Purity and the F Word
Photo: Ayoola Salako
Christina Purity bought a bottle full of curry spice and thyme and stuck it deep into her vagina so she could spice up her sex life. The following week, we all took turns visiting her in the clinic, and the mathematics teacher finally got sacked. Purity used to roll with the “geezers”, the meanest girls in the dorm, video vixens in teenage bodies. Girls would order all the ass and boobs cream they could find online so they could be offered a spot at the back of the class where the geezers sat, cuddling their big asses and counting F-bombs in their school works. I used to dream of them whenever I touched myself at night. I didn’t want to be greedy with my imagination so I’d picture them one at a time. Today, Shalewa; tomorrow, Vanessa. I had much to give and enough to go around. Everything stopped the day the hall master caught me in the toilet at 2 a.m., moaning and cursing and spanking an invisible bad bitch that I was straddling. I hated my dick the moment the blows landed on my neck. I was asked to put my feet in hot water. My crucifixion was not that different. I picked my own cross, broken branches behind the hostel. I was nailed to the bed with four sturdy hands belonging to senior hall prefects, but no vinegar was given to revive me when I fainted forty-seven spanks after. I was stranded in the afterlife for hours.
My story doesn’t begin like this. Before the era of cum, squad, and blood, I used to be a very different student. Before my classmates became the bad bitches of my fantasies, I used to dream about my career. Me, a doctor, coming home from work and telling my wife and children beautiful tales of the dead bodies I guided to heaven. I wanted to be like my dad, a doctor, who was supposed to save lives but missed the memo when he truanted his way through medical school. He came home every day looking more like a forensic pathologist.
‘Good evening dad. How was your day?’
‘Better than yesterday son. Just three dead today.’
I looked at school as my guide towards a bright future. I used to think of these days with words usually associated with the bright and colourful. Shimmering, simmering, glimmering, fucking. School was the perfect prison break, and I would have scoffed at anyone who told me otherwise. But first day at school, the universe sent me a memo of the future that awaited me. Back home, bedwetting was not a habit for me. It was a culture. I never had to bother about it because the maids handled it. There was always a new bed sheet, fragranced, waiting for me whenever I got back from playing in the field with my friends who lived, ate, bedwetted, and had maids that tended to their needs and deeds. I remember when my hall master came in on my first day, noticed the bed stain, and found me wearing my kimono and flip-flops nonchalantly.
“Who owns this bed?”
“Me!”
I was smiling and walking to my lockers to pick up my cereal and have a morning refreshment before the day began. I blacked out after the first slap. I was not conscious to feel the slaps that followed, but I could tell from the bandages on my neck, planks on my legs, and ringing in my ears when I woke up that the hall master had taken his time. I heard my cereals were the ones that were offered to the winners in the athletic competition during the Inter-house Sports Competition later that semester.
My roommate, Daniel, was vulgar, and he used the bible always for context. A lot of the things he said have accompanied me through my life and pushed me to laugh when I was supposed to be quiet. When I came crawling from the sickbay, it was Daniel who nursed me to health, who told me that the hall master called my father and my mother “proper representatives of crap” and ordered every other person in the room to call me “worse than crap”. Where we didn’t have injections and drips or bandages, we had laughter. And if laughter were words, Daniel was a poet.
“Deuteronomy is God’s diss track to humanity.”
One day, Daniel was performing at the centre of the room; the hall master was lurking. Immediately the punchline left Daniel’s mouth, the hall master’s legs closed his eyes. That was the last day I saw Daniel.
The Hall representatives take their jobs the same way an army commandant in a civil war would. Perhaps, they were in the wrong line of work. But there was no other explanation for the hall master: he was definitely in the wrong kind of work. He beat students for talking whenever he spoke, and he slapped the ones who were too quiet after he spoke.
‘Rude bunch of fuckers!’ Those were his favourite words, and they were what we called him behind his back. He fucked us from dusk to dawn. It was back-to-back semesters of fuckery, and he took his time no matter how many we were. One day, we all decided to throw a meeting of intellectuals in the junior class to figure out a way to remedy this dictatorship.
“We should write a letter to the principal and inform him about this,” one boy, who shall not be named and who always pushed his glasses up the bridge of the nose like Sisyphus pushing the boulder, said. No more suggestions were taken from him, and he was banned from attending all meetings after that. I heard no one even attended his wedding, and he was not offered an invitation card to attend our graduation party. After we had taken turns cursing his mother and announcing his sisters' fate of becoming prostitutes to albino pimps, we offered better suggestions.
“We should build a deity and offer his name as a sacrifice,” Joseph Barnabas, whose father was an Ifa priest at weekends and the secretary of a catholic church during the week, said. He strutted into the middle of the gathering and took a long pause before he spoke. He made it seem the pause was for dramatic effect, but we knew he struggled with English and was trying to pick his words, or else the meeting would be derailed because of his grammatical blunder.
“What will the deity collect in return?” I decided to spare him the effort.
“His life.”
“What are we going to gain from killing him?”
“Our freedom.”
“There is something about living that makes people forget.”
“The deity suggestion is too risky; let us just poison him,” Anderson, whose sister recently became a stripper, said. He had an image problem ever since his sister’s sex tape went viral on social media, the same week the school authorities announced that none of our seniors passed WAEC. Every senior in the hall had his sister’s moans on their phone guiding their hands to the toilet bowl. It was a consolation for the academic failure.
We offered suggestions that would make Albert Einstein question his Nobel prize, yet we didn’t settle for one. We had all dispersed before Rude Bunch of Fuckers resumed his shift. He had heard about our meeting and was too pleased to show how displeased he was. Our pleas for clemency were in futility. The next day we ran like runaways across the narrow fields. And then we rode imaginary okadas before we cut a large part of the thick bushes behind the school.
The weekdays were not any fun. We were failing, and the teachers had run out of classroom ideas to save our grades. They went from despair to anger, resenting our parents, referring to them as dumb. One of us, Esther, like the biblical one, a brave woman, rose from the ashes of cowardice like an Ajegunle phoenix and walked right through us until she was at the front of the class. My heart stopped. Our hearts stopped. Finally, a voice for us. Esther walked right to the teacher, who is now nameless in my poor memory, and whispered straight to her face: ‘Excuse me, I did not hear you.’ The woman’s eyes widened, and we leaned closer to get a whiff of the cologne of courage that Esther had slapped her face with.
“I am menstruating, ma. I need to use the toilet. Do you have tissues?”
Sometimes, I hold my cheeks when I remember how many times we got slapped for silly reasons. The nightmare of flogging, dodging slaps and bullets were made bearable with the stories and the gossips we traded to keep us company. We were scarred in our bodies and mind. I would be poetic about it but there is nothing poetic about being unable to use the toilet because you cannot sit on the toilet seats. If we had scars, that would be poetic. We had huge lumps and swellings on our bodies. We could have gotten into chickenpox roles in movies, getting the parts without any auditions. We looked like the children of Israel on their way to the promised land. Only this time, we had no Moses; we had ourselves. Decades later, when we see each other on the streets, we laugh about those moments, the pain and the trauma, how life has made a comedy of our tragic days. There is something about living that makes people forget. I do not know whether it is the absence of similar experiences that makes us forget what trauma once smelt like.
Life got easier after the hall master died. He was poisoned. Ojiefoh, the chapel leader, called it “God’s great gift to humanity”. He and his fellowship of hypocrites organized a wake for the dead Idi Amin the same day they spoke in tongues to celebrate his demise.
The press club published an essay on his death and titled it, “The chicken has come home to roost.” The club was banned shortly afterwards, not because they refused to refute the essay but because the school found out that all the members took cocaine and smoked hemp during their work hours.
The ban of the press club hurt the students more than the time the gates of our school chapel was closed with hammer, nail, and urine. We used to go to the chapel on Sundays before it was shut down. We were flogged from our beds every Sunday morning. During the rainy season, when all the hair on our skin was at attention, hall prefects would lick their lips and swarm in with belts and kicks. And like flies to wanton boys, they beat us for sports. We cried during the sermon and the ministers always interpreted it as our deep reverence for God’s words and salvation. The next phase was the speaking of tongues, and if your lips were not moving, your backs would not be spared.
‘Shedi labalaba, shedi lobolobo.’
It was a symphony. Everything changed when a senior prefect’s dick was found in the minister’s mouth. Since then, every prophecy from our mouth on Sundays was held in our private residence in the hostel.
Rude Bunch of Fuckers, Our Hall Master, died shortly before my first year in senior school, and so I was indifferent to his death. I was almost close to the immunity class, and I could not be bullied except for my innocence. Unfortunately, I realised that I would not need a hall master to slap me or break my bones for me to feel embarrassed. We were all growing up, and the united front became a divisive stand. The introduction of squads.
I have mentioned the geezers; I will just jump ahead and skip the cultists. I want this story to be funny, and I don’t want to tell you the tale of the group of students who were raped, beaten, taken to the bush, initiated, and killed the next day during a cult clash.
We had the “F4”. This was a lame attempt by some boys in the science department to recreate the Korean fantasy drama; it was so bad that girls whimpered, describing it as bats screeching through broken windows. The Failed 4 were a group of geeks who tried to act cool and deceive new female students to cure their long curse of virginity. They never broke the curse. People saw beneath their geek jokes and their awkward pronunciation of rap icons.
“It’s Jay Zee and not Jay Zed.”
And there were the Femboys. A band of boys who had been chewing sticks and sitting with their legs wide open since junior school. One day, they decided to be open about their true selves, and what better way to represent your bravery than to take up the name that people used to make fun of you. The Femboys were a closed group.
It was a comedy fest of squads and principles, and I was behind the scene as girls gave head and made headlines. Boys fought audibly without screen time, and gossip ran the scenes. I felt like a used condom whenever people met up in squads. I always had to sit awkwardly, turning my legs here and there. Fortunately, I bought a phone during the holiday before my penultimate year in school, and I faked a lot of phone calls to soften the injury of my loneliness.
In my final year of secondary school, we got a new mathematics teacher. He was handsome. We were growing hair on our cheeks and balls, and we thought those were the definition of masculinity, but this beauty was cleanshaven, and he had girls awwnning as he walked. The only problem was that he was a horrible teacher, and he got all his maths wrong. Often, we had to correct him. When he realised that we probably knew more than the last students that got him sacked wherever he was coming from, he used another tactic. He told stories more than he taught. He was an immaculate storyteller. Our WAEC dates were getting closer and some of us grew worried. We were doomed. Some took to other tutorials and some took to God. Whether it was prayer or coincidence, everything changed when the new mathematics teacher told Christina Purity to spice up her sex life. That was the only way we passed, that was how we graduated.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Festus Obehi Destiny is a student of English at the university of Lagos. He lives in Lagos and works as a freelance writer. He tweets as @hugsandeyes and on Instagram as @hugsandeyes.
