The Fear of Homo!

Melvin had learnt the norm in the school: serve yourself. The PG refectory was the small house opposite the PG hostel. It was neater and more spacious than the undergraduates’ refectory where you cannot concentrate on the food because of the flies that buzzed uncontrollably. The PG refectory was not as noisy and overcrowded as the undergraduate refectories where you would have to stay on a long queue for sometime before you could buy food. There was smell of freshness hung in the air. Melvin tried to imitate John, eating with fork and knife. The fork refused to balance in his fingers. He looked up and saw John watching him. He smiled shyly and dropped the fork on the table. John laughed. Melvin stood up and crossed over to a sink on the wall and washed his palms. John looked up still smiling at him. As he ate the Ogbono soup, he was conscious of his white shirt to ensure that the gluey mucilage of the Ogbono soup would not loll down on it. After eating, John paid and they climbed up to his room. While they climbed the staircase, Melvin tried to recall the face of John’s hideous roommate and wondered if the two of them were gay mets. He thought about how he would manage to sleep in the same room with such an ogre without having convulsion. He was afraid, not just because of Efe, also because he wasn’t sure of the kind of person John was. He wouldn’t want a repeat of his secondary school experience, where Senior Bus-stop would have sodomizing him if he hadn’t stabbed him with a kitchen fork. He couldn’t say what the gays liked in him. If John turned to be a gay, he would be the forth gay to make attempt at sodomizing him. Agbo, the huge chemist boy in his street at Aba, with chest like a fox, was the third. He was even the one that gave Melvin the money he used to purchase his JAMB application form. He was so fortunate that he fled from Agbo. He ran into Agbo’s chemist shop for a shed from a heavy rain. While he waited for the rain to stop, he dosed off on a short bench behind the counter. When he opened his eye, the door to the shop was slightly closed and it rocked slightly as the breeze of the rain outside moved it. The shop assumed some kind of unholy quietness that frightened him. The hushing sound of the rain outside swallowed the wailing of the rusty ceiling fan that rarefied the suffocating stench of drugs in the small enclave of the shop. Agbo was sitting behind Melvin caressing his opened chest and the flap of Melvin’s trousers was open. Melvin jerked up in shock and zipped up immediately and turned to Agbo with astonishment in his gassy eyes.

      “What is this?” he managed to berk in cracking voice and the veins that run across his temples stood turgid.

      “KC cool down, I… I’ve not…” Agbo said with some curves of mischievous smiles on his face. Melvin pushed him violently and he fell backwards and hit the back of his head on a counter and the bench overturned and hit him on the face. Before he could get up Melvin pushed the door open and ran out into the rain.

He wouldn’t want to have such an ugly experience again with John, and John had all the while been behaving like Agbo – the unsolicited kindnesses, the mischievous smiles permanently on his face and the steady looks whenever he looked up at Melvin with those bulgy eyes. Efe was away when they returned and that heightened Melvin’s fears. The veranda was quiet with such unholy quietness like in Agbo’s chemist shop. A grasshopper perched on the handrails and catapulted itself to the ground floor into the empty quadrangle. Melvin wondered why such small animal would not fracture any limp when they jump from such heights.  There was nobody in the room. Melvin was tired. He needed to sleep but he couldn’t close his eyes when he is alone with John and he couldn’t remember any story to tell to break the ice cold silence that set in. Then the door swung open and Efe entered the room with his shirt hung on his shoulder exposing hairy abdomen. Melvin breathed out loudly. He would have done the sign of the cross if John was not looking. John was watching with a calm that terrified him the more. Their eyes met and Melvin flinched. He wished he could read what went on in John’s mind.