We have wood, gravel, and leftover roofing sheets from the time the local government built a shed with a roof for the transformers down the road because electricity shocks killed some boy’s father during the last flood.
We have old wood, nails, and sawdust, and we will find old plastic bowls no one uses anymore.
All of Grandmother’s things are old. She still has those green Pyrex dishes, teacups, saucers. They are older than all of us grandchildren. She still wears the aso oke wrappers she wore when Sister Kehinde and Sister Taiwo were baptized. We will not use any of Grandmother’s things. She has given us the space at the back of the house for the chicken coop, and that’s just enough.
We do not need a hammer. That’s what stones are for.
We are digging the hole already. It’s ankle deep and is wide enough for us to stand back-to-back in it. Already we have a heap of sand-dirt. Grandmother says that chicken coops do not need a foundation. We both insist that they do. So we promise that we will spread the sand-dirt all over the back of the yard instead of leaving an unsightly heap.
We do not have a phone. We are thinking of ways to get one.
We are alone at home. Grandmother is out shopping. Our sisters are at work. We are big boys, eleven and nine, old enough to be by ourselves staying out of trouble.
We have walked all over the carpenters’ shed in the next street, picking as many old wood nails as we can find. We are sitting at the back of the house, straightening bent nails with a big stone. Sometimes we think we hear the gates opening, someone coming, but there is no one else here.
The boys next door are playing table soccer in their backyard. We cannot hear the sound of bottle caps falling off the table or large suit buttons pushed into a goalpost made of paper. It is their happiness we can hear, the sounds of boys our age cheering and screaming. It sounds like it is coming from a galaxy far away.
Last Saturday, we walked for fifty minutes till we got to Rita Lori Hotel in Ikeja. There was a wedding reception. We had two black shopping bags. We were going to pick up as many bottle caps as we could find, start our own league. I was going to take all the Coca-Cola covers; all the Fanta and Sprite covers were to be Peter’s. If we got more than enough to split evenly this way, we were going to scratch the covers till the names disappeared and write our player numbers with red ink.
There was no guard at the gate, so we walked in. We searched for covers but there were none. We were too late; the hall had been cleaned up. We went outside to the dumpster behind the hotel. The guard was there smoking cigarettes. He offered them to us. I refused, and he chased us away.
When our hens are grown, they will lay eggs of their own. Then we will sell them for money. We will buy a crate of soda, and drink as often as we like. We will have our own teams and players.
Peter is unhappy with this work. He is focused on the nail in front of him, squinting like the sun is in his eyes even though we are in the shade of the cashew tree, straightening nails as he is supposed to, bottom first then the top, over and over. There is an interesting melody in this repeated banging, easy to get swept up in, gbam gbam gbam, shake your head, gbam gbam gbam, from side to side.
He is sitting with his legs crossed under him like he is in a mosque about to pray.
“Andrew? Are you hungry?” he asks. Looking up at me.
He is just like Mother, staring and squinting like that. I do not mention that. Instead I say, “Let us go and search for something to eat.”
We leave our pile of nails there and go looking for our friend. His name is Solomon, but everyone calls him If You See My Mama. He is a good dancer. He dances all the time. Anytime there’s loud music. Especially when there’s a ready audience, like people gathered at the beer parlor or at Rosetta’s snooker joint. People sometimes give him money. Most give him food.
I can do what he does, dance galala like Daddy Showkey, but I have no plans to dance for food. To dance for food, you have to be able both to dance and to eat anything. I don’t like stew without pepper. I cannot stand vegetable soup with crayfish in it. Peter can’t eat eggs or beans.
Solomon lives with his mother in the house where the TV repairman Uncle George lives. There is a pile of broken televisions on the veranda outside their house. There is a big one with a brown wood-paneled back, the TV like a long rectangle lying on its side. Sometimes, the littler kids sit in it and pretend to be newscasters reading the evening news.
I am Frank Olize
And I am Abike Dabiri
This is NTA Newsline
Today there is no one sitting inside the TV. We go into the house and find Solomon’s mother’s room. It is the third on the left. The one with a charismatic renewal sticker on the door.
It says HONORING MARY, NEVER WORSHIPPING. I have no idea what it means.
Solomon is inside. He opens the door only when he hears my voice.
“Andy dudu.” He calls me by the nickname I hate. His room smells like freshly cooked egusi soup, so I let it go.
“If You See My Mama,” I sing out loud.
“Tell am say I dey for Lagos,” he replies.
“I no get trouble.” Peter supplies this last part. Solomon and I laugh at him because he still makes r sound like w.
“Sit down,” Solomon says as he laughs. “I wan turn garri. You go chop?”
“What type of soup do you have?” I ask.
“Egusi,” he says.
“Nice,” Peter says.
Peter and I sit on the floor. There is a curtain with little blue fish and yellow bubbles demarcating the bed from the rest of the room. Solomon kneels by the bed and pulls out a tiny stove and an old Mobil tin gallon out from under it. He opens the door and places the stove and keg outside. As he pours kerosene into the stove, I tell him what we are up to.
“We are building a chicken coop.”
“Since when?” he asks.
“A few days now,” I reply.
“For sell or for choppin?”
“Both,” I say.
“For selling,” Peter says.
Solomon comes back into the room, picking up a kettle and a box of matches. There is a covered plastic drum at the foot of the bed. He opens it, puts a cup in it, and fills the kettle with water.
“This is the perfect time for chicken business,” he says to us. “It will be almost Christmas by the time the chickens are big, then you can sell them for even more money because of Christmas rush.”
We did not think it would take that long to raise chickens.
“Let me tell you where you can get maize for free.” Solomon puts the kettle to boil and comes to sit on a stool next to us.
“What for?” Peter asks.
“Where?” I ask at the same time.
“For feeding your chickens na.” He looks at Peter like a fly is on his nose. He turns to me and asks, “You know where the bakery is?”
“Not really.” This time I am not ashamed of not knowing. Solomon has lived here since he was five years old. Father brought us here this year to live with his mother, our grandmother. We do not know where our father lives now.
“It is bit far. I don’t know how to describe it. There is the borehole with three huge