Everything Good Will Come (35 page)

My phone rang. It was Busola from next door, inviting me to dinner.

“We're having Bomb Alaska,” she said.

I really couldn't, I said.

“I saw your husband at the club today. I couldn't believe it. I said, ‘You? Here? Where's your best half?' He looked at me, as if to say, ‘This girl, you're certifiable.' I know he hates me.”

“He doesn't hate you.”

“Oh, I know he doesn't like me.”

“He doesn't... ”

“Anyway he's one of the decent ones and he works hard, unlike some lazy buggers in this house. Come on, to cheer yup.”

“I can't,” I said.

Busola was someone I'd known from my student days in London. She socialized with a few Nigerians who drove Porsches to lectures and snorted cocaine for extra-curricular activities. They were called the High Socs, and Oppressors, and they were the envy of those who had time for such emotions after studying and socializing. I'd always thought her crowd was a little tragic: their cocaine habits, the inevitable drying out, which could mean they were in a clinic in Switzerland, or being exorcised by the whip of a juju man in their hometowns. Wasted brains, and the boys nearly always ended up beating their girlfriends.

“Any Rhoda,” she said.

The gossip about Busola was that her husband had married her because of her good English and secretly he chased women who could barely string two words together without breaking them. Her father was a retired government minister and my father handled part of his large estate. While the rest of us were filling out university applications, Busola was planning a year in Paris. A year stretched to two years and she returned to London wearing short skirts and saying she was in public relations. No one could understand it. We had to go to university. But Busola didn't, and her parents brought her back home when they discovered she was dating an English boy. Now she was married to a Nigerian whose sole purpose in life was to wear good suits and attach himself to the polo-playing clique in Lagos.

I liked Busola, down to her Chinese hair wigs and bags from Milan. I thought she was stylish, smart even. She had conned a whole bunch of people into submitting their children for her Montessori classes, hosted art exhibitions for artists she knew nothing about, dabbled in interior design. All these things required skills, I told Niyi who started calling her “the blockhead next door.” From the day she described the houses on our estate as glorified storage space, he'd lost patience with her. Her father had robbed the treasury and she was not afraid to open her mouth, he said. “Why do you always befriend women that no one else can stand, like that Sheri?” he asked. Sheri, who having spent a mere ten minutes with Busola, asked, “Come, what was she talking about? Is she a joker?”

Being generally offensive was what I had in common with both women, and there were a handful of jokers in Lagos, enough to keep the dinner parties going. They cherished their foreign ways, not like the bumbling colonial copycats of our parents' generation. They were much too savvy for that. They gave their children Nigerian names, wore traditional dress, spoke our languages, and pidgin. They were not that different from me, to be fair. But I lacked their affectations, to be fairer still. I imagined them being accosted by state security men at Busola's party. She would drop her Bomb Alaska and run screaming through the gates of Sunrise.

She was nice. The kind of nice that she would say of her husband: “He took my car, went out and didn't come back till morning, and I was furious. So, so furious. You know what I did? I looked at him. Like this. So he knew how furious I was.”

Each time I heard a car that night, I went to the window. How free was I, really, in my marriage? Niyi got in a bad mood and in no time, so did I. When I met him, I followed his eye movements, to see if he would stray. Now that I was sure he didn't, I still worried if he was out late, and not just because of his safety. Infidelity was always my limit. For Sheri it was any form of physical force. But there were other things a man could do. My father-in-law had tamed his wife, almost as if he'd scooped out her brains and left just enough for her to keep on obeying him. His son acted like I was invisible until he liked what he saw.

I went downstairs and padlocked the front door, tossed the key with a flourish. Beaters, cheaters, lazy buggers. The worst were the so-called decent. No one would ever encourage a woman to run like hell from them. Fortunately, my mother had shown me the power of a padlock. Whenever Niyi returned, he would have to wait a while before he entered his own home. Mosquitoes could keep him company outside meanwhile.

It was past midnight when I heard the door bell. I opened the door in my crumpled night shirt. My face was swollen. I had not slept. Niyi dropped his keys on the dining table as he normally would. I sat on the bottom stair. I was determined to make peace with him this time. The floor felt cold under my feet.

“Busola says she saw you,” I said.

He raised his brows as if to say, “And so?”

Niyi's face was easy to read when he was angry. This was not the case. He was not sulking; what he wanted was a surrender. I'd almost forgotten that he was a man who believed in absolutes: he wouldn't chase other women but he would break my heart for my own good.

“I'm not asking you to talk,” I said. “Just listen. I know you're scared for my safety. I too wish my father were not involved. He and I, there are questions I could ask him, but none of it matters now. What if I never have a chance to speak to him again? God knows what is going to happen, but my life has to change, and you have to help me. Please. This is too much for me. Look at me.”

Niyi looked as if he wished I were still upstairs sleeping. “You hear me?” I asked.

His expression didn't change. I gave him time.

“So,” I said. “This is how it is. I can't tell a lie—you're hurting me. I've tried my best. Don't forget to lock your door.”

Anger was heavy in my hands that week, weighing them down, and I didn't know where to place it. I would stab a table with a pencil, drag a curtain by the nose, kick a door in its shin. Sometimes I passed Niyi along a corridor when he returned from work. I felt like reaching out to push him, with both hands: “Bombastic element!” But I wasn't going to give in.

I visited Grace Ameh again, hoping for some impartial advice on what to do about my father. She was dressed as I last saw her, in a colorful up-and-down.

“My dear, any news?”

“No,” I said.

“
Na wa
, what a pity. Well, come in.”

She placed her hand on my shoulder. We found our way to her study. This time I looked around. There were piles of paper in bundles, an ancient computer, a typewriter, two ebony busts used as book ends. I recognized some of the authors on her shelf: Ama Ata Aidoo, Alice Walker, Buchi Emecheta, Jamaica Kincaid, Bessie Head, Nadine Gordimer, Toni Morrison.

“You write here?” I asked.

She looked confused. “What?”

“Write in here,” I said.

“You'll have to speak up,” she explained. “I'm deaf in one ear. That's why everybody shouts in this house.”

Now, it was obvious she was lip-reading, not scrutinizing, me. I repeated my question.

“Not recently,” she said. “I feel their presence too strongly, on the tip of my pen. I want to write a word and I think of treason. I'm too upset to write since I came back. Have you ever been to South Africa?”

“No.”

She screwed up her nose. “I didn't feel comfortable there. Racial tensions and all that. I don't understand, wherever I travel, beautiful countries, better countries than ours, countries that function, I am always eager to come home for a reason. What do I get on my arrival?”

I smiled. “Arrested.”

She folded her arms. “What is it you do? I never asked. I assumed you were a lawyer like your father.”

“I am a lawyer.”

“I hear that's curable.”

I touched my stomach. “I've been out of practice for a while. I was in banking, and then maternity called.”

“How many months?”

“Four.”

“Na
wa
, congratulations. My mother was a midwife. She worked in Lagos Maternity. She gave up the day she learned that rats were eating the women's afterbirth.”

She caught my expression.

“Afterbirth is nutritious,” she said. “But it makes the rats fatter, and she couldn't bear that.”

“My husband wants to know what you write about,” I said.

I could not forget him for a moment, I thought.

She glanced at me sideways. “You've heard of my play ‘The Fattening House?'”

“No.”

“You've never heard of my play ‘The Fattening House?' Two sisters locked up in their home and force-fed by their grandmother?”

I smiled. “No.”

“Look at you,” she said. “That was my first play. I made such a loss. Yes, those were the days. At least we were able to express ourselves freely. I write plays for the stage and television. I'm also the arts editor for the Oracle. Now that they've driven us into hiding, I do what I can to make sure they don't completely silence us.”

I seized the opportunity. “My father says women are not vocal enough.”

“He does?”

“About what is happening.”

“Not many people are, men or women.”

“I can see why women are silent.”

“Why?”

“The usual pressure. Shut up and face your family.”

“I don't subscribe to that.”

“Neither did my father, but it's reality.”

“Not mine.”

“Your family must support you.”

“I wouldn't have it any other way.”

Was she being smug or trying to get information out of me? After all, she was a journalist.

“Not everyone has the will to defy people they care about,” I said.

“You?”

“Yes. I hear the warnings all the time. ‘Don't get involved,' ‘Don't say anything.' Sometimes it's easy to forget who is at fault.”

She nodded. “Yes, yes, but you have a voice, which is what I always try to tell people. Use your voice to bring about change. Some people in this country, what chance do they have? Born into poverty, hungry from childhood, no formal education. It amazes me that privileged people in Nigeria believe that doing nothing is an option.”

“Don't you think I should at least try to get my father released?”

“If you stand with others. But on your own, you are nothing but another victim. Those men I begged at Shangisha, they could easily have harmed me.”

“You managed to trick them.”

“That doesn't make me a willing hero. Make no mistake, I am not about to be recognized posthumously, as they do over here, people forgetting you and nothing ever changing. I may not be able to write freely with the threat of treason over my head, but I cannot write if I'm dead, eh?”

“You still believe I should avoid Shangisha?”

“Yes.”

“It is frustrating, just sitting around.”

She reached for a sheet of paper on a side table and handed it to me.

“See. Maybe you would like to come. They've invited me to speak. They are a good group. They work with writers overseas to spread awareness of what is happening.”

It was an invitation to an event in support of journalists in detention. Peter Mukoro was one of them.

“A reading,” I said.

“There are people there who are involved in the campaign for democracy, human rights and civil liberty organizations. No one will expect you to be silent.”

“Thank you,” I said.

She smiled. “Hm, so you came here to see me?”

“Yes.”

“Petrol shortage and all that?”

“Yes.”