Nnamdi was thirty-eight when Ugochi said it was over. She did not shout. There was no quarrel to file away and rehearse later. She simply stood in the middle of the room, that had been theirs for eight months, folded her hands, and said, “This relationship is like a canvas. Plain and empty.”

Canvas. He remembered that word for weeks. He had tried, God knows he had. He ate the pizza he did not like because she loved the way the cheese stretched. He followed her to Christ Embassy on Sundays and sat among shouting men. And at night, he read every copy of Rhapsody of Realities she left on the table. All those testimonies of miracles — a woman who vomited a lizard, a man whose car key appeared after prayers — which he found implausible to believe but read anyway because love, he thought, was about tolerance. Still, she packed her small box, and left his flat on a Tuesday morning while he had gone to buy bread.

It was the fourth time.

Chinaza left the week he mentioned marriage. Bola stopped picking up his calls after he met her parents. Sandra, whom he had paid school fees for, left a note on his pillow. And now, Ugochi, with whom he had stayed the longest because he thought that duration would finally translate to permanence.

So, for eight months, he had made it a ritual: every Friday, he would buy suya from Mai Suya at the junction, extra onions, extra yaji, wrapped in newspaper that stained his palm with oil, and take it to the cyber cafe where Ugochi worked. She would take it without smiling, but still, he liked going. Now Fridays came and there was nowhere to take suya to. And now, with the ritual broken, he realised how empty the other days had been.

For weeks after, his life fell into a strange, precise boredom. He would stop at a drinking spot after work. One bottle of Gulder, then a second, while watching the road and nothing else.

At site, the foreman would look at him and say, “Oga Electrician, why your face de like this? Light no dey shine again?” and he would laugh, shortly, feebly. How could he explain that, while he was a successful electrician, he was a failure when it came to relationships?

The realisation of being a failure in finding love was not one to arise from self-pity. It was merely a fact, and therein lay the root of his heaviness. It was factual. Then came the Sunday afternoon when Motherly Mother banged on his door.

She had moved into the flat below his, two months ago, with her twenty-four-year-old son. He had never said anything to her apart from “Good morning, ma,” to which she responded cheerfully, as if she had been waiting all day to be greeted.

That afternoon, she came up with a torchlight and two small phones, one with a cracked screen. Her blue Hitarget wrapper smelled of camphor and mustiness that reminded Nnamdi of his mother.
“No light for my side since yesterday, my son. Abeg make l charge for your side?”
He said yes. What else could he say?

After that, she came every night. She would bring something in exchange — moin moin wrapped in banana leaf, still warm, or freshly-baked meat pies that smelled of butter and nutmeg. She knocked like she owned his door, ignoring the doorbell, but he began to look forward to her nocturnal visits, with that familiar scent that fascinated and repelled him at the same time. That contrasting feeling summed up the entire building. Like the incessant bloody-battling with unseen demons that came from upstairs where a certain pastor lived, while the gentle melody of reggae came from Mama B’s flat.

He had never actually been to Mama B’s flat, until the night, in high spirits after finishing a contract, he went down to finally fix her light issue. That was when he saw Buchi.

Buchi was tall and dark-skinned. Big and ugly in a way that made you look twice. As though God had made him in haste, running out of time and squashing his face with a thumb. His body was a canvas of calligraphy, all tattoos and tapestry: a viper curled around his neck with its tongue at his Adam’s apple, an anchor on his left shoulder, and a big puma, mid leap, on his back. His hair was dyed a dark, fading blue, and his voice was hoarse, as if perpetually coming out from a cold. His eyes were a foremost testament of his smoking, yet he had a perfect set of teeth with a dazzling whiteness that jarred Nnamdi.

He did not like Buchi at first sight. He did not like the way he spoke to his mother — shouting, “Mama, you don start again!” — or how he came back at midnight most times, after several days of absence, smelling of weed and dried sweat. Yet Mama B did not care. Or rather, she cared too much to care about that. She still washed his singlet and left it folded on his bed. She still cooked his favourite food — jollof rice with too much curry, he would later learn— and kept it covered even when he did not come home. Nnamdi had never even heard her shouting at him. And the only time Nnamdi had seen Buchi fetch water for his mother, he felt that Mama B should not have expressed gratitude as she did, standing by the stairs and thanking him. It was supposed to be his duty.

After Nnamdi restored the power supply in her house, he suddenly felt a light erupt within him as well, and it frightened him. His own mother died when he was seven, and his stepmother disregarded him, except when she told his father not to take him to church again because he loved the music too much. And now, he suddenly saw Mama B as the mother he never knew he needed, and he felt a pull to be the son she deserved.

He would buy her oranges and anara from the market, tune the TV station to Nigerian movies that amused her, and he would sit on her low stool after work, telling her stories of what happened on site. And, of course, he moaned to her. Often. About his failed past relationships. How he cared and tolerated and tried to please, but in the end was dumped as usual. Broken as he was, he told her one evening, peeling an orange she had given him.
“Love is senseless, Mama B. It’s nonsense.”
She took his hand, and calmly said, “Love matters even if the beloved feels unloved. Love anyway.”

Her faith was terrifying. She kept praying and caring for her son Buchi, going to church every Sunday, rosary around her neck, swinging as she walked, playing Father Mbaka songs loud on her small stereo — the same stereo Buchi’s reggae blared from — weeping when Mbaka sang about Mercy.

One day, after she had gone to Enugu for the rumoured Bethesda water that everyone was fetching, she brought Nnamdi a small can of holy water, with a white sticker that said, Holy Land, in blue ink. She talked about the miracles she witnessed. Crowds. People falling. “There was a man whose son was healed of lifelong blindness after drinking it. I saw him, Nnamdi. And I wished Buchi had followed me.” She sounded a little wistful, so Nnamdi accepted the strange gift to humour her even though he did not believe. He put it on top of his fridge beside his tester.

One of those days when she slept alone because Buchi did not come back home, Mama B called him to her flat. Her eyes were tired. She brought out a folder from under her bed, and showed him Buchi ‘s SSCE results. Strings of As. Further Maths A1. Physics A1. Chemistry A1.

“He was brilliant,” she said as if confessing. “He played drums for St. Peter’s Catholic Church. He followed me to the pharmacy, and chatted with me as we prepared dinner. But he changed the moment he left for university. He dropped out after two years, even though he was on scholarship. When he came back, it was with tattoos, blue hair and a drum set. He refused to find a proper job, started to play drums for a club on Anwai Road, flocked around with some ruthless boys, and refused to marry the girlfriend he got pregnant.” Mama B’s voice was getting thicker, more sentimental. “He never told me what happened. It must be those boys he goes around with. I can’t imagine how hard it must have been for him at the university. But he will change. He will surely change.”

But Nnamdi did not hear her. He stared at the result. At the passport photo clipped to it, a small Buchi, no tattoos, hair low, smiling with a gap tooth.

Weeks afterwards, he looked at Buchi with a respectful glance. Not pity. Recognition. He listened more to the rhythm of Bob Marley coming from the flat, and even hummed “Nobody can stop reggae” with Lucky Dube. Even when he came home after work and found him behind the stairs, red-eyed and bare-chested, in a sphere of cigarette smoke, Nnamdi did not feel the former contemptuousness he usually felt with him.

So, on the day Mama B came to his flat happily, bubbly, dancing a little in her wrapper, to invite him to St. Peter’s Parish for a 3-day crusade night, a week after he had finally deleted Ugochi’s number, he said yes.
She winked at him. “You might even see fine girl there, Nnamdi. Fine Catholic girls. And I finally bribed Buchi into coming to play the drums for the Church. Can you imagine?” She chuckled, and recounted the old days when she and Buchi usually argued about crusades. He saying it was wrong for the Church to take a historic war, full of blood and swords, to nickname a symbolic fight with imaginary adversaries, and she insisting that Crusade was a perfect moniker to capture the whole event, because life itself was war.
“I told him, Buchi, your own war is inside your head. He vex commot.” She shook her head, smiling. “Anything can happen in the Holy Land,” she told Nnamdi.

In the church, later that evening, amidst dancing and drumming and trumpeting and screams of Amen erupting from the crowd whenever the priest prophesied about destiny helpers and open doors, Nnamdi stared at Buchi in the church corner, on the choir stand.

Buchi was bathed in sweat, his blue hair dripping. He hit the drums as if he was fighting them — snare, tom, bass — and a brassy clang at the cymbals to heighten effects, his viper tattoo rippling each time he turned his head. Under the yellow light from the gold chandelier, there was a certain glossiness to him. He did not look ugly then. He looked absorbed. And Nnamdi was taken aback to a past he hated to think of.

“Don’t take this boy to the church again. He will not come back. He stays there because of music,” she had insisted, and his father listened. And so, he stopped going. And he never danced again in church.

Now, his eyes flit to the images on the blue-painted walls — saints, angels blowing trumpets, and St. Peter, prominent, holding the key, big, rusted, almost as big as the man himself. Then, something shifted.

The band started a jazz-like cover of “Amazing Grace.” The keyboardist found a strange, slow chord, and the trumpeter blew a long note that sounded like crying. Suddenly, there was a communion of spirits, a harmony, a merging of heaven and earth. It was there. The symphony of souls: the instrumentalists’ tune melded into the singer’s baritone droning from the speakers and the echoes from the crowd. Like magic, the world became a hulking, hallowed vault where melody was the common language.

Nnamdi did not know how it happened. It was like a possession, an epileptic fit, an involuntary trembling of his whole body, a full submission to the rhythm. The music had entered his spirit before he could argue, and his muscles responded. Dusts curled up from under his feet. He was moving. Shouting Amen. Jumping up beside Mama B to claim the blessings floating in the air, sent forward by the priest. Mama B sang along happily, watching her sweating son banging the drums, and kept whispering to Nnamdi, her eyes closed, “God might do something. God might do something.”

But Nnamdi did not care about God doing something. For the first time in thirty-eight years, he did not care about pleasing anybody. He danced and danced, bending his limbs and twirling his waist, his arms freewheeling in the air, his head bobbing. He threw his head back, his face glowing, as though he were a little crazy. And somewhere in the drumming, Buchi saw him and smiled — the gap tooth again — and hit the drums harder.

 

 

 

 

Photo by Carlos Coronado on Unsplash