Making Wolf (2 page)

This was my experience of the funeral: I kept running the names of the malaria parasite through my head to give me something to do while the preacher read out the eulogy and to control my irritation at finding out I was not expected. I was so scared of malaria that I double-dosed on proguanil and mefloquine. The night before I hunted mosquitoes in my hotel room and sprayed odious chemicals on my skin to repel them. I got the latest malaria information off the erratic wireless internet supply.

But the funeral. The funeral was why I was back in the home country. My aunt had taken care of me while I was young, paid for my airline ticket to the UK, given me my start. I’d long since settled the financial obligation, but some debts just can’t be settled by an online credit card transaction. There were lots of people, many of whom didn’t know the deceased but were here because of the three large cows tethered outside the family home for the last few days. Guaranteed food and the unmistakable stench of potential full bellies was a potent crowd draw around here.

This was the scene: Ede City, Alcacia. It was in West Africa. Former British colony, former French protectorate, former Portuguese trading post, now in its fourth decade of independence, the country of my genetic contributors. I’m British these days, but I still consider myself loyal to Alcacia.

The funeral was full of tears, a shrill, quivering warble, and humongous, wobbling, semi-exposed breasts. She had a name, but I didn’t know it. She was a professional mourner and worked for money and food using her considerable girth, voluntary lacrimation, and intimidating vocal range in the service of the more emotionally continent bereaved. The invited guests milled about or sat on headstones. Some wept quietly, privately, unusual for black Africans—we like to express our emotion freely, spread it around. My tears are bigger and better than your tears. I have more grief than you. I loved her more than you.

I sat apart from everyone; I always have.

With time I remembered a face here or there from growing up. No names came to my mind, though, so I just continued rolling my eyes over the crowd. Idle. They cast furtive looks at me, trying to place me, knowing me to be foreign from my clothes and demeanor. The priest finished and the mourner let rip, asking to be buried with my aunt who, if memory serves, would have frowned at the lack of restraint.

Graveyards in Sub-Saharan Africa were the same as in Western Europe or North America except for the fences. Here they were rudimentary affairs with no exclusionary function. The fence was there to delineate the boundaries between the quick and the dead. Vandalism was almost unknown because we were all scared of ghosts, wizards, and other supernatural nasties. The magical route to riches would be to sleep in a graveyard for seven days and nights at the end of which a demon would appear to tell the brave soul who made the attempt what the secret to unlimited riches was. I always touched my head when passing a cemetery because I used to believe sprits could suck out your spirit from the fontanelle at the top of the skull. Seriously, I did.

Something buzzed behind my ear and I slapped, but not too keenly; didn’t want to appear too much of an outsider. All the time while I was away, telling myself everyday that I’d return but knowing I never would. Telling myself that eating McDonald’s and having uninterrupted electricity supply didn’t change me. Lynn was more realistic in her assessment and told me we would never settle back in Alcacia, but that the urge was a typical immigrant instinct.

I heard someone say my name and looked around. It’s difficult to recall my exact reaction but I’ll go with alarm followed by low-level anxiety bordering on panic. Here’s why: Churchill Okuta. Or simply, Church. That grin. Straight out of my secondary school nightmares. Church was the meanest person I had ever met in my life, and that is saying something. He had made my life unbearable as a child, yet here he was. I had like two inches on him now but back then he towered over me. The day I arrived in my dorm for the first time, Church took a leather belt to me “to establish the rules and ranks,” according to him. His nickname back then was Tippu Tip, after the notorious black Arab slave trader. He called his dormitory room Zanzibar and the activities there were notorious. “Going to Zanzibar” became school parlance for taking a beating. Years later he was expelled for flogging and using his belt as a leash on a junior student, tying the boy to a railing outside in the cold overnight because “dogs shouldn’t live indoors.” The boy almost died of lobar pneumonia.

Before me, he wore a shirt with a pattern of repeated kolkis on a background of deep purple. Frivolous for a funeral, but that was Church. In the microseconds before we spoke, I wondered if he and I were related, God forbid. What would Church be doing at my aunt’s funeral?

“You bastard,” said Church, “when did you get into town?” Broad grin. Church’s grins were frightening as hell because he had small, even, inward-pointing teeth that reminded you of a shark. Neither was he calling me “bastard” in a comradely fashion.

“Hello, Church,” I said. “Nice to see you again.”

“Liar.”

“How’ve you been?”

“You know. Here and there, here and there.”

“How did you know Auntie Blossom?”

“Oh, I didn’t know her. I just like attending funerals, yes. The rich ones at any rate. I enjoy the nice food.”

I grunted in a noncommittal way.

“What are you doing these days? I heard you went to America.”

“London.”

“Yes, London. All is one to us. Away is away.”

“True.”

“So what do you do?”

“I’m in the police force. I’m a homicide detective with the Metropolitan Police.”

“Police. Yes.” Which was meaningless. I started to feel the familiar panic because back in school, when Church wanted to catch you out in a lie, he would make a meaningless statement, one which would coax you into embellishment and which always indicated he knew you were lying. As you talked, stammered, and expatiated, painting yourself into that proverbial corner, he would start unbuckling his belt.

And I was lying, but only a little, and only because I wanted him to veer away from my orbit. What I should have remembered is he had always been like Superman without his two greatest weaknesses: Kryptonite and a moral compass. Church did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, with consequences being a strange and abstract concept, the understanding of which he left to others.

Some Area Boys walked by, paying loud respect to Church by shouting his name. He waved to them and shrugged at me, as if to say, what can I do? Area Boys are like multi-purpose thugs. We inherited them from Nigeria. They are both for hire and private entrepreneurs. They don’t have equivalents in western culture, but you might say they’re similar to street gangs. They have to be paid in cash, food, and drinks if you’re to have a peaceful party. During elections politicians hire them to disrupt the opposition’s campaign. Since the opposition would have hired their own cadre of area boys, the result is usually a magnificent street fight or a whole carnival of drive-bys. Occasionally, they go on street rampages in which they loot, rape, and kill, apparently at random. Their dress varies, but this bunch had an American street clothing theme. Imagine five men wearing Beanies and puffers in average temperatures of a hundred and two Fahrenheit and minimal wind chill. That’s how absurd they were, but I didn’t dare laugh.

“Are you going to the after-party?” Church asked.

“Yes, Auntie Blossom was—”

“Okay, see you there.” He moved off. “Bye! Nice to meet you again.”

Before I could say anything he was fingering his mobile phone and making his way to the exit. I can’t say I wasn’t pleased.

I turned my eyes and mind away from Church and back to the ceremony. Now that the preacher was finished, pall bearers lowered the coffin. There were four old men with talking drums beating away in sweet rhythms interspersed with traditional Yoruba verse, some of it the antithesis of the Christian service.

O d’oju ala. I will see you in dreams.

The family edged closer. Well, the immediate family, because every Yoruba is related and the definition of family is broad. Up until now I had lurked at the edge of the crowd, but I started to push my way through. I became tense. I shamed Auntie Blossom because I wasn’t thinking of her. I was thinking of the tall man wearing a massive agbada pouring dirt into the grave. My father, but not my dad. He must have felt something because he looked up just then and saw me. He showed no reaction except allowing his eyes to linger for half a minute. I saw that he had been crying. This made me sad in spite of myself. Back when I was a child the man never cried or showed any emotion. He associated tears with womanly behavior and discouraged my brother Simon and me with violence.

Beside him, with a clump of dirt in her hand and trailing a gang of children was his new wife, name escaped me, the one he married after my mother. This woman looked insipid and, judging from her hips and progeny, was just a brood mare for the old man. I did not feel fraternal toward her children.

There was a loud bang, and I lost my hearing for a while. I was next to one of the drums, and they’d started a new song just as I passed. The songs all began with an all-powerful percussive blast. It was enjoyable when you weren’t two inches from the drummer.

By the time I reached the graveside, women had their makeup in a mess from all the keening, and my deafness had reduced to a constant ringing. I cried when I poured dirt on her grave. I poured two handfuls—for me and for my sister, although Lynn hadn’t known Auntie Blossom as long as I had.

No one comforted me. I made them all uncomfortable by just being there, but I didn’t care; I hadn’t done anything wrong.

Later, I leaned against the stumpy palisade fence watching people leave in groups, headed for Auntie Blossom’s family house to be fed. A large shadow grew on the grass near my feet as someone walked up to me.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Dad.

“It’s a funeral, Dad. Traditionally the family attends,” I said.

“Ahh, but that’s the key word, isn’t it? Family. The family attends. And if that’s so, what are you doing here?”

Oh, we’re all just comedians, aren’t we?

“Dad—”

“Don’t call me ‘Dad,’ Weston.”

I was still afraid of him. Lord knows why. I didn’t need or want anything from him, and there was no way for him to harm me or my sister anymore. It was a great day for rekindling old fears.

“Auntie Blossom was my family,” I said.

“Hmf.” He cracked his neck. “Blossom always was soft-hearted. And a little crazy to boot.” Auntie Blossom had indeed been free-range mental, but there was no way I was agreeing with the old man. “Is Lynn here, too?”

“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

He was quiet for a time, then he said: “If you come to the reception you’ll be treated like mo gbo, mo ya. Take one step out of line and I’ll have you thrown out.” He spat and lumbered off, led by his large belly. With the warning he had lapsed into his own dialect, which I could barely follow. A more indurate man you could never find. I didn’t realize I had been shaking until he had gone and the fence began to rattle. I studied his phlegm for a while, watching it mix with the soil.

A gust of wind picked up some leaves, spun them about near my right foot and then carried them up toward the palm trees and beyond. It left a patina of dust on my clothes. I brushed my shirt sleeves off as I went to look for the hired jeep so that I could go to the reception.

In more ways than one it was a mistake to go to the reception. I should have just gone back to the hotel and waited for my flight. I think my father’s threat stirred something in me. I wasn’t going to be intimidated. In any case, I thought a party would cheer me up. While the funeral is for the departed, the reception is for the departees.

The organizers had cordoned the street off. A seven-piece Juju band played off a two foot-high stage at one end, with dancers all over the road. A few revelers, mostly male, held wads of cash and were placing individual notes on the foreheads and necks of other dancers, mostly female—a practice known as spraying. The smell of expensive perfume and savory food mixed with the odor of cow shit. There was still some dung where the cows had been tethered earlier. Beer and kola nuts and jollof rice and schnapps and pounded yam and soups and stews of all kind piled up on tables. Fireworks lit up the inky black sky. Nobody was drunk, but it was early hours yet.

I felt apart from it all, I’d spent too long in London. I kept waiting for the police to show up because of a neighbor’s complaint. Most probably, the neighbors were among the guests and the organizers had paid off the police and the Area Boys. Which left the military, but I was told they were too busy fighting rebels up north.

As in the cemetery, I sat at the periphery, at a table where nobody admitted to knowing who I was, which suited me fine, thank you.

It looked chaotic but the organization was obvious once you knew what to look for. The band was set up across from Auntie’s house. The space in front of the band extending up to the gates of the house was understood to be the dance floor. On both sides of the band, tables and chairs stretched into the distance like a lecture hall without the walls and ceiling. Party lights, colored bulbs in lamp holders along flex cable, were strung between street lights. The house itself was open, literally. All doors and windows were open ,and it acted as a command center for the caterers from where they dispensed food and drink. There was a man standing alongside the lead singer feeding him information from prompt cards. The singer would integrate names into rehashes of popular juju songs. The people whose names were called out would be obliged to spray the bereaved family and the singer in mint-condition US dollars. Had to be crisp. And so it went.

I sat watching the spectacle of rolling buttocks, elaborate gele, and sweeping agbada. I had some more palm wine. There were people I used to consider family, some doing well, others looking on the verge of poverty with their thinness and threadbare clothes.