Father says, when he dies, he’d like his body to be incinerated, disposed at the crematorium. “Don’t make a fuss of it,” he says. “Don’t spend your days crying. I have lived my life. You should, too. Move on.” He speaks with light-heartedness, as if death is seasonal, something that sweeps across the earth every so often, like summer. My eyes, turned rheumy, tell him he will be gravely missed, my lips quiver watching his feeble lips undulate and, intermittently, I zone in and out of consciousness. He is composed. A locked expression on his face. He is my father, never broken to the point of despair.
It has been three months since we lost Mother. When news broke of her passing, I was fast sleeping, dreaming, as usual, that I was free-falling from a cliff. Mother, on a holiday trip to Calabar, was returning by road when the commercial vehicle she’d chartered collided with an oil-carrying tanker. She was burnt to death. That morning, Father barged into my bedroom and, startled, I bolted from my dream. Standing by the door, were tears swimming on the brink of his eyelids as if saying: Martin, how do you reconcile a loss devoid of goodbyes? I stood up, held tightly onto his skull and we fell to the floor. His body spasmed in my arms and I rocked him to sleep.
I have had to adjust to my new reality. Father isn’t getting any younger and, someday, he too will not be here. The idea of another tragedy frightens me. Not a day goes by do I not fear for his safety. At the mention of his “going out to hang with a few friends” “running late for a meeting” is the nagging fear, he won’t come back. So I remember, always, to say, “Daddy, go safely” “Daddy, drive carefully” “Daddy, I love you.” Some days, I imagine it best I died first. Because what hope is there without him? The bridge close to the Central Area Mosque, Jabi lake, these are the places I imagine taking my life. Other days I want to do right by him, make him proud, so I fight to find meaning in this nearly obsolete world.
Mother and I weren’t the best of friends. Sundays were the worst. She couldn’t understand why a child she bore be anti-God. “I know God will arrest you, someday,” she’d say, pointing a finger at my third eye. “You will become a pastor. Win souls to God.” Albeit not your typical son-mother relationship (the kind I would have given a limb for), I loved her in my own special way. Whenever we got in a fight and I’d storm out, towards the garage, where I loved to sit and reflect, Father would come after me and, with a hand on my shoulder, remind me she is an extension of him and what I do to her I do to him also. “One day, Martin, she won’t be here. You’ll be grown, with a family to look after, and you’ll understand why she worries so much for you.”
The happy days, in snippets, flash before my eyes these days. They take me back to my fifth birthday. I have a large coconut cake on the centre table, a table knife in hand, with a cardboard cone on my head. Mother, standing beside me, kneels, whispering in my ear, “Blow your candles and make a wish, Martin.” I blow out my candles and, somehow, my hat falls in the cake and catches fire. I am laughing, Mother, panicking, reaches for the extinguisher, putting out the fire. Soon after, when the guests leave and we are by ourselves, we chase each other around the house, picking chunks of the cake and smashing our faces with it. Father is on course somewhere far, and she and I are the closest we have ever been.
I do not remember when, exactly, our relationship began thinning out. If I had to guess, I’d say from the day she found lewd magazines in my wardrobe. I was thirteen, had concluded my Junior Secondary School Certificate Exam and was awaiting the result. “What is this?!” she said, holding the magazine like she would her used tampon. “When did you become so demonic?” It was the way she used words, without a filter, that offended me. Half, if not most of the time, I was wrong. I know that. But her choice of words! They made me wish, night after night, she would die. I wish, now, she’d cherry-picked her words. I would never have wished her into extinction.