Bukola’s voice commanded me to listen to what she had to say while we walked toward 250LT a day before we competed in a speech contest. You walked behind us with Oyin, Bukola’s eight-year-old daughter. You were silent and distant. We would compete in teams of two; you would be Bukola’s partner. I would speak twice, because the pretty girl in my team had developed cold feet. The Faculty of Management Sciences that you represented would come second. You would disappear then, only to reappear eight days later, on matriculation day, before flitting out again.
Matriculation was held on a glamorous forenoon. The visiting parents’ exotic cars added colour to the campus grounds. We, the university freshmen, queued for entry into 1200LT which had been prepared for the ceremony. I wore the shirt that I had worn at the speech contest and draped my matriculation gown over my arm.
With the formal part of the ceremony over, we loitered and posed for pictures. When someone familiar passed, we invited them to take pictures with us. You walked past with a quatrain for a face: mahogany skin/nocked bow lips/milk and coffee eyes/a Nubian nose. You looked graceful in your dress. I asked you to pose for a picture. You did. It would be the only photograph I ever took of you. We remained this way for a long time: running into each other, pausing for a brief exchange, and forgetting to keep in touch until our next meeting.
When we did find a sea to sail our friendship, it was on a dark night. We were no longer shy first year students. You had joined the National Liberty Vanguard, become a student sociopolitical counsel and represented the university at debate competitions. I had been a class governor for two years, had engaged in a number of campus revolutions and had just won a scholarship. You demanded for a percentage of the scholarship bursary. When I tried to explain why you could not get a part of it, you laughed. We bonded, and nights became our thing. On a different night, I let you sleep on a drafting table in Architecture Studio II. We do not allow foreigners in the studio. So, when I let you in, the whole class reached a consensus: I was in love. I wouldn’t agree until one morning, a month after your death, when my girlfriend said, “you loved her.”
On another night we sat on a step, our bodies touching, biting through bread and omelette and sipping coffee. We talked about home. You told me about your sisters, how you had no brothers, how much you missed your youngest sister. You told me about your ex-lovers. You had a grandma who thought you were an Emere.
“That’s a good thing,” I said, laughing. Emere is both accusation and curse. Trapped between two realms, the Emere straddles the earth and the otherworld. They say she is a seductress and the most powerful spirit in Africa, south of the Sahara. People who find favour with her become enormously wealthy. She is perpetually angry with the world for preventing visitors from her parallel home. She is a ticking clock, counting down to a day when her time will run out. Sojourning on earth and unable to separate life from death, the Emere never arrives.
You settled our bill and we strolled to a barbecue stand on a back street where we inhaled the aroma of roasted chicken. We had exams the next day. You would later go on holiday with your grandma who took you to see an Alfa. The Alfa would ask the Emere to avoid water bodies and we would laugh about this.
¶
Your ex-boyfriend had died. You said he was a good person and he was young. I let you cry. You showed me his picture on your phone. Rather than for the dead man whom I didn’t know, I was sad for you. I had never seen you cry before. The only other time was months later when Damola left you. You ended up in my room and sobbed on my chest. I recalled the moment Damola told me that he loved you. I had asked him not to because he would hurt you. But it was too late. He was already in love.
‘I love her. I know we don’t belong to the same religion but I can convert to Islam for her,’ Damola said. I tried to explain to him that loving you was a journey to breaking you. Love is an expression of greed: you are friends with a person, then you start wondering if you could ever get enough of them. You keep asking for more until you choke and spit them out.
Your sister would eventually tell your mother that you were having an affair with a Christian boy. Your mother would get mad at you and you would tell Damola to keep the relationship a secret. He dumped you instead. You would tell me all this. I would ask you to walk with me; we were going to make sport of wooing people. But you laughed and buried your head in my chest.
Between the late lover and Damola, there was another boy. You phoned the boy to ask where he was. He was at an eatery. You went to see him. He introduced you to his date as a friend and walked out with his arm around her waist. You gawked after them. It was easy for you to supplant tears with a smile; it was hard to decide if you were hurt. In the days that followed, the boy attempted to cage you. He told you to be submissive because you were a girl. He convinced you that he was a privilege that you could not afford to lose. That he loved you.
You would tell me these things.
I would ask you to dump him.
You would.
¶
The school, Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, was on closedown. The ASUU, NASU and SSANU were on strike over the nonpayment of staff salaries by the governments of Oyo and Osun states. Now, chaos reigned at the university gate. Student protesters had seized control of the entrances. I strolled toward the gate, making out the dark, bold letters against improvised pickets before the familiar faces. The strike was exhausting. While comrades like me had relented on protests—the strike had been on so long that I had become weary—and had become self-absorbed, others raged on.
Domestic workers sat to a side of the entrance with cutlasses and head pans. They were shut out of their jobs of weeding lawns, sweeping grounds, dusting halls. The gate swung open. I entered into your arms. I shook hands and bumped fists with the boys, and hugged the girls. A luta continua, vitória é certa. They thought I had come to join the protest. I walked past, you followed. You regaled me with stories – including the ones Damola told you about me. We went from one university entrance to the other. On the desolate road, with poplars as witnesses, you asked, ‘can I kiss you?’
I said yes.
Outside the locked gate, cars lined the road, a few members of the university staff watched from between the metal bars of the high gates. Behind them, the highway led out of town, towards Ilorin.
‘Young lady, I like the way you danced yesterday,’ a gateman said.
You said, ‘Thank you, sir.’
The gateman turned to his colleagues and told them how you had shaken your buttocks during the previous day’s protest. ‘She was wonderful,’ he said. The gateman brought out his copy of the key, opened the gate, and locked it behind us. We walked in the middle of the road, following the procession down the highway. Along its length, the road branched left and led to a classmate’s room where I would spend the day. I said I had to go. You removed a black leather band wrapped around your wrist and put it around mine.
¶
Before the strike, there was a student parliamentary election. A hot afternoon succeeded a morning of manifestos. A road separated 250LT and the circular Senate building. Outside lectures, the hall served a purpose similar to the university’s political edifice on the other side. Propaganda had become plots. The chaos that accompanied elections had arrived before I did. A mob hung around the only door that served as entrance, keeping out representatives that might threaten their interest. While parliamentarians struggled to make entry, I strolled in another direction with you, your hand tucked beneath my arm. We sat under a tree and shared puff-puff and Coke. That was when you said, ‘You have to vote for Bossman as Senate president.’
Bossman was a dark, stocky young man. He was ambitious. In anticipation of this day, he had taken a number of pre-dawn journeys to my room. He had come with promises and pleas and people. But my loyalty was somewhere else. Now that you mentioned him, I nodded. You kissed me on the cheek. Perhaps to remind me that we were friends and I had to do this for you.
¶
The wind was in my face. I was in transit from Osogbo to Ogbomoso. The road led the bus toward the city of speed breakers. I felt alone in the bus. The only time I talked was with you, over my phone.
‘Call me when you arrive in town,’ you said. Your voice – soft and sweet – jolted me to a different time: my birthday. The cake, balanced in your hands, was white with excessive blue icing. On it was scribbled, HBD. You were late. You had skipped an event that you were to facilitate so you could be here in my room, on the eve of my birthday, cutting a cake for me. That evening, friends came to make merry. My girlfriend had stormed out of my room when the first merrymakers arrived. She said she had hoped the celebration would be private – with just the both of us in attendance. I phoned my mother and told her a friend had made me a cake.
I rang you to say that I had arrived. You came over. It was the first time you cooked in my room: spaghetti and tomato sauce. The sauce was watery. You asked me to visit you on Saturday because you would cook spaghetti bolognese. I said no. And that was the last time I saw you.
¶
July 3, the day Feyi turned 18, I woke up early. I pulled on a t-shirt and a pair of jeans and headed for Bowen University Teaching Hospital’s Social Service Workers’ office. The outpatient clinic teemed with the sick. A tall, rotund man walked into the waiting area where I sat. He flirted with an auxiliary nurse who insisted that she was married. The man hit me on the shoulder with his palm — the habit of men sharing dirty jokes.
I was awaiting clearance to document Kersey Children’s Home, an orphanage. I opened Toni Morrison’s Beloved while I waited and repeated the title of IfeOluwa Nihinlola’s personal essay that I had read a couple of weeks before, in my head: I Hope Someone Calls Them Beloved.
You were a third year student of Accounting who planned on getting a degree in Law too. You would have made a fine management attorney. You were supposed to be at the social worker’s office with me. I told you that I would ring you up and we would go together. Maybe you would have been sitting beside me, talking about your recent tour of the Badagry slave port, getting mad at the images of chains in your head. Rather, you were astride a bike, your face lowered, mapping your journey in your head. You were about a kilometre from my hostel when a car mowed down the bike on the highway. You met the tar with your head.
The driver was a student returning from a party, over-speeding. They said he crossed into the oncoming lane dodging a puddle on the road. But how was I to know this, yet?
I wound up in Funmi’s room at sunset and we set Feyi’s birthday party in motion. Feyi was Funmi’s sister. She was on a visit from Abeokuta. The aroma of Jollof rice and fried fish tickled our noses. There was a game of cards, a lot of laughter, some flirting and an abundance of death talk. We were trying to figure out the best way to die.
“Death by drowning or burning?” Funmi asked.
“Drowning please,” I said.
Two boys joined the party from Oyo, and booze was added to the menu. There was food, another round of card games and a vulgar session of truth-or-dare. I was getting drunk while you were dying. But how was I to know? The morning of July 4, Damola texted me: Please be fine… I beg you.
¶
Ebenezer knocked on my door. Eyes wide open, I leaned forward in the chair that I was sitting on, ended the phone call that had awoken me, and unlocked the door to let him in.
“You need to be strong now,” he said, “someone close to you just died.” My eyes were trained on him, narrowing, as I watched him focus on his phone. He was speaking gibberish. Which of my friends looked like they were dying? He showed me a picture of you on his phone with three letters, R I P, edited into it.
Your quatrain face.
I wept.
At 7:09PM, July 5, I was staring at the spot where you died. The spot stared back — black, empty. It held no mark of the accident. No blood. No flesh. Nothing. It spoke nothing of loss.
Everyone dissolves into memory. Some go a little too early, so that you do not consider them gone. You do not know where they have gone to; and no one will tell you. People lied. They said that you have gone to a better place. I could not tell them they were telling a lie. The look in their eyes would have been that of pity.
The Yorubas believe that the dead come back, that there is no place in the afterlife for those who die young. Usually, their souls stay with the familiar, lurking in shadows, appearing in flashes. Other times they drift to places where they can keep living until they have fulfilled a purpose. They call them Akudaaya.
I travelled to the cinema in Ilorin to see Roti, a modern Nollywood reincarnation story. After the movie, I stood by the roadside and watched a lady alight from a Primera saloon car. She wore an emerald suit. I became still. I felt my heart flutter. The lady’s situation contrasted mine—she was trying to alight from the car as fast as she could. In the second that it took her to turn around, a name rose to my throat. It swelled in my mouth, burning. I parted my lips to spit it out about the same time the emerald suit brought her visage into view. The burning dissipated. It was absurd that I had hoped it was you.
I scrolled through my chats and found the messages that I sent you. A part of me expected a reply. I do not like the idea of an afterlife. The rules may change significantly but the struggle never ends.
I phoned Damola.
“Do you know if Hikmat kept a diary?” I said.
He asked, “Why?”
“I’m just wondering what it was like in her head.”
“I really think you should move on. It’s hard for everyone but you should.” I wondered how he could say that, how his pitcher was not broken enough to let his sorrow leak. Or was he bleeding inside? Some people hide their pain better than the others.
I lingered on your profile in my Whatsapp contacts list. My fingers hovered above your picture. Your quatrain face made me smile. I resumed scrolling faster than I intended and made a mental note to delete you from my phonebook. But I would not be able to. My Whatsapp messenger would have to go instead. The excuse would be that it took up too much phone memory space.
Really, it did.