Short Story

By Nwanne Favour Obirinma

THIS KINGDOM

In this kingdom, weed is Lord. Weed is that ever present help when you need it, that silent voice that makes you clear eyed when the mustiness of the world clouds your head. When the days gets dark and the beds are lonely, weed comes in, ever faithful, to sit beside us. People rule kingdoms, but in this kingdom, weed rules the rulers, and like death, it is the great equaliser. In this kingdom, weed is Lord. 

 1. 

You stood by on a cold, raining Tuesday in September as your father beat your mother, hands flying swiftly in the air, screams piercing through the noise of thunder strikes. The tiled floor, usually a sparkling white, had blood gently gathering in a corner - your mother's blood - and you stood by, shaken. You had seen it happen before, had heard screams that touched the ceilings and bounced off all the walls in the house, but you had never seen the red pigment that now gathered on the floor, that gathered like a small pool of water. You were not sure what was being said, but you were able to make out the sounds 

"Stupid man! Evil man! Chimoooo" 

"You will shut up your nonsense mouth!" 

You hated the rain because of the thunderstorms and yet, when flashes of lighting parted through the windows and made way into the house, you remained firm, your legs would not move. You tried to fight him off, but your frail bones failed you. You were just ten and when the screams became louder, you descended to your knees and started to beg. Your pleas fell on deaf ears. The shouting stopped, and your father lifted your mother like a bag of cement across his shoulder. He did not say anything to you, and when he banged the door, your legs collapsed. You were on the floor, and you tried to clean off the small pool of blood that had formed. At first, gently, then aggressively, until your tears choked you and your nostrils began to drip mucus. 

The next day, your father came back. He did not come back with your mother, he came back alone. He tried not to look at you, he steadily went around the house, except the living room where you had curled yourself in a corner all night. Finally, he told you. "Your mother has passed on. She is dead". You tried to let the words penetrate you but your eyes starred blank into space. Your father must have been talking rubbish. Days that followed confirmed what your father said, people trooped in and looked at you with despair. They wore black and cried, saying how your mother was such a nice woman, how she had given foreign rice to people on the streets during Christmas. It was then you knew that your mother had truly died and that your father was not lying. You cried when you went to bed and you remembered how your mother would pat you, how she would take you everywhere she went. You were her only child, you were her hand bag. She told you about everything and you told her about everything that happened to you too. Each time she had a scar or a black eye that she tried to hide with make up, you would tell her not to worry, that she would be fine. She would end up hugging you and start crying, you too would start crying and both of you would not know exactly why both of you were crying. 

Two weeks after, your father brought another woman. She wore a sharp red lipstick and looked like a frog with her bulgy eyes. Your father said she would stay with you and will become "the woman of the house". You didn't understand that until her belly began to grow and she gave birth to child. They - your father, this woman and her child - lived a secluded life apart from you. You only saw them when it was time to eat. You still went to one of the best private schools though and so your friends became your family. You talked with them, laughed with them, grew with them. Years passed and memories of that night night still lingered. Your father still existed in a world separate from yours and when it was time to go to university, you made the conscious effort to go as far away from home. You would finally leave that environment that stiffled you and left you breathless. 

School moved fast, too fast, your friends became your family and there was a new class of young men driving flashy cars all over town. Your friends said that there was a new code in the streets. You were not sure what they meant, but you were eager to be a part of these young men that called you "brother". You followed them and because you desperately wanted to feel among, you took your first puff. This, they said, was better than anything in the world. And you did it again and again until you were able to puff out smoke through your nostrils. Your friends called you a "fucking chimney" followed by a roaring laughter. You were studying Medicine because your father said that was the only way he was going to sponsor your education but you hated the sight of blood. It reminded you of the pool of blood that laid bare on the sparkling white tiled floor from that night, many years ago. Your crew, friends from your hostel mostly - your medicine counterparts were too serious - had started to tell you that money was flowing on the streets. They laughed though, because they thought you had no need of joining, you were after all the son of a big man. And they were correct, your father might have been everything, but he was not stingy, he was willingly gave out money but you were tired of the conditions that came with receiving his money, the pressure to become what you didn't even want. Days would pass and become months, and you will find yourself falling behind in school. You will find yourself spending several nights out, you will find yourself learning the ways of the street. You will find yourself going to bed, strangled by the hatred for your father. You will see your mother in your dreams and run to her but you will never catch her. You will end up in a HK - Hustle Kingdom - and realise that weed ruled all, that weed made all things equal. 

 2. 

You sit on a chair far away from the piano. You look at it and there is a shaking in your legs. Your ear drums still shudder from all the shouting, all because of that nonsense piano. Why did it matter so much to learn how to play the piano? You see  white and black keys in your dream and you think of them when you play with your friends in school. You try to remember what they mean, try to separate the different keys the music instructor had told you about, yet they all smear together in your head till you are no longer sure you know anything about the piano. You are still looking at the piano and you remember that soon, your music instructor will come for your lessons, and you are not sure if your hands will betray you again. When your hands betrayed you last week, your father had shouted at you, telling you that he was paying lots of money for your piano lessons and why were you taking it for granted? You wished your sisters were around, but they had both been sent to boarding school. You too were old enough to go to boarding school, but your father said you were the only son, he had to teach you how to be a "man", that he would not be far from you. He had read that music helped struggling teenagers, so he had employed the best of the best instructors. He himself played the piano well, why would his son not learn he same? Today, as you sit distant from the paino, you pray that your fingers don't betray you. After all, they never did when you played alone in the house, they only did when you felt the weight of your father's scrutiny in his looks. 

You think that maybe you are the problem, maybe something is wrong with you, that is why you can't make your father proud. You wish to see the joy in his face when you finally play to him the way you play to yourself, but there is a realisation that it may never happen. Your father's rigidity forced you to lock certain parts of yourself. You didn't want the burden of having to be perfect but you constantly got plagued by your own imperfections. Maybe your father is right, you are just wasting his money for nothing. The music instructor walks in and you hear your heart race. It is time, you whisper to yourself and you walk to the piano. Your father walks out of his study to meet the both of you and you wander, as you now look at him, if the swell in his belly is as a result of his bloating on so much money, or was it the pride that he refused to let go off? You realise how much you look like him, how easily people recognised that he is your father and you wish that today, he will smile at you and tell you everything you have always wanted to hear. You want to see his pride for you gleam in his smile and echo in his voice. Your music instructor asks you to play and suddenly, you sit frozen. You can't remember anything, your father's breathing is upon you, your hands are betraying you. You look up at the ceiling and catch your breath, you know what comes next after this, and your eyes wet with tears. Your father is alarmed, his voice skyrockets. He says you are a man, that you are not supposed to cry, that it is enough that he is spending so much on you, yet you still want to disgrace him, you want to be a nobody in life, you have failed to learn the piano, the same way you failed at school. There is a cracking in the walls as he spits out his venom, but he walks away before he gives you a second look. Like all venoms, you feel the impact, the word "failed" rings in your head. You have failed, you have failed again.  

You remember the first time the words had blurred in your text book, the first time they seemed to float away from you. You told you mother about it and your father said you were making up excuses for your tardiness in school but you knew you were not. It was soon found out that you had dyslexia, and your doctor said with therapy, you could work it out. Your father paid for it and it helped a lot, but he wanted so much more from you, and you wandered if your efforts felt inconsequential. You sit all alone now with the piano and your hands rests gently on the keys. The study room is firmly shut, nobody will hear you, you play and play until all you see are white and black keys floating in your mind.

In the following weeks, you will make friends with a boy with ratty hair and tattoos drawn all over his back in your neighborhood. He will tell you of the many things that now go on in the "streets", he will introduce you to a loyal partner, he will tell you of all her glory and how she can make you forget. You will realise that you want to forget, more than anything, and you will embrace this partner. You will feel the weight of the world crushing on you and you will descend underneath it all. You will rebel against your father and he will send you packing, leave you all alone. You will take the advice of this your friend and end up too in a Hustle Kingdom, you will smoke more weed. You will realise as you look at yourself one day in the mirror, the gravity of Jesus's statement - He who puts his hands on the plough, should not look back. 

 3. 

The clouds formed an assembly and cast a dark film all over the earth, or this particular part of the earth. You imagined what it was that they could be saying, if they said anything at all. Were they discussing the rains, when it would fall? How it would fall? You hoped they decided that the rains would not come down just yet, or else you would have to wrap yourself like a child in her mother's womb, and shiver endlessly as the rains hit you left, right, centre. You had no home, no family whose face seemed familiar, you sometimes moved from house to house, holding your hands out and then pointing it to your mouth. Of course, you could speak, even quite well, but you had learnt that if you were going to arouse a great level of sympathy, you had to look very pitiable. Memories of your past jag and scatter you very often, so much so, you cannot tell which memory fits into what events, they all come to you in fleeting images, until you scream and your head burns of migraine. You have gotten used to being that "street child", at the small, even age of 12, people know you as that boy that roams about in tattered clothes begging for food. 

How it happened is what you can't exactly tell, did your parents die when you were ten months old or was it something different? You never really knew, you never even knew your parents and so your uncle and aunty could have been right. They might have died in a car accident, both of them, not just one of them, both your parents, two healthy humans enjoying a car drive before being squashed into pieces by a Dangote trailer. Two healthy humans. Your uncle said you took your mother's colour and your father's eyes, that you were such a handsome combination of both of them. Your aunty - your uncle's wife - rarely spoke to you. She must have nursed you, and you imagine this to be true because you were only a baby when the family decided that you would stay with your uncle and his wife for the "main time". The "main time" became the ten years filled with sharp, painful and brutal memories that you have now come to detest. You think of these memories now and you liken them to the experiences of Harry Potter in *Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone*,a book that you found in a dustbin, the story about an orphan stuck with a certain uncle and aunty. Your other family that entrusted you to your uncle never tried to visit, or look for you. If they had, the would have seen the multiple times red strips cut across your skin, the times when your eyes were sore because of tears. They would have noticed your limping, noticed that you said only few words, they would have read your looks and understood that you needed saving, but they all became distant and you still do not know, after all these years, what this "family" of yours look like.

You planned your escape the day after you turned ten. You would run away and you were sure nobody would look for you,  neither your uncle or your aunty. Both bitter and miserable humans, both selfish and self seeking, both self righteous and children seeking people . They would be glad, so you thought, to have you off their necks and you were not wrong. You left one afternoon after your aunty went to a nearby store to get something and warned you sternly not to leave the house. You carried a small polythene bag and put in your belongings. You left, you did not know where you were going but you left, at first, you ran, then you walked, then you collapsed against a wall in the middle of no where. Your eyes closed and you fell in a deep sleep. This was your first night on the streets. 

The days would add up to become months, the months would eventually become years and you would end up making a living from picking pockets and running in and out of provision stores, with hands full of whatever it is that you can grab. You would turn sixteen in a one bedroom apartment where you and other young boys squatted. It was not exactly comfortable but you had a roof over your head and this seemed enough. The owner of the apartment took in boys like you, and gave them a place to sleep and you felt grateful to have met him. Later, he would have a meeting with all of you and begin to tell you of a better way, a more profitable way, a sure way out of poverty and lack. His words would intrigue you and spark a hunger, a desire within you. He would take all of you and one by one, like it happened in the Scramble for Africa, attach you to different "Ogas", those ones that drove flashy cars and drove like James Bond on very narrow Nigerian roads. He would assure them of each and every one of you, he would say all of you were "hard and willing" and you would wish he didn't use terms such as "hard and willing" to describe you. You still dreamt of your parents, imagined if they were watching you, if their eyes followed you at all. You were willing to leave this your life, but you were not sure what he meant by saying "hard". He would thrust you into a new life, a new world and you would learn pretty fast. Life would flow and money would flow. At Las, you, like the OTHERS before YOU would end up in a Hustle Kingdom. You would avoid weed, because the smell chocked you but you would realise it's subtle influence, it wielding power over EVERYONE. You would realise that it was such a foundational component in any Hustle Kingdom and you would not be able to tell why. Maybe it was it's tendency to give a temporary suspension of reality? Or because it made people "harder", less fearing? You would make friends and you would think it foolish for someone to have come to this life as a payback to his father, you would imagine being forced to play a piano and having to deal with floating letters. You would laugh at the stories they would tell you, and feel anguish at some, like when  Chuma told you of his father beating his mother to her death. Or when Micheal said he wanted his father's approval more than anything else, and that he really learnt how to play the piano, he just never knew how to play it in front of his father. Moments like these - times when you and your new friends talk about life in general- forges a certain kind of bond between all of you, humanises all of you. You would always remember these times, these moments, these people, these stories.

                                                   

Nwanne Favour Obirinma has a first-class degree in English from Delta State University, Abraka. A creative writer (something she considers a "gifting" and a privilege), she also has research interest in Gender Studies, African Literary History, and Contemporary African Fiction, especially the emergence of comics and graphic novels on the African scene.