Mad Man Timo used to come to our window after a heavy downpour and place his penis in between our louvers. He ran around the neighbourhood naked. He grabbed women by the butt and suffered slaps whenever he reached for a man’s crotch. He would roll in the PotoPoto and sing.
‘If you come out, you die. If you don’t, you still do. Thou Shall not’ For a mad man, he had a good voice.
Sometimes, I covered my eyes at his dangling crotch. But I had seen it well enough to draw it blindfolded. Sometimes it looked like a snail without a shell and other days it resembled a long earthworm that was reeling from the effect of salt. It depended on the position he stood. When he was still young in madness, Mad Man Timo was taken to a psychiatrist who referred him to an Ifa priest for a cure. He spent two years picking dirt and eating mud before he was taken back to the hospital. There, he received more attention from the Catholic priest who spent five minutes with him than the doctor who kept walking past his bed as if he was invisible. Mad Man Timo only came to our window because we were the only tenants that did not pour hot water on him. We were his favourite audience. He told us one day when he saw Caleb and me going home from school.
‘I have performed in many countries and continents. But whenever my tour bus stops in Nigeria, I tell myself that I must perform in your arena. You are my number one fan and I will make sure I perform at your funeral free of charge’
Iye said he watched a lot of commando movies in his youth. That was why he ran mad. He would run around the street, pointing wooden guns at children going to school, and elders whom he caught shitting in the bush.
‘Hands up,’ he would challenge them.
‘A thousand madness to you and your mother,’ they would greet him back.
‘Too much fantasy leaves no space for reality. This distraction is the root of all madness,’ Iye said this as she tasted the food that she cooked in the living room.
We never went out when it rains. We lived without a door. On nights like these, where Mad Man Timo cast a shadow across the windowpane, mosquitoes and voices filled our room and broke through our curtain’s defences and bit us wrenchingly. It was an attack from all fronts. We heard the neighbour’s mockery before it escaped their lips. There was no roof in the kitchen and the compound was always flooded. We would slip tiny morsel of food down our throat, squeeze our face and spit it out when Iye was not looking. Perhaps once upon a time, Iye could cook. But as we grew older, our taste buds grew outgrew her delicacies. Sweet became too spicy. And bitter just became sour.
We found laughter outside the taste of the food and the tiny morsel we slipped down our throat. Laughter was the thread that bound us together. It was not enough to cover the hole-ridden aluminium roof that water slipped in through, but it was warm enough to keep us from shuddering whenever the heavens coughed in form of lightning. When Iye’s packs of foods got caught by custom because it was contraband, laughter was enough to fill her empty shops and the pages of a thousand empty naira notes.
After a heavy downpour, Iye would gather us under the bonfire of a blackout and mosquito bites. Tales of our parents love stories before their death would slip out, reawakening scars that had not found peace. How quickly mirth would grow to brooding silence, leaving the attention to the cricket and frogs that cried till daybreak in distant ponds. The next evening, we ate the same food. Trash! Eba and floating vegetables in what Iye called soup. Before Iye came the next day, we groped around the kitchen searching for garri. Finally, we planned a heist and stole from the neighbours in the kitchen.
And I wish life would continue that way. It was sour but it was easier to swallow. We drank too much garri. We drank Iye’s soup and spat it out. We laughed. We were poor, but we were happy. But with age, comes a bitter realization that breeds the deadliest poison of all, Impatience. Impatience makes you feel older.
It began in school. A school where students had to create their seats with wood and nail or else, they would stand throughout the term. A school where mathematics and Agric were taught in Yoruba and the Igbo sales boys, who enrolled to pass WAEC, always had to stare in absurdity as if Kanye West was performing a song in Hausa. The same school where we never finished an exam without thugs jumping through the fence to reply to the scores of some senior students who had trespassed on their territories. Every morning, at the assembly ground, when we gathered for praise and lectures, the principal would distribute curses and swears the same way Oprah gave souvenirs. You get a curse! Everybody gets a curse!
It began when our Civic Education teacher told us ‘Not to compare sufferings’.
I thought about Karen, our class captain, who used to moan about the bad network she experienced at night whenever she was chatting on Facebook.
She would look at me and say, ‘Oh Sharon! You have no idea how I feel when I can’t get a proper chat at night. It is so exasperating.’
Karen was the only one who could understand what a sophisticated word like ‘Exasperating’ meant. It was exasperating to complain about a network problem in a school where teachers cursed students as they punched their faces. It was exasperating for Karen that she couldn’t send nudes before the deadlines while my tongue was already getting used to watery soup and long eels of penis casting shadows on our window. Karen, with an exaggerated accent from the lost seas of Westeros, nodded and clapped when the teacher uttered his ‘Aspire to Maguire’ philosophy and I could not get out of my head the picture of my dad, In Igbogbi hospital, surrounded by dead bodies, and a nurse, looking at Iye, with unpathetic eyes and a stoic face. ‘There is nothing else we can do. Leave it to God and make him comfortable until his time comes’. She said this after she had tried twenty-seven times to locate a vein in his body so she could give him an injection.
Perhaps the teacher wanted us all to feel equal. But after that day, I felt more unequal than I had ever been. That night I had a dream about rich people. They organized a seminar to create some wise sayings to keep poor people from dreaming higher. I saw them, waking up and walking stealthily through the bush path. Holding torches in their Kimono and Flip flops. ‘Agenda must agend’, they cried. I pictured them the same way the children of Israel must have been waiting impatiently for Moses when he went to get the ten commandments. Only this time, the rich people were burning bushes for the laws of being broke to be drafted. There was a leader among them and they hailed him as he wrote.
‘Machala’
‘Baddest’
‘Odogwu’
Finally, he came down from the mountain and read it out loud.
‘Thou shalt not compare sufferings.’ They laughed at poor people. They laughed at me.
And as if there was no deeper tunnel down our tragic lives, we got robbed. Morals usually come at the end of a story but this one is really important I have to tell you now. If you are shot in Nigeria, find a quiet place to lay your head and die rather than visit a general hospital.
We were together, another evening of Iye’s soup, and Caleb’s garri addiction.
‘I am never getting married,’ Caleb said.
He spat out a splice of leaf and continued chewing. Iye smiled and I blinked in reply. Caleb always started conversations like this. He once said he would become an activist, and organize rallies to speak against marriage but he was always head deep in the skirt of the next lady he found.
‘If our parents did not get married. We would not be suffering this much.’
‘At least we have Iye.’
Iye did not look at me to affirm my complement. Instead, she stirred her spoon absentmindedly.
‘Everything happens for a reason.’
‘Sometimes it feels as if there is no rhythm to our lives.’
‘There is a light at the end of this tunnel’
I was beginning to sound like my Civic Education teacher and I hated it. I hoped Caleb would stop speaking and Iye would ask us to turn off the lantern and sleep.
They burst in through the curtains. There are no doors so there is barely any resistance. Caleb moves to stand up but a cutlass on his shoulder splatters blood into the open pot of soup. Iye is choked to the bed and I am helplessly speechless. We are blindfolded. It all happens in a second. Caleb’s whimper. Iye’s torn skirts. I, blindfolded and slapped anytime I breathe loudly. When they leave, they do not take their dread with them. The fear lingers on as we each take time in opening our eyes. We hold our breath. Fear is in the air, pungent like the immortal Hausa perfume. Caleb slumps. Iye screams, breaking the silence that we are buried in.
It takes hours before we find Caleb a floor to sleep in. I can’t tell if the hospital is always this crowded or everyone just got raped, slapped, and gutted today. Don’t compare suffering. Have you ever been to a hospital with the will to not compare suffering? There is a student with the weight of his family responsibilities digging a tunnel in his head. Of course, the lady with the unsuccessful abortion is gasping for breath as her hands are getting tired of holding her guts in place. There are dead bodies littered on the floor and sleepless ghosts are singing through the halls. If you are unconscious enough you can hear them, discussing the doctors that let them die because they were too poor to afford hand gloves for surgery. If you get robbed, you have to buy all the equipment’s for surgery or else the bullets will sink deeper and your ghost will become one of the many choristers lingering on the hospital corridor. A man is groaning. Doctors are in their office, placing a bet on bet9ja app. Don’t compare suffering. Nurses are playing a different gamble of whose life is more important to save today. They have nicknames for their projects. The tumour man or the cancer girl? A pregnant woman is pushing her child out of her womb, all alone. The other patients stare from their beds and their mats. Iye comes back with a nurse. She is short and drags her legs across the floorboards.
‘Don’t rush me.’ She pushes Iye back
‘Please, help my brother.’
The nurse points at Iye’s bloodied gown. ‘Did you do this to him?’
‘No, we were robbed. I was raped. They slapped us. They, they cut him. He tried to fight back. He was fighting for me,’ Iye had more to say.
‘Police report please,’ she says. She opens her palm and chews her gum nonchalantly. I burst out in tears. I feel for Caleb’s heart. His body is now cold. Iye grabs the nurse by her feet and cries. She means to beg. I know I should beg too but I feel Caleb again. Cold. I walk out of the hospital. The nurse kicks Iye’s hands off her leg and bends to touch Caleb.
‘Please don’t leave his body here. Bury him outside, or anywhere else.’
The wind blows into the room and lighting strikes again. I close my eyes. I tell myself that I will open them and I know what I will see when I do. We will all be home, in our one-room apartment, eating soup, and trading jokes. We will not complain because we cannot compare sufferings. It would be exasperating. Caleb will grope for garri after the meal. When the rain begins, we will hide under old smelly clothes and our waning lantern. Just then, when we are about to sleep under the grace of cold and family, Mad Man Timo would come to our window and place his dick in-between the window pane and sing us a symphony.
Before Iye came to cook for us, my mother ruled the kitchen. Long live the woman, long live the kitchen. We used to have delicacies on weekends. I was never shy to pack my lunch box and I never spat out soup. Then she died on a hospital bed. The light went off during surgery and the hospital had no generator. Father believed it was spiritual and took to fasting. He grew leaner and had headaches. One day, Iye took him to Igbobi, the hospital. He needed drugs. He had a headache. The nurse looked at him, with her big lips, Phillips. She said his death was imminent. She spoke like a seer, not the doctor she was. She was offering judgement instead of hope. My father had a headache, not cancer, not Ebola. He died the next day. His last words were the nurses he kept calling for help. He did not know their names. Long before I became an orphan, Iye told me of the low budget Romeo and Juliette story of how my parents eloped on a ship to Lagos, after their proposal was rejected by their parents. Father was broke. Mother was young. Together, they eloped. They survived the stringent harmattan and intense heat. Iye remembers. I don’t. Memories are like old clothes. Even if we haven’t worn them for a long time, at first glance, or a pungent whiff, they come rushing in, overwhelming our senses, cracking our lips, and walking down a familiar path that we can tread without maps. Whenever Iye relived her years, I never had to wander far off to see the pictures she painted. I saw through her. Months folded into years and my parents took a higher decision and tied the knot. A bunch of idiots.
Festus Obehi Destiny is a creative writer from Lagos, Nigeria. He has a website at www.hugsandeyes.com where he manages and promotes his creative writing portfolio. He also works as an opinion contributor for newspaper websites and magazines, as well as a media creatives for movie productions in Nigeria. When he isn’t working as a storyteller, Destiny enjoys watching K-Dramas and listening to rap albums.
Image by Tom Fisk via Prexels.
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