Black Sunday. Tola Rotimi Abraham

being annoying and rude,” I said.

      She did not stop. Her laughter made me think of water in the canal and how we loved to go there when we were younger. The canal water was usually calm and still. I hated it when it was like that. I used to throw rocks in the water just to disturb it. First, I’d cause a small ripple, which would create a larger one, and then another ripple, and then it was no longer calm undisturbed water but a series of unending circles. That’s how laughter poured out of her, in waves and ripples. When I thought she was done, she only paused to laugh even harder.

      “Are you done laughing?” I asked.

      “Are you done saying stupid things?” she answered.

      “Have you finished?” I asked again.

      She did not answer. She just wiped her eyes with the back of her dress.

      “These are the last days,” I continued. “Everything the Bible talked about so far has happened. Wars, pestilences, rebellions. The only thing left is the Rapture. God told Pastor David that it’s happening really soon.”

      “Ariyike, even if that is true, God won’t tell anyone. Especially not Pastor David.”

      “Why won’t he?” I said.

      “Because it will be unfair.” She got up as she said this, pouring the beans out from the bowl and into a large sieve, washing them under running water, splashing everywhere, on her dress, running down her legs, settling around her feet in a small puddle. “He will have to tell everyone or tell no one at all. God should be fair. Treat everyone the same. Like sunlight—”

      “You’re getting drenched,” I said, interrupting her.

      “I know. I will change before Mother gets back.”

      MOTHER HAD A new job. She was teaching business studies, shorthand writing, and typing at Oguntade Secondary. It was a private school, two streets away from us. She was offered a discount to enroll two children, but she didn’t take it. We were enrolled in the neighborhood public school. She complained about her job every day.

      “These children are so terrifyingly lazy.”

      “This proprietor is the most miserly man I have ever met. He is making us pay for tissue paper in the teachers’ lounge, can you imagine it?”

      “The parents want you to give their children marks they haven’t earned; not me, let the other teachers cater to these nincompoops.”

      Mother was unsuited for this position. I felt sorry for her students. She was taking out her disappointments on them, I was sure. I hoped they knew that when she called them stupid or insolent, it was not because they were exceptionally incompetent. She just did not expect to be herding other people’s children at this stage in her life.

      Bibike and I were making moimoi. Mother sold moimoi wrapped in clear plastic bags to kids at her school during lunch. Lately we also had moimoi for lunch every day. We half joked to Mother as we cooked, “Can we eat something else? Peas will soon start growing from our ears o.”

      But her reply was: “You’d better be grateful you have any food to eat.” She said this like it was the most normal thing to say to your own children.

      Since she’d lost her job, Mother had been different, always angry, always tired, always looking for something to criticize us over. The boys, though, could do nothing wrong. One Friday, Andrew stayed out late. He was playing football at the stadium. Mother did not even notice he was not home. Or if she did, she said nothing. Bibike and I would never have tried something like that.

      Father noticed everything but said nothing. It was harder for him, I assumed, because when Mother lost her job, he lost his inside connections and could no longer get printing contracts from the government. Father had never had a regular job. This was why he was our favorite parent; he had the time to do things with us. Before Mother lost her job and we all became poor, Father drove us to school every day. The first car I remember was a yellow ’88 Mitsubishi Galant, but then he had it repainted to a brash red-wine color, because people in Lagos always thought it was a cab. They sold that car when Bibike and I were in primary 6, to buy a white Volkswagen Jetta. I loved that Jetta so much. Father washed it by himself every single day and it always had a fresh clean smell like a baby’s bathwater.

      Ever since selling the Jetta, Father had been home all the time. He had no connections, no car, and nothing to do. He spent most of his time indoors reading old newspapers, using a blue pen to mark them up. Other times, he was outside the house, “spending time with friends,” “making money moves,” “cultivating new business relationships.”

      “They are nothing but a bunch of time wasters,” Mother said once, the day after Father’s new group of friends visited him at home for the first time. “Time wasters. Roaming about looking for whom to devour.”

      We were all in the living room when she said it. She was standing by the dining table folding laundry. Father was sitting in his armchair, Andrew and Peter sat on the floor, Bibike and I lay on the purple couch. I could feel my face swelling with anger. Bibike was patting me on my back, calming me down without words. How could Mother think it was okay to talk about Father like that—and in front of him? All he was doing was trying. Trying to make something happen.

      She would have continued like that, going on and on, if I hadn’t jumped off the couch and started singing, out of nowhere, the reggae dancehall song “Murder She Wrote.” Peter joined in singing, and soon we were dancing, swaying this way and that, flinging imaginary dreadlocks right, left, and right again. Andrew was providing the beat and shouting, in his imitation Jamaican accent, “Mderation Man,” over and over, and Mother was saying, “Stop making noise,” but no one was listening anymore to anything she had to say. She walked away, into our room, with a pile of folded clothes to put in our chest of drawers. Then Father said, “Stop making that racket. I want to watch the news.

      Afterward, Mother spoke to Bibike and me yet again about the dangers of worldly music, that it was the devil’s mascot, leading young girls to bad things, like boys and drugs, and how we had to be better examples for our brothers. And in this moment, I wanted worldly music more than I ever had. Nothing Mother was saying was new. I had heard it all in church already

      I listened to Mother repentant now. I started crying not because of what she was saying but because I was afraid. I was afraid of failing God. My pastor, David Shamonka, the reason I knew Jesus was coming soon, had been in university studying medicine when God called him to win souls. He left medical school, he left his parents and siblings, he left everything to start his ministry. If God called me like he did him, what is worldly music that I couldn’t give it up?

      I hoped that God could tell that my heart wanted him more than it wanted worldly music, or anything else. I could sense that the world was changing, that big things were about to happen. Of course, I could not say for certain that it was the end of the world, the Rapture or the Second Coming or anything like Pastor David said—Bibike’s mocking made it hard for me to believe everything he said—but I felt something.

      On some days, right after I said my night prayer, when I focused hard enough, I could hear the voice of God in the evening breeze. It sounded like an old man speaking softly in the distance. I did not know, in the way Pastor David apparently did, how to decipher what the voice was saying. But I believed that someday I, too, would understand His voice. I think I love Pastor David.

      Once, before Mother lost her job, a street magician visited Fadeyi. All of us children paid five naira per head to watch his act. I watched the magician swallow a whole python alive, only to vomit it up five minutes later. It was an unforgettable sight. Pastor David reminded me of that magician. The difference was that he was teaching me, teaching all of us his congregants, how to do all the same glorious things he did.

      I had first met Pastor David six months after Father sold the car. It happened in my school principal’s office. I was there that day because Mrs. Modele the math teacher had reported me for copying my test answers from Bibike. I was walking up the stairs past the courtyard when I saw him approaching. He was smiling directly at my face. I pretended