Everything Good Will Come

by Sefi Atta

  Pierre walked in with more dirty plates and jiggled cutlery around in the sink.

  I headed for the living room. Niyi was sitting on the floor by his Uncle Jacinto’s feet. Uncle Jacinto was leaning over him, talking hush-hush as the Francos did. I imagined it was like sticking my nose into a petrol pump. Uncle Jacinto was a retired law professor and the reigning king of Latin phrases: de jure, de facto, ex parte, ex post facto. He enjoyed his spirits, though the word “drunk” had never been mentioned in relation to him.

  Niyi nodded politely. If our friends were here, this was about the time he would be stirring up trouble, either on his own or in support of me, telling someone or the other I was the boss in the house. As soon as they left, it was Enitancanyou? With his family Enitancanyou began while they were around and I couldn’t challenge him, because they would hate me for controlling him, he said. Watching him, I felt sorry. It was no lie, he was protecting me. I was protecting him too. I didn’t want anyone to call him a weak man, even though I thought the sooner his family hated me the better. From then on I could do exactly as I pleased.

  There were about twenty of them present and any family as large as that was bound to have the usual array of people: Uncle Funsho, who rubbed my bra straps whenever he hugged me; Aunty Doyin, the pretty one who locked herself in a room. She still wore wigs and pale pink lipstick of the early seventies. She wasn’t so pretty anymore, because the man she had locked herself up for ended up punching her face whenever another man looked at her. There was Simi, her daughter, braids down to her butt, sassy as Brazilian Samba. Too cool to smile or be pleasant. What was it about this new generation? I loved their bad attitude. Simi walked around with a T-shirt and exposed her navel. After she pierced her nose the Francos said she would get pregnant, but she didn’t. She was studying to be an accountant, though her university was closed after a student protest. There was Kola, her brother, who always looked weighed down because his family had called him a dullard for so long. “Won’t learn a thing, keeps taking photographs and thinks that will suffice,” they said. I knew he was dyslexic. And Rotimi his first cousin. Rotimi, whose voice was high. Niyi and his brothers tried to slap his manhood into his back, punch it into his skinny ribs. “Speak like a man! Speak like a man!” I warned them, “You’ll kill this boy before he discovers his sexual preference.” Now he had a girlfriend, and his voice was still high.

  Gnarled and plump people, the Francos, I thought. The old and young. I could well be jealous of them. When did we ever have family in our home? My mother’s family was her church. My father avoided his because they were always trying to extort money from him. “Big Foot,” I said.

  It was Niyi’s youngest brother, the tallest and skinniest.

  “Yep?” he answered.

  “Gerrin here,” I said.

  He walked toward me looking like some sort of willow tree. Big Foot was my favorite—clumsy, and his feet were size fourteen.

  “We need help in here,” I said.

  “Who needs help?”

  “Your mother, who gave birth to you, needs help.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Serving food.”

  He frowned. “I don’t know how to do that.”

  “No one knows how to do that. They learn. So you better gerrin here or else those girls you keep bringing around here, trying to impress, I will start talking.”

  “You won’t do that.”

  “Just ask your brother what a wicked woman I can be.”

  “You women’s liberation-nalists,” he mumbled.

  He tackled his mother for the bowl. “Relax woman,” he told her.

  She sat by the kitchen table watching him. “Big Foot knows how to do this? Big Foot? You know how to do this? I thought you were useless, like the rest of my sons.”

  Big Foot spilled stew on his shirt and yelled.

  That evening, I found a dress in my wardrobe. It was not one of mine. It was made from tie-dyed fabric and newly sewn. I thought I’d stumbled on infidelity.

  “What is this?”

  I held it up. Niyi was lying on our bed.

  “I can’t even have a girlfriend in this place,” he muttered.

  “Whose is it?”

  “You were not supposed to see it. It’s yours.”

  I lifted it. “Mine?”

  “For Easter.”

  “You’ve never given me a present for Easter before. Who made it?”

  I placed it against my body.

  “Your seamstress,” he said.

  “You went to my seamstress?” I leaned forward. “You went to my seamstress?”

  He nodded. “Now I know where our money goes. That woman has a bigger fan than ours in that shack of hers.”

  Niyi called me Jackie O. I ran to my seamstress more than any other woman he knew, for all my principles. Well, he was a big fat liar, but it was true that new clothes could make me salivate. I sniffed the dress. I could still smell the sweat of my seamstress’ fingers on the cloth.

  “Thank you,” I said, using the dress as a shield.

  “You too,” he said. “You did a lot today.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I also clipped his toe nails before we slept. I always did because he wouldn’t and he would end up scratching my legs. As I wrestled with three months’ nail growth, I was finally able to tell him about meeting my brother.

  “These men,” he said. “I don’t know how they do it. I didn’t choose to have two families and most days I feel like half a man.”

  “Since when did you feel like half a man?”

  “Watch what you’re doing.”

  “What will I do with half a man? I want you to be double man. How many years now, and we’ve been fighting. I want you to be my greatest ally.”

  “I am.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Here we go.”

  “Keep still,” I said.

  “Don’t amputate my foot!”

  He wasn’t kicking me and I was cutting him up. We were talking again.

  “My love for you is much,” he said. “You just don’t know.”

  Baba came to collect his monthly salary the next day. He was still tending my father’s garden on Sundays, and on Saturdays worked at a house nearby.

  “Compliments of the season,” I said. “How are you?”

  I spoke to him in Yoruba, addressing him by the formal you, because he was an elder. He responded with the same formality because I was his employer. Yoruba is a language that doesn’t recognize gender—he the same as she, him the same as her—but respect is always important. “We are fine,” he said. “Hope all is well with you. Have you heard from your father?”

  “No word yet.”

  “I will be there to work tomorrow.”

  “Please excuse me,” I said.

  He waited by the kitchen door as I went to get his money. When I returned, I felt a slight breeze through the mosquito netting. I handed the money to him.

  “It’s cold,” I said.

  “It’s going to rain,” he said.

  “Rain? So early? The rain is strange these days.”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You’d better not get caught in it,” I said.

  “I will hurry.”

  I rubbed my arms as goose bumps appeared. Walking upstairs, I imagined Baba trudging to the nearest bus stop in the rain. He had withered so much, it was hard to believe he was the same person who had chased me round the garden when I was small. I told Niyi I would give him a lift, then visit my mother. “She hasn’t been well,” I said.

  “Again?” he said.

  “It’s not her fault,” I said. “She prefers to be well.”

  He, who listened to his father’s self-praise without yawning. I’d asked him to stop finding every excuse to leave home whenever my mother visited. Mostly, he said he had to go to the office. She worried that he was overworked.

  I found Baba by the gates of our estate, and drove him to the nearest bus stop. We
passed a marketplace. The sky had turned gray and the market women were clearing up in anticipation of the rain. They placed plastic sheets over their wooden stalls and secured them with rocks. Children scurried with full trays perched on their heads. Some were giddier than the wind with excitement. Their trays were colorful with tomatoes, cherry peppers, purple onions, okras, and bananas. A sign post on a shack caught my eye.

  We specialies in

  Gonerea

  Sifilis

  AID

  Watery sperm

  “I didn’t know you lived on the mainland,” I said.

  “I moved,” Baba explained. “Ten years now. I used to live in Maroko. They drove us away and flattened our homes. Your father let me stay in the quarters, until we found a new place.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You were with your mother. They came to us that day with coffins, and told us that if we didn’t leave, we would end up inside them.”

  When Baba said “they,” he meant anyone in uniform: the army, the police, traffic conductors. He would have seen different rulers under the British, First and Second Republics, and military governments.

  I slowed for a group of hawker women to cross the road.

  “Did you vote at the elections?”

  “Yes. They told me to put an “X,” I put an “X.” Now they’re telling me my “X” is nothing. I don’t understand.”

  He said “hex” instead of “X.”

  “They’re following their predecessors,” I said.

  “These ones?” he said. “They have surpassed their predecessors. For the first time, I’m looking at them, and saying, it is as if... ”

  Baba took time to finish his sentences. I waited until he was ready.

  “It’s as if they hate us,” he said.

  I dropped him at the bus stop. It began to rain as he boarded his bus. The rain coursed down on my windscreen; the wipers barely cleared my view. I drove slow and noticed the sign post on the shack again.

  We specialies in

  Gonerea

  Sifilis

  AID

  Watery sperm

  My face was wet and steamy. The gutter in front of my mother’s house flowed like a muddy river. My mother didn’t come to her door when I rang her bell, so I rushed to the back door to check if it was open. It was. I walked upstairs cleaning the rain from my arms, knocked on her bedroom door.

  I smelled her death before I saw her.

  “Mummy!” I screamed.

  She was lying on the floor, before an empty candle holder. I reached for her shoulder and shook, bent to listen to her heart. There wasn’t a sound. I ran out of her house and swallowed rain.

  On the front porch of Mrs. Williams’ house, Shalewa stuck her toe into a puddle. She took one look at me and froze.

  I rattled the gate. “Shalewa, where is your mother?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “Please. Open the gates.”

  Shalewa ran into the rain.

  “Tell her it’s Enitan from next door. Tell her I need to see her. Please.”

  She unlocked the gates and I followed her indoors.

  Mrs. Williams didn’t think it was wise to call an ambulance. “They may come, they may not come,” she said as though discussing the month’s profit margins. “We will have to carry her to hospital in my van. Shalewa?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “Get me my phone, my sweet.”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  She’d been skirting around, trying to hear our whispers. As her mother made phone calls in the dining room, I sat in the living room with her. She moved a place mat around a side table, and sang a pop song; not one I recognized, “Treat me like a woman,” occasionally peeping at me. She knew I’d been crying.

  Mrs. Williams returned to the living room.

  “I’ve found help,” she said. “I’d better call the hospital now. You stay here and I will come for you when we’re ready.”

  Who would carry my mother? I thought. Her arms, her legs. They would have to carry her with care, as if she were sleeping, as if she could wake.

  Once her mother left, Shalewa resumed her game with the place mat. I wanted to tell her not to worry, but children knew when they were being lied to and she would think she was responsible for my sadness regardless. She continued her song. “Treat me like no other... ”

  Her mother returned.

  “Shalewa,” she said. “You want to go to Temisan’s house?”

  Shalewa nodded.

  “That’s my girl. Go upstairs and get your shoes. Her mummy is coming for you.”

  Shalewa ran upstairs, half-smiling. She tripped on a stair and exaggerated her limp.

  “Will she be okay?” I asked.

  Her mother nodded. “I’ll explain to her later. We’d better go.”

  I noticed the mobile phone in her hand, but mine were shaking too hard to make a call. I asked her if she would.

  On the way to the hospital, Mrs. Williams kept talking to herself, “I hope the police don’t stop us. You know, these checkpoints... ”

  Her windscreen wipers hypnotized me. They tore the rain apart each time and I hugged myself, not because I was cold, but because my mother was lying in the back of her van, wrapped in white bed sheets. Above us the rain beat proverbs on the car roof:

  Let our tears help us see clearer

  He who denies his mother rest will not rest himself

  Below us the rain beat the earth.

  “I knew there was something,” Mrs. Williams murmured. “There had to be something. The rain, pouring like this, coming so early.”

  My mother had been dead a day. Going through her medicines later, I discovered a batch which appeared to have been re-dated. I did not know where she’d purchased them, or how long they had expired. I imagined she’d bought them because they were cheaper.

  Mrs. Williams washed her. The nurse’s aide in the hospital would not.

  “There are others,” she said. “She will have to wait.”

  “But she’s waited too long,” Sheri said.

  Sheri was anxious; Moslems buried within a day. The nurse’s aide shrugged. Her eyes were like a dead fish’s, sunken and gray. Too much, they were saying. I’ve seen too much, can’t you see? Whatever your story is. I don’t care.

  “Is there someone else?” Sheri asked.

  “Only me,” the aide said. “Only me is here.”

  Irritation crept into her voice. She was shifting, wanting to resume her task. Who were these people? Coming down to the mortuary, getting in her way?

  Sheri turned to Mrs. Williams. “What will we do?”

  I stood by the door with Niyi. I’d been waiting upstairs for three hours. Niyi arrived first and Sheri after him.

  “I can wash her, ” Mrs. Williams said to me.

  I felt Niyi’s hand. He led me into the corridor outside.

  A week later we buried my mother, in Ikoyi cemetery next to an angel with broken wings. The cemetery was filled with decapitated statues. Thickets grew higher than the head stones. It was where my brother was buried, but the plots next to his had been filled. I paid the local council for a plot by the entrance. During the funeral the pallbearers we’d hired to carry her casket refused to carry it further until we’d paid their money.

  “You will burn in Hell for this,” our priest told them.

  “Reverend Father,” said the stocky man who’d snatched the money from Niyi. “Hell and Lagos? Which is worse?”

  He squinted as he counted the notes. One of his mates yawned and scratched his crotch.

  For two days after my mother’s funeral, I stopped eating. On the third day Niyi accompanied me to my pre-natal check up and at the end of it, the doctor told us, “I don’t like what I’m seeing. This baby isn’t growing properly.”

  “Enitan hasn’t been eating,” Niyi said.

  “Why not?” the doctor asked.

  “She’s lost her appetite,” Niyi said.

  “How can we get it ba
ck?” the doctor asked. “Can’t her mother cook her something nice?”

  He was an old man and tended to talk to people as he pleased. Normally I didn’t mind because he was also one of the best ob-gyns in Lagos. Niyi began to explain but I tapped his arm. I could barely form the words because my mouth was dry.

  “My mother is dead,” I said.

  We arrived home and Niyi headed straight for the kitchen to cook a meal. I was lying in bed when he brought it to me. Fried plantain. They were golden brown and cooked right through, unlike the charred, half-raw pieces I usually handed to him. He picked one up and carried it to my mouth. He pried my lips open with his forefinger and thumb. The plantain slithered into my mouth, warm and sweet. I shut my eyes as it clung to the roof of my mouth, pulled it down with my tongue and began to chew.

  As a child, whenever I had malaria, I would have a bitter taste in my mouth, after my fever broke. I hated that bitter taste. It tainted everything that went into my mouth, but the bitterness meant that I was cured: no more bouts of nausea, no more pounding headaches. I did not like the taste of the plantain in my mouth, but I began to eat from then on.

  My daughter Yimika was born on the morning of August 3. Between the time crickets sleep and roosters wake, I tell her. After my water broke, I begged to be gutted like a fish. Then I saw her. I burst into tears.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said.

  Like a pearl. I could have licked her. I had only one wish for her, that she would not be disinherited in her lifetime. I chose Sheri as her godmother. She would understand. Following Yoruba tradition, Yimika could have been called “Yetunde,” “mother has returned” to salute my mother’s passing, but I decided against it. Everyone must walk their own path unencumbered. Hers wouldn’t be easy, born in a motherland that treated her children like bastards, but it was hers. And I didn’t worry that she wasn’t born in a more fortunate place, like America, where people are so free they buy stars from the sky and name them after their children. If you own a star from the day you are born, what else is there to wish for?

  My milk took me in a tackle, tugging on my shoulder, and tearing through my chest. I sat up in bed and unbuttoned my nightgown. Yimika’s tiny mouth snatched my nipple and dragged. Bluish-white milk spurted from my free nipple. I covered it with a tissue from the box on my bedside table. The air-conditioner blasted cold air over my face; I lay back.