
Content warning: this story contains profane language and scenes.
I don’t like people. Not him. Not her. Not you. Not the man beside the idiot trying to woo that girl over there, who has got her face painted to appear as that of a clown. She shifts to the other side of the road, a grimace stamped on the stupid face, which she must think looks better than the hideous thing that it is, when she grows tired of the man’s pestering. He doesn’t have money. His car is not parked somewhere around, and so it is called pestering; he wouldn’t be a pest if he did smell of cash, of AC, of cologne.
I can guess it’s her birthday, that girl, and she has just returned from a photoshoot. They always look this way on their birthdays. Faces beaten. To pulp. Like highway thieves. Ask her if you want, where she is headed to, and she’d say she is going to her boyfriend’s house. The usual, he is to give her some money for some stupid cake, which she would take a hundred thousand pictures of, splattering these pictures across her Instagram with the caption: “Boyfie surprised me.” Oh, and yes, surprises mean gifts gotten through fights to a lot of people here.
To my neighbor, Ogechi, who goes about telling everyone her husband surprised her by proposing, it means the ring on her finger. It took four years for her to get it—with the help of a pregnancy, that is. I was in my year one, a fresh medical student who had come from another town in pursuit of this fucked up thing called success, when the battle for it began. The I-want-to-be-a-married-woman battle. She fought alongside her mother sometimes, and alongside her father at other times. I remember his croaked voice, thrown at Jesam, the then-intending husband: “You don’t want to marry my daughter?”
“I do, Sir.” Jasam would drawl like a child. “I promise. I am going to marry her. The thing is, I am just not ready.”
“What do you mean you are not ready? Better marry her o. Is it money you do not have? Tell us. Just carry our daughter and go. She’s 40 now.”
Maybe Jesam would not have married her if he hadn’t gotten her pregnant. A fucking mistake. Or a miracle, whatever it was. Took away his choice. How best for a woman to tie you, a man, down than with a chain made from the words: “I am carrying your baby”? Reminds me of Jamilat. Fuck her stupid soul wherever it—paradise, hell, nowhere, everywhere, wherever. Good thing she died in that car accident. With the baby, of course. Fuck the baby, too. I don’t think it was mine. If it was, it could have seen I wasn’t ready to be a father. And would have convinced its mother to flush it out. “Mummy, flush me. Daddy’s an idiot who is doing poorly in school. He isn’t ready to be a father. So, please, flush me.”
Misoprostol is barely a thousand Naira here. All she needed to do, Jamilat, I mean, was swallow it with warm water and a glass of guilt. I would have accompanied her to a pharmacy down the road to get the drug if that was what all it would have taken to convince her. We would have gulped the shame together. I would have shielded her from that old nurse’s eyes, from the woman’s scoffs of “Children of nowadays.” I would have held her belly, offering comfort, when she bled and winced at night, and bought her tampons with my savings; they would have been the baby’s last bed, these tampons. But, no. Jamilat thought it was best to keep the baby. “I can’t do that.” She would say, wiping vomit off her lips. “It’s against my upbringing.”
You know what? Fuck her upbringing. Fuck whatever made her think it was best to travel to Maiduguri, to go tell her parents she was raped. She said they would accept her if she told them that story. Rape is evil. That they would raise the child without bringing me into any of it. The child would not be an almajiri. Never.
Oh, wow, Jamilat the savior of my soul. Such great altruism from you. All to save my neck. All to see to it that I remain in school and become a doctor for both of us. Fuck your soul again, fool. Died for nothing. When you could have just lived for me. When you could have saved me months of crying, of evading the police, of explaining to your father that I was never responsible for anything that happened. Perhaps I’d not have failed that exam twice if you were still here. But, I failed. And now, I hear back home. To go show myself to my mother. And to my father. They are priests, and I am a leprous soul.
“Go show yourself to the priest,” Jesus said.
Oh, I have not forgotten about this one: fuck my penis. Fuck my pull out game. Fuck that night in June, when I first felt the warmth of a vagina over my shaft. Fuck how she kissed me, how she rocked my groin so good I shot cum deep inside her. Fuck her moans, how she giggled afterwards. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. A thousand more fucks until the world is flooding with fucks. Why should this world even exist in the first place? Why should we be born? Fuck the plan, whatever it is. Fuck the government, and capitalism, and money, and all that is a fragment of ideas.
“Shift nau? Ah?” A man who has been standing outside this cab moves my leg. From the bitterness in his voice, I know he has been standing outside for long, screaming against the blaring of my earphones. I look up at his face and then down at his feet as I adjust in the seat. He joins me, the smell of suffering immediately hovering inside the car. He must be a Yoruba man. Fuck him. Only Yoruba people smell like suffering, like mashed potatoes and ground pepper. You guessed right. I don’t like Yorubas. Nothing much. Just a special, hate-at-first-sight thing. I don’t know a lot of them, I admit; there are not many of them here. But the few I know define the word ‘backbiters’, giving a new meaning to it even. Brutuses, like Wole, who ratted Ediomo out to the EFCC for being a Yahoo boy. They must have paid him thirty pieces of silver.
I know it’s only a matter of time until he, this man flanking me, begins to dish out unsolicited advice to me. Good thing I’m with my earphones.
Oh, and he does. I admit to flinching when he tells me sorry. Not like it’s so surprising. Anything to start a conversation goes with these people. Even sorry—the hardest thing to say in this world. But it does surprise me that he says it. His is a brittle: “Sorry for pushing your leg like that.” muttered between two rows of incomplete brown teeth.
I nod, then push my earphones deeper into my ears. Straight face. He drags one cable of the earphones out immediately. Not forcefully, anyway, or a slap would have blessed his face.
“Ah, my son,” He begins, genuinely concerned. “Don’t you know this thing can spoil your ear?”
I smile, swallowing spit and the, “Go fuck yourself, sir.” That gathers in my throat.
Then the conversation begins. He tells me about his daughter. Then about his old wife. The one who left with all his gratuity in a black polythene bag. She’s married to a new husband now, he says. Like he’s not married to a new wife himself. Pfff. His new wife is going to birth a son soon, he does not leave that part out. Bla, and then bla, and bla. He falls asleep whilst still talking, and I put my earphones back in my ears to shield me from the snoring, from the gurgling sound from a saliva-filled mouth. Unbrushed, most likely, that mouth. Not his fault. Brushes are dangerous after all. They break teeth and destroy the ecosystem. Why should one even think about brushing his teeth?
I have been respectful, I bluff mentally as I unlock my phone. I have been patient enough to listen to some foolish elder talk, from start to finish. My mother would be proud of me if she were here. Her son, who has listened to nonsense. She’d throw a party and invite her friends. Her snobbish son, she would say, has changed. He has become a listening boy. The friends would cheer, clapping. But, as you know, they’d always be that one animal amongst humans. A woman, most likely, this one would be. She would scoff then say to me, “This your bear-bear is plenty o. Remove it na!?”
There’s network service now. I smile. Not like there’s anything to smile about. Oh, fuck me. I have sinned, for smiling. Nobody deserves to smile in this country. It’s outlawed. You must suffer and suffer and suffer and die like a bird. This is how you become law-abiding. My data comes on and the notifications come in like rain. I open Facebook first. Two hundred notifications there. Some girl who has just discovered me is going through my works, liking each one, commenting on some. They call it ‘blowing’ a person’s wall. I scoff. She’ll get tired. They always do.
Bing. A notification from Messenger. I open it. It’s Grace. I sigh. Leave the message pending. What am I to say to someone who is in every other writer’s inbox, telling them the same things? She’s in mine. She’s in the other person’s. And the other person’s. Annoying thing. One time, during an outdoor writer’s meeting, a friend mentioned her among the boys. Laughs burst. “Free that one. She de do follow-follow too much.” Fuck her and fuck everyone like her. I am not forgetting even fellow writers who have turned themselves into sycophants under the guise of seeking mentorship. Why seek mentorship when you can invest that energy in yourself and become really good at this thing?
Oh, fuck.
Fuck.
Fuck.
My mother’s call comes in. Before I can answer it, the taxi jerks to a stop. A tire has burst. We all step out and wait for the driver to fix it. The woman who was seated in the front seat, who shouted the loudest, “Jesus Christ!” when the breakdown happened, walks to me by the edge of the road, where the broken street meets what should pass as a fence of tall grasses. She wants to talk about Jesus, I know. Sadly, I don’t want to talk about him; neither do I want to listen to talks about him. What I want to talk about is my mother. My father. My results. What would they say? I failed again. I am a failure. They’d never ask why. Not like I can tell them about Jamilat, anyway, or about my random bouts of depression and memory loss.
I dismiss her with the wave of a hand and a mental fuck you.
When the car is fixed and we enter it, she keeps stealing glances at me, but I don’t give her attention. Her eyes don’t tire. They keep looking and looking until we arrive at the park in Owerri. We’ve arrived. The Yoruba man says bye. Wants to talk about coming to see me sometime. I laugh it off. The Jesus woman follows me.
“Oh, fuck.” I mutter.
When she holds my arm, I feel the urge to take her hands off me. But I do not. I listen to her speak.
She ends the talk with, “The Lord be with you.”
“Amen.”
Tears have gathered in my eyes. I’m in my street now, heading home. I know that Mother and Father are both around. I know what’s coming. Mother isn’t the problem. Dad is. He is the one paying the fees. I am the one embarrassing him. I know he’d blame it on my phone. On my writing. On everything but himself.
“If they withdraw you from medical school,” He’d scream. “That one is your business!” A scowl on his face, his index finger before my forehead. “You will just fail in life.”
I’d only sit there, struggling with the desire to yell, too. “Fuck you. I didn’t ask to be born.”
Ubee knows how to write!