Everything Good Will Come (29 page)

No, Sheri didn't love men or money. What she loved was food. She was always munching on fried meat, corn, biscuits. She could suck down a dozen banana ice pops and her eyes grew wide as food entered her mouth. I was there when her worship of food began and it didn't make sense because I was learning to starve myself through my tribulations. Now I knew some women did exactly the opposite. Sheri had gained weight from it over the years: English size 16, American 14, Bakare household size 2, she would say. But she had shed most of her childhood spirit, and I often remembered the time she laughed till hibiscus toppled out of her afro. It still brought tears of laughter to my eyes.

She was my oldest friend, my closest friend. We had been absent friends, sometimes uncertain friends, but so were most sisters and she was the nearest I'd come to having one in this place where families were over-extended.

In my kitchen I removed the food and stored the plastic bags away for future use. My kitchen was equipped for preparing local meals, nothing else. There was a wooden table, two collapsible iron chairs, an electric cooker, a kerosene stove, in case of power cuts, a deep freeze large enough to store a human body, and a refrigerator with an ice maker I'd never used. In my store room, I kept plastic bags, which were hard to find in Lagos, kegs of palm oil, groundnut oil, sacks of rice, yam flour, dried ground cassava, a bundle of dusty yams and sticky plantains. On the shelves there were piles of dishes, Tupperware, enormous steel pots, plastic bowls and calabash quarters for scooping. The door leading to our back yard was barred. The windows were also barred and covered in green mosquito netting. The netting garroted mosquitoes, trapped dust and raindrops. Sometimes, if the wind blew, I smelled all three and sneezed.

Pierre, my present house boy, began to wash the vegetables in a bowl of water. He was a burly boy about nineteen years old from the neighboring Republic of Benin. French was the only language we had in common. He spoke it fluently with an African accent, and I vaguely remembered it from secondary school. Pierre couldn't cook. He cleaned, fetched water, and thought himself a lady's man in between. Unable to get the French accent quite right, we pronounced his name, “P'yeh” and Niyi said it served him right anyway, because Pierre was lazy and never around when you needed him.

I needed Pierre to place the okras on the chopping board. “
Ici
,” I said pointing. “Over there, please.”

Pierre raised a brow. “
La bas
, madame?”

“My friend,” I said. “You know exactly what I mean.”

It was my fault for attempting to speak French to him. Now he raised his eyebrows twenty times a day.

“I beg, put am for there,” I said.

Our continent was a tower of Babel, Africans speaking colonial languages: French, English, Portuguese, and their own indigenous languages. Most house help in Lagos came from outside Lagos; from the provinces and from neighboring African countries. If we didn't share a language, we communicated in Pidgin English. Night watchmen, washmen, cooks and gardeners. The general help we called house boys and house girls. It was not our way to feel guilty and adopt polite terms. If they had friends over, we worried that they might steal. If they looked too hard at our possessions, we called them greedy, and whenever they fought we were amused. We used separate cups from them, sent them to wash their hands and allowed our children to boss them around. They helped with daily chores in exchange for food, lodgings, and a stipend. Most were of working age, barely educated, but some were of pensionable age, and many were children. In good homes, they could be treated like distant cousins; in bad homes, they could be deprived of food, or beaten. I had more than once suggested that they were a few degrees separated from blacks in old Mississippi and in apartheid South Africa. “But that's racism,” someone would say.

Pierre began to chop the okras. I ground the peppers and onions. Later he washed and cut the meat and I braised it. We worked together, cutting and frying, stirring and pouring. My eyes streamed from pepper and palm oil fumes settled in my braids. Steam scalded my wrists. Three hours later, we'd finished four separate stews. Pierre scooped them into Tupperware containers and placed them in the freezer. I handed him a plate of lunch and decided to have a wash.

Behind our bathroom door, we kept a drum of water. I filled my bathing bucket and topped it up with boiling water from a kettle. But for the bump under my belly button, my body was the same as it was before I became pregnant. I'd finished soaping myself when the electricity generator next door began to roar. “Shit,” I said, remembering the food in my freezer. Quickly, I scooped bowls of water from the bucket over my body and came out. Niyi was coming upstairs.

“No light?”

I stamped my foot. “It's just gone.”

“Why are you getting angry?”

He looked just as irritated.

“I've been cooking all day.”

“You cooked?” he said. “Good.”

He headed downstairs as I grumbled on: “Someone ought to call a national conference for diet reform. The day an African woman can prepare a sandwich for a meal, that will be the day. I've spent the whole day in that bloody kitchen... ”

“Where is this food?” Niyi interrupted.

I leaned over the banister. “When you are truly hungry, those bearings of yours, you'll find them very quickly.”

He knew how serious I was. If he liked, he could try me, then he would see the African version of the girl from
The Exorcist
.

Electricity returned before midnight and my food was saved. Niyi said it would taste so much better if only I learned to cook with a sweeter disposition. “The trouble is,” he said, before we went to sleep. “You are not a domesticated woman. You just don't have that... that loving quality.”

He pinched his fingers together as if I couldn't grasp the essence of what he was saying. He was lying on my side of the bed. I pushed him over.

“I'm very loving,” I said. “What do you know? Move, I beg.”

I was a scrotum shrinker, he said. And I would not stop until he was as small as raisins.

“What are you doing for my womanhood?” I said, spreading my arms. “Am I not a temple of the miracle of creation?”

Every picture, advert, film, I'd seen of pregnant women, showed their partners rubbing their feet and such. I didn't ask that of him; never once expected him to tell me I was beautiful. It was a miracle, I had to admit, that he never complained when I came to him in the mornings with a puffy face after vomiting. That was his best loving ever; his best romance from the time I met him.

We held hands to sleep. The next morning, we shared the Sunday papers, though Niyi remained downstairs while I stayed upstairs reading what he handed to me from time to time. I was flicking through a government-owned newspaper. A group of army wives had founded a program for women in a village. They promised to train the village women to eradicate infant dehydration. On the front page, an army wife was put on display with a gold choker around her neck. I turned the page and a man had thrown acid into his lover's face. On the next page was a charity drive for a boy's eye. He had a rare type of cancer and would have to be flown overseas for treatment. Underneath, a bank director in tortoiseshell glasses was discussing capital investments. A page later there was an update on our peace-keeping troops in Liberia, directly over the story of a child hawker who had been molested. She had had difficulty expressing herself during the court case, and untied her wrapper to show where the man had touched her. The magistrate ordered her to cover up. The caption read, “No Need for Nakedness.”

Niyi walked in. I held the paper up.

“Have you read this?” I asked.

His mouth was open. My heartbeat quickened.

“What?” I asked.

“They've arrested him,” he said.

“Who?”

“Your father.”

I grabbed my head. “No.”

“This morning. Baba came to tell us. He's downstairs.”

I scrambled out of bed. “I told him. I told him.”

I ran down the stairs. Baba was in the dining room. His eyes were yellow and watery. A fly settled on his white lash and he brushed it away with a trembling hand. “I was doing my work,” he said. “Doing my work, as usual. A car came. Two men. I let them in. I went back to work and time passed. Then your father called me to the veranda. ‘Tell Enitan,' he said. ‘Tell her they've taken me. And let Fatai know, too.' Then he got in the car and they drove off.”

“Policemen?” I asked.

“Like policemen.”

“What were they wearing?” Niyi asked.

Baba ran his heavily veined hands down his chest. “Em, something. Something... ”

I was trying to recall the last detainees I'd read about. Ten-millimeter names, blurred photographs, newspaper phantoms. People invited for questioning by state security. They disappeared for months.

The rest of the morning, we tried to telephone our friends and family. I couldn't recall any telephone numbers and Niyi had to find my address book. My mother still didn't have a phone. We called Uncle Fatai, then Niyi's parents. Later, Sheri. By lunch time, they were in my home.

They eased into my father's disappearance the way people in Lagos eased into death. At first there were the usual questions. How? What? When? Then resignation set in. My father-in-law began to talk about other people who had been detained: journalists, lawyers, a trade union leader. “I know him well,” he said.

He talked slow and savored his pronouncements. Whenever my father-in-law spoke, he lifted his chin as though he was making a great contribution to humanity, and kept his eyes shut, confident that when he reopened them, someone would still be listening. My mother-in-law always was.

Niyi walked over to me. “We should get them lunch at this rate.”

“Lunch?” I said, as if he'd suggested horse manure.

“Yes. They've been here all morning.”

I began to gabble. “Pierre has his day off and I don't know if... ”

“I'll help,” Sheri said.

Niyi tapped my shoulder. “Thanks.”

I was getting lunch, Niyi told everyone. I stood up and my mother-in-law stood up, too, but I waved her down. “No ma, Sheri will help.”

My voice was unnaturally high. It was nothing but a minstrel show, I thought, except no one bothered to watch as Sheri and I headed for the kitchen.

Inside, I slammed an empty pot on a stove. “What am I doing here?”

“Where do I start?” Sheri asked.

“My father is detained and I'm cooking?”

“People have to eat.”

She looked around as though searching for a weapon. I imagined us finding plates and breaking them; both of us banging pots.

Sheri beckoned. “Be quick. Where do you keep your cutlery?”

I did not eat. My father-in-law and Uncle Fatai sat on opposite ends of the table. Their chewing inspired me to imagine new ways of throttling.

“I want to talk to you,” Uncle Fatai said, as I collected his plate. Niyi and his father inclined their heads like world leaders at a conference. On a whim I asked, “Can you help?” Niyi looked up like a world leader confronted by his mistress at a conference.

My father-in-law cut in, “The young lady can do that.”

Sheri stood up hurriedly and nudged me through the kitchen door.

“I want them out of my house,” I whispered. “Out.”

Sheri touched my shoulder. “They won't stay here forever. Go and speak to your uncle. Go on.”

She pushed me through the door. I joined Uncle Fatai at the dining table. He pressed his hands together and his knuckles dimpled. “Who will mind your father's business now?”

“I will,” I said.

“Good,” he said, covering his mouth.

“Is there anything we can do meanwhile?” I asked.

He rubbed his mouth with a napkin. “Nothing.”

“Shouldn't we try to look for him?”

“Where?” he asked.

“I mean, can't we contact someone?”

He noticed my expression and leaned forward. “Enitan, your father knew what he was doing. You understand? I'm sorry but this is the result of a decision he made on his own. When he started saying things, I told him, be careful. All we can do now is to make sure his practice continues. You understand?”

The aftermath of his belch hung between us.

I nodded. “Yes, Uncle.”

“By the grace of God he will be out soon,” he said. “Now, I will need a bowl of water.”

His knuckles dimpled as he held his hands up.

“To wash my hands,” he explained.