Ghosts in the kinky part of town

Lagos, Nigeria; 2005. The Continent; the part of Lagos with rough and decaying houses, noisy streets, merchants with long skinny necks, all fighting souls from different tribes living lives of uncertainties; many die without fully knowing what they are capable of, but return, like ghosts, wandering the streets to continue the fight. Hope like dust remains on his eyelashes. They barely blink, but when they do, it’s a quick slap to the eyelids so they don’t see the opportunity go by. It’s the perverted part of town where anything can happen.
I belong to one of the many religious families on the continent. The sentences are always long; the mornings were covered with the blood of Jesus and the nights found an exchange of fire – fire of the Holy Spirit – a fire willing to consume, to burn or so we believed.
The father works in a post office and the mother sells fresh tomatoes at the market. I go to a school where classes are filled to the brim with kids twisting their lips into something resembling a smile, where a teacher gives an A when you learn a new word and not when you use a new word correctly in a sentence.
Sometimes we visit the island, when Daddy’s friends invite us to dinner, to houses with chandeliers so bright and ceramic plates so smooth. Island life stung my curious eyes. People lived enabled lives, walked with measured steps, wore sneeze-making colognes, bags had names and had to have names, buildings quite honestly defined home and island girls, oh! They all have dimples, these girls who smile a lot and say ‘my mistake’ every time they did something wrong, admitting failure with a smile. Their names sound stuffy (Shirley, Chloe, Wendy) like names of things rather than human. They ask questions that make me giddy, and I respond with answers that cause disconcerting lines to appear on their foreheads like soft little ridges. Have you been on a ghost train before? Do you use moisturizer at night? Do they teach Spanish at your school? What would you receive on your sixteenth birthday? My answers… It doesn’t matter but I always stutter and I hope they don’t ask me if I breathe oxygen.
I tell them a lot about the mainland, about the noisy streets of Isolo, about the possibility of something happening, about how people eat indiscriminately regardless of the time of day. And he had felt in those moments of storytelling, an awakening, a haunting envy for these island girls who didn’t know what bleached palm oil looked like.
So during a Saturday morning devotional, as my father talked about contentment and vanity and emphasized the word “desire” as if he could see into my soul, as if the liquid in my eyes revealed my aching desire to belong to the girls on the island, I blinked and my eyes caught. I began to think about the familiar underbelly of life on the mainland.
I’m next to my father in his new Mazda, in his new car, nodding to the voice of Bob Marley on the radio;
“I think I might join in on the fun~ but I had to hit and run~ I see I can’t settle~ in the kinky part of town.”
Dad has a new job now that he came with an official car and a lot of money, he had announced to mom and me last week. We were moving to the island next month. Now I don’t know how I feel, what I feel, a mixture of ambivalence and mild excitement. The father became rich overnight, the sentences became quick. We would be leaving the continent, the wicked part of the city full of ghosts from different tribes that roam the streets with the will not to unite but to survive.