On my fifth birthday, the year we moved to Mile 4, my dad got me a new bicycle, and the bicycle got me a new friend. Every morning, Tee was at our gate. Breakfast in hand, he would call on me to come with my bicycle so we could go for a ride. For a few months, we met every morning in front of our house, riding and falling around our stony yard, until one day, the bicycle decided it was tired of our religious mountings and broke itself down. My mom gathered its pieces and parked them in the store.
In Mile 4, people stand haphazardly like children at the amusement park: some standing tall, some lying on their bellies, some naked, while others face each other making jokes or preparing for a fight. They stand haphazardly like a lazy farmer had, in a hurry, scattered house seeds on his land; and now every house sprouted and grew the way it knew how—shanties near bungalows near mansions near shanties. Sometimes, you had to squeeze through someone’s kitchen to get to your front door. And since Tee’s house was one of the houses in conversation with ours, our friendship did not breakdown with the bicycle.
At age seven, I went to his house to play, and we ended up fighting on their veranda- punching of faces, squeezing of necks, wrestling each other to the ground, until Maman, the neighbor who sold Fulere, came and untangled us. She yelled at us, asked us what we were fighting over, and then gave us an ear of boiled corn, as some sort of peace meal. Tee’s arm was bleeding; my eyes were a liquid red, my entire body ached as if someone used a hammer to crack my bones. We broke the corn into two equal pieces, sat on their veranda, and ate together quietly. It was the first time I fought.
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My parents liked Tee’s family. I overheard them talking about how hardworking they were. How his parents worked hard to send their children to good schools, how his elder sister, Ma, was the kind of first child every parent would be proud to have—helping her mother sell food at home while owning the first position in her class. And so when Tee’s mother started frying gateaux for him to sell, I tried to convince my parents to let me go to the bus station with him. It was holidays and my elder brothers spent all their time at Church Street, taking piano and painting lessons. The characters of my novellas had started to bore me with their snow and gingerbread—things I had neither seen nor tasted. My mom shook her head; she said I was just looking for an excuse to leave the house. My dad said selling with my friend would help me get a sense of business. My mom was right.
At the bus station, I asked Tee if I could carry the transparent bucket of twisted gateaux on my head. He asked if I was sure and I said yes. We walked around in the rowdiness, screaming “Fine gateaux! Fine gateaux!” trying to outshout the fish-roll and meat-pie hawkers. We clung to the windows of dirty buses cajoling snobbish passengers to buy, smiled too long at girls with bad make-up and boys who were too busy nodding to songs from their MP3 players to shoo us away. One hour and three buyers later, Tee took the bucket from me and said people could tell it was not my business and that was why they did not buy. I laughed. He must have sensed it in my excitement, that it was not so much the sales as it was the experience of hawking, of carrying a bucket on my head, trying to sell, that intrigued me. He asked me not to yell “Fine gateaux!” as we walked. When I asked why, he said it was funny when I did. That I should leave it to him. I could talk about the video game my dad promised to get us instead. He wrapped two of the gateaux in a cement paper and handed it to me. He took two for himself. Later, we would stop at their eatery and eat waterfufu and eru served by Ma.
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Even in the dry season, Mile 4 does not burn. It does not purloin another sun from Mars, or Jupiter, to chase its people away. It does not raise dust and slap it on the faces of its own. It is just a quiet dry, a kind of hot just enough for drying laundry, for early morning basking, for midday swimming. Mom says it is the stream in the place that flows all her veins like blood. That keeps her cool and alive.
The nomenclature of this stream changes with location. About two hundred meters uphill from our house is the one we called Drinking: a huge purifying tank vomiting portable water through huge blue pipes, as young denizens perch at the sides with plastic bottles and small drums. When home taps stopped running, everyone fetched water here, everyone except for Maman, whose husband worked with SNEC. Usually, Tee and I would pack our containers in a wheelbarrow and we would take turns in rolling it home. The un-fetched water from Drinking falls into the stream that passes just in front of Tee’s house. This one, we called Shit Water. The neighborhood children go there to shit while their big sisters wash clothes just beside them. One day, I overheard Ma and her friends talking about a fetus that had been found in the stream.
Of all these sites, though, the biggest and deepest was Big Water. It was a little further from our house, somewhere around Promise Land. No parent from our neighborhood let their child go to Promise Land unsupervised. It was at Big Water that stubborn children went to swim. Sometimes, they went there straight from school, uniforms dirty from dust and ink still on; and their parents, worried and wrathful would hold long whips as they walked from house to house asking anxiously if anyone had seen their child.
One sunny day, I was seated on our veranda, holding a picture book. An abandoned building stood in front of me: uncompleted and moss-covered, it stood hopeless like plans that had been cut short by its dreamer’s death. Years ago, my dad had wanted to buy the place to start a school. But the caretaker, an old woman who was rumored to turn into a rat at night and invaded people’s houses, said they were not selling. Opposite the building, a tall barren pawpaw tree swayed its branches, stretching them out in display as if in prayer to a god for blessings of fruition. When Tee said my name, I had not expected it. He said he was going to Big Water and had come to get me. I told him I could not go, and he should not be going. He called me a Fear Fear Man and left. He had told me about how the activities of Big Water went. How the big boys catapulted the small boys in the water, forcing them deep down so they would swim to rescue themselves from drowning. That was how they learned how to swim. “Fear Fear Man” he had also said, referring to his cousin. The one who after the first day of being forcefully immersed in water, of drinking a little too much of Big Water, decided he was not going to know how to swim if this was what it took.
That night, Tee came back red-eyed, his face and feet ashen from swimming. Most times, this was how parents caught their children who had gone to swim (most of them forgot to carry body lotion.) His father, the retired soldier, grabbed him by his uniform, pulled him close and started to flog him. At first, Tee held his screams tight on his face, it was a grimace. And then his father started yelling something in their dialect as he flogged. Anger had colored his eyes the red of Tee’s. As Tee’s father flogged, Tee’s face began to open, and then his mouth open to loud screams, until the neighbors ran out to beg his father to take it easy with him. He would remind me of this, years later, when I would take him to the pool to teach me to swim.
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Tee went to GTHS, Ombe, and I went to Sacred Heart College, Mankon. During the holidays, Ma would teach me and my brother Chemistry on our veranda: drawing atoms on the blackboard, asking us to balance chemical equations, and so on. Because Tee was in Technical School, and did not do Chemistry, he waited for his sister to leave before coming to ours to play video games and watch movies. It was on one of those days I found out that I was a month older than him.
“You have to start calling me Grand Howard or Brother Howard.” I told him.
He looked at me and said “Meward” with a smirk.
When Tee called me Meward, I knew he was talking about Melissa—he had coupled our names to suggest and tease, but what I did not know was why he was talking about her in particular.
Melissa was our neighbor’s daughter. A tiny dark-skinned girl whom we said hello to sometimes. One time when we were younger, we shared the quarter into two, our side (with Tee) versus Melissa’s side; drew a line in the middle, and did a competition of insults. She told me I should walk with stones in my pocket because I was too weak the wind could carry me away. Someone from our side said her mother was a fat woman with a tiny head—she looked like a gas bottle. Soon, the insults became a general thing. Someone from their side: Your smelling foot.
Someone from our side: Your papa na thief man.
No side won.
Years later, Tee would date Melissa. He would tell me this one holiday when I returned from school. He would tell me with a casualness that did not welcome any deep questions. He would not tell me who had said what to whom, if she was the love of his life or just a girl he was with to ward off loneliness. I would not ask. But when they loitered by the entrance in the dark, she leaning on his chest, he holding her waist; they would look consumed by each other. And when I passed by, they would greet me in unison, and he would still call me Meward.
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Every evening, Tee sat shirtless in front of their house, lifting weights. If there was wood to be split, he’d waltz out with an axe. He looked like a sweating mannequin, a dark-skinned, bearded android. I told him he was big for his age. He asked me if I remembered our fight and the corn. Asked me if I could try fighting with him now. I laughed and told him he was my younger brother no matter how much muscles or beard he had. He told me not to say that anywhere because no one would ever believe that. I asked if he had considered modeling. He said that kind of job was meant for people like me.
It was typical of him to make statements like that, statements that would throw one off guard, so that I did not know if he was being too cool for school or he was playing the inferiority complex card. When I spoke to him in English, he would reply in Pidgin English, asking if he looked like someone who went to school.
Tee was stubborn. When Ma and his parents tried to force him to get baptized, he told them no one would make him do what he did not want to do. Sometimes, my brother would bring news of how Tee had beaten up a boy who was harassing his friend. It was after the fight, that Tee would ask what had happened. My brother would say this with a kind of amused admiration, a distant one. Because even though he too was a Muscle Man, he would not be caught dead fighting on the streets.
One day, while I was visiting my Alma Mater, a group of boys marched in the school with long tree branches like they were in a riot. I was shocked to see Tee among them. When he saw me, he ran towards me and my classmates, a big smile on his face. He told me they were looking for someone who had stolen from a friend. It was the day he asked me to tell him if I ever got in any trouble with anyone, that he would break the person’s bones before asking me what happened.
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After his baccalaureate, Tee got a job working with SONARA. I had just graduated from the University of Buea with a B.Sc. in Microbiology and was trying to decide between a Masters Degree and a job. In his room, as his younger brother sang R. Kelly’s “You Saved Me” from the veranda, we’d talk about the intricacies of life and living. About recent deaths and what the future holds. He’d ask about the girl I used to date, the one who went to his church. And then say we were a good match, “English English people.” He was courting a girl who said she did not like boys with big muscles. He had bought a piece of land at a new layout and was saving to build a house for his parents. One better than the small plank house they were currently living in.
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Tee moved to Thailand and I to Bangladesh and Ma to America. She was doing her PhD and still had the smallness and baby face cuteness of someone in her teens or early twenties, but her eyes still said she could not be intimidated. On Facebook, Tee would comment “Model Man” under my picture and I would ask him who looked like a model between the two of us, and he would laugh and call me Meward, perhaps as a kind of touché. When we chatted, we reminisced about Mile 4, about the quarter quarrels and the feuds, about how he had asked me to start greeting other neighborhood mates because they were calling me a snob, about the food shared between neighbors, about how I almost drowned the first day we went out to swim. When I spoke about Ma and how she was helping me with the whole postgraduate experience even from afar, he said Ma and I loved school too much. He was an English teacher now. I asked what exactly he taught those Thai kids given that he did not like “English English people,” and he laughed and said they were lucky to have a teacher like him. Sometimes, when he posted pictures where he was with his students, I would comment “English Man.”
He was serious with the girl who did not like boys with big muscles. He told me he thought she was the one. When they fought, he would send long write-ups about what had happened and how she could go away for all he cared. And then a week later, he would tell me they were fine and she was the one. We talked about how time was flying and how settling age was fast approaching. I told him I was still his big brother and he should not hurry and marry before me. He laughed and said Melissa was waiting for me. The house he was building for his parents was completed; they had moved in already to the gated bungalow with a garage on its side. By now, he had, in his own time, thought about his life, and met his pastor so he would be baptized. He was ready.
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It is 2016 and Tee is in the news. I am back in Mile 4 when my brother walks into my room and tells me he got a call this morning that Tee was dead. I ask him to get out.
On Facebook, his pictures are everywhere with tags saying Rest In Peace and sad faces by people who knew him and people who did not. I slap my laptop off. I go to the kitchen, pour some water in a glass, but I cannot drink. On a random WhatsApp group, three people send a link. Yet Another Cameroonian Dies in Thailand. The picture is Tee’s. It was an accident, the article explains. He was returning from a Cameroon association meeting when his bike crashed on a pole and he died before they reached the hospital. There were pictures to show.
Everyone in my neighborhood has stormed out expressing shock and grief in ways only they know how. A neighbor says Tee was such an energetic young man who had a great potential of being great, another says he was moving too fast for his age, building a house at what age? I move indoors and sit on the couch. The images of the crash keep flashing in my head; of him on the hospital bed lifeless; of him in his blueblack suit, smiling; of him calling me Meward; of him. At night, I lock my self in my room and cry myself to sleep.
Ma has come from America; her eyes are swollen from crying. Tee’s father hugs me and tells me sorry for my loss. I don’t know what to say. The boys from the quarter are here too, sad and eager to help. The boy everyone calls Manager is asking about the canopies to be hired. Every hand is on deck. Ma sends me to Buea to print the funeral booklets. At the Documentation Shop, the chubby attendant gasps and asks me if the boy is my brother. I say yes. She says she saw it on social media; it is so sad that this would happen to someone as young and good looking as this. I agree. She offers to reduce the price of printing, because my brother was such a handsome guy. I smile and thank her. I imagine what Tee would think about this.
Tee’s brother has not cried since the news came. He does not talk about it. When he comes to the house, he talks about music and sings songs that would have him screaming and drawing notes. My sister says in secondary school, he had performed John Legend’s “All of Me” and all the girls had fallen for him. Ma tells me the corpse is on its way from Thailand. It should land later today.
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Now, we are in Awing village. It is cold and everyone is in their jackets and sweaters, thick shawls thrown over T-shirts engraved with Tee’s face. The village has thatch houses and dusty paths with picturesque hills that look like paintings. When a hill was too steep, we got out of the car, walk a little and take pictures, catching up with the driver ahead. Someone is shouting “Na Tee don bring we here o. Na Tee don bring we for Awing so o.”
Rituals are done. Some boys have dug the grave by Tee’s grandfather’s house. The burial is set. I see Tee’s younger brother hurry into his grandfather’s house. I follow him to the room. It is now that he falls on the ground and begins to cry. I hold him; try to console him by saying nothing, just holding him. He is picking up small sharp stones from the bare ground and piercing them against his finger tips. He is pressing and pressing as if to wake himself up. As if he wants to feel another kind of pain. When he looks up at me, his face is wet with both tears and sweat. His breathing is quick. “So Tee is really gone?” I don’t know what to say.
“You know he promised. They told me he was gone but I did not believe them. I spoke with him the other day and he told me he was coming and he would do everything for me to make it in music. We had plans. Look, he had already sent money for the first beats. I was supposed to go and see the record producer. He told me he would be here. That he would make sure he does everything. That he would be here. He told me. He said it. He promised.”
He collapses in my arms and continues to cry, continues to pierce himself with sharp little stones until he almost bleeds. Uncles come to ask him to eat something, to drink something. He ignores them. I tell him it is alright; or maybe not, but it would be. I will myself to believe my own words. I tell him Tee would watch over him from where he is. And as for having a big brother who has his back, my brothers and I are always there. He looks at me, “So Tee is really gone.”
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An elderly man has just finished talking and now they are calling for a friend of Tee’s to come and talk, to bid him farewell on behalf of all his friends. I am thinking of our discussions about life and the future, about death. Manager is calling my name, asking me to talk on behalf of his friends. I feel broken, like my bones are something soft. Like someone has dug up substance from me and now I need to walk around with stones in my pocket lest the wind carries me away. I think of how speeches in Pidgin English make me stall and stammer. I think of how Tee would not like his final goodbyes in too much English. I tell Manager to do it. I don’t listen to him because I am still thinking. And in the future, when I see kids riding and falling on bicycles, when I hear them running from the whips of half-disgruntled, half-grateful parents, I would think of Tee.
editor 
Nkiacha Atemnkeng 
Sada Malumfashi