Ugochukwu Anadị is the Book Review Editor at _Afreecan Read_, a Contributor at _The African Theatre Magazine_ and a publishing intern at Griots Lounge Publishing. He is also an editorial intern at _Counterclock_ and Narrative Landscape Publishers, and enjoys reading and writing about works he has read.
I would like to thank Chris Cleave for the money metaphor he employed in the first chapter of his 2008 _The Other Hand_, which portions of this story tries to replicate.
If Ebeano Road Could Talk
If Ebeano road could talk, it would tell you about De Nwokedi’s gaming centre, and how all the small, small children ran to it quite impulsively, like they had been jazzed.
It would scoff and say it is unsure of how they got the money to fire this PlayStation, but it can bet that it won’t pass the pockets they picked, the change they got from going on errands, or the money they withheld from the offering basket the previous Sunday.
It had no clue what they saw in this PlayStation. Why they could risk being plunged into tyres and getting their flesh burned or having the wrath of God come upon them. But if you saw how their teeth shone bright— not like torchlight, but like the sun— as they ran with their fifty nairas, and how their lips slacked when they moped, returning after playing just one game, you’d think someone dashed them car, then collected the car back and instead dashed them slap. You would think that De Nwokedi must have hidden a juju of irreparable attraction somewhere above his door, so their bodies would be at ease so they never think to leave and then begin to itch so they desired to return as soon as they were away.
Ebeano road would ask if you’ve ever seen juju that strong before; the kind that usurps a person’s mind from their body, but you’ll be too struck with fascination to respond. You would wait for the actual story to begin; this wholesome tale that’s been preserved and guarded by the infamous Ebeano road.
And, you would wait through the time it spends describing juju and jungle justice; this comeuppance, where unmannerly touts and market folk gather round to splatter kerosene on thieves, returning them to the form they once were— dust.
You would grumble and yawn, just so Ebeano road is wary of how bored you’ve become of its long preamble, but it would keep on lamenting like it doesn’t see or hear you. Up until the moment it would out of the blues say, “Chai.”
It would tell you it said chai because it just remembered how one of these small, small children died. On a day rain refused to stop falling, and the sun refused to show its face, like it was Adam, hiding from God.
It would describe the manner in which the rain fell: in drizzles, then downpours, just so it avoids getting into the disquieting details of how this boy died.
The rain was preceded by this breeze, it’d say, this breeze so powerful it felled an iroko tree. Then, the iroko tree, as though transferring aggression, crashed into the NEPA wire, cleaving it from the grip of the transformer it was roped to, to its surface, so it shocked it wella. Soon after, people started screaming when they heard the sparks that followed, as if one of their girl pikins just carry child for yeye man.
Ebeano Road would talk and talk o. About the cars that drove around the felled pole like nothing happened. About how useless MOPOL should have come and blocked the road. About how it even thought the people finally cared for its well-being when they screamed, not knowing it was because their electricity had been cut off. But in talking about all these things, it wouldn’t utter shit about small, fine boy’s death.
It would speak of his parents instead: Linus & Beatrice Onyeoma. It would tell you that their son didn’t resemble them one bit; that if you had seen them on the road walking with him, if not for how he always shined his teeth like a cartoon character sketched into being, you would think they kidnapped him. Save that kidnapping gist for later, it would say, then begin listing out the differences between the boy and his parents.
It would tell you that the boy was fair, almost white like oyibo, and his mother and father were cockroach-brown. The boy had a pointed nose spearing his oblong head, the mother had a fat one sitting on an even fatter head, and the father had this balloon nose that wrestled with his egghead, like God placed them side by side and forced them to get along.
Anytime Ebeano road set eyes on the man, it laughed so hard that it narrowed, for a while, so Mama Nkechi’s hair salon chooked head inside the filling station, leaving her to wonder when it widened back— if her shop had begun to fly, or if she was stupefied by alcohol, again. Ebeano road would then grow cold as ice, and it would tell you that if you saw Linus & Beatrice’s eyes when they looked at their son, you would think he was secretly made of gold, and every Sunday afternoon after church, they took to scraping his skin, and shredding the shards of gold off his shining body with a shaving stick. That was how much they cherished him, even though people claimed they didn’t birth him. Ebeano road would then grow sober, and a couple of minutes later, in between sobs, it would tell you exactly what happened, how it happened. Just because you’d asked.
It would tell you the boy was just twelve, yet he beat people much older than him in Mortal Kombat and FIFA. It would say that a few days before he died, De Nwokedi had announced a tournament, where the winner would receive a lifetime of free gaming, while the runners-up would be left with nothing. The boy had begged his parents for the entry money, which was a whole two hundred naira, and to hasten his parents’ approval, all week, he had washed plates, swept the house, and on the morning that preceded the tournament, he tried to wash his father’s third-hand jeep but sprained his ankle in the process. He was full of zeal, and at night, as he slept, his mother and father tiptoed into his room like oyibo parents, dropped the brand new five hundred naira note under his pillow, and planted a kiss on either side of his face in simultaneity.
The boy was stunned when he woke up and found this money, as he’d never seen a five hundred naira note before. He got on his knees, thanked God, and asked Him to bless his parents. Then, he sprinted to Ariaria market under the rain, hugged his mother tight as she haggled in her wholesale store, and asked her to give him her Nokia phone, so he could call his father, and thank him too. The boy was kind and loving, and did not deserve what happened to him in the slightest.
If Ebeano road could have saved him, it would have, and without any compunction replaced him with that money-grubbing De Nwokedi. But it was so busy trying to pursue the truck that carried dustbins away from dropping smelly water on its body, that it did not know when Mama Nkechi’s red Volvo jammed the boy, and flung him to Osadebe roundabout, which is a whole mile from the gaming centre.
II.
See eh, Ebeano road can never run out of spit. It would beat its chest, telling you this, just before it begins to lecture you on the dangers of beer, and how to resist it so it doesn’t become the death of you.
It would tell you of all its empty bottles loitered at every corner; which house they emerged from, whose lips kissed them, and for the ones in the gutters, whose legs volleyed them in there. It would tell you about the horrible things people did under the influence of beer: thievery, battery, arson. The speed in which their countenances switched to contemplation and lamentation as regret, remorse and soberness set in, and the time it took for them to gradually return to the beer parlour, or Mallam Isa’s infallibly obscure wooden kiosk if they were too ashamed to be seen.
Ebeano road would tell you about the first time Mama Nkechi started drinking beer and ogogoro unrepentantly. And why she dashed from the scene after sweeping small, fine boy’s body away.
Mama Nkechi had lived alone for four years before the incident. Her house was the yellow one with the grey roof that refused to rust and the rough walls that tore the skins of its visitors as it kissed them goodbye. She moved into this house with Papa Nkechi when lovely Nkechi was in her belly. Ebeano Road remembers that day like the bitumen ingrained in its asphalt skin. It was confused about who was pregnant at first sha, until it saw hair like the Sambisa forest encircling Papa Nkechi’s lips, and descending to his chin.
On the afternoon they fully moved, sun was shining. The kind that scorched and smited so sharply it didn’t matter if you were hale and hearty; your body ran an awful amount of temperature enough to convince you that you had a fever. It knows this, because on that day, Papa Nkechi drove Mama Nkechi to the hospital because her fever had refused to simmer down, despite his desperate pleas for the blood of Jesus. That day, Ebeano road also saw this thing they call true love as Papa Nkechi lifted Mama Nkechi from the floor in front of their gate and dropped her inside their car, all the way, blowing gentle air from her forehead, to between her eyes. And, when he entered the car, before he started the ignition, as he kissed her on her parched lips and whispered something. Something soft, something sensuous, something Ebeano road, through the speckled windscreen, made out to be: “Oga dinma.”
And everything seemed very well the next time Ebeano road saw them. With Nkechi swathed in her mother’s arms like a fulfilled promise.
You see, Nkechi is the main reason why Ebeano road wishes it could talk. If it had talked when it saw what happened to her and not just looked, other people would have known how Nkechi was kidnapped, and where she was kept. And, they would have marched down to that kidnapper’s semi-detached house with their fists held high, bracing all sorts of weapons— rakes, cutlasses, machetes — just to send that onye-iberibe that kidnapped her to his early grave.
Ebeano road would tell you that men couldn’t take their eyes off Nkechi. That they’d commit her scent to memory and note the exact times she would walk to and from school, so wherever she was, they were. They’d whistle as she crossed the roads, and their unshapely heads would dance and bob to the rhythms of her curvaceous buttocks’ wiggling. They were stupid and heckless, and no matter how much it tried to send them away with potholes in front of their houses and gorges swallowing their car tyres, they would always stay and endure, or relocate to somewhere it couldn’t access, somewhere they could still spy on her from.
De Nwokedi was one of these perverted men sef, but he tried his best to hide how he looked at Nkechi because everyone knew he was a worthless man that distributed his sperm by any means as if it were evangelism pamphlets.
He was brainless except when he was greedy, that man, and on that day as Nkechi walked back from her school at Nneogidi Lane, he called one of the men that wanted to have her all to himself, and told him that he would have to triple the amount they’d agreed on. The man didn’t agree at first, of course, but De Nwokedi, who could convince a bald man like himself to buy a hundred dollar shower net, whined and whined the man’s mind until he agreed to double it and meet him at the place where Mother Mary steps on the serpent. The grotto? Who cares? What did he now use the money to do eh? What did this vile man gain?
Ebeano road would break down, as it bewails grieving questions, expressing how bitter a man De Nwokedi was, and between that, it would say it heard Nkechi’s screams, but was too scared to do anything. And it was too scared to do anything, because it didn’t really know how many men were in there, or what they did to her. Then, it would skip to seven months later, still wailing like a mother at her child’s funeral, as Mama Nkechi found her daughter’s head in the conduit passing the front of her salon.
Ebeano road would say it waited for God to let loose that retribution he had stock-piled for De Nwokedi, because it could not bear to see this man bouncing with that giant head of his, whilst innocent people lost theirs left, right and centre because of him. It would not tell you all the things Mama Nkechi went through because of this man: the regrets that heaped upon her shoulders, all the blames and insults she swallowed like bloody, thickened phlegm; how her once-loving husband left her because, apparently, she was “a good-for-nothing woman”, and you would not ask. You would assume.
And, you would assume everything else. That it skipped to seven months later, because it only knew where Nkechi was kept, but couldn’t see past the tinted windows to know what went on in there; that Mama Nkechi started drinking after she found her daughter’s head; that she was drinking and driving when she ran into small, fine boy, and that her tyres screeched as she sped off because she couldn’t quite comprehend what she had done. Then, Ebeano road would say to you, in between ugly tears, that De Nwokedi, after Nkechi’s head was found, spotted Papa Nkechi in a beer parlour, and on hearing how he was planning on involving the police, talked him out of it, and with that his viperous tongue, goaded him into hating his wife, saying that unpleasant things happened to careless, evil people. Who was the evil person here eh? Ebeano road would swear that it had no idea Papa Nkechi would heed his words, even in the utterly intoxicated state he was in.
It was almost as though God’s punishment of ‘No Sleep For The Wicked’ fell to bits when it came to De Nwokedi; as if he had, with enough practice, mastered how to extend his jazz to God Almighty. Because, why would Father Lord, after all the things De Nwokedi had done, still let him be the one to see when Mama Nkechi jammed small, fine boy, eh? How could He then allow him to carry the boy’s body to his mother’s shop without inflicting leprosy on him on the way?
Ebeano road would tell you that sometimes this God that went from unleashing locusts if you so much as said fiam, to letting bad things happen to good people works in little, almost insignificant ways. For as soon as De Nwokedi pressed Beatrice’s breasts to his chest in an embrace and whispered into her ear that he knew who sent her dear son to his early grave, the hug and her entire phase of consolation halted. Not because of shock, or in anticipation of whom, but because her little moment of vulnerability ceased the instant her nostrils got a waft of the appalling mix of smells De Nwokedi reeked off: tobacco and that goddamn perilous beer.
III.
The heavens will not know peace if Ebeano road could talk. It would restlessly trumpet to you, and anyone willing to listen, the amount of liars that filled this place. The liars, the thieves, the kidnappers, the killers, the rapists. It would tell you, matter-of-factly, that any sort of transgression or destruction your brain could muster, someone that lived here, on Ebeano road, had been a perpetrator. Any kind of kasala, even, someone here had experienced it and God-willing; it had seen it all. But do you see De Nwokedi, that short, bald man that derived pleasure in screwing people over and ruining their lives?— he was the worst of them all.
You would wonder if this De Nwokedi is the reason behind Ebeano road’s absolute emptiness. If he woke up one morning, a few sandwiches short of a picnic, and decided to set people’s homes, shops and offices ablaze, with or without them in it. You’d wonder what circumstances on this entire globe could make a man this beastly, but you’d keep mum and listen instead as it lists the vitals you would need on encountering anyone as heinous as De Nwokedi in your future. A machete for their neck. A shovel for the earth, to lay their lifeless body to unrest. At least two wheelbarrows of gravel so they dare not rise up. And then, for a clean cover-up, connections to person(s) in the police force, or a sharp wit in case money for bribing is a little hard to come by. It would tell you not to worry about entering heaven— that won’t be an issue at all!— for God shall note down this thing you’re about to do as a favour to the world at large.
Ebeano road would say that it had thought of killing De Nwokedi many times, for the horrible things he’d done, but you know, as a road, with boundless limitations, those thoughts couldn’t have been transformed into reality. It would say the first time was in 1996 as it saw him grab one woman’s buttocks on the main road, you know, the same main road that housed Osadebe roundabout, where the boy’s body was hurled to. At that moment it was as if it should just splinter and send signals to the main road to engulf him, because of how he harassed that lady and had the audacity to smirk despite seeing how uncomfortable he’d made her. It would say that it regrets many, many things, but you see not obliterating De Nwokedi when it first noticed his tendencies; that has to be at the top of it, because somehow by not taking any actions then, it had allowed him to evolve into this being that felt his actions had no repercussions, so he did as he pleased. You would watch and jot as Ebeano road laments on the many atrocities De Nwokedi had committed without reproof, then as you hear it sound as though tears fall from its eyes, and ask why, with a banquet of compassion clammed into the tone of your voice, it will tell you it’s nothing; it just remembered the bald man’s birth.
It would tell you that De Nwokedi was born right here, on the piece of earth that eventually became his betnaija shop. That is, before it had a roof of zinc or walls of cement. The day was radiant and the bouncing baby boy was called a beautiful blessing, because of the circumstances in which he arrived. In the late months of 1967, during the feral turmoil that was the Nigerian Civil War. He forthcame like a blustery storm or a thief in the night, with a few signs here and broiling rumours there, but altogether as a vivifying shock. The war hadn’t penetrated Aba yet, so women rushed from neighbouring homes with their ebele mîî for storing water, to help deliver him since there was no motor car to drive his mother to the community hospital. The women fanned and screamed and dabbed warm water on his mother’s face as she huffed and puffed and moaned, until he plopped out like thick faeces, with thick faeces, into the plastic basin she bent over. If only those women had known what a nuisance he’d become, they’d have remained in their compounds, minding their businesses, and he wouldn’t have existed.
Ebeano road would then cringe at the mess of a man De Nwokedi was, and begin highlighting, in a rather vindictive tone, the horrible things he’d done.
It would start from the late months of 1981, at fourteen, when he took a little piss in his father’s palm wine and sprinkled it with sugar to mask the taste. Then in the summer of the succeeding year, as he placed a nail in the shoe of the boy that always took first in his class, because his father persistently compared them, inquiring if the boy had two heads and he, half. Then, ten years later, when he enrobed himself and other towns boys as masquerades, and flogged his father to near-death for not giving him money to relocate to Lagos; a city he’d only heard of from his fellow drunkards, for a “better” life. Then, weeks later, as he banged the dining table, spattering his mother’s onugbu soup over her blouse and the walls, because she’d brought up this marriage thing, and in-between the nagging called him jobless. Something he evidently was. Then, 1996, as he had sex with a surfeit of women instead of planning his father’s burial and much later, when he spat instead of shovelling into the grave. And, the next year, when he denied the women, implored them to swear that he was the only man they’d been with, jabbering all sorts of derogatory monikers at their scampering shadows as he drove them away.
Ebeano road would ramble on for what seems like forever, with unending volatile words flying in disorderly haste, and as it does, an arctic indignation will froth within you; one so unusual it coerces you to think. And as you would gawk from the window of the taxi at its dried gutters, bloodstained self, and the forbidding houses towering over it one last time, the placid, yet disembodied voice you’ve unknowingly attached to Ebeano road would tell you to exhale and get down. You would mumble senseless nothings to the cushion, then you would stumble, bibulously, a few steps in the direction this voice guides you until you reach it; Ebeano road’s true beginning, bordered by a slew of splitting tombstones.
And with an inbred purposiveness, you would read the inscriptions on each and every single one. So, your eyes will reveal to you, almost immediately, the one belonging to De Nwokedi, and as you stare at it, Ebeano road would tell you his death was just as ominous as he deserved. That while he locked up his shop one evening, a truck carrying metal rods for construction lost control at the steering wheel and swirled, so seven of its rods flew out its trunk and fastened his neck, torso and groin to the door. And that the truck driver, instead of screaming for help, hopped out of his vehicle and took to his heels, like a frightfully fervid freak, leaving De Nwokedi there, gurgling and jittering, his blood trickling down the rods, to the tiles he’d just replaced.
You would strive to keep yourself from visualising his death by scouring for more tombstones with familiar names. So, you would see Nkechi and Agnes, whom you would make out to be Mama Nkechi from the surname they share. You would see Beatrice and Linus and even, Isa. But not one tombstone amongst the myriad would have an inscription to reckon with small, fine boy, because he hadn’t died from that accident fifteen years ago. Ebeano road hadn’t really known this, but after De Nwokedi dropped him at his mother’s shop, she’d rushed to a hospital in Aba, where he spent two months before being transferred to Umuahia. And that’s where he’d been for the past fourteen years unable to move a single limb.
Not Ebeano road or any of the souls that had lived there would know this.
Because on waking up, with the voices of your mother and father resounding in your head like a small clinking bell, guiding you, you’d journeyed all the way to Ebeano road only to discover all the houses had collapsed and not a single being had survived whatever struck. You’d asked around, of course, but the responses were witless. If it wasn’t that a hurricane stormed the area, vanquishing everyone in its path, it was the Lord who attacked them with spheres of fire, like He did the miscreants of Sodom and Gomorrah. And, if it wasn’t any of those, it was that one night, they were asleep, and the next morning, they were gone, the buildings they’d erected with their sweat and blood, destroyed.
You would stand by the tombstones, in the crippling quiet, struggling to revive the faintest memories you had before the accident, before the ruin; when you were ensorcelled, like all other children, with De Nwokedi’s gaming centre. And they would all hurdle around you, these troubled residents of Ebeano road. You would not see them, you see, so they would tag along, and be the disembodied voice you hear later that night as you sit by your desk, with anything else but beer in your hands; the lucence from your computer burning your eyes, overwhelmed with a restless eagerness to get to the bottom of whatever in God’s name happened to Ebeano road.
