Death Needs No Accomplice
Photo: Sharon McCutcheon
The day that Sarah went missing started perfectly. A bright, glorious Sunday. The kind that convinces you there is a God in heaven and he is looking down on you with love. That Sunday I didn't go to church. I woke up to a bright red stain on my sheets and a sharp pain in my abdomen that left me doubling over. This pain, it is normal. It is a pain that I've come to expect but not one that I've learned to embrace as my mother has advised me countless times over.
I started my period at fourteen, after every single girl in my age grade had started hers. I used to pretend to have started mine too because I didn't want to be the weirdo who had not seen her period at 14. Sarah used to help me sell the lie. She’d keep her sanitary pads in my bag and then ask to borrow a pad from me in class, loud enough for other girls to hear. And she’d tell any girl in class who forgot to come with a pad to ask me for one. She’d say to the distraught girl, “Go and ask Adanne, you know she always has a spare.”
But every time Sarah whined about her cramps in that voice that said “look at me, I’m a woman, I get cramps now,” I'd cry into my pillow at night, praying to God to make me a woman too and give me my own cramps because I was convinced that something was very wrong with me.
I finally started my period in school, right in the middle of biology class. When I felt the wet, squishy liquid on my panties and its slow trickle down my thighs, I clenched my stomach and froze in panic. Here I was, the giver of sanitary pads, and I had none for myself. It was all I could do not to cry right there in class. My panic intensified when Mr Vincent asked me to stand up and answer a question. This would normally not have been a problem, I’m great at biology. But all I could think of was the look of disgust that would be on the face of everyone when I stood up with a bright red stain on my bright yellow skirt. But somehow Sarah knew. She took one look at my face and told Mr Vincent that I couldn’t stand up because I had a tummy ache and standing would just make me vomit all over the classroom.
“It has happened before,” she insisted when Mr Vincent looked at both of us sceptically. He finally rolled his eyes, turned away, and asked someone else his question.
It was Sarah who lent me her sweater to tie around my skirt even though her shirt was missing two buttons at the top, and she needed the sweater to cover her full breasts that gave the female teachers concern. It was Sarah that walked me home that day, chattering in my ear as she carried my school bag because its weight only added to my discomfort.
I remember that I asked my mother for pain pills when I got home because I didn't understand why this had to hurt so much and she told me it was all part of being a woman. All part of the joys of womanhood and that I should learn to embrace it, and when I whined some more she had said;
"Look at this girl, is this how you will do when you are in the labour room?"
I wanted to ask her why I had to bear this pain like a badge of honour? Why this thing I’d be waiting for all my life had to lead to more excruciating pain, that would lead to children that would probably hate me as much as I seemed to readily hate her these days.
My mother saw me as weak and my “whining” was more evidence of this. So I tried not to complain, tried to find joy in this monthly cross that, according to my mother, other women, including my younger sister, seemed to draw such enormous joy from. But the joys of womanhood didn't feel all that joyous every month, so it was Sarah who snuck pain pills into my room and stood at the door to look out for my mother as I drank it. She became the reason I didn't have to “embrace” this pain every month.
When she came to see me after church that morning, she had the pills in her bag. I never bought them. I didn't have to; she always did. She watched me pour the pills into my mouth.
"We are not going again, abi?" she asked.
I shook my head."We are not going, but you are."
"No. I want you to come with me.”
I watched her fidget on my bed. Biting her lip in that way that she did when she was nervous.
"It's just a date, Sarah,” I said. “It is not a big deal."
Sarah was seventeen, one year older than me. She had never been on a date, and she had never been kissed. This was not her fault. She lived with a single mother who did not allow her outside the house after 6 pm and who always told her to "keep herself for her husband". One time when her mother caught her on the road talking to a boy who told her that her big eyes were pretty, she had dragged Sarah home by her ears cursing and shouting.
"You want to me disgrace me eh! You want to shame me? Tufia! I will die before I let you be like me!”
I did not know then what she meant, but I remember how embarrassed Sarah had been. She didn't come out of the house for days, and every time I told her that the boy asked me about her when he saw me on the street, She would shake her head and say,
"No. Tell him to leave me alone.” It made me wonder what else her mother had told her that day.
So I understood her apprehension. She didn't want to go on this date if I wouldn't be there to hold her hand. I was supposed to go with her, but the truth was I didn't want to. I didn't want to hold her hand. I wanted her to go on a date by herself, without me hovering over her, without her thinking about her mother. Just once I wanted her to be free, to just be a teenager. But this was not about me. This was about her, and if I had considered that, maybe she would still be here.
“Go,” I told her every time she shook her head.
“But my mother," she had protested, fear clouding her big, brown eyes.
"I'll cover for you. Just tell her you are coming to my house."
"I have nothing to wear."
"You can wear my clothes, just pick any one you want."
When she had gone quiet, biting her lips again, because she had run out of excuses, I remember asking her:
"What are you afraid of? You think he will use you for money ritual?”
We both laughed, she throwing my pillow at me and I throwing my book at her, while my mother yelled at us to be quiet. That was the last time we played like that. That was the last time I heard her laugh. That sound haunts me now. Sometimes at night when I'm tossing and turning in my bed, unable to sleep or breathe or think, that sound is the only thing I can hear.
Sarah had never met the guy in person. They had only chatted on Facebook. But he was cute in that way that teenage boys could be, and he was charming like a character in a Disney movie. He made her laugh so much that she kept her head buried in her phone and her mother told her that if she didn't stop laughing like a crazy person, she would take “that stupid phone” away from her.
He was seventeen too, he had told her. His favourite colour was blue, too. She loved to read? He too. She was going to study nursing because she loved taking care of people. Wow! What a coincidence, he was going to be a nurse too. When she had responded to this with the eye roll and laughing emoji. He had responded with the sad face emoji and “men can be nurses too.” His name was Daniel, but Sarah called him Danny.
"It's cute," she said. "Just like him."
He was perfect, and we should have known that there was no such thing. I should have known. I was the worldly one. I was the one with the boyfriend. The one with the exes. The one who told her to live her life before she got old. The one who told her that sex was not a big deal.
"I've done it," I told her as she looked at me in awe. “I’ve done it, and God did not strike me down with thunder."
And she had listened to me. Why wouldn't she? She trusted me. I was her best friend. I was the one with experience. I didn’t tell her that I decided to lose it now because I didn’t want to be the last at this too. I didn't tell her that it hurt so much the first time that it took me a while before I could do it again. I didn't tell her that I thought I would feel different, more enlightened like the other girls in school said it would be, but I didn't. I didn't tell her that it lasted for all of sixty seconds and that afterwards, he stood up with a big smile on his face like he had been told some mysterious fucking secret, but I laid there, still and completely clueless. I didn't tell her that for the first few days I was terrified that my mother would look at me and find out what I had done. I told her that it was fine. That it was not a big deal.
When she left my house that Sunday, smiling and dressed in my favourite white dress, my strawberry lipgloss shining on her lips, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, a beaded purse dangling at her shoulder, I hugged her and told her to be back before six. I watched her walk away, her long, brown legs taking her farther and farther away from me, and I swelled with pride, like a mother setting her child free into the world. But this was not about me, I don't know why I didn't see that.
I stayed home, floating in the euphoria of my accomplishment until the clock struck six, and she hadn't called or come back. I tried not to worry. She was supposed to stop by at my house. That was the plan; that was the agreement. But when she wasn't back and it got to 6: 15 pm, I stopped floating and felt myself crashing to the ground. Sarah was never late. It was the one thing I could count on no matter what, even though I teased her about it. But it got to 6:30, and she still wasn’t back.
I tried not to be alarmed. I thought of the many reasons she was running late. Maybe she was having too much fun and forgot the time. Maybe she was stuck in traffic. God knows Lagos traffic could be an absolute fucking nightmare. Maybe she had gone straight home. But even as I thought that, I knew that I was wrong.
I remember pacing back and forth in my room and biting my nails until they hurt. I remember trying her number over and over again and shaking my head in dismay every time it went to voicemail. I remember that I still tried not to be alarmed. Her battery could have died. Yes, that was it, I had told myself. Her battery had run down. I sat down in the parlour with my sister and little brother while we watched TV before our parents got home. But I couldn't see the pictures. I couldn't concentrate. Sarah was supposed to be back, but Sarah was not back.
At 7 pm, my parents came back, and I went to help my mother in the kitchen. I dropped the knife. I broke a plate. When I finally dropped the bowl of red oil she wanted to use to cook her egusi soup, she ordered me to leave her kitchen.
“I don't know what is wrong with you this evening,” she snapped.
At 7:30, Sarah's mother came knocking on the gate. She had just come back from the market and Sarah was not in the house, was she here? When I heard her ask that question, my heart dropped to my stomach and I was convinced then that something horrible had happened. My mother had gone out to meet her.
"Nne," she had greeted. "Won't you sit down? Sarah is not here oh."
Sarah's mother had looked confused. "But she told me she was coming here."
They both turned to look at me. "Where is Sarah?" My mother asked.
I stood there tongue-tied as both women stared at me. My mother's eyes pierced into mine as if she was daring me to lie. My mind was completely blank. I had no answer, I couldn’t lie if I tried.
“Where is Sarah!” My mother barked this time.
“She's at the mall,” I answered in a voice that I didn't recognize as my own.
Sarah’s mother had looked at me incredulously as if I just announced that her daughter had taken a rocket to the moon.
"Mall? Which mall? What is she doing there?"
I was on the fence. If I told her that Sarah went to the mall to meet a boy, Sarah would be in so much trouble. Her mother would probably not let her out of the house ever again. But it was already nearing 8 o clock, Sarah was never late. What if something had happened to her?
“Come and show me this mall,” her mother said.
“Wait,” my mother interrupted, “why don't you call her?”
Sarah's mother looked at my mother like she was dense. She said her next words very calmly, though I could see the rage seething just underneath.
"I have called her, her phone is switched off." Then she turned back to me, "Adanne come and show me this mall."
"It is very late." My mother had responded, "And the—"
"Do you think I don't know that! It is very late, your daughter is here and my daughter is not back. Can you not see that!”
My mother had turned to my father, giving him the look that said “won't you say something?” My Father, who wore glasses and always looked like he had a thousand things on his mind, stood up and said,
"I'll go with you, Mama Sarah. I'm sure she's fine. I'm sure everything is fine."
But everything was not fine when they came back two hours later. Sarah's mother was in tears, and my father was exhausted. They had searched everywhere, he said. They did not see her. Sarah's mother kept screaming at me.
"It is your fault! My daughter is a good girl! She does not behave like this! She has never lied to me about where she is going. You are the one spoiling her. Where is my daughter? Tell me where she is!”
My father had to hold her back from hitting me. I wish he hadn't. I wish he had let her. After Sarah’s mother left amid promises from my father to continue the search tomorrow. My mother had turned furiously at me.
"Why are you bringing me out? Nobody knows me in this street. Do I have any friends in this street? Why can't you be like me and stay on your own? Friends,” she shouted. The sound of her voice, shaking every core of my being, "Must you have friends? Must you?"
I stayed in my room that night crying. Why did I make her go? She didn't want to go. Why did I make her go?
***
One week turned into two and two weeks turned into a month and still, Sarah was missing. My life was at a pause, frozen in time to that Sunday when she left. But you would not know this from looking outside. The rest of the world moved on, oblivious to the tragedy that had happened, oblivious to my pain. One missing girl did not mean that the world should stop turning. One missing girl was just another missing girl in a series of missing girls. Sarah's mother grew thinner each time I saw her. So thin that I was sure she would disappear.
And people? They were not kind. A few weeks later, I went to the market with my mother, we stopped at the stall where my mother always bought tomatoes and the woman said to me;
"That your friend, dey don find her?"
My mother responded before I could.
"For where. No oh, my sister. Two months now. Nothing."
The woman had clapped her hands dramatically and spat on the floor.
"God forbid! That's why I dey warn all dis young girls. Be careful. Be very careful. Everything is not money, money, money. Now you see,” she said, spreading her hands in front of me like what I was supposed to see was right there in her tomato-stained hands.
“See your friend. Only God knows the kind of yeye man she follow. Thank God say you did not follow her.”
My mother circled her hand over her head, snapped her fingers, and pushed it forcefully towards the ground.
"God forbid! My daughter is not like that. She can never try that rubbish!"
I stood there completely speechless. I hadn't known that this was what people were saying about Sarah. Also what the fuck was my mother talking about? She knew Sarah; Sarah was not like that. Sarah did not care about money. Sarah had saved up half of her lunch money the past term because the school told us to contribute money for a trip to an orphanage. My mother had called her a good girl when she heard this; why wasn’t she defending her now?
I had looked at my mother that day, standing there and talking, while the woman packed her tomatoes in a black nylon bag, both of them oblivious to me and the tears threatening to run down my face. I thought I hated my mother, but at that moment, I was sure of it. I felt the hate fill up my body as if someone had turned on a pipe, and then I felt it run and settle, dark, unmoving, like the stagnant waters Sarah and I saw in the gutters when we walked to school. When we got home. I didn't follow her into the kitchen. She cooked her stew, and I had none of it.
***
I saw the video three weeks later. Two months and three weeks after Sarah went missing. I had stayed off social media. The only time I went was to search for Danny. I searched his name so much that every letter stuck to my brain like a virus, but still, I couldn't find him. I started to think that maybe we dreamt him up, this perfect stranger, that maybe he didn't exist.
I saw the video in class. On the day we were starting our mock exams for WAEC. A group of students, eight of them, five boys and three girls were bent over a phone, watching the video, intently, completely engrossed. They were not from our school. They were students who had registered at our school to write the exam because they had been assured of a good result, so they didn’t know who Sarah was. I didn't mind them at first. I was trying to study for the exam. An exam I was sure I would fail because this was the first time I was carrying my book in weeks and because I didn't care.
While they watched the video, at intervals someone would say, "God forbid.”
“Just look at all that blood.”
"Shebi you see, slay queen, because of money. Now she has jam ritualist."
"No it's not ritualist, it's Yahoo boys."
It wasn't until a girl said, “just look at her white dress covered in blood," that I became interested. White dress? Blood? I walked slowly to the group. My mind was already rejecting what I knew I was about to see.
I got to the group, pushed a girl aside, and grabbed the phone from the boy holding it. "Hey!" he snapped at me, "what is wrong with you?"
"Let me see," I said
"Give me back my phone!"
“Let me see!”
He paused when he saw the look in my eyes. They all went silent as I watched the video. As I watched this boy wearing a mask hit the girl in the white dress with a club, over and over again. He kept hitting her until she was on the floor. Until the blood poured out of her head. Until her body went still, but her legs kept shaking. And still, he hit her. Over and over and over again. The girl in the video, wearing a white dress, the girl was Sarah.
I felt my whole body start to shake, and the phone shook with it, dangling precariously in my hands. I tried to hold onto a chair to stop myself from falling, but everything felt light and everything felt heavy, and I felt like I was drowning. The boy whose phone I had tried to take it from me. But I wouldn't let him. Somehow, with all that shaking, my fingers still had a firm grip on it.
"Give me," he kept saying. “Give me back my phone.”
But I didn’t. Instead, I smashed the phone on the ground. Everyone looked at me, completely stunned. The boy’s face twisted in shock, and he looked like he was about to cry. But I didn’t care. Nothing else mattered because all I could see was blood.
I started to hit the phone with my foot. Over and over again. Maybe if I hit it hard enough, then I would stop seeing the video. Then I wouldn't see Sarah dead on the floor with all that blood. I’d stop seeing all that red. Then everything wouldn’t feel so heavy, and I’d be able to breathe again.
The boy who owned the phone tried to push me, to get at his phone but I hit him too. I wouldn't stop even when he hit me back. Soon we were surrounded by screaming and cursing and many hands trying to pull us apart. All of the chaos brought the teachers in, and when they pulled us apart, the sudden calm unnerved me so much that I started to scream.
From somewhere far away, I heard a teacher say, “stop screaming.” I heard someone ask, “what is wrong with her?” I felt someone try to pull me up; I felt the ground give under my legs; I felt myself fall to my knees. All I could see was red and blood, A dark, awful red, spreading and spreading, threatening to engulf me. Sarah was dead; Sarah was not coming back. Somehow I heard a teacher quietly ask,
“Who brought this? Who owns this phone? Phones are not allowed in school.” Everyone pointed at me. I brought the phone. I started the fight. One of the teachers angrily dragged me to the principal's office.
"Fighting," the teacher kept saying. "A girl like you. You should be ashamed of yourself. Ashamed!”
After scolding me for an entire two minutes with words that I didn't fully understand. The principal suspended me for two weeks. I would miss the mock exams. They called my father.
I sat in the principal’s office crying. My chest heaved so much that he thought I would pass out in his office. He ordered the school nurse to give me water, but I wouldn’t take it.
At that moment, I wanted to die.
It felt like I was having an entire year of menstrual pain rolled into one, and I knew that no pill could ever fix this. The words kept running through my mind, like rioters in a stampede. Sarah was covered in blood. Sarah was never coming back. Sarah was dead, and it was all because of me. My father finally came, walking into the principal's office angrily, but he took one look at me, and the anger dissolved from his face. He pulled me into his arms and held me tight.
"Everything will be fine" he kept saying. "Everything will be fine."
Inside the car, I kept crying. My sobs choked me,
"It's all my fault Daddy. I made her go. She's dead, and it is all my fault. She didn’t want to go, but I made her go. I made her go."
My father slowed the car until it came to a stop at the side of the road. Then he got out and came around to the back seat to sit with me. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes slowly.
"When I was a boy before my mother’s people sent me to come to live with her brother in Lagos, I had a friend. His name was Chike. We did everything together. I was an orphan, and he was my only friend in the world. One day I went to his house; he was asleep. I woke him up and told him that we should go to the river and swim. He wasn't in the mood to swim, but he went with me anyway. The current was strong that day; we should not have swum, but we were foolish boys who thought we were stronger than nature. My friend drowned, and I only survived because the man who saved us got to me first."
He sighed. His face was suddenly older than I had ever seen it.
“Everybody blamed me for his death, but they didn’t have to because I blamed myself. But all these years later, after losing more friends and watching good people die, you know what I’ve realised?”
I shook my head.
"Death needs no accomplice. When it’s ready, it takes, and there is nothing you can do to stop it. This is not. your fault." He hugged me, tight, as if he wanted to take the pain from my body.
Right there safe in his arms, I wanted to believe that he was right. I wanted to relinquish my pain. I wanted to believe so badly that it was not my fault.
But every month, at the time of the month when the pain comes, and I welcome it, letting it cut through my abdomen like a knife, I know that he is wrong.
About the author
Ezinne Esther Njoku is a fiction writer and Poet. She ghost-writes memoirs and customised poetry and loves to work with clients who seek to inspire and challenge others with their stories. She is a lover of art and good food and spends her spare time baking, reading, watching movies, and discovering new music. She believes in the power of love, friendship and the all saving grace of God.
