Ma opens the fridge and takes out a bottle of Sprite and hands it to Ajie. “It’s Sprite you like, abi?” Then, “Oh, sorry, it might ruin your appetite. Except you want it.” She lets him decide, and Ajie says thanks, that he will have the Sprite with his meal.
“Has Bibi confirmed when she’s arriving?”
“Tomorrow.” Ma runs her hand over the top of the fridge for an opener. “First flight.”
“With her boyfriend?”
“Her fiancé.”
“Boyfriend,” Ajie says. “She hasn’t said she wants to marry him.”
“Fiancé,” Ma says firmly, her mouth about to smile.
Ajie is in her way so that she brushes against him as she passes. He goes into the garden and is confronted with Ma’s expanded taste in plants.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Throughout Ajie’s ten-year sojourn abroad, Ma was always a morning caller. Nigeria and Britain were in the same time zone for most of the year, yet each time Ma called, he felt a lapse he could never explain or shake off, like she was speaking from the past, a gaping void with muted echoes.
After he finished boarding school, he left Port Harcourt for St. Albans, an English city which at first felt to him more like a medieval town, with its stone wall, church bells, and oak doors that give onto the narrow cobbled streets. He attended sixth form there and lived as a boarder in the house of a middle-aged widow, Mrs. Heath. Ma would call on the landline by eight in the morning. “Why are you still in bed? I can hear it in your voice. Don’t you have class today?”
He left Hertfordshire, moved to London to study electrical and electronic engineering at Imperial College, and then began to do the Friday-night pub crawls that left him groggy and hungover until two P.M. the next day. He started missing Ma’s calls. Sorry. Call you back in the evening, he would text her. He wouldn’t return her call, and Ma would ring him again on Sunday morning before heading to church.
Why does she never call in the afternoon or when I’m not in bed?
Throughout his years at university, during his one-year internship, and when he began his first proper job working for a digital media company at Kings Cross, Ma would always ring him twice a week: once on the weekend, and again in the middle of the week.
Last week his phone rang, and Ma’s voice came through: “Where are you?”
“I’m at home,” he replied. He almost joked, “Standing in the kitchenette of my flat in the North London borough of Camden, and where are you?” But something in Ma’s voice stopped him. “I’m at home. Are you okay, Ma?”
“I need you to buy a ticket as soon as you can.”
“A ticket.”
“Yes, if possible for tomorrow — you can tell them at work that it’s important. A man has just left here, says he’s a pastor. It’s about your brother, Paul. Can you get a ticket? I have sent for your sister, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“It is not enough to confess your sins and receive forgiveness from God,” the man sitting before Ma began. “Even though the blood of Jesus washes your slate of sins clean, you have to go back to the people you’ve wronged in the past and try to make things right. Some Christians these days believe this is some obsolete Old Testament doctrine, but it’s not. A true believer must make restitutions for his or her wrongs. The Bible shows us ways of doing this; this is not about trying to pay people off, no. If, for instance, you steal something from someone and you one day repent of your sins and God forgives you, shouldn’t you go to the person you stole from, apologize, and then give back what you have stolen?”
Ma waited to see where it was all going. She had been in her back garden, weeding, when Ismaila called out to say she had a visitor. It could have been anyone, relatives always dropped by. Perhaps it was someone from Ogibah who would want to spend the night, or one of Bendic’s former colleagues. Once someone had come in to inquire if she was looking to sell the house, and Ma didn’t know how to respond, so she just said no, as if it weren’t such an unusual question to ask in the first place.
Ma came inside through the back door and let the man in. He was dressed in a black suit, red shirt, and black tie. There was something captivating about the way he went about what he had to say. Every word seemed completely needful, every sentence; the way he enunciated some words, gesturing with his hands in order to illuminate them; it was as if the turning of the world depended on the things coming out of his mouth.
“I used to be a mopol,” he continued. “For six years, I did mobile police work. Between 1994 and 1995, they stationed me in Port Harcourt. I want you to take what I’m going to say calmly. God sent me here to come and make peace, because I saw something, and I think it’s only right that you should know about it.”
Ma, looking a little alarmed: “What is this about?”
The pastor hesitated, inched closer to the edge of the sofa, and linked his fingers together. “During the student riots that year, ’95 to be exact, an accident happened with a boy. He was not among those rioting, but one of my colleagues stopped to search him. It was just the work of the devil.”
“What are you saying?” Ma shot to her feet. “What are you saying?” Ismaila, who had been eavesdropping in the veranda, was now standing by the parlor door. Ma picked up the vase on the center table and hurled it at the pastor. “My son! My son!” She grabbed the man by his black tie and slapped him all over the head and shoulders. “My son! My son!” she kept shouting as Ismaila rushed to her side, trying to restrain her. “Madam, wetin him say happen?” Ismaila turned around to shout questions at the pastor, but the pastor just held his hands together in a quiet demeanor, his face placid, his eyes gentle like a dove’s.
—
The student demonstration had been peaceful all morning. It was raining, and most of them had gotten drenched in the downpour. At about midday, the sun came out and warmed up their enthusiasm. More students arrived. The mobile police, who were there to keep a close watch on the demonstration, had received strict instructions to keep things under control at all cost. Word circulated that another group of students had burned two government cars near Eastern Bypass.
Some students began to hurl stones in the direction of the police. The police shot some tear gas canisters and some bullets into the air to disperse the crowd.
That was when one of the corporals saw a boy who could have been a university student; he was carrying a knapsack. The area was deserted now, and the boy was walking briskly between the stones and the tear gas. The corporal thought he looked suspicious. His inspector had gone to ease himself in the nearby bush, so the corporal beckoned to him. “Hey-shhh, come here.” The boy acted like he didn’t see or hear the corporal. “Hey-shh, you there carrying bag, come here now!” The boy kept walking. The corporal rushed toward him in a fit of rage and whacked the boy from behind with the butt of his gun at the base of the neck, and the boy went down at once. “Bagger!” the corporal barked as the boy’s body dropped to the ground.
“Wetin be that?” the other colleagues questioned him.
“I dey ask this bastard to come, him dey ignore me.”
One of them went toward the boy lying on the ground and stooped over him. “Wetin you do am? E be like say you don wound the boy-o.”
A constable joined them to lift the boy as they put him in their van. They tapped him on the cheeks, shouted things at him in order to revive him.
The inspector came back and asked what was going on. They said the boy looked suspicious and they had tried to stop him. He wouldn’t stop, and a little accident occurred when the corporal went over to accost him. The inspector bent over the unconscious boy in the back of the van and was the first to notice the trickle of blood from his ears and nose. He turned around and spat abuses at the corporal. He threatened to ensure that the corporal got sacked if things turned for the worse. “You have injured an innocent boy! Let’s hope nothing happens to him. What do you mean, he looked suspicious?”