Everything Good Will Come (31 page)

“They're underground.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know.”

“How do you know she was one of their reporters?”

“She said she was.”

“Did you ask her for an ID?”

“No.”

“Suppose she was state security?”

“She wasn't.”

“How do you know?”

“She wasn't.”

He would know if he'd seen Grace Ameh himself, and why was he questioning me? He threw his keys on the dining table.

“You should have called me first.”

“I didn't have time.”

“What if they pick you up, after the article is published?”

“They won't pick me up. Not for this.”

“She took advantage of you. I'm sorry. The woman knew exactly what she was doing. They will do anything to get publicity, these journalists.”

“What publicity?”

“Asking you to give a statement, jeopardizing your safety at a time like this. You shouldn't even be going to work.”

“I shouldn't be entertaining people, either, but I did.”

“What?”

“Yesterday,” I said.

“I'm serious,” he said.

“So am I,” I said.

There was no precedent for this, nothing to draw on. We went to the authorities to report crimes. Where could we go when the authorities committed one? It was as if I'd opened a Bible and found the pages blank.

“Call me next time,” he said.

Wednesday morning I paid my father's staff their salaries: Dagogo and Alabi first, and then the others. I was surprised— Dagogo and Alabi's paychecks were a fraction of what I had earned at the bank. I'd heard them joke before about eating two meals a day, about substituting beans for meat. It was the principle of “at least” on which people persevered in Lagos: at least they had food in their stomachs, at least they had a roof over their heads, at least they were alive. People said there was no middle class in a country like ours, only an elite and the masses. But there was a middle class, and all that separated us was a birthright—a ridiculous name for a right, because there wasn't a person dead or alive who hadn't been born at some point. We were a step-down society compared to those by which we would be defined. The Nigerian elite were middle class people. Few had the sort of wealth that would rank them amongst the world's elite, and they were usually government or ex-government officials. The middle class, in turn, were working-class people, and the masses were poor. They begged for work and money, served, envied and despised the elite, which actually made the elite feel more special and important. But for Lagos, always reminding me where exactly in the world I was living, I grew up feeling like I was part of landed gentry in England. That uppity.

I left the office that afternoon with my head down. How could my father be paying his senior associates so little? I asked Niyi at home.

“It is the cost of living that's high,” he said.

“Don't employers have a responsibility to compensate?”

He rubbed his eyes. “It's the northerners. They are responsible for the problems in this country. They've completely ruined the economy.”

“Beggars on the streets, our night watchman, he's from the north. The hawkers by our gates, they are from the north. I don't see them ruining any economy.”

Niyi wasn't convinced. “Who heads our government? Northerners. Who heads the army? Northerners. One southerner wants to be president and they lock him up. Come to my office. The whole place is full of them. Barely educated and yet they want to bring in more of their people. They've completely ruined the economy. How can men like Dagogo and Alabi survive?”

Increasingly, I was hearing this type of sentiment; north versus south. We had the oil fields, the northerners had enjoyed the revenues for so long. Some southerners were calling for a secession. I thought it could end in the kind of bloodshed we'd seen in the Civil War. From his little experience with office politics, Niyi had come to distrust northerners, and Moslems, if he cared to admit. He called them Allahu-Akhbars. His chairman, a northerner and Moslem man, had little education. He bypassed senior staff for another northerner. Round them up and shoot them, Niyi would say. “Then what?” I once asked. “No one will ever bother you at work again? No official will ever dip their hands in our treasury and deposit half the proceeds with the Swiss? Please.”

I imagined my father in a prison cell again. Under a detention order he would have no right to know the reason for detention, no access to his family, or legal counsel. The detention orders were renewable and the law courts could not review them. Some detainees were released after a few weeks; others were held for longer periods and no one could decipher why. It didn't matter to me if a northerner or southerner was responsible for this.

“Do you think they will let him out soon?”

“Yes,” Niyi said.

“What if they try to kill him?”

“They won't,” he said.

I moved closer toward him and rested my head on his shoulder.

“If anything happens to him,” I said, “someone will pay.”

He stretched and the leather sofa grunted.

“You're tired?” I asked.

“Exhausted,” he said.

He put his arm around me. Family rifts, losses, absences. The stress brought us closer. Niyi's heartbeat was almost in time with mine when our air-conditioner shuddered to a halt. We were sitting in the dark.

“Jesus,” he said.

We heard the electricity generator start next door. He went to the kitchen and brought back a huge battery- operated lamp. I watched the stark light, like the moon. Outside crickets chattered. I began to feel hot.

“It really is more than north and south,” I said. “We have all played a part in this mess, not caring enough about other people, how they live. It comes back to you. Right back. Look at us in this house, paying Pierre pittance... ”

“Pierre's lazy,” he said. “I work harder than him.”

“Living in quarters... ”

“He's lucky to have a roof over his head.”

“Bad ventilation and a pit latrine? Would you like to live there?”

A mosquito buzzed around my ear. I swiped it away. If I wouldn't like to live in our quarters, why would anyone else?

Niyi turned to me. “Why are we talking about Pierre? Don't we have enough problems of our own?”

The skin on my belly was beginning to feel moist. Niyi once said I was guilty of thinking too hard. I told him that it wasn't possible, even with a million thoughts, colliding with each other, my thoughts wouldn't be enough. I envied his ability to be certain.

He placed his hands behind his head. “You live in this country, you suffer in some way. Some more than others, but that's life.” He noticed my expression. “That's life, o-girl, unless you want Pierre to come and sleep in our bed tonight?”

I resented him, enough to shift inches away from him, then I shifted back again because none of it was his fault anyway. If people didn't care, it was because there was so much to care about. After a while the suffering could seem like sabotage; salt in your sweet pap. A beggar's face at a car window could appear spiteful, a house boy's clumsiness deliberate. Sheer wickedness could begin with the need for self-protection.

We slept without electricity that night. The next day, Niyi returned from work with two potted plants. “Anything?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

He shook his head. “Man... ”

I walked toward where he stood in the veranda. We'd had the same conversation several times during the day: Anything? Nothing.

“All day,” I said. “People were calling the office. I had nothing to tell them. I mean, if you detain someone, shouldn't you at least tell their relations?”

I held his hand as it came over my shoulder. What little garden we had, Niyi was responsible for: the golden torches I liked, the spider lilies he liked. He bought them from a nearby nursery and performed tricks with them: cutting up the leaves and replanting them, halving a plant to make two. I'd even found him polishing the leaves of a rubber plant. These new plants were pinkish-white and waxy. I couldn't remember what they were called.

“You love this house so much you bring her flowers every week,” I said.

He rolled his shoulder. “Hm.”

“You strained something?” I asked.

“It will go,” he said.

“You should have asked Pierre to help.”

“What, I'm not a slave driver today?”

I'd been looking forward to seeing him. What I wanted was to share every thought I had during the day.

“No one is calling you a slave driver. I'm just saying, maybe we can't see things the same way. Not anymore.”

I expected an answer, instead he began to punch the air with his free hand.

“How was work?” I asked.

“Same. Akin called, just before I left.”

My mind was drifting. Between phone calls at work, I was thinking that the one person I could ask for advice was the one who needed help. My father. There was no one else.

“He and a group of other guys,” Niyi was saying. “They are starting a firm. Stock-brokers. They are looking for people who want to join. It seems like a good idea, I mean, privatization is bound to happen soon. Can you imagine? If it means we can have an electricity system that works in this country, a telephone system that works... you're not listening.” He tugged my chin.

“Sorry,” I said. “I was thinking.”

“Yes?”

“All day I've been thinking. So many things. Decree Two. You remember when they first passed it? You remember? I didn't care then, and I called myself a lawyer. Now... ” I waved my arm around. “Now, we don't have a safe country. Not even to have a thought.”

“So?”

“So, this is the result, can't you see? Nothing, nothing will get better if we don't do something. That is what I was thinking.”

His hand dropped. “Something like... ”

I stepped back. “It is blood money if they privatize. I wouldn't join a firm like that. What is it? These military bastards are always on to something: Indigenization decree, Structural Adjustment Program, Operation Feed the Nation, War Against Indiscipline, National Conference for Democratic Reform. Now, privatization. I'm sick of it. Their damn initiatives. Someone gets rich and people continue to drop dead. What, are we to rejoice because a group of generals and their friends are about to buy up what the public owns in the first place? Let them privatize if they want. They can't deceive the people anymore.”

I could have been bragging about an old boyfriend the way Niyi was looking at me. He worried more about the loss of financial power than any other. But I was not interested in the profit ventures of my father's captors; not even if it meant a career change for him.

“I take responsibility for what I have done,” he said. “Only for what I have done.”

“And what we have not done?” I asked.

I was hoping he would tell me I was right.

“At some point,” he said, “We have to let it go.”

Letting it go. My father, backdoor house boys and house girls, child hawkers, beggars. We saw their faces every day and we were not stirred. There was a feeling that if people were at a disadvantage, it was because they somehow deserved it. They were poor, illiterate, they were radical, subversive, and they were not us.

How did we live comfortably under a dictatorship? The truth was that, we in places like Sunrise, if we never spoke out, were free as we could possibly be, complaining about our rubbish rotten country, and crazy armed robbers, and inflation. The authorities said hush and we hushed; they came with their sirens and we cleared off the streets; they beat someone and we looked the other way; they detained a relation and we hoped for the best. If our prayers were answered, the only place we suffered a dictatorship was in our pockets.