“Aunty, why you wan’ make I give you pure water if you neva drink de one you get?”
“You this bush gal, gerrout from there!” hissed one of my mates behind me. “This fine aunty talk say make you give am water, you still dey question am?” He switched from pidgin to what he considered a better form of English. “Fine aunty, take dis water. Is cold well, well.” My madam laughed in her throat, showing a glimpse of white, white teeth.
“You’re observant. I knew you were special when I saw you,” she said. “Where did you get that thing on your head?”
I touched the wood and fabric contraption I used to keep the sun from heating up my scalp. I had sewn together scraps of cloth collected from Iya Wunmi, the local seamstress, and attached it to a wooden frame which I wore fitted to my crown. Everyone thought it was funny but it worked for me. “Na me do am,” I frowned. I was prepared to defend it. The hot sand and broken asphalt crunched underneath my feet as I walked alongside the slow-moving car still hoping to make a sale in spite of my smart mouth.
“You’re creative too. How would you like to work for me?”
Just like that.
My mother took some convincing but by the time she saw my elegant, light-skinned madam, acting as if my poor, tattered mother was her superior, she agreed. The first night she spent at the three-storey house on the quiet, tree-lined street, my madam treated her as if she were a queen and told her she could come and visit whenever she wanted. The next day madam personally made my mother’s breakfast, gave her gifts of local wax prints and money and made sure that one of the drivers could take her back to the slums, where we lived. My mother prayed over her gifts, took me aside and spoke plainly with me.
“You are my only child. I have nobody else. God is blessing you through me. Let favour continue to flow into our family. Please do not let me be disgraced.”
*
I already have his dinner laid out when Oga returns from the airport that night. He eats quietly and goes to bed. I toss and turn in my bed and finally settle into an uneasy sleep in the early hours of the morning. The next night is the start of the weekend. A couple of his friends and their wives and girlfriends come to pick him up from the house in their flashy cars with their booming sound systems. I know he means to drink as he does not leave in his own car so I stay up to let him in. I needn’t have bothered. Oga does not come home.
The next morning I am still trying to sleep when my intercom rings.
“Hello?” I ask, weary with emotional turmoil.
“I need some breakfast. Bring a glass of palmie as well, my head is splitting.”
I knock three times on the door and wait for a bit before I turn the handle. Oga is sitting on the bed in a robe with his gorgeous calves exposed. He is on the phone and from the sexy way his baritone is rumbling I know he is talking to madam. I feel a pang of sadness when he doesn’t even look up to acknowledge me. I put down the tray and feel my throat closing up.
“Sir... I...” He waves me away. I burst into tears.
“What is it?” he asks in alarm. I cannot answer him. I am heaving sobs and the sadness is threatening to tear out my chest. “I don’t know what is wrong with her, she just started crying,” he is explaining to my madam. He hands the phone to me.
“Hello?” she says.
I try to speak but I cannot. A fresh wave of sobbing and sniffling wracks my body.
“Sylvia, stop crying. I know you are upset because my husband is not talking to you.” She chuckles. “Ask yourself why it matters to you so much that he is acting this way?” My madam is firm and calm.
“Ma... ma?” I bleat in shock as her meaning dawns on me.
“You think I don’t know? You like him; he likes you. What are you waiting for?”
“But madam... I... he is your husband and I am not supposed to... I mean you have been so kind to me and I am repaying you with evil thoughts.” I am crying again.
“Shhhhhh... I admire your respect for me, but don’t you like your Oga?” I look over at him, leaning back against the pillows now, his robe open to expose his strong thighs.
“Yes, ma.” My head is spinning at just how much. I dare not hope. I try not to disturb what feels like a beautiful daydream by breathing.
“Well, he likes you too Sylvia. He is only a bit hurt that you did not give in to him like most women would. You know how men can be.”
I think about the rough street boys I hawked with, their rough language and their even rougher hands, taking whatever they wanted. “No, ma,” I answer.
“Look after my husband, Sylvia.”
I hand the phone to my master who listens, smiles and hangs up. “So, you like me, do you? Come here and show me how.”
I walk towards him, my tight pink Chinese silk dress constricting my movements somewhat. It is a gift from one of my madam’s travels and it used to be split to the thigh but I sewed it up to save some decency. Oga frowns, leans forward and rips the slit to its original height. “That’s better.” He shrugs off his robe in one fluid movement and stands naked as the day he was born.
My Oga is beautiful. His skin glows coffee brown and I can feel the heat coming from him in waves. He pulls me towards him and kisses me, sucking my lower lip and tongue. I kiss him back, slobbering all over his gorgeous face. He laughs. “Easy Sylvia, easy,” he says, but I cannot wait. I kneel down in front of him and shove his hot member into my mouth. It is so sweet that I almost pass out. The skin on it is stretched out so smoothly that more saliva pours from my mouth. I clasp his smooth muscular thighs, I travel the length of his long legs, I grab his tight bum, and I fondle his balls. My hands are everywhere at the same time. Oga is thrusting in my mouth on tiptoe and I swallow his length up, stuffing him deep in my throat.
“Easy Sylvia, easy,” my Oga’s voice is husky and he is hissing as if he is in pain. I know I am doing this right. If you want to survive rape on the streets... I shake the thought from my head and concentrate on my master’s shaft. I lick along its length and suck on its head, breaking only to spit in my right hand. I work the spittle all over my index finger and stick it slowly in his arsehole without hesitating. The element of surprise had worked in my favour many times with boys who thought they knew everything.
“Mmmh, Sylvia, oh Sylvia... mmmmmm, Sylviaaaaaa,” he draws out my name and I smile to myself. It doesn’t matter how masculine they are, the fingers always seem to work the magic. I change from a kneeling position to a squat and rub my engorged clit all over his outstretched leg. I can barely keep up with all my movements and we are both getting too excited. I thrust my finger deeper into Oga’s receptive arsehole and rub around...
“Wait,” Oga orders. He reaches down and snaps the clasps across my breasts, freeing them from the tight fabric. He slides his fingers into my overzealous nether and comes away with juice with which he masturbates himself, leaning back and pointing himself at my nipples. They point back at him.
“Sylvia, touch your breasts for me.” Oga is biting his lips and masturbating faster and faster. I jiggle my breasts in and pull my nipples. I try to suck on my own nipples, as he cums on them, warm and slippery, stabbing the air with his member. I rub this all over my breasts until it disappears. Oga is still very, very hard.
“Oga, kiss me now.” He smiles and makes for my mouth. I stop him by sitting on the bed and spreading my legs for him. “I want to know what it feels like.” I had seen him and my madam on the living-room sofa in the middle of the afternoon, coming in through the kitchen door from an early market run. I peered round the wall; my madam’s yellow-banana legs pointed straight in the air. For a moment I thought my Oga had seen me.
He laughs loud and long and I know my suspicions are correct. “Spread your legs wider, darling.”
I cry, I scream, I beg for more. Oga sticks his efficient tongue in all my three holes. In my ecstasy I abandon my carefully cultivated English. “Oga ah take God beg you, chop am, chop am o, e dey sweet me!”
By the time Oga finally en
ters me from behind, I have abandoned pidgin English for my local language, “Suga m! Suga m o!” I scream, not caring that the drivers can hear. Oga and I spend all day, eating each other and drinking from each other. I worship his body, with spittle and tears. He christens me with the milky glass of palm wine and laps it all up.
I am a good maid; madam will be pleased.
MRS SALAD WOMAN
Nnenna Marcia
Nnenna Marcia is a pseudonym for a Nigerian writer living in London. By day she tells other people’s stories for major news organisations, and by night she scribbles her own. She is an incessant reader and prefers make-believe to real life because it is so much easier and – ‘she gets to play God’. She writes stories about strong African women, sex, sexuality and relationships, her inspiration drawn from her life in West Africa. She brings an exciting new voice to the stream of talent emerging from that continent. Africa Hot is her first anthology of short stories, some of which have appeared in the Erotic Review. Currently, she is working on a sequel to the novella contained within Africa Hot.
Ejike tasted salt and knew that he was bleeding. He put his hand to the corner of his mouth and wiped. It came away stickier than blood should be. Straddling the gutter on the road in front of a dressmaker’s shop, he surveyed the damage to his face in the glass door. The blood was coming from his nose. A reddish-brown trail covered the right side of his face from his left nostril; a result of the wind he whipped up as he ran from the school grounds. He tilted his head to get a better view of the nostril. The inside was black. It was getting difficult to breathe from it. He pinched the right nostril and blew hard. A clot fell into the gutter slime. He buttoned his shirt and went on his way, ignoring the women staring him down in the shop.
Damn Alex and his big mouth, he thought. It was Alex who had called his mother a whore. It was Alex who had alerted the whole school to his secret shame and forced him to fight for her honour. But he had since decided that Alex was not the cause of his anger. His mother and her lover were. That was why he was on his way now, to see this man’s wife. It had to end. Ejike pushed the gate open and scanned the ground-floor flats. Even without looking at the number scribbled on his palm, he knew this to be the right place. It was the only flat he could see that had flower pots in the veranda. The balconies of the upper flats were covered in the usual family-friendly bric-a-brac; mops drying in the sun, ironing boards, buckets and water containers.
He pressed the button set into the doorframe and listened. The whole compound sat still and heavy in the midday sun. All along the walls, lizards nodded, too lazy to lick at the ants crawling into the cracks in the concrete. Ejike pressed the bell again, going through his plan in his mind. It didn’t go past ‘Tell his wife’ before but now he was calmer, he thought about his mother. What if this wife did something to her? What if she was the violent sort? Maybe he made a mistake in coming? He knocked on the door before he could change his mind.
“Yes? How may I help you?” The woman standing in the next doorway sounded as if she wanted to do anything but help.
“Good afternoon, Ma. I am looking for your neighbour, the one whose husband sells salad items.”
“Oh? And what would a schoolboy want with my neighbour, wife of the one who sells salad items? Should you not be in school?” Ejike felt his nostrils widen. He knew the woman was taunting him but he didn’t know why. He straightened.
“I have some important business to discuss with her, Ma. It’s between me and her. Please can you tell me when she will be back? I must speak with her. It is about her husband.” The woman raised an eyebrow. “I guess you had better come in,” she said. Ejike hesitated. “I’m the woman you are looking for, little boy. This flat is the same as that one. You were knocking on my bedroom.” Her feet sunk into the floor. “Take your shoes off; I can’t have you dirtying my carpet.” He waited until he was sure she was not trying to start a fire with her shuffling and followed her to the middle of the room. The woman took an armchair.
“Speak. What do you want to tell me that was so important, you had to leave school to find me? And who are you?”
“Never mind who I am, it’s what I want to say that is important. Ma,” Ejike added the last bit as an afterthought. He clenched a fist. It would not do to lose his calm now. He would just say what he needed to and he would not have to see her again. The woman gathered the cloth of her boubou and tucked it between her legs. “Your husband is... He is sleeping with my mother. He is harming her reputation with my father’s people...” He expected the woman to jump out of her chair, to shout or slap him even, but she regarded him without blinking. Ejike cleared his throat. “I am sorry you had to hear it from me. Just tell him to leave my mother alone. He should go and find other people who are not widows dependent on other people for charity...”
“Ah,” she said finally, “so your mother is only sleeping with my husband because he is so charitable. Is her name ‘Charity’ by any chance?”
“Excuse me, Ma, but do not speak about my mother this way. She is a poor woman who is being exploited by your husband. Just tell him to leave her alone.”
“Mschew,” the woman hissed. “What ‘poor woman’ knowingly takes another woman’s husband to bed? Are there no other men around to scratch her nightly itches?”
“Excuse me, Ma...”
“Oh you’re offended by that, are you little boy? And yet you took it upon yourself to poke your nose into adult business.”
“I am not a small boy!” Ejike blinked at his voice rattling the louvers. He sounded childish even to his own ears. The woman started laughing. Ejike watched her boubou ripple like a sheet of water. He imagined the body underneath doing the same and felt his lip curl. As suddenly as she started, the woman stopped.
“You are a small boy. While you were marching here from school to report my husband to me, did you spare a thought for how I would feel when you told me? Did you even think about me at all? Did you think of confronting your mother maybe?” The woman clapped her hands together. “No, instead you come to me, the person who has done nothing to you. You come to the person who is already a laughing-stock because her husband dips his wick into other lanterns but hers. He cannot even give me a child...” She trailed off. Ejike eyed her body. He turned away.
“You think I was this fat when he married me?” the woman asked. “What you see on me, this body, is built from unhappiness. But I do not expect you to understand. You’re a small boy pretending at being a grown-up. Maybe you are just jealous that my husband is giving your mother what you cannot...”
“I. Am. Not. A. Small. Boy.” Ejike felt his shoulders expand until he was sure they filled the room. “I am a man.”
“I am a man,” she mimicked him in a whiny voice. “Show me.”
Ejike knew he was breathing too loudly but he couldn’t stop himself. There was no mistaking her meaning. She had gathered the folds of her caftan again. The more Ejike looked at the cloth wedged into the juncture of her thighs the more he could feel sweat beading on his upper lip. He inched his satchel around until it was hanging in front of his groin.
She followed the movement, licking her lips. “Oh. I see. A boy like you wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman anyway. I thought you came here to get revenge on my husband? Well, here it is. I am offering you a chance to take it and for me to take what I want. You don’t have to like me. You just have to fuck me.” Ejike jiggled, using the motion to adjust the erection straining the zipper of his trousers. The woman laughed. He didn’t give her a chance to continue. Passing the strap of his satchel over his head, he went towards the woman, pushing her further back in the chair.
“Ha! Big man. Is that how your mates do?” Ejike ignored her, pulling her by the arms until she stood up. He pushed her to the floor. The woman laughed again and again. Ejike felt the heaviness in his groin keenly. He kept it away from her reach, pushing up her dress.
“You are not wearing any pants?” he heard himself ask. The air left his lungs fa
ster than he could get it in. The smells coming from her made him want to put his head into the melting heat of her vulva and never come back out.
“I was not expecting visitors,” she said. Ejike watched as she spread her legs seemingly in slow motion. It was a different story. While the lips on her mouth curved in amusement, her nether lips were criss-crossed with sticky strands of clear moisture. It sat on the dark hair like raindrops on waxy leaves. Ejike inserted two fingers. The woman didn’t move. He added a third. As he pulled away to add a fourth, a bead of her juice rolled down her flesh and pooled on the floor.
The woman yelped. Ejike felt as if something possessed him. He was aware of his hands sinking into the flesh of either thigh, grabbing handfuls of it, trying to stop the quivering that had started in his arms. Everything else was pure sensation.
Ejike licked and slurped. It was his mission to stop any more of her wasting. The springy bush cushioned his nose and he was lost. Her scent was nothing and everything he had ever smelt all at once; flesh, sweat and warm, dark spaces. He couldn’t breathe. He didn’t care.
“Oh. Oh small boy. Fuck me, you small boy.” Ejike didn’t know if it was the dirty talk or the insult to his person, but his mouth dropped open. His tongue stabbed into her, swirling around inside her slipperiness. Small boy! He would show her. He started to part the hair. The woman got his intent and did it for him, reaching down and exposing her clit with a swiftness that told him just how well she knew her own body. Without waiting for him, she flicked the nub back and forth with the index finger of one hand, while holding herself open with the fingers of the other. Ejike fumbled with his school trousers, watching the wet opening winking as her muscles twitched.
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