He was muscular. He was tall. He was brown, with skin the colour of an eggshell. Some say he came into our street in February, others put it as late as July, but all the same, he came into the street, was living in it, and his activities were not known. He was like the wind that one could feel and say it is cool or hot but may not be able to tell where its journey began; or where it is going. Everyone called him Opposite Neighbour, a name he had indirectly coined for himself when he was asked his name and he told of where he lived. He had laughed that day, realizing his mistake, but the name clung to him because it was true. He was an opposite neighbour to a woman selling fish in a mini hut-like Pub, a hut that is ours, a woman that is my mother. He lived opposite the pub in one of the oldest houses on the street. It was a house like a rectangle, with the front-facing the road. Outside the house was marbled, and the compound secluded by a two-coach fence line. There was leftover heaps of sand here and there that made the house appear to be hurriedly left during construction. The roof covering the whole dull show looked brown, revealing that the house had served the sun. It was just like that of the woman selling fish opposite.

The two houses facing each other were different planets, call one Venus and the other Pluto. One lacked life and light, was so dull that echoes played in it for a while before escaping through loosely shut windows, while the other almost always brimmed with laughter, and chatter, and clinks of a bottle. One was the house of a man with shaggy beards and his small, hairy dog, Bingo; the other was the home of a couple with four children. When I started this story, it was this way.

Opposite Neighbour lived a clandestine life. No one knew well who exactly he was, what he did, or how he lived. No one knew if he owned the house or how long he would live in it as a tenant to an unknown landlord. We all woke up one Sunday morning to find him in the house, sweeping and cleaning its browned window panes. There was no account of how he entered, or what he entered with. And what every account will say is that he was a tall, dark man, with beards that always looked unkempt, or a man that had no known source of income but still fared, drinking tea or custard every morning. He looked older than 40, and had a hard face, with stripped scars running across his chin. It looked like Roman Numeral II, and like gun-wounds sustained in a small battle. Opposite Neighbour’s face barely smiled. When it did, which was seldom and usually while he was alone, his lips opened up to a red gum crowned with yellow teeth. His laughter was rarer than his smiles. It meant a shaking of the house, a breaking of the silence that formed a hue over him. But the hue was always kept unbroken except only once, on a day we caught him laughing at his dog when it ran around his house in frenzy, trying to bite its shadow. The act caused roaring laughter across the people present at the bar, and for that moment, with him laughing with others, he seemed to have become soft in my eyes, to have become one with us, a part of the street, blended. But the covalent bond was short-lived as he had simply unhooked his balcony’s door, came out wearing his green, clean short, and carried Bingo back inside. He did not acknowledge the laughter of others, but I had caught him laughing and that was important.

When a mystery subsists, hypotheses arise over its existence, Mother said. Many hypothesized that Opposite Neighbour was mad. They claimed he was deported having been caught with cocaine in Libya, or in Italy as some would say. Theories that he was an expatriate were popular, and he no doubt looked like one, from the way he spoke English to his dog, saying his short sentence, “Bingo come here,” in believably feigned half American accent. He also spoke Yoruba, with an accent strong enough to qualify him for a Lagosian, and this too contributed to his mysterious existence. Months later, I started forming a narrative of him.

Opposite Neighbour was usually dead between Mondays and Friday nights. His life saw blinks of light on Saturdays when he would sit on his balcony to greet almost everyone that would pass by his house while polishing his shoes which no one knew when he wore. He would tune his radio to KU FM, and nod to every good song bursting through the small speaker. He liked whistling to the songs playing. He liked singing aloud to those that he knew their lyrics. He liked peering at the Fish Joint opposite his house, and later liked the fish pepper soup they sold though would never buy. His only relationship with the people opposite him was to charge his phone or radio, or to get leftover fish bones for his dog. And even while doing this, he spoke only few words.

His narrative in my diary was going to pages.

The first five months of Opposite Neighbour’s stay was like stagnant water. The street remained dusty, the pub remained noisy and full of laughter, of people that had come to pour out sorrow and refill themselves with beer. His house remained empty. Children tried to go close to him by playing with his dog, but these know-it-all children only learnt that he had a fine, brown dog and a long curtain separating his balcony from the long passage that led into the possibly empty rooms. They couldn’t see the rooms, couldn’t decipher what he did when he was not seated in his chair in the balcony, nor could they tell if he had a name beside Opposite Neighbour. Night in his house all these while was dark, safe a candle that would weave shadows through the window on some Saturdays.

In my narrative, Opposite Neighbour was becoming a seer but I changed my mind. He became a man that was living in a house hunted by ghosts that would not allow him go out.

But then, too many things that were knitted about Opposite Neighbour started loosening the evening his dog died.

The Tuesday was mild in the afternoon, the sun hung loosely among the cloud. But evening came with a drizzle, and before we could decipher the language of the sky a downpour ensued. As the rain was falling and I was putting buckets outside, I heard a moan come from Opposite Neighbour’s house and rushed to the front of the house with my umbrella to see what had gone amiss. It was then that I saw him run out of his house, leaving the door open. It was then I saw something like emotion in his face when he ran into our house. I followed him in mad frenzy, sensing danger and taking in the smell of gin left by his body. His footsteps on the tile floor looked like big 8s, and just as I was approaching our door he stormed out as quickly as he had come in, carrying a small China plate. My mother followed him, her wrapper loosely tied. Together they entered his balcony and from there to his corridor. I waited for them, feeling too small to enter the house, or perhaps too afraid. Minutes later mother came out accompanied by Opposite Neighbour, who was crying. Mother told him sorry and came out, and told me that his dog died from eating chocolate and white powder. White Powder.

A small hole was dug by Opposite Neighbour behind his house the next day, and I watched from the pub as Bingo’s body was laid in the earth, the morning drizzle hiding the tears of the dead dog and the man. Death was something I hated.

When one thing dies, a wise man once said, another thing is reincarnated.

Our relationship with Opposite Neighbour became soft after his dog’s demise. He started coming out, started staying at the bar, started drinking alcohol. I was beginning to know him, to learn how he had been deported from Morocco, not Italy or Libya, as people had postulated. He started talking, though in few words, and took care to listen more. He looked dangerous and innocent. In how he counted his words before freeing them, he was dangerous. In how he did not show up at the bar or on his balcony for days, he was also dangerous. But he unveiled the story of his life with innocence, taking time to explain how life in Morocco required running people down to live, and how he had been caught in the bridge separating Morocco from Spain.

The night he disclosed how many people he had killed, I did not know how to bend my narrative to suit his personality. I paused my tale.

* * *

“My mother died when I was eight. I fled from home afterwards,” he said, nodding. The sun was hot outside. But inside the hut was cool. 

“Why? When?” I asked him.

“When is not usually a question,” Opposite Neighbour said.

His eyes glared, my heart shook, and sitting opposite him was becoming tiring. I paused, looked at his eyes, and could see the tears forming in them. The old also cry, I said in my heart and planned to include the scene in my narrative.

“Had you no other family? What of your father?”

“Home turned. Against me. I had to run. Because it became too heavy to stay.”

His sentences were not coming out smooth. A hawker was passing with groundnut, and his shrill shout interrupted the silence that was about to germinate between us. He was becoming restless, seen from his frequent turning in his chair.

“I grew in the streets of Lagos, and when I had the chance, I left for Morocco. I wanted to make a life. I wanted. To start afresh. After many years doing Street things.”

“Then you could not remain in Morocco?”

“Boy,” he said, “I have told you about Morocco. The running around. The sleeplessness. The running down to survive. Morocco was a war front.”

“You got deported, what did you do to the government?”

“Kali, you’re not supposed to know certain things.”

I looked at him deep in the eye, surprised, shocked.

This man, I thought, is a soft man of danger. I wanted to say that he should tell me everything, like A, B, C, to tell him that a masked existence is not bliss, to tell him that the street was thinking of putting him off, to tell him that he behaved like a viper, but I kept quiet. When a minute passed with us staring at each other’s face he stood up.

“I think. I have to go, Kali,” He said

I watched him stand and walk briskly into his apartment.

That night, I wrote that he was a kidnapper, cancelling out the seer. That night, his candle did not weave shadows in his room.

* * *

Opposite Neighbour did not come out the next day, or the day after. His clothes on his line became thinner as the sun burnt it. Dust swirled more in his compound. And then, on Saturday morning he walked out of the house wearing a black toga. Mother said that he had received a call. But no one knew exactly who it was that called him or where he was going. We only woke up Monday to find his body in his passage. No one knew how it got there.

Orjichukwu ChikamObi Golding currently studies English and Literary Studies at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. His works have been published or are forthcoming in Young African Writers Anthology, The Muse Journal, Pencillite, and others. He is currently the mate custodian of The Writers Community, a small literary family in UNN. You can hit him up on Twitter @Chikamobi