Everything Good Will Come (28 page)

“She doesn't know how lucky she is,” he muttered.

“For the sake of this child,” I said. “Forget how much you hate her. It doesn't matter who is right or wrong.”

“Why do people say that rubbish?”

“Okay, it does matter. But try to make your own phone calls from now on. I didn't escape my parent's home to become a mediator in mine.”

He did not answer and I thought I'd been insensitive.

“At least,” I said. “Give me a chance to despise her, or to be jealous of her or whatever it is I'm meant to feel for her, instead of acting as your counselor. Look at you, you worry, you phone, you write, you listen. There is no better father than you. It is her loss. No one can come between father and son. Have you eaten?”

I asked only to appease him.

“Nothing to eat.”

“Did you bother to look?”

“It's stale. I don't want any of it.”

I waved my free hand regally. “Hm. Maybe someday I can sit with my feet up and grumble about food. I will have to go shopping this weekend, since my lord and master is not pleased with the food I have at home.”

“Woman, what d'you think I paid your dowry for?”

“Good sex,” I said, strutting away. Since I was out of bed and running all over the place, he said, I would have to perform my wifely duties and give him some.

“You speak like that to the mother of your child?”

“Your breasts have grown.”

“So have yours, and you'll be lucky if I ever have sex with you, after all the sex I've had to make this baby.”

“What about my needs?”

“Handle your needs yourself,” I said.

I had married a man I could fall asleep with, not a man who would keep me up at night. I told him, the only way he could make me scream in bed was if he farted under the covers. I would repay him my dowry one day, have a ceremony and return his gifts. I went to bed dreaming of market shopping instead. Sex my ass.

“Give me another tray,” Sheri said.

The market woman passed her a tray without looking. She neatened the tray of tomatoes Sheri had rejected.

“How much?” Sheri asked, surveying the new tray.

“Twenty,” the woman said. Her hair was bound in thread and her cheeks were lined with facial marks.

“You must be joking,” Sheri said. “Twenty naira for this? Fifteen only.”

“Fifteen is not possible,” the woman said.

She swatted flies from her ware. The sun bore holes in my back. I dipped under the corrugated-roofed shack and swiped flies from my braids. The flies swarmed the marketplace, perching on mangoes, between spinach leaves and lumps of cow flesh. Later they would settle in the gutters and clotted drains and fly back to the food. I had left Sheri to bargain. She was better at it. Sometimes the women misjudged her and she immediately told them, “Do you know where I'm coming from?” One woman answered, “It's not my fault. I've never seen a white person who acts like you.”

In the same shack, another woman sat behind a wooden table laden with okras, cherry peppers, and purple onions. She had tattoos on her arms. A naked infant sat on a mat by her feet. Spit drooled from his lips and yellow mucus dangled from his nostrils. His eyes were lined with kohl.

“How much is this?” Sheri asked.

“Ten naira,” the first woman said.

“Ten naira!” Sheri exclaimed.

It was a game. I watched the second woman. She lifted the infant and sucked on his nose. The infant gasped as the woman spat his mucus into the gutter. The first woman wrapped our tomatoes in the obituary pages of a newspaper.

The marketplace was a series of meddlesome shacks like this, built row by row for a square mile. They were topped with rusty iron sheets and had no light except for sunlight. A small tarred road, wide enough to contain a car, separated the east side from the west. Cars and bicycles were not allowed in. They were parked by the entrance, near a high rubbish dump that smelled of rotten vegetables. Shoppers filled the road, walking in one direction like pilgrims. Above their voices I heard car horns from nearby streets.

At the butchers, I preferred to stand in the hot sun, rather than stand near the stall. I couldn't bear the smell of cow's intestines. From a distance I watched Sheri giving the butcher instructions. He laughed and hacked through a cow's flank with a machete. Soon he paused to wipe sweat from his forehead using the neckline of his bloody undershirt.

Sheri returned to me. She had lost some weight and it showed in her face.

“You're skinny,” I said.

“You think?” she said.

“Are you fasting?”

“It's my gym. I never fast.”

I fanned my face with my hands. The sun seemed to be melting me.

“Everyone is going to the gym these days,” I murmured.

I'd heard men say that women like Sheri didn't age well: they wrinkled early like white women. It was the end of a narration that began when they first called her yellow banana, and not more sensible, I thought. Thankfully, Sheri never relied on their praises, so she didn't pay attention to the insults. She was not one of those retired beauties who walked into a room and immediately began to assess who was better looking than her before she could relax.

We stopped by a fabric stall across the road, then loaded our bags into the trunk of my car and drove out of the market. By the exit, a hawker sat before a gutter selling roasted corn.

“Want some?” Sheri asked.

“No,” I said.

I couldn't risk getting typhoid. She stuck her head out of her window and beckoned to the hawker. I drove into the usual Saturday traffic. Cars formed two lanes on the narrow one way street. Some stopped by hawkers on the side walk, causing temporary bottlenecks. Shoppers scurried between them. Before us, a yellow bus staggered along. A conductor hung from its door, shouting the destination of the bus: “C.M.S! C.M.S!”

C.M.S. was the Christian Missionary Society school near the Marina. Only two people came out of the bus and about ten hurried in. There would be no space for them inside. Lagos was getting more crowded. Most of it resembled a shantytown. Buildings were never repainted, roads never repaired. My car began to make grinding noises. Ten years old, it gave me a reason to visit my mechanics almost every month, though in its present state, it could fetch three times the amount it had cost. I still used it for what I called my rugged trips. These days, people budgeted for cars the way other people in the world budgeted for houses.

“Niyi is talking about a party for my birthday,” I said.

“He is?” Sheri said.

“Yes. I've told him it has to be small and only people I want. Will you cater for us?”

“Yes.”

“Discount?” I asked.

She finished her corn and threw it out of the window. I would get my discount, she would help cook, but Sheri would not come to my party. She was not interested in people who would gossip about her or boast about their possessions. And the people I knew, Sunrise people in particular, scrutinized her whenever they saw her, for unhappiness, sexual frustration, and other deprivations, so that they could say her life was well and truly ruined. Sheri, who had always divided people into those who would die for her and those who were jealous and wished for her downfall, ignored them in a way that made me want to jump up and cheer, so desperate was I to rise above our social circle.

Niyi wasn't home when we arrived. “He's at work,” I explained as we separated our bags in the trunk of my car.

“Your husband works too hard,” she said.

“Everyone works too hard,” I said. “I'm about to work too hard.”

“You must take care of your husband's home,” she teased like an old woman.

“Ah, I hate it,” I said, peering into a package. “And for a man who won't even take a glass to the kitchen.”

“He won't?”

“I've never seen anything like it before. The man behaves as if I'm his personal servant.”

I told her about our living room, how I found beer glasses left overnight, stuck to our glass side tables, stuck so hard I could lift the tables. In our bedroom, I picked up his clothes as he dropped them. In our bathroom, I found stains around our toilet rim, which looked like beer stains, except they were misdirected urine.

“You must have known before,” she said.

“I haven't been at home this long before.”

“It's his mother, I'm sure.”

“The statute of limitations has run out.”

“Show him sense, jo.”

I handed her a bag and sighed. “These are peaceful times.”

Our conversation was as idle as conversation was in Sunrise. We separated parcels of vegetables wrapped up in censured news. Sheri recounted how she'd seen a man knocked down by a car the week before. The driver who hit the man drove off for fear of being mobbed. Four passersby carried the man off the street, one for each limb. They were shouting and the man himself was shouting, from pain.

“Please,” I said. “Why are you telling me this?”

She sighed. “How-for-do?”

I ruffled through more bags.

“You must break fast with us this year,” she said.

“You don't fast, Sheri.”

Allah had to forgive her. She couldn't go an hour without eating.

“Still come. We're going to cook.”

“I'll be there.”

She sighed. “Hopefully we will have light that day. All this talk about democracy. I will take any kind of government that can guarantee me electricity.”

“Any government?”

“A communist regime even.”

I knew she wasn't serious.

“Only electricity?”

“That's all I need,” she said.

“Some people don't have power lines.”

“Who? People in the villages? What do they care? They light their fire at night, the smoke drives mosquitoes away. At night they quench the fire and sleep. Clean water to drink is their problem, not electricity. Guinea worm? Can wipe out a whole village.”

Two children rode past my gates on bicycles. They pedaled fast and screamed.

“We're still better off,” I said.

Sheri handed a package to me. “I wonder.”

I arched my back. “Have to be grateful, Sheri, for everything. Good health, food, roof over your head and bed to lie in.”

“With a grumpy husband,” she said.

“At least he's not one of those running around.”

“No other woman will have him.”

“You see? What more do I want? And at least I have a car of my own. Even if it hardly works, I can still get up and go. Someone can't knock me dead on the streets. Hm-hm. What are we going to do? 1995 and we still have no decent ambulance service in this city. No decent hospitals. No nothing.”

“I'd rather die on the streets than go to any hospital here.”

“I'm telling you. If you get a headache, start packing your bags.”

“If you can afford to get out,” she said.

“If not,” I said. “Start digging your grave.”

“Gather your family for last rites. And oh, don't forget, on your tombstone: ‘The wicked have done their worst'.”

We laughed. Sheri handed me a tight obituary parcel.

“But people suffer,” I said.

“Country hard,” she said.

Our bags were finally separated.

“My sister,” I said, tapping her back.

“Greet Papa Franco,” she said.

Sheri called Niyi “Papa Franco” behind his back, because he was always scowling, she said. I couldn't tell her he scowled because he thought she was bad company. “Used-up like dry wood. That's why no one will have her.” I would get hoarse arguing with him. Sheri didn't need any man. I was there when she walked out on her lousy brigadier. “Yeah, yeah, she has a past,” he would say.

“Has a future,” I would say.

When she took money from her brigadier, she wore evening shoes in the day, bought any ornament with flower motifs and didn't even stay abroad too long because it was too cold. Now that she earned her own, she watched it like an accountant. I envied her freedom to spend as she wanted; her business knowledge, which came from bargaining. Sheri said she didn't have a head for books, but she saw a clear margin before a deal started. It was true that she rarely read anything, not even the gossip magazines I sometimes read. She said they were written by idiots, for idiots, especially on the rare occasions she was captured by the handful of tiresome Lagos paparazzi at the society events she catered for. “A half caste and a half” one recently called her. Sheri only ever read the romantic novels she'd been reading since she was a child. She used leather bookmarks to save a page. It took her several weeks to get through one, and yet trading came naturally to her. A wake, a wedding, a christening, she was there, haggling and keeping her client's dirty secrets as a doctor would. Within a year of starting her business, she was able to buy herself one of those second-hand cars people called “fairly used” and after two years, she was able to rent a place of her own.