On Black Sisters Street (25 page)

Lagos streets were rutted, gutted, and near-impassable, yet they were jam-packed with cars: huge air-conditioned Jeeps driving tail to tail with disintegrating jalopies whose faulty exhaust pipes sent out
clouds of dark smoke, making the air so thick with pollution that a constant mist hung over the city, and the bit of sky that one saw was sullied with dirt. Broken-down trucks dotted the highways, their flanks huge banners of wisdom, warnings, tidbits of information, or prayers written in bold blacks and reds, each letter a flourish with a paintbrush: R
OME WAS NOT BUILT IN A DAY; WORK HARD AND YOUR DAY WILL COME. POOR MAN GO RISE ONE DAY. GIVE PEACE A CHANCE; AFTER ALL STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE HAD TO LIVE TOGETHER. THE YOUNG SHALL GROW. GOD PLEASE MAKE ME RICH. EDUCATION PLUS BEAUTY MINUS CHRIST EQUALS HELLFIRE; SINNER REPENT. HAD I KNOWN IS THE BROTHER TO MR. LATE. ASK AND YE SHALL RECEIVE: MATTHEW 7:7
.

The words were sometimes misspelled, the job shoddy splotches of paint, but it seemed to Alek that no self-respecting Lagos truck would be seen without a slogan or prayer inscribed along its side. She loved to read the slogans out loud to Polycarp as they drove around the city: “ ‘One plus one does not always equating two.’ ‘The world is my oysta. I shall eat it well.’ ‘Saluttation is not love.’ ”

The trucks that did move ferried cows and goats, packed tight like sardines. “For Christmas,” Polycarp said, and asked if they ought to get a goat, too. Christmas was only three weeks away. Alek said no, she preferred chicken. “You’re with an Igbo man. You better start liking goat!” Polycarp responded, his laughter almost muffling his words.

On any given day, one was likely to find a corpse abandoned by the roadside, waiting for someone to claim it or for the many vultures that circled the city to devour it. Some of the dead were victims of hit-and-run drivers, most of whom were never found and brought to justice. The majority of the dead, however, Polycarp told her, were homeless people murdered by those who needed them to make money. Apparently, juju made of human blood was the best sort to ensure abundant wealth. There were many flyover loops to ease the traffic of the more than ten million people who called Lagos home.
Under the flyovers, beggars made beds out of cardboard and empty cement bags. They left their beds to harass passersby for money, touting their disability like trophies. Every sort of illness known to man was present in whole or in part in the homeless under the bridge. Alek thought it was almost a freak show, an unabashed display of anomalies. People with stumps for arms and legs sticking them at passing cars and pedestrians; blind people rapping on closed car windows and singing for money, led by children with perfect sight; people with disfigured mouths or eyeballs that were unnaturally huge; lepers with skin that looked plastered with coarse sand.

Once Alek saw a man with only a head and a torso being pushed in a wheelbarrow by an old man with the frail body of an invalid. She felt sorry for both of them, so much that at the risk of incurring Polycarp’s wrath, she threw a crumpled hundred-naira note from her window to them.

Polycarp had scowled at her,
tut-tut-tutting
his disapproval. “You’re just encouraging laziness. Some of these people have absolutely nothing wrong with them. If that old man can push that wheelbarrow, why isn’t he doing something useful? In Mali a blind couple are successful musicians. Their music is everywhere. I even know a Canadian professor who is blind. I met him. I shook his hand, so I know what I’m talking about.” In his anger, he gripped the steering wheel tighter. “I saw a TV program once where this white woman in London without arms or legs was painting with her mouth. She held the paintbrush between her teeth and one, two,
fiam
, she had finished painting this incredible picture. I saw this with my own
koro-koro
eyes. No one told me about it. I saw it. She is making money. She is making serious money. Her paintings are everywhere in London, and she is being paid for them. In this country, will it happen? No! They just get a spot under Third Mainland Bridge and wait for people to throw money into their palms. They are an eyesore. The government should get rid of all of them. Arrest them and shoot them like they did
Anini and the other armed robbers. If they don’t want to make use of the lives they’ve been given, they should be cleaned up.”

Sometimes Polycarp’s views bothered Alek, but she loved him nevertheless. The same way that Lagos sometimes bothered her but she liked it still. She loved its arrogant noisiness, its dazzling colors, its fiery temperament, and its hot food that caught her by surprise initially, making her hold her throat and mime maniacally for a glass of something to drink. Polycarp had laughed at her and told her she had to try his mother’s
ngwongwo
. “It’s more pepper than goat meat.”

Lagos was not all pollution and dirt. It had a splendid beauty that was sometimes enough to make her cry. The first time Polycarp took her to the Bar Beach on Victoria Island, the day was made to order: clear skies and a sun that shone straight onto the beach, a dazzling show of splendor. She stood on the wet, incredibly white sand, Polycarp holding her hand, and she told herself that life would not get any better than it already was. She had reached the zenith. Later, they walked along the water’s edge. She held her sandals in her right hand and Polycarp’s hand in her left. Under her feet the sand was moist and warm, like Polycarp’s breath behind her ears when they slept. Her feet made love to the sand. It was a day of innocence: the sort of day that made people believe nothing bad could happen.

She was sure she would be happy in Lagos. Not in the way she had been in Daru, of course, but in a different way that had nothing at all to do with her former life. Her life in Daru would never come back, but she was ready to move on. No more dust clogging her lungs. She felt lucky to have been given another shot. And with Polycarp by her side, there was very little else she wanted.

The flat that Polycarp rented for them had two bedrooms and a small sitting room that she walked the width of in ten normal steps. Alek spent time decorating it. Buying curtains for the windows and pictures for the walls. She went with Polycarp to order a dining-room table from the local carpenter. Polycarp asked for a table that could
sit three, for when they had the occasional visitor, he said. Alek smiled shyly and said she much preferred a table that could sit six. She was thinking ahead. To when they would have their own children. And before then, to when Polycarp’s family visited. She would make sure they felt at home. She would make it clear to them that they could look upon her as a sister. Or as a daughter.

“But there is no space for that, darling,” Polycarp said, reminding her that they still had to fit chairs, a TV, and a sound system into the same room. They compromised on a table for four.

Alek chose the sitting-room furniture; she picked out chairs upholstered in the softest shade of brown, with seats so deep they swallowed one’s buttocks.

“These chairs, na ministerial chairs ooo,” the salesman told her, slapping the arm of a sofa. “You just sit in them and you go tink say you be president sef!” Alek laughed and asked for a set of four.

They chose a bed together, and when the salesman said they had made a good choice in a mattress: a firm, solid Dunlop on which “one trial and babies will be born.” Alek smiled, but Polycarp looked away, embarrassed. She hoped their babies would have their father’s eyes.

What with the decoration and the new life to get used to, it took Alek a while to notice that Polycarp had not yet gone to visit his family. Or that none of them had come to see them. She asked Polycarp when she could meet his family. She was looking forward to hours of gossip with his mother, to loving the woman who had given birth to the one person alive she loved the most. He told her they lived down south, in Onitsha, and did not often make trips to Lagos. “Too long. Too many bad roads. And the bus drivers are not always careful.” He counted each reason off on his fingers.

She suggested that they go and visit them. “You’re a careful driver, Polycarp, and I don’t mind the distance.”

Polycarp told her he would think about it, but what with him
being very busy at work and the distance being long, he did not know when they would be able to make it. “It’s not Badagry. You just can’t get up and go. You have to prepare, make arrangements.”

She tried to make friends with other women, wives of officers in her neighborhood. She asked good-neighborly-wanting-to-be-friends questions.

They answered her all right. Yes, they were fine. Yes, it was hard being an officer’s wife. Yes, it was impossible to sleep with the heat. Yes, Lagos had too many cars. Far too many for its own good. But they always fell still after the queries, and none invited her to their homes. And she did not have the courage to invite them to hers. Maybe she was too young for them. Most of the women had teenage children already, children who were her age. She had nothing in common with these children who still lived at home and so did not bother to seek them out. What would they talk about? School? Friends? Parties? The things she had been through had made her way older than they were. Instead of talking to them, she stood on her balcony fighting claustrophobia and dust, making henna patterns in the skies, trying to convince herself that she did not need anyone and that Polycarp was more than enough for her.

Sometimes they went to Ojay’s to listen to Rolling Dollar play music that got Polycarp reminiscing about his youth. Telling her how his parents played highlife music when he was young. Sometimes they went to all-night
owambe
parties where entire streets were barred to traffic and live bands played loud music all night long and food and drinks flowed in excess. At first Alek found the idea strange. Most times they did not even know who the celebrants were or what they were celebrating, but the music would attract Polycarp, and he would tell her to dress up, another party to go to. She soon got used to the parties with deafening music, where she and Polycarp danced until their legs turned liquid and then fell exhausted into each other’s arms to rediscover themselves.

•   •   •

ALEK BEGAN TO SUSPECT THAT THINGS WERE NOT ALL RIGHT WHEN
Polycarp stopped saying “I’ll think about it” when she asked about visiting his family in Onitsha. Instead, he muttered over a newspaper that “it was impossible at the moment” and returned to his paper. Alek’s happiness dissipated a little, but she was not entirely down. It was like Coca-Cola that had gone flat but was still drinkable. She asked a few more times but, getting no further than before, she decided to let it rest for a while. Her mother used to do that with her father. “No point in nagging a man,” her mother would say. “They are like children. The more you nag, the more headstrong they are. You ask, you withdraw, and then you ask again. It’s all tactical.”

I had been living with him for almost a year and still had not met his family. It did not seem right. So I gave him a break and then I started nagging him about it again
.

After a restless week in which Polycarp was a lot more taciturn than normal, he announced to Alek on a Saturday morning that he was leaving for Onitsha to visit his parents. Alone. Alek felt the dust worming its way into her nose, filling up her lungs, and the pain she felt almost had her doubled up.

“Why?”

Polycarp looked at her as if she had suddenly gone insane. “Why? What do you mean by ‘why?’ Do I need a reason to visit my parents? You have been nagging, nagging: ‘Polycarp, when are you going? Polycarp, when are they coming?’ Well, now I’m going.”

She knew that he knew that she was asking why he was going without her. He knew that she wanted to come along. Something twisted in her and she looked at him, this man she had always adored, and for the first time she wished she could hurt him in some way. Without a word, she turned her back on him, left the kitchen, and walked into the bedroom. She did not come out to wave him
goodbye when he said that he was on his way out. She pressed her head into the pillow and tried not to breathe in the scent of him.

At night, alone in the flat, she stood on the balcony and tried to create henna patterns in the sky, but what she produced was a farrago of dripping red and brown. And all around her a sandstorm whipped.

He came back after two days.
He said he was sorry for going off like that. He didn’t know what had come over him
. Six months later, in June, he went again. Alone. In between his trips, he was the same old Polycarp. Loving her. On the weekend, he took her to Bar Beach and paid for her to go on horse rides and bought her
suya
and Sprite. In the midst of the neck-kissing-eye-searching-horse-riding-hand-holding love, the cracks that were developing had enough hiding places.
Maybe that was why I did not notice that there was something wrong
. Why she noticed his restlessness only in retrospect.

The second time he went, he returned on a hot Tuesday afternoon with an older, feminine, fuller version of himself. Where the son had a scar under his left eye, the mother had a beauty spot above hers. She had a rather agreeable structure, ample in all the right places: the arms, the bit of legs that showed under her skirt, the cheeks. But her eyes were cold, cold, cold. They got colder when Polycarp perfunctorily introduced them: “My mother. Mama, Alek,” nodding to one and then to the other. And froze when Alek threw her hands around her in a welcome embrace.

Polycarp’s mother, freezer eyes and hissing lips, rejected the hug with a ferocity that landed Alek on the floor, buttocks first.
Pwa!
The humiliation! The shock! And when Alek looked at Polycarp, he averted his eyes and said something in Igbo to his mother. Mother and son walked into the guest room and left Alek sitting there like a scene from a still film, her mouth opening to form a surprised, silent ‘O.’ Around her, she felt the stirrings of a sandstorm.

At the lunch table, Polycarp’s mother spoke only to her son. They
chatted in Igbo, and often the woman burst into raucous laughter, a
ke ke ke
that, in its cheeriness, sounded false to Alek, a show staged for her, although she could not tell why. She had been there for an hour and had yet to say a word to Alek. Nor had Polycarp, for that matter, brushing Alek’s infuriated “What’s that all about?” away with a contained “We’ll talk later. I promise you.” His voice not quite sounding like his.