She picked a rock and grabbed a fistful of sand. She stood, turned and walked straight to me. Her nakedness, her person without the weight of fabric, was a natural push that did many things to me. Confused and alarmed, my legs froze where they were. My spines rattled on both ends. What was I to do with the approaching pointers, dark at their tips, and the emerging tropics between her legs? But more, why was she coming to me?
There, in front of me, she neither spoke nor touched my hands. Her eyes of red peppers, sharp as the edges of a knife, lacerated my forehead. Then, as if on a second thought, she took my left hand and transferred the sand, and the rock.
She smiled. I squeezed a weak smile. Hers disappeared. She turned and returned to where the ripples were. But this time she walked on towards the source of the ripples. It rose to her knees, to her thigh, and her waist.
She paused and said in a soft voice, “Run home, please.”
I ran. And to this day, each time I replay that scene, I feel myself in motion, running away from what I did not know.
*
At noon the crowd was back at Jide’s door. They had positioned themselves in small pockets, expectant. Ibe was at the same spot, shirtless. Jide’s door was ajar. Sisi was at the doorpost. Her usual war-ready pose was gone. The scene, as I now see it in my mind, was like a floating tableau vivant that lacked the usual theatrics. Jide was not there. So what was the gathering for?
An unusual and almost strange calm loitered. There was the occasional voice or cough. It seemed they had been instructed to offer their silence to the earth on which they stood, at least for once. I sat next to Ibe, and studied the crowd, scanning their faces for the stories they bore. I did not know what mine looked like; neither did I know how I was expected to arrange my face to suit the occasion.
And what occasion was it, anyway? The characters, Sisi in particular, and the place were clues that it had something to do with Dora’s case, but there must have been a new twist to the script. “Jide is gone,” Ibe was saying. “He left this morning.” I grunted something in response, for I had seen Jide leaving that morning.
My grunt was a metaphor – or rather – my way of processing the connection between Jide’s departure and the throng that had re-convened at his door. Ibe was beginning to say something, I feigned attention but was busy with the faces around. Having deciphered the novel twist in the story, Jide’s furtive exit, I studied the faces differently. Were they sad that Jide, the alleged offender, had disappeared before justice was done? Or were they heartbroken by the unannounced exit of their entertainment provider? It was hard to say, for their faces bore the marks of our collective slum existence – the pain, the normalized horror, the death of dignity. It was impossible to say what expression signified what.
Sisi pushed the door; it opened without the usual creak of doors around the blocks. The sleek Jide must have oiled his hinges. I bet he did. “Some of his things are still there,” said Ibe who was always in the know.
Sisi entered the room and shut the door. What followed is better described as the sound of fury. It started with a ripping sound: the curtains, perhaps. Then came the squeal of shattering glass, or was it Jide’s chinaware? The crowd did not move. The explosions ended with a big boom. The television? It was the heavy boom that moved the crowd. There were gasps and various shades of puzzlement: mouths opened as if to collect rain, eyes unblinkingly zooming in on the door as if to penetrate and stock-take the wreckage, legs stationed in mid-stride in readiness for intervention.
Sisi emerged from the wrecked room, sweating. Her chest rose and fell like the murmur of voices around her. But there was something more: her eyes were damp and as red as fresh palm oil. And for the first time Sisi sobbed in public.
Her tears sped down like sled on ice. She lifted her eyes to the sun, and bit her lips. When her eyes fell, they fell on the cold crowd. I saw a trail of questions in them, words she could not utter but could project with her eyes. Words that were meant to express how much she loathed the crowd for enjoying the show. A show that began in the room she had just wrecked and ended with an absconded man and a pregnant girl.
What I saw in her eyes were not significant then, for I was only a child. But they were vivid enough to leave imprints on my mind.
