Tayo has always had a penchant for self-destruction. It’s remarkable really. As a kid, it was a new injury every week. After a messy break-up with his girlfriend in secondary school, he decided to get into a fight that almost got him expelled. In university, it was his allowance finishing as soon as he got it until father cut him off for three months to teach him a lesson. And now, it’s trying to discover which of the ways he’d be murdered in Lagos.
This is the third time some kind friend of a friend has called me to get him out of some bar or club or whatever place he’s decided to drink himself half to death. If there is a next time, I won’t go. No point in risking my life for someone who has a death wish. Besides, I don’t have his luck. Very few people are as lucky as Tayo.
When I get to the club, he’s barely conscious. I thank the acquaintance that called me to tell me where and how he was and kept an eye on him and then I swing his arm around my shoulders and try to drag him out of the bar. I barely manage to get him into the car and I have to catch my breath after I get in and lock the doors.
“Where are we going?” he slurs. I’m startled that he’s coherent enough to speak, let alone ask questions.
“I’ll drop you off at your house,” I answer.
“No, I want to go to dad’s house.”
“I’m not the one that’ll take you there sha. Feel free to get an Uber if you want.”
“Why not? I deserve to be there.”
“Why should we clean up after you? I don’t want to.”
“You owe me that much.” He says.
That’s one thing he got from our father. The entitlement. The certainty that the world owed them something because they graced it with their existence.
I hate that fucking entitlement.
“I owe you nothing Tayo,” I say as I start up the car.
“I won’t be picking you up from any restaurants or bars or clubs or wherever else you decide to endanger yourself at whatever time. You’re an adult, you can handle things yourself.” I say as I stare at the car in front of me. Traffic. I should be home resting but now I’m stuck in traffic.
I didn’t want to pick him up this time. When I get home I’m telling mom that I’m done. I always humour her and her requests, but I have had enough with this.
“I didn’t ask you to,” he snaps.
“Because you expected me too. Maybe not me, but you expected someone to.”
And someone always has. Someone is always there to protect him from whatever he needs to be protected from. To shield and defend him. For Tayo, there’s always someone.
It’s 3:00 am and there’s still traffic. Not the type with no end in sight, the one that I’m convinced is designed to breed hopelessness and crush your soul a little more until there’s nothing left every time you get stuck in it. It’s the kind that is just slow enough to ruin your day. There are stretches and bounds of clear roads, not necessarily good roads but clear roads and then there’s just as many, if not more, stretches of lines of cars with too much horning and not enough space or speed.
I am too tired for this. I shouldn’t even be driving anymore, my eyelids are getting too heavy for me to focus on anything else. I should just get us home. If I run into any more traffic because I want to make a stop at Tayo’s house I may crash this car.
But I will not subject myself to cleaning up after Tayo. I’d rather die in a car crash.
“You always had him. I got to see him on weekends or when I had a game but you always had him,” Tayo says.
I envy him, I really do.
Because father could be very charming. The charm wasn’t sustainable, but when he could trick you that it was with just enough distance, it was spectacular. When I was younger and I didn’t see him all that often because he worked in a different state (and had a different family but we didn’t know that yet), my father was second only to superman. He was the best human that existed. Then he lived with us again and he was just a human, like every other human. Except more harmful and toxic than most. Perhaps he was just as harmful as toxic and the average human and the let down from being a superhero to being as human as the rest of us made it seem worse than it was.
It would be nice to still have that, to still think of father as the best person that could exist. That distance that I wanted gone as a child, if it never left, could he still be the perfect human that could only exist in the mind of someone who was close enough to see the illusion but not close enough to see the trick to it?
Everything is prettier from a distance. From a distance, you can’t see the cracks and smudges, all the little imperfections that you can’t not see once you’re close enough.
“Weekdays are busy days, do you think I just used to sit down and play with him on days when he had work and I had school?” I scoff.
“He was there.”
“How do you know that? Were you?”
I’ll admit, that wasn’t very tactful.
“That’s what I’m saying,” he snapped, his voice rising.
“Look Tayo, we didn’t ask him to stay with us. We didn’t tell him what to do or where to be. We didn’t really care what he did. I get that you loved him, I get you wanted him to live with you but it’s not on us that he didn’t and you have to understand that.”
“Then why didn’t he stay with us?” He doesn’t sound accusatory or angry. He sounds sad, like a child that can’t understand why a parent isn’t around anymore. This feels like some part of him I’m not supposed to see. Some part he’d never show sober, at least not to me.
I think I know why father chose to live with us even when Tayo’s mother uprooted her and her sons’ familiar and thus more comfortable life in Jos and moved to Lagos when he was done with his work there. Even when mom made it clear that she didn’t care about him; whether he lived or died or stayed or left, she couldn’t be bothered. That pissed him off more than her hating him. He wanted her to hate him, she had seen too much to adore him anymore so hate was the next best thing. Hate meant she still cared. It meant he’d still consume her thoughts and everything she did. Hate meant she was still his.
Tayo’s mother wanted him, wanted to win him. He would always be the prize she could never win, because once you win a prize that’s it. You’ve won the prize and it’s not that fun anymore. The fun is trying to win the prize. What can you do to get it? What can you do better? What do you have to do to be good enough for the prize?
And Tayo adored him. I already knew the tricks to the illusions, but Tayo didn’t. And as long as father stayed just far enough, as long as he maintained the balancing act between being there and not being there, he would continue to be adored. To be the prize and perfect father he wanted to be. He stayed with us so he would still be worshipped, not because he wanted to stay with us.
Despite everything, I don’t hate him. I loved him even, but he never could recognise love if it wasn’t adoration. If he wasn’t being worshipped, he wasn’t being loved. Father wasn’t a bad person, he was a person desperate to be loved with a very flawed understanding of what it was. We’re all like that, to varying degrees and in different ways, but like that nonetheless. His just happened to be more destructive than most.
“I don’t know, maybe he thought it was what he was supposed to do. Does it matter?” I ask rhetorically.
“How would it not?” He laughs sarcastically.
“He’s dead.”
“So he didn’t matter?”
“I didn’t say he didn’t matter, I said it doesn’t anymore.”
“It happened, it matters.”
I don’t want Tayo to get the last word. I want to say something to leave him without a comeback. I want to tell him to hold on to the past until that’s all that’s left for all I care, to feed on it till he chokes.
But I know what he means. We are the things that have happened to us. The people that we love have had some part in what we are. We are everything and everyone that has happened to us until now. We are a collection of all the choices we made, all the one’s we didn’t, and all the choices that were made for us.
“Do what you want, but I recommend moving on. He’s dead.”
Perhaps there’s some warmer, kinder way of saying this that would make everything fall into perspective for him or at least be an easier pill to swallow if he chose to. If there is, I’m far too tired to think of it. Or I’m too bitter to try.
“I get that it happened and I get that it matters to you, but it can’t un-happen and we can’t ask him why either. I don’t know if you trying to get kidnapped or used for some ritual is your way of finding answers or trying to understand and far be it from me to tell you how to heal or whatever, but find a way less likely to get you killed.”
That’s all the warmness I can muster up.
I look over to him and he pretends to be asleep. I pretend to believe him.
I drive us home.
