Kambirinachi smiled and waved back. “I thought you were in sick bay,” she said.
She said it again louder when Mercy didn’t answer.
“Mercy!” Kambirinachi shouted. “The nurse let you leave?” Kambirinachi’s classmates looked at her, at first annoyed at the distraction, and then puzzled.
“Who are you talking to?” one of them asked.
“Mercy.” Kambirinachi gestured toward their classmate, who stood not even twenty feet away, beaming. She had never smiled so big. Her royal-blue pinafore was, for the first time Kambirinachi had seen, impeccable.
“You’re funny. There’s no one there.”
“She’s right there,” Kambirinachi said, turning back to see Mercy slowly walking backward, away from them, her face flickering and dimming. Then Kambirinachi understood.
In the humidity of the following Monday morning at general assembly, the principal announced Mercy’s death. The wailing and crying that ensued lit a flare of annoyance in Kambirinachi: her classmates were cruel to Mercy when she was alive; what exactly was the purpose of this performance of grief? She felt relief on Mercy’s behalf; her body had not been kind to her, had not been able to contain her.
Kambirinachi did not cry. She celebrated that Mercy was free.
FOR THE LONG HOLIDAY BETWEEN HER FINAL YEAR of junior secondary school and first year of senior secondary, Kambirinachi went home to Abeokuta. She packed up her Ghana must go early that day and spent the morning cleaning her aunty’s flat. She swept the dark carpet that covered her bedroom floor, washed and mopped the poorly tiled bathroom floor. She scrubbed the toilet with bleach and scoured the discoloured bathtub. In the kitchen, she cleaned the cupboards after politely asking the black, seed-sized cockroaches to leave, and she rearranged the tins of powdered milk and plastic tubs of provisions. Afterward, she bathed in the freshly cleaned tub, oiled her skin, dressed, and waited for Aunty Anuli to drive her home.
The moment she saw her father sitting on the wooden bench on the veranda of their crumbling bungalow, his shoulders drooping sadly, his whole body thinner than she’d ever seen, Kambirinachi knew that something was wrong. She smelled the sickness on him, sharp and sour, when she embraced him. It had only been three months since she’d last seen him; what was working so quickly inside him to undo his body?
“Bigger and taller every time I see you,” he said. Even his voice was tainted with the stink of whatever illness was coiled and rotting inside him.
Kambirinachi felt fear like needles down her spine and small bitter bursts in the back of her throat.
“Papa, what is wrong?”
“Ah ahn, tortoise, nothing o!”
He called her tortoise for her precociousness. After the wily character that stole birds’ feathers to fly and join a feast in the sky. He angered the birds with his greed, so they pushed the tortoise out of the clouds and he fell to the ground, shattering his shell. Like Kambirinachi on stolen time, waiting waiting to be pushed out of the clouds. But she wouldn’t be the only one to shatter.
SHE WAITED UNTIL EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, after her mother left for her provisions shop in the army barracks, before the sun was fully awake with its limbs stretching hot across the sky. She tiptoed across the cold, damp concrete floor of the kitchen toward her parents’ room. The brown wooden door was just barely open, and she peeked in to see her father’s thin body face up on the old wood-framed bed. His breathing was ragged and loud. She walked toward the bed, careful not to wake him, stood above him, and slowly and steadily, she sank her hands into her father’s chest, from her fingertips to her wrist. And then, with all her strength, she drew the sickness out of his lungs. He was fast asleep until she pulled her hands out, then he awoke with a loud gasp, his face broken open in shock.
Kambirinachi ran outside to the backyard. She shook her hands to flick the sickness—black tar that stunk like rotten meat—into the open gutter. The filthy, stagnant muck splashed onto her bare legs, so she rinsed it off with water from a large plastic drum they kept to collect rain. Leaning against the drum, she looked into the water at her reflection, who blinked languidly at her.
“What will the consequence be?” she asked, but her reflection only looked away, with something like contempt on her face.
Kambirinachi went back into the house and knocked gingerly on her parents’ bedroom door.
“Kambi, is that you?” her father called out, his voice groggy with sleep. “Yes, Papa.” She stepped into the room that she had fled only moments before.
Her father was sitting upright on the bed, looking around him in a daze. “Your mother has gone?” he asked, on the edge of a big yawn.
Kambirinachi nodded. Already the smell of decay had left him. “What are we going to eat this morning?” He smiled big.
Ikenna had left a pot of palm oil stew with catfish on the stove, so Kambirinachi peeled and boiled sweet potatoes in salted water. They ate with their hands, listening to the radio in silence that was occasionally interrupted only by her father’s laughter; he found the advertisements hilarious.
The voices didn’t begin to hound Kambirinachi that day until after her father left the house. He’d decided to surprise his wife at her shop, wanted to tell her that their daughter’s return had cured whatever it was that ailed him. Ikenna had taken the pickup, so he travelled to her by bus.
Kambirinachi was lying on a worn red-and-blue raffia mat in the living room, drawing in her school notebook. The moment her father shut the rusty burglar-proof gate behind him, she was overcome by a blank, a savage empty. A yawning hollow, a brief pause, only for an instant, before the howl of voices rushed through her whole self, like harsh, forceful harmattan winds.
Give it back!
Taiye
WHEN TAIYE AWOKE IN THE WARM GLOW OF SUNDAY MORNING, the day felt like it would be yellow and smell bright. She made a cup of green tea with a generous helping of dark honey and sat with her back against the fridge, her bare legs on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. Coca-Cola cat found her and curled its fat furry body into her lap.
For a long time, even before the bad thing, Taiye felt plagued with, with … “shame” is too blatant and not quite insidious enough a word for the feeling that she wore, draped over her shoulders like a water-laden blanket. There is a way that she can look up at you through heavy-lidded, dark wells for eyes. It will fill you with this unassailable desire to unburden her. She doesn’t know it, but it was this very thing that endeared her to her lovers. The magnetic gravity of the planet that is her.
Among her friends, it wasn’t uncommon to hear: “You like her? Of course you do. Everyone likes her.”
Even when she was callous about the intimacies she shared like cheap sweets, the women she chose made excuses like, “She’s just a bit broken.”
Lovers, Taiye’d had many. Too many. She found herself too lustful, too gluttonous. She desired too much. She recognized her weakness for these particular vices early in her life. As an eight-year-old, she quietly consumed helping after helping of beans and dodo, jollof rice, eba and egusi soup. She ate everything, until her stomach stretched well past its limit, and only pain and nausea forced her to stop.
“Oliver Twist!” Sister Bisi would marvel. “Even as you dey chop nothing dey show for your body.”
It was true; Taiye was a lanky and wispy child. She grew into a lanky and willowy woman, but she never outgrew her voracious appetite.
Lucky lucky. Your sister would kill for that figure.
“It’s as if you eat and your sister gets fat,” her mother said once, finger on her chin in mock seriousness.
One moment on your lips, always always on Kehinde’s tummy.
It was a joke—of course it was a joke—and it was a ridiculous notion. Where Kehinde was lush with soft curves, generous hips, and ample thighs, Taiye’s skin clung tightly to lean muscle over her athletic frame, narrow hips, statuesque shoulders. This was the extent of their physical difference; they were identical otherwise. They had the
same deep dark complexion, the same wide-set brown eyes, the same disarming lopsided smile. Disarming, in part, because it was lopsided and opened to reveal a small gap between their front teeth. Taiye would learn later than Kehinde the effect that particular use of that smile could have on people. Soft manipulation.
But every time Kehinde pinched the soft flesh of her belly, or her round cheeks, the plumpness of her upper arms and frowned, Taiye felt deep remorse for her gluttony.
When Taiye was ten years old, she learned about the seven capital sins. It was at Catechism on Saturday, just after the six p.m. Angelus bell had rung its heavy song, and the sun had begun its slow, reluctant descent. The resting sun cast an orange glow through the high dusty windows of the children’s Mass hall. On Saturdays, the white plastic chairs that were usually arranged to face the altar were stacked up high against the stained white walls. And without the lace-covered altar as a focal point, the high-ceilinged hall was exposed for what it was: dusty, old, poorly maintained.
Taiye sat beside her sister on a long wooden bench that they shared with seven other fidgeting children. There were three more benches in front of them and two behind. All filled with squirming but silent preteens. Sister Augustina was teaching, and they all knew better than to speak out of turn.
“Okay,” Sister Augustina said, adjusting the rose-patterned scarf tied tightly around her head. “We are learning about the seven capital sins that Father Raymond preached about last Sunday. Does anybody remember what they are?”
Eager hands flew up.
“You, Kunle.” She pointed at a stout, chubby-faced boy in the second row.
“They are the sins that God doesn’t want us to do,” Kunle said, his voice scratchy.
“Yes, thank you, Kunle. And which sins are they? Someone else? You, Uche.”
Uche hadn’t raised her hand; in fact, she had been falling asleep, her head rolling slowly forward. Jumping when she heard her name, she said, “Sorry,” high-pitched and trembling.
Sister Augustina looked expectantly at Uche, who stayed silent, her chipped teeth gnawing at her lower lip. Tears pooled in her eyes, defying gravity, until Sister Augustina said in a stern voice, “Uche?”
“I don’t remember!” Uche wailed, and the tears poured down, to the laughter of the whole class.
“Olodo!” Sister Augustina scolded. “Okay, I will tell you this time, but make sure you remember tomorrow at Mass.”
Vigorous head nods from a chastened Uche.
“The seven capital sins are lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, and pride. Do any of you remember what they mean?”
Kunle piped up, “Greed is when you want to eat all the biscuits, even if they’re not your own.”
“No, that is gluttony,” another child interjected. More students jumped in, a small uproar as they scrambled to give the right answer.
Sister Augustina whistled to seize their attention and placed a finger across her lips. Silence. She defined each of the seven deadly sins, starting with gluttony, and then, halfway to lust, she hoped she wouldn’t have to explain it.
Of course Taiye noticed. “What about lust? What does it mean?”
“You people are just small now, but when you are a little bit older, and you girls start liking boys”—Sister Augustina wagged her crooked fingers and made her eyebrows jump in a suggestive dance, raising groans and nervous laughter from the class—“and you boys start looking at girls’ nyash, that is lust. Remember that God doesn’t like lust.”
Another, louder, eruption of laughter.
Taiye felt a prickly rush run from her chest to her cheeks. Was it lust, the thing she felt when she saw Patra winding her hips in slow motion in the “Worker Man” music video?
Lusts of the flesh, rotten girl Taiye.
THAT EVENING, after Catechism, Taiye pulled out the navy blue Oxford English Dictionary from the row of Encyclopaedia Britannica volumes stacked against the wall by the bathroom door in her parents’ bedroom. Her father was sitting cross-legged on the unmade bed, still in his navy blue suit and round tortoiseshell glasses, pawing through a stack of papers on his lap. He worked even on Saturdays.
“What are you doing, Baby Two?” he asked, without looking up from his papers. A Yoruba man, he believed the lore that she was the younger twin. That even though Taiye was born first, her sister, Kehinde, was actually formed first and had merely sent Taiye out before her to make sure the world was fit for their arrival.
“I’m looking for a word,” Taiye responded. “What are you doing, Papa?”
“I’m looking for some numbers.”
Taiye flipped through the sepia pages of the old dictionary, all the way through to L.
Lust
Pronunciation: /lʌst/
Definition of lust in English:
noun [Mass Noun]
1. Strong sexual desire
1.1 [In Singular] A passionate desire for something: a lust for power
1.2 (usually lusts) chiefly Theology A sensuous appetite regarded as sinful: lusts of the flesh
This was how Taiye learned that she was sinful.
IT WASN’T JUST PATRA’S DANCING that let Taiye know that her desires lay on the left side of expectations. There was also the quickening in her chest whenever she saw Isabella. Or smelled Isabella. Or heard the dulcet melody of Isabella’s voice. They had been neighbours as children and went swimming together at Ikoyi Club. As sixteen-year-olds, during the haze of teenage melodrama, Isabella stopped speaking to Taiye. An abrupt ending to a long-time friendship. Isabella never explained, but Taiye suspected that she’d known something of the warm rush that dizzied Taiye whenever Isabella smiled in her direction.
Thirteen years and many lifetimes later, Isabella was engaged, but she’d been writing and phoning Taiye almost incessantly since they’d run into each other at an Afrobeat concert in Freedom Park.
It was an uncharacteristically cool evening for Lagos when they came across each other again. Taiye had been home for seventeen sluggish days, and aside from a few trips to the market in the Falomo police barracks, she hadn’t left the house. So when, on one of her home visits, Dr Savage mentioned that her nieces would be going dancing that evening, Taiye took it as an invitation. She asked if they would pick her up on their way.
Habiba and Kareema drove up in a black Jeep with tinted windows and greeted Taiye with glossy lips and wide white smiles. They sparkled, not with any kind of inner light necessarily; they literally sparkled. Their pin-straight weave-ons shone in the glinting street lights, their bracelets and earrings clinked and shimmered, their lips, their bright eyes. They were perfectly lovely, but Taiye wasn’t in a terribly talkative mood. They eyed her as she settled into the back seat.
“Nice to meet you, Taiye,” Habiba said, smiling from the driver’s seat. “Aunty Folake said you just moved back from Canada?”
“Yes,” Taiye said. “Good to meet you, too. Thank you for picking me up.”
“Welcome back home.” Kareema smiled. “Where in Canada? I have some friends in Toronto.”
“Halifax.”
“Oh, I don’t think I know anybody in Halifax. Where is that?”
“It’s farther north than Toronto. There’s a lot of Nigerians there, but we’re everywhere, so that’s not saying much.” Taiye laughed; the girls laughed. “It’s small, but it’s right on the ocean, like the Island,” she added.
“How long were you there for?”
“Like two and a half years.”
“Really? Aunty Folake said you and your sister had been gone for a while.”
“Yeah, I was in London for a bit before I moved to Halifax.”
“Oh, okay. How about your sister?”
“She’s still in Canada. Montreal.” Taiye adjusted the neckline of her kaftan; the stiff opalescent embroidery fell in a deep V down her sternum, revealing the beginnings of a tattoo. She had small breasts that forgave her choice to go without a bra; still, she felt exposed in the cold gusts of air rushing out of the
A/C.
“I like your kaftan dress thing,” Kareema said, turning her shiny head to flash Taiye a toothy grin. Endearing.
“Thank you.” Taiye smiled back. “How about you girls? You’re in school?”
“Habiba just graduated from Covenant, pharmacy degree. I’m still there, engineering, one more year. I want to go to Canada for my master’s. Toronto, though.”
“Congrats, Habiba.” Taiye said. “And you, too, Kareema, in advance.”
Besides the pulsing rhythms blaring from the speakers, the rest of the car ride passed in smooth silence. There was some traffic in Obalende, but it eased up when they climbed onto the Ring Road bridge. At Freedom Park, Habiba slid the car deftly into the last remaining spot in the crowded lot. They starting walking toward the main stage, where a dense crowd had already formed. Excitement bounced around like an eager contagion. Taiye smiled wide, more to herself than anyone in particular, suddenly grateful for a night out: a desire to become enveloped by the crowd, dance as if she were alone, maybe get a little fucked up. She told the girls she’d meet them by the stage and headed toward what she assumed was the bar. A gin and tonic—maybe three, no ice, mostly gin—would ensure the desired mellow buzz.
Several white plastic chairs were spread out by the open-air bar, all turned to face the stage, mostly occupied. Taiye wove past them. She didn’t recognize anyone, but there was a light-skinned woman perched, legs crossed, on a stool by the bar, her heart-shaped face haloed by a short Afro. And she was staring right at Taiye, her eyes widening.
“Taiye Sokky Adejide, is that you?” Isabella asked, a green bottle of Heineken paused midway to her mouth.
Without skipping a beat, as if she’d been expecting to see her childhood friend, Taiye said, “Isa, long time! How far?”
She felt the familiar rush and laughed at herself. She wanted Isabella on sight; that hadn’t changed.
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