Erezino was a name he’d chosen for himself, to detach himself from the legacy of the father he’d been named after, a name on his passport he never showed me.
‘You brought the expensive one,’ I chimed as Zino uncorked the champagne bottle.
‘Nothing of mine is ever cheap.’
‘Touché.’
I watched as he filled the flute, tiny bubbles forming against the glass surface. ‘Thank you,’ I said as we clinked flutes. ‘What are your plans after this?’ I asked after taking a sip.
‘Some new proposal I got the other day. The script looks decent but the powers that be already have their choice for lead actress fixed.’
‘Hmm,’ I said, swallowing a gulp this time. ‘Do I know her?’
‘I don’t, but she’s light skinned, has a London accent and a decent following on social media, and that seems to be enough for the team. The things people care about these days.’
I giggled, suddenly feeling light. ‘I’m fair skinned too.’
He held my gaze. ‘You can act,’ he retorted in a deadpan tone. ‘Seriously, I don’t understand what’s happening. We have local talent that can be polished, but we’d rather give an amateur with the right accent and connection the role. It’s preposterous.’
‘ “Preposterous”,’ I repeated, swallowing more champagne. ‘You sound like Ego. I only use that kind of word in written speech.’
‘You just love to pretend you aren’t as smart as you are.’
I turned to the side and picked up my phone. The champagne had already begun to take effect, turning my mood. ‘We should listen to something, this conversation is getting too serious,’ I said, scrolling through my playlists.
He raised his flute. ‘Go ahead.’
I settled on Westlife.
Zino groaned. ‘Not this again.’ He’d always complained about my attachment to boybands, but as always, he let me have my way. ‘Can’t Lose What You Never Had’ came on as we continued to chat.
‘You know,’ I said as the chorus played. ‘Ego and I used to listen to this album so much when it came out. But this song was always my favourite. It’s a love song but that’s not what I hear when I listen to it.’
‘We focus too much on romance as a society anyway.’
I nodded. ‘I can’t lose what I never had so I might as well take a chance.’
He knew my story. On the night we met, he’d poured red wine into crystal glasses and shoved one between my jittery fingers. Then he’d clinked our glasses and said, ‘Here’s to being rejects, the ones our parents would rather not have.’
In a different society, it would be considered strange – obscene even – to travel back and forth through a monument to the man responsible for the death of your grandfather, a man whose very memory was a grisly reminder that your tribe had lost the civil war. I thought of this as I prepared to head to the Murtala Muhammed Airport to pick up Ego.
‘Have you seen the new cabinet list? What utter bullshit,’ Zino texted me as I drove towards Eriife’s clinic so we could go to the airport together. Ego’s flight was due to land in an hour. The traffic light changed before I could respond.
Eriife was standing outside the glass double doors in a tailored navy trouser suit despite the blazing heat as I pulled up. It had only been a few years since she’d opened the clinic with her husband – their pictures splashed across the newspapers as they cut the ribbons – and it had already gained a reputation for its great quality of care, a rarity in a country like ours. There was a time when I would have looked forward to this trip together to the airport, before our connection had become only a dreary elegy to the bond our mothers had shared.
Eriife had wanted me to campaign for their party’s candidate for presidency – now the newly sworn-in president, a man I despised – to wear t-shirts and appear in TV interviews, to espouse words I held no belief in, to become the person she now was.
‘Can’t you do this for your friend?’ she’d said when I turned her down, her eyes burning with the sting of betrayal. We were in the sprawling duplex she shared with her husband and hadn’t seen each other in months even though we both lived in Lagos. When she’d called, asking if I had time to come over, I’d thought it was to rekindle the connection we once had, the days of laughing on hostel bunks. I’d been mistaken.
‘You know me better than that,’ I said that day. But did she?
She’d been the first to know about my boyfriend after my parents had pulled me from St Mary’s, the first to meet Chuka, because she saw men in the same way Ego did, through the lens of her father. I was the one who still bore the secret of the day after Aunty Chinelo’s death, the day Eriife had said, her voice laden with guilt she did not understand, ‘I hate my father, he’s the reason she’s gone.’
Eriife’s separation from us had begun in the smallest of ways: missed hangouts had turned into birthday parties and major milestones, until we’d grown accustomed to her absence. Now, I was the semi-famous face she called on for political campaigns.
I stopped the car long enough for Eriife to get in then pulled away from the driveway, noticing her chauffeur-driven Land Rover SUV following closely behind. I wondered why she’d asked to go together instead of just meeting at the airport.
We travelled in unbroken silence, until I said awkwardly, ‘Ego says you got her the job.’
‘Oh. Did she?’ Perhaps she was surprised that she’d cropped up in our conversations at all. She shrugged. ‘It was nothing. They needed someone, I only made the connection.’ She looked out the window, her lips tight together.
We did not speak for the rest of the journey.
Ego looked different and yet the same, pushing a trolley piled high with luggage, wearing a chic jumpsuit and large sunglasses. She was no longer the broken young woman that had left the country, desperate to escape.
‘Well, hello there,’ I said, Eriife standing stiffly by my side like a stranger. People milled past, dragging luggage and sending stares my way.
I’d been anxious that Ego’s return would be the end to the utopia of our friendship, that it would reveal our bond had been a version of our previous selves we’d clung to, that we would be so changed by the years apart we would no longer connect. A short visit and phone calls were different from living day to day.
We hugged, clutching one another for several seconds, our perfumes mingling, our weaves blending.
Ego pulled back first and raised her sunglasses to dab at her eyes, I kept mine in place. Then she hugged Eriife. ‘We should probably not be doing this here,’ she said and laughed. I took the trolley from her hands and pushed it towards the car park.
‘Ahn-ahn, you have a Range? What else haven’t you told me?’ Ego said as we stopped by my car and I clicked the doors unlocked. She turned to Eriife, ‘Did you know she had a Range?’ Eriife shrugged.
‘It’s not that big a deal,’ I said, loading her boxes into the rear.
‘Not that big a deal? Since when?’ she said, then stared at me. ‘You’ve changed, you’re calmer.’
