Ghosts in The Kinky Part of The Town

Lagos, Nigeria; 2005. The continent; the part of Lagos with rude decaying houses, noisy streets, long-necked and scrawny merchants, all fighting souls from different tribes living lives of uncertainty; many die without fully knowing what they are capable of, but return, like ghosts, wandering the streets to continue the fight. Hope like dust rests on your lashes. They barely blink, but when they do, it’s a quick flick of the lids so they don’t see the opportunity pass. It’s the wicked part of town where anything can happen.
I belong to one of the many religious families on the continent. The sentences are always long; the mornings were covered with the blood of Jesus and the nights were found with an exchange of fire, fire of the Holy Spirit, a fire ready to consume, to burn or so we believed.
The father works in a post office and the mother sells fresh tomatoes at the market. I go to a school where classes are filled to the brim with children twisting their lips into something like a smile, where a teacher gives an A when you learn a new word and not when you use a new word correctly in a sentence.
We visit the island sometimes, when daddy’s friends invite us to dinner, to houses with such bright chandeliers and smooth ceramic plates. Life on the island stung my curious eyes. People lived skilled lives, walked with measured steps, wore colognes that make you sneeze, bags had names and had to have names, buildings in all sincerity defined a home, and the girls on the island, Oh! They all have dimples, these girls who smile a lot and say “my bad” every time they did something wrong, admitting a fault with a smile. Their names sound airless — Shirley, Chloe, Wendy — like names of things rather than human. They ask questions that make me dizzy and I respond with answers that cause puzzling lines to appear on their foreheads as small, smooth ridges. Have you been on a ghost train before? Do you use moisturizer at night? Do they teach Spanish at your school? What would you get on your 16th birthday? My answers … It doesn’t matter but I always stutter and hope they don’t ask me if I breathe oxygen.
I tell you a lot about the mainland, about the noisy streets of Isolo, about the possibility of something happening, about how people eat indiscriminately regardless of the time of day. And she had felt in those moments of narration, an awakening, a disturbing envy for these island girls who did not know what bleached palm oil was like.
So during a devotion on Saturday morning, as my father talked about joy and vanity and emphasized the word ‘desire’ as if he could see behind my soul, as if the liquid in my eyes revealed my painful desire to belong. to the island girls, I had blinked and warned my eyes. I started to think about the underbelly of life on the continent.
I’m next to my father in his new Mazda, in his new car, nodding to Bob Marley’s voice on the radio;
“I think I could join in on the fun ~ but I had to hit and run ~ look, I just can’t sit ~ in wicked part of town.”
Dad has a new job now that he came with an official car and a lot of money, he had announced to Mom and me last week. We would move to the island next month. Now I don’t know how I feel, what I feel, a mixture of ambivalence and meek emotion. The father became rich overnight, the prayers became more lively. We would leave the continent, the wicked part of the city full of ghosts of different tribes that roam the streets with the will not to unite but to survive.