by TJ Benson
‘I have two fathers,’ he told her, smiling at her confused face. ‘My second father, a priest from Zaria … he gave me this place because I needed time to think. You see, I ran away from the army not long ago.’
‘You can’t just stop like that, haba, give me the gist!’
He leant forward to kiss her nose (to taste the sun, according to him) and said, ‘If you stay long enough in this house I will tell you. Your turn.’
She didn’t say much either. Just that she had grown up in Zaria and that she hated her real name and couldn’t tell it to him. It started with ‘H’ like the rest of her sisters and she had always dreaded becoming like them.
‘O, tell me the name!’ he begged, blowing on her stomach, ‘Tell me, tell me, tell me—’
‘Okay, okay!’ she screamed, laughing, but when he stopped begging she jumped out of bed and said, ‘If you stay long enough in this house I will tell you.’
After his return, they began to really make the house their own. They stripped down the God-knows-how-old curtains and washed them, and soaked and scrubbed the terrazzo with baking powder so that the reverend’s brother, the real owner of the house, would come back from Europe and find the place in good shape. He told her he had never met the man before but he seemed to be very particular about things.
What if he wanted his house back, where would they go? They didn’t think about this. They dragged out cartons of mouldy, rat-eaten registers filled with names and consignments of probably dead mad white people to burn and finally give them rest. Halfway through the cleanest intact volume the list of names abruptly stopped with an entry on 18th October 1961. Shipped back to Great Britain it recorded in drunken calligraphy.
She left the brass clock hanging on the wall in the living room, though. It could only tell midnight and high noon because it had no hour hand and its minute hand was permanently on twelve. So time in the house was what you made of it. They carried their washing to the kitchen and stopped at the back door to survey the small patch of land that stretched to the high fence, both thinking a garden would one day come out of it. They cooked naked. It was the most natural thing to do. She enjoyed painting his body; it was hard to transition to canvas. Thank God some mad person in the house had stocked paints and yards of canvas decades ago. They tried to name the strange flowers and grasses that had survived the desertions and reoccupations of the house, the coups of the Sixties and civil war.
‘This is lemon grass.’
‘This is hibiscus.’
‘No, it is sweet pea.’
‘No, I read about sweet pea in that English horticulture volume four book on the shelf. Sweet pea is not supposed to be in Africa. Some of it is very rare.’
‘You are not supposed to be in my life. You are rare. I have only met women like you in novels. Yet here you are.’
And only after years of preparation for the owner who Father Ebube had said would come, after they had altered the house and cleared the cobwebs and were almost halfway through the great library in the parlour, after giving birth, only then did he return. He looked mixed race, just like Father Ebube, with greying hair, next to his younger wife.
‘No, no, it is yours now. My brother wanted you to have it so it is yours. I only visited to see if I like you or not. My reverend brother talks about you a lot in his letters. You were the son he never had. But he never mentioned your wife. He never knew he was a grandfather, did he? My grandfather reverend brother, hahahahahaha; I am the one with jokes, the only thing I inherited from our father. Thank God the man is dead now. Took his time but he is dead with his family in Essex. I never went to visit him during my PhD but I think in retrospect I should have. The thought of his black boy becoming a professor, hahahaha! O, I should have visited. This is my wife, Sarai. Before you say anything about our obvious age difference I want you to know she is the one who approached me. Is it a lie, Sarai? Hahahahahaha. O, I talk too much; that’s why I am a prof. You can just call me that. You guys have done wonderfully well with the house; I’ve never come in before but I heard it was a coffin. You should open the windows, let the sunlight in.’
Late in the evening, after tongues had been loosened by alcohol, they all sat round the candle-lit living room. Sweet Pea chose the chair at one end and Shariff followed her, sat on the floor, leant back, his head between her thighs and she caressed his soft scalp while he talked. The lecturer chose a chair at the other end, towards the kitchen door, and Sarai crawled onto his lap like a kitten. The candle light made her skin almost reddish gold and her small palm brushed the lecturer’s open hairy chest. Her head rested on his shoulder. She was the most beautiful woman Sweet Pea had ever seen.
‘So,’ she said to Sarai, digging her fingers into Shariff’s beard, ‘Father Ebube told us you used to be the darling of one general.’
Shariff turned to look at her. ‘Haba, Sweet Pea.’
Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘No-no-no, it’s fine!’ smiled Sarai. ‘Really. Yes, I was a spy. I can’t say everything because that will get you in trouble. The general must have found out after the coup two years ago but by then I was already on a bus going to Bida. I am still on some “most wanted” lists.’
‘But you are so … fragile!’ exclaimed Sweet Pea. ‘I want to carry you in my arms and sing you sweet songs through the night.’
The men laughed. ‘Don’t mind my wife,’ said Shariff. ‘That’s the alcohol talking.’
‘No, it is the mother talking,’ said Sarai looking at Sweet Pea intensely, ‘and I am going to take you up on that offer one of these days.’
‘I just … I never thought you would be that kind of woman,’ she said. ‘The bravest thing I have ever done in my life is flee my father’s house.’
Shariff turned back to say with a wink. ‘And move into my house.’
‘Whose house is this?’ Do you have a receipt?’ she scolded. ‘Just mess up and you will see yourself on the street.’
‘Something tells me you would be on the street with me,’ he retorted.
Everyone erupted into laughter.
‘Hehe, Prof,’ Sweet Pea clapped her hands, chuckling. ‘You see this one?’
They settled down and became comfortable again.
‘My father was a Fulani man and a soldier, fought in the civil war,’ said Sarai. ‘He feared an invasion of the Igbos so from the moment my brother and I started talking we knew about bullets.’
The candle went out, throwing the living room into near darkness.
‘Where is your father now?’ asked Shariff.
‘O, he died in the war.’ She took the last swig from her bottle. ‘Towards the end of it. I never saw his body.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Sweet Pea. ‘What of your brother?’
‘General Suntai got to him first,’ Sarai said in a barely audible voice, looking into a corner the dim light couldn’t reach.
‘General Suntai is the man she was spying on,’ Prof clarified.
‘Jesus.’
‘I couldn’t get a message to my brother in time.’
‘My God.’
‘I was so sure I would get to Bida before the general would know what was happening. I got word from my brother’s torture chamber. I escaped the town, but I can tell you I wanted to exchange my life for his. How would my father’s lineage continue?’
‘I have told her to give our children her father’s name,’ said Prof gently.
She buried her face in his. Then she slapped it softly and said, ‘Shut up, Prof.’ Her eyes returned to the dark corner of the room. ‘Anyway, I know I am going to die, very soon, I know it. He is going to find me and shoot me.’
‘Sarai!’
‘I was serving him one day like that – we were still in Keffi that time; he was sitting outside his house on Lafiya Road and he just pointed his gun at a woman on the road and shot her, just like that, and before she fell I saw that she was me.’
‘Sarai.’
‘I am serious, Pro
f. She looked like me, my carbon copy. Before she fell down, she turned and made eye contact with me. As if I was the one who’d shot her. She held onto the person beside her, maybe her husband, maybe another person on their way somewhere, and she looked at me, ehn. Then the person looked at us and pushed her away and she fell.’
‘The military regime must almost be over,’ said Sweet Pea. ‘I am so sorry I brought this up.’
‘Hasn’t it always been almost? Abi, didn’t the war almost never happen? Abeg pass me whiskey jare.’
Shariff flung the glass bottle across the room and Sarai caught it.
‘You have had enough.’ Prof took the bottle from her. ‘You are not thinking straight any more.’
‘O, I am thinking straight. I am thinking that because I married an optimist I will not know it when General Suntai comes for me. I will be walking on the road beside you and after all these years of fear, after knowing how my life is supposed to end, I will still be surprised by the bullet, and I will turn and see a woman beside him who looks just like me. I will look at her before falling; it is she that I will look at because she should have known.’
There was a long silence. Then the professor removed a key from his briefcase. ‘Well then, we have to make sure you are not walking.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Happy birthday to the only fruit in my basket, the only bread in my cupboard.’
Shariff and Sweet Pea laughed but Sarai was dumbfounded. ‘But this is your car key.’
‘An early birthday gift to you.’ His eyes twinkled.
‘Happy birthday to you,’ Sweet Pea sang, and the others joined in. ‘Happy birthday! Happy birthday to you …’
She knew.
It was one of the many things in their marriage she couldn’t understand, this knowing, but when Prof rushed in one night saying Dele Giwa was dead she knew something else had happened or would happen and she didn’t know what. A heaviness too old for her lifetime, a grief carried by women before her, weighed her to the ground. But she ignored it and comforted Sarai. They had been friends for over a year by then.
After Prof asked Shariff to please drive his wife to a small hotel he owned and left for an unknown destination, she pulled out a volume of Soyinka’s poetry to attempt by candle light. That was when she heard his steps shuffle to the door, his steps, surely, but at the wrong pace. And this person with steps that were and weren’t her husband’s hesitated at the door. She rushed to it in her flowery night gown, the rollers on her head bobbing. Her restless heart recognised his on the other side of the door. She took a deep breath before turning the knob and pressing the latch down. She pulled the door open, the terrible terrible night’s chill rushed in, and when she used her fingers to lift his chin up she saw the answer floating in his eyes.
She let his head go and staggered back into the house, away from him, stunned, grasping the wall, anything for support, as her eyes filled up and he stumbled after her as if she was gravity, forgetting to shut the door. She tripped over a small stool. He scrambled to save her but fell to the carpet with her. They stared at the ceiling.
‘Is something wrong with me?’ A whisper. She turned to him with those full eyes that wouldn’t brim over and cry. ‘Is something terribly wrong with me?’
‘No-no, damn, no.’ His voice was husky from crying. ‘I am a fool, an evil fool; it is not you.’ He grappled for more words to say for fear that a window was closing shut forever. ‘You are a queen, I am filthy.’
‘I make men filthy.’ The low, pure voice, tears falling now, a roller untangled from her hair. The evil air flowed freely in from the darkness outside through the open door. Her arms crossed, fists shoved under her armpits, legs straight in front of her. Whole body rocking gently on the ground in a sea of emotions, independent of his hand squeezing her shoulder. Body rocking side to side, side to side, side to side. ‘I make men filthy,’ she declared, then stood up languidly as if in a dream, a trance, and felt her way out of the parlour as if she was blind. ‘I make men filthy …’
He stumbled after her, desperate, drunk with agony for both of them. She sat on the bed, eyes staring into far away, arms wrapped around herself, rocking back and forth; even the larger shadow cast on the wall by a dying candle was forlorn. Reciting, ‘I make men filthy … I make men filthy. How am I going to raise sons when I make men filthy?’
‘Stop it!’ He no longer cared if he screamed. He grabbed her shoulders, furious now, and shook her violently. ‘Stop it now!’ Most of the rollers jiggled loose and fell from her hair but her face did not melt from the cold realisation that was tearing her apart from him. He knelt on the ground and buried his face in her lap, his voice a muffled cry now. ‘You know I lo—’
She snatched the electric iron from the dressing table and struck him a vicious blow on his head. He yelled and fell back. She looked down at him, an arm stretched high above her head with the iron. ‘Don’t even say it, I beg you. I don’t want to hurt you.’
‘You know it is the truth.’
‘I know it didn’t stop you.’
‘Look, you want to hit me?’ He spread out his arms. ‘Hit me, but—’
‘Just get out.’ She pointed with the iron to the door. ‘I paid for this house with my money. Please just go.’
In the days after her husband fled home to train for the warfront of another country. Sweet Pea stayed indoors, nursing her children, husbanding her depression and grief, not allowing it to flower and make her lock her children in with her and set the house on fire so that when her husband came back to his senses and came back home he would meet nothing and run mad proper.
One morning three months and two weeks after he had left, she realised with surprise that she was mourning him already. The matchbox was in the kitchen and her eyes were getting wet.
‘Sweet Mum.’ Max, growing like a corn stalk. ‘Sweet Mum, why are you crying?’
‘Nothing.’ Then she knelt on the kitchen floor to his height. ‘Mummy is not well. Something is making Mummy not well. But Mummy will be fine soon, you hear?’ She tweaked his cheeks and smiled, and how could she not, her first love child? ‘Sit in class today, you hear?’
He bobbed his head up and down, unconvinced, and went to the parlour where his baby André was waiting.
She went to her room to watch them walk out of the gate, Max’s hand on his baby brother’s back, and she exhaled in relief. She retrieved her unsmoked cigarette and went to her studio. There, she sat in the midst of her paintings and admired her heartbreak. It was older than her children. It was merely a grotesque explosion, really. Why was the Abuja art crowd crazy over it? Well, she would have to let them have it because she had to pay André’s school fees and books. She brushed her finger over a dash of colour in the explosion, to feel the texture, this small wave of thought. Shariff had always told her to express her thoughts, to tell him what she was thinking. What would she say to him if he stood before her? Your son started school today. I don’t have any money so I have to sell this painting. But it won’t be enough. I have to paint more and sell more.
Maybe if she got connected to Bruce Onobrakpeya he would put her in contact with agents in Germany or Spain. The man was kind. Her Shariff would roll in his grave if she sold the painting but they had to eat. Maybe he wasn’t dead yet. Maybe he was still alive. The cigarette wasn’t lit yet, it was still squeezed in between two fingers. Yes, he was probably still alive in Monrovia, having sex with a Liberian girl with an American accent and big breasts, or maybe his body had been blown to pieces, scattered all over some market square. She uncrossed her legs at the memory of his hands on them, shut her eyes briefly, then snapped out of it, crossed them again. She forced her eyes open and studied the painting. She put the cigarette between her lips and sighed: it would be easier for her if he was dead. So easy.
She uncrossed her legs and began to stand up when he walked in. She didn’t know when she started laughing, waves from her belly flooding her mouth, tears from her eyes. ‘
Omygawd, omygawd,’ she moaned between cackles, slapping her thighs. Concern pinched his bruised face made more real by stitches, so she stopped laughing. Worry crept into her voice as she asked, ‘Omygawd, what have I done? What did I do?’ Her eyes were wide in horror as he placed a real hand on her face.
‘I am back, Sweet Pea.’ He thumbed off a tear. ‘I am back.’
She pushed him away, looking at him as if he were a vandal who had invaded her home. ‘How did I die, Shariff?’ she screamed. ‘How did I kill the children?’
He embraced her and she cried long and hard into his bandaged chest. When she stopped he showed her the wounds he carried, asked her if she wanted to touch them. He summarised the horrors of the peacekeeping, the role of the Nigerian army, the senselessness of the war. He told her about how a general had saved his life and helped him defect.
‘So you are back.’
‘Yes,’ he said, smiling and lifting her up. He carried her out of her studio. She had to cover her eyes with both hands because she would die in his.
At the bedroom door she squirmed out of his grasp. ‘Wait, wait, put me down.’
‘What?’
‘I said put me down!’
He put her down.
‘We have to bath you first.’
He allowed her to lead him to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth with her toothbrush while she plugged the tub and filled it halfway with water that had been boiling in the tin tank outside under the sun. She helped him strip and released him into the water. She sat on the rim as he relaxed into it. She scrubbed everywhere, the topography of scars on his back, down to the buttocks she had missed so much, down his legs to the in-betweens of his toes and the undersides of his feet. It took all the effort she could muster not to cry as she scrubbed this body she had believed to be dead. She had to drain the water in the tub and replace it because it got too dirty. He moaned where it hurt and moaned when she briefly stroked his penis as you would absent-mindedly twirl a braid on your finger; she was startled by his fullness when he called breathlessly, ‘Sweet Pea.’