and Silver Washed Fritillary amongst many others. I couldn’t decide which one I was but they made me think of things in flight and how devastating it was to fly with one broken wing. I sensed Mrs Harris at my shoulder. “Ahh,” she said with a smile in her voice. “You’re a butterfly, I thought so.”

I bent down for a closer view. “Magical things aren’t they?”

“That they are, creatures of wonder. Do you know about the cycles of a butterfly?” She asked, wiping away the damp map that was receding into her raincoat.

“No.” I answered, feeling slightly ignorant. The butterflies, swirls of colour, began to flutter their wings in the whites of my eyes.

“There are four stages.” Mrs Harris continued. “The egg, caterpillar, pupa or chrysalis and finally the adult stage. You my dear are in the pupa stage.”

“What happens in that stage?” I enquired.

“This is the thing!” She waved her finger animatedly as her voice rose. “It feels as though nothing’s taking place because you feel suspended, but major things are happening internally and externally. Things buried inside you forming eyes and wings.”

I nodded, drawn in by the sudden intensity emanating from her spritely, small body.

“It’s a shame though,” I retorted. “They have such a short life span.”

She pulled me closer secretively. White tendrils of hair had escaped the loose bun she’d curbed her mane into. There was a hole at the front of her sweatshirt you could poke a finger in. “Flawed, mad butterflies grow extra wings,” she said. “Even after they die, they come back reborn.” A weird expression clouded her face and there was a wild gleam in her eyes as she straightened her body. For a moment she appeared wizard-like, dancing on some detached edge, dressed in pauper clothing to accompany a friend on a museum trip.

By the time we’d gone round twice I was still paranoid. I stood in a corner next to a baby Quagg skeleton I knew was breathing echoes down into my eardrums. I flickered like a light bulb low on wattage, suspicious of more sinister hallucinations winging their way towards me, flanked by bits of night in jarring shapes. A film of sweat lined my upper lip. I eyed things warily; a trouser pocket of a passerby, a museum brochure in the large hands of an imposing security guard, dusty windowpanes, velvet curtains hiding shadows, a woman’s exposed collarbone. Mrs Harris appeared oblivious to this, steering a running commentary on everything. In a way it helped.

“Ants, bloody resourceful things!” she commented at one point, followed by a short monologue on their habits.

“Aren’t they something?” This in reference to several stuffed owls starring moodily at a distance neither of us was privy to. Eventually she pulled me aside. “Don’t you think we should see that curator contact about the brass object?” she asked, reminding me of the very reason we’d come to the museum in the first place.

“Sorry for dragging you along, I’m not feeling so well. I don’t think this is the right place for it anyway.” I answered, turning to walk away quickly, leaving Mrs Harris trailing in my wake. She threw her hands up at our corpse audience in their glasshouses before following me. I was embarrassed and sad. Tears blinded my vision. Angles of light in alliance with the picture frames lodged in the corners of my mind. A hard bottom swallowing the sound of rolling bottles pulled me under. Damp trails on my cheeks wet the feet of people on stairs and escalators all over the city.

Outside I took deep breaths as if oxygen was running low. The rain had stopped but the world was shrouded in a dim, muggy airlessness and you wish you’d stayed indoors. Mrs Harris placed a steady hand on my back. She seemed to understand that moments of grief could loiter around corners.

She smiled patiently. “I know just the thing to make you feel better,” she said pushing back some hair from her face. I thought of the butterflies, of their beauty silenced behind a manmade prison and cried even more. A crack emerged in my mind’s eye, shimmery from salt water and blinking. Mrs Harris’s teeth flashed white. Then, I saw butterflies being fed on my tears, growing taller, wider, like plants until in the thousands they smashed through their glass cabinets destroying them entirely.

Peter Lowon Journal Entry February 14th 1956

Ultimately, people will let you down, the reverence you once gave them shrinking to the last drop of tea in a cup. I know this from experience. I have settled into army life. I am now used to the routine of being told when to wake up, eat, train. The comfort of rubbing your finger over a willing rifle, the daily exchanges between the feuding door locks and their keys. We are ticking clocks simply waiting to stop. There is beauty to the unexpected when it happens, whether good or bad, because it doesn’t take your feelings into account.

Consider this: a proposition from a General, a soldier dead forever, and a brass head. If I offered these bare bones to a thousand people, there would be a thousand different stories and a thousand different attempts to make skin cover these bones. Two days ago Mr Caretaker man finally found something worth discovering. A soldier named Mohamed Fahim’s dead body was found in the small, cramped outhouse toilet with his hands behind his back and his head crushed in the throat of the toilet. As deaths go, it was an undignified one, since when the traces of life left him, his last breaths must have smelt of a shit and piss. I can say this. I can also say that there will be no real investigation; his death will be ruled as an accident. Although how a man can accidentally kill himself in a toilet is highly suspicious. This is what the army do, they protect themselves and ironically there is no sense of injustice.

I do not know about Emmanuel and Obi but I have been stashing the guilt I feel in my uniform pockets, inside the soles of my boots and under my bed in my squashed green bag with its sturdy, reliable strap. We are good actors and didn’t even know it; we were appropriately shocked like every one else, enquiring if anybody had seen anything or how come no-one had come upon his body for most of the day. This act in itself is normal; people ask questions they know the answers to all the time, like you are eating egussi soup and pretending not to know that in fact what it tastes like is what lies taste of. Mr Caretaker man looks sad but unruffled. He has been reeling off questions to soldiers left, right and centre. Somebody should remind him he is only a caretaker!

Three nights ago, on a calm, balmy evening at the barracks when most of the officers were wandering about, and anybody could have been anywhere, I, Obi and Emmanuel were playing cards in the common room and drinking beer and stout, poisons that were good for us. Looking back, I think I must have been drunk, I did not feel like myself and I was laughing a lot even when something wasn’t funny. I was choking a little on my laughter when General Akhatar walked in. Initially it surprised me that he was unaccompanied. He was out of uniform and is a big, imposing man with neatly cut hair and cold black eyes. The left side of his face sinks in on itself, as though someone had repeatedly punched him there. It is a hazy picture but a picture still. He was jovial, he laughed with us, cracked a couple of jokes, even stopped to sip from a can of beer. Then came his request, although it seemed more like an order because of his no nonsense tone. Would we be willing to kill a fellow officer who had not only disgraced himself and the army by propositioning the General in a shameful way but had also put the General’s life in danger? He would pay us of course, he said. Plenty money! Easy money. Obi, Emmanuel and I looked at each other, at the General’s smiling face and easy manner. We communicated in the short silence that followed. I squeezed the glass bottom of my Guinness, Obi tapped his knee, Emmanuel leaned forward. Say yes or no to the promise of rewards and advancement through the army. In time, I cannot say if I had been sober whether I would have walked away. I would like to think so. In the few nights since, when I lie with the little conscience I have, I tell myself this. But that night when we walked away from that room we were high and ambitious.

Mohamed Fahim was alone in the quarters he shared with other officers. He was in the hard, familiar bed when we got there, not quite asleep but his chest was rising and falling. I wished I had thought to ask him what he knew that was worth killing for but I could barely breathe, my hands shook. My heart raced. The fear in Mohamed’s eyes made me panic, made me feel sick. I could sense his confusion, his shock but we had come too far. There are witnesses who saw what we did, but they are things and not people. They cannot speak. If it could, the doorframe of the dormitory would say that we plied his fingers off when he held it, desperately. The dark, long corridor just outside it would state that Emmanuel covered his mouth as we dragged him through and that he kicked and fought all the way. Emmanuel had one red eye from drinking earlier and sweat covered his forehead. The toilet bowl with its shaky black seat would say that Obi held his head down and that he turned his face away as if he couldn’t bear looking. That he slumped to the ground and held his head just after Mohamed took his last breath. I vomited a little on myself, I am ashamed to say this but I remember thinking, even after what had happened, that I hoped I could get the stains out of my uniform. It is a miracle nobody saw us, we disappeared out of there like magic, the tensions between us pulling our bodies along. Immediately afterwards, I felt disconnected, like there had been two of me, one fleeing the scene and one watching as I did so. Following a heated exchange, Obi and Emmanuel went off to be seen, to blend in. They seemed surprisingly more sober, but I suppose murder can do that people. For sure I was a sinner now, and no amount of praying about the blood of Jesus would wash this sin away. I saw the blue-eyed Jesus falling to his knees in the prayer room, floored by the weight of what we had done. In the corridor I walked over my last steps, wishing someone could pull my elbow and yank me out of the night, the scenes beforehand, the meeting with the General. My mouth became dry like sandpaper, I found myself in the bunkroom I shared with eight other officers including Obi and Emmanuel. Suddenly, each identically made bed became a pit you fell into, no matter how cautiously you climbed. I sat at the end of my bed and began to take my uniform off. I washed my shirt at the sink round the back. My fingers trembled. As I undid the buttons, my right leg seemed to spasm uncontrollably. I will never forget the sound of a man pleading for his life, begging us to stop. And how his voice sounded thin and shriller the more he must have realised that there would be no return for him that night. Inside my bed, in my white singlet and shorts, my body felt hot as if I would burn through the sheets. A couple of soldiers began to drip in. “British gentleman, you dey sleep already? He’s a funny one that guy, my friend get up. Should we leave him?” I recognised the voice and didn’t move a muscle. I closed my eyes and longed for the chaos of the following day to come.

The next morning, things were fairly normal, because surprisingly, no-one had discovered him yet. I arose to the familiar, musty smell of sleep sweat-coated male bodies. When the whistle, the usual morning wake up call, tore through our eardrums for a moment I felt that the night before hadn’t happened. But I was born too knowing and the sand dry mouth, the humming in my temples told me otherwise. Soldiers padded about barefoot, nicking their rough feet on stories from the previous night. My uniform shirt had dried and there were no incriminating stains on the brown khaki. I did my best to avoid Emmanuel and Obi, despite us sharing sleeping quarters. We did not look at each other, as if we knew the thing we did would be mirrored in our faces.

I went to breakfast. The cook was in his usual dirty green vest serving hot akamoo, stale bread and butter.

“Oya, oya, don’t waste time,” he said shoving our plates into our hands as we formed winding queues.

By afternoon, it felt like only a matter of time, and so it was. I had already picked up on officers querying soldier Mohamed’s absence. I noticed the buttons on my uniform jacket looked red, or maybe they were always red and somehow I had missed it. My uniform felt too tight. During our training drill, the sergeant had to shout an order to me four times because I didn’t hear the first three despite standing nose to nose. A confusion settled in my brain. And then late afternoon, the news of a dead soldier came from a sergeant and with it, the order of the day scattered. A hum rippled through the barracks, and the soldiers separated into packs, only to be assembled before higher-ranking sergeants who poked and prodded us for more information. We were told in a wide, dark room, our bodies crammed in like sardines in a can, that we were our brothers’ keeper. To have our eyes and ears open, report anything unusual. Standing there, in the room, the continuous drone of a large grey portable fan was the backing track to the senior officer’s voice. He stood lecturing us at the front with his dirty collar and rumpled uniform. How he expected anybody to take him seriously looking that shabby is a miracle. The men were coiled strings attempting to stand still, but shifting from one foot to another, their unease obvious in their tight shoulders, low grumblings and weary looks. I caught the tail end of rushed conversations. How could this happen right under everybody’s noses? One of us? Was he made an example of? How was it nobody had seen anything? Or did somebody just look away? We were warned that whoever was responsible would be caught and punished severely. A shudder ran through me. I spotted Obi and Emmanuel near the front row, their backs straight. If backs could be read, you would never be able to tell what they were guilty of. In that moment, I felt reassured; maybe they knew something I didn’t. By this point, most of the soldiers began to get even more restless; you could see it in their glances towards the doorway. Eventually we were dismissed with the reassurance anybody holding information could go and see a higher-ranking officer privately.

It is such a terrible thing, the death of the young.

Today I received a gift from General Akhatar, wrapped in old, yellowed newspaper. I sat on my bed looking at it for several minutes before opening it, somehow daunted by what would lay within. I removed the layers of newspaper to find a brass head in perfect condition. It is a beautiful piece, life-like with its proud, defiant expression. I am guessing that it is quite ancient, a collector’s prize. In his brief note that came with it, which amounts to two lines, the General writes that it is his favourite piece. I have no idea why he has chosen to give it to me in addition to what will be done. I know a good man would not accept this gift, but life is not so simple and I am not necessarily a bad man for taking it. I will keep this brass head because I am selfish. I want it. I will not mention it to Emmanuel and Obi. I can write a version of the truth, so I will say that for a long time I will not have to worry about money and that the terrible night binds all four of us together; me, Obi, Emmanuel and the General. I will live with myself because I can and because I have to. I cannot undo what has already been done. Still, information I would rather not know has begun to circulate through the barracks. People say that Mohamed was a good soldier, a quiet man who mostly kept to himself, that he had a pregnant girlfriend waiting for him back home. And that his mother had been reluctant for him to join the army. Things that paint a picture you try to look away from. Now more than ever I avoid going to our prayer room, though I should. I am frightened that the blue-eyed Jesus’s head will snap and roll on the floor before my feet, that I will have to be carried out of there. I will send some of my tainted money to my father. It will make him happy, the irony being if he found out where it came from, he would be disgusted. This is why I want to share some of it with him, so he can unwittingly spend my burden. People will let you down; I have been feeding on this slab of truth since childhood. As I grew, it grew. It is still excreting its blood stained bits under my fingernails.

Throw For Loop

Filo was gradually turning to stone before the dismissive eyes of the palace, after their words that had been knives to her skin, driving her to check her body for cuts, had finished their assault. Her skin began to thicken into impenetrable layers of shame and loss. Now the laughter behind her back bounced off and the pitiful glances slipped through her fingers like tiny grains of sand. She still mourned the loss of her children, child after child and suffered all the heartbreak that came with it. She resented the role she occupied in the palace of the damaged, troubled wife. Even the Oba had completely lost interest. Then Omotole had become pregnant, and she could not find it within herself to pretend to be happy. Her blood ran cold in the punishing heat for no reason, and the other wives looked at her as if questioning why she could not pull happiness from inside herself and dangle it before them. It was selfish of her not to share in their joy. But when she thought of this all she saw was her gunk-filled hand, drenched in slime clutching the remains of her battered womb. So her heart had hardened, lodged within her chest, a fortress trapped within a fortress.

Meanwhile Oba Odion refused to step in. He did nothing to help his forgotten wife. He caught distorted, miniature reflections of himself in her black pupils and believed it to be an attempt to suck him in. So he would skulk away, his face in a scowl, mouth disapprovingly grim. Filo’s anger grew. It was then that Filo realised waiting for one person to breathe life into you with guilt-soaked breath could break you, just a little, each day.

So when the brass head called her, she was unable to resist its slow, rolling whisper. Soft yet insistent, it had fondled her lobes before slipping inside her eardrums, saying her name softly, repeatedly. She carried it as though it had always belonged to her. The weight of it had rested comfortably between her thin arms, and she had hopped daintily to her quarters, ignoring the sandstorm brewing between her toes.

Inside the disarray of her chamber, the heat emanating from the brass head singed her rough fingers. She accidentally dropped it on her foot. That act jarred her into thinking; now I am even stealing. It was only when Adesua came to see her that the humming inside stopped. She thought she would resent Adesua for coming to take back what belonged to her but she didn’t. She could not have imagined she would welcome the company of another wife, but Adesua’s presence had calmed her. Somehow, silently a common ground was discovered. Yet behind her raised knees, something inside her locked. The birds could have told her when it had happened because they were waiting, hoping their soft-feathered breasts would muffle the sound when it surely came. When it did, the birds had flown away, and Filo decided to stop crumbling beneath her desperation.

Nestled within a room in the shoulder of the palace, Sully stood behind Oba Odion who was slumped in his chair. You could almost taste the Oba’s sweat in the room and the terracotta walls, punished long enough, could have been shrinking within themselves. Since the Oba had appointed Sully as his personal guard a funny, unexpected thing happened. Oba Odion began to confide in him, his tongue loosened by a well of stories and incidents. Sully was an attentive listener, and he ahhed and tutted when required to do so. If his face began to crumple, he would stop himself and smooth his expression down.

When the Oba started talking of his wives, he found himself genuinely riveted by the Oba’s tales and how different each wife sounded. And eventually, when the Oba mentioned Adesua’s name, Sully felt his face flush, his pulse dance against his temple. He lifted the Oba gingerly and rested his back against the seat properly. The Oba let slip that he did not trust his council, and that they in return simply tolerated him. Sully glanced through the window; the afternoon light was now dimming slowly, changing into the more seductive, burnished glow of evening. He could hear the chatter of hens and imagined them pecking at each other, charging around in delicious freedom sniffing each other’s backsides. There was an orangey tint to the sky. Oba Odion’s mumbling in his stupor drew Sully’s gaze back. There was a crack in the ground in the back corner of the room, and he wondered what secrets of the palace had slid inside it. Voices travelled through the apartment blocks and the surrounding area, Oba Odion spluttered, the coughing racked his body. Sully patted the Oba’s back and offered him his hand; Oba Odion stuck his hand out limply in response. The Oba’s hand turned into a piece of thread, and all Sully had to do was hold on to the tip while it continued to unravel.

Soon after that, while attempting to deposit the Oba in his quarters as discreetly as possible, he saw Adesua. Ironically Sully was steadily carrying the Oba, an arm thrown behind his neck and across his shoulder, when he caught the flash of a green, patterned cloth. She was standing beside the tall, sturdy worn pillar watching her husband as though he was a stranger. And she did not rush forward to flounder after him. She rubbed her neck, sighing and throwing an irritated look, as if she wanted them to disappear from view. A little servant girl approached Adesua and genuflected. The girl smiled as Adesua picked her up. Keen to get the Oba to his quarters, Sully continued to lead him gingerly through small clusters of people who wore embarrassed expressions and chuckled under their breaths.

Sully dumped the Oba unceremoniously in his chamber, barely flinching as he hit his mat with a thud. The Oba giggled and pointed, “I like you, good man,” before slouching back onto the floor. Sully fumed, the Oba’s indignity taunted him. Is this what you came here for? It said. He could only crouch down and watch, in response, patience simmering under his skin. He contemplated throwing water over him but this was the king, an Oba who was trying to dilute the fervour of something nipping away at him. He could feel dust and grainy bits between his toes. There were grainy bits inside him; they needed to be smoothed away. Deep down he knew only one thing could do it. His face twisted at himself and his surroundings. A guava sat on the mantle beside him, plump and beckoning. He reached for it, took a chunk out, but he couldn’t taste it.

Braid in The Hat

It happened accidentally. Not that you could follow somebody by accident but Sully had not planned it. He had been scouting for trails out of the kingdom; one because he enjoyed it and two, it was always better to be prepared. He was mentally mapping his latest route which began from the back of the soldiers’ quarters, then wound behind the long, dusty new road which had delivered him to the palace gates that fateful day. He was chewing kola nuts, savouring their slightly bitter taste when he spotted a familiar looking, slender young woman darting past, wrapper hiked up and what looked like a broken wooden spear in her hand.

Quick on her feet, she turned occasionally to look around. He paused behind an Iroko tree, recognising the king’s youngest wife. Good grief, he thought. What on earth is that creature up to? How had she managed to slip out of the palace unnoticed and more importantly, how did she do so with that spear in her possession? He chuckled at the thought, waiting for some distance between them before emerging to pursue her discreetly. She headed in the direction of the river, humming to herself, elated at the feeling of freedom. Dust tongues of quiet Gods stilled. Footsteps of hidden creatures with stones in their mouths rustled crinkled leaves. The heat was punishing. Sully’s skin had browned somewhat since arriving in Benin but it still burned now and again.

As he watched Adesua weaving between trees, he spotted the tell tale signs on his chest, a patch that looked like a small red sky crawling up his skin. Damned heat, he murmured. Thank goodness he had worn his large brimmed brown hat. The mosquitoes liked to feed on him too but he had managed to resolve that problem somewhat in his living quarters, having put up grey netting all around to keep the little buggers out. He had adapted to his surroundings. The way he always did. He could never really blend in but he had picked up some of the customs and habits of the kingdom that endeared him a little to some people.

In the mornings, he walked around with a chewing stick dangling from the corner of his mouth, he had fashioned a piece of orange traditional cloth the king’s tailor had given him into a handkerchief which he tucked into his shirt pocket. He ate their delicious food with gusto and quietly observed the kingdom with a keen eye as people continued to gossip about the white man who had charmed his way into the palace. He had found himself coming to this particular river several times because it was out of the way. Hidden behind a wall of forest, an untrained eye could easily pass it without realising what was there. So she liked it there too, he thought, warmed by the idea.

At the river, he loitered behind a stack of rocks. She was knee deep in the water, spear in hand, head bent in concentration before lunging at movements below the surface. He watched a few more of her spirited, unsuccessful attempts. Charmed, he uncurled his lean body. Slowly approaching, he whistled. “Why that’s the best fishing technique I’ve seen in Africa.”

Adesua dropped the spear. She had been concentrating so deeply, she barely heard him coming. Either that or he was good at catching people off guard.

“Oh. It is you. Should you not be following my husband around?” she spat.

“Shouldn’t you?” he asked, giving her an amused look. “You must be the least enamoured bride I have come across.”

To her horror, he took off his boots and began to roll his trousers up, exposing tanned well-defined bow legs lightly covered with fine brown hairs.

“No, what are you doing?” She held the spear up, aiming it at his moving chest.

“Easy,” he chuckled, barely breaking stride. “You’re not going to use that thing on me are you?” The water felt cool on his limbs. If she had not been there, he would have stripped and taken a dip naked. The devilish part of him almost suggested it. Barely a hair’s breadth away, he wrapped his hand around hers, gently prying the spear out of it. “I’m your husband’s guest. Do you not think you could bring yourself to be more hospitable than aiming a weapon at me?”

He thought he saw a flicker of shame in her expression but it vanished quickly. The water rippled, mouths of fish glimmered seductively below and the afternoon light threatened to bend things to its will. The air between them crackled. He could almost hear the flutter in her long, elegant neck. He knew that flutter could catch things; a bright neon fish scale, the frayed thread on the inside of his trousers, the cut on his jaw he had given himself shaving with his pocket knife three days earlier. He knew if he ran his finger over that flutter the skin would be soft, the shape unpredictable, that he would remember the contours days later.

The catapult in his left pocket was firing a series of jagged objects at an entrance Adesua did not know she had.

“Why do you wear that annoying hat?” She asked suddenly, breaking the tension.

“Oh, this offensive thing?” He answered, giving a half smile and pointing at it. “To protect me from the kingdom’s curses.”

“You are mocking me!” she exclaimed, wiping a trickle of water from her forehead.

“Come here.” He instructed. “I want to show you something.” He grabbed hold of her hand. She jerked it back, a scowl on her face. “How dare you? I am one of the Oba’s brides. You show no respect. I could report you to the Oba for that, have you flogged, made an example of.”

A tight expression appeared on his face, as if he was considering throttling her. He laughed instead, taking her hand again. “Come and I’ll help you catch a fish,” he said softly.

He led her to the bank where the water gently lapped at scattered stones. They sat down. He took the hat off, turning it in his hands. “You see this hat? I negotiated with a Chinaman on a ship for it, gave him my pipe in return. Was compelled to at the time, couldn’t understand why.”

He placed the hat on her head, tugging it down firmly. “There. You look like a modern young woman. What a picture.”

She put her hand on her head uncertainly and her lips curved realising it provided shade.

“See?” Sully continued. “Not so bad after all.”

She touched a braid poking out, rubbing the kinky hair that had somehow partially unravelled. “Why are you in Benin?” she asked, slapping away the fly she had one eye on, listening to the soft trickle of water, the gentle crackling of the surrounding bush. He turned foreign, cool green eyes at her. “Why is anybody in Benin? I’m a man of adventure. My travels led me here. I have to tell you, that hat looks much better on you than it did on the Chinaman, beautifully turned out fellow that he was. He looked like an Emperor, gave me opium too. I never did ask him how he got the hat.”

Adesua did not know who a “Chinaman” was or what “turned out” meant or what “opium” was. Some kind of seasoning for food maybe? She did not ask for fear of appearing ignorant. She knew this shifty stranger would add it to his arsenal of weapons, using it against her when she least expected. She took those funny sayings to be yet more unusual things from this strange man with the crooked smile and unsettling ways.

Later when they caught the silvery fish, Adesua was struck by how quick Sully was, striking with the spear while she was still trying to follow its movements. He made her hold it down on the riverbank. It felt cool and smooth, a watery distance shrunk in its gaze. He tied it with some string. “For the palace cook! When you eat this tonight, you’ll remember our time here,” he said, holding it up.

On the way back, she kept the hat on to stay cool, following his lead, his easy manner. He whistled, occasionally peppering their silence with bits of information about the forest’s inhabitants; ladybirds, lizards, snakes, throwing curious, loaded looks her way. A molten heat began to spread through her body. She could hear each sound fully, intensely; his long strides eating through the ground, her damp wrapper dripping into the earth, watering the heads of creatures underneath, her breath lined with unspoken things. She watched the curve of the fish’s mouth, remembered it bucking against the stones, struggling to breathe and at that moment, imagining it turning blind in one eye from the brightness of the light. She returned his hat just before they snuck back into the palace separately, their chests expanding with the weight of new secrets.

And all the way back to her quarters, she thought about her treacherous braid coming undone in the wide-brimmed brown hat.

Adesua responded to the call at night. It winged its way across the palace grounds and she sat up restless. Listening, she succumbed to it. It rumbled its intentions and she only paused to gather fragments of her resolve with a scented cloth laced with coconut oil. She followed the call. She counted out her steps to the rhythm of it, as it skirted along the empty trail that led to the main palace. She was so light; if someone laughed it would surely carry her away. She went on past the high iron gates abandoned by distracted guards and rounded the backside of the servant quarters brimming with people. Past the servant quarters, the call tested her, she came to a threshold, a low wall, and beyond it in the near distance was a small, familiar building surrounded by shrubbery. She could make out the outline of a man, and the building behind him was glowing amber approval. She could hear her breaths and the faint thrum of hundreds of caterpillars hatching out of their cocoons and she was crushing them with each step towards Sully’s quarters, leaving a trail of squashed, meshed, butterflies spilling colours.

Sully was waiting for her. The sky seemed wider, open with longing, the stars twitching in their ceiling. In that sweet darkness, with only the elegy of the grasshoppers nudging them on, in the clammy anticipation of the night air, she wilted as Sully’s face close to hers, naked with intent, seemed to block all that surrounded her. Somewhere on the palace roof her caution plunged down. She ran her fingers through his thick, dark hair, holding his head to the rise and fall of her chest. In the dark, his green eyes seemed bewitching, calming. His beard was rough on her skin. He kissed a trail down her firm stomach, then further down still, till his head was buried between her legs. His tongue softened the bud there. Then he caressed her belly button, running his tongue back up, murmuring her name in slow seductive chants. He held both breasts, chuckling; he named them.

Behind the curtain of a mist that made the palace dewy, as though it were floating in a giant watermark freshly wet, two ghosts peered through. The blurry figures of Oba Odion’s father Oba Anuje and his hanged childhood friend Ogiso were keeping busy, spinning a curse so potent, it whipped through the grounds gathering momentum and snatching solace from its unwitting bearers.

Made up of bitter punishments, things left unsaid and repercussions that couldn’t be undone, it continued to spin an invisible web over the walls. Between pillars and under the noses of the palace inhabitants, this was a curse that would travel on the back of time, out-shadow shadows and lie in wait at corners where really good fortunes rounded.

The two ghosts stilled their fading fingers and admired their handiwork. Now, there was a fine colourless film sticking to the palace that only they could see. Sometimes, they forgot what they were; there were holes where their hearts used to be. If you looked through them it would turn your eyes bloodshot with scraggly thin lines darting across it. Red lightening in eyeballs, they began to whistle, a charming melody sounding both familiar and new. When dawn came, some people would wake up whistling it too, not knowing why. When the palace was like that, in that silence, it was beautiful. And there were things you could see in that light; like the servant girl who wouldn’t live past twenty seasons, the small boy who couldn’t stop chewing his thumb, he didn’t know it but one day it would just fall off. And the dwarf court entertainer who couldn’t stop dreaming of a certain councilman’s wife. The ghosts stopped their whistling and paused, after they had cast words that would rain down woes, they savoured the moment because it was a joyous thing! The mist was starting to disappear. They listened to the snoring of the sleeping palace, yet to yawn out its share of crusty, smelly morning breath. And strangely, there was a comfort in that.

Footnote Parables

In Harlesden people milled about. It was a spring day and cocoa buttered brown skinned beauties were out in all their bare-limbed glory, ready to lure willing victims with the promise of their sweetness. I felt under dressed in my scuffed Converse trainers, ripped faded jeans and Betty Boo t-shirt. My head was full with revelations, family secrets that were severed fingers lying on my carpet crooking their way towards me.

Mervyn lived a walking distance away from his practice. On his road in full Technicolor, men sported versions of green, gold and white string vests, standing in groups outside gates catching blaring music beats. I was amazed; here were neighbours in London who spoke to each other. Mervyn’s house had cobblestone-like walls. Stunted sprigs of grass with no ambition grew in the small, concrete jungle of his front yard and the oval black gate creaked. He answered on the third knock.

“Hey princess! I’m glad you made it man.” I was swallowed into his hug and immediately picked up the smell of grilled meats.

“Can’t miss a good barbecue.”

I handed over a bottle of white wine that had been sweating in my cupboard for weeks. In the hallway, I stepped over children with missing teeth and mouths full of sweets. Armed with crayons, they huddled over drawing books. A Lover’s Rock tune was playing on the stereo. “Wha gwaan sis?” A man with a long beard dressed in an African print shirt said. He was holding a plate of curry goat and rice as if it was his last supper. I was impressed that he managed to peel his eyes off it to say hello.

“Leon, Joy,” Mervyn said by way of introduction. In the living room, more bodies were gathered on Mervyn’s cream leather sofa. People were leaning on walls chatting between bites of crisp salad and patty. There were some elders sitting at a table talking about cricket and sipping rum. I nodded respectfully as Mervyn went to the kitchen to get me a drink, rum and coke for starters. You could smell the barbecue in the garden from the living room. I knew I only had to walk out through the kitchen door and into the neat, well-kept back garden to find succulent pieces of chicken browning on the barbecue flavoured with spices. Mervyn loved his food.

I sipped the drink Mervyn gave me casually but underneath, thoughts of Peter Lowon were cooking in my brain, sizzling and spitting. I couldn’t quite get my head around the fact that my grandfather had participated in a murder, drunk or not. Maybe my family were cursed and it was just a matter of time before I got dragged down with everybody else.

Mervyn had a brand new fitted kitchen that didn’t so much wow as comfort. A warm, homely space kitted out in wooden cupboards and grey marble-like countertops. There were trays of food spread out like elaborate Japanese fans. I grabbed a plate. Jerk chicken with barbecue sauce beckoned, ackee and salt fish in a big glass bowl, steamed fish and vegetables, plain white rice, salad, rice and peas and fried plantain. I served a good portion on my plate and tucked in. It was a nice day for a gathering; Mervyn was the sort of man who never lacked company. If I stopped by at two am I could guarantee there would be strays wandering in and out of the house. I parked myself on a stool at the counter; more rum and coke was needed.

In the garden, Mervyn stood at the barbecue comfortably flipping chicken sausages and lamb burgers, affably passing his laughter around as if it were napkins. I happened upon him from the back, my shadow following his baldhead.

“You alright princess?” he turned to face me, still poking a sausage.

“Yeah, this is a nice do, great food, thanks for inviting me.” A few people bit into their hot dogs wholeheartedly.

“Hmm, but that’s not why you came is it?” he smiled astutely. I made a show of feigning ignorance, wrinkling my nose and attempting the blank eyed look. “What? No.”

“Yes, I know you, can’t get you down these ends on most days.”

“About my mother.”

“Ahah! I knew it.” He stepped away from the barbecue to give me his full attention. Now the Staple Singers were playing, waiting to do it again.

“Did she talk about her father much?” Internally I smoothed his puzzled expression as pieces slotted into place.

“Not really. You been reading that diary?” he said.

“I think I might need your help.”

“Oh yeah? What for?”

“I don’t know yet, I’m just warning you in advance.”

“So you need my help but you don’t know what for? You’re a strange girl you know that.”

“What does “not really” mean? Just now when I asked about her and my grandfather that was your answer.”

He pinned me to the spot with a calm look, “Not really means not really.” I didn’t believe him.

After that, I got a condensed education on the merits of chess from a bunch of black nerds. Somebody caught me on the video camera and I pulled a face Freddie Krueger would have been proud of. Then, I slunk away to relieve myself.

Mervyn’s house had three floors and I went straight to the top. You would think that his house would be full of facsimiles of him and all the people he entertained, plastered everywhere, but especially as I climbed up to the top floor toilet the walls grew emptier and the house took on the feel of somewhere much more functional and far less inviting than it had appeared down below. The walls were bare, painted a dull greyish white and the carpeted stairs held not so much as a stray hair, as if no-one really spent any time up here. In the bathroom I found myself wondering about Mervyn and his family and what made them tick.

I emerged from the toilet to the faint scent of perfume in the air. It was lightly exotic and sweet smelling. With each step I took, the smell grew stronger. It seemed to get stronger further along the hallway. I followed it to Mervyn’s bedroom. The hairs on my arms stood up. The smell felt overwhelmingly familiar. The bedroom door was firmly shut. I opened it.

He’d had it redecorated after his wife died. It was a masculine room with dark oak panels and huge wooden bed made with a blue duvet. An un-emptied ashtray spilled old cigarette butts onto the dark nightstand while some big shoes frowned at their temporary neglect. I could have blinked and missed it. Peeking out from beneath the soft breast of Mervyn’s pillow was a strip of light purple material. There was a searing, short sharp pain in my chest. I picked up the material. It was silky and light. It weighed nothing but felt heavy in my chest. I held it to my nose, inhaling the scent deeply. Now the smell was inescapable. White spots on the material polluted my memory. I recognised it instantly, my mother’s Hermes scarf. She used to tie it into a bow at her throat. I pulled it out gently, touching it. It had the faded smell of Yves Saint Laurent Opium, her perfume. I was a low, grainy resolution of myself in that instant.

The thick, maroon carpeted stairs must have cushioned his footsteps because I didn’t hear Mervyn come up. I only heard him at the door, shuffling from one leg to the other, his stance slumped and awkward, the expression of deep sadness on his face. He opened his mouth several times but no words came out. He looked smaller in the doorway. I asked myself how that could be possible. Fresh tears sprang in my eyes. We stood there just looking at each other. I took my time, putting my mother’s scarf back under the pillow, as if he wasn’t standing there watching me. By the time I left the party, Gregory Isaacs was crying for his night nurse.

Outside, the night had the illuminated intensity of an owl’s gaze. I took off my Converse shoes and walked barefoot, carrying them gingerly. A white van tore down the street, its exhaust pipe panting magic smoke waiting to catch my sleepy eyes. Later, I knew I’d get home and think of my mother’s scarf still faintly smelling of Opium, a red flag under a white pillow.

Peter Lowon Journal entry March 20th 1956

I met my Felicia. I only met her two days ago but one day I will marry her. It was inside a small, thriving shop several miles from the barracks in Onisha. She was sitting behind the till, sipping from a Supermalt bottle. I have never envied an inanimate object before! She looks like a Fulani girl, with delicate features and her hair braided in an elegant style. She is beautiful. About five of us stopped off to buy some refreshments, maybe bread and tins of sardines to eat on the ride back. She barely glanced our way as we descended on a wave of noise.

I listened to one soldier call her “pretty girl” and wink at her after asking where the beer was kept. I had been pretending to check out maize flour while watching her discreetly. Her voice was calm. “Soldier man, is under the sign that says beer. You dey lose sight for army?” We laughed and she dismissed us, turning to concentrate on the magazine open in front of her on the till counter. She looked no older than twenty to me but her voice had an assurance to it. I watched her bend down in her little shoebox of space, head disappearing under the counter only to come up again with a cigarette stuck between her lips. The slim cigarette glowed. I found myself starring at the white strap of her top on her shoulder. I picked up more than I needed, bottles of beer, Fanta, pounded yam flour, Bournvita, bread, a packet of Tom Tom sweets. The others were teasing each other at the back, grabbing products, putting them down again.

At the counter I laid everything out carefully. Smoke curled from her mouth. Stupidly, I told her smoking was for fast women! I don’t know what made me say that, especially considering I smoke myself! She rang up the goods laughing, telling me if I wanted to ask her out that was not the comment to make! Throughout our brief conversation, she managed to watch what the boys were doing at the back. After she asked if my friends were in the shop to play. I whistled at the boys.

Inside the rusty, white Volkswagon on the way back to the barracks I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Up close, she was slim and not too tall. Say 5ft 5in and had the kind of shifting face that looked subtly different each time you saw it. Felicia seemed capable of being a little cruel. For some reason, this made me more curious about her, intrigued. The boys teased me. “British gentleman nah wah oh! See how he just become smooth in front of woman!” They slapped me on the back as if they were proud. “She fine well well but she dey make yanga.” I didn’t care about their words. I knew they were jealous. I kept playing my conversation with her over and over again in my head, thinking about army life. I can no longer say whether I like it or not, the sound of soldiers boots is constantly in the background. But I like what the army can do for me. It is why I am still here, waiting to take opportunities when they come.

Obi, Emmanuel and I have not talked about the thing we did that night, but there is a coiled string attaching all three of us. These days, when we talk, our sentences have double meanings. I can see the truth, white words written in chalk on their foreheads. Obi is jovial as ever, you would think he has won the lottery. I wonder how long it will last, but the money is good, nawah! Emmanuel is surprisingly calmer than I’ve seen him in the past. For now this situation has been the making of him. These boys are confident nothing will happen. The General has paid us well, made good on his sugarcoated promises but we will see. I thought of sending the brass head home to my father, a gesture and gift he would love. This would amuse me, the irony of it. But yet I want to keep it to myself, it is mine after all. It is safely tucked away amongst my possessions. Whispers of a military coup taking over the current government have begun slipping in and out through keyholes. Who knows if this will manifest, but if it does, the death must not be for nothing. Also the General will think of me for the bigger plan, if not I will remind him. I have not told Obi or Emmanuel about the brass head, it is better that way. At unexpected moments I catch myself wondering what I have become now that my heartbeat is no longer my own.

Felicia. Unflappable Felicia was still on my mind the day after. But Caretaker man, the white-headed seer, a ruffled man in his rumpled uniform, still drifted around looking for clues and making strange proclamations. The mystery of Caretaker man’s identity is something the soldiers like to get their teeth into during moments of boredom.

“He must be related to somebody high up, why else would they let a mere caretaker roam around in full military uniform? Ah ah, it is like something out of a comedy.” Soldiers often say or, “Oya, something is not right with that man in the upstairs compartment. You know what I’m saying. How old is he?” This is another mystery to us. You cannot tell his age, his face is smooth and unlined, but his completely white hair tells a different story.

At times I imagine he must have received some terrible news in the past, that this news was too much to bear and the days which followed saw the changing of his hair, like a change of seasons, greying and whitening itself from the roots up. Unrealistic I know, though this has stuck in my brain. Other times, I imagine him rising and brushing cobwebs from his head. There is no mention of a wife, children, or family. Nobody knows. One evening, a few of us took it upon ourselves to spy on him. We crouched low under the window of his quarters, listening to high life music coming from his cheap radio. The light from several candles was flickering. He sat on his bed in his white vest and shorts staring into a distance. One soldier imitated a cock crowing and we ran, most of the group chuckling. I felt uncomfortable having seen him in that state. We had intruded on a private moment and whatever he was seeing had rendered him completely still. I remember his uniform hung neatly on a hanger on a nail. I liked him just a little bit more for that.

Earlier that same evening, Caretaker man was sniffing around looking for answers. Mustapha, the soldier who tore his letters to shreds, ran through the barracks naked, screaming at the top of his lungs. He interrupted groups huddled around playing cards, polishing their boots or arm wrestling. He spoke in a strangled, voice and ran frantically to people, shouting that there were demons in uniforms that made promises with smiling faces. That the dead soldier’s crime was knowing too much and he was silenced. I did not witness this scene; this is what I was told.

Shortly after this display, three superior officers came out, one holding a syringe in a gloved hand. They held Mustapha down, right there on the common room floor in the presence of all those soldiers. He wriggled his body still screaming for all it was worth, as if something had possessed him. One officer punched him in the face. Blood spurted from his nose and dribbled into his mouth. Then he was smiling blood. The soldiers’ voices filled the room, beseeching the officers to take it easy man sir! Feet shifted nervously around the suddenly hot floor. The silver needle, a slim spear in the big room, pierced the stuffy air before it did him. He was sedated, and then they carried him away like it was nothing. I am glad I did not see this; it would have ruined my day.

This weekend I will go back to the shop in Onisha where the beautiful girl Felicia sits on her shop counter throne as if she is in the wrong picture. The lines of her body will be as I remember. She will come to life when she sees me. I will buy gari, cola, and peanuts. The portable fan will blow air over her shifting face; other customers will shop themselves into the background. My hands will be steady. I will make useful and useless conversation with her. She will tell me more about herself. She will give me my change and in the process, something else will be exchanged.

Two-Legged Race, Three Legged Stool

One type of destruction has a way of serenading its victim. It led Oba Odion through the next few weeks with a sure steady lyrical hand. The Oba had a problem; it was not that he was forgetting things, but that he couldn’t forget. He would rise late in the day craving the taste of days-old palm wine, sinking himself into the drinking of it till people could smell him long before he entered a room. He stumbled through the palace halls, arms outstretched, balancing himself with fingers splayed on the walls. In council meetings his mind abandoned his head, thoughts balking at the voices. He found himself mumbling agreement to the suggestions of the council members, while distracted by the most irrelevant details. Like how crooked Councilman Ewe’s teeth were, and why it had only recently begun to bother him. With every other breath the room grew smaller, as if it were shrinking.

Seated at their table of crumbling self-importance, Oba Odion had also lost his ferocious appetite for the wiles of his wives. In the mornings, his flaccid penis would greet him, the small slit at the crown frustrated by its wasted pleadings, lost in the snarling thatch of curly hair that extended down the softening expanse of his brown thighs. He avoided the questioning eyes of the palace and took to using the long twisted parched path that led away from the gates. That way he could compose himself and talk down the speedy jolts slamming against his temples. He realised on a murky, tangled day that something you thought you wanted badly may turn out to be your undoing. And on that day, he began wearing an expression of deep sadness he knew he would never be able to take off. He would have to cry through it, talk through it and laugh through it, because something was happening. Inside him something was spreading from the pit of his stomach. It was unstoppable, but he tried to slow it down and dilute it with drink. It hit him then, this was what it must feel like if somebody took a heated bar of iron and scraped it along your bones.

Adesua and Sully found themselves staining patches of ground at night as their scents of coconut and a pleasing manly odour that permeated the air mingled and curled the branches of trees. They wallowed in each other whenever possible. Stole glances amidst busy throngs of people filtering in and out around the yards. Glances that burgeoned into the soft pad of a finger against parted lips and later into surrendered bodies. There was a delicious pleasure to it. Adesua struggled to keep this happiness from bubbling to the surface. She had to bite her lip to stop it spilling out. Their betrayal didn’t thin their blood; it left only a slightly sour taste, which was washed away by the abandon of two people who couldn’t help themselves. They were careful treading cracked lines across the palace with a rhythm of light steps. The possibility of being caught loomed before them, large and steadily arranging itself into caution. Bright-eyed, they attended to their duties with a muffled vigour.

Sully guarded the Oba with an expression of dutiful concern, but the veiled glee in his eyes told another story. By now Adesua had developed a healthy disdain for Oba Odion, insult upon insult! Had he no shame? Trembling and falling all over the place like a useless drunkard. What had gotten into him? But really, what had gotten into all of them? Under the punishing heat in the palace, people were falling apart. Only the day before, in the palace kitchen between piling the ingredients of cocoa yam, goat meat, cassava, wild mushrooms, bitter leaves, baby tomatoes and the bustling servants, the head chef Ahere had ground to a halt and screamed. He stood there screaming while his eyes bulged out of his head and piss trickled down his leg. Nobody knew what he had seen but he was inconsolable for the rest of the day, sent to lie down while the other servants squashed their alarm with tightly-spun snickers.

On the nights Adesua did not see Sully she would lay on her mat turning restlessly, wondering if his feet itched the way hers did, thinking how she never meant to start this unspeakable thing that belonged to them. But it would go on, because she felt alive while the spicy, addictive flavours of dissent swelled her taste buds.

Omotole’s burgeoning stomach by now stretched out full and rounded and preceded her wherever she went. She waddled about the palace pleased with herself, a puffed up hen crowing above the others. She was beginning to tire even more easily, but she told herself that was what happened when you carried the Oba’s heir, as she began the long, arduous walk to the river, on a dirty, loping path littered with stones and shrivelled leaves worn by the sun. It was not too far but far enough from prying eyes. She spat and gulped her irritation at seeing the blue, bubbling spittle on the ground. The petals were still appearing inside the wet fold under her tongue, and every morning she had to rinse her mouth out several times so it wouldn’t stain her teeth. She knew she had to talk to the Oba and soon. The fool was spoiling everything, and did not seem the least bit concerned about becoming the laughing stock of his own kingdom.

As she neared the river, she could hear the chattering of birds and close by smoke from crackling firewood wandered up into the endless expanse of darkening sky. She thought she spotted the ears of a hare behind a clenched bush, foraging for what remnants of food it could find. At the edge of the rippling river she steadied her body for a moment to listen to the water gently caressing the banks. This was where she came, clutching at her throat on days when she felt possessed and was fleeing from discovery, to howl out the fire within her. There was nobody around and that was how she preferred it. She took off her wrapper and naked, she waded gingerly into the river. Her swollen breasts sank into the cool water and her dark brown nipples tingling a little hardened to nubs in relief. One day soon she thought, Benin’s new heir would be born, suckling all the strength he would need at his mother’s breast. His tiny fist curling and uncurling, she saw this vision so precisely, she almost sighed out loud in pleasure. She submerged her head under the clear water, as thin blue veined streams escaped from her nostrils merging with the ripples.

Years before, under the reproach of the shrieking sun and a sticky, suffocating heat that made you weary of your dry mouth, the boy Odion had stumbled upon a truth that was to become the making and the ending of him. It was a day before the Festival of Yam and the palace was humming with activities. People were carrying slaughtered meat, poultry, yams and such a dizzying assortment of ingredients he could barely count them. After slipping into the palace kitchen for a cool drink of water, bored, he kicked jagged stones as he walked round the back of the palace, eyeing its high familiar terracotta walls; daring it to become something else. His friend Ogiso was nowhere to be seen and he wondered why for the third day running he had not come upon him. Usually, they were together, rummaging through some unfamiliar room, following pretty servant girls with their eyes or play fighting.

But something had changed between them. Not just that recently they had become more competitive with each other; but they had argued. It had started off as an innocent comment, under the mango tree suckling the juicy flesh while they joked. When Odion had said that one day Benin would be his, instead of agreeing with him, a strange look passed over Ogiso’s face while he said that no, Benin would rightfully belong to him. Suddenly, there was a tension between them as Odion asked his friend to explain. Ogiso chuckled but the expression is his eyes remained serious. Instantly, Odion was on him and the two boys were pummelling each other. Wrestling their bodies to the ground and trying to fight away the shift that was already changing everything. Then it ended almost as abruptly as it had begun and the boys went their separate ways, neither of them really spoiling for a fight.

The boy Odion continued along the back of the palace as it curved like a voluptuous woman. He heard raised voices coming from a wide window overlooking the gardens. He recognised Oba Anuje’s voice and his own mother’s. He crouched low under the window. The voices became louder, fraught with tension.

“Stupid woman! You think I don’t know that Odion is not my son?” From the beginning I have known, do you know what I can have done to you?”

“Do your worst!” The voice he knew to be his mother’s responded but there was a wildness to her tone that he did not recognise. He stayed still, completely rooted to the spot.

“I no longer care, as the Gods are my witness. I found comfort when it came and I will never regret it.” Her tone was defiant and he imagined her pacing the room. “Your son will grow up and-”

“He is not my son!” Oba Anuje wailed, “You should be thankful that I have spared the lives of you and that useless child for this long. Come to me with this again and I will have both of you thrown out of Benin.” His mother laughed hysterically. Then some unforgettable words came through the window so swiftly, they stung his heart. “And who is your son Anuje? Why not officially announce to the palace, to the whole Benin kingdom that Ogiso is your son. Everybody knows you have been lying with his mother, that good-for-nothing servant woman, all this time!”

Odion heard a whap! from Oba Anuje’s hand as it crashed onto his mother’s cheek, and the sound jarred him into movement. He straightened himself up and ran. It all made sense, Oba Anuje had never been able to stand the very sight of him. The humiliation he’d suffered, the coldness, this was the reason all along. The words reverberated in his head; hot tears trickled down his face and along with them went the essence of his childhood. He had thought the blood of kings flowed through his veins but instead it flowed through Ogiso’s.

When he met the medicine man Kalu who had given him the ingredients for death, he knew his prayers were answered. It wasn’t until he came upon Oba Anuje poisoned and broken, when in that searing moment their eyes bore into one another’s, Anuje’s hands desperately reaching out to him for help, that Odion finally felt vindicated. In those last moments before he slipped away, Anuje knew what Odion had done. Never had a moment been so sweet for Odion, the song of death had served a dish of revenge and served it well. Benin was his to take; he had earned it. Now even within the grip of self-pity Oba Odion knew that far from being rewarded, he was being punished. Walking aimlessly about the palace he admitted that he deserved it. His guilt was now fully mauling his conscience. But that was the price you paid and even in death, he knew Anuje and Ogiso would haunt him for the rest of his days.

The halls were swelling with people and they lowered their voices when they spotted him, bowing respectfully as he moved past them; regardless of the depths to which he had sunk, he was still Oba after all. But his dwindling condition was so apparent, they were touching him and wiping their hands afterwards. Oba Odion summoned Sully to meet him at the gates of the palace. No questions were asked as they fell comfortably into step. They trundled on through a rough, coiling road that would take them to a place Oba Odion remembered all too clearly. It was time to see an old friend, and even the worst weather would not have stopped him.

Eventually, they came to the opening of a dense, sprawling forest with twisted, gnarling trees and pathways weaving at you from every direction. At this point Sully walked in front leading the way while the Oba directed him. Finally they came to a small hut and Oba Odion ran to it, calling out a name only for it to be carried in the wind. He rushed inside the hut but it was empty. He shouted the name more frantically. Kalu! Kalu! As if it would conjure the man before him. But there was no one and Oba Odion imploded, because Kalu the medicine man was nowhere to be seen. The keeper of secrets had gone, and all that remained was the shell of his hut letting the breeze stroke its abandoned walls, and the tall grass stretch burnished blades towards it in sympathy and remembrance.

Pendulum

The local park was tucked away behind high, Gothic black iron gates that I suspected snagged things unexpectedly; a pair of hands gripping its bars in disappointment after closing time, a letter blown by a gust of wind, one dirty, sodden trainer caught on the angular tip of a bar at the top, laces dangling down like threads. It was fairly large and unfurled maze-like, intersected by paths heading in different directions. On entering, a lengthy walkway was lined by trees that shook. To the right, at the back a pond shimmered, and the benches before it understood the language of ducks.

As I headed there, the high street hummed. Early evening meant scrums of school children dipped into buses that seem to sag beneath their weight. Shop doors whooshed open and shut, lone customers hunched over menus in poorly lit takeaway restaurants. Handles of heavy shopping bags tugged at the hands of people rushing to get home. Cars nudged each other towards the end of the day and streetlamps yawned light. A chill lodged in my bones. The gentle wind blew my coat open, exposing its red lining to bulls that leapt from behind steering wheels, ran through traffic naked, searching for their horns. I sank my hands deep into my coat pockets, lamenting on how small things could turn sinister; lumps of brown sugar in my cereal becoming dusty red stones, double breathing in my room at night, the rhythm of my breath being copied.

At the park, I cut across the middle, avoiding the long way round. Sometimes, I liked to sit by the pond gathering my thoughts, catching bits of conversation as people meandered by; intrigued by contexts I’d never fully know. Approaching the pond, I spotted a familiar, slight figure sitting on one bench, swathed in a bright, kaftan, there was smoke curling above her white hair. Mrs Harris looked very much like what she was: an old hippy drawing from a shrinking cigarette. She leaned forward, staring at whatever caught her eye in the distance, cigarette tip glowing amber. She threw pieces of bread at some ducks, turned to her left. It was too late to pretend not to have seen her and she waved me over enthusiastically. “Hello there!” She greeted.

At the bench I smiled sheepishly. “Hey there yourself, you’re in my spot.” I teased.

“Plenty of room for two.” She patted the space beside her but didn’t bother to remove the gold box of Marlboro Lights that stored weightless nicotine lungs. The ducks argued amongst themselves. I sat down, undid a few buttons of my coat to allow myself to breathe. I took in her side profile and realised then Mrs Harris had once been a looker with her emerald eyes, charming gap-toothed, wonky smile and high cheekbones. With white hair that was reminiscent of snow, hers was a sly beauty, which made it even more attractive in my eyes.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Taking a break from something?”

“Aren’t we all usually trying to take a break in some way my dear? From routine, the cards we’ve been dealt. I was talking to the water.” She took another draw from her cigarette, blew smoke that curled into a root before disappearing.

I laughed. “You’re crazy.”

“It’s true,” she exclaimed wisely. “The water never lies. How do you think I knew you were in trouble that day? It was the water that alerted me, not just dropping my ring. The pipes had been clanging and hissing in a really odd, persistent way. I stopped by to hear if you were having the same problem and of course Buddy going missing gave me the perfect excuse.”

“That’s unnerving,” I said.

“Maybe, but it did happen that way. When you didn’t answer that second time, I let myself in with your spare key. I found you and the bath water was still running.”

I thought of her discovering me on the cold, chessboard linoleum floor. One Queen Piece in a limp heap, watering roots the eye couldn’t see, staining her forever with my blood, strange how you could inexplicably bond with someone by trying to slip away.

She threw another piece of bread at the ducks. “How are you doing?”

I shook my head, wanting to cry on her shoulder. “Oh you know, trying to breathe. Do you think becoming increasingly isolated can make someone see things in a distorted way?” I turned to face her fully, edging my body closer. She pinned me with an intense, luminous gaze. As though she could see what I meant behind the question.

“You mean like some people who for whatever reason don’t connect to others, lose their moral compass and become serial killers?”

“Well, not exactly, I’m not struggling with a lack of moral compass. I’m-”

“You meant losing touch with reality?” she interjected.

I blew out a tense breath. “Something’s shifted; I can feel it in the air. I’m anxious about being alone in my own flat. Once or twice I’ve woken up in the middle of the night thinking I’m having a fucking heart attack.”

“It’s not the flat, wherever you were, you’d have this issue. You see the grooves in that?” She pointed at the nearest tree, hand trembling. “What do you see?”

I studied the fat trunk, already leaning against a harsh wind to come, the pattern of swirls. “I see a sad girl with legs that don’t feel like her own.”

“Really? I see a resurrection and it’s not Jesus.” She smiled thinly, laugh lines deepening. “So who do you think is right?” she asked.

“I don’t know, both of us. Neither of us?”

She took my arm gently, held my gaze. “People like you and I sometimes find ourselves embracing different realities. There’s a beauty in it. It’s like having a key.”

Her eyes glowed and I felt their pull. For a moment she wasn’t a sweet, older woman. She looked feral and other worldly. Then the flames in her pupils shrank and she let go of my arm, flicking her cigarette butt away coolly. The noise of traffic grew louder, threatening to break into our green oasis.

“It doesn’t seem fair; you know this big thing about me. I don’t know enough about you. Pretend we’re strangers, tell me something true.” I instructed.

“I used to be an escape artist.”

“Tell me a lie.”

“I used to be an escape artist,” she sputtered, biting her amusement down.

“Come on!” I whined. “Play along.”

“Okay. My father was a Scotsman, tall and arrogant, a Doctor. My mother was Romany, a free spirit, what they call a gypsy. They were as different as two people could be but my father fell in love. His family were horrified; he married her anyway. He said it had been like something came over him.”

“What happened?”

“It turns out she wasn’t the marrying or motherly kind. Oh she was beautiful and had this mysterious quality that drew people. She could be kind but she was selfish, self-possessed. She took what she wanted from people without an afterthought. I’m not sure what world she was from.”

“What did you want from her?” I asked.

“What any child would want I suppose. To know her more, be loved by her, it became increasingly difficult, my parents… they had terrible arguments. At times it felt like the whole house shook.” She paused, reaching for things long buried then continued. “My mother liked the company of men very much you see and that caused even more quarrels. Over a certain period of time, she started coming home with strange cuts and bruises.” Mrs Harris shook, touched by a memory. “There were woods near where we lived and sometimes she’d arrive home from there covered in bruises, chanting bizarre things nobody knew the meaning of. One night when I was twelve, she left while we were asleep. Not even a note, I never saw her again.”

She ignored what must have been pity on my face, patted my thigh reassuringly. “In the years to come, I felt like I’d dreamt her. In a way you’re luckier than me, you can make your mother indelible.”

The silence shrouded us in a deepening vacuum. There was no more bread left; Mrs Harris crumpled a white plastic bag before shoving it in her pocket. The ducks had begun to gnaw at shadows of passers by and pond water lapped at the curved lines of their bodies. The trail of white crumbs scattered into nothing. Maybe my mother was indelible, in the crackle of coppery gold autumnal leaves, in the slipstream bearing the ripples of a familiar looking back, in my one winged arm as I held the edge of a dark sky by mouth.

“Also, I’m celebrating.” Mrs Harris remarked, breaking the silence. “It’s the anniversary.”

“Congratulations. What’s the anniversary?”

“It’s the date I was discharged from Bedlam.” This was revealed casually, in the same way a person would say, “Pass the salt.”

“You mean Bedlam the psychiatric hospital?”

“The very same. I even wrote a poem on that day:

Once I had a spell in Bedlam,

Dancing beneath a hat,

They came for me goggle eyed,

Wearing the whites of angels.

This was followed by a bitter chuckle. I was stunned into silence. Mad butterflies, I thought. Now that the water knew secrets, it wore the glint of daggers. Bathed in another silence and connected by the mottled umbilical chord of lost mothers we stared at the water, lulled by its gentle, deceptive motion.

Talking Heads

Windswept and ashen, Mrs Harris stood on my doorstep flickering like the flame on the candle I held. Blanketed by night, her white hair shone even more ferociously. She’d thrown on a black hooded jacket over green pinstriped pyjamas. Glancing at windows of the other houses it was clear the power cut had affected the whole street, I saw the dim glow of candlelight silently breathing against glass in many of them.

“Are you okay?” I asked, ushering her in. “You look sick.”

“It’s these terrible headaches I get occasionally. God! They’re worse than migraines, as though someone’s sawing my head in two.” She shrugged her jacket off, trailing behind me and slung it over the sofa. “I don’t have any candles you see, it’s horrible lying in the dark alone like that with an ice pack on your head.” Her voice was croaky and sleep lined, as if she’d just woken up. It was after 11pm. I’d lit the sitting room using fat candles that burned the scent of orange blossoms into the air. Some of my mother’s old photographs were strewn on the small, wooden side table in a weird time line. The TV sulked quietly and half a glass of green ginger wine promised warmth, sweetness and spice.

“It was so bad; I took some sleeping pills to knock myself out.” She continued amiably. “When I came round, everywhere was dark. I had to feel my way slowly out of the house.”

“You can sit with me for a while,” I offered. “I know what you mean, I hate being ill if I’m on my own. I get this horrible feeling of dread worrying that the worse case scenario will happen. How long have you been suffering with these headaches?”

She sank into the edge of the sofa, right next to the photographs. “They come and go. They first started when I was a little girl. It was horrible; I used to cry from the pain. Anyway, it’s dulling now somewhat. I feel like a stray! This is good of you, thanks.” She chuckled nervously and raised a trembling hand to wipe her brow. I headed into the kitchen; put the kettle on for some peppermint tea. I moved the blackboard covered with Anon’s comings and goings further back, glad I’d had the sense to wipe away some of the chalk markings from the sitting room. In the dark, things changed shape. I was used to it but I didn’t want disgruntled, faded markings to accost Mrs Harris.

The kettle hissed its intent. I looked around warily, watching for Anon to make an unexpected entrance. It dawned on me that she usually liked to wrong foot me during quiet times. I filled a cup with the word grubby emblazoned on its ceramic, blue body. Since Mrs Harris had revealed she’d spent time in Bedlam Hospital, I felt even more of a kinship between us. I wondered why she didn’t tell me all those times she came to visit me at the hospital. I was intrigued by the things that had been set in motion, which bound us together and were tracing our movements with their secretive tongues. I carried the steaming mugs back into the living room where Mrs Harris eyed the pictures curiously. The sound of an ambulance siren flooded the street. I handed a mug over.

“Do you need any painkillers?” I asked politely.

“No thanks, I took some already. I love old pictures,” she mused. “They reveal something to you every time you look.” She nodded at the display on the table and the short piles on the floor. From my vantage point, the pictures had chalk-drawn miniature nets etched over my mother’s mouth. I shook the invasion away. “I’m looking for anything that seems unusual. It’s hard to see her appearing so alive… But I need to do it.”

“Is this in connection with the brass head?”

“I don’t know, yes, maybe. It’s to do with her in general. I’m not sure what I’m looking for but I’ll know when I see it, if that makes sense. Will you help?” I asked.

“Sure, happy to be of use. I’ll earn my drinks,” she said.

As we rifled through the pictures, the rough, thick scab inside me began to peel. The wound beneath was red and angry, snarling against bones in my chest. And there was my mother, leaving footprints on my organs, removing the lines on her palms to make one long thread that dangled hauntingly. Each picture showed versions of her plotting to keep growing in the damp soil of memory. There she was, running on a bridge looking behind, cream coat tails flapping in the wind. Outside a café called Sal’s, wearing tattered dungarees and a white vest, laughing and holding a paintbrush dripping globs of red paint. In another picture she was on a pier, sunlight streaming over her body, clad in a Fifties flowery, orange dress. There was a wine red butterfly brooch pinned at the right side of her bust that looked ready to flap its wings and fly into my mouth. Mrs Harris watched my expression.

In the pier shot my mother’s gaze was direct and intense. The backdrop consisted of a candyfloss stall and a fairground ride of plastic horses, illuminated by smatterings of light on their false bodies. I felt the waves crashing beneath the pier, the pull of the tide. I saw sand-speckled memories washed up on the beach, until the water’s unpredictable line dragged them in again. My mother’s lips were pursed; I tasted the salty sentences that had loitered on her tongue. Mrs Harris had remained quiet for a bit, rubbing her temples, smiling sadly, and sipping tea. Suddenly she piped in. “Very striking woman, elusive somehow. There’s something in her gaze….” She paused, and then continued. “Chameleon like, I bet she navigated social groups easily, whereas you’re more of an odd character, in a good way,” she added, touching my hand.

I wondered if through my touch on the photographs, my mother could feel my fingerprints on her back. Sending her limbs into movement, crawling through dead soil onto fractured planes only those left behind could breathe into existence.

As we rummaged through more snaps, Mrs Harris’s face swam closer, then further back under the gaze of candlelight. The candle flames burned wax, flickered, threatening to lick the edges of the photos. She gingerly set her empty cup down next to my glass. “You can ask me you know, about how I ended up in Bethlehem Hospital. It’s only natural to be curious.”

“I guess I was surprised when you first told me but then it made sense, that’s why you came to see me so much in the hospital, why you took an interest. I’m grateful for that. You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.” I snuck a sideways glance at her; she seemed calm.

“No, its fine, I want to.” She drew her shoulders back, as if steeling herself then continued. “I had a break down just after my marriage ended. Nicholas, my husband was a very creative man. He had this ethereal quality about him.” She smiled wistfully. “He used to make the most beautiful scenes and figurines from wood. Oh, they were stunning! The level of detail… He’d lock himself away for hours carving those things.”

“Did he ever make any money from it?” I asked.

“Well, there were small commissions from friends, people we knew but nothing steady,” she answered. “He was your classic frustrated artist, delightful if you caught him on the right day. Struggled with terrible mood swings though. We fought a lot over money since I was covering most of the bills. He accused me of attempting to turn him into something soulless.” I stood and opened the window slightly to counter a growing tension in the air. She tucked a wisp of hair behind her ear.

“One day, we had a terrible fight. He’d asked me for money, quite a large sum. I wanted to know what it was for. He claimed I was emasculating him. He was in a rage, he flew at me, grabbed me by the throat strangling me.” She stopped again, stared at the memory head on. “At the time, I was battling one of my awful headaches. You have to understand that sometimes when they come, things take on a dream like quality; I can lose my sense of time. I picked up the metal poker we kept by the fireplace and hit him. I kept hitting him until I saw blood and he went limp. The headache was screaming.”

“Jesus,” I murmured sympathetically.

“I was stumbling around, my head felt like it was split open. I left him lying on the floor. I went calmly upstairs to find my medication. But he’d thrown them away you see. I blacked out on the bed the pain was so intense.”

“Sorry to hear that,” I responded, squeezing her arm. She laughed her eyes bright and leaned forward assessing my face. “You’re shocked, you think I’m heartless. I have to admit at the time, I thought he was dead. When I came round, he’d disappeared, taken my bankcard and wiped out the account. Everything fell apart after that.” The sadness in her eyes cloaked the whole space. I felt sorry for her, sorry for both of us, cardboard cut-outs of ourselves crashing into real life.

“What about those pictures?” She pointed to a stash in a grey envelope at the foot of the sofa.

“I’ve looked, didn’t pick up on anything.” I grabbed them, handed them over. “Feel free,” I added. She leafed through, lips curving up and brow furrowed.

“That’s interesting,” she said, spreading them on the table like a stack of trump cards.

“What?” I navigated myself round for an even closer view.

“Well… the lens on her. See the light in which she’s been captured? It’s beautiful, personal. Look at the way she’s interacting with the camera. See the look in her eyes? It’s quite intimate. It’s like a lover’s gaze.”

I peered closer and she was right. In the photograph my mother wore a thinly-strapped white top teamed with a red velvet mini-skirt that exposed her long, lean legs. One strap had slipped down teasingly against her arm. Her feet were encased in fire engine red, traffic-stopping heels. A purple Hermes scarf was tied jauntily around her neck and she leaned back against a beat up, blue Ford. Of course, I recognised the scarf. It was the one Mervyn kept beneath his pillow. She was laughing in some of the shots, head thrown back, light falling gently on her neck. In others, smiling coyly, a hand splayed invitingly on her chest, sweat beading on the rise of plump breasts. And others still, mouth twitching knowingly, staring at the camera head on. She penetrated it with a subtle defiance, communicating to the glass eye in a language imprinting itself on the roll of film. I animated her with the flicks of my finger.

Mrs Harris picked up the bottle of green ginger wine, unscrewed the cap. I moved to grab another glass but she motioned with her hand. “Don’t worry; I’ll use yours, no point sullying another glass. And you don’t have anything I can catch?” she said in jest, filling the glass and moving to stand by the window. “Did you know any of your mother’s boyfriends?”

“Not really, she was discreet about that sort of thing. An unmarried African woman with boyfriends having no intention of getting married would have been frowned upon back home.” I ignored the ticking in my temple.

Mrs Harris rubbed her face, eyed the glass. “It’s just a thought but maybe her last lover knew something, people tell each other all kinds of things in bed.”

A sick feeling crept inside me. I watched her raise the glass to her lips, thought maybe I’d pushed glass rims towards her unwittingly all evening. We caught the arrival of car headlights engraving yellow travel journeys on the road. For a moment, watching her knock her drink back, it was as if her head had split in two, drowning her silhouette yet harbouring daylight in her eyes.

The Shape Of Traps

Rumours of a curse in the palace began to take on funny shapes. A servant fixing the hole on the roof could have sworn he saw a woman drumming her fingers on her jaw inside it. She looked lost and forlorn, but before he could reach out a hand to help her, he slipped and fell to his death. In the roughened, scab-ridden feet of the chief courtier that had ceased leaving footprints, making him marvel as to how he could both be and not be in a place all at once. In the ever-burgeoning belly of Omotole whose greedy baby was sapping all her strength. She found herself pausing to check he hadn’t stolen her heartbeat too, placing her clammy fingers on her chest and at her wrists, anxious for the faint throb of her existence. And where was Oba Odion? Locked away in his chamber worshipping the darkness of his shadow, and the murky, distorted shapes that flittered from his lids and darted across the warm floor.

The council were now running the kingdom but their quiet triumph fell flat on its face, gashing its thin skin under the altered glow of a waning Benin. The people did not know why things were happening as they were, but it continued. One of the Oba’s tailors became stuck in a moment of coming in and out of his door with a small pail of water. He kept repeating this action again and again, until he was dragged out of it, flailing his arms in resistance. The palace appeared unsettled, there was a hushed fear rubbing the walls and the teeth of the gates had a sinister gleam when the light caught. People wondered why their lives began to droop right in front of their eyes. Their sympathy shrank. Where was the king to rule over his kingdom? Where was he to stroke their questions with reassuring answers? A thick resentment began to build, passing between them like morning greetings, lagging at the entrance of the palace waiting for any opening. And when blood started leaking through the roof, nobody dared go up there to see why. Instead they scrambled to their knees, at once mopping the jewel-like droplets with a snatched cloth and the loosened shock from their jaws.

It was that time of day when Benin was caught between late afternoon and early evening. When the daylight dimmed to a duskier yellowy orange, and you could swear that someone was shrouding the sun. The smell of cocoa yams doused in flavours of wild peppers, onion and meat stock wandered from the main palace like a drifter requesting entry at the nostrils of irritable inhabitants. When the day stopped deceiving itself and it finally became evening, it was the perfect time for two lovers to meet because everybody was distracted. The palace servants had gathered wood for their small celebration of nothing and would soon form a ring of mouths around a ravenous fire. Most of the councilmen were in their various apartments, doing anything to stop their stomachs from somersaulting over the future prospects of Benin. The Oba’s wives, disconnected pieces of a game, loitered in their compound. They were braiding their hair into submission, attempting to wash the stubborn odours of the palace from their clothes or tracking their restless children.

So two lovers met, on the wrong side of a stretching, split dirt road, on the right side of betrayal and all it entailed because it was with them now, a third, palpable thing, that was not just rearing its head, but its arms and legs too. It carried them and they in return stoked it, fanned it. On that dirt road Sully lifted Adesua onto his back, her legs wrapped around his middle, thighs rubbing against his bare skin. She was laughing, transformed by giggles, and then nipping at his neck with the certainty of a young woman in bloom. She rested her face into the crook of his neck, mumbling into it. It didn’t matter that he didn’t know what she was saying right then, because something beyond his control lit inside him. He could have wept, just stood in that moment and wept; instead, as she slid down, he hefted her further up his back. Rushing into the waiting night, rushing into a cruel trick of life, the way the unfortunate ones do. The heavens watched Adesua and Sully in the distance; it was a matter of time before somebody spotted them. Benin’s decline was imminent and they were a part of it.

The roof continued to leak blood. This baffled the palace. When a few servants began to see reflections of themselves swimming in that blood, they abandoned cleaning it, stilled by the fear dancing on their spines. Small puddles of blood formed on the floors within the main palace, as if the heavens had a wound that kept opening up to drip down upon them. It had an ancient, rotten stench that the servants cleaned but could never get rid of entirely. They took to opening the doors for long periods of time, and the air wrestled the smell out only for it to find its way back in again.

The council ordered a new roof be built but in their hearts they knew something serious was at work. Something that no amount of intricately entwined palm leaves woven into the skull of the palace could stop. So they did what they knew to be their only plan to combat their worries. They continued to rule and to live. While they rallied what was left of their army of men in preparation for an overthrow, the servants continued to maintain their beautiful palace, and the farmers fed and ploughed the land. Then worry began to strip some people of their sleep, hiding it under their mats or the folds of their lids. So they would not know the irony of it being close by. Tense bodies slick with moonlight glow you wanted to lose yourself in traipsed around the grounds. It was a funny sight from above, to watch the cornered. To see how they stayed and how sad it was when all you know is all you think there is. These people were holding onto their beloved kingdom, keeping it alive with their breaths. But what would you have them do? If only the people in the palace knew what they were doing, baiting their own traps with the very things that could release them from it. And Sully, the stranger in their midst became increasingly comfortable, touching the cracks in the kingdom with dusty, pale hands.

When Omotole finally got to see her husband, Oba Odion was dipping into the shallow end of his pain. He sat on the shabby, wheat coloured mat on his floor, legs splayed. There were dried crusts of food on his chin and his eyes were red-rimmed and distant. He was dishevelled, his hair noticeably fuller than it had been, his clothes were so wrinkled and dirty they annoyed you to look at them. He was plumper than he had been, refusing visitors but clearly not refusing food. In the stale, trapped air, Omotole lowered herself beside him slowly, her protruding belly a visual reminder of the future. It was something to jar him out of the state he was in but he only continued to stare blankly ahead. She wrapped her hand around his wrist, yanking his arm towards her, then splaying his fingers on her stomach. “Oba, your son is coming.” The smile he cracked was wobbly, unsteady on his face.

“What is the meaning of this Odion? Terrible things are happening, what have you done?” She turned to him, the urgency in her voice almost a third person in the room. “No, no, no!” Oba Odion answered, “It is what he has done. Can you not see he will not leave me in peace!” Omotole glanced around the room quickly to indulge him. “What are you saying Odion? Who will not leave you alone?”

“Anuje.” The name was soaked in spit as bits of saliva slipped from the corners of his mouth.

“Anuje is dead Odion.”

“No.” Oba Odion shook his head so hard that it wouldn’t have been a surprise had it begun to spin clean off his neck

“Yes!” She grabbed his shoulders digging her nails into him, “You killed him. Stop this nonsense and look after your kingdom. You think the council should be running it? This is an insult.”

Oba Odion shoved her away with such force she slammed her head against the wall before sliding down to the floor. He could only mumble to himself as her whimpers rose towards him before dropping down again.

Occasionally, Councilman Ewe wandered over to the servant quarters to ask for one errand or another to be done. On this night, it was to put in a request for kola nuts for the next day’s council meeting. In between bits of bitter, crunchy kola nuts, the men would lament over events in Benin; it was clear that something had to be done. After a slightly annoyed male servant stretched his sluggish frame through Ewe’s instructions, Ewe began to head back. He was thinking of the odd occurrences that had been happening and whether they would get through it. Really Oba Odion’s inability to oversee his kingdom was a gift as far as Ewe was concerned. Without a qualm he’d relinquished control to the council who were all too willing to take over.

As Ewe contemplated the fortunes of Benin he spotted Sully’s quarters further down the trail of the worker’s area. Later, he would not be able to say what exactly it was that drew him to it. Whether it was the way it had appeared in his vision suddenly. Or if it was the resurfacing of his annoyance at how quickly the Oba had taken to Sully, allowing him freedoms no white stranger should ever have been afforded.

Before he could change his mind, he found himself moving towards the terracotta hut Sully had taken as his home. It was a short walk and as he neared it was surprised that Sully, the man who always appeared so alert had not come out to greet him. At the door he was torn about announcing himself, but his voice tickling his throat made the decision for him. As he stepped round the back he jerked quickly from what he saw before him. Sully sitting on the ground with the Oba’s youngest wife Adesua between his legs, her face resting sideways against his chest, eyes closed, both barely clothed and what clothes there were, arranged in complete disarray. Councilman Ewe took pains to leave as silently as he was able to, armed all the way back to the palace with the hard, disgruntled image of the two lovers embedded into his head.

Light Shade

There is a moment that trespasses sporadically inside my head. I don’t know if this is an actual memory or something my brain cooked up, but in it I’m no older than five or six. My mother and I are inside a café; the sign outside it reads Denny’s. At the counter, there is a portly white woman with brown hair and a foreign accent. She is wearing a blue apron with white stripes and indiscreetly biting her fingernails. I am wearing a white dress with a yellow sunflower pattern on the skirt. My mother has on a blue T-shirt and faded denim dungarees; there are lighter spots where the material is thinning. We are sitting by the window with a man who looks older than my mother. His hair is lightly peppered with grey but his brown face is smooth. The table hasn’t been wiped down properly, there are crumbs on it and the plastic ketchup bottle has sauce running down its white mini cone lid. Underneath the table, the man is tapping his feet on the floor. I take a sip from the steaming hot chocolate before me and burn my tongue. Here’s the weird thing, they open their mouths to speak but I can’t hear a word. There is no sound coming from them but they are definitely talking. Though I can hear other things, the cash being rung up on the register, the door swinging open to allow hungry customers to make rushed orders of the lunch time special soup, chairs scraping back against the floor, Roy Orbison driving all night on the radio and the jingle of cutlery coming from the back kitchen. It is like a semi-silent movie where you can hear everything, but the main actors. Then my mother’s facial expression turns, she looks furious and is pointing at the man with short, sharp movements. Her mouth is moving, doing that thing she did when angry; curling down, like it will drop to her chin. The man shakes his head, he looks beaten, and his twitching left leg has taken on a life of its own. He stretches his arms out to us pleadingly. My mother stands up jarring me, more words are exchanged and yet… more silence. She grabs my hand, pulling me away; the man cuts a lonely figure. It seems he is wearing a Sunday best grey suit on a bleak midweek day. I turn to wave at him; it feels as though my fingers are skimming something bigger than me. He waves back. A smile cracks his face. Outside, the door chimes shut behind my mother and me. Her chest is heaving. Each time this scene comes to me, I am desperate to hear what was said.

Peter Lowon, Journal entry October 1956

Felicia and I are married! She is three months pregnant but not showing yet.

We said our vows inside a neat, packed church in Lagos. Our families came for the wedding. While the minister’s voice was booming, I caught my father’s movements using my side eye. He sat in the front pew with my mother who was dressed in a bright yellow wrapper and blouse, her hair braided and styled into a bun, her neck adorned with thick, heavy pink beads. At one point I was sure he took off his glasses to study the proceedings more intensely, something he does when he cannot believe his eyes. He wore his favourite black suit, he looked proud. To my surprise, a lot of my army boys came, teasing me in the annoying but familiar way I have become accustomed to. “Ah British gentleman don marry oh! Funny character, your wife fine well well”

“Nah wah oh, wonders will never cease, why the rush to marry now? You are making us look bad my friend, you are still so young.”

“Leave British gentleman alone, he knows what he wants.” This from Obi who had Emmanuel with him.

It is funny how I cannot separate the two of them now. I think of one and the image of the other attaches itself. It wasn’t always that way. Despite everything, I was surprisingly happy to see them. It is as if I too in my own way wanted to say see? Life can carry on as normal! Let me confess that on the day I was also very nervous, not because I had any doubts about marrying Felicia, no, she was a vision in cream. But because I was frightened something would snatch away my good fortune. That Felicia may pull me aside and say I cannot go through this with you. That while blessing us I would suddenly be violently sick on the minister and he would proclaim that my soul was tarnished. And then the spirit of the dead soldier would appear, just as I was about to kiss Felicia and seal my vows. Thankfully none of this happened. By the time I was walking away from the minister with Felicia’s hand in mine and the guests were whooping there was a stitch in my side.

General Akhatar came to our native ceremony with a big-bottomed fair skinned woman I did not recognise, his sunken, beaten side face floating amongst the sea of guests with full faces. I wondered why a man of the General’s stature and success had not married. But then I was caught up in a dance with my wife, which swept the question away.

That night she held my fingers firmly. In our adequate apartment in Lagos, just big enough for us, I made love to my wife. I kissed the faded scar on her left knee, shaped like a caterpillar. I made a replica one on the opposite knee with a trace of my finger. In her belly button I whispered to my growing child. I drew her ankle down to my face, read her fortune from her beautifully arched feet. I predicted she would marry a foolish man because like attracts like, and listened as she laughed, falling against my chest.

Afterwards, we lay on our backs on the squeaky mattress coated in a lovers’ sweat and I asked her why she’d agreed to marry me.

She said, “Because I love you. You are reliable, quietly strong. You are still getting to know yourself and I see your potential.” Then she kissed my shoulder. I slid down and rested my head on her stomach. Silently, I told my child I would teach them to sit on top of their weaknesses. I warned them not to make my mistakes. All three of us were a triangle of flesh, nerves and electricity reflecting in the blades of the whirring ceiling fan overhead.

Several days later Felicia discovered the brass head in my bag whilst unpacking my things. “Peter, where did you get this?” She stood facing me in the doorway of our box kitchen holding it up, a curious look on her face. The bottle top I’d removed with my teeth from the cola grazed a lie a husband must tell his wife. I informed her it was an early wedding gift from General Akhatar, from his collection, one of his favourites.

I watched my wife run her fingers over it, as if she were blind and trying to memorise its image with her hands. Finally she said, “that’s so generous of him, this is something special, and he must think a lot of you to give you this. You have to stay on his good side.”

Felicia carried it away to display in our parlour. I bit down a sudden worry. That in my absences the brass head would be a mirror. It would show her she was more than just a shop girl, more than a wife and mother.

On our first date I brought Felicia a gift, a packet of cigarettes I laid in her palm gently. One eyebrow shot up and there was amusement in her eyes. We stood outside her miserable looking rickety grey house. She was beautiful in a white dress.

“I thought smoking is for fast, loose women” Was her comment.

“Maybe, maybe not” I steered her towards the black Volkswagen sitting there like a blown up bug.

I told her I wanted it to be our last packet of cigarettes.

I knew she was laughing inside at my hypocrisy. I stood there feeling exposed. If I looked down, there would be a trap around my foot, and she would pluck out a slim cigarette, light up, then offer “cigarette?” as I howled. Instead she dropped the packet inside her handbag. We sat inside the car watching the house for a moment.

“You’re not like some of the other soldiers that come into the shop. You seem sad for someone so young.”

I didn’t answer but flicked the engine on. Heady, wild flower perfume filled the car, and I swear I wanted to tell her right then.

We went to the cinema and watched a horror film where the acting was so bad it should have been a comedy instead. We laughed and laughed. Afterwards, we took a walk by a bendy road. I asked her why she was not studying at the university for someone so bright. And she told me.

When Felicia was at secondary school, she had been an A student, always performing within the top of the class. At Our Ladies of Light School she was a popular girl but was always getting into fights defending one stray or another. This resulted in memorable run-ins with the head mistress. Either her skirts were too short, she couldn’t mind her business or she had no respect for authority. But to the head mistress’s annoyance she continued to excel. She spent every spare moment in the school library, tracing the spines of books and poring over their pages greedily. She read books on physics, biology, philosophy, history, law and economics. Her first love was the work of Soyinka but she cheated on it with the poetry of Keats. The school librarian was so enamoured with her, she began to keep books of interest aside for her. Though Felicia was an only child, even with their little shop, they were still poor, her father elderly and sickly, her mother changed by bitterness. They could not afford to send her to university but one day something wonderful happened.

Felicia was called into the principal’s office and told she had been recommended for a university scholarship and she would have to apply to the Ministry of Education for it. The deadline loomed. That day, she ran home excited, foolishly showing the forms to her parents. Two days later, the forms disappeared. She searched everywhere but her search came to nothing. She never asked which one of her parents was responsible; it was too painful to know. Instead, she spent her nights re-reading old library books by candlelight on her bedroom floor. And the candles without fault were always apologetic, shedding their melting hot skin onto her resigned knuckles.

We followed our steps back the way we came, creating a map of the latter half of our date. The air hummed with night creatures and we held a comfortable silence heading back to the car. I wondered at such normality after that terrible night. The three of us, Obi, Emmanuel and I were walking around as if nothing happened. I asked myself how a beautiful, smart girl couldn’t see me for what I am; a self-centred opportunist willing to do whatever it takes. Or maybe she could see it and just locked it away. I drove her back home and we sat again looking at her house for several moments. I didn’t want to stop myself when the words came out. She didn’t say yes that time, she squeezed my hand and laughed. And when she shut the door behind her it felt like the beginning of something. I know it is funny and true; I proposed to my wife at the end of our first date.

Discombobulated Herd

First the wives went bald, their gleaming crowns like plump brown melons waiting to be pulped, left them clutching their thick, fluffy hair as if they were vanishing puffs of smoke. And by now the palace grounds were vomiting. Dead insects littered hidden cracks, red ants rolled on their backs in haste and confusion, mosquitoes buzzed about in panic swirled patterns and the strange bluish plants in the garden had wilted. As though the heat off a cutlass had crushed their hopes to death, and really, they couldn’t blame the heat. Not when hundreds of fish lay on the red earth trail leading up to the gates, bucking against each other in those precious few moments before their stories of water escaped them forever. Not when it began to hurt to look around the palace, to see the tiny bits of crumbling walls that a virgin eye wouldn’t pick up, the abandoned rooms unattended gathering only dust for comfort, the circular courtyards once bursting with congregated shades of brown bodies vacant and naked in their loneliness because people stopped lingering. Instead they rushed through, shutting themselves off from the miniature storms whipping through their heads.

And the days merged into one long passage of time that seemed to never end or repeatedly began depending on how you looked at it. The palace rumbled, grumbling low so gold-kissed leaves left their trees to drop down and listen, carrying what they knew to the feet of the inhabitants who couldn’t understand the crackly language they spoke. Some people began to not know themselves, frightening their hearts out of their chests. So they sought the council, begging them to do something to stop this invisible hand that was twisting them all. Their worry was now distorting their voices, even to their own ears, changing their walks, splitting their lips. They were being smudged into their picture, blurred, till you wanted to check their bodies for thumbprints. The council members bit down on it all gently, apprehensively. Bloated with their cheapened version of power, they kept their stiff necks outstretched. This was bigger than them. All they could do was to show the people of the palace their palms, empty of answers.

Omotole and her baby survived the incident with Oba Odion. She was too strong to allow an inept king to finish her, husband or not. It was bottomless will that allowed her to crawl her way out of there; while he sat rocking himself into the bleak, dark enclave he had built for himself. She had not sighted him since, so when her water broke, the blue tinged liquid splashing between her feet in the yard outside her chamber, she did not ask for the Oba to be told. Instead, she grabbed the hand of a servant girl tightly and a wince flashed over the girl’s face before she lifted her up, shouting out for more help.

One of the other wives came. Omotole recognised the eldest wife before they gripped her arms, one on each side as they moved her back inside her chamber. There, a musty scent was clinging to her clothes and her headdress. They laid her down on her newly made grape coloured mat with its thin, slightly rough edges. The pains of childbirth came thick and fast and her screams pierced through the rooftops. Later, other details would come back to her; taking short sharp breaths, the feel of a small wet cloth on her forehead, advice that rained, a jumble of words that fell all over her body and her legs propped up. And a hazy feeling of confusion that continued to grow throughout. Both the servant girl and the first wife were alarmed at what was happening, though they tried to keep it from their voices. When the baby finally came some hours later, the servant girl was unable to stop shocked words flying through her lips. “Oh the Gods help us!”

“What is it?” Omotole said, limp and tired she struggled to raise her head up. They handed the baby over to her wrapped in a sucking, gloomy silence. The first thing she noticed was a soft looking, small exposed chest and it was a boy. He was wriggling in the way that newborns do, covered in an unusual blue gunk. As her eyes wandered up, a horror gripped her by the throat. He was alive, but her baby had no face.

Bad news like good news travels fast, and before they knew it, residents in the palace found themselves making excuses to visit Omotole, just to get a look at the baby. Some even made bets on how deformed the baby would be, but nothing prepared them for it. From the neck down, the baby was perfectly healthy. Its arms, legs and body were just as they expected. But it was his face… It was such a shame and they had never seen anything like it. It was completely flattened, as though what lay under the skin wasn’t bones but mush. It looked as if he had been filed down; there were no angles or planes, just an insult of a face stuck there. An ugly, terrible face not even a mother could pretend to love.

Even with the eyes, tiny slits of flecked brown and the gash of a mouth, you couldn’t tell anything about the child. Whether it was happy, sad, and hungry or tired because you just couldn’t see it. It was all Omotole could do to interpret his thin, high cries as the instincts of motherhood abandoned her, frightened away by the sight before them. And she was inconsolable those first few days afterwards. Her eyes wet with tears, carrying him as if he were a mistake, labouring over why it had happened, how it had happened. Shame, heavy and scorching burned her, so much so that she felt hot even when it was cooler in the evenings, and you could smell the dry earth and relief of the suffocated air that darkness was coming.

She thought of the bluish excretions from her body that had suddenly stopped, and the petals under her tongue no longer appeared. How deceptive it had been and she almost felt she had imagined it all, only she knew she hadn’t. A hard blame began to form in her stomach, as she thought of Oba Odion up there sheltered away from it. No, this was not her doing, but the disgrace would never leave her. And she would sit there, on the cusp of night, staring at her son dumbfounded, beads of resentment popping on her brow, she and that wailing baby; attempting to talk expressions into his face.

While Omotole’s baby sent tremors through the place, something else was bubbling beneath the surface like simmering soup. Councilman Ewe could never keep a secret, particularly if it was of no benefit to him to do so. If you knew you wanted to keep a secret protected, they should never pass your lips in his presence. That night after he had seen them, he was almost drunk with this knowledge, coming back to the apartment he shared with his wife. How those fools could be so brazen right under their noses! Oba Odion’s appointed guard and his youngest bride laughing at them all. The council had warned the Oba about her, they had all seen that she would not make a good wife but bring shame on the palace. No amount of undoing could change what had happened.

He arrived home to see their small, apartment had been swept, and the terracotta walls darkened by night made his eyes swim a little. He was a success, a member of the Oba’s council, residing in the palace with a wife and two children. He had truly arrived, and he imagined the tiny village he came from just shy of Onisha hailing him. The dancing and music leading a trail all the way back to his family’s hut. So engrossed was he in that image he nearly tripped over a chipped dark wooden chair they usually left in the corner of the back room. The apartment smelled of the homely mixture of cooked goat meat and Ewe’s ambition. As he stopped to listen to them he could hear the reassuring breathing of his children caught in sleep, their young chests rhythmically rising and falling. Finally, he took off his beaded adornment and crept in to sleep beside the broad, fleshy frame of his wife who murmured a little in response. He tried to sleep but found himself tossing and turning, till his wife frustrated by it said, “Ah, ah what is it?” So the secret entered her ears.

“Tell the council Ewe,” she humphed.

“You know what the punishment is for such a thing?”

“Tell them.”

And he ran his excited tongue over his dry mouth.

Amidst these events in the palace, Filo remained surprisingly calm. As if the shrieking Harmattan-like wind inside her that had pulled her furiously back and forth suddenly stopped. She thought it funny that the slow destruction happening around her created an opposite effect within her. And she began to run towards her thoughts instead of away from them. Just outside her narrow chamber doorway, if you stood on your toes you could see the Oba’s back room window staring the horizon down. Every time she looked, somehow it seemed further and further away. She had allowed a thought so delicious to leave her head and sit in her mouth that she no longer felt guilty carrying it with her. And it was this: she was glad Oba Odion was suffering. Through her hair falling out, the blood from the main palace roof and the stream of bad luck that had plagued the palace it was clear that he knew. He knew why these terrible things were happening but couldn’t show his face. The Gods would disapprove but she was happy the Oba was being handed the fate she believed he deserved.

It was a clear, slow-burning day when it happened. Filo’s skin felt sticky and no amount of water wetting her dry throat was enough. She was tentatively tending to the group of fowl that hung outside their back yard, throwing grains of corn to them and watching them pick at it. At the same time thinking of the street vendors that lined the roads on market day, whistling through their teeth and shoving handfuls of material, native jewellery and spicy food wrapped in broad green leaves your way. But then a curious thing happened, a seminal occurrence. Filo softened, her body had stopped turning to stone. She dropped the corn, haphazard yellow mouthfuls scattered as if to be replanted.

The fowl, her only interested audience, sensing the importance of the moment began to cluck, as she started a sure, confident retreat. She took nothing; she turned to do the walk towards the main palace where the gates were waiting. People were milling about within pockets of the grounds and she passed some guards laughing at words hanging between them. They nodded at her and she did not stop. She walked out of the palace gates and didn’t look back. She threw the spare gate key she had stolen from a guard into the river, imagining water creatures using it to unlock a town beneath their tremors. And she kept going because beyond her, that body and that life, the rivers and the land, another world beckoned. Winking just behind the edges of broken clouds, she imagined people filled with so much light, it would be blinding, and a place where the shame of this life was not smothering the next.

Applique for Beginners

Reading my grandfather’s diary felt like I was on a canoe, in the sea. I didn’t even know if I liked who I think he was, or if I knew enough about him to patchwork quilt his personality together. He was just fragments colouring white paper. When someone does a terrible thing, a thing that continues to have repercussions, it’s hard not to judge. It is difficult not to stick a label on their box that says damaged, carry this side up. It is hard not to be reminded that you are alone and that maybe, a puppet master made these strings for you long before you were born.

Tomorrow, in households across the city, door hinges will creak emphatically as the air sweeps failures and successes of the day. Fathers will tuck their children into bed and smile knowing that one day this moment too will change, mutate into a different version because you can’t protect your children forever. And somewhere, a moth begins its day by laughing at me.

Peter Lowon, Journal Entry May 1961

My daughter Queen is now five years old; she is like her mother in the sense that she is all-seeing. I have heard people say this and it is true for me too; the day she was born was the happiest day of my life. Everything else paled in comparison to her toothless grin, her pointed nose that is a replica of mine and her first attempts at walking. I named her Queen because the first time I held her perfect little body, she opened her bow shaped mouth and crooked her tiny finger at me as though she were a royal and smiled. So I call her Queenie and her mother calls her Queeeeeenie! Because most of the time she is shouting her name.

Queenie is a fearless child. She sticks her hands inside holes in the ground, touches everything, attempts to catch lizards with her bare hands and talks to the flea ridden stray dog down our street that begs for food. Sometimes, she angles her head to the side when you are talking to her, as if she’s questioning the validity of what you’re saying. On my trips home, after the gate has squeaked and announced my arrival, she runs as fast as her feet can carry her, clutching my uniform clad legs. “Daddy you’re home! What did you bring for me?” Queenie does not stop asking questions, in fact Felicia has joked that she is considering taping Queenie’s mouth for at least two hours a day. Daddy what is rainbow? Why do people call you Lieutenant Colonel? Is fried dodo banana? Why do they put pepper in suya? Doesn’t the man selling corn on the road with no shoes have a daddy to buy him shoes? Daddy why? Daddy, daddy, daddy.

Yesterday she told me she drew an eye on a tree. When I asked her why she looked at me as if I was an imbecile and said “so the tree can see, shhh don’t tell mummy!” Now the mango tree with one eye is our secret.

Life is good, the General kept his word and I have advanced to a higher rank. We moved to a bigger house in Lagos. It is white and Queenie thinks it is made of sugar cubes. We have a mayguard at the front named Nosa but Queenie calls him No sir No sah! When I carry her on my shoulders and she giggles, I forget who I am, what I’ve done.

Now, the brass head sits in a glass cabinet, right on the top shelf, looking down on everyone who enters the parlour. It is safe from Queenie’s hands. It used to be on the first shelf, but once Queenie picked it up and played with it, tossing it around carelessly. Felicia was furious; she smacked Queenie’s hand and warned her it wasn’t a toy. I couldn’t help thinking that it had began to weave its pattern of trouble. I wanted to get rid of it then. But if I disposed of it I knew I would have to tell Felicia the real reason why, and I couldn’t do that, not yet, not after all this time. So I let it be, and I say nothing when Felicia polishes it as if it is made from the finest gold. I swallow my irritation when guests point at it curiously. I look the other way when my mother requests I get her something similar.

When I am away, Felicia tells me she spends her days keeping our household ticking over and running after Queenie. We have several people in our employment including Nosa the mayguard, a houseboy and housegirl, the driver and one of Felicia’s girl cousins Eunice who also helps around the house. She loves her daughter but I know she is bored, unfulfilled. Sometimes when I ask how her day is she says what do you want me to tell you when I have nothing of substance to say? She wants to get a job, maybe working in a bank or something along those lines. I refuse to allow her to do this. Deep down I know she still wants to go to university, even now, perhaps to study law or medicine. We fight over this, arguments that shake our bedroom and leave the door shuddering. If I allow her to follow her whims people will say my wife is the master in my house, that my trousers fit her nicely. This resentment festers between us, gathering in mass till I worry one day it will push me out of our bed. I know my wife has grown to love me over the years but sometimes, unguarded, I catch a scheming expression on her face. I tell her I will give her money to run her own store selling bobas, shoes and handbags. I tell her this as if it isn’t a consolation prize.

Earlier today I came into my parlour whistling to find we had a guest. He had his back to me but something about the sloppy, hunched way he sat seemed familiar. My heart raced and Felicia’s laughter seemed slightly tuned out, like a bad radio frequency. She stood upon seeing me, “Peter you are finally home, how long does it take to buy ice cream for Queen? Honestly that girl has you eating out of her hands, little madam.” She looked to our guest and smiled; he now turned and stood awkwardly with a cane that had been leaning against the chair, confirming my suspicions. “British gentleman, long time, you are living well my friend.” Emmanuel stuck his hand out; I dropped the container of ice cream on the table. There was a wet patch of melted ice on the left side of my shirt. My fingers were cool. I shook his hand.

I had not seen Emmanuel for years; I’d heard he got discharged from the army some time back but never bothered to find him. I did not want to rake over old ground. I hugged him, the last thing I wanted to do. A chill settled inside me.

Felicia laughed, informing me that Emmanuel had been telling stories about what army boys get up to! “To think I thought I knew you all this time Peter!” My wife said. “It is nice to see an old friend of Peter’s. These days, it’s all army generals and rich oil contractors.” This was her last comment before picking up the ice cream and walking out. I felt a buzzing in my head as Emmanuel lifted his glass of juice and swigged. Angrily, I asked him what he was doing at my house? He laid his cane down carefully. He then had the nerve to say he was disappointed I never came to see him after what we went through! That I should never have abandoned my friends like that.

“We killed a man.” I spat this at him. It was the first time I had said it out loud, and somehow saying it confirmed I could never really get away from it. I could dodge and side-step but how long for? Not when the memory grows legs, not when part of it hobbles into your living room joking with your wife, holding a cane. Too close.

Emmanuel was bitter; he accused me of benefitting more than any of them. I remember his exact words. “I don’t have friends in high places like you Peter. Do you know what it is to drain a man’s life with your bare hands? To wait for his body to become completely still? No, of course you don’t, you only watched from the sidelines yet reaped all the rewards. I’ve never known why the General took such a liking to you. I heard him say I like the way that Peter conducts himself, with class! You never did him any extra special favours did you?”

I was confused by this statement. When I pressed him, he laughed. “Peter you’re smart but at times miss what is right in front of you. You mean you don’t know about the General? You never heard about his taste for young army boys? It is a well-kept secret.”

My head spun with this revelation. I swallowed the anger working its way up my throat and slowly, silently counted to ten. I managed to probe him about his leg. Apparently, armed robbers came to his house one night, held him and his girlfriend at gunpoint. Stupidly, he resisted a little. They shot him in the knee and took everything. We had come to the heart of the matter at that point so I asked him what he wanted.

“Peter, I’m in trouble, you know I wouldn’t ask but… I need some money.”

I gave him the money. In hindsight I shouldn’t have. He will only come back for more like a leech. He may surprise me and not do so, but people rarely do. In truth, I would have done anything to get rid of him. He wobbled unsteadily out of my house, a broken man. Afterwards, I ran to the downstairs toilet and vomited, and it smelled bad to me, as though the stench had been building for years. In the kitchen I wanted to destroy whatever I could. I smashed plates, bottles, cups and glasses, scattering the place. I drowned out the noise and Felicia’s wet, wild marble brown eyes rolling in their sockets. It was Queenie who stopped me, she ran into the kitchen barefoot, dripping vanilla ice cream onto clear, broken pieces of glass. Then, this evening the questions: what is wrong with you Peter? Should I not have let him in? We were inside our bedroom, where the blue wall still looked freshly painted; the double bed with its large wood headboard had matching blue and white pillowcases, sheets and a cover. The ceiling fan turned continuously; I had thrown my clothes on the floor and was reaching inside the wardrobe in my underwear. Felicia didn’t look a day older than the day we met, just more polished. As bored as she was, our life so far had been good to her. She stood with her hands on her hips; the gold head wrap was unravelling itself as if my silence earlier had offended it. “No, you did the right thing, he wanted money.”

“That’s not all though Peter.”

“I told you what happened!”

“No, you told me your version of what happened, I am your wife. Why do you still keep things from me? Since we were married, all this time, there is something. Something between us and I can’t take it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about; can I have some peace in my own house?”

“You want peace? Fine but I’m fed up of being stuck here while you’re away playing General says! I get excited when guests come because I can talk to them, I can talk to other people more than I talk to my husband! I want to do something with my life.”

“Who the hell is stopping you? You think this house; these nice things were waiting for you? I paid the price while you do nothing! The driver can take you wherever you want to go. What do you think I pay him for? I will replace the things in the kitchen.”

“It was never about the bloody things in the kitchen.” She screamed, slamming the door, so much harder than a woman that slight should have been able to.

I found Queenie on the wooden swing at the back of the compound; she was pulling at the rope handles and kicking her legs up half-heartedly. I walked up carrying juicy cuts of pineapple; her favourite fruit for now, it changes weekly. For a while we didn’t say anything as I pushed her, containing the force of the swing with a steady hand. This I could handle.

“Daddy, why are you mad?” She broke the silence. “Have I done something?”

“No, not you Queenie. Do you know I control the weather?” I said, starting one of my tales she loved and I knew would make her laugh. Sure enough, a small smile came. “How do you make the weather daddy?”

“Well, in the morning if I am in a good mood, I rub my hands together, say a secret chant and make sunshine. Now I can’t tell you what the chant is otherwise it wouldn’t be mine see?”

“Ok, how do you make rain?” She asked, “Do you use the same chant or say it backwards?”

“No, I use a different chant because water gives life, it makes things grow and can erode things. It is everything. And I don’t rub my hands, I call upon the clouds, I need their help and cannot do it without them.”

“What if the clouds are angry with you or you have an argument with them? Can you do it without them then? What if they’re sleeping and they want to be alone sometimes, like mummy?”

“I try not to anger them, I respect them because you know the elements have great power Queenie, and they can control things without us being aware of it.” She scratched her newly braided hair that lay in slim, single plaits. She wriggled her mouth and face like she was trying to loosen the tightness in her scalp. I handed her a pineapple slice, watched as she took a bite.

“Daddy? Once I was mad, I ripped my doll’s head off.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I put it back though. Daddy, you don’t really control the weather do you.” She said this, as if she’d been indulging me all along, like she was the parent and I the child.

Rider Rendered Blue

When the oyibo men from Portugal arrived for a short visit the council wore their gleeful expressions openly and proudly. These visitors had come to the palace court as emissaries of the King of Portugal. They had heard elaborate tales of the Benin kingdom and its Empire. How it stretched beyond the whole of Idu land, into the lands of the Mahin, Ilaje, Dahomey and further still. It was Benin’s imperial might and trade routes that interested them. The palace welcomed them with a warm reception and they in return wanted to give a Portuguese education to the Benin royal household. They intrigued people, with their pale skin and strange language. And they were slighter than Benin men, whose broad, sturdy shoulders were built for the demands of the land. People joked that the Portuguese would not cope in the harsh, glaring heat, but they surprised people. Even telling the council that sometimes they struggled with hot weather where they were from. They were told the Oba was too sick to personally receive visitors.

If these men noticed anything strange they kept it to themselves. After all, how could they distinguish what was the custom and what wasn’t? They were in a fascinating, foreign world, everything appeared odd and interesting to them. They wanted to see it all, and the council showed them, flourishing as impressive hosts. The palace staff found themselves working constantly. Cooking and cleaning, repeatedly preening for show but they were happy to have a distraction from all that had been happening. The soldiers from the Oba’s army had been instructed to cease looking for Filo. After all, she was a wife Oba Odion had never wanted and she was long gone.

In the evenings the court would entertain the visitors with music, and dancing while the councilmen drummed their fingers and nodded their heads along. They revelled in their supposedly mutually beneficial new alliance. Slapped backs and forced laughter drove conversations. But something escaped the council members: these Portuguese men were not just eyeing in admiration the Benin palace, its art, the Oba’s collection, treasures and armoury. They were watching with a clever, concealed furtive hunger and disbelief, already stripping away what they could with the naked eye. They were given a ceremonious send off. For their final evening, a fat calf was cooked and the men ate till their bellies were full and they could barely move.

There was a vulnerability emanating off the palace that even the glow of that evening couldn’t mask, as though if you drew a big enough breath and blew at it, it would split into large chunky fragments made up of red clay, betrayals and longings, revealing flawed walls intended to protect the inhabitants from everything. The councilmen had boasted to their foreign guests of the tribute system collected on behalf of the Oba. The reality was the opposite; they had been struggling to gather tributes from the surrounding areas for the last two seasons. People were having a terrible time feeding their families, farmers in particular because the harvest period had been and gone, yielding very little. The council couldn’t have told their visitors this. Or that pile of rotten cocoa yams were more useful than their Oba who still sat locked away mumbling in solitude.

Instead, a careful picture of Benin had been presented, dressed up in tales of conquests, happy traditional songs and an outwardly thriving palace. On this front the council succeeded because the Portuguese, uncertain of what to expect had been flummoxed. Why the Benin were a civilised bunch! Such a sprawling palace, what impressive, sophisticated artefacts and cultured people and of course this was true. If you caught the chuckles darting over the holes, the high-pitched voices talking over one another in excitement and the clapping, you may have thought all was well in Benin. In the palace, they forgot about their deception and began to believe in the sweetness of the image. The Portuguese left and the council congratulated themselves for days, what a coup. But they had made a fatal mistake; they had unlocked the stranger’s gate and in doing so, extended a hand to unforeseen dangers. Because more European men would come, setting in motion an unstoppable, tragically disastrous, chain of events.

Adesua, stunned by Filo’s departure, continued to feel surprised for days after she found out Filo was really gone. How had she not seen it coming? Had Filo planned it? Fooling them all with that air of fragility. Filo who slipped her bracelets over the pain she had worn so openly, it had hurt to look at her sometimes. Five days after their Portuguese guests left, things were gradually returning to their normal state. Adesua sitting on the hard floor of her chamber, was thinking of the last time she had seen Filo with her sad, sombre smile that swum in her face. She never really looked at you but through you, not because you were of no interest but out of a bad habit she seemed incapable of breaking. Although Adesua admitted to herself that she felt betrayed, she knew she had no right to feel that way. But somehow a bond had formed between them that joined them together, in anticipation of a life of duty, disappointment and routine. Somehow, finding the strength nobody knew she possessed Filo had smashed it.

Adesua surprised by the anger brimming inside her stood and paced the wall on her left. There, she lifted the brass head from a dark wooden stand, thinking again of Filo’s fixation with the thing. The air in the chamber seemed loaded with possibilities yet somehow she knew this was a bad sign. Terrible incidents seemed to find the palace fertile ground. Sully walked into her head, she pictured him so clearly, tales dangling from the corner of his lips, holding an audience in the palm of his hand. A rush of fear attacked her body so suddenly; she wanted to cough it out. She wondered where Filo was and if she would finally find peace. She envied Filo’s newly discovered freedom. The crickets started to talk, as if alerting each other to some discovery. Adesua began to vigorously polish the brass head with her hand, as presently that action alone seemed the answer to everything.

At the opposite end of the palace, Sully was also fighting the feeling of unease. He sat several steps away from his quarters, occasionally looking up to name a glimmering star. With each attempt he hoped to trick himself into believing all was well. But the apprehension stuck and as a result he had insisted on not seeing Adesua for a few days. He was a man who paid attention to the voice within and it was telling him to leave. Benin was cursed and he knew he should go before it mercilessly stripped him too. But not yet, it wasn’t enough that he was witnessing its slow destruction from the perfect position. Or that he had watched Oba Odion oversee the beginning of the palace’s collapse. He just had to be patient he told himself.

Oba Odion’s decline, the blood leaking through the roof, Omotole’s disfigured baby; these were more signs. The palace was revealing its secrets and one day he would stumble on what he had been waiting for. He let these thoughts drift from him like smoke while near his feet a tiny glow of colour pulled his gaze down. A small ladybird crawled around aimlessly. He realised he was so deep in thought he nearly crushed it. It appeared to be in some distress. It rolled onto its back and began to twitch its tiny, curled black legs. He watched, gripped by its short, jerky movements, which became increasingly pronounced, as if it was trying to reveal something. Then it stopped, perhaps fed up with the futile attempt of sharing whatever burden it carried. It rocked back over on its front, perhaps the call of other bugs and crawly creatures luring it over. Sully watched it make its way till it disappeared out of sight. He closed his eyes tightly, wishing there were things he didn’t know because knowing changed you. And once you acknowledged this you could never go back. It seemed, even the tiny creatures of the land knew this truth.

When your worst fear comes to life, a twisted, sweaty anticipation follows and hollowed out from the persistent rapping of the heart, it festers within. This Adesua and Sully discovered when they were yanked out from their reveries and thrown into a trial after the council had been informed of their affair. All they could do was stand to attention, watching as the repercussions of their actions lay within the creased folds of the council men’s native wear. Waiting. The palace was agog with the news and it had spread like a disease. At the trial the councilmen were sombre, their appropriately grim expressions could have been hand drawn. There was an air of inevitability about the whole proceeding. Adesua pleaded with them, looking them in the eye when scrambling to answer some questions, then defiantly refusing to answer others and shaking fitfully as any hope she harboured dissolved in the space of breaths. She thought of Mama and Papa, how they would hang their heads in shame and what would become of them afterwards. But looming over all that was Sully, the way he stayed so still. As though he was a spectator in the whole thing, his chin poised unflinching, for all the blows. He refused to apologise, and a thin, cracked veil of shock came down as Sully, the man who could talk himself into and out of any situation, said nothing.

On that last day, there wasn’t anything a soul could do to change the upside down face of their destiny. They were watched all night by a pack of sober guards in a rank, shabby out-building reserved for prisoners. When morning arrived, their hands were tied with thick, cutting rope that rubbed their skin raw as they were dragged on the journey they couldn’t come back from, flanked on either side by six soldiers from Oba Odion’s army. Adesua tried to not let her whimpers slip, attempting to catch them with her shocked, and flagging tongue. On their way, death wasn’t in the broken, gnarled branches scattered about, or the rough, prickly frowning bush plants nipping at her legs. Or even the ground; coughing pleas disguised in red dust as the stamp of feet moved on. No, death was in the sweet, sugarcane kisses she had shared with her lover. Sully baffled the soldiers; he was laughing to the heavens yet he would never hold a daughter in his arms, never travel with his family, to freely experience new lands the way his wandering feet loved. Never again would he watch Adesua fall asleep in his arms.

Working for the British as a scout, sent to assess the lay of the land and the conditions of the palace he had failed. He had absconded, keeping the money and in the end had fallen in love with the king’s beautiful new wife. Ironically had he stuck to his end of the treacherous bargain, he may have been left a rich, free man. They paused when they reached a clearing deep in the dense bush, the promise of Sully and Adesua’s lives not yet realised shrank back from outlines mired in sin. One soldier untied Sully’s hands and handed him a long metal instrument, it’s curved, menacing head shaped as in a fit of surprise. They instructed him to dig a grave big enough for two. He stooped down, arching his back, sticking the metal thing into the ground, watching as it spat piles of earth, seeing Adesua trembling without even looking at her.

At that very moment, Oba Odion finally left his chamber. He was being chased by the boy he used to be, through the palace grounds and all the charred enclaves beyond it, while the spirit of Oba Anuje looked on and the ghost of his lost son Ogiso settled into the brass head, rattling it against the floor of Adesua’s quarters.

Sully kept digging, while his back ached, he couldn’t feel his arms and his legs were folding. He wanted to tell Adesua he was happy they had destroyed each other together with their love, to tell her that when she laughed, he wanted to keep seeing more of her playful side. He wanted to tell her it was a beautiful day to die. You could see small clusters of clouds slowly, steadily floating down, as though the sky was shedding bits of itself. And the air was sweet and full of promise. And right there. There. In the far corner of himself, a headless hyena was pawing at the blood tears running down the stump of its neck, circling in on its body and him. The soldiers buried the two of them together alive, and just then, the sun God stepped out, stuffing bits of shredded, stolen moonbeam where he could. His golden rays searing through the thickened air and cutting it into slices he opened his mouth wide to swallow their cries.