‘It doesn’t matter. I’m fine,’ I quickly interjected.
My mother stared at her hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.
The weeks afterwards restored some sense of normalcy as we developed a routine – my mother went out every morning to drop my sisters at school, then she returned to take me to therapy. In the car, we said little to each other, listening to music instead.
Therapy was uncomfortable, like pinching at a scabbed wound continuously. My therapist, a small woman swamped by her lab coat, encouraged me in exercises and drills to recover my neurocognitive skills. Cognitive remediation therapy, it was called. Each day, we listened to recordings in American accents that instructed me to press buzzers or indicate when I heard certain letters or words, perform maths equations and embroider letters to create language.
At the end of the sessions, she said, ‘Well done, Ego. You’re doing very well,’ pronouncing Ego in a Lagos accent, then scribbling feverishly in notepads before handing out assignments and exercises to practise at home. As time passed, I grew bored and listless, fatigued by the routines and encouragements to journal, but I did not tell my mother because I knew the sessions were costing more than she could afford.
While I was at therapy, my mother sold her belongings to amass funds for us to start our new lives – the ornate jewellery, bejewelled wrappers and custom shoes. My father had money but my mother did not, it was a baffling phenomenon to explain to an outsider so I never bothered. Yes, it was possible to be married to such a wealthy man and have nothing of your own. My father hardly, if ever, handed my mother raw, hard cash but he’d ensured she lived and looked the part of the wife of the man he was. It allowed others to make assumptions of their own, painting spurious pictures of our lives that differed bluntly from the reality.
When she wasn’t looking for a buyer for her assets, my mother went job hunting. On those days, she returned with scarlet eyes and slumped shoulders and I knew it hadn’t gone well.
At night, she slept uneasily, rolling this way and that, and I wondered if even in sleep, she couldn’t get away from my father.
Zina visited often; it was the least she could do after encouraging me to go home that day.
‘Molo!’ she shouted as I opened the door the first time and she saw my almost bald head.
‘Fool,’ I said, slapping the door in her face, and her laughter echoed through the heavy wood.
She was the first person to know where we were, my mother having informed her of our location before even her own siblings; she hoped the companionship would improve my disposition and my dissatisfaction with the fact that I couldn’t yet go back to school. But if anything, her visits made me long more for what I couldn’t yet have.
The three of us had filled our JAMB university admission forms together. Zina had carefully penned ‘Theatre Arts’ as her choice for her course of study, Eriife, ‘Medicine’, while I scribbled ‘Law’. We all chose the University of Lagos, determined to continue our mothers’ legacies. But two weeks later, Zina purchased another JAMB form, and in the course of study box, she wrote ‘Law’, defeated by her father’s will.
Our fathers were alike and yet so different: they’d both been born into nothing and by the sheer force of their wills made their fortunes. But whereas my father mostly ignored mine and my sisters’ existence, Zina’s father’s will extended to every area of his children’s lives. And so, when he’d insisted that his first daughter would only take up a profession he considered reputable, neither of us had been surprised, just disappointed.
‘Can’t your mother talk to him?’ Eriife asked Zina as a tear blotched the paper.
‘There’s no point,’ she said.
I knew the feeling.
Eriife visited only when she didn’t have classes, which wasn’t often. ‘I’m a medical student, not like you jokers,’ she told us, and we laughed, accustomed to the jabs. But on one of those afternoons when Eriife wasn’t there, Zina confided that she’d been spotted around campus with an unusual older student. ‘Don’t ask her, when she’s ready she’ll tell us what she wants us to know,’ Zina said.
In my absence, the world had moved on: classes continued, tests were given, Ademola had a new girlfriend (and he’d received hearty congratulations that he’d escaped my bad luck), exams were looming, the sky was still blue and rain still fell, drowning walkways and reminding the beach to push back. I wondered if this was how the dead felt, watching the earth stretch to cover the hole created by their former existence.
‘Do you know who he is now?’ I asked Zina, another day. We sat with bowls of popcorn watching a movie on the small television my mother had purchased to keep us entertained.
‘She’s still not said anything but I did some digging, trust me,’ Zina said.
I laughed. ‘Of course, I trust you, Madam FBI. What did you find?’
‘He’s a former student leader, during the NADECO days, when they tried to pressure the head of state to hand over power to Abiola, but got too involved in national politics and had to leave school for a while because the military men were looking for him.’
I wrinkled my nose. ‘Do you think that’s why she didn’t tell us about it? Is he still on the run?’
Zina gave me a look. ‘The head of state is dead, you know that.’
I did.
Glancing at my face and guessing my thoughts, she reached out a hand to tap mine comfortingly, ‘Don’t worry, she’ll talk to us when she’s ready.’.
‘Isn’t he too old for her? Is that legal?’
She chuckled. ‘This is Nigeria.’
‘I don’t like him,’ I grumbled, and she laughed.
‘You don’t even know him.’
My mother sold her car to make up the money needed to rent an apartment. By then, Zina already had a boyfriend of her own: a man so tall the top of his head hit the roof of his Peugeot as he dropped her off at our gate. I didn’t like him either.
Sister Bolatito had marked our departure with a grand lunch in her living room. We were the only ones to attend; the church ladies no longer socialised with her and I could tell she would miss my mother’s companionship – the animated remarks as they watched home videos, commenting on the characters like they were real people: ‘Don’t do that, stupid girl. Oh God, she’s going to die!’
‘Ladies and ladies,’ Sister Bolatito said at the lunch, causing us to burst into laughter. Then she gave her speech, thanking us for our stay. My mother gave a speech as well, a less confident one, but a speech nonetheless. At the door of our new apartment, just before she left us, Sister Bolatito pushed a thickened envelope between my mother’s fingers, telling her to take care, and my mother wept, loud broken sobs, as they hugged.
At first, my mother did not tell anyone where we’d moved, and we lived in tentative peace. Then she told my grandmother and days later, my father was at our door with an entourage, all wearing the charcoal uniform of the police force, clicking handcuffs around my mother’s wrists and driving off.
Sister Bolatito stayed with us the nights our mother was away; she’d been charged with kidnapping and I wondered how you could take your children to the same school every day – a school their father had never visited – and still be accused of kidnapping. It was one of the reasons I wanted to become a lawyer. Our laws seemed to me mere suggestions, tools of manipulation of the powerful and not edicts to protect the everyday man.
Days later, my mother was returned to us – a warning to return to the status quo or be punished. And I wondered how much further my father would go. Nasir, my father’s business partner, always said he was not to be credited for their remarkable success: ‘Chigozie is inevitable.’ I pondered on those words as my mother walked through our door, smelling of dirt and stale urine. Inevitable.
‘You don’t like anyone,’ Zina countered when I voiced my thoughts about her boyfriend.
‘He’s not good enough for you,’ I said. There was something much too ordinary about him for my liking and he carried it like it was an accomplishment, not wanting to be better, and Zina was anything but that. He would want her to be ordinary one day and she wouldn’t be able to be.
It was why they called her mami water, the creature whose beauty seduced men to their deaths; she’d inherited her mother’s stunning features and her father’s yellow skin tone. Even that wasn’t what made Zina different, there was a fire in her eyes, a recklessness and willingness to tread the borders of caution that left people curious.
