The Fishermen

Chapter 7: The Falconer

THE FALCONER

Turning and turning in the widening gyre, the falcon cannot hear the falconer.

W. B. YEATS

Mother was a falconer:

The one who stood on the hills and watched, trying to stave off whatever ill she perceived was coming to her children. She owned copies of our minds in the pockets of her own mind and so could easily sniff troubles early in their forming, the same way sailors discern the forming foetus of a coming storm. She occasionally eavesdropped on us in attempts to catch snippets of our conversations even before Father moved out of Akure. There were times when we gathered at my brothers’ room, and one of us would slink to the door to detect if she stood behind it. We’d pull the door open and expose her in the act. But, like a falconer who knew her birds deeply, Mother often succeeded in tracking us. Perhaps she’d already begun to sense that something was wrong with Ikenna, but when she saw the M.K.O. calendar ruined, she smelt, she saw, she felt and she knew that Ikenna was undergoing a metamorphosis. It was thus in an attempt to find out what had started it that she’d coaxed Obembe into divulging the details of the encounter with Abulu.

Although Obembe had left out what happened after Abulu went away, the part about how he’d told us all what Abulu had said while the plane flew past, a monstrous grief seized Mother nonetheless. She had punctuated every point of the account with a trembling cry of “My God, My God,” but after Obembe finished, she stood up, biting her lips and fidgeting, visibly ripped from inside-out. She went out of our room afterwards without saying a word, shaking from head to foot as if she’d caught a cold while Obembe and I sat pondering what our brothers would do if they knew we’d divulged the secret to her. Just about then, I heard her voice and theirs as she confronted them on why they never told her such a thing had happened. Mother had barely left their room when Ikenna stormed into ours in a rage, demanding to know which idiot had revealed the secret to her. Obembe pleaded that she forced it out of him, in a voice that was deliberately loud so Mother could hear and intervene. She did. Ikenna left us with a vow to punish us when she was not around.

An hour or so later, when it seemed she’d slightly recovered, Mother gathered us in the living room. She wore a headscarf that was knotted behind her head into the shape of a bird’s tail — a sign she’d been praying.

“When I go to the stream,” Mother said with a voice that was husky and broken, “I carry my udu. I stoop at the brook and fill my udu. I walk from the stream—” Ikenna gave a wild yawn at this time and heaved a sigh. Mother paused, stared at him for a while and continued. “I walk — to my home, to my home. When I get there I set my pot down only to find it empty.”

She let the words sink in, rounding us up with her eyes. I had imagined her walking down a river with an udu—an earthen jar — balanced on her head with the help of a wrappa formed into many layered rings. I’d been so drawn and moved by this simple story, by the tone in which she told it that I hardly wanted to know what it meant because I knew that such stories, told just like that after we’d done something wrong, always had kernelled meanings; for Mother spoke and thought in parables.

“You, my children,” she continued, “have leaked out of my udu. I thought I had you, that I carried you in my udu, that my life was full of you”—she stretched her hands and carved them into a convex—“but I was wrong. Under my nose, you went to that river and fished for weeks. Now, for even longer, you have harboured a deadly secret when I thought you were safe, that I would know if you faced any dangers.”

She shook her head.

“You have to be cleansed from every evil spell Abulu has cast on you. We are all going to the service at the church this evening. So, no one goes anywhere else today,” Mother said. “Once it’s four, we will all go to the church.”

David’s playful laughter came from Mother’s room, where she’d left him with Nkem, and occupied the silence created after Mother delivered her speech and watched us to make sure her words had sunk into our heads.

She rose and was heading to her room, when she stopped abruptly because of something Ikenna said. She turned back sharply: “Eh?” she said. “Ikenna, isi gini? — What did you say?”

“I said I’m not going to church with you today for any cleansing,” Ikenna replied, switching back to Igbo. “I can’t bear to stand in front of that congregation and have people looming over me, trying to cast out some spell.” He stood up briskly from the lounge. “I mean, I just don’t want it. I don’t have any demon; I’m fine.”

“Ikenna, have you lost your mind?” said Mother.

“No, Mama, but I just don’t want to go there.”

“What?” Mother shouted. “Ike-nna?”

“It’s the truth, Mama,” he replied. “I just don’t want”—he shook his head—“I just don’t, Mama, biko—please, I don’t want to go to any church.”

Boja, who had not spoken to Ikenna since their altercation concerning the television programme, rose to his feet and said: “Me neither, Mama. I won’t go for any cleansing. I don’t feel I or anyone needs deliverance from anything. I’m not going there.”

Mother was about to say something, but the words tripped backwards in her throat like a man falling from the top of a ladder. She gazed back and forth between Ikenna and Boja with an expression of shock.

“Ikenna, Bojanonimeokpu, have we taught you nothing? Do you want that madman’s prophecy to come true?” Spittle formed a weak bubble across the ridges of her left-open mouth, and busted when she made to speak again. “Ikenna, look at how you’ve already taken it. What do you think is the cause of all your misbehaviours if not because you believe your brothers will kill you? And now, you stand here, face me, and tell me you don’t need prayers — that you don’t need to be cleansed? Have the many years of training, and efforts by Eme and I taught neither of you nothing? Ehh?”

Mother shouted the last question with her hands thrust histrionically aloft. Yet, with a resolve that could have smashed gates of iron, Ikenna said: “I will not go is all I know,” Boja said. And apparently encouraged by Boja’s support, he walked back to his room. Once he shut his room’s door Boja rose and went in the opposite direction — to the room Obembe and I shared. Mother, wordless, sat back in the lounge and sank beneath the surface of the filled pot of her own thoughts, her arms clasped around her and her mouth moving as if she were saying something that had Ikenna’s name in it, although inaudible. David threw a ball about with clattering steps, laughing aloud as he tried to make the sound of football stadium spectators all by himself. He was shouting when Obembe moved to sit with Mother.

“Mama, Ben and I will go with you,” he said.

Mother looked up at him with eyes clouded with tears.

“Ikenna… and Boja… are strangers now,” she stammered, shaking her head. Obembe drew closer to her and as he patted her shoulder with his thin long arms, she repeated: “Strangers, now.”

For the rest of that day till when we left for the church, I sat thinking about it all, how this vision was the cause of everything Ikenna had done to himself and the rest of us. The encounter with Abulu was something I had forgotten, especially after it happened, when Boja warned that Obembe and I should never mention it to anyone. When I asked Obembe once, why Ikenna no longer loved us, he had said it was because of the whipping Father gave us. And I had believed him, but now, it became very clear to me that I had been wrong.

Later, as I waited for Mother to dress and take us to the church, I cast my eyes on the columned shelf in the sitting room. My eyes then fell on the column that was covered in a quilt of dust, a cobweb strewn to the end of it. These were signs of Father’s absence. When he was at home, we used to take weekly turns at cleaning the shelves. We stopped a few weeks after he left and Mother had not been able to effectively enforce it. In Father’s absence, the perimeters of the house seemed to have magically widened as though invisible builders unclasped the walls, like they would a paper house, and expanded its size. When Father was around, even if his eyes were fastened to the pages of a newspaper or book, his presence alone was enough to enforce the strictest order and we maintained what he often referred to as “decorum” in the house. As I thought of my brothers’ refusal to come with us to church to break what might be a spell, I craved for Father, and wished, strongly, that he would return.

That evening, Obembe and I followed Mother to our church, the Assemblies of God Church situated across the long road that stretched to the post office. Mother held David in one hand and fastened Nkem to her back with a wrappa. To prevent them from sweating and getting skin rashes, she’d powdered their necks so that they shone like masquerades. The church was a big hall with lights that hung in long lines from the four corners of its ceiling. At the pulpit, a young woman in a white gown, who was very much fairer than a typical African of these parts, sang “Amazing Grace” with a foreign accent. We sidled in between two rows of people, most of whom kept locking eyes with me until I got the feeling that we were being watched. My suspicion increased when Mother went up behind the pulpit where the Pastor and his wife and elders were seated, and whispered in the Pastor’s ear. When the singer was done, the Pastor mounted the podium, dressed in a shirt and tie, his trousers strapped with suspenders.

“Men and brethren,” he started in a voice so loud it made the speakers near our row go irrecoverably mute so that we had to pick up his voice from the speaker on the other side of the room. “Before I go ahead with the word of God tonight, let me say that I’ve just been told that the devil, in the form of Abulu, the demon-possessed, self-proclaimed prophet whom all of you know has caused so much damage to people’s lives in this town, has been to the house of our dear brother James Agwu. You all know him, the husband of our dear sister here, sister Paulina Adaku Agwu. Some of you here know that he has many children, who, our sister told us, were caught fishing at the Omi-Ala at Alagbaka Street.”

A faint murmur of surprise rang through the congregation.

“Abulu went to those children and told them lies,” Pastor Collins continued, his voice rising as he spat his words furiously into the microphone. “Brethren, you all know that if a prophecy is not from God, it is of—”

“The devil!” the congregation shouted in unison.

“True. And if it is of the devil, then it has to be refuted.”

“Yes!” they chorused.

“I didn’t hear you,” the Pastor spat into the microphone, shaking his fist. “I said if it is of the devil, then it MUST be—”

“Refuted!” the congregation yelled with so much vigour it seemed like a battle cry. From around the congregation, little children — including Nkem, perhaps frightened by the roar — burst out wailing.

“Are we ready to refute it?”

The congregation roared in agreement, with Mother’s voice resounding above all, and trailing after the rest had stopped. I looked at her and saw that she’d begun to cry again.

“Then stand and refute that prophecy in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The rows lifted as the people jumped to their feet and became caught up in a rapturous session of fierce prayers.

Mother’s efforts to heal her son, Ikenna, were wasted on him. For the prophecy, like an angered beast, had gone berserk and was destroying his mind with the ferocity of madness, pulling down paintings, breaking walls, emptying cupboards, turning tables until all that he knew, all that was him, all that had become him was left in disarray. To my brother, Ikenna, the fear of death as prophesied by Abulu had become palpable, a caged world within which he was irretrievably trapped, and beyond which nothing else existed.

I once heard that when fear takes possession of the heart of a person, it diminishes them. This could be said of my brother, for when the fear took possession of his heart, it robbed him of many things — his peace, his well-being, his relationships, his health, and even his faith.

Ikenna began walking alone to the school he and Boja attended. He’d wake up as early as 7 a.m., skipping breakfast, to avoid going with Boja. He began skipping lunches and dinners when they were either eba or pounded yam, meals that were eaten together from the same bowl as his brothers. As a result, he started to emaciate until deep incurvatures were carved between his collarbones and his neck, and his cheekbones became visible. Then, in time, the whites of his eyes turned pale yellow.

Mother took notice. She protested, pleaded and threatened, but all to no avail. One morning towards the end of the school term in the first week of July, she locked the door and insisted Ikenna have breakfast before going to school. Ikenna was devastated because he was to have an exam that day. He pleaded with Mother to let him leave—“Is it not my body? What do you care if I eat or not? Leave me, why not let me be?”—he broke down and sobbed. But Mother held on until he finally resigned to eat. As he ate the bread and an omelette, he railed against her and all of us. He said everyone in our family hated him and vowed to leave the house someday soon, never to be seen again.

“You will see,” he threatened, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. “All of this will soon end and all of you will be free from me; you will see.”

“But you know this is not true, Ikenna,” Mother replied. “No one hates you; not me, not one of your brothers. You are doing all this to yourself because of your fear, a fear you have tilled and cultivated with your own hands, Ikenna. Ikenna, you have chosen to believe the visions of a madman, a useless fellow, who is not even fit to be called a human being. Not even greater than — what should I compare him to? — the fish, no, the tadpoles you picked from that river? Tadpoles. A man who, just the other day, people in the market were talking about how he found a mallam’s herd grazing in a field and calves suckling their mothers’ udders, joined the cows and started sucking the udder of one of the cows!” Mother made a spitting sound to show disgust at the troubling image of a man sucking a cow. “How can you believe what a man who sucks cows’ breasts says? No Ikenna, you have done this to yourself, eh? You have no one to blame. We’ve prayed for you even if you refused to pray for yourself. Don’t blame anyone for continuing to live in useless fear.”

Ikenna seemed to have listened to Mother, staring blankly at the wall before him. For a second, it appeared as if he’d realized his folly; that Mother’s words had incised his tortured heart, causing the black blood of fear to leak it out. He ate his meal at the dining table for the first time in a long time in silence. And when he was finished, he murmured “Thank you” to Mother, the customary thanks we gave to our parents after every meal, which Ikenna had not said in weeks. He took the utensils to the kitchen and washed them as Mother had taught us to do rather than leave them on the table or in his room as he’d been doing for weeks. Then he left for school.

When he was gone, Boja, who’d just brushed his teeth and was waiting for Obembe to finish using the bathroom, came into the sitting room swaddled in the bath towel he shared with Ikenna.

“I’m afraid he will make good his threat and leave,” he said to Mother.

Mother shook her head, her eyes focused on the fridge, which she’d begun cleaning with a rag. Then bending so that nothing but her legs alone became visible under the door of the refrigerator, she said: “He won’t; where will he go?”

“I don’t know,” Boja replied, “but I fear.”

“He won’t; this fear will not last, it will leave him,” Mother said in a voice that was assured, and I could tell at the time that she’d believed it.

Mother continued to strive to heal him and to protect him. I recall one Sunday afternoon when Iya Iyabo came in while we were eating black-eyed peas marinated in palm-oil sauce. I’d seen the commotion around the compound, but we’d been trained not to go out to watch such gatherings as other children of the town did. Someone could be armed, Father always warned, there could be gunshots, and you could be hit. So we stayed back in our rooms because Mother was at home and would have punished or reported an offender to Father. Boja had two tests the next day — on Social Science and History — two subjects he detested, and had grown prickly, cursing all the historical figures (“dead idiots”) in the book. Not wanting to disturb him or be around him while in such a state of frustration, Obembe and I were in the sitting room with Mother when the woman knocked on the door.

“Ah, Iya Iyabo,” Mother called, rising swiftly from her seat once the woman came in.

“Mama Ike,” the woman, whom I still hated for telling on us, said.

“Come chop, we dey chop,” Mother said.

Nkem threw her hands up from the table and reached for the woman who lifted her off her chair at once.

“What happened?” Mother said.

“Aderonke,” the woman said. “Aderonke killed her husband today.”

“E-woh!” Mother screamed.

“Wo, bi o se, shele ni,” the woman began. She often spoke Yoruba to Mother, who perfectly understood the language, although she never believed herself proficient in it and almost never spoke it otherwise, but would always have us talk with people on her behalf. “Biyi drunk again last night and came home naked,” Iya Iyabo said, switching to Pidgin English. She put her hands on her head and began to squirm plaintively.

“Please, Iya Iyabo, calm and tell me.”

“Her pikin, Onyiladun, dey sick. As her husband come inside, she tell am make im give medicine money, but im start to beat-beat am and im pikin.”

“Chi-neke!” Mother gasped, and covered her mouth with her hands.

“Bee ni—it is so,” Iya Iyabo said. “Aderonke vex say im dey beat the sick pikin, and fear say because of im alcohol, say im go kill am, so she hit im husband with a chair.”

“Eh, eh,” Mother stammered.

“The man die,” Iya Iyabo said. “Im die just like that.”

The woman had sat on the floor, her head resting on the door, rocking and shaking her legs. Mother stood still with shock; seeming frightened, she hugged herself. The food I’d just scooped into my mouth was instantly forgotten at this news of Oga Biyi’s death, for I knew the wasted man. He was like a goat. Although he was not mad, he snarled and plodded when in his usual state of drunkenness. In the mornings, we often saw him on the way to school, walking home, sober, but by evening you’d see him staggering about, drunk again.

“But you know,” Mama Iyabo said, wiping her eyes, “I no think say she do am with clear eyes.”

“Eh, how do you mean?” Mother said.

“Na that madman, Abulu cause am. Im tell Biyi say na the thing wey im treasure most go kill am. Now im wife don kill am.”

Mother was stung. She glanced around at our faces — Boja, Obembe, and I — and took in our stares with her eyes. Someone stood up from a chair somewhere, not in the sitting room, and gently opened a door and appeared in the room. Although I did not look back to see him there, I knew. And it was clear that Mother, and everyone in the room knew, too, that it was Ikenna.

“No, no,” Mother said loudly. “Iya Iyabo, I don’t want you saying this nonsense, this thing here.”

“Ah, what—”

“I said no!” Mother shouted. “How can you believe a mere madman could see the future? Just how?”

“But Mama Ike,” the woman murmured, “Na so they say im be—”

“No,” Mother said. “Where is Aderonke now?”

“Police station.”

Mother shook her head.

“Them arrest her,” Iya Iyabo said.

“Come make we go talk outside,” Mother said.

The woman rose, and together, with Nkem following, they went out. After they left, Ikenna stood there, his eyes lifeless like those of a doll. Then, suddenly clutching his belly, he raced to the bathroom, making choking sounds as he retched into the sink. It was here that his illness began, when the fear robbed him of his health, for it seemed that the account of the man’s death had established in him the unquestionable inescapability of Abulu’s prescient powers, causing smoke to rise from things yet unburned.

A few days after that, a Saturday morning, we were all having breakfast at the dining table, fried yams and corn pap, when Ikenna, who had just taken his food and gone into his room, suddenly rushed out, a hand on his belly, grunting. Before we could make sense of what was going on, a cupful of disgorged food landed on the paved floor behind the blue lounge we’d named “Father’s throne.” Ikenna had been heading for the bathroom, but now, inhibited by the force he could only try to contain, he dropped to one knee on the floor, as he retched, partly disappearing behind the chair.

Calling, “Ikenna, Ikenna,” Mother ran to him from the kitchen and tried to lift him, but he protested that he was fine, when in fact he looked pale and sickly.

“What is it, Ikenna? When did this begin?” Mother asked after he stopped, but he did not answer.

“Ikenna, why, why not even answer, why? Eh, why?”

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Let me go wash now, please.”

Mother let go of his hand, and as he walked to the bathroom, Boja said, “Sorry, Ike.” I said the same. So did Obembe. David did, too. Although Ikenna did not respond to any of these sympathies, he did not bang the door this time. He closed it and bolted it gently.

Once Ikenna was out of sight, Boja ran into the kitchen and returned with a broom — a stack of needle-thin sticks of raffia bound together with a tight cord — and a dustpan. It was the quickness with which Boja had run to clean up the mess that had moved Mother.

“Ikenna, you live in fear that one of your brothers will kill you,” she said aloud so Ikenna could hear her voice over the water, “but come and see—”

“No, no, no, Nne, no; don’t say, please—” Boja pleaded effusively.

“Leave me, let me tell him,” Mother said. “Ikenna come and see them, just come and—” Boja protested that Ikenna will not like to hear he was cleaning the vomit, but Mother was undeterred.

“See those same brothers of yours weeping for you,” she continued. “See them cleaning up your vomit. Come out and see ‘your enemies’ caring for you, even against your wish.”

Perhaps because of this, it took long for Ikenna to come out of the bath that day, but he did, eventually, swaddled in a towel. By that time, Boja had swept clean the spots and even mopped the floor and parts of the wall and the back of the lounge on which his vomit had caked. And Mother had sprinkled Dettol antiseptic everywhere. She would force Ikenna to go with her to the hospital afterwards by threatening that if he refused, she would phone Father. Ikenna knew Father took matters of health very seriously, so he caved.

To my consternation, Mother returned home alone hours later. Ikenna had typhoid and had been admitted at the hospital, receiving intravenous injections. When Obembe and I, gripped by fear, broke down, Mother comforted us saying assuredly he would be discharged the following day and that he would be fine.

But I had begun to fear that something bad was going to happen to Ikenna. I spoke little at school and fought when anyone provoked me until I was whipped by one of the disciplinary teachers. This too was rare; for I was an obedient child not only to my parents, but to my teachers as well. I dreaded corporal punishment and would do anything to prevent it. But the sadness I felt for my brother’s deteriorating situation had inflamed a bitter resentment towards everything, especially school and all it contained. The hope that my brother would be redeemed had been destroyed; I was afraid for him.

After his health and well-being, the venom next robbed Ikenna of his faith. He’d missed church for three consecutive Sundays, giving illness as an excuse — plus the one he could not attend because of the two nights he spent at the hospital. But on the morning of the next one, perhaps emboldened by the news that Father — who had travelled to Ghana on a three-month training course — would not be visiting Akure again until his return, Ikenna declared that he just didn’t want to go to church.

“Did I hear you well, Ikenna?” Mother said.

“Yes, you did,” Ikenna replied forcefully. “Listen, Mama, I’m a scientist, I no longer believe there’s a God.”

“What?” Mother cried, stepping backwards as if she’d stepped on a sharp thorn. “Ikenna, what did you say?”

He hesitated, a deep scowl on his face.

“I asked you: ‘What did you say,’ Ikenna?”

“I said I’m a scientist,” he answered, with the word “scientist,” which he had to say in English because there was no Igbo word for it, resonating with alarming defiance.

“And?” The silence she met would prompt her to say “Complete it Ikenna; complete this abominable thing you have said.” Then, with her finger pointing to his face, charged, she said: “Ikenna, look here: one thing Eme and I cannot take, and will never accept, is an atheist of a child. Never!”

She tsked and snapped two fingers over her head to superstitiously stave off the possibility of that phenomenon. “So, Ikenna, if you still want to be a part of this family or eat any food in it, stand up from that bed of yours now, or else you and I will fit into the same trousers.”

Ikenna was cowed by the threat; for Mother used that expression “fit into the same trousers” only when her anger had reached its peak. She went into her room and returned with one of Father’s old leather belts wound halfway around her wrist, fully ready to flog him, something she almost never did. At the sight of it, Ikenna dragged himself to the bathroom to bathe and get ready for church.

On our way home after the service, Ikenna walked ahead of us, so Mother wouldn’t pick issues with him in public and because Mother usually gave him the key so he could unlock the gate and the main door for us. She almost never went home directly after church; she always waited with the little ones for post-service women’s meetings, or attended one visitation or the other. Once we were out of Mother’s sight, Ikenna began quickening his steps. I and the rest followed him in silence. Ikenna, for some reason, took a longer route home through Ijoka Street, a street that was populated by the poor who lived in low-cost houses — mostly unvarnished — and in wooden shacks. Little children were playing in almost every corner of this dirty area. There were little girls jumping around within a big square of columns. A boy, not more than three, stooped over what appeared to be tawny ropes of excreta trailing down from him to form viscous pyramids. As this pyramid formed and polluted the air, the boy played on, marking the dirt with a stick, undisturbed by the league of flies that hovered around his fundament. My brothers and I spat into the dirt, and then by unquestioned instinct, immediately erased the spittle with the soles of our sandals as we passed, Boja cursing the little boy and the people of the neighbourhood—“pigs, pigs.” Obembe, trying to cleanly erase his spittle, trailed behind momentarily. By spitting and erasing it, we were observing the superstition that if a pregnant woman stepped on saliva, the person who had spit — if male — would be rendered permanently impotent, which I understood at the time to mean that one’s organ would magically disappear.

This was indeed a dirty street, the street in which Kayode, our friend, lived with his parents in an unfinished two-storeyed building whose floor alone had been paved. The house was in such a raw shape that masts of unshaped concrete and iron stretched from the attic, thrusting skeletal beams upwards. Unvarnished piles of blocks greening with moss were scattered around the entire compound. In the holes in the bricks and in its entire frame nested multitudes of lizards and skinks that scurried everywhere. Kayode once told us of how his mother found a lizard in the drum in their kitchen where they stored drinking water. The dead lizard lay atop the water for days unnoticed until the water acquired a sour taste. When his mother emptied the drum and the dead lizard slid to the ground in the pool of water, its head had swollen double, and like all things that drown, had started to decompose. At nearly every corner of the neighbourhood, heaps of trash ate into slabs and thrust into roadways. Some of the dirt piled in open sewers, brooding and choky like tumours, curved around pedestrian bridges like boas, nestled like bird nests between roadside kiosks, festered in small land cavities and peopled clearings. And all over the place, stale air hung, linking the buildings together with its invisible stench.

The sun was fierce in the sky, forcing trees to create dark awnings under their canopies. At one side of the road, a woman was frying fish in a pan on a hearth under a wooden shack. The billows of smoke rose steadily from both sides of the hearth, pooling towards us. We crossed to the other side between a parked truck and the balcony of a house whose interior I glimpsed briefly: two men seated on a brown couch, gesticulating while a roving standing fan slowly turned its head. A goat and her kids were squirrelled under a table in front of the balcony, surrounded by black pods of their own waste.

When we got to our compound, waiting for Ikenna to open the gate, Boja said: “I saw Abulu try to enter the church during the service today, but he was not allowed in because he was naked.” Boja had joined a team of boys who played drums for our local church. The boys played by rotation and he’d played that day, and had thus sat at the front of the church near the altar — hence the reason why he’d been able to see Abulu come through the rear door of the church. Ikenna was fumbling in his pocket for the key, and had to turn the pocket inside out because the key had become tangled in a twine of the linen and unfurled fibres, wrapping itself out of his reach. The pocket was dirty: it was stained with ink, and small pieces of groundnut husks showered to the ground like dust when he thrust it out. When he tried to untangle the key without success, he tore it out with force, causing the pocket to spring a leak. He was starting to turn the key in the hole when Boja said, “Ike, I know you believe the prophecy, but you know we are children of God—”

“He is a prophet,” Ikenna replied curtly.

He opened the door and as he extracted the key from the keyhole, Boja said, “Yes, but he is not of God.”

“How did you know?” Ikenna snapped, turning to face Boja now. “I’m asking you; how did you know?”

“He isn’t, Ike, I’m sure.”

“What is your proof? Eh, what is your proof?”

Boja said nothing. Ikenna’s eyes were raised upwards above our heads and we all followed, and saw the object of his view: a kite made of different polythene materials gliding aloft in the distance.

“But what he said cannot happen,” Boja said. “Listen, he mentioned a red river. He said you will swim in a red river. How can a river be red?” He made a gesture that vocalized impossibility by spreading his hands, gazing at us as if asking for assurance that what he’d said was right. Obembe nodded in reply. “He is mad, Ike; he does not know what he says.”

Boja drew closer to Ikenna and in an unexpected show of courage, put his hand on Ikenna’s shoulder. “You have to believe me, Ike, you have to believe,” he said, shaking Ikenna’s shoulder as if he was attempting to demolish the mountain of fear deep within his brother.

Ikenna stood there, his eyes fixed on the floor — apparently moved by Boja’s words. It was a moment of hope, one in which it seemed that we could restore him who was lost to us. Like Boja, I, too, wanted to tell Ikenna that I could not kill him, but it was Obembe who spoke next.

“He. Is. Right,” Obembe stammered. “None of us will kill you. We are not — Ike — we are not even real fishermen. He said a fisherman will kill you, Ike, but we are not real fishermen.”

Ikenna looked up at Obembe and his face wore the expression of one confounded by what he’d heard. Tears stood in his eyes. It was now my turn.

“We cannot kill you, Ike, you are strong, and bigger than us all,” I said in a voice that was as collected as I could manage, having been nudged by the feeling that I, too, had something to say. But I did not know what gave me the audacity to take his hand and say: “Brother Ike, you said we hate you, but it is not true. We like you very much more than everyone.”

Although at that point my throat became warm, I said with all the calm I could muster: “We like you even more than Daddy and Mama.”

I stepped back from him and my eyes fell on Boja, who was nodding. For a moment, Ikenna seemed lost. Our words, it seemed, had had an impact on him, and for the first time in many weeks, my eyes and those of the others met his. His eyes were bloodshot and his face pale, but there was an expression on it that was so indescribable, so beyond recognition — as my memory at the time could afford — that it became the face that I now mostly remember of him.

A moment of great expectation followed, all of us waiting for what he would do next. As if nudged by a pat from a spirit, he turned and hurried into his room. Then from within it, he yelled: “I don’t want anyone disturbing me from now on. All of you mind your business and leave me alone. I warn you, leave me alone!”

The fear, after destroying Ikenna’s well-being, health and faith, destroyed his relationships, the closest of which was with us, his brothers. It seemed that he had fought the internal battle for too long, and now wanted to get it over with. As if to dare the prophecy to come true Ikenna began to do all he could to harm us. Two days after our attempt to persuade him, we woke to discover that Ikenna had destroyed our prized possession: a copy of the Akure Herald of June 15th, 1993. The newspaper had our photos on it; it had Ikenna’s on the front page with the caption Young Hero drives his younger brothers to safety. The photos of Boja, Obembe and me were placed in a small rectangular box just over Ikenna’s full image, under the title Akure Herald. The newspaper was priceless, our medal of honour even stronger than the M.K.O. calendar. At one time, Ikenna would have killed for it. The newspaper told the story of how he led us to safety during the internecine political riots, a seminal moment that changed everything in the life of Akure.

On that historic day, barely two months after we met M.K.O., we were in school when cars began honking interminably. I was in my class of mostly six-year-olds, unaware of the boiling unrest in Akure and around Nigeria. I’d heard of a war that had happened long before — a war Father often mentioned in passing. When he said the phrase “before the war,” a sentence unconnected to the events of the war would often follow, and then sometimes end with “but all these were cut short by the war.” There were times when, while chiding us for an act that smacked of laziness or weakness, he’d tell the story of his escapade as a ten-year-old boy during the war when he was left to cater for, hunt for, feed and protect his mother and younger sisters after they all took to the big Ogbuti forest to escape the invasion of our village by the Nigerian army. This was the only time he ever actually said anything that happened “during the war.” Alternatively, the phrase would be “after the war.” Then, a fresh sentence would take form, without any link to the war mentioned.

Our teacher disappeared early on when the commotion and the honking began. Once she’d left, my classroom emptied as children ran, crying for their mothers. The school was a three-storeyed building. The kindergarten and my nursery class were on the ground floor while the higher classes, the primary classes, started from the first floor up to the second. From the window of my class, I saw a mass of cars in different states — doors opened, driving off and some parking. I sat there, waiting for the moment when Father, like other fathers who had come to pick up their children, would come. But instead of him, Boja appeared at my classroom’s door calling my name. I answered and took my school bag and my water bottle.

“Come, let’s go home,” he said, climbing up the desks towards me.

“Why, let us wait for Daddy,” I said, looking around.

“Daddy isn’t coming,” he said, and put a forefinger across his lips to silence me.

He pulled my hand and led me out of the class. We ran between the scattered rows of wooden desks and chairs that had been uniformly arranged before the commotion began. Under an upturned chair lay a boy’s broken food flask and its content — yellowed rice and fish — strewn over the floor. Outside, it was as if the world had been sawn in two and we were all teetering on the edge of the chasm. I removed my hand from Boja’s grip. I wanted to return to my classroom and wait for Father.

“What are you doing, you fool!” Boja cried. “There’s a riot; they are killing people, let’s go home!”

“We should wait for Daddy,” I said, following him with cautious steps.

“No, we can’t,” Boja objected. “If these men break in, they will recognize we are M.K.O.’s boys, ‘Children of Hope ’93’, enemies, and, we’ll be in greater danger than anyone else.”

His words smashed my resilience into smithereens and frightened me. A crowd of mostly older pupils trying to get out had formed at the gate, but we did not head there. We crossed the fallen fence and began moving through a line of palm trees out of the school and joined Ikenna and Obembe, who were already waiting for us behind a tree in the bush, and together we ran.

The creepers crashed under our feet and a flood of air broke into my lungs. The bush spat us out into a small path that Obembe immediately identified as Isolo Street a few minutes later.

But the street was almost deserted. We ran past the timber market where, on normal days, we would have had to shield our ears because of the deafening noises of drilling machines. The many rickety trucks that transported heavy timber from the forests sat in front of a mountain of sawdust, but there was no one around them. From here, we saw the wide road split in two with a long rail the width of perhaps three of my feet placed in front of each other. It was the road to the Central Bank of Nigeria, the place Ikenna had suggested we go because it was the closest place protected by armed guards in which we could hide, because Father worked there. Ikenna insisted that if we did not go there, the junta’s forces — bent on cracking down on supporters of M.K.O. in Akure, his home state — would kill us. The road was heavily littered that day with all sorts of things — personal effects that had dropped from people fleeing the carnage — making Akure appear as if an aircraft had thrown out belongings from a great height. When we crossed to a side of the road where there was a walled compound with many trees, a car filled with people raced down the road with hellish speed. Just as the distance swallowed it, a blue Mercedes Benz with one of my classmates, Mojisola, in the front seat, emerged from the road we had come from. She waved at me, and I waved back, but the car raced on.

“Let’s go,” Ikenna said, once the car was out of sight. “We could not have stayed back at school; they would have recognized we are M.K.O.’s boys and we would have been in danger. Let us go through that road.” He pointed and glanced widely as though he had heard something we had not heard.

Every gripping detail of the riot my eyes saw, every smell of it, filled me with a concrete fear of death. We’d entered a bend when Ikenna cried: “No, no, let’s stop. We shouldn’t walk on the main road; it’s not safe.”

So we crossed to the other side, a major commercial lane, filled with shops that were all closed. The door of one of them was shattered, and pieces of broken wood, fecund with nails, dangled dangerously from the broken door. We were forced to halt somewhere in between a closed bar with crates of beer piled on each other and a truck littered with posters of Star Lager Beer, “33,” Guinness and other brands. That instant, a loud cry for help, spoken in Yoruba, came from somewhere we could not immediately make out. A man emerged from one of the shops and ran towards the road to our school. Our fear of the palpable danger grew.

We crossed the dump into a street where we saw a house in flames. The corpse of a man lay on its veranda. Ikenna ducked behind the burning house and we followed, trembling. It was the first time I, and probably the rest of my brothers, had seen a dead man. My heart raced, and that moment I became conscious of a gradual warmth that began to slowly seep down the seat of my school shorts. When I looked at the ground beneath me, I realized that I had wetted my shorts and watched the last few drops slip to the ground, trembling. A group of men, armed with clubs and machetes, trooped past, casting furtive glances about and chanting, “Death to Babangida, Abiola must rule.” Squatted like frogs, we maintained a silence of stones for as long as this clique was in sight. Once they had passed, we crawled behind one of the houses and found a van with a dead man in it parked just across from the backyard, its front door left open.

We could tell from the man’s attire — a long, flowing Senegalese robe — that he was a northerner: the main targets of the onslaught by M.K.O. Abiola supporters, who’d hijacked the riot as a struggle between his west, and the north, where the military president, General Babangida, belonged.

With a force no one thought he could muster, Ikenna hauled the dead man off the seat of the car. The man fell out of the car with a thud, blood spattering on the ground from his broken face. I screamed and began to cry.

“Keep quiet, Ben!” Boja cried, but I could not stop; I was very afraid.

Ikenna got in the driver’s seat and Boja sat beside him, Obembe and me in the back seat.

“Let’s go,” said Ikenna. “Let’s go to Daddy’s office in this car. Close the doors quickly!” he cried.

With the key in the ignition beside the large wheel, Ikenna started the car and the engine roared and blared into life with a prolonged groan.

“Ike, can you drive?” Obembe asked, trembling.

“Yes,” Ikenna said. “Daddy taught me how to some time ago.”

He revved the engine, pushed the car backwards with a jerk, and it went dead. He was about to kick-start the car again when the sound of ammunition in the distance kept us at a standstill.

“Ikenna, please drive it,” Obembe moaned, flapping his hands. Tears had begun to course down his face, too. “You asked us to leave the school, now we are going to die?”

There were bonfires and burning cars everywhere, for Akure was singed that day. We’d neared Oshinle Street on the east of the town when a military van filled with soldiers in full combat regalia sped past. One of them noticed it was a boy at the wheel of our car and tapped his friend, pointing in our direction, but the truck did not stop. Ikenna maintained a steady course, accelerating only when he saw the red clock-like arm of the speedometer move to a larger number, the way he’d always watched Father do it every time he sat with him in the front seat when he took us to school. We verged onto the road, staying close to its shoulder until Boja read out the sign Oluwatuyi Street and the small one beneath it with the inscription Central Bank of Nigeria. Then we knew we were safe and had escaped the 1993 election uprising in which more than a hundred people were killed in Akure. June the 12th became a seminal day in the history of Nigeria. Every year, as this day approached, it seemed as if a band of a thousand invisible surgeons, armed to the teeth with knives, trephines, needles and extraordinary anaesthetic materials, came with the influx of the north wind and settled in Akure. Then at night-time, while the people slept, they would commit frantic, temporal lobotomy of their souls in quick painless snatches, and vanish at dawn before the effects of the surgeries began to show. The people would wake with bodies sodden with anxiety, hearts pulsating with fear, heads drooping with the memory of loss, eyes dripping with tears, lips gyrating in solemn prayers, and bodies trembling with fright. They would all become like blurred pencil portraits in a child’s wrinkled drawing book, waiting to be erased. In that grim condition, the city would retract inwards like a threatened snail. And by the dim squint of dawn’s light, northern-born inhabitants would exit the town, shops would close and churches would convene for prayers of peace as the fragile old man that Akure often became in that month would wait for the passage of the day.

The destruction of that newspaper shook Boja greatly; he could not eat. Again and again he said to Obembe and me that Ikenna had to be stopped.

“This cannot continue,” he repeated many times over. “Ikenna has lost his mind; he has gone mad.” The following Tuesday morning, after a clear sky had bared its teeth, Obembe and I had slept late, having told stories into the rump of the night. Our door forcefully jerked open, rousing us to a swift awakening. It was Boja. He’d slept in the sitting room where he’d been sleeping since his first struggle with Ikenna. He came in looking sullen and cold, scratching every part of his body and grinding his teeth as he did.

“Mosquitoes nearly killed me last night,” he said. “I’m tired of what Ikenna is doing to me. I’m really tired!”

He’d said it so loudly I feared Ikenna might have heard it from his room. My heart raced. I looked at Obembe, but his eyes were on the door. I sensed that, like me, he was looking to see what might come next through that door.

“I hate that he doesn’t allow me into my own room,” Boja went on. “Can you imagine? He doesn’t let me into my own room.” He beat his hand on his chest in a gesture of possession. “The room Daddy and Mama gave both of us.”

He removed his shirt and pointed at places on his skin where he felt he’d been bitten. Although shorter than Ikenna, he closely followed him in maturity. Signs of hair growth had appeared on his chest, and actual hair now webbed his armpit. A dark shade trailed from under his navel down into his pants.

“Is the parlour so bad?” I asked in an effort to calm him, I did not want him to continue because I feared that Ikenna could hear it.

“It is!” he cried even louder. “I hate him for this, I hate him! No one can sleep there!”

Obembe cast a wary glance at me and I noticed that, like me, he was consumed with fear. Boja’s words had dropped like a piece of chinaware, its pieces scattered about. Obembe and I knew something was coming, and it seemed Boja knew, too, for he sat down and placed his hand on his head. Within minutes, a door opened from within the house, creaking aloud, followed by footsteps. Ikenna entered the room.

“Did you say you hate me?” Ikenna said softly.

Boja did not reply, but kept his eyes fixed on the window. Ikenna, visibly stung (for I saw tears in his eyes), gently closed the door and moved further into the room. Then, casting a spear of a scornful glance at Boja, he took off his shirt, in the custom of the boys in the town when about to fight.

“Did you say it or not?” Ikenna shouted, but did not wait for a reply. He pushed Boja off the chair.

Boja let out a cry and rose to his feet almost immediately, panting furiously, shouting: “Yes, yes I hate you, Ike, I do.”

Most times when I recall this event, I plead frantically for my memory to pity me and stop at this point, but it is always futile. I’d always see Ikenna stand still for a moment after Boja uttered those words, his lips moving for a long time before the words “You hate me, Boja” finally formed. But Ikenna uttered the words with so much power that his face seemed to lighten with relief. He smiled, nodded and blinked a tear.

“I knew it, I knew it; I have only been foolish all this while.” He shook his head. “That was why you threw my passport into the well.” A look of horror had appeared on Boja’s face at those words, and he made to speak, but Ikenna spoke on in a louder voice, switching from Yoruba to Igbo. “Wait! Were it not for that malicious act, I would have been in Canada by now, living a better life.” And as if every word Ikenna said — every complete sentence — struck him, Boja would gasp, mouth agape, and words would begin to form, but Ikenna’s “Wait!” or “Listen!” would drown it out. And some strange dreams, Ikenna continued, had further confirmed his suspicions; in one of them, he’d seen Boja chasing him with a gun. Boja’s face twitched at this, his face flushed with a mixture of shock and helplessness as Ikenna spoke. “So, I know, my spirit attests, to how much you hate me.”

Boja walked springily to the door wanting to leave, but stopped when Ikenna spoke. “I knew,” Ikenna was saying, “the moment Abulu saw that vision that you were the Fisherman he talked about. Nobody else.”

Boja stood still and listened with his head bent, as if ashamed.

“That is why I’m not surprised when you now confess that you hate me; you always have. But you will not succeed,” Ikenna said suddenly now, fiercely.

He made towards Boja and struck him on the face. Boja fell and hit his head on Obembe’s iron box on the floor with a loud clang. He let out a jolting cry of pain, stamping his feet on the floor and screaming. Ikenna, shaken, took a step back as if teetering on the mouth of a chasm, and when he reached the door, he turned and ran out.

Obembe stepped forward towards Boja once Ikenna left the room. Then he halted suddenly and shouted, “Jesus!” At first, I did not see what Ikenna and Obembe had seen, but did that instant: the pool of blood that was filling the top of the box and trickling down to the floor.

In distress, Obembe ran out of the room and I followed. We found Mother at her garden in the backyard where, hoe in hand and a few tomatoes in her raffia basket, she was talking with Iya Iyabo, the neighbour who had reported our fishing, and we called out to them. When Mother came into our room with the woman, they were horrified by what they saw. Boja had stopped wailing, and now his body lay still, his face hidden in his bloodied hands, his body in a strange state of tranquillity as if he were dead. Beholding him lying there, Mother broke down and wept.

“Quickly, let us take him to Kunle’s Clinic,” Mama Iyabo called out to her.

Mother, agitated beyond measure, hurriedly changed into a blouse and a long skirt. With the help of the woman, she lifted Boja onto her shoulder. Boja remained calm, his eyes gazing vacantly, as he wept noiselessly.

“If anything happens to him now,” Mother said to the woman, “what will Ikenna say? Will he say that he killed his own brother?”

“Olohun maje! — God forbid!” Iya Iyabo spat. “Mama Ike, how can you let such a thing into your head just because of this? They are growing boys and this is common with boys their age. Stop this; let’s take him to a hospital.”

Once they were gone, I became conscious of the steady sound of something trickling to the floor. I looked and saw it was the pool of blood. I sat in my bed, shaken by what my eyes had seen, but it was the memory Ikenna had conjured up that disturbed me. I remember that incident, although I was only about four at that time. Mr Bayo, Father’s friend in Canada, was returning to Nigeria. Having promised to take Ikenna to Canada to live with him whenever he returned, Mr Bayo had got Ikenna a passport and a Canadian visa. Then the morning Ikenna was to leave with Father to Lagos, where he was to board the plane with Mr Bayo, Ikenna could not find his passport. He’d kept the passport in the breast pocket of his travelling jacket and hung it in the wardrobe he shared with Boja. But it was no longer in that jacket. They were running late and Father, furious, began a frantic search for the passport, but they could not find it. Afraid the plane would leave without Ikenna, as he would need to go through a new process to get the passport and travelling documents all over again, Father’s anger escalated. He was about to smack Ikenna for his carelessness, when Boja, hiding behind Mother so Father wouldn’t beat him, confessed he’d stolen the passport. Why, Father asked, and where was it? Boja, visibly shaken, said: “In the well.” Then he confessed to having thrown it there the previous night because he didn’t want Ikenna to leave him.

Father dashed for the well in delirious haste, but when he looked, he saw pieces of the passport floating on the surface of the water, damaged beyond repair. Father piled his hands on his head, shaking. Then, as if suddenly possessed of a spirit, he reached for the tangerine tree, broke off a stick, and ran back towards the house. He was about to descend on Boja when Ikenna intervened. He’d arranged for Boja to throw the passport in the well because he did not want to leave without him; they would go together when they were older. Although I’d come to understand later (and even our parents did so) that this was a lie, Father was overcome at the time by what Ikenna had deemed an act of love, which now, in this moment of his metamorphosis, had become to him an act of ultimate hatred.

When Mother and he returned from the clinic that afternoon, Boja appeared many miles from himself. Blood-stained gauze, with cotton wool underneath, covered the gash at the back of his head. My heart sank when I saw it and I wondered how much blood he’d lost and shuddered at the pain he must have endured. I tried to understand what had happened, what was going on but I could not; the reckoning of these things was not cheap.

Throughout the rest of that day, Mother was a mined road that exploded when anyone stepped within an inch of her. Later, while preparing eba for dinner, she began to soliloquize. She complained that she’d asked Father to request a transfer back to Akure or move us down with him, but that he hadn’t. And now, she lamented, his children were splitting each other’s heads. Ikenna, she continued, had turned into a stranger to her. Her mouth was still moving when she set dinner on the table, while each one of us pulled out the wooden dining chairs and sat on them. When she put out the last thing for dinner, the hand-washing bowl, she began to sob.

Silence and fear engulfed the house that night. Obembe and I retreated to our room early, and David, scared of being around Mother in her harsh mood, followed us. For long before I slept, I listened for any sign of Ikenna but heard none. Yet even as I waited, I secretly wished he would not come home until the next morning. One reason was my fear of Mother’s fury, what she might do to him if he returned in this climate. The second was my fear of how, after they returned from the clinic, Boja had declared that enough was enough. “I promise,” he’d said, licking the tip of his index finger in a gesture of oath-taking, “I will no longer be kept out of my room.” And, to make good his threat, he’d retired to sleep there. I was afraid of the potential danger of Ikenna returning and finding him there and this filled me with the immense premonition that Boja would, someday, retaliate, for he’d been deeply wronged. And as my body yielded to the forceful closure of that day, I began to ponder how far the venom in Ikenna had travelled and feared where it would end.