A Small Silence

by Jumoke Verissimo

  18

  Desire woke up the following day, amused that she slept through the heaviness in her mind. She hurried through the normal things that readied her for campus, locking the door in a flurry of activity: slipped on her sandals, ensured the lock on the door keyed in, said goodbye to neighbours who greeted and then rushed down the stairs.

  Outside, the harmattan haze courted dried mud on the stretch of untarred road and when vehicles sped past, it formed clouds of dust that painted houses, signposts and billboards in a rusty, red hue. Desire walked fast despite the dry harmattan wind lashing at her face, and the burden of the secret that she bore. She tried to make her strides longer but ended up stepping in potholes. She drew close to the retail market road with her bag hanging loosely over her left arm and three hardback notebooks in the fold of her right arm. At first, she walked hurriedly towards the junction; approaching the stalls and branded tarpaulin umbrellas studded by the roadside. There was a canteen just after the road junction which led onto the main road. Her nostrils picked up the smell of fried plantain set against the stinging odour of stale piss in the open drain.

  She suffered the visual fuss of faded paint, coated and bright colours contrasted on the low cost government houses, dust drifting from the dried clay by the side of a recently open drain which was now swamped with garbage; nylon sachets and broken plastic. This was mixed with the Ipaja smell of the fetid roadside take-outs bragging for recognition; that coalescence of fried plantain and yam, prepared over mobile kitchens that stood over drains harbouring faeces and urine, which meant that many seconds usually passed before a breath of fresh air. This smell was not permanent, it floated from one end of the area to the other, hopeful. A few steps away, smoke filtered into her nose from a burning bush. Above her, the colours of the sky mingled with the unsettled ashes drifting in the wind like a condensed swarm of fleas. Under this sky, the sun wandered across like a lord.

  The temperature was rising, and what should have come as the eager bustle of morning risers, expectant workers and school children, could be compared to workers returning home at night after hectic traffic. Desire turned around to check how far she had come, and as she turned, her first step landed in an unobserved pothole.

  ‘Hey!’ the scream of the man in front of her and the struggle not to fall shook her. The lanky man, whose foul breath almost knocked her over when he drew closer, helped her up and she staggered backwards to escape the odour coming from his mouth.

  ‘Sorry-o. De road too bad. Even we wey dey waka, our leg no even free from dis potholes.’

  The man picked up and handed back a copy of a newspaper cut-out which had fallen from between her books. It was the picture of Prof. The one she had carried in her bra for many years. She had only moved it to her purse recently. The picture, if it could talk, would tell the maturity of her areolae. It was a miracle that she had never developed some horrible breast rash or infection during those teenage years. It was only recently, when her visits to Prof began, that she stopped slipping it into her bra. Instead, she made copies of the cut-outs and put them between the pages of diaries, books and in purses. She felt a sudden shame as the man picked up the paper and handed it to her. She did not raise her eyes to acknowledge the man’s own, as he held out what she considered her major secret—which even Remilekun did not know about—to her. How would anyone understand why she had carried the same picture of one man for about fifteen years?

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ she mumbled to him without smiling. In this state of walking in and out of the stench in Ipaja, she arrived at the block with Prof’s flat. She stopped a few metres away and stared. She was oblivious to the people setting up their shops, the feet hurrying past her and the honking cars that slowed down as they approached the potholes on the road. Around the three-storey building were wood stalls, covered with rusted zinc roofing sheets which leaned against heaps of garbage in jute bags. She wondered if it would make any difference if all these people knew she came to see him at nine and left at midnight.

  The longer she stood in front of the building, the odder it felt being there. Prof’s windows were shut, yet she felt like she was being watched. She wondered if he would be able to recognise her outside the room—would he be confused by her features and guess endlessly as he looked out from the window?

  Like many other buildings in the neighbourhood, his had sash windows, and a net. The other flats, with louvres, had their curtains tied up in a bunch forming the letter M. His flat was the only one in a building of twelve flats with its louvres closed. From where she stood, one could almost assume it was a single slab of glass. She looked at his window; just a calm row of shut slabs. This reminded her of the stuffiness and silence that reigned each time the laughter stopped, and silence settled between her and Prof.

  Are the walls painted blue, or green or even grey? Is it a room without paint or one with wallpapers with patterns of flowers on them? she wondered, remembering that the walls felt glossy when she leaned against them. The walls were painted, she concluded.

  As she stood in front of his block, she longed to go and see him that instant, so much that a hunger stretched the muscles in her chest that she felt she could tell what it was like to be in the early stages of cardiac arrest. Those nights when she would stop herself from going to see him and she would end up nestled on the bed did not count. There was something she assured herself of—she was not in love. She was inquisitive. Desirous to see a man who was from her past and whom she now felt a duty to connect to his long lost son. Once she was done, she would move on, she thought to herself. Perhaps, she may consider Ireti’s unprofessed attraction. She wanted to believe he was attracted to her. Perhaps.

  Desire sighed and made a quiet vow to keep Prof out of her thoughts until evening, when she would insist that the room must be lit, to tell him about Ireti. She felt that once she saw his face, she would not feel this weight of curiosity. First, his face in the light needed to be unveiled. Then she needed to persuade Ireti to come and see him.

  She moved a few steps away from the building, and although the thought of being late for her class bothered her again, she found herself stopping once more. It was the first time she had come close to his house during the day since she began to visit him. She watched a little girl bathing by herself in front of the house, splashing water on two boys her age who were laughing gaily, only for her to hurry off as a man who could be her father approached her swiftly. Desire did not know if she was the one making assumptions, but the fear in the girl’s eyes as the man approached mirrored the one she felt for her father as a child, those days in Oshodi, before she and her mother moved to Maroko.

  She walked towards the house thinking of how there was no better way to preserve a landscape than in the agonies of a childhood suffering. Just how the memories of Oshodi rested in her head like dew settled in the early morning on leaves. In a way, it was different from Maroko, where she experienced what it was to be homeless. Oshodi, the place she was born in, was soaked in a terror which was beyond the pictures of a street with a panorama of dilapidated tenements, clinging side by side and running into bends.

  On Mosafejo Street in Oshodi, when they lived there, there were no recreational parks. The children created their own entertainment. They carved out playing spaces from abandoned sites, or streets with lesser traffic, where they kicked makeshift balls made from rags and broken condoms found on the road. In the mornings, the edges of the open drains were filled with naked children bending over to scoop water with plastic vessels to bathe themselves. They stood against gutters with brackish water flowing with stale food, shit, and urine; with all the odours hanging in the airlessness. Between this, hordes of food sellers hawked past, with the still-naked children running after them, sometimes with soapy heads, and shouting at them to stop and sell. The sellers walked towards them, placed their wares on the ground, close to the drains, and waited for the children to go in and bring bowls for the food, after which their mothers—clad in inches of cotton an
kara—brought them money.

  The sandwich of houses faced an improvised bus terminus which left the narrow streets perpetually rammed on most days, so that screaming voices of bus conductors called out for passengers going to different areas in Lagos at every hour of the day. Close by, there was the popular Lion Junction, where area boys continued their conversations between puffs of cigarettes and rolls of gbana. She could not forget the screams of women whose bags had been snatched, howling and running with legs scattered like chickens being pursued by dogs. Considering how young she was when they moved, it always amazed her that she remembered names and people and even faces—once or twice, she met people they had lived with in Oshodi—but they rarely ever remembered who she was.

  Her eyes moved about and landed on a policeman scratching his crotch with one hand and shouting orders to a motorcyclist with his baton pointed at him. The posture and faded black uniform soiled her thoughts. She and Prof shared one thing in common: they hated Nigerian policemen. Her father was a policeman, Prof suffered torture at their hands, and Remilekun was indecisive about them.

  ‘Who cares? A bad man is a bad man. A bad man in a uniform is just a consistent badass man,’ a drunken Remilekun had said, in a voice filled with laughter. ‘As long as they fuck, they can be fucked, and they respond to fucking, they must mean some-fucking-thing to somebody.’

  19

  Against a faded signpost, Desire watched as young boys and girls sold bread, sachet yogurt, biscuits and other sweets about the streets, while men in suits and women in high-heels rushed everywhere. There were also streams of school students fooling around and chatting in twos and threes, while the lonesome ones dragged along looking lost. The electric poles had their cables twined like wire meshes; one pole had fallen onto the road and was causing heavy traffic. Car honks belted out a incongruous tune that travelled into her eardrums, beating the sanity from her head.

  Desire jumped as an okada rider trying to wriggle his motorcycle from the traffic screamed at her. She leapt across the open gutter and struggled to keep her balance on the kerb. She tottered. All the exercise books she held to her bosom fell into the drain. As she raised her head to scream an insult at the man, he drove off laughing. Desire stooped lower, until her buttocks sat on her hind legs, and she stretched her hand to pick up the books from the dry drain.

  On the other side of the kerb, a stray dog with ears half-eaten by fleas stood in the middle of the road, sniffing at a black polythene bag. She watched as the dog ran from motorcycles as they headed straight towards it. Each time, it howled, running away, only to return to nibble on what, on a closer look, she found to be a dead rat.

  Her phone rang at the bus stop and she was thankful that it broke up her increasingly revolting observations.

  ‘I can’t sleep,’ Ireti started in that voice that sounded drowsy. There was a chuckle accompanying his words. ‘What happened?’

  ‘You know you keep me awake.’

  She laughed, as she continued to walk towards the bus stop, ignoring a few heads that turned towards her, ‘Be serious.’

  ‘I just want to know if I can come to your house this weekend. You are avoiding me—this idea of switching off your phone at night from 9pm. Why is your phone always off by this time?’ There was a long pause, which carried an anxiety she was eager to ease.

  ‘We need to talk. New things about my father.’

  She felt her heart jump. The way he directed the statement at her, made her uneasy.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  He ignored her question. ‘Will you come and visit me?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Where are you? It’s noisy.’

  ‘I’m at the bus stop. Waiting for a bus to take me to the campus.’

  He stopped talking, and then said with a note of finality, ‘Come, and let’s meet on campus. I have to see my father.’

  ‘Hehn?’ she asked. Her voice was lower and her heartbeat increased. She wondered if he knew that she met with Prof every night. Or maybe Prof had contacted him and they talked about her. There was nothing about Prof that indicated this when they met in the evenings, but since she had not visited in a while, she could not tell if something had happened within the days of her absence.

  ‘Desire, are you there?’

  ‘Yes. I just need to know why I have to see you.’

  She waited and when he said nothing, she switched off the phone and joined the bus in front of her.

  Desire walked through the giant arch at the gate which carried the inscription: Lagos State University. She turned to the right to face the temporary bus park where only three of the yellow and black striped danfo buses were parked.

  ‘Iyana-Ipaja, Iyana-Ipaja! One more yansh!’ each conductor shouted, coaxing the undecided students to join their different buses. A scar-faced conductor held Desire by the hand and she pulled herself out of his grip. She pushed away his hand when he tried to grab her again and walked away, as she considered buying pure water for her parched throat from one of the string of hawkers lined by the curb. She handed a five-naira note to a teenage girl whose eyes were almost as round as the tray of oranges which sat next to her bowl of pure water. The orange seller, a heavy breasted woman, squatting on a small wooden bench besides the girl gaped at Desire with a smile on her face. At first, the gawking seemed like one of those sudden moments of interest, but when it persisted, Desire returned the woman’s stare, eyeball for eyeball, ignoring the scar-faced bus conductor who returned to squall ‘Iyana-Ipajaaaaaaaaa’ close to her ears, like he was being pinched with a pincer, before turning towards other students strolling past the bus stop.

  ‘Hehn!’ The suddenness of the words were met by the spring of the orange seller who jumped from her squatting position to house her in a tight embrace, while beaming at Desire’s face with a Mr. Bean smile. Desire pulled back, until a rush of spittle bearing the words, ‘Desire. Na Basira,’ splattered across her face.

  ‘It is me now! Basira-oke,’ the orange seller said, holding her in a tight hug and dragging her in an embrace to the side of the road to escape colliding with students rushing out from the campus. All this time, Desire was racking her head to remember where she knew the podgy woman, with breasts that navigated northwards, from. Then she saw the rabbit ears. Desire remembered in an instant: the long hours of sitting together exchanging neighbourhood gossip, sharing knowledge of contraceptives and family planning while stroking those ears that she joked connected her to every titbit in the neighbourhood. Basira, who with the suffix ‘oke’, became the Mountain; because boys swore to voyage and conquer the world through her breasts. The one whose laughter sounded like thunder when she said she did not want to have ten children like her mother did. The disappointment in Basira’s eyes switched to pride as Desire greeted, responding with a laughter that wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

  Basira turned Desire around, touching her cheeks and smiling,

  ‘Iwo re o! See your baby-face! You have not changed!’

  Desire nodded at Basira’s inspection. She could not help but respond with, ‘You have changed-o—you’re like a balloon!’ She stood before her childhood friend, smiling until her cheeks were sore, watching Basira, the girl who started wearing a bra before any of the other girls. She was also the one who became a mother at 15.

  There had been a group of six friends on the beach: Desire, Basira, Chioma, Sikira, Kemi and Funmi. Like all the girls there, their first admiration for boys fell on the teen bus conductors, who had been hand-picked as “forward-looking”, for renting half-lit one-room flats, as opposed to sleeping under the bridge drinking paraga or building their own shack on the beach. The boys with their own rooms invited teen girls to watch Indian and Yoruba films on video players, and perhaps, even enjoy meat pie and soft drink, usually Coca-Cola or Goldspot from an eat-out restaurant. Love, if that was what happened to them, seemed simple in those years. It was all about springing a breast, finding a boy who played films in the one-room flats and fi
guring out sex there if you were being pruned for wifehood; and if you weren’t, it was many days of sprightly fondling lemon-sized breasts behind make-shift stalls and on danfo buses.

  It was Basira’s breasts that disrobed the five friends of their naivety, once they began showing under her T-shirts and she spent the first days walking with her chest withdrawn, like that could suck in what for her then, were lumps. Basira’s shoulders still took on that perpetual arch from trying to draw in her chest. Her shoulders adapted to this posture as those “lumps” grew bigger and manifested into breasts—much bigger than those of some of the women in the neighbourhood. Basira offered herself to her friends as an experience, the experiment, on how to live when their breasts began to form. First, she told them, for the ache the two painful swellings would cause, sleep facing up and wear loose blouses and dresses.

  ‘Wo! Let me tell you. It is painful, very painful when your cloth is touching the koko,’ she pointed to the small buds on her chest.

  She also told them a fitted T-shirt would only increase attention from boys, because some would even touch them and run off. Secondly, as the steady growths formed, here is how to wear a bra—cup the breasts, hang the straps over your angled shoulders and strap right and tight. Or else, your breasts would fall off and become slippers like grandmama’s own. Lastly, when Desire’s breast failed to grow at 14, Basira advised her to put an antlion on it.