The Fishermen

Chapter 4: The Python

THE PYTHON

Ikenna was a python:

A wild snake that became a monstrous serpent living on trees, on plains above other snakes. Ikenna turned into a python after the whipping. It changed him. The Ikenna I knew became a different one: a mercurial and hot-tempered person constantly on the prowl. This transformation had started much earlier, gradually, internally, long before the whipping. But it was after the punishment that the manifestations first began, causing him to do the things that we didn’t think he was capable of doing, the first of which was to harm an adult.

About an hour after Father left for Yola that morning, Ikenna gathered Boja, Obembe and me in his room just after Mother went to church with our younger siblings, and declared that we must punish Iya Iyabo, the woman who told on us. We had not gone to church that day because we claimed we were ill from the beating, so we sat on the bed in his room to listen to him.

“I must have my pound of flesh and you must all join me in this because you caused it,” he said. “Had you listened to me, she would not have caused Father to beat me so much. Look, just look—”

He turned and pulled down his shorts. Although Obembe closed his eyes, I didn’t. I saw red stripes on the plump cheeks of his buttocks. They appeared as those on the back of Jesus of Nazareth — some long, some short, some crossed each other to make a red X, while some stood out from the rest like lines on the palms of an ill-fortuned individual.

“That was what you and that idiotic woman caused me. So, you all should come up with ideas on how to punish her.” Ikenna snapped his fingers. “We must do that today. That way, she will come to know that she cannot mess with us and go scot-free.”

While he was speaking, a goat bleated from behind the window. Mmbreeeheheeeh!

This riled Boja. “That crazy goat again, that goat!” he cried, rising to his feet.

“Sit down,” Ikenna yelled. “Let it alone now, and give me ideas on that woman before Mama returns from church.”

“Okay,” Boja said, sitting back. “You know Iya Iyabo has lots of hens?” For a while Boja sat, his face turned in the direction of the window where the goat’s bleating could still be heard. Even though it was clear his mind was fixed on the bleating goat, he said: “Yes, she keeps a whole lot.”

“Mostly roosters,” I put in, wanting to make him know that it was roosters, not hens that crowed.

Boja cast a sneery look at me, sighed, and said, “Yes, but must you tell us the gender of the hen? I have told you many times to stop bringing this stupid animal fascination into important—”

Ikenna chewed him out. “Ooh, Boja, when will you learn to face what is important, which is telling us what your ideas are. You are wasting time getting angry at the bleating of a foolish goat, and rebuking Ben for something as trivial as the difference between a rooster and a hen.”

“Okay, I suggest we get one of them and kill and fry it.”

“That is fatal!” Ikenna exclaimed, making an irritated face, as if on the cusp of vomiting. “But I don’t think it’s proper to eat that woman’s chicken. How are we even going to fry it? Mama will know we fried something here; she will smell it. She will suspect we stole it, and stealing will earn us even more severe strokes of the whip. None of us wants that.”

Ikenna never dismissed Boja’s ideas without giving them a proper thought. They had a mutual respect for each other. I hardly ever saw them argue, unlike the way they would answer my questions with an outright “no” or “wrong” or “incorrect.” Boja agreed that it was true, nodding repeatedly. Next, Obembe suggested we throw stones into the woman’s compound and pray they hit either her or one of her sons, and then take to our heels before anyone comes out of the compound.

“Wrong idea,” Boja said. “What if those sons of hers, those big hungry boys who always dress in tattered clothing with biceps like Arnold Schwarzenegger, catch and beat us?” He demonstrated the bulge of their brawny biceps.

“They will beat us even worse than Father,” Ikenna noted.

“Yes,” said Boja, “we can only imagine it.”

Ikenna nodded in agreement. I was now the only one who hadn’t made a suggestion.

“Ben, what do you have to say?” Boja said.

I gulped, my heart beating faster. My confidence often wilted when my older brothers urged me to make a decision rather than make one for me. I was still thinking when my voice, as if autonomous of the rest of me, said: “I have an idea.”

“Then say it!” Ikenna ordered.

“Okay, Ike, okay, I suggest we get hold of one of the roosters and,” I fastened my eyes to his face, “and—”

“Yes?” Ikenna said. Their eyes were all fixed on me as if I’d just become a wonder.

“Behead it,” I concluded.

I had barely said those words when Ikenna cried, “That is really fatal!” and Boja, suddenly wild-eyed, started clapping.

My brothers gave me credit for an idea whose source was a folktale my Yoruba language teacher had told my class at the beginning of the term, about a vicious boy who goes on a rampage decapitating all the cocks and hens in the land. We hurried out of our compound with a covert path to the woman’s house in our minds, passing small bushes and a carpenter’s shop, where we had to close our ears with our hands to shield them against the deafening sound of the filling machines as they sawed wood. The woman, Iya Iyabo, lived in a small bungalow whose exterior was identical to ours: a small balcony, two windows with louvres and nettings, an electric meter box clamped to the wall, and a storm door, except that her fence was not made of bricks and cement but of mud and clay. The fence was cracked in places from long exposure to the sun, and was littered with spots and smears. An overhead electric cable reached through the branches of one of the trees and stretched out of the compound to connect to a high power pole.

We listened at first for sounds of life, but Ikenna and Boja soon concluded the compound was empty. At Ikenna’s command, Obembe climbed over the fence, using Ikenna’s shoulder as a ledge. Boja joined him while I stayed with Ikenna to keep watch. Just after the two of them climbed in, the sound of a rooster squawking and frantically flapping its wings came ever closer, as did the sounds of my brothers’ feet chasing the cock. It happened repeatedly until we heard Boja say “Hold it still, hold it still, and don’t let it go” the way we used to speak when our hooks angled a fish when we were still fishing the Omi-Ala.

At the shout, Ikenna tried to climb the fence quickly to see if they’d caught it, but stopped short of that. From behind the wall, he echoed Boja’s words. “Don’t let it go, don’t let it go.” His buttocks slipped up above the waistline of his pants as he planted his foot in a hole on the fence. Old coatings rained down below him like dust. With one foot secured, he pulled himself upwards, holding on to the top of the wall. From behind his hand, a skink rose and journeyed away in agitation, its multi-coloured body smooth and shiny. Half of him stretched into the compound, and half outside, Ikenna took the rooster from Boja, crying, “That’s my boy! That’s my boy!”

We returned to our own compound and went straight to the garden in the backyard, the size of a quarter of a football field. It was fenced around with cement bricks on all three corners, two of them marking off the boundaries with our neighbours — Igbafe’s family on one side, and the Agbatis on the other. The third, which faced our bungalow directly, marked off a boundary with the landfill where a colony of swine lived. A pawpaw tree stretched out of the landfill, just over the fence, while a tangerine tree — usually extremely leafy in the rainy season — stood agelessly between the fence and the well in the compound. This tree sat just about fifty metres further inside the compound from the well — a big hole in the ground, with a neck made of concrete around it. Attached to the concrete was a metal lid that Father locked with a padlock in dry seasons when wells dried up in Akure and people stole into our compound to fetch water. On the other side of the backyard, patched to a corner of the fence bordering Igbafe’s family’s compound was the small garden in which Mother planted tomatoes, corn and okra.

Boja set the petrified cock down on the chosen spot, and took the knife that Obembe had brought from our kitchen. Ikenna joined him and together they held the chicken in place, unshaken by its loud squawks. Then we all watched as the knife moved in Boja’s hand with unaccustomed ease, a downward slit through the rooster’s wrinkled neck as if he’d handled the knife several times before, and as if he were destined to handle it yet again. The cock twitched and made aggravating movements that were restrained by all our hands holding it firmly. I looked over our fence to the top floor of the two-storeyed building overlooking our compound and saw Igbafe’s grandfather, a small man who had stopped speaking after an accident a few years earlier, seated on the large veranda in front of the door of the house. He had the habit of sitting there all day and he used to be the butt of our jokes.

Boja severed the cock’s head, leaving a jolting outpouring of blood in its wake. I turned away and returned my eyes to the old mute man. He appeared like a moment’s vision of a faraway warning angel whose warnings we could not hear owing to the distance. I did not see the rooster’s head fall into the small hole Ikenna had dug in the dirt, but I watched as its trunk palpitated violently, spurting blood about, its wings raising dust. My brothers held it down even more firmly until it gradually quieted. Then we set off with the headless corpse in Boja’s grip, the blood marking our trail, unshaken by the few people who looked on in awe. Boja flung the dead rooster over the fence, blood spitting around as it careered in the air. Once it was out of sight, we felt satisfied we had had our revenge.

Ikenna’s frightening metamorphosis did not, however, begin then; it began long before Father’s Guerdon, and even before the neighbour caught us fishing at the river. It first showed itself in an attempt to make us hate fishing, but this was fruitless, for the love of fishing had been wired into the arteries of our hearts at the time. In his frail effort, he dug up everything he deemed bad about the river, things we had never before observed. He complained, just a few days before the neighbour caught us, that the bush around the river was filled with excreta. Although we had never seen anyone do this, nor even perceived the odour he so painstakingly described to us, Boja, Obembe and I did not argue with him. He said at one point that Omi-Ala’s fish were polluted, and stopped us from bringing the fish into his room. Hence, we began keeping them in the room I shared with Obembe. He even complained he had seen a human skeleton floating underneath the waters of the Omi-Ala while fishing, and that Solomon was a bad influence. He said these things as if they were undeniable truths newly discovered, but the passion we’d developed for fishing had become like liquid frozen in a bottle and could not be easily thawed. It was not that we did not have reservations about the enterprise; we all did. Boja hated that the river was small and only contained “useless” fish; Obembe had troubles with what the fish did at night since there’s no light under the water, in the river. How, he frequently wondered, did the fish move about — since they did not have electricity or lanterns — in the pitch black darkness that covered the river like a sheet at night; and I detested the weakness of the smelts and tadpoles, how they died so easily even when you stored them in the river’s water! This frailty sometimes made me want to cry. When Solomon came knocking the following day, the day the neighbour caught us, Ikenna had insisted at first that he would not go to the river with him. But when he saw that we, his brothers, were leaving without him, he joined in, taking his fishing line from Boja. Solomon and the rest of us cheered him, hailing him a most valiant “Fisherman.”

The thing that was consuming Ikenna was like a tireless enemy, hiding inside him, biding its time while we plotted and carried out our revenge on Iya Iyabo. It began to control him from the day Ikenna severed ties with Obembe and me, keeping only Boja with him. They barred Obembe and me from their room, and excluded us from joining in at the new football place they discovered a week after the whipping. Obembe and I longed for their companionship, and waited in vain for their return every evening, yearning for our kinship that seemed to be slipping away. But as days went by, it began to seem as if Ikenna had got rid of an infection in his throat by finally coughing us out, like a man who’d simply cleared his stuffed passages.

At around the same time, Ikenna and Boja hassled one of Mr Agbati’s children, our cross-wall neighbours who owned a rickety lorry that was known as “Argentina” because of the legend “Born and raised in Argentina” inscribed around its frescoed body. Owing to its feebleness, the lorry made deafening noises when starting, often rattling the neighbourhood and waking people from sleep in the early hours of the day. This engendered several complaints and quarrels. In one of the fights, Mr Agbati came off with a perpetual swelling on his head after a female neighbour hit him with the heel of her shoe. From then on, Mr Agbati began sending one of his children to inform the neighbours whenever he wanted to start the lorry. The children would knock on every neighbour’s door or gate a couple of times, announcing that “Papa wan start Argentina, oh.” Then they would run off to the next house. That morning, Ikenna — who had begun to grow more belligerent and irascible — fought the oldest of the children after accusing the boy of being a nuzance, a word Father often used to describe someone who made unnecessary noise.

Later that same day, after we had returned from school and eaten, he and Boja went to play football at the pitch while Obembe and I stayed home, sad that we could not go with them. We were watching television, and were still on the same programme, one about a man who settled family disputes, when they returned. They had only been gone for half an hour. As they hurried into their room, I saw that Ikenna’s face was covered with dirt, his upper lip was swollen into a pulp and there were bloodstains on his jersey which had the sobriquet “Okocha” and the figure 10 inscribed on its back. Once they shut their door, Obembe and I ran to our room and stood beside the wall to eavesdrop on their conversation to find out what had happened. At first, we only heard the closet doors opening and closing, and the sound their feet made as they walked on the worn carpet. It was long before we caught the words “If I hadn’t thought Nathan and Segun would come in if I did and outnumber us, I would have joined in the fight.” This was Boja’s voice and he was not finished yet. “If only I had known they wouldn’t join, if only I had known.”

The sound of feet rapping on the carpet followed this declaration, after which Boja continued: “But he did not even really beat you, that frog; he was only lucky to have,” he paused as if searching for the right words, “to have… done this.”

“You didn’t fight for me,” Ikenna burst out suddenly. “No! You stood by and watched. Don’t even try to deny it.”

“I could have—” Boja began to say after a brief pause, breaking the silence.

“No you didn’t!” Ikenna cried. “You stood by!”

This was loud enough for Mother to hear from her room; she had not gone to work that day because Nkem was having diarrhoea. She scrambled to her feet, slapped the floor a few times with her flip-flops and started knocking on their door.

“What is going on there, why are you shouting?”

“Mama, we want to sleep,” said Boja.

“Is that why you won’t answer the door?” she asked, and when no one answered back, she said: “What was the shouting in that room about?”

“Nothing,” Ikenna replied sharply.

“It better be nothing,” said Mother. “It better be.”

Her flip-flops slapped the floor again in rhythm as she returned to her room.

Ikenna and Boja did not go out to play after school the following day; they stayed in their room. Wanting to take advantage of the situation to communicate with them again, Obembe seized on the opportunity of a television show Ikenna particularly liked to bring them to the sitting room. Both of them had not watched television since the neighbour caught us at the Omi-Ala, and Obembe continually ached for the days when we all saw our favourite programmes together with riotous glee—Agbala Owe, the Yoruba soap opera, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, an Australian drama. Obembe always wanted to reach out to them whenever any of the programmes was on, but the fear that he might annoy them often stopped him. On this day, however, having grown desperate and because Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was Ikenna’s favourite, first he craned his neck to look through the keyhole of their room’s door so he could see our brothers through it. Then making the sign of the cross, his lips moving inaudibly with the rhythm of the words “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he started pacing about the room singing the theme song of the show:

Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo

Skippy, Skippy, Skippy our friend ever true.

Obembe had told me many times over those dark days of separation from our brothers that he wanted to put an end to the rift, but I’d always warned he’d incur their wrath. I’d managed to dissuade him every single time. So when he began to sing that song, I began to fear for him again. “Don’t, Obe, they’ll beat you,” I said, gesturing that he stop.

The effect of my entreaty was like a sudden pinch on the skin that attracted only a minute response. He’d stopped and cast a lingering stare at me as though unsure of what he had heard. Then shaking his head, continued, “Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo—”

He stopped singing when the handle of the door of my brothers’ room twitched. Ikenna appeared, walked to the lounge beside me, and sat in it. Obembe froze like a statue and remained by the wall, under a framed photo of Nnene, Father’s mother, holding the newly born Ikenna in 1981. He would maintain this posture for very long as if pinned to the wall. Boja came out after Ikenna and sat down.

Skippy, the kangaroo, had just fought with a rattlesnake, making prodigious leaps every time the serpent lunged to sting him with its venomous tongue, and the kangaroo was now licking its paws.

“Oh, I hate when this stupid Skippy does this annoying paw-licking!” Ikenna fumed.

“He just fought with a snake,” Obembe said. “You should have seen—”

“Who asked you?” Ikenna snarled, jumping to his feet. “I said who asked you?”

In anger, he kicked Nkem’s mobile plastic chair so that it plunged into the big shelf which held the television, VHS player and telephone. A glass-covered framed photo of Father as a young clerk of the Central Bank of Nigeria crashed behind the cupboard, shattering into pieces.

“Who asked you?” Ikenna, ignoring the fate of Father’s treasured portrait, repeated for the third time. He pressed the red button on the television and it went dead.

“Oya, all of you to your rooms!” he cried.

Obembe and I ran there, panting. Then, from our room, I heard Ikenna say “Boja, why are you still waiting there? I said, all of you.”

“What, Ike, me, too?” Boja asked in astonishment.

“Yes, I said all — all!”

The silence was broken by the sound of Boja’s feet as he walked to his room, and then the sound of their door slamming. After we’d all gone, Ikenna turned on the television and settled to watch — alone.

I have come to believe that it was here that the first mark of the line between Ikenna and Boja — where not even a dot had ever been drawn before — first appeared. It altered the shape of our lives and ushered in a transition of time when craniums raged and voids exploded. They stopped speaking. Boja came descending like a fallen angel, and landed where Obembe and I had long been confined.

In those early days of Ikenna’s metamorphosis, we all hoped the hand that held his heart, having clenched into a fist, would unclench in no time. But days rolled past and Ikenna moved farther and farther from us. He hit Boja after a heated argument a week or so later. Obembe and I were in our room when this happened because we’d started to avoid the living room whenever Ikenna was there, but Boja often stayed put. It must have been Ikenna’s anger at his persistence that caused the argument. All I heard was blows and their voices as they argued and swore at each other. It was on a Saturday and Mother, who no longer went to work on Saturdays, was at home taking a nap. But when she heard the noise, she ran out to the living room, swaddled from bosom to knee because she’d breastfed Nkem who had been crying earlier. Mother first tried to break up the fight by calling on them to stop, but they paid no heed. She plunged in and pulled them apart until she was stretched between them, but Boja held on to Ikenna’s T-shirt in defiance. When Ikenna tried to wrest himself free, he did it with such a ferocious jerk of Boja’s arm that he mistakenly pulled off the wrappa Mother was swaddled in, stripping her to her underpants.

“Ewooh!” Mother cried. “Do you want to bring a curse on yourselves? Look what you have done; you have stripped me naked. Do you know what it means — to see my nakedness? Do you know it is a sacrilege—alu?” She fastened the wrappa around her bosom again. “I will tell Eme everything you have done from A to Z, don’t you worry.”

She snapped her fingers at both of them, now standing apart, still trying to catch their breath.

“Now tell me, Ikenna, what did he do to you? Why were you fighting?”

Ikenna threw off his shirt and hissed in reply. I was stupefied. Hissing at an older person in Igbo culture was considered an insufferable act of insubordination.

“What, Ikenna?”

“Eh, Mama,” Ikenna said.

“Did you hiss at me?” Mother said in English first, then placing her hands on her bosom, she said, “Obu mu ka ighi na’a ma lu osu?”

Ikenna did not answer. He moved back to the lounge where he’d sat before the fight, picked up his shirt and walked to his room. He slammed the door so hard that the louvres in the sitting room rattled. Mother, astounded at the brazen insult in his act of walking out on her, stood with mouth agape, her eyes fixed on the door, and her wrath piqued. She was about to head to the door to discipline Ikenna when she noticed Boja’s broken lip. He was dabbing the shirt now covered with crimson stains against his bloodied lips.

“He did that to you?” Mother asked.

Boja nodded. His eyes were red, full of bottled tears that were held back from pouring out only because it would have meant he’d been beaten. My brothers and I hardly ever cried when we fought, even if we’d suffered severe blows or had been hit in the most sensitive places. We always tried to stifle tears until we went out of everyone’s sight. Only then did we let it out, and sometimes, in spades.

“Answer me,” Mother shouted. “Have you turned deaf?”

“Yes, Mama, he did it.”

“Onye—Who? Ike-nna did this?”

Boja nodded in reply, his eyes on the stained shirt in his hands. Mother walked closer to him and tried to touch the wounded lip, but Boja squirmed in pain. She stepped back, still gazing at the wound.

“Did you say Ikenna did it?” she asked again as if Boja had not replied before.

“Yes, Mama,” Boja said.

She fastened her wrappa again, this time tighter. Then she walked briskly to Ikenna’s door and began banging on it, calling on Ikenna to open it. When there was no response, she began threatening aloud, punctuating her words with tsks to give them resolve. “Ikenna, if you don’t open that door now, I will show you that I’m your mother, and that you came out from between my legs.”

Now that she threatened with tsks, she did not wait too long before the door opened. She pounced on him and an exchange of blows and tantrums followed. Ikenna was unusually defiant. He received every slap with protests and even threatened to hit back, further aggravating her. Mother struck more blows. He cried freely and complained aloud that she hated him because she did not reprimand Boja for the provocation that led to the fight in the first place. In the end, he pushed her to the floor and ran out. Mother chased after him, her wrappa falling again as she did. But by the time she got to the sitting room, he was gone. She raised her wrappa to cover her bosom as before. “Heaven and earth hear me,” she swore, touching her tongue with the tip of her index finger. “Ikenna, you will not eat anything in this house again until your father comes back. I don’t care how you do it, but not in this house.” Her words clogged with tears. “Not in this house, not until Eme returns from wherever he is. You will not eat here.”

She was speaking to those of us now gathered in the sitting room and to others, perhaps our neighbours who were probably listening from the other side of the lizard-infested fence. For Ikenna had vanished. He’d probably crossed the road to the other side of the street, walked northwards to Sabo, along the dirt road that led further into the part of the city where old hills rose above three schools, a cinema in a crumbling building and a big mosque, from where the muezzin called for prayers through mighty loudspeakers at dawn every day. He did not return that day. He slept somewhere he never disclosed.

Mother paced the house all that night, anxiously waiting for Ikenna to knock on the storm door. When, at midnight, she was compelled to lock up the gate for safety — armed robbery occurred frequently in Akure in those days — she sat with the keys near the main door, waiting. She’d driven the rest of us to our rooms to sleep and only Boja remained in the sitting room because he could not enter his room for fear of Ikenna. Obembe and I did not sleep, either; we listened to Mother from our beds. She went out many times that night, thinking she’d heard a knock at the gate, but returned all those times alone. She barely sat down. When a deluge began later, she telephoned Father, but the repeated rings went unanswered. As the pon-pon, pon-pon sound of the phone repeated itself again and again I tried to imagine Father seated in the new house in the dangerous city, his spectacles on, reading the Guardian or the Tribune. That image of him was torpedoed by the static on the line, which made Mother hang up.

I did not know when I eventually slept, but I soon found myself and my brothers in our village, Amano, near Umuahia. We were playing football — two-a-side — near the bank of the river when Boja suddenly kicked the ball to a footbridge that was once used as the only crossing over the river. Biafran soldiers had hastily constructed it, after blowing up the main bridge during the Nigerian civil war, as an alternate bridge by which they could cross in the event of an invasion by Nigerian troops. It was hidden away in the forest. The footbridge was made of slats of wood held together by rusting metal loops, and thick ropes. It had no handrails one could support oneself with while crossing it. The portion of the river that flowed under the bridge was bedded underneath with rocks. Rocks and stones, reaching out of a hilly part of the forest, were visible just below the waters. Ikenna ran to the bridge without thinking, and was at the centre of it in no time. But the moment he picked up the ball, he suddenly realized he was in danger. As he gazed with trepidation at the chasm beneath him, the chasm fed his eyes with visions of his death by a fall that would end in a fatal contact with the stones. Suddenly engulfed in fear, he began crying “Help! Help!” Just as scared as he was, we began calling on him: “Ike, come, come.” In obedience to our entreaty, he spread his hands, and letting the ball fall into the gash, began walking towards us, slowly, his gait like that of someone wading through a pool of mud. As he came, tottering dangerously, the slats — made fragile with age and decay — cracked, and the bridge snapped, breaking in two. Ikenna descended at once with planks of broken wood, metals and a loud jolting cry for help. He was still falling when, abruptly waking, I heard Mother’s voice scolding Ikenna for having endangered his life by sleeping out and returning wet and ill. I once heard that the heart of an angered man will not beat with verve, it will inhale and bloat like a balloon, but eventually deflate. This was the case with my brother. For by morning, when I heard his voice, I ran out to the sitting room to see with my own eyes that he had returned drenched, helpless, an afflicted man.

With every day that passed, Ikenna became more distant from us. I hardly saw him in those days. His existence was reduced to these minimal movements around the house, the noise of his often exaggerated coughing and of the transistor radio whose volume he’d often raise so high Mother would ask him to turn it down if she was at home. Sometimes I saw him briefly leave the house, in haste mostly, not once seeing his face. I saw him again later that same week when he came out to see a football match on television. David had taken ill the previous night and vomited his dinner. Mother did not go to her store at the town bazaar that day, but sat at home to nurse David. After school, while Mother looked after David in her room, my brothers and I watched the match. Ikenna — who could not resist seeing the match, but also could not send the rest of us out of the room because Mother was there — sat aloft at the dining table as mute as a deer. It was almost at the end of the half-time when Mother came into the sitting room with a ten-naira bill in her hand and said: “I want both of you to go and get David some medicine.” Although she did not mention names, she’d apparently addressed Ikenna and Boja; they ran errands outside the house because they were older. For a moment after Mother spoke, none of them moved an inch. This staggered Mother.

“Mama, am I your only child?” Ikenna replied rubbing his chin where Obembe had told me he’d seen some beard earlier. Although I had not noticed it at the time, I did not dispute it. Ikenna had just turned fifteen, and to my eyes, he was now a full adult able to grow beards. Yet, the thought that he was old came with the strong fear that once he grew into an adult, he would disconnect from us, go to higher college or just leave home. That thought never fully formed at the time though. It hung in my mind like a television acrobat, who, having just made a prodigious leap remained — after a click of the pause button — in mid-air, unable to complete the jump.

“What?” Mother asked.

“Can’t you send someone else? Must it always be me? I’m tired and don’t want to go anywhere.”

“You and Boja will go and get it whether you like it or not. Inugo—Do you hear?”

Ikenna dropped his eyes, in a moment of wild contemplation and then, shaking his head, said: “Okay, if you insist it must be me, I will go, but I must go alone.”

He stood and made forward to take the money, but Mother retracted the bill into her fist, concealing it. This shocked Ikenna. He stepped back, aghast. “Won’t you give me the money and let me go?” he asked.

“Wait, let me ask you. What has your brother done to you? I really want to know, really.”

“Nothing!” Ikenna cried. “Nothing, Mama, I’m okay. Just give me the money and let me go.”

“I’m not talking about you but about your relationship with your brother. Look at Boja’s lip.” She pointed to Boja’s injury that was now almost fully healed. “Look at what you did to him; what you did to your blood brother—”

“Just give me the money and let me go!” Ikenna bellowed and stretched out his hand.

But Mother, unruffled, continued while he was speaking, so that they competed for the same moment, giving way to a rush of words that came out from both of them as: “Nwanne gi ye mu n hulu ego nwa anra ih nhulu ka mu ga ba—Your brother give me who suckled the money the same breasts and let me as you did go!”

“Give it to me and let me go!” Ikenna cried now, louder, as if enraged even more by every word Mother had said that’d climbed on his own words, but Mother responded with soft tsks and monotonous shaking of her head.

“Just give me the money, I want to go alone,” Ikenna said in a more restrained voice. “I beg you; please, just give me the money.”

“May thunder strike your mouth, Ikenna! Chinekem eh! My God! When did you start challenging me, eh, Ikenna?”

“What did I do to you now?” Ikenna shouted and began stamping mad on the floor in protest. “What is this? Why are you always nit-picking on me? What have I done to you, this woman? Why don’t you let me alone?”

Seated there, we all — like Mother — were shocked by Ikenna’s address of Mother, our mother, as “this woman.”

“Ikenna, is that you?” she asked in a subdued voice, pointing her forefinger at him. “Is that you, a duck that flutters its wings like a cock does? Is that you?” But as she was speaking, Ikenna made for the door. Mother watched as he opened it, then snapping her fingers, raised her voice after him, “Just wait until your father calls, I’ll tell him what you have become. Don’t worry, just let him return.”

Ikenna hissed and then — in a show of brazen defiance unprecedented in our house — stormed out of the house, forcefully slamming the door behind him. As if to enunciate what had just happened, a car honked insanely for a length of time, and when it finally stopped, it left the din to echo in my head, thickening the enormity of Ikenna’s defiance. Mother settled into one of the lounges, shock and anger tightening their grip around her heart, as she mumbled despairingly to herself, her hands clutched around her bosom.

“He has grown, Ikenna has grown horns.”

I was moved to see her in such despair. It seemed a part of her body, which she had got accustomed to touching, had suddenly sprouted thorns and every effort made to touch that part merely resulted in bleeding.

“Mama,” Obembe called to her.

“Eh, Nnam — my father,” she replied.

“Give me the money,” Obembe said. “I could go to get the medicine, and Ben could come with me. I’m not afraid.”

She looked up at him and nodded, her eyes lightening up with a smile.

“Thank you, Obe,” she said. “But it is dark, so Boja will go with you. You both should be careful.”

“I will go too,” I said, rising to get my clothes.

“No, Ben,” Mother said. “Stay here with me. Two is enough.”

In the state of mind I have come to develop after the breakdown of our lives, I often remember that phrase, “Two is enough,” as a foreboding of the things that would befall our family a few weeks after that day. I sat down beside Mother and Obembe and pondered about how much Ikenna had changed. I’d never seen him act rude to Mother; for he loved her greatly. Of all of us, he looked the most like her. He took her colour of the tropical anthills. In this part of Africa, married women often went by the name of their first child. Hence, Mother was commonly known as Mama Ike or Adaku. Ikenna enjoyed most of the earliest cares that she ever gave her kids. It was in his cot we all laid years later. We all inherited his baskets of medicines and baby-care things. He had stood on Mother’s side against anyone in the past — even Father. Sometimes when we disobeyed Mother, he punished us before she took any action. Their partnership was what gave Father the satisfaction that we could be well reared, even in his absence. The small depression on the fourth finger of Father’s right hand was a scar from Ikenna’s bite. Years before I was born, Father hit Mother in a fit of rage. Ikenna swooped in on him and bit him on his finger, naturally ending the fight.