We knew him as the man with deep wrinkles around his eyes. He often wore a cap, the kind we heard the traders call a bicycle seat. I can’t see the cap around. All I see is blood. His blood. It’s all over my hands and my clothes. It’s on the bed. It’s on the floor. But I sit, with my hands on my medal. I try to polish it as best as I can. But I only stain it with more blood. Still, I try. It’s the last piece of me. All I have left.
The boys don’t know why I wear the medal.
I remember the first day I brought it home. It sat around my neck the way the sun sits in the sky—big, shiny, and proud. I didn’t take it off for the rest of the day. It gleamed against my skin, vying with my father’s broad smile for brightness. His teeth shone as bright as the medal that day. I had won the spelling bee in primary school. My teacher said I was smart. The others called me a promising child. They said I was smart enough to attend schools in places whose names I couldn’t even pronounce.
With each new plaudit from my teachers came an unfurling of my father’s lips into a grin—wider and wider, like an umbrella opening against the rain. I was a light, they said. A star. But stars fall, don’t they? Maybe if they hadn’t called me a star, I wouldn’t have fallen to the earth.
My star didn’t just fall; it died. It followed my father into his grave. I’ll go back to school soon, I thought. My mother said the same. You’ll go back soon. Things will be okay again. But I couldn’t shroud myself in that optimism for long. His death was the muezzin’s cry that summoned all our troubles. One by one they arrived—squeezing themselves into our lives, darkening our doorstep with their wretched presence.
With each passing day, with every skipped meal and hungry night, it became apparent that the dawn of my childhood dreams would never see reality’s welcoming light. We waited for a payment that never came for my father’s government benefits that never arrived. We waited on the shore, hoping, until the waves of poverty submerged us in their unforgiving, chilly, and sunless depths. My mother’s odd jobs and the little I earned from hawking were barely enough to keep hunger at bay and prevent the roof from caving in on us.
The boys don’t understand why I keep the medal. Ali and Kunle laugh at me and threaten to take it away. I’ve never told Saliu, but I notice the way he looks at me when the other boys laugh. I think he too dropped out of school. I asked him once. He doesn’t like to talk about it. The other boys call us efiwe. I think he understands me.
He once told me his elder brother was in the army. He doesn’t know if he’s still alive. Saliu ran away from home when bandits burnt his village in the north. They held a knife to his neck and made him watch while they raped his sisters before carving through them like chickens. He told me one rainy night while we shivered and swatted at mosquitoes inside a danfo at a park. I wonder if he still thinks of his sisters. I wonder what has become of mine.
I remembered my elder sister’s glossy lips and shiny hair in the evenings and my mother’s deepening frown a few months after my father’s death. The more notes she shoved into my mother’s hands, the more her frowns reduced to resigned sighs of near-acceptance. My sister never returned from one of her nightly trips. We never saw her again. My mother cried for the daughter she had lost long ago. But she didn’t cry for long. She couldn’t waste all her tears on my sister. She had many sorrows that jostled and tripped over themselves to draw the tears from her eyes.
Schooling became a thing of the past for me. I only thought of it in passing. It became a ship adrift on the seas till it was swallowed up by the thickening mist. My brother and I took to scraping what we could find on the streets. We rummaged around the streets of Isale-Eko for food. We got into fights. Our childhood mischief found full expression. On the days when wits and will failed, hunger’s cruel arms caressed us. We did odd jobs at the park. That was how I met the boys. They were a ragged bunch. If I had a mirror, I didn’t look any better.
But I always came home. I always came home to meet my Chief Ajanaku chatting merrily with my mother—his huge belly tenting the folds of his roomy agbada and his uneven teeth looking like jagged shards of broken glass. My brother never liked his unctuous manner and his loud chatter. But Chief Ajanaku had broad wings; wings that sheltered us against life’s troubles. The kind of wings that forced my mother to accept his hands fastened around my fifteen-year-old sister’s waist in exchange for some money. My mother sold my sister. That was the last time I went home. Another piece of me skittered away to a nameless place at the disintegration of my family, like a tumbler hitting the ground and splintering in a million directions.
The boys and I rarely talk about how we got to be. We only mention it every now and then.
Ali scares me sometimes. His eyes bulge when he’s angry—which is almost always. I once had to stop him from hurling stones at a cleric who only paused to ask if we were hungry. He hates the idea of God. Saliu told me Ali’s tutor at his ile kewu beat him mercilessly for failing to recite his Arabic lessons. One day, Ali pushed back. The man fell, cracked his skull on a stone, and bled to death. Ali ran. But he never really escaped. Some nights, he is unable to sleep. Other nights, he wakes up screaming, Astagfirullah! He tells us he smokes weed to keep his teacher’s ghost at bay.
Some days, we talk about our families. When I mentioned how my mother sold my sister, Kunle spoke about how he had to live with his aunt at Yaba—how she often slipped into his room at night. He squeezes his eyes shut when he describes her hands moving under his pyjamas, the scent of her perfume, the laughter in her voice. Later, when his own hands wouldn’t stop wandering beneath his trousers, they took him to a church for an exorcism. He was chained and beaten until he was within an inch of his life.
The first chance he got, he ran away from his aunt’s house. That explained why he sometimes went off on his own at night. Once, I saw him—his dirty shorts around his ankles—as he grunted, his hand jerking back and forth. He turned and caught me watching. I saw the slime on his hands. He threatened to beat me up if I ever told the others what I had seen.
When we walk up to people in Isale-Eko to ask for food, I see the looks in their eyes. Some take pity on us and throw some money our way. Sometimes, Stella, the girl who works as a house girl in the big house down the street, would give me some money for helping her run errands. When it rained heavily, she would let us stay in the empty boy’s quarters when her madam wasn’t around and give us whatever leftovers she could muster.
One of the men on the street is kind to us. Sometimes, he tells the akara seller to give us some when he sees us milling around the fire, struggling to keep the drool from dripping off our lips. His wife is Stella’s madam. We do not know his name. We know him by the deep wrinkles that form around his eyes when he smiles at us.
Others look at us with disdain, like we are the scum of the earth. In their fancy clothes and shiny bags, they care little for us. We scare them. We run around in our tattered clothes, grimy with dirt, chasing whatever pleasures make our existence a little brighter. We search for the small parts of ourselves buried in places we will never reach—a place filled with could-haves, if-onlys, and what-ifs. But we do not dwell on them. We have neither the time nor desire.
On some days, when Mallam Suhib gives us free suya for helping him carry his grill and meat, I go under the streetlamp and squint at the letters smudged with oil, fat, and yaaji pepper, searching for a new word. Sometimes I find one in the tiny scraps of paper I gather. I struggle to remember them. Some feel familiar. I tell Saliu. We laugh over them. Kunle doesn’t understand us. We often see him with pictures of naked women and men. We never ask him how he comes by them.
Some days are sad. We don’t have much to eat. Whatever any one of us brings, we all share. Some days, it’s scraps of Mallam Suhib’s suya. Other days, it’s mouldy bread from Mama Nkiru’s stack of loaves.
When begging fails, we put our weakened bodies to work. At construction sites, we haul whatever blocks we can carry, buckling beneath the weight of half-filled headpans of water—then rolling in the sand afterward. Sometimes, we help the conductors at the park scream for passengers, yelling until our throats go hoarse.
I like going off on my own to help the cleaners at my old school. But I never stay too long. I always leave before my classmates arrive. It reminds me too much of a life I can no longer have. Other times, we pit our wits—and lives—against fate by risking Lagos’ ire. Ali taught me how to lift change from the pockets of elderly men when they mill around the newspaper stand. I always do it. But I never feel comfortable about it.
Saliu died last week while trying to steal puff-puff. Ali and Kunle told me the crowd put a tyre around his neck and set him ablaze. They said he tried to run, but a weak, emaciated boy stood no chance against Lagos’ fury. They beat him until he could barely move—then they burnt him alive. I wept for my friend. I wept for my friend. I thought of the suffering he must have endured.
Our lives were hard; couldn’t death have been kind to us? I remembered his gap-toothed laughter as we gambolled in the rain, mud splashing against our bare skin. I remembered his head leaning close to mine as we stumbled through scraps of paper, piecing words together.
I didn’t know how to cry for him. So I tried to remember more words. Words I would have told him. Words he might have liked.
I hear some of the men in our street call us monsters as they walk by. They see us scratching our mite-ridden skin with grubby fingernails blackened by dirt. They see the empty bowls clutched to our chests, the ill-fitting clothes that sway on our spindly frames. We do look like monsters after all. But I remember—Frankenstein’s monster had a father who made him. I wonder who made us. Was it my father? My mother? Chief Ajanaku? Was it Ali’s teacher or Kunle’s aunt with the sweet perfume? Or was it the bandits who drove Saliu from his village?
This is how I remember it.
It rained that night—the kind of rain that made us huddle together in the cold. The kind that plunged Lagosians into madness. Danfo drivers sped through the flooded streets with annoyance, splashing unlucky pedestrians.
On nights like this, Stella often let us stay in the boy’s quarters when her bosses weren’t home. She had done it for so long that we knew the routine: jump the fence, and the doors would be unlocked.
That night, I went alone.
I stumbled in, dripping wet and shivering. My eyes fell on Stella, struggling beneath her madam’s husband—the man with wrinkled eyes. One of his hands was fastened around her neck, the other yanking up her skirt, his trousers pooled at his feet. One moment, I was standing outside my own body. The next, I was consumed by a murderous rage. A demon seized me by the throat and rattled me like a chewed-up toy clamped in the jaws of a bulldog. When the red mist cleared from my eyes, I looked down. My hands were wrapped around a bloodied knife. Stella’s screams rang in my ears. Outside, I heard the crashing boom of thunder.
Saliu ran. They caught him anyway and set him ablaze—like an offering.
So I stayed.
Stayed with the body in the room. Sat there, my hands clutched around my medal.
Stella’s madam will be home soon. I will tell her what happened. But she won’t believe me. No one will.
They’ll say I broke in to steal.
They will remind everyone how the man fed us on many days.
They won’t listen.
After all, I am a monster.
Maybe I’ll go to prison. Maybe they’ll burn me like they did Saliu.
I only hope they’ll be kind enough to let me keep my medal.
It’s the last piece of me left.
Adédoyin Àjàyí is a young Nigerian writer. He writes from Lagos, the city that never sleeps. Nature is the biggest influence on his writing. His work has appeared in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, Afrocritik, Livina Press, Fiction Niche, Maudlin House, African Writer, Ngiga Review, Spillwords Press, Journal of African Youth Literature, Everscribe Magazine, and elsewhere. He was longlisted for the 2024 JAY Lit Awards (fiction category). He’s addicted to cakes, books, and suits. He tweets @AjayiAdedoyin14.
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