The Nightshift: V

Fernandez and I officially met later that day, in the afternoon, on the maize field in the school farm. He didn’t talk much but you just knew his meeting with Big had not gone well, which was natural about all meetings — even parents’ meetings — with Big. He was so useless on the farm; we each had our own cutlass or rake, depending on what you were supposed to be doing but I don’t think the new boy had ever done much farming before. He just stood there watching us while we worked, twisting his cutlass into the earth, whistling, biting his nails. You wondered why Big had punished him too. The working suspension was to last until the end of term, or earlier for anyone that confessed who put the drawing on the board. Big left us to think about the latter aspect. He had flogged us six strokes each and even with padded shorts, we were all still sore. Eventually, all the boys rested their tools, we never dropped them until we were sure old Tangerine had gone off to pump his nostrils full with snuff, and wasn’t coming back anytime soon.
Tangerine was the caretaker of the school farm; the worst kind of adult you could find at boarding school: an adult who actually liked his job. He was ripe-bald, albino-red with slanted salmon eyes that frightened Jesus out of everyone. He was old, tall but spindly like a finger. He himself had dry, bony fingers, crooked like the rotten chewing stick that dangled from the rope he invariably wore around his neck. He had no fingernails at all, just nubs of skin the colour of fried salmon.
More than anything, Tangerine liked farming. More than life even. He talked to trees, kissed leaves and petted flowers — you know, like they were people. He took all that nature nonsense pretty seriously. He didn’t like students though. They were always getting in trouble and winding up on his precious farm. Even lost his wife during the whole Ghana Must Go wahala in 83, but this was long before any of us knew him, and he had been alone ever since. So I guess he didn’t like students, didn’t want a family either. He just liked his plants, besides, he always said plants listened to instructions.
It was just after Tangerine left that the new boy walked up to me.
“Here you go,” he said, returning my packet of Tom-Toms.
“Thanks!” I said, collecting it. I had thought I’d never see those sweets again. And they were so difficult to get! So I thanked him. Then I tried to apologise for getting him in trouble.
“So what did Big tell you in his office? That’s what we call the headmaster.”
He wasn’t listening, however. He was looking up a nearby tree, had his hands over his eyes like a visor. On his t-shirt, it said RUFF-RIDERS.
“Has anyone ever climbed that?” he asked.
“The guava tree?”
He nodded.
“No, you’d get in serious trouble.”
“Aren’t we in trouble already?” he said and smiled. He pointed his head at the tree. “Come on…”
“What about the other guys?” I asked but he had already started walking. Everyone else was gathering at the other end of the farm.
“Ooh, I don’t know. This is not a good idea,” I said after him.
I took off my glasses and wiped the lenses against my shirt before putting them back on. Everyone else was gathering under a mango tree with bright yellow mangoes tucked in-between its leaves. One of the boys, Da Silva, was poking the tree with a stick.
“Don’t be a pussy, man! Just come on!” yelled the new boy.
“Okay, okay!” I said, running after him. He kept looking at the tree, edging towards it like he had been charmed by it.
“So, what is your name self?” I asked, slightly out of breath, reaching him slowly.
“Race you to the tree!” he said and took off.
I tell you, he was fast. The new boy reached the guava tree like that! and just as he was climbing, we all heard Oladimeji’s aching, pubescent voice crack out that Tangerine was on his way back.
“Come on! Hurry up!” the new boy said. I eventually reached the tree but I started to think I had better go back to my cutlass.
“Come on!” He stretched me a hand.
It was a humungous tree, with no obvious route to climbing it. Look, I’m not a hard guy and I’ve never been spontaneous. I have to think about these things; have to process them, pros and cons etc, and best believe, I’m no computer. These things take time but at that moment, once I had decided to climb, there wasn’t any left. I started to take off my shoes.
“Forget that!” he said, looking over my head, breathing hard, sweating. I tried to turn.
“Is he there?”
“Don’t look! Just grab my hand!”
I grabbed his hand and together, I climbed the tree. Rather, I got pulled up. Tangerine returned just in time to catch some boys with half-eaten mangos and made them frog-jump. I was this close!
“Oooooosh,” the new boy said.
“I know. But that’s what they get for being slow!” I said, laughing.
“Not them. Your leg!”
“Ehn?”
The scratches were like skid marks across my right leg, long, reckless and throbbing red. I wasn’t bleeding but God, my leg was burning. Like hell. And it would do so for many days to come; showering would become a nightmare. Still, I was on the tree. There had to have been something special about being under punishment and yet doing what I had just done within the time I had to do it. Whatever it was, it made the scratch quickly seem inconsequential, negligible, numbed, gone. What scratch? The air was indeed finer up there, up there where there was only thrill and no such thing as scratches and sore bottoms.
“You better hold something,” I said.
“Nah, I’ll live. And my name is Toby.”
“What kind of name is that?”
“Toby. Tow-below-bar Fernandez. It’s a ‘Yo! Ruba’ name.”
“What’s funny? Isn’t that it? Yo! Ruba?”
“You don’t even know how to pronounce your own tribe.”
“Figures.”
“I’m Bello.”
“What? No last name?”
“That’s my last name. Lanre is my first name but we don’t use first names unless parents are around.”
“So that means I’m Fernandez? Not bad,” he said. He wrinkled his face, like he was contemplating something troubling.
“All names mean something around here right? So what does Bello even mean?”
“I don’t know, what does Fernandez mean?”
“I-own-know…”
All this time, Fernandez had been tiptoeing on a branch towards a bunch of guavas. He was taller than me but I was short for my age, anyway. He had stylish silver chains sailing down from his belt holes to his side pockets and wore dirty camo adidas trainers. He had his tongue flat like a seal, out on the corner of his mouth, concentrating as he reached for a really shy guava. Behind those bushy eyebrows and brown freckles was a boy who wasn’t afraid of anything. Below us, most of the boys were weeding and cutting and clearing grass. Tangerine walked round the maize farm with a cane. He had a straw hat on now, and kept his faded khakis and blue rubber slippers. He looked like he was counting the boys or just inspecting what the boys were doing. Either way, I wasn’t feeling comfortable anymore. The scratch on my leg began to burn.
“We are going to get in trouble.”
“Not if we stay up here,” Fernandez said at the guavas. “How long have we got? Don’t we get to go for lunch or something?”
“We aren’t supposed to leave until six.”
“Six? Then I guess we better find something else to eat cause I’m starving. What other trees have we got here?”
He turned around to ask me but I was watching the frog-jumping boys. There were four of them: Adesina, Da Silva, Roberts and Okonkwo; four of the most notorious boys in our set. The other three seemed to going along steady, but Okonkwo, the fat one, looked like he was about to faint.
“Something’s up with that one,” Fernandez said, pointing at Okonkwo. Tangerine looked up sharply, it probably wasn’t because of us but we ducked.
“Oooh God, he’s going to find my cutlass then he’ll start looking for me and that’s when I’ll be in trouble. Look, I’m going back down before they call my parents.”
“Are you crazy?” Fernandez asked me.
“But look!”
“Shh!” He said. “You need to chill, man! Jheeze!”
My cutlass was still lying on a tuft of grass not too far from where the four boys.
“So? You want him to hear us?” He gave up. “Okay, what are we eating tonight?”
“Ehn?”
“For dinner. What are we eating? If we get caught, you can have mine.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Then you give me yours fair and square.”
“Oooh God, I just know we’re going to get caught!”
He grinned. “Then keep shouting and you’ll get two plates tonight.”