alone. What could I say to my mother? Our Raphael is going mad? For her he had always been mad. Only I had really liked Raphael and now he was becoming someone else, and I was so slow I would only ever be me.
He got a strange disease that made his skin glisten but a fever did not register. It was what my father had done: get illnesses that were not quite physical. He ceased to do anything with his hair. It twisted off his head in knots and made him look like a beggar.
He was hardly ever fully dressed. He hung around the house in underwear and flip-flops. I became his personal Mamamimi, trying to stop the rest of the family finding out, trying to keep him inside the room. In the middle of the night, he would get up. I would sit up, see he wasn’t there, and slip out of the house trying to find him, walking around our unlit streets. This is not wise in our locality. The neighbourhood boys patrol for thieves or outsiders, and they can be rough if they do not recognize your face. “I’m Patrick, I moved into the house above the school. I’m trying to find my brother Raphael.”
“So how did you lose him?”
“He’s not well, he’s had a fever, he wanders.”
“The crazy family,” one of them said.
Their flashlights dazzled my eyes, but I could see them glance at each other. “He means that dirty boy.” They said that of Raphael?
“He’s my brother. He’s not well.”
I would stay out until they brought him back to me, swinging their AK47s. He could so easily have been shot. He was wearing almost nothing, dazed like a sleepwalker and his hair in such a mess. Raphael had always been vain. His skin Vaselined with the scent of roses, the fine shirt with no tails designed to hang outside the trousers and hide his tummy, his nails manicured. Now he looked like a labourer who needed a bath.
Finally one night, the moon was too bright and the boys brought him too close to our house. My mother ran out of the groaning gate. “Patrick, Patrick, what is it?”
“These boys have been helping us find Raphael,” was all I said. I felt ashamed and frustrated because I had failed to calm him, to find him myself, to keep the secret locked away, especially from Mamamimi.
When my mother saw him she whispered, “Wild man!” and it was like a chill wind going through me. She had said what I knew but did not let myself acknowledge. Again, it was happening again, first to the father, then to the son.
I got him to bed, holding both his arms and steering him. Our room was cool as if we were on a mountain. I came out back into the heat and Mamamimi was waiting, looking old. “Does he smoke gbana?” she asked.
I said I didn’t think so. “But I no longer know him.”
In my mind I was saying
Makurdi lives only because of its river. The Benue flows into the great Niger, grey-green with fine beaches that are being dug up for concrete and currents so treacherous they look like moulded jellies welling up from below. No one swims there, except at dusk, in the shallows, workmen go to wash, wading out in their underwear.
Raphael would disappear at sunset and go down the slopes to hymn the men. It was the only time he dressed up: yellow shirt, tan slacks, good shoes. He walked out respectfully onto the sand and sang about the men, teased them, and chortled. He would try to take photographs of them. The men eyed him in fear, or ignored him like gnarled trees, or sometimes threw pebbles at him to make him go away. The things he said were irresponsible. Matthew and I would be sent to fetch him back. Matthew hated it. He would show up in his bank suit, with his car that would get sand in it. “Let him stay there! He only brings shame on himself!”
But we could not leave our brother to have stones thrown at him. He would be on the beach laughing at his own wild self, singing paeans of praise for the beauty of the bathers, asking their names, asking where they lived. Matthew and I would be numb from shame. “Come home, come home,” we said to him, and too the labourers, “Please excuse us, we are good Christians, he is not well.” We could not bring ourselves to call him our brother. He would laugh and run away. When we caught him, he would sit down on the ground and make us lift him up and carry him back up to Matthew’s car. He was made of something other than flesh; his bones were lead, his blood mercury.
“I can’t take more of this,” said Matthew.
It ended so swiftly that we were left blinking. He disappeared from the house as usual; Mamamimi scolded Andrew to keep out of it and rang Matthew. He pulled up outside our gates so back we went past the university, and the zoo where Baba had taken us as kids, then down beyond the old bridge.
This time was the worst, beyond anything. He was wearing one of Mamamimi’s dresses, sashaying among construction workers with a sun umbrella, roaring with laughter as he sang.
He saw us and called waving. “M’sugh! My brothers! My dear brothers! I am going swimming.”
He ran away from us like a child, into the river. He fought his way into those strong green currents, squealing like a child perhaps with delight as the currents cooled him. The great dress blossomed out then sank. He stumbled on pebbles underfoot, dipped under the water and was not seen again.
“Go get him!” said Matthew.
I said nothing, did nothing
“Go on, you’re the only one who likes him.” He had to push me.
I nibbled at the edge of the currents. I called his name in a weak voice as if I really didn’t want him back. I was angry with him as if he was now playing a particularly annoying game. Finally I pushed my way in partly so that Matthew would tell our mother that I’d struggled to find him. I began to call his name loudly, not so much in the hope of finding him as banishing this new reality. Raphael. Raphael, I shouted, meaning this terrible thing cannot be, not so simply, not so quickly. Finally I dived under the water. I felt the current pull and drag me away by my heels. I fought my way back to the shore but I knew I had not done enough, swiftly enough. I knew that he had already been swept far away.
On the bank, Matthew said, “Maybe it is best that he is gone.” Since then, I have not been able to address more than five consecutive words to him.
That’s what the family said, if not in words. Best he was gone. The bookcase was there with its notice. I knew we were cursed. I knew we would all be swept away.
The sun set, everyone else inside the house. I wanted to climb up onto a roof, or sit astride the wall. I plugged the mobile phone into the laptop, but in the depths of our slough I could not get a signal. I went into our hot unlit hall and pulled out the books, but they were unreadable without Raphael. Who would laugh for me as I did not laugh? Who would speak my mind for me as I could never find my mind in time? Who would know how to be pleasant with guests, civil in this uncivil world? I picked up our book on genetics and walked up to the top of the hill, and sat in the open unlit shed of a church and tried to read it in the last of the orange light. I said, Patrick, you are not civil and can’t make other people laugh, but you can do this. This is the one part of Raphael you can carry on.
I read it aloud, like a child sounding out words, to make them go in as facts. I realized later I was trying to read in the dark, in a church. I had been chanting nonsense GATTACA aloud, unable to see, my eyes full of tears. But I had told myself one slow truth and stuck to it. I studied for many years.
Whenever I felt weak or low or lonely, Raphael spoke inside my indented head. I kept his books in order for him. The chemistry book, the human genetics book. I went out into the broken courtyard and started to lift the iron bags with balls of concrete that he had made. Now I look like the muscular champion on his netbook. Everything I am, I am because of my brother.
I did not speak much to anyone else. I didn’t want to. Somewhere what is left of Raphael’s lead and mercury is entwined with reeds or glistens in sand.
To pay for your application for a scholarship in those days you had to buy a scratch card from a bank. I had
