‘I know, how about: In a hole in the swamp there lived a girl?’
Lucy’s eyes narrow dangerously.
‘First, I find that insulting. Secondly, you’ve just stolen the opening to The Hobbit and changed the words.’
I chew on my biro for a moment, practice twirling it between my fingers, drop it, pick it up and hold it wagging in my fingers. I daydream about daydreaming until some urge, some mental itch that demands to be scratched, makes me look down at my hands, which I find have not been idle.
‘Gbomogbomo,’ I announce, reading the word I appear to have scrawled unconsciously on an otherwise blank sheet of paper.
‘What?’ Lucy manages to look both quizzical and unimpressed, like she trod in something she doesn’t like the look of but isn’t quite sure what it is.
‘Gbo-mo-gbo-mo’ I repeat, stressing the syllables. It just came to me. Look! I absent-mindedly wrote it down.
Lucy does not look, her expression implying that to do so would be beneath her.
‘It’s a stupid way to start a story. Nobody will know what you mean.’
‘Well I could always delete it and we can spend a few more hours thinking of another opening word.’
Lucy is defeated by her impatience. I knew she would be, we’ve been going round and round on this one for the best part of a week.
‘Fine! Start with a stupid word that nobody knows the meaning of. That would suit you down to the ground wouldn’t it, to have people pick it up and put it down without reading it, so your confession never gets read?’
I could argue that this is not a confession. I could refute the allegation that I have some ulterior motive, but I take my victory silently. Quit when you’ve won and move on to the next battleground.
‘So, now we just need a title. What do you think?’
‘I think this is another pointless exercise. You’re going to call it what you want anyway so why don’t you tell me what you think?’
‘Well…’ with my chin in my hand and head tilted to one side I pretend to ponder this seriously, ‘…I thought about using the title that D’Artagnan came up with. You know The Life and Death of Swampland Lucy LeFarge.’
In truth I have grown quite fond of this title but I see by the darkening expression on Lucy’s face that I’ve gone too far.
‘Sorry,’ I add quickly, before she makes me pay a high price for flippancy. ‘Tell you what; the title’s not important right now. Who knows, it’ll probably just come out in the telling. Sometimes it’s as simple as finding a sentence that one of the characters says, like Phillip K. Dick’s Flow My Tears the Policeman Said.’
Lucy kisses her teeth like a proper Nigerian woman and lets out a long hiss. It’s a trick she’s been working on and I have to say, for a foreigner, she’s very good at it.
‘We both know you’re not sure a Policeman actually says that in the book, but I really don’t care. Let’s say you’re happy with your opening word, even though you spent days telling me it had to be a sentence, and you’ll find a title as you get into it, does that mean you can start now?’
There’s more than a hint of sarcasm in Lucy’s voice but there’s a steely determination and a strong desire for finality too. I risk making her angry, which I don’t want to do, but there is one last element to resolve. I’ve sort of genuinely tried to find the answer, in a it-would-be-nice-to-know-but-I’m-not-going-to-try-too-hard kind of way.
‘I need to think of where to start. I don’t mean just the opening word, I mean the place and time.’
She looks at me as if I’m stupid.
‘How can you have an opening that isn’t set in a place and time? What are you talking about?’
‘I know it sounds stupid but I can’t start with you, or me. We’re not where gbomogbomo started. It was here long before us, and it’ll be here when we’re long…’ I let my words trail off. I nearly said dead.
She knows what I was going to say. She looks pale, a sure sign of rising anger, which is bad.
‘Start where you like Ade, but start now!’
The threat is clear. I’m starting.
Good, bad or indifferent, talented or tediously inept, short story or epic tome, thinking of where to begin is the eternal problem for a writer. Should I start at a time when life was normal, whatever that means, and work my way forward from there so you can see how I ended up a killer? I think not, because then you’d only understand what I did, not how I came to be, and the inescapable influence of my environment is part of my defence even though defence of my actions is not why I am compelled to write this down. It is only because of Lucy that you shall know what happened. If she weren’t here and capable of making me tell, I’d take the truth with me to the grave.
I am the story you see, not her, though she’d argue the toss. And to understand me and the absurdity of my chance existence you must understand something of the place and times that I, and the others I shall tell you about, come from. So I’ll begin with my grandfather and the fateful day he was taken to the family farm by his older brother, for no other reason than context you understand.
Grandfather was about seven years old. They didn’t register rural births in those days but he couldn’t have been much older or he wouldn’t have done what he did, and he couldn’t have been much younger or he would never have eluded his angry brother. That’s sleuthing for you.
It was hot. I’m guessing now, toying with you, letting you know that you should only believe so much of what I say, after all Lucy thinks I’m an inveterate liar. But I digress; we were at the farm – he was at the farm, and it was hot, because it’s always hot in Nigeria, so I wasn’t lying even though I wasn’t there and nobody described the weather on that day to me. On this hot day, with little for a young boy to do on a farm, my supposedly seven-year old grandfather wandered among the plants, waving a stick at the fledgling shoots of young yams, absent-mindedly killing them as he indulged in childish sword-play. When his brother looked up and saw the trail of vegetal destruction he flew into a rage because they were poor and this farm was not the lush Eden that the word farm might conjure in your imagination, rather it was a barren, dusty wasteland of leached red earth from which a meagre livelihood had to be wrested with grit and sweat and tears.
Knowing that he was in for a beating my grandfather fled, running into the compound of a wealthy family. It just so happened that on that day and at that time the family matriarch was sitting on her veranda watching the world go by, as is the wont of matriarchs of Nigeria who feel the right to know not just their business but also the business of every passer-by. Grandfather ran onto her veranda and took refuge behind her chair, a space he could get into and from which his brother could not winkle him out. His brother (whose familial title I really ought to know and be using by now - let’s call him ‘gruncle’), demanded his return so he could administer the beating that was due. Our matriarch, following her innately maternal calling, pleaded for my grandfather, saying that for her sake he should be forgiven. But gruncle was adamant. No pleading would appease him. He was going to beat his brother and sorely too.
‘Well, in that case, I shall keep him.’
Only in those days of long ago was such a thing possible; that an elderly woman could exercise the power of her birthright to take a child from another family. It is quite likely that grandfather’s family were her tenants or in some other way beholden to her and therefore unable or unwilling to deny her authority. She probably did it out of pique that her wishes should be denied by the lowly young man before her, whom she probably considered rude, and not for the love of a poor tramp of a child. Or maybe she didn’t want to vacate her seat and didn’t fancy the fuss that would ensue if someone tried to extract the little urchin from behind her. Maybe the words just tumbled out of her mouth as words sometimes do and she regretted saying them immediately afterwards but stubborn pride made her refuse to retract them. Who knows? Who cares? Whatever the reason, this is how my grandfather came to be the man he was. This is how he came to be brought up by a wealthy Christian family and to go to school where he learned English. In Colonial Africa that was fortunate indeed because together with the patronage of the family that had taken him under its wing it led in the fullness of time to him becoming a Magistrate under the white man. This in turn elevated him above his peers, so that he accumulated wealth, was made a chief and married way above the station of his birth.
I never met my grandfather. All I know of him is what I have been told and what I imagine when I look up at the sepia photograph of an austere man seated in a wig and gown, holding an ostrich feather fan. There is nothing in his eyes to betray his true nature; the photo is posed beyond any ability to display the soul of the poser. I think of this photograph of a man in two ways - as a teacher and as a disciplinarian. Both views stem from my father’s behaviour and I’ll give you examples of what I mean: On days when we had fish for lunch, Father would eat different fish from his children. His would be a fat, juicy, cleanly-boned fillet while ours was always a head-whole, scrawny tilapia with more bones than flesh and dead eyes that stared at you accusingly. When I asked him why we ate fish with so many bones and he didn’t, he smiled and told me what my grandfather had told him, ‘son, eating that fish will teach you patience.’ Thus he was a teacher who turned experience into proverb and passed it down, bones ‘n’ all.
Father’s disciplinarian expressions were more prosaic. Once, when I dawdled over his request to go and buy him a newspaper, he spat on the floor next to his chair. I ran to the shops with the ominous words ringing in my head - ‘you’d better be back before that spit is dry…’ No explicit threat was made but spit dries quickly in the Nigerian heat and you should take the implied threats of a man who is prepared to spit on the floor of his own house very seriously indeed.
These snippets of Father’s behaviour, littered as they are through my early life, serve to remind me that my family’s origins are humble indeed. The poor, illiterate family that my grandfather escaped has slipped so far from our minds that it came as a complete surprise to me to discover that though we are Christian, in name if not in deed, our origins were Muslim. Who knew?
Now you know something of where I come from you understand what I mean when I claim to be a victim of chance and circumstance. I am but a single random act removed from being a peasant farmer, a street beggar, a palm wine tapper, a tinker-tailor-soldier-sailor, a Boko Haram fighter, an unborn what-if of life that never came into being. The alternatives to this existence are endless, concerning not just my father but his brother, the kindly matriarch whose name I shan’t mention so her reputation is not tarnished by the retelling of my misdeeds, the millions and millions of tiny acts of chance that led to his marrying my grandmother, her giving birth to my father, him meeting my mother three thousand miles from the place of his birth and marrying her. It goes on and on and on, an unbelievable string of coincidences that are far less likely than the story I shall tell. Speaking of which, my part of the story, now you have some context, begins in a hot, airless room, watching a stranger with the table fan greedily turned and locked in her direction, reading my words and tutting as she goes.
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