‘I still haven’t done my hair and makeup, and you’re talking intimidation. Just wait and see,’ I boasted unabashedly. They laughed.
We could hardly hear Zahrah’s voice above the noise of the blow dryer and television at the other end of the room. She waved her hand at the stylist and the noise died. The hairdresser looked disgruntled; Zahrah didn’t notice. ‘Zina, this is beautiful, and please don’t get me wrong, but why is our fashion so aggressive? It’s so in your face.’
‘Hmm, Zahrah you’ve come again with your Americanah,’ Cassandra said.
‘I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that,’ I said. ‘We’ve never been understated people. There’s no reason our fashion should become understated to appeal to certain sensibilities.’
Zahrah had already shown us her dress: a simply-cut turtleneck gown that billowed to her ankles, and Tare had asked if she intended to die of heat.
Zahrah’s wedding had been a glamorous affair graced by the political juggernauts of Nigerian society. As her friends, we’d attended to plaster her with wads of cash as she danced, but we’d all noticed the sharp pivot in her style since it took place and we wondered how soon it would be before she told us she was no longer interested in acting.
I glanced at my phone as the argument continued, unsure what I was checking for. I’d invited Ego but she had no interest in appearing in pictures that might feature in newspapers.
Messages from Halil and Bayo buzzed at the same time. I never took a date to premieres because I tried to keep my relationships private but Halil had been eager to come with me, as if sensing a stutter on my part. Bayo wasn’t aware there was a premiere to begin with.
My conversation with Ego had left me unsteady and anxious, and one day, as we lay in bed staring at the ceiling, wrapped in balmy silence and spent desire, I asked Bayo, ‘What’s my favourite colour?’ It was a few months since we first met up at the restaurant.
He chuckled. ‘That’s a weird question.’
I sighed. ‘Just answer.’
‘Red?’ He grinned, a triumphant grin because he’d gotten it right.
‘How much do you know about me?’ I asked. ‘Like beyond the regular things, like my favourite colour?’
‘Zina, why are you asking this all of a sudden?’
I propped myself up and said, ‘My favourite colour might still be the same but I’ve changed as a person in many ways. Do you know that? I’m sure you’ve changed as well.’
His face crinkled in confusion but he said nothing.
‘You come here every other day and we have sex but that’s it. You’ve never even asked how I became an actress or what happened in between. Or when my next movie is out or even what books I read. What are we really doing? We can’t keep living in the past.’
Bayo rolled out of bed and hurriedly began to pull on his clothes. I stared at him, confused. ‘Where are you going?’
He sat down to wear his shoes. ‘You’re doing this thing you do again.’
I blinked. ‘What thing do I do?’
‘That thing where you act like every man is your father and you try to push them away.’
It was as though I’d been hit by a boulder, and my heart began to race. I tried to say something but the words hung in my throat; instead I watched as he stomped out of my room and seconds later, I heard the door bang downstairs. I hadn’t heard from him since.
I read the texts without opening them:
Halil: ‘Where are you getting ready? I want to come over to pick you up.’
Bayo: ‘I think I forgot my wristwatch at your place. Please send to this address:’
I clicked my screen black.
Marve came late as usual, just as one of the hairdressers was burning curls into my wig. She dragged a sizeable box behind her.
‘I know I’m late but I promise it’s for a good cause. You won’t believe the gist I gathered today, in fact it’s so plenty I don’t know where to start,’ she announced, dropping her box and zipping down the front of her fashionable tracksuit. ‘Remember Oma announced her engagement to her very rich bobo last month, that we were all congratulating her for bagging? He has been picked up by EFCC for fraud. And Nkiruka – the tall fair one that was in that film with Bisi Somolu – fought Blessing Giri in a salon in Lekki Phase 1 for sleeping with her boyfriend, boyfriend that already has three wives o. Omo things are happening!’
28
Wind and truth
The wind had started in America, a turbid and sudden yet not-so-sudden wind that had taken its time to form a surge rooted in the pain of many. Then a single tweet caused it to erupt into a cyclone that rocked the world. Twitter threads were written, blog posts were put up and Facebook was flooded with harrowing recounts, heads lopped off in numbers. Women had found their voices and were no longer to be silent in the face of abuse. #MeToo.
Dera was hopeful that the same could happen in Nigeria. ‘We’re already seeing threads on Twitter and anonymous Facebook posts. Hopefully it can translate offline and across industries. I’m sure the stories here are even more horrific.’
She wasn’t one to talk much but had brought up the topic as soon as we’d all settled in Zino’s living room. There were expensive wines, cocktails, platters of canapés, charcuterie boards and trays of small chops arrayed around the plush space. Zino knew how to host a gathering.
‘I’m very doubtful to be honest, but maybe I’m just pessimistic,’ I said, biting into a piece of fruit. ‘You need a functioning justice system that will hold people to account and we just don’t have that.’
‘The conversation online has been encouraging though, I must say,’ Simi said, then glanced nervously at Zino as if expecting him to contradict her. She’d been that way since the evening he’d spoken to her sharply at the Cosmopolitan, jumpy, expectant of a reproval. Zino lounged on a sofa across from her, seemingly oblivious to her newfound apprehension. He said nothing.
‘We have other important issues to worry about. Let’s not allow ourselves to be sucked into issues in the West,’ Dapo said, his voice once again reverberant. I’d come to assume that he’d been brought up in a large polygamous home and had to raise his voice to be heard. ‘We started last year with scarcity of tomatoes, the economy is barely out of recession, prices are soaring, people are unemployed, insecurity is rising and now, our government is arresting and bullying reporters that criticise them. I feel like we trend a new hashtag every day for a reporter that was picked up for interrogation by the Department of State Services for simply reporting the truth. Are we going to continue living like this?’
‘The whole world is forging forward and we seem to be plunging back into the ugly past days of the military regimes,’ Zutere commented.
‘That’s what you lot get for voting in a former military dictator. It was Shakespeare that said, ‘What is past is prologue’, but we willingly decided to make our prologue the story again,’ Zino said, finally chiming in.
Dapo huffed, exasperated. ‘Zino, when are you going to forgive us for voting for this man? We were hopeful and unhappy with the previous government. We were fooled by the propaganda and people that we trusted that campaigned for him. It’s been almost three years now – saying “I told you so” doesn’t change anything. We’re all suffering this together.’
Zino raised a nonchalant brow. ‘I still told you so.’