Everything Good Will Come

by Sefi Atta

“Did he say he was coming?”

  We faced each other. Sheri looked beyond me at the road.

  “I hope he doesn’t come,” she murmured. “This place is a mess. Look, this man is going to... ”

  A Peugeot had moved too quickly on the road and rammed into the back of a Daewoo. The Daewoo driver got out and smacked the Peugeot driver through his open window. Mr. Peugeot jumped out and grabbed Mr. Daewoo’s shirt. Mr. Daewoo was bigger. He slammed Mr. Peugeot against his car, held him by the scruff of his neck.

  “Are you mad?”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Bang my car?”

  “Slap my face?”

  “I’ll kill you!”

  “Bastard!”

  People came from the surrounding buildings to watch: men, women and children, elders so old their backs had given way. On a Lagos street, justice happened straight away. You knocked someone’s car and they beat you up. The people would come out to watch. You knocked someone, and the people themselves would beat you up. You stole anything, and the people could beat you until they killed you.

  The drivers on the road blasted their horns in frustration. They were as gridlocked as my mind; tight and going nowhere. The horns were never about this, two men beating themselves senseless over a dent in a bumper, and after a while, the horns had nothing to do with the delay, at all.

  It was like pressing on a painful bump. I could not stop. The phone in my father’s office rang one afternoon. Peace was out for lunch so I answered it. It was the receptionist from his travel agency. I told her he was in court.

  She dragged her words. “His tickets are ready for collection.”

  “I’ll tell him when he gets back,” I said.

  I knew my father was traveling, but I’d dropped the phone before I realized she said he was traveling with someone. I found the number of the travel agency, and waited for a dial tone. My father still had not updated our phone system. We waited up to two minutes for a dial tone and every month when we received telephone bills with phantom charges to Alaska, Qatar, places we were not even aware of, he threatened to have our phones disconnected.

  The line was busy. I slammed the phone and tried again.

  “Star Travel, good afternoon?”

  “You called Mr. Taiwo’s office?”

  “Yes.”

  “His tickets. Whose names are they in?”

  My heart was hammering. She put me on hold, consulted someone who asked who I was. I said I was his secretary.

  “One is for Mr. Taiwo,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Second one is for em, Mr. Taiwo.”

  I frowned. “Who?”

  “Sorry, Dr. Taiwo,” she said.

  No such person, I thought.

  “Dr. O. A.,” she said. “Initials Oscar Alpha?”

  “There’s no such person,” I said.

  “Hold on,” she said.

  A man’s voice.

  “Hello, Peace? Why these questions?”

  I wasn’t Peace, I explained.

  “Who are you?” he asked, brusquely.

  “I work here,” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “Well the tickets are for Mr. Taiwo. And his son Debayo. Are you new?”

  No such person, no such person, I thought.

  “Peace will know. Tell her. Mr. Taiwo and his son are traveling. Their tickets are ready. She knows about it.”

  I dropped the phone. It was like shrapnel, being pulled out, I was sure.

  Guilt never did show in my father’s face. I’d seen. It was how he won cases. It was how he’d driven my mother to distraction. I’d seen that also.

  My parent’s mothers were both in polygamous marriages. My mother’s mother was a trader. She saved money for her children’s education under her mattress. One day my grandfather took the money she’d been saving and used it to pay the dowry for a second wife. My grandmother died broken-hearted for her money. My mother herself had never gotten over the shock. A pampered child, she disguised her embarrassment with snobbishness from then on. My father’s mother was a junior wife. The two senior wives would deny my father food, hoping that if he were skinny enough, he would amount to nothing. That was why he didn’t eat much; that was why he never gave in to my mother’s food threats; that was why, years later, he still preferred to have an old man in his kitchen.

  I waited for him that afternoon. My head felt like a shaken jar. Each time I opened it up, I didn’t know which emotion to pull out. It wasn’t uncommon for married men, especially of his generation, to have children outside. But this? Lying for years? I recalled how he punished me for lying as a child, how he would not forgive me for sneaking out with Sheri. It wasn’t her—it was him I couldn’t trust.

  The joke was that a man’s families discovered each other at his burial. That they fought until they fell into his grave. In reality most men who could still afford to lead this kind of double life confessed or were caught long beforehand. What were the requirements for being successful, after all? Telling one family, Don’t call me at home, keep away from my real family?

  It was nonsense.

  He returned late in the evening. I opened the door.

  “Do you know a Debayo Taiwo?” I asked.

  My father placed his brief case down. “Yes.”

  “Is he your son?”

  He straightened up. Yes, he said. Debayo was his son, four years younger than me. He lived in Ibadan. So did his mother. No, they were never married. He was in medical school there, finished last year. He was born a year after my brother died.

  “I would have told you myself,” he said.

  “When?” I asked.

  “I wanted you two to meet. Not like this.”

  I began to count my thoughts out on my fingers. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have known how to speak. But I spoke calmly. He was not going to take control of this argument.

  “That I thought I was your only child, I can live with that. That almost everything I’ve done comes back to it, was my own choice. That I have a mother who despises me because I stayed with you, is my own lot. So is the fact that I live in a place where all sorts of asinine...”

  “Be careful how you speak to me,” he said quietly.

  “Asinine behavior is passed off as manliness.”

  “Be very careful.”

  “But don’t tell me it is time I meet your son. That is not my choice. Not my lot, and I don’t have to live with it.”

  “I have not asked anything of you.”

  “Does my mother know?”

  He did not answer.

  “Does she know?”

  “No,” he said. Shame had winded him. His voice was too low.

  “You see?” I said, just as quietly. “You’re the one who did the wrong thing, not her. Not her.”

  “You do not speak to me like that. No child of mine speaks to me like that.”

  I turned away. “I’m not staying here.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To my boyfriend’s house,” I said.

  My father pointed. “Walk out of that door, and you won’t be welcome back here.”

  “Liar,” I said.

  I packed a bag, didn’t even look at him as I walked out. For all I cared, he could take my hymen, stretch it out, and hang it on the wall next to Mike’s mosaic.

  The road to Mike’s house was choked. I kept punching my steering wheel. Perhaps it was a sign. Daughters didn’t walk away like that. It was sacrilege. Costly, too. Under my breath, I cursed our economy that didn’t give me freedom to sustain myself.

  I had always believed my mother chose to depend on my father. The evidence was there in her dusty certificates. Other mothers walked out every day, to work, but she didn’t. Now I felt no different from her, driving the car he had bought. My father would give a car, but he would not pay me enough to buy myself one. If I were taking the car with me, I deserved it. If my mother took a house, two houses even, she deserved them. The power had al
ways been in my father’s hands.

  I stopped at a junction. A battered Peugeot crossed the main road before me. The driver was gaping at me. He drove as slow as if he were taking time to masturbate. I could not imagine why. A more bitter face than mine, I had not seen.

  I banged on my horn. “What are you looking at?”

  He scratched his head and accelerated.

  When I arrived at Mike’s house I rattled the gates. He came out wearing nothing but shorts.

  “You didn’t say you were coming,” he said.

  “I didn’t know I was.”

  He opened the gates and I slid through.

  He spotted my bag. “What’s this?”

  “I need a place to stay,” I said. “I beg you. Tonight.”

  He walked ahead of me and I thought nothing of it because he might have been working or playing football. Climbing up the stairs, he stopped by the door.

  “You didn’t say you were coming, Enitan.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No, no. I’m not driving you away.”

  “You won’t... have to,” I said, studying him. His shoulders were hunched. “Do you have someone with you?”

  He looked away.

  “Mike, I’m talking to you.”

  Still, he said nothing. I brushed past him and opened the door. Lying on his sofa was a girl wearing nothing but a shirt. His shirt. I recognized it. Her hair was cropped like a boy’s and she had bronze lips and eyes so haughty they didn’t even blink. She was so dark and so beautiful I could have wet myself from grief. She drew on her cigarette.

  Mike’s hand closed over my shoulder. I wriggled out of his grip and hurried down the stairs. He ran after me, grabbed my waist and I elbowed him. We locked into a knot, breathing heavily into each others’ faces. I was tempted to spit at his.

  “Let go of me!”

  He gripped me tighter and dived lower. I kicked him. He released me.

  “Don’t open your mouth,” I said, pointing at him.

  I remembered how I’d called him a liar when I first met him.

  “Pretentious bastard.” I said, walking away. “You’re shallow and your work is shallow.”

  He followed me. I fumbled with the lock of the gate, then kicked it. It rattled in protest.

  “Open this damn lock,” I shouted.

  The gates fell apart. I pushed him aside and walked out. I reached my car, jabbed my key into the key hole and yanked the door open.

  “Listen,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Tell me? Why should I listen to a single word that comes out of your mouth.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You don’t?” I said. “Well, neither do I.”

  He was one of those people. They were either living as they pleased or they were the greatest pretenders. In a room of ten people, how many would call him a berk? I sort of knew. I’d always sort of known.

  The thought seized me. She couldn’t go free. If I got in my car and drove away without letting my rage go, it would rupture me.

  I got out of the car and began to walk back to the house.

  “W-where are you going?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, wagging my finger.

  He hurried after me. At the top of the stairs, I saw the girl peeping from the doorway. She took one look at me and dashed back inside. I heard a door shut and realized she was running from me. Stupid girl. She was running from me.

  I ran up the stairs.

  I headed straight for Obatala, grabbed her, seemingly, by the ear and dragged her out. Mike was standing at the foot of the stairs. He was staring at me as if I held a gun in my hands. I raised Obatala high above my head, smashed Obatala over the banister, heard her beads pitter-patter down the stairs. Mike clamped his hands over his head. I placed the broken board on the ground, and walked down the stairs.

  “Tell her,” I said. “Tell her she should be running away from you, not me.”

  “Not my work,” he said.

  “Not my life,” I answered.

  I drove away. Through the gate I saw Mike’s landlord, standing with his mouth open. I could almost read his thoughts: Good women didn’t shout in somebody’s house. Good women didn’t fight on the streets. Good women didn’t come looking for men. Good women were at home.

  My fingers trembled over my steering wheel and tears pricked my eyes, but they wouldn’t fall. I drove fast till I reached Sheri’s house. The traffic favored me.

  There I cried.

  Sheri asked me to reconcile with my father. “These things are nothing,” she said. I was not the first and I would not be the last. Half of Lagos had an outside family, and the other half wasn’t aware. I refused and arranged a transfer to work with the Federal Ministry of Justice for the rest of the year. While my father was at work, I went home and packed a suitcase.

  The day I met my new boss, I waited an hour before she arrived, and waited another thirty minutes while she ate yam and eggs out of a Tupperware container. My boss was one of those people—asking questions was unnecessary fussing. Her favorite complaint was that her duties belonged to someone else. Over the next months, I would go to court with her as an assistant, prosecuting in federal cases. The first time I had to address the bench, I tried to adopt an impressive voice. The judge, a middle-age woman, asked, “Young lady, is this some sort of new style?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Speak in your normal voice, please,” she said. “This is very tiring.”

  It was a hot day in court, especially under our wigs, which were made from horse hair, so we never washed them and they itched. The judge’s salary would never compensate for the procession she had to witness: a tattered clerk, an illiterate criminal, my boss who was ill-prepared and asking for an extension, “if my lord pleases.”

  This particular my lord was not pleased. She had to take notes because there was no stenographer. She was taking the notes in longhand and oh Lord, the different ways of speaking. Then there would be traffic on her way home.

  Fraud rackets had recently increased. Overseas they were calling it “Nigerian Crime.” Here we called it “419,” after the criminal code. Drug trafficking had also increased, and if the latest reports were true, Nigerian drug rings were now one of the largest suppliers to the US and Europe. Foreign embassies were reluctant to grant us visas, and those of us who received them risked being strip-searched for drugs at airports. Many of the accused were single women, mules, who were caught en route to Europe or the US from the Far East. Some had swallowed condoms crammed with heroin and cocaine; others had squeezed them up their vaginas. There was a case of a woman who stuffed a condom of cocaine down her dead baby’s throat and cradled him on a plane. She was caught when an air hostess noticed the baby wasn’t crying.

  I hated coming out of court to find relations pleading to spare their son or daughter, old men and women prostrating. In one trial, the accused, a nineteen-year-old girl, claimed she didn’t know what she was carrying. Another woman had handed the package to her, then disappeared. The court found the girl guilty. A month before, the new regime had shot people for the same crime, as part of their war against indiscipline. The executions were carried out retroactively, to punish those who had been tried and convicted before the law came into effect, but following a public outcry, further executions were deferred.

  The girl’s face haunted me. The way her glasses kept sliding down, I imagined her as a school librarian in her hometown, coming to Lagos to earn a better living. When I actually began to believe her story, I realized I was not detached enough to be successful at litigation. I wasn’t even sure I enjoyed being in court. The proceedings took too long, relied on too many people. I viewed them through bleary eyes and my heart throbbed like a toothache.

  I had lost weight, even with Sheri’s cooking. Whenever I remembered Mike and my father, not being able to say a word, I dropped my head. I cared for someone and I enjoyed showing them courtesy. The worst was to be depr
ived of giving it. I carried some of their shame. Soon I began to keep the same hours as my boss and learned how to disguise my tracks. I didn’t even mind the bad looks I was receiving from other colleagues.

  Living with Sheri, I saw how she survived as a sugary girl. She limited her involvement in the family business to please her brigadier. She tidied, after me and after her nephews and nieces who came to spend time with her. She dusted with cleaning rags, sometimes with her fingers. She plumped cushions if she stood up, picked fluff from her carpet, listened to the saddest Barbara Streisand songs. The rest of her time she spent preparing for Brigadier Hassan: her hair, her nails, dabbing perfumes and cooking meals. There wasn’t a coy bone in her body to spare for the outrage of others, especially those from homes like mine, with errant fathers and mothers who prayed good and hard about which good families their daughters would end up in.

  In a bizarre household arrangement that appeared incestuous to me, Brigadier Hassan’s wives were trying to recruit her as a third wife. They knew their husband had a number of girlfriends and thought that if he had to remarry, it would be to someone who wasn’t liable to sit around the polo club chukka after chukka, wearing expensive sunshades. Sheri found polo boring. Their daughters liked her. She was less than ten years older than the eldest and would never tell if they visited boyfriends. They had all attended finishing schools in Switzerland, and their marriages were to be arranged. Their father also thought they ought to remain virgins until they left his house. The eldest claimed that horse riding stretched her. Meanwhile, he was taking Sheri to Paris, to Florence, first class. Sheri, who had trouble remembering: “That place in Florence with the gold market,” “that street in Paris with the shops,” “that watch, starts with P? Exactly, Pathetic Philip.” I could remember every single trip in Europe, even the names of each poxy pensione I’d stayed in, and if someone had bothered to buy me an expensive watch, I would at least try to remember.

  Where two cultures diverged Sheri had chosen which to follow. Her grandmother, Alhaja, had seen to that. A woman widowed in her thirties, Alhaja headed a market women’s union and earned enough to educate her children overseas. She was disappointed when her son ended up with a white woman, but she raised Sheri herself so that no other wife would mistreat her. When the other wives did come, they would worry more about Alhaja’s rage than their husband’s. She would visit their home, if she heard they were fighting. There, she threatened them. Her son had had a white woman, and he would get rid of two squabbling Africans in no time! She would go to the houses of her daughters if their husbands beat them. The husbands would end up begging her. When she learned about what happened to Sheri at the picnic, she visited each of the boys’ houses with a mob in tow. The mob started with the watchmen, or whoever was unfortunate enough to open the gates. They broke down doors and windows. As they went for furniture, Alhaja went straight for the boy’s crotches. She wasn’t letting go until their mothers, fathers, their grandparents even, lay flat on the floor to beg her granddaughter. After, she visited her medicine man to finish what was left of their lineage.