sitting on a scratchy faded green rug with spots of candle wax all over it.
We are talking about new music. We all agree not to like musicians who start their choruses with names of girls. (“Sade” by Remedies is a stupid song; “Omode Meta n Sere” is the greatest song of all time.) I am thinking about Mother and Father. Mother hates worldly music. Father hates it but smiles anytime our sister Bibike sings.
As we sit here talking, a short man I do not know walks in. He does not knock, he just pushes the door open like that.
“Welcome,” Solomon says to him as he motions for us to get up, leave.
“Sit down and continue your enjoyment.” The man speaks to us, smiling a wide white smile that brightens his face. His lips look too wide for such a small face. The man has dark blotched skin. His face is a perfect round shape. His eyes are swollen and red. He looks like Raphael the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle without the green. The man sits on the bed behind us and starts taking off his clothes. Solomon springs up.
“We are leaving. My friends have to be home before their grandma comes back.”
“They don’t have to leave. Okay. Take this money. Let the small one stay. The two of you go and buy something to eat—” The man is still talking. I get up. I pull Peter onto his feet. The man is still smiling, softer now, hopeful even. He is sweaty even though he has taken off everything but his undershorts. I do not know what he sees in my face but he stops smiling immediately. His transformation is instant, almost funny.
“Get out of here, foolish children. Shut the door,” he screams. “And Solomon, you better not come back till your mother comes home this night.”
We rush down the hallway, to the veranda of TVs and into the streets. Peter is humming. We are walking slower now, still saying nothing. Peter stops in front of a dusty Datsun that looks like it’s been there for ten years and starts to write on the windscreen, “Wash me please.”
We walk in silence until we get to our home. The boys next door are still playing a game. We can also hear some girls singing.
“Let’s go see Stanley.” Solomon does not wait for me to respond. He walks to their house, opening the gate.
Peter and I look at each other, then we go in with him. Their house looks just like ours—cracked plaster walls, a moldy well to the left at the entrance, a veranda made with red brick paving stones.
At the back of the house, the boys are playing table soccer in one corner. Stanley is winning. Their table is huge. They have taped a linoleum rug over the wooden top. The bottle covers just glide over it. Peter and I will never be able to make a table like that on our own. I must become friends with Stanley.
A group of girls are in dance formation. They have strips of aso oke tied across their chests. Longer ones cover their waists down to their knees. Girls are magic beings. They have to be not to die from itching, wearing scratchy aso oke next to their bare skin like that. They are singing in Yoruba:
We are here
We are here again
The eagle is the king of birds
The lion is the king of forest animals
We are greater than these by far
We are singers, dancers too
I am watching them but pretending not to do so. Soon they start to argue. One girl, the shortest, the one with blue stars drawn on her legs, wants the group to roar like a lion at the end of the first verse. Many disagree with her. As she talks, explaining her point, she keeps untying and retying her waist wrapper. It is a very womanly move and it makes me feel like my stomach is punching itself. It also makes me think of Mother. Mother once made us crowns out of her old gold aso oke. Peter and I hated it. We wanted store-bought crowns, like the other kids in the play.
As I watch the girls dance, I start to feel the feeling again. This time it is a different, more sure feeling. I am certain all of this has happened before. I have seen this before—little girls singing, dancing, smiling, one in the middle stopping occasionally to stare at me, saying nothing, just smiling. I feel like all I need to do is focus my brain and I will remember what I am remembering.
I notice a lizard running across the yard, it runs over my feet and then goes up the wall separating our house and Stanley’s. Once it gets to the middle of the wall it stops, still except for bobbing its little red head every few seconds. I have seen this before. Even this red-orange lizard crawling over the wall, nodding.
The girl looks at me again. This time I smile back. I blow a kiss. She spreads out five fingers, points them at me. “Your mother,” she screams.
Girls are crazy.
There is a concrete slab in the center of this backyard. It is a long rectangle that extends almost to the end of the east wall. It’s as if someone intended to cover the ground completely but ran out of concrete too early. The girls are dancing on one side of the slab. On the other, Stanley’s mother has spread out yellow maize and red guinea corn to dry on a raffia mat.
Some white pigeons circle around above. The girls love birds, they wave at them singing the leke leke song, Leke leke, give me white fingers, won’t you?
Sometimes the birds swoop down as fast as lightning. They pick bread crumbs or a smooth pebble or chicken feed. A couple of pigeons hover close to our heads then fly away. They want the maize, but they won’t land because we are here. There are too many of us.
One of the boys notices the pigeons and says something. The rest of them stop playing to look at the birds. Then someone says, “I have an idea. Let’s make a bird trap.” Another says, “I know how to build one.” They begin to argue about what is needed when Peter invites them to our house.
“We live next door. We have extra wood and nails. We are building a chicken coop,” he says.
They want to see what we are up to. They want pieces of wood to make a trap. And so we walk away, a small crowd of boys in two lines. If the girls notice us leaving, they don’t show it.
As we walk into our house, I see it the way they see it. Our moldy well has a pile of broken plastic buckets next to it. Our laundry is drying on the walls of the perimeter.
Solomon laughs when we get to the hole we have dug.
“Just look at this.” He is laughing. It is the second time he has spoken since we left his house.
“You don’t need this big hole, don’t you know?” a skinny tall boy says to me. He is wearing a white shirt. His dreadlocks are long and dusty. “You just need four small holes for your four-by-twos, then you pour in a little concrete and it stays.”
“We were going to fill the hole with stones,” Peter says.
He sounds like he is annoyed and impatient. He must be unhappy with me. This is our house, I should not just stand there like a fool while these boys laugh at us.
“Which is easier? Stones or concrete? Where will we get concrete from?” Peter continues. It is hard for him to say concrete, so he is making everything worse.
“Okay. Do you want to help with the bird trap, then, or are you still digging your nonsense hole?”
“Just
