On Black Sisters Street (9 page)

Even without looking at Titus, Efe knew that he was still eating. She could hear him smacking his lips as he sucked bone marrow. She got up and slowly walked out.

Lucky Ikponwosa would never see his father again.

What Efe had not known, for who would tell her, was that she was the sixth woman in as many years to come to Titus with an offspring from an affair. And all six the wife had dismissed in more or less the same way, marching them to the door with orders never to return, asking the house help to bolt the door behind them.

From the day she married Titus and caught him looking at her chief bridesmaid with a glint in his eye, she had known that he had a roving eye. As long as women swayed their hips at him, he would go to them, a drooling dog in heat. It was not his fault; it was just the way he was created. She could live with it. He could have his women. Have their children, even. She had no problem with that. What she had a problem with, though, was the women turning up with their children and expecting him to take care of them.

Titus, this is your baby. I’m not looking for marriage, just for you to help with upkeep
.

Titus, here is your son. He needs to know his father
.

Titus, this. Titus, that. Well, she was having none of that.

When she met Titus, he was just finishing his apprenticeship to a car parts salesman with a shop in Ladipo, but his heart was not in spare parts. He complained that there was no joy in it, but the parts man was one of the wealthiest men from his village, and to have
made the money he made, he must have business knowledge enough to spare. It was that—the knowledge of how to make money—Titus wanted to milk, so he had jumped at the chance of living with the man for five years, working in his shop and learning the secret of his success firsthand.

In his first year of marriage, his apprenticeship was done, and even though his former master gave him some money, as was customary, to start his own business in car parts, he had thrown his lot in with a man—another just-graduated apprentice with big ideas—and they pooled resources. They brainstormed and agreed that money was in women; their logic was that even a man who would not spend money on himself would spend it on a woman. They started by importing wigs—shiny, glossy wigs they hoped to sell to all the Lagos women dying for good hair without the trouble of going to a salon. It had not done as well as they had hoped. They had huge competition from Aba and Onitsha traders who imported wigs from Korea and sold them at much cheaper rates than they sold theirs. So they invested a huge chunk of what was left of their capital into skin-lightening creams. Lagos men loved light-skinned women; this was sure to be a winner. But their shipment of
Yellow Skin toning lotion
, with its promise of “noticeably lighter skin in fourteen days guaranteed or your money back,” arrived with half its contents broken and the unbroken half sullied by lotion. They spent five days and three thousand naira on cleaning the dirtied jars. Titus’s business partner would see this as a warning sign that worse was in store for them if they stayed together, and he would pull out, preferring to cut his losses. But Titus was the sort of man who persevered, especially if he was convinced he was right. That was one of the lessons he picked up from his former master: “Never give up if your heart and your head tell you that you are right. People can disappoint you, but your heart and your head never will. Make them your best friends.”

Titus was still certain he could become rich by concentrating on
women. There was nothing flawed in the logic that had attracted him to a business that targeted women in the first place. He was also certain that his partner was a fool for pulling out before they had struck gold. He only had to find something that pandered enough to women’s vanity to make him wealthy. His wife remained patient, counting pennies while he dreamed up one unsuccessful scheme after another, rubbing his tense muscles at night, telling him, “It’ll be okay. It’ll be okay, don’t worry about it, eh. Just don’t worry about it.”

He discovered the lacuna in the human-hair business quite by accident in his bed. He said it came to him in a dream, a sort of vision. A deep biblical voice instructed him to go to India and import the finest hair Lagos had ever seen. Not even his wife knew if this was true, if the vision was a tale he had made up. But he had gone to India and returned after eleven weeks, gaunt and hungry for some
proper
food. Close on his feet, a container full of hair extensions followed. “The rest, as they say, is history” was how his wife always concluded the narration of their rags-to-riches story. She was beside him when they bought their first car. She went with him when he consulted an architect to draw up plans for their house, saying how many rooms she wanted, where she wanted the kitchen, the playroom. She stood beside him when the foundation of their new home was laid. And when the house was finally ready, she bought the furniture and curtains. She was not about to let any other woman lay claim to the fruit of her patience. None would share the money she had waited so patiently and so good-humoredly for Titus to make. It was her right and her children’s legacy, so she guarded it jealously. He could have his women—honey always attracted bees—but the bees had to remain in their hives and keep their young with them. The honey jar was hers to keep, and she intended to do so, encircling it with two hands to keep it close to her heart.

Titus, for his part, let his wife get away with chasing his out-of-wedlock children out of the house. He was grateful to her for staying
with him when he’d had nothing, steeped deep in a penury that he could only fantasize about escaping. Many women would have left for less. Besides, he appreciated having a wife who did not nag him about where he had been, whom he had been with. What man wanted to come home to a nagging woman? She accepted him for who he was, and he knew well enough to be thankful for that.

So when the seeds of his trysts sprouted and were collected by their mothers who came knocking at his door, he let his wife handle them. She had earned that right. And if sometimes his mind wandered to those children he would never get to know, he showed no signs of it.

EFE FELT SHE OUGHT TO HATE HER BABY; AFTER ALL, SHE’D NEVER
asked for him. He kept her at home and was a visible sign that she was damaged goods. Now there was very little hope of marriage to a rich man rescuing her from the pit she lived in.
Which kin’ man go marry woman wey don get pikin already?
If the man who got you pregnant did not want you, there was no chance of any other person doing so. Her mother would be disappointed. Her mother, who always said she would make a good wife. “You were born a wife,” she told this daughter of hers who did not think anything of getting up early to help her mother with breakfast. “Some women, they enter marriages half-formed. They need to be honed. But you are perfect. You will enter marriage already finished.” There was no way that would happen now. She would never be the perfect wife her mother had hoped for her. She could not be revirgined. Could never be unpregnant. She was chipped.

At the beginning, Efe had good days and bad days. On the bad days, she woke to a dreary blankness that did not clear no matter how bright the sun shone. On those days, her baby wailed constantly and she wished she had never met Titus. Her head screamed at her to
hate their baby. On the good days, her baby gurgled and smiled and the world was right. As the weeks wore on, the good days became more and the bad days receded. It was not long before she realized that, try as she might, she could not hate her baby. She forgot the pain of delivering him. Forgot that she had not planned to have him. Forgot the humiliation at Titus’s house. She forged new memories with the baby that had nothing to do with before he was born. When he cried, she rushed to soothe him, cooing to him, “Don’t cry, my child, don’t cry, your mommy is here,” until he stopped. She let him drool all over her and waited with excitement for the first tooth to cut through at five months. When he got ill from cutting the tooth, she held his hands and talked to him until she ran out of what to say, and then she fell quiet and prayed for his fever to break. She cried when her milk thinned and she could no longer breast-feed him at six months. She loved him, astounding herself with the force of her love. She thought she now knew why women went on to have more and more children. It was easy to forget the pain associated with the delivery. She delighted in the solidity of this child whom she had brought into the world and often would pick him up just to convince herself that he was there, that he had not gone up in smoke.
Jus’ to be sure him never disappear like money-doubler trick
.

Efe was still determined to provide her son with the kind of life she had dreamed for him when she thought she would be able to get Titus’s help. Every morning before she went to her cleaning job at an office in GRA, she whispered in her son’s ear so that only he could hear, “I promise you, I shall get you out of here. I don’t care how I do it.” She had never been more serious about anything else in her entire life.

Everybody called the baby L.I., the initials of his name, because his grandfather, in one of his clearer moments, had come out of his drunken stupor to announce that was what he was to be known as. “All this business of two names will only lead to trouble. Giving a
child a mouthful of a name is incurring the wrath of the gods. It is a big name that kills a dog.”

And although neither Efe nor Rita understood his speech, they never referred to the baby as Lucky Ikponwosa again.

Renaming the baby was about the only time Efe’s father showed an interest in the plump baby who was always crying at night. The only other time had been the day Efe came back from the hospital with him. Her father had slurred that had their mother been alive, she never would have let Efe bring a bastard child into their home and that not a penny of his was to go toward the boy. “I cannot be raising my children and be raising another man’s child, too, you hear that? There is only so much trial a man can bear in this world.”

L.I. grew and his mother worked to provide for him, cleaning first one office and then a second. She left early, before her son woke up, and by the time she came back he had worn himself out from playing and was winding down, ready to end his day. Left in the care of her sister, Efe did not see enough of him, and it pained her, so she took to praying. She prayed for longer hours in a day. And then she prayed for more work so she could save enough, soon enough, to take a break. It was only the second prayer that got answered.

She was going home at the end of a working day, seated at the back of an
okada
, weaving through Lagos traffic, her arms around the cyclist, when she spotted an advertisement for a cleaning woman for an office on Randle Avenue. Randle Avenue was close to the location of her second job, and she was sure she could juggle all three. Three jobs meant more money, more bonuses, which equaled a better life for L.I. A better life for L.I. totaled a happier life for her.

She begged the cyclist to take her to Randle Avenue instead. If he hurried, she might still be able to make it to Dele and Sons Limited: Import-Export Specialists before the closing time of 6:30
P.M
. The bearded cyclist with the bandanna said she had to pay more money.

“No problem,” she answered. “Just get me there as quick as you can.”

He asked her to hold him lower around his waist, as getting to Randle Avenue before 6:30 required his “James Bond moves.” She moved her hands to the area around his belly button, but he asked her to move lower and to hold him tighter to ensure she did not fall off the bike. Efe did not argue, willing him on to her third job. She held him tight, hid her face from the wind by placing her head in the small of his back, and tried to stay on while he swerved and revved, meandering through traffic, avoiding potholes and almost knocking down a bread hawker.

She was glad to make it to Randle Avenue in one piece, though slightly shaken. The man’s James Bond moves had involved riding at top speed and with total disregard for other road users, especially pedestrians. Many times during the ride, Efe was sure she was going to be thrown off the back of the bike or that they would ride under a moving truck and that would be the end of her, a mass of bones and flesh flattened under the wheels of a truck carrying crates of soft drink. She could not decide which was the worse prospect of the two. Which would mean a more merciful death? At some point she had begged, “Softly, softly,
oga
. Don’t go too fast, please.” But either her words had gotten lost in the medley of honking and hawkers calling and people raining abuse from open windows, or the cyclist had chosen to ignore her. In any case, he rode just as hard until he had deposited her in front of her destination.

“Shall I wait for you?” he asked Efe, his engine still running. He had one leg resting on the ground, the other foot on the pedal, but she’d had enough of him. Besides, she had no idea how long she would be there for, and
okada
fare mounted if a cyclist had to wait. So she dismissed him and said a quick prayer before walking into the building.

The office was still open, and Efe was interviewed on the spot by
a man three times the size of Titus, who would become her new employer, and who, despite the “and Sons” attached to the name of his company, seemed to be the only one working there.

“Do you know how to use a vacuum cleaner?” the man wheezed, to which Efe said, “Yes, sir.”

It was the default answer she gave to all his other wheezed questions. “Can you be here every Thursday?” “Can you get here before seven
A.M
.?” “Do you live close by?” “Are you a hard worker?” Had he asked her if she could fly, she would have replied just as enthusiastically as she did to the other questions, “Yes, sir! Of course I can fly.”

Dele would also turn out to be the most generous of her three bosses, giving her huge bonuses at holidays.

He often complimented her, noticing when she had her hair done, when she looked worn out, or when she had a new outfit on. When she mentioned that she had a nine-month-old son, he exclaimed that she did not look like a mother, telling her she must be one of the lucky women whose stomachs were like rubber bands: No matter how hard they were stretched, they snapped back into shape. He inquired cautiously if she had a husband. Or a boyfriend. Anybody waiting for her at home?