There was a loud bang outside. It wasn’t right outside the window, but I knew it would have come from the next street. The gang was loud enough o have scared some people, because at that instant Gladys ran into my room, screaming, frightened.
“Thieves,” she said in a small voice. “They are shooting. God, who have they shot now?”
Because it was just seven on this Thursday evening I couldn’t imagine that any robber would be brave enough o strike an area when everyone as still up. Men were still returning from work; women were still returning from market; boys and girls were starting to rove in pairs and seek out secluded street corners for those quiet talks they would never have during daylight. Especially because it was Thursday and the latest edition of Super Story hadn’t come on air yet, any robber brave enough to strike at seven should be brave enough to stand lynching.
Gladys was still whimpering. She turned off the light in the room closed the curtains, stood at a corner of the window and peeped through the end of the curtain. “Can’t these thieves let people spend their Christmas in peace?” Suddenly she let go of the curtains and shouted “Blood of Jesus” as another bang sounded outside.
“What is it, Gladys?” I asked in a tired voice. I thought perhaps the single bang had come from a gun, more like a police gun. The property owners and residents of my neighbourhood had ordered extra security for the area. And they paid good money every month so that five police officers could always keep an eye on the neighbourhood every evening. After a recent spate of robberies in nearby streets, the extra security seemed as good as telling would-be robbers that this particular street was out of bounds.
Maybe the deterrent was working, because in the lat two months no robbery had been reported. That’s why I found it unimaginable that robbers would strike at seven on a Thursday evening. More likely, those police officers had fired a couple of warning shots to bring some to attention who wanted to prove uncooperative. But who, I thought desperately. A bike rider who would not stop and show his particulars? Or a pair of lovers caught exchanging sweet nothings in a dark street corner?
That second possibility amused me for a while until I realised that my sister was actually praying in a desperate to God, covering our entire family with the precious blood of Jesus, putting up a ring of consuming fire around our house, and striking the robber blinds with such blindness so severe they could never dream let alone think and plan to rob God’s children. She was about to say Amen but screamed another Jesus as the third bang sounded. It was so loud, and so powerful. Only a gunshot could have sounded like that. But as the deafening bang receded, I could hear a dim babble of voices, excited children screaming with glee in the next street. The sound of those voices brought relief. I said, “Gladys, stop behaving like a child. Nobody is shooting anybody.”
“Is there something wrong with your ears as well?” she asked, angry perhaps because I wasn’t seeing the gravity of the supposed danger we were in.
“My ears are fine. What you heard was a banger.”
“Banger,” she echoed.
“Yes, banger. You know, knockouts? Those little sticks I used to buy that looked like cigarettes?”
Another bang sounded. Gladys looked foolish for appearing so scared before her kid brother. Then, like the superior big sister that she was, she left the curtain and said in a very superior voice as she left the room, “So why haven’t those policemen done something about it? Bangers have been banned. I heard it on TV last week. Those children should be arrested for constituting public nuisance and danger to public safety.”
Yes, they should, I thought as she went to tell of an incident when a banger stuck inside a bottle had blown the bottle apart and sent pieces shards of it flying in all directions and wounding passers-by as well as the kid who had set up that little killer knockout in the first place. That went for the traders who sold the bangers to the children too.
But all that was talk. So many bans have been slapped onto some goods. Rice. Turkey. Second-handcars, for which the government said the country had become like a dumping ground for inferior good. But these goods still filled the country.
They should be arrested, I thought rather amused at the thought myself. The traders and millions of children for whom Christmas bangers were a form of self-expression. The louder the bang the better.
When I was young, I would buy little firecrackers, sixteen a pack, and light them up. They sounded like rapid-fire gunshots from those cheap old Indian films. These days, the banger manufacturers in Taiwan, ROC—as the product labels said—reduced the number of bangers from sixteen to three a pack, made each one bigger, and the explosion louder. In fact, so loud and sounded as real as an explosion or a gunshot next door.
Three bangs went off in rapid succession, followed by a whiz that reminded me of a rocker launcher in a cartoon, and then six more bangs and a chorus of young voices screaming, cheering and comparing notes.
It was just a few days to Christmas, but for them Christmas was not Dec 25. Christmas was the air, the season. It struck me then that I still had not felt Christmas stir in the air. At the sound of those bangers, I knew it. Christmas was around the corner. I could breathe it in the air.
** ** ***
That feeling was gone by morning. I woke up to a dry, dusty, hazy, cold Harmattan morning—the kind of mornings on which I would have done anything for a hot bath and hot breakfast. At if that wasn’t bad enough for a young fit but almost bedridden 24-year-old, my mother came right into the room without first knocking on the door and announced that she was heating water for my bath and that breakfast was ready. Over the last few days, I had learned to expect her next words to be whether I wanted the breakfast before the bath or the bath before the breakfast. Instead she surprised by saying, “I shall get a taxi to take us to the hospital as soon as you are ready.”
It was unlikely. Ever since the accident and after discharge from hospital I have remained an outpatient. I only went in for checkups every other day or so in the company of my father. Mothers were something else.
I asked, “Where’s Daddy?”
He had to rush out for an early meeting about the security. The police summoned all the property owners. I think it has something to do with those children shooting bangers.”
The thought of going to hospital with my mother stunned me. But I said nothing.
** ** ***
I said nothing because there were so many things that were not in my power to change. I didn’t want to, couldn’t, change my mother or the hospital. But I wanted to change my doctor.
The doctor who conducted my medical was a woman, more likely a young woman. Not that having a young woman doctor treat me was something wrong, but this one, well, she looked as though she’d only graduated two years before me. And she knew her job. At least she could play around with the medicals jargons in a way that made me, a young fresh almost bedridden graduate of chemistry, appear silly…words like cerebrospinal something or other, fibular compaction, deep vein thrombosis.
If I had my way, that young woman would have no business being my doctor. In fact, if I had my way, I would have avoided the accident that landed me in hospital in the first place.
Who would have thought that a young graduate waiting to be called, like all youths, to serve Mother Nigeria had been so exhilarated on graduation day that he’d done one very stupid thing that nearly crippled him?
I still remember speeding along the expressway in the company of friends in a friend’s Volvo. We were going nowhere, just taking a ride but speeding all the same. One moment the wind was whipping against my face. In the next moment, I was s creaming as the Volvo plunged into a crash barrier along the expressway and a lorry helped the Volvo along its merry way to destruction head on in the trunk of a huge tree.
I remember waking up and looking into the eyes of what I thought was a very young pretty doctor, the same eyes that now peered at me through a pair of plain glasses.
I winced as she pressed against my sore ribs. Was that part of the check-up, or did she do that to see whether I could stand the pain?
She said in a very controlled voice, “I know your ribs are sorer than you are leading me to believe.” I shrugged as if to say, you know better. “But then your ribs look even better to me than your legs do.”
I asked what she meant by that. That question made me seem knowledgeable, not like an average patient who thought the doctor knew best and never questioned a doctor’s decision or sought second opinions. But inside I was scared of the possible meaning.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she asked how sore my legs felt. I told her they felt like a carpenter from hell was perpetually hammering away at them.
“Let’s see how much you can move them,” she said, looking with intense scrutiny at my legs in a way that made my feel more exposed than was usual in a doctor’s examination room.
“No!” I snapped it so quickly she looked at me in surprise. Then gently I added, “I can’t…. They hurt. So much…feel so heavy.”
She nodded understandingly, made some notes on her pad and said in a voice that made it clear she was in control despite my reluctance, “I will schedule another x-ray for you with Radiology. For your leg, that is. I want to see how well the bones we put back together have remained in place. It seems to be suppurating on the inside. Depending on what shows up on x-ray I may have to schedule another surgery to get rid of the internal pus. That may explain why it hurts so much.”
I took that like a hero. “Are you saying I may have another surgery?”
“Mm-hmm.”
That I didn’t take like a hero. It was three days to Christmas, and it was no time for getting cut open in an operating room.
** ** ***
At home, I tried everything to get around the surgery. I made a little slit in my knee with a blade and pressed on both sides. Blood oozed. After the second day, when no pus still flowed, I gave up.
The tension of Christmas was growing stronger by the day. The day I gave up on my knee, Gladys came home with a huge package wrapped in gift wrapper. It was shaped like the wicker basket in which Baby Moses floated down the Nile, and was so equally important that Gladys kept it so close to herself. She came to meet me on the veranda and tore off the Sellotape on the gift wrapper.
It was a basket all right—filled with a packet of corn flakes, a bottle of peanuts, a tetra pack of fruit juice, a bottle of wine, tins of milk and cocoa powder, a box of chocolates and cookies, two cans of corned beef. Generally, the sort of provision she sued to take to school as a student at a girls’ boarding school only two kilometres from home.
I asked whether she was planning on going back to school, which was an irony, for she worked as a marketing idea sub-executive at an employment agency.
She grunted. “School? Puh-leeze. This is supposed to be a Christmas hamper from my boss. Everyone at work got this. I mean, did he think I was so hard up for cash I couldn’t afford fruit juice and corn flakes and groundnuts?” When she pushed the basket aside dismissively she added, “When you think about it, it seems like I am going back to school.”
“What were you expecting?” I asked for lack of something better to say. “Baby Moses in a basket?”
** ** ***
The next day, Dec 24, Gladys still felt disappointed with the contents of her hamper. She agreed with my argument that her boss had sent that hamper in good faith, probably unaware of the contents since hamper makers may have assured him enough goodies were loaded inside. She conceded that the gift from her boss could have been from the bottom of his heart but that there was more room at the top for more. She planned, during her shopping that day, to make up for the all the deficiencies. That meant cutting the time she would spend for home shopping to buy clothes she’d probably wear only once. She would visit every designer boutique she could think of, and the bend-down boutiques as well. I wondered how she would combine that itinerary with shopping for Christmas lunch.
Christmas lunch was a 24-hour task. No two people wanted to eat the same thing at Christmas, and our parents wanted to see that on this one special day everyone got what they wanted. That meant four courses for four different meals for the four souls in the house.
Gladys zoomed out full of great hopes for what she’d buy. When she wasn’t back by eight that evening, my mother started to worry. Father calmed her down. She forgot about the Christmas vigil service she was supposed to attend.
Outside children thronged the streets. Bangers exploded. I could hear the strains of Jingle Bells and Jogodo on my neighbour’s CD player.
Despite the noise around, at eleven my mother rose from her seat and said she’d heard something. I said it would have been more alarming if she didn’t hear anything for all the noise outside. I felt too weak to talk.
Ignoring me, she opened the door with a surprise, then furiously put both hands to her chest as though to ward off some evil. She cried, “Jesus almighty. Gladys, Gladys, Gladys…How many times did I call you? Where have you been all day, this girl? Do you want to kill me?”
Father tried to mediate, but mother rushed on, saying she’d thought something had happened…
“Thought what?” said Gladys, catching her off balance.
“Are you blind? Can’t you see? Or you don’t see all the missing people that have been used for rituals?”
“God forbid,” said Gladys, running a hand through the air above her head and making a loud fillip with her fingers. “Not me and you.”
Father finally said, “We thought something bad had happened to you.”
“Something happened.” Gladys hitched up the hem of her skirt, revealing a cut with a bruised shin and a bandage over it. As mother gasped wordlessly, Gladys explained briefly, “The traffic was heavy. I decided to take a bike. The okada man ran into a bus.”
Mother cursed the bus driver. “You mean the bus driver ran into the bike,” she said.
“Whatever. There was an okada, a bus and a running into. It doesn’t matter who ran into whom.” With that, Gladys left her package on the floor of the sitting room and went to get others outside.
For once Mother forgot to thank God for her daughter’s safe return. She itched at her daughter’s rudeness. But I didn’t hear her reply, because I drifted into a world of my own.
** ** ***
When I regained consciousness I was lying back down on an operating table in an operating room with a bright light overhead. That young doctor had two nurses behind her as she spoke to me. “Can you hear me?” she said.
I nodded weakly.
“What have you been doing? Have you been cutting up your knee with a blade?” She didn’t wait for a reply. One nurse inserted a syringe needle into the intravenous line attached to my arm. I felt numb. A strange taste rose in my mouth. My senses seemed to have never been more alert, as the doctor said, “Your parents are outside. They have a message for you.”
When I asked what, my voice sounded weak, like a low rumble in a nightmare.
“They said Merry Christmas,” she said and turned away from me.
I felt too weak to think clearly. The doctor and both nurses put on their green robes, secured the sashes behind, put the cap and mask in place and looked like astronauts in the little theatre.
As she turned to me, I said, “Do you want to spend your Christmas Day in an operating room?”
She looked at me over the rim of her green surgery mask, seeing me for the first time, I thought, like a human being, not a guinea pig on her operating table about to go under her knife.
She replied, “I have to be in here as long as you are in here.” She put another syringe full of yellow liquid into my IV line. “Sometimes the day doesn’t matter. Only the living can celebrate Christmas. That is what I have learned to believe…” In a small voice that chilled me she added: “If this gangrene fully sets in like I am suspecting it will, we may have to amputate your leg. I guess you may say its either Christmas or amputation.”
My stomach churned at the weird options that dangled before me. My eyes grew heavy. My head rolled of its own accord to the blinding light overhead. I could taste the drug creep up in m throat from the IV line.
I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was unconscious or conscious, dead or alive. Which did I want?
For most people Christmas was the fun of the season. It was driving through streets choc-a-bloc with traffic, lined with shops decorated with blinking fairy lights and coloured shiny papers and lights of greens, blues, reds and yellows.
It was wishing I could be very generous to my Jehovah’s Witness neighbour when he came visiting with his family and hoping he would not touch a morsel of all the food that would be offered them.
It listening to my girlfriend scream at me: “You are doing it again. Every December you cook up one excuse so we can quarrel, so you won’t have to buy me anything at Christmas, so that you can wait until January to make peace.”
It was listening to my neighbours scream at each other over Christmas clothes for their children, listening to the sound of sizzling onions, smelling the burning hair of goats roasting in open fires around the neighbourhood.
Now, which did I want? I thought to myself, very solemnly, “I want to live.”
And then I realised something.
Christmas was nothing.
Nothing but desire
As I began to drift away, a voice in the room, a voice that could have been that of the doctor, or one of the nurses, said: “Merry Christmas.”
I couldn’t even reply, “Same to You.”