‘That morning, as we sat in an embrace, she cried and told me that my father never wanted a baby. She didn’t let him know she was pregnant because he always said he didn’t want a child. I happened by mistake, Desire. I was a born-by-mistake,’ he laughed.
‘You know, I didn’t like the way she said it that day, but she’s my mum. She’s that kind of person. She always just spoke her mind like someone who had not given much thought to what she had to say. She’d say, “Eni, you’re a born-by-mistake, but it’s not the end of the world.”’
Ireti explained how it was a phrase his friends used in school for describing someone without a father, or whose mother was rumoured to be promiscuous. None of them called him a born-by-mistake to his face because of his popularity in school, but there were times he wondered if they talked about him behind his back. This was the reason that he did everything he could to uphold that place of likeability among his friends. He was the one who did things the others could not do. He asked them to dare him to go and pour shit on the principal’s doorstep. He did this for a couple of nights, praying to God that no one should catch or see him. He also asked his secondary school friends to dare him to have sex with the head teacher’s daughter and they did. He asked the girl out but never slept with her. She was one of those whose parents had told her repeatedly that if she so much as touched a man she would get pregnant. And each time they met, she sat a few inches from him smiling and hugging herself. On his part, he knew he was still trying to figure out what a real vagina looked like, outside of the ones he saw in X-rated movies. The day he took the bet on her with his friends, he explained to her, as he walked her to his house, that she must groan like someone in pain because some people wanted to hurt her, and he was trying to protect her from them. He would deal with them himself, and this was why she must cooperate with anything he said. For some reason, she believed him. She believed anything he said. He was the popular one who continued to have good grades despite his pranks. His friends came around to the house, it was all planned. They were outside, listening to their activities.
‘I told her to scream: “Haaaaaaaa. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me please. It hurts. Haaaaaaa!” And I said, “Just wait. Next time, you’ll know your daddy. Am I your mate?” I tried to say all the things I felt should be said when having sex.’
He stepped out of the house, with a bare chest, smiling at his friends, who gave him the thumbs up and left before the girl came out. The following day, he told his friends, ‘She was just crying like a baby. She is a vir-gin! She kept screaming as I was just going inside and out.’
His friends loved him more, except for one. He was the eldest and he just looked at him, laughed and said, ‘Fool!’
Desire laughed softly as he narrated the story of his escapades to her.
‘See, I’m in the university now. You know things are different. I stand up for students’ rights and I can walk into the Vice-Chancellor’s office and tell the man the “pain of being a Nigerian student”. Things are different now for me. But, I am still the born-by-mistake.’
‘So what if you’re born-by-mistake?’ Desire asked.
Ireti stayed quiet and didn’t respond to her question, instead he said, ‘Since I met you, I have woken up in the middle of the night playing our first meeting in my head.’
‘Why? Do I scare you?’ She felt she could see through him. ‘No. You give me courage. I’m afraid I may go looking for this father with my mum now dead, and no longer there to give me those long calls on why I should continue aiming high. You know, the last time, before the message came that she died in her sleep, I told her I was thinking of meeting my father. And she replied, “Have I been less than a mother and a father to you?” You know, she said it in that tone that required me to ask no further question.’
‘It’s the pain. The pain is the only thing she remembers. And, you know, we all turn towards imaginative questions, questions that empower us, so we can bury those stories that we won’t give words to because they’ve corrupted our memory,’ Desire said in a small voice.
Ireti raised his head, ‘Is that a quote from someone I can read?’
‘No. It’s me just thinking. I’ve always considered how some stories will never get told. It’s the way it is, Ireti. Silence is where we go to listen to those stories. Sit in silence and listen. Silence tells stories too, you know.’
‘I don’t want silence. I want those stories she did not think should be told. I really want them, Desire. I want them.’
17
Desire slipped into bed without removing her shoes. She covered her face with the ankara material which served as a duvet and ignored Remilekun’s griping on how she was becoming more of a stranger with each passing day.
‘I’m going out. Not coming home tonight,’ Remilekun said and began to whistle Onyeka Onwenu’s You and I song like she did not care whether Desire responded or not.
‘Okay, stay well. Can you please put off the lights on your way out,’ Desire said, her thoughts full of how she would arrange a meeting between Ireti and Prof.
Remilekun left and shut the door. Desire plumped the pillow, placed it in the middle of the bed and lay prone on it. Her nose dug into the mattress, taking in the smell of her own stale sweat. After several tries at falling asleep, her eyes remained wide open. She stood up, turned the lights on and began to organise the room. She moved the curtain to see what it was like outside. It was as dark as soot with only amber bulbs sprinkling light that fell into sparse corners of the area. A stray dog howled on the street, and then, the distant hoot of a night guard’s whistle made her jump. She was reminded of how a man lost his life while peeping out of his window at night.
The night it happened, she was returning from Prof’s house and she heard the gunshots. She walked home briskly only to hear the next morning that a man in the neighbourhood had died from a gunshot wound because the armed robbers who came to the neighbourhood thought he was spying on them from his window. Sadder still, was that a woman who was returning from a visit to friends was hit by a stray bullet from night guards who had shot into the air to scare off the thieves. They said the bullet lodged straight in her skull. The question many in the area were asking was why anyone would wake up in the middle of the night to look out of their window, especially after hearing shots being fired? Why can’t anyone look out of their window in the middle of the night, to enjoy the feel of night, that velvet black where things bounced about, and shadows became the mystery waiting to be discovered?
What was wrong with looking out of the window at the skies? Was the world no longer ours? Was the world ever ours? Desire wondered what would have happened if she were the one who died that night. Were she to die, by some ill luck, would similar questions arise? Who would mourn her for looking out of the window as shots rang out, when others were sleeping? Maybe Remilekun and her Mama T. Desire would be mourned for some time, and then she’d be forgotten.
Desire returned to sit on the edge of the bed. She stared into the darkness until she had formed a mental picture of Prof being there with her. It occurred to her that the moment she began to visit him the little details of him she had carried for many years were becoming blurry. She sometimes needed to look at the newspaper cuttings to remind herself of the man she met in her childhood. She tried to think of him in the same way as this man she met in the dark. The one in the dark was the one without a definite face and who remained a silhouette, but could talk and make her body react. The one in the paper was different, he sat in her head like a father’s final admonition before dying.
In one of the newspaper cuttings of him, which she kept in her purse, he was bald. His scalp gleamed from the lights of the photographer’s camera. She wished more than ever these days to get one chance to put on the lights during one of their meetings. She wondered if light would still fall on his scalp. She wanted to see if his face twitched when she recounted her story of this old acquaintance she knew from a long time ago. The one whose photo she took with
her every day. The face she had memorised since she was a child. She would tell him they met in a place that no longer existed, and he might have laughed and said, ‘Eldorado?’
And she might have laughed, and said, ‘Kind of. For some of us, imagination is our reality.’
She thought of telling him what she had just uncovered about his past, her past, their past. It was beyond Maroko. She felt like an unpleasant whiff. The more she thought about it, the more she wondered if it was her place to tell Prof about Ireti, or to tell Ireti about Prof. She also thought of telling Ireti about him and them about her.
Desire sat up on the bed and looked for a pen and paper to write down the dialogue she imagined could happen between herself and Prof. And then Ireti and Prof. And then herself and Ireti. She wrote on and savoured the way it sounded. The possibilities of seeing the future where all their lives would find some meaning. She finally stood up from the bed as she managed to convince herself that this was a dream she could slip deep into if she lingered any longer. At this point, what she wanted was to stick with reality. She did all the things they say can make the mind focus better; a deep breath, a concentrated stare at an object, the thought of something other than that which was disrupting her train of thought. Nothing worked. Thoughts of Ireti and Prof filled her mind like vapour in a bottle. With Prof in her head, she found herself sneaking about the room until the thought of being late for a class test slipped into her mind and snapped her back into the moment. She rushed into the bathroom, only for an empty bucket to stare her in the face. She kicked the bucket, sending it sprawling to the extreme corner of the bare bathroom as she realised that it was the one with a nail-tip sized hole that was barely noticeable at the bottom, which Remilekun discovered some days earlier. She stood with her hands on her waist for some time, picked up another bucket and flung open the door.
All of the estate used to have water when the blocks of flats were first built. A few years before she and Remilekun began to live in the house, a road construction was said to have resulted in major water pipes getting broken in the estate. Two years after they moved into the area, the road was rehabilitated, yet no one considered repairing the pipes even as the years ran into themselves and the taps in the bathrooms and kitchens became rusted antiques. Some houses built boreholes. Many of the neighbours eventually removed their bathtubs and placed them in front of their flats, where they served as water storage and washing bowls. Those who lived on the ground floor found it easier to get the mai ruwa, who fetched water for people for a fee, to supply them.
Desire lingered by her door when she saw a mai ruwa who sold water in metal gallons walking towards her neighbour’s flat in hurried steps. Water splashed from the two tilted metal gallons in his cart. Someone must have paid him the previous night to supply water. She watched him: the poise of the cubic-shaped metal containers which hung down from a rope tied to a bar that sat on his shoulder. She wasn’t ready to go to the tap to fetch water, and her pocket money from Mama T was running low, so she couldn’t afford to pay the mai ruwa. She considered stealing water from one of the neighbours’ water storage containers, like Remilekun sometimes did whenever she was broke, running late, or just too lazy to fetch water at the tap.
Desire smiled and greeted the water carrier. She watched him move towards a drum and pour the water in it. She waited for him to leave, turning left and then right to look out for any early risers. She scanned the neighbours’ water containers from her doorstep without moving, so as to move quickly and precisely towards her target without arousing anyone’s suspicions. She moved towards the container with the confidence of an owner, looked around once more, and set to work. She scooped one bowl at a time, quickly, so that the water furled and unfurled into the bucket until it was full, and then she hurried into their self-contained one-room flat.
For a moment, Desire considered carrying a bucket of water to Prof’s doorstep as an excuse to see him in the day, before remembering that his flat was in one of the buildings that did not have water issues like hers.
She moved from the window to the bed, pushing away Remilekun’s washed bra, which limped down from a nail above her. Her friendship with Remilekun had taught her that being estranged from one’s relatives was not enough to hate them. Remilekun was the 54th child of a man with the skin of a shrunken banana. Yet, she spoke with so much affection of aunties and uncles, brothers and sisters, and of her father, a man who she had to make an appointment to see every three months. Although Mama T had not seen her husband in many years, she made sure that Remilekun visited her father every year, to celebrate Sallah.
Desire reflected on how society placed so much emphasis on family, yet there was more dysfunction than normality. Before her death, her mother told her of how Babangida’s relatives visited her after he died and “took care of their kinsman’s belongings.”
Her father’s family came early one morning while the world was still asleep. They sat her mother down and told her they would exempt her from the required rites as she was not a properly married wife.
‘However, we must recover the things our son worked for as he is still owing the family for the money we used to send him to school.’
She said there was nothing to argue or struggle over, considering that he left nothing. She made a visit to the police to claim gratuity, and she was told Babangida had several uncleared loans for which they would need to do some deductions. A few more visits and she was told there was nothing to take home as gratuity.
Desire would always remember how she could feel the fire burning in her mother’s eyes as she told the story. She could still remember the way her mother’s voice held a laugh between the stories. Her face, however, carried the disdain and pain and anxieties of those years.
‘I turned to the black and white Sony television and told them that was what he left behind, and then I stood up and went inside to sleep beside you. I left them sitting down in the parlour.’
That was the day she spoke the proverb that Desire always repeated when she was faced with a situation that made her feel shame for herself, ‘You know when a big shame pushes you down, even a small one would want to dance on top of you.’
‘You know, they carried the TV,’ her mother said, laughing as she went on to describe how they then returned for the refrigerator she sold iced water from the following day. It was as if they held a family meeting to return to the house a week later, to claim things that her mother thought were her security each time Babangida maltreated her. They claimed the only piece of land he owned in the village, four old suits, and even two ashtrays with marks from cigarette stubs. On their way out, they offered to give Desire and her mother a 50 naira monthly upkeep allowance, but they were expected to come to the village to collect it. The bus fare to the village was 80 naira at the time. It was sheer luck that these relatives did not know about the land in Maroko, which was bought a year after Babangida met her mother, and while their love was still on fire.
Alone in a house stripped of everything in it—bed, refrigerator, television and clothes—the landlord reminded them of the couple of months’ rent they owed. Desire remembered him leaning against the door smacking his lips. She later learnt, when her mother was not in one of her ghost states, that he had offered to marry her and take care of Desire by making her his eighth wife.
Years later, when they were both thrown out at Maroko, Desire always remembered this drama because her mother acted it out once madness began to settle on her. Those times, when there was no food in the house, Desire wondered if her mother had made the right decision. How much can a woman, dressed in shame, bargain for her pride?
Desire did remember, in those faded snippets of memory through which the past visited the mind, being strapped onto her mother’s back as she walked away from the broken-toothed landlord, stomping her foot, cursing and tapping her fingers and turning them in a gyre over her head, before repeating over and over how a union between her and the landlord would be over her dead body.
Maroko was the promised land for Desire and her mother. Once the landlord sent them away, her mother became certain her husband foresaw it all.
‘A man can know the right thing but own a wrong mind. A man’s mind is formed by the people around him. The wrong set of people is equal to a wrong mind. Knowledge is not enough to do the right thing. The right people is equal to a right mind,’ she said about her late husband.
Desire listened as her mother recounted how she and Babangida used to lay on a small mattress, dreaming of owning their own house in Lagos. Of how their children would have a room of their own and they would travel back home, so that people could see that they had not wasted their lives as predicted. They laid the foundation of the house, before Babangida’s attitude changed towards her. Desire’s mother never told her what the changes were, but she knew that he was far from whatever aspiration he started off with.
‘The moment we were married, he took me to this man who was his friend in Maroko, and a son of the soil and said, “This is my wife, we are buying our first land together.”’
He was Baba Ondo, a retired police officer who had lost an eye in the line of duty. When Desire and her mother arrived in Maroko, she traced him, as he luckily still lived in the same house. She introduced herself as Babangida’s wife, ‘the only one who could take or claim the land if anything happened to him.’ Baba Ondo was kind enough to show her mother the land, offered her a stall to sell food, and the first raw materials for a make-shift house. He helped them to settle down in Maroko, where the actual meaning of childhood, for Desire, was shaped. She was beginning to believe she would have a father-figure in Baba Ondo, when he was lynched to death by boys who wanted to snatch his bag, a few months after their arrival in Maroko.
A Small Silence Page 12