Going home to Mama

TW: murder

I stepped on the gas as the car zoomed through the dusty Balogun Street. I had left as soon as I saw the news. I was sure I wasn’t going to lose my job as a good number of my colleagues left work immediately too – including my boss. PenSal, the writing firm I work for was about a 20-minutes drive from my place but I intended getting home in less time.

I scanned through the radio channels with one hand, the other clutching the steering wheel like a bad name held on to a criminal. Every station was talking about it;

‘The sudden android uprising: What was making them sentient and feral?’

On Kamkpe FM, a woman mourned the sudden death of two children to her robot ‘house girl’. “She killed them o. Oh my God… Chinekemo. Had I known…” she kept lamenting and wailing.

I felt bile rise in my stomach, all my thoughts on Kamsi, my six month old baby I had left home with the android nanny. I had gotten Kamsi from a surrogate program when all I and Kachi did to achieve pregnancy came to nothing. There was another news cut to a riot that had began after mobile police tried to stop residents from burning down the BlueSky building at Ikorodu, Lagos. BlueSky represented everything the Household Android Program stood for, after all.

A call from Kachi came through. I picked up and placed the phone to my ear.

“Babe, where are you?” he asked, the noise of cars in the background showed he had left work too. He wouldn’t be home in at least an hour though.  

“My baby is at home, Kachi,” I was sobbing. “She’s at home with Mama.” 

Kachi had insisted we called the android ‘Mama’ mainly because she looked sixty, which was older than his mum. Mama had stayed with us for two years before Kamsi came along. She had been there as soon as we had started trying. We knew we’d need help when the baby finally came from our efforts. She was like a real mother, or maybe she made me feel like she was one. She’d clean and do the washing even before I woke up and would assist in making breakfast before Kachi would get up. Sometimes, we engaged in small robot talk or sang together –she reads the news and could sing a number of my favorite songs –and Kachi will always say that he forgets that she was just all nuts and bolts. 

‘Wow, she sweeps me off my feet, sometimes,’ Kachi had acknowledged one cool July evening; I guessed she had an impression on both of us.

When we had Kamsi, it was only natural that I left her at home with Mama after a one-month leave from work –my boss claimed being a surrogated mum meant that I wasn’t expected to stay too long at home doing omugwo for my child. I had seen Mama pet, feed, bath and clean Kamsi severally so it was only natural that I left her at home. She, the machine, made me feel safe. Now, I was both scared and felt sick.

“I’m almost home. She should pray that she doesn’t touch my baby because I will kill her, Kachi. I swear… I will kill her,” I snapped.

 “Stay put, Eniola. I don’t want you to get hurt. I have called…”

“Don’t tell me that crap, Kachi! What do you expect me to do? Sit in the office and pray that my maid does not stifle the life from my daughter?”

He was silent.

“James will get over there as soon as possible. Just stay put. Don’t go anywhere close to her.” He hung up. 

*

“Mama, put down my daughter,” I readjusted my grip on the iron rod I held up like a baseball bat. I had found it lying outside our house, giving its life away to rust with each passing day. It’s strange how you are made to notice certain things you overlook so often.

Mama looked at me, expressionless, her left hand still holding the leg of my crying baby. She swung her hand to and fro, dangling Kamsi –who was upside down –like a pendulum, like she dared to see what I could do with a piece of iron.

I felt bile build up in my stomach, screamed and charged at her, headfirst, like I had seen wrestlers do on television. We three fell with a thud I knew I would hear from where the Ibrahims stayed, across the street. Kamsi kicked and screamed from where she lay on the floor, with a blood stained Teletubbies shirt and a cut on her upper lip. I stood up to grab my daughter when I felt my legs give way under me. Mama swept me off my feet, literally.

My body made impact with the glass table I and Kachi always fought about whenever we had brought work home, shattering it like a puzzled jigsaw puzzle, the books and papers on it now lay as a cushion under my body. My head ached from the fall and I felt hot tears come to my eyes. She pulled me up by my hair –the same she had woven a week ago. A hard blow went to my stomach and the fried dodo I ate that morning met the floor in a semi-refined mess. I wrapped my stomach in my arms, on my knees, trying to catch my breath. I coughed and was glad when I didn’t see blood –I had not broken anything, yet.

Blood gushed from a cut in my head, down my face and eyes. I blinked to clear my vision.

Mama turned and walked away from me, towards Kamsi. I threw one of Kachi’s hardcover texts and it smacked the back of her head. She turned and rushed towards me, a killer’s agility in her steps.

I grabbed a shard of the broken table top as I parried her kick with my other arm –a kick that was aimed at my head. If a robot could show shock, Mama did in the way her pupils dilated and her sudden stop.

She stopped and that was her mistake. She shouldn’t have. If she had planned to kill my baby, she should have known that every second mattered, that every input had no time to get too processed.

I held her blouse and pulled her down in what would have looked to her like a millisecond. My other hand, that held the glass shard, went straight to both of her eyes, moving in and out, in and out like it was cutting through butter. Her hands went to her eyes as a dark, red liquid spilled out of it. I knew her ears and every other sensory mechanism she had would work better now. I picked up the rod, the one that lay in my compound, the one I hadn’t noticed until today.

I walked towards her. She stiffened. She sensed me coming. I wanted her to. My blind Mama lunged towards me and met the rod through her mechanical heart. Why she tried attacking again, I would never know. Maybe it was a final trial at killing me, even when she knew she couldn’t. Even when she knew I was a superior machine.

*

I carefully took off the broken skin from my head, humming a lullaby and shaking occasionally to calm Kamsi who I tied firmly to my back with one of Mama’s wrappers. I opened the small black box with the BlueSky logo on it -the one Kachi didn't know i had with me all these years. I picked up a new face and placed it over my titanium alloy skull, moving and shifting and aligning until the bathroom mirror spoke of perfection.