Their salary meant they could now relieve the women. Fineboy was the only question mark. What the boy added he could not say. He ate their meals with an ever-diminishing stock of table manners. At breakfast, his spoon would corner the largest egg. Come evening, the softest piece of yam would also make its way to his plate. And the boy was proud. Any hints that he should go caused offense but he was never offended enough to leave. He would list his usefulness to the group. “I’m the one that got us to stay in this place for so cheap.”
“I’m the one who borrowed the stove we are using to cook from Iya Bọsẹ.”
I’m the one, I’m the one, I’m the one.
He was coming towards them now, walking at a pace that was almost a run.
“Brother Chike. You have to come with me now.”
“What’s the matter?”
“A place. I’ve found to stay.”
“What kind of place?”
“Quick. Someone can enter before we get back.”
“You’ll have to wait for the women to gather their things.”
“No time for that. You must come, then I’ll leave you there and come back for everybody.”
It did not sound promising. Clearly no formal arrangement had been made with the landlord. How many others were racing there even now?
“If you don’t want to come, I’ll go and stay by myself.”
Finally a chance to be rid of the boy. And if he was telling the truth? What harm would it do to go with him? Should it be a lie, Chike could confront him away from the group and convince him not to come back, maybe even pay him to go away.
“All right. Let me finish my water.”
THEIR DESTINATION WAS TWO danfo journeys and a ten-minute walk away. They passed a main entrance, lit harshly, with security guards checking cars as they drove in.
“We’re not going through there,” Fineboy said.
He followed the boy to a side street where there was a man-sized gap in the perimeter wall.
“We have to go like this, just tonight. From tomorrow we can be walking through the main gate like everyone else.”
It was like Fineboy to go through back doors. They slipped through the hole and into a residential estate, the type that rich people parceled themselves into all over the country. They passed mansions built close to their walls, satellite dishes growing like tumors on their roofs. Some streets were well lit and wide, paved with smooth asphalt. Others were little more than alleys, dark and lined with weeds. It was to one of these that Fineboy led him. On the plot was an incomplete building, falling apart as they watched it. No roof, no windows, no doors.
“You want us to live here?”
Chike saw the remains of a chain and padlock on the ground, discarded like a broken bracelet.
“Abandoned property is for anybody that finds it. Check it anywhere in the world. Because there’s no roof, I came here thinking I would find something uninhabitable but boy was I wrong.”
A small swamp had grown in what would have been a hallway and he stepped carefully after Fineboy.
“Then I walked into a side room and saw this.”
With a sense of drama, Fineboy paused over the metal opening, an iron door sunk in the ground. It groaned when he lifted it, the hinge rusted beyond redemption. Cut into the ground were steps descending into a black hole. Chike hung back, dawdling close to fresh air. The lights came on.
“A fully furnished two-bedroom basement apartment for us to live in.”
The boy stood in the middle of a parlor, done up to showroom standard. A small herd had been slaughtered to make the leather set that took up most of the room: mothers and calves stitched together for sofas and cushions, settee and footrest. What happened to the men who laid these carpets and hung the wall paintings, dark landscapes and bright market scenes, abstract women without faces, men with no eyes?
“We have to leave. Whoever built this can’t be up to any good aboveground.”
“Come on. It’s been abandoned for years. The TV, when was the last time you saw one so old? Even look at the newspapers on the shelf: 1994. This one 1993. The owner isn’t coming back.”
Everywhere Fineboy touched, the shape of his palm remained in the dust.
“Honest people don’t build such places.”
“Dishonest people don’t need them anymore. Everybody knows where all the top militant guys live in Yenagoa. It’s small boys like me that have to run from the police.”
The place would need cleaning and airing. Even then, the smell of damp clothes might never leave.
“Let me show you around. Mind your step. A bulb blew when I put on the light and there’s still glass on the floor. Kitchen to the left, fully equipped, stove and all that. Toilet here. Bathroom there. Separate, which I think is better. The flush is still working. There must be a borehole somewhere on the compound with pipes and everything underground.”
Fineboy demonstrated, flooding the bowl with water. Oma would like that very much. “I’ll go and bring the others.”
“Wait,” Chike said. “How did you find it?”
“Some guys like this, they live in an abandoned house. When I saw their house, I started looking for incomplete buildings.”
“Which guys? They know of this place?”
“Heck, no. Let me go get the others. It’s getting late.”
THERE WAS SOMETHING OF the miraculous in this, a heady coincidence that threatened to sweep away all rationality. Today he had wished or hoped or prayed fervently for a house and now here was one, unoccupied. To think Fineboy had been the instrument of this. He felt chastised as he picked up a broom lying behind the kitchen door and began to sweep the parlor.
22
Nigerians are the happiest people in the world. We suffer and smile, we dance as we weep, we sing in the deepest mourning, but even the Homo nigerianicus, joyful and ebullient as he is, gets depressed.
—extract from “Health Matters,” Nigerian Journal
OMA KEPT THE BLOODIED cloth that had put an end to the question of a pregnancy, carrying it in a plastic bag from the bridge to their new home. She could not bring herself to wash the flannel. The blood had turned a rust brown, a smear that might hold cells, the building blocks of what would have become the organs and limbs and eyelashes of her child. The phantom baby had saved her. Without that wave of nausea, she might well be in I.K.’s house, driven there by those first rough days under the bridge.
Life there had been a battle. Hygiene was not an option. Combing her hair was compulsory. Even spraying perfume became a symbolic ritual, every puff a banner unfurled against decline. Only boredom could not be kept at bay. Most days, after she had performed her ablutions and prepared breakfast, there was nothing else for her to do.
She was woken early in the morning by the cries of the bus conductors, ringing out like matins: Ojuẹlẹgba, Ojota, Ikẹja, Agege, Iyanopaja, Ọbalẹnde. She wished she were brave enough to climb into a danfo and discover a destination but she was not sure she would be able to find her way back to the bridge. She had never been so close to poverty, so close to beggars and open-air defecation. She was shocked by how unpitiable these beggars were, how shrewd and businesslike, how the blind never missed their change; how the woman in a wheelchair carried a baby who never grew older, never cried, never ate. She had shared her suspicions with Chike and he had laughed.
“She can probably walk. I dare you. Tomorrow, run up to her chair and push her out of it.”
She looked forward to his return. Once she had sketched on thicker eyebrows and colored her lips pink, wiping off the effect before he could see it. There would be young women on his road, strutting around in their brazen, tight clothes, garish Lycra clinging to their bums and thighs. She couldn’t bring herself to ask how old he was. Certainly she was walking when he was born, probably talking and making inroads into multiplication. They spoke sometimes of his mother who had raised him and cosseted him and of whom Oma would think, if she were alive, this would be a very difficult
mother-in-law.
Some days, after she had waited for hours, Chike would return only to bury his face in his Bible. It happened often enough for her to grow jealous of this book that everyone had read in their childhood. It was useful for learning your left from right but it was nothing to burrow into like an ant disappearing into a hole.
“Read it to me,” she said one evening.
“What?”
“What you’re reading that’s making you smile.”
“It’s just something I didn’t expect to find here.”
“Yes?”
“Your stature is like a palm tree and your breasts are like its clusters. I say I will climb the palm tree and lay hold of its fruit.”
And since that evening when he had read those words as if speaking without the proxy of a page, she had asked him to read to her. It reminded her of the times her father would take them outside, nights when the electricity was gone and the room she shared with her brother was too hot to sleep in. Her father had a book, The Stargazer’s Companion to a Midnight Sky, a slim volume with a forbidden chapter on astrology blacked out in felt pen. Because of her father, Oma knew that the Pleiades were seven slender sisters in Greece, and for the Hausa, Kaza Maiyaya were a mother hen and her brood, and the Japanese turned the constellation into a Subaru, a sturdy motor she had once imagined cruised down the Milky Way at night. When their eyes finally came back to earth, her father would say, “Only a fool says there’s no God.”
Gradually the others would stop and listen when Chike read in his low, steady voice. It became an evening ritual they carried on even now that they finally had this home, this extravagance of kitchen, toilet, and foam mattresses. She had survived without things she had once thought essential. The wastefulness of a toaster, an entire lump of metal, fashioned into hidden wires and glowing filaments, just for bronzing bread. An Etruscan jug, its handle bent in the shape of an ear, its body painted with the most fantastic village scene, all for pouring water, when water could be drunk straight out of a plastic bag.
She had been a kitchen worshipper once, a nun in the order of the stove. She knew now that the pillars of her old life were decorative columns, supporting nothing. Yet she gasped when she opened a cupboard in their new home and saw a grater, shaped like a small pagoda, with four different hole sizes dotting its sides. She grasped the ends of a rolling pin and ran it up a wall, imagining a lump of dough spread flat under its pressure. She did not realize till then how much she had missed her kitchen.
Since they’d moved into the basement two weeks ago, the group had been split into male and female, and Oma was stuck with the density of Isoken’s mood. The girl never greeted in the morning; complained Oma’s perfume was too strong; left the room pointedly if Oma began to sing; and now she had stopped going to work.
For the last five days, Isoken had lain on their bed without moving. Oma, impatient with her inertia at first, had grown frightened after forty-eight hours had passed and Isoken had gotten up only to shuffle to the toilet and back to the depression that was beginning to form in the mattress. Oma had begun bringing food and water on a tray. Isoken drank the water but touched very little of the food.
“Eat. Please,” Oma said in the tone you would use for a child.
“I’m not hungry,” Isoken replied, turning her face to the wall. Oma placed the tray on the bed beside her but did not leave as before.
“EAT. PLEASE,” THAT WOMAN said, standing over Isoken in a manner she found distinctly unpleasant.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t taken your bath for five days,” Oma said.
“Is that what is disturbing you?”
Isoken’s mother would have slapped her by now, would have dragged her out of the bed and flung her into the bathroom, not leaving until she washed herself clean. But Oma was not her mother, did not share even the remotest similarity with the woman who had breast-fed her through infancy and disciplined her through adolescence. Spare the rod and spoil the child. If she had grown up with just her father, she would have been rotten now, decayed from the inside, sprouting mold on her soul.
Isoken’s father had always been a little in awe of the daughter who knew so many long, inconsequential words. He would have wept to see her handling other people’s hair for a living. He had taught her his trade so she could make pocket money at university, not so her life could shrink to weaving evenly spaced cornrows and twisting a million identical braids. If only her family hadn’t gone to Bayelsa.
They had gone searching for the impossible, a herbal cure for breast cancer. Isoken had told her parents of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, treatments she had read about online, but for once the string of syllables made no impression on her father.
“Those ones are for white people,” he said.
In the evenings her mother would go off with a group of village women. She would return smelling of traditional brew, dark liquids stored in glass bottles, opaque and unknowable. Quack medicine, Isoken had told her parents. Unsterilized. Poisonous. But they believed in it and her mother swore she was getting better.
“What happened?” Oma said, interrupting her thoughts. “Why did you come back screaming that day?”
“Can’t you leave somebody alone?”
“No, I cannot. Because if you die here, it is us the police will come and carry. What will we do with your dead body? Do I look like a gravedigger to you?”
The matter was almost too small to mention. Walking to the bus stop, a man had whistled at her, then called after her, then followed her, talking of friendship and wanting to get to know her. She ignored him until he took her hand.
“I screamed and ran back here. That’s all,” Isoken said.
“Was there something that happened before that made you react like that? Let me go and get you some tissue.”
“MY HUSBAND USED TO beat me,” Oma said when she returned.
“You’re married?”
“Am I unmarriageable? I had quite a few toasters when I was your age.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“That day we all met on the bus, I was running away from him. I don’t know how I stayed for so long. Only Chike knows about it. Oya, what happened to you?”
“I can’t say it.”
“Say it out loud so it doesn’t have power over you again. My husband used to beat me. I only married him because I was afraid of being a spinster for the rest of my life. Say it.”
“I was attacked by some men. They tried to rape me. I can’t forget. I’ve tried everything but I can’t forget. Semen everywhere. On my face. On my stomach. In my ears. I can still feel it.”
Isoken’s mother had slapped her once for crying on a bus. Tears were precious water, only for family members to see. If outsiders saw your tears, they would drink of your sorrow. And who was her family now?
“Just cry it out,” Oma said. “There’s no shame. You know, for weeks after I left I.K.’s house, I will be wiping my face, or combing my hair, and I will just feel his hands closing on my neck. Until one day I said, enough. He did not kill you. Even now, when I feel that thing rising, I say to it, ‘Oma is not dead.’ I say it in Igbo. Oma aka anwuro. Isoken, did you hear me? You are not dead.”
“Nobody will want me.”
Oma took her hand and dragged it down from her face, almost as roughly as her mother would have done. The force would leave scratches.
“You listen to me. You are the one that decides if people will want you or not. Every day you wake up, you decide. Eat your beans or else Fineboy will have it. That boy is too greedy.”
THE GIRL WAS EATING again, Oma told Chike when he returned. Whatever wall that stood between Isoken and Oma must have been dissolved in an afternoon of feminine solidarity. She had even woven Oma’s hair into black lines that bent and twisted on her head. Isoken would not join their evening meal but she had eaten most of her lunch and fallen asleep afterwards.
“Thank you,” Chike said to Oma. “I was worried we might have
to take her to the hospital.”
“She has gone through a lot. You knew of it?”
“Some, but it is not the kind of thing a young girl can discuss with a man. This hair suits you.”
“Isoken made it. It’s time for our daily reading.”
Chike did not know how he had come to this evening ritual that had turned him into a sort of priest for the group. He was the doubter, the one who would place his hands in the side and probe for scars. But to Oma, this nightly reading knitted them closer. It took nothing from him to read from a text he read with pleasure and skepticism. At first, he had jumped from passage to passage looking for the credible. One day, a sermon on the mount. The next, a parable from Luke. Until Oma had said, “Read it in order. The way you’re doing it is confusing.”
So he chose the book of John and every night they marched verse by verse, chapter by chapter. Tonight, they had camped on absurdity. It was the story of the feeding of the five thousand, a tale so bloated with exaggeration, the kernels of reality had long been lost. At the end he felt it necessary to state his position.
“This is one of those stories that make the Bible so unbelievable.”
“Why?”
It was Fineboy asking.
“Well, how can five loaves multiply into five thousand?”
“Is it not a miracle?”
In university, Chike had run up against this blind faith in the student pastors, crusaders against the gentle iniquities of his first year—alcohol, miniskirts—and too often silent on the grand evils: the cult boys who would kill you if you stood up to them, the lecturers who failed students who didn’t sleep with them.
“It is not such a big miracle,” Fineboy continued. “I used to go to my grandma’s farm in the village. We planted maize there. You put four seeds in the ground and when you came back a few months later, if the soil was good and there was enough rain, a few seeds had multiplied into thousands.”
Welcome to Lagos Page 9