Everything Good Will Come (21 page)

The joke was that a man's families discovered each other at his burial. That they fought until they fell into his grave. In reality most men who could still afford to lead this kind of double life confessed or were caught long beforehand. What were the requirements for being successful, after all? Telling one family, Don't call me at home, keep away from my real family?

It was nonsense.

He returned late in the evening. I opened the door.

“Do you know a Debayo Taiwo?” I asked.

My father placed his brief case down. “Yes.”

“Is he your son?”

He straightened up. Yes, he said. Debayo was his son, four years younger than me. He lived in Ibadan. So did his mother. No, they were never married. He was in medical school there, finished last year. He was born a year after my brother died.

“I would have told you myself,” he said.

“When?” I asked.

“I wanted you two to meet. Not like this.”

I began to count my thoughts out on my fingers. If I didn't, I wouldn't have known how to speak. But I spoke calmly. He was not going to take control of this argument.

“That I thought I was your only child, I can live with that. That almost everything I've done comes back to it, was my own choice. That I have a mother who despises me because I stayed with you, is my own lot. So is the fact that I live in a place where all sorts of asinine...”

“Be careful how you speak to me,” he said quietly.

“Asinine behavior is passed off as manliness.”

“Be very careful.”

“But don't tell me it is time I meet your son. That is not my choice. Not my lot, and I don't have to live with it.”

“I have not asked anything of you.”

“Does my mother know?”

He did not answer.

“Does she know?”

“No,” he said. Shame had winded him. His voice was too low.

“You see?” I said, just as quietly. “You're the one who did the wrong thing, not her. Not her.”

“You do not speak to me like that. No child of mine speaks to me like that.”

I turned away. “I'm not staying here.”

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“To my boyfriend's house,” I said.

My father pointed. “Walk out of that door, and you won't be welcome back here.”

“Liar,” I said.

I packed a bag, didn't even look at him as I walked out. For all I cared, he could take my hymen, stretch it out, and hang it on the wall next to Mike's mosaic.

The road to Mike's house was choked. I kept punching my steering wheel. Perhaps it was a sign. Daughters didn't walk away like that. It was sacrilege. Costly, too. Under my breath, I cursed our economy that didn't give me freedom to sustain myself.

I had always believed my mother chose to depend on my father. The evidence was there in her dusty certificates. Other mothers walked out every day, to work, but she didn't. Now I felt no different from her, driving the car he had bought. My father would give a car, but he would not pay me enough to buy myself one. If I were taking the car with me, I deserved it. If my mother took a house, two houses even, she deserved them. The power had always been in my father's hands.

I stopped at a junction. A battered Peugeot crossed the main road before me. The driver was gaping at me. He drove as slow as if he were taking time to masturbate. I could not imagine why. A more bitter face than mine, I had not seen.

I banged on my horn. “What are you looking at?”

He scratched his head and accelerated.

When I arrived at Mike's house I rattled the gates. He came out wearing nothing but shorts.

“You didn't say you were coming,” he said.

“I didn't know I was.”

He opened the gates and I slid through.

He spotted my bag. “What's this?”

“I need a place to stay,” I said. “I beg you. Tonight.”

He walked ahead of me and I thought nothing of it because he might have been working or playing football. Climbing up the stairs, he stopped by the door.

“You didn't say you were coming, Enitan.”

“You want me to leave?”

“No, no. I'm not driving you away.”

“You won't... have to,” I said, studying him. His shoulders were hunched. “Do you have someone with you?”

He looked away.

“Mike, I'm talking to you.”

Still, he said nothing. I brushed past him and opened the door. Lying on his sofa was a girl wearing nothing but a shirt. His shirt. I recognized it. Her hair was cropped like a boy's and she had bronze lips and eyes so haughty they didn't even blink. She was so dark and so beautiful I could have wet myself from grief. She drew on her cigarette.

Mike's hand closed over my shoulder. I wriggled out of his grip and hurried down the stairs. He ran after me, grabbed my waist and I elbowed him. We locked into a knot, breathing heavily into each others' faces. I was tempted to spit at his.

“Let go of me!”

He gripped me tighter and dived lower. I kicked him. He released me.

“Don't open your mouth,” I said, pointing at him.

I remembered how I'd called him a liar when I first met him.

“Pretentious bastard.” I said, walking away. “You're shallow and your work is shallow.”

He followed me. I fumbled with the lock of the gate, then kicked it. It rattled in protest.

“Open this damn lock,” I shouted.

The gates fell apart. I pushed him aside and walked out. I reached my car, jabbed my key into the key hole and yanked the door open.

“Listen,” he said.

“Why?” I asked. “Tell me? Why should I listen to a single word that comes out of your mouth.”

“I don't know,” he said.

“You don't?” I said. “Well, neither do I.”

He was one of those people. They were either living as they pleased or they were the greatest pretenders. In a room of ten people, how many would call him a berk? I sort of knew. I'd always sort of known.

The thought seized me. She couldn't go free. If I got in my car and drove away without letting my rage go, it would rupture me.

I got out of the car and began to walk back to the house.

“W-where are you going?” Mike asked.

“I don't know,” I said, wagging my finger.

He hurried after me. At the top of the stairs, I saw the girl peeping from the doorway. She took one look at me and dashed back inside. I heard a door shut and realized she was running from me. Stupid girl. She was running from me.

I ran up the stairs.

I headed straight for Obatala, grabbed her, seemingly, by the ear and dragged her out. Mike was standing at the foot of the stairs. He was staring at me as if I held a gun in my hands. I raised Obatala high above my head, smashed Obatala over the banister, heard her beads pitter-patter down the stairs. Mike clamped his hands over his head. I placed the broken board on the ground, and walked down the stairs.

“Tell her,” I said. “Tell her she should be running away from you, not me.”

“Not my work,” he said.

“Not my life,” I answered.

I drove away. Through the gate I saw Mike's landlord, standing with his mouth open. I could almost read his thoughts: Good women didn't shout in somebody's house. Good women didn't fight on the streets. Good women didn't come looking for men. Good women were at home.

My fingers trembled over my steering wheel and tears pricked my eyes, but they wouldn't fall. I drove fast till I reached Sheri's house. The traffic favored me.

There I cried.

Sheri asked me to reconcile with my father. “These things are nothing,” she said. I was not the first and I would not be the last. Half of Lagos had an outside family, and the other half wasn't aware. I refused and arranged a transfer to work with the Federal Ministry of Justice for the rest of the year. While my father was at work, I went home and packed a suitcase.

The day I met my new boss, I waited an hour before she arrived, and waited another thirty minutes while she ate yam and eggs out of a Tupperware container. My boss was one of those people—asking questions was unnecessary fussing. Her favorite complaint was that her duties belonged to someone else. Over the next months, I would go to court with her as an assistant, prosecuting in federal cases. The first time I had to address the bench, I tried to adopt an impressive voice. The judge, a middle-age woman, asked, “Young lady, is this some sort of new style?”

“No,” I said.

“Speak in your normal voice, please,” she said. “This is very tiring.”

It was a hot day in court, especially under our wigs, which were made from horse hair, so we never washed them and they itched. The judge's salary would never compensate for the procession she had to witness: a tattered clerk, an illiterate criminal, my boss who was ill-prepared and asking for an extension, “if my lord pleases.”

This particular my lord was not pleased. She had to take notes because there was no stenographer. She was taking the notes in longhand and oh Lord, the different ways of speaking. Then there would be traffic on her way home.

Fraud rackets had recently increased. Overseas they were calling it “Nigerian Crime.” Here we called it “419,” after the criminal code. Drug trafficking had also increased, and if the latest reports were true, Nigerian drug rings were now one of the largest suppliers to the US and Europe. Foreign embassies were reluctant to grant us visas, and those of us who received them risked being strip-searched for drugs at airports. Many of the accused were single women, mules, who were caught en route to Europe or the US from the Far East. Some had swallowed condoms crammed with heroin and cocaine; others had squeezed them up their vaginas. There was a case of a woman who stuffed a condom of cocaine down her dead baby's throat and cradled him on a plane. She was caught when an air hostess noticed the baby wasn't crying.

I hated coming out of court to find relations pleading to spare their son or daughter, old men and women prostrating. In one trial, the accused, a nineteen-year-old girl, claimed she didn't know what she was carrying. Another woman had handed the package to her, then disappeared. The court found the girl guilty. A month before, the new regime had shot people for the same crime, as part of their war against indiscipline. The executions were carried out retroactively, to punish those who had been tried and convicted before the law came into effect, but following a public outcry, further executions were deferred.

The girl's face haunted me. The way her glasses kept sliding down, I imagined her as a school librarian in her hometown, coming to Lagos to earn a better living. When I actually began to believe her story, I realized I was not detached enough to be successful at litigation. I wasn't even sure I enjoyed being in court. The proceedings took too long, relied on too many people. I viewed them through bleary eyes and my heart throbbed like a toothache.

I had lost weight, even with Sheri's cooking. Whenever I remembered Mike and my father, not being able to say a word, I dropped my head. I cared for someone and I enjoyed showing them courtesy. The worst was to be deprived of giving it. I carried some of their shame. Soon I began to keep the same hours as my boss and learned how to disguise my tracks. I didn't even mind the bad looks I was receiving from other colleagues.

Living with Sheri, I saw how she survived as a sugary girl. She limited her involvement in the family business to please her brigadier. She tidied, after me and after her nephews and nieces who came to spend time with her. She dusted with cleaning rags, sometimes with her fingers. She plumped cushions if she stood up, picked fluff from her carpet, listened to the saddest Barbara Streisand songs. The rest of her time she spent preparing for Brigadier Hassan: her hair, her nails, dabbing perfumes and cooking meals. There wasn't a coy bone in her body to spare for the outrage of others, especially those from homes like mine, with errant fathers and mothers who prayed good and hard about which good families their daughters would end up in.