SHORT STORY: DARKER SHADES

By Okorie Divine

             

                        Photo Credit: Shutterstock

DARKER SHADES

He winced again and clutched the lower branch of the mango tree as if to shield him from his vulnerability. I knew he was vulnerable. Vulnerability came with imperfection and since he became imperfect in my eyes I began to see him as bare. He didn’t look at me, even when I giggled at the mad dance video of two people on Tiktok. 

“Will you tell them, your family?” I asked peering into his face to read uncertainty. His eyes were hollow, hollow as the dreadful emptiness of the water tank on Vet. Mountain. 

“No,” he answered, still looking away, at the cassava plants behind the looming fence of UBA bank. The leaves of the plants were all dried making the land almost bare, like his life. It baffled me when I remembered it all – how hastily I predicted his life after he told me; how I was almost sure about his movements. 

“Are you going to continue living like this? Locking things away in your heart. Depression, Tony, depression,” I implored, narrowing my eyes as people do when they talk with so much concern. He was slightly taller than I am, so I raised my face each time I spoke to him.

He winced again.

“No,” he said again and hissed. 

And I knew it was not for me. It was because to him his life was terrible. His messages still read clear to me as if they came just two minutes ago.

'Ego, I feel terrible inside. I have dark shades.’ When he said 'dark shades', I thought of his sun shades. They were not dark, even if they were, sun shades couldn’t make anyone feel terrible. 

I had implored, just as I was doing now. I typed furiously, my keyboard clattering and the sound echoing through my lodge at the dark hours of 1 am. 

“Say it, Tony. What is making your life so dark? How worse can your life be than mine?” I told him. 

I hadn’t heard what he would say, so I had known that whatever I told him might never be as horrible as his. I had rolled my eyes, taking my eyes off my phone for a second and it clicked. I told him the story Ola had told me, sitting under the shades in front of Akintola hostel. Stories of her molestation; her uncle tearing her panties every night when she travelled to his home in Lagos, to enter her, and buying her new panties the next day. He wasn’t married, so he was unrestrained, until Ola stabbed him and ran out into the street, aimlessly and blankly. There she met Tunji who took her in and was now proposing to marry her. That was how she narrated the story, skipping the best part which I knew was equally dirty. 

I told Tony, smiling at my own mischief, and making the story entirely mine. His next message had been sympathetic. My heart watered and I felt unworthy of listening to him further, but I did. 

'I didn’t know such a thing happened. What did you do to him – your uncle?’

I hadn’t expected it, but my reply doesn’t really matter here. It all pushed him to say what he felt he had hidden. 

“I’m gay,” came the short, stunning reply. 

I stopped. And typed, “WHAT?”

No reply. I then guessed he might have thrown his phone on the bed and must be weeping. That is one thing with writers. They are hypersensitive, I had told him some time ago, and I had thought so, two nights ago. I called. He didn’t pick up. And two days later, we met at the long road leading to Greenhouse, as I was trying to catch a bus going outside school. He was coming in. 

“Why?” I asked again. This time I knew I must add something, not just standing there peering at his face like an out-to-please housewife. “I know depression is staring at you in the face but your family first. They can never reject you,” I rhapsodized, not minding if it made sense or not. 

He heaved a sigh now, and sat down on the tunnel-like structure made of cement and probably bricks and lying on the floor. 

“I don’t know what to think now, Ego,” he said looking downwards. 

As I surveyed his back and his head which he hung low to study the dry grasses on the ground, I saw everything. Tony was almost perfect. Finely cut face and dark-skinned and I had told him he was the only dark-skinned person I had ever seen with a pointed nose. His face was squared shaped. And his brain was fire. It brimmed so hot that our essays were rarely perfect until Tony glanced through, nodding his head commendably and frowning at the lines he felt we all got wrong. 

Those were times I had thought of questioning Jesus when he said that no one is perfect. Did He see Tony? With that fierceness in mind and brain? Here was the imperfection dotting and staining the whiteness of his life. I knew it was this imperfection that made him vulnerable because he felt I would tell. 

And I did, five days later that was three days after meeting him by the roadside when he still hadn’t come out of the pool of trauma. Not to the society as he had feared and begged that I shouldn’t tell, but to Bola and Ike. Ike had called me when the WhatsApp message turned blue indicating that he had read my message. His voice came in whispers. His “Are you sure?” came like that of a person who suspected something but kept it to himself, until full discovery was made. 

Bola didn’t reply. And the next day, she dragged Tony and me to the quadrangle and asked, her eyes darting from me to Tony, “Ego said you’re gay and you’re depressed.” 

I didn’t know how I felt, but I felt covered, the roof tumbling down on me and saving me from Tony's morbid stare. 

“Although it is not totally a bad thing oo,” Bola continued, sitting on the cement slab after slapping the surface three times and blowing air on it to remove dust. “But why you of all people. I mean what girl in her sensibleness would say no to you.” 

“Can you stop Bola?” I shrieked and the students in the quadrangle looked. Two girls who conversed and one gesticulated furiously while the other giggled, stopped too. I didn’t know why Tony did not cry. He stood gracefully, like an Oba, after a threat of war from a miniature town, and walked away. 

Those were the darker days of his life, he told us one week later, when he began to miss classes and ignore our calls.  He was still recuperating, he said, sitting up on his bed and balancing his chin on his palm which was raised from the elbow. 

For many things, Tony was relieved that night as we made our way out of his lodge. We had refused his idea of sleeping alone in his room. Writers are crazy, Bola said, shaking her head furiously. 

“You can stay with me,” Ike opted, and looked at me. 

Tony laughed. We joined. It then became our joke: asking Ike if Tony acted funny at night, and asking Tony if he had found a macho boyfriend he desired. It was almost forgotten, his gayness, and normalcy returned. Bola never said how disgusting it was for a man to admire another man. Ike didn’t distort his face, almost throwing up whenever the Lecturer discussed Unoma Azuah's Woman To Woman. It was then solidarity – we shielding this imperfection, blurring it away from the profane gaze of the society. 

Until the Christmas holiday. Tony was going to Lagos with Bola, Ike stayed in Enugu and I left for Onitsha. 

Two days after Christmas, Bola shrieked on the phone. It was like a sharp alarm let loose from hell. It pierced my ears, and it took two minutes before she calmed, and began to narrate the story by bits, arousing the suspense, sniffling here and there. She coughed too and I wondered where Bola's brazenness and never-give-in-to-emotions had gone to. 

“Tony killed himself, Ego. He took rat poison – otapiapia,” she yelled and wept the more. 

I swallowed hard and the only thing that had a tinge of reality in it around me was Bola's sob over the phone. I was thrown into a haze and I began to convince myself that it was a lie. I began to do what people did when a person died – recalling past events that were so near that death was very far away, looking for hints and interpreting the minutest cough as a hint of death. Tony didn’t give any when I called him two days before. His voice boomed and, although he coughed and cleared his throat, they were normal as harmattan was in the air. 

I didn’t know how to grieve when Bola ended the call. Grief, as we know, is innocent. It is so easy to purge when the heart is not as dark (even darker) as Tony’s heart when he came out to me. Ike may not say anything, he will grunt and grumble about how beastly I was. But Bola will tear down on me, when she finds out that I had called Tony’s family two days ago, after speaking with Tony and urging him once more to tell his family. I had told his mother, who, as I heard through the phone, dropped something that broke on the floor and forbade my story. His eldest brother took the phone and thanked me when I regaled him my story. 

I did not ask, and I dare not ask, but Ike calls me later to give details: his brother entered his room with their mother and had called him a disgrace to the family. His brother threatened to beat him up if he didn’t stop being gay. 

I swallow a lump hanging on my neck when he ends. I had emptied Tony’s dark shades to the world and he couldn’t stand it – the ordure it oozed. Twice, I had failed him. 

I clutch my pillow and call for death, but death is not a perfect recompense for what I had done. Maybe I need Lucifer to plunge his jagged fingers into my chest and wriggle out my heart. 

                                                                                  

Okorie Divine is a student of English and literary studies at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. He focuses on queer fiction, feminist writings and anti-discriminatory posture.