Five Pips And A Sigh.
Written in January, 2016.
The vigilante whistles used to make me feel safe.
When I was a much younger person I would lie on my stomach, chin supported by the dirty pillow my brother had left behind when he deserted us two years ago, reading from the low light of the atukpa my mother swore was going to make me go blind one day. There would be no noise (if you did not count the synchronized snorings of my father and mother — as soon as the old man’s sputtered, my mother’s would pick up, wargggllllhhhh, and back and forth they would exchange sinus batons until morning) and I would sometimes feel fear wrapping itself around me like the blanket my parents could not afford to get me.
On those mornings — usually around 2am — I would listen for the vigilante whistle. It was a low, sombre, drawn out sound that started out loud, punctuated by silences and echoes and ebbed as the distance between my house and the vigilante grew. The whistle assured me that at least one honest person was awake, and he became unwittingly my night-time companion, my touchstone when the abstruseness of the night came calling.
That was until one morning when we received news that the house close to ours — a shack as deplorable as ours, a face-me-I-face-you piece of shit box — was robbed in the night and two palasa phones and a TV set had been stolen. My father, an ordinarily whiskered shrew, had ruined his features even further by grimacing and saying ‘and we pay 150 naira monthly for that useless nightguard!’
My mother, making eba in the parlor, which doubled as a kitchen and guest room (a corner of which was currently booked as my sleeping space) said, shrilly, ‘but the man works!’ — a sentiment I echoed, but quietly.
‘Which work!’ my father said, somehow making his rhetorical question sound like a statement. ‘All he does is whistle so that the robbers can hurry up their operation before he arrives!’
‘Hm!’ said my mother. ‘E fit be true oh.’
‘Oho! Trust me — that’s what they all do — these vigilantes, nightguards — have you ever heard of any of them actually catching a thief? Doing the actual job we are paying them for?’
‘Hm,’ said my mother, again. ‘E fit be true oh.’ She was a very nice, submissive woman. Also, the eba was done and in need of serving. My father, we knew by now, would not eat until he had taken his customary shit in the communal toilet; this was a custom he swore was good for enjoying his wife’s cooking. My mother would laugh dutifully — and heartily — whenever he said this, and I would lose my appetite.
For nights after that I felt even more terrified that before. Whenever I heard the whistle, I wondered which new house was being burgled, which new girl was being raped, and which new robber was getting the old ‘heads up, I’m coming your way’, from the vigilante.
My vigilante.
My hitherto trustworthy ally against the forces that went bump in the dark. I felt betrayed and even caught myself crying on some nights. I started turning off the atukpa early — sometimes even as early as 1am —now afraid that the faint illumination would attract a daring thief who would break in and attempt to rob us only to realize that, due to the collaborative forces of the economy and my father’s lack of ambition, we were essentially un-robbable.
I often wondered about this thief, this hypothetical robber. He would be so angry at our lack of money or any item worth being ascribed the term ‘precious’ (unless you count my father’s green-and-yellow church suit) that he would proceed to rape my mother with utmost fervor. My father would be livid and attempt to save my mother’s dignity by pouncing on the robber who would promptly shoot him and abruptly end all hope of his future snorings, after which he would listen for the whistle of the vigilante.
I imagine the vigilante’s whistle would still be low in the distance, signaling to the robber that he has an approximate window of about four minutes, in which time he would finish with my mother and — for good measure —start with me.
He would then leave through the window from which he came, leaving my mother and me significantly unchaste and with a verifiably dead breadwinner, with parts of his head seeping into the already tarnished rug of the parlor.
Then — and only then — would the vigilante round the bend that led into our street, and by morning we would become the latest story about vigilante uselessness at the makeshift breakfast table of another home.
The snores from my parents returned me to the present, and I shivered a little. It was a warm night. Although I checked the locks around the house a few hours ago, I check again, allowing paranoia fuel my actions.
It is an unsafe neighborhood, I decide. We are living in an unsafe neighborhood where even the police would not visit. When we pay the vigilante to protect us we know, on some level, that we are not paying for protection. We are paying for the illusion of it. That is why my father and mother can sleep contentedly despite the knowledge of the fact.
Unfortunately, for me, the illusion was now broken and I had fitful sleep punctuated by vivid nightmares for three years in that face-me-I-face-you apartment until, like my brother, I fled to become a young urban escort.
Sometimes I wonder, but not too seriously, if my parents ever made it out of that shack.
