Behind Closed Doors by Kingsley Adrian Banks - HTML preview

CHAPTER THREE

Phoenix was seated before the vanity table of the dressing room of the Drummer Club, preparing to get ready to go onstage for his performance. As he plied black kohl on his eyelids with meticulous care, the diamond ring on his right hand flashed, catching his attention. The ring had been a stupid mistake on his part, a temporary aberration that was never to be repeated again. But he had been unable to stop himself from seeking for that ring; the ring was too beautiful and it had caught his fancy, and it was so obviously not a fake. The other guy had been very willing to part with the thing after only a moment’s hesitation when he could have refused to part with the thing, so it meant that the guy was obviously loaded with juice. Phoenix had not spent the months at the Drummer Club without developing a well-honed instinct for detecting the signs that emanated from the guys of the upper echelon of the Lagos society.

The young man who owned the ring was obviously new at the altar of gay love because of his insatiable need for their tryst and the fact that he had subsequently written a note to Phoenix, along with some money and an apology for being unable to honor their second appointment.

‘Phoenix.’

He looked up, dragging his traitorous senses from its contemplation of the rich enigmatic stranger to focus back on his immediate surroundings. A tall dark man with a sculpted body and a finely chiseled face was standing behind him. It was Ali Hassan, the Northerner who owned the snakes Phoenix usually used for his acts.

‘Can you handle the cobra even with the fact that it has had its poison sac removed?’ he asked.

Phoenix nodded, a smile appearing on his lips. His eyes met the eyes of the man through the mirror and their gaze held, and he knew that when his act for the night was over, he’d have to show the man his gratitude in bed. Without another word, Phoenix stood up and walked away from the room, and in his mind which was a large labyrinth of memories and a long corridor of events, the past and the present began to merge into one incomprehensible whole.

PHOENIX.

That was his name, the name that he’d chosen to merge with his identity, but it was not the name that he’d been born with. He had been born as Tochi Okoh in 1981

to Andrew and Andrea Okoh. His father was a commercial bus driver in the teeming city of Onitsha where he’d pitched tent after walking away from his life in Lagos working as a factory worker in Ikeja and his mother was a small-time seamstress with very little prospects of advancement. There was his older sister and older brother, and then his kid sister who was conceived three years after his unceremonious birth.

His earliest memory of himself was a little boy with the plump face and the very quiet disposition who people loved to carry about. As he grew up, he skipped some classes, advancing forward, and, by some twist of fate, he found himself in the same class with his older brother after he’d lost all his set mates who were not skipping up to the higher classes like he was.

Phoenix came from a higher lower-income earning family by the then Nigerian standards, with a plethora of aunts and uncles. Then, in 1990, when he became enrolled in for his junior secondary school alongside his elder brother Matthew, his problems really started. Already, he’d lost his chunkiness and the plumpness of his baby years, but his body was round, his legs curved like a girl’s, his ass full and very round, and his face was very delicate-looking as to render him very feminine, making people to wonder sometimes if he was really male. From that age of nine, his effeminacy had become really apparent, too pronounced, and he was often bullied by the boys of the school because of his fragility, and because he was too young to be in their midst.

‘You really must stop this stupid feminine behavior of yours,’ Matthew would admonish him in anger. ‘It is ridiculous.’

But Phoenix really couldn’t stop it. It was a part of his genetic make-up, and there was no way he could control that behavior. It was a deeply ingrained feature of his psyche that couldn’t be dispelled even via his greatest efforts. He was relegated to the background, a nondescript fellow who lacked the commanding presence and the hyped sense of masculinity of the other boys. He was the isolated one at school, the

one no one would really associate with unless where absolutely necessary, and at home, he was treated with open contempt by his brother and the kids of the neighborhood because of the fact that his behavior was unacceptable.

Due to the crushing loneliness that engulfed him, a loneliness which survived even till his adulthood, he turned to books as an escape route. He devoured all the novels he could lay his hands on, and, as each tale unfolded before him, he got lost in the lives of those he knew nothing about. But the problem was that he never had the money to buy all the books and the novels he needed. He was also among the very last to pay the school fees in the class and was often sent home because of his inability to pay the necessary fees.

All these contributed to crush his spirit and whatever faith he had in the human factor. It was then that he learned that you had to only look out for yourself and for no other person, that it was a man-eat-man world out there.

During the lunch times, when the other students went to the school cafeteria to buy assorted snacks and drinks and stuff themselves with it, only Phoenix and his brother bought nothing more often than they did, because they didn’t usually have even the paltry change it took to buy a bottle of yoghurt and doughnuts. In their home they ate breakfast at the crack of dawn, ate nothing in school, and by the time they returned home in the evening and did their house chores, they ate their dinner. Lunch was such a foreign concept to Phoenix.

By the time Phoenix started maturing into puberty, he turned quite beautiful.

His physical details were becoming more pronounced; his looks had blossomed

rapidly. He was a stunning beauty, what with his luminous brown eyes, light brown complexion, and perfectly chiseled features. It was a look that would have rendered a woman to be a stunning beauty, but in a man, it was a lethal combination that exposed him to abuse and lots of stupid questions about his sexuality.

On January 1994, his elder sister Vivian got married. In her own way, she’d been close to Phoenix, though her sanguine nature kept her from being too attached to him, and he missed her. But the life had to go on and there was nothing to be done about it.

The taunting continued.

‘Oh, Tochi baby, dance for us and shake your ass so we can see what you’ve got . . .’

‘Tochi, walk again like that dancer you try so hard to emulate . . .’

‘Tochi, I know you’re a kpokpo garri, so I’d really like to stick a piece of wood in your ass. Kpa gi homo . . . ’

The taunts were malignant, and they crushed Phoenix’s spirit like nothing else ever could, and during the nights, when the entire family was in bed, he sat down and cried, tears of pure sorrow cascading down his eyes. His life was a living hell, and he could remember the times when he thought of committing suicide, though he of course could never dare to try such because of the fact that his culture totally forbade it. And besides that, what would he use to realize his plans? He had no access to guns; knives were too painful, too direct, and not even foolproof. Slitting his wrists with a

razor involved a lot of blood, and so was out of the question. He wanted to just go away, to become detached from his physical body and float weightlessly to a place where there’d be no more taunting, a place where he wouldn’t be an embarrassment to the masculine gender.

However, all that was impossible and so he turned to physical exercises. He started to jog, and then he turned to more taxing pursuits; he turned to yoga. He drew inspiration from the Chinese martial arts movies that thronged the market in those days: Twin Warrior; The East is Red . . . he remembered the taunting he always had to endure from the guys he knew and pursued that part of fitness with a serious passion.

At first, everyone thought he was crazy, but after he’d thrown one balletic kick too many, they all learned to be very wary of him.

One day, in 1995, Phoenix got the gay insult from Matthew, when the latter called him a kpokpo garri right in front of one of his friends, and it hurt him so bad, to be insulted like that by his own family. He knew that Matthew and all the other guys were wrong in one respect: no guy had ever touched him in that way, though not for their lack of trying but because he’d halted the advances firmly and very stubbornly.

His preternatural feminine looks, coupled with his voice and that slightly swaying walk rendered whatever assertions he made pertaining to the fact that he was not gay totally unbelievable to his peers. And now that even his own blood brother had called him out on it, it cut him to the core, and it was an event he vowed never to forget, even to his dying day.

At last, by that ripe age of fifteen, he came to a realization of the way guys acted around him. He grouped them into three categories. Those in the first category were those who did not mind his effeminacy and tried to be good to him everywhere.

They enjoyed his wit and his honesty, and his company, though he never really became good friends with any of them. The second group was those who were polite to him in public, shunned him socially, but they were always coming around to ask for sexual gratification from him. They begged, they cajoled, and some even threatened him with threats as they plied him with gifts. The third group shunned him in every ramification of the word. Some were closet gay cases who did want to appear safe in the light of the homophobia in the country. And then there were those that were so thoroughly confused about who and what they were that they did not know how to act around him.

When he took the Senior School Certificate Examination with his brother and they both passed, Matthew elected to go into business because there was no money for them to go to the university. He had expected to be relieved that his brother who was always at his throat was now gone from the house but the truth was that he wasn’t. He was now basically left with no one to talk to.

In 1997, when he turned into the ripe sweet sixteen, Phoenix was sent over to Calabar to stay with an aunt and her family who would see to his tertiary institution training.

‘We do not have the money to train you up to the level you’d have wanted to go to,’ Andrea, his mother, informed him. ‘You are very young, but you have the

wisdom and the knowledge of an old man. Agatha my sister is quite wealthy, and so she’ll be in the better position to help you than we will here. Let me handle your younger sister, Juliet. I hope you understand.’

He was no fool; he understood her perfectly well. He had the grim determination to succeed, and then he went off to live with Agatha, her husband Ezekiel and their son. Their home was exquisitely furnished, with the touch of elegance and opulent beauty he’d always dreamt of. He marveled at the white walls, the exquisite paintings that decorated them. There were very beautiful works of pottery that dotted the house, stainless cooking equipment that filled the kitchen and left him feeling awed and terrified at the same time. It was as if he was in another world altogether.

And he felt that here, at last, he would have what he wanted and be the person that he was meant to be with his life.

Unfortunately, he was wrong about that.

IT WAS ON the second day that Phoenix spent in the exquisite apartment he was now a part of that he realized that his time in the home of his aunt and her family would not be spent in luxury. She had woken him from bed at four am－ he knew what the time was because he’d sneaked a look at the wall clock in the parlor when they’d walked past it on their way to the kitchen. Agatha plunked herself down on a stool and began to reel off a list of tasks that he was to perform.

‘As you know, Larry has an intense aversion to kitchen work, so you will have to fill in on his behalf, wash the used dishes from the previous night, make a cup of warm coffee for my husband, a cup of very sweet tea for me and a cup freshly squeezed oranges for my son Larry. Every day when you finish cooking, scrub the countertop, scrub the sinks, keep everything in this kitchen sparkling clean; make sure you check the vegetable and meat compartments in the fridge to make sure that nothing there is rotten or needs to be thrown out. All the washed dishes need to be meticulously arranged in the cupboard. Everything is to be neatly stacked and arranged; never misplace anything or break anything.

‘Wash all the dirty clothes belonging to my family and iron them all. Place mine in my walk-in closet, Ezekiel’s in his, Larry’s in his too. Wash the blankets and the other stuff at least once every week, and keep them all tidy. Every morning at six, rush downstairs and wash my car, my husband’s too; make sure everything in them is very neat and ready for use. I will teach you how to start a car so you can also warm my car while washing. I will show you how to top up the brake fluids and power steering fluids, and to check the tires too. Every day, I will write down the list of things for you to buy－ Larry will be made to show you the market. Sweep the whole house every day and dust the cobwebs; clean all the electrical gadgets once every week. Wash the toilets and the bathrooms with liquid cleaner and a can of Hypo bleach－ please remove all spots. Did I make myself clear?’

Still recovering from the shock at the avalanche of chores that had been heaped on him as if he was a slave, all Phoenix could do was to reply: ‘Yes.’

‘Yes what?’ Agatha said in a cold flat voice that was alien to her usual exuberant tones. There was a hardness to her now, something different in her attitude towards him.

‘Yes Aunty.’

And then she proceeded to teach him how to use the various appliances in the kitchen and around the house. She pointed out the sockets and switches; she showed him how to operate the telephones in the parlor and the master bedroom.

When the three pampered owners of the house subsequently left, Agatha to the company where she worked as an accountant, Ezekiel to his own workplace, and Larry to God-knows-where, Phoenix sat down on the tiled floor of the kitchen and wept. Hot tears of crushing bitterness swept down his cheeks, uninhibited. What a stupid, unrealistic fool he’d been: how could he expect Agatha to train him in school and for her and her over-pampered idiot of a son to treat him like family?

From the unending litany of chores the woman had heaped on him, it was obvious that the woman did not want a guest in her polished home; she wanted a slave! And she was demanding his services, not asking for them politely in this beautiful flat of hers!

At that very moment, he cursed his life; he cursed his unlucky fate for thrusting him into such an unfavorable position. There he was; an extremely intelligent straight-A student who had a very strong yearning to complete his education, but due to the fact that there was not enough money to see that through, he’d been sent here to be

helped by his aunt. But she was first trying to subject him to the indignity of being the slave of her family.

Well, he could live with that. With a burning determination to win her approval and her love for him through his hard work, he set about his tasks, washing and dusting and cleaning and polishing till he almost dropped to the ground in sheer exhaustion. But as the day grew into days and the days into weeks, it became obvious to him that nothing he ever did to please his aunt ever did please nor went noticed by her. She was very quick to criticize even the smallest mistake, no matter how slight, but there was not to be any praise from her to him no matter what he did for her and her family. She was a monster, an impossible woman to please.

Once, when she was seated at the kitchen table, reading the beauty section of the morning paper and sipping a cup of yoghurt as she waited for her breakfast, her husband came in and sat beside her. ‘What are we having for breakfast?’ he asked her.

‘Pancakes,’ she answered flatly. She looked up at Phoenix, her eyes cold and hard, her face and demeanor ruthless. ‘Okay, cook.’ She snapped her fingers at her nephew.

Phoenix set about preparing her request, icy fear beating at his chest. He put in too much sugar in the creamed coffee because he had no idea that it was already pre-creamed before the packaging; he botched the poached eggs. The burnt oats and the badly fried pancakes were the last straw. They were meant to be perfectly round and brown; the shape of his pancakes were uneven and a mixture of brown-and-black, thanks to too much heat from the gas cooker and too much sugar in the mixture which

caused the pancakes to burn quickly. In a flash Agatha was on her feet and across the kitchen floor, delivering to his face a stunning slap that jerked his head back with a snap. Wham!

‘You demon child!’ she screamed at him, her body shaking with the force of her rage. ‘Any idiot can prepare these meals but you destroyed everything. Do you know how much you just wasted? Andrea did not train you well, she didn’t. You’re just a useless piece of baggage like that your mother is.’

‘I am not useless, and neither is my mother.’

Slap, slap, slap!

‘Do not dare talk back to me, you untrained monkey!’ she screamed savagely at him. Pulling him savagely by the arm, she shoved him into her chair and frowned severely. ‘I will do them today, but heaven help you if you dare to waste my money again. I’ll kill you and cook you for dinner! All your mother knew was how to make useless babies. She cannot do anything, and you took right after her! Idiot!’

That was the beginning of a new ordeal. It became palpably obvious that Agatha had never loved his mother; she had taken him in so as to appear charitable to her less fortunate elder sister, but deep down in her heart, she hated having him under her roof. He remembered the different stories his mother had told him, of how often Agatha had humiliated her when they came together for family gatherings and meetings, and he knew that even though his aunt swam in a pool of money, she hated her elder sister and was insanely jealous of her. However, since she could not make Andrea to feel the brunt of her anger, she had to take it out on her nephew.

Phoenix woke at four every day, and did the chores in the house until they had all left, then he’d go and sit in the living room and switch on the TV even though his aunt had barred him from ever switching on her TV set whenever she was away from the house－ as if he even watched the thing when she was home－ and then he turned to the soap operas and the Mexican dramas. He soon became a soap opera addict, and as he watched the beautiful people on the big screens, he’s always convince himself that one day he’d be like them, a Face to be recognized wherever he went to, a force to be reckoned with. He would become a movie star like they were, with beautiful clothes and expensive things all around him for his use. He would make it and this same woman would be forced to watch his movies and applaud him on screen, but then it would be too late for her—he would never acknowledge her as his blood relation. She could enjoy her mistreatment of him now. His time would come. He promised himself that.

The house was an extremely lonely place for him to be in; he had neither friends nor companions, and even though Larry was his set, the guy never stayed at home and even when he deigned to be there, he took pains to avoid Phoenix. He made lots of acquaintances, but there was no time for him to solidify their relationship into friendships because he had so much house work to do and so little time for himself, and Agatha had barred him from daring to bring in any ‘riff-raffs’ into her house. The only person he ever felt a little close to was his aunt’s husband, Ezekiel. He always came to talk to Phoenix whenever he had the time to spare.

‘I’m really sorry about your aunt,’ he told Phoenix one hot Saturday afternoon.

He had returned home because he had a pounding headache, and, seeing Phoenix

planted in the kitchen, preparing a chocolate cake for Agatha and her girl friends that would be coming over in the evening, he had sat down to keep Phoenix company. ‘I know that my wife doesn’t treat you well.’

‘She treats me the way she’d treat any other person,’ Phoenix countered uncomfortably, because he found it awkward to be discussing his aunt with her husband. What if he said the wrong thing and it reached his Dracula aunt? Then she would kill him for sure.

‘But she doesn’t treat Larry the way she treats you,’ Ezekiel persisted, fixing his eyes intensely on Phoenix’s face. ‘You have seen how useless the guy is, how he sits down and then watches the opportunities of life pass him by. And his mother does nothing.’

As he continued to prepare the batter, Phoenix merely lifted his shoulders in a small shrug. ‘He’s still a kid and he has the time to adjust, so . . .’

The timer on the oven went off and he turned towards it, away from the eyes of his uncle in-law. He extracted the greased tin from which wafted forth the very strong aroma of a freshly baked delicacy, and then he placed it on the table. As he dipped a knife into the middle of it and extracted it, looking for any crumbs that may cling to it, an indication that the cake was not yet done, he felt Ezekiel embrace him from behind. He stiffened, alarm bells ringing in his mind.

‘You are very beautiful well-behaved boy with great intelligence,’ Ezekiel whispered into his hair. ‘You were not meant to suffer like this, not when you have people around you who should be helping you to achieve your dreams. I promise to

help you in whatever way I can, but you must understand the fact that if I were to dare to interfere too forcefully, she’ll turn more mean to you when she has you alone to her clutches.’

Phoenix was really reassured by the kind words, but the expressive love and the affection this man had for him made him uncomfortable. It was the kind of thing he was unused to, some alien concept to him. But he knew that he needed all the love he could get because of the fact that he felt caged as if from all sides. There was his monstrous aunt on one side; there was Larry and his supreme indifference on the other side, and then there was Ezekiel . . . and what did Ezekiel want?

His life was an ordeal that he had to live through every day. He became aware that Ezekiel had gotten kinder towards him, more attentive to him as a person not as the unpaid help of the family; there was the occasional body contact between them which was prolonged by the man; every eye contact they had was some kind of challenge that begged for a release. It was something that petrified Phoenix with a nameless terror, one that kept him awake some nights. At the back of his mind he felt that he knew what his uncle wanted, but he dared not put a name to it so he wouldn’t have to face it.

Everything that happened around him in the home of his aunt was a source of apprehension to him, and he often found himself hurrying through his house chores so he could get out into the streets and be free from the suffocating family he’d gotten himself entangled with. He admired the men in their flashy cars as they swept past on the streets; he admired the flash of their wealth, and he always told himself that one

day, he’d be like them, that his own time was coming. He had that faith in his life, that something would change, and then he would be way better than his aunt and what she had to offer to him, which was nothing, by the way.

One day, when he had heaps of laundry to do and subsequently grew very fatigued about it, he went into the living room, and sat down on one of the plush chairs after he’d flicked on the TV set. There was a Mexican soap playing on the TV, and it was raining, and he felt so tired his eyes were already closing before he’d seen two scenes in the movie.

A loud clap of thunder that flashed across the sky made him sit bolt upright in his chair, all the sleep scrubbed from his eyes. His gaze flew to the clock, and he discovered that he’d been asleep for a little over three hours on the chair, and that he’d left more than half of his daily chores untouched. Flying to his feet as if he’d been stuck by a sharp needle, he hurriedly switched off the TV and turned towards the door.

And then he froze.

Standing in the doorway, water dripping down her expensive suit, was Agatha.

She looked deadly, her eyes glaring at her nephew with a coldness and hatred that was almost palpable. ‘So you’ve been busy watching the TV all day long,’ she said in a cold flat voice as she stepped into the room, closing the door behind her. ‘Disobeying my instructions, that’s what you’ve been doing.’

Phoenix felt his muscles clench with fear and apprehension, his mind wondering why his own aunt would like the wrath of Hades on earth. ‘I can explain,’

he said.

‘There is nothing for you to explain, you little devil. I told you what to do before I left here in the morning. You left my things untouched!’

Phoenix opened his mouth to say something in his defense, but a crushing blow from Agatha’s fist sent him reeling back, a wave of pain assailing his senses, blood sputtering from his mouth. Agatha then pounced on him like a tigress, throwing strong punches at him like a professional boxer. She struck hard and mercilessly, over and over again, her fists hitting at him with the force of a sledgehammer, her long acrylic nails scratching at his neck and face. She was kicking him, hitting him, until he fell to the floor, and yet she continued her merciless attack on him until he blacked out . . .

mercifully blacked out.

It was that particular episode that made him to lose whatever love and empathy he had in him. The woman had not even bothered to see that he had the requisite medical care after her assault on him, and threatened to throw him out into the streets if he dared to divulge the occurrence to her husband when he returned from work.

‘Remember your education,’ she warned.

Hence, he’d been forced to dish out some trumped-up excuse about some stupid mistake he’d made during the day that had caused his fall and injury, but he could see that the man did not believe him, that Ezekiel was no fool; he knew what had happened. But since there was a conspiracy of silence, he knew that there was nothing he could do about it.

A week later, Phoenix overhead the couple arguing in their room about him in the middle of the night. He’d been sleeping when he heard the sound of raised voices,

so he’d crept out of bed and tiptoed silently to the door of their room to know what the problem was.

Ezekiel was speaking, his voice low but intense and furious. ‘That boy is your own nephew. He’s your blood, yet you treat him no better than a slave you have in the house and you look for ways to degrade him as if he was nothing. All he’s ever done was to try and show you some love, but all you do is to hate him. I wonder why you went down to Onitsha to get him.’

‘I was doing my stupid sister a favor,’ Agatha snapped, he voice like a whiplash. ‘She wants me to finance the education of her son whereas she could have just sent him off to someone as an apprentice to a businessman so he can learn a trade.

Instead, she wants to send him to school.’

‘And is something wrong with that?’ Ezekiel demanded.

‘Of course not, but the point here is that I do not want to spend my money on that woman or any of her offspring. She always thought that she was better off than any of us, that she’s got better kids than any of her other sisters. Now, she’s foisting her brat son on me and I am not happy about that.’

‘Are you jealous of your sister?’ Ezekiel asked in a voice so soft that Phoenix had to strain to hear him well.

‘We’re not discussing that woman here, so let it rest. Just know it that I don’t intend to send him to school with my money. He can stay here and rot for all I care.’

Phoenix had heard enough. He stumbled back to his room, tears filling