After my mother
deserted him, my father worked hard to become the man she wanted him to be. He
learnt how to drive a bus, somehow managed within a month to overcome what he
had often told my mother was a paralysing fear of the steering wheel. Before
she left, he did odd jobs at the motor park. He collected and calculated bus
fares. He arranged travelling bags in the boots and on the roofs. The vehicles
then swayed out of the park and headed to Lagos, leaving him behind to scream
at the top of his voice for passengers to fill the next bus. Lagos! Lagos straight! Eko Akete! One more
chance! E remain one person! There was
always just one more seat left to be filled at the motor park even if the bus
was empty.
When she was
still my father’s wife, mother had a table in the corner of the park. She sold
cheap rum, gin and cigarettes to drivers, passengers and men like Baba who
wandered around doing odd jobs or nothing. By noon, she left the park to start
her afternoon business. She sat in the sun and sprinkled fishes with yam flour
before frying them in hot oil. She used the cheapest fish available, the ones
that left a bad aftertaste and could give you diarrhoea if your stomach was
weak.
Mother never
complained about her work, the stinky fish, and the drunkards who tried to
fondle her breasts. She was proud of all
her businesses, of the fact that no one could ever call her lazy. But she
griped constantly about the afternoon sun.
She said that her beauty was melting away because of all that sun, and
because my useful-for-nothing father did not provide money for good food, or
body cream, or powder.
My father
started out by driving a bus that was not his own. It was painted white in
front, green at the sides, and pink at the back. On all sides, the faded paint
was peeling off to reveal rusty metal and tiny holes. Whenever I rode alone
with him, it rattled like something about to unravel. It didn’t rattle so much
when it was filled with passengers, with five bodies cramped into a space meant
for three cushioned by each other’s sweaty flesh, for then that feeling of
being tossed about in a tin jar was not so strong. A couple of times, the sliding door fell off
when the bus was about to leave for Lagos. This happened whenever my father
didn’t secure the door with a rope so that it couldn’t be opened without
someone loosening the rope from the outside. Some passengers complained about
being sealed off into the bus without an escape route in case of an emergency.
At least, my father would tell them, at least the bus has a door.
Every morning,
father wiped the windscreen with a towel, he often paused to smile at his
reflection in the cracked screen. It was a good thing that my mother had left
him before he got the bus, this display of affection would have irritated her .
Her scorn would have spilled over and swallowed his smile. At night, he returned the keys to the Alhaji
who owned the bus and gave him seventy percent of his proceeds. Thirty percent
of that was part payment for the bus. By my father’s calculations, it would
take him about two years to make full payments. He talked a lot about all that
he would be able to do once he owned the bus. He became loquacious after my
mother left, for then there was enough room for his words. He would talk till
he fell asleep in the only chair in our room, his mouth still open. It would be
a year before he slept on the tattered mattress he once shared with her.
The proceeds
from mother’s Saturday business could have cut the time needed to pay for the
bus by a year. On Saturdays, we washed clothes and bathrooms in the university
staff quarters. There were many people there who could not bear to scrub their
bathroom floors or wash their own clothes. My mother and I went every Saturday
and made more money on our knees than she made from all other businesses
combined. This was how my mother met
Dr., the man she left my father for, and Dr. Mrs, the woman whose husband our
neighbours said she snatched.
I did not see my
mother for a month after she went to live with Dr. Mrs’s husband. In that time, I thought about Dr. Mrs. Her
left hand and the way her wedding ring, a golden band embedded with tiny
stones, sparkled when she pointed to a corner of her living room that I needed
to clean. I wondered if it slid off her finger as the plane snapped in two and
passengers already ablaze crashed to the earth like falling stars. Could it be lying somewhere in the forest, still
sparkling, safe? Or was it also found two days later when the emergency
response team located the plane. Two days later because they could not search
at night, their helicopters were bad, did not have night lights, there were no
helicopters at all or something like that. Two days later when the few people
who might have survived were already dead and those who died instantly were
charred and bloated beyond recognition. The
president’s spokesman assured the nation of the president’s dismay at the turn
of events. Mr Spokesman informed us, again and again as if we did not know,
that the president even shed tears at the crash site. And to those who
complained about how long the search and rescue took, he reminded us that at
least, the bodies were found. He sounded as though he expected some form of
gratitude for the president’s tears. It was impossible to tell who he expected
to be grateful, the dead or their relatives.
When my mother
learnt that Dr. Mrs. had been in the plane that fell from the skies, she
removed the oil she was heating for her afternoon business from the three
stones that served as our stove and doused the fire with a full bucket of
water. She went to have her bath, screamed my name when she was halfway through
and asked me to bring her some salt. I took the bowl of salt to the wooden shed
that was our bathroom and handed it to her through the hole in the door.
Through the hole, I watched her scrub her body with the salt. When she was done
bathing, she slathered her body with Vaseline. She rubbed it into every inch of
skin that her hands could reach and when she was done with those parts, she
asked me to rub it into her back. She did not put on mourning clothes, she did
not wear the only black dress she owned. Instead, she put on a floral print
dress she had bought second hand. It was made of chiffon and when she stood in
the sun, you could see the curves of her thighs. She did not have shoes, and when she was done
powdering her face and rubbing Vaseline on her lips till they shone like
something dipped in oil, she stood barefoot on the dirt floor of our room,
staring at the only footwear she owned, a pair of rubber slippers that were
worn thin at the heels. She muttered something to herself and a single tear
slid down her cheek. It was the only time I saw her shed tears.
“See my life.”
She pointed at the worn slippers. “See my life, that man has spoilt it.”
That man was my
father, the man who had impregnated her when she was sixteen. She always put it
that way; he impregnated me, as
though she had nothing to do with it. As if it was something that happened
while she had travelled and somehow left her body behind for my seventeen year
old father to impregnate. She made it clear that she could have had a much
better life if she had never met my father, if she had never gotten pregnant
and dropped out of school. That day as she shed tears over a pair of worn
slippers, I felt responsible for her misery. So I offered her my school
sandals. They were not pretty but they were newer than her slippers.
She hugged me
before she left. “Tell that man that I have gone to console Dr. over his wife’s
death.” She touched my cheeks but did
not look into my eyes. In spite of the salt, her hands still smelt like rotten
fish.
“When will you
be back?”
“Soon,” she
said.
Soon was a month
later. She came back unannounced one Sunday afternoon. My father was at home,
he did not work on Sundays, because it was God’s day. My mother did not believe
in God or His days, she carried on with her businesses every day of the week.
That Sunday, I hissed when Dr.’s car parked in front of our building. He was
not in the car. He had sent his driver to bring her down. The driver rushed out
to open the door for my mother and followed her into the house like a
bodyguard. From the moment her feet, encased in red stilettos, touched the
floor, her mouth did not stop moving. She started with a song of thanksgiving
to her head which had delivered her from hell and set her feet in heaven. She
sounded hoarse. Her voice was made to
hawk, not to sing.
She continued to
sing as she packed a few items into a small travelling bag. She threw most of
her things out of the door into the front yard where our neighbours had
gathered with their children. She sang something by Ebenezer Obey, something
about her enemies having their eyes plucked out by a big fish. There was a
strange expression on my father’s face. It looked like a deformed smile. He sat
like a fool on his tattered bed, his eyes shut, his hands balled into fists as
she continued to sing. He held himself perfectly still as if he was glass and
would shatter if he moved at all.
“I forgot to
bring your sandals,” she said to me. “What have you been wearing to school?” It
was all she cared about where I was concerned, school, my education, my grades,
the university, the potential I had to become the woman she could have been. It
was all that mattered.
I did not answer
because she was not listening, she was about to ask the important questions.
“How are your
studies?”
“They are fine
Ma.”
“What
did you score on your last test?”
“Twenty five out
of twenty five Ma.”
“Are
you still first position in your class?”
“Yes Ma.”
She always spoke
to me in English, warned me never to get used to speaking Yoruba like my father
who acted like a man who had never been to school. Once, she made me hold my lips together with
my thumb and index finger for five hours because I had spoken to her in Yoruba.
“Face your books
and buy new sandals,” she said as she pressed a thousand naira note into my
palm.
After she left,
I ran out of the room, past the neighbours who had gathered in the front
yard. I did not stop when I stepped into
puddles of water in the street. I did not stop till I got to Ola’s house. When
I was with Ola, I tried to judge him through my mother’s eyes, see if she would
approve. She had told me to be smart and
not open my legs to useless men. I never asked if it meant that I could open
them to a man who was not useless, a man like Ola, an Engineer, a youth corper
who already had enough money to rent a fine room and buy a television and a
fan, men who could never be poor like my father.
It was hard to
press my knees together when Ola played with my hair, twisting the braid at the
end of each cornrow, it was hard to breathe then, it was hard to do anything
but feel. Feel things that tingled like love. My mother never spoke to me about
love. I don’t think she ever believed in it. She believed only in the stupidity
that made her lay on her back for that useless man also known as my father. Ola
did not make me feel stupid. With him, I felt sated, as though I would never
need to eat again.
After my mother
left us, I visited Ola’s place every day. I had a copy of his keys and let
myself in if he was not home, sometimes I took my school books and studied
them. He owned a lot of news magazines, and when I got tired of studying, I
would read one of them or sleep in his bed. I spent most of the time sleeping
if he wasn’t in. It was the only time I got to sleep in a bed.
Ola was home
that Sunday afternoon, his door slightly
ajar. He lay in bed, asleep. I bolted the door before climbing to lie behind
him. I pressed my body against his back and whispered in his ear. He did not
stir. It was easier to talk to him while he slept and could not hear the
terrible things I said about my parents. I spoke for almost an hour, then I
shut my eyes and willed myself to sleep.
Baba had already left for the motor park when I returned home the next
morning. He never asked me where I had spent that night.
About a week
later, my mother sent Dr. Mrs’s former driver who was now her driver to our
house. It was a Saturday afternoon and my father was away in Lagos. The driver
informed me that my mother had sent him to pick me up for a visit. I sat in the
front seat beside him as the car glided through the streets and there was no
rattling even when the car hit potholes. We drove into the university through
Road One. There was always something strange, something abnormal about going
into the campus. The long stretches of tarred road totally uninterrupted by a
single pothole; the rows of trees that lined the sides of the streets made me
feel as though I had stepped into a dream. There were traffic lights that
worked and zebra crossings where drivers actually stopped for pedestrians to
cross. In all the years my mother and I went there to clean, scrub and iron, I
could count the number of times when there was a power outage. Power was
usually restored almost immediately. Yet, Dr. would complain about the heat if
the power went out for more than ten minutes in his house. It was as though he
did not know that outside the university gate, people went without power for
weeks and months.
My mother was
one of them now, the people who could not bear to scrub toilets or live without
light. She was standing on the lawn when we arrived at the house. She wore a
pair of blue jeans and a sleeveless green blouse. I did not join her on the
lawn when I alighted from the car. She smiled as she approached me as though we
shared some secret joy. Her cheeks were rounder, her smile wider than I had
ever seen. Her laughter too had put on weight. I followed her into the house
and was surprised to see that there were still pictures of Dr. Mrs on the wall.
There was a new picture though, it was a picture of Dr. and my mother dressed
in outfits sown from the same lace material.
She offered me
food, amala and ila alasepo. The ila
alasepo filled the soup bowl to the brim, two chunks of meat swam in the stew.
“I will never
cook fish again in my life,” she said as we sat down at the dining table to
eat. She dipped her fingers into her soup bowl and let them stay in the ila
alasepo for a while. The stew in her bowl was more than the quantity she used
to cook for us in one week when she was still my father’s wife.
She asked me how
I was doing. “Se you are not following any foolish boy about?”
I wrapped my
fingers around the glass of cold water she had placed beside my plate and
wondered why boys always had to be foolish. My mother had warned me to never
allow a boy to sit too close to me, never to let them touch my arms, or my
breasts. She had assured me that they would want to, she had prepared me for
Ola’s lust. But she had said nothing about my own desires and her silence made
me believe I was incapable of having them. I did not know that I would want Ola
to kiss my belly button and was surprised when I asked him to. I was not prepared for the fierceness of my
desires.
“I have a
boyfriend,” I said. The glass cup was sweating; cold water trickled down my
palm. “He wants me to get pregnant so that he can marry me.”
She choked on
her food, held her throat with both hands and started coughing. Clumps of amala
coated with her spittle fell onto the blue tablecloth. She breathed through her
mouth for a while after she stopped coughing. “What did you say?”
“I may be
pregnant already.”
In her moment of
distress, she reverted to Yoruba. “Ori e yi
ni? You have been staying out in
the sun? Is that why your brain is melting and you are talking rubbish?”
I pushed some
amala into my mouth.
She slapped her
thigh. “How did this happen? How?”
How? That Sunday
afternoon, with my breasts pressed against Ola’s back and my eyes shut, I
couldn’t will myself to sleep. I was restless. I couldn’t stop thinking about
that afternoon, my mother with her shiny red shoes. My father’s deformed smile,
the smile of a man who had started trying to late to catch up, a man who would
never have been enough anyway. He had been the dullest in their class, my
mother reminded him of that all the time. She said he would have had no future
even if he had finished secondary school. She on the other hand could have been
anything; she was at the top of the class. She was going to be a doctor, a Dr.
Mrs. I couldn’t sleep thinking about all
that. So I woke Ola up. He was a deep sleeper. I had to sprinkle cold water on
his face. That was how it happened. I straddled him. I unbuttoned my blouse slowly, watched his
eyes dilate as he realised that this time I wouldn’t push his head away from my
breast. That is how it happened.
“Have you lost
your brain?”My mother screamed. She was on her feet, quivering with rage. “You
want to spend your life frying fish in a foolish boy’s back yard?”
I drank some
water. “He is not a boy. He is a man.”
She slapped me,
“Don’t talk when I am talking. So you want to get pregnant with a useless
child? You want to stop school? Omo osi. Stupid stupid child. Omo osi.”
I rubbed my
cheek and drank more water.
She slapped me
again. The glass cup fell to the floor and shattered at our feet.
I stood up and
walked away from her, stood in front of the new picture, the one where she and
Dr. held hands and grinned at the camera.
She came to
stand beside me, still quivering. “You are ruined. No university? You are
ruined.”
I studied the
picture, surprised that they looked so happy. My father had once said my mother
was not a woman who could be happy.
I turned to face
her. “You now have a driver,” I said. “Did you go to the university? You also
have a garden. Did you go to the university?”
Then I slapped
her face. Twice.
I ran to the
door before she could react. I staggered when I pushed it open, but I did not
fall. I raced through the garden, trampled on her flowerbeds. She called my
name as I neared the road. She called me again and again. I kept running, away from her.
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Ayobami Adebayo was born in 1988 . Her work was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth short story competition. In 2012, she was a writer in residence at Writers Omi International (Ledig House), New York. Her first novel, Stay With Me was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript prize.
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