Now Francis had that sickly smile on his face, and Adah guessed that he was smug with some heroic deed. He picked up the last sheet, and among the crumpled papers she saw the orange cover of one of the exercise books in which she had written her story. Then reality crashed into her mind. Francis was burning her story; he had burned it all. The story that she was basing her dream of her becoming a writer upon. The story that she was going to show Titi and Vicky and Bubu and baby Dada when they grew up. She was going to tell them, she was going to say, “Look, I wrote that when I was a young woman with my own hand and in the English language.” And she was sure they were all going to laugh and their children were going to laugh too and say, “Oh, Granny, you are so funny.”
Then she said to Francis, her voice small and tired, “Bill called that story my brainchild. Do you hate me so much, that you could kill my child? Because that is what you have done.”
“I don’t care if it is your child or not. I have read it, and my family would never be happy if a wife of mine was permitted to write a book like that.”
“And so you burnt it?”
“Can’t you see that I have?”
That to Adah was the last straw. Francis could kill her child. She could forgive him all he had done before, but not this.
She got a new job at the British Museum as a library officer. Francis gave up his job because he guessed that Adah was now earning a great deal more than she had ever done in the past. But Adah remained adamant to her resolution. Her money was for herself and her children.
Life with Francis became purgatorial after that. She was back into the street once more, surrounded by children just like the Pied Piper, looking for a house to live in. It took a long time, but she eventually got a two-room flat which she had to share with rats and cockroaches
Francis would not let her take anything with her: noise and fighting was so great that the police had to be called in. The landlady apologised to her later, and said, “I am sorry I called the police, but he was going to kill you, you know.” The policewoman who came ordered Francis to relinquish a box of clothes for the children.
So Adah walked to freedom, with nothing but four babies, her new job and a box of rags. Not to worry, she had not sustained many injuries apart from a broken finger and swollen lips. She was treated at the Archway Hospital. Francis’s parting words were that if Adah thought he was coming to see her and her brats, then he would rather she started thinking of him as a bastard.
Adah was happy about this; she did not want to see him again, never on this earth.
But things got awful for Adah. A month later, she discovered she was pregnant again. In fact she had been pregnant for three months, through all those fights, and to cap it all, Francis traced their new address through the children. He followed Titi and Vicky on their way home from school.
One day, Adah was at her wits’ end, wondering what she was going to do now, when a tap on her window sent her peering through the glass. It was Francis who, not realising that Adah had seen him, started to bash on the window as if he were going to break it. Adah was frightened now. She had lied to the landlord that her husband had gone home to Nigeria and that he would send for them soon when he was fully settled at home. She had to speak all this in Yoruba otherwise she would not have got the flat. When she signed the cheque she gave the landlord he had noticed the name and had said, “How come a nice girl like you got married to a YAIMIRIN?” Yaimirin and ajeyon, are the two words the Ibos are known by - it means a race of cannibals. Adah had told him that it was a case of childish infatuation. But she silenced him by paying him six weeks in advance, and by cheque as well. This impressed the man, and bought Adah her freedom for a while.
But now, Francis was bashing at the window and it would be only a question of time before the landlord and the landlady would know that her husband was in London and that she was Ibo as well. Anger welled up inside her, but she opened the door.
The first sentence that came to her mouth was: “I thought you said that you would never come to see us. What are you here for?”
Francis ignored her but forced himself into her room. Adah sensed trouble. Then he said “In our country, and among our people, there is nothing like divorce or separation. Once a man’s wife, always a man’s wife until you die. You cannot escape. You are bound to him.”
Adah nodded but reminded him that, among their people, the husband provides for the family and that a wicked man that knocked his wife about ran the risk of losing her altogether.
“My father knocked my mother about until I was old enough to throw stones at him. My mother never left my father.”
“Yes,” agreed Adah again, “but was there a month when your father did not pay the rent, give food money, pay for all your school fees? Can you, Francis, show me some vests or anything these children can lay their hands upon which you can claim to have bought for them? No, Francis, you broke the laws of our people first, not me. And remember, Francis, I am not your mother. I am me, and I am different from her. It is a mistake to use your mother as a yardstick. You never loved or respected her. You simply tolerated her, I know that now, because it never crossed your mind to work and send her money like other Nigerian students do. That should have warned me. In the short courting period we had I noticed that you never thought of giving her anything. It was always you, you all the time and she, poor soul, was always giving and giving to you. To her nothing is too much, no human is good enough for you. You remember the saying that a man who treated his mother like a shit would always treat his wife like a shit? That should have warned me, but I was too blind to see then.”
What followed is too horrible to print. Adah remembered, though, that during the confusion Francis told her he had a knife. He now carried knives with him. She tried several times to call for help, but could feel the life being squeezed out of her. She then heard people talking, banging the door which Francis had locked. But the landlord had guessed that Francis was Adah’s husband and, like most of his people, he didn’t want to interfere until a real murder had been committed. It was the old Irish man living on the top floor, Devlin was his name, who broke the door open.
This could not go on, Adah told herself when everybody had gone. She had left Francis over four weeks before, she did not ask for any maintenance either for herself or for the children. She had to pay almost forty pounds a month for the children at the nursery and for their dinner money and to a girl to take Titi and Vicky across the road She had to pay almost the same amount for the rent, to say nothing of the fact that most of her everyday clothes, their cooking utensils, even the spoons and the children’s vitamin coupons and the family allowances were all with him. Now he came here adding this insult to all the injuries he had caused. Adah threw caution to the wind. One never knew, Francis was carrying a knife today, she told herself - he did use it to threaten her, but she had been so bruised and maltreated that she could not see herself going to work for a week or two. No, the law must step in.
Then she looked round the room and saw with tears the radiogram she had just bought with a little deposit off the man at the Crescent; she saw it had been smashed by Francis. She saw the new teaset she was paying for from the landlady’s catalogue all broken, the flowery pattern looking pathetically dislocated. No, she needed protection against this type of destruction.
Adah had never been to a court before in all her life. All she wanted was for the magistrate or the judge, or whoever it was, to ask Francis to stay away from her and her children. She was not suing for maintenance, she did not even know if she was entitled to any. She simply wanted her safety, and protection for the children. The wife of the Indian doctor, who was a doctor herself, and who had treated her, had said: “Next time you might not be so lucky with a man who can beat you like this.” She gave her two weeks off work and told her to spend most of it in bed.
Inside the courtroom Adah started to stammer. The doctor had told her to call her and that she would come to give evidence. Adah had than
ked her, but did not call her. Suppose they found Francis guilty of assault which was what they were charging him with? What then would she gain by it? They might send him to prison, and what good would that do to her?
She should not have worried because Francis showed another side to his character which she had not seen before. All the bruises and cuts and bumps Adah had to show the court were the result of falls. Yes, he broke her radiogram because he thought it was a chair. He would pay for the repairs. Nobody asked him how he was going to pay, since he was jobless.
Adah did not know that they would require so many details. She had never read Law or anything to do with Law, but it was one of Francis’s major subjects. Adah hated courts from that day on. Another thing shook her further.
The magistrate said the children had to be maintained, and since Adah had always been the head of the family financially she was given the custody of the children. But how much could Francis afford?
Francis said they had never been married. He then asked Adah if she could produce the marriage certificate. Adah could not. She could not even produce her passport and the children’s birth certificates. Francis had burnt them all. To him, Adah and the kids ceased to exist. Francis told her this in the court in low tones in their own language.
It was then the magistrate knew he was dealing with a very clever person. He said, “You can say the children are not your own, but you have to contribute to their maintenance. She just can’t do it all on her own.”
Francis replied, “I don’t mind their being sent for adoption.”
Something happened to Adah then. It was like a big hope and a kind of energy charging into her, giving her so much strength even though she was physically ill with her fifth child. Then she said very loud and very clear, “Don’t worry, sir. The children are mine, and that is enough. I shall never let them down as long as I am alive.”
She walked out from that court at Clerkenwell and wandered anywhere, not seeing anything, tears flowing from her eyes without stopping, her temperature rising She never fully recovered from the Big Fight. She arrived in Camden Town, in front of a butcher’s shop where they sold cheap chickens. She stood there, not because she was buying any chicken but because she was tired, hungry but without appetite, and feeling like being sick. The tears still flowed.
Then a voice cut through the crowd, called her by her Ibo pet-name “Nne nna”. The first thought that struck her was that she was dying, because nobody had called her by that name except people who knew her as a little girl, and only her Pa used to call her like that, drawing out every syllable. The voice was very near now and it called again. A man’s voice, much too deep to be her Pa’s and too gentle to be Francis’s.
Then she saw the face of the man. Then she remembered, and he remembered. He was a friend she used to know a very, very long time before, when she was at the Girls’ High. His eyes swept down and saw the ring on her finger and he said: “So you married Francis?”
She replied that she had.
It was like Fate intervening. It was like a story one might read in a true story magazine. This old friend of Adah’s paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband.
Second Class Citizen Page 21