I know dad is talking but I can’t focus on what he’s saying because everything is wrong. The table is wrong, the shelves and the books are wrong, the ornaments and awards on top of the shelf are wrong too. Everything is wrong and I can’t focus on anything else even though I’m trying to.
I get up and start on the table. If could just get the place to look right again, I know everything will be fine. I just need to get the place to look right.
He grabs my hands and restrains me.
“No,” he says. “No, I don’t want you to.”
“I don’t mind,” I say and try to pull my hands away. His grip on them hardens.
“It’s not about you minding, I don’t want you to. This has to stop.”
“I would be able to focus better if…” I start.
“Just pay attention and stop this rubbish Biyi.”
I know he’s right, I know this is silly. But I need this place to be right and I don’t know why but I have to fix this place.
“I won’t take long I just…”
“I said stop!” He yells. He pushes me back.
“Please,” I say. Because I don’t know what else to.
“This ends now. We’ve always commended you for being tidy, but this is ridiculous.”
“It has to be right. I need it to be right. Please.”
“You sound like a mad person! You sound crazy Biyi!”
“I know,” I say. Because I do and I’m aware. If there’s one thing I’ve always had, it’s awareness, for better or worse.
“I know but please let me do this. I have to do this.”
I start to pick up the papers and folders and he grabs my hands again. I pull my hands from his grasp and continue.
He’s on my side of the table now and he tries to restrain me again, with more force this time. I push him away and continue. I know things will be okay when I’m done with this. I just need to be done.
He shoves me. I stumble back into the shelf and the papers I’m holding fall out of my grasp. I pick them up and I try to continue, but he’s in my way now. He looks angry. I don’t remember when last I saw him this angry. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him this angry.
“I just need to finish this,” I plead.
He slaps me. I feel tears rush to my eyes from the sting.
“I told you to stop! I won’t tolerate this nonsense anymore.”
I need to get this place right again. I have to.
I push him out of the way, but it’s harder than I meant to. He falls back onto the floor. Now I’m sure I’ve never seen him this angry.
It took me 8 minutes to properly clean the table and the chairs we’re sitting in. It took another 6 to arrange everything on the table properly. It would have taken less time, maybe 4 minutes, to line up everything right but then I didn’t account for the menus so I had to start again halfway into it.
I’m glad nothing took 7 minutes, I can’t stand that number. No, that’s not accurate, The number 7 is catastrophic. Saying I can’t stand it makes it seem as if it’s simply a mild annoyance, like one can’t stand flies buzzing past their ears or a particular persons’ especially squeaky voice. Technically, you can stand these things. Maybe not for very long and you’d much rather not, maybe these things would ruin your mood or day, but you would probably still function whether or not you encountered these things. This isn’t what the number 7 is for me. It is more like getting hit by a truck.
I’ve tried everything to get over this fear because logically, I know it’s silly. I know that the number 7 is just a number. I even learned facts about the number 7; ladybugs are pretty cool and most of them have seven spots, and seven is the first natural number to have more than one syllable in its pronunciation. All of this is cool but it doesn’t seem to matter because I am still terrified of the damned number.
I haven’t eaten out in months. I haven’t really stayed anywhere that isn’t home in months. At least spurs is familiar and the kitchen should be hygienic. I hope it is. What if it isn’t? What if I get sick or mom gets sick? What if I die? What if mom dies? Okay no, no this isn’t likely. The most likely worst-case scenario is mild food poisoning, and even that isn’t likely. We would probably just eat and that would be that. The best-case scenario is that this meal is somehow the best meal we’d ever have in our lives and everything else will pale in comparison, but that’s not very likely either. We should order something that would be cooked, that should kill off any germs, right? No salads. But beef, tapeworms, a parasite living and growing inside me…
No, this isn’t likely. It probably wouldn’t happen. The probability of this is so low. It’s not like either of us eat medium-rare, no tapeworm could survive that. Could they?
“Biyi!” mom shouts. Why is she shouting? What happened?
“I’ve called you five times now,” she says. She sounds annoyed, but also like she’s trying not to sound annoyed. She sounds like that a lot these days.
I apologise.
“What do you want?” She asks, pointing at the menu she’s placed on the table. It’s not placed right. I reach over and straighten it.
“What do you want?” She asks again.
“I’m not really hungry,” I say.
“You haven’t eaten all day, you should eat something.”
I look at the menu in my hands but I can’t focus on reading it. I keep wondering what the kitchen is like and how they cook the food. Do they clean the place properly? A lot of places don’t do that.
“Should we just go home and eat?” Mom asks, leaning forward. She sounds concerned, but again like she’s trying not to. Like she’s trying to sound as neutral as possible.
We’ve already sat down here and we’ve been assigned a server that weirdly enough hasn’t come to check on us the 22 minutes we’ve been seated. I think she wants to eat here. If I say yes I know we’d leave right away.
I say no. I say it’s fine. She smiles.
“So what will it be then?” She asks, leaning back into her chair.
I wasn’t lying when I said I wasn’t hungry. I think I might have been before, but I’m not sure. In any case, if I was the idea of food poisoning and tapeworms fixed that. But now I have to choose something. I try not to think of food poisoning or the many illnesses certain bacteria can cause or being eaten alive from inside out by parasites. I try to convince myself that the likelihood of these things happening is practically zero. But practically zero is still not zero.
“I’ll take the brownie,” I say. The temperature at which it’s baked should kill off any harmful bacteria and the chances of it giving me food poisoning is extremely low. Unless ingredients that have turned bad are in the mix. But the probability of getting a bad egg out of 400 eggs is 0.035. And they’d probably notice. And ingredients probably move too fast to get spoilt and would be noticeable if they did. What goes into a brownie aside from eggs? Flour, butter, sugar… none of these things are likely to be bad. But if they were, would they care? Are they paid enough too?
“Is that all?” She asks, frowning slightly.
“Yes, that’s all. I’m really not hungry,” I say.
“That’s not enough, you should eat more than that. Get some meat while we’re here. How about a burger? Or steak? You used to love that steak, the one with pepper.”
“I think I’ll be fine with just the brownie.”
“That’s not enough. Are you sure you don’t want to go home?”
“No, I’ll get a steak.”
“Are you sure?” She asks again with even more concern. I really must have not sounded convincing.
I want to say yes. I want to say that I’ll get to get a burger or a steak or anything else. I want to stop thinking of bacteria and parasites and food poisoning and illnesses and death. I want to, I really do.
“Is it okay if we go home?” I ask.
“Yes, it’s okay.”
“You did well today,” she adds as she reaches for her bag next to her.
“You should at least get what you wanted to,” I say. I want to feel less like a bother than I do.
“I guess I could get something to go for myself. You can sort yourself out for dinner.”
I wonder if she meant that as a question or a statement. Sometimes that happens, her questions coming out more like statements than questions. Other times, they’re just statements.
“Do you still want the brownie?” She asks as she motions with her hands to get the attention of our server. “You should get it and have it for dessert like oyinbos do,” she laughs.
“It comes with ice cream, I don’t think I can. It’ll melt.”
“We can ask for it without ice cream, I think we have some at home anyway. Do you want it?”
She made a valid point. Besides, a brownie to take home does sound nice. And hey, I can throw it away if I can’t bring myself to eat it.
“Yeah. Yeah okay, I’ll take it.”
She smiles, gives me a thumbs up and whispers, “Good job.” It’s so odd to see that I have to laugh.
Our waiter comes by and we give him our order.
I’m trying my hardest not to flinch but the sting from whatever mom is swabbing my face with is making that hard. She keeps apologising with each flinch and recoil, so I try harder to stay still.
The last time dad beat me, I couldn’t have been more than 9. And even then, they were a very measured and deliberate affair. They almost felt impersonal with how calculated they were. The same amount of pressure put into each stroke and the number of strokes being decided in my presence based on the offence. The most I’d gotten was 10 strokes for accidentally breaking the car window while playing with a ball he’d specifically told me not to when the car was parked in the compound. And with a cane, always with a cane. Always with the same cane. We must have thrown it away because I haven’t seen it in years.
This time, it was not with a cane. It was with his fists and a glass vase, although I think the glass vase just happened to fall and today was not my lucky day. It also felt personal, each blow and hit felt very personal and too intense to have been measured.
Mom drops her hands with cotton wool still in them. I wonder if she’s done. She looks at me and says she’s so sorry. She sounds so sad.
Then she continues.
I recline the car seat as far as it’ll go so I can’t see the road from the windshield. I wonder if I should get my earphones and play music loud, but I did that the way here already. Besides, things are relatively quiet now.
“So you’ve decided not to deafen yourself ehn? We thank God,” mom jokes.
“What’s worth hearing if not music anyway?”
“My voice is not worth hearing? You spoilt child.”
“You could learn sign language,” I suggest. She hisses.
“So you don’t want to hear my voice abi? May your own children not ask you to learn sign language so they don’t have to hear you talk.”
“It’s to not have any.”
“You think you can scam your way out of giving me my grandchildren? You can’t, my dear.” She says this light-heartedly, but I can tell from my many attempts to make it clear that she should expect nothing from me because marriage and children are not aspirations for me that she means it.
“I’m doing you a favour. Children are scams, they’re the worst investment you could make.”
“How do you know? Have you had one?”
“I’ve been one. Besides, look at me, 17 years of pouring money into me and the payoff is still uncertain.”
“Don’t say that,” she says. The mood is all different now, more serious
“I was only joking.” I wasn’t really, but it’s easier to say I was. Besides I kind of was, so it’s technically not lying.
“Children aren’t shares, it’s not about making money off them.”
“It is for a lot of people.”
“We’re not one of those people. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on relying on you when I’m old,” she says, lightening the mood.
I raise my hands to my chest and feign pain. “Ouch, am I that unreliable?”
“Even if you were reliable I wouldn’t.”
I know the vague details of what happened. A very promising older brother, robbers, and a gun that broke any promise he held. Also a murdered dad, broken mom, and a new financial low they’d never had to deal with before.
“Sounds like you have trust issues,” I say.
“Don’t change the topic, give me my grandchildren.”
“Now?” I ask. “I don’t think I should do that right now.” She removes a hand from the steering wheel and uses it to playfully smack my head.
“What do you like about having a kid anyway?” I ask. I don’t know why I asked that, but I realise I want to know.
“Have one and you’ll find out.”
“I’ll now be stuck with them even if I don’t like them.”
“They’re your kid, you’ll love them.”
“I watched this movie where their kid was a psychopath and shot up a school. Not because they did anything wrong, he was just mad from the start.”
“Were they white?” She sneers. They were, so I don’t bother answering the question. Instead, I bring up an example that we know.
“Demilade’s parents are perfectly nice people and he’s stupid.”
“He’s just young and has a lot of growing up to do.”
“If you do anything wrong, they’ll blame you for everything that goes wrong.”
“Pray you don’t do anything wrong then.”
“Of course I will, I’m human.”
“Then pray your mistakes are small ones.”
I don’t know how she can do that, suggest parenting to me so confidently when she has me for a son.
“You could do everything right and still end up with a lunatic,” I mutter. Because as much as I wish I could assign what’s wrong with me to something they did, as much as I wish there was some Freudian theory I could use as an excuse for being this way, there isn’t.
I don’t know why I’m like this.
“You’re not a lunatic,” she says with a tone of finality that means we’re done with this conversation now.
She fixes her gaze firmly on the road ahead. I reach for my earphones.
I’m not awake enough to process whatever mom is saying. I can make out the basics of it, dad is going somewhere and I should greet him before he leaves. This isn’t a thing we do, wake me up from sleep to greet them. The usual unsaid agreement is that I mumble good morning, or whatever time it is, whenever I see them. The exception is when we’re to put up a show for certain guests. We have no guests, we haven’t had any for a while.
I’m too tired and too sore to want to get up, and getting back to sleep is too hard for me to risk getting up. I tell her I want to sleep and fall back to bed.
I see her in the living room after I wake up and mumble a good afternoon. She asks me to take a seat because she wants to talk to me about something. She tells me that dad won’t be home for a while and that he said he was very sorry about yesterday.
I say okay.
I think I’m supposed to ask why. Why he left and when he’s coming back. Or maybe be show some sort of anger or sadness, some form of distress.
She asks me how I feel. I tell her I feel better. She nods and we look at each other for a while before she turns to the TV and unmutes it. I get up and go to the home office. The glass has already been swept up, but I should clean the floors again. Glass gets everywhere. The tiniest shards are the hardest to get and still slice through skin. Someone could get injured and then the injury could get infected. And then lasting conditions, amputations, death…
I start on the table. The table, each section of the shelves, the top of the shelves, then the floor. Until it’s right.
I’m checking each room upstairs now. Downstairs starting from the store, then the kitchen, dining room, living room, and then the door at the top of the stairs. Then each bedroom except mom’s starting from the guest room, the office, the hallway and then my room. Mom told me to stop locking the door to her room. She also asked me to stop coming in to check the switches and sockets, said it woke her up. I try not to think about it. Some nights, when I really can’t not think about it, I check the sockets as quietly as I can.
My phone rings. It’s not hard to guess who it is, no one calls me but my parents, and mom is already asleep. If anyone else was going to call me, it wouldn’t be this late.
I wonder if he’s not supposed to be reaching out to me. I doubt it.
“Hello,” I say. It comes out differently than I intended it to, almost like a question.
“Hello Biyi. How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I say. I wonder if I’m supposed to ask how he is too.
“Thank you,” I add. I don’t want to be impolite.
“I heard you made a lot of progress in therapy this week.”
“Yeah.”
“How did it go?”
I shrug as if he could see me. “Okay.”
“That’s good. I hope it goes well.”
“Thanks.”
Silence. Then a sigh.
“I’m very sorry Biyi. I hope you can forgive me one day.”
“I’m not angry at you.”
I can’t be angry at him. I have to live with myself, it must have been pretty hard to live with me.
He’s not a violent person, despite everything that happened. An angry person, but not violent. This isn’t one of those cases where we were being constantly abused, where that was the last straw. That was the only time. At least, from what I know.
Still, one time too many I guess.
“You should be,” he says.
I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.
“Goodnight Biyi.”
“Yeah, goodnight.”
