On Black Sisters Street (28 page)

“Why did your mother’s husband rape you?” Joyce responds. “Why do people do the stuff they do? Because. He did it just because.”

The territory they are charting is still slippery. They are just starting to really know one another.

“You know, every day I go to work I wonder if Polycarp was in on this. I wonder if he knew all along what Dele had in mind for me. I don’t want to believe he’s that heartless. But thinking of all the whys and how comes, I can’t sleep at night.”

“Polycarp might have known. He might not have known. You’ll probably never know. But one thing is sure, Joyce. You are the one having to live with it. And it’s up to you how you handle it. What did you say you promised yourself that day at Dele’s?” Efe asks gently.

“That I’ll never let my happiness depend on another,” Joyce says.

“So there you go. Say to fucking hell with Polycarp. Banish him to the hottest part of hell. You might not have asked for this, but this is what you got. That’s life. We don’t always get what we bloody order. Forget Polycarp. Be the best worker you can be, make your money, and do whatever else you want to do!” Ama lets her cigarette dangle from between her lips while she talks. She removes it now. “Whatever you do with your life from this point on is up to you. Forget Polycarp. Keep your eye on your dream. Fuck Polycarp.”

“Fuck Polycarp,” Joyce says after Ama. She is determined that she will never again let the thoughts of what he knew, how much he knew, keep her awake at night. She will never again suffer an insomniac night on his behalf. Later, when she thinks of this conversation with Ama and Efe, she will think of it as a release from something she had not known held her hostage. Weeks later, on a Saturday morning, she will tell Efe and Ama, “I had forgotten that my destiny was in my hands. You girls reminded me of it.”

“Ah, Joyce, no begin all dis so so fucking wey Ama dey use ooo. One is enough in dis house!” Efe teases. The three women laugh.

At the end of it, a thoughtful silence swallows them up. When it spits them out, it is to hear Efe say that she always wanted to be a writer.

“It was my biggest dream. I was going to write books and become famous.” She laughs. “At school na so so cram I dey cram my literature books.” She stands up and begins to give a performance. “ ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so.’ ”

“I like the way ‘incredulity’ and ‘epoch’ dey drip commot from the mouth. I like the way things wey dey opposite, salt and pepper, dey side by side. Best of times. Worst of times. Light and darkness. It make me tink. Tink say how dat for happen? And when I read am, I jus’ wan write like dat. Words wey fine so like butterfly, fine sotay person go wan’ read am again and again and again.” Her voice dims and she sighs. “But dat one no go happen now.”

Before today she had not even thought about it. She has amazed herself by remembering the lines, by her ability to still recite them. But she is not amazed by the happiness it brings her. At the familiar neediness it opens up in her.

Ama starts clapping for her, and Joyce joins in. Efe beams. When the clapping stops, she takes a mock bow. “Maybe I fit try fin’ the book. I hear say for Brussels dem get English bookshops. It go nice to own that book again. I for like read am again.”

Efe will trawl bookshops in Brussels three mornings in a row without success. On the third day, a helpful shop assistant will offer
to order the book for her. It will take a week to arrive. “I don’t mind. I don’t mind at all,” Efe will reply. The day Efe picks it up, she will lock herself in her room with it and cry at a remembered past.

Joyce says she wanted to be a doctor. “Dr. Alek, that was how I saw myself. I thought I would marry, give my parents grandchildren, work in the government hospital. Now I think I’ll settle for maybe a boutique. Or a huge supermarket in Lagos.”

Ama says she gave up her dream of going to the university long ago. Now, she says, she sometimes thinks of becoming a pop star. Ama does not do more than dream, because even she knows that her singing is false. Once, during a quarrel, Sisi told her that she mewed like an angry cat whenever she sang. “Every time I hear you singing, I think we are under attack from the cat next door!” Sisi had told her. But that is not enough to stop Ama from dreaming. “Sometimes, when I stand behind my window, I imagine I am standing on a podium, posing for my fans. I imagine them screaming out my name, shouting out for autographs. I imagine that my real father hears about me, his famous daughter, and reveals himself to me so I can tell him to fuck off.” She laughs, joined by Efe and Joyce.

“I wonder what Sisi’s dreams were,” Efe says. The question changes the mood again and sucks the easy laughter of the women.

“It’s not easy to believe that she is really dead. I keep thinking, what if they’ve made a mistake? What if she’s not really dead? What if she has just gone out on one of her walks?” Ama asks.

Joyce counters, “If she’s not really dead, she’d be bloody well here.”

“It feels like she is here, I dey feel am,” Efe says. Her voice is soft. A prayer. Perhaps even a wish.

SISI

SISI’S FIRST EPIPHANY CAME ON A WEDNESDAY NIGHT WHILE SHE WAS
waiting for clients. It was so clear that she could not have been blamed for believing that, finally, the secret of the Prophecy had been revealed to her. Diaphanous, it fluttered down and slipped over her face. What she saw dipped her in such black gloom that her first client, a man with a toupee that he insisted on hanging on to, told her he felt cheated. Her performance had been so poor, he said, that he was never coming back to her. “The girl who used to stay here, she knew her job. You just waste my money! Today I have no release. No release! I have to masturbate.”

This was it. The prediction meant nothing. Just the ramblings of a bungling, overindulged guest at a naming ceremony. She swore never to forgive the woman responsible.
Stupid, stupid woman who had me in search of brightness. Stupid woman who brought me to this. To this!

Seven days after Chisom was born, at her naming ceremony, a gap-toothed soothsaying neighbor (whose reputation was solid, backed by a series of correct predictions) sucked the air between her teeth, raised the new baby up to the skies, looked deep into her future, and declared to the waiting parents, “This girl here has a bright future ahead of her ooo. You are very lucky parents oooo.”

Now Sisi knew what she had seen. The woman had seen her in the bright lights of Antwerp. That was her destination. Not, as she had stupidly imagined, a transit route to an infinite betterment of her world. Blue and red lights, like Christmas lights, decorating her window, and she in the middle of all those lights, on display, waiting for buyers to admire and buy. Temporarily. That was the bright future the soothsayer had seen through the bottle of beer she was gulping. (That woman must have drunk a carton of beer that day, so happy was she with your future! You remember, Papa Chisom? How impressed she was with Chisom’s life that she finished a carton of Star?) And they had not known that the bright future she had seen was literal. Not the sort of bright future that they had all thought it to be and of which her father had been certain that education was the key to and had pushed her to study. Study! Read! You’ll have all the time in the world to rest once you graduate! She had studied hard, not because of her father. Or even because of the vision the neighbor had seen. But for herself. A university education guaranteed a good job. She burned candles when there was a power failure and studied in their light, straining her eyes. What had all that been for? What had all that hard work and straining and worrying about exam results gotten for her? It turned out that it was not her math teacher—who told the class at the beginning of Chisom’s final year in secondary school that she was sure to be a successful career woman, “That girl has nothing but brains in that head of hers”—who had the key but Dele. Dele, the big man with an office on Randle Avenue. Dele had brought her to the brightness that was in her future. When he made the offer, she had found herself grasping it, the Prophecy assuming truth, her belief in it as unequivocal as her father’s had been. If Dele could get her a passage into Europe, he would bring the soothsayer’s prediction to fulfillment.

Her education had just been a waste of resources. A total waste of
time and funds. And a step in the wrong direction. It had brought her nothing but misery, smoky dreams that rose and disappeared, thoughts of what might have been.

When she thought about her life now, the phrase that came to mind was
Omnes Errant
. She could not even remember where she had picked it up. Probably school. But it encapsulated her life. Her life was a series of mistakes. Always steps in the wrong direction. Those steps placed her on the Vingerlingstraat, a regular face with the black-lined eyes and lips painted in the brightest shade of red
rat-tat-tatting
on the window to help men make up their minds. And she wanted to howl forever.

On that Wednesday night, Sisi had been in Antwerp for exactly five and a half months. The revelation displaced her enthusiasm to make money. In its place came a stoicism she could never have imagined she possessed. She went to work and her smile stayed on. She greeted her clients and it did not falter. She thanked them when they tipped her. When they complimented her. When they said she was not like a lot of black prostitutes who tried to wrangle more money than was originally agreed upon. The smile stayed on. But an unhappiness permeated her skin and wound itself around her neck and forced her head down so that she walked as if something shamed her. While she had never been comfortable in her job, there was now a certain aversion added to the discomfort. She could no longer bear to look at herself, not even when she was alone. When she took a bath, she sponged her body without once looking at it. Regrets assailed her day in, day out. She smiled, but behind that smile her regret grew bigger and bigger, its shadow casting a pall over her. She began to wish she had never left home, ruing the day she met Dele. Why, oh why, had she gone to his office? Why had she been taken in by his promises of wealth and glamour and happiness that knew no bounds? When a customer asked her to lie spread-eagled, while he yelled “whore” at her and jerked off to that, she felt something akin to revulsion.
Her walks into Antwerp increased in both frequency and length. She woke up early and walked along the Keyserlei and the Grote Markt. She made detours into alleyways, discovering old buildings that held no interest for her. She bought more and more stuff: bottle openers in the shape of beer bottles. Postcards of Antwerp by night. Dainty coasters of delicate lace. Tablecloths. Swelling her suitcase under the bed, so that it was difficult to close and she feared she would need to buy another one.

ZWARTEZUSTERSTRAAT

A CHILD SHRIEKS HAPPILY OUTSIDE. A SOUND THAT SEEMS ALMOST
anomalous, slithering into the room.

“It is odd, isn’t it? Sisi is dead, and everything’s going on as normal,” Joyce says.

Ama smiles. “In my place, we have a saying: When a stranger’s corpse is being carried, it is as if it is mere firewood.”

“True talk,” Efe agrees. “I remember when my mama die, I dey even dey angry wit’ de sun wey dey shine. Like say de world suppose end.”

“But even inside this house, nothing’s changed. Sisi was not a stranger here!” Joyce sounds petulant.

“Not to us. But to them she probably was.” Ama points her chin in the direction of Madam’s and Segun’s rooms.

“Dat Segun sef na stranger to himself!” Efe scoffs.

“Probably fucks himself!”

“Ama! You and your dirty mouth. You suppose use soap wash am out!” But there is a twinkle in Efe’s eyes.