Uchechukwu Peter Umezurike

I’m wincing in the veranda when Pa plods back from work. I bend over, lowering my head, hoping he does not notice my wet cheeks. Ma has just dabbed some gentian violet on my right knee, and surprisingly it’s scalding like pepper. Pa is going to ask me why I am crying. I quickly dry my eyes, although my heartbeat is ringing in my ears. I wish I were somewhere else right now. But he walks by me silently. I can’t tell what expression he went in with, but I hope he’s too worn out to ask me questions. I watch the sun losing colour and start wishing I could hurt Izu back.

I am about to limp into the parlour when I bump into Pa. I catch myself and see him looming over me like he’s about to crash all over the place. Thick veins roping together in his neck, he points to my purple knee. I have the urge to lie, but he glares at me as if he’s read my mind.

‘Who did this to you?’ he asks. 

‘You just got back,’ Ma interrupts him, but he barely glances at her.

My chest is packing into itself. I’m afraid of how Pa will react once he finds out Izu is to blame for my injury. That braggart’s son won’t ever come to much good, Pa once said. I do not know why he dislikes Mr. Okose (maybe because his face is mottled from bleaching creams), who is considered lucky by everyone else just because he drives the works commissioner around and has been able to buy a Nissan for himself.

‘He didn’t know,’ I mention. But Izu had pushed me down on purpose while I was trying to fight him off from snapping the wing of a sparrow. 

‘Who didn’t know?’

‘I…Izu…’

‘That rascal?’

Pa shoves me forward. Ma quickly positions herself between both of us.

‘Nkem,’ she says, ‘please come in and eat.’

‘Food can wait,’ Pa tells her. ‘Let me speak to that bloody braggart. It’s time I taught Chidi to stand up for himself. We can’t have our only child behaving like…’ He frowns, maybe because he cannot find the right words to describe me.

‘He is wounded, can’t you see.’

‘You call this a wound? This scratch?’ Pa clasps his callused hand around my knee with such force I almost slip but because his grip is firm I only stagger. I grind my teeth to stop myself from howling in pain.

‘You’ll hurt him some more!’ Ma cries, slapping him on the wrist.

‘He’s my son, I can hurt him any way I like,’ Pa says, and lets go of my knee. ‘But any bloody rascal can’t hurt my child.’

‘E ji m chukwu rio gi, I don’t want any fight.’

‘I don’t like the way you talk at times, Kasarachi. I’m now a fighter, eh? Is it when they’ve damaged his leg and we are left with a cripple, you will have me act?’

Ma gives him an angry stare in response and stomps away. I wish I hadn’t scraped my knee.

‘Is this where that rascal lives?’ Pa asks me, when we get to the rusted gate of a two-storey building, with walls so wrinkled and wan, like tortoise shell. Izu’s house happens to be on the street behind ours.

Something grips me by the heart because I can’t make out why Pa is acting as though he doesn’t know where Izu’s parents live. Everyone knows that Mr. Okose occupies the first flat on the ground floor facing the gate. Pa might have been practising ahead of this moment, I realise, as he pounds the door with his fist. All those times I had seen him shadowboxing.

‘Onye?’ a man hollers from inside, like he wouldn’t mind slamming the door in anyone’s face.

Pa snorts and bangs harder. The bulb in the veranda comes on, a garish white. I pray that Izu’s parents will behave themselves so Pa doesn’t get provoked and pick their son off his feet and toss him against their door. I wouldn’t feel proud if he beat up someone’s father. I already feel embarrassed when I’m pointed at in the neighbourhood as the boy whose father is that tall muscular ex-soldier.

The door flies open. And Mr. Okose stamps out in chinos shorts and a white singlet. I imagine him boiling over, but his filmy face grows soft the instant he recognises Pa. His wife appears behind him, fluttering almost like a fat owl in daylight. I think the Okoses have probably never dreamt that they’ll find him towering in their doorway. I’ve noticed the same look on some neighbours’ faces any time they run into Pa. It has to do with his rugged boxer’s looks, the fact that he isn’t friends with anyone and rarely attends any events organised in our street.

‘Good evening, Mr. Uzoma –?’

‘Is your boy in?’ Pa cuts him off, shunning pleasantries.

‘Hope there’s no problem, my good neighbour?’

‘Your boy wants to damage my son’s leg.’

‘Eewo,’ cries Mrs. Okose. Jostling her husband aside, she squats in front of me and, rubbing my head as if I am a baby, she speaks in a rushed sing-song voice, ‘Ndo, ndo.’

It seems Mr. Okose’s face will tear easily from one sweep of Pa’s knuckles. Watching it twitch as he speaks, I wonder why he has it bleached. Now he is expressing himself a little too fast so his eyes go scuttling this way and that as if to keep up with his words.

‘Where’s that problem child?’ Mrs. Okose stops rubbing my head. ‘Izu!’

Izu skips out, only to halt abruptly like he’s just seen a three-eyed dog. I catch Pa narrowing his eyes at him. I remember the bat he had killed two nights before and feel a chill licking me over. I don’t think I will like to defy him a second time if he prods me to strike Izu in front of his parents. Meanwhile, Izu looks like he will shrink into himself as his father grabs him by the ear, swinging him round like a puppet. Stuttering as he speaks, he jams his knuckles hard on Izu’s head.

Izu begins fumbling about and rubbing his sore head with both hands. Deep spastic sounds burst out of his throat, as though he wants to cough up all his insides. I avoid his eyes as his father vows that he will be using a belt on him later on. I shouldn’t be here watching him cry. Izu has never struck me as the crying kind, maybe because he usually looks tough, mean, unfeeling. A few minutes earlier, on our way to his place, I imagined I was going to punch him in the face had Pa asked me to. I was so cross with Izu for having hurt me. But I’m not sure I’d want to get even any more.

‘We’re sorry for all the trouble…’ Mr. Okose says, ‘but why not come into the parlour, let us apologise properly over some beers?’ 

‘I can prepare some ugba in a few seconds,’ his wife chips in.

Pa says, ‘It’s late, but thanks.’

The couple share glances, then Mrs. Okose brushes her son aside and darts into their parlour. Her husband becomes nice and sweet; even his washed-out face takes on a shine, like he’s tipsy, cajoling Pa to visit their humble home—anytime, anytime, he is saying this particular word with emphasis—when his wife returns, her face slick with sweat, with a wide-bottomed green bottle of wine, which looks delicate and costly. She is about handing it over to Pa when her husband tells her to wait. Confusion flickers on her face as her husband snatches the bottle from her, as though he fears she might drop it.

Holding the bottle with both hands, he lifts it towards Pa. ‘My good neighbour, for you. Our door is open, anytime, anytime.’ 

Pa frowns at him. ‘That is not necessary, Mr…’

‘Clement, call me Clement.’

Pa starts shaking his head slow and perfunctory.

Mrs. Okose also entreats him. It seems she may be going down on her knees as Pa holds her eyes a minute longer, like there’s something he finds unflattering about her, something oily about her round face. Then he turns to her husband. He takes the bottle carefully but stiffly by the neck. Taps me on the shoulder, hands it over to me. Without saying thank-you or goodbye, he strides out the gate. Mr. Okose calls after him, reminding him to extend his warmest greetings to Ma, but Pa does not bother to reply or glance back.

I hurry after him, proud that he didn’t beat up our neighbours. He had carried himself so well, though he acted firm and distant the whole time. I wonder if that’s what Pa means when he says I have to be a man. Something—probably a bat—shrieks overhead and Pa begins to hum a tune, reminding me of Ma whenever she is in the kitchen. Up in the cobalt sky, the moon bares its fullness, like yolk—too yellow and unreal. I think of Izu and hope we could still be friends.

 

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