Everything Good Will Come (13 page)

“Go on,” she said. “Who asked you to come with your trouble? Not one minute's peace did you give me as a child, now you want to criticize me. Asking me why I won't stand next to him in a photograph. Why should I stand next to him? For any reason? The man gave me nothing. Nothing, for all his education, he's as typical as they come. And I may not have paid your school fees, but remember I gave birth to you. Just remember that, while you're out there walking around with certificate, calling yourself a lawyer. Someone gave birth to you.”

It took all my strength to shut her door gently. At her gate, I swore that I would never visit my mother's house again. Some people were happy by habit; others were not. It had nothing to do with me.

We were thirty minutes into our endurance test, a ten-mile run. I was hoping to make it to my old school, to see what had become of the place. Mike and other healthy people were in front. I had fallen behind. I took shorter breaths as my heart raced. I was trying to run with some dignity, unlike some of my platoon members who were using their hands to support their backs.

This part of Lagos was a shanty town. We passed a house with flaky yellow paint and a group of pot-bellied infants scurried out. One almost toppled into the gutter alongside the road and his mother yanked him out and boxed his ear. He began to howl. We passed a group of palm trees huddled together and a pink and white building with a sign post saying: “Hollywood Hair. Mannycure, Pennycure, Wash and Set. Fresh Eggs and Coca-Cola.” A woman, the proprietor perhaps, sat on a stool with a cloth wrapped around her body. She was polishing her teeth with a chewing stick and paused to spit into the gutter. The entire area smelled of goat droppings and morning mist. I decided to head back to camp.

The soldiers on duty eyed me as I walked through the gates of the college. I remembered how I tried to bribe them to sneak out during the day as my roommate did. They waited while I fumbled with the money in my pocket. Mike later said, “You greet them every day, then you give them something to buy beer. That's how you do it. Not bringing out wads of naira notes. Where have you been?”

I could have swiped his head.

A car horn tooted. I turned to see a new Peugeot. Stepping on the side of the road, I waited for it to pass, but it came to a halt. The windscreen was tinted so I couldn't see the driver, but as soon as the windows came down, I knew.

“Sheri Bakare,” I said.

It was like finding a pressed flower I'd long forgotten about. Her smile was less broad; her pink gums seemed to have disappeared.

“
Aburo
,” she said. “Is this your face?”

“What are you doing here?”

She laughed. “I came to see my brother.”

“Which one?”

“Gani.”

“Gani's here? I'm too old. Far too old.”

We were holding hands. She was wearing a yellow
agbada
with gold embroidery around the neckline, and her fingers were laden with gold rings.

“Can I give you a lift?” she asked.

Inside her car I smelled perfume and new leather seats. I sat up because I was wet with sweat. Sheri slowed over a speed bump.

“How come you're in national service?” she asked.

“I'm just out of law school.”

“You're a lawyer?”

“Yes, and you?”

“I studied education.”

“You're a teacher?”

“Me? No.”

We drove past the race tracks and stopped by the women's halls. As we got out, Sheri wrapped her scarf around her head and leaned against the car. She moved with the rhythm of big women I admired; like a steady boat on choppy water. I noticed she was wearing black high heeled sandals with rhinestone buckles. It was ten thirty in the morning.

“You look well,” I said.

“You too,” she said. “You're still slim and don't even try to tell me I am.”

I laughed. “I wasn't going to, Miss Nigeria.”

“Ah, don't remind me,” she said. “Those skinny girls. I still have a pretty face,
sha.
”

“Beautiful,” I said.

Even with her big ears. Her cheeks hollowed as she spoke.

“I hear you went to England that summer,” she said. “I wish I could have gone, for university at least.”

“Why didn't you?”

“My father died.”

“I'm sorry to hear that. I only heard that you moved.”

“He died,” she said, scraping the ground with her shoe. “And we lost Alhaja, too. Not long afterward.”

I watched her sandals cloud up with dust.

“You remember Kudi?” she asked.

“How can I forget her?”

“She's in her first year at Lagos University. I've just been to visit her. You should have seen her, all of them, nineteen- year-olds wearing the latest fashions. No wonder she keeps asking for money.”

“Aren't they supposed to be studying?”

She sucked her teeth. “Their heads aren't in studying. They are looking for boys with cars. I told Kudi, ‘If you want clothes, take some of mine.' But she said she didn't want any of mine.”

“Why not?”

“She said I dress like an old mama. Can you believe it? She said that to me? Children of nowadays. No respect. We were never like this, I'm sure.”

I laughed. “How is Kudi?”

It was as though I saw her a day ago. She continued to talk about her sister and I encouraged her, only because it was easy conversation to make. Before I left, I took her address and promised to visit her over the weekend. It was an apartment block not far from my father's house, and I knew she couldn't afford to live there without a sponsor. But Sheri was sugary, as we said in Lagos; she had a man, an older man, a man as old as my father even, and he would pay her rent.

“Make sure you come,” she said. “I'm lonely there.”

Saturday morning I drove into Lagos Island via the mainland bridge to see her. A few freighters were docked along the harbor of the marina. Descending the bridge, I caught a partial view of the commercial center I had come to know by driving. A mishmash of skyscrapers crowded the skylines, scattered between them were dull concrete one-story buildings with corrugated-iron roofs. They were mostly trading stores. Each bore a sign in need of painting. A web of electricity and telephone lines criss-crossed above them.

The Atlantic weaved its way around Lagos. Sometimes dull and muddy, other times strident and salty, bearing different names: Kuramo waters, Five Cowry Creek, Lagos Marina, Lagos Lagoon. It was the same water. Asphalt bridges connected the islands to the mainland and the sky always looked as sad as a person whose lover had lost interest. People rarely noticed it, even its amber sunsets. If the sun were going down, it meant there would be no light soon and Lagosians needed to see their way. Street lights here did not always function.

Millions lived in Lagos. Some were natives, but most had roots in the provinces. They fell in and out with the elements as though the weather were created to punish and reward: “Sun beat my head,” “Breeze cooled me.” Most days it felt like a billion people walking down the labyrinth of petty and main streets: beggar men, secretaries, government contractors (thieves, some would say), Area Boys, street children. You could tell how well they ate by the state of their shoes. Beggars, of course, went bare foot. If no one noticed the sky, it was because they were busy watching vehicles. There was a constant din of cars, popping exhaust pipes, and engines, commuters scrambling for canary-yellow buses and private transport vans we called
kabukabu
and
danfo
. They bore Bible epitaphs: Lion of Judah, God Saves. Their drivers drove devilishly, and added to the incongruity around: cattle grazing in a rubbish dump, a man crossing the highway in a wheelchair, a street hawker with a Webster's dictionary in one hand and a toilet brush in the other.

There were countless billboards: Pepsi, Benson and Hedges, Daewoo, Indomie Instant Noodles, Drive Carefully, Fight Child Abuse. All smells joined hands in one: sweaty skin and fumes, and the heat was the kind that made your forehead crease, and crease, until you witnessed something that made you smile: a taxi driver making lurid remarks; people cursing themselves well and good; All right-Sirs, our urban praise singers or borderline beggars, who hailed any person for money. Chief! Professor! Excellency!

It was a hard city to love; a bedlam of trade. Trade thrived in the smallest of street corners; in stores; on the heads of hawkers; even in the suburbs where family homes were converted into finance houses and hair salons, according to the need. The outcome of this was dirt, piles of it, on the streets, in open gutters, and in the marketplaces, which were tributes to both dirt and trade. My favorite time was early morning, before people encroached, when the air was cool and all I could hear was the call from Central Mosque:
Allahu Akhbar
,
Allahu Akhbar
. All that crooning when the city was most quiet, it made sense.

By the Cathedral Church of Christ, I met a bottleneck and was cornered by a group of lepers. One rapped on my window and I rolled it down to put money into his tin cup. A group of refugee children from North Africa, noticing my gesture, scurried to my car. They rubbed my windows and pleaded with feigned expressions. I felt ashamed for wishing them off the streets. Passers-by trespassed the stairs of the Cathedral without regard. Once a monument along the marina, people could now buy fried yams, brassieres, and mosquito coils inches away from her ebony doors. The traffic gave way and I drove on.

I remembered my mother's medicine and made a detour into a market district to check their prices. The roads there were as tight as corridors and gutters dipped inches from my car tires. Crowded stalls blasted out bluish-light fluorescent lights. Their iron roofs collapsed into each other. I called out to a young man behind the counter at a pharmacy stall. “You have Propanolol?”

He nodded.

“Let me see it,” I said.

He hurried over and held the bottle up. I noticed the expiration date.

“This has expired,” I said.

He snatched it and walked away.

I drove fast until I approached a large round-about. A group of police wives sat within it, waiting for customers who came to braid their hair. Some had infants strapped to their backs, but they pursued my car. I recognized one who regularly braided my hair and waved to her. Lagos festered with people: drivers, sellers, shoppers, loiterers, beggars. Madmen. The latter sometimes walked the streets with nothing but dust covering their private parts. I once saw a woman like that. She was pregnant.

When I reached Sheri's house my shoulders were as tight as springs. She opened her door wearing another colorful
agbada
and matching head tie. I sniffed.

“What are you cooking?”

“A little food,” she said.

“For me?”

She prodded my shoulder as I walked in. Sheri's apartment was like an array of plastic flowers. Each piece of furniture had a flower motif on it; some in powdery pastels, others in strident reds and yellows. I almost expected to smell pungent potpourri instead of the onions and peppers simmering in her kitchen.

“Sit here while I finish,” she said.

I sunk into a sofa of daffodils and noticed the miniature porcelain ornaments on her center table. There were kittens, a woman with an umbrella, and a house with the inscription “Home is where the heart is.” The kittens were lined up. I was sure that if I moved one, she would notice. Her cushions were lined up the same way on the sofas, equally spaced.

Pepper smoke scratched the back of my throat. I heard a pot rocking over a hot plate. “I hope I'm going to eat some of that,” I said.

“Eat what you want,” she said. “Ibrahim doesn't eat much.”