Chinweizu Lydia//Winner, Outstanding Literary Artist of the Year, 2024

Before they moved into the new storey building adjacent to ours, before we even knew we would have neighbours that would make us whisper in the day, we used to run up and down the stairs of the house, in and out of apartments to play hide-and-seek and avengers game. That was before it was painted, when lengths of a hundred thick bamboo sticks crisscrossed the bare, coarse storey building. Once, I saw Emeka jump from the first floor. He landed like he was in an Indian action film with his gun clutched to his bosom, starting into a run as soon as his bare feet touched the sandy floor. I tried it too, bruised my heel, and at the end of that gun shooting session, Chimaobi, Ebube and Odera laughed at me, even Emeka. “Ujunwa, it’s like you don’t know you’re a girl” was what they all said. Only Kosi told me sorry and cleaned my bruise with a squeezed onugbu leaf. The green juice stung so bad and my heel hurt like it was held over fire. I did not play with them for days. It was terrible waiting for my bruised heel to close up. I wanted to go out everyday to play with my friends. And I was longing to hide with Emeka, to come out with him when everyone else had been found and have them look at us like, “You think we don’t know?” They came to my house one day to see me and my leg. Kosi brought me half-eaten roast corn and coconut which edges were rough and looked like the colour of her teeth. Emeka went home last.

We had nowhere else to play hide-and-seek when the workers on the building began plastering. We could not even play on Sundays; some of the masons slept there. (That was what Mother called them, masons). So we did game-start in the narrow way between the fences of Kosi’s house and mine, clasping ourselves by the walls when trucks loaded with cements came to the building. Emeka said that at the end of the plastering, the masons will go home and there will be a long break because the owner of the house will have to save money before he can start painting. We would have more time to play in the house. But now, we were passing time on a dead log in front of Kosi’s fence, waiting to play game-start. It was midday. And the sun was high up the sky.

“What if every husband and wife who will live here has children that are like us?” asked Kosi. With a stick, she was drawing a large rectangle on the sand.

“It will be interesting oo,” replied Odera.

“That’s if they will come out to play like us,” said Chimaobi. He stuck a finger into his nostril and drew it out, trailing thick, slimy phlegm like he was glad to have found it there. He put it in his mouth. My stomach grumbled and I flung the guava in my hand.

“We will make them come out,” said Odera.

“If they are like you, I would stop coming out to play,” I said to Odera.

“Why?”

“We would all have one blind eye in two days.”

Kosi giggled with a hand over her mouth like she did not want Odera to hear. She was drawing smaller rectangles inside the big one. Everyone knew that Odera threw stones like a mad man.

“And you won’t marry a girl who has one eye,” I said. He said nothing to me. And I knew it was because Emeka was there. Odera could beat every one of us except Emeka. Except me, too, because of Emeka.

“What if the children behave like oyibo? Their feet will never touch this ground except when their father wants to drive them to school like Chimaobi’s neighbours,” Ebube said.

“Let them be whatever they want to be. They won’t make me stop playing,” Odera said. He got up and everyone followed. We took our positions inside the rectangles for game-start. And soon, we were shouting about who touched who and who caught the other by the knickers. This was how we lived in Edozie Close, Nzuteigbo Street, in a small community on the outskirts of Nsukka.

*

Nnamdi is my brother. He said he wants to study civil engineering and he likes to shout at me. He goes to the storey building all the time, talking God-knows-what with Peter, the man in charge of the uncompleted building, and looking into his big phone. I thought people who want to study civil engineering look at buildings instead of looking into phones. When I told Mother and Mother scolded him, he went out one day and locked the gate behind him, locking me in so I would not go out to play. I took a spare key from Mother’s box and slid it under the gate to Emeka who was already waiting for me. He opened it and let me out. Nnamdi thinks he’s smart. We were wrong about the house; there was no break. Emeka said the owner of the house has enough money to last until the building is completed. It is true. Because after the plastering, carpenters came and put the doors and windows. Then the painters came and the floors were tiled too. The days the floors where tiled were the noisiest, noisier than the sounds of our guns during avengers game. From our house, we heard the pounding of the tilers’ mallets.

The last time we entered the house was when Peter called us together and gave brooms to each of us. We were to sweep each of the apartments from the top floor to the bottom. It was no longer the bare, dusty place we used to play hide-and-seek. The apartments sparkled. Emeka said that his house would be like this when we start giving birth to children. And I scraped hard at a tiny, little mound of dried cement on the floor with the head of my broom pretending I did not hear him say ‘we.’ Each of the apartments had what my brother called chandeliers, lights in tiny glass bulbs strung together hanging over sitting rooms and the dining rooms. The floor beneath our feet had this smooth shine. The building was like a big man’s house waiting for furniture to arrive. The furniture did arrive, in large trucks. But they did not belong to one big man. There were many big men. They were not the kind of big men I saw at Sister Adanne’s wedding, the big men in flowing agbada and the men whose stomachs did not allow them to button there tuxedos like Sister Adanne’s husband buttoned his that day. They were big men with thick muscles, bushy beards and isi dada. (Mmeso called it dreadlocks because she reads big books all the time and corrects everyone in the house. But isi dada makes it sound more like it looks, like a mop). And there were many boys. They were like my brother Nnamdi. You could tell they were not yet big men because they were thin, they had no beards and no isi dada.

During what would be our last game-start in the narrow way between the two fences, we contemplated our new neighbours. We sat on the log by the fence, facing the building we had helped to clean, a building which now seemed like a strange island for the presence of these tenants we did not understand.

“Why don’t they have children?” asked Kosi. She looked sore with her eyebrows knotted, looking up at the house.

“Can’t you see? The boys are their children,” replied Odera.

“Odera is a big goat,” said Ebube. Odera fixed on him. And I knew what would follow next.

“How can there be children without a mother?” continued Ebube. “And even if there were women, would they give birth to boys boys boys like that?”

A small, rugged stone flew past me, Emeka, Kosi, and Chimaobi and struck at Ebube’s bent head. All eyes turned to Odera who dashed off just then and soon to Ebube who immediately chased after him wielding an empty milk tin. Their shirts billowed behind them.

“And how could they take up all six flats of this building? Just men and boys. No space anymore for a family with children,” said Kosi. Kosi was the only child. I envied her because her mother gives her whole lumps of meat after meals. She did not have to share. She also did not have a big brother that locked her in the house to punish her.

“Maybe the owner of the house asked all of them to come here and live. Can’t you see? The boys are thin. They are being helped,” Chimaobi said.

“Yes. That is what it is,” replied Emeka.

That was not what it was. I know because later in the night, Nnamdi and Mmeso and Mother talked about our new neighbours. Nnamdi said they were bad people, that they steal people’s money through the internet, white people. That’s why their generator is always on every single day when we cannot even afford fuel. But in my mind I was like, “How can a White person allow himself to be robbed? I thought they are more intelligent.” As if Nnamdi saw my mind, he said that they use ọgwụ, black magic to confuse them. To tell the truth, I began to pity their White victims. Mmeso did not feel the same. She said that White people are now paying for everything they did to our forefathers.

“Shebi they used brutal force then? They should now tell which hurts more between that one and waking one day to find that you have, with your own hand, sent your life’s savings to someone claiming to be a soldier lost in Istanbul.”

What Mmeso said did not bother me as much as what Mother said next, that our neighbours also use ọgwụ to turn children to money and that I will not be going outside our gate to play again and that I won’t be coming home from school by myself. Nnamdi also said they do not go to church; they go to ndị dibia. Mmeso called it spiritism, but I refused to call it that because why does Mmeso have a name for everything? This name even makes our new neighbours’ evils sound like a proper profession. I had many questions. Did they go to people’s houses at night to collect children? I had to know so that l would tell my friends to lock their doors better before going to sleep. I could not wait for day to break. My chest was tight and I knew it was because wild fear, the kind that makes you want to run away, was trapped in the walls of my stomach. I could not sleep. It was that night I knew that cocks crow many times before the break of dawn.

I ran to our fence as soon as I heard the grating of Kosi’s mother’s broom against their stony-floor yard; we hear her sweeping every morning. That’s what happens when you use fronds of coconut tree to make your broom instead of palm fronds. Soon, as I expected, Kosi came out with gallons in their wheelbarrow and I whispered her name as fiercely as I could. She came over and I did not care about the chewing stick sticking out between her lips and the odour that would follow when she opened them. I whispered that she should be careful about our new neighbours, that she should tell Odera and Emeka and Ebube the same too if she sees them at the borehole. She looked at me like I changed colour overnight. I told her I will tell them more when the sun comes out.

*

We were back to school. I, Ebube, Kosi, Chimaobi and Odera were in Primary 5 in the community primary school. Only Emeka was in JSS1. But we all walked home together everyday. It was the best thing ever.

Things had changed on the street, changed even more in Edozie Close. Kosi’s dog barked and howled every night and looked worn out every morning. One night, we heard the sound of many rushing feet, then banging on the gate of our new neighbours. Mother heard, the following day, from Kosi’s mother that the street vigilante group pursued masked boys and lost them. Kosi’s dog growled all the time at one of the boys, the one with bloodshot eyes and scruffy beards. We stopped roaming bushes in the evening (except when we went out to find snails) and we played either in my yard or Kosi’s yard, never in the open street. They were big enough for game start but too small for hide and seek and avengers game. But we played anyway. We had to, while our mothers talked all the time about how the life had been snuffed out of our street. The younger boys of the new neighbours did not grow fat like the big men with isi dada. Two of them came one day and asked us to give them guavas. If you had something to say about our new neighbours, you had to say it in whispers. Mother worked hard to be home before dark. Nnamdi never stayed outside our gate beyond 6:30 after Mother whacked him across the face and asked him, “Do you want to kill me?”

Policemen drank every Sunday at Mama Judith’s. They talk and laugh and argue at the top of their voices. But Mother said they were not there just to have fun, that they were watching people’s moves. I hoped to God that they would come up our close and watch our new neighbours because Odera found black feathers and dried blood and a calabash full of eggs in Ebube’s mother’s groove of tall banana plants. Odera had called us and showed us that day. We had stood there, watching it with stunned faces while Odera looked at us with a satisfied face, like he was a hero for finding it first. Maybe he thought it was a small thing. I felt fingers scrunch up my ear from behind. From the first touch, I let out a terrified scream as my heart thumped the fastest it ever had. I turned to see that it was Nnamdi’s hand, not the feathers I had seen. He dragged me by the ear back to our house.

Odera kicked every can on his path as we walked home from school one day through a shortcut that led directly to Edozie Close. Kosi plucked the petals off a wild marigold in her hand, Ebube and Chimaobi talked about their English teacher’s tight skirts and Emeka was asking me what I want to be in future. What we did not know was that on that small road hardly ever walked, it was sealed without our consent, the beginning of our walk through life with tear-drenched hearts and guilt-stained faces. How could we have known we should not have followed the shortcut? Odera saw it first. He froze on his track and then we stopped because we saw it too, a figure in thick hooded Balenciaga jacket with dark shades on with his hands in his jeans pockets. His feet were bare, he stood tall and huge in the middle of the path. He faced us directly, like a brick wall, and I thought about how we were nothing more than ants before him. My knees quivered under me and my tongue grew cold in my mouth. I was convinced that we were all finished. As if a whistle went off in our heads, we all turned around at once and ran, ran fast toward where we had been coming from. All I could see was the dust in the air and leaves tearing off the path as we ran on thin, terrified legs. It was not long before I heard a scream, followed by a loud sound, like a hard slap, before the scream slowed to a moan, drawn and muffled.

I knew whose voice it was. I could make out that voice anywhere, even if I heard it under water. I slowed down and looked back. And there was Emeka limp already in Hooded Man’s grip. It dawned on me, like how we unfurl ọkpa from banana leaves for breakfast, the reality that I would never see Emeka again, that his mother on hearing this would wail and roll in red mud wet by her own tears. And Mother was right. Our new neighbours use ọgwụ to turn children to money.

Chinweizu Ugwuagbo loves Jehovah first. She loves flowers and blue skies. She still sends and receives handwritten letters. Her favourite authors are first, Richard Wright and Peter Abrahams, for teaching her to write hearts out, then Noviolet Bulawayo, for teaching her to watch and write children. She often thinks of children who have to sleep in markets without soft pillows and warm clothing, of what becomes of the child-hawker. More than anything, she believes in the distinct accuracy of Bible Prophecy, in genuine hope and in the coming New Order.