In drafting manifestos, foreign consultants were employed – to differentiate us from the incumbent – and new media were deployed in dispersing the message. Despite his brief moment of crippling unbelief, Soye was desperate to prove he was ready to play a bigger role in the party and take on a mantle of leadership. He knew the locale of the Southwest like the back of his hand – after all, he’d spent enough years hiding in them as he’d dodged the wrath of the military dictatorships. When the time came, it was easy to mobilise the young who looked up to him as a contemporary hero. Then he took his campaign online, forming narratives and countering propaganda with that of their own.
Then Soye told me, ‘You know how to speak with people in a way that they’ll listen.’ Before then, I’d played more of a behind the scenes role, visible yet unseen – now he was ready for me to step out from behind the curtains.
On the night the results were officially declared on the national television station, the air crisp with exhilaration, we celebrated with others, patting ourselves on the back for a job well done, raising crystalline glasses in toast. The numbers had come together and we’d accomplished the unimaginable. That night, Soye made love to me for the first time in months, fevered and frenzied, high on the adrenaline of history-making, just like the days on campus when he’d taken to his first ballot in almost a decade in ’99, as if desperate, yearning to pour his ambitions into something or someone.
32
Circle
Soye sat at the head of the dining table, an open laptop in front of him as he picked at a breakfast plate.
‘Moses!’ he screamed for the chief steward as I approached the table. ‘Bring more orange juice, madam will soon be down; the jar is almost empty.’
‘Good morning,’ I murmured as I took a seat.
‘Iyawo mi, good morning,’ Soye said. He placed a hand over mine on the table and leaned in to peck me on the cheek. I pulled away.
‘Ahn-ahn. You’re still upset? Don’t be like that,’ Soye said. He pushed the laptop in front of me. ‘Come and see, our pictures are everywhere, all the blogs and newspapers. Even our pictures with the vice president and senators’ families.’
We’d only just returned from Abuja the night before. Camera flashes, synchronised and blinding, had greeted us as we alighted the limousine that transported us to Eagle Square and trailed our every step as we were escorted along the red carpet to our seats. It was only to be expected that our pictures would appear on the usual sites and in the pages, but for Soye, the fact that we’d been thought important enough to post in the dailies, to name – Chief and Mrs Adetosoye Adebowale – denoted an elevation of status: we were no longer to be ignored.
He put a hand on my thigh, and slowly moved it in soothing circles, like one petting a wild animal. ‘Senator Majekodunmi was telling me how impressed everyone was with our galvanising. I’m being seriously considered for a national legislative seat come next elections, and this is just the beginning. This state legislative seat is just a stepping stone. From there I can move to the Senate, even the Presidency. Who knows? Anything is possible.’ He was using my words on purpose.
‘That’s nice,’ I said as I placed a teabag in a mug, before covering it in hot water.
Soye flicked a finger under my chin. ‘Stop being like this now. I know you didn’t want to travel with Kamsi, but it was Onomavwe who brought him along, you know he’s very scared of flying and I couldn’t say no. There are things you put aside for the sake of politics, you should know this. We’ve been in this long enough.’
‘There should be a limit somewhere,’ I said. ‘We’ve given everything, must we sell our souls too? I’ve known Nwakaego all my life and now she won’t even speak to me; imagine she found out I flew with him.’
He caressed a hand across my cheek and returned his attention to his plate. ‘Smile, you look finer when you smile. You know everyone kept mentioning how beautiful you looked yesterday, like they were just finally noticing. I told them no be today, my wife has always been beautiful.’
I wasn’t always beautiful; beside my mother I’d looked like a derelict urchin, and it wasn’t because she was fair skinned. Aunty Ada was dark and everyone considered her beautiful. But there was a phosphorescence about her, an unalloyed and irreplicable cheer that attracted and retained attention. My father talked often about how others on campus had tried to lure my mother away from him because they’d wanted some of her light. And when she’d passed, it was as though a candle had been snuffed out from within and we were left to meander life’s maze in impermeable darkness.
In ’98, I’d volunteered to escape her memory, the crushing weight of its omnipresence. It was my first year of university and all I could think about was how much I wanted her to be there; the times we’d talked about it: me studying at the University of Lagos just as she’d done with her friends, her visiting too often and me eventually complaining about it, everyone asking, ‘Is that really your mum? You look nothing alike’.
A flyer stuck on the hostel notice board drew my attention to a student union meeting at the back of Omotola Multipurpose Hall. The first year of medical studies at the Akoka campus wasn’t cumbersome back then; we still had time for club meetings and make-up.
A man who did not look like a student was speaking when I snuck in over an hour late and crammed myself into the nearest seat at the back. Student politics, he was saying, served as a good training ground for future political involvement. The head of state’s death had only just been announced and people were already speaking about democracy.
He was tall, a lanky sort of height I thought more appropriate to basketball than politics, but from the manner in which he spoke, it was clear he’d chosen his path. The audience listened, enraptured by a voice I found too eager, too determined to convince. When he was done, they erupted in applause and the student that took over to ask for questions bowed over his hand as he shook it. The questions filled in what I’d missed – a biography of a faithful martyr to the cause of democracy, a man who’d dared to question a dictator, who’d campaigned for Abiola and led protests when the results of the June 1993 elections were scuttled.
A union secretary diligently penned down names of volunteers and I moved forward to be included amongst them. Being busy meant no time to think, and no time to think meant no time to feel.
I waited till the crowd around the man dispersed and the hall had finally emptied, leaving just him and the student-appointed officials. He pulled on a grey jacket and moved towards the exit; I moved to block his path. I observed as he once more put on the persona of a politician.
He stretched a hand and I took it. ‘They haven’t started releasing political prisoners yet. How come you aren’t in prison?’ I said.
He looked dumbfounded. I was accustomed to that – intimidating people into silence. In secondary school, the boys had avoided me; I was the girl with a tongue she wielded like a weapon. I knew too much, said too much, always had an answer. And I wasn’t even pretty enough to be worth the trouble.
He smiled, a slow smile that said he found my boldness endearing. ‘Well, I somehow managed to escape,’ he said finally.
I returned his smile, then tutted. ‘Too bad. You’d have had more stories to tell us.’
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Eriife.’
‘I’m Adetosoye, but everyone calls me Soye.’ Later, he would tell me how his names bore ‘Ade’ because he was a distant relative of a crown, a poor distant relative. He was twenty-four, I was sixteen. Ego said it was inappropriate and I told her to mind her business. We would not take it to the next level until I was eighteen. He was solace in a time I needed it most. Then, in my penultimate year of medical school, I discovered I was pregnant. Fear that I would end up like my mother clamped around my heart.
‘Let’s get married,’ Soye said.
I turned him down; I’d promised my mother I would finish university before I married. ‘But you’ve spent almost nine years in school for a seven-year course because of strikes. How long are we going to wait? I’m already in my thirties,’ he said. I told him I wasn’t the one who’d asked him to date a younger woman.
One night, I woke up to a bed drenched in blood; I’d lost the baby. And in that moment, I felt more relief than pain. I graduated from university the following year and a few months later, we got married in the chapel my mother had attended, sunlight streaming from the windows like a halo.
A year passed, then two, then three, and Soye fretted about our not having children. I agreed to visit the O&G ward for a checkup just to stop his diatribes. I had fibroids that prevented a fertilised egg attaching itself to the lining of my womb and I needed to undergo surgery. A few days before my scheduled surgery, Soye returned home with a little girl with skin like polished wood, a girl whose sharp features were all too familiar.
He wanted me to know the truth if something went wrong. It had happened once, one time when he’d grown wary of waiting for me. He hadn’t known how to tell me but he hadn’t wanted me to find out on the other side.
‘Adelola said to tell you she’s coming home in July for the summer holiday,’ Soye said now, downing the glass of orange juice that Moses had just refilled.
I looked up from my plate. ‘July? Don’t universities in America go on holiday in May/June?’
‘She’s going on a trip with some friends around Europe. She said she knew you wouldn’t like it so she called me instead.’
‘She called you because she knows you always say yes,’ I said.
Guilt was what made him so pliable, he was eaten up by irremissible guilt for how he’d left her in his mother’s care, for his failure to acknowledge; her mother had been too young to bear such a burden of who she really was.
