Stay With Me

by AYÒ. BÁMI ADÉBÁYÒ.

  Dr Uche placed a palm against her forehead. ‘Madam, I’m sorry if I sounded patronising. I’m just worried about your health, your mental health.’

  She said mental health in such hushed tones, as if she was afraid to hear her own words. I wondered about the state of her own mind.

  ‘Doctor, I am fine. Just let me have the results. You have a lot of patients waiting.’

  She handed the results over. ‘It happens, this kind of . . . pregnancy. To people who can’t have . . . haven’t had children. It happens – pregnancy symptoms are there but no baby. We are agreed that you aren’t pregnant, right? Perhaps you could see a gynaecologist again about this issue? I can see on your file that you have had a number tests done before, but maybe we could run some more tests?’

  ‘I’ll think about it.’

  I walked into the hallway with a hand on my slightly swollen stomach, undaunted by doubting Akin and the doctor. I felt like a balloon, filled with hope and a miracle baby. I was ready to float over the wards of Wesley Guild Hospital.

  Akin laughed when I told him Funmi wanted to come and stay with us during my pregnancy. We were getting ready for bed; I was already in my white nightgown. He was still taking off his office clothes.

  ‘That girl? What pregnancy anyway? Have they confirmed it at the hospital?’ He yanked his belt off forcefully; it snapped against the bed like a whip.

  ‘The doctor I met does not know what she is doing. She needs glasses, I’m telling you, saying she can’t see my baby, ehn? The baby that has started kicking.’

  ‘Kicking?’

  ‘Yes, now. You are shaking your head at me? Shake it well, shake it until it falls off your neck, you will see.’ I climbed into bed. ‘When I hold my baby in my arms, you will be put to shame, all of you who think I can’t have a child. Even that stupid doctor will be put to shame.’

  ‘You know you sound crazy, right?’

  ‘What are you saying?’ I cradled my belly and waited for him to reply.

  He stripped down to his boxers and lay beside me. ‘Yejide, please dim your lamp.’

  ‘What did you mean by what you said just now?’

  He rolled onto his stomach and turned his face away from me.

  ‘Akinyele? Me, I sound crazy?’

  ‘You are not pregnant and Funmi is not coming to stay here. Can I sleep now?’ He pulled the covers over his head.

  His words crept across the room and clung undetected to my body like soldier ants would. Then they stung without warning in the early hours of the morning when I woke up to urinate for perhaps the tenth time in the course of that night. As I sat in bed and sipped water from the nearly empty bottle that I now kept on my bedside table, his words played back in my head, triggering questions.

  I was now about four months’ pregnant, my stomach was growing bigger each day, yet my husband chose to believe some incompetent doctor. He kept telling me I sounded crazy. Was he blind? Could he not see my stomach? Could he not see my puffy face? Even strangers could see it. Everywhere I went, people greeted me: L’ojo ikunle a gbohun Iya a gbohun omo o – May we hear the mother’s voice and the baby’s voice when you deliver. Strangers wished me well, they prayed for my survival and that of my child. People alighted from full taxis so I could enter; I did not have to queue in the bank any more, I was asked to go to the top of the line by those in the queue. Did Akin think I was a crazy woman who stopped people on the road to tell them that I was pregnant? Since the day we got married, I had never told him I was pregnant before, why did he find it so hard to believe me now?

  I lay back in bed and clasped my hands over my belly. I could feel tension in my head, the beginnings of a headache. Beside me, Akin was stirring; he stretched in his sleep. I stared at his hairless chin and clenched my fist to keep from stroking it. I was still staring at him when he opened his eyes.

  He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands. ‘Didn’t you sleep?’

  ‘Why do you hate me so much?’

  He scratched his neck. ‘You’ve started again. Get some sleep, Yejide.’

  ‘If I do a test, and it shows I’m pregnant, will you believe?’ I tried to read his face in the hazy light of dawn. I could not.

  ‘Yejide, you need to sleep more. It’s too early for this.’

  I converted the empty room beside the kitchen into a playroom. I created a special place where I could spend time with my baby, a space for just the two of us. The playroom was not something I planned; I converted it because Akin stopped talking to me. He stopped visiting Funmi in the evenings. Instead, he planted himself in the sitting room, watching the evening news, reading newspapers, but mostly not speaking to me, even if I was seated beside him. He responded to questions with a grunt, to insults with silence.

  I gave up on trying to provoke or persuade Akin to talk and stayed in the spare room instead of the sitting room. I arranged the toys I had bought for the baby on the floor of the room. I put in a cushioned chair and bought my own newspapers so that I had something to read while I waited for the kitchen timer to ring. In that room, surrounded by teddy bears and brightly coloured rattles, I read about the military officers who had been accused of planning a coup. I was drawn to the profile of two of the men. There was Lt-Colonel Christian Oche, who had been a PhD candidate at Georgetown University in the United States until he was summoned back to the Supreme Headquarters. I kept wondering what course his life would have taken if he hadn’t been recalled and had been left to complete his thesis. Perhaps he would have read about the events in the lower right-hand corner of some American newspaper. I also wondered if, when he boarded the plane back to Lagos, he had felt an enervating sadness that he ignored until it was replaced with the excitement of being back home.

  And then there was the man whose fate fascinated the country, Major-General Mamman Vatsa, sitting minister, award-winning poet, and close friend to the Head of State. Vatsa and Babangida were childhood friends who had been classmates in middle school; they were commissioned into the army on the same day and had commanded neighbouring battalions in the civil war. Babangida had even been the best man at Vatsa’s wedding.

  I was spending more time in the playroom than anywhere else in the house at this time, but the day I read that Vatsa, Oche and eleven others had been sentenced to death, I sat with Akin in the sitting room and tried to discuss the events with him. But he kept redirecting the conversation to my bulging stomach, so I retreated to the playroom and didn’t bother to ask if he thought it would help when Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and J. P. Clark met with Babangida. The writers’ appeal for clemency made sense to me; after all it had not even been a proper coup attempt: the men had been tried for their intentions. The next day, I wept when I learnt that ten of the officers, including Vatsa and Oche, had been executed. Vatsa maintained that he was innocent until the end, but it would be years before other military officers would question the evidence used to convict him. At the time, Nigeria was still in the honeymoon phase of her relationship with Babangida, and like most new brides she wasn’t asking probing questions, yet.

  I did not go into the sitting room while the Defence Secretary announced the executions, but I could hear him from the playroom because Akin had turned up the volume. I wanted to go to him, not even to talk, just to be next to him and feel him squeeze my arm. But I was afraid he would stare at my stomach mutely with the expression of a man looking at vomit.

  Eventually, Akin’s icy silence melted into warm words spoken softly. He even came into the playroom a few times. His words took up too much space in the room and it was hard for me to breathe. Since I had told him I was pregnant, he had sealed his mouth about the baby, but when he visited me in the playroom, it was the only thing he wanted to talk to me about. He wanted to talk sense into me, only he couched his sermons in questions that I soon stopped answering. He asked me several times if I thought my baby would save the world. He asked if I saw visions of the child. He asked me to describe the angels I had seen, even after I told him
I had never seen an angel in my life. One night, he asked me if I thought my baby would have super powers and I decided I had had enough. I went to my salon the next morning and informed my shop girls that I would not return until the next day. Then I drove to the teaching hospital in Ife.

  There was no electricity in the hospital when I arrived. After he booked my appointment, the nurse informed me that the generator would not be switched on until 2 p.m. and since there were people in line ahead of me, I might not get to see a doctor until 3 p.m. It was just 11 a.m. now. I decided to go into the market to buy a few items for my salon. I got the usual setting lotions and shampoos that I used in the shop, and then I stopped by a gift shop to buy a wooden flower vase that would look nice in the playroom.

  I was on my way out of the market when I felt a hand grab my wrist. I turned and found myself face to face with Iya Tunde, my father’s fourth wife. I had not seen her since my father’s burial.

  ‘Yejide, so it is you? I saw the person and I told myself, no, it can’t be Yejide, Yejide would not come into this market without visiting my stall. Is that the way this world is? A child can now visit the market without branching off to her mother’s stall?’ Iya Tunde said.

  ‘Good afternoon, Iya Tunde.’ I could not resist reminding her she was Iya Tunde, not my mother. ‘How is the market?’

  ‘We are begging God for a good market day. Still, we thank God because we are not going hungry.’

  For the first few months after she had married my father, Iya Tunde sold fruit in a small shed behind our house. When she got pregnant, my father moved her into the stall he’d built for Iya Martha in the market and he asked them to share it because a pregnant woman should have sufficient shade and space to do her business. He promised Iya Martha that he would build a new stall for her elsewhere in the market. I don’t know how she did it, but by the end of the year Iya Tunde had taken over the stall and Iya Martha was selling her wares in the wooden shed behind our house. My father never built another stall for Iya Martha.

  ‘Greet everyone at home for me,’ I said. ‘I have to get going.’

  ‘Wait, wait, let me rejoice with you, I can see you are now two in one? You are pregnant!’

  ‘I thank God.’

  ‘Your mother is not sleeping in heaven-o, she is praying for you. Even though she had no lineage, or at least we did not know her lineage, it is obvious now she is a good mother.’ She could not let me go without throwing her own jab at me. According to my father, my mother had been part of a nomadic Fulani group when she got pregnant by him and refused to travel on with her own people. But my stepmothers would go to their graves calling her a woman of ‘unknown lineage’.

  ‘I really must go.’

  ‘Remember to visit us once in a while, try and show us your face now and then. After all, it is still your father’s house.’

  Every time he married a new wife, my father would tell his children that family was about having people who would look for you if you got kidnapped. He’d then add that he was doing his best to build an army just in case one of us did get kidnapped. It was a bad joke and I was the only one who ever laughed. I laughed at all his jokes. I think he believed in this myth of his large harmonious family. He probably thought that I would still visit my stepmothers after his death.

  ‘Goodbye, Iya Tunde.’

  ‘Goodbye-o. Greet your husband for me.’

  The polythene bags I was carrying suddenly felt heavier. I was grateful when the bus conductor took them from me as I climbed into the bus. I had left my car at the hospital to avoid putting unnecessary strain on its old engine. I fought off thoughts of my lonely childhood, rubbed my stomach through my clothes and was comforted. I did not need to be afraid. Even if Funmi ended up taking Akin from me, I would soon have someone all my own, my own family.

  I was just in time for the appointment.

  After the scan, Dr Junaid cleared his throat. ‘How long have you been pregnant?’

  ‘About six months now.’

  ‘When did you have the last scan?’ He wrote something in the open file before him.

  ‘At three months, and that was three months ago. I met one young doctor like that, maybe that is why she made a mistake – lack of experience.’

  He stopped writing and looked at me. ‘Hmm, you think she made a mistake?’

  ‘That is why I’m here to confirm. She said there was no baby there.’ I patted my protruding belly. ‘You can see for yourself and I’m sure it is not kwashiorkor.’

  I laughed. Dr Junaid didn’t.

  ‘Have you seen any fertility specialists? Did you see any, before you got, um, before you came to think you were pregnant? Did you have any tests done?’

  ‘Yes, of course. I saw someone in Ilesa, I did all the tests. They said I was OK.’

  ‘And your husband, did he see a specialist?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  We went to the hospital together once. Akin answered most of the doctor’s questions. When the doctor asked about our sex life, Akin held my hand before he answered and stroked my thumb as he said, Our sex life is normal, absolutely normal.

  Dr Junaid shut the file he’d been writing in and leaned forward. ‘So your husband, was he tested? Did they run any tests and –?’

  ‘Yes, he was tested,’ I said. ‘Look, doctor, what about my baby?’

  ‘Madam,’ he drummed his fingers on his desk, ‘there is no baby.’

  I clapped my hands three times and laughed. ‘Doctor, are you blind? I don’t want to insult you, but can’t you see?’

  ‘Please, let me explain. These things happen sometimes. Women think they are pregnant, but they are not.’

  ‘Listen to yourself. I don’t think I am pregnant. I know I am pregnant. I have not seen my period in six months. See my stomach. I have even felt the baby kick! I don’t think I am pregnant, doctor. I am pregnant. Can’t you see? I am pregnant.’

  ‘Madam, please calm down.’

  ‘I am leaving. I don’t even know if it is the machines you work with that are faulty or your brains.’

  I slammed the door as I left the room.

  As the pregnancy approached eleven months, I decided to visit the Mountain of Jaw-Dropping Miracles again. On the day I went there, Akin was in Lagos for a meeting and had travelled with his colleagues in the bank’s official car. I drove his car to the flat expanse of land at the base of the mountain. When I arrived, there was only one car in the space, a Volvo parked in the shade of an almond tree. I recognised Mrs Adeolu’s plate number.

  As I climbed up the mountain, everywhere was still and quiet. It took me over two hours to get to the crest because I stopped from time to time to sit on rocks and drink from the bottle of water I carried with me. The sun was relentless. Sweat streamed down my back into the crack of my buttocks. I pulled my dress back and forth at the neckline to get some air on my skin.

  When I arrived at the crest, there was no living creature in sight. I wandered around until I found a wooden slate on which someone had scrawled: Prophet Josiah on travel. Plis come back in next month four your miracul. Too bad for Prophet Josiah, I thought to myself, patting the wad of naira notes in my pocket – I wanted to give him some money. He had not asked for any money the first time I came, and I figured giving him a gift would not hurt. The bottle of water was now empty and I was parched and felt faint. Afraid that I would collapse on my way down the mountain, I went around the crest, hoping to find a forgotten bottle of water, praying I would not get cholera from whatever I found. That was when I found the shed – it was made from four wooden posts arranged to form a rough rectangle, and palm fronds covered it at the top.

  In the shed, Prophet Josiah and Mrs Adeolu were having sex. I could see her face; her eyes were closed in what could have been ecstasy. The Prophet’s distinguishing chef cap was about to fall off; his robes were bunched up around his waist, exposing his thrusting buttocks. His bare legs were so skinny.

  I left before either of them could see me and spen
t the next two months at home, waiting for the baby to come. I stopped going to the salon and left Akin to attend to the head stylist when she came to give account in the evenings. I did not cook or do housework. Akin bought meals from bukas in town and sat with me in the playroom to make sure I ate something. He also brought newspapers that I did not read. One morning I told him that I was conserving my energy so that when the baby was ready, I would be strong enough to push. He did not tell me there was no baby, or ask me why I had not done this when the pregnancy had lasted for nine months. He just kissed me on the chin and left for work, but when he came back that evening, he explained that if I wanted to be strong for the baby, I needed to be active. There was no mention of psychiatrists and he did not sound as if he was joking or humouring a crazy person. He spoke to me the way I’d wanted him to all the while, like an expectant father. I took his advice and went back to work the next day.

  One Saturday afternoon, I opened the door of my home and found Funmi on the other side, surrounded by several boxes and bags. The taxi-cab that dropped her off raised a cloud of dust as it drove away.

  ‘Move and let me pass,’ she said.

  I stood by the door like a guard as she swept in. I watched as she dragged her bags into the house one after the other, and littered the sitting room with them. She wore a navy-blue boubou, complete with a matching scarf that she had tied around her braided hair like a band. Her bright skin shone in the sunlight that streamed in through the open doorway.

  ‘Where is my room?’ she said when she was done lugging her bags.

  ‘In this house? Are you dreaming?’

  ‘You, this woman – I have tried enough for you-o. Don’t try any more nonsense with me. This is my husband’s house too. Why must you keep me outside this house?’ She removed her scarf and tied it around her waist. ‘Why? You wicked woman, I asked you to shift so that we could both sit down. If you are not careful, I will push you off the seat totally.’

  ‘You see, I am not the one who married you. Your so-called husband is not in. When he’s back, you can ask him stupid questions.’ I pointed to the door. ‘Now, get out of my house.’