The Spider King's Daughter (11 page)

While I was rubbing in cream, I wondered if I should call my party planner, to see if she had come up with any ideas for a theme. She hadn’t been my first choice. Yesterday I went to her agency to ask for my usual. She was booked.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, ma,’ the receptionist said, reading off her screen.

‘Let me speak to your manager.’

She came out of her office, she remarked on how lovely it was to see me and how lovely I looked and how lovely everything was but I could not have Deji.

‘What about Tope?’

‘I’m sorry, Tope is booked.’

‘For what?’

‘A wedding.’

Tayo, Derin, Buki, they were all booked.

‘Even for a customer like myself?’

‘Abikẹ, I’m sorry. It’s wedding season. I would if I could but they’re all so close to the date and this new secretary forgot to leave someone free for your family.’

The woman behind the desk lowered her head at this hastily concocted lie.

‘If you don’t have someone, I’ll go somewhere else.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t say that. I just said we don’t have any of the girls you asked for. There’s this new girl, Nkem. She’s wonderful.’

‘Nkem?’

‘Yes, a lovely Igbo girl. What date do you want her for?’

‘Let me see her first.’

Tribe doesn’t matter any more. Everyone still knows that the Igbos don’t have style.

‘Didn’t you hear the customer? Go and get me Nkem.’ The receptionist stumbled out of her seat and disappeared into a back room.

I heard her clicking heels before I saw her. She was light-skinned, tall, noticeable if not pretty.

‘Yes, madam, you called me.’

Her voice was deep and her speech clipped, almost British. Not quite.

‘I wanted to introduce you to your new customer.’

Nkem gave me a pageant smile, widening her eyes and lowering her head. ‘Nkem Ejike,’ she said, advancing with an outstretched hand. Even her name was mutilated by that strange accent of hers. I nodded at the manager. It would be a shame to fail her after all that effort.

So far she hasn’t disappointed. She remembered the weekend I had in mind clashed with a big concert. On the question of venue, we have decided to use my house. This means that my father will definitely attend. Time remains unsettled. Though afternoon parties are generally for children, there is an appealing straightforwardness to them. Once the sun sets on an event, make-up thickens and voices mysteriously deepen. Yet for all the falseness of evening parties, their effect is longer lasting.

Of course these are just preliminaries. As Nkem takes notes on diamanté-free stationery, there is hope.

Wale and I walked through a large wooden door into a room that was barely cooled by the rusty fans circling over our heads. It was the first room I had seen in this house that was almost the same temperature as the rest of Lagos. The second thing that struck me, even more powerfully, was that every single person in the room was male.

‘Are these your brothers?’

‘Yes they are.’

‘All of them?’

‘Half-brothers.’

There was a boy so dark his white teeth looked fake. On the far side of the room, a scrawny boy was playing table tennis with the wall, his face a bleached yellow, his fair skin bursting with strawberry pimples.

‘You guys, this is my friend.’ The small clutch gathered round the television grunted their hellos at me. It was strange, all these boys, some of them older than me, watching TV on a Saturday afternoon.

‘Don’t mind them. They’re usually more polite. This is what TV does.’ We moved through the room, an introduction here, a smile there. ‘You should probably meet Chief.’

‘Who?’

‘He’s the oldest of us all. Twenty-eight next year.’

He led me to a side table where a hulk with excessive facial hair was playing Ludo with a boy of about fifteen.

‘My brother.’

I put out my hand but he just stared at it, hissing.

‘Don’t do that,’ the fifteen-year-old said from behind me, ‘He doesn’t like people disturbing his Ludo.’

‘
This
is my eldest brother.’ Wale said. I turned to face the boy with no facial hair and with skin as smooth as a small boy’s.

‘I’m sorry. I—’

‘There’s no need. It’s not the first time such a thing has happened. I can assure, it won’t be the last.’

‘Chief, my friend here, who is also Abikẹ’s friend, wants to find out about her.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s suspicious.’

‘Well, we won’t be very useful. We don’t know her very well.’

‘How come? Aren’t you all siblings?’ I said before Wale could interrupt again.

‘Half-siblings. Sit down.’

I sat and Wale stood behind me, his arm draped on the back of my chair.

‘So, what do you want to know about Abikẹ?’

‘What do you think of her?’

‘I know very little of her. She lives in her section. We live in ours. We’ve been ordered not to go to that part and she’s shown no interest in us. Look at him.’ I glanced at the hulk still rolling the dice and counting the squares, not realising his opponent had left. ‘He had a breakdown a few months ago. No one is sure why. She must have heard but she never came.’

‘She might have a good reason,’ I said, rushing to her defence and instantly feeling less guilty about being there.

‘Yes. Maybe,’ Chief said, tapping his fingers on the glass screen of the Ludo board. ‘Is there anything else you want to know?’

I looked round the overwhelmingly masculine room. ‘How come you don’t have any sisters?’

‘We do.’

‘Where are they?’

‘A few years ago, our father decided to send them all away.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he can. Of course he didn’t send Abikẹ away and of course, she did nothing to stop him.’

‘It is not her fault that she is the favourite child,’ I said, raising my voice above Chief’s conspiratorial whisper.

He looked at me pityingly. ‘How do you think she became his favourite child? There was a time when we all lived together. We all had access to my father. We were all his children. Now she has poisoned his mind against us. She is the reason our living room looks like this; why none of us went to university abroad, why our father is one of the richest men in Africa and we have not seen one kobo.’

‘It could have been her mother that turned him against you.’

He shook his head. ‘You cannot blame her mother. If you’d met her you would see that she is as much a victim as the rest of us. No. Abikẹ did it by herself. She is his daughter.’

‘Aren’t you all his sons?’

‘Yes we are his sons, we have taken three DNA tests to prove.’

So that was the test Mr Johnson had mentioned in the corridor. No wonder it had shaken Wale so badly. What kind of father would put his children through such an ordeal?

‘What about Abikẹ? Did she have to take any tests?’

‘Of course not. Abikẹ is special. She is like him.’

‘What do you mean?’

He caught Wale’s eye. ‘This boy does not know our
father
.’ He looked at me again. ‘You don’t know what type of man Olumide Kayode Johnson is?’

When I shook my head his face froze in irritation.

‘Wale, why have you brought me this small boy?’

He dropped the insult carelessly without meeting my eye. Wale’s hand fell on my shoulder. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘Wait,’ I said, shrugging him off. ‘How many half-siblings do you have?’

‘Thirteen,’ he answered before giving a small cough. ‘I must leave you with Wale now. I’m keeping my brother waiting.’

‘So what do you think?’ Wale asked as we left the room.

‘Of what?’

‘Chief.’

‘I don’t know. He seemed all right.’

‘He’s better than all right. He’s the only one brave enough to stand up to our father. If not for him, we would be cut out of—’

‘Cut out of what?’

He shook his head and an echo of Chief’s irritated look settled on his face.

‘Don’t worry about that. Just walk down these stairs and take the door in front of you to get out.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Keep your eyes open. You’ll see we’re telling the truth,’ he said, turning to make his way back to his brothers.

Nkem would not be amused if she found out her carefully planned party was centred on the preferences of a street hawker. It is a gesture he will probably never fully appreciate. I can’t spend the whole evening pointing out ‘Nasco Love’ keeps playing and my dress is the same shade as his bright pink shirt. In a way, the party has nothing to do with him. For once, I feel like doing something completely outside Frustration. Just to see.

I know he won’t take advantage of me if he realises how much I am willing to spend on him. I know he won’t stop talking to me if the party somehow contrives to flop. Life without Frustration. Someone should have told my father it was possible. It might have saved him a marriage and some friends.

Why should I believe what Abikẹ’s half-brothers had told me? I saw her more often than they did. As for Cynthia, since the day she dropped me at home, we’ve barely said anything to each other. It was almost like I dreamt that night in the car. Though once, I caught her staring at me in a more knowing way than usual. A silver Mercedes slowed. I quieted my mind long enough to hand its owner an ice cream. She drove off and the thoughts returned.

Liars. All of them. Except why would their lies overlap? Watch her. Keep your eyes open. Why would they both say that she had her father’s ear, his chequebook, his character? Scheming, conniving, cruel: how could they be talking about the Abikẹ that I saw every day on the road?

When I walked into the store, it took a few seconds to realise there was something familiar about the scene before me. A man was kneeling. Aunty Precious was sitting behind the counter. They turned when I entered. I saw she had been crying.

‘Emeka, you have to leave.’ Aunty Precious said to the man.

‘But—’

‘Please leave me.’

‘But—’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but my madam said you have to go.’

He gave her the same pleading look. She looked away. Once he was gone she began to cry.

‘Aunty Precious what’s wrong?’

‘I can’t tell you. It’s not that I don’t trust you. It’s just—’

‘Telling someone might help.’

‘Emeka is the only person I’ve told this story. It’s very long.’

‘I’m not doing anything this evening.’

‘What about your mum and sister?’

‘They can manage for a few hours.’

 ‘There were some men who used to hang around outside my school waiting for girls to come out. Mr Alade was one of these men but he told me he was not looking for a girlfriend. Instead, he wanted a young seamstress to take abroad. He said the factory he was recruiting for particularly wanted Nigerian girls because they were the most hard-working. At first, I was reluctant. Although I could hand-sew well, I wanted to go to university and study medicine. I was my parents’ only child and they took my education very seriously.’

‘Let me get you some tissue.’ I went to the small toilet in the corner and took a new roll.

‘What was I saying?’

‘Your parents.’

‘Yes, they were village people. The world moved too fast for them, even me, their daughter. Mr Alade took one look at our small parlour and knew what would make them release me. He gave an estimate of what I would earn in a month then he converted the figure to naira. My parents were not greedy but they had always worried about paying my university fees. “Stay for two years” my father said when Mr Alade left. “Stay for two years and come back and study medicine.” The day Mr Alade brought the contract we signed without reading. He said that if we read it, it would show we did not trust him. After that he made one final request. He asked that I go to a shrine to swear.’

‘A shrine?’

‘Yes. We too were shocked. But Mr Alade said that the man who owned the sewing company was a traditional Nigerian. So we followed him to the bush to swear. As we were about to enter the shrine, Mr Alade told my mother she could not come in.’

‘Were you afraid?’

‘I was very afraid. Remember I was only sixteen. When I walked in and saw fresh blood on the floor I almost ran out and said I wasn’t doing again. It was the memory of the mobile phone Mr Alade promised that made me walk to the
babalawo
at the back of the shrine.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘I don’t know. He told me to kneel down. I was too scared to look up while he listed the curses that would follow me if I broke the contract. At the end, he spat in his hand and rubbed it over my face.’

‘And you let him, Aunty Precious.’

‘What could I do? In any case, I was lucky. Some of the other girls later told me their
babalawo
poured his urine on them.’

‘Excuse me, do you sell powdered milk?’ a woman asked from the doorway. From her olive skirt suit and square shoes, I could tell she was an employee from the new office down the road. After Aunty Precious had served her, I shut the door and put the closed sign in the window.

‘Please continue.’

‘By the time Mr Alade finished with us, both I and my parents were so excited. We told all our neighbours that I was going abroad. We told relatives; sometimes even strangers on the street. The only reason I was sad about leaving was Emeka. Everyone on our street used to call us husband and wife.’

‘The same Emeka that just left here?’

‘Yes. We grew up together. His house was just five steps from mine and I saw him more than I saw my parents. He promised to wait for me when I left. We took a bus to Italy: myself, Mr Alade and ten other seamstresses. On the way, my seat mate confessed that she did not know how to sew. I had a small sewing kit on me so I taught her. I also taught some of the other girls who were not yet perfect. I thought Mr Alade would be angry that some of us could not even do basic embroidery. All he said was it was good we were occupying ourselves on the journey.’

‘How long did it take?’

‘Six weeks to reach Rome. We got there in the night and for the first few months, I rarely saw the city in daylight. Some of the girls would go out in the afternoon but I was too ashamed. I felt that everyone who saw me would know how I earned money.’

It was odd that she should be ashamed of working in a sweat shop. There were worse ways for a woman to survive in a foreign country. I wanted to reassure her of this but she had reached a point in her story where she could not bear interruption.

‘The women in the house Mr Alade dropped us in said we had no choice. We had signed and sworn that we would not stop working for them, until we paid off our debt. These women that ran the house were very harsh. They enjoyed putting us down and insulting us but one was kind to me. She said I looked like her junior sister so she gave me advice that saved my life. She was the one that told me I should make sure my customers always wore a condom no matter how much they offered for sex without. A lot of the other girls took the money and died of AIDS.’

Aunty Precious hadn’t gone to Italy to sew on buttons in an airless room with sixty other girls. She had gone there to become a prostitute. Like those women I saw when I left work late. They stood on the side of the road in their tight cycling shorts, sometimes bending over so their breasts could spill out of their crop tops even further. Every thought must have shown on my face because she said, ‘Maybe you are too young for this story. I’m sorry I started.’

‘No, Aunty Precious. Please continue.’

She was not like those girls. She had been tricked.

‘It’s funny. Now, when I look back on those years, what makes me the angriest is the shoes I had to wear. None of the men that beat me left scars. It’s so hot in this country, I can no longer imagine what it felt like to wear a miniskirt in winter but the shoes – they have left permanent marks. Look at my feet.’

She slid off her slippers and raised one leg. ‘See how swollen they are. Look, I don’t have ankles and it’s because of walking around Rome in high heels. My feet used to ache so badly that I would go around the streets barefoot. Until one day, a customer beat me for leaving black footprints on his white bed sheet.’

‘Aunty Precious—’

‘No. Stop looking like you are about to cry. I was one of the lucky ones. I met Richard. He was old with grey hairs all over his body but he was kind. Whenever I told him I didn’t feel like, he would always reply, funny enough I don’t feel like either. He was a colonial officer in Kenya when he was a young man. That was why he picked me up. He said I reminded him of a Luo woman he loved. One day he offered to pay off my debt in exchange for my living with him until he died. He too drew up a contract for me to sign.’

‘Did you?’

‘Of course. It was about survival. But this time I read before I signed.’

I looked at her green boubou and the rubber slippers she wore on her cracked feet. When we used to travel, I’d noticed there was a type of glamorous woman you saw with white men. ‘I can’t imagine you with a white man, Aunty Precious.’

‘Neither could his children. They were always asking if Richard had changed his will and other questions like that. We were together for two years before he passed on. One morning I woke and found he was not breathing. Coronary heart failure is what the doctor said and while his body was still warm the children swooped down to drive me away.’

‘How did you survive after he died?’

‘His will said, “to my precious Precious, ten per cent of all my savings”. Even that little portion, his children wanted to take.’

She stopped and looked outside the store. ‘You should be going. It’s getting late.’

‘You haven’t finished.’

‘What else is there? I moved to Nigeria. I set up a store with my inheritance, the same one we are in now.’

‘What about Emeka? Tell me what happened when you came back.’

‘You have to go soon.’

She blew her nose again.

‘I looked for my parents but another family was living in our house. They had died poor, the new tenants told me. Their daughter had gone abroad and not sent them money. Shame would not allow me to go to the village and see where they were buried in the family compound. My relatives would have cursed me.’

‘I’m sorry, Aunty Precious.’

‘It was many years ago. I started going to church to fill time on Sundays. I joined the choir because I liked their uniform. Then one day, the preacher announced, “There is a woman sitting here. You are precious, despite what has been done to you. God has called you by that name, Precious.” Many years passed, the shop thrived and I thought I had left Italy behind.

‘Then Emeka walked into this store asking if I sold shaving sticks. The shock almost killed both of us. We screamed and hugged and all the time we held each other, I kept thinking, he must be married now. He must have at least two children. I pulled away from his embrace and came to sit behind the till. “So how is the wife?” I asked, preparing myself for the news. “There is no wife,” he said. “I have tried to get married but no girl has been like my Precious.”’

She smiled and dabbed her eyes. ‘Look at me, acting like a teenager over a man I just sent away.’

‘Why don’t you say yes?’

‘His family hates me. I left their son to go to
obodoyinbo.
I used juju
to stop him from marrying and now I have come back to ruin him. To add to that, he told them that I used to be a prostitute. He thinks everyone is easily forgiving like him. Now over his sisters’ dead bodies, his mother’s dead body and his father’s dead body, will Emeka marry me. The only way they will attend the ceremony is if we marry in a cemetery.

‘It’s them that almost closed down my shop. They told everyone in the area about Italy. Now the tenants upstairs would rather walk twenty minutes to another store than buy anything from me. If not for your hawking and the customers from the new office, this shop would not be open.

‘When you walked in he was proposing for the fifth time. Yet, he will come back and I must say no. I will not separate him from his family and I will not ruin his reputation. He is respected in his work.’

‘What does he do?’

‘He is a pastor and even though the Bible mentions prostitutes who did well for themselves, no Lagos congregation would listen to that.’

‘You don’t have to tell them.’

‘He would feel he had to. If he didn’t, his family would.’

If he had worked as anything else, he could have married her and kept his job.

‘Before I left Italy I visited the kind matron to say goodbye but also to find out about her employers. I took her for lunch and gave her some expensive perfume. At first she refused to say anything. She thought it was foolish to try and find such dangerous people. She grew more cooperative with alcohol. Even then, when she spoke, she would only tell me the man’s name was Olumide Johnson and that she had been surprised to hear he had a daughter. When I asked where I could find him she refused to say.’

‘Olumide Johnson?’

‘Yes. Remember that day we went to the market, you mentioned your friend with the same surname. For a moment I thought it was his daughter, but where would you have met someone like Olumide Johnson’s daughter?’

Of course.

‘After I returned to Nigeria, I became obsessed with finding him but the name Olumide Johnson appeared so many times in the phonebook.’

I was glad I had said nothing.

‘There was a man I was certain was him. He owned a large car business that could serve as a front. He had the political connections necessary for blinding the eyes of border police. When I went to his house and asked the gateman if I could see Oga’s
daughter, he said I had the wrong address. Oga only had sons.

‘Eventually I found him. He was hidden behind many respectable businesses and he had even more political connections than the first Olumide Johnson. He was tall and dark with a mark blacker than the rest of his skin on the side of his face. He had a daughter. She was his only child with his wife.’

How many powerful businessmen with birthmarks could there be?

‘I found a young lawyer just out of university and full of the justice he had crammed for his exams. He helped me find the others who returned to crawl into the holes in Lagos. We built a strong case that we really believed could win. Then the first of us died, then
another
was bought off, and another disappeared and then one day, he killed the young lawyer as well. It was made to look like an accident but we knew.’

I remembered the man in the corridor; the harshness with which he had spoken to his own son and I could believe he had killed people to cover up his crimes. Did Abikẹ suspect? Surely his favourite daughter would know what her father was capable of.

‘After our lawyer died, we returned to our holes and tried to forget about the case. But at times like this, when Emeka reminds me of the woman I could have been, I want my justice.’