Everything Good Will Come (16 page)

“Why does he keep extending it?”

“New wives. More children.”

I smiled. “So you feel artistically compromised?”

Mike sighed. “Here is a man, who has in his living room a portrait of himself inside his aquarium.”

“No.”

“I swear to God.”

“He gave you the job, I'm sure.”

“Bent over, eyes closed.”

I slapped his arm. “Mike! Everyone needs a job in Lagos. Everyone needs a car that works.”

He wrapped it tighter round me. “I'm not doing it anymore, not after this. The pay is not good, and the work is lousy. My parents never had much money, but they were satisfied with their jobs.”

I could easily have told him that was years ago, that they lived on campus, in a house provided by the university.

“So you'll concentrate on your art work?”

He nodded. “Teach for national service, find small work to pay my way. My rent is not much, and I pay monthly.”

“That's brave. I'm not sure I want to practice law full- time, but I'm too frightened to think of it.”

“Why study law at all?”

“Who knows? Father's business, only child. But it's not bad work. Though he doesn't pay me enough and it pains me that I can't have a place of my own.”

“Find another job. Move out.”

“A daughter? It's not done.”

“What is this ‘it' that's not done?”

I sat up. “Don't be difficult. You know where I'm coming from.”

“Thousands of single women are living on their own, all over town.”

“Well, I am not them and they are not me. I will go back to England penniless before I live in a Lagos slum. What kind of country is this anyway? You graduate and you're privileged to live off your parents, or some old sugar daddy or some government contract. He should at least pay me enough. It's only fair. It's only fair, Mike.”

He smiled, satisfied that he'd made me look beyond my small world. Yes, I was acting like a brat, but he hardly ever had to consider his parents and they were not sanctioning his every move. I was curious.

“Tell me about when you were small,” I said.

“What age?”

“Eleven,” I said, placing my ear to his belly.

As he spoke, I fell asleep dreaming of him, an eleven-year-old boy with khaki shorts holding a rifle made of sticks, dancing to high-life music with his mother and learning how to drink palm-wine from his father's calabash. His parents played card games lying on the floor. It was like a bed-time story.

When I woke up there was light in the room. I was startled by how bright everything seemed. Stretching, I asked. “When did they bring it back?”

“An hour ago,” he said.

“And you sat here?”

“Your head,” he explained.

“I'm sorry,” I said, getting up. “Which door leads to your bathroom?”

He pointed.

Inside, I looked at his shaving cream and toothbrush on the sink. The blue tiles on the shower wall were powdery white from scouring powder. Black mold lurked between them. In the corner was an aluminum bucket for bathing because water pressure in Lagos was too weak to drive showers. I washed my face, came out and found Mike lying on the couch with his shirt off.

“You can pick any of my shirts,” he said, pointing to his rack of clothes.

“I don't want a shirt,” I said, unbuttoning mine.

He watched me undress and I pulled a face. I walked up to him, willing myself to be confident.

He kissed holes down my back. I cried, only from his tenderness. Later, as he slept, I crept to the bathroom and filled the aluminum bucket with cold water, and washed myself clean. I slept with my nose in his armpit.

Military camp ended in a parade attended by government and military officials. Some members of our platoon were chosen to participate in the event, but Mike and I were not among them. We stood in the stands and cheered instead.

Monday, after the parade, I started work at my father's firm. I was a sleeping partner, he said, no matter how hard I worked. “Five years' time and I will be dead according to the latest statistics! Still nobody serious to hand my business over to! This is my lot in life!”

In time my father had become bona fide miserable, not surprisingly. His business was to appease acrimonious freeholders, after the fist fights and juju. Another rental agreement, an old one breached, a reminder letter to an expatriate who had not paid his rent, or a Nigerian tenant who was certain to throw the letter away and still not pay. Court case after court case over property disputes, land disputes, split families, brothers who had not spoken for years, since the old man died.

My father had two senior associates working for him. Dagogo John-White, a quiet man whose name we loved to tease (Da go go, Da come come, Da going gone, and for the brief period he found religion, Da kingdom come, Da will be done.) I made no mention of his white john, left that to Alabi Fashina, a quick tempered man we dared not tease. Whenever my father was away, Dagogo and Alabi sometimes argued about their home cities. Alabi was from Lagos, Dagogo from Bonny Island in the Niger Delta. “Bushman from Lagos,” he would say.

“Bushman from Bonny,” Alabi would reply. “Hm. Bonny women. They are the most forward women on earth. I visited once. Women were crawling all over me like ants on a sugar, crawling all over me. I did what a man had to do.”

“Our man Flint!” Dagogo would say.

“It was a precarious operation.”

“007!”

“But I had license to kill.”

Our very own double act. They would end with a handshake, snap their fingers and call each other “man mi,” my man. Dagogo was tall with a neck at least six inches long; he naturally looked downward. Alabi was stocky with a one inch neck; he looked upward. Different temperaments, but if they faced each other, they always saw eye to eye.

Thankfully, they were rarely in the office. The others, I saw more of: Peace, the receptionist and secretary whose gymnastics with bubble gum broke new boundaries every day. She would not speak clearly on the phone, because she did not want to smudge her lipstick, and was occasionally off with General Body Weakness—her bones were paining, if you asked her to describe the symptoms of this officially recognized illness. Mrs. Kazeem, a woman who handled the company secretarial work. Her expression was naturally vexed, and we called her mother of twins, because she was expecting some. And finally, Mr. Israel, the lugubrious driver. We called him Papa sometimes, because he was as old as Moses. He spoke Yoruba to everyone, even to Dagogo who couldn't understand a word.

“Who wants groundnuts?” I asked, looking around the office.

Dagogo raised his head momentarily, Alabi said no, and Peace popped her bubble gum. Mr. Israel and Mrs. Kazeem were out. I pulled some dirty naira notes from my bag and went outside to the woman who sat by our gate, selling roasted groundnuts by the bottle.

My father's office was designed like a classroom, without a blackboard. We sat behind desks, facing his room and whenever he came out, it was hard not to react as one might to a school master. He was a different person in the office and kept his face as closed as one of the hardback books he'd stashed along his shelves. I'd also discovered just how stingy he was. He had not increased lunch allowances in over five years and I really wasn't surprised. I couldn't ever remember having much pocket money to spend as a child. My father always told me he had no money. The oil boys were the rich ones, he would say, referring to the handful of lawyers who were counsels for international oil companies. Lawyers like himself, they had to scrape a living.

My father had scraped enough to acquire a large estate. If he worked these days, it was only because he wanted to. He had shed most of his staff now, except for his senior associates, but still, he didn't pay well. I placed the bottle of groundnuts on my table when I returned and invited everyone to eat. Then I headed for his door.

“Come in,” he said.

He was scribbling on a sheet of paper.

“What can I do for you?”

“Are you busy?”

“I'm always busy,” he said, without looking up.

“Shall I come back?”

He placed his pen down. “No.”

I sat in the client chair. “Three things, please.”

“Yes?”

“Our lunch allowance.”

“What about it?”

“It's too little.”

My father's knuckles locked like a zip. “How so?”

“One hundred naira a month?” I said. “I've just bought a bottle of groundnuts for ten naira.”

“Please, get to the point.”

I spoke slower. “Our lunch allowance needs to be increased, in line with inflation at least.”

“In line with inflation,” he repeated.

“Yes,” I said.

My father sat back. “We'd be doubling allowances every year. Did my staff ask you to do this?”

“No.”

“My dear, I've been running this place for over thirty years and... ”

I raised my hand.

“Let me finish,” he said. “I've been running this place for many years and I think, by now, I know how to run it well. My benefits are fair. Ask my people outside. If any of them are dissatisfied, they will leave.”

I thought of the scruffy lawyers who stood outside the courts, begging for affidavit work.

“To go where?” I asked. “You think it's easy to find work these days?”

“I'm busy,” he warned.

“Just think about it,” I said.

“The next thing was?”

“I've drafted the transfer letter,” I said.

“What transfer letter?”

Of his houses, to my mother, I explained. My father listened without commenting.

“The third thing?” he asked.

“Can Sheri do the catering for your dinner party?” I gabbled the words. “She's very professional. Please. Her father died, and her uncle took her inheritance. And she has no job. And Titus cooks so bad. Sheri can do better. Please.”

My father looked irritated enough to throw his pen at me.

“You're wasting my time,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said, getting up. “Thank you. I knew you would say yes.”

Back at my desk, I lifted the bottle of groundnuts and found it half empty.

“Who ate my groundnuts?” I asked.

No one raised their head.

“How are you coping?” I asked Sheri.

Our kitchen was unusually clean. She wiped the water around the sink, and grease from the stove. There wasn't a dent in her gown, not even a stain, while my own dress was creased from shoulder to hem. I was glad I was wearing black because I'd spilled wine on myself.

Cooking was a skill, I thought; an art form. In our country, we appreciated the end result, but not the craft, perhaps because we didn't have fancy names. Paring was “cut it.” Julienne was “cut it well.” Chopping was “cut it well well,” and so on till you had puree, which would probably be “mash it.” And, if anyone was measuring any ingredient in a kitchen, it meant that they really didn't know what they were doing.

Sheri was preparing what she called a continental dinner for my father's party: chicken curry with coconut fried rice, grilled fish, shrimp kebabs, and a bowl of Nigerian salad that would put any niçoise to shame. It had tuna, baked beans, potatoes, eggs, and dollops and dollops of mayonnaise. For dessert, she'd made a pineapple crumble and a platter of sliced mangoes and pawpaws over which she sprinkled lemon juice. I checked one of the bowls.

“Shall I take this to the table?”

“Please,” she murmured.

She folded a dish cloth to take the crumble out of the oven. In the dining room, I checked the table. Sheri had insisted we used another table for the food. The guests would have to serve themselves buffet-style, she said. I agreed only because I wasn't that interested in the logistics of a dinner party, or entertaining. Growing up with my father, I rarely stepped into a kitchen, and my father was easily satisfied with meals his cooks prepared. Tonight the food would at least be edible, I thought. His guests were out on the veranda and I would call them in soon.