I knew her by name, just like I knew my mother by name, the sun-bleached petite woman who fried yam along the road to my school, whom Mama called friend and sat with after school hours, recounting Papa’s escapades and misgivings. I hated her for that, for the willingness with which Mama banished regard for my father just to indulge her inquisitiveness.

“So, what did he say next?” the woman would often ask with hooded laughter, glee dancing in her eyes, and Mama would chuckle freely and loudly as though she wasn’t desecrating Papa and unmasking his weakness to a stranger.

“She’s a hustler, such a breath of fresh air,” Mama told Papa during dinner as an excuse for her spending so much time with the small woman.
“Hmmm,” was all Papa said before he went back to his food, and I willed for him to do more, to say more, to let out more than the non-committal sound he loved so much. Mama was using him as a prop in her friendship with the sun-bleached woman and he was enabling her with his absentminded responses.

Mama’s relationship with the sun-bleached woman evolved. While she had once been content seeing her twice a week and sitting next to her as she fried yam and served her customers, it was no longer enough for her to visit twice in a week or to just sit and watch.

I always stood and observed with disgust—refusing to sit—as my mother, sophisticated as she was, bent over to stir the slices of yam simmering in hot oil, then proceeded to turn around and serve peppered yam to undeserving customers with a smile on her face. Mama who never cooked, not even for her husband. Mama who shied away from the gathering of ndị Nwunye dị in avoidance of the chores that came with such gatherings. Mama whom Papa called Ugegbe, stood under the hot sun and served food to strangers. The sun-bleached woman was slowly turning my mother into someone else, someone less.

I hated the woman and wished her ill, until I met her son—a fiery boy with a creased uniform and a crooked smile who did not inherit his mother’s petite nature nor share in her love for cheap bleaching cream. He was two years my senior yet three classes ahead of me.

“He is smart,” Mama said, and I felt a dark green venom spread through my hollow body. Smart was my thing, intelligence was my gig. It was the one way I grabbed Papa’s attention and retained Mama’s interest. But next to the boy with a crooked smile, my intelligence seemed diminished.

I sat quietly in the car as the driver took us home, willing myself to do more than just bleed green, willing myself to hate the boy who was threatening to yank my life away from me, willing myself to sabotage him. But my heart and mind already picked sides with him and all I could feel was sympathy for the boy and resentment for the hand that life had dealt him.

The next day, as Baba Bola drove us to the sun-bleached woman’s stall, I fought my excitement over seeing the boy again. But my heart betrayed me and went off track as we approached his mother’s stall, because there he was, slicing yam with his sleeves rolled up. His muscles flexed with the movement of his hands and my heart pulsated in sync with them. I could see from his uniform that he was a student of the Community Secondary school, a school steps below mine on both social and academic ranking, but that did not matter, schools could easily be changed.

As we went home that day, I waited for my mother to start praising his intelligence again, then I suggested, “Why don’t you give him a scholarship to my school?” Mama must not have expected me to say anything as the sound of my voice seemed to startle her. She stared at me as though she was going to ask why I would suggest such, and I stared back daring her to ask.

The next session, the boy with the crooked smile resumed school with me. Baba Bola picked him up at his house which was not so far from ours, and although he allowed my mother to hug him when he greeted and thanked her, he said nothing to me, choosing not to even look at me. I could tell that he was abashed at being the subject of pity and I could not fault him for that. To my mother, he had no choice but to be grateful, but to me he owed nothing at all.

At school, he never spoke to me, he joined the other kids in ignoring me. We were not in the same class but the few times I bumped into him, he acted as though he didn’t know me. We went to school coated in silence and came back reeking of its poison.

I wasn’t allowed to initiate conversation with anyone, I couldn’t recall why but it was a rule I had strictly adhered to for a long time. But I was so drawn to the boy that I broke the rules and said the first words. The words uttered in the backseat of my mother’s car, with Mama seated between us on our way to school, left the air thick with anticipation. But as silence raged between us, I realized he had ignored me like he always did.

Deciding that I had had enough of his indifference, I immediately hurried down after him when the car came to a stop, without saying goodbye to Mama, and followed him. I wanted so badly for him to turn around and talk to me, to ask why I was stalking him, to yell at me and tell me off, but he did not and neither did his new friends whom he met up with and with whom he strolled to the assembly ground. Walking silently behind them, I realized with dread that the boy I love couldn’t care less about me and I felt my mind shutter as my heart shut down.

As days bled into weeks, I fought to make peace with his nonchalance and to forge on with life as I knew it before I met him but that seemed impossible as I could not imagine a lifetime in which I did not pine for him.

Hope finally peeked through the barricaded door of my shattered heart on the day Mama was too sick to accompany us to school. Baba Bola had stopped in front of the boy’s house and as he skipped to my side of the car, I knew that was the day he was finally going to talk to me.

“Mummy is not here today?” he asked, opening my door. He had taken to calling Mama ‘mummy’ and I wondered why she never corrected him as she often did me. But before I could answer his question, Uncle Bola’s voice pierced the air.
“Don’t!” he screamed and the boy who already had one leg raised, froze.
“That’s Ms Ivara’s spot”
“Ms who?” the boy asked, and I felt red droplets fall from my heart. He didn’t even know my name.
“Just go around and use the other door,” Baba Bola instructed, ignoring him and he complied.
“Who is Ms Ivara?” he asked again, already seated in the car.
“Me! me!” I screamed tired of his childish little games but he didn’t bother to acknowledge me, didn’t even spare me a look, and although Baba Bola gazed towards my direction, he too said nothing.

As the car came to a stop in our school compound, the boy did not jump down as he often did, instead he sat upright and asked for the third time, “Who is Ivara?”
Baba Bola exhaled loudly and surveyed the car like a thief on a mission, then like one who had just discovered a breach in security, he whispered, “That is a story best told outside this car.”

I wanted to scream at him, to ask why he was talking about me as though I wasn’t there, but Baba Bola was known for his humour and practical jokes. I wouldn’t let his words get to me. He must have guessed that I liked the boy and was now on a mission to taunt me. Having cracked the code, I smiled and wished him a lovely day as I left the car.

Later that day, when we dropped off the boy with the crooked smile at his house, Uncle Bola exited the car and walked with him until they were out of earshot Although I wanted to follow them and hear what they were saying, I couldn’t get over what happened the last time I stepped out of the car after school when I wasn’t yet home, so I consoled myself with the knowledge that Baba Bola was most likely persuading him to like me back and decided to stay put.

After spending over fifteen minutes watching them whisper like rats, my decision crumbled and I made my way out of the car to call Baba Bola to take me home. I didn’t mean to eavesdrop on them — did not plan to overhear their conversation. But as I stepped out of the car and walked towards them, the wind carried their words to me.

I froze as I heard the boy’s soft voice whisper, “Why does she still keep space for her?” And then I unfroze and walked back into the car as fast as I possibly could but not fast enough to outrun Baba Bola’s response.

As we drove home, I sat in the moving car with my hands clutching my heart. I couldn’t wait to get home and discover the truth for myself, and as soon as Baba Bola hit the brakes, I sprang out of the car and ran into the house.

I found my mother in my room, sitting on my bed, her shoulders slumped forward as she folded my clothes into a bag, her eyes heavy with unshed tears. A pen rolled off my table and she stood to pick it up but as she kept it back, her hand brushed over a painting she had commissioned for my thirteenth birthday, and she stilled.

I moved to stand beside her, and she — alert to my presence — turned, her hands gripping the painting violently, and called to me with a sad smile, “My baby.”
I forced a smile in response to her.
“My baby,” she called again, her curved lips trembling as a tear finally found its way out of her eyes opening the floodgates for others.
I made to hold her but she shook her head slowly and called to me again and again and again.
“My baby, my baby. My baby!” With each call her voice rose higher and higher, until she reached a crescendo and came crashing down with a thud, taking the painting with her and smashing it on the ground over and over and over again.

I immediately swung into action, holding her, restraining her but she refused to be held down as she hit her fists against the broken pieces of the painting. She had resumed her calls, although they were now refined into screams, wails of despair and agony. “My baby!” she called. Reality blurred as each syllable shot straight to my heart, stirring up memories long buried.

Urgent footsteps sounded in the corridor and I turned to see Papa enter the room. Seeing her on the floor with bloodied hands, he rushed to her, brushing by me, and held her amidst her struggle.

“I hear her,” Mama sobbed after Papa had nestled her into his hands. “I hear her in the silence, in the noise, in the breeze, in the car, in this room, in my head. She’s here, she is always always here.”

Her words pierced right through my heart like a dagger and I finally understood it — the reason I barely had an appetite, the reason my father no longer looked me in the face or spent time with me, the reason my mother carried me with her everywhere she went, the reason the boy with a crooked smile wouldn’t notice me no matter how hard I tried, the reason Baba Bola hadn’t tried to make me laugh in months.

“No one can tell a mother how to grieve,” he had responded to the boy with a crooked smile, and now I knew just how right he was.

Papa’s body shook as he held Mama and I knew I did that to them. The brokenness in our home, the hollowness in Mama’s heart, the lost gaze in Papa’s eyes, the emptiness in my bones, it was all my fault. I had become an ominous presence haunting sacred space, just like the horror movies I hated.

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Filipp Romanovski on Unsplash