Three
It’s midnight by the time everyone leaves, except for Jide, who is spread out on a sofa with the thousandth can of beer balanced on his chest.
“My mother has found another girl,”
he says.
“And listen to this, she went to a polytechnic.
A polytechnic.
Remember the days of ‘Jide you should marry a medical doctor’? See how desperate my mother has become? She even started crying and doing that self-pity thing: why is her own different, all her friends have grandchildren, this and that.
She never asks me ‘how are you’ before she starts.
Then my father came on to say I need to do a borehole for our compound in the village.”
The nasal ring of Jide’s complaining voice irritates me and I feel guilty for my irritation.
He is the only son, and he is burdened enough with expectations even without this pressure to marry.
The other day his parents said he has to start building a house in their village, as if anybody with a telecoms job like his can afford to build a house.
“,”
Jide says. “Can we get married?”
I look at him, surprised. “What?”
“And stay married for a few years, so they can stop harassing me.”
“The incestuous energy will be out of this world, Jide. Even your parents won’t believe it,”
I say. Still, I imagine marrying Jide. What a way to stick it to Aunty Jane. Look, Aunty, I have a husband! So much for my empty life!
“They just want me to marry and marry a woman that I will marry,”
Jide slurs.
He has lost command of his tongue; until his chin drops to his chest in sleep, his words emerge mangled and torn. His loud snoring rises and vibrates and ends on a mournful note. I spread a throw over him. His body fills the couch’s entire width. I remember years ago when Jide told me, “Just stay on the couch,”
while he wiped my mattress with a soapy cloth. I was so sick, I had thrown up violently everywhere, my bed, the walls, the floor. As Jide cleaned some dribble on the floor, he looked up at me and said, “ Ndo, sorry, just stay on the couch,”
as if to protect me from my own effluences. He has never brought it up and when I did, not long ago, he brushed it aside. My eyes are filling with tears looking at Jide sleeping and thinking of that day.
Atasi comes into the parlor and right away I know she wants to ask me for something; she asks only when she knows I’ve been drinking, and I don’t know if her scheming is forgivable teenage behavior or something worth worrying about.
“You’re still awake?”
I ask her. I hope she hasn’t noticed my tears and doesn’t think it’s drunken crying. A sweet-faced kitten is printed on her blue nightshirt. She’s so skinny she swims inside the shirt. She tells me she needs a personal trainer to work on her problem.
“What problem?” I ask.
“I have hip dips,” she says.
“And what is that?” I ask.
She explains and explains but I don’t understand until she pulls her nightshirt tight across her hips.
According to Instagram, her hips do not flare outwards as they should, and the inward dints she has instead constitute a gross abnormality which, luckily for us, some guided exercises might correct.
I think again of Aunty Jane, and how easy it is to invent a problem where previously there was none.
“When did you know?” I ask.
“Know what?”
“Did you know you had hip dips before you saw the video on Instagram?”
She sighs and glances up at the ceiling in lieu of an eyeroll.
“Atasi, somebody woke up and had a cup of coffee and decided to call a perfectly normal body part a ‘hip dip’ and make it a problem, because they want to create content or sell something or just make themselves feel important or better. Your body is normal and normal is fine,”
I say, and teasingly I add, “If you eat a little more, you’ll go from normal to perfect.”
But she doesn’t smile.
She sulks away without another word.
She’s always pouting and photographing herself with her phone fixed on a tripod, or with Philippe or Mary as her photographer, while she stands by the flowers in some contorted pose, midriff bare, crop top glued to her bony frame.
Modeling-school flyers magically appear almost every day, on the dining table or sometimes in my study, of photoshopped girls with vacant expressions and impossible skin.
But my no is no; no modeling classes.
Increase Your Confidence, one of the flyers said, and I told Atasi the contrary was true.
“Modeling will give you low self-esteem,”
I said, and she looked at me with, of all things, pity, but not for long enough to be considered disrespectful.
She had been the one hundred meters sprint star in school, until she stopped abruptly in SS1 because she feared she would grow muscles and look like a man.
“People with muscles live longer and healthier lives,”
I remember saying to her, and now I think I should have said something else. I should have reassured her that she won’t, of course, ever look like a man, and that exercise will benefit her health. With Atasi, I say things and then later I wish disappearance on them.
—
Jide wakes up sober and somber, saying he should go home and, yes, he knows our getting married won’t work.
He looks like a giant rumpled pillow, lying there, his discontent so gravely etched in the shadows of his face.
For years he has wanted to move to Lagos, to escape the slow waste that his love life here has been.
He says Abuja is like a prefabricated stage, with older government men looking for transactions and younger men primed only to take, while what he longs for is the simple wonder of talk, of touch, and time.
Lately, he keeps asking if I don’t feel the menace in the city’s air.
His unhappiness is so ripe and yet it doesn’t push him to act, as if all his unhappiness really needs is to be witnessed by someone else.
“Go to Canada, Jide.
Nigerians are colonizing Canada now.
I’ll pay for everything until you’re settled,”
I tell him often, and each time he says okay, he’ll look into it, but he never brings it up again until I do.
He’s a gesturer, Jide, not a finisher; he starts things or makes to start things and then he stops.
It frustrates me that nothing is too intolerable for him to bear, and that he bears it all, so plaintive and passive.
You don’t stop at longing; you use the force of your longing to bring into being the life that you want, or you try to, at least.
I told him something like that once, I don’t remember my exact words, and his reply left me stunned with a glimpse of a resentment I didn’t know existed at all: “We are not all fearless like the great .”
He is slowly raising himself from the couch.
I would marry him if marrying him would help, but anyone who knows us even in passing will easily discern the glaring farce.
We met in kindergarten in university primary school but we became best friends in grade 2G, seated next to each other in Mr.
Ngwu’s class.
He would come to my house to play after school and I marveled that he was allowed to walk all the way up campus by himself.
We liked chasing the butterflies that forever flitted over my mother’s plants.
Once Jide farted loudly and I shouted in gleeful accusation, “You polluted!”
and he promptly replied, “I didn’t pollute, it was the butterflies!”
I remember what he was wearing that day: a blue He-Man and the Masters of the Universe T-shirt, with a haloed He-Man holding a sword.
It’s been more than thirty years and we still joke about farting butterflies.
—
We were neophytes together in Abuja, Jide and I, in the early days after we first got our jobs here.
We didn’t know the roads; we would set out driving to the market and end up on tree-lined residential streets.
We didn’t know of the rich Northern boys racing expensive cars on the highways, or how abusive the sun’s heat could be.
We didn’t know of the Friday somnolence of offices as so many went off to mosque, or that some hair salons don’t allow men to step inside their doors.
One Saturday I searched online for a natural hair salon and I asked Jide to meet me there so we could go right after my braids were done to look at the mini-flat he wanted to rent.
He was still living with his uncle then.
The salon did not smell like most salons, no burnt notes of singed hair, no sickly-sweet perfume of harsh chemicals.
It was fragrant with the scent of coconuts and shea butter and essential oils of lavender and mint.
Freshly mixed hair puddings sat in bowls on the counters, as appetizing as something you could eat.
The women there were all Northerners, their headscarves draped across their chairs.
They had such beautiful hair, bouncy and coily, their edges lush and full, and it seemed a great loss to me that their hair so lovingly done would then be closed off again to the world.
One of them said, “My cook made me a large yogurt before I left home.”
So strange and exotic, these Northerners, eating a large yogurt at home.
I had no picture in my mind of what a “large”
homemade yogurt could be, because yogurt to me was something you bought in little cups in the cold section of the supermarket.
They were people whose ancestors herded cows and I was a person with forest-dwelling forebears, and this ancient distinction made them interesting to me, more than that they were Muslim and I was Christian.
They spoke Hausa, with some English sprinkled in.
Even then, my Hausa was good, learned in the few months between interviewing for and getting my job.
“I do all my groceries in London. I take British Airways overnight and spend the day and then come back,”
the one who had eaten a large yogurt said.
She looked slyly from side to side, as if to ensure that everyone had heard her, her hair flowing to her neck like lustrous black wool.
When Jide appeared at the salon door, the receptionist shrieked loudly and these imperial women, utterly aghast, began reaching for scarves and towels to cover their hair, and all the while they were casting about to expose the usurper who had brought in a man.
I understood right away and I should have said, “Please sorry, I didn’t know men can’t come in.”
I should have owned up and faced their livid eyes.
I didn’t.
Jide had hurriedly backed out, and I stayed silent and didn’t answer his calls in case that gave me away.
I wanted to be one of the people who knew what everybody else knew.
There was so much I didn’t know in those early days, and because I was used to knowing things, it disoriented me.
I knew Igboland well and Lagos fairly well, but the North had a texture so unrelated to them, not that Abuja is even truly North, stuck in the center of the Nigerian map.
Capital territory, seat of government, city of parks with leafy trees.
I had always imagined a life in Lagos, but the job I got here was too good to refuse, levels above what new graduates got.
Already I was plotting to scramble up higher, and if it meant living in a staid city of no imagination, then so be it.
Abuja was too dull, too caged in the formality of its own existence, a city built for a precise reason, like a Lego house.
Or so I thought, until one day in a phone shop in Ceddi Plaza somebody called out my teenage nickname, “Logos!”
A very fair-skinned woman wearing a boubou and flat designer slides, the casual uniform of the socially chosen.
I looked, head tilted, at her.
Maybe she knew someone who knew me.
“Logos! It’s Nodebem,”
she said, her manner all sweet warmth. “From university secondary school.”
She looked nothing like Chinodebem, the girl who was so dark people called her “Black Maria” in secondary school and boys said she had a bad body odor and teeth discolored from infrequent brushing.
Now she smiled to show teeth so white they distracted me, as though she had pasted printer paper in her mouth.
I would never have recognized her with that new yellow face, a blasé face, the face of a rich Igbo man’s idle wife, flat from layers of foundation applied with scant regard for the rise and fall of a human face.
“I go by Nodie now,”
she said, and moved her metal-studded designer bag from hand to hand in case I might miss it.
We exchanged numbers knowing I would never call her, but as she walked away, I admired her for daring to remake herself and for the audacity it took to affably say, “It’s Nodebem from secondary school,”
as if her dramatic skin bleaching was nothing at all.
She rattled my view and shook me to see that Abuja’s margins were fluid.
There was room at its edges for reinvention, and I began to think it might not be just a job stopover and maybe I would stay.
And so began the shadows and surprises of a city I would yet know.
At my first finance training course, a routine course in risk analysis, we were asked to take drug tests.
The coordinator gave us lanyards and folders and plastic vials for our urine samples.
I was baffled but all the others looked unsurprised, so I tried to look like them.
We drifted to the women’s toilet, odorous with Izal, where a stout woman wearing a Cleaner badge was standing by the sinks with a solicitous and slightly shifty air.
“Please pee for me,”
a woman called Hadassah said to the cleaner.
Hadassah wore a showily bejeweled watch and a blue scarf draped around her head.
She handed her vial to the cleaner, who promptly hurried into a stall.
Another cleaner came in, a mild matronly woman, her eyes flitting from person to person in silent offering of her pee.
She did this often; she had probably hurried to be here before the training course started, as there was clearly money to be made.
A woman named Chikamso wearing a silk shirt under her skirt suit gave the second toilet cleaner her container and said, “I’ll transfer to your account, I don’t have cash.”
I went into a stall.
I heard somebody say the cleaner needed to drink water to make her pee more and somebody else said, “I have Eva water here.”
It startled me that these women were all worried about what their urine might reveal.
Had they done drugs at the weekend, or did they snort something as they primly dressed for work? In the end, every woman who walked into the toilet to get a sample of her urine left with a sample of a cleaner’s urine, except for me.
Chikamso and I became good friends, and sometimes in the middle of our conversations I would blurt out, “Please pee for me!”