‘Uzondu, is it until she kills herself? I told you when you started this that you shouldn’t force them to marry so early. Must you always have your way?’
I did not hear my father’s response.
I laid in bed and pretended to be asleep afterwards when my mother came into the room. ‘I know you’re not sleeping. Open your eyes,’ she said.
I opened them, one after the other.
Her arms were crossed across her chest. ‘I hope you’re happy with yourself. Can you see what you’ve done? Me and your father and arguing over this. What kind of child are you?’
When I was five, I broke a plaque that had been gifted to my father as I wiped it. The splintered pieces had scattered across the floor of the sitting room. Alerted by the sound, my parents had rushed into the room seconds later as I hurriedly tried to gather the pieces, then my father said, ‘Look what your daughter has done.’ An argument erupted almost immediately, my mother questioning why I was labelled her daughter. Afterwards, she’d pulled me by the ear, holding a broom in her other hand and said, ‘See what you’ve done. Are you trying to scatter our home?’
It was the same tone she used now: ‘You’re not only trying to kill yourself; you’re trying to destroy your family.’
It would take a week, but the cramps would eventually dissipate, aided by the capsules the doctor had handed out at the clinic, with the warning, ‘She’s very lucky, had she come in even an hour later, she might be dead by now.’ My mother had nodded with tears in her eyes, and for the first time, I thought she didn’t see me as a burden.
An uncharacteristic silence shadowed me about the house. Suddenly the dining room was empty when it was time to eat; my plate, covered and isolated at the middle of the glass table; the living rooms deserted of siblings fighting over the television remote control. In the kitchen, we occasionally bumped into one another, by the refrigerator or by the sink, and before our eyes could meet, they bowed their heads and hurried away. It dawned on me that they’d been instructed to avoid the impurity of my person.
The novelty of my near-death wore off eventually and my mother paid a different kind of visit to my room, with a Bible tucked underneath her armpit, the lilac-embroidered volume my grandmother had given her on her wedding day.
She was settled at the edge of my bed when I came out of the bathroom, wrapped in a towel. ‘Good morning,’ she said, moving the Bible to her hands.
I stared at her, droplets of water falling off my skin and pooling in a small puddle at my feet along with my stomach. Finally, I murmured, ‘Good morning, ma.’
She nodded, accepting my greeting then said, ‘Get dressed quickly, I need to talk to you.’
I rushed through the routines and pulled on a house gown, then I sat, tentatively, by her side. She flipped through the pages of her Bible in silence until she settled on the page that interested her. She placed her thumb on a scripture and asked me to read it aloud.
‘Thou,’ I started.
‘Read the scripture,’ she instructed.
‘Exodus 20:13. Thou shall not kill,’ I read out loud, realising what this was about.
‘Do you know why I’ve asked you to read this?’ she asked.
I said nothing.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, ma,’ I mumbled.
‘I don’t think you do. Or you wouldn’t be so unremorseful.’
I stared at my clean hands. ‘Do you realise what it is you’ve done? In your foolishness and selfishness, you’ve taken away a precious life, a child that deserved to live. Your hands are covered in blood!’
In the hospital, I’d overheard the nurses gossiping about me, the girl who’d killed her own child and nearly killed herself in the process. I tried to picture a baby, my mind conjuring a hazy blur – or babies, I’d never tried to find out. In my hospital gown, I drifted to the maternity ward and stared through the glass at the small helpless creatures, name tags attached to scrawny arms, nurses carrying bundles moving in and out of the room.
A nurse stopped by my side and asked, ‘Madam, are you a new mother? Would you like to see your baby?’
I opened my mouth to answer but the words stayed frozen on my tongue. I’d been a mother less than a week before and just like that, I wasn’t. I turned and walked away.
Now, as my mother launched into her diatribe, I saw a baby, a plump colicky infant that would have been the perfect fusion of Bayo and me, a child not too light and not too dark, a child with pudgy arms and legs, that would have one day grown into a toddler, a teenager and an adult.
My mother was still speaking. ‘I’ve done my best to raise you right, but still you’ve chosen to make all the wrong decisions.’ She paused. ‘Are you even listening to me?’ she demanded.
Her palm cracked hard against the side of my face before I could respond; I felt each one of her fingers imprinted on my cheek. ‘Don’t you realise what I’m telling you? You’ve killed! You’re a murderer!’
23
Flowers and floodings
Rain thundered down when the naira fell, clobbering the pavements, filling the soakaways and blocking sewages, a homage to what had until then been a steadily burgeoning economy.
‘Keep all your money in dollars o. Don’t say I didn’t warn you,’ Tari shouted over the phone. She was on the set of a movie but promised to be back in time for our monthly gathering.
The streets flooded, the water rising above ankle and then knee length. On social media, residents posted videos of canoes on the roads, sloughing floodings from their cars and furniture floating about in discoloured water. And our gateman caught fish, a flatheaded whiskered thing squiggling about in a bucket. ‘Aunty I catch fish! I catch fish!’ he screamed, holding the bucket up to my face so I could take a look.
I smiled, amused by his childlike excitement, wondering which fish farm had lost its pond. ‘Where you catch am?’ I asked.
‘For the other street, the water plenty for that side. Aunty I wan make pepper soup, make I bring some for you?’
I laughed as I recounted the events to Ego, describing the squirming catfish in the bucket and his offer of pepper soup. We were in the living room of my house, watching soaps on TV; she was living with me while work on her new apartment was still underway.
Ego gave a strained smile, then said, ‘After all these years, how can the supposed capital of enterprise in the continent look like this every time rain falls?’
I could feel the smile disappearing from my face. She’d been back for a little over six months and the ecstasy had slowly worn off; all that seemed to be growing in its place was a caustic disillusionment at the state of the country. She couldn’t say I didn’t warn her.
At first, she’d continued to tweet about British problems until I’d asked her if she feared her followers finding out she’d moved back home. ‘Do you think they’ll look down on you?’
