The Shape of Water – Doyin Ajayi

There are a number of things you will learn. They will creep up on you and dig into you. It will be subtle – like the sluggish slither of a dying snake, and slow – like an earthworm burrowing into wet soil.

You will learn that water has no shape. It’s a shapeless, ordinary mass that takes the shape of whoever handles it. You will learn that this shape can be distorted at will. Water bears reflections too. Water cannot reflect itself. The reflections that dance on its face bear the visage of whoever gazes on it. This visage can be terrifying. It obscures the face of water.

You will also learn that people shake water this way and that. They pour it here and there. They wash their hands in it. They dip their soles in it. They poke it with their toes. They spit in it. It’s cruel. It’s callous.

You will learn that you are water.

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You have a race to run.

You feel a thousand eyes on you. Why can’t you play gently like the others?

‘On your marks!’

You dig your toes into the sand. There’s a deathly hush around the grounds. Look at you, see the hair on your chin like that of a man!

‘Set!’

Sweat drips off your eyelids and stings your eyes. Your lungs expand with air. I’ll show you who the man is!

‘Go!’

You’re a cannonball. Your heels play hide-and-seek with the ground. The air whizzes past your ears. Your arms swing with vigour. Your heart thunders in your chest. You’re getting to that point. You know it when you hear your classmates chant your name.

They don’t stop. You don’t either. The other runners are simply there for your parade.  It’s your track, your race, and your show. And you always win. The boys don’t mind that you beat them anymore. You’re that good, that much better than them. The whispers of awe and amazement, though muffled, are almost as loud as the cheers. You quell the elation rising in your stomach. There are more races to run. They’re no problem for you. Your display of fireworks on the tracks ignites the interhouse sports like never before.

The sun has crawled home. You can still hear the cheers. The raised eyebrows, pointed thumbs, and curious looks that accompanied them were there too. But you focused more on the cheers. They were loud. Louder than you’ve ever heard them. So, you left the bewildered faces behind and let the smiling ones follow you home.

Yet, no matter how many races you win, you can’t outrun your mother’s disapproval. Not when you were supposed to be in skirts and playing the way normal girls did, the way they were supposed to do. Thankfully, she’s not home. You want to savour the euphoric feeling in you before she dampens it with her sneers and disparaging comments.

But you will have no respite.

“Where are you coming from?”

Your father’s eyes are black with rage. Rage at your mother. Rage at you. Rage at your quick feet. While your feet are quick, his hands are quicker. Quick enough to throw fists at you and your mother. That’s why his hand is a blur before you feel the sting on your cheek. Your tomboyish body always infuriated his depleted sense of manliness. Whatever bluster he couldn’t find in his beer, he found in his continual attempts to beat you and your mother into the ground.

His drunkenness isn’t new. But the madness that dances in his eyes today scares you. It has plunged to a new depth, low enough to meet hell and for the devil to step in from his cursed dwelling. He drags you by your hair and throws you on the ratty couch. Your screams are loud and tears run down your cheeks. Your ropey arms and strong legs flail desperately, but he’s a man on a foul mission, and he will see it done. Your struggles evoke laughter out of him.

His laughter is harsh – a conqueror’s laugh – fueled by your fear and frailty before him. Taking his fists to you was nothing new. Sneers about your mannish features wasted in a girl’s body were yesterday’s news. But this is new. Your howls are loud. Pain fuels the pitch of your screams. He forces his way inside you like an uninvited villager at a king’s feast.

Your screams will taper off to sobs. You will beg him to stop. You will ask him why. He will only laugh harder and thrust deeper. Your painful lesson in learning about water’s formlessness will begin whispering in your ears.

These will be the last races you run in a long, long time.

---

Ever since you could run in skirts, you liked to play with the boys. You ran as fast your legs could carry you. Your scampering feet on the school playground was a common sight. Chasing kites down dusty streets in Ikorodu. Helping old Mama Dipo catch her chickens when they strayed from her yard. Skinning your knees and bruising your elbows when you tumbled out of trees. Your mother worried about your femininity. You were a girl, not a boy.

She comforted herself with the hope that you’d grow out of that phase. While your mates played with makeshift pots in the sand and mimed breastfeeding babies made from rolled up-cardigans pressed to their prepubescent chests, you were lengthening your strides with the boys, darting in the streets, trying to outrun your evening shadow. While the other girls played ten-ten, you beat the boys at catcher. Barbie girl songs? No. Schwarzenegger blow-‘em-up movies instead.

You quickly learnt the word for girls like you: Tomboy. It doesn’t sound so bad. It also doesn’t feel so bad. But people say it like a curse. They spit it out of their mouths and on the ground like orange seeds. You don’t care. As long as you can run, the wind blows it all to naught. Your mother’s questioning stares and constant admonishments gradually seep into your core though. Questions only pop in your mind when you overhear her conversation with your aunty Bodunde.

“She’s just a tomboy, Laide,” your aunt says. “She’ll grow out of it.” Though you can’t see your mother, you imagine her signature pose for conversations that detest her – head raised with a hand on it, the other hand akimbo.

“I don’t think so,” she objects.

Bodunde dismisses her concerns. “Have you forgotten my Pelumi was like that at her age? Always running around like a boy. If you see her breasts now, ehn.” Bodunde chortled. Pelumi was her mother’s daughter. But were you? Your own breasts remained cardboard flat. Pelumi had blossomed into a lovely twenty-year old, her body a wondrous map of hills and valleys, and her skin as smooth as glass.

Your mother isn’t convinced. “That one?” She scoffed. “That one that looks like a boy.” She hissed loudly. “If she wanted to be a boy, she should have died. Her twin brother should have been alive. She should have been the one I left in the hospital.”

“Ahn ahn! That’s too much o.” Bodunde was horrified.

Your feet were glued to the ground. You stood there listening, but your spirit had wandered out of your body, exorcised like a demon on the command of your mother’s words. On pain of death, you couldn’t recall the rest of the conversation.

But you learnt two things. You never knew you had a twin brother. But you wished you learnt of that under very different circumstances. You also never knew your curse was your breasts that refused to grow. Your curse, your crime, was your body, nature’s warped shell that housed your broken identity. A shell that gave you ropey shoulders instead of broad hips. As the days go by, you will your hips to broaden. You pray your breasts into existence. But they will remain rooted to your chest like an island refusing to rise above an ocean’s depths. Your mother sniggers at you through it all.

Three weeks after this, after your feet create fireworks at the interhouse sports and leave the other runners in a smoky pile of ash, your father will fling you on the couch in a bid to show you who the man is.

---

You have two years left in secondary school. Your mother sends you to the boarding house. Perhaps being surrounded by girls will bring out the part of you that she wants to see. Maybe being surrounded by your fellow girls will cure you of the lunacy that has seized her daughter in its demanding grip. 

There are different kinds of girls in the boarding house. 

You see them braid their hair, unlike the low cut you’ve sported for as long as you can remember. You see them fawn and obsess over Justin Bieber and his sonorous, heart-stealing, panty-dropping voice. When you hear them talk about their first time in muffled giggles, you clam up and remember how your father invaded your body in a bid to remind you of who you were. You learn about Victoria’s Secret and laugh when you realize how unattractive those frilly things would look on you.

Some of them talk about their dream weddings. You watch wedding videos on BellaNaija. You see the picture-perfect images of men and women. The women’s bodies are curvy, winding, like a highway, unlike your razor straight, angular body that has brought you much ridicule. You see the smiles on their faces and the ditzy background.

It seems fake to you. That will never be you. Not with the hairs that peek from your chin like curious children hiding behind a curtain to peep a spectacle. Not with the looks and the jests that accompany your yam legs. Your classmates swaggered around in sports bras in the dorms, eager to show their budding femininity – their fast-growing breasts that they shoved in each other’s faces like a new, powerful currency. Your angular shoulders will cower.

There are no girls like you. It’s a weird kind of uniqueness you dislike. In that delicate age where girls find their bodies a magnet for eyes, yours is a magnet for all the wrong reasons. But not to Stephanie. She was a class ahead of you, yet, the only one who smiled at you in the mornings as you fetched water for your morning bath. Tall and fair-skinned, she glowed with youth’s freshness, and she had enough curves on her body for two women.

No matter how her day was, she ensured your plate had more than the meagre portions the other girls had to make do with. You snickered as you saw the envy-filled looks. In a few weeks, those glaring looks will become ones of derision after Stephanie pulls you into her bed and forces your hands and your mouth to go to all the places her body desires. You will let her. She has a woman’s body. Nobody wants you. She does. Envy-filled eyes will make way for derision. The girls will mock you even more.

Nobody will believe she cajoled you. She has the woman’s body. You have the manly body; you must have forced her.

The amphibious assault on your body and mind will not cease.

---

You’re water. Shapeless. Formless. Devoid of an identity. You have no control over who you are. Your mother, father, and Stephanie have all washed their hands in the water of your body and sullied it with who they thought you should be. Your body isn’t yours. It never has been, and it never will be. It stopped being yours long ago. You’ve known it since your mother looked at you, hissed and turned her head away as if to ward off your presence.

You lost control over it, over you, when your father invaded you, and all the other times he sought to discipline you by putting you in your place and reminding you he, not you, was the man. It ended those dark nights in the boarding house when Stephanie pulled you into her bed and forced your hands and your lips to go to all the places she wanted.

You no longer run anymore. It has brought you too many hurts. You often heard you were gifted when you were younger. Those strong legs and ropey shoulders felt like a gift. But not anymore. This isn’t what a gift is supposed to look like, what it’s supposed to bring. It has denied you ownership of your own flesh— of your very being.

You still don’t run.

It reminds you too much of that day. The memory eats away at your insides like gluttonous goats gnawing green leaves. That was the last time your feet hit the tracks. Those same feet that couldn’t kick your father away when he violated you. They couldn’t save you. Running can’t save you either. So, you don’t run.

Even in the university, you don’t do a lot of things. You don’t wear skirts. You wear trousers to hide your strong, muscular feet. You make sure they’re baggy. So that they hide the slimness of your hips. But it leaves you bone-weary fending off questions from your course mates about why you never wear skirts. Wearing wigs reduces the questions about your short hair, even though they itch you terribly.

You also don’t go to parties with your few friends. You’d go swimming with sharks before wearing anything tight. The guys don’t like a body like yours. You’ve learnt the hard way. You thought Seyi liked you, but he didn’t try to muffle his laughter when you came to his birthday party in a tight gown.

You don’t have curves, you have angles. You don’t have sexy feet, you have inelegant legs suited to spike shoes and trainers rather than four-inch heels. You still watch wedding videos on BellaNaija every now and then. You see the picture-perfect images and know that will never be you. You see couples and their love captured in snapshots that tell stories you’ll never know. They remind you of another world. They’re like a movie. A fantasy. But not your fantasy.

You’re water. They don’t see you. They use you. They leave their dark reflections on you. 

---

Students talk about the upcoming NUGA games. The sports complex is a beehive. You sit in the stands in the evenings and watch the athletes practice. The evening sun paints their skins a deep golden-brown. You watch them and feel a weird curiosity kindling in your chest. They don’t look like they have demons that have followed them from the tracks and whisper in their ears when they least expect it. You watch them on several evenings. They look happy, full of zip. The wind blows their squeals across to your ears and into your mind. It reminds you of you: the you before your father’s brutal invasion; before your mother’s haunting words; before Stephanie.

At their last practice session, you run with them. It’s the first time you’ve run in years. They cheer even when you beat them. You feel energy you’ve not felt in a while. The wind caresses your short hair like an affectionate parent. And when you stop, your heart, like a horse on weed, doesn’t stop galloping. You hear a girl’s happy shriek and you realise it’s yours. The guys and girls invite you to train with them whenever you want.

You run with them that evening till you’re all tired. Your feet scamper over the tracks while your heart chases respite. It’s like the wind that blows in your ears as you run. It’s loud. It’s fleeting. And you can’t catch it. Like your mother’s love. You realise she mutilated you for her wretched approval. And you searched for that approval every time you let Stephanie pull you into her bed:  Someone wants me, mother. Your crime was who you were. Their crime was bleeding you out to see their selfish reflections on you.

And you suddenly realise it was never about you. It was them.

On the tracks, you’re still water. But you’re unhindered; who you want to be; who you were meant to be.

And when you sleep that night, you hear a girl’s happy squeal, not a drunken man’s evil laughter.

---

You don’t go to the games.

But you keep running. You might never go to any of the games; you’ve had more curious stares than you bargained for. Still, you run.

You stop watching weddings on BellaNaija; no use torturing yourself with a future that won’t be yours. You also throw your wigs in the trash. You try harder to run. It’s the only thing you know how to do well. It’s the part of you no one can get to.

So, you run – you keep running, trying to outpace those who have cruelly occupied your body. Sometimes, it feels like you’re on a circular track, and no matter how fast your heels wink at the ground, you come back to that same point.

You try to get past them.

So, you run. It’s the only way you know to be yourself: water flowing. Unhindered.

You sprint. 

You keep sprinting.