To the villagers of Mkumbi, Mpondoland South Africa and all the cannabis, coca and opium farmers worldwide fighting for their rights.

The nutrients from my last meal flow from my mouth and into my veins as its body flows downstream, slowly disintegrating back into nature, and for a moment my old eyes gleam again with the vigour of youth, penetrating and bold yet somehow wiser than they used to be. More alert. Each drop of fluid holds a truth, an emotion, an overwhelming desire for life and death, eternity and oblivion. I am able to commune again. To feel time stop and multiply, to remember it all, every sensation, every pain and every pleasure in my life.

   Yet already the vibrancy fades, consumed by the fire inside me that never ceases to burn, and my ravenous hunger, and again the memories drift away, always a heartbeat ahead of me they disappear in the waters that are my world.

   Days and nights do not have the same meaning when you are as old as I am. Yet I know there was a time when the next meal and the last were not a question lost in a fog. I cannot remember my last meal neither can I remember being young, back when the river was mine, and all the rivers of our corner of the world belonged to my people.

***

The waters are dark and empty around me, only the reflection of the night sun gleaming down, round and alive from the sky provides any light, turning the black, stony waters into fractals of shining, oily pearls that rub against my belly and back as I swim and spin.

   Night is the most peaceful time. The noises of the day do not break through the waters tonight – I do not miss the cacophony of the human engines, the splashing of their oars, the laughter and tears of their children playing and fighting on the riverbanks.

   The humans believe the river is theirs. They believe the whole world is theirs and maybe they are right about that, but they are wrong about the river. The river is mine.

   Tiny salmon swim next to me now, completing their run upstream to spawn on the gravel beds that line the river, the night sun illuminating their bluish-grey scales as they nibble off little bits of dead skin from my body, cleaning me, tickling me, loving me.

   I suppose it is love that I miss the most.

   The humans will not let me prey anymore. Eons ago they did. There were days long ago when they let me roam free, another creature of the world whose wonders they embraced with the gleefulness of any young species or beast, just as I had loved discovering new bends along my river, rapids and rocks, algae and fish.

   Not so anymore.

   They do not remember those days, any more than my famished self remembers my life. They do not live long enough. They believe that the world is theirs and that their thoughts are their own.

   They cannot remember when I whispered my name into their minds.

   Mzintlava.

   They believe they named the river on their own, and gave my name a meaning of their own, and then forgot it. But they did not name it. It was I. I and my sisters, dwelling in the other streams and rivers, and communing with them. Letting them know that different though we are, we all share the same mind. Their language came from us. Their own names came from the dreams we planted in their minds at night, back when I was not so lonely. Before they replaced us with gods. Back when I still had sisters.

#

I might just eat tonight; I can smell the warm scent of prey on the current.

   It is swimming ahead peacefully. I can sense its mind, yet unaware of my presence, unaware of the role it is about to play in the cycle of life. How its flesh and blood but also its thoughts, memories and feelings will ever be part of a greater whole. Me. The one creature connecting it to a past it has forgotten.

   It is closer now. I can feel its panic as I awaken something primal buried deep inside of it. The depths that existed before it was sentient, before it knew itself as distinct from the world. But it need not fear. It need not fear eternity.

#

The day sun shines overhead now. It brings life to the water and the whole world. Although I am almost blind, the day sun allows me a glimmer of my youth, the different shades of small plants, the glorious colours of the fish that have multiplied in their tininess while giants such as myself have dwindled and died.

   But for now I am fed, for now I am strong, I can remember everything, and my body swerves easily towards the waterfall that marks the end of my territory and the grounds of my dead sister. Where our two rivers collide, mine feeding into hers in harmony.

   I want to raise my head out of the waters, just as freely as I had done in the past.

   Even then, times were not always the same. We grew fewer as the humans grew many, and the drunkenness of conquest made them look only ahead, never to pause, never to look behind and remember.

   They would sling rocks at me at first, then with time wooden spears that would soon have pointed stones on their tips, sometimes flames and soon metal. Some would brave the water, clad in the fur of other creatures they killed in the world they own. Loincloths and knives. They would wait for signs of me, and then howl at the night sky, then attack me. The smarter ones would run. Who knew what the price of their shame was? I do not understand that emotion. I retreat if I must, attack when best suited and do not care for the feelings of the world.

   Those knives and spears became bullets. They would bounce off my skin as I reared my head and roared, diving and appearing again, mocking their puny greed, but somehow feeling sorry for them. Pity is an emotion I know too well. Pity for myself, and my amnesic loneliness.

   But today I feel strong. Today I feel defiant. Today I feel that maybe my loneliness will end, that somewhere in another river, one of mine is making its way for me.

   I push my head out of the water, eager for the yellow warmth of the day sun against my flesh.

   Some things never change.

   The rich green and brown mountains still witness my comings and goings as they have before. The valleys are still lush, the skies are still blue and streaked with clouds thin and writhing like eels. There are huts too now, small circular and domed. Pink, blue and green, dotting the grass and slopes like pimples on the noses of giants.

   And around the bend, the waterfall pouring from the mountains to become my sister’s river.

   Mzimvubu.

   How I miss you. How I miss finding you at the end of my realm and the onset of yours. Our fights, heads raising from the waters, thundering like the waterfall, and necks intertwining in a playful dance just as our rivers become one. I never wanted your river and you never wanted mine. Both of us guarded something sacred, something that now, among the stones and the fish lays littered with human refuse.

   Why rule the world if only to treat it so?

   Your limits were the ocean, Mzimvubu. The glorious expanse you would sing to me about, planting ambitions in the sleeping human minds. We thought the world was for everyone to share. How naïve we were.

   They absorbed your name and gave it new meaning as they did with everything else. Calling it the home of the hippopotamus, which were so many and worshipped you. Until they killed them all.

   Just as they have killed you.

   I can hear their children laughing, their joy bouncing from the plateaued stones of the waterfall and ripping through the valleys and paths to their homes.

   The taste of the air so fresh. The breeze of the wind so cool.

   I see them running towards the banks now, rifles in hand, kneeling and pointing their barrels towards me.

   My skin is no longer as impenetrable as it used to be. If they aim true I will bleed. If I bleed, I will die.

   I should dive back. Plunge and disappear as the coward I have become. But what does it matter? How much time must I spend alone? Hunted. Famished. Afraid. Forgetting. I have lived like this for so long. Far too long.

   Perhaps that is what shame feels like. Perhaps I can show them one last time the glory they have forgotten. It may not be much, but it might tickle their mind.

   I have only one last jump in me. One last leap. May it count for something.

   I push my body out of the waters – every drop falling away, a fragment of my soul – and open my mouth.

   I will eat and commune one last time, and let them destroy all that is left of a time when things were better.

   My body twists through the air; the mountains, valleys and trees spin in a whirlwind of burning life under the day sun.

   The first of their bullets roar, but I cannot hear them, the thunder of their hatred is drowned by the immortal rumble of the waterfall. Splashes of my blood ripple through the air and mix with the colours, streaks of such a long life yet so miniscule, each drop a lifetime, each bite of rusty metal searing my flesh alive.

   It feels good. Good to be dying as strong as I will ever be.

   I can hear their screams now as my jaw closes in on one of their heads and I bite; the flood of who that person was connecting me to their life one last time.  A little girl climbing a mountain every morning to go to school morphing into an adolescent slapping a young boy’s hand away, then a married woman working the bright green dagga fields and singing, thinking about the teenage boy, and what had never been. Their ancestors’ memories, bubbling through every fiber of their being, weaving a timeless tapestry. The sum of who they are, all the way back to when we were all free.

   And through it all I think I can hear you, sister. You and me, united once more as the two rivers that bear our names meet to feed into the ocean.

***

Johan Villiers reporting from Mkumbi village for the Mpondoland Sun.

   It is a beautiful day this afternoon in Mkumbi.

   All the more beautiful as local villagers have finally managed to capture and kill the elusive Mamlambo.

   While many believed it to be a mythical creature, a remnant from old legends such as the Scottish Loch Ness monster, I can confirm with my own eyes that the Mamlambo is very real indeed.

   The creature is an amazing seventy feet in length, with what appears to be the tail of a large fish, the body of a lizard, the long neck of a snake and a head that is equine in shape and features, except for its overlapping layers of sharp fangs, that undoubtedly caused the alarm in recent months.

   Named the Goddess of the River by the Zulu, it has a more infamous name in the region: Brain Sucker.

   Indeed, while locals have spoken of the Mamlambo for generations, it was yet to be sighted, and local knowledge was dismissed as superstitious rumors.

   In the past year three villagers – excluding this morning’s victim, as residents rushed to attack the creature – were found dead, near or in the water, their skulls open and brains sucked out. Local police assumed that they had drowned and had been feasted on by crabs, but it is now clear that they were wrong.

   The reason the Mamlambo fed on people’s brains, and the reason for its recent re-emergence will remain a mystery. While local residents refuse to turn over their catch to local ANC representatives, no sightings of the creature have been claimed in other rivers and streams of the country in the past year, decade, or century.

   I think we can say for certain today, that whatever its motivations were, whatever its existence was like, the fabled Mamlambo is no more.

I started following Zainab Isa in Primary 3.

Her mother brought her to our house on the morning of what was her second day in our school. From my perch on the round leather pouf with an embroidered Nigerian Coat of Arms in the centre, I watched the girl with the intense gaze as her eyes scanned our sitting room, sliding past the framed family pictures on the wall to hover for a second on the wooden room divider which doubled as a place-holder for our new Sony Colour TV and the ancient Bosch radio that my father refused to throw away because its ability to capture and hold BBC Radio broadcast was unmatched.

The girl’s head didn’t turn as she took in the room from where she stood beside her mother near the door, but I sensed that her big eyes captured everything, and judged them – and us.

She must have felt me watching because she rolled her eyes towards me. We went at it. Stare for stare. I was the first to look away.

‘She is new here o, make sure you watch over her and bring her home when school closes,’ her mother said as she held a plastic lunch box towards me.

Reluctance struggled with breeding as I moved to take the box from the oyinbo woman, allowing my ‘okay ma’ to be audible enough for her and my parents to discern but whisper-like enough to convey my unhappiness.

Married to a Nigerian a man from somewhere in the middle belt, Mama Zainab hails from one of those Arab speaking countries outside Africa: I thought Lebanon, but she could have been Syrian. She was a Christian.

Though our parents had lived in the same compound for years, Zainab had just moved back to Kaduna after spending the last six years in Kano with an aunty. ‘Not exactly a JJC, but too young to have known her way around before she went to Kano,’ Busola, my sister, had remarked as I complained to her about being asked to shepherd someone, a girl for that matter.

 It didn’t help that everyone at home started calling Zainab my wife right away. In secret, I didn’t mind. But I acted annoyed, all the same.

 I was all big brotherly for the first two days I led Zainab to and from school. After that, she stopped allowing me hold her hands as we waited for traffic to clear before we ran across the zebra crossing opposite Army Children School, New Cantonment A – our school. On that third day she did not even show up. Annoyed, I went to check up on her after waiting thirty minutes. I found her, to my annoyance, sitting in front of their apartment, waiting for me.

It became a habit. She became the leader. I became the one on a leash, one of several.

My sister said Zainab Isa had a magnetic personality. Even though my Oxford Children’s Dictionary did not help when I sought for the meaning of magnetic personality and Busola had refused to explain, I understood—magnets attract metal, Zainab Isa attracts people.

Besides the fact that she was the most beautiful girl in school, Zainab was the closest thing to a white person in Angwa Shanu, our corner of Kaduna city. Before her, Mama Idara’s yellow pawpaw daughters were the ones everyone called oyinbo. Idara and Ekaete’s claim to that tag faded away with Zainab’s coming, like the light of our lantern fades when the florescent tube that hung from our parlour ceiling crackled to life as NEPA blessed us with power. Zainab was that different. In our community, mixed race and white people were akin to gods – fantastic beings who could do almost anything, hence Zainab’s fame, or infamy, as Busola called it.

Everyone wanted to be friends with Zainab, everyone wanted to touch her wavy hair that was almost always pulled into a tight ponytail. In a school where every other girl wore the official plait of the week, Zainab had liberty—the sort that annoyed me to no end.

I soon got tired of hearing teachers mouthing fine girl this, fine girl that, when they should have been flogging her silly for being naughty, again. Where others suffered hot and welted backsides, she got sent to clear litter from the playground. As if there was an edict in school against giving Zainab Isa anything beyond the mildest scolding.

I hated her, I was sure, for getting people—me in particular—in trouble, but loved it when she looked me up during break time, when she held my hand as we walked to the canteen area, when she looked into my eyes and smiled.

***

I first voiced my feeling to Zainab in primary five.

 It was a Saturday. We had decided to be truants for a day, so skipped the extra lessons Mr Aliu arranged for our class. It was not an official class, so instead of continuing to school we walked past it and followed the sound of pop music we could hear from the road between the barracks and Government Secondary School, Kurmin Mashi.

Government Secondary School was a big school, one of the few mixed secondary schools in Kaduna. There was no fence to hold us back. Of the barbed wire that once surrounded the compound, only the concrete poles which held them in place now remained. Cutting between buildings, we avoided the sharp-eyed gate man at the entrance—why there would be a gate man for a compound without a functional fence or gate was a question I never found an answer to.

The music led us to an auditorium where a disused water tank provided the height from which we looked through a window at the seated students from various schools facing a large stage.

The window was too small for the two of us to stand abreast, so Zainab rested her head on my shoulder. Her arms hugged me close.

Zainab was always comfortable sharing intimacies. A short time before then, she had pulled me to a corner at break time and lifted her skirt to show me her underwear.

‘E dey new,’ she said as I stared, speechless and wide-eyed, at the sky blue cotton panties. ‘You wan touch am?’ she asked.

I did not touch it. Same way I had not followed her into her mother’s room when she asked me to, about two months before the pantie episode. I never did find out why she wanted us to go into the room, but her amber eyes had lit up as they usually did when she was up to some mischief: enough warning for me to steer clear. Leaning on that window ledge, with her weight comfortable on my back, I knew a truth and named my feeling. “I love you,” I said as I exhaled.

I can’t remember what my thoughts were. Whether I felt any of those clichéd emotions such as a light bulb coming on in my head and exploding, an Eureka moment, or something stranger yet, I can’t recall.

Ray Parker Junior’s Loving You echoed through the building and vibrated on the cracked glass of the window. Two older boys were on the stage, dancing to the song, their legs, body and arms moving in time to the beat, synchronised. I liked the song, even though I could barely make out much beyond the refrain …loving you.

I liked to think it was the song, but it was most likely the tingling sensation I was getting from her body pressing ever so closer to mine, but what I did next surprised me.

I turned to her, held my lips close to her ear and whispered. She laughed. A rich laugh, mocking me. I moved to face her; annoyed that she was making fun of me. She was smiling. I liked the way her eyelids lowered when she smiled or laughed. I also liked how her smile played around the corners of her mouth. Secretive. Wise.

‘No matter how much, loving you means to me,’ she sang, in tune with Ray Parker Jr. I hadn’t known she knew the song. I laughed with her when she mumbled lines she didn’t know as she sang along.

We must have stayed like that for a long time, me savouring the closeness, she saying nothing. I recall that the Ray Parker Junior dancers gave way to some miniskirt-clad girls from Maimuna Gwarzo Girls Secondary school who swung their hips to Madonna’s Like a Prayer. and that they were still on the stage when the boys from Government College Kaduna, popularly called GCK, jumped on stage to perform Michael Jackson’s Bad. We clapped for the GCK boys. Zainab’s brother was a GCK boy — I would enrol there later that year — so they were the closest thing to a home team for us. We clapped, we yelled, and then we screamed when a lanky GCK boy floated across the stage just as Michael Jackson would. We must have yelled too loud for several eyes in the room turned to look up at us.

We did not wait to get caught. We ran, laughing as we went.

We did not stop until we crossed the school field, past the zebra crossing, through the mostly broken chain link fence of the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) Sports Complex and were inside the obstacle course proper. Walls, trenches, rope bridges, tunnels and water troughs stretched behind and in front of us. We sat on the soft grass on the biggest obstacle, the one the military cadets had to run up then jump down from, and laughed as we tried to catch our breath.

“You see the girl, the yellow one with short skirt? That one that was in the middle, their oga na? Yes, her. That’s me when I grow up,” Zainab said as we looked towards the distance.

I smiled.

I could see our houses in the distance. Twin one-story buildings, olive green, with the sun glinting off its silvery roofs. I pointed. She looked, nodded. 

Storey buildings were rare in this part of Kaduna. My father said it was because Muslims, who were in the majority do not like storey buildings near their residences. Something to do with Kwunle—purdah.

There was a valley between the twin houses and us. I thought of birds, I thought of flying home. I looked at the birds circling in the harmattan sky, effortless. I could get home in the blink of an eye. I told her this. She smiled.

‘Let’s kiss.’

I was stunned. ‘What did you say?’

‘I say let’s kiss. I see two oyinbo doing it inside movie wey my brother bring yesterday. I Spit on your Grave. na bad film. Dem dey watch am for Mama Idara’s house. Dem no know sey I dey bedroom with Idara and Ekaete, I see di man kiss di woman, an dem start to do am’

‘Do what?’

‘They started…you know…oya let’s kiss.’

We kissed. More like a peck. Muaaah. We made the noise as our lips met. More like blowing air. We laughed. Then we walked home. Along the way, we would look at each other and laugh. Yes, we had just kissed. We were one.

***

When I fell out with Zainab Isa, no song played. If ever there was a song, then it must have been in my head, a buzzing that seemed to have a rhythm, a beat even. 

Our relationship had gotten more complex. Before I left primary school, there was a big commotion about a ring. I think she told someone I gave her the ring. That someone told someone else and the gist spread until it got to the teachers. The teachers were alarmed that kids in primary five were exchanging rings. It was not too hard enduring ten hot strokes of Mr Ajayi’s cane across my buttocks. It was harder facing my elder sister, who screamed at me when we got home, but just as I had done in school, I kept mute. I never told anyone else the truth about the ring: that I didn’t give it to her, that I knew who did—Chuks, whose house was on the way to school.

Life went on.

 I left for secondary school a few months later, doing only a couple of weeks of primary six. I was a GCK student, deemed intelligent enough to handle junior secondary school when most of my mates were still in primary six. I was an afternoon section student in a school whose route was 45 degrees from the one we used to take to Army Children School. This was when we really began to drift apart. We did see each other, on the weekends, but even the how fars became stilted, a mere formality, devoid of their former glory—if you can ever call hyperventilating lungs and a surging heart rate glorious.

Then she came to me.

It was during the long vacation. I was in JSS 3, she in JSS 2 in Queen Amina Secondary School. She was at this moment a buxom beauty with shoulder length ponytail and skin the colour of ripe udara. I was in our shared backyard, crouched over a Hadley Chase paperback, struggling to finish it before the owner came for it later that day when the noon breeze brought a distinct smell and palms crossed over my eyes.

My heart was threatening to burst as I called out her name.

‘How you sabi sey na me?’ she asked as I turned to face her, still holding on to her hands.

I smiled, said, ‘cocoa butter.’

‘But my sister dey use cocoa butter cream na, in fact, na her own I use.’

Yes, I smiled, but your sister will not try to cover my eyes.

Later, sitting on the raised side of the small bridge over the gutter in front of the twin storey buildings, she told me about my letters. ‘I kept every one of them. So you really love me that much?’ she asked.

‘Yes!’

‘But why you no say anything?’

‘I did, I said something, several times.’

‘When?’

‘In primary five, the day we went to Government Day Secondary School to watch the dancers, then in my letters.’

She laughed. Her eyelids met as her eyes dimmed. ‘I don’t remember primary five. You say all those things in your letters, when I return from school you no dey talk anything.’

‘But, what could I have done?’

‘Plenty things. E dey bi like you be two different persons, the one inside the letters and the one I know.’

I smiled and said nothing. We sat like that, me staring at the bright coloured birds chirping as they foraged for food among the harmattan dried corn stalks in the garden; she staring at me in that intense way she is wont.

What would I have said? That I always had a thousand things to say to her, but I allowed my jealousy over her numerous admirers get in the way? That I wanted her to really tell me what she felt about me?

I said nothing.

‘Take,’ she said. I looked up to see her holding out a bar of goody goody chocolate.

‘Thanks,’ I said as I collected the chocolate from her and stuffed it into my pocket.

‘Eat it na,’ she urged.

‘I go eat am later,’ I said. To stop her pressing on, I asked, ‘When are you going back to school?’

‘Tomorrow. You go visit me?’

‘When is your next visiting day?’

‘June 8. Why you no wan eat the goody goody?’

‘I said I will eat it later na. Shey you have given it to me already?’

She frowned. Though I was aware of her explosive temper, what she did next shocked me.

‘If you no go eat am, give me back my goody goody,’ she said, stretching out her left hand towards me.

***

The news floated in. It was Rukiya, the girl whose father worked at the local clinic, who first told me. She had just been admitted into Queen Amina and was home for the first term holiday.

‘Zainab is a witch,’ she said in a conspiratorial tone, her finger digging furrows into my arm.

‘What do you mean ‘Zainab is a witch?’ I asked, letting my voice carry my impatience.

‘She is. She and some other girls turn into cats at night. Everybody in school knows their story.’

‘Everybody in school is a jealous busybody joor. Don’t tell me you went to school to become a gossip?’

‘Eeeehn…I am only telling you because you are her husband. Don’t eat anything she brings back from school. Don’t let her initiate you.’ Rukiya said as she ran off to whatever errand she was on before she spotted me.

Zainab didn’t come back to Kaduna that holiday. Her brother said she went to Jos with her school mother, but there was a ruckus in their house a few days after school resumed. She returned home, on suspension from school, and we heard the loud shrieks and ululations of an Aladura priest, who rang his bell in a rhythm that complemented his Yoruba chants.

Busola later told me how a parent had reported that her daughter confessed that Zainab initiated her with a chocolate bar. A search of Zainab’s locker had revealed packets of unopened goody goody bars. Zainab had refused to reveal the source of the chocolates and greeted the question; ‘Are you a witch?’ with silence.

News has a way of running faster than its source and the story of a beautiful mixed-race girl who was initiating the girls in her school into witchcraft, spread as easily as drops of groundnut oil would on a hot pan. Taking children to deliverance session became commonplace in our neighbourhood and Zainab became a hermit. I don’t know for sure if she chose to spend her time indoors or if her parents barred her from going out. I do know that I didn’t see her for weeks.

Then I got her note.

Meet me in the building opposite by 11 pm

***

‘You believe in witchcraft?’ Zainab asked me, her eyes holding my own.

We were seated on the wooden bench I had borrowed from the mechanic workshop that occupied the frontage of the long-abandoned building we were in. I could feel the chill of the coming harmattan probing like sharp needles through my cotton shirt. It was my favourite shirt. I called it my shirt, but it had once belonged to my father. I had dug up the shirt, as I had the opanka sandals I wore, from the big leather trunk my father inherited from the Indian family that used to live down the street—dug up because the 20-year-old red, blue and yellow check pattern came back in fashion. Minus the extra pocket on the right breast, the shirt was on point.

Zainab, who was sitting beside me on the bench, drew closer and turning away from the pockmarked road where a passing okada’s headlight cut a wide swath of yellow through the grey moonlight, pressed her warm cheeks to my chest. I followed the orb of headlight as it washed over the twin storey buildings across the road from us. I marvelled at how the yellow of electric lighting seeping through the glass panes of steel framed windows lent a postcard quality to the view. I wondered where our parents would think their children were—obviously not snuggled together in the uncompleted building across the street.

I spoke my thoughts out loud. Her laugh didn’t surprise me. She lifted her head from my chest to look up at me. She was smiling, understanding, but not falling for my attempt to dodge the question she had asked earlier.

‘You believe in witches?’ She asked again, her eyes steady on mine, perhaps trying to catch a lie.

‘I don’t know, but I know I want to be here with you,’ I said, hoping it was the right answer. She hugged me tight and tried to bury her head into my chest again.

I guessed I must have provided the right answer.

‘You want see wetin I fit do?’ She murmured into my breast pocket.

I felt that familiar quickening.  ‘Yes,’ I said.

I heard a rustle and looked down and saw her hands holding up a goody goody bar.

‘Take,’ she said, smiling up at me. I looked from the chocolate bar to her face and felt a chill climb my back as cats meowed nearby

End

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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