Your Laughter is a Beast of Prey

Content Warning – child abuse, sexual assault and abuse, a hint at homicide

There’s a match––Chelsea FC is playing Manchester United, or some such nonsense I would not care about, but for the disruption. I adjust my headphones, again. 

‘Noise-cancellation ko!’ Stupid marketing gimmick. 

You and your boys fill my usually eerily-silent space with football-and-beer induced enthusiasm. Between the legitimate ones blaring from the TV and the opinionated ones being tossed back at it, there is no shortage of commentary. You all spout drunken or dubiously sober rants, masters of the sacred masculine arts of seated dribbling and sedentary goal-scoring. 

Give him enough alcohol and a football game, and every man styles himself a sport analyst. 

I sigh, tired, as I often am these days.

I pray that this game ends soon. I hope your team loses––I don’t know that I can handle any version of your jubilation tonight. I pray your friends don’t linger on for another couple of hours, another round of beers, basking in your presence. 

I cannot blame them. I, too, have basked in your glow, for far longer than is wise. I hope tonight is not one of those nights you invent an excuse to stay over. 

I wonder if she really doesn’t know––the she that you deemed worthy enough to claim publicly, with her proper connections and appropriate education. You, who continue to show up here like nothing has changed. I wonder how she justifies these absences. In the year since the owambe, surely she’s suspicious? But maybe she knows. Maybe she, too, has come to relish the soothing rush of breath being away from you allows…

Laughter rings out, jolting me out of my own head with characteristic rudeness, and I am mesmerized. 

I know that laugh. I hate that laugh––almost as much as I love you.

Your laughter is a boisterous beast, erasing any confounding line between shared mirth and mockery. It is derisive: big, loud and in-your-face. Like the aggressive billboards of affluent advertisers and the inconsiderate preaching of gospel peddlers in Lagos molue. It is the validation of all that was said about me. Of everything you don't say, evidenced by your actions and the relentless march of time.

I do not need to see you, from my place here in the shadows, to know how this plays out. I have intimate knowledge of that laugh. 

Your laughter is preceded by a smirk, attractive in its assured cockiness––a subtle re-alignment of facial muscles I once thought adorable. These days, it haunts my nightmares with an unnerving resemblance to my mother’s expression as she woke me up every morning of my childhood with a well-placed, vicious kick to whatever body part was accessible, where I laid on the floor of our dingy, face-me-I-face-you single-room apartment. 

‘Get up, Useless Girl! You will end up just like your good-for-nothing father.’ 

Her stringent voice follows me into wakefulness more often now, too. It dogged my harried footsteps when I left home that last time. 

‘You are nothing! You hear me? Nothing! And he will soon know it, too!’

The chuckles come next, beginning while you are still smirking, echoing through the untenable distance that forever separates us––soft, deceptive sounds that give no indication of what they portend. Taunting, like the girlish giggles of the pretty mean girls of my childhood. 

‘She thinks she’s all that. Forming Goody-goody; as if studying fit change am. You be ashewo! Just like your mother.’ 

They are the same sounds you emit whenever I dare bring up plans for my future. ‘Relax,’ you’d chuckle. ‘Am I not taking good care of you? Oya smile for me!’

On cue, you let loose the bellow, catapulting me back into humiliation. To high school Career Day, and a classroom of kids who could not contain their incredulous mirth. And teen-aged me––standing in patchwork uniform and frayed Look sandals, wishing fervently to become the Nothing her mother called her. Wishing she’d never dared to share, to dream… 

When the exertion of hilarity overcomes you, I hear your distinctive grunts, the gasps for air. I hear him, too. Another man from a lifetime ago who tried to break me. I was a good girl, he said, he’d care for me. He, too, lied. Another person who deemed me good enough only for one thing. Deemed my eight-year-old body his, to toy with. 

I told no one, like he demanded; I had no one. The Landlord broke down the door after a week to find what was left of him; naked, bloated, gnawed by the rats he’d thought to poison. Twelve years old in the slums of Mushin, no one noticed the bottle I kept as souvenir.

Now, here comes the accompanying guffaws from your friends…

It is alarmingly familiar. That ribald note followed you on the day we met. You, walking away from the car they hung off of, to chat up the scared, teenaged me on her way to JAMB lessons. Theirs is the universal sound of human males on an ego trip––how did I never recognize the derision it carries, before?

I heard it that night, too. 

Agreeing to one date, I’d thought, maybe then you’d stop pestering. And I would have the memory of being the girl on your arm, just for a night. 

That night is a blank, of which I remember nothing. Not after we turned up at the party you hosted in this same flat. You remind me often of, taunt me sometimes with, that night. How I acquiesced to your toasting, how we were intimate. It would have been my real ‘first’ time...

Your laughter trails off, pewtering away like every raging forest fire eventually burns out, heedless of the destruction in its wake, the ravages it leaves behind. I know your smile will linger, will light a twinkle in your eyes, allowing the joy that is you to shine through. Painful in its sweetness, that smile is hardest to bear. It won me over all those years ago, doing the job you were raised to ascribe to wealth, position, power. 

That smile is the peek into the man I knew you to be, a fleeting show of the vulnerability I was sure lay below your entitled persona––one you would undoubtedly reveal, if I just loved you well enough. That smile lured me in. 

And here I am, years later; no degree, no job, no prospect, not even a measly wedding ring, listening to the silence of your contentment. Your laughter, as always, has drained the room of everything. Energy. Life. Will. 

All that’s left, all that I am to you, is silence. Unacknowledged. Nothing. 

Exactly as they said, as she’d predicted. I see their sneer in your every smile, I hear their snicker in your laugh. I wonder if they––she, you––know what it takes to swim against the tides of a lifetime of expectations. Of being worn by life, like I was––even long before you fastened this albatross of dependence and despondence around my gullible neck. 

Yes, I admit. Some days, these past years; it was easier to drift, to let the sound of your laughter lull me further into nothingness. I am swimming now, though, for the first time since your smile happened to me. It is a steep learning, paddling furiously beneath the waves of your gaiety, so you won’t see. 

You mustn't see. I am fighting for two. Like no one did for me. And there is only one way this ends. You’ve told me so yourself many, many times while drowning my aspirations in the peals of your laughter.

The silence intrudes, deafening under the weight of disappointment. Your team lost. It is

the omen I thought I had no time to wait for.

This time, there will be no souvenirs.