ponds and birds and water lilies: beautiful but it smelled of drains and rotting reeds.
We continued to go to the main cathedral for services. White draperies hung the length of its ceiling, and the stained glass doors would accordion open to let in air. Local dignitaries would be in attendance and nod approval as our family lined up to take communion and make our gifts to the church, showing obeisance to the gods of middle- class respectability.
But the church at the top of our unpaved road was bare concrete always open at the sides. People would pad past my bedroom window and the singing of hymns would swell with the dawn. Some of the local houses would be village dwellings amid the ageing urban villas.
Chickens still clucked in our new narrow back court. If you dropped a bucket down this well all you had to do was reach in for it. The problem was to stop water flooding into the house. The concrete of an inner courtyard was broken and the hot little square was never used, except for the weights that Raphael had made for himself out of iron bars and sacks of concrete. Tiny and rotund, he had dreams of being a muscleman. His computer desktop was full of a Nigerian champion in briefs. I winced with embarrassment whenever his screen sang open in public. What would people think of him, with that naked man on his netbook?
My father started to swat flies all the time. He got long sticky strips of paper and hung them everywhere— across doorways, from ceilings, in windows. They would snag in our hair as we carried out food from the kitchen. All we saw was flies on strips of paper. We would wake up in the night to hear him slapping the walls with books, muttering “flies flies flies.”
The house had a tin roof and inside we baked like bread. Raphael resented it personally. He was plump and felt the heat. My parents had installed the house’s only AC in their bedroom. He would just as regularly march in with a spanner and screwdriver and steal it. He would stomp out, the cable dragging behind him, with my mother wringing her hands and weeping. “That boy! That crazy boy! Jacob! Come see to your son.”
Raphael shouted, “Buy another one! You can afford it!”
“We can’t Raphael! You know that! We can’t.”
And Raphael said, “I’m not letting you drag me down to your level.”
Matthew by then was nearly nineteen and had given up going to university. His voice was newly rich and sad. “Raphael. The whole family is in trouble. We would all like the AC, but if Baba doesn’t get it, he wanders, and that is a problem too.”
I didn’t like it that Raphael took it from our parents without permission. Shamefaced with betrayal of him, I helped Matthew fix the AC back in our parents’ window.
Raphael stomped up to me and poked me with his finger. “You should be helping me, not turning tail and running!” He turned his back and said, “I’m not talking to you.”
I must have looked very sad because later I heard his flip-flops shuffling behind me. “You are my brother and of course I will always talk to you. I’m covered in shame that I said such a thing to you.” Raphael had a genius for apologies, too.
When Andrew was twelve, our father drove him to Abuja and left him with people, some great-aunt we didn’t know. She was childless, and Andrew had come back happy from his first visit sporting new track shoes. She had bought him an ice cream from Grand Square. He went back.
One night Raphael heard mother and father talking. He came outside onto the porch, his fat face gleaming. “I’ve got some gossip,” he told me. “Mamamimi and father have sold Andrew!”
Sold was an exaggeration. They had put him to work and were harvesting his wages. In return he got to live in an air-conditioned house. Raphael giggled. “It’s so naughty of them!” He took hold of my hand and pulled me with him right into their bedroom.
Both of them were decent, lying on the bed with their books. Raphael announced, very pleased with himself. “You’re not selling my brother like an indentured servant. Just because he was a mistake and you didn’t want him born so late and want to be shot of him now.”
Mamamimi leapt at him. He ran, laughter pealing, and his hands swaying from side to side. I saw only then that he had the keys for the SUV in his hand. He pulled me with him out into the yard, and then swung me forward. “Get the gate!” He popped himself into the driver’s seat and roared the engine. Mamamimi waddled after him. The car rumbled forward, the big metal gate groaned open, dogs started to bark. Raphael bounced the SUV out of the yard, and pushed its door open for me. Mamamimi was right behind, and I didn’t want to be the one punished again, so I jumped in. “Goodbye-yeee!” Raphael called in a singsong voice, smiling right into her face.
We somehow got to Abuja alive. Raphael couldn’t drive, and trucks kept swinging out onto our side of the road accelerating and beeping. We swerved in and out, missing death, passing the corpses of dead transports lined up along the roadside. Even I roared with laughter as lorries wailed past us by inches.
Using the GPS, Raphael foxed his way to the woman’s house. Andrew let us in; he worked as her boy, beautifully dressed in a white shirt and jeans, with tan sandals of interwoven strips. In we strode and Raphael said, very pleasantly at first. “Hello!
I saw at once this was a very nice lady. She was huge like a balloon, with a child-counselling smile, and she welcomed us and hugged Andrew to her.
“Have you paid my parents anything in advance for Andrew’s work? Because they want him back, they miss him so much.”
She didn’t seem to mind. “Oh, they changed their minds. Well course they did, Andrew is such a fine young man. Well, Andrew, it seems your brothers want you back!”
“I changed their minds for them.” Raphael always cut his words out of the air like a tailor making a bespoke garment. Andrew looked confused and kept his eyes on the embroidery on his jeans.
Andrew must have known what had happened because he didn’t ask why it was us two who had come to fetch him. Raphael had saved him, not firstborn Matthew—if he had wanted to be saved from decent clothes and shopping in Abuja
When we got back home, no mention was made of anything by anyone. Except by Raphael, to me, later. “It is so interesting isn’t it, that they haven’t said a thing. They know what they were doing was wrong. How would they like to be a child and know their parents had sent them to work?” Matthew said nothing either. We had been rich; now we were poor.
Jide and I measured replication decline.
We carried out our old experiment over and over and measured methyl as levels declined for no apparent reason. Then we increased the levels of stress. Those poor mice! In the name of science, we deprived them of a mother and then cuddly surrogates. We subjected them to regimes of irregular feeding and random light and darkness and finally electric shocks.
There was no doubt. No matter how much stress we subjected them to, after the first spectacular results, the methyl levels dropped off with each successive experiment. Not only that, but the association between methyl and neurotrophin suppression reduced as well—objectively measured, the amount of methyl and its effect on neurotrophin production were smaller with each study. We had proved the decline effect. Truth wore out. Or at least, scientific truth wore out.
We published. People loved the idea and we were widely cited. Jide became a lecturer and a valued colleague. People began to speak of something called Cosmic Habituation. The old ways were no longer working. And I was thirty-seven.
With visitors, Raphael loved being civil, a different person. Sweetly and sociably, he would say, “M’sugh;” our mix of hello, good-bye and pardon me. He loved bringing them trays of cold water from the Intermittent Freezer. He remembered everybody’s name and birthday. He hated dancing, but loved dressing up for parties. Musa the tailor made him wonderful robes with long shirts, matching trousers, shawls.
My father liked company too, even more so after his Decline. He would suddenly stand up straight and smile eagerly. I swear, his shirt would suddenly look ironed, his shoes polished. I was envious of the company, usually men from his old work. They could get my father laughing. He would look young then, and merry, and slap the back of his hand on his palm, jumping up to pass around the beer. I wanted him to laugh with me.
Very suddenly Matthew announced he was getting married. We knew it was his way of escaping. After the
