Ego was getting married. To Emeka.
Soye extended his neck in my direction, and I felt the aso oke of his fila brush my gele as he read over my shoulder, the uneasiness with which he monitored my every activity never failed to irk, like a single move on my part would bring the house of cards he’d carefully constructed crumbling down. ‘She’s getting married?’ he murmured.
‘It would seem so,’ I replied shortly.
‘You’re no longer in touch? Good. Hope no one outside that company knows about your friendship? You know the newspapers would carry it immediately if they got wind of it.’
‘Soye, how many times are you going to ask me the same question?’ I asked, letting my irritation show but keeping my volume low. To any observer, we were having a normal conversation. ‘I didn’t tell anyone else, and who else do I have to tell?’
He adjusted the collar of the kaftan underneath his agbada. ‘Good, good,’ he murmured, appeased.
A stewardess moved towards us then. ‘Sir, the plane is ready,’ she said courteously.
‘Oh wonderful!’ Soye exclaimed theatrically, then to the larger room, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I believe we’re ready to leave now.’
The men bounced to their feet and arranged the wings of their agbadas over their shoulders in unison, and I thought that they looked like members of a drummers’ troupe. I was the only woman in their midst; the others had sent their wives and children ahead on first-class flights, but Soye knew better than to treat me that way.
In the plush interior of the private jet, the men shared jokes and a bottle of champagne. ‘This is really a moment of celebration,’ Soye said, and the other men laughed. There always seemed to be a lot of laughing in their midst, servile and fawning laughter; what exactly was persistently funny, I wasn’t sure.
‘Ah Madam Adebowale, you won’t join us?’ Yunusa asked, raising his flute in my direction.
‘I’m not feeling too well,’ I lied before Soye could speak on my behalf; his lips had already moved.
‘Hope madam isn’t pregnant? This one Soye takes her everywhere with him like his handbag,’ Onomavwe said, and the others laughed again – no one dared not laugh at his crude jokes. I forced a smile. Just a few years ago, Onomavwe, a former governor, had been serving time in a jail cell in the UK on myriad money-laundering charges, but he’d patiently served his time, buoyant in the assurance of his eventual return to his stowed-away loot and kingly influence. ‘It was all politics. They sold me out to the Brits because a lowly Niger Deltan like me wanted to become a vice president against their preferred candidate and they were angry,’ he always said when he spoke of those years. He saw no use in contesting for electoral offices now, not when he could control events just the same from behind the scenes. A true godfather.
Soye answered this time. ‘We’re happy with our daughter, sir.’ He didn’t add that I couldn’t have children.
Onomavwe tutted. ‘I have six and my father had twenty!’ He laughed again, and the others laughed with him.
An air hostess waltzed in then to inform us that the flight would take off soon.
Onomavwe nodded, suddenly seeming agitated, and turned to the man seated next to him. ‘We need a spiritual man to lead us in prayer. You know there have been crashes in recent times. The nation cannot afford to lose men like us. Yunusa, you can lead us in an Islamic prayer for balance when he’s done.’ I could have laughed then. A man like Onomavwe was scared to die?
Kamsi bowed his head and stretched forward a hand; a diamond-studded Rolex watch glimmered on his wrist. ‘Let’s all close our eyes in prayer. Father in heaven,’ he started. The men all followed his lead while he led the cabin in prayer. I stared, wide-eyed, unable to hide my disgust.
‘What a powerful prayer. God is with us!’ Onomavwe declared afterwards. The men chuckled and nodded their heads. Yunusa raised his palms to take his turn. The plane moved then.
‘I’ve not forgotten about that file at the Ministry of Justice,’ Onomavwe said to Kamsi when we were in the air. Soye glanced at me nervously. I turned away to look out the cabin window at the disappearing cluster beneath us.
Onomavwe was still speaking. ‘My men are working hard but that woman has some strong people behind her. They’ve assured me that they will make the file disappear regardless. Power pass power.’ He guffawed. The others joined in; I thought Soye sounded choked.
I returned my mind to the story I’d read in the terminal. Nwakaego was getting married and she hadn’t bothered to invite me, not that I was particularly deserving of an invite considering who I currently shared a plane cabin with, but at the very least, I’d thought she would have sent a text, even if it said I couldn’t come. Perhaps it was Zina’s influence; she’d always been far more unsparing than Ego, except where it concerned those she cared about, and I’d long ceased to be on that list.
‘Your mother would consider you a disgrace,’ Zina had written to me the day I’d called to talk her into convincing Ego to withdraw the case. A disgrace. So easy for her to say. An actress whose face alone guaranteed attention. She had no idea what it was to live as women like me who had no blinding beauty to guarantee they escaped rigorous scrutiny. Unlike her, I’d had to work to not be ignored, to be listened to, to have meaning.
But had Zina influenced Aunty Uju too? Following my mother’s death, when Aunty Ada had been too devastated to even try, Aunty Uju had been the one to attach herself to me like an epiphyte, refusing to let go even while her own life quickly fell apart. She’d been present at my wedding and called at every turn to remind me she was there should I ever need her. The year before, she’d called the morning of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. It was 3am on the east coast of America where she lived. ‘I’m just calling to remind you that Harry, nwa Diana is getting married today, make sure you don’t miss it.’ She’d done the same for his brother’s wedding, but this time was different. He was marrying a black woman. ‘Our sister,’ Aunty Uju said. They’d loved Diana, all three of them, but especially my mother. She kept newspaper clippings of her dresses to show to her tailor to replicate and included her in our evening prayers. ‘We know what it’s like not to be liked by our in-laws,’ she said. The year my mother passed, Diana had gone not many months later, and for some reason, I’d been grateful that she hadn’t been alive to witness the devastating sadness of the event.
Ninety-seven was meant to be a good year. My mother was in love again, not with my father – that was more or less a given – but with the life growing inside of her. I was to turn fifteen, an age where boys were a befuddling fascination and life was an expanse of assignments, teenage fashion and the Spice Girls. But because my mother had been eager for me to establish the sort of sororal bond she enjoyed with her friends with those friends’ daughters, I’d started schooling earlier than others and was in my final year of secondary school.
‘Have you decided on what you’re going to study now?’ my mother asked when second term resumed that year. We were in the living room, me in my green school skirt and jacket, and she in her trouser suit, her belly protruding, ready to leave for work. The time to register for all the school leavers exams that determined most of the rest of our lives was drawing closer and I still felt unprepared for such a consequential decision.
I shrugged. ‘No, not yet.’ I knew I enjoyed biology, chemistry and mathematics and did well in all, but that was as far as my decision-making abilities stretched. My mother – unlike me as she’d been in so many ways – had studied business administration at the university and worked her way up the ladder of a manufacturing company. Early on, she’d spotted the differences in our persons and guided me towards the sciences.
She nodded thoughtfully and picked up her handbag, indicating it was time to go. She was going to make Vice President; I’d heard my father say so. ‘Maybe I should speak with your school guidance counsellor so we can think of ways we can help you decide what’s best for you, maybe we can find some professionals to give your class talk, I could come as well,’ she said with a smile. I’d taken it for granted then, her unstinting love and infinite patience, the brightness of her smile and ebullience of her laughter.
It was that very laughter my father claimed to have fallen in love with when they’d met on the first day of campus opening. In the large hall to welcome new students, he’d been seated beside a girl whose laughter was a little too loud, and he’d told himself he wanted to hear that laugh for as long as he lived. He was a Nupe boy from a small village along the middle belt of the country – a place designated under the old Northern Region – lucky to be selected for a scholarship to study chemical engineering, and she was an Igbo girl who’d been brought up in the modern ways of the city of Lagos, an almost improbable match if there was one, but he’d made a go for it anyway. ‘The most she would have said was no,’ he always said smugly years afterwards, even though his actions remained that of a man who couldn’t believe his luck.
Their parents formed a stumbling block. He was a Northerner, she was Igbo, they’d lived through the civil war. But my parents remained resolute until their dissenters had had no choice but to let the wedding hold.
Eriife – evidence of love – was the name they chose when I was born, a name outside of both their tribes that many would consider unusual, a representation of their love. The oil sector was booming then and my father’s job at an oil company, together with my mother’s, guaranteed a stable life for them. My brother came afterwards, and for a while, we were a relatively normal family. If their tribal differences created any problems, they were not very evident, or perhaps my parents were so enamoured of each other that those differences meant little more than momentary interruptions to them. Then at the close of ’94, my grandfather – my father’s father – passed away and my grandmother moved in with us because my mother did not want her lonely and neglected in the village; a good deed that spun the sequence of occurrences that would result in her eventual demise.
The plane taxied along the runway as we landed in Abuja. Several others just like it lined the tarmac. An event such as this came once in four years. Onomavwe rubbed his hands together in intemperate relief. ‘We thank God, that was a smooth flight!’ The others murmured their agreement. Kamsi said a brief prayer of thanks.
‘The party this time will be different,’ Yunusa commented when it was time to alight the aircraft.
‘You mean the inauguration party? In what way?’ Onomavwe asked, running a hand across his rotund belly.
Soye was running a thumb along the vessels that lined my knuckles, a silent imploring gesture. I removed my hand from under his.
Soye chuckled. ‘I think what he means is that last time we weren’t even sure about a transfer of power.’ The men laughed again.
We had been the underdogs the last time around, the antithesis of the ruling party, working against a state machinery that had yet to be defeated since the country’s return to democracy in ’99.
‘I don’t think it’s possible,’ Soye told me after party members had informed him of their plans to unseat the government in the coming elections. He was the man connected to the streets, the one who could make some of it happen. Winning a state seat was easy; it was time to take it national.
‘Anything is possible,’ I told him then, because that was the role I played in our relationship.
The months that followed were a testament to the fact that the powers that be had chosen their candidate and the man in power was not to be the one. Alliances were formed across the Niger, each wielding its own agenda for a future shot at power, tribal differences were put aside, new languages were spoken and traditional garments exchanged. The people were hungry for a change and the time was right.