She was about five or six years younger than me. Twenty-three or twenty-four, I am not sure. She never told me her age, but I knew she wasn’t born before 1989, the year I was born. She was thin, with a voice that sounded like the high-pitched screech of a car coming to an urgent halt. Sometimes it was too loud, especially when she was telling me to be a man and stop acting like a village sissy; that I could beat my insensitive husband like a man, even though I was a woman. If I could not do it with my bare hands, at least the pestle, knives, frying pan, and water heater did not exist in my kitchen for nothing na.

She was not the type to let you see through her walls, but I had a hunch that she was trying too hard to be tough. That life had dealt with her; lashed her well enough to realize that if you can’t be tough, you should at best try to appear tough. She was a neighbor; the type that pried too much.

“If it ain’t necessary to probe, I ain’t gon’ probe,” she always said in a mock American accent.

She lived alone and would always come knocking on my door after listening attentively for minutes to my agonizing wails: the outcome of the periodic high-handedness of my policeman husband. The other neighbors never came out.

Her name was Julie, and sometimes she tried too much. Couldn’t she see that I wasn’t ready? That I would never be ready? My husband was the kind of husband who became romantic when he wanted something from you. For him, it was sex. I think, in that regard, he stood out. He never coerced me. He never beat me because I said no two consecutive nights when I didn’t feel like it. He punished me in other ways and pretended it was nothing.

For instance, when I eventually let him in after his faux romantic gestures, he would slam too hard, grope roughly, sink his teeth into my lips, and I wouldn’t say, “No, stop. It’s too hard. I can’t take the intensity.” And it would never be rape because he was acting under consent. In that regard, he stood out. He was the policeman he was.

But he beat me. He beat me a lot. There was always something I had done wrong; something I shouldn’t have said; somewhere I shouldn’t have looked. He beat me until he beat the passion I initially nursed for him out of me. The love escaped with the screams that tore out of my throat every time, and the blood that ran out of my broken skin and congealed on it.

But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t fight. I couldn’t report him. I couldn’t do anything, and I was embarrassingly ignorant of the reason why I was so stupid. Just how do you accuse a D.P.O. of domestic abuse? In Nigeria. Just how?

Julie would visit after everything. She would clean me up while insulting my life:

“Mumu like you.”
“Be strong, this woman! Be strong, shuo!”
“I would have said we should plan, but your soft brain will not allow you, chai!”
“I am tired of those ugly screams and cries that sound like the bleat of a goat in labor. Did they not teach you about noise pollution?”
“I know a human rights activist.”
“If I were you, ehn, no man would ever do this to me o. I would cut off his penis. But you na agbaya, so what do I know?”

And I wouldn’t respond because she was right, and because she would then insert two long fingers inside me, and it would feel so good that instead of hitting back at her, I would begin to moan and cry. My husband’s fingers did not massage me the way hers did. It didn’t occur to me how sensitive my nipples were until I met Julie.

“I can’t carry your battles on my head and fight them for you o,” she would say while sorting pills. Or on days when the beating was really intense, on our way to the clinic.
“I can help you. But how can I help you if you don’t want help, ode!”

It burned her that I kept mum most of the time. Most people would have stopped coming. But not her. She said she just liked me.

“See, I just like you o. If I didn’t like you, you think I would come to your house? Wetin concern me? But I just like you, and I don’t know why. One day, all this your rubbish will stop.”

And she would kiss me. The only days she didn’t kiss me were the days my lips got swollen from the trouncing. And even on those days, I wished she did.

Julie hated my husband.

One day, she came over after he had beaten me and gone to work, leaving me to nurse my hurt. She began to curse as usual. In the bathroom, she cursed. When she led me out of the bathroom and into the bedroom I shared with my husband, she cursed.

My head was aching, and her voice began to trigger irritation inside me. She asked me more than once if I didn’t want to go to the hospital; if I didn’t want to go to the hospital? I said no.

“No, Julie. Just touch me. I want you to touch me, please,” I said, my head pounding.

She kept quiet for some time. Her silence was so long I felt she would ignore me. Then she leaned over and kissed me, twisted my nipples in the way only Julie knew how. She was careful not to touch my back because there were wet, painful welts designed on it. But she slowly spread my legs and buried her face in between. Relaxation coursed through me.

I swear, he entered like a night thief. There wasn’t even a sound. It was his voice that announced his presence. He called my name, and I froze. The only words that escaped my lips were:

“Julie, run. Julie, please, run.”

But Julie was Julie. She stood up and began to curse him:

“You bastard of a man! Wicked man like you! Hypocrite policeman! Wife beater! Woman wrapper!! Evil…”

I’m sure Julie didn’t see him pulling the gun out. She would have run. She didn’t see it. I was screaming:

“Runnnn!”

She continued to curse. Then… it was over.

He shot her. Once, twice, thrice. She crumbled. The last words I heard were:

“May worms feast on your pen…”

Written by: Fortune Aganbi, 2019.