Area Boy
Photo: Umur Batur Kocak
The knock on the door is almost subtle, as though the door swallowed the sound. Your heart starts to race as you walk to the door.
"Who be that?”
No response.
Pausing halfway, an air of uncertainty hovers around you.
Area Boy is not one to knock like that. Even if he returns in the middle of the night, he bangs at the door.
"Who be that nau?"
"Boy, open the fucking door!"
The turbulence in your heart dies. Area Boy is the only one who calls you Boy in the neighbourhood: everyone else calls you Chikwado, your birth name.
The door snaps and clicks and groans as you open it gently. The blinding contrast of the full glare outside and the near darkness of the room and the way Area Boy stands with his arms against each doorpost and his head slightly bowed makes him look like a knockoff of Christ crucified. He pushes the door further inwards. You grope around, find the torch, and strike the switch. The room is illumined by dim rays. You shut the door behind you.
Area Boy staggers in, walks past you without a word, and lands on the bed stomach-down, so hard that the springs under the mattress yelp. You hear his grunts of pain. And because you pity him, you must tend the wounds. Using a rag soaked in warm water, you clean the wounds on his back. They look like machete cuts.
He grunts. "Small, small."
"Ndo, broda. Sorry."
You uncork the bottle of methylated spirit that you keep for emergencies like this and pour the liquid on his back. A tear snakes down your eyes as you watch him grit his teeth and mould his hands into a fist as he tries to stifle a scream and brace himself for even more rippling pain.
When you give him rice, he barely eats a spoonful. You don’t know if it is because the rice is plain even for your standards or if it is because pain has filled his stomach. Your mind is at peace when he falls asleep, his snores filling the room.
You sit by the window overlooking the soon-to-be wild bush that no one wants to manage and stare into the dusk, watching as pockets of shy stars slowly reveal themselves. Tears stream down your eyes as you try to imagine what your lives were before the darkness crept in and swallowed the light. All of it.
Your Pa and Ma were everything to you and your brother. Even though you didn't come from a rich family, your Pa and Ma ensured that the both of you had enviable lives. They were always there until, one day, they were not. That day, before they travelled, Pa had promised to buy a pair of shoes for you—a gift for topping your class—when they returned from a friend's wedding at Asaba. They never did. A lorry ferrying logs slammed into their car and killed them on the spot.
Your Pa and Ma's demise affected you in inexplicable ways. Your elder brother took to drinking and smoking, perhaps to flush the pains from himself. With time things began to worsen. Hunger became synonymous with daily living. Eventually, you had to leave Enugu—where you lived all your life—to Lagos, with your brother, since he could no longer afford the rent and your uncles and aunties were not helpful.
“The blinding contrast of the full glare outside and the near darkness of the room and the way Area Boy stands with his arms against each doorpost and his head slightly bowed makes him look like a knockoff of Christ crucified. ”
It took you some time to ease into the hustle and bustle of Lagos life and your new secondary school. You were surprised at how your brother blended in easily, learning to speak Yoruba fluently and becoming friends with the other boys in the ghetto.
Your train of thought crashes when Area Boy begins to groan and turn from side to side on the bed.
"Papa! Mama! No! No!" He starts to cry. Rushing to him, you pat his head until he falls asleep again.
*
"Boy, how far? Wetin you go chop this morning?"
"I no know."
Area Boy continues to check himself in the mirror, examining his face for ripe pimples to burst.
"Broda, ehm—"
"Ehm, wetin?"
You beg him to stay home because it's Saturday, told him about your terrible dream last night where a group of masked gunmen shot at him three times.
He laughs so hard that the room shakes. "Kai, forget that thing. Nah me be Area Boy. Nothing dey shelle for this ghetto." He flings a wad of money on the bed, grabs his gun from the desk close to the wardrobe and tucks it under his shirt with the precision of an experienced hand.
"You sabi prepare Okra soup bah? Eh, arrange am with one thousand and give Iya Ayo the rest. No go out o. Stay here. I go show for night. Lock door.”
You clutch his hand. "Broda—"
"Wetin sef?" The red-hot glare he shoots you can fry plantain.
Area Boy almost never gets angry with you, and even when he does, he is never physical. Behind all that bad boy air he carries about to scare people is a kind and loving elder brother, a young boy aged quickly by hardship. And you love him.
He stopped school a long time ago to allow you continue your education. Although he always tells his friends that school is not his thing, that his brain cannot house books—and you watch his friends burst into laughter—you know he isn't being truthful. School, before the pendulums of your lives tilted towards the wrong direction, before things went so south that it seemed the compass of your lives could only point in that direction, had always been his priority; he had wanted to become a professor someday. Now, he never stops boasting about you to his friends. "See this my brother here, I no dey use am joke. He too sabi book. He be Aibat Einstain of Nigeria."
"Broda, please, don't go." He stomps out.
This is not the first time you’ve begged him to give up the life of crime; your pleas always fall on deaf ears: "If I stop now hunger go kill us." But you know that there are better ways to earn a living and you won’t stop trying to make him stop.
*
As the heat of the sun roasts everyone and everywhere, Iya Ayo shouts your name weirdly, as if she is being choked. You run from the backyard where you are washing a bowl of vegetables for the Okra soup. You know something is wrong, and when you see her crying, your heart can barely be held in place by your chest.
“Your brother don die," she cries.
"Which brother? Person wey comot this morning. If nah joke stop am o." You know she isn’t joking but a part of you want to believe that it is all a joke, that Area Boy is pranking you.
"I dey serious. Area Boy don die. Im body dey lie for road, close to Ekon filling Station."
Without pausing to check if you had your slippers on, without pausing to collect yourself—because you, like your heart, cannot be contained—you run as fast as your little legs can, faster even because you feel like you are weightless and flying.
There on the ground, in a pool of blood, you bear the cold, lifeless body of Area Boy in your arms, his head placed on your left breast, just above your furiously beating heart. A crowd gathers and forms an amphitheatre around you. Lagos people know how to stand and watch sorrow. The news that will eventually make the rounds is that Area Boy was killed by some rival gang during a robbery. A thief gunned down by another thief: that's the way these people who don’t know him the way you do will put it. They will even say he deserves it. But you, you know better. And that is why you cry, cry until the last ray of sunlight is swallowed by the clouds.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is a Nigerian writer who writes both short stories and poems. His jaw still drops each time he gets published. He is an alumnus of Professor Chigozie Obioma's 2021 creative writing masterclass. His short story, wearing my skin, was shortlisted for the Ibua Journal 2020 bold continental call: Imagining a new Africa. So far he has been published in literary journals and magazines like Ibua Journal, whimsicalpoets.com, Brittle Paper, Nantygreens, penmancy.com, Bengaluru Review, asterlit.org, and elsewhere. If he's not writing, he is either taking a walk to clear his head of writers' block or thinking about his writing. Sometimes, if lucky, you can catch him fiddling on Facebook and Instagram to ease off boredom. Other times he's taking a nap.