It’s been almost eighteen years, yet I remember with frightening clarity the first night he came into my room. I still feel the warm breeze from the open glass louvres; I hear the pittering of rain, the whoosh whoosh of the wind through the palm trees, the way they bowed and made their shadows dance, cast in the light of the street lamps on the bedroom walls. I remember, and it still pains me. Sometimes rage threatens to tear itself out of my body in a sharp scream; sometimes fear freezes me to my bed for days. It still makes me nauseous, makes my skin crawl so that I want to slither out of it. Sometimes I nod at the memories and let them pass as quietly as I can stand it.
It was a Saturday night, and there was no light.
Sister Bisi and the gateman were outside with their torchlights refuelling the generator. I thought Aunty Funke was at night vigil. She usually went on Saturdays, but it turned out she was downstairs the whole time. I think my mother was in her room on the second floor, but I hadn’t seen her since Thursday. I was afraid of her then. Taiye and I were in my bedroom, the room we had shared at night since I can remember. She was lying under the bed with a torchlight, reading out loud a story from Goosebumps about a living ventriloquist doll. It was supposed to be frightening, and Taiye read it in a low, growling voice to scare me, but I think she was more afraid than I was.
The door was open. I saw Uncle Ernest stumble up the stairs, looking dazed. I felt like there was ice water running down my back, and I sat up quickly. He had never come up that early before.
“Ibeji,” he said softly.
Taiye stopped reading the moment she heard his voice.
“Only you on this whole floor?” he asked me from the stairs, looking around at the two rows of closed doors on either side of my open one. “Na wa o,” he muttered, and curved his lips down in an exaggerated frown. “Am I talking to myself?” he shouted toward me, quite suddenly very annoyed.
“Sister Bisi sleeps here with us,” I lied.
My body was a block of cement when he leaned against the door frame.
“Ehen? Where is she now?”
“Downstairs on-ing the generator.”
“Why is your torchlight on the ground?” he asked, apparently unable to see Taiye beneath the bed.
I felt bile rising hot from my stomach when Uncle Ernest came into the room and shut the door behind him. I started to shiver when I smelled that nausea-inducing drunkard smell coming off his damp, wide body.
“You’re not allowed to come inside our room.” I meant to shout it, but my voice came out small.
It paralyzed me when his face changed, contorted hideously with rage, his eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his mouth twisted into a sneer.
“So this is what happens when your mother is a madwoman, and there is nobody to train you, abi?” His voice was a low growl. “Talking to me as if I’m your mate.”
He put his face close to mine, and when I recoiled, he grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the bed. I felt his damp palms on my skin. Bile dribbled down my chin, but I couldn’t move.
“Please stop,” I squeaked.
“Shut up.”
He clamped a callused hand over my mouth and shoved his other hand under my nightie. He jammed his fingers inside me, and I bit hard against the sharp pain that shot up through my body. He withdrew his hands and threw a blinding slap against the side of my head.
“Useless girl,” he muttered.
I screamed, and he covered my mouth and nose with his big palm so that I couldn’t breathe. He pushed my nightie up until it was bunched under my chin.
I remembered my arms, and I flailed them, scratching his face until he removed his hand from over my face. I threw myself onto the floor and screamed. I cried for Taiye, but she didn’t come out from under the bed. Her eyes were wide-open circles, both hands covering her mouth, as if to keep her terror from pouring out. She started to move toward me, she reached her hand toward mine, but we weren’t close enough to touch. I screamed her name like a question, a plea.
The roar of the generator poured into the room, followed by a flood of light. Uncle Ernest backed away, his bloodshot eyes darting around.
Suddenly, Sister Bisi was there, her breath heavy from running up three flights of stairs. She snatched me from the floor with a strength I didn’t know such a soft body could contain. She held me against her, backed away from him. I clung to her while she dragged a sobbing Taiye out from under the bed and took us downstairs to her room. She locked the door and propped a chair under the handle so it wouldn’t budge, even when Aunty Funke banged and rattled it, shouting, “What is all this? What are you crying for?”
But Aunty Funke, she must have figured it out, because by morning she was sobbing quietly at the door. She knocked and said, “Abeg make I follow them talk.”
“Him don go?” Sister Bisi asked through the door, opening it only when she heard an arrested “Yes” from Aunty Funke.
Sister Bisi said to Aunty Funke, her voice soft but possessing unmistakable undercurrents of rage, “If I see am near this compound again, I go call police. E go better if you sef comot.”
Everything moved in molasses that day. I sat on Sister Bisi’s bed for several eternities. Aunty Funke left with Uncle Ernest. Taiye stopped shivering and fell asleep. I wailed in the bathtub while Sister Bisi poured warm water from an orange plastic bucket over my head, soaking my braids. I was engulfed in a pitch-black hollowness; it swallowed me whole. Ever since before our father died, since before our mother retreated far from us, I knew without a doubt that I would never be alone. My Taiye was my quiet partner, closer than my shadow, than my own skin. But on that day, I called her, and she hid.
“Taiye didn’t come out.”
I had nothing else to say.
2
Honey
Kambirinachi
IT RAINED HARD THE DAY THAT KAMBIRINACHI’S FATHER DIED.
She’d dreamed it just before dawn and woke up during the deep inhale before the sky broke open and poured out. Kambirinachi paused her breathing and rushed to her parents’ bedroom to shout that her father mustn’t leave the house that day! He mustn’t drive on the expressway! But their room was empty. The old green curtains covering the burglar-proof windows flapped and gave way to a warm breeze carrying the scent of rain striking earth: petrichor.
Kambirinachi started to shiver from sheer panic. She heard movement coming from the kitchen and hoped with all her might that it was her father. But it was her mother, spooning thick liquid eko into uma leaves. The spiced aroma of catfish pepper soup woke the air and made it sing. Kambirinachi could identify the distinct scent of each spice: the alligator pepper, the toasted fingers of Grains of Selim, the fragrant aridan. Her mother was making rain food—that’s what she called it—food that soothed and comforted when it poured outside. Food to keep you from regretting that you couldn’t leave the house. Eko and pepper soup.
Ikenna took one look at Kambirinachi and placed the spoon down by the tray of broad leaves. “What is the matter?” she demanded.
“Where is Papa?” Kambirinachi’s voice was small but steady, and sharp with fear.
In reply, the voices of her Kin shrieked, a sound that seemed to pierce Kambirinachi’s temples, and was not at all remorseful: You already know.
ONLY A SHORT MOMENT BEFORE, Kambirinachi’s father was driving, carefully, somewhere between Itori and Wasinmi on the Lagos-Abeokuta Expressway. He always drove carefully. He knew to be cautious of the impending rain by the way the clouds gathered and darkened and swelled. The expressway, usually clogged and choking with traffic, was virtually serene. Not many cars zoomed passed his Peugeot pickup, and he was filled with a hope that he might make it home before the downpour.
Then a shadow came over his eyes, thick, like a heavy cloth draped over his face. He froze, distressed, and when the shadow lifted as suddenly and mysteriously as it had descended upon him, he found his truck facing the rusty mouth of a speeding lorry.
The lorry, transporting Gboko tomato
es, swerved sharply to keep from chewing up the dingy pickup that was sitting there. But there wasn’t enough time and space between the two vehicles to prevent a collision. In the end, the sudden swerve shifted the mass of fruit and tipped the metal beast onto the front half of Kambirinachi’s father’s pickup. He was swallowed up by the lorry. All the burst guts of so many tomatoes hid the slaughter underneath.
SINCE NEWS OF HER HUSBAND’S DEATH, Ikenna could not stand to look at her daughter. She could not bear to hear or smell her, or even know that she was around. The three emotions that dominated her until the day of the funeral, when she decided that her youngest sister must take Kambirinachi away, were grief, rage, and profound fear.
After the burial, Ikenna turned to the youngest of her sisters beside her on the discoloured velvet sofa. “Please, Akuchi, you have to take this child away. Biko, I can’t bear it o.”
They were in the small living room, which seemed to have shrunk to half its size since her husband died. Everything in it appeared old and dank and worn; she was only just noticing the ugliness of the objects around her. These same objects had seemed so valuable in her husband’s presence.
It must have been something in her voice, perhaps in the way that her typically plump cheeks lay flat and deflated. But Akuchi must have seen that Kambirinachi would no longer be safe with her mother. Within a week, Kambirinachi was, again, living with an aunt. She wept, saying goodbye to her mother, who remained stoic, despite her anguish.
Kambirinachi pretended to be asleep for the entire bus ride from Abeokuta to Ife. Akuchi, an agricultural science lecturer at Obafemi Awolowo University, lived in a modest two-storey house covered in a warm terracotta colour that felt welcoming to Kambirinachi.
To get to it, they took a cabu cabu from the bus stop near the university campus. It was only a twenty-minute drive, and the roads were clear. Kambirinachi had never before been to Ife, but to her, it felt the same as Abeokuta had felt since her father died: vast and cold, despite the raging sun.
AKUCHI WAS KIND ON PURPOSE; she believed that it was her duty, as a godly woman, to show the love of Christ through her actions. She understood that kindness was a practice, the same with patience and humility. She had no children of her own, and she loved an unavailable man, so she did not marry. Her housekeeper, Adaora, lived with her, and she frequently had guests visiting from Lagos and Asaba, so she was not a lonely woman. It was unexpected, but she was rather pleased to have Kambirinachi in her care.
Music always played throughout the house, filling the small rooms. Akuchi loved Bob Marley. She loved the thrumming rhythm of Ebenezer Obey, the smoke of his husky voice. Often, she sang along to Fatai Rolling Dollar and I.K. Dairo’s Yoruba crooning and swayed her round hips to the Juju beat. She was the youngest of the three sisters, and to Kambirinachi, it seemed that she was the most joyful.
Akuchi set Kambirinachi up in the small bedroom beside hers. She embraced the child, and then, after a moment of hesitation, said, “Don’t worry, my dear … rest, eh, and after, come down and eat, you hear?”
Kambirinachi nodded and waited for Akuchi to leave the room before flinging herself face down on the bed, weeping.
When she was spent, she lifted her head from the hot damp spot on the pillow expecting silence but was met with the soft warmth of Akuchi’s singing. The melody found its way from the kitchen where Akuchi was shallow-frying thick rectangles of yam and Adaora was cooking a palm oil stew.
Kambirinachi followed the music.
TWO MONTHS INTO HER STAY WITH AKUCHI, the voices inside Kambirinachi had dimmed somewhat—or perhaps her alive mind had stretched to house them alongside the reality that she had chosen. She heard them on a low volume, always present but not impossible to ignore. She learned to tune in and out as she liked.
Once, she was partially tuned in, listening to her Kin mutter in displeasure, and watching Adaora run after a brown speckled fowl in the backyard. Adaora cornered the chicken and snatched it up by its flapping wings. She flung it onto the concrete slab over the open gutter and fell a knife over its neck so that its head lobbed off and bounced across the grass. Adaora was swift; the fowl likely felt nothing. Still, Kambirinachi shrieked.
The voices paused for a moment, and then just as suddenly poured out again in roaring laughter: Since when are you afraid of blood?!
“Wetin?” Adaora scolded Kambirinachi. “Biko commot, dey go inside.”
In the living room, Kambirinachi turned on the record player and lay on the carpeted floor. She dozed off to the lulling melodies of Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World.”
She dreamed of her parents. They were, all three of them, walking together down a quiet dusty road, hand in hand. Her parents walked on either side of Kambirinachi, her guardians, though in truth, in her truth, she was much older than they were, an ancient thing.
She woke up with a start at the sound of a car driving into the gravel-covered driveway of Akuchi’s compound. Kambirinachi sat up quickly and rushed to the window to see that it was her mother, stepping out of a navy blue cabu cabu.
She hadn’t seen or heard from Ikenna since she’d sent her away with Akuchi. A hard and bitter seed had been rotting in Kambirinachi’s stomach ever since. She’d been doing her best to keep from nourishing it. Shaking her head briskly, shaking off the remnants of sleep and spite, Kambirinachi put a smile on and ran out to meet her mother.
IKENNA KNEW THAT THE ONLY WAY TO MOVE FORWARD was simply to move forward. She’d learned this lesson many times in her life. Her small bungalow was taunting her, shrinking around her. She’d tried to make space by locking away everything that made her think of her late husband. She’d shoved as much of the furniture, bedsheets, crockery—everything that she could remember him touching—into Kambirinachi’s room. Everything except his flattened pillow; Ikenna slept curved like a crayfish, with half the worn pillow between her now-bony knees and the other half cradling her head.
Still, the house taunted her with her late husband’s voice, and sometimes it mimicked her daughter’s laughter. So the day before Kambirinachi’s fourteenth birthday, she packed up a small bag and took a bus to Ife.
The cabu cabu driver had only just pulled into Akuchi’s compound when Kambirinachi ran out with a devastating smile on her small face. The girl was already taller. Ikenna embraced her child.
The next day they bought a cake with red icing that tasted as artificial as it looked, but Kambirinachi loved it. Ikenna and Akuchi sang “Happy Birthday” and blessed her with prayers. Adaora fried the chicken she’d slaughtered the day before, and they ate on the floor, joyfully, despite all that lingering grief. Kambirinachi thought of her father, closed her eyes to see his face, and smiled at him with a mouthful of cake. He smiled back.
For years, Kambirinachi would think about that day, and she would scour her memory for signs, examine her mother’s features for any indication of the woman’s decision to walk out of her life for good.
Taiye
AT SEVENTEEN, Taiye left home to study chemistry at University College London. During the six-and-a-half-hour flight from Murtala Muhammed to Heathrow, an overwhelming sense of having forgotten something important tugged at her insides. This feeling took the shape of a near gasp in her lungs, or perhaps the brief hollow space before a shiver, but it overstayed and stretched out over her whole self.
Over and over, she searched her backpack for her passports. Her Nigerian and British documents were bound together with a yellow rubber band and tucked away in the inner zippered compartment, next to an envelope filled with cash—crisp pound notes from one of the Mallams outside Ikoyi Hotel. She pushed up her cardigan sleeve to check that her watch was still wrapped around her wrist, still ticking. She touched her chest to feel for the brown scapular that hung from her neck on a thin worn leather rope.
She knew what she was missing, but there was nothing to be done. Kehinde had chosen not to come with her. So she spent the entire flight restlessly checking the same things repeatedly,
in a frantic rhythm sustained by her manic grief.
Tears didn’t come until the pilot announced that the plane would begin its descent momentarily. Taiye pictured the distance between her seat in row twenty-three and where Kehinde was, at home perhaps—so vast a distance, so much air and space and dust and ground between them. Her tears were silent, yet to keep from waking the grey-haired woman beside her, Taiye covered her mouth with her hand as she cried.
Aunt Yemisi picked Taiye up from the airport and took her to her three-bedroom flat in Brixton. The same flat where Taiye had lived with her mother and sister for the ten months they’d spent in London after their father died. It looked entirely different from how Taiye remembered it. Yemisi had moved in shortly after they’d moved back to Lagos. Technically, it belonged to Kambirinachi and the twins—that was the way Banji, the twins’ father, had willed it—but Yemisi needed a place to live after she threw a bubbling pot of egusi soup at her raging ex-husband. It was self-defence, the first and only time she had struck back in twelve years of marriage. She’d run out of the house immediately after and screamed that she would call the police if he didn’t let her collect her things and her children and leave in peace.
Yemisi was Banji’s younger sister, and in the months to follow, Taiye would learn that Yemisi was the kind of woman who seemed, always, to favour the men in her life. Taiye would also learn that Yemisi did not like Kambirinachi.
Yemisi grew up the youngest child with two older sisters who either ignored or tormented her, and an older brother and father who adored her. So, it was no surprise that she indulged her two sons, Dapo and Jide, and had little patience for her only daughter, Sade. But her impatience for Sade was benevolence in comparison to her treatment of Taiye.
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