Towards the end of her life, Cody’s mother would lie in bed all day long, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, mumbling to herself; when he entered the room, she would turn and stare as if registering him for the first time, a person who had materialised from nowhere. It was the medicine taking effect, his father would say. Cody would bring her simple meals of sweet potato porridge or herbal chicken broth and feed her in small spoonfuls, which she would refuse after two to three mouthfuls. “Enough, enough, you eat,” she would say, lying back on the bed, the exertions deepening the lines around her eyes.
On more lucid days, she would tell stories about her past, how she had wanted to be a teacher but her father’s disapproval—he needed her to help out at home and at the fish stall he owned, and also to take care of her nine siblings—led to her discarding her ambition. She took great pride in her responsibilities towards her younger siblings, a no-nonsense role that had shaped her into the woman she became. Yet, when she told Cody how she and his father had met, she got more bashful. Helping her father at the fish stall in the mornings, she was always conscious of how she smelled. “The stench of fish went into everything, into my clothes, under my nails, into my skin; no matter how I cleaned or showered, it’s always there.”
So when Cody’s father asked her out one day—he was the delivery driver for the vendor who supplied fish to her father—she was caught off-guard, though her doubt did not stop her from going out with him. She was twenty and of marriageable age, and Cody’s father was the first man to ask her out; she was curious about this shy, sinewy man who had never said more than good morning when he handed her the daily invoice. They dated for four months before he proposed marriage, and then they were married for twenty-five years.
“So fast,” Cody said. “How come you never considered other guys, or dated more before deciding?”
“What was the point?” she said, amused. “Waste of time. I knew he was the one I wanted to marry, a good man, stable and reliable. Unlike young people these days, talk about love and romance all the time, have so many choices but still can’t make any good decision, breaking up here, divorcing there.” She then closed her eyes, slipping into other thoughts.
Sometimes, after taking her afternoon medicine, Cody’s mother would turn pensive while she mused. She would remind Cody that she had not got married because she loved Cody’s father from the start—“none of that nonsense”—but because of the realistic, steadfast qualities that marked him as a man of conviction. The love came later, years after they were married.
“Love does not always have to be the first thing,” she said. “Use your head first, and the heart will follow later.”
Love was not the word Cody would use to describe how he felt about Cedric, which was something more evasive, more illicit—lust, infatuation, or something else? It only took a sneak peek in class for Cody’s whole being to be wrapped up for the rest of the day in a confounding state of confusion, shame, and deep unabated longing. He felt sharply alive, and at the same time, terribly conflicted.
In school during recess, Cody would sometimes head to a deserted boys’ toilet located in a quiet corner on the third floor of the Technical block where they had their weekly two-hour Design and Technology lessons. The toilet was used as a storage room for broken toilet bowls and covers, ruined tables and chairs, and cracked mirrors, the floor covered with a brown carpet of dried leaves, animal faeces, and the shrivelled carcasses of cockroaches, beetles, and even a sparrow that had flown in through the broken window slats. He had tried the taps the first time he was in there, but the water supply had been cut. He had pissed into the sink while staring at his reflection in the cracked mirror, emboldened by the little act of subversion. The toilet soon became the one place in school he escaped to whenever he needed to be alone.
Sometimes he would bring a book to read, but because the air in the toilet was stale and dusty, he could not concentrate for long. A few times he gathered the dried leaves into small piles, set fire to them with matches and watched them burn; when the smoke became too thick, he would stamp the fire out. When the mood struck, he would strip down and masturbate in front of the row of mirrors, and come very quickly onto the dirty floor.
Then one day, he heard someone outside while he was masturbating to mental images of Cedric, and ran into the nearest stall with his shorts still down. Just as he slammed the stall door closed, he heard the person enter the toilet.
“I saw you, Cody,” said Cedric. “What are you doing here?”
Cody gasped, but stayed silent, his heart hammering in double-time. He was still holding onto his erection, which had become even stiffer. He willed it to subside, but no luck.
“Come out now, why are you hiding?”
“Go away, please,” Cody whimpered.
“What are you doing in there?” Cedric knocked on the door, and in that sudden moment, Cody came furiously in thick, milky spurts that hit the graffitied wall of the toilet stall and slowly dripped downward. He bit his lips to suppress the cry.
“Nothing,” Cody whispered. “Just go away.”
Cedric laughed and slapped his palm once on the toilet door before leaving. In the ensuing silence, Cody let out a long breath, bristling with heat and shame from his own foolishness—how precariously close he had come to ruin.
After recovering, Cody left the toilet and went to one of the school administrators to report the faulty lock to the deserted toilet. In no time, the lock was changed, and, after that, he never went near the toilet again. When Cedric broached the topic later on, Cody laughed off the whole matter, brushing it aside as nothing more than a childish indiscretion, an innocuous act. Cedric cocked his eyebrows and looked doubtful, but did not inquire further.
Cody was in school the day his mother passed away. He was called out of class by the school clerk, informed of the news and excused for the rest of the day. As he made his way home, his mind stayed vacant. There were a few relatives already present in the flat when he finally got back. His father was talking to them while his sisters went around serving tea and packet drinks. Cody slipped past them, catching snatches of words here and there, and paused at the entrance to his parents’ bedroom. His mother lay on the bed, her eyes closed, hands by her sides. For a brief moment, Cody thought she was deep in sleep, her features undisturbed, but there was an absence that was palpable in its stillness. As he walked up to her, he could not look away from her face. Cody stood by her side for some time before his father entered the room with a relative, prompting him to leave quickly.
The period between the wake and the cremation was unending, an unbroken series of activities, filled with noise, smoke and condolences. People came up to Cody, took his hands and offered their words of comfort. He listened, nodded his head and returned their smiles. With his silence perceived as grief, he was able to retreat into himself, into the space where words no longer meant anything. Even when he was surrounded by people, he felt cut off, removed from whatever was happening at the moment, and the sensation that it brought was strangely comforting, as if he were slowly becoming invisible, and all he had to do was sit or kneel or stand, and nothing more was expected of him.