‘Is what true?’ I responded.
‘Is he, you know…?’ she demonstrated with her eyes. ‘I know you’re his friend.’
‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. She raised a brow, indicating her disbelief. ‘I don’t think it’s any of our business, to be honest,’ I added.
In 2014, after the Same Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act was passed, we’d discussed the legislation over a bottle of Antinori Tignanello.
‘It’s the poor who will bear the consequences,’ he’d said. ‘The poor are subject to the rules; the rich do as they want, in silence of course.’ He clucked his tongue. ‘Quite unfortunate.’
‘Ego is moving back here,’ I told Zino when we were done discussing the potential project, a film focused on something outside the usual themes.
‘You’re unhappy about it.’ He wasn’t asking. ‘Did she say why?’
‘The usual: she misses home. But I know Eriife convinced her that this new government will change everything. She already has a job. She applied without telling me, can you believe that? Eriife’s husband and the director of the company are friends, I’ve seen pictures of them online.’
‘Did you watch the speech on democracy day?’ Zino asked.
‘No, why would I?’
It was the cause of our first major disagreement: he wanted to vote and I didn’t. We’d participated in several protests together, lifting placards and screaming for the country we wanted, but in February that year, I refused to vote.
‘Protests are a part of being Nigerian, the ballot is the ultimate protest,’ Zino said.
‘I don’t like the current system – we both know that. It isn’t ideal. But I will not be voting for a man that jailed my friend’s father and turned him into a monster.’
‘I’m not voting for him either. I was a teenager when he was head of state, my memory functions perfectly,’ Zino countered.
‘So you’re voting to keep the status quo?’
‘It’s better than not voting. You vote for or against what you want or don’t want. I’m disappointed in you.’
I’m disappointed in you. I blocked his number for a week.
The whole country had been taken up in the frenzy. Change! On Facebook, people documented epistles for and against the sitting party and its momentum-bearing opposition. Family members issued blocks and insults, old newspaper clippings and conspiracy theories drifted about. Hashtags trended. Elections are not won on social media, the incumbents responded. Detailed manifestos, promises upon promises. Change was coming.
‘We’re going to regret this,’ Zino said as the results were announced.
20
Wild
Acting came easy when you’d spent the better part of your life playing a character. I was always going to be wild; Sister Teresa at my father’s local diocese said I needed to be monitored or I would go astray. That had been the first sign of the incompatibility between my parents: doctrine. My father was a staunch Catholic, the sort who mouthed Latin phrases like ‘Deo Ggratias’ and ‘Anima Christi’ and my mother was a screaming, waving, jumping Pentecostal. In the early days, they reached a compromise: they would rotate attendance between each parish until the other one was convinced to abandon theirs to serve God the only right way he could be served.
Until Sister Teresa uttered that word about me. Wild. An animal to be caged. At seven, my breasts came, round pointy things jutting out of my blouse and my father agonised about my waning childhood, that I would mature too quickly, attracting men like scavenging animals to prey, and lose my flickering innocence. He measured my skirts with his eye, adept at calculating their length above and below the knee, turned off music with the slightest corrupting lexicon and locked the doors in his absence.
It was only appropriate that I inherited my father’s fair skin and my mother’s features – looking like neither of them and both of them at the same time. My father might have been the reincarnate of a Prussian sentry but it was in the shadow of my mother’s person that I matured.
Adaugo Okafor née Omimi. The paragon of perfection. Adaugo with the flawless chestnut skin, sculpted oval-shaped face and teeth like coconut meat. Neither too tall nor too short; the perfect height for a woman. Adaugo who did as she was told without question or pause. Adaugo who had graduated at a ripe age with a good degree and returned home with an enterprising husband.
‘Your mother never gave me any trouble, so please don’t kill her for me,’ my grandmother often said. And when my mother complained about our trouble, she murmured, ‘You must have gotten it from your father’s side.’ But it was in the mirror that our likeness and disparities were most apparent, as my mother slid her fingers into hair that was just like hers – hair that made others question our heritage. Twisting the black thick strands into cornrows, she would stare at our faces side by side, and her eyes would ask how her offspring could be so unlike her.
My period arrived at nine, gushing like it could no longer bear to hold itself back, thickening my hips and widening my buttocks, staining my best skirts. My father mourned as if bereaved, then bundled me over to an all-girls Catholic boarding secondary school.
At St Mary’s Girls, we put on a daily performance, for ourselves and for the benefit of others, the chapel our amphitheatre, ‘Salve Regina’ our chorus. At mass, we stood, we knelt, we stood again, the shawls on our heads inert, the hymnals in our fingers dogeared. For the Eucharist, we bowed our heads in contrived penitence and received the sacrament in acknowledgement of confessions we’d never given. Then we said ‘Amen’ and became ourselves again.
We purported to believe the stories of Madam Koi Koi, the spectral woman who walked the halls of the hotels at night in clacking heels; we testified to have set eyes on her fiery red heels and the image of her other ghostly counterpart: the headless girl who made her own braids. We’d even heard the cries of the bush baby that positioned itself by the clothes hanging line at the edge of the undeveloped bush paths, but we’d grabbed our checkered house dresses and Sunday whites off the line and run in the opposite direction.
We played a sullen disinterest, revulsion even, for the opposite gender even though we were fascinated by sex: its meaning and the act. We stole biology textbooks from the senior girls and studied the drawings, then we read lascivious romance novels for the seriatim. In my third year, when I’d given up tearful scenes during visiting days, pleading with my father to withdraw me from St Mary’s, a scandal broke and made its way to our parents: two soon-to-be-expelled students were caught in a bathroom doing God knows what. My father pulled me out at the end of the term before I could be tainted by their immorality – an unceremonial end to an act.
Troubled. That was how Pastor Matthew described me to my mother the Saturday afternoon I was found kissing a boy at the back of the church auditorium, his fingers deep in my bra. The devil had a strong hold of my life, the kind that goeth only by prayer and fasting. In the midst of the mothers the following Sunday, their tongues wagging in rapid fervent prayer, I knelt for deliverance and waited for God to move, to send a new spirit and change me.
Kanyinulia needed money again.
‘Sisterly!’ she shouted over the phone.
I rolled my eyes even though I was aware she couldn’t see me. ‘Nulia, you only call me “sisterly” when you need something.’
Her wardrobe was lined with the newest designer releases. On Instagram, she’d posted a picture of herself a week earlier, seated on the bonnet of a brand-new car with the caption: ‘Work hard, God will do the rest. Glory be. #tearrubber #mercedezbenz.’ And yet she needed money.
My sister had inherited our mother’s penchant for shopping. It was how my father had appeased her: a bag, a new pair of shoes, gold that glittered against her skin. And he would be absolved of all his wrong. He was ill-tempered, erratic even, not violent, not angry. Once, he’d smashed the blender my mother had purchased, accusing her of teaching her children to be lazy. For hours, she’d picked at the glass pieces with bleeding fingers, refusing our assistance. The next day he’d come home with cardboard boxes bearing the labels of her favourite brands, and she’d pulled at the seals with her taped fingers like a child on Christmas morning.
‘Ahn-ahn, I can’t greet my sister again?’ Nulia joked.
‘I’m not your only sister,’ I reminded her.
Our parents had had us in quick succession – Zinachukwu, Urenna, Apunanwu, Jachinma, Sofuchi, Kanyinulia – until they’d landed on the treasure they sought: a son. Ifeadigo – the light has come.
‘Well, you’re my best sister,’ she replied, her voice a lilting song.
