I felt deeply guilty for smashing our TV. He would have been relaxing more frequently at home now watching CNN, soap operas, movies and the like. He stayed longer outside and it pained me greatly. I felt like a scorpion tortured by her burden of venom!

            A group of boys from our neighbourhood picked him up from a gutter after one of his obscene dealings in a bar. The bar was now where much of the money he made from his musical concerts in Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt; from his few tours with his chorale outside the country.

            The morning after the boys brought him home, I went to his room.

            ‘Did you see the boys before they left?’ I asked cryptically.

            He was writing something. It was one of those scribbles he was fond of making at uninterrupted hours – composing. And I had interrupted the process unwittingly.

            ‘What boys?’ he grunted.

            ‘So you did not see them? They brought you here yesterday. They found you in a gutter and picked you up. When they brought you, you were grimy. I had to take off your greasy clothes and cover you with neat ones – the pyjamas that you are wearing now…’

            Now he had stopped writing down those curly, lovely symbols that when sung out or played by him became sweet sounds that lifted the soul into heaven, sounds that brought me back memories of him sitting on a low stool in my father’s yard, a keyboard before him, playing Papa’s favourite hymns and bits of Handel’s Messiah.

            He stopped writing and in perfect stillness placed on me a piercing, cursing, shameful stare that could have lasted more than a minute.

            ‘The kindly boys brought back your car,’ I continued. ‘This is the key. (I shook it before him as if to dispel his doubts.) Thank God you didn’t drive. Things could have been very bad.’ And when I said ‘Things could have been very bad’ I actually meant that he might not have been alive now composing that masterpiece sprawling out before him.

            His stare lasted longer as if to take all of me into those big eyes, which once were round gates through which his love beamed into my soul.

            ‘Your hot water is ready for your bath,’ I dropped at him, frustrating wistful remembrances rushing curiously like journalists to a scene of scandal. ‘Your breakfast is ready, too –’

            I was going to add ‘It’s akara and akamu, your best meal’ before I saw myself striving to stand from the blood-red rug of his bedroom.

            A portrait of Beethoven hanging peevishly on the wall glowered at me. It seemed to be shrieking: NOW I’M GOING TO FINISH YOU OFF TODAY.

            The rug also connived with the rippling ceiling and walls into a shaking, sinking pool of blood. I found myself gasping, entreating frantically: ‘Munachi, Munachi – please, please, please…’, my arms folded over my face.

            But he was kicking and swearing and smiling and pummeling and frothing at the mouth. Muscular words flexed out of his mouth execrably. Words like: ‘I AM GOING TO KILL YOU NOW LIKE A RAT, YOU WHORE.’

            I flailed and clung to his car key as a last hope of deliverance. Stings of newly-broken flesh throbbed all over my body like stars in the night sky. Blood was leaving my body, dribbling down my forearm, down my thighs. I could feel the warm flow of it down my cool ankle. The rug concealed the brutality of his beating, united its own redness with mine in plush wedlock.

            Munachi unbound from me with a last heavy kick. He clutched his manuscripts and tore out of his room like an assassin escaping from the scene of murder. Perhaps he had seen the enormity of the work of his own hands, the same hands that had crept stealthily and craftily from under my skirt in those crazy nights full of stars and shooting stars and an astounding constellation of chirrupping crickets; the very gifted hands that were secure and fluid when he played on the piano, working out the nuances of his own compositions that had taken his name beyond the borders of Nigeria. Yes, those hands.

            And I, too, had seen my new image looming, doddering, fat-eyed, fat-lipped and bathed in palm oil, in his standing mirror.

            No, it was not me. It could not be me.

It could not be Ezinne. Ezinne that my mother fondly called African beauty. She once said to me: ‘Ezinne, you are the reincarnation of my grandmother. She was so beautiful our people used her name to tell proverbs. Even in her old age, she shimmered with beauty. You have her nose, her gapped teeth, her sunrise eyes, her long neck. Nobody in our extended family resembles her as closely as you do.’

            Was it now my grandmother looming out large with ageing fat in the mirror in this way? In rejection to the corrupt suggestion of Munachi’s mirror, I tottered up, my tacky palms publishing my fingerprints redly on Munachi’s walls.

            It pained to move. It pained to touch things, to breathe, to see. The world mourned glassily, looking out of my eyes. But –

            I was up on my feet again.

            And I was waiting for Munachi to finish me off for bringing him his key and waking up very early this morning to make him his breakfast and for talking to him about last night’s shamefulness for both our sakes.

            Munachi must be very sad. The piano –

            He had bought a handsome piano. From those successful concerts in Los Angeles, London, Munich… The piano was the finest and most comforting thing in the loneliness of our big house. My fingers usually galloped out of it confused sounds and chords and chaotic arpeggios. But not so when Munachi’s gifted hands lifted forgiveness and sorrow and complexity out of the dark rooms of the piano.

            Now Munachi was playing something new on the piano.

But now as I heard the chords and cadences, they dropped on my battered body like stars falling into a vast ocean of silence. In my mouth, the music tasted like salt. Like blood.

            Leaning on the jamb of the door leading into our living room where Munachi was pounding away on his piano, I could see the boys that had picked him up from the gutter huddled up behind him. Smiling. Clapping. Tapping their feet on the ground. Munachi played out his new composition to them.

       Perhaps the boys had heard my yelps and had come to our house to rescue me.

            Now they sang around Munachi.

            And I could hear Munachi telling them to sing like Africans, not like Italians. The piece was an African masterpiece. It would be played accompanied by tom-toms, rattles, slit drums, water pots, udu. And in their next superb concert in London, the chorale would be donned out in ancient African clothing.  The sopranos and altos would wear cowries and beads and smoked raffia skirts and ankle rattles and their exposed bellies and thighs and faces would be painted with uli. The drummers and the lot of male singers would wear eagle feathers and smoked raffia skirts like ancestral warriors. The white people in London would be thrilled at the rich cultural heritage coming right from the African heartland…

            And the boys, enthralled, laughed loudly and merrily at another prospect of traveling to London. They seemed to have forgotten all else, forgotten the night before. Perhaps forgotten my yelps today, too.

            They clapped, cheered, praised, danced, ran scales on the piano. They made such a blissful world around the piano with their rejoicing it seemed nothing untoward had happened since the world began.

THE END.