They started out as fraternities, the cults. Poorer students wanted strong networks, like the ones boarding school pupils had already. At the start, in the 50s and 60s, they were just normal societies. Like many things, they took a brazy turn in the 70s. Splits in the main fraternities led to infighting, then military rulers saw a chance to use them to break up student protests, pumped them with money and cutlasses and guns and set them at the unions. Fraternities began to intimidate professors for grades, prostitute female students, carry machetes and practice idol worship of unseen Gods.

We could ask why the religious, metaphysical element is there but it’s there in a lot of places – it’s there in Parliament, it’s there in the White House. The more pressing question is: why do positive things turn negative in one context, but not in another? In Nigeria it’s like everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. We can’t catch a break and from what I’ve seen online it causes Nigerians a lot of anxiety because they worry there’s something uniquely wrong with them – I mean us – as a people, to have a government like this, a police force like this, a power grid like this and so on. Looking at it from the UK and knowing the people here this explanation seems ridiculous, but it’s hard to argue with the weight of history. I mean, say what you want about phi-bettta-gamma or whatever, but there’s no massacres section on their Wikipedia. I spend a lot of time digesting this stuff. I wrote a whole article and still I didn’t feel like I’d got it all out.

I told my dad about the piece on the motorway, one hour after my tenancy ended. My landlord had put the rent up, and now my boxes blocked the rearview mirror. Other cars glid past like snooker balls.

Article ke? Dad said, looking in the back mirror.

The one for VICE. That’s the first one I’ve got in there.

Are they big?

Yeah they’re big Dad, I said, smiling.

His face softened.

And they paid you for this?

Yes.

VICE, he muttered to himself. That means sin doesn’t it? Is that a good thing to call a magazine?

My mum flashed a smile: what’s the article about?

Cults in Nigeria.

My dad groaned.

Don’t you think people want to read something positive?

I write a lot of positive things.

Eh, about Europe, and America. It’s only Nigeria’s dirty laundry that you want to put out in the open. That’s where they write about Nigeria isn’t it? On Sin dot com.

–

I went out to see a few of my friends from school, the ones who were still in the area. I caught myself looking at them and thinking: Shit, you’re old. I couldn’t shake the feeling we were only kids in adult make-up with fake beards, clothes too big for us, bodies too big for our heads. I saw my friend Ama. At school she’d been one of those people you never saw on their own.

We were at a pub in Purley, a little Brexit but the drinks were cheap – wooden walls and stained red and gold carpets, and a contingent of sixty-year-olds who never seemed to leave. It was the same pub Ama’s dad had caught her at back when we were younger. We must’ve been sixteen or something and he dragged her out by her hair and it was a big deal on Snapchat, one of those vids that got screen recorded so many times the captions stacked on top of each other until you could barely see what was going on. I brought the story up again to liven up the conversation and she did one of those fake smiles you do to crazy people. Ama is someone whose face is the mirror of her emotions, she can’t help it. She must have grown up in a very different family to me to get away with being so open. Or maybe a similar family, but one she dealt with differently. I dropped it regardless – I didn’t want her to be mad at me and if we started talking embarrassing stories from them times I’d be in trouble anyway. I ordered her another drink. We ran into a few people from school who wanted to know what I was doing, but it was never what they expected it to be.

I got back and my parents were watching MasterChef in the dark. Somebody’s main course had fallen apart. The lamb was overcooked, the fondant potatoes – something that had never looked appetising to me at all and that I take as proof that people will eat anything if you say it in French – were hard, the jus hadn’t reduced. The contestant brought the food to the judges with shame deep in her eyes.

I don’t think I’ve shown you what I’m really capable of, she said.

No, you haven’t, my dad said, you’re going home!

He chuckled.

–

My mum was shouting to my dad – not at him – in a mix of Yoruba and English. She took the last can out of her shopping bag and slammed it down on the counter then drew her finger across the top of the tin as though marking a pie chart, dividing it in half and then half again. My dad was ambivalent. His body too, was split down the middle – one hand in his pocket signalling calm, the other with one single finger pointing, signalling husbandly outrage on his wife’s behalf. Something to do with hitting something else. Oko, the word for car. Something that happened a long time ago, something to do with never forgetting. I heard the word for car again and cut in asking if the Volkswagen was ok.

I said oko, she said, not ọkọ̀.

Someone hit your farm?

Your dad’s father had a farm back in your dad’s town.

There are some legal issues, my dad said.

People with issues in their head, she said.

Oh, I said.

In your father’s family.

I glanced at my dad. That sounds tough, I said.

They have a more forthright approach to dealing with issues, he said.

Forthright. I tried to understand: How do you mean?

They’re not as Western, he said. They value different things.

Mum laughed, almost a snort. She mimed washing her hands and shook them in front of her.

God help me, she said. My husband works for the United Nations.

My mum picked the blue reusable shopping bag off the countertop, folded it loudly and stuffed it into the drawer under the sink. I looked at my dad, who now had both hands in his pockets. He said something in Yoruba, more calmly. My mum replied and they nodded conspiratorially. The discussion had closed. My dad pointed at me with his lips, then the hallway, then me, then the hallway again.

Before you write another article, he said. On WICKEDNESS.

–

Mum bumped into me getting out the shower at three in the afternoon as she was coming back from her prayer group and raised her eyebrows. I waved at her. I went downstairs to eat and found my dad waiting for me in the kitchen. I sat down with my cereal and he stood over me with his hands clasped behind his back. He cleared his throat.

We’re going to work on a little project today, he said, in the garden.

Any discussion of my dad must include the garden. It’s a monument to the strength of an African man’s will; unbending, unyielding water crashing endlessly on life’s shores, and less a location itself than a collection of textures and intersecting planes, grass slopes, shallow brick walls, pink and green and lavender and yellow, with green and purple hedges on either side. Recently something had been eating at the rose bushes. My dad didn’t know what, and he was determined to compensate for the damage in other areas until the threat could be apprehended.

We went to work repotting the hydrangea bushes. I squatted down to hold their ceramic pots steady, while my dad hacked at the soil to get them free and then held the whole bush aloft with one arm, like a heretic’s head, leaving me to scramble for a new pot. He lowered the bush back into position and we alternated between pouring new soil and patting down what was there already into place. Two hours, thirty pots. Rinse and repeat.

That was Saturday.

On Sunday the project was raking the leaves. I went round after him kicking the leaves into tighter piles, then circling round to bag them up. I had a thought.

Do you have any gloves? I asked.

Gloves? He said.

For the leaves.

What, are they going to cut you?

You don’t have garden gloves?

Dad put one hand on my shoulder.

It’s good to feel the plants, he said.

I had one earbud in and I listened to a podcast on the Iraq War as analysed through Simpsons episodes. They went over this Treehouse of Horror episode where Kang and Kodos invade Springfield and blame it on their weapons of mass disintegration. You see Tony Blair and these suits now on daytime TV and life insurance ads but twenty years ago he was lying so Britain could burn people alive. Listening to all this stuff made me feel that people have very short memories when it comes to the things they’re ashamed of.

I picked a thorn out my thumb and sucked the blood out the wound. Rusty, slightly sweet. Just then Dad’s rake hit on a snag at the very back of the garden, close to the fence. He called me over to look, scraped the top layer of leaves off and saw something that made him put the rake down. The flesh was grey and wet but the ribcage was clearly visible, about the size of a small dog. I couldn’t make out where the head was supposed to be.

Oh my God, I said.

Dad squatted over the body. He took his hood down, exposing his bald head to the rain. So you were the bastard that attacked my rose bushes, he said. I told God to punish you, and my God is a mighty God because you have been struck down. You didn’t know it was my roses you were eating. But you know now.

–

A few days after that I met back up with Rika. We had met on the apps, although we had crossed paths a few years before at a young journalist conference in Hamburg. She was much more attractive, in person, than I remembered her being. She had big eyes and short black hair, a kind of sickly, striking, look to her cheeks. She talked to me about the things her ex-boyfriend had done to her and the state of the publishing industry, and then she asked me what I wrote about for my last article.

It was about cults in Nigeria, I said.

I got voted most likely to join a cult in high school you know, she said.
I continued talking. The cults I was writing about weren’t religious, or at least they didn’t start that way. By the late 80s, early 90s, they were out of control, I said. Animal sacrifices at crossroads, mass shootings, all that stuff. I found this anti-cult poster from the 90s.

Rika took my phone. The screen read:

SECRET CULT IS DEATH. THE FEDERAL MINISTRY OF NIGERIA WARNS THAT SECRET CULT IS DANGEROUS TO YOUR SOUL.

She pursed her lips.

Dangerous to your soul, she said. I like that. I wish the British government warned about dangers like that.

When it was time to part, I went for a hug but she offered a handshake instead. Fair enough, I thought. Leaving, I came through central Brixton and the crush of people outside the station towards Electric Avenue, selling incense, stepping around homeless people with cardboard signs and caps turned up in front of them. Many old people too but getting older myself I understood that old and young were different points in the same stream. I considered what my dad would’ve looked like passing through this same street ten or twenty years ago, how he would’ve dressed, how he would’ve walked, even. Rika texted while I was on the bus. She wanted me to go for dinner with her and her parents next week. The bus turned suddenly and I nearly fell over.

I got back late, maybe one in the morning. There was a red BMW parked in the driveway and lights on in the living room. Coming through the doorway I peered in: there my parents were, on the couch with a man who looked familiar but who I couldn’t quite place, moist skinned and with a belly like a sawed-off basketball stuffed under his jumper. He was talking about a restaurant to my dad, about a customer trying to leave without paying. The man on the couch described sneaking through the kitchen to confront the customer with a card reader and a wooden spoon. He saw me in the hallway and waved me into the living room.

Look at him, the man said, he doesn’t remember me.

Of course he remembers you, my dad said.

Where do you remember me from?

I said he’d been at my confirmation party. That was always a good guess. The man nodded patiently, then roared with laughter. Closer now I noticed that my mum had bags under her eyes, and as the man began a story about himself and a group of Chinese seafood suppliers going drinking at a pub in Hastings, she got up abruptly, saying she should go sleep.

No, stay here, stay with us! The man said. He shifted in his seat but his belly seemed always to stay in the same place.

I’m so tired.

We can sleep when we’re dead!

Nobody will die in Jesus’ name, she said. Bami, this is your Uncle Bolaji. Make sure you switch the light off when you come upstairs. Last night you forgot.

Uncle said he should be going as well. He gathered himself to his feet heavily and mentioned something about inviting the family to his restaurant. Chioma will be so happy to see you, he said.

When you come back in the day, Dad said, I’ll show you the garden properly.

Talk louder man, Uncle said, you’re slurring.

I’ll show you the garden.

Which garden?

My dad puffed his cheeks out and Bolaji slapped him on the back.

You know this man was the only man at university with a garden, he said. He fenced off a section of bush behind the Pharmacology labs, like it was Hyde Park.

–

My dad rolled fluffy balls of pounded yam greedily between his fingers and dipped them into rich red and green stew. He dabbed the fingertips of his right hand in the bowl of water and reached for his glass of Guinness, burping and covering his mouth with a napkin. Bolaji watched him happily as he ate, and then craned his head around and watched a server clear a table. Eagle-eyed, he slipped easily between total agitation and relaxation, not unlike a father watching his child on the swing sets.

They played the specifics of their shared history out for my benefit, my mum chipping in to clarify or affirm – best friends at university but separated by migration, re-united by migration as well when Uncle came to the UK looking for a job in a kitchen and slept on my dad’s couch until he found one. They were separated again when Bolaji went to Lagos to set up a restaurant there. Uncle tired of this line of conversation quickly, I sensed it made him feel old. He asked what I was doing with my time.

Gardening with my dad, I said, and trying to place pitches, after my last article.

What’s your last article about?

Cults in Nigeria. His eyes lit up; he collected himself. He took on a haughty look and folded his arms.

Cultism, he said, what do you know about cultism?

I know what I researched, I said.

That’s not knowledge. In the bush they say there are two kinds of knowledge – the kind that you know from what you have seen with your own eyes and your own ears, and everything else. Research is not real knowledge.

So I should join a cult?

No. But you should interview someone who did.

Uncle wrote a number on a napkin and handed it over. Next to the number he’d written his own name.

But the original cultist is right over there, he said, pointing. International Soul Cultist Extraordinaire.

Taking his napkin and turning it over in his hands my dad tore at the paper and placed the scraps in a pile on his plate. He nodded, only slightly, eyes lowered.

It wasn’t one of those terrible ones that they have these days, Uncle continued. It was a lot of fun when we were doing it. That’s not to say nobody got hurt. There was a bit of wahala. But these kids these days, they’re crazy. They’re shooting their professors.

I nodded. The things I was researching happened in my parents’ country, in their lifetimes. Why shouldn’t they be a part of them? Why not a cult, I thought to myself. People do all kinds of things when they’re young.

What was it called? I said.

We were the Norse. Everybody was a Pirate back in those days, but your dad – he pointed again, enthusiastically – he was a bit of a maverick.

He came up with the name?

Oh, he came up with everything. The name, the pledge, the colour scheme, the logo.

Wow.

Yes o. He was actually the leader, you know. The chief.

Bolaji that’s OK, Mum said.

He reached into his jacket pocket. Where’s the dis-ting. I have a picture somewhere. We used to call him Magnus.

Because of the Norse?

See? Uncle clicked his fingers, you got it. This kid has sense oh. You dey raise am well.

Magnus, I thought, a whole new name. An old name actually. I’d been calling him Dad, but he’d had a whole lifetime’s worth of people calling him Magnus, the Scandinavian name, in the cult that he founded and designed the logo for. By now he’d taken his own napkin apart totally and started on my mum’s. The pieces were all the same size, they were all the same square shape. He glanced back at me, a few times. I didn’t know how to read it. I thought for a second he was going to jump out his chair and drag me out the restaurant like a naughty child. It was only later I realised he was worried I was judging him. I had never seen embarrassment on his face before.

–

Rika was late and I was on time. Her parents trailed behind her, looking like college professors, which is what they were. They had their arms around each other and their coats were nearly identical shades of brown, something akin to old corrugated iron.

She and her parents talked mainly to each other, not cutting me out of the conversation but not leaving space for me either. Her father had the flu, it was going around. Rika’s mother had had a hip replacement a few months before. By the time dessert came they were in an argument about whose side of the family was weirder, the mum’s or the poorer father’s. I sat back and observed, I sat back and thought. There’s self-obsessed, but what’s the word for when a group of people are obsessed with each other? Maybe they don’t have one, I thought, or at least one that isn’t to do with nationalism and ethnic cleansing.

I checked for the best route home and saw there was a train strike on and the bus would take an hour and a half. There was no way my parents would still be awake. I didn’t want to stand in the street for too long so I started walking to the bus stop, down a quiet suburban street. How many families on this road alone, I thought, a driveway and a front garden and one point five children, fifteen years of selective silence, places in the parents’ minds the kids can’t go. A waiting room, one person standing and another sedated lying down, some callipers, some screaming, a twelve to sixteen hour wait then a baby’s born, then a mother, then a father, all one after the other in that order. There was a gust of wind; I pulled my coat collar up. A red Mercedes pulled up alongside me and the window rolled down. The driver shouted blackie! out the window and sped off. I put my headphones in and checked my phone again for buses. A few minutes later I saw headlights in front of me and turned to see a red car driving up again and I quickened my pace, but the car was a BMW not a Mercedes. The window rolled down. Uncle Bolaji looked at me, appalled.

Walking at this hour? You don’t have a car?

He pulled over and waited for me to get in. The car smelled of mothballs and cologne.

Seeing a lady friend? He said.

I considered if I had been.

You know what, he said, I don’t want to know.

He typed a postcode into the sat-nav; it was my post code. The sat-nav was an overlarge screen surrounded by silver metal rails which curved like the lane we were turning off now and onto a two-lane road towards a roundabout.

What’s her name? he said.

Rika.

Just Rika?

I don’t know her surname yet, you know.

Ah. That’s not good. You don’t know her surname, and you’re sleeping with her?

I’m not sleeping with her.

Of course not, he said. Don’t tell me.

We came closer to the roundabout. Bolaji had brought a smell with him into the car, it came over the air-con, slightly bitter, malty. One hand came off the steering wheel and gripped my shoulder. I felt we were going to clip the parked cars to our left.

You shouldn’t let the dark meet you outside, especially not with women, he said. It doesn’t end well. No, listen. I know what you’re thinking. I’m being a hypocrite. But it’s because I’m a hypocrite that I’m saying something worth listening to.

What were you up to?

Me myself I wasn’t out tonight actually, he said. I was at home having a few beers and I wanted to go for a drive.

Oh ok.

I looked out the window.

A few beers?

Maybe three or four.

How’s Chioma? I said. You said she was feeling ill before?

She’s better now. You know when you have a wife and they get ill you can’t be out gallivanting the way you are now. I remember your dad at uni, he missed a whole week because your mother had a cold.

I reached and turned the radio down.

I thought my parents met in London, I said.

Yes, he said. Yes, London.

But you’re saying they knew each other in Nigeria.

Yes. Yes, Nigeria too. But not very well, he said.

They were going out with each other, in Nigeria.

Yes.

But they didn’t know each other well?

No, they knew each other. But not as well as they were going to. That was the first time, he said, they met in Nigeria the first time.

Why did they stop talking, I said, my parents. What happened?

You should ask them, he said. They’ll tell you.

I looked over at him.

Alright, he said, alright. So they started at university. But your grandad, he had a farm. Farming makes people strict. And he was Christian as well, not like the Christians they have here, these ones that they don’t go to church. Christian with a capital C. When he found out your dad was seeing someone, he locked him in the basement for a week. Word got out. When the Norse found out we went down and beat hell out of that your grandad. We thought Magnus would be thankful, but he was mortified. The whole campus was talking about him. He stopped speaking to your mother.

There was that name again, Magnus. And a basement for a week. I thought of a little window up near the ceiling, some metal bars. A crowd of people with mutton chops and those cardboard cut-out afros they had in the eighties, stomping on my grandad’s head.

You happy now? He said.

I don’t know, I said. I’m still thinking about it.

It’s not that much to think about.

A cult beating up my grandad?

He laughed, a roar. You don’t know Nigeria, he said. You don’t even know England. That kind of thing happens every day.

I shrugged.

I think it’s good I told you. It’s good for bonding. So what if your mother disowns me. You should come over for dinner sometime. Chioma would be happy to see you again, she loves kids.

I’m not a kid.

Sure you’re not, Uncle said. You know we had a boy like you, but he didn’t make it out the hospital.

He flicked the indicator and craned his head around a bend in the road.

I told you the one about knowledge, he said, I’ll tell you another one. In Nigeria, they say it’s better to never have children than to have one child and lose it. That’s the worst. We say if a man with one child loses it, he’s lost his life.

I folded my hands in my lap.

I didn’t know about that.

How would you, you just met me a month ago.

He clapped me on the shoulder again.

Sorry about this jinky-janka driving oh, normally when I’m drunk I just – he made a gliding motion with his hand. I must be getting old.

The streetlights bathed him in waves of amber light through the window. I saw his whole face relax like somebody sleeping, just for a moment, then it snapped back like a rubber band.

–

A week later the foxes came again. My dad noticed when he was having his morning black breakfast tea; he dropped his mug and it shattered. I found him in the kitchen with my mother’s hands on his shoulders. Bolaji was visiting Nigeria for work, and Dad’s centre of gravity had shifted back to her.

I think the garden centre is middle class heaven, but in a pagan sense. The Greeks thought you’d wander forever in foggy fields, not knowing your own name, and this has come to pass in our world: all around me, pensioners changed direction in the middle of the aisle, looked left and right and left again, down at their paper maps and out in front of them in vast open spacing, calling out to one another with hoarse voices.

We’d gone to replace them but we couldn’t find the same kind of roses. Light pooled thick and hot under the greenhouse ceilings and I felt like an ant under a magnifying glass. I considered my dad, small and exhausted, walking through long aisles under the glass and dirty white plastic. His arms were tucked tight to his sides and his face was worn out, and I found myself feeling protective. All he wanted was his family and his garden. Why had I never seen him this way before?

What do you think? He asked.

I don’t know.

He made a face.

Maybe the dog roses.

That could work.

Bush in trolley he went to find a garden centre worker. He looked around and mumbled something.

Excuse me? The woman said. I’m sorry, I can’t hear you.

Do you have anything to deal with foxes? He said.

Deal with them?

She showed us to a section with electric boxes that emitted an ultrasonic noise when the animals came close. I picked up the slim white box and handed it to him.

And it hurts the foxes? Dad said.

The lady crossed her arms. It’s very uncomfortable for them yes.

I know they must have traps for foxes, Dad said later, when we were in the car. Maybe you can look on the internet and see if there’s one we can build. We can try this ultrasonic thing first but I think we’ll need something more vigorous.

I’ll do that, I said, another project.

By the time we got back I was tired. Dad went straight to the garage to put on his wellies. I went upstairs to wash my hands and he waved at me from the garden, looking much happier. When I went back down he was on the phone. He saw me and pressed the phone to his cheek, scratching his bald head.

Your Uncle’s dead, he said. A car crash. Someone hit him while he was parked.

–

My dad baked a Victoria sponge to take with us. Both my grandparents were dead but I had never really known them, them living in Nigeria, and I could only remember meeting them a few times. I had seen Uncle not long ago and I could see his face still in my mind very clearly. It made me weak to think there was no longer a real counterpart to my memories of him, that his face was the face of a corpse now.

Other relatives were in Uncle’s kitchen, they were in the hallway and the living room, compiling paperwork, cooking food, on the phone to work outside, but even with all the people there was a white peace in the house like a church at night, after the service is over and the wine and the host has been packed away and all that’s left is the smell of incense and the light through the stained glass windows. Chioma was on the couch trying to watch television. Dad put his arm around her. For a second she didn’t realise he was there.

I’m so sorry, he said.

How was the drive over, she said. Was it fine?

Dad shrugged. Chioma nodded. She looked up suddenly, as though hearing something upstairs.

Did you hear?

Yes. Yes Chioma.

No, she shook her head. Did you hear?

No.

I got the phone call this morning. Bolaji had a family in Lagos. A wife and three kids. She changed the channel. I always said, you know, if he wanted kids we could adopt one. After what happened. And then, when we had money, I said we should do IVF.

My dad put the cake down on the coffee table.

Can you believe it? Chioma went on. Thirty-four years of marriage. His oldest child is twenty. Twenty years old.

Jesus. Twenty years.

My mother and I looked at each other and back at Chioma on the couch. She looked out of her body with grief.

What a husband I had.

She changed the channel.

Bami! She called, there’s food in the kitchen.

I nodded at her but didn’t move. The flow of tears subsided. She looked directly at my dad’s face.

Did you know? She said.

Know what?

What do you mean what, she said calmly. What else?

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

What else would I be talking about?

He wiped his hand on his trouser, shifted in his seat. He raised his eyebrows, inviting her to continue speaking, to clarify again.

Oh okay, she said. I understand. You think I’m an idiot. You think you can come here and lie to my face. You and Bolaji were probably laughing about it for years. Just keep it going, another year, let’s see how far we can push our luck with this mumu. You feel bad now, abi? Okay. You will never feel good again.

My dad was rubbing his brow. He was looking across Chioma, into thin air. Her neck tensed, a smile on her face.

That’s fine, she said. But if you think I believe that nonsense look on your face you must be an idiot.

There was silence, the others in the house had stopped speaking. I kept wondering why he wasn’t moving. He mumbled something, getting to his feet, Chioma said in an even voice that things would not be well with him and that he would not live to see the fruit of his labours. She threw the TV remote and went on cursing, louder now, as the three of us went for the door. She threw the Victoria sponge at us and it landed in the vestibule and the plate shattered and sprayed shards on our legs. We got into the car and drove home.

Image © Markus Spiske