I.
She came into the world with her hands fisted. She didn’t arrive crying as most babies do. A nurse had to smack her brown little bum with a wooden ruler before she gave a loud, piercing cry. Four days later, in the middle of a quiet street, sun burning fiercely on the asphalt, a car knocked down and killed the nurse. The girl’s companions, all three of them, stood watching as the driver sped off and grew smaller and finally melted into the distance. They brought news back to the girl about the errant nurse, how painfully she had died, writhing, confused, face skyward, blood pouring in a thick line from her nose to her ear. “Before her eyes closed, she saw us,” the smallest companion, Y, said.
“Be quiet,” said the eldest companion, Z.
The girl smiled in her scented bassinet bed. Her mother caught the smile and called to her father to come see it. He ignored her. Her naming ceremony was a few days away, and all the money he had set aside for it had gone towards the tests they had had to run when the mother had labored for hours and the baby refused to come out. He sat calculating and scribbling numbers into a flimsy paper, trying to figure out how to make do with the little he had left. But the girl, offended at what she read as dismissal, blinded him in one eye. Every day, punctually at first light, her companions, X, Y and Z, took turns pushing their fingers into the man’s left eye. He felt this daily prodding as a dull ache at the back of his head, just there, persistent, inexplicable. When he died some months after the girl arrived, rotund and creamy-white worms poured out of the eye like they had been breeding there all his life.
The girl tore through the family like a brakeless bulldozer, taking out whatever or whoever got in her way. People and things went missing or turned up dead on empty, deserted streets: relatives, friends, neighbors, pets: nobody was spared. Her mother’s brother, her Uncle James, lost both of his legs because he commented on the shape of her head during the naming ceremony. Her companions sawed off his legs in his sleep. The next-door neighbor’s cat that meowed too loud and interrupted her sleep drowned in a bath of rain water. When it became clear to the mother that something was wrong—they had been left completely alone by then, and the girl was almost two—she started to take her around, seeking help.
First, they went to the pastor of a white garment church whose eyes, red as a car’s break light at night, terrified the mother and amused the child. He confirmed her suspicions; one look at the girl and he screamed at the mother to go away with her and never return. “If you know what is good for you,” he said as she turned to leave, “you will go and leave this girl somewhere and never look back.” But the mother ignored the pastor and took her to other places—to an Alfa in Ijebu-Igbo who wanted to lick her kunu before helping her, to a magician with sinuous fingers and thinning hair which he kept trying to put into her blouse, a witch doctor called Professor, and a prophet that lived in a hut on a sun-beaten beach in Lagos Island.
They arrived at the hut and the mother stood outside with the sleeping child balanced on her back. The prophet waved her over and whispered some words to her, but she couldn’t quite make them out. He put his hand over her mouth when she asked what he had said in a too-loud voice. The child had to remain asleep, else he wouldn’t be able to attend to her at all. “There is power and there is power,” the prophet whispered. “When power meets power, one must bow. This girl sleeping on your back is a powerful girl. You cannot see them, but those are her watchers standing there, they watch over her. They have turned their backs on us but they can still see us and they are trying to wake her up. They have been trying to wake her since they saw you were coming to me. I deal with them every time. They know every letter of my name.
“Tell me,” continued the prophet, “did you not almost fall on your way here?”
“Yes,” the mother answered, her skin breaking out in hives. “Many times. I hit a stone just there.” She, too, pointed in the direction of the girl’s companions. The prophet smiled a knowing smile. He stared long and hard at X, Y, and Z. They felt his eyes on them.
“I will help you. There is a way to cut what binds them once and for all. I will help you. We will save what’s left of the real child you were to born, the one whose rightful place was taken.” Tears streamed down the sides of the mother’s face. He told her to come with him. “Careful,” he said as she came in after him. “Inside here they can’t hear us or see us. Behind this door we are here but not really here.” Her face was red under the dim lights in the Prophet’s hut. The place smelled like coconut and shea butter. There was mist in the air. The prophet took the girl from the mother and bathed her with water from a plastic bottle and marked under her feet with a blade—two small lines side by side for each foot—and, for what seemed an eternity, spoke in tongues. To finish the job, when they returned home, the mother was to stand with the baby at the entrance of their house and call the girl’s name three times, one to dispel each companion, to sever the tie. The mother made her way out of the hut and the girl’s companions followed, telling her what had happened while she slept. They did not know what the prophet did to her, but something had happened, they said, and she needed to be careful. The mother walked out the beach with sand in her slippers and entered a Sienna going to Iyana-Oworo/Oshodi.
II.
Toni got off work at five but did not leave until ten after because the sun was out and hitting her face right and it would be a shame to waste all that light. She stood outside the office building pouting into her phone, taking pictures, wind lazily lifting the hem of her dress. She’d have to spend longer in traffic, about an extra hour, but she did not mind that. She had resolved, since her mother died, to live life on her own terms, and that meant that she could do whatever she wanted to whenever she wanted to, and, for that matter, however she wanted to. She shifted from one pretty spot to another, switched angles—from multiple selfies to placing her phone against the window for a fuller picture, and then a full frontal, the phone held with two fingers each of her left and right hands—and even made videos. She bade the guard goodnight as she made her way out, but he was too distracted by the news on the radio to hear her. She walked down the dusty, shop-lined street, at the end of which was the terminal where she boarded the bus to Iyana-Oworo every day after work. Her steps were urgent. Peeking out from the Adidas slides she had changed into after taking off her stilettos, her toes collected dust. Some guys called to her as she walked down the street. She ignored them. At the terminal, she had not waited for up to a minute when a Sienna stopped in front of her and the woman in the front seat said , “Iyana-Oworo, Oshodi,” and turned away and looked straight ahead. Luckily, there was no tussle; none of the people flanking her were interested. There was space for one more person in the middle seat, just behind the driver. Four people—three women and a man—were packed into the backseat, a shovel’s handle jutting out of the boot behind them, forming a rough triangular halo above a woman’s head. Sweat crowned the only man’s bald head. He sat a bit forward, his back off the chair, and stared at her as she momentarily scanned the bus, pretending to wait for those in the middle seat to make room for her. It was a necessary thing, that furtive scanning, especially for someone like her: young lady, ripe, pretty (though not in the conventional way)— the ever-present possibility of harm, how ugly things could quickly get, all the sordid stories she read every other week on X, passed around so casually they lost their actuality and became mere cautionary tales, of women who, desperate to get home after arduous days at work, entered cars with tinted windows and returned damaged in unspeakable ways, or never returned at all. She entered and slid the door shut. The woman she sat next to had a toddler on her laps, a little girl not more than two, wearing a pink dress dotted with small, fading petals. The girl sucked her thumb and looked at Toni, and, disgusted, Toni made a face and turned away as the bus gathered speed on the expressway. The mother pretended to be asleep. The prophet had told her not to let the girl look into her eyes for too long because she could extract information that way.
Toni remembered her best friend Tolu’s daughter, Ewa; how brutally Tolu had taken sucking from her, leaving for the child constant horror even at the thought of it. Back then, it had been Toni who suggested she coat Ewa’s thumb with pepper while she slept, and the child had dipped the thumb in her mouth and begun wailing. Tolu had repeated the same thing for many nights after that, and, naturally, before she turned three, the child had stopped sucking. Toni flirted, for a moment, with the idea of calling Tolu when she got home, but they had not spoken since they signed out after NYSC because she had been against Toni dating Obi, her current boyfriend. Toni still remembered her exact words: “He feels too much. You are a very emotional person, Tee, you need someone buttoned-up, a square man. You’ll be up late at night with Obi, explaining why you said Love you without adding the I.” By then, of course, Toni had fallen for Obi and she was mad Tolu was deliberately getting in the way and so cut her off.
She checked Google Maps and saw a red line running from Third Mainland to Iyana-Oworo. She thought about the long ride ahead, the pain in her side, what to tell Obi when he asks if she has eaten—whether to tell him the truth (nothing) or lie (rice). No point in lying, no reason at all for it, but she had been increasingly unable to help it. She hoped the lies would form a wedge between them and drive them apart. After a long silence on the phone with Obi the day before, he had cleared his throat and said, “Babe, are you still here?” and she had pretended she didn’t know what he was talking about and said, “Where?” and another long silence had followed. His “Don’t worry”, when it came, had a painful dip to it. It made her sad. But she couldn’t help it.
Wind struck Toni’s face with annoying persistence. She turned away from the window towards the girl, who still had her eyes on her, sucking, wondering why Toni had made a face at her. She increased the pace of her sucking when she saw that Toni had turned towards her. She made saliva dribble down her thumb onto the wet neckline of her dress. She stopped, removed the spittle-whitened thumb from her mouth, and seeing Toni’s disgust give way to relief, put it back. She did this over and over until she had Toni’s rapt attention, and then, out of nowhere, when Toni briefly turned away, poked her cheek with the wet finger.
Toni was stunned. She looked at the mother. The woman was asleep, her tired face solemn, her eyes trembling behind their lids as if troubled by bad dreams, her head thrown recklessly back. The girl’s companions laughed from the backseat, where they perched on the legs of the three women. Toni looked back. The three women were asleep. The only man looked out of the window. The man seated next to the mother frowned into his phone, ears plugged, watching a movie, and beyond him, another, sleeping, drank air from the open window. It was just her and the girl. She shot the girl a stern, don’t-try-that-shit-again look, and wiped the wetness off her cheek.
The girl poked Toni again, this time near her lower lip. She wiped off the saliva and moved as much as she could manage out of her reach.
Minutes passed. The girl conversed with her companions about Toni. “I’ll teach her a lesson,” she said, but all Toni heard were incoherent babbles. The driver turned on the radio and a disembodied voice, interrupted by others, spoke about something Toni couldn’t place. When they stopped at a traffic light along Ikoyi, young men bearing small baskets of Gala and Eva Water and chips all in her face, the radio became very loud, and Toni heard the voices arguing about whether Davido or Wizkid made better music. One person said Wizkid was a true musician, a legend, a pacesetter. Another said Davido had something Wizkid and others don’t: grit. A third voice, a feminine one, said, “What does that even mean?” Toni laughed at this.
“She mocks you,” X said.
“She does,” Y answered.
“Make her pay,” Z said.
The girl waited until they had moved again and air filled the bus before she reached for Toni’s stacked golden bangles and pulled it. One came off. It broke into two. Toni recoiled, now angry.
“Make her pay,” Z said again. “Make her pay.”
Toni considered waking the mother but decided against it. She would not give the devilish little thing the satisfaction. Instead, she eyed her and flung what was left of the bangle out of the car. They were nearing Third Mainland Bridge and there was no traffic. “Just a little more time,” she said to herself.
The girl reached out and pulled at Toni’s butterfly earring. Toni’s earring came off and fell into the small space between Toni and her mother’s legs. She dared her to say something, do something. When Toni simply picked the earring, shifted again in her seat, and moved further away, facing the window, the door pushing hard against her side, the girl pulled at her hair with so much force that Toni felt strands of it come off. That was when Toni, unable to take anymore of it, tapped the mother and told her what the girl had been doing.
“So sorry, so sorry,” was all the mother said. The girl halved her mouth with her small index finger, shushing the woman.
The mother smacked her, and then, as if she had committed a mortal sin, started to plead with her. Confused, Toni turned away from them.
At Iyana-Oworo, when Toni got off and looked back at the girl and her mother, who was holding a Capri-Sun still trying to placate her, she wagged her small index finger at Toni and made an ugly, angry face, so unlike anything Toni had ever seen on a baby’s face, a look so adult it spooked Toni.
The girl’s companions kept watch over her the rest of the day. They sang to her to keep her awake. She had to stay awake if they were to stop whatever the Prophet had planned with the mother, if they were to finish off Toni for what she had done. They waited patiently by the girl’s bed and watched her mother’s every movement.
The mother busied herself with fake chores. She swept and cleaned the kitchen, arranged the room, folded clothes, cooked, swept again, and pretended to sleep next to the girl. She felt eyes bearing down on her the whole time, and her heart beat fast, and her palms sweated, and she had a pit in her stomach as if something sinister was about to happen.
When it came time for her to take the girl to the door, she hurried out of bed carrying the girl with her, but before she even reached the door, a heavy hand slapped her to the ground. She looked up and saw that the girl was up, just above her, floating, babbling, her eyes afire. Y and Z strangled the mother as X held the girl up. When they had finished with her, they waited till night came and left the house.
III.
Toni was exhausted by the time she got home. She had cancelled all plans to work and was on the phone with Obi, who wanted to know if she would like to be left alone. Obi went on for minutes on his end of the phone, asking why she had been so unavailable, what she wanted him to make of her prolonged absences, her disturbing reticence. “Do you want me to let you be?” he asked.
For a moment, she said nothing. She thought about it. Does she want to be left alone? Yes. Does she want Obi to let her be? Sometimes. Does she also really need him, his reassuring presence, his warm arms? Yes.
“I don’t know,” she said.
“What do you mean you don’t know? Just help me out here, I’m dying trying to figure out why you won’t just talk to me and you don’t know? Really?”
She said nothing.
After a while, Obi cut the call. She laid crying in bed and wondered what was wrong with her. Was it her mother’s absence? She had felt displaced when her mother died, bereft, her life emptied-out, turned upside-down, but that was quite a long time ago, and she had once told Obi she’d healed from the loss. What was making her so tired, so uninterested? Her job? Or had she just grown bored of Obi and his barefaced love for her, how he worshipped her, cared for her, no matter how difficult she got? She slept off with these thoughts tugging at the neck of her dress.
There was a sound in the house, the sound of feet scurrying around, but Toni was asleep, lost to what was happening around her. She was dreaming. A masquerade holding a whip chased her down a narrow road, and she ran towards a house along the road, trying to get away from it, her dress sweat-glued to her back. Inside the house, it was dark. There was no sound. She couldn’t see her own hands. She felt a hand on her shoulder. Another hand struck her blind and she hit her head against something hard. Toni felt blood dribble down her dress from the side of her head, then she heard a cry—a baby’s—and the empty house multiplied the sound, so that it hammered on her head, which already ached from the fall, and she went mad with pain.
When she woke up, her head was still ringing, and, before her, perched on her vanity, was the baby from the bus, wagging her small finger at her. Toni screamed but it got stuck inside her. Her head swelled and swelled to bursting. She felt a sharp pain in the side of her head and touched it and saw blood. She felt fingers behind her eyes, prodding, pushing, trying to force them out of their sockets. Her breathing was labored. Lone tears rolled down the sides of her face. The girl kept laughing, and her laughter echoed in Toni’s head, and Toni could hear all the sounds of the night—the cricket outside her window, the small bird cooing her lover home, her neighbor’s bed heaving, the baby’s reverberating laughter, her own ragged breath—and they all stabbed at her ears with painful insistence. The girl continued to wag her finger and laugh. A whip curled around Toni’s body, over and over, and left thick welts. The girl and her companion said something and laughed and Toni saw them, the other three, saw them all around her, one holding her neck from behind, choking her out, one going around the room making a mess, one by the baby, propping her up. The sounds multiplied, filled the room, Toni’s ears, her slim, hungry body, until, no space left, none at all, the air gone out of her, Toni went limp.
