Elnathan John: One long New Year’s day (A short story)

by Elnathan John

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Now every time you try to use the microwave, you think of cancer and malignant tumors taking over your organs and your father staring down angrily but with concern in the hospital, his eyes telling you: Asabe, na gaya miki! I told you!
Your mother always says fear is a killer.  You believe her in the tentative way that you believe new information- the things you read in health pages on the internet, like the articles that tell you why palm oil, consumed copiously by your grandparents who lived until their nineties, is suddenly a mean cholesterol-packed killer; like sites that say dragging the towel down your face makes your muscles sag; or masturbation causes mouth odor. These days you catch yourself saying it: fear is a killer. You are afraid of becoming like your mother. Of not caring if your wrapper is skewed at the edges. Of not caring about a bra when walking out to buy bread or Indomie in the morning. Of summarizing the world in catch phrases.
Dawn comes early and you feel tired these days- you wake up feeling like you need to rest from sleeping. You think your mattress is getting soft as you roll out of the depression your body has made. This year, you have sworn not to buy the cheaper items on sale. In the end you always regret it- the hand dryer from a new manufacturer that was almost N10,000 less than all the others in its range which works only once every three times you try to use it; the car you bought cheaply from your colleague who was leaving the country, which is now in its fifth month at the mechanic’s junkyard; the mattress which has lost all its firmness barely one year after. You end up feeling like exactly the kind of sucker you are afraid to become.
Before you returned to Abuja from Christmas in Gombe two days ago, you used to heat water for your morning tea in the microwave. Your father had read of its many dangers and sent you a three page document explaining how microwaves cause cancer. Sodangi told you he got one from him too and another explaining why he should never put cell phones in his trouser pockets, on his laps or in his chest pocket. When you asked Sodangi the reasons the paper gave, he laughed and said: ‘Kawai, the thing said the waves fuck you up: everything from messing with your sperm to cancer and heart issues.’ You laughed and told him: ‘Abeg don’t put your cell phone in your pocket o. You don’t want anything to f__k with his chances of grandchildren bearing his name.’
Now every time you try to use the microwave, you think of cancer and malignant tumors taking over your organs and your father staring down angrily but with concern in the hospital, his eyes telling you: Asabe, na gaya miki! I told you!
With the index and middle fingers of your left hand, you feel your right breast for lumps as you get the miniature water heater from the overhead cabinet in your narrow kitchen. Lying down is how you should do it, you tell yourself, but you continue anyway. You started doing this when you visited Uju in the hospital after her operation. For weeks after seeing the huge bandage where her breasts used to be, you would wake up in the middle of the night, panting and unable to go back to sleep. Uju held your hand the day you were escorting her home from the hospital and told you: I don’t feel like a woman anymore. You squeezed her hand and grit your teeth to hold back the tears. How does one reply to that? you asked yourself.
Sodangi is the one who never screwed up. The one you always wanted to kick into the well or lock up in the water drum so he would suffocate to death when you both played hide and seek. The one you always wished each time would never recover from his frequent bouts of malaria. Because growing up, it was clear to you, your father’s preferences and his plan for Sodangi to inherit the empire, whenever Jesus would make that happen. Sodangi was that brother six years younger who became the man of the house when your father was not around.
These days you love Sodangi because he grew up, unlearnt how to be the head of the house and learnt-you have told him this is the smartest thing he has ever done- how to let you be his big sister. And that is why he is the only one you let call you at 7 am.
‘I fit show later later. You cook?’
‘I be your wife? Where are all those girls you have been toasting around town? Where is … what is that her Igbotic name again?
‘Akachi…  Sis leave matter. That one is old story sef. But I told you about the new one na. If you follow these girls, you will age faster than a military pensioner on a queue for his pension.’
You laugh. You wonder where he gets his crazy metaphors from.
‘Kai Soda! Which new one again?’
‘Her name is Mouzayian. Her mother is Lebanese. Her father is from Abakaliki. I told you na.’
‘Ha. Igbo-Lebanese. Moving up in the world, are we?’
‘Go jor. Should I come later or not?’
‘Oya now come. But not too late o. Come around eight. I would have come back from my evening walk.’
Your eyes hurt from the soap as you wash your face in the bathroom sink. A couple of seconds is the maximum amount of time you can keep your eyes shut without feeling your heart stop and your nostrils block and your whole body go into spasms. Blindness is the scariest of disabilities for you. As a child you would never shut your eyes completely during your father’s long morning devotion prayers. Especially after watching the movie where a little girl woke from sleep and suddenly couldn’t see anymore. Your father beat you and called you a rebel child fighting against the influence of the Holy Ghost but there was nothing he could do to make you shut your eyes completely.
Tweezers have a way of disappearing when you need them. As you examine your face in the mirror, you notice two thin hairs on your chin just where you pulled some out a few days ago. You move closer and try to pinch the hairs out with your fingers. You laugh as you see the silly expression on your scrunched up face.
The people in your Karu neighborhood are all outside shouting Happy New Year to each other. You hear Mama Oyiza’s husky voice in the background. Shaking your head, you think she wouldn’t know happiness if it hit her in the face like a brick. She is probably the most joyless person you know, fighting about everything from the way a person looks at her to a shop owner giving her son the wrong change. You will not step out until it is dark- you are not in the mood for pleasantries and pretend happiness.
It is 2014 and you feel stuck in 2008 when you started your first job. You are in the same two-bedroom flat your father first rented for you. The traffic to town is better than to used to be before the road construction, but it is still a nightmare early in the morning and at the close of work on week days. Your room is arranged in the exact same way, the only new additions being the LG refrigerator you got as a birthday present from your fat bald boss who has been trying to convince you about the benefits of sleeping with him, the split unit AC you got from your cousin who left the country two years ago to be with her British husband and the paintings from Muyiwa, your artist ex-boyfriend. Your wardrobe is bursting with clothes you will never wear again. Mostly hideous color combinations that you had to wear at least once because all the people your age have been getting married for the past seven years and whoever is refusing to buy the ashoebi will automatically be termed bad belle. You do not care that people wonder why you are still single in Abuja. But you do not think you can bear people saying you are jealous of those getting married because in truth, you cannot stand all the happiness at weddings.
Perhaps you might have said, like Ada your troubled colleague always says, that you are a little depressed. However, you cannot say you really know what it means to be depressed. Ada is not someone you can compare yourself to. Ada is really fucked-up, you remind yourself whenever you are tempted to use the word depressed. She spends half her break periods crying in the bathroom, shows up with cuts on her arms and throws up food two out of five times that she eats. You do not sit up all night crying or have thoughts of killing yourself or anything dramatic- you just know that at least once or twice every week you feel like a the world is crashing down on you.
Lying back on the bed you tell yourself you must change this mattress and buy something proper that won’t sink when you sit on it. There are cobwebs on the ceiling, but you are too lazy to get up now. You will make Sodangi do it when he comes. This is what you like about him. He seems to like being told to do domestic work. He would have enjoyed cooking if he knew how, but your father messed with that part of his life in his attempt to forge his regent into a man.
Now that you are lying down, you feel your breasts again for lumps. You begin moving the three middle fingers of your right hand in small circles on your left breast. What if I actually find something? You stop. After a little while you begin to tug gently on your nipple with your index finger and thumb. Changing hands you use your left fingers to roll and pull your nipple. Your right hand slides down your flat belly, into the loose trousers of your pajamas, beginning the circular motion that makes your feet twitch and your toes curl up. It is Mr Bassey you think of as you breathe harder: his pink lips and his hands that look like baby hands, his neck and his white shirt and the way he always looks like he just came out of the shower when he walks past your table at work. As you spread your legs wider, you see his face. He is lying on top of you with his mint breath all up in your face like a fresh breeze. You like his weight on you. His fleshy baby hands have replaced your slim hands and his fingers now stroke harder and faster in the same circular motion. Your toes curl up even more and your muscles tighten and you whisper the name of this forty five year old assistant-manager-secret-crush of yours who smells like mint and chocolate wine.
Mr Bassey, you whisper because the Mr. makes it all formal and taboo and thus turns you on even more.
After the spasms, you instinctively blow some air from your mouth into your nostrils. Apart from the mint from toothpaste you smell no odors. You avoid the mirror when you walk into the bathroom to wash up. It feels like stepping out of heaven right into a pile of shit. Not on the f__king first day of the year, you tell yourself as you run the shower.
New Year resolutions are for losers, but you find yourself making one as you squeeze some lavender bath gel into your right palm. This is the last time you will touch yourself. The last time you were with someone you remember feeling nothing, just counting the minutes until it was over so that you could go into the bathroom, shut the door, run the shower to block out your moaning and at least come for all the effort.
The shower does not wash away the terrified thought of ending up like this when you are forty-five: alone and being the only one who can satisfy yourself in bed.
You drag the book you had started last night and open to the dog eared page where in Prophet Revelations Bitchington Mborro’s church, Darling, the main character, talks of a baby with “crazy bullfrog eyes” whose face looks shocked like he has seen the “buttocks of a snake”. You feel like you shouldn’t laugh, like infants are off-limits, like it is bad karma to laugh about evil things being said about helpless, ugly babies, but you do. You drop the book and laugh so hard until a tear rolls out of the outer side of your eyes. It is just page 33 but already you think, this Noviolet Bulawayo, more African writers should help us enjoy their fiction like this. Most of them are all too busy trying to show off and make some goddamn point as spokespersons for Africa. You are happy that you took this book from Andrea who fancies herself a writer even though her blog is unreadable. The book puts your fear of becoming a single, forty-something year old wanker on hold.
When you feel like going at it again only five hours after touching yourself, when even Bulawayo’s gripping prose cannot distract you, you turn to the drawer where Uncle Sam’s prayer books are. He is a knight in the Catholic Church, and he dumped all the books with you when you admitted to him that you hadn’t been to church in some time. You have never opened them before because you really do not consider yourself a Catholic anymore. You are tired of defending the abuse scandals and you think the stand of the church on contraception is not valid for the world in which you live. It was Father Ignatius who stripped you of your faith. When it was discovered he indeed was the father of at least one child in his parish, he was transferred to a parish in some remote town in Bayelsa. After that you stopped going for confession, stopped receiving communion and then stopped going to church altogether.
Lord I am not worthy for you to enter under my roof…
You grit your teeth at those words. You feel especially dirty now that all you want to do is slip your hands down your pants. Unworthy. That is exactly how you feel. And angry. Angry at yourself for being addicted to this. You hate yourself until you start being angry with the Lord too. He made you in his image no? And without your regular self-help sessions you would still be considered a sinner. Unworthy is how you were born. If the Lord made me, then how am I unworthy? Why is meeting him such a big deal? Why did he create this thing called sin? How can I exist at his pleasure and come to him on his invitation and still be called unworthy?
You are angry with the Lord for his defective products until you start to think of his omnipresence. What if he hears me and strikes me dead? You leaf through the pages of one of the books without looking at its cover. Your eyes stop at the Rites of Penance:
My God, I am sorry for my sins with all my heart. In choosing to do wrong and failing to do good, I have sinned against you whom I should love above all things. I firmly intend, with your help, to do penance, to sin no more, and to avoid whatever leads me to sin. Our Saviour Jesus Christ suffered and died for us. In his name, my God, have mercy. Amen
You are not sure you believe it, but you whisper amen. Too much Jesus has been drilled into you for you to disbelieve without that nagging, potent combination of guilt and fear. The power goes off and slowly the lights go out in your head and in your eyes.
It is the niggling pangs of hunger that nudge you awake at 6pm. The power is back. You need to take out two bowls of soup from the freezer so that they will defrost before Sodangi comes at 8. There is just one apple left and the space where you keep red wine is empty. You do not understand why people say red wine shouldn’t be refrigerated. The last time Sodangi mentioned it you gave him a piece of your mind.
That’s all pretentious nonsense. I prefer my red wine cold jare. The oyibo people who say you shouldn’t refrigerate it, they have cool cellars where they keep their wine. Their countries are temperate. Is it in this tropical heat I will be drinking hot wine? If you want hot wine go buy your own… 
The red apple is as crunchy as you want it, but it is it’s coldness that does it for you. You drop the two frozen bowls beside the kitchen sink and sit in bed with the apple in one hand and your iPhone in the other. There are dozens of generic New Year messages in your inbox. At least two people have sent you the exact same message: Let’s ring this new year with only good things: wish you a happy new year. 
What a stupid message, you say out loud.
Only Mr Bassey’s message stands out:
Asabe, I hope you get to rest well this holiday season before we get back to the discomfort of making money for someone else. Happy New Year.
You lay back on the bed and smile, digging your teeth into the cold apple. The biting, sucking and chewing sends you into the space you have resolved not to go into again.
F__k it, you say, dropping the apple, licking your three middle fingers and letting them travel between your legs.
At 7, when Mr Bassey and the spasms have gone, and you have cleaned up the mess, the air in the house starts to drive you crazy. The walls of the flat seem to be closing in on you. Jesus comes from the prayer books scattered on the bed. At times like this your photographic memory annoys you. The words you read earlier leap at you:
I confess to almighty God, to blessed Mary ever Virgin, to blessed Michael the archangel… to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the saints, that I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault…
The words drive you crazy. It is unfair to have all the blame. You fight them. It is also through Mr Bassey’s fault, for being so damn sexy and fresh. Through the cold apple’s fault for conjuring an image so sensual… also through their grievous fault…
The words fight back.
O God, loose, remit, and forgive my sins against you, whether in word, in deed, or in thought; and whether they are willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly committed, forgive them all… Let my soul and body be thus healed and my evil imaginings be driven away, for yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and forever. Amen
Very quickly, like someone trying to escape a collapsing building, you put on your shorts, make your braids into a ponytail, step into your running shoes and head out. You are on auto drive, briskly taking turns and footpaths and shortcuts, trying to focus on something else, anything but Jesus and guilt and contrition and damn prayer books.
In a dark alleyway between two blocks of flats, you see only the glow of a cigarette. The glow rises as you approach, intensifies, and flies away into the gutter to the right. As you get to where the glow was, you see a slim, tall man. He regards you and as soon as you pass you feel his bony hands grab you, first around the stomach then over your mouth. A long knife emerges from godknowswhere, hovering dangerously beneath your chin.
You freeze. The same way you froze when Salma’s bag and phone were being snatched and you could not run or scream for help. Instantly you are ejected from your body and become a spectator in all that is about to happen. He turns you around. You are looking in his eyes with a blank expression in yours. In his eyes you see hunger and fear and desperation and someone who will stab you if you make one false move. He lowers the knife and grabs your breasts, squeezing them hungrily. Pulling you close to his body he rolls up your top and tries to unclasp the bra hooks. He is struggling with it and grunting. With the knife he cuts it loose and pulls it out of your top. He holds you tighter, breathing his tom-tom and tobacco breath into your face as he tucks the torn bra into his back pockets. You feel his penis hardening as he rubs against you. The way he kneads your breasts you wonder if he is trying to burst them open. He has started pulling your shorts down when he stops, realizing that you are just standing there, not struggling, not crying, not kicking. He turns you around and shakes you. You see his huge penis hanging out erect through his zipper. It looks like a long cassava tuber. This is the first time you are seeing an uncircumcised black male. Apart from your panting, which is from brisk walking, no sounds leave your mouth. He slaps you, hard across the cheeks.
‘Won’t you struggle? Bi__h?’
His shrill, almost effeminate voice pierces your ear. You put your hand over your cheek where he has slapped you. Tears roll out of your eyes without notice. You wipe them as they come. He is panting too, his nose flaring, his eyes shocked. In a few seconds his penis starts descending, going limp. He tucks it back in his trousers and runs in the opposite direction, pulling his zipper, grunting.
For the first time, you are glad Sodangi is one hour late.
***
You are still in the bathroom absentmindedly scrubbing your body when your brother lets himself in.
“Hello hello!” he shouts, breaking you out of your trance. You turn and the first thing you see is the black polythene bag that has your t-shirt and shorts. Tomorrow it will burn.
“Have you come? Take food from the bowls in the kitchen and microwave it. I am coming.”
Hot water has since stopped coming out of the shower head but the wall is warm when you lean your back against it for balance. Your calves hurt from standing so long. You can still see your frozen body. You slap your forehead several times, to pull yourself back to the present, to ask yourself the questions you know your mum would ask you if she knew. Why did you walk through the dark alleyway alone, that late, dressed like that?  Why didn’t you bite, kick, scream?
 
You stand in front of the mirror to examine your breasts. There is the thin slight swelling of a scratch beneath your right breast. You touch it to see if it stings. It doesn’t. You pick up the polythene bag and dump it in the bathroom bin.
It is fear that makes you force a smile when you step out.
Your mind is on the man who tried to rape you- if he will keep your bra, if he is now at home, holding it, thinking of you and what he could not accomplish, or if he dumped it somewhere nearby. You think to walk past the area in daylight to see if you will find it lying in some gutter or by the road.
Sodangi asks what is wrong with you when you do not laugh at his jokes and when it takes you longer to respond to him as you curl up in the single sofa. You say it is your walk that made you tired and that you think you might have sprained a few muscles and was he not supposed to come earlier, much earlier than this? He returns to mixing rice and beans with stew. You have told him before that he has temporary ADD when he has not eaten.
While Sodangi munches away, you struggle in your head with how to say what just happened to you. Even though he is perhaps the only person you can share this with, in your heart the decision is shot down, for fear of how he will feel, of what he will think of you, his big sister just standing there letting a strange skinny man fondle you and almost strip you naked in a dark alleyway. Just like you have never stopped wondering what Salma thought of you as you stood frozen, almost like you were the partner of the young man who snatched her phone and purse.
“How is Mouzayian?” you ask.
“Sis, don’t ask. That Lebanese blood affected only her skin and hair. She behaves kaman she is from a rice farm in Abakaliki.”
“You are just so foolish I tell you. You didn’t see all that when you were shagging her abi?”
“Haba sis, who said anything about shagging?”
“Sorry, you were doing Bible study. Ko choir rehearsals ne?”
He laughs.
It is when the remote control falls from his hand to the floor that you realize he has fallen asleep on the settee. He does that- falling asleep in the middle of a conversation. You tap him awake and ask him to move to the bed in the other bedroom. He mutters something you do not hear as he drags himself to the room. In your head he is seven, reluctant to leave the TV in the living room when your father declares lights out. As he bumps through the door, you smile sadly, sure now that you will never tell him.
‘Thanks for coming,’ you whisper, knowing that in the morning you will only meet the made bed, the cleared table and the clean dishes.
***
On the first day of work after the holidays, you will be glad not to have run into any of your superiors as you reach your desk, thirty minutes late, panting and cursing under your breath.
Ronke will be her usual excited self. From where she will be making photocopies across the open office she will call out to you.
“Happy new year o! See how you are looking trim when the rest of us are looking like fattened cows.”
“Ah, you look smashing yourself Ronke, in fact to me you look like you have lost weight.”
“Really? Thanks!”
You will see her stomach which she struggles to hide and the folds of her neck and her fat greasy cheeks and her massive calves which remind you of an elephant- you will wish you didn’t have to play lie to me.
“Who dropped the sweets on my table?” You will stare at the Tom-Tom sitting menacingly among the Butter Mint, Milkcose, and Vicks Lemon Plus.
“Is Oga Bassey o, he gave everyone.”
And your crush on Mr. Bassey will die a sudden, violent death.
———————————-
Elnathan John blogs from www.Elnathanjohn.Blogspot.com
Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.

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