Come Come, Let’s Go Cycling in the Woods – Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó

We speed downhill past the wild thorns, pass the vestingbar, go beyond the witbreuksweg into the woods, past the thick bushets and olive groves that constantly seek out each other, grow together. An unreplied ‘I love you’ floats in the air, gets caught in the mouth of the next sayer. 

“I love you!” she shouts. 

I would say this to my neighbour but he doesn’t know who I am. He is big and beautiful and set like a wrestler, his stomach is pudgier. He wears tight red t-shirts that hug his tummy and a pouch around his waist. 

Every session with him would be confessional. When I could feel my cheek against another’s and say, ‘we’re sisters,’ or feel the pulse of another quicken through touch and say, ‘this is sisterhood.’ 

We shone in the sun, baskets of fruits on our heads, yellow like lemons, orange like tangerines, yellow green like mangoes, glistening against the bright sky that sometimes took on the colour of earth red when God was angry, or silver when clouds were smiling. A sky lined with nickels and bleeding sky blue. 

Hooves of mud buildings dug deep into leaves that sprouted from the ground. Mamas kept wads of money stuffed into their breasts, or tied in efficient knots tucked in the insides of wrappers that wrapped their waists, and when they walked through town, instructing, they looked so regal. 

Sometimes they would host a river party and boys in colourful adire wound around their bodies like monks would grill fish by the seaside. The smell of sea salt and grilled fish filtering through makeshift windows attracted lonesome men with an aroma that quickened their tummies and stung their sinuses. 

*

So, we go cycling in the woods. An offer I could have turned down one more time and preserved myself, but for an insistence on meeting, on making friends, on mingling. Every time I say no, he mocks me and says I am ‘mancaved’. At least he is still laughing. Though rejection, like hurling rocks, piles on his head. 

“Okay okay let’s go cycling in the woods,” I finally say. 

As we cycle he says, “Learning how to design artificially intelligent architectures is how to make your money flow like grass. Presents you with countless choices. All human interactions can be filtered through ones and zeros.

“Actual human interaction becomes a privilege. One too difficult to disrupt loneliness for so I understand you don’t worry,” he says, “Vice got an ugly boy to sit in front of a camera and talk about family and believed they had achieved something. Because he was ugly they thought he would be more believable, or more endearing. That the ugliness would crack us open, draw us to him with wondering curiosity: how have you, all your life, survived this utter lack of beauty?”

I say, “Since I’ve been here, sometimes it’s just so hard to mix. Or like, to get the fuck out of my house, my room.” 

“It’s a quiet town,” he says, “a little too quiet. Maybe you belong to something bigger. But it is beautiful.” 

And it is. The world is a straight line and the clouds start where the trees stop, wild and jagged. Foaming at the mouth. Sometimes the clouds would part slowly, letting sunlight shine on topmost leaves, moving in slow progression like a musical construction. A small city town set at the outskirts of the world like a small painting or a postcard, brimming with forest. 

At 6pm, when the sun sets, my neighbour would send me a picture and ask that I look out my window. 

“So vast and so infinite, so complete and yet only god knows where it really ends.” 

“God ;),” I would reply. 

*

When Chief Ogalu tried to have my sister against her will, I decided I would destroy him and I said this to my sister Biku as I wrapped her hand in mine while we traced the outlines of a pencil as I showed her how to write a story about a boy girl who belonged to nothing. 

I attacked Chief Ogalu in Ugada, the name given to a small shed in the center of Okpele, where big men gathered. Him drunk on palmi – and you should have seen how he swayed like the drink was an instrument. His belly bouncing at the insistence of the stamp of his feet, two old cuts along his face to show who he was. A big man. And me, a small boy afraid for my life, shaking with fear yet pumped by adrenaline and an even bigger sense of justice. 

I got on top of him and held the knife to his throat. 

“Onibaje ni e!” he said and spat at me. 

I wiped the spit off my face and held him closer. 

“Onibaje,” he said again, “I’ve seen you walk around shaking your hips like you’re attracting chickens? Attracting your ilk, aren’t you? I’ve seen you paint your eyes with red lipstick like you’re a girl. Look at you! And now you attack me because I have the zest to do my bidding? The work oLoRUN obA put me on earth to do?” 

I pulled the knife against his throat and watched him gurgle up his life then reopened the scars on his face and watched him cry blood. 

*

“Come, come, let’s go cycling in the woods,” my neighbour says as his big body comes towering down to kiss my three cheeks. We talk about religion and he says I resist the faith for freedom to fuck. He says the sexual revolution is a ploy to break up the family unit and everything here is systems. 

“Systems on systems on systems,” he says. 

“Rigid,” I reply, tutsing. 

I learn how to speak of their country with much pride. Like them, to say, “Here, in the Hinterlands, you must have health insurance, but if you go to the hospital without, the doctors are legally bound to treat you regardless.” 

Okay so why must I have health insurance then? 

They speak with pride about the countries they possess. The aboriginals their forefathers displaced. How much bigger and more powerful they are than ‘the stupid Americans who make so much noise.’ I mean, of course they are stupid, look at [redacted]. 

Ask me to go back and I would say no. My country says liberty is death and money is the only liberty. In hindsight I am here transitioning. You wake up at the other side of one lifetime and realise you are someone else, floating in and out of who you are and who you are. 

*

I told them I had to go not because of what I’d done but because of who I was. “I have to become who I am,” I said to my mother, who cried and said she understood but roughed me up and held me by my shirt like I was a crook who had stolen some of the juicy tomatoes she sold in Igbari. 

“Promise?” she said, demanding I keep in touch, “Cross your heart and hope to die.” 

Biku had taught that to her and I did as I was told, shaping a cross across my chest, with my fingers. 

“I know what you did,” Biku said to me.

“God will forgive you, Okpa and may Chief Ogalu’s soul be forgiven.” 

“A chief? Even in death?” I laughed her off and then hugged her. 

She melted into my hug. 

I told her, “When God was making his word, what did he say about me? About people like me?”

“That you are loved,” she said. 

“And that you are a liar,” I said. 

She said she would see me tomorrow, which is something we said to each other, whenever we parted. We said it to each other when she had to go and work with Chief Ogalu’s wife before she ran back home saying all the things Chief Ogalu had done to her. How his wife had known and said, “You little whore. If I don’t return you as a corpse to your mother, call me a bastard.” She was only fourteen. Someone had to pay. 

*

I mark my eyeballs with chanel. Black paint rests on my eyelids. To master the art of eyelining one must attempt to draw on the eyeball itself. I am no artist. It takes twenty three years to learn this, still I am losing all my disguises, so call me beauty-chaser. Or beauty-catcher. 

When I go to the African shop to have my nails done, I am still chasing beauty. Soon enough, I will catch it. 

Jerry does my nails and I like to have them long and shiny and purple in the light of my house, like claws that can snap the arteries of a human neck open, relieving them the misery of the human condition with one sharp swipe. I like to watch the rolling thing like a rotor perform surgery on my fingernails, blend the acrylic so far into my body, they become each other. Imagine a body made of acrylic, sculpted like a painless condition, unbreakable, full of beauty. 

Jerry says I am almost ‘there’ when I tell him I am a woman. At least he acknowledges who I am. He asks me if I wear glasses to cook to find out if I can cook. I say, ‘Just ask what you want to ask and stop the mago mago and yes I can cook.’

He tells me not to get hooked on drugs because if I do the doctors would not have anything to bring me back to life. They do not understand how my body works or my mind. They would give me something that would transform me to an eternal mumu, stunt my mental growth, turn me into an invalid, he says, with his head drooped to one side, his tongue sticking out the side of his mouth. 

“Okay but show me where you see drugs,” I say, spreading my hands.

From the point trust is broken, everything else comes undone. Imagine paying monthly to an institution that does not cover me. I tell Jerry to stop calling me baby and he says, “sorry”. 

“Sorry for what?” I ask. 

“Sorry for yourself baby,” he says. 

I remember him rubbing himself against my shoulder on the day we met in the shop saying, “feel this”. After that, he took my number and gave me five coins to pay his madam and adopted mum. I block him and never get my health insurance but I will marry for it. Will also marry for sweet men that need their soft egos massaged, and their poor hearts mended.

*

I pulled my lavender hoodie tight against my head, waved bye bye to my family and danced a quick goodbye dance right there at the seaport. They laughed and waved bye bye and Biku cupped her hand around her mouth and sent an I love you my way so that I caught it and kept it in my backpack. 

A man shouted that I hurry up and so I made my way between the hoards of people that gathered. The ship was big and sturdy and painted a sage green and when I looked up into the sky, it too had assumed the form of this green, just a little tinge of it dancing against the skylines revealing a sense of longing, as though the sky was longing for its children, asking: but where are you going? But isn’t this home? 

Isn’t home where the heart body is?

They spoke of these things who hung themselves to their yarns, spun from trees in the beautiful summer, how they hung in midair awaiting. A person speeds by on their bike, the thing gets caught in their face, they panic too much, have an attack of shock, the doctor sedates them. 

‘Be careful,’ they told me. 

Clumsiness never lends itself to carefulness. Be careful. As though I would ever try. 

Haven’t you seen me toppling everything over, including myself? Haven’t you seen me wobbling on a bike like a snake, leaving the bike path, straddling the path for bikes and cars, getting hooted at, being told, ‘Would you get the fuck?’ slowing down to expose my middle finger, getting thrown off the road, into the curb, where passersby walk past with their trolleys and four year old kids licking strawberry ice cream off a cone, apologising awkwardly sorry I – , grabbing my bike and running off, very ashamed. Be careful ko, be careful ni. I do not because I do not know how. My clumsiness puts me to sleep. I lose myself in a dream and awaken in Okpele. 

*

In Okpele, we would get to a point where we would have to ride in small boats and walk on sore feet and the sky would hide from us and I would know we had finally left Okpele. We held on to each other on the small boat. The sharp fingernails of the lady who stood beside me pierced through my jeans and into my thighs as the boat went smash – kraaapp!! against the mighty waves it mounted. To go back was bad luck so I stopped looking into the horizon that could have been Okpele. 

It was not a surprise that people were leaving our beautiful country. People were leaving in droves at the time and still are. I was consumed by a sense of justice. Some may call it self-righteousness. Let him go to the afterworld and send news back to his mates, a cease and desist, tell them that they are not immortal. That there are hungry boy girls who are willing to take one life for the survival of another. 

I felt like I had completed my last piece of work in Okpele, finnessed my masterpiece, avenged my sister, made a change, now I could keep writing my story elsewhere. Become who I truly was in a place where they would let it. I threw up food and hope into the sea countless times and yet was sick with hope that I would make it. An excess of hope: the same thing that made me sick is the same thing that would see me through. 

*

I awaken in the ER, afraid. 

My neighbour calls me ‘womancaved’ when he finds out I am becoming me, tumbles over himself laughing as he narrates the story of his neighbour who got attacked by summer gnats. 

He says, “You were just so awkward on the bike, and how you started screaming when the swarms attacked. Goodness. The trick is to remain calm, I tried to get you to remain calm but you started speaking a language I don’t know. I think it’s your language from Okpele. But it was so funny, sorry I just can’t stop laughing.”

The blisters on my body would make a laughable story. I should have chosen solitude again, let one more rejection pile. It would not have made a difference: ‘sorry am unable to get out of bed, my heart is too heavy, my stomach hurts and I feel anxious.’ 

I’d said them before, I could have said them again. 

“You feel anxious and because of that your stomach hurts?” he would say. 

“You might be right,” I would say, “but I am anxious with love or something like it.” 

“Maybe you could come up for tea?” 

“I don’t feel up to it, not today.” 

“Come come let’s go cycling with the moods.” 

My ‘yeah sure’ should hve been one more ‘maybe not today.’

After the attack, the doctor gives me an ointment and some drugs and says in three weeks I will be completely healed. He is wrong because this is not how to heal. He says they are just summer gnats and smiles down at me as I lie splayed on the bed, just rousing, fighting the white light filtering through my false eyelashes and wondering where I am. He says he is sorry and that I should remember to breathe but in retrospect I should have said I too was sorry. 

*

Aliens attack only aliens. If not why did they attack me and not my neighbour? They settle with you. I do not know what they are so I call them my comrades. There’s a whole online house dedicated to support for this ‘mystery illness,’ they are calling it. The doctors don’t even acknowledge it because we are not their demography. 

A Yaa Kravenk leaves a comment that says: “if someone doesn’t want you here, what do you do? You get out.” He is saying he is going home. And someone else replies and says, “but how does one get out when one has nowhere to go”. It is a violent kind of coercion, but also a violent kind of refusal to leave. I know I have my answers now and it is not what the doctor said, it is that this is the future and we are unprepared. 

Sometimes I take a picture of myself and observe my quirks. Three strong veins mark my neck. I have always had this. More veins mark my forehead and multiple veins mark my hands. I think I am somewhere between fine girl and alien so I smear my whole body with glitter to resemble magic. The pain of my sores is more than enjoyment when it’s glitter that’s doing the furtive dance around the abscesses on my skin. 

When my neighbour tries to reach me I block his way. He says I look sickly and, “haven’t those things on my skin healed? It’s been what? Eight months now, hasn’t it?” I say none of his business and keep moving. “Nice glitter though,” he says. I keep moving. I don’t want him to see me like this. I think it is shame because my sores tell me they are here to stay and these parasites

*

Carmichael Shoenmaker says this is how we make money. We turn a normal online house to a market for buying and selling, share my work I share yours, scratch my itch I scratch yours. I chuckle at the thought of itches left unscratched, the horror, like my life. Since the attack I have not had a life. 

I met Carmichael Shoenmaker when I went to buy shoes. 

We struggle to talk through the barrier of different languages so I wave over his wares, and say, ‘asterpiece’, making my fingers into a gang sign to show that his work is specific. I ask to learn. He invites me in. I spend six months going to the shop every day. Sometimes I want to talk to him about how fishing is nothing like shoemaking but we do not have enough words so to each other we say hello or hallo, good night or goedenavond, prima! Or maybe it needs some more work.

I learn by watching and by listening. How he glues, weaves things together. The sound of a hammer setting a piece of lush leather in place. His replies to everything are often funny gesticulations that imply that anything that wants his trouble is just so foolish and I cannot help but laugh. The shop is all white and smells like hot glue, old and burning sage with racks and racks and racks of shoes that climb up into the white ceiling. 

Carmichael Shoenmaker sits in the middle of the shop working on a brown stool. I sit beside him on a wooden stool a foot shorter than his, working in the golden light of our studio. Outside is painted white too with Schoenmaker printed on the wall in gold like jewels but I am tired and alone and every day I want to die. 

*

He never asks about my skin or about my hoodies so that I stop wearing hoodies in the shop. He sees the scars and the sores melted into every bit of my skin and yet says nothing, acts like they are invisible. Instead, he shows me videos of tall black models stomping runways in beautiful outrageous gowns and points to the shoes and I say, ‘yeah, the shoes right? Intense.’ 

When we reach a creative catharsis, it is both sporadic and eccentric. ‘Dit is het design,’ he says, pulling out a clean sheet. The markings scrawled along the paper in coal. Another one printed out. Geometric representations. Signs. Numbers. I hardly use descriptions. I dig my way into the pit with bare fingers and crawl back up with something to show for it. Material foaming in the box. Sometimes leather. Sometimes leather and styrofoam. Sometimes recycled sneakers, plastic bottles, manufacturing scraps. 

Everything is upturned as a heap on the floor. A cage of parrots chirps from the far corner of the wall. They are turquoise blue, maroon, and canary. On Fridays, he would sing them a song on the windowsill and release them into the world. By Monday, they would be back at the windowsill, yearning for home.

I fold myself into Budha. Grin at markings on my sheet. It is a peculiar type of man that wants his shoes made, big-feet men, fat men, old men, disabled men. It is a peculiar type of woman that wants her shoes made, big-feet women, old women, disabled women, stylish women. Style is taught to the world through women. Except Donatella. Versace taught style to her, showed her how to move paparazzi with the swing of a black gown he made her. 

I imagine myself as both Versace and Donatella and when I say to him, “Me me! Both! Donatella! Versace!” he says, “Of course!” in an accent that resembles mine and we laugh. Soon, he would speak my language and I his, and we would get there through humour. Which is to say he humours me. 

*

On the day of my passing out, he invites his mother, who brings Chirekean tea and coconut cookies. We sit around a small wooden table he’s made, the dark brown of the wood fading into the lighter shades, teasing it, sip tea and talk. His mother is warm and smiles and says, “Gefeliciteerd.” I say, “Dank je wel.” 

It is the way she smiles and her whole presence and how she touches her son’s upper lip, dabs at it gently, to wipe a stray cookie particle that prickles all my skin like needles and so I start to bawl. 

I say I miss my mother and Mrs. Shoenmaker holds me and says, “It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay” as my sobs crumble into my quaking body.

*

My mind is with my mother and I am scrolling through Esquire when she appears to me on a magazine page. She wears her hair tied underneath a turban that drapes her face, lips painted black, one prominent line down her forehead that finally reaches her upper lip, dividing her face into two perfect side views, a pointy nose in the middle, her upper lip melts into a pout. She is looking over the horizon, standing on a mountain. She ties and reties her wrapper like a magnetic tick. 

She sighs when she hears my voice at the other end of the phone, the static moves along with my heartbeat, gbim gbim. 

“There are many things I want to say,” she says, “You…you…haven’t called me in so long … We …I…I…tried to reach you. What kind of child does… You’re alive” 

“Of course mum, I am,” I say, “but I am sick, mum. I’m wrecked… Mum. Are you there? I can’t hear you. Mum? We went cycling in the woods, they infested me. They hatch in me everywhere. Bioweapons and all, and like these insects, parasites, I do not know what they are. But they’re fighting us mum, people like us. It’s tough.”

“What on earth is that? You won’t come home?”

“You know I can’t. I love you. You know. I love my family and I love all you. And Biku. How’s Biku?”

“But you just said you are sick. So you should have a little sense and find your way home.”

“I am not yet who I came here to be.” 

“I have always supported you. When you told me you are not who you are, I believed you. I let you go. I supported you. You’ve hurt me. Okpa you hurt me real bad. Come home. Now you say you won’t but you’re dying. And you say you won’t come home. Ah iru omo wo leleyi nitori Olorun? Ah temi bami, but you are sick!”

“Mum stop. You’re panicking. You know I can’t come home. Not yet. What’s there for me? I’m learning how to control the insects. I spray insecticide on my skin. I don’t even pay for health insurance. The whole system is set up to suck you dry so I got free. Mo ja pa ni o. These doctors. And they don’t believe in us either. They’re liars and killers. Mum, I need your help. Those treatments you used to dole out I need them. Tell me what to make. I will make my own version of it. Mum? You get so quiet I don’t even know—”

“Omo mi I am here o. And I hear you. I am listening to you Omo mi. You know what you will do?”

“No, mum. Please help me,” I start to cry, “I’ve missed you so much. Just hearing your voice.”

“You should have called.”

“I thought of you every day. You are my everything.”

“I’ve heard. You know what you will do? You will pray. Baba wa to n be loke,” she begins to pray. I close my eyes and say amin amin amin. But she doesn’t just pray. When she splays her knowledge of natural cures, it curls around my ears, my heart leaps, my memory reaches for it, grabs it, and with it, enters into a choke hold. 

It’s a concoction she’s given me with ginger, garlic, honey, lemons, green tea, and her secret ingredient, for which she tells me to go to any Turkish shop and ask for a complicated word whose meaning I don’t know. 

*

I say the word and the man from the Turkish shop looks up from the counter as though I have become special by virtue of the thing I have asked for. He tells me to wait and goes rummaging through a sack in the back, then he comes back with it. His grey hair slicked to the back of his neck, his words failing like one that has mastered another language so we speak through signs and gestures. 

He asks if I like tree, and I say yes I do. 

What mami would tell me is that trees live long peaceful lives, at the edge of the sea or wherever it is they choose. She says it’s like living but not really, that there’s less severity, less pain. She knows because some of her ancestors became trees, and some of their children too become trees, like Olurombi. 

So when one morning I walk down to the pond and enter into it as though I am a swan who has become a gymnast, stretch out myself, tumble in the water, and fold myself into a tree stump, I am not surprised. 

My mother had said, “It’s all part of it, you would do things you only imagined.” 

When my feet turn to roots, and my leaves start sprouting, she says, “Ehen my child you are becoming your true self, they will not kill you for me, you will not die before your mother.”

Afọpẹ́fólúwa Òjó is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria. She lives between Lagos and Amsterdam. Her work has been longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and the Elizabeth Jolley Prize.

*Image by Let’s go Together on Unsplash