‘Ego, please try to calm down,’ Emeka said.
‘You cannot understand what this means,’ I retorted.
‘You’re not a law student,’ Zina added before Emeka could defend himself.
‘I’m sure they’ll find the killers,’ Emeka assured us.
‘They know who killed him,’ Zina said with assured finality. Years later, she would say to me, ‘If the death of such a man can go unpunished, who are we?’
On the afternoon of the armoury explosion, Emeka’s parents’ bungalow breathed brandy, warm, smooth and spicy as his mother baked. Food was her language, cooking how she expressed her love – from the bags of rice stewed into jollof for motherless children, cakes gifted to the children’s church, coolers of fried meat carried along on condolence visits. She was the type of woman born for nurturing, her buxom undulating arms created for giving love through fervent embraces.
Mrs Agnes Igwe had worn a fancy church hat complete with feathers and flowers the first Sunday afternoon Emeka sweated, a nervous sweat that beaded around his forehead and rolled down the side of his face, because his mother had requested I stop by their house so she could meet the ‘tall girl’ he was always with. She would always call me his ‘friend’, never adding the ‘girl’ as a prefix; a purposeful obliviousness.
‘Do you speak Igbo, my dear?’ she asked.
‘Not very well,’ I replied, anxious that this was reason enough for her to consider me unsuitable.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘My father did not like my mother speaking Igbo to us, he thought it would affect our English pronunciation,’ I answered truthfully.
‘Hmm,’ she grunted, with neither disapproval nor approbation.
She kept the brandy hidden in a top corner of her kitchen cabinet because it was a dereliction of the church’s policy to avoid drink. She was wary of visiting members seeing it proudly displayed, but she needed brandy to bake her fruit cakes.
The afternoon of the explosion, the kitchen tap was leaking, the pipes rusty, and Mrs Agnes had barely taken off her Sunday clothes before returning to the kitchen as she did every week, refusing every offer of help.
‘Emeka, please remind your father about this tap,’ she shouted.
‘Yes, ma,’ Emeka shouted back, before mumbling about how his father never remembered anything. He always returned from church late in the evening, barely uttering a word as he ate his cold dinner, wrung of his tolerance for people by hours attending to the problems of others.
‘Seventy percent of all the funds raised go to the headquarters, most of the rest goes to church activities and whatever is left, church members use up with all their problems. My mother pays for almost everything at home,’ Emeka had told me once. He’d seen the questions my lips were too polite to ask, aware of the imperfection of my own parents’ situation: why his father only possessed one suit, why his younger sister had been sent home for not paying her school fees, why he never changed his clothes. But you could never tell by the way Mrs Agnes sang in the kitchen, glorious choruses declaring the wondrous works of God.
‘They really love God,’ Emeka said. I believed him.
The floors shuddered and the walls convulsed. Mrs Agnes turned off her gas oven and screamed for us to all run out. ‘Earthquake! Earthquake!’
‘Oh God. My cake will collapse,’ she complained when we were all safely outside. ‘I was supposed to give it to Sister Jumoke. Her husband just lost his job and her son’s birthday is tomorrow. When did this country start experiencing earthquakes?’
The ground vibrated under our feet one last time, then there was a heavy silence. Before long, others gathered on the street to noisily question what had happened. On the news that night, we would learn that there had been an accidental detonation of explosives at a poorly maintained military base that had been marked for decommissioning the previous year. For the hundreds killed, thousands injured and left homeless, and the many that would go unaccounted for, it was yet another symptom of the home they’d not chosen, a sleight of hand dealt by the lottery of birth.
‘Lives are so dispensable here,’ Emeka remarked a week later at the funeral of a church member who’d lived close to the military base, his eyes frozen on the low-cost wooden coffin.
After the service, Mrs Agnes pulled a cooler from the boot of her car and shared packs of rice with the attendants. Pastor Igwe stayed at the front of the auditorium with the widow, and when the crowd had dispersed, I saw him fold an envelope into her hand – money he did not have.
At Emeka’s graduation, his father insisted that only Nigerian songs be played, nodding his head vigorously to Majek Fashek’s ‘Send Down the Rain’. And I wondered if he was where Emeka’s disdain for patriotism had originated.
13
Whispers
I had a demon in me. A demon of disobedience who inhibited me from acceding to authority and advice, and Pastor Kamsi was determined that I be exorcised of it. Of course, it had nothing to do with the whispers floating around about my taking up with those he’d condemned.
Names had been attached to Pastor Kamsi in the past: Akachi in the choir whose mezzo soprano was said to rival the angels, Veronica the children’s church teacher with a penchant for hugging babies, and the new attendee who’d just joined the youth ministry.
For the while that their names were affixed to his, these women breezed in and out of Pastor Kamsi’s office, consorts of the monarch, barely acknowledging my pedestrian presence.
Parishioners acquiesced to their elevated status. ‘Greet Pastor Kamsi when you see him,’ they said.
And the women blushed and swished their hands as though swatting at flies and said, ‘Me ke? No o.’
He was mentoring them, he insisted, but their coquettish smiles and flighty laughter hinted at more. Then the tide would turn and the once favoured consorts would suddenly be cast out. Parishioners would turn their backs, shutting them out of circles and conversations of which they’d once been the centre.
Stories circulated in the space these women had once occupied, disparate yet connected in theme: disobedience, a disquieting lack of spirituality, arrogance, abortive efforts at seduction. No one was sure of the origin of these tales, but they always came from someone who knew someone who was close to Pastor Kamsi, and this someone would never lie about such things because they loved God.
It was a sight to watch these women fold into themselves, sitting in a quiet corner of the church auditorium, no longer leading songs or calling for prayer, having lost their zeal for Kamsi’s God. I was reminded of Ademola and the girlfriends he’d dated after his attempt with me. For the duration of the dalliances, they burned brightly, spearheading conversations and debates on law, unofficial first ladies of our department. The lights always went out once it was over, and they were left covered in the dust of defeat that coated their tongues and prevented them from speaking as eagerly as before. A curated version of the truth always followed. Once, all we’d heard was that the girl had added nothing to him, and it had seemed like a sensible enough reason to end things.
‘You don’t think it’s strange?’ I asked Emeka.
‘I don’t think what is strange?’
‘The way all these stories pop up whenever Pastor Kamsi falls out with people.’
Emeka raised a brow that asked what direction I was headed.
‘I try not to listen to church gossip. I hear enough from my parents at home – imagine what I’d hear about myself.’
‘I don’t listen to gossip,’ I protested, ‘but whenever I ask after someone Pastor Kamsi was close to or mentoring, I hear all sorts of terrible things. Where else would these stories come from?’
