Dangerous Love (10 page)

Things took a turn for the worse when their father announced that he was taking a new wife. The next day she was led into the house. Omovo and his brothers learnt that her dowry had been quite expensive. They learnt also that their father held a lavish marriage party in her parents' house. After she arrived they felt shut out of their father's life. They felt like strangers. The house became too small for everyone. Tempers were taut. Omovo's brothers would brush past their father, almost shouldering him, and not a word would pass between them. It became almost impossible to breathe in the house.

Strangely, Omovo was able to reach his father in this welter of raw emotions. Any act of his which was less angry than his brothers' defined itself as something positive. The truth is that Omovo could not take sides: he knew his father's difficulties and understood the anger of his brothers. And although he knew how bad the relationships in the house were, he was not prepared for the exposure of raw nerves, the definitive parting of ways, which happened that Saturday morning.

Omovo was woken up by the noises of a quarrel. He went to the sitting room and saw his father standing near the outside door. He held a blood-stained belt in his hand. He trembled with barely controllable rage. Umeh stood by the bookshelf, his head lowered. He had a thick welt on his neck. Okur was at the other end of the room, near the dining table. He stood tall, and there was something strategic in his bearing. He sweated. At the kitchen door Blackie pretended to be winnowing husks from rice on a tray. She watched the events with sideways glances.

Umeh lifted his head. Tears streamed down his face. Omovo knew that he was not crying. The tears were involuntary. In front of him the centre table lay on its side. One leg had been wrenched out of shape. On the floor, beside him, there was a stuffed travelling bag. Then it struck Omovo, for the first time, that Umeh was leaving home.

The compound people gathered to watch the events through the window and through the open door. There were children and strangers amongst them. They stared gravely, impassively. Omovo could imagine them whispering the public history of the family. He felt sad. He was part of it all, and there seemed to be nothing he could do.

Then his father began shouting. His anger was directed at Umeh, but what he said seemed more general.

‘I want you out of my house now. Get out of the house! This place can no longer contain the two of us. You are a man, go out into the world and fend for yourself as I have done. And let's see if you can do any better. So, okay, I have not been a good father, eh? Go out and find yourself another one... Go on...'

Omovo had never seen his father so angry before. Not even during the terrifying quarrels with his mother. He seemed to have inflated. His neck, trembling, was held straight. His anger shook the place.

‘I cannot tolerate you in my house anymore. The time has come for you to go your own way and for me to go mine. You say I have been a bad father, eh, that I have not done anything for you, that I refused to sponsor you to university, that I have failed you as a father... and you have the guts to wake me up to tell me all of this. You have no shame, you do not respect me. I am your father and yet you do not fight my battles with me. If I died today you would not care, you would not even know the hardships I have been suffering, the debts I have been trying to clear. You do not know my difficulties. You do not know my enemies. In spite of all the suffering I endured to provide for you when you were a child, all the money I spent educating you, your only gratitude is in accusing me. You are a man now and yet you are still living with me. Your comrades are all married. They have settled down, they have children and they are progressing. But you roam about, smoking marijuana, fighting and coming home whenever you want. You are here doing nothing. Useless, that's what you are. Useless... Get out of my house and go where you like, do what you like, I don't care. What business is it of yours if I marry a new wife? What's your business with it, eh?'

He paused in his rhetoric, exhausted, and breathed in deeply. He had worn himself out. It was too much for Omovo. He seemed to be in a terrible dream. He felt he had to act, to make a movement.

‘What's all this, Dad?' he said, stepping forward. But his father turned to him and lashed out with the belt. It caught Omovo on the back. Omovo twisted, the pain searing through him.

‘Get away, you small fool! Or do you want to follow your brothers as well?'

Mist formed in Omovo's eyes. And through the mist everything seemed to be gyrating. Omovo blinked and the mist cleared. Umeh looked at Omovo with brooding and vacant eyes. Okur stood still, his bearing as strategic as ever. Blackie continued to blow the husks from the rice. The compound people were still at the window and at the door. They seemed excited by the latest scene in the family drama.

Omovo shut his eyes and said a silent prayer. He prayed that it was all a dream, and that harmony would be restored. If a word existed, potent like mystic syllables, that he could utter to save the disintegration of the family, he would have given anything to know it and to be able to voice it. When he opened his eyes, he was scorched by the indifference of reality.

He heard Umeh say: ‘I'm going, old man. I hope you will find happiness with yourself when I am gone.'

Then Umeh picked up his travelling bag and pushed past his father. At the doorway he screamed obscenities at the people gathered round the window. Then his heavy footsteps were heard leaving the compound.

‘You can go,' Omovo heard his father say.

Before he could do anything, Okur suddenly pulled out his own bag, which had been hidden under the dining table. He picked up the bag and moved towards his father. Omovo felt himself swaying in the sheer inexorable force of events.

‘If Umeh goes, I go,' Okur said, towering over his father.

Tension hung over the room like a shroud of immense gloom. Nobody moved. Then their father took a deep breath. His neck stiffened. His chest expanded. Then he looked around, as if everyone present were crucial to the next thing he was going to say. Okur moved towards the door. Their father grimaced. Omovo could imagine him saying in a drinking session, much later: ‘I don't take nonsense from anybody. I turned them out. Just like that.' Then, with heaviness and exhaustion in his voice, he said:

‘If you want to follow your brother into madness, then you can follow him. You two have been bad children to me. It's all a waste.'

Then he went, unsteadily, towards the sprawled chair. He stood it up straight, slumped onto it and took a long drink directly from the bottle of ogogoro.

Omovo looked up and saw the old framed photographs on the wall. In one of them his father, bearing a fan, his expression dignified, stared proudly down at the sitting room. Something passed through Omovo. He shuddered at its irrevocability. He felt hollow with the shared guilt, the disembodied sorrow. Okur came over to him and, with a hand on his shoulder, said:

‘Take it easy, little brother. What happened had to happen. We shall seek the true meaning of our lives. This is a dream we might wake up from one day.'

A moment later, Omovo was alone. The hand had left his shoulder. It had happened. It had happened.

The compound people, having witnessed the end of the drama, went back to their various duties. The strangers left. The children ran up and down the corridor, playing. Omovo's father drank his ogogoro. His eyes were bloodshot and dazed. Blackie disappeared into the kitchen. Only the faint rattle of shuffled rice grains could be heard. Omovo went to the door and looked outside. The corridor was deserted. It was difficult to believe that a moment before their door had been crowded. The damage had been done and life had resumed its altered course. Nothing seemed to be real.

He went to the house front. The area bustled. Pulsating noises sounded from everywhere. The scumpool was green and covered with filth. People streamed past. Children played. Girls came to buy water. A hawker of roasted groundnuts, dressed in tattered clothes, went past, calling ‘Ele ekpa re-o!' in a sweet high-pitched voice. He could not see his brothers anywhere in the commotion. He ran towards the garage. He still could not find them. He came back home, stood on the cement platform, his back against the wall, and shut his eyes. When he opened them he looked up at the tranquil expanse of sky. He thought: ‘It's a dream from which we might wake up one day.' He hoped that he would not wake up too late, when the nightmare had gone too far, when nothing could be done any more.

After that day his father took to drinking heavily. Omovo fell deeper into painting. It was once a childhood hobby. After his mother's death it became a world full of his bizarre feelings. With the departure of his brothers it became a passion. It became a way to explore the hidden meanings of his life and to come to terms with the miasmic landscapes about him. Painting became a part of his response to life: a personal and public prism.

Omovo took in the sounds and activities of the compound. Children in varying stages of nakedness ran up and down the corridor. Their shrill voices filled the air. They liked him because he was generous to them. He liked the children as well. But as they ran up and down they ignored him, as if they sensed the mood of his dark thoughts which they could not share.

Omovo felt far away from the bustle around him. He looked up through the gap left by the eaves of the zinc roofs. Against the unobtrusive sky, his thoughts formed themselves. Something warmed within him. He smiled. His face began to glow. The children playing around must have sensed this brightening, for some of them soon gathered around him.

‘Brother Omovo, give us money. We wan buy groundnut,' they said, as if they had rehearsed the request.

He smiled at them. It pleased him to hear them call him ‘Brother Omovo' in chorus.

‘Brother Omovo, give us five kobo, you hear?'

His hand moved to his breast pocket. He felt in a playful mood. He drew back his hand and looked at them in pretended severity. The children fell silent. Omovo crossed his eyes. The children laughed. Then he bent down and said:

‘I go give una money if una fit do arithmetics.'

The children nodded. Omovo found himself staring at the protruding stomach of a little girl. She had a yellow-brown complexion. A boy with a head like a pear broke the silence.

‘Oya now. Give us the arithmetic.'

Omovo turned to the boy. ‘Okay, you, wetin be three times seven?'

The boy counted with his dirty fingers, racking his brain. ‘I don get am!' he soon announced. ‘Na twenty one! Oya where di money?'

Omovo gave the children twenty-one kobos. They cheered, as if with one voice, and ran out of the compound to buy items of their fancy. As they went one of the children shouted: ‘Shine-shine head' at him. He could not tell which one it was and he smiled after them forbearingly.

He turned his gaze upwards at the sky. With his eyes wide open he tried to imagine objects. He tried to imagine darkness. He couldn't. Then, shutting his eyes, he tried to imagine trees. He could sense the remembered shape of trees, but he could not see them in their solidity. He found that, as always, he had to create the image within him; he had to bring it into being as if he were painting it internally. When he opened his eyes he felt serene.

With his serenity he tried thinking about the painting he had resolved to do. But the idea was too abstract, and he felt he was deceiving himself in some way. He was aware that there was something he wasn't facing. He wasn't sure what it was. He began to think about the concrete basis of all ideas, and about the long silent phases it had taken him to trap the scumscape on canvas, when his mind clouded.

Life outside began to intrude. A baby cried, a husband and wife quarrelled publicly, and there was a hiss of food being fried. A radiogram blared traditional music. A woman demanded to know, in a loud voice, whose baby had excreted on her doorstep. A man with a wide mouth and kola-nut-stained teeth called to his children with merciless repetition. And there were the constant noises of passers-by. The cacophony was a vibrant assault on his senses.

His mind wandered amidst the babel. Then he came up with the notion of trying not to hear the noises. He concentrated on a television aerial on the roof. For a moment he heard nothing. When he bent his mind to affirm whether he was really hearing nothing, he began to hear the tumultuous sounds of the world. He smiled. He began to concentrate on space, on the gap between the roof and sky. He was shifting the focus of his eyes when the clarity of her voice penetrated his consciousness.

‘What's the matter with you?'

It was Ifeyiwa.

‘Omovo, why are you staring like that?'

Her voice was soft. He tried to hold her voice in his mind. But it had been there, and it was gone. She looked at him quizzically.

‘Omovo, did you hear me?'

‘Yes, yes.'

He became suddenly aware that she was close to him. She held a bucket full of water in her hand. He felt the heat from her exerted body. A warm and earthy smell came from her, filling him with remembered passion. Her eyes, clear, and white brown, were widened as though in wonder. She had a blue scarf about her head, framing her face. The expression on her face excited him. He swarmed with uneasiness. He became conscious that the compound people were staring.

Imitating the stance of older women, Ifeyiwa said: ‘What does a young man like you have to think about? You have no wife, no children, so why do you have to keep staring at the sky?'

She smiled. Omovo, smiling back, said: ‘It's good to hear you teasing me.'

She drew closer to him. Her breasts heaved with sensuous dignity, rising and falling, as if she had difficulty in breathing. They carved provocative shapes on her simple blouse. Omovo's eyes could not avoid being drawn to them.

‘I was just thinking about my brothers. I had a letter from Okur this morning.'