On Black Sisters Street (4 page)

Outside, a neighbor’s dog barks. Its owner shouts for it. Tells it to be calm, he’s almost ready for their walk. The ladies might still be sleeping, he says.
Shh
.

But the ladies are not sleeping. Inside, Efe, Ama, and Joyce are gathered in a room painted in tongues of fire. They are sitting on a long couch, its black color fading with age, its frame almost giving way underneath their combined weight. The wall against which their couch is placed is slightly cool, and if they lean back, their necks press against the coolness. They are mostly silent, a deep quiet entombing them, filling up the room, so that there is hardly room for anything
else. The silence is a huge sponge soaking up air, and all three of them have thought at different times this morning that perhaps they should open the door. But they do not, because they know that would not have helped, as the door opens onto a short carpeted hallway. They think about the air that seems vile and rub their necks and their temples. Still, no one says a word. They will not talk about it. Their eyes are mainly on their laps, their arms folded across their chests. Sisi is everywhere. She is not here, but they cannot escape her, even in their thoughts. Joyce says the room is dusty. She grabs a rag from the kitchen—one of the many that she stocks in a cupboard—and starts to dust the walls. The table. The mantelpiece above the fake fireplace with logs that never burned.

Efe says, “Stop. It’s not dusty.”

Joyce continues dusting. Frantically. Her rag performing a crazed dance, like one possessed. The same way she dusts her bedposts in the Vingerlingstraat every morning, after the men have gone.

Ama has a bottle of Leffe on the floor between her legs. She picks it up and starts to drink. The sound of her gulping the beer takes over the silence for a while.
Glup. Glup. Glup
. Until it’s finished. She flings the bottle onto the floor. Efe eyes it as it rolls, slows down, and finally stops.

“Isn’t it too early to be drinking, Ama? Day never even break finish!” Efe tells her.

“It’s early, and so fucking what?” Ama burps. Tugs at her crucifix. “You dey always get ant for your arse. Every day na so so annoyance you dey carry around.”

“Fuck off.”

Another burp.

Joyce keeps dusting. Maniacally.

The women are not sure what they are to one another. Thrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele, they are bound in a sort of unobtrusive friendship, comfortable with whatever
little they know of one another, asking no questions unless they are prompted to, sharing deep laughter and music in their sitting room, making light of the life that has taught them to make the most of the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs, dissecting the men who come to them (men who spend nights lying on top of them or under them, shoving and fiddling and clenching their brown buttocks and finally [mostly] using their fingers to shove their own pale meat in) in voices loud and deprecating. And now, with the news that they have just received, they have become bound by something so surreal that they are afraid of talking about it. It is as if, by skirting around it, by avoiding it, they can pretend it never happened.

Yet Sisi is on their minds.

SISI

“THERE IS NO ROOM TO BREATHE HERE!” CHISOM DROPPED THE MIRROR
and turned to Peter, her boyfriend of three years. She had left her parents in the middle of an argument and gone to Peter’s flat, not too far from theirs. Peter with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. The framed certificate had pride of place in his cluttered sitting room, on top of his small black-and-white television. Since the television faced the door, the certificate was usually the first thing a guest saw. Above it on the wall, another framed certificate announced that Peter was teacher of the year. Beside that, a framed photograph of Peter with stars in his eyes, shaking the hand of a bored-looking man in a stiff black coat. Under the photograph, the inscription
TEACHER OF THE YEAR
, with the commissioner for education, Chief Dr. R. C. Munonye. There were identically framed photographs in Peter’s bedroom. Peter with eyes that sparkled, shaking the hands of men (and occasionally women) in flamboyant suits who always looked bored. Or busy. And very often both. Peter’s flat was a shrine to an accumulation of incremental successes that did not camouflage, as far as Chisom was concerned, the fallacies of those successes. Peter’s life was a cul-de-sac. He did not have the passion to dream like Chisom did, did not aspire to break down the walls that kept him in.

And this made her think that she was outgrowing him.

“I’ll marry you one day, and I shall take you away from here,” Peter swore, his voice firm like a schoolteacher’s, as he wet his right index finger and pointed it up to the ceiling to accompany his oath. He walked toward her and held her around her waist, nuzzled the side of her face with the side of his. “I promise you. I’ll take you away from all this, baby!” Another nuzzle.

In Europe, when she would no longer be Chisom and before Luc, this was what she would miss most about him. His hands around her waist. His breath warm against her face. His stubble scratching her cheek. She would believe that she would never find that kind of love again. That she would never hanker after the sort of intimacy that made her want to be completely subsumed by the other. She would be wrong on both counts.

“I don’t want to become like my mother,” Chisom said, gently unlocking his hands around her and turning around to look earnestly at this young man who thought he could rescue her. What did he have? she thought. He had a job teaching at a local school. The months he got paid, his salary was barely enough to cover the rent on this flat where his five siblings lived with him. The months he did not get paid, he begged his landlord to allow him to live on credit. His eyes looked into hers, and their solemnity pained her. She looked away. His patience, of rather heroic proportions, aggravated her.

“Peter, you have to save yourself from drowning before you start promising to save others!” Her voice came out angrier than she had intended. What right did he have to make promises he could not keep? What right did he have to ask her to wait here, to wait for him, while she got pulled further underwater?

There had been a time when she had looked up to him. Her whiz kid with the soft hands and a brain that could make sense of any mathematical equation, (a × b) × c =a × (b × c) =a × b × c, decipher words that made no sense to her: polynomial, exponential, trigonometric. Algebraic identities. Laplace transform table. Scribbling
magic in his notebook that fascinated her to no end and gave certainty to a future that included him.

It was not as if she no longer loved him. She did. She loved the way his left eye half shut when he smiled. She loved the way he cradled her when they made love, breathing into her skin. She loved the way he grinned while he ate, as if the very act of eating, the thoughtful chewing, never mind what was being eaten, was pleasurable; an art to be cultivated, elevated, and enjoyed. But love had its limits. Peter did not have the means to turn her life around. Had she had foresight, she often thought, she would have done a nursing degree. At Christmas most of the men returning home from Europe and America with wallets full of foreign currency, to scout for wives, always went for the nurses. They said it was easier for nurses to get a job abroad. “The British NHS depends on our fucking nurses, innit?” Ed, her friend and Ezimma’s cousin, told her. Ed also had come to get a wife. He lived in England—somewhere unpronounceable that ended in “Shire”—but so unmistakably English that it made him attractive, and within three weeks of being in Nigeria and parading both himself and his pounds, he found himself a willing nurse. Even though Chisom did not like the way he marinated his sentences in “shit” and “bloodyfucking” and “innit,” she knew that had he asked her to marry him, she would have. Because by then she had given up on love as a prerequisite for marriage. She would discover this yearning, this want to marry for love, a year later, abroad.

“We are all stuck here, baby,” Peter told her, his arms around her again. He took her ear in his mouth and bit on it gently. She liked it when he did that.

“And I am tired of being stuck.” She let him hold her, regretting her earlier outburst. It was not Peter’s fault, after all, that she had no job or that he did not earn enough or that the entire economy was in a mess, so her father had nothing to show for his many years in the civil service, or that she did not see Peter as part of the bright future
that was hers. She closed her eyes and let the smell of his cologne take her away. “I wish life were like this,” she muttered. “I wish life smelled this good.”

Even as she said that, she knew she could not stand another year in Lagos. Not like this.
I must escape
. Perhaps it was this vow that made her recoil when Peter teased her mouth open and snaked his tongue in, running it across her teeth. She put a hand on his chest and gently pushed him away. She was not in the mood, she grumbled.

She would think, a few weeks later, that it was the vow that threw her directly in the path of providence. It would make leaving Peter easier. As for leaving her parents, she would be doing it for them as much as for herself.

CHISOM WAS AT THE HAIR SALON ON ADENIRAN OGUNSANYA STREET
, getting her perm retouched, when a man with a protuberant stomach walked in with a young girl who could not have been older than seventeen. It was obvious from the way he held her with his left hand, casually touching her buttocks, that there was nothing innocent about their relationship.

“
Oya!
Make am beautiful. She dey go abroad. Today! Beautify am!” he shouted, almost pushing her toward one of the hairdressers. He brought out a white handkerchief and wiped sweat off his forehead. His breath came in loud pants, the
hmph hmph hmph
of someone who had just run a marathon. It occurred to Chisom that it was probably the talking that wore him out. The young girl—all bones mainly, except for a humongous pair of breasts—was quiet. There was an uncertain smile on her face as she stood while Tina the hairdresser, toward whom she was pushed, touched her hair to determine what to do with it.

“You wan braid am? You get good hair,” Tina complimented as she raked professional fingers through the girl’s hair.

“Braid? I tell you say she dey go abroad, you wan’ do
shuku
for am? Perm am. Put relaxer. Make she look like
oyibo
woman! I wan’ make she look like white woman!” The man wiped his forehead again. He looked around for a chair and, finding a wooden stool, drew it closer and started to sit. With his massive buttocks hovering over the chair, he shouted out at one of the hairdressers, his voice like a madman’s: “Una butcher meat for dis chair? Dis chair dirty plenty!”

The hairdresser rolled her eyes and grabbed a tattered towel from a client’s head. Standing behind the man, she spat on the towel and then proceeded to wipe the stool, rubbing slowly. Chisom, who had seen what the hairdresser did, snickered.

“It’s clean now, sir,” the hairdresser said to the man’s back with a self-satisfied grin as she watched him groan and settle into it.

Tina touched the young girl’s hair again. “You get good hair.” She sat the girl down in an empty chair beside Chisom’s. As soon as she was done with her client she would attend to the girl, she promised.

Chisom felt compelled to talk to the girl. Her silence bothered her. “So you dey go abroad?”

“Yes.” The girl nodded. Then added, almost as an afterthought, “Spain.” Her voice sounded garrotted, as if it hurt her to use it.

“Wetin you dey go abroad go do?”

“She dey go work. You wan’ go, too? You wan’ go abroad, too?” The man walked up to where Chisom and the girl sat, inserting himself, incredibly, into the space between their chairs. He brought out his handkerchief again and sighed as he wiped sweat off his neck. On the side of his neck, Chisom noticed a tattoo: a small dark drawing of a hammer. This was what Sisi would remember as she died. Dele and the tattoo on the side of his neck.

“If you wan’ comot from dis our nonsense country, come see me, make we talk,” he continued loudly, not giving the girl a chance to say anything. He brought out a wallet from the front pocket of his shirt and drew a card from it. “Here. Take.” He stretched out the
hand with the card. Chisom took it out of politeness. She did not think she could take him seriously. Who offered a total stranger the chance to go abroad? She put the gold-edged card in her purse.

Chisom did not talk to the girl again, because she did not want to hear the man answer for her. His manner irritated her, and she half wished she had been rude to him, refused to take the card. She would never use it anyway.

When she got home that night and she had to eat
gari
and soup for the third day in a row, she thought nothing of the man’s offer. The next day, when her father came home to announce that there were rumors of job cuts in the civil service—“They’re likely to let me go. Twenty-four years and
pfa
, to go because I am not from Lagos State!”—Chisom merely brought out the card and fingered it. Like she would something beautiful, a pair of silk underwear, perhaps, and put it back in her purse. When she went to the toilet and found it broken and overrun with squirmy maggots and a day’s load of waste—there was a citywide water shortage—she felt short of breath. She needed to get out of the house. Go for a walk. A breath of fresh air. And even then she had no destination in mind until she found herself at an office on Randle Avenue, standing at the address on the gold-edged card, which she had somehow, without meaning to, memorized.