Page 35

Timi's throat squeezed. “You're so foolish.”

“You are the only one who can define who you are. Not your past, not the media, not acquaintances, and certainly not a miserable old man ruled by hate.”

Timi faced him again. “He wasn't wrong, Alex. Prostitution is a universal truth, not an individual perception. It's an actual job.”

Alex stayed quiet for a while, then asked softly. “You know how we were able to get to the UK despite losing our properties to my uncles?”

He shook his head.

“My elder sister, Oyin, helped. Or so we thought, until we met Perkins. ”

“Who's that?”

“Her boss? A British Nigerian pimp. She'd told us she worked in human management. Until we got into the country, eager to start our lives afresh, and realised she catered more to the genitals of her clients than their overall wellbeing.”

Timi sidled closer, knees grazing Alex's lower back. “Seriously?”

Alex pushed in as if seeking strength, though he seemed unaware.

“My dad had died a debtor. And our coming had been funded by debt, which my sister had agreed to pay off with her body. And the only shame in that, was I, the son, had allowed that to happen. Nothing more. Reason I had to give up my foolish dreams of doing my master’s and getting a decent job.

Wrestling was the only way to rescue Oyin. ”

Timi's heart continued splintering, for Alex, for his sister, and for every pain his family must have endured. “I'm so sorry.”

Alex reached out to brush back a lock falling over his face. “I want you to know, whatever hell you've gone through, whatever you've had to do to be who you are now, there can never be any condemnation from this quarter. Never. Do you understand what I'm saying?”

Alex's eyes pinned him down, everything else he didn't say visible in the tenderness pouring out of them. And Timi felt that dead place within him stir with life. He returned Alex's gaze, pretty sure wonder shone from his. How were his and Alex's hell so similar?

He believed in God the same way people slept believing they would wake up.

An abstract conviction this intricate multi-verse couldn't possibly have been created from nothing.

And was an advocate for God and his minions focusing on their celestial realms, while other creatures ran their own planets.

But right now, it seemed as though the big guy up there had selected Alex and him as his favourite chess pieces.

Positioning Alex as a compass to his aimless navigation.

And instead of resenting the manipulation, all he could feel was a throat-locking gratefulness.

“Alex?”

“Hm?”

“Would you….climb up here for a second?”

Without hesitation, Alex pulled off his socks, crossed over him, and settled against the headboard .

Timi dimmed the lights to the lowest and lay facing the ceilings. “The first time I met Uncle Jude was at his clinic in my hometown,” he began. “And it was to treat an infection my latest girlfriend had given me.”

He held nothing back. Except, well, for the very thing that kick-started the whole nightmare. Albethas Boys' College was a hell his soul couldn't bear reliving, because it had within it a boy his memories had wronged.

But he introduced Alex to Prophet Emmanuel, and the hellish months he'd served at his church. The midnight prayers involving dancing around candles, being drenched in cold water, flogged with palm fronds as he repeated the scriptures after the prophet, and dunked in the river down the hill.

When he got to the prophet's midnight visitations, Alex grew so still it seemed like he'd stopped breathing. And Timi fought against the repulsion and terror drenching him as he recounted those horrid nights.

“He claimed he was only touching me so I could resist the devil living inside me,” he said, grateful for the darkness and claps of thunder enveloping them, which gave him the strength he needed to keep talking.

“When I…couldn't, he progressed to locking me up in the church's freezer.

Not long enough to kill me, but long enough to make me wish he did. I'd never felt so cold.”

He took a deep breath and pulled the blanket tighter around him. “I don't believe I've hated myself more during that period. Those touches always made me wanna throw up, yet that part of me wouldn't cooperate.”

His eyes closed against the memory of the fresh face that always overrode the prophet's.

How rough hands turned smooth and hesitant.

Soft palms cradling his face, minty breath giving life to his lips, whispering into his mouth how much he was loved.

The name he couldn't stop calling, even when it infuriated the prophet.

Kainye.

How he'd gradually turned the innocent boy into the devil the prophet wanted purged out of him. Hating him as much as he hated himself.

He swallowed hard and continued. “So, I, uh, began imagining dicing it up into tiny, bloodied bits.

It took some time, but one night, he touched, and it felt like peeling off a dry scab.

He'd succeeded. Made me dead while I still drew breath. He declared me free after four days of no show. And I thought I was...forever, till the women began to come.”

In the middle of narrating Iya Fati's story arc, and her large, busty female helps who wasted no time forcing him into their rooms, burying his head in their heaving bosoms, and promising to settle him, Alex eventually burst out.

“But that isn't prostitution, it's rape. You were only fifteen.”

His heart squeezed at his outrage, but he shrugged, unwilling to give the experience a name. It would only make it more real, and the detachment characterising his narration would fade.

“Just one of those things men face,” he said.

“The disadvantage I would say was their smell.

Fish and stale fufu aren't exactly what your nose needs when you're being forced to get it up.

And don't forget, they allowed me carry leftovers home and bought me stuff.

I guess that's where the prostitution part comes in.”

“You were never that,” Alex said. And the stubborn conviction in his words landed in Timi's dead place, breaking more grounds.

When he finally introduced Alex to the Witches of the West, he'd exhausted himself mentally and couldn't breeze through their story as he did with the others.

Even after years of actively not thinking about them, his chest couldn't stop constricting.

He lived briefly in that dead place. Where nothing mattered to the chief witch than delivering her only son from the devil.

Not the death of his father he couldn't grieve nor the sight of her once vibrant son lumbering through life like a bottom-barrel zombie.

There were no limits to the means of achieving her aim and soon Timi found out in the most appalling manner how far she was willing to go.

“Your own mother approached those girls and forced you to work there?” Alex asked, shock making his voice small. “Your mother abandoned you with that…man?”

Timi fisted the duvet's edges. “She popped me out of her lady place, but yeah, you can call her that. Prophet Emmanuel was well known for his deliverance services. He was her only hope for her possessed son. For the girls, I overheard her. She asked them to record the…deeds too.”

“But why?” Alex whispered. “What did she hope to achieve by doing this?”

And in the dark room, with light showers of rain pelting against the windows, Timi slipped down into the pillows, and said the words he thought he never would. Ever again.

“Once upon a time, I loved a boy. And it was the greatest sin ever.”

He didn't know what he expected, but it wasn't Alex sliding down to face him, his beautiful eyes, wet and dilated.

“Me too,” he whispered back. “There was once a boy.”