Mary sits in front, beside Boye. She has the look of a newly married wife whose husband has just bought a brand new Jeep. But she is only eight or so. Her left palm rests on her thigh, where there are four big holes on her yellow-gold skirt. And this makes me wonder: Does she leave her clothes for rats to feast on? Not that I’m angry about being cheated out of my turn to drive or for any other thing; the truth is, most of her skirts appear the same—faded, with holes the size of fish eyes. Her plastered smiles annoy me. They annoy me so much I don’t know when I say, “Boye, it’s my turn to drive.”

Chima is the first person to speak after what seems like a long pause, a long pause which makes me look as though I had only spoken to myself, the way madmen do. You see, Chima’s tongue can cut right through your skin like a sharp knife, even if you are as fat as those cows his father sells at Abule market. So it doesn’t surprise me when he says, “Shut up your mouth.” But it stings, like a fresh nosebleed. I am twelve and the oldest among them. Chima is nine. Perhaps he is like his mother, who wakes the whole street with her shouts at her mother-in-law every morning because the poor woman wets her bed daily. Disrespect and anger run in their blood.

“But it’s his turn,” Musa says in a voice so thin it can pass for a rat’s scratch. Maybe he is afraid of what Chima will name him today. Yesterday, it was shit-eater. Last Sunday, after the football match between Spain and Portugal, it was anu ohia, the meaning only Chima and I understand. Anu ohia made Musa cry as he ran home, like a baby hungry for his mother’s milk. Now Musa sits beside me, close to the window at the back. I watch his trembling hand curl around the door handle. I think he is scared of Chima hitting him. After all, who knows what other bad things run in Chima’s blood?

“I see you ate too much tuwo. And it has given you strong power, bah?” Chima says, jerking back and front as though the car is actually moving, bumping along potholes. “If you open your dirty mouth again this afternoon, your father who looks thinner than aziza will not recognize you again.” I’ve always thought of Musa’s father as broom-thin, but I never knew it would make my heart stop when said out loud—especially from someone like Chima. He begins to cheer Boye who, by now, waves to other invisible drivers and honks the horn that never blares.

“Children, it’s okay. Daddy will soon get tired of driving.”

I’d like to call Mary a big fool. Who is Boye that she should call him Daddy? I’m beginning to dislike this game. In fact, I’m beginning to dislike Mary. Her right elbow leans against the open window, collecting cobwebs and smelly dust. Look at her—how dirty! Musa must have been right about her when he told me she sometimes skips her morning baths. But then, I wonder how Musa gets to know the kind of things he knows. Like whose sixteen-year-old daughter was kicked out of the house for getting pregnant. And whose son slept in a cell for robbing Mama Atinuke’s supermarket. Musa is like my younger sister in the village—they know too much for their age.

Boye is getting tired. This, I know. His voice is thinning out. His grip on the steering wheel is like a year old baby holding a big torch in one hand. His straightened back relaxes in slow curves against the back of his seat. Me, I never let my back rest on that seat. Who knows what sleeps inside of those ugly-looking holes oozing stained brown-yellow foam? Bugs? Cockroaches? Rats? Who knows?

Boye gives up. “Make anoda person come drive.”

Boye sounds like a broken radio—cracked, way too throaty for a boy his age. It’s not his fault his English is as bad as a rotting egg. His father doesn’t send him to school; instead, the poor man leaves him in his mechanic shop to tend to petty car issues. Most days, his father is never around in the shop, so Boye has his father’s unpaid apprentices as companions, as friends. Musa once told me he had seen those boys—Boye’s father’s apprentices—smoking weewee. And Boye was right there in their midst. He said he saw Boye breathe in air from the wee-wee before coughing out his intestines like an asthmatic patient suffering an attack. Then Boye tried again, sucking in smoke as if he was sipping sweet kunu, exhaling, smiling, laughing, his friends welcoming him into a hallowed club of wee-wee smokers. Again, I wonder how Musa knew this, how he was afforded the chance to see all that. But his story rings true. If you’ve ever seen a wee-wee smoker—with his blackened, dry lips and dark lines under his eyes and fingers—you would believe Musa. Boye looks like a wee-wee smoker, or is it just my eyes?

Chima climbs out of the car soon after Boye does. I follow, too. Boye’s palms no longer look like a person’s palms. They are pitch black with an oily sheen, like the generator man who spends half of his day messing with machine parts in the name of generator repairs. He rubs his palms up and down and sideways on the front of his shirt, and this does not surprise me: One day, he is going to be a mechanic, like his father. While Boye takes the middle seat in the back, Chima reaches for the front door.

“What do you think you are doing?” I ask Chima and aim for the door handle.

“What does it look like?” says Chima, whose hand is now underneath mine. “Are you getting blind like your mother? Or is the smoke from the puff-puff she sells spoiling your eyes?”

In this life, there are two things I don’t joke about: my mother and my books. And for the rubbish Chima just spat out, I must make him take it back and chew, and I won’t mind if he chokes on it the same way I sometimes choke on my saliva.

“You dare not talk about my mother in that manner. Say you are sorry.”

“Sorry? Is the smoke now getting to your brain and frying your senses, too? Anu ohia.”

I withdraw my right arm and punch Chima in the face. He squeals, almost sounding like amplified clucks of a rooster on heat. He rushes at me, trying to pull me off the ground. I land him a hard blow in the back and two on his head. His might—even his senses— is not as sharp as his tongue after all. He picks a stone the size of my fist and shoots at me. I duck faster than an eye blink. He misses, for the stone drops at the foot of an abandoned refrigerator just near the rusty metal gate. I make use of this opportunity to finish him off. I strike him twice in his sides and then draw back my hand to give him a hard slap across the face. He is too sore to cry. He whimpers and runs away, tripping as he runs.

Boye goes after Chima. Musa sits there in the car, looking ahead as if something special has caught his interest, but beneath his straight face, I know he is happy to see Chima all beaten up like a sack of threshed corn. I climb into the driver’s seat. “Ooomph, ooomph,” goes my wheezy breath. I feel for my left thigh where Chima bit me with his teeth. A round throbbing welt grazes my fingers. Mary is looking away. Her husband is gone, gone like her own father Chima sometimes laughed about. She should be happy, you know. Chima taunts her like the other children he plays with. But I’d still like to tell her she’s a big fool; she stood up for Boye even when his time to drive was through.

“Are you okay?” Musa still whispers his words, even when the almighty bully of a Chima is gone.

I ignore him. I ignore the swelling pain in my thigh. I ignore the thought of a bug or a cockroach sneaking up my back when I recline fully in the driver’s seat. A drop of water falls on my hair. I look up. It is raining, and I don’t even know when it started. More drops of rainwater and late-afternoon sunlight trickle through the rust-eaten roof of the car. I shut my eyes tight, allowing the wetness on my hair, on my worn clothes, on my rubber wristwatch that forever ticks 12 even when it is only a few minutes after five. And when I open them, Musa and Mary are no longer in the car. I circle my fingers around the steering wheel and go, “Vrooom, vrooom,” quite louder than the tap-tap-tap angry pelting of rain.

I return home just before the sun begins its departure. The house is empty. I change into a set of new clothes—half of Spiderman’s face on my t-shirt is gone, and my pair of green shorts has a hole in each leg, round enough to fit two of my fingers. But I don’t mind, it’s getting dark outside and besides, who cares to look my way? People around here go about their lives minding their own business. I grab a handful of newspapers from the pile Mother’s friend gave us the other day and hurry outside.

If you stand close to the middle of Idowu street—it’s a popular street in Lagos, a famous Nollywood actor was once robbed there—and look ahead as if to read the words on the only billboard on that street, you will see black whorls of spicy smoke rising and disappearing into the sky high above. The smoke is from Mother’s shop. Although it’s not really a shop, Mother and I like to call it so. At least, that is what the men from the local government office call it, and we even pay for it. Her shop is just a small space in a corner, near an open gutter, with only a table and a fireplace. But because she has stayed there for over three years, the ground of her shop is no longer leveled. Heaps of charcoal and ash have compressed and hardened into a rough black rock, the shape of a mound. Early one afternoon, a few months back, the men from the local government office tried evicting Mother from her shop. That same day, the chairman of the local government visited us there. I remember Mother squeezed five hundred naira note into his palms, and, later that evening, after the day’s sales, I found him leaving our one-room apartment, his face heavy with smiles, as if he had won an American visa lottery. I don’t know what Mother must have given or said to him, but all I know is this: We stopped receiving eviction threats from the local government office.

Mother is frying another set of puff-puff by the time I arrive. She has sliced the yams and cut the potatoes into fingerlike shapes, and steam is escaping the pot of freshly prepared pepper stew. The paper she uses to wrap puff-puff for customers is almost finished, but when she sees me with newspapers bundled under my armpit, she looks happy.

“Godspower, it’s good that you brought additional paper so neither of us needs to return home,” she says. “How are you? Did you eat the food I kept for you? Has your father returned?”

Mother is like that, asking questions like a runner racing to the finish line. She never waits to hear your reply after one question. But it surprises me that she asks after Father. She hardly does. Father and Mother are like oil and water. Mother thinks Father is a lazy man who sits around beer parlours waiting for a free drink. Every night, before Mother leaves in tight clothes for her other work, she tells me to study hard and not to be like Father. I don’t know how I’m going to tell her that I haven’t read a thing today, that I have been fighting and driving the car in Musa’s compound.

“I’m fine,” I say, attending to the next customer who wants fifty naira worth of puff-puff. “I didn’t know you kept food for me. I ried here as soon as I returned home.” But I avoid mentioning Father.

“Help me with the gallon of groundnut oil by your leg.” I pass her the gallon. “Will you eat puff-puff, my son? You must be hungry. Or do you prefer to buy boiled rice? The woman selling food is still around. Let me buy some bread. Will you like bread?”

“Mother, I’m fine.”

Evening is getting darker, and there are more customers than ever before. Is it the fried yams and potatoes Mother now sells that attracts them? Or is it the new big umbrella, poised over the centre of the table, with a bright yellow bulb dangling from its middle? Whatever the source of attraction is, I don’t care. I’m only feeling happy that we’ll top our sales today.

But my happiness is pruned short, an hour or so later, when Chima appears out of nowhere with his mother, both of them carrying wooden faces. My heart takes a quick somersault, my throat dries up, and my eyes begin to ache.

“Good evening, Mama Chima,” says Mother.

“What is good about this evening, eh, Nne Godspower?” Chima’s mother doesn’t know, but her voice sounds like a parrot’s, even in her visible fury. Mrs. Parrot, this woman.

“Ah. Mama Chima, my good friend. O gini neme? What is the problem?” Mother tries to pacify Mrs. Parrot with her gestures and her Igbo, but the woman is so angry I think she doesn’t hear a word Mother says.

“You are acting as if you don’t know. Look at my boy. Take a close look at Chima’s body. What has my boy done to your son that your son wants to kill him? What I have done to you people?”

Mother looks at me through narrowed eyes as if they had those metal-cutting lasers I see on television in Musa’s house, as if she wants to rip me apart and feed my parts to Mrs. Parrot so as to calm her down. Some customers simply stare at us, folding their arms to see what happens next; others leave because they are tired of waiting. The yam slices frying in the hot oil start to burn.

I begin, “Mother, it is Chima who looked for trouble first. It was my turn to drive, not his. But he insulted me and you, Mother. He said the smoke from your puff-puff is making me stupid. He said—”

Mother slaps me with the hand she used a while ago to touch the oil and yam slices and salt. She pulls me by my ear and drags me around in front of Mrs. Parrot. She slaps me. Again and again. Mrs. Parrot is still not satisfied. She jumps all over the place as though Mother has not punished me enough. Maybe she will stop if Mother lifts the frying pan off the fire and empties its contents on me. Out of the corner of my eyes, I see Chima laughing behind his mother, a silent wicked laughter. He is making many faces at me. This is the kind of night I wish will pass like it never existed.

“Tell Chima you are sorry,” Mother says.

I say I’m sorry as if I’m talking to myself.

“Louder. And on your knees.”

I obey as instructed.

I catch the tears in my eyes, hoping to release them when Mrs. Parrot and her son are long gone. Mother insists on giving Chima some puff-puff, but Mrs. Parrot rejects the offer. She asks after Father, comments about the killings by Boko Haram in the north, asks Mother about the outcome of the last Christian Mothers’ meeting, mentions so-and-so, says such-and-such—and before she is done talking like the parrot she is, hot tears pour down both sides of my cheeks like a dam tired of being caged. Chima sees me crying, bends as if to pick a fallen object, but actually, what he does is laugh at me, that same wicked laughter. After a few minutes, Mrs. Parrot bids Mother goodnight and scurries off with her son the way they came.

“This is how you want to repay me after everything?” Mother says. “Do you want to end up like your father? Am I not trying my best to make sure you get the best of everything? Is Chima your mate, or even your size, that you engage in a fight with him?” A long silence falls between us. “Get up from there. Let’s go home.”

Mother must have been packing up when Mrs. Parrot was chit-chatting away. I want to ask Mother when she bought the umbrella. I want to ask her who had offered to connect the electric bulb for us. But all I do is hang my head low like a guilty offender of the law. Now, all I feel is hunger and shame and desire for revenge in equal amounts. All this seems to vanish when I see Father. He is sitting outside on a low wooden stool, a bottle of Chelsea dry gin in one hand. I greet him. But he only nods his head, sleepily, like a person head-dancing to an inner music. Mother walks ahead, straight into the room, undresses, ties a wrapper around her bosom, grabs a bucket, and heads to the bathroom, which is a tiny aluminum-roofed room standing in the backyard, attached to the wall. She waits her turn.

Father lifts himself out of the stool, supporting his weight with his free hand on the unpainted wall. He wobbles into the candle-lit room where I sit in a corner picking at my cold meal. He turns the radio on and dances to the scratch-scratch sounds of the radio. Is this man alright upstairs?

“Dance with me,” Father says to me.

I turn my back to him, acting as if I didn’t hear him. An hour or so later, Mother is in the room. She is getting ready to leave for her other job. This other job, if you ask me what it is, I will tell you I don’t know. But what I know is this: She returns from this job as early as Mrs. Parrot’s shouts at her mother-in-law begin in the morning. When she returns, some parts of her face have the faded version of her lipstick, and her breath is heavy with the smell of alcohol and cigarettes, and there are black smudges under her eyes like Boye’s. Maybe she cries too much in this, her other job. Maybe this other job requires her to fight, because when she comes back, her hair looks like it has never seen a brush, and her clothes are rumpled in many areas of her body, and she comes back very, very tired. I don’t know. But I think Father knows, which is why he allows her to do this night job.

“Dance with me,” Father says to Mother.

Mother is putting on the brown leather high heels I took to the cobbler for mending two days ago. Her legs have outgrown them, and I don’t know why she still struggles to wear them. She doesn’t even walk well in them. Won’t her manager complain about this? Or perhaps her manager never notices, because whenever she is ready to leave for her night job, a Jeep is already waiting to pick her up. Again, I wonder why she never lets her driver into our house. There are many things about Mother’s night job that baffle me, and if I don’t stop thinking about them, one day my head will swell and burst like a nylon filled with too much water.

“Papa Godspower, I don’t have time for this or any of your games. I’m already late for work,” Mother says.

“Which work? You think I don’t know where you hang out every night.” Father is spraying spittle on Mother as he talks, but she doesn’t seem to care, or is she becoming like Mary? Most times, I think Mother is like Mary—she sneezes on her wrapper, and when she does it on her palm, she rubs the mucus between her palms until it dissolves.

Father is holding onto Mother’s tight clothes now. He doesn’t want her to leave for her night job. And while the two of them go at each other, raising their voices to see whose is the louder, I sneak outside, into a windy moonless night. I hear Mother calling Father names like useless man and onye iberibe, and telling Father how he is the reason they decided to keep only me in the city and my sister in the village. I hear the kram-kram breaking of bottles on the walls of our one-room apartment, and the dull thumps of heavy objects falling. I am running almost blindly into the night, past the parked Jeep waiting for Mother, to the car I know how to drive, to watch the blank sky through the rust-eaten roof, to sleep there, and to forget that some days, some nights, are ever like this.