CHILDREN OF THE 90s: OF RATS AND SNITCHES

Some names have been changed to suit my purposes...the stories included in this series are 85% accurate... just don't ask me what is real and what isn't...enjoy!

 

I have always hated rats and cockroaches…little crawling things that annoyed me to no end. For roaches it was easier to channel my hate; crush them underneath my feet wherever I saw them without mercy. I always enjoyed the crunchy sound their bodies made whenever I squashed one under my feet. It made me feel so good and justified. With rats it was a much different scenario…they were smart…they could adapt easily and survived above all else.  There is one particular rat I will never forget; Mr. Jack from my early teenage years. That little sucker terrorized me for years without reprieve… at one point I had even resigned myself to the fact that he was my personal hell for all  the sins I had committed on earth.

The heat that exists in Lagos mainland has always been intolerable…all year round from January till December it was there…during harmattan and rainy season it let up a bit but never too much. The cluster of houses hurdled close together like refugee camps left no room for air. In Lagos, even air cost money so houses had no space in between…there were people everywhere, where there were no people there were factories shooting big puffs of poisonous black smoke in the air, and where these big bad factories didn’t exist there were shops and kiosks in every corner…no space, non so ever! We hardly ever slept on the bed on nights when there was no light. I and my sisters would fight for space on the floor so we could sleep as close to the door as possible and steal whatever little air came in from the passageway. The person who slept in the middle had the best position because there was a small crack underneath the door where air came in more than from the sides. That was the prime sleeping position that we always wanted to occupy, it was the only way to ensure a good night sleep. I remember the first night I noticed there was a mice in the living room; I had been suspicious for a while… little noises from behind the chair at night, half eaten biscuits and torn sugar packs. Made absolutely no sense! One night…for the first time in a long time I won the right to sleep in the middle for the next week. I was so happy! No nightmare from being uncomfortable, no wrangle neck from tossing and turning like a homeless dog…just good, average non-turbulent sleep! That was the first night Jack showed up…at 1:30am when the sleep was sweetest he stood at the top of the pavement close to the door and made stupid rat noises till I woke up and tried to hit him with one of my mum’s heeled shoes. I never got him, not that night or the next or ever. It became a nightly ritual for a long time; anytime I slept in the middle, Jack came to visit…if I ignored his noise he would climb on my hand and scare the bejuzzule out of me and I would chase him round the room till he suddenly disappeared. I took to sleeping with a broom underneath my stomach…half sleeping/half-awake waiting for after midnight when he would come out to play. It was plain torture…surprisingly he never bothered my siblings that much as they somehow could sleep past all the noises he made but I never could. Jack was a menace and he remained so for a long time.

We moved to a better building and i thought that would be the end of it but alas! one week after we moved in there was another rat and he looked so much like Jack it was scary... I got rat traps and laced it with poison, fresh fish, crayfish, bread crumbs and set it nicely where i knew he always came in through. At 5 am I was so excited to go and see what the trap had caught but there was nothing there. My younger sister Onyinye proceeded to show me how to step a trap properly; the trick was to put very little bait on the trap so it looked like you were not trying at all and the next morning, the trap had caught a rat..but it was still alive. I sat there watching it struggle to move and only make it worse and i felt such deep joy watching the life go out of Jack II.

There has always been the most competitive of sibling rivalry between me and my senior sister. Till this day we never full know how to get along without always stepping on each other’s toes at the slightest of provocations. The only difference between now and 17 years ago is that we are better at handling our relationship than when we were kids.

I was terrible I can tell you. My sisters could never trust me with a secret or tell me what they had been up to and with good reason. I gave them up when it suited me…but the victim of most of my actions was my senior sister. I remember one time when she took money from my mum’s purse to fund a Scotch egg and Coke binge for 5 days and I got suspicious as to where she had suddenly gotten so much money from. I went undercover and did some digging till I found out how she had gotten the money. I sat with my mum in the parlour watching reruns of face 2 face and started a conversation with her:

Me: Mummy, have you noticed anything missing from your belongings of late?

My Mum: No

Me: Have you noticed anything missing from your purse specifically?

My Mum: (with total attention still on the TV) No

Me: Have you noticed that Ugochi has been drinking Coke and Scotch egg everyday of late…I mean where is she getting that kind of money from?

My Mum: (mutes the TV and turns to me with a wicked look in her face and raised eyebrows) is that so? So what are you saying really?

Me: Am saying maybe you should have a better idea of how much money is in your purse and ask your daughter where she is getting money to buy scotch egg and coke because I know you want us to eat as healthy as possible so you would never give us money for coke and scotch egg.

My mum gets a pensive look in her eyes and suddenly it dawns on her as she makes a correlation with the pointers I’ve been trying to make. Ugochi has stolen from her!

At dinner that day it was a tense affair…my mum didn’t speak more than five words to any of us… my siblings were wondering which one of them had done something wrong but I knew that my mum was only brooding over how hard and how many strokes of the cane she should mete out to Ugochi. The next day after we returned from school and had lunch, my mum asked us to take a siesta as was our daily routine, after that we had a fruit as we did our homework and by 4pm we could play or watch TV. Unbeknownst to any of us my mum had something special planned for 4pm... She locked the doors as soon as we put away our homework and brought forth Junior’s cane…the super-sized Dr. Do Good…

“One of you has been very bad…I try to teach you right from wrong so that when you grow up you can be responsible and accountable to yourself and those around you…some things I can easily forgive out of ignorance but stealing…I do not tolerate stealing in this house and over my dead body will I be raising future thieves…”

My mum beat my sis so bad that day it was the most epic of corporal punishment any of us ever received (minus when she whipped my kid brother till he passed out and woke up and passed out again).

This was what we were constantly doing…my mum encouraged us to snitch on each other. Snitching was rewarded with food, extra break money and 24 hours of special mummy love and we went at it till each one of us gradually left the house for boarding house.

You know that moment when you are about to do something so redundantly stupid that you know you will be caught and you will be whipped proper ghetto style, but you can’t seem to stop yourself because you are on a helpless mission to self-destruct and the best you can do is to do the deed and watch yourself fall. Well, it happened to me one time when I decided it would be a fantastic idea to play football with my neighbor Tobi in the living room. The living room that housed the television, glassware and favorite kitchen china of my mum and did I say that there was glass cabinets filled with breakable stuff everywhere…oh yeah! We were playing and having a good time till Brother Japheth, my mum’s younger brother who was living with us at the time walked in and saw us. Our eyes hung open in fear…I brought out my best pity face and begged Brother Japheth not to tell my mum…I promised him that I would do all his chores and absolutely anything he wanted…I could have been his work bitch for a month but his mind was made up, he wanted me to have a taste of my own medicine. So that evening, when my mum came home from the shop, Brother Japheth went into the bedroom and told her everything that had happened. I sat there in the parlour, heart practically pounding so loud my ears were ringing of their own accord. My mum made me wait there for 45 minutes stewing in my own fright. She came in, locked the doors and this woman beat me till there was no tears in my eyes. As in, the tears dried and the only sound coming out of my mouth was the hoarse cry of a dying Christmas goat. The next day at school I was so ashamed of the bruises on my body that I lied to my friends and classmates at school that I was run over by a reckless okada driver and the bruises were so bad they believed me!

I didn’t speak to Brother Japheth for a long time but he didn’t mind, he had done what he had been wanting to do to me for a while… did it stop me from snitching no…it only meant that my focus was now redirected to Brother Japheth and sometimes Ugochi. Mr. Jack though…I wonder whatever happened to that little demon who terrorized my sleep for what felt like an eternity…I sure do hope he is rotting in rat hell!