To work for a master is to be thrust deep into a bloating, never-ending present of chores; to wake up busy and to have no recollection of having slept; to have no past or future; a living aneurysm in the walls of time itself; a life in morse, abbreviated to barest minimums. When I joined the workforce at Madam Shaje’s Catering Company plc, I was maybe twelve, I had been passed through a catalog of masters like a two-naira whore paying a debt. I had been in dingy, low-roof, face-me-I-face-you apartments as a cheap nanny or babysitter; and also in mansions, as a houseboy, sticking out like a wart in all that opulence, scrubbing floors and washing cars.
I had a handler in those days. Her name was Aunty Bashira, a towering entity who took ninety percent of my cut, the remaining ten going to parents whose faces I could not even remember. I remember, though, a time before all the work, a sliver of airy, joyous childhood, of playing on a farm with my siblings and swimming in rivers; a time of quiet, real rural quiet, interrupted only by the chirping of crickets or the crowing of cocks; a time before Aunty Bashira’s shadow darkened my parents’ door and her forked tongue tickled my parents’ ears with promises of money and a better life for their children just across the border, in that country called the giant of Africa, where oil gushed if you tapped the earth with your heel.
I had many masters, but none were as memorable as Madam Shaje. She was a caterer and a damn good one because she was never without work. She catered to birthdays, burials, weddings, annual general meetings, the whole owambe shebang. She was an Isale-eko woman, through and through, who worked with the fury of one pursued by poverty and who continued even when poverty was far behind in the dust. She was very tall, and now that I think of her, she must have been about six foot two. She was never married but had an estranged son. When I served with other caterers, I had seen Madam Shaje a couple of times, she was the caterer that others talked about. Never to be out dressed by the partygoers she catered to, Madam Shaje always wore glittering lace, and an assortment of violent damask geles of geometric shapes and sharp, pointy ends. If Madam Shaje was a peacock, her gele was her fanned tail. She also had a square face and a strong jaw, the face of a man pretending to be a woman’s.
My first day with Madam Shaje started on the sixth floor of a government secondary school. A statesman’s burial. The bereaved had rented the school grounds midweek, and endless canopies flapped on the school field; cars parked on the side of the road stretched as far as the eyes could see, and six different caterers, contracted for the party, worked feverishly on separate floors of the empty classrooms. Madam Shaje’s catering company plc was on the sixth floor. I was quickly seated with other children and tasked with peeling boiled eggs. The other boys were perpetual servants like me, locums, their malnourished arms and box-like heads a dead giveaway. The one who sat across from me looked like he’d killed before, he had soulless eyes rimmed with tiro, and a flash of pearly whites. When no one was looking, he pushed whole eggs into his mouth and without difficulty, swallowed them. Another boy, whose jaundiced eyes were the deepest yellow, the yellow of danfo buses, and whose arms were covered with a rash of scabies, attempted the trick. It was during a brief period of busyness when no one was looking. The Alases, contracted cooks, were preoccupied with scooping steaming, hot pounded yam or black-as-midnight Amala into Santana nylons; Madam Shaje, had her back turned, hot on her phone as she argued another contract… The boy cast furtive glances at Madam Shaje’s broad back and pushed the egg into his mouth. He tried to swallow. It filled his throat, and promptly stayed there. His eyes rolled up in their sockets as he tried to force it down, but he gagged, a choking noise, and the egg reappeared in his hand, covered in slime. Before he could put it back on the pile of flawless, white eggs, Madam Shaje was on him like a frog on a leaf. She grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and flung him over the railings. Six stories. She continued to make arrangements over the phone without missing a beat.
“Elo le ma san, Chairman,” she bantered. “Ati ju gbobo yen lo now.” She stepped up to each one of us, grabbed us by the throat, and looked down our open mouths. Her fingers felt like a vice, like the clamp we used at the vulcanisers to separate tyre rims from rubber, and when she looked down my throat, her gaze was long and piercing, an endoscope that travelled down my gullet and saw all the way, past the bubbling acids of my empty stomach.
On the ground, the boy was sitting up, a trickle of blood down his nose. We, the infinite servants, were resilient like that. We were like lizards. Ever seen a lizard hurt from falling six floors? He picked up his egg, which we’ll agree he’d now earned, from the ground next to him and ate it, taking small dainty bites that were like the kisses of a considerate lover, his teeth unravelling the egg whites first, saving the yolk for last. As he ate, he trained his yellow eyes on our floor, ready to leap in case a basin of hot water or some other arsenal came after him.
*
On that first day, I picked a record number of eggs, balanced baaffs of water on my head up the flight of stairs and fanned the firewood with air from my own lungs. I had learned to impress masters, to appear as a diligent, hard worker, more value for the paltry but hard-earned sums they parted with. And Madam Shaje noticed me. At the end of the night, when the last of the drunken guests had tottered off, and the beggars had slunk in like hyaenas for the leftovers, Madam Shaje regarded me and asked: “Omo tani e?”
“Aunty Bashira.” I said, putting the rest of her charger plates into the back of her bus, where her dutiful cooks also sat in the dark, silent, their eyes glowing like dull atukpas.
“Ah, Bashira,” she said, picking up her phone and dialing my handler. “Ello?”
I waited, both hands behind me, my head bowed in deference. In the distance, two beggars fought over a half-empty bottle of coke like animals.
“Bashira dear. Mo ti mu eleyi na, maa sanwo ori e,” she said without pleasantries. I heard Aunty Bashira’s tinny entreaties: ahh, nooo, egbon, he’s one of my best, he’s priceless.
“How much?” She cut her off, getting into the driver seat of the bus and directing me into the passenger side, where I sat, my head at the same level with the dashboard. Aunty Bashira gave a number.
“Put it on my tab.” Madam Shaje said and tossed the phone. I was now her property. She drove the bus like a danfo driver: bare feet, jerky stops and close shaves. She crossed red lights and drove against designated one-way lanes, navigating Lagos with the internal google map of one whose ancestors laid the very road network. An omo-onile. A daughter of the soil.
Mariwo tu yeri yeri
Agan tu yeri yeri
Awori omo akesan, omo oloko ni ilu Isheri
On the road in those days there were two types of drivers. The ones who insulted and the ones who replied. She was both an aggressor and a replier.
“Woo! Weere!” said a driver whose car she’d just scraped. “Waa Jegbese!”
“Iwo,” she’d reply, chuckling, spinning the steering wheel with one bangled hand like a Formula One racer. “Baba e la jegbese.”
Her home was deep inside Lagos Island, the bus travelling through a series of progressively narrow roads, and excruciatingly worsening poverty. Stalls and shops in such obscurity that it was no wonder they were so poor. Who would come this deep to buy noodles? I wondered. But these were her people and Madam Shaje would slow down when she saw someone, anyone, and call them by name. They’d reply “Mama oo!” Both fists in the air above their heads, black panther style. And she’d hand out wads of cash from a bag she kept under her seat, jocularly teasing them with insults: “Ehh, Elebi. Elenu pelebe bii bata teacher.” And they loved her for it.
Finally, we reached her house, a mansion sequestered in all that poverty like a pearl in the jaws of an oyster, like a foreign body trapped in a keloid. It was a white alabaster edifice, lit by electric lights and surrounded by a fence with electric wires running on them. It sat perched on a cliff overlooking a deep gorge of refuse. She tapped her horn once and the gate opened, pushed by a blind old man I would come to know as Baba Lagbaja. I jumped down from the bus, eager to work, eager to please, as we parked alongside a fleet of identical vehicles. I was in the home of my new master. Chop, chop! I hurried to the back and opened the double doors, expecting the Alases to emerge. But there was no one at the back. Only the pots and pans, charger plates, bags of raw food, atubers of yam. I did not remember them dropping off anywhere and by God, they had been in the back, three women, quiet as mice, eyes like atukpa flames.
“Leave the pots, we’ll wash them tomorrow,” she said. “Baba Lagbaja will show you your room.”
The gateman’s hand on my shoulder was cold as a corpse’s.
*
The three women were there in the morning like they never left, washing the pots and pans and chatting excitedly as Alase women usually did. They’d worked together for years, it seemed, cooking for Madam Shaje and had between them an easy friendship borne of proximity. Try as I could, though, I couldn’t understand a word they said. It was Yoruba, all right, which I understood perfectly and spoke so fluently you wouldn’t guess I was an illegal Togolese migrant. They weren’t speaking a dialect either. I understood most of the dialects and even the distant languages on the Yoruba lexical tree, but I could make neither heads nor tails from their conversation. It rose and fell with the cadences of normal speech, interjected with laughter and backslapping and wrapper swishing, but they were for all intents and purposes unintelligible. To me, at least. Madam Shaje understood them perfectly. When I went around the back looking for a broom to sweep the compound, one of them cornered me. She was the youngest of the three, with two tribal marks on her cheeks like exclamation marks, her hair up in shuku braids.
“Boy,” she whispered. In Yoruba. And I had a feeling she was expending considerable energy to bring understanding to me.
“What are you doing in this place?”
“Na work carry me come here, Ma.”
She looked at me as if I had gone mad, and then pirouetted and returned to the company of her fellow cooks. I swept the compound and then mopped it before it was noon. My new Madam had not given me explicit orders, and I was restless. I was not comfortable with idleness—in my little experience, it was usually followed with scolding or fists. Soon, I edged to the main house. I had not been invited, but I needed to ask if she wanted me to sweep the floors in there, lay the beds, polish the windows – anything. Masters always needed something done. I knocked on the brown mahogany door and waited. I noticed there was an elaborate design carved on every inch of the door like words in Arabic, like the whole sutras of some holy book interjected with little recognisable shapes: cattle, dogs, vehicles. Hieroglyphs. I knocked again and when there was no answer, opened the door and stepped into the cool interior.
Madam Shaje was standing in the foyer as if waiting for me. It was eerie. She was standing in the hallway, just staring. It was my first time seeing her without her elaborate lace dress and gele. She wore simple house clothes, and I noticed she had soft-looking, grey, low-cut hair, like the wool from an old pillow. She had not noticed me even though I had opened her door and come into her presence. She was lost in thought and one eye had drifted a little outwards.
“Ma-madam,” I stuttered.
She blinked slowly, eyes shutting for a few seconds, and then looked down at me, “I called, and you came,” she said, smiling. She had those teeth, the ones with gaps between them like a picket fence. “That’s good.” She said and walked into the dark interior of the house. I followed.
She led me into her parlour. It was old school Yoruba woman parlour: out-of-fashion sofas, a dining table, and black and white family pictures on the wall, of probably, long dead relatives. On the rectangular center table, I could see she had been working. A pair of glasses, account books with numbers, a bowl of orogbo, kola nut, and a worn Casio calculator stood there. She sat and pulled out a roll of paper.
“I always give my staff a contract,” she began. “I’m not like these other employers that do things anyhow. Sho ma sign?”
I nodded. No one had offered me a contract before and my little heart was thudding in my chest. Maybe, just maybe, I could be free of Aunty Bashira. Maybe I could get health insurance, annual leave, go home, visit my family, see my siblings sometime. My baby sister had been five when I left home. I was desperate to see her again, see how much she had grown or changed. Maybe I could finally save my own money.
“Do you have a bank account?”
I shook my head.
“My bank manager will open an account for you.”
A bank account! Me? I was elated. At my last employment, payment was the roof over my head and the food I was eating (save the money paid to Aunty Bashira).
“I will sign ma,” I said, hoping she didn’t change her mind. She opened up the contract on the table and offered me an old, knotty dip pen with a sharp pointed tip. I couldn’t read for shit, but even if I could…
I had never signed my signature before, so I quickly formed one, knelt at the table and signed over the dotted lines. It was a dip pen with no ink and my signature came out as an indentation on the paper.
“No ink, ma?” I asked.
“Kosi ink.” She said without missing a beat, as if it was a prepared answer. She looked at me square in the face. “Sho ma sign abi oo sign?”
I nodded, frantic, confused.
She held my right hand, the one with the pen. Her touch was oh so cold – mortuary standard cold. She directed the pen to the palm of my left and pushed its sharp tip into my skin.
“Ye!” I yelped. My skin broke and a bubble of blood surfaced. She twisted the pen, soaking its tip in my blood, and pointed at the dotted lines again. Let’s just agree that I couldn’t turn back at this juncture. I bent over the contract and signed.
Afterwards, I sucked on my bleeding palm and walked down the hallway to the large mahogany door, a bittersweet feeling nestled in my stomach like a swarm of wasps.
“Ma beru,” Madam Shaje said behind me. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.” The door creaked open. She put one considerate palm on the small of my neck. “Okunrin nie, you’re a man.” She said and eased me out of her house. The words sounded like what you would tell a traveler who’d arrived from faraway to meet the corpse of his mother.
Outside, a tableau of shrieks and screams was waiting for me. I fell to my knees and covered my ears but it was of no use. The sky was overcast. And the women, my God, the women…
*
The women were as I had seen them in the morning, talking, laughing, appearing happy. Layered atop that reality, however, the women were different. They were in hellish agony, shrieking and screaming. Two states at once. Their faces were gaunt, hollow, decaying, like walking corpses. They flung themselves at the mahogany door in a clatter of bones:
“Please Madam, release us!” They cried.
“You bastard witch!”
“You will never know peace!”
They were dead women conscripted into an eternal service in Madam Shaje’s catering business. And, alas!—I looked at my bleeding palm—I had become one of them. Baba Lagbaja, the gateman, was the worst. He was a slithering mass of decaying flesh pulling himself across the ground, a wail rising from his open mouth, his hand held up entreatingly. I turned to the door but there was no handle and I felt a repelling force that seemed to come from the inscriptions, which now glowed with a sickly yellow light. A warding spell. I did what anyone in my shoes would in those circumstances. I ran. As the saying went, I had not come to Lagos to look at bridges; let alone be tied to an eternal bondage. Jesus!
I pushed past these carrions in my path and fled to the gate. I did not care for the electric wires running on them; I knew most houses only had them for show. Even electrocution seemed better than this, if it came to that. In two parkour leaps, I was on top of the gate, and over the electric wire. I thought about the community. Were they in on this? I did not trust that I would not be caught and brought back into the house. All my Madam needed to do was make a phone call to the hoodlums I had seen sauntering around the other night. I went around the fence, through a clump of bushes, and found myself on the tottering edge of the cliff. I scampered down the steep incline into a mountain of refuse. I crossed a river of sewage and climbed up the other side and found myself on the Lagos Island expressway. I crossed the road, caring less for speeding cars, and entered another village, where women still had their wares out. I walked fast lest anyone mistook me for a running thief, putting as much distance as I could between myself and Madam Shaje and her cohort of dead people. After a couple of hours, I found an empty stall and crawled onto the belly of an overturned bench. In a distance, local vigilantes blew their whistles and a night guard, even farther off, banged on his gong.
Fitfully, I slept.
*
I woke up to movement. I opened my eyes and waited for them to adjust to the dark. I recognised charger plates, tubers of yam, sacs of uncooked rice. I was at the back of Madam Shaje’s bus! I looked around and saw the three women looking at me with pity. I tried to scream but couldn’t make the sound.
“It is no use,” the youngest said. I could see her molars through a gaping hole in her cheek. “There is no escape unless Madam release you. You will work, even if you no wan work. Shebi you sign contract?”
“Please, I need comot this place,” I begged. “How I take come back here?”
The other two women rocked in their seats, resignedly, paying no heed to me.
“Abi I don die?” I asked.
“No, not yet,” she said. “It is only a matter of time.”
The bus drew to a stop, and the doors swung open. Madam Shaje was standing there in her full regalia: a beautiful glittering lace and her trademark gele.
“Oya, alele!” She barked, pulling garish red lipstick across her black lips. And like clockwork, we got into action, compelled by incredible force. We leaped down from the bus and started setting up at the location. I swept the place, arranged the wood and set the fire. The women carried the food and fetched the water. Soon we were pounding yam, rolling amala in huge ikoko irin pots, removing the spines of moi-moi leaves. The women were still pleading and screaming but no one heard them. All people saw were hardworking Alases, the best in town. And they came for seconds because the food cooked by the dead could be nothing but delicious.
At the end of the day, we piled into the back of the bus with the rest of the equipment, exhausted. I had worked to the very inch of my life, manipulated by invisible strings like a marionette. I looked at the women and wondered who they were. Did they have children somewhere searching for them? Mourning them? How did they come to be employed by our madam? How long had they been in servitude? As our Madam drove home, the women began a mournful song.
Ejigbo ye o. Ma ma ri mama, Ejigbo!
Ejigbo ye o. Ma ma ri mama, Ejigbo!
Oseme nuwa, o ye o ri mama, Ejigbo!
And as they sang, they faded away, like wisps of candle smoke into nothingness, leaving me with their harrowing voices echoing in my head.
*
Madam Shaje looked exhausted when she opened the doors of the bus, one sinewy hand massaging the pulsating arteries on her temples. In a roundabout way, I felt her distress. To listen to the pain of the enslaved daily like the incessant wailing of infants must not be pleasant. I jumped out of the bus and added to it, kneeling and clutching the helm of her starched lace.
“Madam, abeg! I take God beg you! No be the kind work I find come be this. Abeg!”
She snatched her lace. “The reward for hard work is more work. Hear me so?” She said. “Abi you think say me sef no wan rest? Ko shi danu.” And with that pithy homily, she vanished into the safety of her house, protected by the warding spell. I saw that she was like us too, enslaved by whatever forces compelled her to keep working. This jailer was as much a prisoner as the jailed. I needed to know her story. It was the only place to start if I wanted to escape. I went looking for the gateman.
“You no get time, my child,” Baba Lagbaja said when I accosted him in the shed and asked him about our madam. For my sake, he appeared in the most humane form—blind, bent, but recognisably human.
“How long you don dey work here?” I whispered, afraid she could hear our gossip.
“I no fit remember,” he said, tears condensing on his lashes. “I know my grandchildren go don old, don die go. I don dey here since before independence.”
I did not know much of the country’s history but I knew that independence was 1960!
“Madam dey very powerful,” he warned. “She no be person. She no be human being.”
“Help me sir,” I said. “How I go fit comot this hell?”
“If you fit enter house,” he advised, “find your contract, burn am.”
I thanked him and ran around the compound, examining the windows. At each window, I felt the repelling force of the warding spell and when I looked closely, I could see the hieroglyphs beautifully etched on the frames and sills. There was no way in. I remembered that when I once worked for a roofer, some houses had skylights. As a roofer’s apprentice, I had learned to climb pipes like a palm wine tapper, all the way to the roofs of the buildings we worked on. I quickly found a robust sewage pipe and started shimmying up the house. At the top, I pulled myself onto the roof and laid down, listening, my heart pattering in my chest like a little trapped mouse.
The wind was extraordinary at that height and I could see the entire village, shanties looking like the lego toys of some giant toddler. The roof creaked loudly when I moved, so I laid on my belly to distribute my weight and moved only an inch at a time. I was searching for a skylight that was not protected by a warding spell.
*
I was lucky. I imagine there would have been no tale to tell if there was no skylight window on that roof, that I would probably still, at this moment, be in the employ of Madam Shaje’s catering service. That I would never have found my adoptive parents or gone to school or married or had children of my own. I would have been like Baba Lagbaja and the three women, dead and alive, working without health insurance or possibility of retirement or pension.
There were no markings on the skylight window and it opened noiselessly into a small, dark, cobwebby attic where mannequins lay fallen over one another. I landed on the wooden floor and kept my eyes on the mannequins. No, they looked really scary. If Madam Shaje could animate the dead, I was sure mannequins were only a minor feat. Oddly, they stayed put, staring at me through glassy, inanimate eyes. I opened the door into a landing area. The entire house was dark, quiet, brooding with secrets. I needed to move fast. I found my way to the stairs and hurried to the parlour-office where I had signed the contract. I hoped she trusted in her spells enough that she didn’t see the need to keep my contract under her bed or pillow.
My eyes had adjusted to the gloom and I could make out her Casio calculator, account book and dip pen on the table. And thank Jesus, my contract was there, rolled up on the table like the certificate of some prestigious university. The eyes of her relatives in the black-and-white picture frames followed me as I grabbed the document. When I opened it up, I noticed it was evolving. It did not feel like paper anymore but like pig skin, and it writhed with peristaltic motions in my hands like a loop of intestine. It was alive, this contract that bore my signature in blood; a living, breathing document. I couldn’t rip it even if I tried.
I rushed to the kitchen and opened the drawers as quietly as I could. I found a box of matches. I lit one stick and held it to the edge of the document. At first, it curled up like a sleeping baby disturbed and then the fire caught on and blazed. Believe you me, it started writhing in pain; I tossed it on the tiled kitchen floor; a mouth emerged from its fleshy face and a shrill, piercing scream came forth.
I heard a bedroom door crash open upstairs followed by heavy, rapid footfalls down the stairs, like the galloping of hooves. Madam Shaje appeared at the door, panting, her eyes bulging, looking in different directions. She caught on to me standing in her kitchen, saw the contract burnt beyond recognition, and let out a maniacal shriek. Her shadow grew as she shed her human form and became a thing of bat-like wings and uncountable arms and feet. A teratoma. Something between a giant spider, a host of bats, and a millipede. She filled the door to bursting and a spray of faeces exploded from her orifices.
“IWO!!!” she boomed from many mouths. “How dare you?”
I stood, transfixed, waiting for the end, for one of her serrated limbs to sweep across and dismember me. I counted four small, symbiotic, fleshy creatures, latched onto what looked like teats on her skin, suckling like hungry neonates; flappy looking things that looked like what my contract would have developed into. They ran around the surface of the beast with pseudopodia, chittering like children.
Madam Shaje hovered over me for a long minute, her rancid breath hot on my face. I remained frozen, unable to look away from the monster before me. There was no escape. The thing that was formerly Madam Shaje filled the kitchen from floor to ceiling. She smelled like sewage, her many eyes blinking asynchronously, and surprisingly normal-looking teeth—incisors—in her many mouths chattered in a kind of suppressed anger. Slowly, she started regressing into herself, numerous limbs folding and disappearing, her little beasties vanishing into crevices. Leathery, bat-like wings folded into her back like the roof of a convertible. Soon, Madam Shaje was standing in the doorway in her human form, looking ashamed at all the mess she’d made, at having lost her cool. She pulled her tattered gown across her body and wiped a tear from her cheek. She looked at me one more long moment before stepping aside.
“Odabo,” she said, as one would to a dear friend or relative. I hesitated but she nodded her approval, gesturing to the door. Go. I walked past her, trying my best not to slip on the pool of brown fluids she had released. She was a woman of principle, of contracts like a proper employer. I knew now she wouldn’t touch a hair on my head, not without a binding contract. The warding spell no longer had an effect on me and I opened the mahogany door without difficulty. The night air was cool and refreshing.
Baba Lagbaja was standing outside the door, a smile on his old, wrinkled face. He could sense I was free, and he started singing and clapping and dancing,
Eni a ori mu
Eni a ori so de’ru
Eni a ori sheleya.
I looked back as the door closed behind me, at Madam Shaje in the dark. A lonesome woman. One of her creatures emerged in the crook of her arm and she caressed it. I felt the pain of our broken bond and my freedom was a bittersweet feeling.
“Go!” Baba Lagbaja cried.
“Bye-Bye Ma.” I said to Madam Shaje and waved.
She nodded.
