BoyGirl - Olakunle Ologunro
A short story.
I was already aware of how much of a girl I was, even before I knew what it meant to be effeminate. I was six or seven, but I wanted to be beautiful, with long hair that I would constantly tuck behind my ears. I wanted to own skirts, frilly blouses, earrings and high-heeled shoes. This effeminacy was there, in my voice, in the hours I spent preening in front of our living room mirror that was framed with green plastic. Alone at home, I dabbed on my mother's powder, tied one of her many headscarves, and slid my feet into her low-heeled shoes. I carried her handbag, clasped her necklace around my neck, and I became — a boy transformed by the magic wand of his mother’s clothes; Cinderella readied for the ball, drenched in glamour.
In school, I was called boygirl. My teachers said my hips swayed when I walked. They said I could fling my arms and make more exaggerated gestures than most—if not all—of the girls in my class. Later, they called me Florence Nightingale because no matter how hard I tried, my voice never had the bass of the other boys, only the delicate wavering of a song. Sometimes, I would force out the baritone to hear how the ‘male’ voice sounded coming from my lips. But I knew, even as I produced the sounds, that it was something that would never belong to me.
I was about nine when a young uncle took a bath with me and I became hard as I watched him. When he touched the sponge to my back, I felt a rush in my body, a spray of goosebumps tightening my skin. But I had no name for it. I did not know there was a tag, an identity for this feeling. I did not know there were others like me, people who looked at naked uncles and felt a stirring in the deep of their bodies. Months after, our neighbour’s son kissed me. It was a simple thing and ought to have been treated as such — just a touch of lips because we wanted to play house, and there was no one to imitate mother. Yet there was no simplicity in the response I felt in my penis, which strained against the fabric of my underpants with their elastic band. There were more kisses as often as we played, and each time he said 'Let’s act like I’m sleeping on you', I was quick to agree, quick to lie prone so he could hold me with the tenderness I had come to associate with him. His family moved away in 2005 when his father was transferred out of Lagos. I remember his chipped front tooth. I remember not wanting them to go.
There were others after him. There was Mayowa, the one who was always behind the fence after darkness had fallen. There was Chibuike, the pastor’s son who interpreted every Sunday sermon and shouted like his father. Then there was Austine whose penis leaked salty semen with just one touch, and John with the body odour and faded Arsenal jersey. They were buses to a destination I longed to arrive at, clues to answer a question I was burdened with. And after each sweaty kiss, each slippery fumble with them, I grew certain: I was a boy who wanted to love and be loved by other boys.
*
I met Ibrahim in my first year in the university. I was seventeen, outside the reach of parental monitoring and determined to really live. On the day we met, I was shouting at a taxi driver, a middle-aged man who, in the course of a fifteen-minute journey with only me as the passenger, decided to double the fare. It was second semester, my fifth month in the university. By then, I had been sufficiently let down.
I thought of a university as the height of sophistication, the only place a person could go to live, learn, surrounded by people and things that opened you up to the many possibilities that life offered. But University of Ilorin fell short. There, lecture theatres had broken seats, windows had too much dust, and in some classes, the boards were uncleaned, the Formica cracked and marred with incomprehensible writing. The toilet stank: sometimes of homemade disinfectant, sometimes of urine too acidic to inhale. Even the water closets were yellowed with shit and age. People bumped into you and didn't say sorry, lecturers answered questions with questions, and everywhere I went, people gaped, as though by being effeminate, I was different from their idea of what a man should be, an alien creature invading their human space. But these had become familiar disappointments. What was unfamiliar was the taxi driver's daylight robbery, his blatant, brazen extortion.
I was shouting at him, unbothered that people had stopped to watch us — and to laugh at my gestures. He was shouting too, unbothered that he was older, that he was the one in the wrong. Ibrahim intervened then, a dark-skinned peacemaker in blue jeans with sharp lines running down the front. Until then, I had not known that people ironed jeans. His approach was conciliatory; he listened to the driver and to me, but he did not apportion blame. He simply said sorry, e mabinu, as though he was the offender. He gave the driver N200, and when he saw I was about to protest this undeserved windfall, he led me into his car, a silver Toyota Camry that smelled like vanilla and had a string of brown prayer beads wound loosely around the rearview mirror.
"It's bad, I know, but just let it go. Okay? Okay?" he said.
I nodded. "Thank you."
"It's okay. I'm Ibrahim. Ibrahim Onasanya. Mechanical Engineering, two hundred level."
"My name is Ahmed. Hundred level History and International Studies."
"That's nice. Ahmed what?"
"Ahmed Lawal. So sorry."
"It's fine. You're going to Arts, right?"
"Yes."
"Okay then."
He started the car and smiled at me, the rich brown skin of his face cracking open to bare his near-white, almost perfect teeth. His eyebrows were thin, sparse, his beard a stretch of budding black curls. When he began to talk to me about how one should never argue with Ilorin cab drivers, I thought that he looked okay.
*
We became friends first. He was more experienced in navigating the confusing terrain of the university, and there was the car, which translated into free rides for me. In his car, I sang along to the songs he played, and laughter was shared, easy. I felt like myself, stripped of the self-consciousness I shrouded myself in with other people. "You have a lovely voice," he said to me, once. In response, I told him of how my teachers in secondary school called me Florence Nightingale, a nickname which my classmates used as a silencer whenever I raised my voice to speak. He squeezed my thigh, quiet, but in that silence were all the words I desperately needed to hear: “I’m sorry you had to go through that. I’m here for you now.”
The only thing he could cook was instant noodles. As an only child, the surviving seed after a string of miscarriages, he was never taught to do anything else — the maid took care of it.
"That's not an excuse," I told him. "Am I not an only child too? Does that mean I can't cook?" Still, I went to his apartment in Oke-Odo to cook for him: soups and stew, eba, potatoes and beans, asaro. On days when I finished late, I slept over. He lived alone, had his own generator, a standing fan. His place was more comfortable, spacious, unlike my own cramped box of a room where I shared a kitchen, toilet and bathroom with the other seven occupants of the hostel. He suggested that I move in with him; would my parents complain? I said no. No, they would not complain; no, I did not want to move in. Living with him would be to dig the well of our friendship deeper, unfurl myself completely and settle into newer intimacy with him, and I did not know if our green friendship was ripe enough, old enough to bear that weight.
But I felt comfortable with him, a comfort that allowed me to imagine the possibility of a relationship with him. And so my toothbrush moved in. My sponge and soap, too. And then some of my clothes, until I was spending four or five days in his place, going home only when I wanted to pick an item, clean up, or when I simply missed that cramped box of a room. It was on one of those days in his apartment that he asked if I had a boyfriend. And it was one of those days, while I was laughing at a joke he told, that he wrapped me in his arms and kissed me, his mouth carrying the faint scent of the fish stew we’d just finished eating.
*
He met my parents at the end of that year when the university went on a Christmas break. When I introduced him to them as a very good friend of mine, they were awed, especially when they heard that he lived in Abuja and had come to Lagos because he wanted to meet them, the parents of his friend.
"How old are you?" my father, ever pragmatic, asked.
"Twenty-three, sir."
"Ahmed is turning eighteen in a few months," my mother said, as though to draw attention to the five-year gap between us.
My father bonded with him immediately. He had always accused me of being silly, his way of referring to my effeminacy, something that disappointed him. It was palpable, this disappointment, piled on so thick I could lean against it, stumble upon it, be crushed by it. My father never took me out with him, and the few times he had friends over, he’d ask me to go out and play, or stay locked up in the room, as though I was a bizarre pet, something guaranteed to draw unwanted, irritating fascination.
After I gained university admission, he confessed that he was scared of my chances of survival, especially now that I was going so far away from home. "You should learn to act like a man, s'ogbo mi? No more of that rubbish you do, acting like a woman up and down. University is a different life,” he said. But with Ibrahim in the story, he was pleased that I had made friends with a fellow Muslim who, being five years older, could act as a guardian, teach me how to be manly, and make sure I never misbehaved. "This is the first sensible thing this boy has done in his life," he said. We all laughed.
My mother loved Ibrahim, too. "Look how he answers questions, so respectful," she said. She asked about his parents, brought him Fanta, laughed at his jokes. My father turned on the TV; a football match was on, and while my mother prepared food, he bantered with Ibrahim, something he never did with me. I sat demurely across from them in the living room, and watched as though they were actors that I loved in a play. This was happiness — never mind that the premise was a lie.
He had met my parents. In the natural order of things, I was supposed to meet his parents, too. To visit their large house in Abuja as he’d visited our small room and parlour in Lagos, be introduced as "Ahmed Lawal, my very good friend. He is also in University of Ilorin."
But Ibrahim did not take me to his parents. Could not. The reason, he said, was that when he was sixteen, a senior student at St. Anthony's Boys College, he was caught kissing another boy. The verdict was expulsion, but his parents, members of the same Abuja Elites Club with the principal, pleaded that he be allowed to finish secondary school. At home, his father slapped him, asking why he chose to embarrass them that way, and couldn't he have chosen a girl to do something like that with?
“As if there were any girls in my school,” he said.
I laughed.
His mother wept through it all. Her only child, kissing another boy? It had to be the work of the devil. She brought in an alfa who gave him a cleansing bath, and spent three days fasting and burning incense to ‘deliver’ him.
"I don't think it worked." He shrugged. "If it did, I should not be doing this with you, right? Or with the other boys I met before I even gained admission at all."
The meaning was clear to me: if he took me home to meet his parents, he would be setting himself up for newer troubles. It would be like trying to fit a kitten among puppies, forcing what was different to conform. No matter how self-conscious I was, his parents would certainly sniff at my girly voice, the involuntary swing of my hands, the embarrassing sway of my hips. I would be found out, greeted with immediate disapproval and suspicion — had he started that sinful thing again? — and they would begin to monitor him closely, springing surprise visits to his hostel so they could catch him unawares.
"I really want you to meet my parents, Ahmed. I swear, I really do. But you should understand." He squeezed my hands gently, and then he kissed me. I felt inadequate, a broken doll shuffled behind the cabinet, erased from sight, but I kissed him back and said that I understood.
After their meeting, my parents gave their approval freely. “Yes, you can move in with him. It means we don't have to pay rent, right?” Right. “He gave you a phone? Yes, yes you can use it. Oh, he really treats you like a brother. We should call to thank him.”
They took turns praying for Ibrahim, thanking him for all that he was doing for me, for them. He put the phone on speaker. “If Ahmed ever misbehaves,” they said, “do not hesitate to call us immediately. We will discipline him, s'otigbo?” He said yes.
To me, my mother said, “Ibrahim is like your elder brother. You must give him all the respect he deserves.”
I laughed about it with Ibrahim, the sheer absurdity of the sentence an evergreen punchline.
*
The first time Ibrahim slapped me was a Tuesday. It was late November; Harmattan had begun in Ilorin, and I remember, even now, how dusty that day was — how dusty everyday was, surfaces and walls coated in dust as fine as talcum powder, thick white fog clouding the distance like God’s misty breath.
That day, I had a morning lecture. HIS 202: The Principles of History, 10:00am. Ibrahim had no class but would be going out later with his friends. Did I want him to get me anything? No. The lecture was eventually cancelled: an impromptu departmental meeting came up, and all lecturers had to be present.
It was my only class for the day and I was supposed to return home, but I spent the free period at the library with friends. We read a bit and then headed to the Student Union Buka where we spent the entire afternoon eating bread and beans and talking about everything from the taste of the beans sauce to how annoying it was that MTN had to make their customers register one phone number a hundred times. Someone mentioned that the students of Performing Arts had a stage play by four, and because we all had nothing else to do, we trooped to the theatre to see the stage play whose title I would forget the moment Ibrahim came at me with questions like pincers, prying me open to pull out an infidelity that did not exist.
I got home a few minutes past eight. Ibrahim sat at the table, reading. He liked to read in the evenings; better assimilation, he'd once said when I asked him why. On the table was a nearly empty bottle of La Casera, and a Gala wrapper.
"Babe, what's up?" I kissed him, but he was unresponsive. I did not read any meaning into this.
"I'm fine." His tone was flat.
I took off my sandals.
"What were you doing in school that kept you so long?" he asked, without looking up from his book. I reached for the La Casera, drank it.
"Just the normal o. Hung out friends, went to watch a stage play, et cetera et cetera. That yeye lecturer did not come today, can you believe it?" I flopped down on the mattress.
"That doesn't answer my question."
I looked at him. He closed his book and faced me. His expression was calm, questioning. A door banged shut, someone from the next room laughed — I heard the sounds too clearly.
"What's the matter?" I sat up.
"I called someone in your department and she told me you guys had no lecture today, so what were you doing in school till this time? Where did you go?"
"I thought I just told you that my lecturer didn't come and that I hung out with friends? Wo, I'm hungry. I hope you didn’t finish all the rice?"
I stood up to go fix dinner but he got up too, and stood in my way. I stopped, stunned. I did not know this version of him.
"Ahmed, where are you coming from?" He asked this with a deliberate slowness. His voice, lowered so people from the next room would not hear him, had taken on an unfamiliar cadence.
I frowned. "This one you have suddenly become a detective. Where else would—"
The rest of my sentence was disrupted by the slap. His palm landed on my cheek, heavy and painful. I gaped at him in shock. In all the months of our relationship — months of sex and gentle whispers, of silly jokes and loud laughter, months when the dusty wind settled on clean pots and plates and heavy rains saw us pulling the curtains close and falling asleep in each other's arms — he had never slapped me.
"Ibrahim," I said, and nothing. The power of coherent speech eluded me, gone like a bird flees the stones of a child’s catapult. I felt softened, uncertain. If someone walked in at that moment to tell me that I was not yet at home, but still in school watching the actors render their lines, or still on the bus heading home, I would have believed it.
“You are no longer who you used to be,” he said and went out, slamming the door behind him.
*
Perhaps I should have seen it coming. But it’s like a painting: the tiny, defining details in plain sight are never seen until you look back at it, again and again. Only then do you discover that the dark fleck hovering in the frame is in fact someone’s hand, not a misplaced background prop, and that the expression on the model’s face isn’t laughter but a grimace. Truth, unfolding in the quiet, resolute way water dampens a fabric.
The day I stepped out of the bathroom naked and he stared at me as though he was just really seeing me and said, "Look how tiny you are. Like a bird. I could break you in two if I wanted," I should not have laughed. The day we saw a movie and he said afterwards, "I love o, but when people try to play on my intelligence, I will show my other side," I should not have said, "Relax, abeg. It's just a movie." The day he said to me after sex, "You better not cheat on me.” I should not have bitten his earlobe. Should not have said, "The power of good sex."
There was that day in July when he claimed that Engineering was a better course than History and I replied, as a joke, “You are a fool, you don’t have any sense at all.” He threatened to call my parents and report that I was rude to him. "You do know that your parents will take my words over yours, right?" he said. I should have asked him, "Who the hell do you think you are?" But he meant it as a joke, just like I meant my own statement as a joke. And so I said nothing, read the expression on the model’s face to be a sweet smile, and thought the dark fleck in the background was simply a misplaced, missable prop.
*
"I'm sorry," he said to me the next morning, just as the noise of the morning prayer call from the mosque pushed against the windows.
I stared at him. There were things I could have done, words I could have shouted at him. Instead, I stared at him in silence. The ladies in the room next to ours were praying; their cries of ‘Jehovah!’ and ‘Lord Jesus!’ sounded like the beginning of a small war.
He reached for my hands and held them in his. I shook them free. He held them again. He looked tired.
"Sorry for what I did," he said, his breath warm and stale in my face. "I’m sorry, Ahmed. Four of my results were released yesterday. I failed three of them. I know I have no excuse for what I did, but I was just … I don't know. I'm sorry." He bowed his head, sniffled once, twice, but it was the gentle quivering of his shoulders that alerted me to his tears.
I was supposed to remain unmoved, to tell him never to lay his hands on me again. But he had just failed three courses, and he was crying, so I knew he was at his lowest, an infant needing all the support he could get. I hugged him, my rage unexpressed, left to froth impotently in the tight container of my chest.
“It’s okay, I understand.”
It became a mime: his voice saying sorry, his hands squeezing mine gently, and soon, his lips found mine. An urgent, hungry kiss, our mouths seeking each other intensely. In that moment, there was the urgency of need, of unsaid apologies, binding us together. It was there in his thrusts, in his moans, in our muffled voices bleeding into each other. Afterwards, we showered. He went to join the morning prayers, and I stayed at home to cook breakfast — yam and fried eggs. As I peeled the yam, I let my mind wander, a fish hook dangling in the sea, waiting for a thought to latch on. Here’s what it brought to the surface: “That slap was your fault, Ahmed.”
I should have killed that thought immediately, but I fed it, nursed it with reasons: Ibrahim needed me, but I was away at school, laughing and talking, without caring about him. Even when I came home, I did not bother to ask him why he was unresponsive. Maybe I did not care for him the way he cared for me? Maybe I was only concerned about myself?
*
The next time he hit me was a week later. A classmate, Demola, whom Ibrahim said had the tendencies of being gay the first time they met, had called me. Demola was one of the very few course mates who did not gawp on seeing me for the first time. I respected him, a respect that increased after he told another classmate in an argument, “Do you have a womb? Then shut up about women’s right to access abortions.” When we were placed in the same group for a class presentation, his knowledge stunned me, as did his sparkling sense of humour, his ability to light up a drab moment with a fine joke.
What I liked the most about Demola was his willingness to defend me, to make me feel safe. Once, while we walked to Block 7 for photocopy, a group of boys called me faggot. He turned back and said to them, “That’s a very stupid thing to say. It doesn’t reflect your education at all,” a statement that promptly silenced the boys. With Ibrahim, such an incident would be a dinnertime story, relayed after the damage was done. He was far away in his own faculty, removed from what I was experiencing in my faculty, my department. Demola was always there in class, next to me during lectures, eager to accompany me in my walks across the campus, available to cover the gaps left by Ibrahim’s unavailability. Ibrahim’s protection was measured, limited, but with Demola, I felt an assured, ready security, like I could leap from a great height and land in the safety of his waiting, outstretched hands.
We chatted a lot on WhatsApp, and I had many goofy selfies of us on my phone. He was straight; I even knew his girlfriend — a lady from the department of Religions. Ibrahim believed the girlfriend was a ruse; after all, being gay in Nigeria could get you killed. I didn’t care: "Whatever you say. Demola is not my type anyway."
We were cuddling in bed when the phone rang. Ibrahim was the one who handed the phone to me, so he knew it was Demola. I picked the call. It was a simple question, "Did the lecturer for HIS 215 give an AOC for his test on Monday?"
"No."
The call moved on to how annoying the lecturers were and how tiring our school was and how it seemed like final year and convocation was a lifetime away and why we needed to have a new course rep.
”See ehn,” I said, agreeing with all he said.
Three minutes passed, and then seven, then ten, and we were still on the phone, laughing as we talked. Ibrahim stood up, filled a glass, gulped it, parted the curtains, flipped through a textbook and closed it again, then finally snatched the phone from me and ended the call.
"What is the meaning of this one na, Ibrahim?" I asked. Just then, a pepper seller trudged by outside our window. Her wrapper was green; the light, clean green of an empty beer bottle.
"Oh," Ibrahim said, as though drawing attention to a ridiculous thing. "So it has now got to the point where your lover can call you at home, ehn?"
The phone began to ring again. I reached for it.
"Pick that call and I'll show you what I can do," he said.
I laughed to dispel the sudden quickening of my heartbeat. I'll show you what I can do was something else he joked with, usually the ‘what he could do’ ending up as kisses and sex. "You have taken something, I know. Hello jare," I said and placed the phone to my ears.
The slap pushed the phone from my hands to the floor and dismembered it. Time stilled, everything noiseless, unmoving.
"So I've taken weed, abi?" He did not wait for an answer. His slaps fell on my face, dry palms sweeping across my lips.
"Ibrahim," I said, but he silenced me. A punch on my back, my face, my chest. He spoke and hit me at the same time, and even when he did not hit me, his words felt like a blow.
"What else do you want me to do for you, Ahmed? What else?" A punch. "Oh, you think I don't know? You think I don't read your chats?" Another punch.
I struggled but I could not be rid of him. I reached for his t-shirt and held the neck, slackened it. I wished I were as masculine as he was, not effeminate. I wanted to match his punches with mine, empty my rage on his face and body, draw blood, but I could not, so I let him expel his rage until he was spent, his breaths coming in heavy spurts, his chest seeming to swell and deflate. I lay there, quiet, but in my head was a loud, loud noise. I knew then that I had to leave him.
I was sore when I woke up the next morning. I had a cut on my lower lip and a throbbing headache. I felt unready for life itself. When I went into the bathroom, Ibrahim was praying, the ends of his jellabiya grazing the floor. It seemed ironic that he could pray with such serenity after what happened. Still, neither of us were strangers to irony. After all, since we met we often prayed then fucked, with Ibrahim saying ‘Alhamdullilahi’ as he slipped out of me and unrolled the condom.
*
When I met with my friends the next day, everyone wanted to know why I had a swollen lip.
“You will not believe,” I said, “thieves came to our hostel yesterday. In fact, my roommate had to go to the clinic to get a bandage. He was badly beaten!” We were under a cashew tree beside the lecture theatre. A line of honey-coloured ants marched down its callused trunk.
“Thieves, in this area?” Amaka asked, surprised.
“I’m very sure it will be those new students or those jobless guys in this area,” another person said. Everyone laughed.
“But you sef, you dull o! When you go dey do like woman,” Iyke said. He was the oldest in our department and had a hairy chest and a clean-shaven head. “Thief come your villa, you no fit attack them. Your matter tire me o. If na to talk who sabi sing for Rihanna and Beyoncé now, na you go dey scream.”
“And what is that supposed to mean? Should he have jumped on the robbers?” That was Demola.
“No vex. I just dey talk my own,” Iyke said.
I smiled, embarrassed. But there was no way I could stand up to Ibrahim. I could never match him. In secondary school, I carefully avoided fights with the guys and paired with the girls. It was easier to say, ‘I don’t beat girls,’ easier to run away from them when the matter escalated.
*
I returned home to find Ibrahim on the phone. I walked past him and laid on the bed. I did not want to have any contact with him.
“Your mum wants to speak with you,” he said and handed the phone to me. I took it without looking at him.
“Hello.”
“Ahmed, so you have started keeping bad company, abi?” my mother said entirely in Yoruba. “Ma? Who told—”
“Shut up! Ibrahim is lying, abi? You think you can do what you want, abi beeko? Ika kan o wo e nidi mo! You think you are now independent because you have entered university?”
“I don’t understand.”
“What is there to understand? Ibrahim that reported you is lying, abi?”
I turned to Ibrahim, he looked away.
“Be careful, Ahmed. Be very careful. It is your gourd that will point where it will be tied to. Give the phone to Ibrahim, let me apologise.”
I knew then that what he said about my parents believing him instead of me was true. There I was, gay but unable to talk to my parents about it, abused but unable to say a word. It became clear, frighteningly so, that I was fighting a lost battle, trapped in an airless room. I wondered how long I could stay before I passed out.
*
There was the slap at Sky-Way, that night we went for night reading. He yanked at my ear for talking to a guy at ShopRite. Playfully, of course, but his eyes were hard. Later, when I chatted on WhatsApp, he peered into my phone, said, "Greet your new boyfriend for me o."
He seized my phone for two days. He damaged a new SIM card I bought without telling him. He called me a fool.
He locked me in and went out with the key because he didn't believe I had a private tutorial on a Sunday afternoon. “You want to go out with him, right?” he said. One night I said I didn't want to have sex, he asked if I had finally let Demola fuck me.
And yet, he was heartbreakingly apologetic, as though he hadn't always meant to hit me, but a fundamental flaw in his character had led him to it. He bought me medicine to relieve the pain. He tried to cook me Jollof, but he oversalted it. He told my parents how hard I read. I would wake up to find him staring at me, his eyes sad and gentle. He was like a dog seeking forgiveness but unable to clearly express itself. And so I stayed in the locked room of his affections, chafing, desperate to be let out for fresh air, but not doing anything to break free.
*
The few times I allowed myself to imagine leaving him, I pictured it with reasons. Perhaps he would hit me. Or say something completely unforgivable. And finally, I would break free, rage erupting like hot lava from the tight rock of my long quiet heart. I would throw a few things in a bag, step out of the house and walk all the way to the bus-stop where I would get in a cab, the rage coursing through me like fuel, blood. Where I would go, I had no idea, but I knew that I would sit in the cab with all the confidence I could scrape together, and if I felt my throat sting with tears, I would not shed them. That was it: an exit fostered by his own doing, as though he had not already done enough.
But a year passed, and I did nothing. He hit me, said completely unforgivable things, yet I stayed long enough to celebrate two years of being together. I kept waiting, the way a person would wait for a rainfall premeditated by dark clouds, a trusted weather forecast.
When I finally left him in the third year of our relationship, there was no rainfall, no spectacular incident. It was a Friday, an ordinary, forgettable day. We planned to go out later in the evening and before I left home for lectures that morning, I made a mental note of what to wear: jeans, a blue t-shirt he got me some months earlier.
I remember coming home from lectures and sitting down. I was thirsty, so I opened the fridge, took out a full bottle of water and drank it all. And when I put down the empty bottle, I suddenly felt tired, as though all the burdens of the world were mine to carry. I longed to be empty, light, and even though I knew I should begin preparing for when he’d return home to pick me, I thought to myself that I could not go on anymore.
Nothing had changed, and yet everything had changed. The walls were the same: butter-yellow, like frozen margarine. I looked out the window; someone’s laundry flapped in the wind like butterfly wings made of fabric. At the window was the table where Ibrahim and I read and sometimes ate our meals, the same table he was reading on the first time he slapped me. To my right was the wardrobe where our clothes hung. And then there was the mattress, the thick square of foam where we slept and made love, his hand sometimes pressed against my mouth to stifle my loud moans, the same mattress where I curled up to cry after he’d gone to school. If I walked a few metres, I would find myself in the bathroom where we’d taken so many showers together, the same bathroom where I scrubbed at my face, careful not to hurt the places that smarted from his blows. All three years of my life and relationship with him, spread before me: a field ready for harvest, memory tucked into every ripe fruit. I did not want to take anything with me. I simply picked up my school books and left. I left my phone on the table, locked the door quietly, and placed the key under the foot mat for him to find. And then I walked to the bus-stop where I took a cab and, without even thinking of it, gave him Demola's address.
I knew the questions would come: he would try to reach me to ask what he did wrong, my parents would want to know why I left him, and perhaps demand that I return to him immediately, but I willed myself not to think about what I would do then. As the taxi sped down the road to Demola’s house, slowing only to crawl over speed bumps, I let the fish hook of my mind wander, and when it latched on childhood, I let it. In that moment, I thought of Mayowa, the one who was always behind the fence after darkness had fallen. I thought too, of Chibuike, the pastor’s son. And then Austine, and John — all of them, buses to a destination I longed to arrive at; clues to answer a question I was burdened with: the boys through whom I acquired the certainty that I was a boy who wanted to love and be loved by other boys. Ibrahim was a confirmation of that certainty, and he was not. He had shown me just how much I could love, and the very kind of love I did not want. And as the taxi approached Demola’s street, rage did not course through my bones like fuel, my throat did not sting with tears. What I felt was a welcome emptiness, relief: the kind that settles on you when you arrive at a new understanding about yourself; the kind that comes with the temporary end of a war.
Brief notes about “BoyGirl”
This short story means a lot to me. It was born out of a conversation with a group of friends in my hostel, and after we were done, I went into my room and began to write it. It was first published as “The Conversation” and then shortlisted for the 2016 Gerald Kraak Award.
I have been rewriting it since 2016. And each year, the characters become even more familiar and reveal new things to me about themselves. I hope they speak to you as they do to me, and more importantly, I hope Ahmed’s voice continues to stay with you.
- Kunle. ❤️
An excellent write up
Kunle, this is beautiful. I loved every bit of it and I didn't want it to end.