Page 38 of The Death of Vivek Oji

Somto looked furious. “You shouldn’t have taken these pictures, Juju. I don’t care if that’s what he wanted. What if someone finds them? What if someone at the photo place made their own copies?”

“Didn’t you hear her?” Olunne was sifting through the pictures; her voice was gentle, almost amused. “She wants to show them to his mother.”

“You dey craze,” Somto said to Juju. “Do you hear me? Your head is not correct. Aunty Kavita must never see these. Can you imagine what it will do to her?”

“I think she should know.” Juju sounded uncertain, afraid.

Elizabeth put a hand on her arm. “You knew him best,” she said.

“He’s not here!”shouted Somto. Elizabeth glared at her and she lowered her voice. “He’s not here,” she repeated. “They buried him already. What’s the point of showing her these?”

Olunne handed me the photographs and I took them, my heart beating fast. I already knew what I would see, that it would hit me in the chest like a lorry. I hadn’t seen a picture of him since the burial.

“You don’t see what she’s like,” Juju argued. “She’s been asking questions all the time. She won’t stop. She wants to know what happened to him.”

“We don’t know what happened to him,” said Olunne.

“Well, she thinks we do. Or at least that I do, just because he was at my house last.”

“She was coming to our house, but she’s stopped,” Somto said.

“Yes, because it’s me that she’s disturbing!” Juju retorted. “Do you know she and my mother quarreled about it? Mumsy even said she shouldn’t come to the house anymore—after all these years they’ve been friends. So now she just calls our landline all the time, begging me to remember something that I’m not telling her.”

“And it’s this you want to tell her?” Somto’s eyebrows were raised and mocking. “You don’t think these will cause more questions?”

Juju shrugged. “They’re the truth. She knows he was hiding something. Why don’t we just show her?”

“Because the woman is nearly mad, Juju.” Olunne said itlike she was stating a gentle fact. I kept looking through the photographs, the gloss slipping off my fingers. There I was in one of them, smiling for the camera. I remembered that one. Juju had taken it in the late afternoon when the sun was setting and had become a line across her bedroom wall. Light cut through my face severely, casting my smile in shadows. I put the photo at the bottom of the pile and continued looking through the rest as the girls argued.

“Elizabeth, please come and collect your girlfriend,” Somto said, throwing her hands up. “She won’t stop talking nonsense.”

“No, but seriously.” Olunne turned to Elizabeth. “Do you think we should tell Aunty Kavita?”

Elizabeth bit her lip. “Look,” she said, “eventually all secrets come out. It’s just a matter of time. And the longer it takes, the worse it is in the end.” She lifted and dropped one shoulder. “We all know this from experience, abi?”

I almost felt Juju wince and knew she was thinking of her father. Or maybe the secrets she’d kept from Elizabeth.

Somto wasn’t convinced. “How will she find out?” she asked. “Na you go tell am? In fact, apart from all of us here, who even knew about it?” No one said anything. “Exactly. So unless one of us decides to go and start opening their big mouth, there’s no reason Aunty Kavita should know. You people don’t have any respect. Let the woman remember Vivek the way she knew him, haba! What’s your own? Am I the only one with sense here?”

Olunne folded her hands and nodded. “Why cause trouble?” she said.

Juju and Elizabeth looked at each other. “Two against two,” Elizabeth said, and they all turned to me.

“I think Osita should decide,” said Juju.

Somto sucked her teeth. “Why him?”

My heart sped up. Was Juju about to tell them about us?

Olunne smacked her sister’s arm. “Idiot. Vivek is his cousin. It’s his family we’re talking about.”

Juju nodded. “She’s your aunt. You decide.”

Elizabeth’s mouth curled into a snarl. “Yes,” she said, her voice saccharine. “He was your cousin.” She was looking me straight in the eye; I could see her disgust. I wondered how much Juju had told her, or if it even mattered at this point.

Juju glared briefly at Elizabeth, then turned to me again. “Should she know?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but then our food came and I swallowed the words. We all fell silent for a bit, shifting things around to make space on the table.