Who will be caring of Kayus when I marry Morufu? Born-boy?
I sigh, look my older brother, Born-boy, as he is sleeping on the bed, a vexing look on his face. His real name is Alao, but nobody is ever calling him that. Born-boy is the first born, so Papa say it is respecting for him to be sleeping on the only one bed in the room three of us are sharing. I don’t mind it. The bed have a thin mattress foam on top it, full of holes that bedbugs are using as kitchen and toilet. Sometimes, that mattress be smelling like the armpit of the bricklayers at the market square, and when they are raising their hand up to greet you, the smell can kill you dead.
How can Born-boy be caring for Kayus? He don’t know how to cook or clean or do any work except of his mechanic work. He don’t like to laugh or smile too, and at nineteen and half years of age, he look just like a boxer, both his hands and legs be like the branch of a thick tree. He sometimes is working all night at Kassim Motors, and when he come home too late in the night, he just throw hisself inside the bed and sleep. He is snoring now, tired, every of his breath is a shot of hot wind in my face.
I keep my eye on Born-boy a moment, watching the lifting up and down of his chest in a beat with no song, before I turn to Kayus and give him two soft slaps on his shoulder. “Kayus. Wake up.”
Kayus pinch open one eye first, before the second one. He do this all the time when he want to wake up: open one eye first, then the second one a moment after, as if he is fearing that if he open the two eyes at the same time, he will suffer a problem.
“Adunni, you sleep well?” he ask.
“I sleep well,” I lie. “And you?”
“Not well,” he say, sitting up beside me on the mat. “Born-boy say you are marrying Morufu next week. Was he joking me?”
I take his hand, cold and small in my own. “No joke,” I say. “Next week.”
Kayus nod his head up and down, pull his lips with his teeths and bite on it. He don’t say one word after that. He just bite his lips and grip my hand tight and squeeze.
“Will you ever be coming back after the marriage?” he ask. “To be teaching me? And cooking my palm oil rice for me?”
I shrug my shoulder. “Palm oil rice is not hard to cook. You just wash the rice in water three times and keep it in a bowl to be soaking. Then you take a fresh pepper and—” I stop talking because the tears is filling my mouth and cutting my words and making me to cry. “I don’t want to marry Morufu,” I say. “Please beg Papa for me.”
“Don’t cry,” Kayus say. “If you cry, then I will cry too.”
Me and Kayus, we hold each our hands tight and cry with no noise.
“Run, Adunni,” Kayus say, wiping his tears, his eyes wide and full of a fearing hope. “Run far and hide yourself.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “What if the village chief is catching me as I am running? Are you forgetting Asabi?”
Asabi is one girl in Ikati that didn’t want to marry a old man because she was having real love with Tafa, one boy that was working in the same Kassim Motors with Born-boy. The day after her wedding, Asabi was running away with Tafa but they didn’t able to run far. They catch Asabi in front of the border and beat her sore. And Tafa? They hang the poor boy like a fowl in the village square and throw his body to Ikati forest. The village chief say Tafa was stealing another man’s wife. That he must die because in Ikati, all thiefs must suffer and die. The village chief say they must lock Asabi in a room for one hundred and three days until she is learning to sit in her husband’s house and not running away.
But Asabi didn’t learn anything. After the one hundred and three days of locking inside a room, Asabi say she is no more coming outside. So she stay in that room till this day, looking the walls, plucking hair from her head and eating it, pinching her eyeslashes and hiding it inside her brassiere, talking to herself and the spirit of Tafa.
“Maybe you can be coming to play with me in Morufu’s house,” I say. “I can be seeing you in the stream too, even at the market, anywhere.”
“You think?” Kayus ask. “What if Morufu is not letting me to come and play with you?”
Before I can think to answer, Born-boy turn hisself in his sleep, wide his two legs apart, and push out a loud mess that fill the air with the odor of a dead rat.
Kayus sniff a laugh and cup his hand on his nose. “Maybe marrying Morufu is better than staying in this house with Born-boy and his smelling mess.”
I squeeze his hand and drag a smile to my lips.
* * *
I wait till Kayus is sleeping again before I leave the room.
I find Papa in the outside, sitting on the kitchen bench near the well. The morning is beginning to light up now, and the sun is just waking up from sleep; be like half a orange circle peeping from behind a dark cloth in the sky. Papa is not having any shirt on, just his trousers and no shoes on his feets. He is eating a short stick in the corner of his mouth, his black radio in one hand, and with the other hand, he is banging a stone on his radio to wake it up. He do this every morning to wake the radio up since before Kayus was born, and so I low myself to the sand and keep my hand in my back and wait for the radio to wake up.
Papa bang the stone on the side of the radio three times—ko, ko, ko—and the radio make a cracking noise. A moment pass, and a man’s voice in the radio say, “Gooood morning! This is OGFM 89.9. The station for the nation!”
Papa spit his stick to the sand beside me and look me like he want to slap my head for bending low in his front. “Adunni, I am wanting to hear six o’clock morning news. What is it?”
“Good morning, Papa,” I say. “There is no beans in the house. Can I go and borrow from Enitan’s mama?”
I have beans swelling inside a tin of water in the kitchen, but I am needing to talk to somebody about this whole wedding coming because Enitan and me, we been best of friends since we been able to read ABC and count 1-2-3. Her mama is also having a small farm, and many times, she like to give us beans, yam, and egusi, and she will tell us to pay for it whenever we are having moneys for it.
Papa shock me when he laugh and say, “Wait.”
He set the radio on the bench ever so gentle, but the radio make a cracking noise two times, and then it just die dead like that. Give up spirit. No more OGFM 89.9 voice. No more station for the nation. Papa look the radio a moment, the silent black box of it, then he hiss, slap the radio from the bench, and smash it to the ground.
“Papa!” I say, putting my two hands on my head. “Why you spoil your radio, Papa? Why?” The tee-vee didn’t ever work, and now, all that is remaining of the radio is a broken plastic with yellow, red, and brown wires peeping out of it.
Papa hiss again, shift his left buttock up, and dip his hand in his back trouser pocket. He bring out two fifty-naira notes of moneys and give me. I wide my eyes, look the money, dirty and soft and stinking of siga. Where is Papa finding moneys to give me? From Morufu? My heart is twisting as I fold the naira inside the edge of my wrapper.