Before the posters arrived, word had reached us about a new football academy coming to town. Celestine’s father brought the news after picking up bits of it at the shop where he buys his taba. The rumour, he tells us, is that the academy will recruit talented boys who play street football and ship them to English clubs in London and Manchester.
‘Boys, this is the best thing that’ll happen to you after Messi and Ronaldo,’ he says.
My teammates and I are playing a football match against the Sunshine Boys in the inter-streets tournament the morning Celestine’s father brings the Rising Stars Academy poster to us. Majid, our goalkeeper, has just saved our team from conceding a goal in the ninetieth minute when we see Celestine’s father by the touchline, standing like a coach. After the game, he shows us the poster, the academy’s address affirming his words about English clubs beckoning us: House no. 49, British-American Street.
‘Boys,’ he says, holding the poster to his chest. ‘Are you ready?’
For years, we’ve prayed for this call from England’s top-flight clubs. For years, we’ve prepared for it. With no access to turf, we play football on the sand at Lambu Field. Without boots, shin guards or knee socks, we nurse scabs or hamstrings weekly, but the injuries never stop us. We adopt the training strategies that have worked for football-loving nations. Five-a-side, for example. And as it has for the Samba Boys of Brazil, five-a-side has built our mental strength, increased our pace, sharpened our dribbles. The poster says these are the skills the Rising Stars Academy is looking for.
Soon after Celestine’s father brings the good news, me and Majid and Tola and Celestine and Bawa are on our way to see the Rising Stars Academy at British-American Street. Even as we walk to find this academy that promises to make us stars, Majid won’t stop talking about his save in the inter-streets match.
‘Shut up,’ says Tola, our striker, whose equalizer earned us a draw in the game. ‘We for lose that match if I no score with that bicycle kick.’ He makes an acrobatic move in the air, recreating his dynamite goal against the Sunshine Boys.
Celestine and Bawa are our defenders. They stop the silky opposition striker’s shots from reaching our goalie. Celestine blames Bawa for the goal we conceded in today’s game.
‘You for cover my spot when I overlap,’ Bawa replies. ‘Cheap goal they scored us.’
‘Lucky, wetin you think about the match?’ Celestine asks me. I am the attacking midfielder, and my position on the pitch, number 7, has earned me the nickname Lucky. The four boys made me the team’s captain because I’m two years older than them.
Usually, after every lost or drawn game, I identify players’ positions that need to improve before the next match. But because I don’t want us to fight over who’s at fault for today’s loss before we reach House no. 49, I change the subject.
‘Name your best club,’ I say to no one in particular. We are at the express, waiting for cars to stop speeding so we could cross the road. We know each other’s favourite club. It’s the topic that brings out our radiance. We talk about it every weekend when watching and arguing about football in Celestine’s father’s house. Celestine’s father sometimes referees our matches, a plastic whistle between his lips, which he blows for a penalty, a free kick, a foul. He connected his black-and-white TV to a frying pan-shaped satellite dish mounted against a wall at the back of his house. That satellite fetches football from the Premier League and La Liga and the Bundesliga.
‘Manchester United for life,’ says Tola, kicking pebbles with his toes that are peeking out of his rubber sandals. They are dry date palms, his toes, thick with veins. He says they will freshen up when he goes to England and starts playing footy in Adidas boots.
‘Me too. I want United because of Cristiano Ronaldo,’ Celestine says. We don’t argue. None of us are in the mood for the Messi and Ronaldo debate this morning.
‘I still want Chelsea,’ Majid says, and we all chant, ‘The Blues.’ We hail his dream club’s nickname while we wonder if Majid knows he may never play for Chelsea. No European club has a small-sized goalkeeper between the woodworks. Short goalies can’t intercept set pieces from corner kicks and free kicks.
‘Always the Gunners,’ I state my love for Arsenal. Bawa high-fives me. Like me, he also wants to play for the north-London club.
At Township Stadium, we see a big poster of our former national team captain, Jay Jay Okocha. He’s advertising Macleans toothpaste. Footballers are brand ambassadors for everything, even Ponzi schemes. Jay Jay’s picture on the poster reminds me of the Nigerian Super Eagles’ forthcoming World Cup qualifying match against the Bafana Bafana of South Africa. In this stadium. Because we can’t afford the tickets, we’ll listen to the live commentary on Celestine’s father’s battery-powered radio.
The cornrows on Jay Jay’s head are neat. He smiles at the camera, shining his thirty-two. We admire his teeth, like we do all professional footballers’. Ours are the colour of stomach acid, and you should see Majid’s bucked dentition. They are cowry shells with roots, crowded all over his mouth. His mother said he took after his father’s teeth, even though we’ve never seen the boy’s old pops to determine the truth of this tale. Majid’s father had lulled him to sleep one morning and placed him on the bed before walking out of their home, according to his mother. Majid says when his father sees him on TV in a Chelsea jersey, he’ll come begging for mercy. Whenever he says this, we shrug and nod.
Anyway, we just walked past Township Stadium into Angwan Mata Street. I have a fresh blister on my big toe from last week’s training. It hurts like I’m stepping on hot coal, but I don’t walk with a limp. Celestine’s father said we must not show any signs of injury to the scouts. ‘No football club wants a dog with one and a half legs on their team,’ he’d said, grinning. Sometimes he talks like that, like someone whose head is not correct, and Celestine says the taba his father sniffs has blackened his brain and lungs. All day, he coughs and coughs, hacking thick, yellow phlegm from his throat.
Celestine says when he begins to earn pounds as a player at Old Trafford, he’ll fly his father to a hospital in Manchester that’ll replace the old man’s system. And we all agree his pops needs a new brain and new lungs. We agree he needs a new satellite dish that isn’t as big and ugly as the one that faces the sky out back, constantly searching for signals. We’ll mount a new one for him, we agree, which will tower high up like a slim skyscraper. He’s the only grown man that sees the stars in us. The rest of our parents only insult us for bringing home injuries and lice, saying we should read our books and quit building castles in the air.
In Angwan Mata, girls are on the street waiting for fancy cars with tinted windows to pick them up. Gutters are spilling thick, black water, the stench so heavy it would make you gag. But you’ll forget the smell of sewage when these girls jiggle the jigida beads around their waists in front of you, smacking gums. Once, on our way home after playing Sunday footy, Bawa had catcalled a light-skinned girl with hair like the peacock’s tail, and the girl had spread her ten fingers in the air, cursing him, uwaka, shege. That day, we looked like the words she hurled at us. Our feet were covered in mud, black blood caked on our legs from hard tackles on the pitch. Drenched in sweat, we reeked of fermented millet. Passing them now, Bawa says,
‘Wait make I reach England, I go come back to fuck all of una.’ We all laugh, even though Celestine’s father warns that too much sex isn’t good for a footballer. ‘When you waste your energy on a woman, you’ll become a lazy baboon on the pitch.’ Bawa doesn’t care. He vows to sleep with all the girls that broke-shamed him in Angwan Mata once he becomes a professional footballer.
We enter the long, meandering road of British-American Street. We see green lawns and unclogged gutters as we search for house number 49. Before today, we’d only seen this street on the TV when the governor cut ribbons, commissioning new roads or streetlights. Our street hasn’t had electricity for months because the power company is load-shedding, and our mothers say we don’t even have the fridges and air conditioners and washing machines and water heaters that weigh down street transformers. British-American, we hear, frowns at boys like us. So, we’re wearing our Christmas and Eid clothes.
House no. 49 sits on a hilly road, towering above other houses. All the boys who play footy in our town gather outside the gate. I wonder what competition our team would face to beat these boys. The Rising Stars poster says twelve players will be selected, trained and flown to England. We join the other boys and wait by the gate. The sun today has hatched six inches above our heads. It is draining, sucking dry the water in our bodies. The crowd swells with more boys in their club jerseys, their names and positions printed at the back of the t-shirts. We are all waiting in front of this house with tall fences topped with razor wire. Scrawled on the gate in bold black letters: BEWARE OF DOGS. This house, built with marble, roofed with asbestos the green of algae, fascinates me and my teammates. We wonder if this is where we’d stay after the Rising Stars scouts have selected us.
Last time I saw a large crowd stand in front of a building this big was when I escorted my mother to the Chinese company where she works, at Pump Street. It is a mining company, and they’d called for applicants interested in drilling valuable stones from the ground to come for interviews. My mother, who hadn’t worked for foreign men before, asked me to accompany her as her interpreter, as if I was a boy with many languages on his tongue. The Chinese man who addressed them then said they could start work the same day without interviews or pay negotiations.
‘Can you dig money from the ground with shovels?’ he asked, and the crowd chorused, ‘Yes sir,’ as if responding to a politician’s big-big grammar. Since then, my mother has been shovelling piles and piles of limestone and no longer stands straight. Celestine tells me that the doctors in England have the best medicine for straightening bent backs like my mother’s.
The man who comes out of House no. 49 is so big we can’t see his neck. He walks slowly, like a crab on two legs. When he clears his throat and speaks, his deep, raspy voice jolts our tired bodies back to life.
‘Welcome to Rising Stars, footy players.’
I’ve muscled my way to the front of the crowd, my team behind me. With a close-up view, I see the man clearly. His skin is as fine as today’s bread, fresh out of the oven. When he speaks, he flashes the pinkness of his lower lip. He’s a man that eats a red apple a day to keep the doctor away.
‘First, there’ll be trials. To qualify for this exercise, you’ll purchase a form. More details are on this flier,’ he says, raising a bundle of pamphlets, ‘which I’ll distribute to everyone.’
The boy in front of me nudges the boy beside him, and the nudged boy raises his hand.
‘Yes?’ says Pink Lips.
‘How much is the form, sir?’
‘You’ll find more information on this flier.’ Pink Lips then apologises for his manners and introduces himself.
‘I was so impressed by your turnout that I forgot to mention my name.’
He clears his throat, raises his voice: ‘Call me Mr. Ezekiel, Rising Stars Sporting Director.’ I commit the name and designation to memory. These are the details Celestine’s father will ask for.
‘Successful footballers will be housed in a boot camp for three months, where they’ll be trained and drilled before we introduce them to clubs in England,’ he adds.
My teammates and I have questions, but because we don’t know how Mr. Ezekiel would react if asked these questions, we collect the fliers and hold our chests firm after seeing the fee for the trials’ form. We walk back home, dragging our legs in the thick dust of the untarred roads that lead to our street.
Jollof and fried meat after a long day in the sun replenish your lost nutrients.
Celestine’s father has prepared lunch: rice and small chunks of beef heaped on a tray, the room heavy with the smell of curry, as if lost in transit.
‘First of all, boys, sit down and eat.’ We don’t say our prayers before digging into the mound of rice with our hands, the taste of Maggi chicken seasoning coating my tongue with a sweetness I can’t describe. Celestine’s father is sitting in the corner, smiling as he watches us eat.
‘Did they put you boys through a drilling exercise? Why so hungry?’
‘Mr. Ezekiel said we need to buy a form first,’ Celestine says with a mouthful of beef.
‘Mr. Ezekiel?’
‘Sport Director of Star Rise,’ I say, and before I can correct myself, Celestine brings out the flier from his pocket. He unfolds it with his left hand and passes it to his father. The man picks up his glasses, squared with brown frames, and reads.
‘What? All this money for the trials’ form?’
We nod. He sighs.
‘You boys will have to tell your parents. This is a golden opportunity.’
Even though the taba Celestine’s father sniffs sometimes makes his head dusty, our mothers respect him because he speaks like a man from the ancient days. Knowing that our parents wouldn’t budge if we told them ourselves, me and Majid and Bawa and Tola prostrate in front of him after our meal, as if we’d agreed to do this before arriving here.
‘Sir, will you please speak to our mothers about this form?’ I plead for the four of us. Celestine’s father asks us to sit down. ‘Boys, you don’t have to beg me to do you a favour.’
The day he comes to our house, my mother is at home nursing her wound. A shovel had struck her right foot at the mining site, opening a gash that revealed raw, red meat, and her boss asked her to stay home on unpaid leave and treat herself.
‘Nobody asked you to be careless with the spade,’ he’d told her.
Celestine’s father meets me and my mother at the veranda, sorting what’s left of the beans at home for the day’s dinner. He shows my mother the flier his son had given him, which I’m yet to tell her about, and explains the academy to her.
‘Papa Celestine, this money is double his school fees, which I never even pay.’
‘Think how bright Lucky’s future will be in the white man’s land. He’s a bright boy who will excel as an attacking midfielder abroad.’
A smile escapes from the corner of my mother’s mouth, even though she doesn’t know the position of a midfielder on a pitch. She must be comforted by the fact that a bright future for me means a bright future for her. She buries her eyes in the tray of beans for a minute or so.
‘Make I think about am, sir,’ she tells Celestine’s father, raising her head. She stands up and curtsies on her left leg, saying, ‘Thank you, Papa Celestine.’ The man scurries to stop her from further bending her knees.
‘No problem. Please, take care of your leg, madam.’
I cancelled training for the next few days. I stay home, dressing and redressing my mother’s wound, helping her with the chores. I tell her about footy players who, after reaching England, flew their mothers in to watch their sons play footy in stadiums with white, halogen lights and green, turfed pitches. My mother asks if I’m fully fit for the trials, which I answer in the affirmative. On the fifth day of my pleas, she borrows the money from one of her colleagues and tells me to promise her I’ll pass the Rising Stars’ trials.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Swear to God, Lucky.’
I touch the tip of my tongue with my index finger and point to heaven.
Tola’s mother, who hawks sachet water at the motor park, has also given him the form’s money. She gives him the money on the condition that Tola will take care of his younger sister when he makes it to England.
Majid and Bawa’s mothers are still raising the money for their sons’ forms. Deadline for the form is approaching. Majid and Bawa suggest we forget the Rising Stars and focus on the ongoing inter-streets tournament, where we could be crowned champions for the first time.
‘Seriously?’ Celestine asks them, sounding like his father. ‘Me, I no go play street footy for life. Una hear?’
So, every evening after school, we wash baking pans and mix dough and bag warm bread at the local bakery on Niger Avenue. We save every kobo from our labour for Majid and Bawa’s forms. We’ll leave no teammate behind, we’ve agreed. The bakery’s manager sits on a swivel chair all evening, rubbing his big belly, ordering us around and threatening to throw us out if we complain. The day our collective piggy bank fills up with our wages, we break it and add the money to Majid’s and Bawa’s mothers’ savings. That same day, five of us buy the forms and watch our dreams begin to take fine shapes before our eyes.
Celestine’s father is filling out the forms for us. We sit in a circle on the linoleum and watch him write legibly, his handwriting neat as though a computer had typed the words. Afterwards, we return the forms to House no. 49. This time, a man sits on a blue plastic chair under a yellow canopy. He’s placed huge rocks on the stacks of forms submitted to him. He isn’t Mr. Ezekiel, but he tells us the forms will reach the sporting director. The man cross-checks the forms to ensure we’ve filled them correctly, especially the mobile numbers. We tell him the phone numbers are our parents’. He tells us we’ll be invited for the trials after the application closes in two weeks.
Celestine’s father says for the next two weeks, we’ll work our socks off. We don’t know what that means, but we undergo the most intense training of our lives. Daily, we assemble at the small field behind Celestine’s father’s house. He supervises us, drills us with different warm-up exercises and trains us according to our playing positions. We lift cement-moulded weights to build our stamina, to fortify our fragile muscles. My blister ripens and bursts, opening new, pink flesh. Majid suffers an injury, maybe a minor hamstring strain. His mother uses hot water and aboniki balm to massage it until the muscle or whatever had cracked at the back of his knee becomes numb. We play a five-a-side friendly with another five-a-side team. We win. Tola with a brace, strikes the jump-in-the-air pose like he’s scored the winning goals in a World Cup final at Wembley.
Though we return to House no. 49 two weeks later with sore bodies, we’re ready for the screening. There’s a security man by the gate. He is wearing the type of uniform the security men in banks wear. Blue uniform, red and yellow fake ranks adorned with small, gold rings, sitting well ironed on the shoulders.
‘Yes, can I help?’ His face, a crumpled piece of paper.
‘We’re here for the screening, sir,’ Celestine says, snatching the words out of my mouth.
‘Screening is in batches. They’ll call you when it’s your turn, okay?’
We nod. We meet other footballers who are also here with questions. Everyone is grumbling, but no one is speaking up. Since our first day at House no. 49, we haven’t seen Mr. Ezekiel. We go back home and continue our training. Celestine’s father agrees that the trials could only be in batches. ‘Do you know how many boys want to play footy in Europe?’ he says.
We sit by our parents’ phones every evening, waiting to hear Mr. Ezekiel’s baritone voice on the other end of the line. Or for a text, at least. Majid and Bawa insist we play our next game in the inter-street tournament while we wait for the Rising Stars’ trials. Me and Celestine and Tola disagree. We are saving our legs for Rising Stars, we say. Organisers of the inter-streets tournament eventually kick us out of the competition for missing two games. The three of us don’t care. It’s a stupid street tournament for a stupid plastic cup. Our eyes are now on gold-plated trophies.
Two weeks later, we’re back at House no. 49. Today, two black German shepherds are tethered to the gate. They’re barking like evil spirits are in their bodies, threatening to bring down the gate and maul to death anyone that comes closer. We hurl huge rocks at the gate, shouting, ‘Who dey house?’ No one answers. Instead, the dogs’ barking mouths drool saliva. When dusk settles and we get tired of talking to dogs, we walk back home, our mouths too heavy with sadness to talk about our dreams like we usually would under a dim sky.
‘What rubbish,’ Celestine’s father says. We are sitting by a kerosene lamp which flickers a light blue flame. It is our third month of total blackout. ‘I will follow you boys to that house tomorrow. They can’t just keep us in the dark like this.’
By now, our mothers have started asking us questions. ‘I go work for the next three months like jacky to raise that money,’ my mother says of the money she gave me for the form, pulling her earlobe as if sounding a warning. ‘I better not hear stories.’ Tola says his mother now sneaks into the house at night, hiding from the landlord. She’d given Tola their rent money for the form.
The following day, a Saturday, Celestine’s father follows us to House no. 49. There, we see boys in hundreds, chanting, Mr. Ezekiel, pay us now; give us our money, punching the air with their fists. We join them. Men of the mobile police force are guarding the house. Their helmets and bullet-proof vests and guns and canisters strapped to their waists would make you think aliens are about to invade the world. Their eyes are behind white goggles, latched onto their skins, like Olympic swimmers.
The big boys with broad chests have ripped off their shirts and are standing in the front row as if they are shields. They clasp hands, forming chains. They are stomping their feet like soldiers on a parade ground. Me and my teammates are behind, huddling around Celestine’s father. Even if Rising Stars didn’t fulfill its promise, new football academies will come to town again. We don’t want to lose our legs or arms to stampedes or gunshots. In protests, things happen too fast.
‘Oga, go back,’ an officer yells as Celestine’s father peels himself from us and approaches him with questions.
‘We’re not here to respond to any questions. This is the private residence of Chief.’ Celestine’s father tries to say something, hands flaring in the air, but another officer threatens to waste him with bullets if he says a word. Next thing that happens is probably the way men start war. A policeman speaks into an intercom, nodding his head vigorously. Other officers cast one eye at him as they listen and nod while using the anger in the other eye to keep us at bay. As soon as he gets off the gadget, he signals to his team in a sign language. He raises his left arm up, balling his hand into a fist before flickering his fingers. The officers translate this: unstrapping the silvery canisters from their waists, uncorking them and releasing the shrill sound of gas into the air.
Now, our eyes are peppering us, hot tears streaming down our cheeks. Our noses are on fire. They shouldn’t hurt this bad even if we sniffed dry ground pepper. Boys are crying, scampering all over the premises. Celestine’s father shouts our names as if we are deaf, and when he manages to open his eyes and assemble us, we use our hands to trace our way out of British-American Street like we would if we were blindfolded.
In the aftermath of past protests in our town, police raided homes. Combed streets. Sandbags magically appeared on major roads, and pedestrians were interrogated, frisked by officers who manned these checkpoints. Police overloaded their vans with boys and girls perceived as troublemakers. We’re reluctant to go home after the incident at British-American, afraid that the police could trace our houses through the addresses on our trials’ forms. But Celestine’s father says this street isn’t our friend now.
‘You’re safe at home,’ he says. ‘Go be with your families.’
At home, my eyes still watery from the peppery air, I meet my mother sitting on the floor, hands on her head, legs splayed, like a child serving punishment. Blotches of blood on the bandage wrapped around her wound. Breaking news is on repeat on the Sanyo battery-powered radio: Hoodlums are disrupting the calm and serenity of British-American Street. The police are on ground to restore peace and order. She ignores me like I’m a stain she’s used to seeing on the wall.
‘Lucky and Papa Celestine don kill me,’ she says, wailing. ‘My son has killed me o.’ I run out of the room before she gathers herself from the floor, and, on my way to Celestine’s house, I meet Celestine and Tola coming to mine. For now, Majid and Bawa will not talk to us.
‘My papa dey for serious trouble,’ Celestine says. The other three mothers are on their way to his father’s house. We don’t know what will happen. Me and Celestine and Tola throw our arms across each other’s shoulders, occasionally sneezing and blowing pepper out of our noses. And walk to Lambu Field. This evening, the field is empty, devoid of the noises boys make while tackling each other over a ball. We sit on the ground in a circle, stones pricking our buttocks. We say nothing, only raise our heads up. Small stars are beginning to assemble in the dark grey sky, as if to remind us of the distance to our dreams.
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