News from Home

by Sefi Atta

  “It’s just the infrastructure, you know,” she said. “The infrastructure that holds us back and, of course, the usual corruption.”

  Your husband kept nodding as if you were all at an economic summit, but he never once looked at her.

  When she was through talking, he said, “I don’t think you are ready for university this year.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “I just don’t believe you are ready for it,” he said.

  She frowned. “Em, why?”

  “In view of your behavior.”

  “What behavior?”

  “Shh,” you said, making calming motions with your hand.

  “No,” Biola said. “I want to know. What behavior?”

  “This is not a punishment,” you said.

  “Can’t he speak for himself?” Biola asked.

  “Em, may I be excused?” Deji said, standing up. “Because don’t...”

  He left without waiting for an answer and Oyinda followed him upstairs.

  Your husband finished another mouthful and afterwards said, “I hear you were dancing with the watchman this morning.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?” Biola asked.

  He kept his voice steady. “Were you or were you not dancing with the watchman?”

  You shut your eyes. Where did the man think he was? In court?

  “I did,” Biola said. “I did dance with the watchman. So what?”

  He nodded. “I see.”

  Biola faced you. “So what if I danced with the sodding watchman? What has that got to do with anything? Isn’t he a frigging human being?”

  “You do not talk like that in my presence,” her father said. “I will not tolerate that behavior from you.”

  Biola slapped the table. “What about you? Let’s talk about your behavior for a change.”

  “Patience?” you called out. “Will you get yourself in here?” Patience walked in, rubbing her eyes. She had probably been sleeping in the kitchen.

  “Wake up,” you ordered, “and clear the table.”

  Biola dragged her chair back. “I hate this family.”

  Why had you trusted your husband again? Your children had inherited their selfishness and petulance from him. He was still eating, but you left him alone at the dining table. He preferred your cooking, which was why he came home on time. You had fantasized many times before about putting poison in his food. Today, that would have been perfect. Why did he have to say that to Biola? Why couldn’t he just wait? This wouldn’t be the first time he had withheld information from her.

  Later that night you knocked on Biola’s bedroom door and Biola didn’t answer. You turned the handle and were not surprised to find that the door was locked. You didn’t sleep well that night. You kept thinking about your sister, Ebun, and could well imagine the pain that drove her to kill herself.

  The next morning, you heard a door creak, which sounded as if one of your children was going to their bathroom. You got up and put on your dressing gown, then you went to see who it was.

  You knocked on the door and no one answered. Assuming it was Biola, you turned the handle and opened the door. You found Biola on the floor with her container of pills by her side. She was still conscious.

  “Jesus of Nazareth,” you whispered.

  Oyinda called out, “Mummy, are you OK?”

  “It’s nothing, my dear,” you said, pushing the door shut. “Just call your father.”

  Oyinda and Deji were in tears when they found out. The driver did not start work until seven in the morning, so their father drove you and Biola to St. Christopher’s, a private hospital nearby. The teaching hospital was too far away. Throughout the drive Biola retched.

  Patients admitted to St. Christopher’s ended up in the teaching hospital because St. Christopher’s doctors were not as well trained, but their facilities were the best in Lagos and you knew the owner.

  You arranged for Biola to have a single room there. The doctor and nurses called you “madam” and your husband “sir” as Biola, now recovering from her nausea, began to insult you both.

  “Illiterate,” she said to you. “You have no pride. He treats you like shit.” “Hypocrite,” she said to her father. “Coward. Bigamist. Bastard.”

  The door of the room was open and her voice carried down the corridor. Your husband left the room with his hands behind his back. The doctor and the nurse, who had called him “sir,” could no longer meet his eyes.

  “Go on then,” Biola said. “You’re used to sneaking off anyway, aren’t you? You’re the embarrassment, not me”Then to you: “Can’t you just leave him? Can’t you just kick him out? You’re the one that’s mad. You’re the one that’s demented.”

  You covered her mouth, wondering what to say, but there was no precedence for this. Your sister, Ebun, was quiet and weepy. Ebun never got to this stage.

  “Madam,” the doctor said, “I don’t think this is the right hospital for her.”

  He sedated Biola. Four nurses had to hold her down. He agreed to keep her for one night because she might end up trying to “harm” herself again.

  You left Biola limp and struggling to keep her eyes open. You, too, did the walk of dishonor as patients and hospital staff stared at you.

  You found your husband sitting in his Mercedes in the car park, with the front windows down. You had never imagined you could have a pain so immense you would be afraid to cry. You sat in the passenger seat and spoke to each other in hushed voices.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “She was getting out of hand.”

  “She didn’t know what she was saying.”

  “She knew. She knew exactly what she was saying.”

  “I shouldn’t have told her.”

  “That has nothing to do with this.”

  “She took it very badly.”

  “That has absolutely nothing to do with this.”

  “You shouldn’t have said that to her last night.”

  “No. This thing is inherited.”

  “What thing?”

  “We don’t have it in my family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We don’t have it in my family.”

  You said nothing to him on the way home. It had taken you a while to tell him about Ebun. Madness in the family was enough cause to have second thoughts about marriage in those days, but he had said it was irrelevant to him. After all, he was an educated man, a Cambridge man.

  Your anger turned to Biola. How dare she disgrace you by bringing up your private life? Did she do that to punish you? You had trusted her. You had thought she would be mature enough to understand, but oh no, she had to throw a tantrum of that magnitude.

  You were no doormat. You had stopped sleeping with your husband once you found out. That was your decision. Once or twice, you thought you would, for yourself alone, but you couldn’t. You demanded that he take a bath before he came home after he returned smelling of a musky perfume you would never use. You had heard the other woman was a divorced lawyer, that her ex-husband beat her because she was flirtatious and eventually threw her out. You were not pleased to hear that. What difference did it make? Your husband could marry as many women as he could afford to by customary law and he would not be forced to pay you alimony, so how literate did any woman have to be to stay, especially for the sake of her children?

  No, you would not forgive Biola, not for a while. Her father was right in that respect. Her display in the ward was deliberate.

  By bedtime, he had changed your vacation plans yet again. He said he would leave for London the following Friday with Oyinda and Deji and would stay there until they went back to school. He would run his practice from there. He had three senior lawyers, who were competent enough. You and Biola could stay in Lagos.

  “Why don’t we all go back to London?” you suggested.

  “No,” he said. “She is not in any shape to travel.”

  “But London is where she will get the r
ight treatment.”

  “No. She can’t travel right now. Besides which, I don’t want her harassing her brother and sister.”

  “So what do you want me to do then? St. Christopher’s will not keep her.”

  “Take her to the teaching hospital. Maybe then she will know she has to take her medication.”

  You agreed, partly to show Biola what would happen if she didn’t take her medication. It wasn’t a punishment.

  He refused to go back to St. Christopher’s the next morning. He said he didn’t want to be disgraced. His driver took you there, this time in your Volvo, and he drove himself to work.

  Biola was still sedated when you got to St. Christopher’s. The driver took you from there to the teaching hospital and Professor Ajose admitted Biola to the female psychiatric ward.

  “Where is my friend?” Professor Ajose asked. “He ought to be here.”

  You said your husband had to go to court. Biola was still too drowsy to care about her surroundings. You asked for the bed by the wall, furthest from the toilet, and made her bed with clean sheets from home. Biola lay down as the patient in the next bed warned her that stray cats were invading the world.

  The following Friday, your husband left for London with Oyinda and Deji. You called to give him updates about Biola every day, and took fresh sheets and food provisions to the teaching hospital. You also brought hot meals in Pyrex dishes and left them at the nurses’ station. Biola, now aware of where she was, was refusing to see you. She sent messages through the nurses that if you so much as stepped inside the ward, you would live to regret it.

  You indulged her. At home the power cuts eased for a while and you spent more time indoors, reading your paperback novels. Patience wanted a couple of weeks off to go to her hometown and you gave her permission to.

  One day, while Patience was away, your driver came back from the hospital to say Biola wanted to see you. You immediately called your husband to tell him the good news. You had been hoping for this moment. You told him you would go to the hospital and, once Biola was discharged, you would both come and join the rest of the family in London.

  “Ah, no,” your husband said. “That can’t happen.”

  “Why not?” you asked. “What is it this time?”

  “It’s too soon. We can’t be sure she won’t relapse.”

  “But she is asking to see me.”

  “It has only been a day.”

  “But it’s a good sign. Isn’t that a good sign?”

  “It has only been a day.”

  He kept insisting that he couldn’t be sure and that he was concerned about Oyinda and Deji.

  “They, too, have been affected by this. Plus, I have to travel out of town after they go back to school.”

  “Travel where?”

  “I have clients I have to see.”

  You heard the tone in his voice and thought about his history of hiding information. You were suspicious. Even if his senior staff were efficient, he had never left them for more than three weeks at a stretch before.

  “Frank,” you asked, intuitively, “are you bringing that woman to our house over there?”

  “It hasn’t been easy for me, running my practice from here,” he said.

  “Frank, I’m asking you. Are you bringing that woman and her boys to our house after my children have gone back to school?”

  You slammed the phone down on him when he didn’t answer, not before calling him a hypocrite, a coward and a bigamist. Afterwards, you called the Five Star travel agency and discovered that his secretary had booked flights for the woman and her sons, from Lagos to London, and from London to Sardinia and back.

  You visited Biola in the ward the next morning and she still appeared sleepy, but she was more lucid now. The patient in the next bed kept grinning at you. The rest looked exhausted and sad. You had brought Biola some jollof rice and fried plantains. She managed a few mouthfuls and gave her neighbor her leftovers.

  “I’m sorry, Mummy,” she said. “It’s been terrible for me. You don’t know how much. I can’t believe I’m in a place like this. I can’t even use the toilet. I will take my medication from now on. I will do anything if you just take me home.”

  She spoke as if her illness was her fault and you said, “It’s not a punishment, my dear.”

  “When is Daddy coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  “Aren’t Oyinda and Deji in school?”

  “They will be.”

  “When?”

  “Soon.”

  Biola shut her eyes. “Maybe Daddy will come home then. I’m sure he won’t believe how long I have lasted here.”

  “I’m sure,” you said.

  But he did not return to Lagos, even after she was discharged from the hospital and Oyinda and Deji started school. They were back to being the little English girl and boy again, sounding self-conscious and answering you in English when you spoke to them in Yoruba. The rainy season came to an end. It was the beginning of autumn in England, and the dry season in Nigeria. You spent more time indoors, even as the power cuts resumed.

  Biola was taking her medication and it left her lethargic. She turned what little attention she had to the English literature classics on the bookshelf under the stairs: Austen and Brontë. She joked that Dickens would make her crazier.

  You went to the NITEL office, and this time offered a bribe. Within a week the NITEL boys came to the house and fixed the phone in the sitting room. You asked if the phone would remain fixed.

  “Yes, madam,” they said, ducking and smiling. “It will work from now on.”

  After they left, you called Oyinda and Deji in school and Biola spoke to them. She actually laughed, which she hadn’t in a while. She didn’t spend long, though, and then she asked if she could call her father next.

  “If you want,” you said.

  “How come you don’t call him?”

  “Ah, well,” you said.

  “But how come he doesn’t call?” she asked. “And why isn’t he home now they’re back in school?”

  “I don’t know,” you said.

  “You don’t ask what he is doing there?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You should ask him, Mummy. You should. Why don’t you? Why don’t you call him and ask what he is doing there?”

  There were times she became anxious, her eyes widening and her tone becoming urgent and it seemed as if her symptoms were on the verge of returning.

  “Ask him yourself,” you said.

  She called and the phone rang, but no one picked it up. After a while, she sighed, her medication subduing her.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I should have known better.”

  Her father was still away when she relapsed a month later. She was bloated up from her medication now, but it was no longer working for her. She was the one who packed her suitcase. She was the one who said, “I think I’d better go to the hospital.” The driver took you there and she didn’t even look back as you left her in the ward.

  You came back to an empty house that evening. At the beginning of the summer vacation you had wanted a full house. You had not bargained for the vacation to end this way: two in boarding school and one in a psychiatric ward. Their father was probably back in Lagos and living with his other family. You went from room to room shutting doors. It made the house seem less deserted. There had been another power cut. On the veranda, you picked up a table-tennis bat, smashed the ball over the net and watched it ricochet until it stopped.

  LAST TRIP

  This time, he wants her to deliver a hundred and twenty-seven balloons of heroin to London. He counts them on her table to make sure there is no question about the number. The balloons are multicolored, a little smaller than her thumb. She is capable of swallowing every one of them, but she bargains for extra pay, a thousand US dollars more.

  “I’ll do it for five,” she says.

  She speaks in broken Yoruba because she has to be careful about eavesdroppers.
The room she rents for her trips has thin walls. It contains the wooden table, a couple of collapsible iron chairs, and a new mattress that smells vaguely like urine because she sweats more than usual on the nights before she travels. Her son, Dara, is asleep on the mattress, face up. He rubs the eczema patches around his eyes and wheezes. A miniature oscillating fan blows dust over him. She has considered leaving her windows open to give him some relief. The heat indoors is unbearable, but the air in this part of Lagos has a sour taste. For now, she is more worried about sounds that escape her room. Even on afternoons like this, with the horns and engines of the traffic on nearby streets, she can hear her neighbors talking. She guarantees they are listening. They know she has a man in her room.

  “Since when five?” he asks.

  He goes by the name of Kazeem. He has a lisp that is amusing, potentially. In the past, he has hired killers to dispose of difficult couriers, couriers who have double-crossed him. After thirteen years of loyalty to their organization, she is not worried about the consequences of betrayal. She is scared of him the way people are of little dogs that jump and bite. His eyes are a sickly shade of pink and the sun seems to have roasted him, the fat in his body melting to oil. His skin is too shiny and clings to his bones. The veins in his arms protrude. He crunches on kola nut and occasionally stops to smack his lips. This habit of his irritates her.

  “You can’t just demand five like that,” he says.

  “Why not?” she asks, sitting up. “My life is not worth five?”

  She is taller than he is, robust, especially with the brocade boubous she favors for international flights. They give her stomach enough space to expand and make her chest look as sturdy as a shelf. Many times before, she has concealed bags strapped around her torso. She eats well to keep her weight up, bleaches her skin with hydroquinone creams to freshen her complexion. In her latest passport photograph she appears much younger than she is, and can pass for her fake age. Her alias is Simbiyat Adisa.