Ugobenna

a short story by Ifesinachi Okoli-Okpagu

The last entry in Silvanus Eze’s diary was a single sentence, quite ordinary, not by any chance thought-provoking but it would later cost him everything he was, and all that he was not. A year later, he would kill a boy that was not his son, a young man with the taste of life still heavy in his mouth.

May 26, 2009.

Ugobenna is no longer here.

The entry was dated the day his son threw Silvanus Eze to the ground. It was written in the aftermath of the fight that rubbed his failure as a father in his face; right after his son, Ugobenna hissed at him and accused him of being poor. He had retaliated by slapping the young man hard across his cheek. His wife, a once docile bride who could never talk to him without adding “Sir” with her eyes fixed on the ground, had urged Ugobenna on with shouts and claps of scorn. It was what his home had turned to, a wrestling match, with him, always the sole opponent on the other side of the ring.

Neighbours came out of their homes to watch in amusement. They leaned over railings. They sat on pavements. They laughed as they enjoyed the free entertainment. Later that day as he trekked to the bus-stop, skipping around shallow pools of mud that slicked the street, he winced as his joints protested the assault. He felt the mocking stares of his neighbours, their fingers pointing at him and describing him as “that policeman that fought his son and beat up his wife”.

He had not beaten Ada, had never lifted a finger against her.

***

The fight had started with Ugobenna approaching him for bribe money so his mathematics teacher would pass his exams. Egunje, he called it, rubbing his thumb against the tips of his other fingers. It had just finished raining and the weak sun that hung in the sky looked like a poorly made omelette with its yoke spilling from the sides.

“The man is very foo. . .foolish and he likes to fail students anyhow,” Ugobenna spat, his red eyes dancing, “If I don’t give him the egunje eh, he will just close his. . .his eyes and write a big F on my paper with his red biro and if I fail this subject eh, that means I will not graduate next. . .next year.” He paused to let it sink in, then he added, “You know what that means.”

The threat was well understood between them. It meant that Silvanus would have to pay an extra year of school fees. He might as well have told him to fly a plane. The boy shifted from one foot to the other waiting for his father’s reply, his movements as restless as the wind fluttering the damp clothes hanging on a thin rope. Silvanus could almost hear his son’s brain working, planning a way to spend the money; maybe on a girlfriend or at a night club or on marijuana with his friends.

“I don’t have any money,” Silvanus replied and stuck a half eaten chewing stick in his mouth. He concentrated on keeping the fibres from going down his throat.

“Ah-ah, what’s that now? What do. . .do you mean by that?”

“I just told you,” Silvanus said with the stick still in his mouth. “I don’t have any money. Maybe if you stayed up in the night to read instead of chasing after the girls on this street, you wouldn’t need to bribe your teacher, eh?”

Ugobenna hissed and grumbled, “Have. . .have you seen me wi. . .with any girl before? Eh? Or have your friends comp. . .complained to you that. . .that I am fucking their daughters? Eh. . ?” he asked, his stammer getting worse. He stuck his hands in his pockets and continued, “so. . .so does that mean you are not giving me the money? All this. . .this your goody-goody, you think I don’t know what you do. . .do outside, eh? Let me tell you, Tunji’s father ha. . .ha. . .has given him his own money oh.”

“Then go and tell Tunji’s father to give you yours and don’t disturb me,” Silvanus shouted, leaning forward on the chair. It creaked. He spat the chewing stick from his mouth. It had turned bitter.

“When I was your age I was already working, bringing money home. You don’t even know what you want to do with your life.”

“Don’t insult me oh. Is it. . .is it because I came to mee. . .meet you, eh?” Ugobenna shouted his head swaying from side to side, and he launched into a string of incoherent words that his stammering made difficult to understand.

“If. . .if you were so. . .so successful, will you be sitting down here wai. . .wai. . .waiting for your uniform to dry because you cannot buy sim. . .simple generator? Is it not your mates that are. . .that are building houses in. . .in. . .in Lekki and Victoria Garden City? See where you live. . .look at everywhere. Ju. . .ju. . .just because you are poor does not mean that. . .”

At this point, Silvanus Eze jumped to his feet, and pouring the frustration of what his son had just said into his aim, his hand flew across Ugobenna’s cheek. For five seconds, they stared at each other—one, apologetic and the other, gradually turning dark with rage. Silvanus was taken by surprise when Ugobenna rushed at him, clearing him off his feet. When his back landed on the cold floor, he stared into his son’s deranged eyes and wondered if it was the same child he had carried on his back, whispering into his ears about how he would become a governor one day and buy a house for his parents. He wondered if it was the same child he used to rush down from the station to pick up from school on the last day of the term just so that he would be the first person to skim through his report sheet and thump his back that he had done well.

Silvanus remembered how a six year Ugobenna had come crying home to him, saying his friends had laughed at him when he told them that he wanted to be a policeman like his father. He had been impressed by the boy’s insistence.

“I want to hold a gun like you, daddy, and if Tunji laughs at me again,” Ugobenna had said with tears still wet in his eyes, “I will shoot him, then warn him that I will tell his daddy that he laughed at me.”

In between consoling the boy who believed that being a policeman was the next best thing and trying to hide his mirth at the innocent words of a child, Silvanus had decided to get a diary. In his diary he would write down the interesting things that happened in his life as a Police Officer.

He had wanted his son to be proud of him.

The first entry in his diary filled two and a half pages. It reflected the pride he had in his job, the courage that made him resilient, ready to take on the world and the energy that put a bounce to his steps. He shared stories of gallantry; how he had refused to collect a two thousand naira bribe from an oil tanker that had taken an illegal route through the city; how he and his colleagues had spent the night on their bellies under a thick veil of dark shrubs before they pounced on a notorious gang of armed robbers; how he ran on cheetah legs and almost got a bullet in his shoulder.

He read his first entry to Ugobenna that night years ago when the boy was barely out of his sixth year. It was dark, the kind of night without stars that did not let you see your hands even if you held them up to your face. The power had been out for almost two weeks and the smell of spoiling meat hung heavy in the air but they hardly noticed it. It was a smell that had permeated the curtains and the holes in the roof and become a part of the house. On the centre table a melting candle cast gold sheens on his son’s face, his bright eyes twinkling. Silvanus read the entry to him, and twice he stole furtive glances at his wife who sat in the quiet darkness, a small smile playing on her lips as she looked at him with renewed awe. The twins on her laps gurgled. They were not yet able to understand the words he read aloud in a forced baritone that sounded like the voice of the governor who had just given a speech on the radio amidst sounds of static.

When he finished, his wife’s voice sounded like the brush of feathers against his cheek, “Should I bring your food now, Sah?”

He had said yes. She knelt as she served him, her eyes to the ground. His bowl of soup contained two pieces of meat and an extra fish, part of which he gave his son.

Night after night as he read his diary to his son and the twins, his chest swelled as his family lapped up the stories with wide-eyed stares. But as the years flew by and they got older, his entries got shorter and less enthusiastic. After a while, he replaced his “I’s” with “We” because it took the load of the blame away from him and transferred it to the system that was beginning to leave premature wrinkles on his forehead. After reading his entry for the day, he would look into the orange flame crowning the candle stick and think about what he had written; if he had told too many lies or too little. He would feel the need to explain his colleagues, to justify their actions; why Bolaji his best friend had threatened to throw the bus driver in a cell if he did not give him the twenty naira he asked for, why Hassan slept in a cell every night for fear of going home to his bitter wives with empty pockets. He would want to explain how drinking countless bottles of beer made him feel better about his situation; that the money he owed Madam Bisi for the beers he drank was to him a token that his salary would be paid. He would want to describe the floating feeling he experienced, like someone dropped into the middle of a sea without a life jacket and left to drown, when he heard on the radio that the Inspector General of Police had been arrested for stealing public funds amounting to thirteen billion naira.

Just about the time when his entries became less than half a page, he stopped reading to his children. He realised that he was tired of the lethargy in his voice, a flatness that reminded him of his shoes that were scraped raw at the heels and was as good as not wearing any at all; he was tired of the ruefulness in his stories. His entries were no longer colourful but melancholic, filled with despair and the dreams he had buried.

It was about the same period that the twins were knocked down by a vehicle while trying to cross a road on their way back from school. As they battled with ghosts, their chests in spasms, his wife clung to their bodies until all that was left were the empty cases. Then she turned to him with tears tracing unruly paths down her cheeks, like the trail left by a moving snail, her fingernails poised, aiming for his throat. Silvanus silently mourned the system that had let him down. He blamed the headmistress that sent the children away from school because they had failed to pay their fees. Didn’t she know the roads were busiest at that time of the day? It was about the same time his wife stopped calling him ‘sir’ and her tongue grew barbs. It was about the same time he felt Ugobenna slipping away from him, and about the same time that Silvanus joined the system in collecting crumpled twenty naira notes on the highway.

***

A year after the fight, Ugobenna left home.

It was the day Ada finally gave birth again. Between the twins’ death and the delivery, she had suffered four miscarriages. The doctor had attributed it to stress. He had on a patronising smile as he said to the couple, “there is no reason why you both can’t have another child. All Madam needs is rest. A lot of rest should do the trick. No problem at all at all.”

Ada had refused to look at Silvanus. She had refused to look at the doctor because she knew he was lying. She had fixed her eyes on a spot above his head. Plain blue wall. Beside his head was a picture of a pregnant woman with a huge grin, her belly as round as the bottom of a calabash. Rest would do the trick, he had said. It was not rest she needed. She needed her twins back, the ones her husband had let die.

When she was told that she was pregnant again, she acted as if she had just been told that there was an ant crawling on her blouse. Just brush it off as one of those things that could fall off easily. Ringing in her mind was the thought that she would wake up one morning and find the baby slipping out between her legs in clots of tissue and blood. Whenever she had the strength, she went to her stall where she sold second-hand children clothes and other times, she moped about the house as she waited for the babies swelling her stomach to join the others. She was alone in her fear. Her first son no longer cared.

Her son’s erratic behaviour left a bitter taste in her mouth that was accentuated by her husband’s coldness. She had been the first to notice the little things that disappeared from the house – a trinket here, some money there, before the bigger things she could no longer hide. Many times when she took a walk in the neighbourhood, she would hear the whispers, feel the pitying looks from the neighbours with whom she had shared funny stories of her children when they were growing up – did you know that the twins hid chicken bones underneath their bed on Christmas day? Those children, they will not kill me, mba nu. . . Do you know that Ugobenna came first in his class? That boy, he will be a governor one day, true. . . Has your daughter started eating, eh? Tell her that she has to eat well well if she will get a husband when she is older – then she would start to think. She would think of how far she had come from being the excited bride who had come to Lagos for the first time to live with her important Policeman husband—a man the village girls said would give her handsome babies like him, who walked with heavy footsteps like he owned the earth. She would think of the way he had held his first son in his hands when he was born and joked that the boy already had his kind of big nose; the pride she felt as her twin babies suckled on her nipples, her contented wincing when they bit down hard. Her mind would try to capture without success the coldness that had shot to her heart when her twins died; how she had looked at her husband with an intense loathing that was difficult to describe because he had not been able to do anything while her children bled to death on a hospital bench.

She would then think of the present; how she tried talking with her son but most times felt like she was speaking to a stranger—a young man who looked a lot like Ugobenna but did not have the warmth that used to be in his eyes. His eyes now told a different story of induced absentmindedness. Slowly, the feeling that her son was turning to someone else got to her and before she knew it, time had passed and her pregnancy was nine months gone. She finally had to admit to herself when the weight inside her started to twitch and pinch that she was indeed going to have a baby this time. She recalled the last words she screamed before the excruciating pain cloaked her senses.

“Silvanus!” she screamed. “Silvanus, you have not done me well!”

***

After dropping her off at the hospital, Silvanus rushed home to get the things that Ada would need. As he opened the door and stood peering into the room, he knew something was missing. At first, his eyes darted to the cabinet where the television used to be then he remembered that it was no longer there. It was one of the things Ugobenna had stolen. Silvanus dashed into the only bedroom which he shared with his wife and checked the pocket of his old uniform where he kept the little money he had at home. He heaved a sigh of relief, the notes were all there. Dismissing the fear that snaked through him, he carried the basket that held baby things and started to leave.

There was a knock on the door. The door opened and Iya Tunji stuck her head in without waiting for an answer.

“Oga Silvanus, well done oh,” she crooned. Her eagle eyes were everywhere at once and the corner of her lips lifted in a self-satisfied smile.

Silvanus grimaced knowing that she was capturing the near-empty room in her mind, perhaps the subject of her next gossip with her fellow lazy women association. He grunted and moved past her, closing the door behind him.

“I hear say your wife go hospital to born pikin,” she said. “That her belle be like two blom-blom put together. I swear, na two pikin dey inside that her belle. How she be?”

“Fine, Iya Tunji. I am hurrying there to see her.”

“Okay oh,” she said and looked away like she was about to say something he would not like. “Eh, Oga Silvanus, that your son come here today.” She scratched her head.

“Which one?” he snapped.

“Ah-ah, Ugobenna now. How many sons you get before?”

Silvanus held back the curses that sprang to his tongue at the mention of the boy who had given him heartache during the past year. As far as he was concerned, he would rather be childless than be a father to a son who had nearly broken his spine and who had robbed him blind. Iya Tunji was still staring at him so he replied, “Yes? What did he want?”

“I see as him leave the house and he carry travelling bag like say he dey travel. I ask him where him dey go and he no answer me. He just comot. Later, Baba Tolani come knock for the door with one big cutlass, that kind dey use cut iroko tree. He dey very very angry. Him say Ugobenna give Tolani belle, say he go kill am today today.”

“Who give who belle?” Silvanus roared feeling the blood pump into his head. Iya Tunji took two steps back almost tripping over her feet, her eyes darting about seeking escape from his wrath.

“Sorry sah,” she squeaked. “I just say make I tell you.”

Silvanus pushed past her, trying to digest the ill-fated news that his son had impregnated a neighbour’s daughter and had run away to God-knew-where.

As he got to the hospital, the doctor told him with a huge grin pasted on his face that his wife had given birth to two healthy baby boys.

“Congratulations.”

The doctor even had the guts to call them “bouncing babies”. . . Silvanus’s frown grew darker and the doctor’s grin slipped. As if their bouncing will put food on the table. . .mschew! All he could think of was how he was going to feed two mouths and still clean up the mess Ugobenna had created which would cost him an extra mouth to feed.

Ada noticed the wildness in his eyes as Silvanus entered the maternity ward with the basket she had packed weeks before, in the way he dumped it on the bed. She sat upright despite the weakness in her joints, a lump forming in her throat.

“O gini?” she asked. “What is it? My babies. . .”

He stopped prancing about and fixed her with a cold stare. In that moment when his eyes bored through hers, Ada saw the torment in his soul, the pain that made his hand shiver as he stretched it out to her, the shame that made him drop it and turn around. Later, she would think to herself that she made a huge mistake. She should have stopped him from leaving in that condition. My fault, she would cry, I for no allow am go like that.

“Ugobenna is gone,” Silvanus muttered before he left.

Ada stayed still, content to release the pain climbing out of her heart in the form of tears.

***

That night, as he stood waiting for the next vehicle to cross the police checkpoint, Silvanus kept hearing the voice of six year old Ugobenna in his head. It had started to drizzle and while his colleagues took cover in the police van parked by the roadside, he allowed the rain drench him, willing the voice in his head to stop. There was a calmness in the way the wet coldness seemed to seep into his blood, warming it up then bringing it to a boil like an open pot filled with water over a gas stove.

I want to hold a gun like you, daddy, and if Tunji laughs at me again, I will shoot him and warn him that I will tell his daddy that he laughed at me, the voice said. Daddy I want to be a policeman like you. . .like you. . .

He jumped when a hand settled on his shoulder. In the darkness, he could make out the rotund shape of his best friend, Bolaji.

“Come away from the rain, Silvanus. Cold no dey enter your body?”

He shrugged off Bolaji’s hand and cocked his gun to block out the voice in his head. Bolaji did not understand. He could try to explain but in the end, he would see the confusion in his friend’s eyes. It was the same confusion that had clouded Bolaji’s eyes years before when Silvanus confided in him that the reason he had joined the twenty-naira collectors was so that he could afford his son’s school fees like other fathers and maybe if there was change left, he could save for his son’s future. He would need the money to go to school, the best university. . .he will not be like those nonsense governors that faked their university degrees.

“I dey okay. I’m all right here,” Silvanus replied.

Bolaji tugged his trousers over his pregnant belly and returned to the pick-up van just as headlights approached. Blinding headlights that tore down the road then became reluctant as they caught sight of a Policeman. Silvanus raised a hand to halt the night prowler. Afro hip-hop music blared from the car, shaking the ground. A light came on within the car illuminating a boy behind the wheels. His square head bobbed to the music. The sparse moustache on his upper lip was an attempt to make him appear older but Silvanus knew that he could not have been much older than Ugobenna; not yet seventeen. The boy turned down the volume of the C.D. player. As Silvanus came closer, he noticed the silver chains round his neck that seemed to drag his head down.

“Yes? What time is it, young man?” Silvanus barked, training his torchlight on his face. The boy squinted and groaned.

“How the hell am I supposed to know?” he slurred. “You are blinding me, mehn.”

Silvanus drew back when the stench of alcohol hit him. Several empty brown bottles lay on the floor of the passenger’s side. The boy’s eyes tried to focus. Failed. His pupils danced. Silvanus seized the boy’s hand and pushed the wristwatch encircling his wrist to his face.

“It’s almost eleven p.m, you hear? Do you hear, you idiot.” He cursed and asked, “What is your name?”

The boy sneered then leaned his head back against the headrest.

“Jay-jay Adewale Martins Junior. Ring any bells?”

Of course, Silvanus thought with disgust, the son of the former Minister of Internal affairs, Adewale Martins. Just the week before, the ex-Minister was accused of money laundering and had been visited by EFCC officials. The Crime Commission released a press report of a long list of crimes of which the minister was a part of.

“Oya, let me see your particulars now now.” He hissed. “People like your father are stealing our money, abi? Allowing others to lick their shit. Like father like son.”

In an instant the snicker on the boy’s face disappeared, replaced with an anger that had him jumping out of the car. His hands encircled Silvanus’s throat and they both crashed on the ground, with Silvanus underneath. Shifting from side to side, Silvanus tried to dislodge the boy whose grip tightened and whose alcohol breath poured into his nostrils, making him even dizzier.

In the wet darkness, Silvanus heard chattering and laughter coming from the direction of his colleagues. It did not occur to him that his colleagues had not seen the boy jump at him; had not heard the thump of his back as his bones connected with asphalt. His mind did a moonwalk back to the day, a year ago, at a similar situation when his son threw him to the ground. It was exactly the same way his son’s face had hovered above his, accusing him with mute lips and eyes filled with the storming of a hurricane. He remembered the laughter from the sides, the sneers, the scorn-filled clapping. Silvanus remembered, and he started to shake. The hands were around his throat, squeezing tighter and cutting off the thread of air that tried to push through his windpipe.

He heard a harsh voice whisper, “Don’t you ever again compare me with my father!”

Silvanus heard the accusation in the voice and it made him feel ashamed. But he was tired of being ashamed. Instead, he welcomed the blood surging into his brain, the fiery redness that blinded his eyes. Thinking of his son, Silvanus choked out in reply, “I am no longer your father.”

If he could see himself at that moment struggling with a boy a third his age, and with his back on the ground, he would have pitied the way his veins strained against his face, threatening to burst free from the pressure. He would have laughed at the way his eyes bulged; the way a thin line of spittle crawled out of his mouth and traced a path down the side to mingle with the shine of the rain on the tar. He would have thrown his head back and kept laughing; laughing and laughing so hard that his ribs would ache, his chest would swell and his body would twitch with the laughter. A laughter pushing from the part of his stomach where the sweet taste of fatherhood had turned bitter like an unripe lime.

Then, in the moment when the gun went off, he stared into the shocked eyes of a boy that was no longer Ugobenna but the son of the Minister of Internal Affairs, his laughter would die like a piece of chewed hard meat tucked into the corner of the mouth – a morsel that had outlived its usefulness.

In the moment after that the gun went off, Silvanus would realise the voice in his head was gone. The frantic voices that filled the rain were of his colleagues rushing to pull the dead body off his chest.

And he would recall the last entry in his diary one year before: Ugobenna is no longer here.

Ifesinachi is a scriptwriter as well as a fiction writer whose stories have appeared in anthologies and online journals including Maple Tree Literary Supplement, Sentinel Nigeria Magazine among others. She was a participant of the British Council Radiophonics’ workshop, the BBC World Service Trust Workshop and the Farafina Trust Creative Writing Workshop. She is currently working on a full length novel alongside a career in media/brand management.