On Black Sisters Street (30 page)

She was anonymous to these people. She could be anyone from anywhere. She could be a married woman with a husband named Peter and a huge duplex in Ikeja: the sort of woman who could afford regular holidays abroad, living from hotel to hotel in cities across the globe, MasterCard and Visa Gold at her disposal.

She could be a professional single woman with money to burn and places to see. She was any story she wanted to be. Far away from the people she knew and who knew her.

It was only once that she bumped into Segun at a chip shop.
Segun had offered to run her home, and she, too flurried to refuse, accepted the offer, all the time worrying that he might have overheard her. What had she told the woman? Aargh! How loud had she been? Exclaiming, “I’m dying to eat Belgian fries! Quite famous back home in the U.S., you know!” She had turned around to smile at the customer behind her only to see Segun smiling down at her.

Ama had seen her get out of Segun’s car, looking decidedly shifty. And Segun, walking behind her, definitely had a salacious swagger. When Sisi flared up after she asked (and she was only joking) if Segun was now her regular guy, shouting, “You’re so wrong!,” Ama knew that she was up to something.

“Segun and Sisi,” Efe said when she heard. “That’s quite something!”

There were days when Sisi had two customers. And one of the two just wanted a cheap service: “I’m on a budget. So just a blow job, sugar.” The money was in delivering all the works: penetration, blow job, no condom. Black men avoided them, and Sisi initially thought that these men were embarrassed for their “sisters” in the flesh trade. But Ama corrected her on that, too. “Many black men here are just struggling to survive. They haven’t got the money to pay for sex.”

In all her years, Ama said, she could count the number of black customers she’d had on one hand. “And they are mainly visitors, tourists from London and America. One of them was not even proper black. He was Caribbean or something.”

When business was good, Sisi did an average of fifteen men. She was diligent about her payment, walking down to the Central Station every first Friday of the month to send a payment via Western Union to Dele. Sisi still dreamed of the big house she would build, but the dream was starting to lose its urgency. When she called home, she talked in a monotone, her eyes diverted from the single bed in her room, a cigarette clutched between her fingers.

Yes, I’m fine.

Yes, I started school.

Yes, I work part-time in a nursing home.

Yes, everything here is wonderful.

Yes, I have made some friends.

Yes, they are all wonderful.

Yes, I never forget to say my prayers.

I shall send some money home soon.

Sometimes, when the night was slow, she called from her mobile phone. In her work clothes and seated on her stool behind her window, she telephoned home and tried not to think of how much it was costing her to make a long-distance call from her mobile phone. Cheaper to buy a calling card. Or, better still, to go to one of the city’s many telephone shops and call from there. But sometimes the urge to call overtook everything else. Even economic good sense.

I’m calling from work, can’t stay long.

I’m glad you liked the handbag I sent, Mother.

Father, I hope you’re taking the vitamins I sent?

It’s cold.
Oyi na-atu
. But not too cold.

Her parents always said the right things. Reminding her to pray. Thanking her for the presents she sometimes sent them. But there was an underlying flatness to their tone that filled her with such visceral anguish that she could not sleep when she knocked off work. Yet she tormented herself. She could not
not
call. That would be worse.

She had not spoken to Peter since she left. She could not bear to. Where duty demanded that she keep in touch with her family, she had no such duty toward him. She did not want to test the limits of her sadness. And what would be the use of keeping in touch with him? Best to make a permanent break. He would never have her back, not after what she had done. Besides, she was a different person, and Peter would not recognize her. She was not Chisom. She was somebody
else. Rougher. Harder. Infinitely more demanding. He belonged to a past that had moved on without her.

One of the few people who made Antwerp bearable for her was Luc.

She met Luc at the Pentecostal church Efe introduced her to. A church that distributed inviting leaflets in huge black print:

At the beginning Sisi had enjoyed the ambience of a church full of well-dressed, ebullient Africans (mostly) singing at the top of their voices,
Praise the Lord oh sing oh sing oh, praise the Lord. Praise His holy name, oh sing oh sing oh praise the Lord
. It reminded her of what she thought of as her age of innocence. When a balloon blown up for her was enough to make her happy. When she thought that having an education was all she needed to escape her father’s sorry life.

The Ghanaian pastor was suave, his trousers ironed and creased in the right places, his jacket sitting squarely on him. He had a voice that held his audience in its grip, mesmerizing in the way it peaked and fell when he preached, calling on Holy Spirit fire to bomb evildoers, angels in heaven to annihilate enemies with automatic rifles, assuring his congregation, “By the end of the month, money will know your names and addreses in the Lord’s mighty name!,” reminding them that the end was nigh. But when he made the Schipperskwartier professionals his target, raining curses on them, “evil daughters of Eve who shall certainly burn at the end,” Sisi quit.

She told Efe, “When he starts acting all sanctimonious, as if he does not know that half of his female congregation are in the trade, donating tithes and paying his salary, then I can no longer be a member of his church. Every month he asks us to pay a tithe, every week he has a special donation request. Where does he think the money comes from? Who pays for his Italian shirts and his wife’s Dubai trips? Who’s sponsoring the new church he’s opening in Turnhout?”

Efe laughed and replied, “You’re very funny, Sisi. All dis big grammar because the pastor do him work? Wetin you wan’ make him talk? Na him job he dey do abeg! Let him do his job
ojare.
”

Luc was a thirty-year-old banker. He stood out because he belonged to that rare breed of white Belgians who attended services at African Pentecostal churches, but that was not the reason why Sisi felt pulled to him. The reason was more banal. He bore a close resemblance to Herman Brusselmans. Tall, lanky, with the same long, dry hair and radiating the same kind of understated, confident sexuality that the writer did. Not that Sisi had ever met Brusselmans. She had only ever seen him in the newspapers. A client had left behind his copy of a newspaper. Sisi had taken the paper home and, with sleep not very quick in coming, had begun to leaf through it. Her Dutch was very limited, but she enjoyed foraying into the words, searching patiently for similarities between the foreign words that danced on the pages with the English that she knew. When she saw words she recognized, she felt jubilation. A minor victory over the language she doubted she would ever be able to master. She had just celebrated “blauw” when her attention was taken by a picture on the next page. It was a very clear photograph of a man who looked at once unapproachable and irrepressibly sexy. Underneath the picture was the name Herman Brusselmans. She understood the word
schrijver
, writer, preceding the name. His eyes had a magnetic pull and his lips a stubborn set that made her want to conquer them. That was the beginning of her obsession. Often she bought newspapers and magazines
just because she recognized his name on the cover. She cut out pictures of him and used them to line her cosmetic dresser so that when she moved her cosmetics to the edge of the dresser, his multiple faces stared at her as if they had been conjured up by a magician.

Sisi had felt an instant attraction to Luc but had not encouraged any relationship between them. She still thought often of Peter, and even if her heart had been free, surely nobody would want to date her.

Luc was the one to initiate a relationship. He asked her out for a coffee one day after service, and she asked him why he came to this church full of Africans. He said he liked the music. “Belgian churches are flat … they are like pancakes. Nothing there to make you want to go back.” Sisi threw her head back and laughed.

Later, when she knew him better, he would tell her that he had stumbled into the church by mistake and the loud chanting pulled him in and kept him going back. His wife had just left him, he said, and maybe he wanted to experience joy vicariously from the singing, swaying throng.

After they became intimate, he would tell her that the faces of the congregation when they shut their eyes and prayed looked almost orgasmic in their contentment, in their happiness, and that intrigued him.

“SO, YOU’LL HAVE A DRINK WITH ME?” HE ASKED, BUT SISI TURNED HIM
down. The following week he asked her out again, with the same result. He gave her a two-week hiatus. Then tried again. Again without success. When she quit the church toward the end of December, he got her telephone number from Joyce and called. He badgered her into agreeing to see him one evening in a café on the Grote Markt, but she would not commit to any date. She was not sure he knew how she made her living; she felt if he did, he would not bother with her.
For all his Brusselmans-like look, there was an obvious sense of naïveté about him. She would not be totally shocked if he were a virgin. She hoped that if she acted disinterested he would give up.

But he was persistent. “Next weekend?”

“I’ll be working,” Sisi said.

“The following weekend, then? Just for a drink?”

Sisi said yes to get him off her back, but she did not turn up. The phone calls did not cease.

He was becoming a distraction, and she needed to get him out of her life so she could concentrate on her work and pay off Dele to regain her freedom. An inertia was starting to spread through her body, and even Madam noticed it. “You’ve still got many years to work oo. Don’t start slowing down now,” she cautioned.

A week before she had her first epiphany, Sisi agreed to meet Luc. He had hounded her for two months. She could not decide what to wear the evening they were to meet. Her bed was piled with clothes she had chosen and discarded. Shorts, miniskirts, T-shirts with spaghetti straps. She tried not to think about why she was restless, and focused on her makeup. She could not possibly be falling for Luc. She lined her eyes. Brown lipliner defined her lips. She wore a black skirt that reached her midthigh and matched that with an off-white short-sleeved T-shirt. She wanted to dress well without looking like she had put in any effort at all.

Luc was standing at the bar, nursing a beer, when she arrived. She walked up to him. He smiled, kissed her on the cheek, and told her she looked beautiful.

“No, I don’t,” Sisi answered sternly. “I do ugly things, and I am not beautiful.” She could not stop the images that came to her when she said this. The flat on the Vingerlingstraat with its gaudy colors, the mirror on the wall, the pictures in her room, Eric with the acne on his face who liked her sitting on him, her fingernails clawing his hair, while he let out soft groans. Casper who always asked her to
kneel and cradle him, her hands around his enormous waist. How could she be beautiful? How could she be beautiful if she was tainted? How could anyone think she was beautiful? She got up to go, but Luc seemed to have anticipated it and stood up with her, spilling his glass of beer. He held her hand, and she begged him to let her go. She was aware that others in the pub were looking at them. She wondered what they must think.

“Please let me go, Luc. You don’t know half the things I have done. Please, I’m begging you in the name of—”

“I don’t care. I like you very much. You are very pretty,” he cut in. Urgently. As though he feared that if he did not say those things he would lose his courage and never say them again. “You are the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, Sisi.”

Sisi tried to free her hand, but for someone so skinny Luc had a tight grip. Her wrist manacled in the loop his right hand made, she sat back down. She could not fall in love with Luc. That would be a major upset. Her life was complicated enough; she did not intend to complicate it any more.

They drank their beer in silence. “I can’t see you again,” Sisi said once her beer was finished. “Just leave me alone, okay?”

Luc battered Sisi’s shield with notes. He sent her postcards of hearts drawn in sand. He sent her letters expounding the theory that love was selfish and would not give up until it had conquered the object of its desire. Sisi was flattered by his attention, and it was this that softened her and made her agree to have him visit her. She imagined that once he saw her in her environment, he would no longer pursue her. That way she would be rid of him. There was no room for love in her life, not if she wanted to earn as much as she could and pay off Dele as quickly as she could. She would quash the affections she was developing for Luc, Brusselmans look-alike or not.

The day he came, Sisi tarted up. She had toyed for a while with the idea of inviting him to the Vingerlingstraat. Let him see her at the
window, dressed in a thong and a matching push-up bra. That should put him off. On the other hand, it might not be a good idea to mix business with personal issues. She would see him at home, but she would be dressed for the prowl.

A short leather skirt squeezed her buttocks, and her breasts almost poured out of a body-hugging black blouse with a low neck. Her lips shone bright red, her trademark color. Her eyes, as usual, were lined with black kohl. When she let Luc in, she expected him to take a step back. Instead, he kissed her on both cheeks and stood patiently waiting for her to ask him to sit down. He had brought a fruitcake, he said, and gave her the box. The only chair in the room faced away from the framed pictures on the wall. It was Sisi’s Chisom chair, for when she wanted to forget where she was and what she did. She would sit there and face the blank wall on the other side of the room.