‘How do you know how we date in Nigeria? You’ve been there for so long. The dating market is rubbish everywhere,’ she retorted.
‘Hm. At least I know we take dating seriously – it is in preparation for marriage, not this thing they do here. I even saw “friends with benefits” on one page, what is that? And then I should join an app and be swiping? Normal people meet in person.’
Zina’s screech of laughter rang through the phone. ‘When did you start sounding like my mother, Ego? It’s 2014! Everybody dates like that now.’
Tinder, the articles said, was a great way to meet people. For a week, I stared at the icon and willed my fingers to sign up. My first match was a white man named Jack, whose picture did not quite match the image I met in person, leading me to learn the meaning of the word ‘catfish’.
‘You’re so exotic, so dark and beautiful, and your lips…’ he said on our first and last date, his eyes hungrily roving between my chest and my legs. Exotic. Would he have referred to an English woman that way?
My next swipe was a Nigerian British boy who assured me he was a feminist and believed bills should always be split down the middle, to the smallest penny – he even kept a spreadsheet. I blocked him.
Then there was Liam, a mixed-race British boy with curly hair and a dashing smile. At dinner, he was gentlemanly – pulling out my seat and filling my glass – and had an easy-going air that lulled me into thinking that perhaps I’d been wrong after all. Until he texted the very next day asking to come over and spend the night.
‘Can you imagine?’ I ranted bitterly to Zina over the phone. ‘After one date! What does he take me for? Is this how they do here?’
‘Don’t give up, Nwakaego,’ Zina encouraged. ‘I’ve heard some good stories about people who met their life partners on these apps. Or do you want to start attending Nigerian parties in London? You might meet someone there.’
No, I wasn’t interested in attending parties. I forged on with Tinder and now had a date with John.
My phone beeped again. I breathed a sigh of relief as my mother’s message came in:
Me and Matthew
I clicked on it, opening the messaging app to reveal a picture of her snuggling a furry Labrador. When she’d first moved to America, my mother had complained about the country’s obsession with pets. ‘They love their animals more than human beings. You see more outrage on the news when something terrible is done to a dog than to a person, especially a black person. Is that normal behaviour?’ Months later, my stepfather had gotten her Matthew and now she sent me pictures of him in sweaters and asked my advice on what treats to get.
Another message slid across the top of my screen from John:
Are you ignoring me? Let me know if you’re coming or not so I don’t waste my time.
I deleted the app – I needed to stop listening to Zina.
Zina was the reason I went home in May 1998.
‘You no dey go your papa house? One would think you’re homeless. A whole big man’s daughter,’ she said, cracking a groundnut shell with her slender fingers before throwing its contents into her mouth. Midterm exams for our second semester had just ended and while others packed up their belongings to return home for the break, we sat on old newspaper pages on the floor of our university hostel room eating boiled groundnuts in affable silence. Between sharp cracks of splitting shells, Zina loosened the worn braids she’d had in for half the semester; the once glistening lines were overrun with new growth and flecks of dirt and grease.
I hissed, looking up from the scattered shells in my fingers. ‘You too, you no get papa house?’
Our eyes met and a loaded stare passed between us, saying that which didn’t need to be said. The corners of Zina’s lips turned up in a wry smile as she cracked another groundnut.
We were both on the run, desperately fleeing the turmoil of our parents’ homes, finding comfort in each other’s company and the shared understanding of never saying too much for fear of revealing the dysfunction, staying silent when others spoke fondly of their parents’ love, wondering what it felt like, crushing the desire under our heels.
I broke the silence. ‘You won’t finish fast enough at the pace you’re going. Eriife said she’ll be here by three this afternoon. It’s already 1.30pm.’ I gestured with my chin at the unloosened braids held up in a rubber band.
With Eriife we were three: complete, as we were meant to be. Our lives had become entwined long before our births, at the back of a packed bus in the Southeastern parts of the country in the late 1940s. Our grandmothers had been unmarried girls then – about our age – on a one-way trip to Lagos to meet the husbands their parents had chosen for them. The twelve-hour trip on the dusty roads, surviving the near accidents, smell of passengers’ unwashed bodies and crippling fear of the unknown had formed a bond so unbreakable it would last three generations. Our mothers had been brought up together, attending the same schools, sharing a hostel room at university – even before our births they had been determined to keep the tradition going.
Zina and I had come into the world months apart in 1981 and Eriife had joined us a little less than a year later. Aunty Ada – Zina’s mother – always said it was a sign that we were to accompany each other in life, and every time she said this, my mother would nod in agreement and Aunty Chinelo would smile, a wide smile that brightened her face and made her cheeks puff up like a baby. At least that was how it had been until the tragedy of ’97. Now our mothers rarely spoke of each other and Aunty Chinelo was gone.
Zina shrugged nonchalantly. ‘Eriife is always late.’
I laughed. ‘I’ll tell her you said that.’
‘I’ll deny it,’ Zina returned.
‘She’ll believe me, everybody knows you lie al— aah!’ I shrieked as the shell Zina threw connected with my forehead. I returned the favour with three shells of my own and soon we were squealing and hurling shells at each other, our familial troubles forgotten.
Minutes later, I was ransacking Zina’s wardrobe for a spare comb to help loosen her braids.
‘I’m serious. You don’t have to form hard girl,’ Zina said suddenly when I was on the third braid. ‘You should go home. It might help you feel better.’
My first instinct was to pretend I had no idea what she was talking about, but Zina knew me too well. I sighed, ‘I’m not sure.’
I missed my mother – the candid conversations we shared, the flavourful dishes only she knew how to prepare, her comforting hugs. But there was also the darkness, and for some reason, this time, I was afraid it would overwhelm me.
‘I should organise some boys to beat up that fellow called Ademola or I should do it myself. God will punish him,’ Zina muttered.
I giggled because I knew she was quite capable of doing just that. That was the difference between Zina and me – she didn’t just talk, she acted; it was why we’d nicknamed her, ‘Action Mama’. She’d been the one to lead the expedition to Aunty Chinelo’s office during our lunch break in our second year of primary school. The three of us, just above table height, holding hands and crossing streets and busy expresses to get to the large office complex in Marina and upon our arrival, telling the gateman we were there to see our aunty and mother Chinelo because we were hungry and she had money.
Our mothers cried that day, more from relief that we’d not been killed or kidnapped than anything else, then they punished us, making us kneel in a line after we’d been fed plates of rice. I’d knelt the longest because our mothers were convinced I was the mastermind.
‘Always coming up with bright ideas, this one. And always talking. Cho cho cho,’ my mother said, sounding like her own mother. But I only talked, Zina acted.
‘Maybe I shouldn’t have turned him down,’ I said to Zina’s braids.
She huffed. ‘It’s a good thing you did, imagine dating such an idiot. And it still doesn’t give him the right to do what he did.’
‘October Rush,’ she’d said to me a week into our first semester at the university. I’d been eager to immerse myself in the full experience. It was the relief of being away from home – from my father’s stormy temper, my mother’s ceaseless tears, my grandmother’s interventionary visits, the black-and-white picture hanging eerily in our living room. And I revelled in it: the air devoid of the weight of fear and trepidation, the constant amiability. When people asked if I was related to the Chief Azubuike whenever I scribbled my name down for the endless activities, I laughed, a vague laugh that could never be mistaken for affirmation.
‘October Rush,’ Zina had repeated that first week when all had still been well. ‘You’ve never heard of it?’
