In a few minutes, after the electric power was restored, the noise of television sets from neighbours watching late night shows drowned the noise of their fan. It divided the silence between her and her mother. Neither of them thought of switching the television on. Her father’s rule was that the television should be off at 8pm, unless of course, he was home. Desire could not remember any neighbour coming to their room to rescue her mother when the fights began. Her mother didn’t share house gossip or her provisions and was seen as a proud and troublesome woman in the self-contained flat of a multiple-storey face-me-I-face-you building, with two rooms and a separate bath and kitchen.
Each night, since he started beating them, Desire daydreamed of how he would die in his sleep or of her mother overpowering him. That night, as her mother played with her hair again, she stirred as she heard the distant voice, ‘Desire. Are you awake?’ Desire was quiet. She didn’t understand why she pretended to be asleep at that time, because usually, she would have answered her mother with a grunt, but at that moment, she remained still.
The darkness covered her pretence even more.
‘Your father,’ her mother said the word, “father” with much emphasis. Before adding, ‘I have never slept with any man apart from him. Is it my fault that nature gave us a dark child, even though we are both fair?’ Her mother’s voice shook, and Desire shut her eyes even tighter. Her mother stroked her head. First, it came with tenderness but soon her hands kneaded her flesh, and the stroke of her hand appeared to be dictated by the rush of whatever she felt inside her.
‘He was never like this. Babangida was such a loveable man. It is that friend of his,’ Desire’s mother said. ‘I was a prostitute and Babangida said he would die if I didn’t marry him. I was the one who was worried about what people would say.’
Her mother gripped her hand hard and she wanted to tell her to stop, but all she could do was stay still and pretend she was asleep. Her mother patted her head. She felt a strange sensation that ran down her spine. She listened as her mother continued to talk.
‘He beats me so hard. I don’t even know myself any more. Desire. I feel like I’m eighty-five and I’m just thirty-one. He thinks I slept with someone else. We used to love each other.’ Her memory took her to the few times that she called Babangida Father, the days before he started to behave like a jealous stepfather, hankering for his wife’s attention.
There was a time, once, after a bout of beating, when her mother’s eyes had a purple glow beneath the eyelids for several days. She had said with usual childhood innocence, ‘I think you should run away-o.’
‘And who will take care of you?’
‘What if he dies? At least someone will take care of me.’
Her mother pinched her nose slightly, ‘What will kill him? He’s your father, okay? Don’t say such things again.’
‘He’s not my father. He says it. If I was the one he beats like this, one day, I would just kill him.’
‘Shut up! What do you know?’ Her mother then put her to sleep and walked into the kitchen saying, ‘I need to prepare his food, before he comes back screaming like something bit off his penis.’ Then she added, ‘Sleep.’
Desire slept for a while, and stirred, but she did not know why. It must have been her father’s thundering presence. She closed her eyes tight and prayed for sleep to take her back to that land where nothing happened. She pretended to be asleep as the usual shouting and cursing flew over her head. It tore her heart to shreds.
‘Bastard woman. Were. Mad woman, oloshi. Carrier of misery. Until you confess, I will make life hell for you.’
Desire heard the thumping, and the muffled shrieks of her mother, like something was between her teeth. When she screamed, it sounded as if there was a hand placed over her mouth hindering her from sounding it out.
That night, like other nights, Papa in his drunkenness beat her mother. Desire knew she couldn’t run into the room, to plead that her father should leave her mother alone, like she did in the past. She knew better now, that they would both come out bruised, from under the weight of her father’s worn leather belt. The first and last time she tried to come between them as they fought, he pushed the two of them together—mother and daughter—and swiped the leather against their skin. Desire closed her eyes tight and prayed for sleep to return as she listened to the sound of the leather belt on her mother’s hide. That was the last she heard, as she either fell asleep or fainted. By the time she woke up, it was to her mother’s soft cries by her side.
‘Desire? Are you awake?’ her mother whispered and nudged her slightly on the shoulder. The night became quiet in a guilty way. The power went off and the televisions died. The church sounds stopped. It was like everything connived in an act it shouldn’t.
The watchmen forgot to beat the hourly gong that night, the gong whose metal rasping created echoes that reverberated into her ears and woke her. After the fight, her mother came to Desire’s side of the bed. She held her in a close embrace and rocked her gently from one side to another; like she was a cloth swayed by the wind. She continued to rock her, but all through, Desire shut her eyes as if she was indeed drowsy. She was thankful that the room was dark and it shielded her, until she fell asleep.
Later into the night, after the sudden quiet, her mother’s body-trembling sob forced her into a sitting position. Then she hugged her and clasped Desire’s hand in her own. The sweat on their palms mixed and their pain came together. As her mother cried, Desire cried. They both cried into the early morn. They then nestled against each other, sniffling themselves to sleep, each knowing that the morning would be different.
The following morning, Desire’s mother swung herself against the doorpost and screamed into the air; neighbours scuttled out from all around as she led them one by one to Babangida’s body, stretched on the bed like he was pulled at both ends by two very strong men, shouting, ‘Wake him… please, somebody wake him up!’
‘It’s almost over. It’s almost over,’ she heard again, her mother whispering into her ears. Desire remembered that she almost opened her eyes to ask her mother what was over, because she couldn’t understand, but she remained still, even when the woman stood up from her side.
‘Please, never you tell a soul this story.’
‘It’s safe with me,’ Remilekun whispered.
She felt she needed to make her story even juicer, validate her reason for visiting Prof even more. This is how she wanted to remember it if she could not forget.
‘You know, there’s something I never told you, Prof gave us our house in Maroko and provided food for us. He even sent me to secondary school. You see why I can’t leave him.’ Desire felt the weight of the story she had just made up seep through her veins. Even her mother’s depressive rants never contained her father the way hers did now. One thing she felt was good, however, was having her mother kill him, as this made her look like one who fought back for what was hers.
‘Babe, no soul shall hear this story from you.’
Remilekun nodded and wrapped her arms around herself. Desire moved towards her, offering herself as warmth.
‘I only wished your Prof wasn’t that strange. I’m sure it was the prison.’
She moved closer to Remilekun and held her and a small sob passed through her throat before she said, ‘I never want to be married. I have the fear that I will kill my husband or maybe my child.’
‘What?’ Remilekun jumped up from the sleeping posture she was in and pinched Desire’s cheeks. She lay back on the bed.
‘Don’t say that, babe!’
Desire did not reply. Instead she sniffed. Remilekun raised her head and peered into her face.
‘What are you looking for in my face?’
‘Checking to see if you have the face of a killer.’
‘What do you see?’
‘The face of a woman who can be anything she wants to be,’ she said, a snort accompanied her words.
‘Thanks,’ and then she added, ‘You be
tter tell me now-o. You know the blood of a killer is inside me.’
Remilekun tickled her again. She tickled back. They giggled and fell in a swoop off the mattress with their arms around each other. The air from Remilekun as she exhaled on Desire’s shoulder made her body tense. She lay with her back to the ground, slowly, and as their bodies met, their perspiration mingled.
Desire covered herself with the bedspread and tightened it around herself.
33
Desire stood up from the bed and looked into the street. She listened to the news filtering in from the other room on a popular radio station.
‘Remilekun, are you listening to the news?’
‘Where?’ she asked.
‘On radio. Labour says there would be indefinite strike action to protest the fuel hike. ASUU strike plus Labour strike is equal to dead country. From what I’m seeing, people have started the strike. The street is dry. No hustle. No bustle.’
The blocks of flats which made up the estate stood around like observers to the units of activity going on: boys played football, and then, in an instant, they scattered in several directions. It didn’t take long before the siren of a police patrol van filtered into her room. It stopped in front of her block. Except for the cans which served as goal posts, there was nothing to suggest that ten boys had just been there. Two policemen jumped down from the van and laughed like they were opening their mouths to the skies for rain. The one who seemed shorter of the two, placed his AK-47 properly behind him, stretched his hands into the air, and pushed out his paunch rather than his chest. She watched them and was about to close the window, when they flagged down a man dressed in fitted jeans and an oversized sleeveless shirt. He had a black laptop bag hanging from his shoulder. He walked past them with an almost unnoticeable stoop. As he walked past, the shorter of the policemen appeared to feel insulted. He dragged the man back by pulling at the back of his trousers. Some words were exchanged. Man-in-jeans nearly fell, yet he didn’t struggle with them, he simply opened his bag and the taller of the policemen looked inside and waved him away. The shorter policeman, who first pulled him, asked him to come back. He unzipped the now closed bag and dug his hands inside. He brought out a laptop and placed it on the ground. He said something to the man—Desire assumed that he was asking him for receipts.
At this point, Man-in-jeans shook his head vigorously and the short one pushed him. He fell to the ground. She didn’t hear what they said to him, but from studying their movements, she understood what was going on. The policemen were accusing the man of having stolen the laptop because he did not carry a receipt, and he was arguing that the laptop was his. She could see it in the way the man threw his hands about, with so much vigour and desperation to state his innocence. His mouth moved very fast and his stoop was straightened. The shorter policeman pointed a finger in his face and he brushed it away. His tall friend held him and he threw his hands frantically in the air. The taller of the policemen, whom she thought was calmer, initially, brandished his gun before the Jeans-man, who continued to flay his arms about. His hand seemed to have met the face of the tall policeman. At this, three other policemen, who all the while were watching the incident, jumped down from the van and began to push him into their vehicle. He held on to the iron that was used as a step-in and fought not to enter.
Desire sighed. The second term of democracy, and each day, freedom still appeared to be a foreign tongue. The president was the type who always wanted to be right, so he could offer an I-told-you-so to his competition, while the masses suffered. If she were to visit Prof that night, she knew she would have told him about the incident. They would have discussed bad governance and then one thing would have led to another. She remembered the very few times, those instances of frivolous abandon, when she forgot everything—her past, the dark, the room, and just laughed and shared jokes with him as a friend. Sometimes, her hand would hit his playfully, and he would slip it off so she hit the chair rather than him. But once she remembered that his room had no light, she became quiet and as if he had sensed her change of mood, they resumed the whispering and became cautious of running into each other’s skin. She shrugged, as she reminded herself that he was now to be forgotten. Prof would be forgotten—and forgetting meant rewriting her narratives. Prof was now just a part of her imagination.
Desire rubbed her hands against her skin and watched the policemen, as they succeeded in pushing the man into their vehicle. His laptop was on the road. They drove a short distance away, reversed, and then the short policeman hurriedly picked up the computer from the ground and jumped back into the van. Desire sighed and drew the curtains. She eyed the towel which hung above the door, but she didn’t stand up to enter the bathroom. She walked to her bed and sank into it, observing everything around her but finding nothing tangible to hold her focus.
Her eyes panned the piles of unwashed pots, dishes, dirty clothes, and the piles of books mounted in their different spaces, forming little hills. Finally, she rested her gaze on crumpled pieces of paper on the floor, around the waste basket. Desire wondered why she never noticed that the room needed some tidying. Remilekun was not one to lift a broom, even if the house became a garbage dump. She picked up a bucket and walked towards the door to fetch water which she could use to clean the room.
‘I need to fetch water,’ she said, even though she knew Remilekun was not listening.
Although people walked around, she still felt as if the place was empty. Even the air seemed languid. She felt like she could notice the thick balls of sweat hidden behind shirt collars and hung across the faces of people on the streets. It appeared as if everybody around walked with their heads bowed and their shoulders drooping. The sun came out fully. A hawker selling oranges screamed past, undaunted by the potency of the sun. It was interesting how the burden of one’s fears appeared on everything around one.
When Desire arrived at the public tap, she slapped tintin insects that bit her leg where she sat on the raised platform, glancing at the running water intermittently as it rolled into the bucket like a ball of yarn. Human memory connected the unlikely. It amused her that the water reminded her of Sarjee unfurling the smoke of weed into the air in Oshodi. She shook her head and saw how easy it was to wear the blame of what we cannot explain. She couldn’t even tell what had been wrong with him.
She bit her fingernails, one after the other, and as she waited for the water to fill her plastic bucket, she decided, This will be my last trip to him. I will apologise for telling him nonsense about his son. I’ll just go inside and lie down. Then she thought, But what if really he’s the father?
She made two trips and then she waited for the bucket to fill a third time, while she watched a group of five teenage boys with plastic buckets and bowls coming towards the public tap, but instead, stopped to start a two-a-side football contest on the road.
When she lifted her head and stared at the rows of blocks with longing, it was with much courage that she stopped herself from putting down the bucket and walking towards his house, to see if he would open the door in the afternoon, and she would be able to catch a glimpse of him.
Later that night, when she would visit him, she would ask if he missed her. Then she wondered if Prof would indeed take her back in his room after they had both decided she was not to come back again. It had not crossed her mind all the while, but now, she felt he might be offended by her disappearance and would not open the door to her. The more she thought about this, the more she prayed that it should be to the contrary. She was so engrossed in her thoughts that she jerked when the hawker girl she noticed earlier stood in front of her and screamed her out of her dreams, ‘Sweet orange here! Buy your sweet orange!’ After several more cries and the same futile result, the girl directed her question to her in Yoruba, ‘Aunty, sweet orange? Three for fifty naira.’
She shook her head and replied to her in the typical Yoruba farewell for persistent hawkers, ‘Thanks. Wa a ta.’ Not just a wish, she really hoped the girl would s
ell some.
The girl moved on, walked a few metres from Desire before she stopped to pick up something from the floor, with the tray of oranges balanced on her head. Desire kept looking at the girl, up to the time when a taxi nearly knocked her down, and she fell flat on the ground. Her oranges rolled in a hurry towards the open drain. The taxi driver jumped out of his car towards the girl, and he, with a few other people, helped her up as some others took her fallen oranges from the ground and placed them back on the tray. A small crowd surrounded her, straightening the girl’s cloth and checking her body for any injury. That was where she first noticed him: a man dressed in an oversized, purple shirt and pink tie over green trousers, watching from a distance. His afro was a thick sponge of white hair, and a careful look at him showed that he limped when he walked. He stood behind the crowd helping the girl, watching them, but in no mood to offer help himself. There was something familiar about him and she could not even place the somewhere-ness that connected her with him. The man stood away from the crowd, yet appeared to be in deep observation of the things happening. Then, he turned. She looked away from him when it appeared that he caught her staring, focusing her attention to the gulley forming in the middle of the road because of unattended potholes.
From the side of her eyes, she tried to see if the man was still looking at her.
Finally, water spilled from the bucket and Desire rolled the piece of cloth she used as padding for her head. She folded it into a ring to protect against the friction of the bucket when she carried it on her head. With this headgear, she bent all her concentration on the bucket in a bid to avoid the man who, though she was not looking, continued to stare at her. She was so engrossed in forgetting him, that she did not notice the strange man moving towards her.
A Small Silence Page 23