Chapter I – The Boy Who Raised the Devil
Religious Education filled the graveyard slot on a Friday afternoon. Pupils and teachers stifled yawns, mopped sweat from their brows and prayed hard for the bell to ring. Minds were elsewhere; splashing playfully in streams, sitting in cool shade, gambling for childish treasures, fishing, eating, playing games. Nothing could have been less interesting than the subject of the day: The Role of Omens and Portents in Religious History. Normally, Evelyn ‘The Holy’ Roly would have told the class to read their textbooks quietly while she perfected the art of dozing open-eyed. Today however a strange feeling beyond her control compelled her to deliver the lesson.
Evelyn removed the nylon beehive wig that was helping to slowly cook her brain and placed it on the table in front of her. She cleared her throat to attract the children’s attention and proceeded to recite her notes to a class of bored, listless, eleven year olds. Given that she had not explained the meaning of the words ‘omen’ or ‘portent’ to children for whom English was a second language, the attention she commanded from the clearing of her throat was fleeting.
Like the rest of his classmates, Emeka Ejoh heard little as he stared wistfully out of the window. He was lost in a daydream, blissfully unaware that this particular lesson had been engineered for him from the moment of his birth. In his final year of school he would write an essay in answer to the question ‘Discuss the role of omens and portents in governing the timing and nature of ancient conflict’. He would get an A-plus for it as a piece of work, proving that he understood divine signals in the theoretical sense, but he failed miserably to see the signs in his own life.
Why did he not realise that the cross on the chain around his neck had mysteriously turned upside down? When he rubbed his head and found the two little bumps growing under his hair, why did he not run and consult Mama Isoro, the local herbalist, immediately? How could it be that when he cut the yolk of his egg and saw blood come pouring out of it, his only action was to screw his nose up in distaste, scrape the plate into the bin and eat a slice of toast instead? Surely God moves in mysterious ways.
It was strange that he should have missed all the signs, for Emeka Ejoh was otherwise quite clever. He might have become an academic had he been educated in his native tongue. As it was, his lips moved when he read, right up until the age of thirteen and by then nurture had defeated nature and it was too late. Though he trounced his classmates in every subject, he was no more than first among unequals. At his final year prize-giving in secondary school, his Headmaster, handing him his third award of the day, turned to the audience and told them that here was a boy who would leave an indelible mark upon the world as a man. Never was a more prophetic statement uttered.
Early indications were that Emeka would become a man of means. His entrepreneurial spirit was far in advance of his age and an early foray into business reaped spectacular results. Like many of the boys in his neighbourhood he spent his afternoons catching catfish in the swamplands near his home. Not for Emeka a mother’s approbation as he laid the day’s catch on the kitchen table, Emeka sold his fish door-to-door on the way home. And instead of spending his profits on sweets, like any other, normal boy would do, he invested in more rods and lines and hooks, with which he caught more catfish. Soon he had more rods and lines than he could set or collect on his own and he began to employ friends, whose labour and naivety he ruthlessly exploited. With their input he rapidly outgrew his door-to-door customer base and in no time at all expanded his market to include the stallholders who sold food, cooked by the roadside, and all the small bars and restaurants in the neighbourhood.
This expansion marked a turning point in his life. Suddenly his success became measurable by the trappings of wealth. He bought a bicycle, a much coveted chopper, with gears in the middle of the crossbar; a radio, and a Polaroid camera. Such possessions in an impoverished neighbourhood were real status symbols. They earned him recognition, which he mistook for popularity, and respect which he misinterpreted as admiration.
And then, one summer, for no good commercial reason, the catfish business ended. Emeka’s hormones kicked in and like many a young boy standing at the crossroads of life he dumped his past like so much old rubbish. He got so torn between the stress of acne and the wonder of masturbation that he quite simply forgot to catch catfish. He forgot where he had laid his lines, forgot who owed him money, forgot everything that now belonged to the life of the child that he no longer was. Emeka Ejoh, child star, metamorphosed into the most pathetic creature of all; the lonely, angst-ridden teenager. He had been respected for his academic prowess and admired for his financial acumen, but he had never been liked. Even his mother didn’t like him. There wasn’t much to like. He had not been pleasant or handsome to start with and manhood did not improve him one bit. He remained short and bow-legged, with lips that were too large for his small, round face. Bright, piggy eyes bulged out of his head so that when he smiled he took on an uncanny resemblance to the catfish he’d so passionately hunted. His physical appearance might not have mattered had there been anything that could be described as endearing in his personality. He did not even possess the redeeming feature of being good at sport or games. His one and only girlfriend, who had accepted this dubious status on account of his previous wealth, dealt the final, fatal blow to any chance he had of popularity when she cruelly announced that she’d dumped him because he always smelt of fish.
While his classmates smooched behind the bushes Emeka consoled himself with music. From the time he bought his first record and stuck it on his mother’s gramophone player, his trading instincts told him he would one day own a record shop. His future opened up before his eyes in a manner so clear that a suspicious mind might have described it as a vision. He would listen to music all day and make a vast profit from the inexhaustible supply of music lovers who would patronise his establishment. If he closed his eyes he could almost see the crowds and smell the money.
Emeka did indeed buy a record shop when he grew up. Intellect and determination made the first step in the fulfilment of his dreams easy. All might have gone well but for his nascent dalliance with business and economics, which left him with a proclivity to reinvest his profits in a winning formula that bordered on the obsessive. It might have worked for catfish but with records it was to prove a disaster. In complete defiance of normal economic principles, it was when he started to trade profitably that he found himself in trouble.
From the proceeds of selling records, Emeka bought more records, until he had so many records that one could hardly move in his shop for fear of knocking a towering pile of vinyl to the floor. In such cramped and precarious conditions he began to lose his customers, who preferred to browse through a selection of records like cows grazing in a large, open field, not jammed up tight against the merchandise unable to see beyond the top layer.
Faced with the calamity of a mountain of stock that nobody bought, in a space that was far too small to hold it, Emeka had three stark choices. He could move to a bigger shop, he could change his business model, or he could become a gifted crank who lived above a dusty old record shop that was packed full of beautifully preserved but ancient records which would never sell. With his usual determination and certainty, Emeka chose the last option, and in taking such a dramatic step crossed the border into eccentricity that sealed his alienation from his friends and neighbours.
“He’s mad,” they all said, the chorus of condemnation growing over the years, “hoarding those stupid records that nobody wants. Hasn’t he heard of CDs and DVDs, and files that you can download over the Internet? I tried to go in there the other day and you can’t even get the door open properly because there’s a dirty great pile of records in the way.”
Day after day, the numbers of people who came to the shop dwindled. At first Emeka tried to entice his customers back with ‘two for the price of one’ offers and free posters, which brought in a handful of bargain hunters. Soon even they stopped coming. After a while it became pointless dusting the records or sweeping between the irregular gaps on the floor, or even switching the lights on. Emeka stood on the brink of ruin.
A less conceited man, staring disaster in the face, might have sought advice. But Emeka remained as certain of his own logic as ever before. In the dark depths of his predicament he was convinced that he saw a shaft of light glimmering at the end of the tunnel. His problem wasn’t that he had too many records it was that he didn’t have enough. He was in the wrong market. Retail was not the answer; he needed to become a wholesaler!
So he took out a loan and began a new business, importing crate-loads of cheap records made by obscure artists. He classified them by genre, ascribed a rating to each and sold them by the crate to local DJs who had discovered that if you play bad records loudly enough to people who are drunk, nobody notices.
Emeka’s new business left him with an even greater mountain of useless records because the vast majority of his new stock was outdated junk that he couldn’t give away if he tried. His gleaming shaft of light turned out to be nothing more than the dull glow of a foolish idea, and everyone thought him more cuckoo than ever before.
Emeka ceased to be ‘normal’. His superstitious neighbours feared eccentricity, no matter how harmless, and ascribed all kinds of extreme outcomes to the gentlest forms of insanity. Which is why, if anyone had told them that Emeka Ejoh would raise the Devil they would have nodded sagely and said “you know, it doesn’t surprise me one bit. I mean look at his record shop!”
To obtain further chapters or the full manuscript please email Dele Sikuade at Dele@Gogojaja.com
