“Wetin you sabi?” Star says and puts his arm around her. “As if you sef no be ajebutter.” Carefully, he takes the half-full green bottle of Heineken away from her clumsy grip.
Isabella rolls her head onto Star’s shoulder, then looks at me with languid eyes. “Kehinde, are you happy?” she asks.
“Me?” I ask obtusely, feeling the warm wash of everyone’s eyes on me.
“Yes, you,” Isabella confirms. “Are you happily married? Were you happy before you married? Are you happy now?” she slurs, eyes fixed on my steadily warming face.
“Erm …” Taiye’s grip on my hand tightens slightly. “I am happy in my marriage, yes.” I look at Farouq, and he smiles at me. Pearls of perspiration dot his forehead and roll down the sides of his face.
I continue, “And, like, separate from my marriage, I’m happy sometimes and sad sometimes and neutral sometimes … same as before I was married. Sometimes, I think, when painful things happen, my emotions reflect that … and painful things have happened …” Taiye brings my hand to her mouth, and her lips are warm and dry when she kisses my knuckles. “But that’s just life,” I finish, just as Taiye gets up to leave.
Isabella watches Taiye walk away, and then she slaps Star on the arm. “You see that?” she asks, her voice climbing in pitch with each word. “See as she dey look am, as she dey look her husband? You no fit buy am, that look, you no fit buy am for market.”
Her voice is shaking, and the group is silent as she continues, “You know when I was in uni, in Reading, I wanted to kill myself.” She clenches her fists for emphasis, and then she tries to stand, but Star holds on to her shoulders. “I carried myself to a psychologist because I didn’t understand.” Tears are streaming down her face, making dark, muddy streaks of her mascara and foundation.
“When I told my mother what was happening, she said that it’s because I haven’t suffered in life, because I’m half-caste, and everything has been easy for me. So any small trouble and I just want to kpeme.” She draws a finger across her throat before bursting into a bout of breathless laughter that veers on hysterical.
“Half-caste?” Farouq asks me in a whisper.
“Mixed race, part white,” I reply. “It’s a bit fucked, but we don’t use it as a slur here.”
“You know something,” Isabella says, “I’m not happy. I’m not looking forward to anything.” She throws her hands up in surrender. “I wasn’t happy before I was engaged; I’m not happy now; I won’t be happy after I get married. I know we’re never supposed to admit it, but na so we see am.”
Two women in the circle mutter something unintelligible and get up to leave. We watch as Isabella unravels at her own party. I feel sad for her, like a gaping wound in my belly. I want to reach for her and take her away from this audience, but she continues, “This thing, happiness, is it actually a luxury? Am I a fool to want to be happy in this life? I feel as if, say, if you open my body, nothing go dey inside. As is say I be empty box!” She slaps mosquitoes off her bare arms and turns to face Star. “Abi I dey craze? I no fit pretend now,” she pleads. “I no wan live my whole life just dey pretend pretend. I no say we go never gree say sometimes no matter how much money, how many connections person get, if something just no dey correct inside here”—she taps her temple with two fingers so forcefully her head tilts, she taps her sternum. “But nobody … nobod …” She drops her face into her hands and bawls.
It’s hard to make out what she says next, her voice muffled by her hands, but I think she says, “I just want to be happy …”
Star holds her tight.
I want to reach out and touch her arm. The circle disperses slowly, stiffly, as she cries. Some people offer confused words of sympathy, rub her shoulders gingerly, before departing to less dismal regions of the party. I think the music is louder than Isabella’s cries. I’m reasonably sure that most guests are unaware that their host is presently in the volatile throes of an emotional meltdown. Still, I scan the party from where we sit. Yes, a few furtive glances shoot our way, but otherwise, most guests seem cheerfully unaware.
Then there is Toki, sitting among a handful of friends on white wicker garden chairs, drinking cognac from small tumblers. He is looking straight at Isabella as she trembles in Star’s arms. His face gives nothing away, his features neatly arranged, opaque.
I tug at Farouq’s arm. “Babe, let’s go find Taiye.”
Before we leave, I hold Isabella’s hand and invite her to our place for breakfast, or lunch, or dinner, or a swim at Ikoyi Club sometime during the week. She looks at my face for a long time and nods her head before saying, “Tell Taiye I’m sorry.”
Kambirinachi
IN THE YEAR AFTER KAMBIRINACHI AND BANJI LEFT IFE they found their rhythm as a couple. Banji was exhausted but happy and well paid at work. During the week, he took a cabu cabu from their place on Osborne Road, Ikoyi, to the Dasha office on Saka Jojo Street on Victoria Island. There he assessed some of the most desperate loan applications, wishing he could approve them all.
While he worked, Kambirinachi alternated between taking slow walks around the neighbourhood and painting vibrant acrylics of the views from the small burglar-proof windows of their place. From the kitchen window: plantain palms with their fanned-out leaves peeled apart like fingers waving in the breeze and bunches of unripe fruit, still starchy and green, hung low and heavy at their base. From the bedroom window: in much deeper shades of green, unkempt Ixora bushes burst with clusters of tiny red flowers. As a child, Kambirinachi gingerly pulled the delicate needle-thin stigma out of the heart of the flower and sucked on precious droplets of tangy-sweet nectar. As a young woman, she only painted them. From the living room window: mature frangipani trees with flowers that started yellow at the core and whitened as their fragrant petals curled out.
Her paintings were stunning, highly stylized renderings that bore minimal resemblance to plants. Because she saw all the life of them, from seed or cutting to seedling, to flowering, to fruit, to dead and drying. She captured each phase of the plants’ lives in layers of bold brush strokes until the resulting pieces were vivid, abstract, and very textured.
Once a week, she went to the Falomo Mammy Market for food. Not an experimental cook, never having been properly taught, she bought produce that was straightforward to prepare: yams to be boiled and pounded or fried. Eggs to be hardboiled or fried. Groundnut oil for all that frying. Okra for soup. Tomatoes, peppers, and onions puréed right there in the market to be made into stew. Beans, plantains, and as much of whatever fruit was in season as she could afford.
The day she felt the first murmurings of a small life begin its delicate unfurling in her body it was agbalumo season. She was haggling with the fruit seller—a woman about her age with a fat infant asleep on her lap. Kambirinachi paused her playful haggling, distracted by the strings of tiny amber beads that clung to each of the baby’s pudgy ankles. In the silence, she was struck by how fragile and gorgeous the sleeping baby’s feet were, struck by the glint of sunlight on those amber beads. In the silence, she heard a soft murmur coming from inside herself. No, it wasn’t the sound of her wounded Kin; it was a different language, a different pitch altogether, one that resonated with her core. She dropped the two unusually large agbalumo she’d been holding, and they rolled across the dirt into an open gutter.
“E jor,” she said to the fruit seller, “no vex.” Then she paid eighty naira more than the cost of the fruit in her bag and ran home.
Kambirinachi was negotiating with her Kin for less palpable madness. “Negotiating” is perhaps too gentle a word for what was happening between them; a combat of wills more aptly describes it.
Here it is: Kambirinachi’s Kin—her many aspects, the core being from whom she’d attempted to sever herself by choosing to stay alive all those years ago—they wanted her back. Quite simply, they desired to heal the wound of her leaving, and this healing required her return. She knew this, she felt it in her marrow, heard their rageful whisperings, crie
d knowing that rage was only hurt untended, hurt ignored and cast aside. This is how you make fury. She made this fury, this dark spirit, howling, feral, and bloodthirsty. She made it by turning her ears from their cries because she yearned to weave herself into the fabric of aliveness.
So her Kin willed her to their presence, willed her ears to turn to them, willed her hands to sharp objects, willed blood. They willed her fragile body to stop its pointless rotations, pointless because alive bodies must die. They die slowly or swiftly, in pain or in sleep, but they die, nonetheless.
How could you want this?
How could you leave us?
How could you turn away?
So you can imagine the fear it cast over her, this murmur of life in her body. She didn’t know how long it had been growing inside her, only that one day she heard nothing but her Kin howling and Banji’s sweet words, and the next day there was another voice, a mewling, a request to be born.
Kambirinachi was pregnant.
“PETRICHOR.” The word had been swimming around in Kambirinachi’s mind. She had to speak it out.
“What’s that, my love?” Banji asked, rubbing circles on the small of his wife’s back.
They were in their living room, wrapped around each other on the sofa, a gift from Banji’s employers that they had reupholstered in deep burgundy crushed velvet. Listening to the soothing pittering of rainfall on the corrugated roof of their bungalow.
“The smell of rain on dry earth,” Kambirinachi replied. “Petrichor, from the Greek word ‘pétrā,’ which means ‘stone,’ and ‘īchōr,’ which, in Greek mythology, is the fluid that flows through the veins of their gods.”
Laughing, Banji asked, “And you know this how?”
“I’m smart, Baba, that’s why you married me.”
“Is that why?” Banji teased. “I thought it was because of your big nyash.”
“My nyash isn’t even that big!”
“But it will, it will grow with Baby.”
Baby.
Baby was growing.
Baby was three and a half months formed.
Baby’s murmuring was rising into a gentle song, a soothing loop of a melody, a travel song, rejoicing.
Kambirinachi’s spirit body, her mind, was becoming a vessel of immiscible elements. Her Kin wanted her, Baby wanted her, but they would not have each other.
Her Kin: This will tether you to them, this will tether you to them, this will tether you to them, this will tether you to them, this is not how it’s supposed to be, we will not allow this.
Baby: a comforting melody, a promise, life and life and life …
Kambirinachi: I choose life.
Her Kin: And the cost—can you pay?
She answered: she ate fruits and vegetables and seeds and good meat and prenatal vitamins. She and Banji went to a private clinic in Victoria Island on referral from his employers, whose family friend ran the place almost exclusively for expats. They glowed as Baby grew.
And then Baby stopped growing. Abruptly, the song ended, in its place a starving, clawing void.
Banji grieved quietly, lit many candles at the chapel in Falomo Catholic church, wept silently, kneeling in the pews.
“Let’s try again,” he said to Kambirinachi. “Let’s try again.”
But Kambirinachi raged. A week after the clinic scraped out what was left of Baby from inside of her, she stumbled out of bed before dawn. She blundered in the darkness to the cluster of plantain palms and scratched open the welts on the back of her neck, opened the wound her mother had given her in an attempt to keep her tied to this realm. A guttural wail rose from her throat, echoed loud and ringing as she dug her bloody fingers into the soil by the root of the plants to call her Kin.
They came to her, a multitude of her own self, plenty of them—of her. They were the same as her. Down to her bloody fingers, to the weeping wound at the base of her neck. They surrounded her.
“Why did you do this?” she asked.
That was the price. They spoke in unison, in perfect alignment, with their eyes fixed on her.
“But I’ve already paid. You took my papa.”
It was his time. You altered that. We only corrected it. Death did her work.
She always collects, you know this.
“I cast you!”
You cannot cast us.
“I reject you!”
You cannot reject us.
“I bind you!”
You cannot bind us. We are not a demon, or evil. We are you.
“I reject you!”
Kin …
“I reject me!”
Don’t do this.
“I reject myself! I reject myself! I free me now!”
You will forget yourself. You will be so lonely.
“I. Reject. Myself.” Her voice rose, distraught and resolute.
Her Kin exhaled in unison, their faces drooped in immense sadness, and they said, You may leave us, but we will never leave you.
Kambirinachi woke up beside Banji after the sun had risen to find that her mind was silent.
SO HOW DID THE TWINS COME TO BE?
Kambirinachi would tell you that she chose them. Like with Banji, she dreamed them. She dreamed them many times, and in these dreams, she saw a spot of light, something akin to a small orb the size of her palm, that floated above gentle, rippling waters. The light flirted with the water, occasionally dipping down to touch its undulating surface, sometimes immersing half of itself, but always, it rose back up to resume its buoyant dance.
When she claimed them, Kambirinachi mistook the orb for one spirit. She glided across the water, scooped the orb in her hands, and swallowed it in one swift gulp. It wasn’t until she felt the weight of the light travel through her that she realized that it was two beings intertwined. That through birthing, she would destine them to a painful separation.
EIGHT MONTHS AFTER BABY STOPPED GROWING, after Kambirinachi attempted to sever ties with her Kin, and three months after she swallowed the orb of light in her dream, Kambirinachi placed Banji’s palms on the slight swell of her belly.
“This one.” She smiled at him. “This one will stay.”
They were in a cabu cabu, on the way to Murtala Muhammed airport. Banji’s employers, who were generous and wanted to be known as such, were sponsoring his six-month managerial finance professional development course at the London School of Economics. Banji was thrilled at the opportunity, and seeing his joy at the prospect, Kambirinachi was also thrilled. She’d meant to double his happiness by telling him of her pregnancy, but he grew ambivalent about leaving.
“Kambi, this is wonderful, but I can’t leave now!”
“Yes, you can, and you must,” she reassured him. “There’s nothing to do here but be pregnant, and I’m already taking care of that.”
“Maybe you can come, too,” he responded. “Before you’re too big?”
“I don’t think we can afford that.”
“Not yet, but I could ask my boss for a loan. They like me, so if I tell them you’re pregnant and explain why we’re worried they might be open to—”
“Baba, don’t worry,” she insisted. “You’ll be back just in time.”
But Banji did worry. He gutted their savings, asked his mother for support, and asked his generous employers if they would contribute to flying his pregnant wife to join him in London.
Within two months, he was meeting a five-months-pregnant Kambirinachi at London Heathrow. He dropped his coat across her shoulders and squeezed her tightly, thinking his joy was complete. And it was still multiplying, growing with his child inside Kambirinachi.
Upon learning a few weeks later, at King’s College Hospital, that his wife was in fact carrying twins, Banji marvelled at his blessings. Ibeji are a blessing, divine twins, one soul contained in two vessels. The off-spring of Sango and Osun, they are the orishas of abundance and joy. And mischief.
THE LIGHT THAT KAMBIRINACHI HAD SWALLOWED was two beings of one spirit intertwined in the
sort of bliss into which, within the short window of living, many seek to awaken. Inside Kambirinachi, they began their painful separation: monozygotic twins form when one zygote splits into two embryos. Monoamniotic twins develop when an embryo does not divide until after the formation of the amniotic sac. The splitting is excruciating, but neither will remember it acutely. All that will remain is a disorienting echo of the wound that the twins would spend a lifetime attempting to locate. Monozygotic twins are physically identical because they share identical genes; they may even have similar personality traits.
Patience is not one of the personality traits that the twins shared; for example, the twin that would be named Kehinde was eager to be born. She coaxed her counterpart, the one that would be called Taiye, to share her enthusiasm for the world into which they would soon be spit. Reluctant, Taiye longed for the blissful quiet they’d shared before before, not wanting to be snatched, swallowed, and forced apart, not wishing to be thrust into the world and its harsh artificial lights.
But, you see, because of this thing we call love, Taiye would always concede to Kehinde. So, five weeks too soon, upon Kehinde’s request, Taiye burst forth from Kambirinachi to see what awaited them, and Kehinde eagerly followed.
KAMBIRINACHI FELT A WARM LIQUID flow out of her body and splash onto the pale yellow tiles of the kitchen floor. It was 10:47 a.m. on October 29, 1987, in their cramped flat in Brixton—a community still recovering from the devastating riot between police and protesters that had occurred earlier in the decade. Banji was at school, a half-hour tube ride away. In the nearly three months that she’d been in London, Kambirinachi hadn’t made any friends outside of a handful of Banji’s classmates. They’d made plans for Banji to spend what they’d assumed would be the last three weeks of the pregnancy at home, but the twins were early. Kambirinachi had no one to call.
She breathed deeply and found a rag to mop up the amniotic fluid. She hummed a soothing melody, Baby’s song, knowing all too well that these were different beings altogether who were tunnelling their way through her body. She was a portal. She hummed Baby’s song and paced around the kitchen. She considered going to the neighbours, a Bajan family of many children and a stern matriarch, but when she moved toward the door, the first contraction caused her to double over in tremendous pain. She sank to the floor, still humming Baby’s song, until the tightness in her abdomen passed, and then she rocked herself back and forth in preparation for the next one.
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