Butter Honey Pig Bread

by Francesca Ekwuyasi

  Her food had grown cold. Taiye started to think that perhaps the sharing had all meant more to her than it did to him. Maybe she was making a fool of herself, harassing this poor boy who really just didn’t want to be her friend anymore. Who did she think she was, anyway? She sat there, sniffling into her scarf, thinking what an utter—

  Her phone rang. Timi’s name and number blinked on the screen.

  “Hello?” Taiye answered, out of breath from surprise.

  Silence.

  “Hello?” she said again.

  “Taiye?” Timi’s voice was hoarse.

  “Timz, hey, yeah, it’s me …”

  “Girl …?” he slurred. Taiye envisioned his right brow cocking up, in preparation for some juicy gossip, but he mumbled as if he’d just woken, or was on the brink of sleep.

  “Timmy Timz, how far?”

  “I dey like dele.” He laughed in slow motion.

  “It’s been a minute. I’m sorry.”

  “No worries, babes …”

  “You all right, love? You’re slurring your words a bit.”

  “I had a bit to drink.”

  “So early, how come?”

  “… Well …”

  “What happened? Maybe you can tell me in person. Where are you?”

  “Been s-staying at Aiden’s old flat.”

  “You there now?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You all right?”

  Silence.

  “Timz?”

  “Taiye …”

  “You all right, love?”

  “… Not really, my mother hates me.” The laughter that followed was jarring. Its joylessness was painful to hear.

  “I doubt that, darling.”

  “No, really … and you know what’s fucked up?”

  “Everything?”

  “Correct … but also the bloke that told everyone …”

  “Yeah?”

  Silence. Followed by sniffling. Followed by sobbing. A guttural cry that sounded as though it were ripped forcefully from the back of his throat.

  Something dropped fast from a high place in Taiye’s chest. It dropped down to her gut and sat there heavy and hard and hot.

  “Timi?”

  “He forced me …” Timi hiccupped.

  “Who?” Taiye asked, her voice forceful, already licking at the rage that smouldered in her gut. “Who, Timi?”

  “The choirmaster, Wasiu … he forced himself on … then he told the elders … he showed them my Grindr profile … they told the whole church.”

  “Timi, I’m so sorry.”

  He responded with that cutting laughter. “My mother told me I was a disgusting abomination.” His voice started to sound far away, leaving Taiye with a sense of sand pouring out quickly from between her fingers.

  “Never, Timi. You are not.”

  “But what if …?” The far-awayness persisted.

  “No.”

  Silence.

  “Timi?”

  He slurred something unintelligible, and fear spiked up Taiye’s neck.

  “Timi, you’re drunk. Are you alone?”

  “I … hope so … Taiye. I took some pills … I’m tired.”

  Taiye’s pulse quickened. “Timi?”

  Silence.

  Taiye waved the server over and mouthed that she needed a pen. She stilled her hands and wrote Aiden’s address, Timi’s name, and the words, Please call an ambulance to this address. Overdose attempt on the unused paper napkin. The server nodded and pulled out a cellphone from her apron pocket. Taiye watched her read out the address to the dispatcher before leaving a crumpled twenty-pound note and running out.

  She ran, following Our Lady’s directions. She still had the phone pressed against her face as she jogged through the door, out onto the cobblestone sidewalk. The sky finally broke open and drizzled cold rain on everything. The wind whipped against her skin as she ran.

  Timi was silent on the other end, and the panic made Taiye speed up until she tripped and fell face down onto the damp, filthy sidewalk, scraping her knees and palm. But she barely registered the pain. She pushed herself up, picked up her phone, and continued to run.

  “Timz,” Taiye said into her phone, but there was no answer.

  She kept running, her legs pumping despite the sharp pain steadily building in her thighs. She sped past the church where she first met Our Lady, past the small park, past the café where Zora worked. She got to Aiden’s apartment just as the ambulance was driving away.

  “Is he okay?” she asked one of the many neighbours loitering on the front lawn. “Is he alive?” she shouted.

  “Think so, love,” said an elderly woman in a red headwrap and a green terry cloth housecoat, her face a mask of concern. “They had that little oxygen mask thing on the boy’s face. I think he’s all right.”

  The woman kept talking, but Taiye stopped listening. She leaned against the brick wall and slid down until her bottom rested on wet grass. Her heart raced to a rhythm that seemed infinite. Bile rose up, bitter, from her queasy bowels to her tight throat. She coughed, and her face crumpled and her head fell into her trembling hands.

  She closed her eyes, and Our Lady was there. The apparition folded Taiye’s damp and shivering body into her own holy one, held her tight, and whispered a secret in her ear.

  Kehinde

  Letter no. 79

  Kehinde,

  It’s a clear night in London. A gift. My eyes aren’t big enough to see the whole night. The sky seems impossibly close, if I reached up right now I could probably touch it. I’m on this tiny balcony that I’m sure will collapse at any moment, but alas, it seems that I cannot move.

  I’ve been sitting here for what feels like a long time. I’ve eaten sooo many edibles. I found them in the fridge, chocolate truffles.

  I wish you would pick up my calls. I called at least a dozen times, at least.

  I made a new friend this year, a real friend that I wasn’t sleeping with, or taking anything from. Yesterday he tried to end his life because something bad happened to him. He was tired.

  An apparition set me up, I think. She set me up to find him. I haven’t seen her since yesterday. I hope she comes back soon. She told me something good, something glorious. I will tell you when I see you.

  Things line up funny sometimes; madness has its purpose I suppose.

  The last time I spoke with Mami, she thought I was you.

  Always always I love you,

  Taiye.

  Letter no. 86

  August 11, 2014

  Heathrow Airport

  Terminal 5

  Kehinde,

  I’m about to catch a flight to Canada.

  Halifax, Nova Scotia, to be exact.

  Don’t worry, I’m not following you. Your silence has spoken, I’m not running after you anymore.

  I no longer want to be in London. My job was meaningless, and I felt like I was burning through people only to find myself fucked up and alone.

  I’ve enrolled in a culinary program at Nova Scotia Community College because cooking is something I know for a fact that I can do well. Meaning: I have not yet found a way to spoil it with my rubbish.

  How have you been?

  I did a bit of reading on Nova Scotian history: Did you know the first big group of immigrants to Nova Scotia (except for the dodgy white settlers—do they count as immigrants?) were Black Loyalists who came to the area as refugees after the American Revolution? Afterward, a group of exiled Jamaicans settled. They helped build the city’s citadel and served in the military.

  African Nova Scotians have a history of more than four hundred years. I read that on a government website. I’ll let you know what else I learn.

  I tried to visit Timi in the hospital; the nurses told me that he’s alive, but his family insisted he not be allowed to see any friends. His phone was disconnected; his Insta was deactivated. I’ve written a few emails just updating him on my life and letting him know I miss him.

  I
miss him very much. I feel powerless and foolish.

  I don’t know what else to do, so I’m going away.

  I’m boarding now, I have to go.

  Love,

  Taiye

  Letter no. 97

  March 25, 2015

  Central Library, Halifax

  Dear Kehinde,

  What’s the weather like in Montreal?

  Today Halifax is covered in a thick grey fog, but it’s humid, and it’s one of the warmest days I’ve experienced in the last three weeks. The sky here can be pretty indecisive, I think that’s why people talk about it so much. Everyone I’ve met so far is atypically friendly. So far the Canadian stereotype is proving to be accurate, but they aren’t necessarily warm, more like polite. That’s more than I can say for South London folk. I do miss it, though. I miss the grit and honesty.

  I’ve been staying out of trouble. My apparition buddy is still with me, though she’s not quite an apparition anymore. Anyway, I have to go. Today’s free event at the library is a mini conference put on by one of the universities here called, “Who Belongs Here: Conversations on Race and Space in K’jipuktuk.” K’jipuktuk is the Mi’kmaq name for Halifax. Mi’kmaq is the name of the Indigenous peoples of the Atlantic provinces like Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and some other areas I don’t know too much about yet. I’ve been learning a little bit about the way Canada was formed as a nation. Like about the European colonizers, and the way they straight-up killed and stole and raped (as they do) and attempted to destroy the original people on this land.

  The conference should be interesting, and if not, then I hope they have snacks.

  Love always,

  Taiye

  I THINK TAIYE IS AVOIDING ME.

  Which is ironic. And extremely irritating, considering how often she used to write to me when we were a whole ocean apart. But I know I have no right to be annoyed, or demand more than she’s giving, considering how absent I’ve been. Ocean or bedroom door or unspoken hurt, something always remains lodged between us.

  In the week I’ve been back, she has spent most of her days tending to her beehive or knee-deep in the patch of soil in the backyard, hoping to turn it into something more alive. Also, she cooks. Large feasts that are too much food for the four of us. She makes plates for Hassan and the security men at the estate gates. Sometimes I help her, and she delegates tasks with swift authority: “Julienne these. Thinner than that.” “Crush this.” “Please put a lid on that.” “Is it burning? Don’t let it burn.” “A heaping spoonful. Heaping.” “No, leave it. It’s supposed to char.”

  But we barely speak otherwise. Don’t get me wrong, Taiye is warm. She touches me: a hand on my shoulder, fingers picking fluff out of my hair, hands rubbing my arms when the A/C turns on suddenly and the chill raises goosebumps on my skin. But words are scarce.

  Most evenings, she massages a mixture of ori and Tiger Balm into our mother’s feet, ankles, and back.

  Always, she ignores her phone, which beeps so incessantly that I want to snap that she must switch off the volume.

  It’s the heat and the house, and this rootless, untethered feeling that they spark inside me, that’s making me so irritable.

  I’ve occupied myself, mostly, by reading Taiye’s letters and attempting to have lucid conversations with our mother. She is a whole other character. This morning, for example, while we were tucking into a breakfast of masa and catfish stew that Taiye woke up before the sun to prepare, our mother asked if I still worked at the gallery.

  “Yes,” I said, “but only part time.”

  She didn’t ask, “How come part time?” or “What do you do the rest of the time?” She just nodded and said, “Lovely,” then took a big bite of her breakfast.

  “How about your art?” Taiye had asked to fill the awkward silence our mother had plunged us into with her half-assed interest and typical distractedness.

  “Good—how did you know …?” I’d asked.

  I’d sent our mother pictures of my work from my first group show. Four pieces of the same picture in different media: white charcoal on black paper, black ink on white paper, watercolour on canvas, and a glass bead collage in beeswax encaustic. Trying, failing, to make myself emerge from the picture. Always, it was Taiye’s face. I only recognized her.

  I’d sent pictures from my first group show—a few years ago now—to our mother, but not to Taiye.

  “Google.” She shrugged, her face a mask of nonchalance. But I recognize this mask; I have the same one.

  “She just scored gallery representation!” Farouq exclaimed. The poor guy was trying to navigate the sudden and perplexing web of unspokens between the lot of us.

  “Congratulations,” Taiye said with a smile, always a warm unfurling flower on that face. “Well done. What gallery?”

  “Galerie d’Or, in Old Montreal.” I wanted to tell her about my art, suddenly, I want her to find it, and me, interesting.

  “Very cool.” Taiye nodded and she said again, “Well done.”

  “And these are for the drawings of the house you sent me pictures of?” asked our mother.

  “Yes, but I’ve evolved the concept since then. I’ve been doing larger pieces.” I wanted to tell her more, describe how I’d been combining the intricate beadwork and beeswax encaustic with life-sized photos to make murals. But she was no longer looking at me, and my words stuck in my throat.

  “So lovely. Your hair is interesting these days, isn’t it?” she said.

  Taiye stifled a giggle.

  Farouq raised his eyebrows in confusion.

  I shook my head, rolled my eyes, and ate my catfish stew in silence.

  Farouq stayed in the kitchen after breakfast to help Taiye clean up. I probably should have done the same, instead of running up to my room like I’ve done after every awkward conversation, but here I am again, in my childhood bedroom, trying to recall why I’ve chosen to come home after all this time. After the bad thing, I stopped sleeping here. I would get dressed and do my homework in my room, but as soon as it was time for sleep, I went into the empty guest room across the hall and locked the door.

  Farouq comes in just in time to keep my thoughts from quietly devouring me. He finds me sitting cross-legged on the vanity, with my back resting against the mirror. Only a week in Lagos and already, he is burnt and browning. He is also clean-shaven.

  “You decided against the beard, huh?” I ask, reaching out to hold his face.

  He sucks his teeth like I showed him. “It’s too hot for all that jor,” he says in a poor interpretation of a Nigerian accent and Yoruba vernacular.

  I laugh, and he laughs. He uncrosses my legs and wraps them around his waist so that I’m straddling him. He kisses me, carries me to the bed, and starts to untie the straps of the adire halter dress that I stole from my mother’s closet.

  “No,” I whisper against his mouth. “Not now.”

  What I mean is, Not here. Not in this room, in this house.

  He rolls off me. “It’s been almost a month,” he says, and leans his forehead against my sternum; gently, he taps it there.

  I sit up, and he rolls his head onto my lap. From here, I can see out the mosquito-netted window to Taiye crouched over in her garden. I kiss Farouq on the forehead and leave him to go outside and join my sister.

  She is barefoot, in a faded black T-shirt and old aso oke shokoto folded up at her ashy knees. She doesn’t look up when I walk out onto the damp grass. Beside her, seedlings are sprouting out of old paint cans: basil, spinach, onions, waterleaf, and a few other plants that I don’t recognize.

  “You’re going to plant all these?”I ask her.

  “Yeah,” she answers, and picks up one of the cans. “I started it when I first came back. I thought Mami would get into it and come out a bit. But I never got to it until now.”

  “Come out?”

  “Yeah, she wasn’t doing so well.”

  “What do you mean? Was she sick?”

  “Her body was probab
ly fine.” Taiye finally looks up at me. She taps her temple with dirt-covered fingers. “She was struggling here. I thought a garden would help, but …”

  “You’ve planted a garden before?” I ask, because for the life of me I cannot think of any other direction to take this conversation and keep it light.

  “Not really.” She is gentle with the seedling, her deft hands tender as she transfers it into the ground. “I figured I’d throw some seedlings in and say a prayer,” she jokes, and to me, it is a sign of hope.

  “And maybe add some water?” I ask, and it lights a smile in me when she looks up and chuckles softly.

  Brown dirt is smeared on her cheeks and chin. She tries to shake a fly that has landed on her nose, and her braids tumble down from the loose bun that was tied on top of her head.

  I touch them gently, thin and long. “I don’t miss sitting for hours to get these in,” I say.

  She starts to say something when the back screen door creaks open. A light-skinned stranger peeks her head through the doorway.

  “Can we help you?” I ask, just as Taiye stands up abruptly. “Isabella, what are you doing here?” tumbles quickly out of her mouth.

  “Isabella?!”

  “Kehinde!” Isabella exclaims, and reaches out to embrace me. “Your sister said you were coming. How long have you been back?”