Axis

August, 2014.

The sitting room was empty except for Malek.

No sofas, no center table, no rug — just bare terrazzo floor and the faint outline where furniture used to sit, patches of tile a shade cleaner than the rest. His mother’s old television, unplugged now and sitting on a stack of newspapers, still managed to flicker with a signal, and Malek lay flat on his belly in front of it, chin propped on both palms, feet swinging lazily in the air behind him.

On the screen, a woman was singing ”If you ask me na who I go ask.The matter wey we see so e tay wey e start.No be me go talk am e heavy for mouth”. Malek mouthed the words without really knowing what they meant. He liked the beat more than the meaning. He was seven, and the world still worked that way — sound before sense, rhythm before reason.

Outside, Isheri was doing what Isheri always did in the evening: generators coughing awake one compound at a time, hawkers calling out the last of their bread and pure water before dark. Malek had lived his whole life inside these sounds. Tomorrow, he would live in a new area, at least with less sounds.

“Malek! Malek, get up now-now, the car is outside!”

His mother’s voice came from the passage, sharp with the particular urgency of a woman who had already carried four bags to the gate herself. Malek didn’t move immediately. He watched the man on the screen throw his hands up one more time.

“Malek.....Toluwalade!”

That was her serious voice. The one that meant she was done asking.

He pushed himself up off the floor — and for just a moment, so brief he wouldn’t remember it by morning, the static on the television screen bent. Not flickered.Bent,like the picture had been drawn on water and someone had dropped a stone in it. Then it was gone, and the singer was still singing, and Malek was already jogging toward the door in his rubber slippers, one strap loose at the heel.

“I’m coming!”

The car — his mother’s dusty gray Camry, back seat crammed with a mattress folded in half and a box of kitchen things that rattled every time they hit a pothole — pulled out of the compound gate at exactly 6:47 in the evening, the sky over Isheri doing that Lagos thing where orange and grey argued with each other and neither one won. His mother drove, as she always did; his father had never learned, and had long stopped pretending it embarrassed him.

Malek sat wedged between two boxes, one hand pressed flat against the window glass. He watched the rented apartment shrink behind them — the balcony where his mother hung wrapper to dry, the corner shop where Iya Basira sold him groundnut on credit whenever his pocket money finished early. Eleven years his parents had lived there, on and off, before he was born and after. Now it belonged to someone else’s evening.

“Are we still in Lagos?” he asked, because the roads had started to feel unfamiliar, quieter, more trees leaning over the road than buildings.

“We’re still in Lagos, my dear,” his mother said, eyes on the road. “Igando is still Lagos. Just... more space.”

His father grunted something that might have been agreement from the passenger seat, both hands resting loose in his lap, eyes doing that thing they sometimes did at road junctions — a half-second too long on nothing in particular, like he was listening for something under the engine noise. Malek didn’t notice. He was watching the streetlights, the ones that worked, throw long orange stripes across the boxes in the back seat, and thinking that stripes like that looked like something you could hold, if your hand was fast enough.

The new house stood at the end of a still-sandy street, the kind that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be tarred. It was bigger than anything Malek had lived in — a proper three-bedroom bungalow facing the road, cream paint still smelling faintly of not-quite-dry, and just inside the gate, a small self-contain flat of its own, one room and a tiny kitchenette, the kind of space his mother said could be “for visitors, or for a housegirl, when we’re ready for one.”

“This one is ours?” Malek asked, standing in the middle of the compound, turning in a slow circle to take in all of it — the unpainted fence, the mango tree in the corner that looked older than the house itself, the generator house that was really just a small concrete shed with a padlock.

“All of it,” his father said, setting down a box with a grunt of relief. “No landlord to answer to again. No ‘oga don’t hang your clothes there.’ You understand?”

Malek didn’t fully understand what it meant to owe nobody rent, but he understood the way his father’s shoulders sat differently saying it — looser, like something that had been strapped tight for years had finally been let out a notch.

By the time they’d carried in the last box, the sky had gone properly dark, and inside the house, without furniture, without curtains yet, it felt bigger than it probably was — their voices echoing slightly off bare walls, footsteps loud on new tile.

“NEPA has not brought light since afternoon,” his mother muttered, flicking a switch that did nothing. “Of course. Our very first night.”

“Mummy, I already knew,” his father said, already moving toward the back of the house with the keys to the generator shed jangling in his hand. “That’s why I filled the tank before we even left Isheri side.”

At exactly seven o’clock, the generator coughed, sputtered, and caught, its low steady growl swallowing up the quiet of the new street. Bulbs flickered on one by one through the house — the sitting room, the kitchen, the passage — and Malek felt something in his chest unclench that he hadn’t known was clenched. A house with light in it felt like a house that was really theirs.

They ate that night sitting on cartons pulled up to a low stool that served as a table, a pot of jollof rice his mother had made that morning in the old kitchen, before the gas cooker had even been unpacked in the new one. Nobody complained about the seating. It felt, if anything, like an adventure — camping inside their own home.

Malek was meant to be asleep.

His mattress had been laid straight on the floor of what would become his room, no bed frame yet, no wardrobe, just a small bag of clothes in the corner and a torchlight his father had given him “in case NEPA and the generator both fail you tonight.” He’d used the torchlight for exactly four minutes to make shadow shapes on the ceiling before boredom sent him toward his door instead, toward the strip of generator-lit light spilling from his parents’ room down the passage.

He didn’t mean to eavesdrop. He told himself that later, though even at seven he half-knew it wasn’t true.

“...still nothing, Mummy. Nothing at all.” His father’s voice, low, the way it got when he thought Malek was long asleep. “He’s seven now. Seven. Most children have shown something by five. Your own brother showed by four.”

“Different children take different time, Daddy.” His mother’s voice was soft but firm, the voice she used when she’d already decided the argument was over before it started. “You act as if a child that hasn’t shown it yet never will. Since when?”

“I’m not saying never. I’m saying—” A pause, a long one, the kind Malek could almost feel through the wall. “You know whose blood is sitting quiet in that boy. Both sides. Yours, mine. It’s a lot of pressure to be holding down, if it’s holding anything down at all.”

“Then let it take its time,” his mother said. “He’ll come into it when his body is ready and not one day before. You didn’t rush the earth under your feet to become what it is, did you? Some things need to sit before they can rise.”

Malek understood exactly what they meant. He had understood for a while now — longer than either of them probably realized. It was hard not to, when it was the first thing anybody ever asked him: “So what can you do? Water? Earth?” And every single time, he gave the same small answer, the one that made the asking adult’s face do a polite, disappointed thing before they patted his head and said “no wahala, it will come.”

He padded back to his mattress before either of them could catch him listening, and lay down, and stared at the ceiling his torchlight had made shadows on minutes before.

I know exactly what “shown something” means. I’ve known since before I could really explain it back to anybody. It’s the first question people ask me — not my name, not how school is, justwhat can you do. And every time, I have to say the same thing.

Nothing.None.

I say it so much I’ve stopped waiting for their face to change after, because it always changes the same way — that little dip, like they were hoping I’d surprise them and I didn’t. Cousins my age already have something. Small things, maybe, a flicker of something in their palm, water that curls toward their hand instead of away. I have nothing to show anybody. Not even a flicker.

Lying there in the dark, in a house that still smelled like wet paint, I felt that small heavy thing settle in my chest again — the one that shows up whenever I hear Mummy and Daddy talking like that, low and careful, like I’m a problem they’re trying to solve without waking me up to tell me I’m the problem. I know Mummy believes what she says. I know Daddy is only scared, not angry. But knowing that doesn’t make the heavy thing go away.

I didn’t want to think about it anymore tonight. Not on our first night here.

New house. New street. New room, that would smell less like paint by next week and more likeme. Tomorrow I wanted to look under the mango tree in the corner of the compound and see if anything lived there. I wanted to find out if the small flat by the gate had a proper door lock, and whether the sandy street outside would ever turn to tarred road like the ones in town.

I decided that whatever I didn’t have, this house was still mine, this room was still mine, and that was enough to fall asleep smiling — even with the heavy thing still sitting quiet in my chest, waiting, same as whatever Mummy and Daddy thought was waiting in me.