Irenosen Okojie - Butterfly Fish

A part of me was dying from the shame, another crumbling from the weight of it.

I couldn’t look him in the eye. I felt like nothing, a tiny speck under a shoe.

“Leave me alone,” I mumbled, pulling away. I couldn’t thank him for saving my life, for stopping my mother from drowning me. I stumbled through the hallway, deformed again in the light, blinded by tears. Bath water ran down the walls, its sloshing sound slipping through the plughole, filling my chest.

Outside my legs buckled in the night. I left the pale chess Queen crying in Mervyn’s pocket and the gargoyles holding bits of a battered chessboard chased the small openings on me, widening in the cold air.

When I arrived at Murtala Muhammed airport in Lagos I couldn’t bring myself to call Mervyn yet. I knew we needed to talk but I was still hurt and confused about being a hidden thing. Peter Lowon’s diary sat in my handbag. Outside, the driver of a yellow taxicab between mouthfuls of pineapple slices informed me the drive to Benin was long. I thought of my mother Queen. I imagined she took Peter Lowon’s diary and the brass head all the way from Africa to London, her only connections to the father whose footsteps she trailed as a little girl. I imagined she read the diary from cover to cover many times, knew it like the back of her hand; that when she passed her first school exams, she ran home to it and heaved bittersweet breaths of success over its pages. That she studied his scrawl and doodles, imitated them. And after she kissed the first boy who whispered chewing gum flavoured nothings in her ear and turned out to be completely useless, she weighed it in her hands and eyed it with resentment. He cursed her by leaving her that legacy. It was the curse of the broken-hearted, the way that only a father can.

Weirdly, I remembered it then: the black and white photograph from the diary. I fished it out, held it at the corner and stared at the faces, the creases. It hit me, I recognised him. Peter Lowon was the man from the café scene that trespassed regularly in my head, the one where I always struggled to hear what was said, the man who was both father and grandfather to me. He was out there, somewhere. I had met him once before. It was a memory after all, a fallen snowflake becoming a tear.

Dear Queenie,

I am a killer. I am a coward. I am your father.

If you find this, then you know I have gone. I was brought to this place and feared this day. The day you know what I have done. Please keep this diary, here are honest pieces of me I can offer you, hold them up to the light. I want to apologise for bringing shame on my family. I cannot make amends; I can only say that sometimes people do desperate things, terrible things. I ask for forgiveness. Queenie there are no good or bad people don’t let anyone tell you this, these lines are blurred daily. The bad we often see in others, we recognise in ourselves, bouncing off our own hand made mirrors. We are all flawed people trying to make our way. Should you choose to find me one day, I am out there waiting.

Tell your mother I’ve always loved her and I’m sorry for being the man she suspected I was. There is no blade to cut my weakness away, no shot to numb the darkness out. Would you believe me if I told you I am a prisoner of myself? I wish so much more for you. Queenie, you are me and I am you. This is the one thing I see with so much clarity; through you I was born twice. One day you will have your own child, and you will know a joy no words can describe, no mathematical equation can depict. It is pure, purer than water, purer than air, injections of life into the blood. And you will make mistakes too! Queenie I am in pain, the kind of pain that makes you run inside to bleed on your carpet privately. I worry that one day you will forget what I look like. I worry you will see me in the faces of strangers. See the black and white picture inside this journal? I am the one on the left laughing. In case you find yourself forgetting: THE ONE ON THE LEFT. Please keep it with you.

With you I laughed. I worry about other things too: that your mother will grow old hating me, that she will count her grey hairs and hold me responsible for each one. I worry you may marry a man like me, that life will beat the importance of knowing yourself out of you. I fear your anger and emptiness within you long after you have stopped calling for me. I have cheated you and myself.

I no longer have the strength to be mad because it has been sapped by a tree sprouting roots somewhere. Wherever I am I will be running from myself. Imagine no day without night, night without the day; there is no end to this. It is an empty well running through the homes of underground creatures we never see, a tunnel through the chests of farmers toiling the land, it is the hidden void where our dreams pile up like dead bodies. It leads back to me. As for the brass head, please get rid of it. Give it to a beggar man to sell, throw it in a river or gutter. I should never have brought it into my house; if you keep it you will bear the burden of the cursed and pay in a currency not found on earth.

Today is so ordinary Queenie. You are playing by the outside tap, counting coins for your bank by the white sugar cube wall. It is the worst day of my life. It is the last time I will see you throw your arms up so trustingly to me, or hold a terrible crayon colour drawing that I will say is perfect because it is. Or attempt to measure your laugh, something that cannot be done. You cannot tell that tomorrow your world will be different. Right now the mayguard is lazily swatting flies from his face, no longer pretending to do his job. The house girl is peeling yams in the kitchen. Aunty Eunice is hanging clothes on the washing line, a yellow vein shot through the sky, which is throbbing, swelling with lost years to come. Your mother is standing at my shoulder. Life carries on, Queenie. When you have ceased asking questions and my name has turned to dust in your mouth know that:

I am the father whose feet you danced on, I am a million broken stars at your fingertips, I am the night sky’s discarded brother, I am a blanket made of rain. I am the conscience searching for your footsteps; I am the Harmattan wind whispering secrets that will fall into the foamy hem of the sea and wash up on the beaches of other countries as rough pebbles and hollow seashells.

I am beating.

I am

I-

My guide Nosa didn’t talk much but when he did, he made it count. He seemed to be casually efficient with everything; expressions, explanations, even arguments. Illustrated by his curt dismissal of a driver he’d cut across earlier in traffic, swatting the irate man away like a mosquito. It was sweltering; the heat made my skin clammy and my white, cotton blouse clung to me. Anon and I sat side by side in the back seat, restless from the hot material, woozy due to the occasional jostling and headiness of being in Africa. Our palms grazed ancestor’s heartbeats.

Dust swirled into the scenes around us; the long stretch of granite strip twisting like a concrete snake in the heat, its offshoots holding items of luggage for passengers yet to collect them. Bike riders swerved in between vehicles, car horns blared loudly as the traffic continued to build. Buses and vans blocked each other off in the rising din. In the car side mirrors, barefoot children sporting adult mouths sold bottled water, groundnuts, plantain crisps, and bread. Mothers carrying babies tied to their backs listened to their adult tongues pressed against the hollows of their spines. We passed the odd huge billboard now and again.