I was eleven, and I think I was still in the throes of blinding religion because, otherwise, I would never have allowed a thing like that. I was warm and quivering with malaria. I had sticky lips, a dry mouth, a persistent dull throbbing in my head, and this awful cement in my chest. I had exhausted my dosages and needed new ones. Because my father was steeped in self-inventions, he would always increase my doses. If the doctor prescribed two packets, he would buy five. If the doctor said I needed only two variants of blood tonic, my father would buy one more brand of the purifier. Nobody asked me questions about my body. I was an eleven-year-old boy, a test-run specimen for pills and their reactions because everybody needed me to recover quickly. One of those pills was this chloroquine antimalarial. I took it, but not traditionally because there was no Piriton. There was no Piriton because my father had argued with the nurse that my body would fight the side effects of taking just the chloroquine tablets.
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One evening, I lay in my room after poking through my eba, forcing measly morsels into my mouth and swallowing my prescriptions. I rolled on the sheets. I did not know I had slipped into a tired, insipid sleep until I woke up with a defined clang in my head. My mother and a friend were chatting in the parlour, and I could hear their voices like a dream. The first thing I saw in the half-light of the lantern placed out in the hallway, was the ceiling fan and—what the heck were those crawly-crawly patterns on its blades? I was unfamiliar with trypophobia but I felt my skin rise with hives. A scream stuck itself in my throat; this was more than just a hallucination. There was this intense itch all over my left arm. I sent my fingernails to the source of assault and scratched the devil out. But the devil increased and spread down to my fingers, then leapt and scattered like seeds all over my open thighs. In a bit, I was scratching like a DJ.
At first, I was muffling my fire. But it licked me down to my ass and I slashed the atmosphere with my screams. The conversation in the parlour stopped and my mum and her friend dashed into the room. They were flustered. I couldn’t reply to their “What is wrong? Ki lo sele?” I just kept hollering. My mother stripped me down to my underpants and baptized me with epo pupa – palm oil. The fire whispered across my skin. I stopped yelling and lay in my mother’s arms, quelled. An eleven-year-old baby slick with palm oil.
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“It’s the heat. It’s too much and bad for a sick child”, my mother’s friend muttered.
My mother looked doubtful but she nodded. The next time, she did not witness the fire. She was a civil servant whose station was far away in Imeko, the outskirts of Ogun state. She left Sagamu the following day, a Monday, and I was left at home with my brother, my father, and my cousin whom I called “Aunty Ruth”. Through my bedroom window, I heard my father drive my younger brother to school. I was not strong enough to go to school, but I was able to at least go take a bath. I insisted on eating first. I sat to a breakfast of bread, fried eggs and tea, which I ate with refrains of “Eat a little more. Drink some more tea” from Aunty Ruth. I filled my mouth with hot tea and gulped down my antimalarials. Then I pulled off my clothes and made for the bathroom. Nobody taught me to rush out of there like a mad person. The moment I lathered up my head and turned on the shower and the water flowed over my skin, the flames leapt back to life—a fierce yellow-red rage. I shot out of the bathroom like a rabbit, my prepubescent schlong dangling before my wet black ass. I shrieked my way to the parlour, where Aunty Ruth quickly had the good sense to switch on the fans on me. I lay on the floor rolling and blabbering and scratching out all the flames eating up my skin, eating up my back where my hands could not reach. I yelled at her to help me scratch that place! She dropped the napkin in her hand and set to work. She was too slow, or perhaps the flames just kept jumping from one section of my skin to another, so I found a rough wall and dragged my back along it, still bawling, soap suds all over my face. After an eternity, I was panting on the floor and my father was staring at me.
“What is wrong with you?”
Nobody in the house thought in a definite direction.
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Afternoon, and he had gone out again and my younger brother was not back from school yet. I was on our veranda with Aunty Ruth, playing Ludo. I was thinking I should skip my afternoon dosage when she threw a double-six and my fires returned. I leapt up from the bench and started dancing something terrible. She was bewildered. She called for neighbours but everybody was either still at work or too buried in the dramatic slumber of the idle to bother. Two of the pastors from my church appeared on the scene. Before I could say “scratch!”, one pastor had seized my right hand and the other had barked an instruction to my cousin to hold the left, while he laid his Bible on my head and prayed vigorously. The fires in my flesh grew even more irate. They ate me up crazily but this time, I couldn’t scratch. Aunty Ruth gawped at me. I was bound in the middle of two lunatics who wouldn’t leave my hands alone for me to scratch. I just writhed in their middle, crying and begging them to leave me alone. My pleas gave them the cue to shout louder to the heavenly hosts to deliver this boy from demonic possessions and torment.
Everybody returned later—my mother, my father, my brother, even the Aunty Nurse who got me the first prescriptions—to see the havoc on my body. It was a canvas of bloody steaks and carved flesh. It was a memory of needless wrongs. My mother took the antimalarial pill packet from the cupboard and peered at it suspiciously for a long time. And everybody realized too late what the demon was.
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Years later, those memories now scars that I carry on my skin, I laugh when I think about how that same chloroquine that nearly killed me turned out to be a procedural treatment for Coronavirus.
The universe cracks dirty jokes.
This Creative Nonfiction was published in the October 2022 edition of the WSA magazine.
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This is purely a detailed representation of Nigerian families in the grassroots level and how they react to children’s health. Ayo is such an incredible writer.