Everything Good Will Come (33 page)

My memory liked to tell lies. Huge lies. Sometimes, I remembered my father standing tall, my mother cracking jokes. My memory could blank out all but one sensation: a sick feeling in my stomach, a smell, a taste, like the creamy sweetness of banana ice-pop in my mouth. Then there were times my memory became a third eye, watching from a distance. This was always how I remembered the conquering moments; the moments I transcended myself: my first free rotation on a bicycle, my first paddle without arm bands, first plunge into a pool.

My father was standing in the shallow end. I was on the very edge, swimsuit in my butt crack and nose streaming. I crouched like I was about to pee, then flopped in.

He grabbed me. “You see? It's not so bad.”

I buried my face in his chest. The water had smacked me good and hard. My father had given me my first swimming lessons, though he wasn't a good swimmer himself. Half of it was a lesson in courage, he said.

I couldn't shift the feeling that I had failed him. I told my friends and family about Grace Ameh, and no one else. Uncle Fatai said we could do nothing but wait for his release.

I waited. In the silence of my home I waited, as harmattan season passed and the Moslem fasting period, Ramadan, approached. Those who could afford time and money began to look forward to the day of the new moon on which Moslems feasted. Niyi's silence continued as the mound in my belly grew. My thirty-fifth birthday came and went like any other day. I was relieved.

As soon as the February issue of the
Oracle
came out, I drove to nearby Falomo to buy a copy. As usual there was a traffic jam there. Traffic to and from Victoria Island converged in the same place, under the bridge at Falomo. On one side there was the Church of Assumption; on the other, the local council had built a line of concrete stalls by the police barracks. Mammy Market, it was called. The road was filled with potholes. The barracks looked like slum dwellings over the marketplace: dusty and gray from cauldron smoke, wooden slabs for windows, barefooted children. Hens.

This was suburbia. A vagrant woman scraped ash from a burnt pile, using a piece of cardboard. A man hawked small plastic bags filled with drinking water. Someone had hung four fake Persian rugs over a public wall, for sale; another displayed a set of children's tricycles on the sidewalk. A man walked by with a sewing machine on his shoulder, ready to fix a zip or tear. There wasn't a corner free from baskets and wooden stalls. A watchman performed ablution into a gutter, another peed by a wall that said
Post no Bill
.

While people moved slowly, they were not idle. They were skewering meat, pumping tires, hawking suitcases of fake gold watches. If no one would employ them, they would employ themselves. The State gave them nothing, not even what they paid for. Sometimes they were begging, and sometimes the beggars were children. A girl stood with a tray of coconut slices on one side of the street. Next to her, a boy carried a board:
Please help me. I am hungry.
Billboards told the story of trade: Kodak was keeping Africa smiling; Canon was setting new standards in office copying; Duracell lasted up to six times longer. Redeemed Church, rug cleaners, Alliance Français. A bank, vet services, a nursery of potted plants,
fresh salad sold here
. No pesticides or dyes so cucumbers were small and oranges were yellowish-green.

Initially, finding myself unexpectedly nervous, I couldn't read the article, but driving back home, I pulled into a private driveway to search for it. It was a three-inch column: “Sunny Taiwo's daughter speaks out.” Grace Ameh recounted the events as I'd told her, and then finished with: “When asked to comment on her father's detention, she stated, ‘My father is not a criminal.'”

I placed the magazine on the passenger seat and drove off. A few meters down the road there was a police check-point. Two policemen stood by rusty oil drums placed on either side of the road. Their rifles were hanging over their shoulders. One of them flagged me down and I came to a stop. He searched the interior of my car.

“Your lishense,” he said.

I reached into my glove compartment. He flicked through breathing heavily and handed it back.

“Insh-wurance?”

I passed my insurance certificate and he held it upside down.

“Sistah, why you stop like dat?” he asked, giving it back.

“Where?” I asked.

“Yonder.”

He pointed down the road where I'd stopped.

“I was looking for something.”

“What?”

“My glasses,” I said.

He scratched his chin. “Is not allowed to stop like dat, Sistah. Is not allowed. You almost caused accident for dis side.”

His eyes landed on my handbag under my legs. There wasn't a traffic sign on the road. I knew not to argue with the police. Give them money, or apologize. Move on.

“That is not true,” I said, quietly. “There are no traffic signs, nothing to say I can't stop there.”

“Eh,” he shouted. “Who tol' you dat? Comot. Comot.”

He banged on my car door. I got out of my car and stood before him. Across the road, his partner glanced at us and carried on watching traffic. The policeman screwed up his face attempting to look angry. “Sistah, you no fear? I can arrest you right now.”

“What for?”

He snatched my arm and I snatched it back.

“I'm a pregnant woman. Be careful how you handle me.” His gaze dropped.

“Yes,” I said. “I am.”

His face creased into a wide grin. “Why you no talk before? You for enter labor small time.”

I didn't answer.

“Begin go,” he said waving me into my car. “Go on. You're very lucky today. Very, very lucky. It could have been another story.”

His mouth hung like a hammock from his ears. The dead and the pregnant, I thought.

Niyi was sitting on the couch with his legs propped up on my ebony stool. As usual, he was listening to his noise. I heard a clarinet.

“How now,” I said.

Drums.

“The article came out today. We have nothing to... ” Trumpets.

“Worry about.”

The instruments clashed like a marketplace brawl. Niyi nodded in time to the bass. I placed the magazine on the dining room table and went upstairs.

The spare room seemed smaller. I imagined it was the same size as my father's cell. I drew the curtains and lay down. Slowly, I rubbed my belly, trying to picture my child inside, skin stretching, bones forming. My palms ached from being snubbed, but I was no longer alone.

My father appeared leaner in my imagination, with yellow eyes. I strained to see him. The rest of him was a shadow.

“I spoke to the
Oracle
about you,” I said.

“You did?” he said.

“They are calling you a prisoner of conscience.”

“They are.”

“Do you think I was right to speak to them?”

“Do you think you were?”

“Yes.”

“Nothing left to say then,” he said. “Let your mind be at rest.”

Downstairs I heard the thud of a bass. Outside I could hear children playing. There was a hush over my country. I heard that too, and in my frustration, it sounded like men learning how to be women.

In my first year of marriage, there was a hawker who sat by the vigilante gates of our estate. She was one of those Fulani people from the north. We never said a word to each other: I could understand her language no more than she could mine. But I would smile at her, she would smile at me, and that would suffice.

Fulani people, traditionally, were cattle herders, but those who lived in Lagos worked as stable hands, night watchmen, craftsmen, or as street hawkers. Lagos people would say they spread tuberculosis because they were always spitting. Their elite were the sort of people Niyi held responsible for the demise of our country, the power hawkers. They were Moslems, influenced by Arab culture, and wealthy. Sheri's brigadier was one of them.

This hawker sold confectionery out of a portable display box: Trebor mints, Bazooka Joe gum, Silk Cut cigarettes, local analgesics, and I would often find her crouched over her box, arranging the contents of her display, as if she were playing a solo chess game. Occasionally I stopped to buy something from her and I soon began to call her “my woman.” She pressed her palms together whenever she smiled, and I thought she was truly graceful and enjoyed seeing her, the way a person might a beautiful tree, or a view.

Niyi asked if I was a lesbian, calling her that. I told him that I'd always wanted men, but women interested me. Still, one day, I came back from work and my woman was not there. I thought she might be preparing for prayers, or resting in the dilapidated building where she and others in her community squatted at night. I asked a gate man and he confirmed that she'd gone. I wondered where. I watched the other Fulani women. They were lighting kerosene lanterns for night time and perching them on their display boxes. I imagined a story about my woman. Her name would be Halima. She would be the wife of a stable hand. His name would be Azeez. One day Halima got tired of being stationary in Lagos. She left on foot, walked to Zaria up north, crossed the Sahara desert in her robes and chiffon wrap. During the day, the sun beat her head, but she never, ever died, and at night, her gold hoops made music with the wind.

February began with the season of Ramadan and a petrol shortage. Sunrise Estate was full of angry residents, none of whom could leave their homes to go to work. The first day, we telephoned each other: What kind of country were we living in? How would we ever get out of our homes? By the second day, children were ecstatic. Two whole days and no school! The third day, and they were driving their parents crazy. Solutions began to emerge fast. A bank was sending a bus around. Someone knew an employee of an oil company with petrol to spare; another somebody knew somebody who knew somebody else who was selling petrol at black market rates.

The queues were three days long. A few petrol stations had opened. They were selling petrol from oil drums using nothing but funnels to get the petrol into car tanks. I stayed at home until the shortage was over. I doubted any of my father's staff would show up. Public transportation had not fully resumed and fares had quadrupled. I saved what little petrol I had for an emergency which never occurred.

Niyi went to work every day. His company driver came for him. Our home was ridiculous. He was carrying on his standoff and I'd retreated fully to the spare room. Silence had become noisy: doors clicking, curtains rolling, and at night, jazz and crickets. Sometimes I heard Niyi laughing on the phone. I wanted to tell him that a heavy plug had settled at the base of my womb. I wanted to tell him that I was finding it difficult to sleep on my belly at night. I wanted to talk to anyone about my father.

On the day of the Moslem festival,
Id-el-fitr
, I left home for the first time that month to break fast with the Bakares. The streets were crowded with vehicles and the heat was heavier than I was prepared for. Harmattan ended in Lagos and we expected something new, the way the rainy season left colors deeper and cleaner and shinier. It was always easy to see that a well-meaning season has passed after the rains. But after harmattan, all that remained was humid heat. Gutters dried up as if they couldn't remember why they started flowing. The dry season was nothing to look forward to in Lagos, and it lasted most of the year.

As I drove through their gates, I heard a ram bleating in the back yard of the Bakare's house. It had been tied to a mango tree for two weeks and would be slain for the Sallah feast. I parked, walked past the lunch time cafeteria and emerged in a cement square. Sheri and some of her family members stood around the square. They were watching a butcher untie the ram. Nearby, a bandy-legged butcher's aide waited with his hands on his hips. I headed straight for Sheri's stepmothers and curtseyed.