The Broken Piece of Me by Doyin Ajayi

Adult Content

For Ann

That sound, sharp.

It slices through the air like a whip. It jolts me awake. I haven’t gotten used to it. The harmattan wind blows through the open windows. I rub my shoulders and try to warm my body up.  The huge searchlight in the yard casts a shadow of the cashew tree on the walls. The branches spook me. They’re wraiths reaching for me, their pointed tips looking like spears aimed at me, reaching for my soul. A woman’s scream. Sergeant Wasiu’s gun cocks again. He’s the chief of the guards – a cruel man with gallows humour. The creeping feeling rises up in me again. The night’s quietness is eerie. The woman’s screams are louder now, they’re bloodcurdling.

The gun roars. Her screams stop abruptly.

# # # # #

In my dreams, I’m running. I feel free, light – like air.

My feet barely touch the ground. I hear mischievous laughter. Loud and carefree. It’s mine. There’s someone beside me as I run. His bony arms swing as he frolics beside me. His grin, unrestrained; his eyes, merry. I’ll recognise that crescent moon-shaped scar on his forehead anywhere. Saliu. A medal hangs around his neck. The medal I won at a spelling bee a few years ago. I can feel the ground, hard beneath my feet. I can’t hear my laughter anymore. It dies in my throat, like a flow of water abruptly shut off. My tongue feels heavy in my mouth. My lips move, but I can’t form any words. The acrid smell of smoke fills the air. I turn to look at Saliu. The soot and smoke obscure his face. But his eyes, those eyes. Fear coils in them. Wild, naked fear. I reach for him. The smell of smoke is stronger now. The fear in his eyes terrifies me. But I reach for him still. The flames consume him. They eat him up. I finally find my voice.

I yell his name.

“Na who be dat again?”¹

My nightmare has roused someone from sleep. I can’t tell who. Thick clouds of darkness obscure the innumerable bodies on the floor, crammed like sardines in a can. I can’t sleep. My nightmares torment me. They constrict my mind in a python-like grip – unrelenting, ceaseless – reminding me of Saliu’s murder. In my dreams, I could never save him.

No matter how hard I tried.

# # # # #

The mob almost lynched me – like they did to Saliu. Stella’s boss was trying to rape her. I stabbed him. I was the monster, a homeless kid, just another boy on the streets. Who would believe me? Stella ran away. I couldn’t blame her. They found me with the body. They’d beaten me till blood ran from every orifice on my head. I lost my medal that night. I try not to think of it. I don’t know how long I spent with the body in the room, my hands in a futile battle to clean the blood off my medal. My medal.

Still, I try not to think of it. But no matter how hard I try, I always remember my first day in here. I remember the dirty, moss-lined walls with the screes of fading paint at the bottom. Sunken eyes in long, drawn faces stared at me as I walked between the row of cells. But what hit me most was the undercurrent of hopelessness and wasted humanity that hung in the air beneath the stench of human waste and unwashed bodies. It was a choking, depressing air. It was in the gaunt frames and filthy bodies that lumbered behind the bars. Their eyes told of spirits long broken and crushed into bits. It was in the moans of pain, the insane laughter, screams of the wounded, and the desperate cries of mercy from hoarse throats to sneering faces.

After six months in the infamous Kirikiri Prison, I finally know what that smell is. It’s the decay of the human spirit in the body. A death, a miserable detachment while being alive. I knew it when I was ‘initiated.’ The guards stripped me. They formed a circle and herded me to the middle. They’d clubbed me and splashed me with water and stones. They roared with laughter every time I flinched. The stones cut into my body, but their laughter cut even deeper. The cold water stung my wounds and washed away my blood as quickly as it appeared, but neither the sadistic chortles of delight that rang around me nor the shame leave my mind so quickly.

I have too much time in here to dwell on the things I’d rather not – my dead father, my education – forever lost, my sister, now Chief Ajanaku’s fifteen-year-old bride, and the times I spent playing with Saliu in the streets. Life clawed away pieces of me outside these walls. What’s left of me is dying a slow, miserable death in here. I don’t have my medal to hold on to. It might have comforted me on the nights I laid down in the cell and bedbugs descended on me and slurped my blood like thirsty desert travelers who stumbled upon an oasis. On the dark nights Sergeant Wasiu’s rifle spat and tore holes in the bodies of those who dared oppose his will, my trembling fingers might have wrapped themselves around my medal.

It might also have comforted me every time I heard Tope’s shrieks of pain and her entreaties that fell on deaf ears the nights Sergeant Wasiu cruelly violates her. Tope worked as a salesgirl to a rich lace dealer on the island. When her daughter made off with the company’s profits, she’d held Tope accountable for the deed and had her thrown in prison. She cries almost all nights. I see her in the canteen as we shuffle to eat meals that sneer at us from our plates. Her eyes are flat, dead, like someone reached into her soul and switched out the lights. She often ducks her head to hide the bruises on her swollen face. I try to talk to her. When it’s my turn to wash the dishes of a thousand inmates, I always talk to her. I say anything that comes to my mind. Anything to stop her from staring into space and to stop the tears from leaking from her eyes. In here, with the walls and the metal that surrounds us, we have all the time to talk. So, she doesn’t mind. I’ve told her about the mischief the boys and I got into. It only brought subdued smiles out of her, unlike the roaring laughter that rolled from Nnamdi’s belly. I didn’t want to tell her about Saliu’s death. But I ended up telling her. She cried. I cried too.

It was the second time I cried for Saliu and the first time I did in here.

I met Nnamdi on my first day here. He had a bald head that glinted with sweat, and a huge, bulky build that carried enough rage for two men. His pockmarked face with its heavy features was twisted in a snarl. He was different from the rest of us. His eyes burned with a fire, an anger, unlike the doused spirits that I saw in everyone else’s eyes. He scared me initially. He usually fights the guards. He fights them over nearly everything. They always beat him. But he fights them still.

He fights them over the beans the cooks serve to us with more weevil than beans and the watery soup that has its fair share of maggots lazily swimming along in it. He complains to them over the twenty-something inmates that share our cramped cell that is no more than a few steps wide. On the nights he hears Tope’s screams, something comes loose in his head – he rattles the bars of our cells, growling like an incensed bear, cursing, spittle flying from his mouth.

I once asked him how he came to be in here. He was silent for a while. He stole over six million in cash from a bullion van after beating his fellow guard unconscious. I imagined that was enough money to swim in. It was more money than I could ever have thought of. I tried arranging the notes in my mind but they exhausted the length, width, and height of my imagination.

# # # # #

I sometimes think of my friends – the boys.

I remember the times when we rolled in the sand after our feeble bodies groaned under the weight of blocks and head pans on construction sites. Kunle tried to avoid us, but he could never outrun us. We’d catch him and throw him in a pile of sand, our childish laughter ringing out. I also remember the times we went to beg Mama Nkiru for bread at her shop while Ali winked at me as he sneaked glances at her backside. Many nights brought Kunle telling crude, and no doubt, exaggerated stories of what men and women did in the dark corners of the car park we sometimes slept in. He liked such stories. He’d liked them ever since his aunt took to coming to his room at night and slipping her hands under his covers before he finally ran away. Ali always chuckled. The stories were easier on his anguished mind. It was easier than seeing the scars on your body, reminders of the times you were thrashed for not knowing your Arabic and your teacher dying because he’d slipped and hit his head on a stone when you’d pushed him.

But most of all, I think of Saliu. Saliu of the quick gait and docile spirit; Saliu, who sat with me beneath street lights when we tried to learn new words from newspaper scraps he’d found. Saliu, who’d lost his home when bandits invaded his village and killed his family. When I sleep, I hear his mischievous laughter – the same when we ran down the steep road leading beneath the bridge at Obalende, the sky emptying its tears on us, our laughter rising with the rain’s intensity. I never got a chance to say goodbye to him, to them. I wonder where they are.

We were a band, an army of four. A constellation of fallen stars swept from the sky and sent tumbling to the earth. A group of homeless kids roaming the streets of Isale-Eko, living with our hands outstretched for whatever life was merciful enough to throw our way.

Sometimes, when life took too long, we tried seizing what we could. Saliu died when an irate mob set him ablaze for stealing food. He went searching for what he could eat. The unsympathetic streets of Lagos ate him instead.

When I remember him at random times, I make scratches on the wall of our cell. The words are fast leaving my memory. Nnamdi once asked me why I do that. I told him about the games Saliu and I played with new words. Words I found harder and harder to remember. Nnamdi was quiet for a while. He later told me he had a son about my age. A boy he hadn’t seen in four years.

Later that night, just before lights out, he sat beside me, a pensive look in his eyes rather than murderous rage, as I scratched a new word into the wall. o-f-f-s-p-r-i-n-g.

# # # # #

I woke up next to two dead bodies last week. Dawn’s brightness brought their stiff, still forms in death’s grip. One of them was a young man, a couple of years older than me. The other was a much older man. They looked more peaceful than I had ever seen them. One day, that might be me. I do not know. There are scabs on my skin, and a violent cough has seized my chest, making me hack painfully till I spit out thick, greenish slime.

Stella came to see me today. I was happy to see her.

When I limped into the small room with chains around my hands and feet, she begged the guards to take them off. They did, but I knew I would pay for that later. When she asked about my limp, I couldn’t tell her that Sergeant Wasiu had clubbed my ankles until they were swollen like boiled eggs.

I haven’t seen her since the night her employer tried to rape her and I killed him, saving her. She looked different. I suppose when you spend nearly a year in prison, everyone who comes in from the outside looks different. She looked at me for a long time, tears rolling down her cheeks. We sat quietly for a while. Sergeant Wasiu walked by us every now and then, taking every opportunity to leer at her. She brought some food for me. She had to bribe the guards before she could bring it in. She smiled when she saw how I gobbled it up. Rice and fish stew had never tasted better. She’d found work – washing dishes for a woman who sold food far away from our old neighbourhood. I asked her about the boys. She smiled sadly and shook her head.

Stella ran away that night. She couldn’t stay. She apologised, tears running down her cheeks. She couldn’t save me. They would have called her a husband-snatcher² and an ashawo.³ They were words that littered my daily life in Isale-Eko. Before she left, she slipped something in my palm. It was wrapped in black cellophane. I unwrapped it when I got to my cell.

It had tiny chips of rust on it. But I would recognise it anywhere. It was my medal. A reminder of who I was and a bigger reminder of who I could have been. A proof of my academic prowess and an excruciating reminder of the many rungs I could have climbed; the many things I could have made out of life. But most of all, it was an anchor, a bittersweet reminder of a happy period of my life that was forever lost to me.

It was the last piece of me.

I stared at it for a long time till the tears ran down my cheeks.

# # # # #

I woke happy this morning. I wanted to show Tope my medal. I had to hide it from the guards. When I saw Tope, she looked worse than ever. Her face looked like a danfo⁴ ran over it. Her right eye was swollen shut and deep cuts lined her cheeks.

Yet, she smiled when she saw my medal. It was a smile unfettered by a prison’s shackles. A leap of a happy heart inside an imprisoned body. A smile I had never seen in here. It seemed to make her wounds fade. My piece of mouldy, stale bread and watery tea tasted less like sawdust.

But Kirikiri is no fairytale life. Not with Sergeant Wasiu lurking in the walls like a dark, evil cloud. That night, Tope’s screams were loud. They pierced through me like a spear. It tore through the night’s stillness like a bullet through paper.

Tope didn’t serve us breakfast the next day.

The next time I saw her, she was free.

Free of her accusers.

Free of her dehumanizing ordeal.

Free of her earthen vessel.

Her body dangled from the decking. Her eyes stared into nothingness.

# # # # #

I’ve been in here for a year.

My medal is rusted. The tiny chips and rust spots that were on it like dry, sandy patches on a football field have fully taken over its surface. I think I have cholera. I vomit every now and then. I also feel dizzy sometimes. One of the dead inmates I woke up to was always feeling dizzy before he died. He told me it was probably cholera from drinking the dirty water in the yard. I probably have it too. I’ve drunk that water long enough to contract it. Long enough to also know the sound of Wasiu’s rifle. Long enough to have the wrinkling on my hands and feet that tell me my hourglass of time is fast depleting. Long enough to know the smell of hopelessness and death that hangs in the air.

So, when Wasiu stormed into our cell at dawn with his men, his eyes fixed on me, I knew what was coming next.

I remembered the screams of the others that reached out in the night’s darkness. Wild. Hysterical. Grabbing the night by the throat and demanding to be heard. And I certainly remembered the gunshot that always followed; slicing through the air like a whip.

Sergeant Wasiu’s cursed, sadistic “game.” Only one inmate had survived it so far. He never spoke of it. He remained mute no matter how many times I asked.

But the look in his eyes told me the story.

So did his wounded leg that had to be amputated.

Nnamdi knew the story too.

He tried to defend me. Wasiu slammed his rifle on the side of his head, sending him crashing into the wall. But Nnamdi wouldn’t be put down so easily. Staggering, he tried to gather his wits. He came back, blocking me from them with his huge frame. The guards clubbed his belly. He dropped to a knee. I felt his blood spurt on me when Sergeant Wasiu’s rifle broke his nose. Nnamdi finally went down as if poleaxed. I didn’t fight the guards when they laid their hands on me. They pulled me up roughly and shoved me out of the cell. The harried me along a path at the secluded end of the prison.

Three guards were behind Wasiu. He fixed his eyes on me for a moment.

He told me to walk towards the cashew tree at the end of the yard.

I turned away from him. I limped slowly. I thought of Saliu and the boys. I thought of my family. I saw Tope’s eyes and their blank stare. I kept limping painfully. I clutched my medal with both hands.

I’m almost at the cashew tree. I can hear Saliu’s laughter again. I fix my gaze on my rusted medal. I try as hard as I can to see a bright spot on it. But it’s too dark. I clamp my wrinkled hands around it.

The cock of the gun splits the air.

And I keep limping along.

Index

“Na who be dat again?”¹ – Nigerian pidgin for “who is that again?”

husband-snatcher² – insulting term for a woman who has an affair with a married man

ashawo³ – a prostitute

danfo⁴ – yellow-coloured, commercial buses extremely popular in Lagos

Doyin Ajayi

Image by Jake Parkinson from Pixabay – prison yard with a high wall and razor wire. NB this is not the Kirikiri prison. Those images were too distressing to use.