My mother wanted to see the world, but I was like a noose around her neck, a piece of rope that tethered her to the village, a swollen foot that would not let her run with the wind and take flight.
She used to sit outside my grandparents' house, chin in palm, while her eyes stared into the distance wondering what could have been. I'd sit and watch, even though I pretended to be playing with stones. Most times, when I thought she had fallen asleep, but her long drawn-out sighs would remind me that she was not asleep, just lost inside her own head.
She was happiest and saddest when an old friend, who had left the village, returned with tales of the city and how wonderful things were there. My mother would be full of questions, the way a boil is full of pus, and when the friend left, my mother would lie on her bed and cry. My mother didn't speak much to me. She made sure I was clean and fed and out of the way. I didn't mind, until my grandparents both died two months apart. That was when I began to notice that my mother really didn't want me around.
My father lived two villages away. My mother said he was the devil's overtime, even though he never, ever, spoke to me, nor called me son.
“See, see your useless father,” my mother would say when she took me with her to the market to cut my hair.
But my father would laugh and say, “When will this your madness end?”
Whenever he said this, my mother would curse him and push me hard, urging me to move fast as if I was the one who made him refuse to acknowledge that I was his son, and while we stumbled along, the man she called my father would blow cigarette smoke into the air and laugh.
Everyone said he was my father because, according to them, we looked alike. He was dark like me and he had bow legs like mine. He also had ears like mine, the wide, open ears that made my classmates call me 'Batman'. I guess my mother had hopes that, one day, my father would finally take a good look at me and acknowledge that I was his son after all.
I was nine years old when my mother said we were going to Lagos.
“If you don't run, can you count the miles?” she asked me as she buttoned my shirt, and I shook my head. “You see? One day I will wake up and I will be sixty years old and I will ask myself, 'What have I done with my life?' Will I say, 'I had a baby boy whom his father rejected'? Is that what you want me to say?”
“No,” I said, and she sighed.
“It's not easy for me. If I was alone…” she said, and left it hanging.
I was getting used to it all now: her constant “If I was alone, life wouldn't be like this.”
When my grandmother was alive, my mother didn't bother me too much with what would have been if I hadn't been born, because every time she did, my grandmother would hiss and say to her, “Did anybody force you to spread your legs for that good-for-nothing?”
I didn't want to go to Lagos but I also wanted to, because the fact that I was going there had brought me new-found respect. My friends looked at me like I was going to the moon.
“You will see big bridges and houses taller than trees,” someone said.
“And the roads; they say you can't cross them because there are like a hundred cars passing at the same time,” said another.
“You will tell us about it when you come for Christmas, abi?” another asked.
I nodded and looked away. I had lied to them that we would be staying with my uncle, even though I had no idea where we were going to live. And I didn't know whether we would be coming back for Christmas.
It was my father who came to pick us up on the day we left for Lagos. My mother and I sat in front, while the market women sat at the back with basins stacked high with their purchases. We looked like a family taking a leisurely ride. That is, if you took a picture of us in front and cut off the women at the back

My father smoked with his left hand, while his right hand gripped the steering wheel. My mother sat me in the middle and, all through the ride, stared fixedly out of the window.
My father did, at least, acknowledge my presence on the short ride to Asaba, where we were to board a bus for Lagos. When he finished smoking his second cigarette, he flicked it into the bushes and pulled out two tablets of tom-tom from his breast pocket. He popped one in his mouth and offered me the second. I was reaching out to accept it when my mother slapped it away. My eyes clouded with tears as I stared downwards, focusing on a hole in the floor of the car, through which I could see the road.
“This madness of yours, when will it stop?” my father asked her, before lighting another cigarette. The luxury bus smelled like new shoes. My mother and I sat in the middle. I had the window seat, from where I could watch the hawkers selling everything from biscuits to gin, wrapped up in sachets. There were very many people hurrying and trying to catch their buses.
A fat woman, who'd arrived late, ran after her bus, which was already leaving the park.
“I have paid. I have paid,” she cried, waving her ticket above her head with her free hand while the other hand dragged a travel bag along. The bus squealed to a halt; the conductor jumped down and, cursing her, pulled open the boot at the back. As he took the woman's bag, it snapped open and spilled its contents.
Falling on her hands and knees, the fat woman began to pick up her stuff, a bra here, a blouse there. Behind her, the conductor picked up the biggest pair of panties I have ever seen and was waving them above his head as people laughed.
“What's funny?” my mother asked, giving me the look, the one she gave me before she slapped me and made me see stars. This time she didn't slap me. She just looked at me, said something about my father, and hissed.
“I want water,” I said a few minutes later as our bus made its way out of the park, but my mother just glared.
“You want to piss inside the bus, abi?” she asked, but I was smart enough to say nothing. I looked out of the window as the bus hurtled on its way to Lagos, eating up the distance like a carnivorous monster.
My mother did not look at, nor speak to me. She stared straight ahead, her eyes unblinking. I ignored her, too, wishing my grandparents were still alive so I wouldn't have to make this trip.
“Take,” my mother said and gave me a sausage roll and a can of Coke. I said “Thank you” and ate, chewing on the stringy sausage roll and sipping the tepid drink.
As I ate, I did not tell her that what I really wanted to do was whip out my pingolo and piss, for fear that she would hiss and slap me. Instead, I held it in, sweating and moaning softly while my bladder threatened to burst.
Finally, we made a stop at a place called Ore and everyone got down so they could piss and stretch their legs. “Forty minutes! Forty minutes, o, or we go leave you for this place!” the conductor screamed, a vein standing out on his neck. I ran to a bush and pissed for almost twenty minutes, or so I thought, because the stream of urine seemed to go on forever in a warm fountain. I slept for the rest of the journey and only opened my eyes when my mother hit me and told me we were in Lagos.
Lagos was madness. Watching the crowds, the innumerable people stuck in what I supposed was perpetual motion, almost made me dizzy. Looking at the people in Lagos was like looking into a gigantic whirlwind, but instead of bits of rubbish, what we had inside was an eddy of human beings.
We got down from the bus at Ojota and, grabbing my hand while the other one held onto the new travel bag she'd bought the previous week, my mother led me a short distance to where we boarded another bus, a small yellow one. I sat in the middle with my mother, beside a fat woman who smelled of fish. Her bottom was so big it kept pushing me and whenever I wriggled to create space, she would look at me and hiss.
We drove onto a long bridge that snaked over a shimmering mass of water. Somebody behind me was telling a young woman with him that it was the 3 Mainland Bridge.
“It's the longest bridge in Africa,” the man said. “They say it takes four days to walk from one end to the other.”
When I looked up, my mother was peering at the man with an expression that said she didn't believe him. I knew that look. It was the look she had had on her face when her friend had come back from Italy and told us how she had married, and divorced, a white man.

Five years have gone by since I arrived in Lagos with my mother on a giddy Saturday afternoon, but I remember that day as if it were yesterday. I remember it the way I can taste the salt on my lips, residue from the corn I have just finished eating.
We got down at Obalende and my mother turned to me and said, “Hold my hand.”
She said it as if I had done something wrong, but I searched my head and couldn't remember what I could have done to make her angry, so I held her hand and walked beside her, breaking into a short run at intervals to keep up.
My mother had been to Lagos before. In fact, she had lived in the city for two full years with an uncle, but he died suddenly, knocked down by a truck as he tried to cross the expressway.
“It was bad luck. The devil really exists, you know. Paulina had made all the plans for us to go to Italy together, and then Uncle Stanley had to go and let a truck kill him. I came to the village with his wife. We were waiting for the mourning period to end when I got pregnant. How can you tell me the devil doesn't work overtime?”
I heard my mother tell this story once to a friend visiting from Jos. Her name was Justina and she had a limp that made it seem like one part of her bum was bigger than the other.
I was sitting behind the door and doing my homework while they spoke. If my mother had seen me, she would have chased me away. That night, after Justina left, I listened to my mother talking to my grandmother as they prepared dinner.
“Mama, see this world is not fair. See Justina with her short leg. When we were in school, nobody thought she would find a husband. See, now she is married with two children and her husband even bought her a car and sent her home with a driver.”
“The cow without a tail,” my grandmother said, turning to look at my mother, “it is God that chases the flies away on its behalf.”
Justina is dead now. She was killed when Muslims attacked Christians in Jos. They said she was pregnant when she was killed and that the attackers stopped her car, beheaded her driver, ripped her stomach open and kicked the foetus around like a football.
When my mother heard this, she sat down, rested her chin on her hand and stayed that way the whole day, muttering over and over again, “This devil knows how to work overtime.”
And that was the thought in my head, too, the day my world, as I knew it, came to an end.
The bus we were on got to Marina and my mother stepped down beside me. While we stood there, still trying to find our bearings, the bus roared off, leaving a cloud of acrid white smoke behind. I looked up and the sign atop the long building with fancy blocks in front of it said 'General Post Office'.
My mother and I crossed the street and, as I walked beside her, she said to me, “We'll go to Mandilas, so I can buy you some clothes.”
There were rows of shops selling clothes, shoes and belts and it seemed everyone was talking at the same time.
“Fine girl. Come buy jeans,” someone said, tugging at my mother's arm. I thought she would slap his hand away, but she smiled indulgently and kept walking.
“See. Fine blouse. Wear am go church na so so vision you
go dey see,” another man said.
It was a blue blouse with a dragon design embroidered across the front. My mother stopped and asked him how much it cost. I watched as she placed the blouse against her body to see whether it would fit and I wondered why she had stopped to haggle. Was it the promise of visions or the beautifully-rendered design?
My mother bought the blouse and we walked on, stopping at three other shops to buy three shirts, two pairs of jeans and a pair of canvas shoes for me.
“Take the long sleeves,” my mother said, urging me to take a blue, long-sleeved corduroy shirt the shop owner was offering me. “You will need it when it gets cold at night.”
We made a few other purchases, mostly bras and panties and frilly things for my mother. Then, finally, she asked me to go with her so we could find something to eat.
My mother ordered rice, beans and plantain for me.
Then, while I ate, she gave me some money.
“Hold this money for me,” she said. “I need to buy something. Wait for me when you finish eating.”
I took the money, nodded, and then went back to my food.
That was the last time I saw my mother.
Adapted from Tony Kan’s Night of a Creaking Bed.

People were milling about, rushing and hurrying in that relentless motion that defines Lagos, while I sat on the steps of the food seller's shop and cried, turning my head from left to right and back again, hoping to see my mother
materialise before me and ask why I was crying, before slapping my eyes dry of tears with a sharp: “You didn't see me and then you start crying? What's wrong with you? You think you are still a baby? Come on, wipe your tears, let's go.”
The way I was feeling then, I wouldn't have minded one of those slaps. A slap would have been far better than being alone in a busy street in Lagos.
But my mother did not appear, and when the shops began to close as darkness fell across the market, I began to shiver from cold and fear. What was I going to do when everyone left and darkness fell? I had no idea.
I pulled out the corduroy top and began to pull it on when, in a moment of startling clarity, the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place. “Take the long sleeves. You will need it when it gets cold at night.”
Had she planned it all the while? Had my mother decided, like a desperate goat, to gnaw off the rope that tethered her so she could roam free in Lagos?
I set the bag down and began to skim through its contents. Aside from my clothes and shoes, my mother had left me one thousand naira and a note that had only one word, the final piece of the puzzle: 'Sorry!'
That was when I stopped crying. I stood up, dusted the seat of my trousers and set out for the main road. I walked to the post office, crossed to the other side and joined a few men and boys waiting to buy akara.
While I waited for the bean cakes to turn brown, I worked out my plan. I would sleep, wake up the next day and go to Ojota, where I would take a bus home. Once my father saw me without my mother and once I told him the story of my misadventure in Lagos, he would do something. What it was he would do, I had no idea. I paid for my akara with the left over change from the food seller's. Then I bought a canned drink and found a spot in a dark part of a car park to eat.
As I ate, I saw a man chase a young girl past me. He pushed her against the wall and tugged at her wrapper, which unravelled like a loose bandage.
“Don't by-force me,” the girl said, laughing as he tried to take off her panties. Pushing him gently away, she stepped out of her panties, then turned her back to him.
The man bent her over as he let his trousers fall. I looked away as they became one, but I couldn't shut out the sounds the girl made.
I finished my food and walked up and down the street.
There were still cars around but by the time I made it back to the post office, the street was deserted and men and women, whom I suspected were mad, were lying in front of the building. There were a few children too, mostly boys, and they were huddled together and playing a game of Whot.
I found a space a few feet from them and sat down. I took a shoe lace from one of the new shoes my mother had bought me and tied up my clothes and shoes into a bundle.
Then I put it under my head and fell asleep.

When I woke, the sun was up. I was stretching and yawning when I realised that the bundle I had kept under my head was gone. I sprang up, crying in disbelief. I dipped my hands in my pocket. The one thousand naira had gone, too.
I started screaming, running into the early Sunday morning and looking for the thief who had stolen my shoes. I found him by the woman selling akara. He was one of the boys I had seen the night before and he was wearing one of my new shirts.
“Thief,” I screamed as I got to him. “Give me my shirt.”
I was reaching out to grab him when his fist connected with my left eye. I fell and then he was kicking and punching me until I was curled up in a ball and screaming at him to stop. He spat and walked away.
I lay there hurting, dusty and sobbing but nobody looked my way. They came, they bought their akara and they walked off, as if I were a piece of rubbish left by the roadside.
“Come,” someone was saying. “Stand up.”
I opened my right eye. There was a boy, dark, skinny, roughly my age. He was standing there with his arms outstretched. I took his arm and he pulled me up. Then he led me to a tap at the end of the park.
“Oya, wash your body,” he said, stepping out of his clothes as he spoke. I looked around first to see that no-one was looking. Then I did as he did. Scooping water with what was left of an old bucket, I had my first bath outside, right there in the park.
His name was Michael and, after we had showered, he asked me to go with him.
“Are we going to your house?” I asked, hoping to find an adult who would help make sense of all the madness.
“This is my house,” he said, waving expansively. “I dey live here for Marina.”
“Where your mama?” I asked, also switching to pidgin.
'I no sabi,” he said, stopping in front of a stall to buy a tin of Robb. “Rub am for your eye. It is swelling too much.”
I thanked him and applied the ointment to my swollen eye.
“See, first thing you must know be dis, this is Lagos and there is no paddy for jungle. You see, you be JJC and I want to take you to a man who will take care of you or else one day you go wake up and somebody don steal your head,” he said, and laughed. “You go dey pay the man o, but at least nobody go steal your thing again, you hear?”
He stopped so suddenly mid-stride that I bumped into him.
“So, who be dis man?” I asked, as we began walking again.
“Im name na Baba Ejiga and im na Area Father.”
The Area Father, Baba Ejiga had one eye and he was smoking Indian hemp when we got to his shack, nestled under the bridge at the crook where the sea lost the battle to the metal and concrete pillars which propped up the bridge.
“Mikolo, who be dat?” he asked, his one eye darting furiously from me to Michael. It moved so fast that I had difficulty looking away.
“Na JJC. The bobo just land and e never begin shine im eye.”
“Hey, wetin be your name?” Baba Ejiga asked me. “My name is Daniel,” I answered and he lowered his head and sighed.
“Na aje-butter you carry come meet,” he said and shook his head. Then he looked up at me and spoke fluent, un-accented English.
“How in God's holy name did you get here and where did that nasty bruise come from?”
Staring at him, at his itinerant eye, the matted hair, the ramshackle shack and the joint in his left hand, I couldn't reconcile the voice with the man.
After I told him I'd been abandoned and the victim of a robbery, Baba Ejiga was silent for a heartbeat. Then, he shook his head and said to Michael, “Mikolo, this one na bad market, o, very bad market,” he said, as if I was not there.
He raised his joint to his dark lips, drew long and hard, and then held it out to Michael who took it, sucked on it, inhaled, and handed the joint back. I watched in wonder, my mouth hanging open. Michael couldn't have been much older than me.
“Carry this JJC waka. Make you show am way. If anybody worry una, tell dem say this JJC na my person.”

That was how I came to live on Lagos Island under the protection of Baba Ejiga. We slept on the streets, usually outside Baba Ejiga's shack, while he frolicked inside with one of the many women who never seemed to tire of him.
In the day, Michael and I prowled the market looking for women to assist with their purchases. We were mules, young ala-barus who eked out a living from the pittance they let drop. Sometimes we stole from them, pilfering items from what they'd bought. Most times they never noticed, though sometimes an eagle-eyed woman would catch you and bitch slap you into the gutter.
We were children, so it was easy for people to forgive us, to put it down to hunger or the devil working overtime, as usual. There were many children living rough on the streets of Marina and we marked our turf, sometimes fighting battles for control. The adults let us bloody ourselves while they sat and watched, amused, as we morphed slowly into what they had long become, little devils with fangs for teeth and claws for fingers.
Once in a while, one of the older boys would be caught stealing: a radio from a parked car or a handbag from a woman exiting the bank. Many of us would give chase and when we caught up with the thief, we would descend on him, kicking and punching him until he was down. Then, someone would find a tyre, another would pour petrol and the hapless thief would go up in flames.
And every time I watched that senseless orgy of rage and violence, I would wonder why we were so quick to land that blow and kick out at one of our own, someone we knew and lived with. Was it out of a feeling of betrayal and anger that he'd let himself be caught, thus tarring all of us with the sludge of shame? Was that what fuelled our rage?
Often, we retired early, bathing in the park or running across to the old quayside where we washed in the briny waters of the Atlantic. It wasn't uncommon to come out of the sea and find your clothes gone, hidden away or cast into the sea by another boy you had offended without knowing.
While the other boys laughed, the unlucky one would walk back naked to wherever he kept his change of clothes. We didn't possess too many things. We were light travellers, unsure of what the next minute held, and that was why all we owned we hid in our stomachs. Our stomachs were our treasure houses because they were easy to transport and no one could steal the food you had eaten or the drink you had taken.
We ate well, saving only the little we needed to pay Baba Ejiga or entertain the young girls who flocked to us like flies to shit. I avoided them, but Flora would never let up, always coming to sit by me while I read old magazines I picked up from the streets or bought when I had extra cash. Of all the boys who lived with Baba Ejiga, Michael and I were the only ones who could read.
“You dey fear woman?” Flora would ask me every time I refused to accept the little things she brought me on her way home from hawking on the streets: a loaf of bread, a tin of sardines or condensed milk.
We became friends the day I took ill with malaria and she ran all the way to Obalende to buy me Fansidar and folic acid; and later in the evening, when I had stopped throwing up, she bought me jollof rice and dodo.
“I know you like jollof rice and dodo,” she said, wiping the sweat off my brow.
We talked. She was from Delta state, like me. Like me, she had never known her father and like me, her mother had left her at an early age, but hers had drowned.
“You know, when a woman drown she will lie face up, but a man will lie face down. That is how you know whether the dead person inside the water is a man or a woman,” she told me in her shaky English.
Once we became friends, Flora spoke English instead of pidgin to me. She lived with her aunt who was married to a warden at the prison quarters in Ikoyi and, once in a while, I would walk with her all the way to Ikoyi and then take a bike back to Marina.
One night as I saw her off to her own block, she pushed me against the wall and kissed me, surprising me by her impulsiveness.

“When are we going to do it?” she asked.
“Do what?” I asked, lowering my gaze as my heart hammered in my chest.
“Do what? Ah ah. Sometimes, I feel that you are fearing woman.”
“But you are not even a woman,” I said.
“Who said? I am thirteen years and Janet is twelve but she is doing it with Michael.”
“Michael is older than me.”
“Ehen, it doesn't matter,” Flora said, and reached for me again.
This time, our kiss lingered and Flora was moaning and I was feeling her breast when someone slapped and punched me. We sprang apart and a huge man started punching and slapping Flora as she ran, and kept calling her a LovePeddler.
The next day, when I saw Flora she had a black eye and a cut above her upper lip.
“Na my auntie husband. He was angry because he wants to by-force me and I don't agree,” she told me that night as we sat at the back of the car park and kissed. This time our kisses were long and languorous and gentle because I was careful not to hurt her lips.
“God will punish him,” I said, with impotent rage.
Even though Flora wanted us to, I never summoned up enough courage, so we spent our times together kissing and sometimes, when no-one was nearby, she would lift her dress and let me handle and kiss her small breasts.
Then one day I waited and waited and she didn't come to the Marina. When I still didn't see her after three days, I sought out Janet and asked where Flora was.
“Why u dey ask me, no be u pregnant am?” she snapped at me. Flora was pregnant.
That was when I began to drink.
Without Flora, and with nothing to occupy me in the evenings, I started drowning my sorrows, sitting with other boys and men in front of the women who sold kai-kai, the local brew, drinking my life away.
I didn't smoke cigarettes or hemp because they made me light-headed so I sat there and drank shot after shot of kai-kai. But while everyone else got drunk, I would remain clear-eyed and sure-footed. Soon, my reputation spread and people came to see the eleven-year-old boy who could down a bottle of kai-kai and still walk straight.
Michael was the one who told Baba Ejiga and the one-eyed man, always eager to make a quick buck, began arranging drinking bouts for me with men who would square up against me and end up being carried away by friends, after they had lost their bearings and their bets.
I never found out what it was that made me incapable of getting drunk, but it made me popular, and the women who sold drinks would offer me free drinks because they knew that my presence at their stalls would attract customers.
But it all ended the day I stole a wallet. This wallet wasn't filled with money but with pictures and cards. A note, scrawled on the back of the picture of a smiling man, read:
‘Mummy Rose, you took me from the streets and gave me a new life at Sweet Home. Without you I would be dead now, burnt on the streets like a common thief. But today I am a doctor and even though I do not know what God looks like, when I close my eyes and think of God, I see your face. Love always, Keme.'
I would read the note, turn the picture over to look at the smiling face of Keme, and then read the note again. He was tall and big and dressed in convocation garb. Looking at him, I became suddenly dissatisfied with my life. I was like someone coming awake from a bad dream.
“Let's find this woman,” I said to Michael.
“How?” he asked, through a cloud of cigarette smoke.
“See this card. It says 'Rose McGowan, Founder, Sweet Home for Boys' and there's an address in Yaba.”
'So, how will you say you got her wallet?” Michael asked.
“I found it on the streets,” I said.
“And?” he asked.
“And I decided to return it to the owner.”
“Dis boy, kai-kai has turned your head. If that woman sees you, she will lock you up.”
“Michael, let's try. Our life can change and we can be like
Keme.”
Michael stood up, flung his half-smoked cigarette into the overflowing gutter and exhaled loudly.
“Daniel, too much hope is not good for people like us,” he said and walked away.
I left early the next morning, afraid that dallying would weaken my resolve. I took a bus to Sabo, then got on a bike that took me to Oyadiran estate.
When you pick a pocket or reach into a woman's bag and pick a naira note or wallet or mobile phone, your mind is focused on two things: filching what you can, and not getting caught. You usually don't know what your victim looks like. So when Rose McGowan came to the door after I'd spoken to the maid, I was surprised to see an ageing woman with an American accent.
“Yes, wetin I go do for you?” she asked in pidgin as she took in my shabby appearance.
I didn't speak. I reached into my back pocket and saw her flinch and take a step back. She relaxed as I pulled out the wallet and extended it to her.
“Where did you find that?” she asked, reaching out to take it.
“Mummy Rose, I am a street boy and I need your help,” I said and then burst into tears.
I wake up and the ceiling is white. There is a ceiling fan and it is whirring slowly. I am sweating and my heart is pounding, but it is not from fear but from excitement. I have been here for months but I still feel like a hungry man who has stumbled on a feast. I still cannot believe that it is all true and real.
I swing my legs off the bed. I find my slippers and walk outside. The sun is bright. It is a lazy Sunday afternoon and Michael is lying on his back under the almond tree behind the hostel and reading a novel. I sit on the grass beside him and knock the book out of his hands.
“Mikolo!” I say and Michael laughs.
“May his soul rest in peace,” Michael says.
Baba Ejiga died two weeks after I ran away. A jealous husband had surprised him atop his wife and pierced him through the heart with a rusty dagger. This was two months before I went back for Michael.
“After he died, I couldn't stop thinking of what he said when you left,” Michael told me on his first night at Sweet Home for Boys.
“What did he say?”
He said, 'That boy wasn't supposed to be here.' After we buried him, I sat in his shack and for the first time I wondered why I didn't leave with you.”
I am fourteen years old now and I am dying. My liver is ruined, eaten away by all that kai-kai I drank like water in the days when I lived rough.
Michael was supposed to take over my top bunk and the new canvas shoes I got for Christmas, when I die.
But my friend has beaten me to it. Two weeks ago, we buried Michael, the one with the healthy liver, the one who didn't have the angel of death hovering over him.
Now that he is dead, everyone says he knew he was going to die because of the things he did that Saturday afternoon when we all got up to go to the river.
“I'm not going,” Michael had said to me when I tapped him on the chest and roused him from the light sleep he had fallen into as he listened to music on his new MP3 player, the one he got as a prize for coming first in the spelling competition.
“Why?” I asked, pulling the wrapper off him.
“I want to sleep,” he said and tried to grab the wrapper from me, but I was holding on too tight and the wrapper tore.
“See, see. You tore it,” Michael said and jumped off the bed.
I ran but he didn't give chase. He just walked out of the hostel and sat on the dwarf fence that ringed the building, and stared out into the distance as if expecting somebody. I knew he wasn't expecting anybody because no-one ever comes to visit.
“Sorry,” I said, touching him, but he brushed off my hand.
“Leave me alone.”
Michael didn't talk to me until we left and he didn't even speak to me when he ran behind us and joined our group.
Once or twice on our walk, I would ask a question and look at him, but he would ignore me and stare straight ahead.
“See, the twins of Ikorodu, they are fighting,” someone said and the other boys sniggered.
Michael and I were the closest in the hostel and we never, ever, seemed to fight, so no-one could understand why we weren't talking.
When we got to the river and separated into two groups,
Michael said he wasn't going to play and just sat on the sand, watching.
When I think about it now, I guess that's why so many people say he knew he was going to die. Everything he did that day was strange. First, he said he didn't want to come.

Then, when he did, he said he didn't want to play with us.
And then, he didn't want to talk to me.
Michael would still be alive if he had stayed back at the hostel. Or if he had come with us and just sat on the sand like he wanted to. But he didn't. Every time the ball bounced outside the line, Michael would jump up and chase after it.
Then, when he got the ball, usually from the river, he would throw it up and spike.
I wasn't looking. I had stubbed the big toe of my left foot and broken my toe nail. I was trying to peel off the broken nail which was still hanging from my toe when I heard my name.
I looked up and all the boys were running to the river bank.
I saw his back, I heard him scream, a watery gurgle more like, and then he was gone, the waves frothing where his red shirt billowed in the rushing water.

Are u done?

Its awesome

Fire on

afolwalex20:
Are u done?

are u done commenting?

God bless you, I love reading this. So pls find it in your heart to finish it. Once again thanks

Popflair:
are u done commenting?

Was just asking na

#no vex come finish dis tin

This write-up is nothing but EPIC! Great writing skills with in-depth and suspense. Good work bro... Bliss.

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