My mother walked in without looking at me even though I held the door open for her. ‘Obianuju informed me that my daughter is around,’ she announced, marching across the threshold.
‘Good afternoon, Aunty Ada,’ Ego said, rushing to-wards her.
The last time we’d set eyes on each other, her eyes had burned with fire as she gripped my chin between her fingers. ‘I hear you now smoke,’ she spat out. ‘Is this the sort of life you want to live? Did I fail as a mother?’
I’d wrenched my face from her palm.
Her face, so like mine, twisted with revulsion. ‘God is punishing you, do you know that? That’s why you’re not married. That’s why you don’t have any children. You killed!’
This time she pulled Ego into a bosomy embrace. ‘Nwakaego, my daughter. You’re looking fairer! So fine! Is that what the weather over there does to you?’
‘Ah yes, Aunty, the sun doesn’t shine at all.’
22
Murderer
In my diary that day, I’d penned: I don’t think I can go through with this. Journaling had come naturally to me from the time my father purchased a sequin-backed notebook covered in glitter on my seventh birthday. A miniature padlock sealed my secrets in.
He loved to write, despite his limited education, and he was determined that we have a different sort of life from the one he’d had, working his parents’ farm after his father’s death in the war, selling grounded cassava and millet in the village marketplace. The missionary school in an adjoining village had been a godsend, where he learned and acquired an affinity for literary education, and even that euphoria was short-lived. It was in his fourth year that his mother passed away, taken by a sudden illness they were too impoverished to treat, her children distributed amongst relatives. An uncle that traded leather imported from China claimed my father.
Hard work, wit and an endless determination for perfection saved him, he always said. In truth, it had been igba boi, the years-old apprenticeship system of servitude that had saved our tribe from impoverishment in the years following the civil war. And after a decade of serfhood, working at his uncle’s behest for little or no pay, learning the trade, he was rewarded with enough capital to start his own. Now, he trained others from the village, just as his uncle had done for him. He did not have the tremendous wealth that Ego’s father had acquired, but enough to do his part.
The money laid the foundation; his quest for knowledge built the scaffolding. In his library, he collected cases of books and tapes on the art of business, research into trades and their shortfalls. His ability to critique was second to none, to pull apart a perfect-sounding idea, until he was left with the rubble of its initiative, to determine a fault ahead of others. It was the same critical eye he turned on his children; it was the eye he’d used selecting my mother.
His expectations were laid out early enough that there was no cause to say: ‘I didn’t know.’ Perfection was the requirement, regiment the tool, conduct the yardstick. Perfection was not obtained by hope but by will, a will to prove he was better than where he came from.
In his eagerness to determine, my father unknowingly gave me freedom – my journal was the one place he could not reach, where his hands could not lord over. My initial journal entries were simple: recollections of the day, of words spoken and unspoken. Soon, they transcended to thoughts and feelings, a recount of flaws and admission of mistakes. Years later, I would re-read them with new eyes, realising the girl I’d been – striving and failing to ever acquire his approval.
Bayo claimed to be different. When he said he wasn’t like my father, I should have known that he would be the one to turn my life upside down. It was the same with all of them: I was a prize to be won, a target to be acquired, a shining new trinket to be displayed on the arm. But with Bayo, there was a golden goodness about him; he was the sort of man that wouldn’t cause hurt knowingly.
He’d been too shy to approach me and so he’d sent a note from the back of the class. And I’d tucked it in the corner of my bag, forgotten along with the others, until a bespectacled gangly young man walked up to me weeks later with a nervous smile and introduced himself.
‘He’s a sort of shiny brown,’ I told Ego in our shared room. She never remembered my male admirers’ names and I was eager for her to remember this one.
‘Hmm,’ she grunted, a brow raised. She never took me seriously. ‘You’re too fickle,’ she told me once. And I knew she’d learned the word in literature class in secondary school; when our teacher had described Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, he’d used the word ‘fickle’. But I wasn’t like Romeo, switching affections between Rosaline and Juliet in a matter of acts; I was just aware of my reality. Until then, dating had been a sport, a distraction as I awaited the inevitable.
Bayo laughed easily, artless joy expressed at the simple things, untroubled by life’s gloom, like a child you constantly wanted to keep happy because their happiness was so pure it brought you joy. I craved to be as unburdened as he was. To have parents like his, hardworking stable-jobbed, spectacled, smiling parents that told you to do whatever, to be whoever, because they would support you regardless. To be able to say ‘I love you’ so easily, because you’d only known love.
On his bed, between sheets with cartoon drawings that smelled like baby powder, we made love for the first time; his first and mine. Chuka had begged to be the one to take my virginity, on his knees in a flat his father had rented for him for school. He’d begged with tears in his eyes, telling me how much he loved me and how much he was willing to do for me, but it only made me wonder how many others he’d pressured and guilted into sex the same way, women who had given their consent unwillingly.
A pregnancy wasn’t something I’d planned, even though I made it appear that way to Ego. Perhaps that was what the Sunday school teacher at my mother’s church had meant by life and death in the power of the tongue – to joke about an event, and have it transcribed to reality.
It had been once, one time when we’d had sex without a condom. We were laughing, joking like we always did, then we were pulling at each other’s clothes, and by the time we realised it, we’d gone too far.
‘We’ll be fine,’ Bayo said, his smile reassuring, believing. And I thought that he wouldn’t make a bad father.
On the same bed, I handed him the paper bag with the six pregnancy tests I’d taken.
‘What’s this?’ he asked with the jaunty smile of a child unwrapping birthday presents.
I waited for him to open the bag.
‘You look so serious,’ he said, laughing as he poured out the contents.
Then his smile disappeared. He picked the sticks one after the other, and stared at the double lines that declared me pregnant.
‘Are you sure these aren’t faulty? You should get a proper test at the hospital,’ he said, his voice carrying the excessive optimism of a child seeking to escape punishment. I pulled out the printed hospital test from my bag and handed it to him.
‘It’s not that bad,’ I said finally, when he remained mute after several minutes, his head in his hands. It was a role I’d never played with him: blind optimism. ‘Now, I don’t have to get married to someone else anymore. Remember we planned to talk to my dad once we’re done with law school? Now, we can just tell them we’re going to get married. Your parents are always supportive, my mum and your mum can help out with the baby while we work and try to stabilise ourselves.’ It rushed out quickly, like I was grasping at a rope slipping from my fingers.
I left the room when his head remained in his hands, smoothing the bedsheet with my hands, wanting to leave the perfection of his life as I’d met it.
His text came two days later:
Hi Zina, I’m so sorry it’s taken so long to say anything. I did not realise it then, but I’m not ready for such a serious commitment as raising a child, or marriage even, and that’s why I’ve been grappling with the reality ever since. I also realise that at the end of the day, it’s your body and your decision, and I’ll support you regardless.
Even the message sounded so innocent, like a wide-eyed infant waking up to the reality of the world.
Girls had abortions every day, we just pretended they didn’t happen, like it wasn’t illegal, like there weren’t back-end doctors and herbalists with solutions to such a minor problem.
I called Chioma. She knew everyone and everything there was to know. ‘Ahh, Zina I thought you were sharper than this. How can you let one of these small boys mess up a shining star like you ehn? A whole fine girl?’ I wondered if she expected a response to her question, if it was only the ‘ugly’ girls that made mistakes. ‘I’ll make some calls. Expect to hear from me soon.’ A final cluck of her tongue and she was gone.
Days later, she squeezed a white pill bottle in my palm at the back of a restaurant. ‘Don’t tell anyone I gave you o. I’ll deny it, I swear.’
I thought of calling Ego to talk, but knew I couldn’t, in the face of her own struggles, mine seemed inconsequential. And so, I wrote in my diary, to myself, to the child I wasn’t brave enough to have. Then I swallowed the capsules.
I heard my parents’ voices through the walls when I returned from the hospital, mostly my mother’s.
