SPIDERS IN THE HOUSE OF MEN

he tried again that evening for what must have been the umpteenth time. He hurried home after work, peeled from his body the coveralls that blew dust into the air as he slung them off over his head and put on clean clothes. Then he turned into the alley filled with potholes and approached the old house on Isolo Street. But by the time he got near the back fence, the courage that had accreted over the course of the long, hot day had leaked out. He saw the same woman from the previous day standing on the front porch, plaiting braids into the hair of a little girl. Even though close figures had begun to morph into silhouettes, there was still enough light for anyone who knew him to make him out. He pulled his cap closer down his face. He’d started to walk

away from the place when he saw his brother pull up, black smoke rising from the exhaust of his motorcycle. He crouched behind a tree and watched his brother as he kissed the little girl on the top of her head and disappeared into the house.

Though he’d been making this kind of trip for weeks now, this was the first time he’d seen his brother. The first time in four years. Once again, he returned to his apartment with a deep, shattering regret. He sat down on the worn sofa Baba Aliyu had let him take home from the shop and unlocked the Nokia phone, placing his finger on the keypad until the torch came on. The phone, still new and nearly empty, a testament to his prison time. It had been a novelty when he left Nigeria in 2001, and now only five years later, everyone seemed to have one. In the phone’s torchlight he ambled slowly into the small space that was his kitchen, took the matchbox on the window pane, and lit the kerosene lantern. Bode sat down by the lantern as if by an ailing relative and with his eyes staring intently into the yellow prism of the fire. He thought about his brother’s wife and child, and about his own father and also, his mother. What he’d done to his family. What he needed to ask of them now and could not. Forgiveness. It was late into the night when the lantern burned out from lack of oil and the earthen smell of kerosene hung in the air.

At work at the shop the following morning, he said nothing to anyone except greetings. But towards noon, as they finished work on a new school desk, Baba Aliyu asked him what was wrong with him. “Eh, what is the matter? Why you’re looking like someone who is about to be taken to firing squad?” He let himself laugh, then shook his head. “Nothing, sir.”

Baba Aliyu bent again towards the desk, nailing fresh tacks into its joints while Bode held the new chiselled slab in place.

“You say nothing, eh, when I can see it all over your face?”

Though Bode tried to avoid this kind of enquiry, he often found solace in the words of the older man who’d employed him the day after he returned to Akure. Now, he wiped his face with the back of his hand, inhaled, and told him of his failed trip to his brother’s house.

Baba Aliyu rose from his crouching position, wiped his hands on his overcoat, and turned away from Bode.

“What is the worst they can do?” Baba Aliyu said suddenly in his soggy Yoruba accent.

“I just fear, I just fear,” Bode began saying, his eyes on the dab of spit on the head of the nail in Baba Aliyu’s grip.

“Fear what?” Baba Aliyu said, and clamped the nail beside the wood he was to hammer into the other slab of wood.

“That they will blame me for the deaths of, you see… Papa and Mama. They will say…”

“What you already are already accusing yourself of, abi?”

Baba Aliyu’s word cut into his.

“Yes, but…”

Baba Aliyu peered under the desk to see if the nail had gripped the right joint. He nodded to himself, licked the side of his lips and said, “But, you don’t know. You don’t know, son, what any other person can say.”

Baba Aliyu assumed an erect position again, the hammer bent in his hand. Bode, still squatting, gazed up at the patches of yellow stain on the knees of his boss’s blue cotton work trousers.

“Shebi, I have told you before about my first wife, abi? I have told you what I did to her. Do you know, do you even know that she never angry for me? And I ran away from Ibadan to here, I ran away for many years and abandon my family.”

Bode listened closely for the rising intensity in Baba Aliyu’s narration, marked by the sudden descent into badly-pronounced English that rendered “abandoned” something like “aba idan”, as if it were a Yoruba word. The man often did this whenever he told

Bode of his own shame. “Eeviri-ba-ady, eeviri-ba-ady have done something bad,” Baba Aliyu said, switching completely to English as he often did when he gave advice.

“Very, very bad things that can even make people to spit on them. There is a spider in the house of eeviri man, eeviri-ba-ady. It doesn’t matter oh, whether them rich oh or poor oh. You must find spider there.”

Bode looked away at a woman carrying a sack of corn who was trying to cross over to the other side of the road. His eyes were still fixed on the distant woman when he heard Baba Aliyu say, in a voice as low as a whisper, “If you look closely.” when work ended that day, as Bode turned the corner towards his street, he saw a man who was his father’s friend, Mr Olisa. The man was driving a familiar silver-coloured Volvo, now much older, its rusted fenders accommodating a big hole. He recalled his father seated with the man on the same porch where he’d seen the woman and child the previous day. She must be his brother’s wife.

What is the worst they can do? he asked himself as he crossed a gutter filled with litter amongst which was a mangled doll, its pink face smeared with grimy water. A woman roasting plantain on a spit beckoned on him as he passed her, trying to evade the swerving cars on the road. “Oga, ewa ra bole oh!” the woman called. He dismissed the plea with a shrug. From here he reached the crossroad with the street where his family had lived before he accepted to do the deal. This was why that day, five years ago, gathered in the unfinished building behind Oshinle Street that was hidden by tall bushes, he’d listened keenly as Yusuf had said, “Look at Jide; look at the kind of house he has built.” Later, Yusuf would ingest almost twice the amount of drugs as Bode and die in detention in London. But at the time, Bode, like others, had believed strongly that he would succeed. “True, that is what we will become,” Agboola had said. “Yes, yes,” Bode had answered, partly elated and partly afraid.

He’d pictured many things after the last of those meetings — the house, the luxury he would bequest upon his family. What he had not thought of at the time was what would become of his family if things did not go as he’d hoped. And when it all came down, when the border patrol dog inched towards him on the long line at Heathrow Airport and refused to stop sniffing at his legs until he and his friend were dragged away, those consequences had rushed at him, like a thing carried on many legs. The stroke his father suffered after Bode was arrested — from the shock, it was said. Then him dying two months later, his mother eight months after that. He could not argue that the fault was his. But presently, as he went home from work, challenged again by Baba Aliyu, he was determined. He would try again. He would go to his brother’s house. He would ask to be forgiven.

So, he walked on, sweating under the heat, taking quieter roads. He walked, conscious of the people in the street as if he were in a new country. He glanced at every car to be sure he did not know someone in it. He was just a street from his brother’s house when he came upon a field on which a group of boys, none above the age of 15, stood gazing at him as he passed. Their bare feet were covered with the dust and a broken green leaf was glued to the calf of one of the boys. “Uncle! Uncle!” they called to him.

“Uncle, please help us,” the one with the leaf on his calf said when Bode turned to them.

“Yes?”

The first boy made to speak, but another tugged at his shirt from behind so that the boy turned. The boy wrested himself from the quick hands of the other and cursed under his breath.

“Yes, kilode?” Bode said in a determined voice to keep the boys in check.

“Our ball,” said another boy.

“Ehen, what happened?”

“It fell… we kicked it into the big house,” the first boy said, pointing to the upper floor of a two-storey building across the field.

The house was familiar to him in a way he could not pinpoint. It was painted yellow with rough patches of plaster on its skin and a wooden staircase leading to the door of the upper floor. The door was shut and the windows were closed and shaded on the inside by a thick red curtain. The ground floor looked deserted, as if no one had been there in a long time.

“We are playing and we mistakenly play shot and it fall inside that house,” one of the boys said. “Immediately, immediately, we go to take the ball but the woman, she pursue us away.”

“Did you beg her?” he asked them.

“Yes, uncle. We even kneel down and beg-beg-beg…” “Yes, sir, we begged very well.”

His eyes passed from face to face, taking in the various expressions of agitation.

“Please, uncle,” one of the boys pleaded, and two others followed.

He stepped back, gazed around him and pulled his cap closer to his face. He was, he reckoned, almost in his own uncle’s neighbourhood and could be easily recognised.

“What did the woman say?” he asked them.

“She said the ball hit her wall and wake her baby, so she will not give us our ball again.”

It was the English-speaking boy.

“OK,” Bode said. “Follow me, let us go. I will talk to her.”

The children stirred at once as if infused with new life. One of them slapped the leader on the back, and high-fived the other boy. Bode walked towards the building. One of the boys led him across the road and was about to reach the staircase when Bode stopped them.

“Wait,” he said and gestured that they come closer. The boy descended towards him and the leaf detached from his calf and fell across the stairs. Bode allowed himself to be distracted by its descent to the ground, watching it as if it was something of importance. He closed his eyes briefly and felt the sensation of something, a tightening in his chest, return. There were five of the boys now, two left in the field, waiting from the distance.

“When the woman opens the door, I will talk to her. Eh?” he said.

“Yes, uncle,” they said.

“I will ask her to give you back your ball, but you also have to say something. You must beg her. Say all of you are sorry. Tell her, eh, it was a mistake.”

He heard the sudden cry of a baby. One of the boys cupped his hands over his mouth and said, “That’s the woman’s child.”

“Eh,” Bode said and glanced at the side window but he saw nothing. “Listen to me. Tell the woman it was a mistake. Tell her, everyone makes mistake.”

“Yes, uncle.”

They’d answered this time with weariness. He could see that they were already tired of this rehearsal and wanted to head right to the woman and retrieve their football.

“Tell her, there is a spider in the house of everyone,” Bode said, looking into the eyes of the boys before him. “Whether rich or poor. You hear?”

They nodded and looked at each other in what he knew was confusion. But he turned back and, without looking at them again, he ascended the stairs. the first thing he heard from behind the door was the slow gasping of the child who’d been crying, followed by a woman’s voice from deep inside the house saying, “Okoo mi, stop crying, stop, eh. I will bring you pap soon.” He turned back to the boys who’d massed behind him, at different levels of the stairs, their eyes fixed on him, their hands folded together. He recalled now in quick pictures the day his father had

taken him to the farm outside Akure. He was only seven and had insisted on going. His father, an uncle, and his two older brothers had walked with him through a grassy path flanked on both sides by tall, whelp-marking creepers for a long time. He’d watched transparent flying insects and butterflies dazzle in the wind all through the walk, half-listening to his father and uncle talk about MKO Abiola and the upcoming elections when, suddenly, in the thicker entrails of the forest something slithered through the floor and rattled the bush.

At first, he saw a marked tail, slowly he saw the head of the snake rise above the crowded plants. The snake, hissing, pulled into the path in a frenzied hurry and raised its head even higher. He’d been transfixed, gazing at the snake when he heard his father shout his name. Then he saw his father’s cutlass knock the snake into the bush. It balled up into a confused mass, and then writhed with great violence, crushing mushrooms as it fled.

As he knocked on the woman’s door, he recalled in vivid pictures the panic he’d seen on his father’s face and the way his father had held his broad, panting chest. He knocked with calm determination until a voice within the house said, “Yes, who is there?” The boys shuffled their feet behind him.

“Madam, my name is Bode! Bode Adesokan.”

The footstep hesitated by the door.

“Bode who?”

“Bode Adesokan. I live on this, eh, street.”

“And what do you want?” the woman said, but as he began to reply, he heard a bolt being pulled back. Then he watched the half-broken handle of the door twist slowly. The woman was about 30 years of age, fair-complexioned and with small marks of scarifications on both sides of her cheeks.

“I said…” the woman started but stopped when she saw the boys behind Bode. “So na you be their father?”

“No, madam,” he said and turned back, mostly to avoid the intensity of her gaze. He looked at the faces of the boys. “I am just here to beg for them. Abeg, forgive them, na mistake dem make.”

“Wait, wait, oh…”

The child inside the house cried out again, cutting her short. Bode saw the child totter up to his mother now, holding a stuffed lizard toy from whose torn belly stuffed fibres were falling out. The weeping boy clasped his hands around his mother’s legs and knocked the toy against her, spraying fibres over the floor.

She looked down at the child, squeezed his nose with her fingers, scooped out snot and rubbed it on the back of her skirt.

“My prince, I am coming, oh?” she said.

She raised her head and faced Bode again. “You see am, Oga? He was sleeping quietly, jeje like sick child. Now, him just dey cry-cry. And it is because of these stupid boys and their stupid ball. I no go give them back.”

“Please ma, please ma,” the boys said. The Englishspeaking one knelt down as the woman stood with her hands on one side of the lintel, her face fixed into a frown. They pleaded with the woman, their voices morphing into a hurried liturgy, and one of them said in a voice at the verge of tears, “Please ma, everyone makes mistakes. Spider is in everybody house — whether rich or poor. Please ma-a.”

Bode stood there, in the midst of the ululations, unsure of what to do. It was a moment he recognised like the twinkling of light in that instant upon awakening. He’d felt it strongly at the airport, from the muffled words uttered by one other Nigerian man at the first cell they’d taken him to inside the city. “This people? Huhm. They don’t accept beg at all — at all. You do the crime, you don’ go be that.” And, indeed, it had been true. It had seemed as though the white people understood him only when they asked him questions. But at other times when he pleaded incessantly, cried and prayed for them in Christ’s name, spoke about what could happen to his ailing father whose prostate

condition could be made worse by his imprisonment, or begged to be deported back to his country, it seemed as though he spoke a strange language which none of them could understand.

“Ehh?” the woman said. “Spider abi?” she said as she clasped her hands. Then, hissing and shaking her head, she slammed the door.

“All of you, get out of my house!” she shouted from inside the house.

One of the boys behind him broke down in tears muttering that he did not have any money for a new ball. Others began begging him, but Bode passed them and walked down the stairs. He’d developed a palpitation the moment the woman slammed the door, and now he gazed into the distance towards the street where his brother lived with renewed fear. The boys had merely kicked a ball and woken a sleeping baby. Yet the anger at them for hurting an innocent child had been so strong the woman could not forgive. Innocent, the word sparkled in his mind like the strike of a match. His brother had used that word many times in the only two letters he had sent to Bode in prison to describe their parents: the way their innocent mother had refused to eat in the days following his innocent father’s death; the way their innocent mother had fallen one day and slumped.

He made towards the road and began walking back home. The two boys who’d waited in the field came up to him, their faces curious. “Tell your friends to keep trying,” he said as he walked past them. “It is not easy, but maybe they can succeed.” The words came out of him as if a part of him had fallen out.

He passed the church he’d seen a few days before with a cracked bell swinging slowly in the quiet evening wind. An earth-brown dog sauntered along, turned to face him, opened its coloured teeth and barked. He stopped in front of the mango tree behind his compound where a woman roasted corn on a spit, plumes of smoke rising from the woman’s hearth and billowing up the tree. And now, as he waited for the woman to wrap the roast corn in old newspapers, he noted that the mangoes were somewhat discoloured, almost blackish, as if the smoke had painted them. the following day, the contract baba aliyu had been waiting for from the big Wema Bank branch materialised. Together with Aliyu, the oldest of Baba Aliyu’s six children, they worked till noon, offloading a dozen bad upholsteries from the back of a lorry. Although Bode had come to accept the job as a lifesaver, it often reminded him of what might have been. Had things turned out differently, he would have been met by members of a syndicate owned by the now infamous John Okayfor. They’d have lodged him in a hotel near London, given him a concoction that would have induced his delivery of the pellets.

“Once that happens,” Yusuf had assured him, shaking his fist, “once it happens, oh boy forget! I say, forget! You’re made. They will give you your £100,000 in cash. Complete. On the spot there.” But none of that had happened. They’d barely stood in line to pass through security at Heathrow when a man in uniform with a dog on a leash approached the line.

It was almost noon when they finished emptying the lorry. Tired, his body tense, Bode sat with Baba Aliyu on the bench in front of the workshop and drank cold bottles of 7-Up. He’d shake the bottle and watch a revolution build up to the neck of the bottle and spill out in suds. Baba Aliyu drank his slowly, his mouth swallowing in a way that reminded Bode of the mouth of the snake that almost bit him, his hand swatting away esurient flies. Then, between belches, the older man said, “So, did you go?”

Although Bode knew at once what Baba Aliyu meant, he said, “Go where, sir?”

“Your brother abi’s house. Did you go yesterday?” He shook his head. “No, sir.”

Baba Aliyu smiled and started to say something, but he was distracted by a man on a motorcycle who

stopped in front of the store but kept the engine running, constantly pushing the foot clutch while he talked with Baba Aliyu. By the time they’d exchanged prolonged pleasantries and the man had asked to bring Baba Aliyu some glass windows to the workshop later that day, it seemed the older man had forgotten what he and Bode had been discussing. The older man went into the back of the shop while Bode sat still, watching the streets.

He paced the workshop that day, lifting chairs, packing stray wood, sweeping sawdust, striving not to be away from Baba Aliyu’s sight for even a moment. But by the end of the day, he’d said nothing to Bode. As Bode left for home, he wondered if the man had given up on him. “If I have urged you on, encouraged you, did all I could to help you confront your fears and you refuse, then so be it.” The words “so be it” reechoed in his head as if Baba Aliyu had shouted them from the distance.

He headed back the way he’d gone the previous evening. The road was softer from the night’s rain, even though the sun was out and the air was humid and thick. He’d walked a few kilometres, thinking only of his parents and Baba Aliyu when, on raising his head, he saw the boys on the field playing with a ball. Their voices were loud, and when they saw him, they erupted in loud cheers.

“Uncle! Uncle!” they called at him.

“What, how, what happen?”

The first boy who’d accosted him the previous evening picked up the ball and gave it to him. He told Bode they’d remained at the woman’s door, not giving up as he’d suggested to the two boys who stayed in the field. And just as they were about to leave, the woman had come out and given them the ball.

“That’s very good,” he said. He tucked at his cap and gazed across the road to the building. He realised that his heart had begun palpitating again. “That’s very good,” he said again.

“The woman say it was because of you, uncle,” one of the kids said. “She say we shud promise her to bring you.”

“Uncle, uncle, she likes you.”

Later, it took him a while to decide, as he walked away from the boys, whether to go first to the woman to thank her, or to his brother’s house. But he found, as he crossed back to the other side of the street, that he was headed to his brother’s. A rough wind had begun blowing and clouds were massing across the horizon, beating the bright colours of the day into a bleached grey. He stopped after crossing the footbridge over the Omi-Ala, and stepped to the side of the clearing to gather his thoughts, behind a crumbling fence halfcovered with roofing sheets. As he waited, an elderly man rode past on a bicycle, carrying a woman who sat with both legs facing sideways as if on a moving stool.

The woman greeted him, “E lee oh.” He nodded and waved at them, wondering if they might know him. The bicycle bumped into a few uneven cracks in the ground and a white handkerchief fell from the older woman’s pocket and hit the ground and rose under the wing of the wind. It tumbled towards him, rolling like a kite through the loose dirt. The old couple did not notice, they rode on, past a shed that was closing, past school children walking home in their uniforms. He picked up the handkerchief and ran after them, calling at the couple. By the time he reached them, he was only a few houses from his brother’s, the old house of his parents on Isolo Street he’d once called home. He removed his cap. Then he walked towards the house, its familiar door littered with gospel stickers and prayers.

He walked slowly, watching his feet, his dust-coloured shoes. Then, at the porch, he stood erect as if his feet were trapped beneath the earth. He could hear movements within it, then a cough. He raised his hand to knock, but lifting his eyes to the edge of the ceiling, he saw a spider web. Empty, browned with loose dust, with what looked like a small stick hanging from it. His eyes were on it when he heard footfalls approaching from within the house coming towards the door.