On Black Sisters Street (2 page)

“Yes. She did. He told her she could not go abroad with him because the British embassy required her GCSE results before they would give her a visa. Dat na de only way he could tink of to stop her
wahalaing
him about traveling with him. Four wives, and she wanted him to pick her above the rest? And she no be even the chief wife. Imagine! De woman just dey craze!”

“Your uncle handled it well. Sometimes it’s just easier to lie to
people. Saves you a lot of trouble and time,” Joyce said, placing a drinking glass she had just dried in the cupboard above her head.

“Men are bastards,” Ama said.

“Ama, lighten up. Since when did this story become about men being bastards, eh? Everything has to be so serious with you; you know how to spoil a good day. You just have to get worked up over nothing!” Sisi wiped a plate dry, examined it for smudges, and finding none, placed it on top of another on the work surface beside the sink.

Ama turned toward Sisi and hissed. “Move the plates,
abeg
. If you leave them there, they’ll only get wet again. Why don’t you put them away as soon as you’ve dried?” She hissed again and went to work scrubbing a pot in the kitchen sink. “How could you burn rice, Sisi? I can’t get the fucking pot clean!”

“I don’t know what’s eating you up, Ama, but I don’t want any part of it. Whoever sent you, tell them you didn’t see me, I beg of you.”

“Fuck off. Why don’t you fuck off on one of your long walks?” Ama’s voice was a storm building.

Efe tried to calm the storm. “Girls, girls, it’s a beautiful day. Make una no ruin am!” She hoped it would not rain. It was a beautiful day for November: leaves turned aubergine-purple and yellow and white by a mild autumn and a sky that did not forebode rain. A minor miracle for the time of year. “See as de day just dey like fine picture, and una wan spoil am?”

“Nobody’s ruining anything. Anyway, I’m done here.” Ama pulled out the now gleaming pot and walked out of the kitchen into the sitting room. She flooded the room with the
twang boom bam
of a Highlife tune. She lit a cigarette and began to dance.

Efe, swishing a kitchen towel over her head, sighed and followed her into the sitting room. “I can see you don’ dey get ready for the party, Ama. Oooh, shake that booty, girl! Shake am like your mama teach you!”

“Oh, shut it! What has my mother got to do with my dancing?”
Ama moved away from Efe, the crucifix around her neck glinting. Her anger seemed blown up. Exaggerated. But Efe let it pass. She had other things on her mind.

The party, for starters. The Moroccan man who had promised to get her cartons of beer at a discount had just called to say that his contact had not come through. Now the drinks would cost her a lot more than she had budgeted for. The girls had promised to help her with the food, but with Ama in this mood, she might have one fewer pair of hands. Everything had to go to plan today. A burial ceremony for her grandmother had to be talked about for months to come. That was how much she loved the woman. And they were not even related. She wanted a party that would last all night.

And that would be what would put her in trouble with Madam. The party was a success, so much so that Efe could not leave until almost midnight. Madam’s anger manifested itself in a laughter that was dry like a cough and a sneering “Ah, so you’ve earned enough money to waltz in to work whenever you want?” For a week she refused to let Efe use her booth. One week of not earning money was enough to put anyone off getting into Madam’s bad books.

Still, Iya Ijebu got a party deserving of her. “She is not even my real grandmother,” Efe told the women when she told them of her death. “I been dey call her granny, but she be just dis woman wey live near our house. On Sundays, she made me
moi-moi
. When I was in primary school, if my mother wasn’t home, she’d make lunch for my younger ones and me. Ah, the woman was nice to us. Which kin’ granny pass dat one? Goodbye, Granny. Rest in peace.”

“What killed her?” Joyce asked.

Even Efe did not know how the woman had died. The news of her death had been an interspersion between “Buy me a Motorola mobile phone” and a “Papa Eugene wants to know how easy it is to ship a car from there to here.” A distant “Iya Ijebu died two weeks ago” carried along a faint and crackling telephone line from a telephone cabin
in Lagos to a glass-doored booth in a Pakistani Internet/telephone café in Antwerp.

“She died? Iya Ijebu?
Osalobua!
What killed her?” A voice loud enough to reach the other end. She had tried to drag her sister back to the news she had just delivered. “How? What happened?”

“What? I can’t hear you. Did you hear what I said about the Motorola?”

And then the line had whined and died, and Efe went around in a frenzy organizing a party.

She did not know the details of the death, but at the party she would distribute badly xeroxed pictures of the deceased: a woman in a huge head scarf, looking solemn and already dead, against a backdrop of palm trees painted wildly on a prop behind her. Below it would be the announcement that she had died after a “sudden” illness at the age of seventy-five (which was an estimation; who cared, really, about exact ages?). And that Efe, her granddaughter, was “Grateful to God for a life well spent.” Summer would have been a better choice, its temperament better suited to feasting, but a party was what dreary November needed to cheer it up. She had a lot to worry about. What to cook. What to play. Who to have. There would be lots of Ghanaians; those people were everywhere. Nigerians, of course, went without saying. A sprinkling of East Africans—Kenyans who ate samosas and had no traditional clothes and complained about the pepper in Nigerian food, not really African. The three Ugandan women she knew who stumbled over their words,
brackening
black and
renthening
long. And the only Zimbabwean she knew, a woman who shuffled when she danced. Those guests would spawn other guests, multiplying the guest list to infinity, so that she was glad she had the foresight to hire a huge abandoned warehouse close to the Central Station, not the parish hall of a church she had rented last year to celebrate her birthday.

Here she had enough space not to worry about the number of people who would eventually turn up. And unlike the floor of the
parish hall, which she had to ensure was spotless at the end of the party, this place had no such obligation. The tiles had come off in some places, exposing dark earth, like half-peeled scabs over old wounds. Against the walls were high metal racks, most of which were already corroded. The racks would come in handy for stacking crates of beer and cool boxes of food, so Efe did not need to borrow tables. In front of the racks were white picnic chairs. The space in the middle provided ample dancing room.

By the time Sisi, Joyce, and Ama arrived, the party was in full swing. Music blared and a lady in bright orange stilettos pulled off her shoes, held them over her head, and yodeled at the very high ceiling. Joyce, radiant in a black minidress that showed off her endless legs, edged farther into the room and began to dance with a man in an oversize shirt. Several times that day she would be told that with her height and good looks she could have been a model. It was not anything she had not heard before. So she would laugh it off and say, “Now, that’s my plan B.”

Ama spied two Ghanaian guests going back for a third helping of rice and smirked to Sisi that surely, surely, Nigerians cooked better, made tastier fried rice than Ghanaians (people who threw whole tomatoes in sauces could not really cook, could they?). And both women agreed that Ghanaians were just wannabe Nigerians and Antwerp was, for all its faults, the best city in the world and Belgium had the best beers, the Leffe and the Westmalle and the Stella Artois. You could not find those anywhere else, could you?

Efe toddled up to them, complaining that the soles of her feet hurt from too much dancing. She should not have worn such high-heeled shoes, she said.

“But you always wear high heels! You’ll complain today, and tomorrow you’ll be in them again,” Sisi teased.

“With my height, if I no wear heels, I go be like full stop on the ground.”

Efe was not really short. At least not much shorter than Sisi, who described her height as average. “Average” translated in her passport to five feet seven. But of all four women, Efe was the shortest, and this gave her a complex.

“You’re not short, Efe. You just like your heels high!”

High-heeled shoes and wigs were Efe’s trademark. Ama called her the Imelda Marcos of wigs. Today she wore a bobbed black wig, so it looked as if she were wearing a beret. It was not a wig her housemates had seen, so it must be new. Bought for the occasion. It was not as voluminous as the wigs she normally wore, and the effect was that her features looked exaggerated: her nose, her lips, her eyes looked blown up, as if they were under a magnifying glass.

Ama tapped her feet impatiently to the music.

“These your bowlegs dey always itch to dance,” Efe teased her.

“Where’s the fucking booze?” Feet still tapping to the music.

Before Efe could answer, Ama was already off. She found her way to the beer and grabbed a bottle of her favorite blond beer. Swigging the beer, she danced alone in the middle of the floor, bumping into other dancers, shouting out at intervals that life was good. GOOD! A black man in short, angry dreads swayed effeminately toward her, and Ama moved back. He tried to grasp her hand, and she snatched it away and gave him an evil eye.

“What’s wrong with ya, sister?” he said, in what she could only guess was meant to be an American accent.

“I’m not your sister,” and she twirled and danced away.

The man shrugged and went in search of a more willing dance partner, grumbling “Bloody Africans” under his breath. He found his way to Efe, who was sipping a glass of apple juice, and dragged her to the dance floor. Efe was a lot more obliging. She downed her juice and glided onto the dance floor, which was fast filling up. “
Wema
, you’re an awright sister! You Africans can really
pardy
!”

“Where’re you from?” Efe asked, amused.

“
Seth
Africa. The real deal. You Ghanaian, too?”

“Nigerian.”

“Oh, Nigerian? We got a lotta those
makwerekweres
in Jo’burg. Lots of Nigerians. They in the news all the time back home in
Seth
Africa.”

Efe said she had to get back to her drink. What was it with the South Africans she met claiming another continent for their country? Especially the black South Africans. She saw Joyce, her black hair extensions moving furiously as she danced with a light-skinned man in a kente shirt. Efe smiled and mouthed “jerk” to Joyce and pointed at the South African, who was now talking to a woman with braids down to her shoulders. Sisi danced behind Joyce, a bottle of beer in one hand and the other waving wildly in the air, two gold rings catching and dispelling light like magic.

Sisi moved close to Joyce and whispered that Ama seemed to be in a much better mood. “That Ama. She can be tiresome sometimes. What does she want us to do? Walk on tiptoe in our own house?” Sisi and Joyce had joined the women only two months before.

Joyce shrugged. She was out to have a good time, not worry about Ama. Of all the women in the house, Sisi was the only one she was remotely close to. Sisi was the most beautiful of the other three, she thought. Her beauty was all the more striking for being unexpected; she had thin legs, a low waist, and a short neck. When you saw her from behind—which was how Joyce saw her the first time—you did not expect to see a beautiful face, flawless skin. She also seemed genuinely nice. Ama was a basket case given to bellicosity; everything set her off. Efe, she was not sure about. Perhaps, given time, she would like her. Efe was definitely more likable than Ama, although she had her own issues. Yesterday Joyce had called her Mother because she had tried to mediate between Sisi and Ama, who were having a quarrel over what TV program to watch. Everybody could tell it was a joke—even Ama (even Ama!) laughed—but Efe had not been amused. “I’m
nobody’s mother,” she had said, her voice wan, as if in disappointment at a betrayal. Still, she was more affable than Ama.

“I need to pee,” Sisi said, and went off in search of a bathroom.

Ama saw her pushing her way through the people on the dance floor and went up to her. “Not off, are you?” Ama asked with a wink.

Sisi’s lips pursed. “I’m just looking for the toilet. Not like it’s any of your business.”

“What’s your fucking problem? Geez!” Ama hissed. She had a bottle of beer in one hand.

“My problem is you,” Sisi responded.

“Oh, get over it! Are you still upset about Segun?” Ama quaffed some beer. “If it’s a lie, why are you so bloody worked up?”

“Shut up, Ama!” Sisi’s voice was raised. Ever since the incident with Segun, Ama had been frustratingly smug. Winking and making silly comments. Screeching songs around the house about Segun and Sisi.

“You think you know it all.”

“So why don’t you tell me, then?” Ama bridged the gap between them so that their shoulders touched. Sisi was the taller, bigger woman, but if it came to blows, she would bet on Ama. The regularity with which she picked fights suggested brawn of such superiority as to instill dread. Sisi took a step back. Ama took one step forward. Efe appeared at their side. “I hope you girls dey enjoy my party?” Chance. Luck. Whatever it was that had brought Efe, Sisi grabbed it and walked away.

When Sisi got back from the bathroom, Joyce was still on the dance floor. Sisi went over to her and tapped her on the shoulder. “What time do we leave?” Joyce asked, turning away from the man in kente. They had to be in their booths by eight.

“Around seven. I’d still like to clean up a bit before work tonight.”

“I’ve eaten so much at this party that I worry I’ll just snooze at work,” Joyce said, and laughed, a bit of tongue showing through the
gap in her front teeth, white teeth that contrasted so sharply with her dark lips.

“Sleep
ke
? Me, my eyes are on the money, baby! I’ve got no time to sleep, and neither do you!” Sisi mock-scolded. “I want a gold ring on each finger.”