Kòfowórọlá had only been yelled at today by his mother. He had not really been beaten. It was a weekday, but the schools were on holiday. If they weren’t, he would have had to sweep the entire compound before he would have his bath for school. A good number of families lived in the compound, renting self-contained room-and-parlor apartments, and it was good living because they each had their own toilets.
He was sweeping the rubbish into a careful pile, and now that the chore was coming to an end, he felt better about doing it, having long-forgotten the wanton cruelty in the ear-pulling and the shouting that had begun the chore. His ears were still tender and itchy where his mother’s hand, moist from washing yams, had twisted them with the intention of ripping them off. She often said she did not know why God gave her a child who resembled his father, and who is as stubborn as his father. She also said she was committed to beating the spirits of laziness and disobedience out of him; she would make a man out of him.
The rubbish he swept into a pile close to the Big Gate contained far more sticks than refuse. The sticks, broken from his handmade broom, had torn holes in the black polythene bags; they were also scattered about in the rest of the refuse, which included plastic Fanta and Coke bottles, dark green bottles of alcoholic bitters, tufts of hair extensions, and yam peels. The refuse piles were converged on the corner of the fence, by the Big Gate. Kòfowórọlá took special care in these final moments. He slowed down and tried to do a really good job by pressing the broom hard on the sand the way Miriam taught him. He started thinking about how nice it would have been if he had remembered to sweep every square-meter of the compound with the same care. If he had done so, maybe his mother wouldn’t compare him to the girl, Miriam, who was in Primary Two (Kòfowórọlá was the same age but he was in Primary Four); Miriam, whose Parents received compliments from other Parents. They said she was a very good girl and would Marry well. Even though he was a very bad boy, Kòfowórọlá also wanted to sweep like her, so that he too would Marry well. But it was hard, seemingly impossible, because Girls were better than Boys at doing chores and in school, but Boys were better than Girls at playing games and sports and were never afraid of lizards. That was just how it was.
“Kòfo! You’re still sweeping after all these years. Keep wasting my time, let me meet you there,” his mother shouted from the doorway of their kitchenette, half the entire compound away, and loud enough for everyone in the compound to hear. She clapped thrice and then snapped her finger.
He swept the rubbish into a repurposed Bagco bag, stomped on it to break the stubborn broomsticks and to compact the plastic bottles. He swept the rest of the rubbish into the sack without a packer—the packers never lasted; they were quick to break, especially after they had been used to fan the charcoal stove. He then carried the sack to the refuse dump at the back of the house. He did not breathe in the rotting stench as he added the sack of rubbish to the pile on a rusted brown wheelbarrow; the other sacks were tied and wet from an early-morning rain. He could hold his breath longer than Miriam, and even the girls in Primary Six. One time he had gotten in serious trouble because of a deal between him and Miriam. She had wanted Kòfowórọlá to teach her how to hold her breath as long as he could, and he had agreed on the condition that Miriam would teach him how to sweep just as well as she did. An adult found Kòfowórọlá forcing Miriam’s entire head down into a large basin of water and shouting at her not to swallow water. He had no recollection of the beating he received that day, but he had a scar on his forehead to show for it. He fancied it made him look like Harry Potter. Thanks to his instruction, Miriam learned to hold her breath the longest, second only to him, in their area community school—even better than the Boys and Girls in her class and in his own class too.
Kòfowórọlá pushed the wheelbarrow. The busted wheel squeaked but rolled fine. He stopped before the kitchen door and looked inside. Tap water was running into the largest iron pot, while palm oil bleached in a frying pan on the kerosene stove. His mother stood before the kitchen sink, washing the sliced pieces of yam. And she was looking at him.
“I am going,” he said.
“So what are you waiting for?” she said.
“They said we should not be pouring the dirty there again.”
“Better go and dispose that thing for me now now.”
“But where will I throw it?”
“Kòfowórọlá, you this boy. Stop trying me.”
He pushed the overloaded wheelbarrow past the kitchen, grumbling. The new signboard, mounted by the Order of the Nigerian Police Force, threatened a fine of fifteen thousand naira if they caught anyone throwing refuse there—but his mother was never going to listen to him. He hoped they would catch him in the act; let her go and find the fifteen thousand naira she did not have and pay the Police. All she knew was to pound yams like she wanted to kill herself. She was not the first person to sell food in the neighborhood. He wished his father had given him the permission, but more importantly, the money to go to stay with his grandparents. How was he supposed to cope with his mother for the entirety of the holiday? If he did not die before the week ran out, they should call him a bastard.
Something struck his back and there was a noise he heard through his bones. A searing pain shot into his chest from his spine. His head was on fire all of a sudden.
It was his mother; she had whipped the calloused palm of her hand right on the ridge of his spine, between his shoulders. Now she grabbed and twisted his ears with her wet, sticky, itchy hands. He writhed and screamed until he freed himself from her grasp. Then he bolted across the compound toward the gates, tore past another tenant’s motorcar and disturbed a flock of pigeons into a whirlwind of wings that swooped up and settled on the roof.
Behind him, his mother was yelling. She pursued him.
“Is it me you’re talking to like that? Foolish boy! Who is the bastard between me and your Useless Father?” she was saying.
He got to the Small Gate, kicked it, but it caught on a pebble as it creaked open, outwards into the street. He pulled the handle just as an object whizzed past his face and struck the gate and then landed beside his leg. The maddening report of the metallic impact against the Small Gate rang in his burning ears, momentarily deafening him.
He looked down and saw that it was his mother’s ladle, whose bowl was bigger than his wide-open palm.
She was almost upon him, still yelling.
He saw her, and so squeezed out of the compound through the Small Gate, then grabbed the handle with both hands and pulled it close, and with all his sinewy strength he bolted it shut.
“If you are the true son of your Useless Father don’t open that gate. Can you hear me?” his mother said.
He backed away.
The Small Gate banged, the bolt jangled; she must be kicking it or punching it. He flinched at every banging strike. He felt his eardrums vibrating. He winced and kept his eyes on the gate. He continued to back away, a step at a time, until he was on their street, a dirt road. She wanted to kill him—he had always known.
He was now in the middle of the street. And as the Small Gate shook alarmingly, a motorbike blitzed past him, blaring. He winced. The bike missed him by a handspan.
The rider yelled all sorts of prayers as he shot along the street, rightly assuming that Kòfowórọlá wasn’t being raised by good parents. But Kòfowórọlá had lost his balance in fright of the near collision. He only saw the blur of the passing bike and felt the roaring wind. He struck the street, arms first. It did not hurt at all. The damp sand cushioned the fall, and he was more concerned about the Dunlop slippers he wore. It felt loose between his Big toe and Small toe, floppier than usual. He looked down and saw that the slippers had snapped.
Between the concrete pillar that the Small Gate was hinged to and the solid metal of the gate itself, there was a thin gap, three fingers wide. His mother was looking at him through that gap. A three-finger-wide slice of her face, one wicked eye and flared nostrils, breathing heavily. When their eyes met, she crouched to pick up her cast iron ladle. It scratched the floor and rapped on the gate discordantly. She turned and left.
Kòfowórọlá knew it was far from over.
The neighbors were outside, standing and watching, jobless as they were by their stupid houses. This was almost a daily occurrence, but they could not mind their own business, nor did they tire of the spectacle of Ìyá Kòfo.
He ran off the street and took an untended path between two fenced houses and he kept going until he was many streets away. He arrived at an unfenced compound, where a large palm tree reached for the clouds; the path ran between two unpainted Face-Me-I-Slap-You buildings. They were the pallid complexion of weathered concrete.
Kòfowórọlá sat behind the palm tree, tracking lines on the floor, around his bare feet. His ruined Dunlop slippers had fallen off his feet during that run from his mother. It was his mouth that kept getting him into trouble, he thought, matters made worse because his father was away on a long-awaited job, driving a petrol tanker to the North. Kòfowórọlá was certain that he would be dead before his father returned from the North to deal with her.
“What are you drawing?”
The voice belonged to a little girl who was now crouched beside him. She sat, supporting her face on her palms, elbows on her bare thighs, and she wore only a blue flowered underpant. Her entire body was covered in reddish spots, like blisters, but not quite. Kòfowórọlá thought he knew what the skin condition was called but that he had forgotten (his Uncle would know).
“It is not your business,” he said. “Leave me alone.”
“Why is it not my business?” she said.
Truthfully, he hadn’t even realized he had started drawing with his hands. He also did not know if she had been there all along. He looked at his drawing, rubbing the damp soil from his index finger. It was just a bunch of lines that looked like a house or a school. He smudged the entire thing with his foot.
“Where are your slippers? My mummy said you must wear slippers,” she said.
“I don’t care about your Mummy. Leave me alone. Go away,” he said.
“Why did you clean the drawing?” she said.
He stood up and went around to the other side of the palm tree.
That was when she started wailing. A terrible cry rose from her as if from the depths of hell, where all the sinners that had died so far were being punished by fire. It sounded like she was down there herself, that he was responsible for her eternal suffering. He circled around the palm tree to see what was wrong with her. Tears were running down her cheeks, her eyes were closed, and he could see the pink of her throat as she scratched the spots that were not quite blistered.
A woman’s voice shouted a name, Aisha. The woman herself came running out of the building where Kòfowórọlá’s teacher lived. He had never seen the woman before. She must be a new tenant. She was retying a wet wrapper and when she reached the palm tree, she wiped the soap suds on her hands and arms on the wrapper.
The woman carried Aisha with both hands and then glared at him. “My darling, what is it?” she said to the girl.
Kòfowórọlá thought he saw the Aisha pointing at him, so he put a fair amount of space between himself and them.
Aisha continued crying, and her fair skin had started turning red. The woman was no longer glaring or paying him any attention. She looked helpless and worried. She scanned the area as if she would find a miracle nearby. Her gaze landed on him and it turned hostile as if just by standing there he was the source of Aisha’s misfortune.
“I did not do anything to her!” he said.
The woman yelled another name, Shola, multiple times. No response came.
Kòfowórọlá thought of leaving, of running away, but he was paralyzed by the woman’s darting gaze and he also felt responsible. Though he had not laid a hand on the girl, he surely had hurt her when he shunned her questions. The woman grabbed the girl’s arms to keep her from scratching her skin.
“Please go inside and help me tell Shola to bring the red oil,” she barked at him.
Aisha was now struggling to free her arms but the woman held her arms locked in futile struggle. The girl began to kick the air. The woman turned her face away protectively and looked at him, where he still watched mutely. She yelled and repeated what she had said.
He ran to the house, unsure of where and who Shola was.
He was standing in the long dim corridor where doorways to twenty rooms faced each other, from both sides of the corridor; some were curtained and some were open but none of them was producing anything that resembled a Shola.
He knew his teacher’s room so he ran there, slapping his bare feet on the warped concrete floor that was broken in several places. Here and there, small Tiger generators were balanced on car tires, the smoke from their oily operation clinging to the exhaust-blackened walls between doors. There was a metal door at the end of the corridor, the twin of the one at the entrance. It led to the backyard where big basins were filled with white laundry and foamy water. Kòfowórọlá could smell bleach. Aisha’s crying was so faint he could not fathom how the woman had heard it from this distance.
He pounded his teacher’s door with both hands and called out. “Uncle! Uncle! Uncle!”
“I’m coming. Who is it?”
The door opened inwards. Uncle was shirtless and was scratching the hair on his head.
The man sighed upon seeing Kòfowórọlá, and Kòfowórọlá, standing at the man’s door without his slippers and with reddened eyes, knew already that Uncle was thinking, as usual, that getting himself involved was a big mistake.
Uncle had gotten involved when Kòfowórọlá’s mother went to his school to learn the truth after she heard that her son wandered about town during school hours. She had caused a scene. Kòfowórọlá never got to school on time, and he was always at the mercy of the teachers who disciplined latecomers. On Monday mornings, he would show up in his white shirt, blue shorts, and black sandals, but without socks. He himself knew that something was wrong with his uniform: the shirt suffered from a general lack of buttons and couldn’t be called a white shirt, and the shorts weren’t exactly the right shade of blue. So, Uncle, like all the other teachers, came to know him. They knew him the way teachers knew troublesome students. The morning his mother showed up, he had, once again, chosen to skip school altogether, delighted because he wouldn’t have to join his fellow latecomers in cutting grass on the school’s large football field, or washing the pit latrines, and he also would not be whipped. But then his mother confirmed his absenteeism, and when he returned to school a few weeks later with new scars, Uncle took special interest in his well-being.
“Uncle, please her skin is burning. She needs palm oil,” Kòfowórọlá said now.
“What are you saying, Kòfo? Who is burning?” Uncle said.
“Her name is Aisha!”
Uncle stood, stunned, and looked towards the front entrance. The crying had drawn closer, the woman’s long shadow filled up the hallway. Uncle perhaps understood what was happening because he went inside his room and returned with a bottle of red oil that had been shaken vigorously, the oil already running down the inside of the bottle.
Kòfowórọlá took the bottle and ran to the woman.
He opened it. She stretched her hand to him with a cupped palm. He understood without being told what to do. He poured a handful of the oil and watched as she lathered it on the little girl’s skin. The woman rubbed it all over. She asked for more oil and repeated the act. She then hugged Aisha to her chest and cradled her head that was covered with pencils of blue rubber threading.
“Thank you,” the woman said.
“I swear to God that I did not touch her,” he said.
Uncle joined them, he had now put on a black jalabiya. “You should take Aisha to the hospital, this thing is getting serious,” Uncle said and looked pained as he watched the girl whimpering in her mother’s arms.
Kòfowórọlá wished he had answered the girl; he might not have touched her, but it was still his fault. It was always his foolish mouth. He rubbed his finger inside the bottle and rubbed it on the back of the little girl’s leg where the woman had missed.
“I just left her with Shola to wash clothes but now I can’t find that boy,” the woman said.
“Shola is as irresponsible as they come. And you—what did you do to your poor mother again?” Uncle knocked Kòfowórọlá on the head in a way that was embroidered with kindness and compassion and love. Kòfowórọlá grabbed the spot with both hands and shifted away, beyond Uncle’s reach.
“Nothing sir,” Kòfowórọlá said.
“You are telling me your eyes are swollen because of nothing?”
“Teacher, who is he?” the woman said.
“Just another one of my brilliant students. I think you must be familiar with his mother, she sells pounded yam at the junction.”
“Iyá Kòfo?”
“This is Kòfo. In the flesh.”
“He is such a beautiful boy—What a shame.”
The comment reminded Kòfowórọlá that his back had long stopped hurting. He wished the ladle that had struck the gate had injured him instead. He would have shown the injury to his father when he returned so that he would properly beat the madness out of her, and she would leave him alone, at least until his father left for the North again. The real shame was that he was the son of that angry woman and that today he had no new injury that would scar.
“I had measles last year but it did not pain me like this her own,” he said and showed the woman and Uncle a faded spot on his arm below the elbow.
Uncle looked at it and shook his head.
“Measles and Chickenpox leave a rash. The things on Aisha’s skin are not rashes I believe they are welts. They’ll have to run a lab test at the clinic before they can diagnose what it is.”
“You know I took her to the clinic last week and there was no doctor to attend to anybody,” the woman said. “Just where is this foolish Shola? I still have so much to wash.”
“Give Aisha to me. We’ll watch her,” Uncle said.
The three of them sat on a woven raffia mat beneath the palm tree. Aisha had curled into a ball, the oil on her skin made it glisten. She hadn’t spoken a word, but she was no longer in pain.
Uncle was finding the right channel on the battery-powered FM radio. Kòfowórọlá knew that Uncle was also waiting for enough time to pass to ask about what really happened, so he told him without being prodded.
“I was grumbling. I think she heard it. That was all,” Kòfowórọlá said.
Uncle looked up from his radio, turned the knob a little. He mostly got radio static with some words. There was a red line that moved over the band of channels whenever he turned the knob. Uncle pushed the red line further, tilted the radio, twisted the antenna. The radio leaned on the palm tree but the stainless-steel antenna was bent at an angle away from them.
“Kòfo, why were you grumbling at your mother?” Uncle finally said and kept turning the knob, still getting static, nothing close to what he wanted.
Kòfowórọlá confessed everything to the man with some hesitation at first until he found his rhythm. After the telling was done, he felt better. And did not know how the man had done it. All he did was talk and all the man did was listen.
Kòfowórọlá noticed Aisha was staring at the floor, and that he himself had been drawing again.
“I want you to think about this carefully before you answer. Do you love your mother?”
“She doesn’t love me.”
“But that is not my question. That’s why I said you should think about it.”
Kòfowórọlá’s legs were moving slowly in the air, his stomach flat on the mat. He had rested his cheek on the back of his hand, the hand also on the mat. He did not want to think about the question. He also saw that Aisha was squinting at him, as if she too wanted to know what he had drawn. But she did not ask him this time.
“See, it’s the house I’m going to live in when I’m older,” he told her. My father will have a room, and I’ll have a wife and two children like you but fine fine children.”
“I am finer than them,” Aisha said.
“You are not.”
“Yes I am. Where will she stay?
“Who?”
“Your mother?”
“I don’t care because she won’t stay with me.”
“Why don’t you care?”
“She hates me, so I can’t live with her.”
“Why does she hate you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
“Does your own mother beat you?”
“Sometimes.”
“She beats me every day even if I don’t do anything. I hate her.”
The boy’s eyes felt like they swelled up and he began to cry. He tried to hold the sobs within but failed. The girl wiped his tears with her small oily palm and then he turned his face away because he was ashamed that he was crying, that he loved his mother, that he wanted to be loved. He also hated how Uncle had put the thought in his head and made him cry. The radio’s static vanished and the man laid his hand on Kòfowórọlá’s shoulder until he stopped crying because even without being told and just from the weight of the hand on his shoulder, he knew in that moment that he was loved.
About the Author:
Adeola Ladoja lives in Ìbàdàn, Nigeria. He is 23 years old and Yorùbá. He has a degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering.
Isele Magazine 