Mumsy says Trouble is my middle name. I carry it around like shit carries flies or like fire, smoke. But she isn’t the only one who thinks of me this way. Many from my secondary school remember me as the evil twin who forced the principal to box and wrestle after I replaced cooked beans with a pot full of shit in the dining hall. Others from my university days remember me as the ‘candle-man’ who sneaked into the dean’s office looking for exam questions before my candle started a fire that burnt it all down. These two events have endured as my worst, but nothing compares to the chaos I have just created here in Baruwa. 

My twin laid in a coffin. His girlfriend struggled, hands holding her back from rolling around on the floor as she wailed. A car and driver waited to transport the dead to Lagos. EFCC agents sat among the crowd, conquering plates of iyán and ẹ̀fọ́ rìró, washing it all down with cold juice, but with the hardness of their faces intact. My heart raced with the confliction of a guest nobody knew was coming. But none of this will make sense if I don’t begin from the very start.

Do you know Baruwa? You most likely don’t. But you probably know Ilesha. Baruwa is two hours by bus from Ilesha, and nothing describes it better than brown roofs, red dust and sleepiness, at least until I learned of its love for celebrations of all kinds, even—and especially—funerals. If you knew how far it is from Lagos, you’d wonder what my business is here. It started with my twin coming to live here a little over a year ago, and it was the same question I asked him then.

“Bàrú-wá kọ́, bàrú-lọ ni,” I voiced my disapproval. “People dey move to civilization; you wan move away from am. Is this just so you can avoid my troubles, àbí na make I no fit wear your clothes or beg you for money again?”

“Ke-nny!” The sternness on his face was more prominent than the fat yellow chain around his neck. “Haba, why you dey think like that, guy?”

I sniffled, exaggerating the fragility of my tear ducts.

That gets him all the time, especially because of our contrasting fortunes, and that time, he set his shortened blunt on an ashtray sitting on the windowsill and placed his hand on my shoulder. “Kenny, see as EFCC dey arrest boys up and down, then hand dem over to FBI. You go like make dem catch me? Na why I need to hide away from all this noise and attention. Stay low key, just do my thing and make money jẹ́jẹ́.”

I sighed. “Fine… but why Baru… Baru-what? Of all places? Which of our family members dey there?”

His face lit up like a full moon, his upper lip riding high to show the pinkness above his gapped-teeth—as identical as everyone say we are, this is one of our major differences; I could never smile or show the fullness of my emotions like that, safe for when there was need to cry. 

“Ṣé you remember Ene?” His question rode an unhinged excitement.

“Yes nau,” I nodded, keeping my eyes on his to register my interest. “No be that your crazy babe for NYSC?”

“Exactly!” He paused to sit the blunt back between his lips, sparked a flame, and blew light smoke out of his room window. “Na Baruwa she do her own NYSC.”

“Oh…” I nodded slowly. Since I didn’t graduate from university, I didn’t do NYSC, but I visited him several times while he did his. “Ṣèbí I dey see her for your place for Ilesha then.”

“Na because me I no dey go see her for Baruwa. That NYSC year, I only went there once, towards the end. She fall sick that time.” He passed the blunt.

“Interesting,” I pouted around the short remainder, the red glow brighter at the other end of my long drag.

“After that one time, I break up straight,” his pink gum was showing again. “Ask me why?”

The smoke was hardly gone from my mouth, but my interest was so piqued, I started to ask him why and ended in a coughing fit. 

“Ámẹ̀bọ,” he mocked, laughing as hard as I coughed. “Anyway, na there I meet Itunu. She came to make Ene’s hair but had to leave because Ene no feel well. Ọmọ, when I see that her wicked backside, I chased her down man. I couldn’t resist.”

It all made sense then. I remembered how much trouble Ene made when he left her, slapping my head against a car door and spraining her wrist, thinking I was him. Her madness was annoying, but I always wondered how leaving her for Itunu—dirty village girl with no manners—was better. When he moved to his fancy Lekki home shortly after returning to Lagos after NYSC, only for her to move in with him just weeks later, nobody knew where she had come from. So she was from Baruwa? No wonder. Keeping up with the pace in Lagos was a problem for her. One time while I was visiting, she returned home with her bag and shoes missing, claiming someone tricked her out of them by inviting her to a foot race. How stupid! Her, with her fat backside and second trimester tummy, in a foot race. I just shook my head. So, she got tired of Lagos and was going to make him move with her back to her village.

As though he read my mind, Taiye broke my trance. “But it’s not really because of her o. Ṣé you believe say that town no get even one police station? Na empty place. Plus, Itunu herself no get family there. She was only working there as a hairdresser, so nobody fit chook nose into my business there.” 

I hissed and threw the dying blunt out of the window. I picked my phone off the sill and walked out of his house, conscious of his confusion at seeing me leave.

That was how my brother left Lagos for Baruwa o. You can imagine.

See ehn, as much as everyone thinks I’m a troublemaker, I never did any of those things if not for Taiye’s sake—the pot of shit was because a wicked senior wanted his food, and the candle fire was because he couldn’t copy me in that exam as he had failed the course once and was now carrying it over. 

So, again, because of him, this time to save him from himself, I thought of a hundred and one ways to stop him, but Mumsy anticipated my thoughts and read me a sermon. First, she went on about how my calm and calculating nature contrasted his impatient and spontaneous one, often making it hard for people to believe it was me up to the evils and not him. Then she played back the many times ‘he got punished for a wrong I was responsible for, and how much he suffered just for being my twin’. It puzzled me how she knew so little about the backstories to these troubles, yet she was the only one in the world who could tell us apart without first looking out for the varying spaces in our front teeth. She sat there holding her Bible, saying just the right things to load my heart with guilt that wasn’t mine.

I wondered how he got her to back his plan, considering she never wanted him out of her sight. When he first moved out after only just moving back from NYSC, I saw how much she wished I was the one leaving. On weekends, she took pots of soup to his place, sitting in traffic for hours, despite knowing Itunu could easily do the cooking. I wondered if she thought about how he made his money, or if she never noticed the weed and all the other girls who were always trooping in and out. How did she even accept Itunu in the first place? Thou shall not steal… Thou shall not fornicate… Thou shall not this… Thou shall not that… It’s puzzling how the standards she raised us on only applied to me. Hiss!

“At least he’s going to leave all those girls and focus on Itunu,” she said after her sermon. “You should be happy for him.”

And so I was happy, or at least pretended to be. Every time the EFCC posted pictures of their nabbed suspects, he would forward them to me. It made sense trying to justify him leaving with EFCC mugshots when he was still a money-making yahoo boy, but in a little under a year, scamming old and vulnerable white folks over the internet stopped making him money and he started selling off his things. Must be something about Baruwa. Definitely something about Itunu. But he wouldn’t move back to Lagos, not even after Mumsy heard that he fell terribly ill and paid a leave-my-son-alone visit down there.

Her bus hardly left Baruwa before Taiye was at the other end of my phone, telling me of the heated scuffle between her and Itunu, reporting how she expected him to pack up and follow her back to Lagos. 

“How she go put me for difficult position like that?” He complained.

The way I saw it, he chose his girlfriend over her, and it wasn’t the first time. 

“Mumsy think say Itunu use jùjú on me,” he sounded unsure of himself. “She no know say me I just love the babe.”

I raised my nose, but on the other end, he heard, “I know right.”

Mumsy was a different person when she returned. She came to my room very late that night, something she hadn’t done in over three years, since Taiye first left for NYSC. 

Naked but for an aged pair of boxer shorts, I had rolled up blunt and condom packs on my dressing table, and empty bottles of alcohol littered the edge of my bed. I was too angry with her to care about hiding my vices. She didn’t think much of me anyway. I grabbed a fistful of my bedsheets and dragged it over my thighs. Instead of lashing out as I expected, she smiled and lowered herself to the edge of the bed.

“You won’t believe all the good good things your brother has done in that Baruwa place,” she paused and hoped for a response. 

“Hmmm. What did he do?” 

Some of her stiffness melted away. “A lot o. He built a borehole, paid for renovation of the king’s palace, mended the leaking roof of the local primary school…”

“Maybe that’s why he is broke.”

“It is mostly that Itunu girl.” Her faux excitement gave way to visible frustration. “You won’t believe that since he went broke, she’s been threatening to leave him, and still he wouldn’t let go or leave that place. Meanwhile, it’s since she took him there with her two left legs that all his businesses started to go down…”

“Which businesses?” 

My sarcasm struck her hard across the face. I saw a curtain fall off and couldn’t help but pity the deep sorrow and pain that stared back at me. The graying edges around her ears had never been more visible. Wrinkles ran across her forehead and squeezed up the flesh around her mouth. It dawned on me that she had aged so much before my very eyes, and in my built-up anger, I had paid no notice. I pushed off the bedsheets, drew close to her and held her hand. Its calluses shocked me even more.

“What do you want me to do, Mom?” I asked as mists gathered over her reddened eyes.

She took a gulp of air and let it back out. She cast her eyes down and tightened her grip on my hand. “Do you remember the name my CAC pastor called your evil spirit whenever I took you for deliverance when you were younger?”

“Iṣu ata yána.” 

“Yam-pepper-scatter.” She translated from Yoruba, shook her head, her eyes still cast down. “I know you think I love your brother more, but the truth is, my biggest prayer every night is that my God frees you from the spirit of yam-pepper-scatter so that you too can get your life together.

I brushed my thumb against the side of her wet face.

“Just look at me,” her sobs grew decibels, rocking her body and making her voice shake. “You two… you two are all I have… I never planned… to… to be raising two boys all by myself… bu-but… since your father walked out… what can I do? Ma-making sure… you both turn out well… is all I want in life… so-so that my enemies will not say… that… that it’s because I didn’t raise you well… But see how trouble has always been following you everywhere…. How can I have a bigger prayer… than for you to be freed from it?”

My inside softened and my ducts swelled, threatening to break down my face. An urge to console and comfort her overwhelmed me, not because of what she was saying, but because this was my mother, crying like a little child, and regardless of how things had been between us, I was the twin who would pick her over anybody, the one who loved her more than anyone else in the world.

Her eyes met mine. “You asked what I want you to do?”

My head went up and down.

“I never thought a day would come when I would be the one asking you to become what I’ve prayed against all these years, but your brother is in bondage, and I don’t see any other way to free him from it.”

“You want me to get Taiye out of Baruwa?”

“I do. Yam-pepper-scatter the place if you have to.” It felt as though her eyes had been replaced by wet stones.

“Say no more, Mom,” I rose from the bed, picked up a rolled blunt off the table and headed into my bathroom.

That night, I watched a wicked plan form in the soft smoke swirling all around my bathroom, fueled by the joy of being unleashed by the one person who’d always held me back, and the guilty pleasure of knowing she was aware that I was smoking in her house. I puffed more smoke into the air, and watched the plan grow thicker. The next morning, I set my plan in motion with a phone-call to someone who must have been shocked to see my number.  

From the moment I alighted from the bus in Baruwa, I could feel that something was different, even as I strolled down the dusty path to Taiye’s duplex and rapped my knuckles on the gate. 

A lean face popped up behind the rails. “You! Shey oga never tell you make you no come here again? Wetin you dey find?”

After telling him that I wasn’t Taiye but Kenny, Taiye’s twin, he announced that Taiye had not lived there for over a month. I nodded to myself as I left the gate, now fully understanding why Mom’s trip had rocked her so much. Also, why unlike other times when I had been here, people hardly met my gaze and mostly ignored me when I walked past them. This was supposed to be a surprise visit, but I had to call Taiye and ask where his new place was.

His new place was unflattering. An abandoned one-bedroom shack standing alone at the end of a vast field. There was only a flat mattress in one corner, a cooking setup in another, two tired chairs and a small table in a third, and the door in the fourth. Taiye’s leanness in comparison to Itunu’s ballooning weight was even worse. She greeted me with a murmur lower than the smacking of her chewing gum. I sneered in response. Neither of us had ever really tried to hide our disdain for each other. I was the twin who refused the lure of yahoo yahoo to keep looking for an honest job instead, while hypocritically still leeching on her boyfriend and his yahoo money. 

After a boring meal of noodles devoid of the usual adornment of meat, chicken, or egg, I pulled my brother outside. We settled beneath a mango tree beside the house and shared the blunt I brought from Lagos. The stories he told me could make anyone cry, but I was not here for that this time. 

“So, these people for just let you die with no help?” I asked.

“Nothing don ever shock me like that before, Kenny. People I used to help o. Itunu beg everybody for my hospital money. Nothing!” 

“But I hear say you renovate the king palace,” I tried to sound sympathetic. “Even him too?”

“Everybody bro,” he scratched his tangled beards, the half-moon crowning his head. “When I well finish, as Itunu don dey tire for my brokeness, I begin ask everybody for loan, but still no luck. Even people wey I sell all my things to. All their pastors, imams, teachers, people wey I donate money to. Everybody blank. That Landlord wey I give extra on top our rent, na thugs he take throw us out.”

“That one weak me o.” 

“If I tell you how we dey see food chop most times.”

“How?”

He moved closer, as though trying to make sure no one else heard. “We dey find events o. Whether na wedding, birthday, naming, funerals. Anywhere we see event, me and my woman, we go enter siddon like guests.”

“They do events that many in this sleepy place?”

“Yes o. Especially funerals. They spend money on funerals pass anything else.”

“Wow!”

“I tell you fam. When I was ill, I hear of the millions wey dem take do party just across the road. Funny thing is, the person wey die there too, na hunger kill am and nobody help.”

Even though my initial plan was still intact, it was at this point that I hatched an additional, more elaborate one. By the end of the night, I had convinced him that we would announce his death, which was no easy feat, as he remained adamant he wasn’t leaving Baruwa because Itunu wouldn’t leave. I had to tell him that after we had reaped all we could from the false death, instead of him running away from the place, all he needed to do was tell them it was his twin who had died. Then he and Itunu could enjoy the proceeds. It was easy to get Itunu on board, with the promise of food, drinks, and lots of money at the end. Seeing Taiye’s bare neck, devoid of its gold chain and all its excess fat, and with his hair grown out, unkempt and crowding his face, I was convinced I would be saving him from Itunu’s grip, and thus doing the right thing.

At the first light the next morning, a shrill scream rang out of the lone house at the end of the field. By the time the sun hit midpoint in the sky, almost everyone had visited to pay their condolences. Even the king sent his beaded staff as a sign of respect. I made sure to speak with everyone personally, letting my tears have a free day. Seeing that Taiye and I were incredibly hard to tell apart, no one asked who specifically had died. Neither I nor Itunu made the clarification. Itunu’s award-winning wailing wouldn’t even let anyone ask her. The only constant message was that the dead had to be buried the next day. 

By evening, a gold casket arrived in front of the house, paid for by the former landlord. The church sent bags of rice and baskets of tomatoes. The mosque sent a cow and two rams. The palace donated tents, chairs, and tables. The teachers’ association started a fundraiser, announcing a two-million-naira target. Envelopes flew in from every direction. I stationed my chair at the entrance of the house, making sure all the wailing happened outside. 

Every time I dropped in to check on Taiye, his feet grew colder, but there was no going back, so he continued to lay on the mattress and the cotton wools continued to stick up his nostrils. Itunu was stealing into the house too, emptying the envelopes, wetting her fingers with spit intermittently as she counted their content. Three hundred and thirty-seven thousand naira so far. It was only Day 1. Neither she nor Taiye could believe their eyes or luck.

“People wey no gree help when I dey sick,” Taiye wouldn’t stop saying. He sat up on the mattress, eating for the first time that day. He had forgotten to remove the cotton wool from his nostrils and when I took a picture and showed it to him, the laughter almost gave us away.

Evening turned into night. A few women stayed on to arrange the chairs and table. The men had set up the tents before leaving. The women sang hymns and told stories of how kind a man the deceased was. I couldn’t wait for the moon to switch baton with the sun by morning. I typed a text message to the driver I had coming from Ilesha. He responded that he would be there, shortly before noon.

As soon as the cocks began to crow, beams of flashlight started to appear from different directions, all coming to assemble beneath the tents in front of the house. Their owners greeted the women and asked about the plans for the day. I had not blinked an eyelid the entire night, especially because I had to make sure no one entered the house. I always knew Taiye to be a heavy sleeper, but I did not expect he would be able to sleep that night, talk less of snoring. Stupid boy!

Soon, as the cover of darkness began to give room to light, a delegation from the church approached me.

“What is the plan?” They asked.

“Well,” I tried to sound as convincing as possible. “Due to traditional customs, our mother cannot attend his burial, but she wants him buried in Lagos, so he’s close enough for visits later. So we will do everything else here and head for his final resting place in Lagos later in the afternoon. I have already arranged a car to take us down.”

“Oh, we completely understand.”

“Thank you very much.”

“We are with you for now. May the Lord be with you as you journey to Lagos afterwards.”

“May He be with you too.”

I did not have to share these details with anybody else. The church delegation did that for me. Knowing that the body was leaving later that day seemed to pump more adrenaline into their systems. In no time, all the livestock were slaughtered. Giant black pots had mounted makeshift fireplaces. A live band had set up and started to rent the air with gloomy music. Children ran all around the space, their merriness contrasting the solemn mood of the gathering. A messenger arrived from the palace. The king would be in attendance. Even the sun seemed a part of it all, its ferocity of the day before totally subdued.

The door was my duty post. Every hour, I gave a chance for visitors to go in and see the corpse for only ten minutes. I couldn’t stop looking at my watch. When the Benz wagon arrived a little after 11am, my heart’s pace slowed back to normal. I made sure to spend as much time as I could talking to Olu, the driver, inside the house. He couldn’t believe his ears when I played back the plan I had shared with Taiye and Itunu the night before. When he peeked out of the window at the pomp that had assembled there and turned back to shake his head at me, even the fake corpse now lying in the casket by the mattress let out a low laugh.

Soon, a knock on the door dragged me to it. Two men in black suits and dark glasses stood there.

“Mr Taiye Thompson.” The taller of the two said.

“Mr Taiye is lying in there,” I pointed to the gold casket. “He died last night.”

They looked at each other, their stiffness softening. 

“So that’s what this is about?” The other one asked.

“Yes, it’s his burial.”

The taller one leaned forward and peered down at Taiye’s super-convincing stillness. I wasn’t sure what was going on.

“May I ask who you are and what this is about?” I asked, coming to stand beside him.

“Never mind,” he said, withdrawing from the room. “Please accept our condolences.” 

Olu dragged me outside as the two gentlemen disappeared into the burgeoning crowd. “You know who those men be?” His eyes bulged.

“Nope.”

“EFCC bro. I see am for the man belt!”

My heart ran into a misstep.

“If Taiye recognize them, this your charade is over o, cos he go run.”

And so I lied when Taiye asked who they were, but my tension didn’t go away, especially seeing that the men had now found seats under the tent and were washing their hands with giant bowls of iyán in front of them. I had not foreseen this at all, and as the afternoon wore on, my original plan had my face frequenting my watch again. 

The pastor had prayed. The Imam too. The music was nonstop, much livelier now. The market women picked one colour. The church members picked another. Headgears competed as fiercely as the caps. The outfits were a rich rainbow. Even the king was now seated. Bleached, chubby and ugly. Food and drinks came in alive and died at the tables. Stray goats roamed the sides of the tent, digging their noses into the leftovers littering the place. An observer would mistake the event for a marriage reception, a birthday, or a naming ceremony. Not the unplanned burial of a 27-year-old. 

My feet had grown colder than Taiye’s, and just when I convinced myself that I had to call off my impending plan, the hard-faced EFCC men stood up and left, their plates licked clean. I breathed a sigh of relief and beckoned to Olu. It was time to move the corpse into the back of the wagon. The music mellowed as the casket traveled from the entrance of the house to the parked vehicle. Wailings assaulted my ears and everywhere I turned, faces glistened with tears. Itunu’s acting resumed, her cry floating atop the cacophony in the air. I glanced at my watch, tired of the wait. Lagos is six hours from Baruwa, so if departure was indeed at 8am, this plan should be less than thirty minutes away by now.

At 2:16 pm, my phone rang. I peeked at the screen and a smile fluttered across my face. I pressed the green button and raised the phone to my ear.

“Yes, we are here. It is down that road. Sebi you’ve lived here before. You can’t miss it.”

As soon as the call ended, I called Itunu to continue her acting by the hatch of the wagon. Olu and I had placed the casket’s tail in, and its opened head out, leaving the cotton wool-dotted nostrils on the motionless head laying there in full glare. The monies from the envelopes had tripled, hidden away in the casket.

“We will be leaving now,” I said to Itunu before turning towards the path leading to the ceremony. 

A tall, slim lady with gangly dreadlocks and dark glasses was tearing through the crowd, racing towards me. My original plan was here, at last. I ducked my head and pointed toward the wagon in fear of the last time she hit it against a car window. She looked me over, hissed and moved towards a visibly shaken Itunu.

“My hairdresser!” I heard her say, shaking her head and smacking her palms in disgust. “So, it is true. For village wey I beg this bastard tire to visit me and him no gree?”

Within seconds, she had whacked her palm against the head laying still in the casket. The cotton wool buds flew off their resting places. That must have really shocked Taiye, but he stayed still. Two more slaps and he was scampering out of the casket and out of the wagon, the entire crowd darting in different directions as he did, their screams shooting through the air, their legs touching the backs of their heads. Headgears, caps, shoes, even wrappers, flying everywhere, a hail of red dust animating the chaos.

“Ghost! Ghost! Ghost!”

The king tripped and spilled his generously bejeweled crown. In a flash, I had it in the casket, and was sitting by Olu as he drove the Benz wagon in the direction of the bus park, after Taiye, leaving a dazed Itunu behind. 

Taiye will definitely not be coming back to Baruwa, ever again! This was my thought before I saw him running back towards the car, people in his pathway tumbling over themselves, still screaming ‘ghost’! The horror on his face was exactly how I imagined I looked running away from the burning dean’s office back in university. He was reddened by the dust like I was blackened by the smoke. But it wasn’t only Ene on his heels this time. There was also a suited man in dark glasses. 

Oh, shit! I thought they were gone, but right ahead, there was the other agent standing by a black pickup truck on the roadside. Its bonnet was wide agape and the bold white print on its body screamed ‘EFCC’.

Damn! Mumsy sent me here to yam-pepper-scatter. How the hell did I let it spiral into yam-pepper-scatter-scatter?

About the Author:

Ibrahim Babátúndé Ibrahim grew up on his grandmother’s telling of African folklore, from where he developed a passion for literature. Since 2019 when he left an erstwhile career to focus on writing, his work has been published in Transition Magazine, Zone 3, Ake Review, Typehouse Magazine, Adi Magazine, JMWW, Brittle Paper, Necessary Fiction, and elsewhere. Among his honours and recognitions are the Quramo Writers’ Prize (2022), Creative Future Writer’s Award (2024), and Faber Children’s FAB Prize (2023). Ibrahim has also been shortlisted for the Miles Morland Writing Scholarship (2022), a Masters Review anthology prize (2023), and twice for the Moon City Short Fiction Award (2022 & 2023). Ibrahim was selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology in 2024 and has multiple nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. He’s @heemthewriter on Twitter and Facebook, and @writtenbyheem on Instagram and Threads. His work can be found here.

*Feature image by Muhammad-Taha Ibrahim on Unsplash