We killed Duna on a Sunday evening. It was one of those quiet nights where the silence in Freetown was punctuated only by the occasional sounds of pestles hitting mortars and war veterans hitting their wives.

We had planned for our battle all week, waiting for Sunday when we could sneak out of church after the first service without our parents noticing we were gone.

On Monday we carved out guns from old plywood pilfered from a nearby construction site. On Tuesday we hid old army uniforms and shoes in polythene bags and sneaked them out of our houses.

Gloria stole brown papers from her brother’s printing shop after school on Wednesday and cut them into several rectangular pieces. John and Kitan went into the bushes at the edge of Freetown and fetched bamboo stalks growing by the canal that snaked around our homes. We sliced the bamboo into pencil shapes and dried them for two days. Then we rolled the bamboo sticks into the brown paper and twisted both ends of each paper to secure the sticks.

What is a battle without Cuban cigars?

On Friday we gathered outside Mama John’s empty food shack to finalise the preparation for our battle. We had debated going into the shack to have our meeting, a place away from the monitoring eyes of Gloria’s and Abu’s mothers, who were sitting under a tree and casting furtive glances our way. There was no doubt what the women were doing: gossiping about other women in Freetown, but also watching our movements as mothers do.

“Let’s go into your mother’s shack and talk there,” I told John.

John immediately rejected the suggestion to have our meeting in his mother’s shack. He hadn’t been in the shack since the day his mother died there.

“I keep having this dream that her ghost is in there, boiling rice and frying fish,” John said, looking away from the shack and down the road at the canal.

Abu stepped away from the shack, and the rest of us followed suit. No, we didn’t run, and neither did our steps quicken. None of us, including John, was afraid of ghosts, but we were all afraid of one thing─John’s mother. Alive or dead, that woman sent fear down our throats.

Taller than anyone in Freetown, light on her feet, and quick to use her backhand to smack any kid who got on her wrong side, every kid in Freetown knew to never get into trouble with Mama John. From the first house on Haven’s Gate to the last house on Galilee Street, every one of us was accustomed to running off the street as soon as we saw Mama John approach.

None of us knew about Mama John when we lived in the barracks. Of course, there was the rumour that crossed the canal with her. Rumours that were perhaps born during the numerous gossips under trees. They said Mama John had been a docile, semi-illiterate young woman sent down from a small town in Anambra to marry a lance corporal. Things changed when her husband died and she had to move out of the Barracks to Freetown.

Freetown was separated from the Army Barracks by a canal brimming with plastic waste and algae, yet once we crossed over to Freetown, life as we knew it changed forever. Our mothers became detached, and those whose fathers returned from wars sometimes wished they hadn’t. If you thought your father was a brutal man before he went to war, you should expect a monster when he returned. Freetown, a shanty made of rusted iron sheets and planks, got its nickname because of the massive influx of widows of ECOMOG soldiers who died in Sierra Leone.

Every woman transformed once she crossed the canal from the barracks into Freetown.

With three young sons to raise and a husband whose remains were never returned from Sierra Leone, Mama John’s transformation as soon as she crossed the canal into Freetown was from a kitten to a jaguar. There was no better threat to get any child in Freetown to act right than when our parents threatened to report us to Mama John. It was the fear of Mama John that made us welcome Duna into our playgroup a while ago.

We were sitting on our verandas, singing, throwing insults across narrow streets, and dashing in and out of the rain the day Old Witch brought Duna to Freetown.

She was the mystery on Galilee Street─Old Witch. She never talked to us, never joined the mothers on the long queue by the borehole to lament the economy or curse the government for its treatment of army widows. When they gathered for gossip under the tree, Old Witch was the only woman certain to be missing. We rarely ever saw Old Witch outside her apartment unless she was fetching water from the community borehole.

Like everyone else, there were rumours about Old Witch, too. There was one about how her husband, a second lieutenant, was killed in the riot that led to the Zaki Biam Massacre. Then her son, a sergeant, was killed the following year during the Miss World Riot in Kaduna. Her last two sons, both fresh recruits of the army, had joined the ECOMOG train to Sierra Leone and never returned. The army couldn’t confirm if one of them had truly died or just gone MIA, but they sent her two flags, one Bereavement Pay envelope, and a push towards Freetown.

When the mothers gathered to talk and the subject turned to Old Witch, there was always one question at the end of the gossip: how can a good heart know so much sorrow?

We had watched, half-curious, half-resentful, as Old Witch led a tiny-framed girl dragging a colourful Ghana-Must-Go bag into her apartment. When the girl came out to play with us a few days later, Mathew was the first to kick against her inclusion.

“Who are you to Old Witch?” Mathew had asked, sizing Duna up as if it were an arena and a wrestling game was about to begin.

Unperturbed by the boy who looked like he was about to pounce on her, Duna replied calmly. “She is my mother.”

“Liar, liar!” Kitan screamed.

“Pants on fire,” we chorused; there was no need to let a good song go to waste.

“Old Witch does not have a daughter. My mother said she was cursed; that was why all her children died in battles so far from home,” Gloria said, scowling at Duna, her forehead creased like paper napkins.

Gloria was the oldest of us all. She had just turned thirteen and always seemed to hold court while the rest of us pretended to debate. We always agreed with Gloria.

Well, every one of us except Chinua. Two months younger than Gloria, he demanded the same reverence we gave her.

“Your father and brother died in Sierra Leone. Does that mean your mother is cursed, too?” We could see it immediately, the sarcasm tied neatly into Chinua’s question.

We laughed, running around the field and patting Chinua on the back. Gloria joined us after a while, nodding her head in acknowledgement of her defeat. Chinua’s comeback was good. There was no need for Gloria to take offence; loss is the one thing we all have in common. It was also the one joke we could always return to.

There wasn’t much difference between Old Witch’s and our mothers’ losses. Kitan and I lost our father and older brother to rebels in Liberia. They were killed because a rebel leader had been offended by something their troop leader had said in the news. My mother forbade us from talking about them. Mathew’s two brothers died in the same riot in Kaduna; his father, a military officer, had been killed several years ago in Jos. Perhaps Old Witch was cursed because all her losses happened in quick succession and the people of Freetown hadn’t had enough time to process her sorrow. It didn’t matter if the sorrow was theirs to process; Freetown was like that—joys and losses shared as communal moments. Or perhaps she was cursed because, unlike the rest of us, she mourned in private, and mystery and evil, as they say, are two sides of a coin.

Duna’s voice rose above our laughter. “She adopted me from the orphanage, and her name is not Old Witch. Her name is now Mama Duna.”

“What is an orphanage?” Kitan asked.

“It’s a place where they keep children whose parents don’t want them,” Abu offered before Duna could speak.

“Your mother didn’t want you, so she gave you to Old Witch?” John sounded incredulous, “What did you do to make your real mother throw you away, little girl?”

“Maybe she is a witch, too, and that was why her mother doesn’t want her,” Gloria jeered.

“You are a witch living with a witch,” we chanted, laughing, clapping our hands, and slapping each other’s backs as we’ve seen the older people do when they shared a joke. We continued until Duna fled towards her mother’s apartment.

No one was sure how Mama John heard about what happened on the playing field, but a few days later she dragged us, one after the other, out of our parents’ apartments and made us kneel in front of her food shack. By the time she released us from our punishment, we had promised her, several times over, that we would never be mean to any new kid in Freetown again. She was also the first to call Old Witch by a different name—Mama Duna.

A peace offering that other mothers soon joined in.

Still, Duna was never really accepted into our group. Perhaps it was because we resented being forced to make friends with her. Yes, we allowed her to play with us because to refuse was to invite Mama John’s trouble. But it was clear to everyone involved that there was no room for the new girl who hadn’t experienced the same loss as us. Duna wasn’t welcome.

Undaunted by our outright dismissal of her presence, Duna showed up every evening after school, hanging just by the tail of the group, hoping for a little more room.

***

Freetown was already in mourning in the month Michael Jackson died. There was Captain, a quiet, retired soldier, who put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger one morning after running around the streets in his old uniform, fighting some fictitious invaders. His relatives came from his hometown that evening and took his body away. Captain was not the first to run mad in Freetown. We’d seen so many cases like his, old soldiers who were fine one day and lost their minds the very next day. It wasn’t like all the men in Freetown were fine anyway. There was always anger in their eyes and impatience on their palms. I was a recipient of a few hard knocks and slaps, so I knew this.

Then there was Mama John, who paused in the middle of haggling with a meat vendor in her shack, clutched her chest, and slumped. No amount of water poured on her face could bring her back. By the next day, Itan, her first son, had been told to prepare for her burial.

Death was not uncommon to us, but funerals were. And funerals with an actual body to bury and not coffins filled with old uniforms and a Nigerian flag were even rarer in Freetown. We wore our best black outfits and joined the burial procession down to the church for John’s mother’s final rites. It was a solemn burial. There were no gunshots in honour of the woman whom our parents said was more fearless than all the soldiers recruited by ECOMOG. What does one do at a funeral where there were no marching soldiers and no songs in honour of a hero passed? My friends and I were unsure of this, and so were John and his brothers. So, we all listened to the sermon by the pastor and fought the sleep tempting to overtake our attention.

As Freetown was coming to terms with Mama John’s death, the world was experiencing another loss. The news of Michael Jackson’s death had filtered into Freetown before we returned from church. We lurked by our doorways and verandas to watch as our older siblings and fathers mourned the music legend, while the mothers gathered to mourn Mama John’s death. Each group sang the praises of the departed. There would never be another as firm and fearsome as Mama John in Freetown, our mothers said. There would never be another star like MJ, the men vowed. They talked about the losses in groups; one group played “Beat It” on repeat into the night; the other group reminisced on all the good deeds of a woman who held her front well.

Perhaps if Captain’s and Michael Jackson’s deaths and Mama John’s burial had not happened all in a week, one of the older groups would have noticed a new loss in Freetown—the loss of our playing field. But MJ’s death was followed by the coming of heavy-duty trucks bringing sand and gravel into Freetown. By the time the builders arrived, offloading materials on our playing field, we knew we were about to experience yet another loss. While the two adult groups in Freetown shared their time mourning deaths, they failed to see that we, the children, were experiencing a loss bigger than theirs. Our playing field, the source of our escape from weeping mothers and yelling fathers, was disappearing before our eyes.

No one asked the builders any questions. The adults, perhaps because they already knew the answers, and we, because no one would have dignified us with an answer anyway. “There is nowhere to play again,” Gloria had sobbed as we watched labourers replace our goalposts with a concrete foundation.

“Let’s have a battle,” Abu suggested. “We can go towards the abandoned building by the canal and play there.”

Abu always had a suggestion up his sleeve. He was the most travelled and most exposed of us all. His late father, a lieutenant, had been transferred from one troubled city to another, and he never left Abu and his mother behind. When he was killed in the mysterious Ikeja bomb blast in 2002, the army said there was no proof that he had died in the blast. Abu and his mother were never sent any brown envelope, but Freetown opened its arms to them. Abu was only four when this happened, but he never stopped telling the story as if he remembered everything vividly.

“Yes, yes, with big cigars and guns,” Junior said.

“I don’t want to play with cigars. Mama will not like it.” Duna spoke from a corner of the group where we had almost forgotten her.

John looked at her and hissed. He was always the first to attack her, and more so since his mother died. Perhaps John wished he could get a new mother like Duna; we would never know. But when Gloria had teased him about the likelihood of his being sent to an orphanage, he said he would rather die than be sent to one.

“You can be one of the captives then,” Abu said dismissively. He wasn’t looking at Duna when he offered this option. He never looked at Duna or anyone he wasn’t interested in talking to. It was an act, he had said: people don’t exist if you don’t want them to.

“I am going to be the commander,” John said. “The rest of you can be my officers and rebels.” He was jumping around, using his hands as pistols and pointing them at us.

We all agreed John should be the commander even though we all wanted the cool role. His mother just died, and no one wanted to argue about the best role with the new orphan in town. There was also, of course, that unspoken fear that John might be sent away to an orphanage if his brothers couldn’t look after him.

The day Duna died, the church service on Sunday dragged on forever. There was no difference between the sermon and the one given during Mama John’s funeral. There was the assurance of the existence of hell and heaven, and the confirmation—for the hundredth time—that evil was always a door away. When the pastor ordered everyone to jump up and smash Satan, the flock leapt to their feet, snapping fingers, banging desks, and hailing the preacher. We shared impatient glances across the pews, careful not to catch our parents’ eyes.

We ran out of the church and towards the canal as soon as service ended, as the ushers were going around collecting offerings. We wanted to be at the canal before anyone would notice we were gone.

We arrived at the canal ready for our battle. Junior came with a small bottle of ogogoro he’d stolen from his father, who returned from war with a limb missing. He had so many half-empty bottles of the drink lying around the house, he won’t miss one, Junior promised.

He diluted the small drink with some water and allowed us to take two swigs each from the bottle.

Then the battle began. Mathew grabbed Serah and Duna and tied them to a dilapidated building with an old wrapper.

“You have to scream and cry a lot, make it look like you have been truly abducted by Liberian rebels,” Mathew instructed them.

They nodded eagerly; we were all battle-ready.

John wore his late father’s old uniform and beret. The khaki sleeves were longer than his hands, and the beret hid his brows. The army didn’t send any corpse home when his father died, and his mother had refused to spend money burying ordinary uniforms and national flags, so the uniform remained in the house.

John stood with one arm akimbo, the other lifting his fake gun. The gun was perfectly carved. We’d lived around guns all our lives; the art of it was no stranger to us.

We inserted our fake Cuban cigarettes into our mouths and picked up our fake guns. We were ready for war.

Our small feet scattered around the building and towards the steep edge of the canal, as we yelled at each other and made gunshot sounds with our mouths.

Taah taah taah. Tthe battle was underway.

We were happy. It was the happiest we’d been since the builders had arrived in Freetown. Our voices rose into the sky; laughter mixed with hysteria as we tried to avoid getting killed. We were so loud and happy that we didn’t immediately realise that Duna and Serah’s screams were different. Different from ours, which was diluted with laughter and gunshots.

John was the first to stop in his tracks and turn towards the screams. He was about to kill Kitan for the fourth time. The rest of us stopped screaming after that, curious to know why John had stopped chasing us. The terrifying screams from Duna and Serah were our answer that something was wrong. We hesitated for a bit, unsure whether to run away from the screams or run towards them. In the end, we ran toward the girls.

“Duna saw a snake!” Serah cried. “Untie me now! Untie me now!”

“What snake?” I asked, running away from the girls.

“It ran past my legs. I think it bit me,” Duna cried.

Everyone else stepped away from the crying duo, looking around in search of the snake. Abu was the only one brave enough to move closer to them. Serah ran as soon as Abu cut her loose, stopping only after putting a few metres between her and the pillar.

Duna crouched to inspect her ankles. Abu moved closer to inspect, too. The rest of us maintained our distance, unsure of what to do.

“It’s just a tiny wound,” Abu said dismissively. “Like mosquito bites. It’s not even bleeding.”

“It’s a snake bite!” Chinua said as if to remind us of the obvious.

“If she tells her mother, they will never let us come here to play again, and then we will truly have nowhere to play,” Gloria warned.

We all nodded our heads in agreement. The parents would be quick to ban us from this new place, and where then would we turn to when we needed to avoid the drama that went on behind each closed door in Freetown?

“I can suck the poison out, and we can pour some ogogoro on it. Just like they do in movies,” Mathew offered.

“Yes,” Abu and Junior both chorused.

Duna looked like she wanted to refuse, her cry gradually increasing every minute. But she knew she was outnumbered, and seven pairs of eyes staring at her, hoping she would make the call that wouldn’t lose us our new playing ground, was enough to scare her into agreeing with us.

“You can’t tell anyone, Duna,” Gloria urged. “It’s just a tiny wound. Let Mathew suck it out.” It was the first time I’d seen Gloria talk to Duna as if she were an equal and not a nuisance who won’t go away. Duna must have noticed the tone, too. It was her chance to prove that she was worthy of being fully accepted into our little group. She nodded and then closed her eyes even before Mathew touched her feet.

We rallied around Duna and watched as Mathew put his mouth to her ankle a couple of times and spat something out each time.

We checked what Mathew spat on the floor; it was saliva, or maybe it was venom, none of us asked. None of us knew what a snake’s venom looked like. Mathew rinsed his mouth with ogogoro and spat it on Duna’s ankle. His actions were so precise; it was like he had a lot of experience doing this.

Duna calmed down after a while and opened her eyes, and Junior allowed her to take one last swig of the ogogoro. Then we packed our weapons and returned home. Like defeated soldiers, a sombre air accompanied us as we trudged through the narrow path that led into Freetown from the canal. The journey home seemed to take forever even though the distance between Freetown and the canal could be covered within fifteen minutes. The journey reminded me so much of the day my mother, Kitan, and I arrived in Freetown. Kitan had cried so much that day. He was just four and my mother said he did not understand what was going on, but I did. I knew something terrible had happened and life as we knew it was about to change. I felt the same now as we led Duna back home. Something was wrong with what we had just done, but we were a group and we all agreed to keep a secret.

We didn’t have to make a pact as we approached Freetown and separated in ones and twos towards our homes. We knew the rules. A soldier never tells.

***

Old Witch’s scream pierced Galilee around 7 p.m. The prime news was just starting; the broadcast music filtering out of several windows and car stereos.

We poured into our verandas and then spilt into the street. Some people ran towards her apartment while the rest of us stayed back.

A shadow emerged carrying a limp Duna, and others followed closely behind him. Mothers tied their scarves around their waists, lanterns in their hands, and ran after the man carrying Duna. A rowdy group wailing its way out of Freetown to the health clinic located outside the barracks.

When our mother returned home past midnight, Kitan and I were still up, peering through the windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of Duna walking with the adults filing back into Freetown. She wasn’t there. Our mother found us by the window; there was no need to run and pretend that we were asleep.

She gripped Kitan and me by the arms and dragged us to the centre of the living room.

The light was brighter there.

She ordered us to strip, and we obliged without question. She examined Kitan’s body first and then mine—ankles to scalp, front to back. She sucked her teeth and sighed at every cut.

“How did you get this cut on your back?”

“Is this a bite mark?”

She demanded the story behind every scratch, and we let it all roll out. The scars from jumping the school fence, the bruises from climbing mango trees. It was more attention than she had paid us since our father died. When she was done, she dismissed us to our room.

“I will deal with you two tomorrow,” she vowed as we scrambled out of the living room. There was, however, no doubt that she wore relief in her eyes and her voice.

There was no sleep for us, though. We sat up far into the night, whispering and pretending that we couldn’t hear our mother sobbing through the thin walls that separated our rooms.

Was our mother crying because something horrible had happened to Duna? Or was she crying because something horrible could have happened to us instead? Would we be punished for keeping a secret? These questions tailed each other, creating a phantom loop that kept sleep at bay.

Duna’s body was brought back to Freetown the next morning, with Old Witch accompanied by wailing mothers. They placed a mat outside her door and sat her on it. They formed a circle around her, some sitting, others standing, and offered their condolences laced with doses of advice. It was time for Old Witch to grieve in public.

No, she would never be alone, they assured. No one would ever mock her for being childless, they promised.

No one asked us what we knew about Duna’s snake bite. No one had to. We had guilt wrapped around us like a shroud. It was in the silence that we observed as we gathered to fetch water every evening. It was in our quiet acceptance after our parents banned us from going out to play by the canal. We sat outside our homes and let our guilt travel across yards and narrow streets to seek company.

The rumour returned even before the mourning was over. How does a good woman lose all her children? Even the adopted one?

She must be evil, they said. Only a dark heart knows that many losses.

By the end of the second week, Freetown had returned to calling her Old Witch.