“Do you know what I was thinking when I was walking home just now?” Andrew asked.
“No, I do not,” I said.
“I was thinking about porridge,” he said.
“What type of porridge?” I asked.
“Any type,” he said. “I think porridge is the worst food in the world.”
“Because it looks like poop?” I asked.
“Nope,” Andrew said. He did not laugh, so I wondered if he knew I was joking. “Only beans porridge looks like poop. Asaro does not.”
“Tell me what you were thinking,” I said.
“I was thinking about stories. The stories about porridge I know. In at least three of them, terrible things happen to people after eating porridge,” Andrew said.
“Are they real life or just ordinary stories?” I said.
“It’s in the Bible, okay?” he said. “That makes it real.”
“Are all the stories in the Bible?” I asked.
“Just the one about a boy who had worked all day hunting for meat for his family and when he came home he was tired, but his brother was making porridge for lunch, so he was excited—”
“What type of porridge?” I asked.
“I have no idea, maybe the type you make with grains, milk, and cheese. What is terrible is how much the older brother lost because he agreed to pay what his younger brother asked for the porridge.”
“What should he have done?” I asked.
“He should have just waited till his brother was done and served himself. Worst thing that will happen, they fight like men,” Andrew said.
“Hmmm,” I said.
“Do you remember that story of the tortoise dying because he ate the medicine the Babalowo made for his wife, Yarinbo?” he asked.
“I do,” I said.
“Another tragic porridge story,” Andrew said.
“That was medicine, not porridge,” I said, laughing a little.
“It was porridge. Irresistible porridge. That is why it was so tempting to the tortoise,” he said. “When I get married, I am never letting any woman send me on stupid errands. A person can meet their death just like that, no warning given.”
Our front gate opened, then banged shut. From the antiseptic smell slowly filling the air, I could tell it was Sister Bibike coming home from the hospital where she worked as a cleaner.
“My favorite tortoise story is when Tortoise goes to heaven,” I said to Andrew.
“Really?” he asked. “You know that it ends with him being thrown down back to earth, right?”
“Yes, I do,” I said. “But before all that, there was a feast and he ate till he was full and bursting, and the angels waited on him.”
Our sister hovered over me for a few seconds, her large work bag dangling from her shoulders like a third limb. She placed the back of her palm, clammy from the humid evening, on the right side of my neck.
“You have a serious fever,” she said, her voice filled with the forced calm of a nurse.
“I just gave him Panadol. He is getting better,” Andrew said.
“Look. Andrew, come over here. Look at this. Look at your brother’s face,” our sister said.
The two of them bent over me, the smell of chewed groundnuts mingling with the smell of medical disinfectant. It was like being in the rain with an umbrella too feeble for the wind. It took too much effort to hold on, there was sense in letting go, giving in to the wind.
“My back. It hurts. Bad.” I screamed as I gave in to the wind. It was liberating, comforting.
“Mama!” our sister shouted toward the direction of Grandmother’s room, where she still was asleep. “Andrew, run down the street to Aminat’s house, see if Alhaji Sule is home so he can drive us to the hospital.”
My brother stood stunned for a second then moved away from his spot above me.
“Hurry,” she said. “And if he isn’t home, ask Aminat to lend us five hundred naira. We have to go to a hospital far away from here where no one knows us. So we can run away if the bills are too expensive.”
I heard the gate shut with the loud precision of a gunshot. Andrew was out before the import of our sister’s words hit him. Grandmother was helping to lift me up, and I felt like I was sinking into the floor no matter how hard they tried to lift me.
In the corner of my eye, I saw an old tortoise, his shell cracked in several places, smiling a tired smile.
“How are you feeling?” I asked in a voice I did not recognize for its cheer.
“Better now that you are here,” the old tortoise said.
We studied each other in silence for several minutes.
“Was it worth it? Falling from the sky? The anger from your friends? Your imperfect shell?” I asked.
“Have you had food from heaven?” he asked. “Have you had everything, every kind of food you ever imagined spread out before you, an expanse as wide as the sea?”
“There would have been enough for all of you to share, you should have just waited,” I said.
“No, there wasn’t. Don’t you get it?” the old tortoise asked. “That was the moral of the story, that there was not enough for all of us.”
“And you had it all. And you were punished for that,” I said.
“But I survived,” the old tortoise said. “I am still here. Where are all the others?”
The hospital was the teaching hospital affiliated with Lagos State University. The children’s ward smelled like a buka—like fried meat, heat from woodstoves, and jollof rice. There were more guardians and parents than there were sick children. They hovered over them like musical mobiles attached to the cribs of babies, soothing their restlessness and cajoling food and drink into tight lips.
By my side, what was left of my family smoothed into something firm, thorough and lasting, like starched clothes dried in the open sun.
It began with my grandmother, who said to the doctors who were urging her to leave my side, “I am going nowhere, I have heard you people kill poor children, so you can give their organs to rich people.”
My sister Ariyike, who read from the Bible over and over again till the rhythm of her recitals became the rhythm of my dreams:
“You will not allow your Holy One see corruption.
You will protect my soul from Hades.
Therefore, my heart is glad.
My glory rejoices.”
My back settled into the stiff sweetness of the hospital mattress. Unlike on the woven mat Andrew and I slept on at home, I rested in the hospital. I felt my muscles relax, become compliant as I lay down.
It was my sister Bibike who explained to me:
“You are getting fluids as well as antibiotics. They expect to be able to save your entire arm.”
It was my brother who said to me, “You are going to be a footballer anyway, you do not need two hands to score goals like Yekini.”
When you are the youngest child in a Lagos family, you are the custodian of the most precious unacknowledged hopes. Every sentence to you is a prayer, every sentence about you is an expression of possibility, everything you hear is love. I did not know this at first. Around the time I was learning to use my left hand to draw superheroes, I learned to listen for those hopes like words from a new language.
The boy on the bed next to me had a clean-shaven head and a full body cast. His mother, a plump woman with two bluish green tribal marks underneath each eye, made a contraption from a metal hanger to scratch his body with. As she scratched underneath his feet, she reported all that was going on in their family.
“Fadeke lost her tooth yesterday. And she nearly swallowed it. Thank God your daddy was with her, he caught it right in time.”
She passed along to us his uneaten meal, long-grain rice sitting on a bed of tomato and carrot stew, pieces of fried beef and cow skin in a second bowl.
“I am something,” Andrew said. “If you do not have strong teeth, you cannot eat me. What am I?”
He dipped his hand into the bowl, picking up both pieces of
cow skin at the same time. This was how I knew everything was going to be all right: my brother was eating food meant for me, and I was laughing with him.
2
HOW TO WEAR MOM’S JEANS
BIBIKE
2002
THERE WAS A black leather portmanteau filled with Mother’s things sitting under the bed our grandmother slept in. The first time my twin sister, Ariyike, saw it, she pulled it out by its patchy leather handle and it snagged on a loose nail, making a small rip along its side. She was in the middle of cleaning up Grandmother’s room and so she was sitting there in the center of the floor, her broom and dustpan at her side, staring at old photographs, when Grandmother and I came back from working at the hospital.
Ariyike had examined the portmanteau’s contents, memorizing them without trying—one wedding dress, two ankle-length dinner dresses, two pairs of boot-cut jeans, one pair of black kitten heels, one shoebox filled with jewelry, forty-five photographs with Father in them.
“Did you know Mother and Father honeymooned in Spain?” she’d asked me that first time.
“They did not. They went to Tel Aviv,” I said.
She did not argue with me, but she should have, because she was half right; they had gone to the Spanish border, had taken pictures standing at the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar.
“We should sell her jewelry,” she said instead. “We should sell everything, even the portmanteau.”
I laughed because surely she intended it as a joke. The portmanteau was old, torn and falling apart, no one wanted it. Besides, it once belonged to Justice Silver, Mother’s granduncle. He gave it to her when she was about our age and traveling to Lancaster for A levels.
“You should not laugh,” she’d said. “Let us take this stuff to Tejuosho market. We can sell it to those Mallams, get some money for new clothes.”
She was sitting there, holding out the shoebox, a silver necklace tangled in the middle hanging from the end. I took the shoebox from her, pushed the tangled necklace inside a heart-shaped emerald pendant, and shoved the shoebox back in the portmanteau.
“It is not ours to sell,” I had said.
My sister did not like that I said this. And she was right. She should have insisted. We needed money. We always needed money. Grandmother was still getting used to having four children depending on her. She still went on complaining about how much food we ate, how much soap was left after we showered, how much noise we made. Sometimes she forgot how she spent her money, so she accused us of stealing it, then made us empty our luggage and purses searching for it. Once, a few months after we arrived to live with her here, after she had searched us and found none of her missing things, she made us walk with her around the neighborhood, from the man who sold chewing gum and candy in a tuck shop, to the woman hawking bread and beans, to the old man mending plastic buckets with pieces of scrap plastic. She made us stop at every shop, showing our faces to them, telling all the owners to never sell us anything because if we ever had any money, it was money we must have stolen from her. We walked past Uche, the jollof rice seller, and even though my belly was filled with water and tumbling with anger, I wanted the jollof rice so much in that moment that I would have stolen to buy it. By the time we had walked to the houses nearest the canal, houses so close together that you could stand at any point on the street and tell which mothers had started dinner and which ones hadn’t, I realized that we were to blame for the shame we had experienced. It was indeed my own legs walking behind her, wasn’t it? My own head, bowing shamefaced.
Ariyike and I decided that day to start earning our own money. First, we started to sell sachet water we had kept in plastic buckets filled with ice overnight, but too many kids here already did that. We had to walk as far as the tollgate and wait until there was serious traffic to make good sales. We did this together, my sister and I, for a few months until one of grandmother’s co-workers at the hospital died and I decided to take the job. Ariyike continued to sell water in traffic.
I worked mostly in the children’s wing of the orthopedic department. Most of the time, all I did was empty trash bins and wastebaskets in doctors’ offices. The favorite part of my day was running errands for doctors and nurses. Most of them were nice; they let me keep the change.
Sometimes the older cleaners did not show up and it fell on me to clean the toilets. It was on one of these days that I met and befriended Aminat. The supervisor had found me sitting beneath the stairs in radiology and said, “This girl again. Don’t you have something to do?”
I had just come back from walking thirty minutes to and fro, buying lunch for some doctors. I could have told him that, but then he would have laughed, telling me that was “extracurricular.” Instead I said nothing, pointing in the direction of the nearest toilets, and walked away.
The men’s toilet smelled like boiling hot piss mixed with something superconcentrated, like hair dye or shoe polish. The cleaning bucket was in a corner by the washbasin but there was no mop or scrubbing brush. I made a makeshift bowl by breaking the top half off a plastic bottle I found in the trash. Afterward, I mixed some cleaning detergent with disinfectant and water then took to sprinkling it over and over around the bathroom. I sprinkled all around the steel pipes jutting out of the wall where the urinals were once erect. I sprinkled inside the doorless stalls, on the mirrorless walls. Unlike in the women’s bathrooms, there was running water. I walked into every stall, flushing toilets repeatedly. I had spent what I considered enough time in there and was getting ready to leave when a woman walked in and shut the door behind her. I watched her lean against the door, sighing loudly as she pulled out a sanitary pad from a large red purse shaped like an envelope. It was the cheap kind of pad, not the flat type with wings, but one of the thicker ones, the ones that look like a long lump of cotton wool. She was a tiny woman. Her long box braids were waist length. They made slow, somber movements across her face as she pulled down her skirt to tuck the pad in. She was wearing one of those tight Lycra skirts with mid-thigh slits, so I had to wonder why a young lady would use such older-woman pads. She looked like the kind of person who would choose Always every day.
She did not care that I was watching her. I was not even pretending to be cleaning at this point. She stuck the pad onto her underwear then took out a Wet n Wild lipstick from her purse. She pressed it onto the pad, making a bold red stain. She drew a couple more poorly structured stains then pulled up her underwear. It was then she looked up at me and asked with that inventive mix of Yoruba and pidgin that took me months to get accustomed to, “Watch me like TV. You no get work to do?”
I realized then that there was no real way she was as old as I had assumed she was. She was only a little older than Ariyike and me, probably—eighteen, maybe twenty. It was the way she carried herself upright in the world that had thrown me off, like she knew things no one else did, like she had plans and she was thoroughly convinced of their brilliance. Her makeup of course contributed to it: she had shaved off her eyebrows and drawn thin straight lines with red pencil, and her lips shone with bright red lipstick. Her eyes were lined with the darkest shade of black possible and contrasted with her light brown skin; she looked like she had been punched several times.
The door opened and, once she was satisfied with who it was, Aminat moved out of the way to let him in. It was one of the technicians who handled X-rays. His colleagues called him Four Fiber because he held on to copies of X-rays until patients gave him at least four twenty-naira notes.
He motioned to leave as soon as he saw me, but Aminat caught him by the arm, pulling him to her. I was so happy to have spent enough time pretending to clean the toilets that I left immediately, kicking my cleaning bucket back into the corner. I walked into the nearest office and picked up their trash bin, waiting for a full minute before walking back to the toilet door, stopping to listen. I heard the sound of struggling, her braided twists smacking the small of her back as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp.
“I do no
t believe you,” he was saying to her.
“Why will I lie about this. I have been looking forward to spending the weekend with you. Don’t you believe me?” she asked.
“Show me, then, show me,” he said.
“Someone might be coming. Calm down.”
He pulled down her underwear, not listening to her protest. When he found the stained pad, he said he was sorry he did not believe her. He watched her as she pulled on her underwear and adjusted her skirt, then put his hand in the inner pockets of his coat, giving her all the money he could pull out.
He was sorry that he had given the girl a real reason to end the relationship with him. A relationship that had cost him a lot of money to begin and maintain. He was ashamed of how excited he became after those few moments of struggle, deflated by the possibility that all that potential had gone to waste.
He would be sad for a few weeks because Aminat will no longer have anything to do with him, then he would learn to accept it. One day, six months later, a tiny light-skinned girl who had been in the hospital for days taking care of a little brother in a hit-and-run would take the lab technician up on his offer for a hot lunch and a cold shower in his apartment. He would wait until she was fed and clean and initiate a struggle. It would be everything he imagined, then he would find another girl and do it again and again and again.
AFTER HE WALKED out of the toilets, Aminat waited a few seconds. Then she walked out after him. I was outside, right by the door, making a show of taking a broom to the cobwebs on the hallway ceilings when Aminat walked up to me.
“Here, take your share,” she said, tapping me on my shoulder. She had two twenty-naira notes in her hand. She was trying to shove them down my bra.
“Stop it. I don’t want that,” I said.
“Why? Are you planning to broadcast on me?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. That is exactly my job here. Administrator of periods, chief commissioner of sanitary pads.”
She laughed a loud hearty laugh and walked away from me, taking her money with her. I watched her go, wondering if she was walking home with the lipstick-stained pad still between her legs.
Black Sunday Page 6