Dry Gutter
A story about love and blindness — from Adelehin Ijasan
When they first come to the school I know. Instantly. It’s the way you know things, the way you know it’s going to rain when you wake up in the morning, and sometimes the way you know the day is going to be a bad day. Perhaps, someone will leave a door open that day, a cupboard door and you will hit your head. Or you will fall into a dry gutter and get hurt really bad. Yes. That sort of knowing. When the sound of the car drive into the compound and the teacher stopped talking, and a certain sort of calm came as they put off the engine of the car and doors started opening and foots started touching the ground, and clothes rustling and people talking, some laughing softly about something someone else has said. . . . It’s the day when something will happen bigger than falling into a dry gutter.
Our teacher is Mrs. Makeba. She turns to us and tells us in that voice she uses in the G and C room when she’s trying to talk sense into a boy that is unhappy for no reason, or when she’s trying to say, you are no different from anybody out there — which is not true. Or that we can achieve anything like anybody out there — which is also not true. One time, she say you can even be president. Nobody laugh. But even she no sure of herself as she talk am. You can hear it in her voice that one time, that she could not bring herself to believe it. You can even be president. Haha. Presidente. There was a pause after she said it and I could even hear her lips smacking like wasa wasanga trying to fill up that heavy silence. So today, she say in that voice, “The people from the eye hospital are here. They have come to look at you and see how you’re doing.” That pause again. Another lie. Then the voice become strong. She straight up her back to say it, and she said it very fast: “They have not come here to treat you. Because there is nothing wrong with you. Nothing. Nothing is wrong with you.”
Another pause. Somebody coughed. Somebody is flipping through a book, a exercise book.
“Yes! Nothing. So they have come to just greet you and see how you’re doing and look at your eyes and see how you’re doing.”
It’s as if she doesn’t want to say it. She’s not sure if she should say it whatever it is that she wants to say next. You can hear her all heaving and her lips fighting theirselves. Then she say it all the same and fast, the words all coming out over one another: “They are not here to cure you or make you see. It’s just a checkup. To see how you’re doing. Because nothing is wrong with you.”
So many ironies in that sentence, Charlie. So many, I can’t even begin to start picking them out one after one. As I said, it’s a day bigger than falling into a dry gutter.
“They are from the government or so I think. It’s a foundation.” Mrs. Makeba said. “So be nice to them. Now you will go to the assembly ground. Now, go, go, file up.” Desks shifting, books closing, lockers bolting (someone has been stealing lately), bags rustling, murmurs, feets shuffling.
She finds me immediately even though her seat is far from mine, Nane. That’s my babe. Na my wifey be that. “Another eye hospital. Tsk!” Nane says in that her voice. Pure girl, Charlie. Her voice is cream milk, silky soft, like a tush girl. Her English is better than mine. She’s beautiful. I can just listen to that voice all day and all night. Nothing spoil. Her hand finds my hand.
“Wetin dem dey find again sef. Who tell dem say eye dey pepper person?”
“I wonder oh.” Nane say. Her breath on my face is warm, clean, like fresh dried clothes.
So we walk down the corridor and down the stairs, our hands sliding on the wall, Nane was bumping into me on purpose sometimes so I can feel her body, and I‘m thinking of how funny it is — Life. How having someone can make it all better. Nane is everything to me. You forget you have a problem when someone like her is in your life. Because she make it look as if there is no problem in her own. Her laughter is true. True. When I laugh, you can hear my worries underneath like sediment. It’s the way I’ve always learned how to laugh. I learned how to worry before I learned how to laugh.
She runs. Nane. This girl. Nobody runs but she does. If she hears you coming at a distance she runs and strikes me with that body that’s soft all over. I’ve never met anybody who runs like that. Even the teachers are unhappy about it. They train us to walk slow slow. With small “incremental” steps is what Mrs. Makeba calls it. But I love it that she runs because I want to run too. Though I have never told her. I want to feel the breeze move past very fast and not settle on me. I want to not feel fear, fear of a sharp bend, or a open door, or a dry gutter, or a wall. Worst of all, I want to not feel fear of . . . krugger, disorientation. Running will fuck your compass up. You will not know which direction is the classroom or the school field or the dormitory when such nonsense has cleared comot of your head and you are ready to continue Mrs. Makeba’s “incremental” steps. But Nane is not afraid to run. Before, I thought it was because she was not afraid to get harmed or wounded but as I got to knew her, I know it’s really because she’s not worried if she gets harmed. She has scars all over. I feel them after light out and we have sneaked to our spot in the woodshop laboratory. She laughs at how smooth my skin is. Every one of her scars has a story. The one on her back, the long one like rope, she fell in a dry gutter once and people have to pull her out.
I worry. I pray she doesn’t get pregnant, Charlie.
“Have you thought about what I said about the keyboard?” Nane say as we settle into the assembly seats. The assembly hall is cool, man. The ceiling fans are working fine today. It was hot out. The place is echoey with shuffling and seating and boys making jest and girls gossiping and teachers chaperoning. Nane wants me to leave drums and start on the keyboard because I once found her a mouse by listening to it squeak and shuffle behind a cupboard. She say drums are for tone deaf people. That with my ear I can become famous on the keyboard. She knows I’m more into writing stories and she reads my stories with little squeaks like that mouse I caught, and ahhs when the plot becomes thickens. She helps me with the grammar sometimes. She try to teach me vowels or something but I tell her who cares about vowels if a story has a beating heart? But she also feels I can be famous for the keyboard alongside the writing of stories. She feels I’m multi talented like that.
“Don’t bring it up again. I don put am for mind.”
“Okay.”
She won’t bring it up again. My Nane is submissive like that. She put her hand under my arm and puts head on my shoulder and sighs. I touch her face and tell her softer: “Don’t worry I go consider am for reals.”
The people from the foundation gave a speech. The truth is Nane is correct about my ears. Sometimes, most of the times, I can hear emotions in people’s voice. They are like sediments in a flowing stream. I can tell sincerity, insincerity, sadness . . . disgust, sometimes. I don’t like that I can tell these things. I no-or mind if words are just words, Charlie, simple and plain.
The people from the foundation are sincere . . . and sad on behalf of us. The sediments never lie. Nobody is ever really happy around a filled assembly hall of blind children. Nobody. They separate Nane from me. They took me to another chair and ask me my name, how old I am, when did I register in the school, who is my guardian. I tell them all their answers, but I’m sizing them up, all their voices and sediments, their perfume, the crispiness of their cuffs when they hold my hand, the cleanliness of their smells.
One of them has a voice like Nane and I have to hold body not to feel her face. I imagine it would be smooth. I smile more like a monkey when she points a light in my eyes and then raises my chin to put eye drops. She’s beautiful too. I can tell her size from how she walks, and carries that body. I can’t help but see in my mind what her body is like. I try to check myself, I thought of how unhappy I would be if Nane was getting kamge from some guy. I don’t want to make Nane unhappy like that.
They ask me if I can see fingers up. I say no promptly. But I can tell when the torch is on or off in my face. The light is a beautiful thing, man. Warm, sweet. My head moves in search of it when the lady switches the torch off and I confirm it is off. I can feel the light in my brain. Not just in my eyes. She swinged the light from one eye to another very fast. She raise up my chin and puts more eye drops. It’s very light, but I feel her hand trembling. Her voice has a emotion I can’t quite place when she says I should tell her again, how I came to be blind. I tell am. Maybe, I was six, or eight. (I’m thirty now or something, so Charlie, I can’t really remember that time I could see. It’s like olden days to me. It’s almost as if dem born me like this.)
I was six or eight. Something hit me. I can’t remember. I really cannot remember. Maybe someone threw something at me. We saw some number of doctors back then, me and Mother with my brother, Joseph. All the doctors look, look and look and they all said I was fucked. Mother dropped me off here. Father married another somebody. A bunch of sad life things have happened since all that time, but the world rolls on, sky is up and ground is down and all sort of shit in-between. But I’m not unhappy. I have Nane. I want the check to be over so I can find her again and we can laugh together about something someone said, Mrs. Makeba perhaps. I want to tell her all about the sediments in Mrs. Makeba’s speech this morning.
They keep putting eye drops and then more bunch of people take turns looking into both my eyes and talking stuff. I’m not interested really. My eyes are not my eyes. I’m thinking of the story I’m writing about the thug kid from east minister who smokes mary and robs trains, am imagining in my mind how Nane would like the part about the train accident. I can almost hear her squeaking already. I write for Nane.
When they let me go, it is prep already. I didn’t see Nane. We didn’t make arrangements to meet up but in my spirit I know she wants to. I remember she bumping into me all morning. I hope I wasn’t imagining it though. Perhaps it was me bumping into her. I can only hope I have not walk all these ways to the woodshop laboratory in the dead of the night for nothing.
“What if I wasn’t here?” Her voice is waiting for me in the dark under the large work table. Her voice is naughty and deep and rich with all the things she wants to do to me.
I always hated that smell of sawdust during woodshop class, during the day — it make me sneeze and cough and Mrs. Duane, a sneezer too, would help me shake up her bag to give me a Loratidine. But I don’t know, I really don’t know, maybe I don’t react as much at night. With Nane here, the smell of sawdust is beautiful, I don’t sneeze. I love it. I love it. It’s like . . . sanzee, embroidery, for my memory of Nane as I form them. Sawdust, wood, damp earth and Nane’s beautiful body, soft here and scars there and her voice, deep and throaty and her nails in my back.
I really hope she does not get pregnant. But I cannot help myself. I usually try to do that withdrawing they talk about in sex class. But fooo. Forget that story.
“I know say you go dey here.” Wrong opener.
“Ooh, because what? I can’t stay a day without your dick inside me?”
I laugh and laugh. And try to tell her I did not mean it like that way. She wants to play so I play with her and she pretend that she’s angry and I pretend that I’m sorry. I love this girl, Charlie. And in the middle of me trying to kiss her and she’s tightening her lips, she softens and opens her mouth and absorbs me and I’m in seventh heaven.
I swear I didn’t hear anything. Nane was wrong about my ears. I didn’t hear anything until we were over and I was breathing hard against her ear and she was gasping underneath of me. The light of a halogen lamp is warm if it hits your naked body. I feel the light, red, against my eyes and for one or two moment I can see myself and Nane in the eyes of the lamp — I can see the baseness, blanket and sawdust and two naked students. I’m too shocked to know who is there holding that lamp. Nane’s twists and scream and her trying to cover her body is going on.
The voice is thick with it when he speaks. The owner of the lamp. I can tell in that voice that he has been watching us in the dark. I am reminded that that this is the day that is worse and bigger than falling into a dry gutter.
“So na so blind people dey do?”
There was so much hate and disgust and lust in that voice, Charlie. It dirtied everything. It was like spitting on what I had and have held beautiful. It was the saddest thing I have ever heard. The utmost saddest thing I have ever heard Charlie. I was ashamed that I exposed Nane to such dirtiness and ridicule.
He is the security man. Many times, I have bumped into him on my way to the woodshop and have pretended to be lost. He would those times use a stick on my shoulder to turn me in the direction back to the dorm. We started getting our clothes. I helped Nane into her house wear skirt and I struggled inside mine own trouser. The light was steadfast on us. The security man was quiet but I can hear him breathing. I helped her up and we take our incremental steps, bumping into saws and tables on our way. I found the door and took Nane to her dormitory taking the darker paths behind the tuck shops where no house keeper can sight us from wherever. At her dorm, I tried to say I was sorry. But Nane shook my hand off and ran the rest of the way inside.
The next day, Mrs. Makeba call me into the G and C room. My heart is in my throat. I know I will be suspended and then where would I go? Nobody has come visiting in years. I sit down in the chair before recognizing that there are more people in the room. It’s not about me and Nane. I remember the perfume of the lady from yesterday.
“Steven, how are you?”
“I’m fine ma’am.”
Mrs. Makeba is happy for some reason but her happiness is not free. It’s like a bird in a cage in her voice. “These people from the Eye hospital say they can try to make you see.They say that your problem is different from the other students. That you can see light?”
“Yes, I can always see light, but . . .”
“And that you did not lose your sight at birth. So there is some hope if you agree to do an operation on your eyes . . .”
“What of Nane?” My love for Nane is secret, has always been, but I can not help but ask.
Mrs. Makeba’s voice is low, and I know that she knows that Nane is not just any ordinary somebody to me. “Nane’s situation is different.” She said.
Right now, all I want is Nane to forgive me. I really don’t want to see if Nane is not going to be seeing with me. It is as if Mrs. Makeba can read my heart and so she say, “It might not work, it’s not guaranteed. It’s just a try and they are going to do it for free.”
“What happened to your hands Stephen?” Mrs Makeba ask suddenly. “You have hurt yourself.” Then she hurries to getting the methylated spirit to clean my knuckles. “What happened to your hands?”
“I don’t know. I maybe hurt myself somewhere.”
I could not find Nane that day or the day after. Everybody in school heard they were taking me for an operation on my both eyes. The air was full with whispers of it. But I could not find her. My heart was torn within me. I could feel Nane’s hurt in the air, all around me, like a invisible thing — sorry, like a more invisible thing. I asked her friends, Jane and Ceete. Nobody knew of where she was. My heart was broken into many places. I imagined her crying in her dorm for my betrayal of her. I needed her to tell me if it was the right thing to do, this operation. If it was against us. If it was another betrayal of some sort, because I didn’t know. I did not know anymore. Mrs. Makeba was too excited. She signed all the papers. Nane, at a point I felt angry that she didn’t come out of hiding. I needed her to hold me, to run to me and tell me it was okay, and it was the right thing to do. I needed to tell her I was sorry about the night before. I was sorry about the night before, I was sorry.
When the car came and they took me, someone slipped a note in my hand. I read it. It said “Good luck”. I cried and cried.
They thought I was crying in joy. They tried to tell me not to be too hopeful. It was a 50:50 thing.
They wheeled me into a room and put a needle deep under my eyelid and that light I could see before, that light went dark and disappeared and I was filled with a fear. I liked that light. It was something else, man, to be without it and I struggled for the table but a soft voice, the voice of a master, a guru at these kine things, I could tell, told me to calm down. I calmed down. I slept. They put a pad over my eye when they finished doing whatever inside it and walked me to another room.
I slept and woke and slept and woke. I was thinking about Nane. I had the note in my hand the whole time, reading her alphabets. G-O-O-D-L-U-C-K. Nane where are you? I’m sorry.
In the morning, they remove the pads over my eyes and there was a pain in my eyes and in my head. It’s as if a lightning came up my eyes. I screamed, then the pain was gone and all the bright light started spreading and from inside that brightness were shapes and forms and colors and there were smiling faces and when they spoke, I saw that I couldn’t gauge their voices again, the sediment was gone and I found myself searching for sincerity and love and kindness in their faces instead. I finally understand what Nane calls tone deaf.
Everything is bright. And for the first time since this all started, I was not thinking about Nane. They took me to another room and made me read alphabets. I could walk without anyone holding me. I could see the other patients inside the ward. All of them looking at me — some with their own pads over one eye. I touched the edge of a table — an old enemy, an old friend, that edge. I did not know what to feel. Or how I was feeling.
I remember these alphabets. I could read them all the way down, to the very smallest letters. Someone took my picture. People were congratulating me and asking me how I felt. They took me here and there and put medicines into my hand and told me which one was every hourly and which one was every four hourly and which one was a ointment to use in the night. Mrs. Makeba was overjoyed. Now that I can see her face, I can barely remember her voice. She was exactly how I imagined her. Round and plump and good. She hugged me and hugged me and knelt down and praised the lord. She was truly happy. Me, I was tired. I wanted nothing but to go back to school and lie in my dorm and sleep and then sneak out to see Nane in the night. The doctor lady with the nice perfume was beautiful as I knew she was. Her teeth was white like her coat and her eyes did not blink much.
Mrs. Makeba kept looking at me on the drive back to the school. Kept turning around in her seat in front to look at me. At the school gate, there was a girl idling around.
I did not know who she was. She was a small girl, like a child, with a small body. Maybe she is one of the junior students, I thought. I realized that I would not recognize my Nane when I saw her. That thought filled me with fear but I thought again that to find Nane, all I should look for was beauty. Nane would be more beautiful than that female doctor with white teeth.
The little girl’s school uniform was dirty and she was holding a stick in her hand which she was using to strike on her knees. She turned when she heard the car. Her eyes were white. There was no black inside her eyes. Her hair was hard and tough. Her teeth were yellow and lapping one on top of another, her lips barely closing over them.
“I can see Nane has been waiting for you.” Mrs. Makeba said as the car slowed down. “Get in Nane! He is back.”
The door opened and the girl rushed to the door desperately, her hands stretched out in front of her. She hit her chin on the sharp edge of the open door — I wince and cover my own mouth. But the pain in her face is only for a split second. We blind people know how to take pain. We can take an atomic explosion of pain and let it die without any noise inside of us. She slipped into the car. She was crying. Her hand was reaching for mine.
I did not take her hand but she found mine.
“Stephen.”
“Nane,” I muttered.
She heard the sediments in my voice. Sediments that I never used to have. I don’t recognize her touch. Sight is too distracting. I don’t recognize her voice neither. She’s small sized. I always thought my Nane was taller. Who is this girl? There are scars on her forehead and cheek and chin and on her elbows.
“Stephen.” She says, again, but this time she’s looking away biting on her lower lip.
“Nane.”
The sediments in my voice are too much for her. She flinches, her skin coils, and the tears well up to her chest and come spilling out noisily. Her both hands is not enough to hold the crying in. Mrs. Makeba does not understand it. Why Nane is crying? Why she is in such pain?
I close my eyes and close it tight till I can feel her touch and recognize it. Till her voice is that smooth silk again. I put my hands around her and she put her head on my shoulder and I’m crying. My Nane is gone when I open my eyes. So I close it for as long as I can. In the darkness, my Nane is taller. My Nane is beautiful. Her scars are a evidence of her powerful character. In the darkness she’s with me. I close my eyes. I close them tight. I try to will blindness back to me. I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to lose her.
But I know I won’t. I cannot. Never. Not to this. This is just one of those things, Charlie. Another of those things. It does not change anything. I won’t let it. I promise. It is only another thread in the tapestry of our love. Just like that night in the woodshop laboratory. The security man didn’t really let us go that night. I know, I know. I lied, Charlie. I tried to fight him off when he jumped on Nane and I swear I strucked him twice, but he dragged me and we struggled and struggled till he pushed me out of the laboratory. The doors are metal and he slammed them shut before I could get back in, Charlie. I could hear Nane’s screams inside and her struggling. It was like my heart was destroyed within me. All I could do was scream too. I pushed against the door and cut my knuckles on the windows. I screamed till my voice was drained in my throat. I ran down the corridor and called for help but no one came. The woodshop laboratory is at the end of the world, Charlie. The dorm is a million miles away.
When the car comes to a stop and we step out, Nane is holding my arm. She has stopped crying. I hold her close to me. My eyes are closed. I shut them tight. We take a moment and listen to the sound of the students in the field, righting our compass, and we turn towards the dorms.
We go slow, slow taking our incremental steps.
Adelehin Ijasan is a Nigerian writer whose short stories have appeared in Membra Disjecta, The Deepening, Everyday fiction & The Best of Everyday Fiction, The Tiny Globule, Takahe, On The Premises, The Naked Convos and Canary Press. He was also on the Commonwealth short story prize shortlist of 2014.