Badlands

The reason Chikelue is coming to my village is that he wants to see the cave. He doubts me when I tell him about the strange cave where noise triggers a waterfall. I wish I hadn't told him about the cave in such glowing terms. He has been scowling since we turned into the dirt road riddled with potholes. I feel guilty each time the underbelly of Baby Love scrapes the hard surface of the village road as he negotiates a pothole. He says it feels like it is his heart and not the car's underbelly that is being scraped.

I understand.

The car is barely two weeks old. A birthday gift from his father. A sleek, black, sexy convertible Chikelue nicknamed Baby Love. I met Chikelue back at the National Youth Service Corps Orientation Camp. We got this chemistry going between us after we discovered our football skills. Chikelue is a fine footballer like me. With our sparkling combination of skills, we helped our team to beat all the boys from the other platoons. I never saw or heard from him again after we left camp, not until that morning on the phone when his husky voice scraped my ears like some abrasive material, while too many ants were running around in my head. My father had stepped into a whole colony when he said: "If you are not a failure, why cannot you secure a job three years after you left school instead of sitting here roasting your buttocks in the ash heap?"

"Leave this boy be and stop pecking at him like he was birdseed," my mother said.

My brother, Majindu, sided with my father. "But Papa is saying the truth. The rest of us can't go to school because you and Papa wasted the family savings to send him to school."

After that argument, I determined to leave my small community of Nru for pastures new, even if it meant sleeping under the bridge like the touts in Lagos.

________

It rained recently. The road is wet and muddy and the tires are rolling with a splosh that angers Chikelue and keeps the scowl on his face. Even when a group of naked children playing in a village quadrangle abandon their play and flee at the sight of the car, skittering like little black beetles, he is not amused.

Driving through village arenas hemmed in by squat cement and mud houses, we finally arrive at my father's compound. Chikelue steps out and walks around the car scowling at his fenders and wheels streaked with mud. My father sitting in the shade of an umbrella tree in the middle of our compound, and my last two siblings, Ogochukwu and Chima, aged nine and seven, playing okoso a few yards away from where he sits, watch us with undisguised curiosity as Chikelue and I approach. I know they don't recognize me because the starched indigo brocade I am wearing is swollen around me like a peacock's tail feathers. I notice Chikelue scowling beyond them to the rusty roof and stark, mud-red walls of our house in whose many cracks and gullies lizards and geckos have made their home. I understand. I have been to his family's mansion in Victoria Garden Estate. It looms white like a snow mountain at the end of a long driveway edged with palms.

I glimpse my mother peeping at us from the side wall leading to the kitchen behind the house under the rust-zinc eaves with a faintly suspicious expression. The sound of a car must have drawn her away from her chore, the same way the noise rouses my sister, Usonwa, the one who came after Majindu, my immediate younger brother, from her siesta. Ogochukwu and Chima, thin and smelling of sweat and grime, race into my arms. My father draws himself up to his full height. He comes forward gingerly with arms splayed. "Big motor car, that is. Whose is it?" he whispers, expectation tickling his nostrils.

"It belongs to my friend," I whisper back and my father withdraws, folding up like one...