We were fifteen when we found the chest, and eighteen when it ripped us apart.

Kubs, Elihazer, Doyin and I were the quadruplets of Bishop Street. Everyone knew us on the commercial street and referred to us as Nigeria. It was a stupid name coined by Doyin's older brother who was jealous of our bond and decided to be tribalistic about it.

Kubs' actual name is Yakubu and he is Hausa, Elihazer is Igbo and Doyin is Yoruba. Because Ade had the silly mentality that Nigeria was made of only those three 'major' tribes, he took to calling us Nigeria, not minding that I am Ebira. He probably thought I fell from the sky and became friends with his ideal Nigeria. Despite my hatred for the name, it caught on like wildfire, but that is not what this tale is about.

The house between Elihazer and Doyin's houses was empty for a year, an anomaly in the busy Bishop Street but news on the street was that it was caught in an ongoing ownership dispute. While they settled their dispute, the four of us made ourselves comfortable in the house that lacked nothing but electricity– same as our homes when the month's profit was not enough to ensure generators at night because NEPA is one of Nigeria's rubbish attempts at civilization.

Friday nights were spent drinking ourselves to stupor on beer from Elihazer's father's liquor store. Saturdays were spent nursing hangovers and watching pirated movies on Kubs' hand-me-down laptop, privileged kid that he was. On days we were feeling particularly brave, we would invite girls over and make sure we watched 18+ movies. Doyin and Elihazer always got some action during movie days while Kubs and I would play Mortal Combat on the laptop, pretending to be unaffected by the girls' unwillingness to sleep with us.

It was on one such day, hours before Kubs and I had any reason to drown our sorrows in pixelated violence, that we found the chest. Calling it a chest is a stretch because it was really just an ugly wooden box, very similar to our school desks without the legs, but it is the chest because Kubs christened it so. Elihazer and I were running late because for some reason, his father refused to leave the shop and we were doomed to hang around like lost sheep. It was infinitely boring, especially as the old man wanted to be in on everything we were discussing and took it upon himself to entertain us with stories of 'the good old days' when we fell silent in subtle hostility. We refused his insistence that we go home and after a few attempts to send us far away, under the guise of needing oranges and bananas, Elihazer's father faced us square on.

He asked why we were really still at the store and his son, being the stubborn olodo that he was, asked him the same question. Mr. Uchendu only nodded and had a look over his face– over the years, I have seen that look come over Elihazer's face while faced with a business prospect. From afar, of course. Always from afar.

He said, 'Maka Chukwu, tell me what you want and I'll give you, but you have to leave this place after it'.

We walked away with two bottles more than usual, pretending not to see Sister Grace, the spirikoko chorister, sneaking into the shop as we turned the corner.

When we arrived at the cave, our name for the abandoned house courtesy of Kubs, the boys were bent over the chest, faces drained of blood and eyes excited. They had come into the house and found the chest. Doyin opened the latch despite Kubs' fear that they would find a body part inside and what they saw was even more terrifying.

Everything is beautiful and shinier than it actually is to a fifteen year old, but if the box's content was shown to me today, I am sure it would be as enchanting as it was ten years ago.

There were gold bars and pretty diamond studs– at least, we thought they were diamonds– to the brim of the box, such that when we thrust our hands into the box and upset the contents, it refused to shut properly.

We were rich. Our turf and the finder's law solidified it.

We were young enough to rejoice about, and make plans with sudden wealth, but old enough to know once we brought an adult into the mix, we stood the risk of losing everything, so we made a pact and buried the chest, employing Doyin's expertise in coffins and burials. We replanted a tiny mango tree from his house immediately to seal the deal because we were 'too infantile to be trusted with such wealth', quotation marks, Kubs. We all agreed with him after snickering at his choice of words and drank our livers to hiccups, safe in the knowledge of riches beyond measure.

The plant grew undisturbed for three years until one Friday when a man who referred to himself as Chief Mongoose sat waiting for us in the cave's parlour. He was the box's owner and needed his box back. He would pay handsomely for it. We all denied any knowledge of the box of course, although Kubs mistakenly called it the chest and we waited with bated breath for the look of suspicion to leave Chief Mongoose's eyes. He advised us to take the offer and come to him with his box because he had eyes on all of us and would know immediately we tried anything funny. He had people in the black market and no one would buy the stones from us. His reward money was six hundred thousand dollars, so we had better made the right decision and become rich.

Some friendships are worth much more than monetary rewards…

We did not drink when he left. We strategized. We would not touch the box for another two years and would only return at twenty to take it because then we would know what to do with the riches and Chief Mongoose would've lost interest in us. We spent most of the night and the whole of Saturday making sure everyone was onboard with the plan. For a bounty of six hundred thousand dollars, the box's content must be five times the value, so we stayed put. We swore to be rich as brothers. We were Nigeria.

It took four days for Nigeria to fall. Even God needed more than that to create the world. We walked into the cave on a hot Friday evening to Chief Mongoose's sleek SUV parked next to two boys digging up our chest.

He tipped his hat at us, beady eyes glinting with triumph as we begged. All of us. Nigeria fell on their knees begging him to give us the six hundred thousand dollars.

We would share it between us for keeping his box safe all these years. Before he left the compound, we had reduced our plea to six hundred thousand naira. Finally, a desperate Elihazer begged for fifty thousand naira to be shared between us. Chief Mongoose left the compound that day and never returned.

Like the trust between the four of us. There was no name-calling, no fists, no conversation. We all just extricated ourselves from the country we had formed, becoming Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and Ebira.

Soon there were murmurs about how Elihazer was a yahoo boy because six months after 'the fall', he opened a clothing store his father swore to have no hand in.

We were all convinced he was the snitch until Doyin flew his family out on a vacation to South Africa. This was right after his father's casket store went up in flames and they were about to be kicked out of their home by their landlord.

Were there two beneficiaries? Did the chic magnets connive to stab us gamers?

When Yakubu bought the cave and turned it into a cyber cafe, that suspicion went down the drain. Maybe Nigeria did not burn in the way I thought it did. Maybe Nigeria just did the Nigerian thing and I was too naive to see it.

Soon, those of us who had nothing keeping us in Bishop Street left for other parts of the country and though we do not speak till this day, we follow one another on social media. Watching. Waiting. Speculating.

Every 28th day of the month, I open my bank app. The one I opened with an alias. I have six beneficiaries– Nigeria takes up half the space. I send them my monthly penance and turn to watch the view out my floor to ceiling window. It is always beautiful.

…Just maybe not ours.

#cashback