Sin Eater – Chikodili Emelumadu

All my life I waited to get into university, but nothing could have prepared me for the experience.

I am the last of seven siblings: three sets of twins – two boys, a boy and a girl, and two girls, then me, the unpaired, skewing the data in favour of more girls than boys. Awkward. All the twins are kind and nice and all, but you can see why I’ve always wanted to get away, live my own life in my own place.

I choose Nnamdi Azikiwe University in Awka, and move into to a hostel, even though my folks live forty minutes away – by bus — in Fegge and don’t want me, their ‘tail child’ to leave their house empty.

Of course, I get a weird roommate.

Her door in the flat stands closed all afternoon. At night, hunger pangs wake me. I click on my rechargeable lantern and make my way down the hallway to the small communal kitchen where I’d dumped my loaf of bread, a bunch of bananas and an old Seaman’s schnapps bottle full of roasted groundnuts.

My flatmate stands naked at the end of the corridor.

“Hi,” she says, rubbing her stomach. “I’m Nchedo. Hope I did not wake you?”

“Okay,” I reply but she doesn’t move. Only my past experience in an all girls’ boarding school makes her nudity sort of normal to me. But not the other thing.

Not the bit where she is covered in blood.

The crimson sheen to her thighs startles me. It glistens, fresh and wet. Her hands are broad swathes of yellowy-brown, mixed in with waves of dripping red.

“You mean this?” she asks, even though I haven’t said anything. “It’s just period blood. I am a heavy bleeder.”

I nod. “Me too… but you know what? No matter how heavy my period gets, I never bleed from my mouth.”

She cocks her head, a micro movement before comprehension. Nchedo wipes her face.

“It’s still there,” I say. She licks a thumb and works it on the corner of her mouth. “I think you need more than a thumb.”

She drops the hand. “You’re not afraid.”

“Of what? All I need to do is wake up and I will be in my bed.”

“You’re not dreaming,” she says. Her stomach gurgles loudly. She winces, clutching at it. “I need to ease myself, before I do it on the floor. Don’t run, you hear?”

I freeze in the act of retreating. The fluorescent lantern in my hand dances jerkily, its beams cutting jagged lines across her body.

“We need to talk, okay?” She’s staring into my eyes, waiting for me to agree.

“I’m not running,” I say. “Take your time.”

**

Nchedo finds me on Nnamdi Azikiwe expressway, trying to flag down a ride.

“I thought you said you weren’t going to run?” She seems only mildly disappointed.

“I’m not running. I just… forgot something at home.”

She shakes her head, amused, as if I am a naughty puppy, takes my hand in her warm, dry one and we are back at the flat, in her room.

“I won’t hurt you, I swear.” Her eyes plead understanding. The curtains are drawn. The single bulb in the ceiling burns low from the half-current that we’ve been supplied this night. There is a human head on the bed in a tangled, viscous mess. It doesn’t look quite real, but the smell, heavy and saturated with metal, says otherwise. I back away. Something gives underneath my slippers. I throw up, long and hard and I have no control over my body, this opening and expelling that takes everything in me. I keep going even when nothing else comes out.

Nchedo sighs. “See, you’re supposed to help me clean this, not add you own.”

**

“Sin eater? Like in ‘Supernatural’ or what?” My voice is muffled behind the headscarf I’ve tied around my nose and my own breath bounces back against my neck. I’m sweating. The meagre electricity gives the room a sickly glow and the brush in my hand is down to its wooden block from the force of my scrubbing.

My flatmate pauses. “That bread-dipping thing? How conveniently neat. Abegi,” she rolls her eyes. Please. “As if there would ever be a male sin eater.”

She tells me. School and freedom pale in comparison.

“It’s my first time. I finally graduated, and this was my first assignment.” She stares at the metal bucket full of sloppy human DNA. “I guess I bit off more than I could swallow.”

Her stomach is flatter underneath the wrapper tied around her chest. I have on a pair of surgical gloves from the packet I stole from my father’s pharmacy. Cutting out three of the fingers on each hand will give you a sleeve over an existing pair. It’s not the first time I’ve had to clean something disgusting. In boarding school, I was a pounder – one of the girls whose job it was to pound the mounds of shit in the toilets with logs so that it could pass through the old, encrusted pipes. It takes a lot to make me vomit.

The room is near spotless when I’m done. Who said boarding school is useless?

“Fine, I’ll help you with your assignments,” I say, even though she doesn’t ask.

“Yay,” she claps. She is gorgeous. Her teeth are whiter than sun-bleached bone and shimmer with their own light. I shudder to think of the mincemeat they made of the guy she’d eaten.

I raise my hand. “Under one condition: No more cleansing in the flat.”

Cleansing. That’s what she calls it when she takes a sin away. The man she ate had beaten his wife for the three years of their marriage. One day, he beat her too hard and she did not get up. We pour out his remains at the foot of a tree, in the bushes where he’d secretly buried his wife.  

“Should we get some suya?” she asks. “I’m a bit hungry.”

I resolve never to eat meat again.

**

Our next mission is a houseboy who is poisoning his madam. A man of about twenty-two, he carries a metal bucket with a lid into the grinding quarters of the market. I watch. Nchedo just stands around attracting okada riders who pull up in their motorcycles and ask where we want to go. She waves them away, worrying at her cuticles with the strong, white nails of the other hand.

The industrial grinders are noisy, shrill. I cover my ears as they work grains, seeds, whatever, into a pulp. The boy comes out, lugging the lidded bucket.

“Maybe his madam is wicked,” I say. “You never know, she could be a witch of a woman.”

“You’re justifying poisoning?” Nchedo snorts. “Anyway, this isn’t the first madam he’s killed,” she says. “It’s his second.”

The boy drops the bucket near the base of the Worker’s Union statue, three men with shovels and pickaxes on a plinth. He slides the lid off with the side of his leg and tips something in, sloshing the bucket to mix it. Nobody in the busy market pays attention to him.

“Rat poison. His Oga is away today. He’s making mai-mai. His madam loves mai-mai. The kids don’t. Really, it’s the children he’s after.”

The boy picks up the lidded bucket. His steps are jaunty.

“The children?”

“Mm. He wants to sell them to traffickers and retire across the border. His madam suspects something is up with him but oga thinks she is being hysterical. She’s just had a baby after all. And she is sick.” She shoves me. “Ngwa, go.”

My skin crawls. I am small. I have almost no breasts. Sometimes, I wonder how far Nchedo’s powers extend. Can she see the future? Did she choose me to be her roomie?

I tap the houseboy. “Excuse, can you tell me where Okwadike stadium is?” The stadium is old, run down and isolated. It’s overgrown and nothing good happens there. Drug deals, quick-action prostitution in cars, rape, a few murders. It is a red flag to a bull.

He looks me up and down and points the way. “That way, then when you come to the junction you corner, turn left, then pass one woman selling recharge, turn right and walk o…in fact, come let me escort you.”

I refuse, thanking him. When I set off, he waits and then he follows.

It’s easy to pretend that I am lost. I haven’t been to the state capital since Children’s Day in primary school, when the stadium bore the name of the then-governor. There’s a new stadium now, bigger and everything. Things change each time there is a new person in power.

I sing, both to cover up my nerves and the fact that he is following me. I’m aware of my jeans, the gap between the waistband and the bottom of my t-shirt. A wrong turn here, another there. I lead him down an alleyway. My voice is small and disappears as we pass behind the lumberyard. A wall. There is no thoroughfare I turn around. He fills up the narrow passage, blocking my exit.

He is bigger than I am, strengthened by hard city living. The alleyway stinks of urine. Someone has wiped their shitty behind on the wall. A used condom lies in the corner, covered in soil and flies.  

“Shift and let me pass!” I say.

The houseboy laughs and hate blooms in my chest like fungi, fertilised by all the times I have felt unsafe. I wonder how Nchedo will do it, but I needn’t have worried. She’s behind him, footfalls muffled on the sawdust from the nearby lumberyard. He doesn’t hear her but when I look behind him, he whirls around, eyes flashing, instantly aware that he has become prey. He relaxes a little when he sees Nchedo, his shoulders coming down from around his ears. She is only a woman.

“Pius, how now?” Nchedo says. He stares at her, surprised she knows his name. I turn away, gazing at the pylons, like so many cobwebs above the city. I don’t see what she does, but there is a twisting and crunching.

“Finished.” Nchedo is out of breath and looks about seven months pregnant. She yawns. “I need to lie down.” Her strappy lycra dress has gone from calf-length to above her knee. When we emerge from the alley, the okada men draw lots as to who will take the pregnant woman, and if they recognise her from before, they don’t say anything.

We end up on the lowest bike and the slowest rider, a portly man with wiry hair growing out of his ears. Nchedo has to pull her dress almost to her hips to get on.

When the houseboy comes out a few hours later, it is in a steady stream of black sludge. We finish all our buckets and jerry cans of water trying to flush him down.

“At least this is better than before, abi?” Her voice is hoarse from throwing up. The houseboy’s remains go down, but the inside of the toilet is stained black no matter the amount of Jik bleach I pour inside it.  

“What about the people he works with? He can’t have planned trafficking those children alone. There must be a network.”

“So, you want me to cleanse all of them? With which stomach? Not my job abeg,” she says. “Let’s hit Diamond Pizza. I want the biggest jollof with coleslaw and a half-chicken.” She grins her usual grin, but it doesn’t reach her eyes.

I order a soft serve ice cream and eat it slowly. She’s distracted, staring off into the distance. Her ears twitch as if she can hear something I can’t.

Later that night, she climbs into my bed, waking me with the warmth of her body. A wind blows through the open windows of my room, setting the empty plastic hangers on my rack a-clanking. She curves around my back. Lightning streaks intermittently across the ceiling of my room, but neither thunder nor rain follow.

“What is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. She’s already asleep, her breath heating up a spot on my back through my pyjamas.

**

Nchedo mentions her sisters a lot. It is obvious she misses them.

“My sister Makuo used to protect me when there was a storm. I have never liked them. Amadiora, the god of lightning, he can be one kain changeable.”

I shake my head to dislodge this information sharpish. I can accept what Nchedo is, but talk of mythical Igbo gods and goddesses is a step too far.

The sisters then: There is Obegolu who loves to eat mangoes and Akabeze that sets fires because she is always cold and nearly burned down their mother’s house. Stella is the crier of the family, everything brings tears. Beluchukwu, and Hapuluora her twin sister, Mgborie…

“Mgborie? Who still calls their child Mgborie? Your parents did not do well at all!” I’m laughing hard. “And how many sisters do you even have anyway?”

“I don’t know,” she shrugs. “My mother has them when it is time.”

I stop laughing. A thought has occurred to me. “And the boys? Doesn’t your mother have boys?”

Nchedo snorts. “What can boys do, except cause wahala and then die?”

I don’t ask her by whose hand. It is as if I already know. “I have brothers,” I say.

She rolls her eyes. “Hashtag, not all men.”

We mutually decide not to talk about her family again. That is to say, I don’t ask and she doesn’t volunteer.

**

Another assignment.

“How do you know if a person should be cleansed?”

“I just do.”

“But how?”

Nchedo sighs. “How do you know when you need the toilet? Or when you’re hungry?” She takes a glug of warm Star beer straight from the bottle.

 I get the point. The girl we are following though, I’m not sure. Her name is Chimere, one of the most popular girls in school, with her light, ‘half-caste’ skin and long, curly hair. Even though she is a fresher like we are, you’ll never find her under the sun, queueing for a bus. Her boyfriend is a fraternity guy, a Buccaneer, one of the fine boys on campus. He picked her right out of secondary school in Enugu, before she’d even finished. The story goes that he worked it for them to be in the same uni. A rotation of vehicles brings Chimere to school every day – when she deigns to attend lectures. She doesn’t need to be in school to pass her classes. Who would mess with a Capone’s chick?

Looks like we will.

“What did she do?”

My flatmate makes a face. There are dark circles under her eyes. “I can show you,” she says. She slides a hand through my sweat-tangled braids and lays it against my scalp. It heats up, and just when I think I am about to scream from the pain, it fades, and I am standing in a new place.

A dim room. There are curtains on the windows, a creamy chiffon underneath heavy burgundy brocade. A sliver of light comes through the middle of the chiffon, where the heavier set of curtains do not quite meet. The air on my skin is cold from the air conditioner. A hotel room, with maroon carpeting overlaid with beige and brown squiggles, cream walls and a double bed. Chimere stands beside me, model-esque in her heels. Her hair smells of chemicals, hair spray or gel or something. She holds a phone pointed at a bed, around which three men…

It’s as if my head is cracking open, the sound is so loud. I’m in the beer parlour again, sitting under an awning. My ears ring and I waggle my jaw to pop them. Nchedo is watching Chimere and her bodyguards picking up cartons of booze from the supermarket next door. Chimere hangs her wrist, as if she is too delicate to do anything. The same hands that held the camera phone. Every pore on my body opens and pours forth sweat.

Nchedo burps, speaks, without taking her eyes off Chimere and her serfs. “It’s how they break them. The video just helps them stay broken. You say ‘No’ to the Buccaneers, and that’s what they do. You say ‘Yes’, same thing.”

I want to scream, shout, cry. The Buccaneers like to call themselves the gentlemen of cults. Whatever. A sword is just a fancy knife. And Chimere’s hand is on the hilt.

**

The party is by invitation only, but that is just a gimmick to make it more appealing. Everybody wants something they can’t have. The bass-heavy music pounds in my chest. It makes me anxious. It’s one thing getting houseboys, but we have entered the lion’s den. I’m just one small person.

“Relax,” Nchedo says. “Drink something. I won’t need you.”

But I can’t. Everyone is drunk. There are drugs going round, openly, everywhere. I’m afraid somebody will roofie me. I don’t want to end up a girl on a bed in a hotel room.

Nchedo moves to the middle of the floor and dances as if she is alone in the place. I retreat further into the crowd. The Buccaneers watch her: campus boys, men who’ve graduated and others like the Capone who should have left school ages ago but haven’t. They’re all too handsome to sweat, so they stand by the walls. They stare from the cordoned-off balcony where the very important alumni point at girls and have them sent up.  

Someone steps on my foot.

“Jesus!”

They don’t say sorry. In the time it takes for me to look up again, Chimere is approaching her man on the balcony, each step like a baby antelope learning to walk. She curls a hand around his biceps, frowns and whispers something in his ear. He doesn’t turn towards her. Nchedo dances, fluid like water and it is she that the Capone watches, biting his lips like he’s a Nollywood leading man or something. His shirt is open and a gold pendant gleams in the forest of chest hair. I can see why he’s the boss man.

Other girls join Nchedo on the floor. Two have blue-black Sudanese complexions and look identical. Many are bronzed and copper-coloured and ochre, all possible hues of black. I can see the similarity in the way they dance as if it’s something they’ve learned together. They are dressed in skin-tight trousers, mini-skirts, batty riders and cut-out dresses; hips working, thighs strong and arms taut. I relax because it means we might not die today. Reinforcements. I’m sure these are Nchedo’s sisters.

Chimere’s Capone gets a look in his eye. He nods at someone and immediately black t-shirts swoop in, smiles, such charming smiles, hands on waists, on bums, giving the girls drinks and leading them off. Nchedo doesn’t look at me when she goes off but somehow, I hear her clearly in my head: Go home.

**

Does it still count as a massacre if there are no bodies? Seven boys are missing. And Chimere. The Black Axes claim responsibility.

**

The bags under Nchedo’s eyes are bigger and she can’t even finish a tuber of yam by herself anymore. At night, she burns with a fever and her breath stinks of abattoirs. I try to take her to the hospital, but she refuses.

“You may muddy a river, but it will flow itself clean again.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” The scarf is back across my nose. It frightens me, seeing her like this.

“I mean,” a pause to cough, “Think about it. You jump into a river and muddy it up. When you leave, it clears itself. It can become vapour, or liquid or a solid, but water doesn’t just disappear.”

“And what does that have to do with the price of garri in the market?”

She laughs.

I snap at her. “If I drink the water, it disappears.” My phone is in my hand. “I’m calling drop to take you to Amaku.” The nearest teaching hospital is ten minutes away by okada but what if she falls off the motorcycle?

“If you drink water it becomes blood and urine and sweat,” Nchedo says. “Water has no beginning and no end. People drive themselves mad looking for the source of this and that, but all water is the same water.” She coughs again. Clears her nose and swallows it, laughing when I make a face.

“It’s in the bible sef. ‘Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.’ Water has always been here and so too, Idemili, the Mother of water, you know?

I bring her a glass of water and she takes it, gratefully.

“They are burning her house. Our house. All over this state. You nko, if they burn your mother’s house, won’t it make you sick?”

Burning water? She’s not making sense but I don’t say this aloud.

 “Are you dying?” I don’t want to cry but it doesn’t matter. A blink and I am crying anyway.

“Shut up, you big taata,” she says. “Who told you I’m dying? You’re worse than Stella, I swear.” I watch her as she falls asleep.

                           **

By morning, I am on her bed alone. Her things are scattered all over the flat, but her phone is missing. She’s gone. I spy a note near the shoe rack by the door.

‘I am coming,’ it says. So Nigerian to be coming when one is going.

Despite wishing for space all my life, I am not good at being alone. Time stretches, folds in on itself. The nights are twice as long and I wake constantly, pulled from sleep by the silence.

How did I not notice that Nchedo didn’t give me her mobile number? I have no other friends. My phone does not ring, and the only beeps come from my parents Whatsapping me annoying forwarded messages. It adds to my restlessness and worry.

It is this worry that drives me to evening service a few days later. I go to pray that whatever is happening to Nchedo resolves itself. I pray that she is healthy, and her family is well. I pray for her to come back soon, right after I realise, I cannot even go to find her because she hasn’t told me where her family lives. All this prayer, and I no longer believe in the kind of God in whom I was taught to believe, the kind that lets bad things happen to people like me and does nothing, ‘for His glory’. I like having my own personal avenging angel or demi-goddess or whatever Nchedo is. I pray anyway, because speaking my wishes aloud calms me somewhat.

As I cook dinner for one that night, I turn my small radio on so that it feels as if I am surrounded by lots of people. It’s hard for me to cook for one.

The seven o’clock news comes on and the newsreader announces clashes in communities, people burning shrines and artefacts hundreds of years old. I eat my Indomie and egg, out of the pot, standing over the kitchen sink.

**

When I was a little girl, I knew things happened at night while I slept. My siblings would tell stories to scare me: witches who ate small children, monsters grabbing one from under the bed, shadows that aren’t shaped like their owners. They stopped telling them when they realised how much I loved the fear. It was like a loose tooth to me, salty and painful, and I prodded it with my metaphorical tongue.

In the night, while they slept, I stayed awake and waited for things to happen as my bladder filled up. I wanted to see. But the night is tricky, and her children are cunning. Sleep would take me before long. Over the years, I trained myself not to flutter my eyelids as I lay there, waiting. I let my body go slack, breathing deeply and steadily, watching out of the corners of my eyes.

It’s a smell that wakes me, thick and pungent, masculine. I wake up behind my eyelids as the intruder bends over my face, breathing staleness. This is no Night’s child, playing in the shadows. This is real and present danger.

He seizes me by the throat and pulls me out of bed, dashing me to the floor. From below I can smell the greenery on his skin, as if he’s been living in the bushes while a campus war is being fought.

“Where is your friend, eh?” Capone delivers me a backhand when I am slow to answer, and I smash my face against the wall. I have never felt such pain before.

“I don’t know,” I reply but he kicks me in the stomach. The Indomie is sour when it comes back up, and the pepper I’d added burns through my nostrils. He steps on my back, pushing my face into my vomit as if I am an errant puppy.

“I knew something was up… those girls. Me! You people tried me! Who sent you? Where are my boys?” He’s talking to himself. If he wanted me to respond he would let up on the pressure. My mouth is full of my own vomit. He presses and my teeth cut into the skin behind my lips. “Where is Chimere?” He drags me up by my hair and the braids around my temples snap and break. I cover my head so that I don’t bang it anywhere. My wrists bear the brunt of his beating.

“Please…”

“You are begging? I know you people did something. My dibia does not lie. You see this?” He rips his shirt and the buttons fly. He grabs my hand and rubs his stomach with it. His skin is covered in thick, raised scars. Juju. “This is why you could not get me. No Black Axe, no dirty bagga can get me. If you shout, I will kill you here.”

I hadn’t seen the knife before, but here it is, drawing the eye.

“Open your mouth!” He slips the knife in. “Now talk or I will cut your tongue, I swear to God. If you no wound today, call me bastard! I will kill you and nothing will happen.”

I’m glad Nchedo didn’t tell me where she was going. I look Capone in the eye and see an animal. If I knew anything, I’d have told him. As it is, I don’t. My head is a basket of agony and one of my eyes cannot open. He pushes the knife deeper into my mouth and my throat spasms, cutting itself in the process. Blood. He fumbles with his trousers in the other hand. He is pinning my body with all his weight and I can’t breathe. I can’t swallow with the knife in my throat. I’m choking. I am going to die.

There is a bang, and the pressure across my chest is off. I gulp air, coughing, retching, while chaos reigns around me. My roommate is here, clinging onto Capone’s back and encircling him with her limbs. He reaches around, trying to hit her, but his trousers tangle his legs and they both go down. I want to say her name, but my throat is fire. I slip in my own vomit.

They roll about on the floor and there is a cracking sound, like many dry sticks breaking. Capone screams and brings down the hand holding the knife. It comes up and down again, red, but Nchedo holds on. She is strong. The veins in her neck are thick, pulsing, but Capone is strong too and Nchedo is weakening. His struggles are violent but targeted. Nchedo has not managed to seize that arm. It comes down again and I grab it, but my hands are slippery, so I bite down hard on his wrist. His skin is tough. My teeth hurt but he screams and drops the knife, hitting me away.

It is enough. Nchedo tightens her grip and there are more loud pops. He is still fighting. I crawl back to them and hang onto his ear with my teeth. It is bitter with wax.

Nchedo looks me in the face but her eyes are different, yellow, glowing like the sun. I clasp him from behind, digging my hands into his windpipe, trying to crush. Nchedo throws her head back, grimacing with effort.

 The Capone’s death throes are violent.  Nchedo opens her mouth and her neck elongates, widens. She brings her jaw down on the Capone’s head and there is a sound of breaking coconuts. He stills and she forces him down like a lump of stubborn eba. It looks painful.  I help her, taking off his clothes, flinging the belt away. I rub my roommate’s arms as she swallows, cleansing our campus of sin.

I will never be alone again.

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