Sky Don Fall [Part I]

Femi lived down the hall from us. He was a lean man whom life had toughened up early; you could tell from the way he walked, from the unintentional muscles that lined his wiry arms, to his hardened face. He wore loose jeans – faded from wearing – and his hair was a bushy afro, eyes deeply set in their sockets with thick, dark lips to match.

He lived with his uncle in Flat 4. He spoke little English, worked much of the day and would come home dragging his feet along, laden with the remaining cartons of frozen fish and chicken his uncle sold at Census Market.

          It was on one such tired night I first met him. I was downstairs by the stairwell; what had begun as a somewhat pleasant evening quickly turned sour when mummy returned with bile. She lost it when she saw the plates I hadn’t washed piled up in the sink, and brought up my “unemployment and arrant uselessness”. So I was downstairs, cooling off after the argument, sitting on a cement block by the entrance to the stairwell.

          Femi arrived with his cartons. He said something that I did not hear, a greeting, maybe, and when I didn’t respond he turned to face me, speaking again: “Aunty, hope nothing?”

          I shook my head. “Nothing.”

          “Why you come dey look like say sky don fall?”

          Insulted, I cast a glare at him. “E consign you?”

          “Ah. E no consign me.” He held my gaze a second longer before turning and drudging up the stairs with his load.

          I returned to the flat, where mummy was sitting in front of the television, glaring over the rims of her glasses at the phone in her hand, muttering about running out of airtime. I went into the kitchen and washed the dishes, washed out the empty pot of okra sitting on the gas cooker, swept the linoleum floor and went into my bedroom. There, my hopelessness swiftly found me again.

*

At the time, my life was in a stalemate; I had graduated from university in the East almost two years before, but still hadn’t been called for national youth service. Each quarter that passed by and I got a call from Doris who worked with admin at FUTO, telling me to “come and drop something” before the next batch of names were released, I felt sick to my stomach. It was this situation that made my mother act like sun and rain, that made her wake up on whichever side of the bed she chose on any given day and act however she wished; and it was this situation that made Femi become to me a fortress, a place in which I hid, an ocean in which I buried my despondency.

*

A few days after that incident by the stairwell, I met Femi at the shed, where numerous generators of various sizes and cadences rumbled. The power had cut and mummy was watching Tinsel, so I had rushed downstairs to turn our generator on. Femi was turning petrol into their generator’s fuel tank and I used the dim light from his torch to feel around in the dark for the pull cord on ours. He moved quickly and soon his generator was roaring, his torch had gone off and I was still fiddling with the cord.

          “Abeg,” I said, “borrow me light.”

          He paused for a moment that seemed to stretch into forever before turning the torch back on. Maybe because I knew he was watching me as I bent over the generator, or because my fingers were particularly sweaty that night, but the generator wouldn’t come on no matter how hard I pulled the cord.

          “Aunty, shift,” Femi said gruffly, his body already nudging me to the side. 

          He reached for the cord, and with one deft pull the generator sprang to life.

          “My name is not Aunty,” I said, instead of thanking him. We were standing face to face now, in the humidity of the shed, his torch turned off.

          “Ehn ehn?” He grunted.

His breath smelled like stew; I could smell the sweat and heat rising off his body.

          I turned and headed back into the stairwell, wondering what was happening to my body, why my head felt light and my heart was pounding.