Angie reached for something to say. “Ella wrote to me that you’re an executive secretary?”
“Yes, that is true.”
Angie tried again. “And on weekends, you run a kiosk?”
“And what else did your sister tell you about me?”
“That she really enjoyed staying with you.”
Funke smiled. Angie relaxed. They sat in silence for a while. Funke removed the soup and placed another pot on the flame. Once the water boiled, she added a cup of cassava grain. As she stirred she said proudly, “We are building a house in Lagos.”
These new appliances, she explained, would be put into the new home. “Light never stays on here,” she said. “So why would I even plug them into the wall?”
Angie nodded in understanding, having had her own experiences with the city’s erratic power system.
Funke took the cassava mixture, which looked to Angie like mashed potatoes with lumps, and placed it in a wooden bowl, which she sat on the kitchen table. She put the pot of soup on the table as well and they all sat. Funke and Andrew scooped up fat pieces of the mixture, rolled them in their hands, dipped them into the soup. The glob of thick, sticky-looking grain mocked Angie. “Do you have a fork?” she asked.
“You cannot be eating eba with a fork,” said Funke. “Grab it with your hand O.”
Angie broke off a small piece and dropped it into her soup, which was green and slimy. She picked up the piece of eba, placed it tentatively into her mouth. Andrew laughed. It was gummy and hard to swallow, sticking to her throat. Andrew rose, handed her a dusty spoon. She dipped it into the soup, took a sip, coughed. It was so hot, her cheeks salivated.
“You must get your tongue used to draw soup,” said Funke. “If you are shy with it, it will always be too much for you.”
Funke fed Ope, who ate greedily. Andrew cupped soup with his eba and pushed it into his mouth. Strings of okra hung onto his chin.
Angie tried again. The soup was tasteless beyond its scorching spice. She wanted water, but feared she would insult Funke if she asked whether it had been boiled first. She’d read somewhere not to drink the water in third world countries; now she longed for the purified pitcher of water that beckoned in the Olapades’ ever-humming refrigerator. Her stomach growled in reaction to the heat. The others stared at her. She forced herself to eat much of what was in her bowl, out of respect and hunger. Her insides burned bright.
Funke grabbed Ope and tied him to her back, began clearing the table as Andrew disappeared out the front door. Angie helped Funke with the dishes, washed with a sudsy sponge then plunged into a bucket of cold water.
“Where were you staying before you came to me?” asked Funke.
“With a Nigerian man and his wife,” said Angie.
“And what does this man do?”
“He works for the International Bank of West Africa.”
“And where does he live, this banker?”
“In Ikeja.”
“Ah-ah? In a new house?”
“Yes, he said it’s only about four years old.”
“This is where our house is being built, O! Right by the airport in a new development!” Funke grabbed Angie’s hand, sat her down at the table. “Tell me about this big man’s house.”
Funke had Angie describe how each room looked, how it was furnished, where the washer and dryer were located, how loud the generator hummed.
“And does it have two floors?”
“Yes,” said Angie. “The bedrooms are upstairs.”
“Ours will be like this!” shouted Funke. “And the boy’s quarters, were they out back?”
“Yes, I stayed in one.”
“Eyyyy! In the boy’s quarters?”
“It was set up like a guest room.”
Funke sucked her teeth. “And did you bring her a gift, this madam who put you in the boy’s quarters?”
“No.” Angie wondered, had Brenda noticed? “Ella stayed back there too, before she came to stay with you.”
Funke stood, returned to the kitchen. “I don’t remember that a-tall.”
Angie watched Funke clean her pots. “How long did my sister stay here?” she asked. She couldn’t really tell from Ella’s letters.
“A long time,” said Funke. “Many weeks.”
“Was there anything she told you that you could tell me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . anything.”
Funke shrugged. “She told me everything. We were very close.”
Angie felt both heartened and envious. “Maybe you can share some memories with me.”
“Yes.” Funke stood. “But now, I must get my rest. I am doing many jobs you know.”
“Of course.” Angie also rose. “We can talk tomorrow.”
“Let me show you where you’ll sleep,” said Funke.
“Is it the same room where Ella stayed?”
Funke looked at her, dark eyeliner exaggerating her big eyes. “That room is very cluttered.”
“I don’t mind.”
She eyed Angie for a bit longer. “Very well. Come.”
The room was dust laden and mildewy. Three cots filled the tight space, alongside several boxes and basins and wide-open drums of grain. Left alone, Angie took off her clothes, and rifled through her suitcase until she found her gown and slipped into it. She lay across the cot, which had neither a pillow nor a sheet, just a bare mattress. She tried to conjure the feeling that had escaped her in the back quarters at the Olapades’, that sense that Ella’s presence lingered in the room. Nothing came. Exhausted by her disappointment, she fell asleep, hoping to dream about her sister. But she didn’t.
Some time before dawn, her bowels awakened her. She couldn’t remember where she was. Her need for a bathroom forced her out of bed; she fumbled down the dark hallway. She thought she might be having a waking dream and opened one door, which turned out to be a storage room, closed it, stumbled to the next, where she could make out a body curled atop a mat on the floor. A snake slithered downward inside her. The next room seemed to be a bathroom, but she couldn’t be certain. She held her stomach in desperation as her eyes adjusted. The room had a cement floor and a sink whose bowl was filled with corrosion. Buckets and basins of water were everywhere, along with barrels of unknowable objects. She could see a showerhead in the corner but no space existed to stand beneath it. She finally spotted a toilet, a basin of water on top of its closed lid. She lunged for the water basin; it was heavy and she lugged it carefully from the toilet to the floor; when she raised the lid, she was assaulted by the smell and the sight of human waste. Desperate, she climbed atop the seat-less toilet, hovering, and let her bowels go. She knew before she tried that the toilet wouldn’t flush and so she closed its lid, returned the basin of water atop and stumbled in the darkness back to bed, her own body’s smell pungent as a trapped animal’s.
In the daylight the washroom was less ominous but no less overwhelming for its clutter, its vast array of water containers, its lingering odor. With Ope wrapped snug against her back, Funke pointed to two covered jerricans on the floor.
“These are for cooking and drinking,” she explained. She pointed to other buckets. “The wide-mouthed ones are for bathing and washing clothes. And you must use that basin on top of the toilet for pouring water into the commode after you have relieved yourself.”
“I actually have to relieve myself right now,” said Angie.
“Come outside when you are done,” said Funke as she walked away.
Afterward, Angie found her on the front porch, holding a large metal pole. “Follow me,” she said. Sticky heat clung as they walked to the side of the house, stopping before a small water pump.
“My husband and I had our own borehole built,” Funke said proudly. “It’s sixty feet deep.”
She turned o
n the curved, rusting spigot; water gushed from the tap. She quickly turned it off. The neighbors, she explained, were allowed to fill their buckets after they gave her twenty-five kobo each.
“They pay you for the water?” asked Angie.
“We have spent big-big money for this!” said Funke. “We pay and so they must pay.”
“But shouldn’t the water department supply the water?”
Funke sighed. “If you live on Vic or Ikoyi Island or maybe with your ay-leet friends in Ikeja, you have running water. Here, we have a borehole. We are lucky to have it.”
Angie thought of all the times she had brushed her teeth, mindlessly letting the water run. The thought loosened her bowels again.
“I’ll be back,” she said, running off.
When Angie returned, Funke was waiting with more rules. “Whenever you use water, replace it from the pump,” she said. “Sometimes the well dries up and the day goes by without a drop.”
She slid the elongated metal rod down a circular hole. “You lock the pipes like this.” She turned the key clockwise. “To unlock it, turn the other way.” She let go of the key. “You try.”
Angie gripped the metal, felt it catch against a lever.
“Never leave the water pump on when you are gone!” said Funke. “A-tall!”
Back inside the house, Funke grabbed a satchel, noticeably flat. She turned to Angie. “You have running stomach,” she said.
Angie nodded. The name was so clearly accurate.
“You must make your way to the chemist. It’s just up the road, straight, and there in the Gbaja Market you will find the kiosk. Tell them what you have and they will give you pills to make it go away.” Funke opened the front door. “Lock this when you leave.”
Once Funke and Ope left, the house quiet, Angie went back to bed and slept. Her diarrhea had awakened her so early that she could feel her tiredness hanging from her, pulling her down, as a swimmer feels the weight of water after climbing out of a pool. Three hours later she awoke, was instantly reminded of her delicate stomach and headed back to the washroom. Afterward, she took off the lid of a covered jerrican, found a cup bobbing in the water. She dipped the cup, barely skimming the water’s surface, and used that to wash her face and brush her teeth. She spit the toothpaste onto the cement floor, as she couldn’t figure out another way. Next she filled a large, idle bowl with water from the bathing bucket. She was afraid to use too much, too intimidated to refill the bucket at the tap outside. Nor did she dare venture to boil the water on the gas burner. She grabbed a giant bar of black soap sitting on the ledge of the rusting sink, stripped out of her nightgown, dunked the soap into the dipping bowl and washed under her arms. She quickly rinsed, the water so cold, her body broke into tiny goose bumps. Water dribbled down her legs to the cement floor, where dirty suds lathered in a pool, slowly swirling toward an unseen drain. She thought: something here is not right.
Lacking a towel, she dried off with her nightgown.
After she’d dressed in jeans and a tank top, Angie headed out the front door in search of a chemist. Humid air engulfed her as chickens and roosters ran across her path. At a wide intersection, a cluster of school children passed by, pealing with chatter and laughter. Dressed in uniforms—the boys in tan cotton shorts and matching shirts, the girls in tan dresses—they carried books on straps slung across their backs. The dust created knee-high stockings on their legs. Each girl’s hair was braided in an elaborate design. They waved at Angie. She waved back.
Feeling weak, she moved slowly up the road. She’d made little progress when she spotted a bus stop, where a cluster of people crowded around a yellow danfo, one of the rickety minibuses she’d seen barreling around Lagos Island that first day. On impulse, she decided to take it. At the doorway, a throng of people pushed themselves onto the bus. Angie stood beside a woman carrying a box on her head cushioned by a ring of cloth; she asked her whether this bus went to Gbaja Market? The woman nodded and Angie let herself be carried along with the throb of bodies. Hands reached out to a boy in the front collecting kobo from outstretched palms. Someone stepped on her sandaled foot but she couldn’t move and swallowed the pain. The seats were all taken, one by an old man carrying a cage of cackling chickens. The danfo took off and she freed her own arm enough to hold onto the back of a seat. Her nose was under a man’s armpit, forcing her to inhale the sweet stank of his body funk. The driver zoomed down the road, swerving around a corner so sharply that the van rode on two wheels. Three boys hung from the doorway. A sign over the driver’s head said, I TRUST IN GOD FOR SAFE JOURNEY. YOU SHOULD HOLD ON.
As soon as they reached Gbaja, she descended with the others in one mass exodus and made her way through the market, which was actually more of a shopping complex. She walked through the outdoor mall for several minutes before spotting the chemist kiosk, its hand-painted sign askew. A boy of eight or nine was manning the shop. Angie asked him for the tablets that help with running stomach. He turned, grabbed a jar of huge white pills on the shelf behind, opened it, put his hand inside, and scooped up a handful.
“How much?” he asked.
She wondered where was the packaged carton of tablets with instructions and an expiration date, the protective seal? And these did not look like “over-the-counter” pills, rather something you get with a prescription.
“Please, do you have any in a box, still sealed?” she asked.
“No, aunty,” said the boy. “How much?”
She looked at the pills, picked a number. “Six.”
He counted out the six pills methodically and placed them inside a scrap of nearby paper, which he then crunched, and handed to her.
“Twelve naira, Aunty.”
Angie handed him the money, and moved through the market until she found a boy selling baggies of water from a pan he carried on his head. She bought a baggie and swallowed two of the pills, washing them down. They caught in her throat.
She got lost on her way back, cursing herself for not taking a taxi. Still it gave her a chance to explore Surulere, see the latticed fences Ella had described as stone lace. Eventually, she asked directions back to Funke’s street from a man carrying a gigantic boom box on a shoulder strap, highlife blaring. He turned off the music, and using her gold pen and a page from her journal, drew a little map. She entered Funke’s street just as darkness encroached; cooking fires burned all along Onibu Ore Road—ribbons of smoke undulating upward, rimming the sky. Women on the lean-to side of Funke’s street called out a greeting to her, “You are welcome!” they said. “You are welcome!”
When the four of them sat for dinner later, Angie didn’t dare eat. Tonight’s meal was more soup and more starch for scooping it up, this time fufu. Funke and Andrew each pulled off a piece of the fermented cassava, rolled it into a ball, pushed a thumb into it, then scooped up soup in the fufu’s little reservoir. They popped these into their mouths and swallowed without chewing. Andrew shoved the bowl of fufu at Angie. “You try,” he said.
“I don’t think so—”
“Try!”
“OK!” She hated yelling. She picked up a small piece, and emulating what she’d seen, dipped the ball of fufu into her bowl of soup, placed it in her mouth.
“No, no!” yelled Andrew. “You cannot chew it. That is bad luck O! Just swallow it.”
Angie gulped it down, nearly choking. “I’ve had enough.”
Andrew grinned. “You will do me a favor.”
“What’s that?”
“You will help me find work in America.”
“What type of work would you like?” she asked.
“I want to be in movies in Hollywood.”
She sighed. “It’s not that easy.”
“I can do it! I am into your acting and singing.”
“You cannot even finish your O-levels,” noted Funke. “They do not let lazy men into Hollywood just because
they have the curly look, O.”
Andrew ignored his aunt. “I will come to America and you will help me,” he said to Angie. “You will help me become an actor in Hollywood.”
“Call me when you arrive,” she said, tired of him. Her stomach still hurt.
Satisfied, Andrew broke off a giant piece of fufu, rolled it with one hand, scooped it into his soup, shoved it into his mouth, and swallowed. His Adam’s apple came alive.
Funke said, “My water is very low. You are drinking a lot of it today?” she asked Andrew.
“Nah! I don’t drink water. Never! Me, I only drink Coca-Cola.”
Funke turned to Angie. “It was you.”
“I only used water this morning to bathe,” said Angie.
“Then you used my drinking water for your bathing,” said Funke as she rubbed her protruding belly.
“No, I made sure I dipped water from the big, wide bucket—”
“You must not use my drinking water for your bath.”
“But I didn’t use the drinking water, I’m sure of it.”
“I’m sure that you did.”
“Here in Naija, it’s all about the water,” said Andrew, grinning wide.
“But I swear, I didn’t—”
“Ah, this one is kicking hard!” They all paused. “Again!” exclaimed Funke. “God willing, it will be another boy.” She rubbed her belly. “I will name him Yele.”
“What does Yele mean?” asked Angie, relieved to change the subject.
Funke rubbed in circles. She looked right at Angie. “It means I am grateful.”
After dinner, Angie was extra careful to wash each plate and bowl and fork with the soapy sponge before dunking it into the bucket of cold, this-is-for-washing-dishes water. She wanted to show her gratitude. Throughout that night, she ran back and forth to the toilet. Funke woke her at 4:30 in the morning.
“You are pouring water down the toilet when you pee,” she said.
Angie lifted up, neck stiff from a pillowless sleep. “I thought you said to use the basin of water on top of the toilet for that.”
Into the Go Slow Page 19