Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

“What have you done?” I asked.

He threw his back and laughed dementedly, crawled into the unmade bed and assumed the foetal position.

I left the palace with my vision partially blurred. The guards lay slumped back into sleep. At the palace gates I remembered the key in my pocket, an invisible hand guided me again. Relief surged in my chest as I inserted it into the lock and turned. It opened. I thanked the dead fish that brought it to me and shrouded it in luck. Now the road felt cooler on my bare feet. The singing crickets had half whistles inside them; their sound grazed the night. An even paler moon morphed into a broken plate and its red dust disappeared back into the ground. Hovering in the air behind me was the sprawling red palace, somehow uprooted by my visit. Beside me the riverbanks arched, water rippled.

In the distance the sound of static beckoned me. I walked till my feet ached and the sound became a wall close enough to touch, twitching like the instances we change our minds. I couldn’t tell when I was swallowed into the other side.

In the morning, I rolled off the sofa and landed with a thump on the floor. Red ants crawled out of my pockets and made a trail. Anon sat opposite me laughing, more ants spilled from her mouth. I traced the cut on the side of my head, a morning alarm. I stood still for minutes, covered in a cold blanket, rubbing an optical illusion that had landed in my hands. Turn it one way and you had a lady with a cut on her head that would change location. Turn it the opposite way and a woman with blood becoming a small, red country in her eye appeared.

Three months after I picked up the diary from Mervyn, I woke up one morning needing to know more. I fished the leather bound journal from my handbag. Inside the front cover the name Peter Lowon was scrawled on the page. The diary was teeming with paragraphs. A grey margin line became a needle sowing a stitch into my side. I saw ink arrows morphing into real arrows, hurling themselves at words, the wounded words would escape with letters lost from injuries, limping off the papers, leaving a trail of blue black ink to drip onto my palms. I could hear the chants of kids playing easing through my letterbox and the screech of impatient car tires. My phone began to ring, but I licked my finger and turned the first page of the journal into another life. I glimpsed a sketch on the back cover. It was a drawing of the brass head with words orbiting around it. I didn’t run my finger over it, in case it came to life.

Adesua did not report Filo to the Oba. Instead the wall of anger she’d erected against her, crumbled on seeing the lost, vulnerable woman clinging to the brass head as though it held the answer to her problems. Adesua grabbed her arms and gently shook her. “Filo, ah ah , what has happened? Tell me, has somebody done something?” She’d pried Filo’s fingers off the warm brass.

But Filo would not speak. Adesua crouched down further till there was only the space between teeth separating them. She snaked an arm around Filo’s back in support, held Filo’s body while she slowly stopped shaking and the sniffling subsided. Outside in the distance the laughter of the palace inhabitants was heard. Adesua didn’t know it but the birds that had been repeatedly circling above Filo’s chamber, listened too. They heard Adesua’s anger, noted the confusion in her voice and still they did not move.

Finally when her concern burst through the roof and touched their heavy wings, they huddled their heads together, and waited. One bird fluttering down to the doorway would have seen the two women sitting with their knees raised to their chins, holding hands as if they were little girls on a farm rather than young women in a palace, their bottoms against the soft, weather-beaten earth, providing a temporary ceiling for the bugs and worms that scurried and slid layers beneath.

Meanwhile Adesua and Filo clung together listening to the sounds of the palace, bearing the weight of a silent thing, cloaked in a comfortable peace. Somehow within that chaos the two women had found a temporary relief. The silence crooned its intent, and unspoken words were exchanged through the small space between their raised knees and entangled fingers. They ignored the comings and goings outside the fragile bubble they were in, the noise from the rest of the palace that at times threatened to burst it. Adesua listening to Filo’s breathing even out again continued to hold her hand and waited. Not because she thought Filo would confide in her, but because she knew she wouldn’t.

Eventually, Adesua dragged her feet up to leave. By then Filo was staring blankly at her walls, but the corners of her lips were no longer pulled down and by the time Adesua walked away with the brass head tucked under her arm, Filo’s shoulders had ceased to hunch up. For the first time Adesua felt as if it wasn’t just a piece of art that belonged to her, but it was a real, live human trophy.

She left Filo’s quarters with a new, slick, uncomfortable knowledge. Of the darkness of Filo’s bedchamber, from the brown cloth she’d hung over the window to stop light flooding through. The wooden platter of days old half-eaten cassava and stew rotting in the far corner and the pungent, rotten smell that filled the room loitering just beneath their nostrils. Of the garments strewn across the floor, leaving a rainbow-coloured mess of materials you navigated your feet through to find a space. Next to the window, a once beautiful, wooden chair sat, chipped and worn. Bits of its top layer had been scraped off, leaving an awkward, bruised thing. It looked lonely, in a jumbled room where the mouth of the green bed mat grazed the terracotta walls.

Beside the bed area was a small, rectangular brass box on a wooden mantle, its one drawer half open, like a jaw dropping in shock. Inside it, you could see Filo’s jewellery. Glinting silver bangles, winking gold necklaces, dark maroon rings peeping coyly from the edges, a fountain of lime-coloured beads dripping out and down the side of the box. Beneath your feet, the hardened floor felt hot and unsettling. As if you were subject to its moods.

Unaware that the brass head had been found, the servants gave up looking for it. In fact, they secretly wished it were never found. Of course the Oba would rant at them and they would soak it up, as they always did. But that artefact seemed to brew nothing but jealousy and resentment.

It was sweltering as Adesua trudged back to the main palace, suspiciously so. She knew something was amiss. The air was thick with promise. Even the flies seemed skittish. Sun-stroked, burnished green leaves from the Iroko tree had abandoned their branches to scatter and rustle against the scorched ground. There were shouting, agitated voices mingling into a chorus of noise you couldn’t clearly decipher ricocheting through the air. Above the clouds seemed to frown before shifting, one moment a face, the next a half-bitten guava.

Adesua decided that night she must see the Oba. Her husband. A man she knew less well than her personal servant. Gone were the days when she felt like a young girl, and all she worried about was falling from tall trees or the scorn of her Papa’s tongue whipping at her when she was caught attempting to wrangle her way into wrestling matches with boys from the village. Now a new, sneaky awareness had arisen, simmering to the surface, a slow burn. There was no going back; she was the young wife of Oba Odion. A king’s bride, a coveted and envied position, but this did not give her comfort, it never had. And as she followed the winding path back under the half-watchful gaze of the guards who held their spears too loosely and their slack mouths even looser, suddenly a rock of fear lodged in her throat. She tried to imagine what this thing she felt was coming could possibly be. Moments later the tantalising smell of roasted fowl infused the air and filled her nostrils. She imagined the palace cooks with their sweaty brows and teeth-dented bottom lips flapping around each other to prepare the meal on time, while her visit to Filo still weighed heavily on her mind.