Everything Good Will Come (38 page)

“You ask me a hundred questions. You don't even give me a chance to answer.”

She began to rock back and forth, mimicking me. “O dearie me. O my goodness. O my goodness gracious.”

“Ignore her,” Grace Ameh said.

“No,” I said.

She would bury me unless I faced up to her. I waited until her dance was over.

“You've finished?” I asked.

“You still have not answered my questions,” she said.

I moved closer. “I answered one. You insulted me.”

“Don't take a step forward,” she shouted.

“Why not,” I said.

“I will damage that precious pregnancy of yours.”

“You will have to kill me afterward,” I said. “Because if there is a heartbeat left in me, I will kill you.”

It was a gamble. She was a bully, nothing more.

She was waving her arm in the air, breathing heavily. I heard women mumbling. Mother of Prisons. Wouldn't she ever stop?

“What have I done to you?” I asked.

“You talk too much,” she said. “You should have shut up. You should have shut up, in the first place. Only a court can decide. You think this is a joke?” Her voice broke. “All these years I've been in here. The one thought that stopped me from becoming like these crazies, is that nothing, nothing, can be done for me.”

She began to cry. This time she sounded genuine.

“This is the kind of hope you have?” I asked.

I looked around. A few of the women were sitting up. They thought we were about to fight. I heard some more grumbling. Mother of Prisons, she was always fighting, and she had no strength, only for talking.

But how could I have answered her question honestly? A government dedicated to eradicating opposition. A country without a constitution. A judicial system choking, even over commercial matters. Sluggish, sluggish as an old man's bowels.

“I'm sorry, ” I said. “I should have been quiet.”

“I have no quarrel with you,” she said.

I took her arm. Her skin felt damp.

“S'all right!” she said.

We lay on the floor. Grace Ameh by my side, Mother of Prisons next to her. She said she was not sleeping next to any stinking people, and there were many in this cell. Someone protested. “Sharrap,” she said. “Watch your step, butter-eater,” she said to me, as we found places to lie. “Easy, easy now. We don't want any accidents. Don't worry, I will take care of you.”

There was not enough space for us, unless our legs and arms touched. My eyes were wide open. I listened for every creak outside. Soon, someone would come in to free us. They would open the door and let us out.

No one came. I remembered the last time I was in a police station. It was during my national service year, when I worked for my father. A client called. Could he send one of his “boys” over to Awolowo Road station? One of his expatriate tenants was there with a hawker he'd caught trespassing.

I went with Dagogo, only for the drama. We arrived to find an Englishman drenched in his gray lightweight suit: Mr. Forest. His hair was wet with sweat and his nostrils flared. He reminded me of every impatient boss I'd worked with in England—I made a suggestion and they ignored it. I made a mistake and they told everyone. I cracked a joke, and they asked, “What on earth are you talking about?”

It was hard not to feel vengeful.

“D-dagoggle?” Mr. Forest asked, for confirmation, and Dagogo answered to the name. It turned out that the hawker had been trespassing on Mr. Forest's lawn, to see her cousin who lived in the servants' quarters in the house behind his. He had warned her, but she wouldn't stop. Every time he looked out of his window, there she was, trespassing again. I studied the police officer on duty, a rotund man with perfectly white teeth. He listened with a grave expression. I suspected he was daydreaming. Dagogo meanwhile questioned the woman. Why did she trespass? Didn't she know it was wrong to trespass? The woman, a popcorn and groundnut seller, looked as if she couldn't understand what was happening. I knew she would do it again and still look just as confused. We advised Mr. Forest to let her go, he'd scared her enough. “She's really, really sorry, Mr. Frosty,” I said.

My legs began to itch from mosquito bites. The cement floor pressed into my shoulder. My stomach groaned. I was hungry; hungry enough to forget the nausea that seized me when I first entered the cell. I pulled dry skin from my lips and swallowed it until I tasted blood. My lips stung. I turned to relieve my shoulder.

“Can't you sleep?” Mother of Prisons asked.

“No,” I said.

“Me too,” she said.

The others were asleep. There was some snoring and two women were coughing incessantly. The rhythm was disturbing. Grace Ameh was awake, though she wasn't talking. She had confessed that this was her worst nightmare, to be locked up, and I was sure she could not hear our whispers.

Mother of Prisons said, “I can never sleep at night, only during the day. By evening, I'm fired up.”

How long could people stay in a place like this before they broke down. One week? I thought. Two? How long before their minds broke down irreversibly? I felt the need to tell her.

“My father is in prison,” I said.

“Eh?”

“My father is in prison.”

“What did he do?”

“Nothing, nothing. Like you.”

“Where is he? Kalakuta or Kirikiri maximum security?”

“No one knows.”

He was a political prisoner, I explained. The new government was detaining people under a state security decree. I explained it to her in simple terms, wondering why I felt the need to treat her like a child. She would know that a man like my father would never be in prison unless he was a political prisoner.

“I know nothing of our government,” she said. “Or our president, or any African leaders for that matter. I don't care to know. They are the same. Short, fat, ugly. Not one ounce of sense in their heads. How long has your father been in detention?”

“Over a month,” I said.

“He's done well,” she said.

There was a loud snore. She sucked her teeth.

“Who was that? These women, worse than any drunken husband... ”

“You must miss your husband,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Focking ass couldn't keep a job.”

“But you... ”

“But me no buts. My whole life was ruined by one but.”

I smiled. “But you married him.”

“Doesn't mean. You're a woman, aren't you? We marry anybody for marry sake, love anyone for love sake and once we love them, we forsake ourselves. Make the best of it, till they die or till we do. Look at me. Everything, everything, in that house I bought, and I was sending money to my parents in the village, sending money to his parents.”

“You must have had a good job.”

“A shipping company. Paspidospulus, or however they pronounce his name, these Greeks. You know white people, they pay well, unlike our people.”

“He treated you well?”

“Paspidospulus? The kindest man ever. He gave me his wife's old clothes to maintain a professional appearance, though her trousers never fitted my ass.”

“Goodness.”

“Then like a fool I was telling everyone that it was my husband who was providing, you know, to boost him up. Then he started telling everybody that, yes, he was taking care of the family, he was providing. Providing what? Five hundred extra mouths to feed? Ate like a focking elephant, that man. Greediness killed him, not me.”

She began to laugh, and her laughter turned to grunts as she spoke.

“It's my children I miss. Not him. You eat like that, you bear the consequences, God rest his soul. He ate my food store empty. Buy a week's beans and he demolishes it.
Pfff!
A month's meat... ”

“Please,” I said, waving an arm. Her grunts were funny and my head was light from hunger.

“Gone in a day,” she said. “Can eat fried ants if you put them on his plate. He won't know the difference. Paspidospulus couldn't have paid me enough... ”

I felt laughter in my belly, and a sweet pain lower down. My bladder was full.

She kept on grunting. “Paspidospulus couldn't have paid me enough. I'm telling you, tomato. Tomato, I tell you. This was when tomato was becoming expensive. The focking ass... ”

“Please,” I said. “Stop, otherwise I will have to go.”

“Huh?” she said. “Go where? Who released you yet?”

“To toilet.”

“Piss in the bucket,” she said. “What do you think?”

I could not let her down. She was enjoying our friendship, and I thought she might begin her tirade again. The bucket was available, she said. For whatever business I had to do. We were all women in this place. There was no reason to be proud. Worse things were happening here, worse than I could imagine. One woman was rotting away. Couldn't I smell it?

“What?” I asked.

“Her cancer,” she said. “It's terminal.”

I had not taken a step before the familiar wave forced me over again. The back of my neck tightened, bile rose from my stomach and singed my throat. I'd gotten up too fast.

“What's going on?” Mother of Prisons asked.

My mouth opened again, involuntarily. I crouched between two bodies, held my sides.

“Are you all right?” Grace Ameh asked, sitting up.

“She's miscarrying,” Mother of Prisons said. “Help her.”

The bile tasted bitter on my tongue. Nothing else came out. I was trying to say I was fine. The women rose in varying stages of alertness. They circled me, the sick and the mad with their sores and ringworm and tuberculosis. Their body heat enveloped me. I stretched one arm out, to prevent them from falling over me. I took shorter breaths, shut my eyes.

“Let her breathe. Let her breathe,” Grace Ameh was saying.

They kept on pushing.

“She's miscarrying,” Mother of Prisons said.

Do-Re-Mi began to talk to herself again. “La So Fa Mi. Ti Ti Re Mi... ”

A whiny voice recited a psalm.
“He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the almigh-tee... ”

“Please, please let her breathe,” Grace Ameh said above the noise. She sounded anxious. I was all right, I wanted to tell her.

“He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, the noisome pestiii-lence... ”

There were hands on my head. Someone kicked my back. I curled up.

“Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night. Nor for the arrow that flieth by day. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday... ”

They would suffocate me, I thought.

“A thousand shall fall at thy side. Ten thousand at thy right hand... ”

There was loud banging on the door and shouting from outside.

“What is happening in there? What is happening?”

“Thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the reward of the wicked... ”

The cell door creaked open. Light shone on our faces. The noise died to a few mumbles. The psalm stopped.

A stocky warder appeared. She was the one who had led us in. She spoke in a resigned voice. “Mother of Prisons, are you making trouble again?”

As the women dispersed, I finally saw her face, Mother of Prisons. Her hair was in patches. Sores had eaten into the corners of her mouth. She was shaking like an old woman. She was about my age.

“Trouble?” she said. “Which trouble? You see me making trouble here?”

The light made me squint.

“What are you doing with the new prisoners?” the warder asked.

“Me? It's you. You should be ashamed of yourself, locking up a pregnant woman. If she had miscarried, the blood of her child would be on your head. Right there on your head. It was I who looked after her. I alone. If not for the kindness in my heart, it would have been another k-legged story in this place.”

She waddled back to her spot scratching her armpits. The others lay down. They looked like twisted tree branches. The warder walked between them.

“How is our sick prisoner today?”

“What do you think?” Mother of Prisons answered. “Why haven't her people come for her?”

“They say they can't afford the treatment.”

“Take her to hospital. She hasn't opened her eyes for days.”

The warder sighed. “Give her pain-killers.”

“She won't take them.”

“Crush them with your teeth and feed them to her. You did it before.”

Mother of Prisons raised her fists. “Are you listening to me? I say she's nearly dead. How will she swallow? The whole womb is rotten now. We are choking on her smell.”

The warder was silent for a moment.

“I've done my best,” she said.

“Not enough,” Mother of Prisons said.