In the hospital waiting room, Owobi says he is a doctor. But nobody listens. By the third time, they threaten to send us out, and I yell at the nurse, the poor nurse who had simply said, “Both of you are agitating other family members waiting out here, too. We may have to ask you both to excuse us.” I watch myself flare up, as if in an out-of-body experience. “Do you know who we are?” I yell at her. They force us to leave eventually, after I say, “I will fucking punch you,” to the security guard, who is just an elderly man in his sixties, saying, “Oga seh, please step outside.”
“Oga seh,” Owobi says, mocking the security guard. We are sitting in the parking lot, on the concrete pavement. The lamps are on, illuminating the lot. Our anxieties have quietened, and we have accepted that the world is anything but in our control.
I hold back my laugh. “This is not the right time.”
“‘Do you know who we are?’” he mocks me too.
I am unable to hold back what begins as a chuckle. I am cackling, howling, tears streaming down my cheeks. It is the out-of-body experience again, the pretence of anger, the false ‘Do you know who we are?’ alarm. I find it all humorous. I had never said those words before, yet there I was at a hospital in Accra, yelling, as though I knew if our father’s influence ran as far as Ghana.
Áda would have been proud to see this version of me if he had not been the reason we were at an emergency ward in Accra. He had texted the family group chat on WhatsApp, which still had our mother’s phone number, even though she was no longer with us.
Boys’ trip to Ghana. Oluchi will email your itineraries.
Chief Dr Ekoche.
Our father signed out his text messages as though anyone would wonder if a text from Simon Ekoche could come from anyone other than him, the owner of his phone. But that was about the least spontaneous thing about Áda.
Our father woke up one morning and decided to run for governor, which he lost in ‘07 after two years of planning and rallying. He said it was the best thing he had ever done: losing in third place. It opened up opportunities for him and skyrocketed his hotel chain business. He dabbled in more businesses and set the bar higher each time Owobi and I returned from school in Lagos. Our mother did not find him overly ambitious, as he surpassed the bar her father, a former chief, set for him as an in-law. It pleased her that her husband could afford more than her father, who had once said, when he came to ask for her hand in marriage, “Can this boy take care of you?” A story she told too frequently.
Our father’s ambition did not bother her, but it bothered me as he began to expect of me a greater version of himself, a version I did not see in myself. At the all-boys’ secondary school I had gone to with Owobi, who was two years younger than me, I had come to see how unprepared I was for life and how it compared to my brother’s. In spaces where I was too sluggish to see a deal like washing a senior’s shirt for food, Owobi was wise enough to jump on it and have food in abundance. I was forever in competition with him, before my father, for skills he intrinsically had.
“Okay, you’re laughing too much now, Ebo,” Owobi says, placing his hand on my knee.
I still want to laugh some more, though I am not sure why.
“Sorry. It’s all just too funny,” I eventually say.
“Not really.”
Our father was dying.
“Yeah, not really.”
*
I have always loved Owobi since the day he came into this world, even though I have no memory of it. Our mother spoke about how I always wanted to carry him, and there was a picture in our Markudi house to prove it. I posted it once on Instagram on his birthday with the caption, ‘my baby brother.’ He was no longer a baby. I admired the years when he was always clinging to me, confident that I knew where I was headed, and that was where he wanted to be. He followed me around the house, tottering alone sometimes, holding my hand other times. We played a plastic 15-disc puzzle most days: with him scattering it as much as he could, and me rearranging and perfecting it in minutes. It was easier to be an older brother when we were much younger, when he had not developed a mind of his own and believed I could do no wrong, when life was contained and I was never unsure of the next exemplary step to take. “Ebo, I want to poo-poo,” he’d say, and I’d follow him to the toilet if the nanny was absent.
My brother had a moustache sprouting on his face before I did, and I was jealous. It annoyed me. For most of our teenage years, I resented him for growing up, as though we were not both growing up together. Growing up meant that he did not depend on me as much, and his dependence had been my validation as his older brother. In boarding school, he would come to me only for money or provisions, never for advice or protection. He fought his class bullies and endured his punishments from seniors without asking me for deliverance. Owobi fit in well. He was a football champion, and my classmates sometimes hailed him as one of the few juniors with ‘sense.’ They adored him.
Once, a senior had read my name on my uniform and called me. “You’re Ekoche?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Is that JS3 boy your brother?”
“Yes.”
“Really?” he said. His colleagues listening were just as amused as he was. I was Owobi’s brother, but I wanted him to be Ebo’s brother – the proper order of formative identities.
Owobi played the saxophone, and I preferred to sing. But singing did not matter before my father. He made Owobi perform before guests at parties he hosted and even in church when we were back home for the holidays.
“Why have you not mastered the piano?” my father asked after one of Owobi’s performances, and I shrugged, unsure of what to reply. He had never asked me to play the piano before.
Owobi had a girlfriend before I did, a neighbour who attended the sister school of our school in Lagos. They would write letters, exchange them with day students, and still meet during the holidays, while I was not sure of how well I liked girls because I barely saw them unless we were having joint social events with our sister school.
Once, Owobi jokingly pitched a farm expansion idea to my father by divine inspiration. My father went ahead with it, and it was successful. I could not compete with that. I wanted to make music, but Owobi had always wanted to be a doctor. He was ahead of me in my father’s measurement of success, and all I tried to do was catch up.
*
When I first fought Owobi, my resentment towards him, beyond his moustache, had not been acknowledged. He was in JS3, and I was in SS2. We had no holiday lessons except swimming every Saturday, and even that we’d mastered, so it was no longer a lesson but a leisure activity at the country club. Our mother had decided we would spend the holiday in Abuja to be with our father at our Maitama home, but I wished for a trip to Paris, which we had taken the year before. It was easier to befriend Owobi outside the country, where I didn’t feel in competition with him, where everything was new to us at the same speed.
One Friday, Áda came home with a white hen, bound at the feet with a rope. “We’re killing a chicken today,” he said. Our father, who was always busy with a phone call or always having someone to see, was standing in the living room with the creature clucking, confused, in his hand. Mr Abbas, the caretaker, could do it, but my father took us to the yard, narrating how killing a chicken was a rite of passage into manhood. Of whose culture? I wished to ask, but this was our father, always spontaneous. He asked my mother for a sharp knife on our way out, which she gave to him, promising to boil some hot water. I knew there was no way I could kill a chicken. I was not sure that I could even touch it. I looked at Owobi. For a second, our expressions were almost similar: why would I kill a chicken? I looked at him again to be sure, but I saw curiosity. He was considering it. He would do it.
“Hold this for me,” our father said. He handed out the chicken to no one in particular, and my stomach churned. I was still figuring out where to grab the chicken. But then Owobi grabbed it by the wings. He laughed, surprised by himself, oddly irked yet unable to let go because he had collected it. Our father sharpened the knife against a corner of the concrete sill.
“Are we really doing this?” I asked, thinking of the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril ride from our visit to Disneyland Paris. That should have been the rite of passage; Owobi and I were mute throughout the ride.
“Yes. It’s quite easy, oyim,” my father said. “Place the chicken on the side, and cut it by the neck. You have to pin it firmly to the ground so we don’t have a headless chicken running about, kukurookoo.” He crowed and pretended to be a headless chicken for a short while. We laughed. Owobi was ready to let go of the hen. Our father swapped the knife for the chicken and promised to pin it to the ground, which he did with one hand and a foot. All that was left was to behead the chicken.
*
At our mother’s wake, Áda started every brag saying, “His mother and I were losing hope in him. We thought he was adopted.” Each time I was present at this narration, I gave a half-suppressed laugh, urging him on, as if to suggest that I was not offended. Sometimes, the listeners would laugh along, observing as my father’s arm wrapped across my back, squeezing my bicep affectionately. Owobi would be behind or lurking somewhere around, both of us wishing our mother would resurrect.
Aunty Ene, my father’s youngest sister, anchored the wakekeep in the parlour. There was a canopy outside, and strangers from the village were sitting on the rented plastic chairs with GIG Rentals etched on them by a pair of dividers or nails. Some were wailing, some were singing hymns, but all were waiting for Chief Dr Ekoche to roll out the food. They were aware that a chief like him would not control matters like food, but they waited on him either way.
My father went around the room, introducing me to several people as the next political candidate for the senatorial seat of our people. He was either answering questions on my behalf or urging me to talk with a pat on the back, but I wanted to sit and observe the wakekeep properly. The people he introduced me to were ugly, too ugly from the inside that it radiated outward. I wanted to be Owobi, off the hook, standing in the corner of the room. Submitting to politics was the only thing that superseded being a doctor in our father’s eyes, and it took my mother revealing this to me to know.
A few years back, in my apartment in Abuja, my mother had mentioned that Áda was building a house in Ohimini. She had said it lightly, in passing.
“Why?” I asked. She was sitting on the dining table scrolling through Facebook on her tablet.
“For retirement,” she answered. I was satisfied with her answer and continued to skip through channels, looking for something to watch, even better if I found something we could both watch. “Won’t you ask me why?” she added.
“Why what?”
“Why your father is building a mansion in Ohimini?”
He is an adult with his own money? I wished to say. Instead: “Why is he doing such?”
“He thinks one of you will run for local government chairman or senator.”
“He is building a mansion based on a thought?”
“That’s why you will do it.”
It was not clear whether it was a command or a suggestion. I didn’t know what to say. I thought of Owobi. I wondered if he knew, but I did not ask. He had just completed his residency and was practising family medicine in Florida. If he were aware, I imagined we would have similar expressions: “Why would I run for Senate?” But I also imagined him considering it, the confused frown on his face morphing into complaisance. Unlike him, I had studied anthropology in Massachusetts before returning to Abuja, my music dreams withering along the way. It was easier, while I was in Boston, to love Owobi from a distance. I missed him and often dwelt on the happy moments we shared in our childhood. In our father’s absence, the pressure to compete faded, and how would anthropology compete with medicine before his eyes? In no time, it was easy to digest being the black sheep, particularly when I began therapy.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said to my mother.
“Many things don’t make sense, but your father wants the political connection.”
“Owobi can do this.” My life was simple as a reporter for one of the leading news channels, a job my father had gotten me. He had enough connections.
“Don’t be silly, your brother is a doctor.”
“Oh.” The insult cut my tongue.
*
“A fine young man like you needs to be married to run for any office,” one of my father’s benefactors said at the wake. Our mother had married a man so ambitious that he would not weep at her wake but make connections. “People don’t take unmarried candidates seriously.”
“You’re right! Marriage is the primary sign of responsibility. A man with a family,” Áda said, sharing a laugh with the strange, ugly man. “Oyim, tell him when you’re getting married,” my father said, squeezing my shoulder. I could not tell how long his arm had rested across my back the entire evening, but even he had to have started feeling the discomfort.
I smiled politely. “Soon.”
“You know, my cousin, the one who procures government contracts, he has a daughter your son’s age. Beautiful girl—” I excused myself to quickly use the toilet, and left to find Owobi.
I finally found him in the backyard gazebo. I had passed through the kitchen and had to greet many family members, all of whom thought I was a handsome young man. I looked just like my mother, they said, and I smiled, just as I had been doing all night. I was not sure it was him by the view of the silhouette from the kitchen door, but I didn’t know that anybody would sit so comfortably in our father’s gazebo.
“What are you doing out here, Mr Man?” I asked, entering the structure.
“Mourning Enem.”
“Hmm.”
“What about you?”
“I was looking for you,” I said. “Some guy was about to marry me off to his relative to look responsible.” I chuckled, hoping we would both laugh, but he did not.
“Hmm,” he said.
I was hoping he would say something that would encourage me, even better if it felt like competition, so my drive to impress my father and run for the position would accelerate, but he was not interested in the spot. He seemed better off without it. He was better off without it, particularly with the life he was building for himself in America with his rich international friends and their evening soirees and weekend trips. Owobi had gotten too familiar with the city; he’d forgotten about our father’s heritage.
He was the last to receive news that our mother had passed away because he had been at work, and when we tried to contact him twice, he was unreachable. He could not return earlier because he needed to request time off and get approval. Whereas I was on the first flight to Makurdi the minute I heard the news. Our father was sad in those few days, and I was there to comfort him and to confirm that I was ready to run for the Senate. It seemed like the only thing that would cheer him up, and it felt good to beat Owobi to it.
“You’ve found me, Ebo, what do you want?” he asked. He had on a nice dark blue suit that softly reflected the security lights on the fence. I wanted to figure him out, beg him to run for local government chairman, or have him fail at something that would make me feel good and look good before Áda.
“I just wanted to make sure you were doing okay.”
“I’m not,” he said. “My mother is dead, and my father and brother are discussing politics at her wake. Thank you for asking. I’ll be fine.”
Once again, Owobi was not one to ask for advice or protection, things I needed from him in that gazebo.
*
That Friday, Owobi attempted to kill the chicken, but he didn’t. He left a slice in the neck, and when droplets of blood began to fall, he was all too irritated to complete it. There was a visible chill down his body. Our father laughed.
“My boy is a chicken,” he said in Idoma. He still did not let go as the creature clucked even more violently. He was holding firm as promised, waiting for another attempt. “You’ve started. Complete it,” he cheered Owobi on, but it was too uncomfortable. In a second, Owobi passed the knife into my hand and stepped backwards.
“And you will eat the chicken,” my father teased him before facing me. “Haba, you give it a try.”
My hand was shaky. I was ready to squeal, but right after, I gave it a stare so that it looked as if I tried, coming so close to the bleeding hen. But it was just a hen. Yet the more I looked at it, the more I questioned my ability to kill it. I could, for the win. I could impress Áda. And so without a second thought, I stepped on the comb and some parts of the head and swung the knife through the neck. It was awfully unskillful but technical. Blood was spewing from the neck. It splattered on both the legs of Áda and me. I was disgusted and immediately stepped away from the chicken. Our mother came out with a bucket of hot water and my father submerged the bloody hen in it.
“Adaebo, so you can kill a chicken?” he teased me in Idoma. “I should fear you.”
I glanced at Owobi, and he glanced back, no expression on his face. I had won.
*
We are still in the parking lot, quiet till Owobi takes a phone call from a friend in Florida. He gets up and roams around the car park, his accent matching his friend’s. I watch him move, and that’s Owobi, the boy I’ve known all my life. In our father’s absence, it’s easier to love him, but in our father’s absence, it’s unclear what I am to become and how well I am becoming it. But as I watch Owobi in the parking lot, I know he’s chosen his own life. He is returning to Florida after this trip.
I remember fighting him that holiday in the yard because he tagged me a murderer for killing the chicken. I knew he was joking, attempting to rile me up, but I fought him for that and all my pent-up resentment till Mr Abbas separated us and gave us a lesson about fighting as brothers. I remember him saying we were all we had. But he had a moustache, and I didn’t.
He returns to sit beside me after the call.
“You’re going to make a good senator,” he says as he settles on the ground, smiling. It is his first sentence about my run since he spoke about it under the gazebo.
“I’m going to be Áda’s pawn,” I say.
“You’ve wanted to be that all your life.”
“Not really. I’ve never actually known what I want.”
“What do you want?”
“None of this.”
“Well, I know I don’t want to be poor,” he says. We both laugh. We could never be poor.
“Neither do I. I don’t want to be Áda either. I want to be my own person,” I say. The words are surprising me as they come.
“Come to the light,” he says, making angelic hands, arms flapping.
“You’re not serious.”
“And you’re going to lose the election.”
“I know.”
“You should see a therapist.”
“I do.”
“Get a better one, Ebo.”
I lie on the pavement to make a loud grunting sound, and the cool tar sends me to calmness as my back touches it. “This man better not die.”
*Photo by Keagan Henman on Unsplash