Chigozie Obioma - The Fishermen

The thing that was consuming Ikenna was like a tireless enemy, hiding inside him, biding its time while we plotted and carried out our revenge on Iya Iyabo. It began to control him from the day Ikenna severed ties with Obembe and me, keeping only Boja with him. They barred Obembe and me from their room, and excluded us from joining in at the new football place they discovered a week after the whipping. Obembe and I longed for their companionship, and waited in vain for their return every evening, yearning for our kinship that seemed to be slipping away. But as days went by, it began to seem as if Ikenna had got rid of an infection in his throat by finally coughing us out, like a man who’d simply cleared his stuffed passages.

At around the same time, Ikenna and Boja hassled one of Mr Agbati’s children, our cross-wall neighbours who owned a rickety lorry that was known as “Argentina” because of the legend “Born and raised in Argentina” inscribed around its frescoed body. Owing to its feebleness, the lorry made deafening noises when starting, often rattling the neighbourhood and waking people from sleep in the early hours of the day. This engendered several complaints and quarrels. In one of the fights, Mr Agbati came off with a perpetual swelling on his head after a female neighbour hit him with the heel of her shoe. From then on, Mr Agbati began sending one of his children to inform the neighbours whenever he wanted to start the lorry. The children would knock on every neighbour’s door or gate a couple of times, announcing that “Papa wan start Argentina, oh.” Then they would run off to the next house. That morning, Ikenna — who had begun to grow more belligerent and irascible — fought the oldest of the children after accusing the boy of being a nuzance , a word Father often used to describe someone who made unnecessary noise.

Later that same day, after we had returned from school and eaten, he and Boja went to play football at the pitch while Obembe and I stayed home, sad that we could not go with them. We were watching television, and were still on the same programme, one about a man who settled family disputes, when they returned. They had only been gone for half an hour. As they hurried into their room, I saw that Ikenna’s face was covered with dirt, his upper lip was swollen into a pulp and there were bloodstains on his jersey which had the sobriquet “Okocha” and the figure 10 inscribed on its back. Once they shut their door, Obembe and I ran to our room and stood beside the wall to eavesdrop on their conversation to find out what had happened. At first, we only heard the closet doors opening and closing, and the sound their feet made as they walked on the worn carpet. It was long before we caught the words “If I hadn’t thought Nathan and Segun would come in if I did and outnumber us, I would have joined in the fight.” This was Boja’s voice and he was not finished yet. “If only I had known they wouldn’t join, if only I had known.”

The sound of feet rapping on the carpet followed this declaration, after which Boja continued: “But he did not even really beat you, that frog; he was only lucky to have,” he paused as if searching for the right words, “to have… done this.”

“You didn’t fight for me,” Ikenna burst out suddenly. “No! You stood by and watched. Don’t even try to deny it.”

“I could have—” Boja began to say after a brief pause, breaking the silence.

“No you didn’t!” Ikenna cried. “You stood by!”

This was loud enough for Mother to hear from her room; she had not gone to work that day because Nkem was having diarrhoea. She scrambled to her feet, slapped the floor a few times with her flip-flops and started knocking on their door.

“What is going on there, why are you shouting?”

“Mama, we want to sleep,” said Boja.

“Is that why you won’t answer the door?” she asked, and when no one answered back, she said: “What was the shouting in that room about?”

“Nothing,” Ikenna replied sharply.

“It better be nothing,” said Mother. “It better be.”

Her flip-flops slapped the floor again in rhythm as she returned to her room.

Ikenna and Boja did not go out to play after school the following day; they stayed in their room. Wanting to take advantage of the situation to communicate with them again, Obembe seized on the opportunity of a television show Ikenna particularly liked to bring them to the sitting room. Both of them had not watched television since the neighbour caught us at the Omi-Ala, and Obembe continually ached for the days when we all saw our favourite programmes together with riotous glee— Agbala Owe , the Yoruba soap opera, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo , an Australian drama. Obembe always wanted to reach out to them whenever any of the programmes was on, but the fear that he might annoy them often stopped him. On this day, however, having grown desperate and because Skippy the Bush Kangaroo was Ikenna’s favourite, first he craned his neck to look through the keyhole of their room’s door so he could see our brothers through it. Then making the sign of the cross, his lips moving inaudibly with the rhythm of the words “The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” he started pacing about the room singing the theme song of the show:

Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo

Skippy, Skippy, Skippy our friend ever true.

Obembe had told me many times over those dark days of separation from our brothers that he wanted to put an end to the rift, but I’d always warned he’d incur their wrath. I’d managed to dissuade him every single time. So when he began to sing that song, I began to fear for him again. “Don’t, Obe, they’ll beat you,” I said, gesturing that he stop.

The effect of my entreaty was like a sudden pinch on the skin that attracted only a minute response. He’d stopped and cast a lingering stare at me as though unsure of what he had heard. Then shaking his head, continued, “Skippy, Skippy, Skippy the bush kangaroo—”

He stopped singing when the handle of the door of my brothers’ room twitched. Ikenna appeared, walked to the lounge beside me, and sat in it. Obembe froze like a statue and remained by the wall, under a framed photo of Nnene, Father’s mother, holding the newly born Ikenna in 1981. He would maintain this posture for very long as if pinned to the wall. Boja came out after Ikenna and sat down.

Skippy, the kangaroo, had just fought with a rattlesnake, making prodigious leaps every time the serpent lunged to sting him with its venomous tongue, and the kangaroo was now licking its paws.

“Oh, I hate when this stupid Skippy does this annoying paw-licking!” Ikenna fumed.

“He just fought with a snake,” Obembe said. “You should have seen—”

“Who asked you?” Ikenna snarled, jumping to his feet. “I said who asked you?”

In anger, he kicked Nkem’s mobile plastic chair so that it plunged into the big shelf which held the television, VHS player and telephone. A glass-covered framed photo of Father as a young clerk of the Central Bank of Nigeria crashed behind the cupboard, shattering into pieces.

“Who asked you?” Ikenna, ignoring the fate of Father’s treasured portrait, repeated for the third time. He pressed the red button on the television and it went dead.

“ Oya , all of you to your rooms!” he cried.

Obembe and I ran there, panting. Then, from our room, I heard Ikenna say “Boja, why are you still waiting there? I said, all of you.”

“What, Ike, me, too?” Boja asked in astonishment.

“Yes, I said all — all!”

The silence was broken by the sound of Boja’s feet as he walked to his room, and then the sound of their door slamming. After we’d all gone, Ikenna turned on the television and settled to watch — alone.