‘He’s young,’ I said, in genuine relief. He looked to be mid-20s, his haircut a recent style.
‘At least you didn’t say, “I don’t like him”, like you always do,’ she joked, mocking me.
‘Have you met him yet?’
She shook her head no. ‘He and his family are coming to see my father this month to formally begin the process.’ Her tone was carefully flippant.
‘Are you ready?’ I asked, not sure what else to say. It seemed like the sort of question you asked your friend who was on the verge of marriage.
‘Chuka wants to make a counter proposal to my father. He thinks he can change his mind,’ she said and giggled like she thought it cute.
I hissed. ‘That fellow? Does he even have the money to pay your bride price? Or he plans to sell his Peugeot? Can that old thing even buy a bag of rice?’
Zina laughed and I joined her, then we laughed even harder, her palm rising to slap my shoulder, and I was certain we’d both gone mad.
We told each other everything. Yet Zina only left a note on my bunk the day she disappeared; only a week after she’d shown me the picture: Ego baby. I’m not ready to marry anyone biko. I’m going away for a while. I can’t tell you where but just know I’m okay. Chuka is with me. Don’t be annoyed ehn. It’s for your own good. I still love you plenty.
I told my mother because I had no one else to confide in, because I was scared that something would happen to my friend and I would be the unwitting accomplice who remained silent when her voice was needed, and because I wanted her to be prepared for the possibility of Zina’s father coming after us. Who else would know Zina’s whereabouts if not me?
‘Nwakaego,’ my mother said, using the tone that told me she was serious. ‘Are you sure you don’t know where she is? Who is this Chuka? Do you know where he lives?’
‘No. I don’t know anything,’ I said and sobbed into my hands, feeling useless.
My mother rubbed my back in soothing circles. ‘Don’t worry, everything will be okay.’
‘Obianuju,’ Uncle Kelechi, my mother’s eldest brother shouted as I opened the door.
‘Kelechi at least enter the house before you start shouting, this thing is heavy,’ Uncle Ikechukwu grumbled behind him, his hands full with a bag of rice.
It had been months since either of them had bothered to look for us.
‘What would Papa say? He must be rolling in his grave,’ Uncle Kelechi had said to my mother the last time I saw him.
‘I’m not going back,’ my mother said.
‘Why not think of your children? This isn’t life,’ Uncle Ikenna added, circling a palm in the air at our sparse living room. My mother looked contrite then.
Now, my mother wiped her hands nervously on her skirt as she stood.
‘This your democracy day celebration is serious,’ Uncle Kelechi said, grinning, charming. ‘Where is my own plate of rice?’
My mother burst into tears. She cried too often now.
The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) welcomed the new government with a strike. Our lecturers instructed us to go home to wait it out, the union wasn’t going to budge this time, they’d given past governments too many opportunities to meet their commitments.
‘Are we not human beings? Will our families not eat?’ a lecturer complained aloud to his colleague in the hallway.
The days were languid, blending into one another until they became a single infinite and meaningless existence. Eriife was consumed by her new boyfriend and, automatically, by his first love – politics.
‘Nigeria has so much potential,’ she said to me one day. ‘Don’t you want to see a better country?’ She rarely spoke about becoming a doctor anymore. And I began to wonder if this person had always existed or had been created by this man and her ardent affection for him.
‘Nice to meet you,’ he’d said the first time I met him, gripping my hand tightly and holding my eyes through the thick lenses of his glasses, and I thought to myself that he had probably learned it from one of those books on power and getting others to do your bidding. Eriife bounced beside him, nervous, eager for him to be liked. But my opinion had been formed even before I set my eyes on him, for the sole reason that he’d taken her from us.
‘He’s tolerable. I can see why she likes him, but I still don’t. He should date his agemates,’ I told Zina over the phone. The phone number had been taped to our hostel room door days after Democracy Day with the words, Ego baby, call me. Friday, 5pm.
‘Are you mad?’ I’d screamed into the landline at the NITEL call centre and the attendant perked up in her seat, suddenly interested in my conversation.
Zina’s cackle rang across the line. ‘Nwakaego, never change.’
‘It’s not funny. How could you do this without telling me. I’ve been so worried. I’ll kill that Chuka if I ever see him, just warn him never to cross my path.’
‘I wanted to make sure that if the police arrested and tortured you, you wouldn’t have anything to tell them,’ she said.
I sighed; she was joking but she wasn’t.
‘I’m psychic, I left at the perfect time,’ she boasted after the strike was announced.
I hissed. ‘When are you coming back?’
Zina did not answer.
A thanksgiving service was how my mother wanted to celebrate my father finally agreeing to sign the divorce papers but she did not want to return to the church we had attended with him, the one where they had met. But still, she wanted a thanksgiving service because that was what you did when you received a major victory: you thanked God.
The church was a few streets from ours, and because buses did not move around as frequently on Sundays, we legged the distance, my sisters complaining nonstop.
A bungalow in the middle of a plot of undeveloped land that reminded me of our village parish in the East met us with a billboard that announced God’s presence was indeed there. There was singing, clapping, dancing and a choir performance. When testimonies were called for, my mother joined the band of people gathered by the side of the altar, and I stood to clap encouragingly when she was handed the microphone.
She did not use the word ‘divorce’; instead, she said God had delivered her from certain death. The congregation stood to applaud.
