On Black Sisters Street (7 page)

“Where am I leaving you to go to? Who am I leaving you for? Wipe your eyes. Don’t cry, my daughter. How can I leave you, eh? How can I leave my children? Tell me, how can I? I will get out of
this hospital and walk home. Just you wait and see. How can I leave my children? Who will I be leaving them for, eh? It won’t be long now and I can come home. I am already feeling better. Soon. Very soon I’ll be back home.”

She had been so convincing that when the nurse on night duty at the Bishop Shanahan Memorial Hospital tried to pull Efe away from her mother’s stiffening body on that Tuesday morning, telling her in the reverential tone reserved for families of deceased patients, “She’s dead. Sorry. I’m sorry, my dear, but she is gone. Sorry. Come. Come,” Efe had resisted and shouted that her mother was not dead. She would not leave them. She had promised. Up until that day, nobody had suggested to her that her mother might have been lying. Not the doctor with her stethoscope around her neck, who came in twice or so a day to check on the woman. Not her father, who came in after work to relieve Efe so she could go home and look after her younger sister and brothers. Not their neighbors, who sometimes came with food “because we know what hospital food can be like. If the illness does not get you, the food will. It’s that bad.”

“Wait, she’ll soon get up from this bed and walk home!” Efe cried at the nurse.

The nurse had to drag her away from the body. At her mother’s burial a few weeks later, Efe had tried to jump into the grave, shouting, “You can’t leave me, you promised. Come back. You promised. Come back, Mama. Remember your promise? Remember, Mama?”

But the promise meant nothing to her mother. She stayed still in the coffin, her features set, and allowed herself to be covered with sand and to be gone forever and ever.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust
. Efe would never forget the priest’s voice as he prayed over the corpse. It had a tone to it that signaled finality, the end of the woman she had believed would not give in to an illness that had sneaked up on her one Sunday morning when she complained of a headache, a tightness in her temple, and a pain that would not go away with two
tablets of paracetamol taken with a tall glass of water, not even after she rested all day in bed.

Everything Efe knew about Titus’s wife, Titus had told her. She was tucked away in their Ikeja duplex with five bedrooms and three sitting rooms. She was old. Almost as old as Titus. He also said her bones were creaky,
krak krak
, and he needed someone with young bones to make him happy. He told Efe she made him the happiest man in Lagos, the happiest man in Nigeria, even.

“I go to bed with a smile and wake up with a smile because of you, my Efe.”

Efe was flattered to hear that she could please such a big man. Titus was big. And not just figuratively. He was tall and broad and looked rooted to the ground. When he wore shorts, his calves looked like they belonged to three men. Sometimes she thought that had her father had half Titus’s strength, her mother’s death would not have changed him. He would have remained the sober, sound man whom she remembered from before.

He would have remained strong enough for them, and Efe would not have had to quit school to look after the family. She missed her classmates, whom she no longer saw because other responsibilities had taken over and made her a lot older than they were, so that on those occasions when she did bump into them she felt embarrassed for reasons she could not explain. She missed the smell of new books at the beginning of every new term. She missed the smells of ink and chalk. She even missed the school bag, heavy with the weight of dead batteries for blackening the blackboard.

After the wriggling and the moaning had ended but the pain was still raw between her thighs, Titus gave Efe the money she needed for the jeans and the blue T-shirt. Efe wondered what the neighbors would think of this big man with his Jeep parked in front of the house, especially the Alawos, who lived in the flat right above theirs.
Mrs. Alawo wey dey put nose for everybody business. Like rat, she dey
sniff out person. Amebo! Tafia!
Efe was convinced that Mrs. Alawo had seen her come out of Titus’s car, had seen them both enter the house, and had probably stood at the zinc door that secluded their backyard from the rest of the compound and listened to the moaning and groaning of Titus. The thought almost made Efe laugh. She put the money Titus gave her into her brassiere and went inside for a bath. She hoped the bath would relieve the pain.

The very next day Efe went shopping. She bought the jeans. And the T-shirt. And she still had money left over. Even after she bought the shoes—blue leather with high platform heels—there was still quite a tidy bit of cash nestling in her purse: crisp notes that made her nearly delirious with happiness. Efe hid the money under her pillow and every night ruminated on how best to spend it, siphoning it out in bits to buy this and that which caught her fancy: hair baubles for her youngest sister. Biscuits. Nail polish. Lipstick. A red handbag. Sweets for the little ones. Chewing gum in varying colors and flavors. She traipsed through Lagos markets and upscale boutiques in Ikeja, buying bits of happiness.

Every night for the next four months, Efe saw Titus at his insistence. He said she had taken possession of him, that he had never wanted a woman as much as he wanted her. She had never had any man before him, so she did not know if wanting him less than he wanted her was normal or an aberration on her part. But it did not matter, because his wanting her was enough. His need was buying her stuff. For the first time in her life, she felt that other girls might be envious of her, that they must want the things she had: the jeans with the glorious metallic V and the handbags that went with all colors and the high-heeled shoes that were so glamorous they could have belonged to the governor’s wife. Her mother had had such shoes, too. Fancy shoes with slim straps and heels that raised her feet off the ground (and which Efe used to wear and pretend to be flying), but her father had everything burned soon after she died. Her clothes and
her shoes and her bags and her lingerie. Everything in a huge bonfire, a big ball of orange that reached up to heaven and roared, “God, why did you take my wife? Why? Isn’t heaven full enough? What am I to do with four children who still need a mother?” Efe would remember that bonfire for as long as she lived. She would see the brightness of the fire in the dark, dark night, and the clouds of smoke rising from it to join their mates in the skies. After the why-oh-why fire had burned and died, bringing no answer in its wake, no phoenix rising from its ashes, it was discovered that the clasp of one bag had survived the massacre, and the father, holding the clasp in his right hand, had hurtled out a laughter and said, “Even this lived through the fire, and yet my wife was taken.” He had collected the ash and smeared it on himself like a madman. That sight of her father, his face and hands smeared with the ash from her dead mother’s clothes and bags and lingerie and shoes, their neighbors gathered outside to watch, some of the children sniggering, would haunt Efe for a very long time. Long after she thought she had forgotten it.

Sex with Titus did not get better, but it certainly got easier. It no longer hurt so much to have him between her legs. It got more frequent, and Efe got bolder and the compensation increased. She asked for bigger things—a suitcase; a red vanity case like her mother used to have and which had been destroyed in her father’s fire; a musical jewelry case with a magnetic lock—and she got more money, even saving enough to buy a radio with a cassette player with dots of light that twinkled when it was switched on so that it was a wonder to behold in the dark and sent her youngest brother into a rendition of “Twinkul Twinkul Little Staa Hawai Wonda Wot Youya.” The bundle under her pillow grew, and she treated her excited siblings to new clothes. New sandals. New water bottles for school.

Sometimes she and Titus met in hotels far away from their part of Lagos, where he rented a room for a day and the receptionists ignored Efe’s greeting, occasionally looking at her with the same disdain they
did the bugs that infested the hotels. The rooms were almost always small and the carpets threadbare. At other times it was a quick grope in the dark behind her house, leaning against a wall, trying to block the smell that came from the gutter running the entire length of the wall.

It was easy to escape her father, a man who, never having contemplated living without his wife, had fallen apart completely upon her death two years before. He regularly drowned his grief in glass after glass of
ogogoro
at the local beer parlor, run by Mariam, who was rumored to be a teetotaler and the mistress of half her male customers.
De gin color his eyes sotey him no even fit see him feet
. He left it up to Efe to look after the house and her three siblings, all younger than she was. The money he provided her every month was just enough for food, and Efe yearned for luxuries. If Titus was what she had to endure to get those luxuries, then so be it.
Dat one na small price to pay
.

Even before she missed her period, even before she felt her saliva turn rusty and metallic, Efe suspected that she was pregnant. So when her breasts enlarged and the morning sickness came, and the food cravings came, and the constant tiredness came, and she could not sleep well at night, she was prepared.

The night she told Titus she was sure she was pregnant was the last time, day or night, that he turned up for their daily appointment. He had been lying in bed, stroking her shoulders. “I am pregnant, Titus.” That was all it took to get him out of that bed, get him dressed, first the black trousers with the cord pulled tightly under his stomach and then the caftan reaching to his knees. Then he got up, turned his broad back to her, picked up his car key from the bedside table, and walked out of the hotel room, closing the door so gently that it made no noise.

For a long time after he left, after the blackness of his back had faded, Efe lay in the bed pretending to be asleep, welcoming the
quiet. She was still naked. She preferred it when they met behind the house, because then their lovemaking did not last long. When they went to a hotel, Titus liked to take his time. He would drag her into the bed, which usually smelled of disinfectant, undress her, and then have her parade around the room naked before jumping on her and dragging her back into bed again. He would make love to her, sleep, wake up, and start again. Everything happened in silence save for Titus’s moans of pleasure. They would stay in the bed until Titus decided it was time to go home. In the car, he would give her some money and make an appointment for their next meeting. The day Efe told him of their baby, they had stayed in bed until the streetlights opposite the room they were renting came on, casting a faint glow of orange light into the room, making the peeling blue walls almost beautiful, like a blue sky with patches of white clouds showing and rays of sunshine scattered over it. Efe had commented on it at some point in the evening, but Titus had seen nothing remarkable in it. “Na just streetlight, Efe. Wey de sunshine in dat one?”

While Efe lay down, eyes closed, pretending to be asleep, her greatest worry was not the pregnancy, which Titus obviously was not interested in. Her greatest worry was how on earth she would get home. She cursed Titus for choosing this out-of-the-way hotel in the middle of nowhere. The fried rice she had eaten and enjoyed earlier soured in her stomach and caused it to rumble, so that she had to rush to the bathroom.
What a waste of good food
, she thought as she sat on the toilet, evacuating the rice and the shrimp and the cubed meat that Titus had ordered for her at the beginning of the evening. If she could have, she would have kept them all in; having no idea where she was, she did not know how long it would take her to get home.

Done with the toilet, Efe decided it was time to go. She dressed in slow motion, wondering how long it would take for her stomach to grow and already feeling that it was no longer a part of her.
Like say
an alien don invade am
. When she pulled up her skirt, she ran her hands over her stomach, still flat and firm, and could not believe that there was a baby growing inside her, gnawing her insides, feeding off her in a symbiotic relationship she was not entirely sure she appreciated. She hung her head when she walked out into the lobby, not wanting to look into the eyes of the receptionist, who was at that moment, she was sure, staring at her with a smirk. It was not the pregnancy that made her ashamed, for no one could see it. It was the fact that she had been abandoned in this Royal Hotel. She felt cheap, for it was only the cheapest sort of girl who was brought to a hotel and left on her own to find her way home. It was a good thing she had some money in her purse. Although she never had to pay for anything while she was with Titus, she had stuck to her habit of always making sure she never left the house without some money. Her mother had instilled that in her. “You never know what might happen. Always be prepared.”
Well, you were right, Mama
, she said to herself, and sent a quick prayer of gratitude to her. What would she have done if she had been empty-handed? Who would she have asked for money?

Abortion never crossed her mind, not that day and not in the days and weeks that followed, when she started to feel really pregnant and her face puffed up and she could no longer stand the smell of okra soup. She had heard enough horror stories of abortions gone wrong. Nkiru, two houses away from theirs, knew of a girl who had died from a cold that got into her stomach when the doctor who performed an abortion on her did not close the stomach properly. Nkiru said the cold went from the stomach and spiraled into the throat, finally blocking the nostrils, so that the girl could no longer breathe. Somebody else knew of someone who had tried to do it with a clothes hanger and had bled to death. What Efe would try, three months gone and horribly sick, would be to punch herself several times in the stomach. She had heard from Nkiru’s older sister that this was a sure but harmless way to get the baby to expel itself. “A surer bet than the abortion belt.
It’ll just be a clot of blood and you’ll be okay.” But it had not worked for Efe, and after two different attempts she would resign herself to fate and a baby who was determined to be born.