“Sooner than the Major expected, the war seemed to be wrapping up. He did not want his business to end so he started to ask for the means to set up as a legitimate diamond exporter with the full cooperation and support of ECOMOG and the new Sierra Leone government. He got greedy and his terms were really crazy, he would not accept anything less. But they couldn’t stop him, and they couldn’t smoke him out and kill him. He was too powerful. The Major had a secret though…and I was the only one who could prove it…and one of the soldiers came and whispered to me one day that what he was doing was bad…really bad, that it was not permitted amongst soldiers… if I didn’t help out, they could kill me…and they could get me out to England to study music if I cooperated…and he said that Major Hassan was too strong, so they couldn’t kill him anyway if I confessed it, they knew that I had been forced into it …so I confessed at a show trial…the different rebel groups had trials for internal crimes in the jungle…jungle justice I guess…mostly they were trumped up charges…but nobody had ever faced this kind of charge in my time. It was extreme…instant execution...but they promised they would not kill him…they said they could not kill him. Major Hassan attended confidently…he knew there was only one way they could prove it and …he didn’t expect me to be there…I can still remember the look on his face when I, when I nodded my head and they put the hunting rifle to his head…it was not anger, it was, it was disappointment.”

Et tu Brute. He collapses in a heap on the floor, now crying quite openly like a small child who has just seen his blood flowing from a gash. The gym is deserted. Unusual, because even at this early hour, there are always at least one or two men trying to catch the worm. I glance around belatedly, before sliding down beside him to offer comfort. The powerful fluorescent bulbs in the changing room lend a glow to the water along our bodies as we sit next to each other. He has turned off the shower so the only sound is of his sorrow ringing forth in peels of sobbing that clang violently between my naked thoughts. I want to ask him about Major Hassan’s secret, but he is distraught so I think instead about the strength of the human being, how much it can take without the spirit getting broken. I think about how much rehabilitation Shankey must have needed before his re-introduction to society. I think about the fear he must have felt playing drums to armed zombies in the jungle, waiting for the right moment to pounce, like a rattlesnake. I think about the pain he must have felt watching his mentor die, how it felt to have led somebody so important to him to his death. I think about how he has had to suppress this for so long. I think about others like him. I think and I do not know.

He leans against me now, his head in the crook of my neck, breath hot against my stubble. His hand is careless against my thigh and I can feel his heartbeat on my bicep. One one two. One one two. Are those his lips brushing against my jaw? I think about Kara and how much I just want to tell her that I love her. I’ve loved her since the day I met her when, eyes rimmed with turquoise stupor, I could not find the words to say it. I want to tell her that I suddenly feel it is crucial to enjoy the things in life that matter, now that Shankey has brought the entire fucked-up nature of the world we live in closer to home than it could have ever come. I want to tell her that she is all the things in life that matter to me. Are those hands actually tapping against my inner thigh, and am I really feeling that sensation? Whoa, a minute! His lips are suddenly on mine, intensely drawing from me with an untamed ferocity as his hands travel against my genitals. What the fuck!

“Are you fucking crazy?” I jerk up to my feet, wiping my mouth repeatedly with comic disgust and fixing him with a cold stare, anger sending the adrenalin pumping right through me.

“Sorry…sorry…but…but…” his eyes are confused and apologetic and full of longing all at once. I want to beat him till he’s cold, already forgetting everything he’s just told me. I always felt myself to be tolerant of homosexuals, but to be the object…personally? “Brother, forgive me, I’m not…”

“We’ve double- dated, you faggot prick!” I hear myself screaming things that have never crossed my mouth previously. Then I see a couple of men, bemused, on the threshold of the shower area and turn my glance to Shankey, rumpled on the floor where we sat together just a moment ago, his head in his arms. I hate him so much right now. So much it scares me.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After the incident at the gym, I was unable to sleep much. My thoughts were invaded by ghostly imaginings of boys at war, their feelings deadened by the hemp which ran their blood cold. My dreams were haunted by the shadow of a body lying against a tombstone, lightning flashing in the sky. I could never see the face of the person in my dreams, just a white shirt heaped over a spectral shadow that stretched long against the concrete grave, a bunch of red roses shivering beside it in the cool of dusk. In the daytime, I tried hard to work on my essays and the looming dissertation. It was that time of year when the school session becomes a blur of flat out work as final exams approach. Spring had folded back the pages of winter without actually turning them over so that it was not completely consigned to the past. Even though it was already March, the air still possessed a crisp edge and the sky was permanently wreathed in a forlorn grey.

I hadn’t spoken to Shankey since that February morning when he tried to rape me even though he left me several voice and text messages. Nor to Kara, or Karachi- whatever- since December. It was her birthday, though, in a couple of weeks and I wanted to give her a special gift. Even though I didn’t know exactly what I would do, I wanted to bury the hatchet before then so I would not seem phony. After all she would be turning twenty- one. Her words the last time we spoke had stung me and made me question myself thoroughly. I was not impressed with what I saw looking back at me. It takes courage to look at one’s reflection and spit, and then to go on and find a revelation in the broken mirror image. I know that I have tried to distance myself from Nigeria. I left the place a long time ago when I was ten and all it has come to represent for me is the land of my father. The man was a drunken bastard who beat my mom and had a heart attack with one of his mistresses wrapped around his waist. Even though I am studying Africa, I am more drawn to the continent as a whole, more an African citizen than I will ever be a son of the Nigerian soil.

Kara is so wholesomely Nigerian. Her seven years here might have rid her of the heaviness of tongue that immigrants bring with them but there’s a spice to her that is purely Igbo, genuine fondness for her people inflects every word she speaks. There is a tenderness to her character and a warmth there that challenges me to look out for others and not only myself. I want to change for her, not to illogically strip myself of who I am just to please her, but to alter my selfish pragmatism and fall in step with her patience for people. This feeling is novel to me. I want to love her straightforwardly; without complexity or pride so that I love her because I know there is no other way. Christ, I’ve even begun to think in verse (that couplet is from a poet whose name I do not remember).

I don’t even know when I started to feel like this. I only know that there is a thrush beating its wings with song inside of me and I want to share this music with her. So one overcast March morning, I put aside all my schoolwork and dressed with care, making sure my clothes, as my mom would say, hung well on me. Then I debated with myself whether to call her to say I was coming. It seemed a foolish thing to do, to ring someone you haven’t spoken to in months to say you are coming to see them, especially when the last time we spoke things didn’t go so well.

The car was temperamental, and spluttered into life reluctantly only at the third twist of the ignition. The radiator wasn’t working either so I drove grumpily across town from my flat in Canary Wharf- paid for with the only legacy my father left me, and mom’s shrewd business sense in managing it. Kara lived on Gloucester road, in one of those flats that gave away nothing of the grandeur within from their relatively modest exterior.  I parked carelessly, suddenly in a haste to talk to her. The West End after-work traffic had made me even grumpier and I was a jumbled up mess as I walked up to hers. I was pissed off at my car, the piece of shit, pissed off at the weather and pissed off at the fact that I could not string my thoughts together to form anything coherent to say to Kara. The front door to the building was ajar, not unusually, there were three flats on the three floors of the property and the tenants were all students who typically had no security worries. So I walked straight in, no need to press the buzzer behind the Greek columns. There was a strong smell of curry wafting down from one of the top two flats, mingled with steak, a bloody steak The door to Kara’s flat was never locked unless she was out, so I turned the black doorknob, glad of the chance to surprise her and perhaps catch her in one of those man shirts that fanned out around her figure, leaving only a hint of the curves underneath. I prepared to have my breath taken away.

There was an r n’ b song playing that I didn’t recognize but it was very up- tempo and I found myself keeping time to the beat like Shankey. The apartment was dark but warm so I knew she was home. I could make out the vertices of the sofa, the funky cubic lamp on the side table, the Matisse copy that hung on the wall above the beautiful original fireplace. There was unfinished pasta in a funny-shaped oval dish on the dining table and I could still smell the Bolognese sauce. In the dark, all our senses crescendo. I had reached the door of her room and was about to knock when I heard a steady sound of tapping…or knocking, that I could not believe at first. There was some moaning interspersed between the knocking of headboard against wall which confirmed my initial fears. And an imaginary wrecking ball plummeted through me. I was wild, uncertain what to do. The bird in my chest flapped around in distress, its song gone. My knees buckled and my eyes stung. Then as I spun on my heels to leave I heard it.

“Shankey…Shankey” her voice was thick with feeling.

Et tu Brute. I would have screamed if the bile wasn’t so high up my chest. I burst into the room and saw a bit of her raised left leg in the sliver of moonlight breaking through a crack in the curtains. The way they stopped abruptly to spring apart in terror would have been comical if my sense of humour hadn’t shrunk behind the hawk-shaped rage crowding my chest now, wings full of revenge, beating furiously. I wanted to fuck the bastard up. There was little meaning to the pictures drifting about before my eyes. My vision had become an abstract mess of figures and shapes that made the soft song- Toni fucking Braxton! - discordant. I wanted to fuck the bloody bastard right up.

Kara was struggling to pull the sheets over her breasts at the same time she was trying to get her panties on. She was saying something frantically, my eyes making out the scramble in her face as they adjusted fully to the darkness. She was shaking her head imploringly. I turned to Shankey, and he was just sitting there, his almost-dreadlocked head bowed and the shaft of moonlight across his chest alighting on his other tattoo. The R I P for his mentor. It’s still so strange to me how my head emptied of thought and anger as soon as he looked up, the yellow of his despondent eyes appearing to me like pulping eggyolk. All I could do was count. One one two. One one two.

I turned and I ran and ran all the way to the car. The wheel was clamped but I didn’t care. I ran past the car in a steady jog, never too rapid because I wasn’t running away, I was just running. One one two. One one two. I ran a long way, going past the station and the Waitrose and farther, taking turns in awkward places until I didn’t know where I was. I saw a bench, one of those randomly- placed pieces of street furniture that clutter London, and I sank into it. The air was still and warmer than it had been when I left my flat. The sky was night as far as I could see, impenetrably black. Nothing stirred around me; Silence. I did not even hear the two men come up behind me. All I saw was the hem of a black coat emerge around the side of the bench and a fist traveling towards my face. I shut my eyes and realized I couldn’t even swing back because the other thug held my arms secure from underneath my armpits. The urgency of the whole thing delayed my reactions and the blow to my jaw ended any sort of response. I saw the compelling glint of steel rise above me as I tried to force open heavy lids. Knife! I said my first prayer in a long time amidst the expletives the thugs were tossing about and offered them my wallet. Take everything please.

Shankey came out of nowhere. He streaked out of a square of nothingness where only moonlight had been. Then the next few minutes were like an action movie. Shankey was smooth and fast and deadly and the knife clattered noisily to the floor within seconds. The thugs didn’t even have time to curse at him. One had the words stolen from his mouth with a very swift kick to the throat. I watched him smash the other’s nose, taking the breath from him with that blow and his consciousness with the other, a roundhouse punch of a power that was at odds with Shankey’s frame. All at once the other mugger, coughing and clutching his throat on the floor a short way away from my slumped form on the bench, pulled out a gun, an old school revolver. I was groggy. I could not get the warning out. A flash of lightning obliged, and Shankey must have caught some movement in his peripheral vision with his back turned sixty degrees away from us. The thunderclap tried, but could not quiet the gunshots that barked true in that silent night. He fell almost in slow motion, red dripping underneath his trenchcoat like dye. I was overwhelmed with shock. Nothing, absolutely nothing could have kept the scream inside me. I got off the bench and fell over his twitching body, every chord in me straining to get that beast of a scream out.

Lights came on in the homes around, windows ablaze with yellow as curtains were cracked open with cowardly caution. The second thug was already stumbling off. I screamed some more.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

It is drizzling and the sky is dark like a shadow of itself. There’s a moon crescent hanging there like an earring and just a few stars like little faraway freckles. The black- haired bitch of a sky. I’ve been feeling crazy recently. Since I moved back home temporarily to be with my mother and little brother and to get away from the evil hiding in my flat, the things I see when I close my eyes and pretend to sleep so that my mother will stop worrying are very surreal. I sometimes talk to myself on the tube when I have to go out to catch a class or to see Kara and people nervously point their features away from me, worried that if they back off completely I will be offended and pick on them. I write prolifically at night, hunched over my desk, drams of emotion spilled frothily like beer over the pages of my little notebooks. When I finally sleep through the haze of my insomnia, I wake up with a throbbing in my head. One one two. One one two.

Kara and I are together now, but it doesn’t feel right. When we sex I feel like I’m fucking a dead man’s memory. And she cries with the suppressed tragedy of that night. Grief is not an aphrodisiac. And it is hard to describe just how much I am grieving for Shankey. I feel responsible for his death personally. But every time I look at Kara, and see her startled- deer eyes, I feel like he deserved to die. He took away this wonderful feeling I did not know I could feel and replaced it with a permanent guilt. He was, though, really the only friend I have had in years and I miss him terribly. I feel like there’s something missing from me all the time. When I step out of my house I am conscious of the inadequacy of my garments. When I eat, there are empty stomachs in my midriff. But I also feel like he stole love from me, love for him and for her.

We are walking to the cemetery now. Kara and I. She’s dressed in a woolen black shift dress and a necklace with a guitar pendant on its end. The soft caress of streetlamps on her face makes her look so radiant yet so poignantly sad. She’s carrying a bunch of red roses and her ipod is going with a recording of Shankey playing sax and guitar. It sounds a lot like Keziah Jones’ “Million Miles From Home”, the song that was playing the night I met Kara. Over the weeks we’d spoken once about her and Shankey so I knew they’d only slept together that one time and that it had something to do with this song. One of those ‘things got out of hand- it just happened’ stories. He’d played his song to her that night as he told her about our fight and after that she kissed him as he cried, not understanding why he was so sad. I don’t know if she’d slept with him to prove he wasn’t gay. I don’t know if he was gay. I don’t care anymore. If he were descendant from Sodom and Gomorrah I could not care any less.

We are standing over the tombstone now and she tosses the roses down. I unravel a sheet of paper Kara gave me only yesterday. She could not find it before. Shankey had come to see her to ask her to give it to me when he met her that night. It was a short note to explain things a little bit. I am reading it now and I skip quickly over the lines about Major Hassan forcing himself on Shankey early on in the Sierra Leone jungle- the stupid big secret- and how it carried on till the Major’s death. That was part of why he betrayed his mentor. He is earnest and I can almost hear the voice of mathematical accuracy and rugged musicality speaking from under the concrete mound. He does not say anything about Kara. I guess it must have just happened. He is saying how much he loves me now. How I have been like a real brother to him, the only person he has known so well since the Major died. How he is sorry he loved me maybe too much so that I became like the Major to him, me being older and wiser in the new world he had come to. Then I see the last two lines there, fresh as moonlight, and searing:

           I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
           so I love you because I know no other way (Pablo Neruda)

The last time I saw Shankey it was in a flash of lightning. And now I am the shadow of a body stretched over a concrete grave, beside me a bunch of roses shivering in the cool of dusk, crying under an unforgiving sky.


Glossary

Oyibo-               foreigner, usually a white person
Naija-                 Nigerian
Igbo-                  South Eastern Nigerian tribe, one of three major ones
Muumuu-           Idiot
Jist-                    Gossip, derivative of ‘gist’
soja/sojaman-    Soldier
comot-               to bring out or to go/come out
kaikai-               local hard liqueur usually hot
igbo-                  hemp