“No one loses anyone, because no one owns anyone.”
Paul Coelho
i.
In his dorm room, with your bodies entwined and the odour of sex hanging heavily in the air, Akande says that Iréoluwa’s body has been found in a ditch near Ring Road junction.
He says it softly, conspiratorially, as though he is afraid that something might spring out of the space around you if he raises his voice more than a whisper. You are not nearly as surprised by the news as you expect you will be and this, the absence of your surprise, is what shocks you instead.
“They said his bo…her body was very mutilated. They had to call Madam to identify her at the mortuary and she almost didn’t even recognize her sef.” His tone is solemn, cloaked in the kind of partial sadness that comes with grieving people with whom you are not necessarily close. You wonder why he has chosen this moment, right after sex, to tell you.
“That is so sad,” you say, and you are acutely aware of how lacking your response is, how devoid of grief you sound. But there is nothing else you can say, no other emotion you can muster from the depths of your stomach because you have grown, albeit unconsciously, an ability to dissociate yourself from the malaise that plagues stories like this one. You have learnt to stop yourself from spiraling into that familiar place where despondence and sadness wrap their cold hands around you until you feel as though the warmth has been sucked out of the world, as though your head has been submerged into the Arctic.
Once, in the time before Madam Atafo and Iréoluwa and Noir; in the time when you still lived in Isale Eko, you heard the story of a boy who had been burnt to death for wearing makeup. Even then, in the sharp sting of the senseless violence, you had remained unaffected by the news even though you had known that particular boy. That was what Isale Eko did to people like you; the city stripped you of your ability to feel, denied you of your humanity.
Now, as Akande continues to speak, you think only of that boy. You try to remember his name.
“They said that the officers who found the body screamed when they saw her thing down there.” Now, his voice carries a gentle, abiding humor. A self-indulgent humor. There is something painfully vague in the way he says ‘her thing’. You do not look at him as he speaks. You slowly disentangle yourself from him and begin to pick up your scattered clothes. If he notices the shift in your emotion, he does not regard it. “Can you imagine their faces when they saw it? Omo! Dem fit get heart attack o.” And then he inserts a small dry laugh that causes your skin to crawl. You wish for him to shut up, for him to stop saying ‘her thing’ with an air of vulgarity underlying his words. But you are accustomed to this, his nonchalant nature, his ability to move on very quickly from his performative grief. It irks you but you are used to it nonetheless, like the overlying skin of curdled milk that sits on your plate of custard every morning.
“You know they refused to identify her as female in the death certificate?” The scandalous air in his voice is dramatized for your presence. You are aware that if he were speaking to anyone else, he would not need to perform, he would say the things he wants to say in the manner that he wants to say them, sharp and biting and riddled with dry humor. You had once heard him refer to Iréoluwa as ‘shim’—an amalgamation of ‘she’ and ‘him’ into one derogatory portmanteau.
You wish once more that he will stop talking but he goes on, “Nigeria is just not ready for that kind of thing yet.”
Something snaps. It is quick and stark and it snaps in you and around you. This snapping thing for which you have no name is the progenitor to a startling rage that froths within you.
“Nigeria is not ready for what?” You do not register the fury that underlines your words. He is startled by your reaction. It shows in the quick rise of his eyebrows, the apprehensive uncertainty that mars his face. He looks so changed in that moment, so vulnerable and wholly, utterly mortal.
“You know…all those gender kind of things.” He sounds a little detached from himself, a small distance exists between the words that he says and the lips with which he says them.
You want him to say the specific words that you can vividly see under his throat, to name that volatile thing that flutters in the air around you and by doing so, to cause it to explode. He does not take your bait, and it enrages you, the fact that he can be blunt enough to be rude and coy enough to come off as innocent. You are also enraged by your inability to speak up for Iréoluwa, by the words that refuse to leave your throat. Your silence makes you complicit.
You stand up from where you are seated beside him on the mattress in his room and leave.
He does not call you back.
ii.
To be born in Isale Eko is to know, truly, the definition of ‘shege’. It is to understand that the sun is partial in its illumination of the earth, that ease is a myth. To be born of Eko is to know that the hustle is an endless chase and that conscience is the crippler of the starving.
There is a signboard at the entrance into the famed city, a dull yellowed post that has been weathered by age and bent into submission by the forces of nature. It is an old signboard, almost as old as Isale Eko itself but the words on it are written in a black paint that is still resilient and alive.
‘Welcome to Isale Eko, the home of God’s favorite children.’
The words are true, Eko is the home of God’s favorite children. But God is cruel, crueler to his favorites, and cruelty permeates, seeps like a wound, a drop of ink in water; it taints all that it touches. And because God was cruel, Isale Eko became crueler.
You feared this quality the most about the city, the nature of her wickedness, the unhidden ease of her unkindness. In Isale Eko, brothers greeted each other with a kiss in the morning and a knife in the cover of the night. The streets were always hungry for blood, for the beauty of death, and the people were always eager to respond, eager to answer the call. In that place, no one declined the call of the city.
Yes and Amen. That was all Isale Eko would hear.
In Eko, you had no need for masks, for skins atop your skin. You were allowed the rare chance of nakedness in that city, allowed to exist in your rawest form because Eko had no patience for masquerades. And that was what frightened you, the way you could not recognize yourself in that place, the sudden aversion that you developed at the sight of your reflection. And so when Madam Atafo offered to buy your freedom, you left. You allowed yourself to take on a new skin—albeit a false one—-to name yourself into otherness, into newness.
You took the girl out of Eko. But you always feared that Eko never took her hands out of the girl.
Until Iréoluwa happened.
iii.
Iréoluwa danced as though the world was watching her. They were and she knew it and it was in this, her knowledge of their attention, that her greatest power was helmed; the ability to provoke in the world’s eyes, a fierce, unquenchable desire for her.
You liked to watch her dance, watch as her arms flung sensuously in the air and as her long legs twirled and turned in a manner that could only be described as magic. Iréoluwa melded into a song whenever she danced, became one with the music, effortlessly attuned to the highs and the lows and the stretches of the singer’s voice. You once imagined that she was a puppet, held upright and moved by the strings of the music. But Iréoluwa could never be a puppet even if she tried. It was her and her dance that were progenitors to the music. Never the other way around. You understood this when you listened to Nina Simone’s “I Put A Spell On You” after she left and found the song lacking its usual soulfulness.
“Don’t dance because you have to. Dance because you want to. Duty will only breed choreography. Everybody can choreograph. It is only in the pleasure of your craft that you can inspire pleasure in others. Shay you get?” She said those words often, just before she graced the stage at Noir, the exclusive nightclub where you both worked. She said it flippantly, carelessly thrown into the wind to flutter towards anyone in need of hearing it. The boys and the girls who danced at Noir held her words tight to their chests, tucked into their flesh, dear and cherished. You held her words with the greatest reverence of all.
Even Madam Atafo, the owner of Noir, treated Iréoluwa with more gentleness than she did the other workers. With Iréoluwa, she became a more docile manifestation of her normally brash, domineering self. That was another facet of Iréoluwa’s power, the ability to become, without thought, the most important person in a room. With her skin like polished obsidian; her slanted, almond-shaped eyes; her thin nose and thinner lips; her slender figure that moved with the seamless fluidity of water; and her hair that gathered like a cloud on her head, Iréoluwa was unsurprisingly the most beautiful woman you had ever seen.
You first saw her on the day of your first visit to Noir. It was a Friday evening, the rowdiest night of the week at the club. Madam Atafo had just made you sign an NDA because her guests desired anonymity. Her clients were the kinds of men and women who held power in their grips, in their strides, in their fleeting glances. Politicians and famous pastors and wives of ministers who smiled and preached for cameras and only unleashed their truest demons in the safety of the club.
“You are here to dance and give our clients a good time. You are free to reject any propositions for sex if you do not feel comfortable with it. My clients are not like those razz men you worked with in Isale Eko, they understand that my workers have agency of their bodies. But everything you see and hear in this club must remain within the walls of this building. The moment your feet step outside these walls, you are a completely new person with no memory of what has transpired here. Do you understand me?” There was something damning about her tone, something akin to a threat. It unnerved you how easily you found yourself eager to nod, to acquiesce. And although your fear had grown into sharp prickling thorns that scattered over your skin, you looked at the club beyond the glass walls of her office, the strobe of light from the ceiling, the stretch of Ikoyi in the distance, felt the Peruvian leather of the chair you sat on and knew, even before you said, “Yes ma,” that you would never return to Isale Eko.
For your first assignment, Madam Atafo took you to a secluded area of the club’s VVIP section and asked you, simply, to watch. To learn.
And then you saw her: tall and lanky with limbs that jutted out as though her bones could no longer wait to escape her flesh. She was clad in what you would later learn was the Victoria’s Secret Autumn Collection lingerie. Her face was caked in makeup, her lips painted rouge, and her eyes lined in smokey dust. A siren. And although a train of other pretty dancers and prettier escorts followed behind her, Iréoluwa demanded, without a word or even a glance in your direction, that you look only at her. And you obeyed.
She danced to everything: from Fela to Osadebey to Tennyson to Nina Simone. She sank into the music and returned wholly inebriated by the rhythm. When she moved, when she smiled, when she teased a potbellied man with a single graze of a finger, the whole club thrummed with life. Everything took on the color of newness, the aura of rebirth.
And you felt, in that place where you watched this woman remake the world, born again.
iv.
You were seventeen years old when your mother sold you off to Eshu, the demon. She did it kindly, in the kindest way she knew how: with her eyes averted from your tear-stained face, her hands reaching out to collect the envelope of money from Eshu, performing indecisiveness because it was expected of her, because no mother would so single-mindedly sell off her child.
You watched her wickedness, the glaring starkness of its quality, and you wondered why you had never seen it before, how she had artfully managed to conceal it, to blend it like foundation until it melded into her and became one with her skin in the holiest of matrimonies.
You thought also of how much money she had collected for your head, pondered on if she had bargained the price with Eshu as fiercely as she bargained the prices of tubers of yam in the market.
You wondered if she had begun at one hundred thousand naira, imagined that she had said “One hundred K” in that same flippant manner with which rich people referred to large amounts of money. You imagined that when Eshu countered the offer with a carefully enunciated “Fifty thousand naira” to drive in the largeness of the offer, the worth of it, she said, “Hundred K, last price,” and felt fulfilled by the acquiescence that she saw in his eyes.
“You don ripe finish.” Those were the first words Eshu said to you, a confirmation of your maturity. His eyes—those leering, beady balls of vile hunger—assaulted you long before he ever did.
You were beautiful, too beautiful, wrapped in an aura of breakable softness and Isale Eko did not know how to be kind to beauty like your own. The city did not understand the art of cherishing pretty things and you were amongst the prettiest of things. In Eko, there was only one response to beauty; break it.
The city called, “Break her,” and Eshu, the ever-loyal servant, obeyed without question.
On that same night when the bruise of your mother’s betrayal was still at its freshest, Eshu unbuckled the straps of his belt and in a dark room that smelled of damp wood and stale urine, he answered the call of Isale Eko.
He owned a brothel, a vulgar business that he only ever referred to as an ‘escort service’ even though his clientele of rich people was close to nothing. His customers were typically garish men from Eko and Oshodi and Ojuelegba; men who smelled of putrid, rotten things, like stale alcohol and labor-induced musk. Men with potbellies who left their wives at home to chase the skirts of girls young enough to be their daughters.
Often, when he spoke of you, he said in a voice wet with humor, “This girl get eye of confam wéréy. See as madness full am for eye.” And you saw it too, the gleam of madness that he noticed in your eyes, that distinct sheen of wéréy that he feared. He was a fearless man, Eshu, and yet you could still him with a glare, could cause him to approach you with a careful tentativeness, with a knowing guardedness. He feared you.
Later you would wonder if it was this, the small abiding fear that you instilled in him, that caused him to sell you off to Madam Atafo. You would also wonder about what you would have done to him if he had not.
v.
In the full year that you worked with Iréoluwa at Noir, you almost never spoke to her, could never muster an excuse to talk to her that wasn’t at best, trite or painfully mundane.
Once, when she passed backstage in pink lingerie and heels, graceful and gliding seamlessly across the floor, a handkerchief dabbing the corners of her sweaty made-up face, you had wanted to say something to her. You had resolved that you would say something slightly officious like ‘You look great, Iré,’ but you would strip your voice of all eagerness to please, be almost flippant in your manner. You would be sure to enunciate the nickname ‘Iré,’ and be pleasantly casual in the way you said it as though it were a name you had always called her. A name that would tile the foundations for your soon-to-be friendship with her.
But your lips opened and she continued to walk and you found yourself, in that moment, completely devoid of the ability to speak. She walked away without a glance in your direction, and you felt a surge of disappointment settle over you.
You remained prickly and easily annoyed for the rest of the week until your colleagues began to avoid you and your clients began to complain of your stiffness. Madam Atafo called you to her office on the upper floor of the clubhouse.
“I have never received any complaints about you before, Izunna. What is happening?” Her tone was scolding, mildly annoyed, worried for you and by you.
You were grateful for this, the absence of her need to perform gentleness on your behalf. It seemed to you that she was the opposite of your mother, and it caused you to want to tell her the truth, to say that you had developed, after Iréoluwa’s indifference towards you, a self-loathing that clogged your throat and stretched your skin into a near-painful tautness. You wanted to tell her that you had newly become irked by the color of things, by the sound of music in the club, by the grubby hands of men and women who reached out to cup your breasts and push crisp dollars into the folds of your lingerie. You wanted to tell her that you had spent the entire evening watching Iréoluwa twirl underneath the praise of gloating rich men who often reached out to touch between her legs and bare their throats in thunderous laughter. You wanted to tell her that as you danced, you prayed that Iréoluwa would not lose herself so completely in the song. That she would snap at the men or raise her hand to catch their faces in fiery slaps. You prayed that she would scream in a voice layered with fury, “Never touch my penis again, you fucktard.” And then you prayed that after she had raged to her satisfaction, she would walk up to you, grab your hand in hers, and take you away.
But you said instead, “Sorry, ma. I’m just feeling a little down. I’ll be better tomorrow.”
And as you left the Madam’s office, you carried in your stomach a sense of something unloosened.
vi.
The only time you spoke to Iréoluwa was on the day she left Noir, a week before she went missing and a month before her corpse was found.
Later, after she had been confirmed dead, you would realize that there had been premonitions, subtle ones, about her death. One such premonition was the fact that she spoke to you.
It happened uniquely, her speaking to you, less casually than you had imagined it would be.
The club had not yet opened for the night and the workers were unhurriedly prepping for the arrival of the patrons in about an hour. Like every day before, they passed the time between outfit changes and makeup corrections sharing gist and gossip.
You were carefully smudging out the black shadow around your eyes to create a smokey effect when Akande sidled next to you, clad in a sheer lace crop top and a maroon padded jockstrap that dramatically accentuated the size of his crotch.
“Did you hear?” He spoke animatedly, face colored by urgency and thrill.
You regarded him as you always did, with slight exasperation and subdued indulgence.
“Hear what?”
“Your girlfriend,” he said, voice tinged with an expectation of your interest. He seemed amused when you paused. “I hear that she’s going to quit today. Says she has found love.” He laughed as he spoke, a dry, rasping thing that sounded almost like a wheeze.
Your legs became sentient. One minute you were seated before a lighted mirror with makeup in your hands and the next you were breezing past languorously spread people who watched as you ran past.
Madam Atafo was just exiting her office when you reached her. She carried an air of a person grieving.
“Iréoluwa.”
She must have seen it in your eyes, the gleam of madness, the distinct sheen of wild desperation. She understood.
“She just left but you can still catch up to her if you hurry.”
Your legs obeyed and again you found yourself soaring past the door and into the open evening air, uncaring for the carelessly tied robe that you wore and simultaneously grateful for the fact that you were, at least, not unclad.
You saw her hail a taxi a little way away from the club. You saw her open the door of the taxi and because you were sure you would not reach her in time, you shouted. You did not know what word you screamed, it might have been her name or a plea or something obscene, but it caused her to stop and turn.
You reached her in a panting, heaving mess. You would ordinarily have been mortified to allow her see you like this, but at that moment, you cared only for one thing.
“Please, don’t go.”
She cocked her head curiously to the left, her keen eyes assessing you with such intensity you felt your knees quiver.
“Izunna, right? You dance so well.”
She knew your name. The thought quite oddly frightened you as much as it thrilled you.
“We need you, ma. Please don’t go.” It saddened you that you had said ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, that you had cloaked the true nature of your desperation under the safety of community. And because you felt a tad braver than usual, you corrected yourself, “I need you, ma.”
She smiled. It looked too much like a goodbye smile.
“I have seen you dance, Izu. You will do wonderfully.”
When she entered the taxi and drove away, you thought only of the ease with which she had called you ‘Izu’ and you imagined that the nickname might have carried the faint taste of citrus on her tongue.
Chidera Solomon Anikpe is a twenty-two years old, queer, Igbo storyteller born to Nigerian parents. He writes from Jos, Plateau state, Nigeria, and can be reached via email at chideraanikpe[at]gmail[dot]com
Photo by Nkululeko Mayiyane on Unsplash