“Yes, Nicholas.”
She would serve his food, a plate on a tray taken to him in his study or in front of the TV in the kitchen. Obinze sometimes wondered if she bowed while putting it down or whether the bowing was merely in her demeanor, in the slump of her shoulders and curve of her neck. Nicholas spoke to her in the same tone as he spoke to his children. Once Obinze heard him say to her, “You people have scattered my study. Now please leave my study, all of you.”
“Yes, Nicholas,” she said, and took the children out. “Yes, Nicholas” was her response to almost everything he said. Sometimes, from behind Nicholas, she would catch Obinze’s eye and make a funny face, inflating her cheeks into small balloons, or pushing her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. It reminded Obinze of the gaudy theatrics of Nollywood films.
“I keep thinking of how you and Nicholas were in Nsukka,” Obinze said one afternoon as he helped her cut up a chicken.
“Ahn-ahn! Do you know we used to fuck in public? We did it at the Arts Theater. Even in the engineering building one afternoon, in a quiet corner of the corridor!” She laughed. “Marriage changes things. But this country is not easy. I got my papers because I did postgraduate school here, but you know he only got his papers two years ago and so for so long he was living in fear, working under other people’s names. That thing can do wonders to your head, eziokwu. It has not been easy at all for him. This job he has now is very good but he’s on contract. He never knows if they will renew. He got a good offer in Ireland, you know Ireland is seriously booming now and computer programmers do well there, but he doesn’t want us to move there. Education for the kids is much better here.”
Obinze selected some spice bottles from the cupboard, sprinkled them on the chicken, and put the pot on the stove.
“You put nutmeg in chicken?” Ojiugo asked.
“Yes,” Obinze said. “Don’t you?”
“Me, what do I know? Whoever marries you will win a lottery, honestly. By the way, what did you say happened to you and Ifemelu? I so liked her.”
“She went to America and her eyes opened and she forgot me.”
Ojiugo laughed.
The phone rang. Because Obinze was all the time willing a call from his job agency, each time the phone did ring, a mild panic would seize his chest, and Ojiugo would say, “Don’t worry, The Zed, things will work out for you. Look at my friend Bose. Do you know she applied for asylum, was denied, and went through hell before she finally got her papers? Now she owns two nurseries and has a holiday home in Spain. It will happen for you, don’t worry, rapuba.” There was a certain vapidity to her reassurance, an automatic way of expressing goodwill, which did not require any concrete efforts on her part to help him. Sometimes he wondered, not resentfully, whether she truly wanted him to find a job, because he would no longer be able to watch the children while she popped out to Tesco to buy milk, no longer be able to make their breakfast while she supervised their practice before school, Nne on the piano or violin and Nna on the cello. There was something about those days that Obinze would come to miss, buttering toast in the weak light of morning while the sounds of music floated through the house, and sometimes, too, Ojiugo’s voice, raised in praise or impatience, saying, “Well done! Try once more!” or “What rubbish are you doing?”
Later that afternoon, after Ojiugo brought the children home from school, she told Nna, “Your Uncle Obinze cooked the chicken.”
“Thank you for helping Mummy, Uncle, but I don’t think I’ll be having any chicken.” He had his mother’s playful manner.
“Look at this boy,” Ojiugo said. “Your uncle is a better cook than I am.”
Nna rolled his eyes. “Okay, Mummy, if you say so. Can I watch TV? Just for ten minutes?”
“Okay, ten minutes.”
It was the half-hour break after their homework and before their French tutor arrived, and Ojiugo was making jam sandwiches, carefully cutting off the crusts. Nna turned on the television, to a music performance by a man wearing many large shiny chains around his neck.
“Mummy, I’ve been thinking about this,” Nna said. “I want to be a rapper.”
“You can’t be a rapper, Nna.”
“But I want to, Mummy.”
“You are not going to be a rapper, sweetheart. We did not come to London for you to become a rapper.” She turned to Obinze, stifling laughter. “You see this boy?”
Nne came into the kitchen, a Capri-Sun in hand. “Mummy? May I have one please?”
“Yes, Nne,” she said, and, turning to Obinze, repeated her daughter’s words in an exaggerated British accent. “Mummy, may I have one please? You see how she sounds so posh? Ha! My daughter will go places. That is why all our money is going to Brentwood School.” Ojiugo gave Nne a loud kiss on her forehead and Obinze realized, watching her idly straighten a stray braid on Nne’s head, that Ojiugo was a wholly contented person. Another kiss on Nne’s forehead. “How are you feeling, Oyinneya?” she asked.
“Fine, Mummy.”
“Tomorrow, remember not to read only the line they ask you to read. Go further, okay?”
“Okay, Mummy.” Nne had the solemn demeanor of a child determined to please the adults in her life.
“You know her violin exam is tomorrow, and she struggles with sight reading,” Ojiugo said, as though Obinze could possibly have forgotten, as though it were possible to forget when Ojiugo had been talking about it for so long. The past weekend, he had gone with Ojiugo and the children to a birthday party in an echo-filled rented hall, Indian and Nigerian children running around, while Ojiugo whispered to him about some of the children, who was clever at math but could not spell, who was Nne’s biggest rival. She knew the recent test scores of all the clever children. When she could not remember what an Indian child, Nne’s close friend, had scored on a recent test, she called Nne to ask her.
“Ahn-ahn, Ojiugo, let her play,” Obinze said.
Now, Ojiugo planted a third loud kiss on Nne’s forehead. “My precious. We still have to get a dress for the party.”
“Yes, Mummy. Something red, no, burgundy.”
“Her friend is having a party, this Russian girl, they became friends because they have the same violin tutor. The first time I met the girl’s mother, I think she was wearing something illegal, like the fur of an extinct animal, and she was trying to pretend that she did not have a Russian accent, being more British than the British!”
“She’s nice, Mummy,” Nne said.
“I didn’t say she wasn’t nice, my precious,” Ojiugo said.
Nna had increased the television volume.
“Turn that down, Nna,” Ojiugo said.
“Mummy!”
“Turn down the volume right now!”
“But I can’t hear anything, Mummy!”
He didn’t turn down the volume and she didn’t say anything else to him; instead she turned to Obinze to continue talking.
“Speaking of accents,” Obinze said. “Would Nna get away with that if he didn’t have a foreign accent?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know last Saturday when Chika and Bose brought their children, I was just thinking that Nigerians here really forgive so much from their children because they have foreign accents. The rules are different.”
“Mba, it is not about accents. It is because in Nigeria, people teach their children fear instead of respect. We don’t want them to fear us but that does not mean we take rubbish from them. We punish them. The boy knows I will slap him if he does any nonsense. Seriously slap him.”
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
“Oh, but she’ll keep her word.” Ojiugo smiled. “You know I haven’t read a book in ages. No time.”
“My mother used to say you would become a leading literary critic.”
“Yes. Before her brother’s son got me pregnant.” Ojiugo paused, still smiling. “Now it is just these children. I want Nna to go to the City of London School. And then by God’s grace to Mar
lborough or Eton. Nne is already an academic star, and I know she’ll get scholarships to all the good schools. Everything is about them now.”
“One day they will be grown and leave home and you will just be a source of embarrassment or exasperation for them and they won’t take your phone calls or won’t call you for weeks,” Obinze said, and as soon as he said it, he wished he had not. It was petty, it had not come out as he intended. But Ojiugo was not offended. She shrugged and said, “Then I will just carry my bag and go and stand in front of their house.”
It puzzled him that she did not mourn all the things she could have been. Was it a quality inherent in women, or did they just learn to shield their personal regrets, to suspend their lives, subsume themselves in child care? She browsed online forums about tutoring and music and schools, and she told him what she had discovered as though she truly felt the rest of the world should be as interested as she was in how music improved the mathematics skills of nine-year-olds. Or she would spend hours on the phone talking to her friends, about which violin teacher was good and which tutorial was a waste of money.
One day, after she had rushed off to take Nna to his piano lesson, she called Obinze to say, laughing, “Can you believe I forgot to brush my teeth?” She came home from Weight Watchers meetings to tell him how much she had lost or gained, hiding Twix bars in her handbag and then asking him, with laughter, if he wanted one. Later she joined another weight-loss program, attended two morning meetings, and came home to tell him, “I’m not going there again. They treat you as if you have a mental problem. I said no, I don’t have any internal issues, please, I just like the taste of food, and the smug woman tells me that I have something internal that I am repressing. Rubbish. These white people think that everybody has their mental problems.” She was twice the size she had been in university, and while her clothes back then had never been polished, they had the edge of a calculated style, jeans folded away from her ankles, slouchy blouses pulled off one shoulder. Now, they merely looked sloppy. Her jeans left a mound of pulpy flesh above her waist that disfigured her T-shirts, as though something alien were growing underneath.
Sometimes, her friends visited and they would sit in the kitchen talking until they all dashed off to pick up their children. In those weeks of willing the phone to ring, Obinze came to know their voices well. He could hear clearly from the tiny bedroom upstairs where he lay in bed reading.
“I met this man recently,” Chika said. “He is nice o, but he is so bush. He grew up in Onitsha and so you can imagine what kind of bush accent he has. He mixes up ch and sh. I want to go to the chopping center. Sit down on a sheer.”
They laughed.
“Anyway, he told me he was willing to marry me and adopt Charles. Willing! As if he was doing charity work. Willing! Imagine that. But it’s not his fault, it’s because we are in London. He is the kind of man I would never even look at in Nigeria, not to talk of going out with. The problem is that water never finds its different levels here in London.”
“London is a leveler. We are now all in London and we are now all the same, what nonsense,” Bose said.
“Maybe he should go and find a Jamaican woman,” Amara said. Her husband had left her for a Jamaican woman, with whom it turned out he had a secret four-year-old child, and she somehow managed to veer every conversation towards the subject of Jamaicans. “These West Indian women are taking our men and our men are stupid enough to follow them. Next thing, they will have a baby and they don’t want the men to marry them o, they just want child support. All they do is spend their money doing their hair and nails.”
“Yes,” Bose, Chika, and Ojiugo all agreed. A routine, automatic agreement: Amara’s emotional well-being was more important than what they actually believed.
The phone rang. Ojiugo took the call and came back to say, “This woman who just called, she is a character. Her daughter and Nne belong to the same orchestra. I met her when Nne took her first exam. She came in her Bentley, a black woman, with a driver and everything. She asked me where we lived and when I told her, I just knew what was on her mind: how can somebody in Essex be thinking of the National Children’s Orchestra? So I decided to look for trouble and I told her, My daughter goes to Brentwood, and you should have seen her face! You know people like us are not supposed to be talking about private school and music. The most we should want is a good grammar school. I just looked at the woman and I was laughing inside. Then she started telling me that music for children is very expensive. She kept telling me how expensive it is, as if she had seen my empty bank account. Imagine o! She is one of those black people who want to be the only black person in the room, so any other black person is an immediate threat to her. She just called now to tell me that she read online about an eleven-year-old girl who got grade five distinction and did not get into the National Children’s Orchestra. Why would she call just to tell me that negative story?”
“Enemy of progress!” Bose said.
“Is she a Jamaican?” Amara asked.
“She is Black British. I don’t know where her people came from.”
“It must be Jamaica,” Amara said.
CHAPTER 25
Sharp, the word everyone used to describe Emenike in secondary school. Sharp, full of the poisoned admiration they felt for him. Sharp Guy. Sharp Man. If exam questions leaked, Emenike knew how to get them. He knew, too, which girl had had an abortion, what property the parents of the wealthy students owned, which teachers were sleeping together. He always spoke quickly, pugnaciously, as though every conversation was an argument, the speed and force of his words suggesting authority and discouraging dissent. He knew, and he was full of an eagerness to know. Whenever Kayode returned from a London vacation, flush with relevance, Emenike would ask him about the latest music and films, and then examine his shoes and clothes. “Is this one designer? What is the name of this one?” Emenike would ask, his eyes feral with longing. He had told everyone that his father was the igwe of his hometown, and had sent him to Lagos to live with an uncle until he turned twenty-one, to avoid the pressures of princely life. But one day, an old man arrived at school, wearing trousers with a mended patch near the knee, his face gaunt, his body bowed with the humility that poverty had forced on him. All the boys laughed after they discovered that he was really Emenike’s father. The laughter was soon forgotten, perhaps because nobody had ever fully believed the prince story—Kayode, after all, always called Emenike Bush Boy behind his back. Or perhaps because they needed Emenike, who had information that nobody else did. This, the audacity of him, had drawn Obinze. Emenike was one of the few people for whom “to read” did not mean “to study,” and so they would spend hours talking about books, bartering knowledge for knowledge, and playing Scrabble. Their friendship grew. At university, when Emenike lived with him in the boys’ quarters of his mother’s house, people had sometimes mistaken him for a relative. “What of your brother?” people would ask Obinze. And Obinze would say, “He’s fine,” without bothering to explain that he and Emenike were not related at all. But there were many things he did not know about Emenike, things he knew not to ask about. Emenike often left school for weeks, only vaguely saying that he had “gone home,” and he spoke endlessly of people who were “making it” abroad. His was the coiled, urgent restlessness of a person who believed that fate had mistakenly allotted him a place below his true destiny. When he left for England during a strike in their second year, Obinze never knew how he got a visa. Still, he was pleased for him. Emenike was ripe, bursting, with his ambition, and Obinze thought of his visa as a mercy: that ambition would finally find a release. It seemed to, quite quickly, as Emenike sent news only of progress: his postgraduate work completed, his job at the housing authority, his marriage to an Englishwoman who was a solicitor in the city.
Emenike was the first person Obinze called after he arrived in England.
“The Zed! Good to hear from you. Let me call you back, I’m just going into a managerial meeting,” Emenike
said. The second time Obinze called, Emenike sounded a little harried. “I’m at Heathrow. Georgina and I are going to Brussels for a week. I’ll call you when I get back. I can’t wait to catch up, man!” Emenike’s e-mail response to Obinze had been similar: So happy you are coming this way, man, can’t wait to see you! Obinze had imagined, foolishly, that Emenike would take him in, show him the way. He knew of the many stories of friends and relatives who, in the harsh glare of life abroad, became unreliable, even hostile, versions of their former selves. But what was it about the stubbornness of hope, the need to believe in your own exceptionality, that these things happened to other people whose friends were not like yours? He called other friends. Nosa, who had left right after graduation, picked him up at the tube station and drove him to a pub where other friends soon gathered. They shook hands and slapped backs and drank draft beer. They laughed about memories from school. They said little about the details of their present lives. When Obinze said he needed to get a National Insurance number, and asked, “Guys, how I go take do?” they all shook their heads vaguely.
“Just keep your ear to the ground, man,” Chidi said.
“The thing is to come closer to central London. You’re too far away from things, in Essex,” Wale said.
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