Everything Good Will Come (10 page)

I had no idea what part of the city we were in.

My mother's priest was quiet as she explained what had happened. He had the same expression I remembered, his nose turned up as though he was sniffing something bad. She was to give me holy water to drink, since my father would not allow me to stay for cleansing. Then he produced a bottle of it, green and slimy. I recognized the spirogyra I'd seen in biology classes. I had to drink the water in the churchyard, and make myself sick afterward. None of it was to remain in me. Outside my mother handed the bottle to me. I gagged on every drop.

“Stick your finger down your throat,” she said, when I finished.

Two attempts brought the entire contents of my stomach onto the ground, but I continued to retch. My eyes filled with tears. Some of the water had come through my nose.

“Good,” my mother said.

I thought of stamping on her feet, squeezing her hand to regain my sense of balance.

“You should never have followed that girl,” she said. “Look at me. If anything had happened to you, what would I have done? Look at me.”

My gaze slipped from hers.

“The bottle,” she said. “Give me the bottle, Enitan.”

I handed it to her. It could have been a baton. My mother was hollow, I thought. There was nothing in her. Like a drum, she could seize my heart beat, but that was all. I would not say another word to her, only when I had to, and even then I would speak without feeling: “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good night.”

We arrived home and I walked to the back yard, by the fence where the scarlet hibiscus grew. Sheri had gotten pregnant from the rape. Didn't a womb know which baby to reject? And now that the baby had been forced out, how did it look? The color of the hibiscus? I placed one by my ear and listened.

M
uffled rage stalks like the wind, sudden and invisible. People don't fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it's too much.

The first person to tell me my virginity belonged to me was the boy who took it. Before this, I'd thought my virginity belonged to Jesus Christ, my mother, society at large. Anyone but me. My boyfriend, a first-year pharmacy student at London University, assured me that it was mine, to give to him. In those brief seconds between owning and giving up my virginity, he licked the walls of my mouth clean. After I thought he pierced my bowels, I burst into tears.

“What's wrong with you?” he asked.

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I have to wash.”

It was his semen. I couldn't bear the thought of it leaking out of me and rolling down my thighs. But each time I opened my mouth to tell him, about Sheri and me that awful summer, I thought my voice would blast my ribs apart, flatten him, flatten the bed, toss my sheets around like the wind, so I said nothing.

The next time around my boyfriend strummed me like a guitar. “I don't know what's going on,” he said. “Maybe you're frigid.” Frigidity was a form of mental illness, he said. We would eventually separate one night, when he complained that I was just like other Nigerian women in bed. “You just lie there,” he said. “Like dead women.”

I escorted him to my door.

I was in England for nine years, coming home only for vacations. My parents sent me to a boarding school there after that summer, as was the fashion in the seventies, and for the first time I would have to explain why I washed my hair once a week and put grease straight back in. My new school friends were surprised that I didn't live in a hut in Africa, that I'd never seen a lion except in the London zoo. Some confessed their parents didn't like black people. Only one had decided that she didn't either and I ignored her, the way I ignored another who said “hey man” and did all sorts of silly dances whenever she saw me.

I'd always thought English people didn't wash regularly. I expected them to behave like characters from an Enid Blyton book. My best friend, Robin, thought this was absolutely wuh- diculous. We became close because she, too, thought Bob Marley was a prophet, and she loved to abhor her parent's values. Dear Robin, she couldn't pronounce her R's. “Wound and wound the wound-about,” the other girls teased her. “Wound and wound the wound-about the wabid wascal wan Wobin Wichardson.”

Twagic. Altogether I thought it was easier being black in that school, but Robin wouldn't say the word: black. Her parents had taught her that it was rude. So, I was her friend with the afro, you know, The-Brown-One. I told her that black was what I was, not an insult. I wasn't even proud of it, because I'd never been ashamed of it, so there. I forced her to say it one night: Black. Bu-lack. Buh-lee-yack. She burst into tears and called me awogant. The day she finally plucked up the courage, I took offense. I didn't like the inflection in her voice. “Flipping heck,” she said. “There's no pleasing you.”

Robin was the laziest and smartest fourteen-year-old I knew, and she beat me in class tests every time. She was the first person to tell me that nothing a woman does justifies rape. “Some girls encourage it,” I said. “Who taught you that cwap?” she asked. I couldn't remember, but bad girls got raped was all I'd heard before, and of the bad girls I knew, not one had taken her matter to court. For Sheri, justice came when Damola Ajayi was admitted into a mental institution where drug addicts in Lagos ended up: therapy included regular beatings. I wasn't even sure she knew about his demise. Her family moved out of our neighborhood and I lost contact with her. Robin assured me that justice was not much fairer in her country. The motto of the Old Bailey should read, “Pwotect the wich and punish the Iwish.”

My parents separated while I was in school in England. My father delivered the news to me and I remember feeling like I'd mistakenly swallowed a worm in a glass of water; I wanted to throw up. I wondered if the trouble I'd caused hadn't divided them further. My father explained that my mother would take his duplex in another suburb of Lagos, and she would live in one unit while collecting rent from the next. There were no phone lines in the area, so I couldn't call her. I was to stay with him.

A squabble began between them, over ownership of property and over me. My mother vowed to have my father disbarred. Instead she developed hypertension and said my father had caused it. I spent vacations with her, and she spent most of them complaining about him; how he ignored her in public; how he insinuated something or the other. My mother clung to details while my father seemed confused: “I don't know what she's talking about. I haven't done anything to her.” Soon I began to spend vacations in London, working as a shop assistant in department stores to supplement my allowance to avoid staying with either of them.

I studied law at London University and became part of the Nigerian student community, who, like the English community in Lagos, clung to each other, grappling with weather conditions and sharing news from home. We had had two military governments since the summer of 1975. The first ended with the assassination of our head of state; the second, in a transition to civilian rule. Still the news from home had not improved: “Ah, these civilians, they are worse than the military.” “Ah, these politicians. Don't you know? They're nothing but thieves.” I heard about Sheri again during this time. She had won the Miss Nigeria pageant, after taking her university title, and would be representing our country in the Miss World contest in England. I was curious to see her. I watched the contest that night with two fellow law students, Suzanne and Rola. Rola was Nigerian and Jamaican, and rooting for both Misses, Suzanne was from Hong Kong and rooting for no one. “I can't believe we're sitting here watching this,” she kept mumbling. Rola, as usual, was ready to analyze. “I mean, she is pretty, but nothing special. Just pretty-pretty. I mean, she couldn't catwalk or anything. Maybe face model, but not even that. I mean, she definitely can't model-model... ”

I was too busy smiling. It wasn't Paris, Sheri wasn't wearing a red negligee, but it was good enough. I regretted judging her; regretted my ignorance at age fourteen. Sheri didn't make it past the first round of the Miss World contest. None of our girls ever did. Later, I heard she'd become part of the sugar daddy circuit in Lagos, hanging around senators, and going on shopping sprees abroad. She was given all the titles that came with that.

1981, I graduated from university and joined a firm of solicitors in London. 1983, there was another military coup in my country. This time, I was recovering from a failed relationship, having discovered the boy I'd been dating half the year was dating someone else. It was out of respect for me that he lied to me, he said. He knew I wasn't the sort of girl to like two-timing. Still, he called to invite me to a vigil.

“Vigil for what?” I asked.

“Democracy,” he said.

At the Nigerian High Commission. Would I come? I almost checked the ear-piece. When did he ever do such a thing? We called him Stringfellow, after the night club. And wasn't he the one who, whenever we passed the South African embassy in Trafalgar square, would say about the English people protesting against apartheid, “There they go again. Always fighting for blacks who live far away, never the blacks they have to live with.”

I thought of standing on Fleet street where our High Commission was, in the cold, with a candle in my hand, all night long, for any cause. I thought of this boy who had lied from the minute I set eyes on him.

“Stringfellow,” I said. “Never call me again.”

People talked about the influence of Western culture as though Western culture were the same throughout the West, and never changed. But our parents had graduated in the dawn of sixties England, and we were to graduate in the material eighties. Like any generation defined by the economics of their childhood, we were children of the oil boom, and furthermore, we were the children who had benefited from the oil boom. Politics in England played out on a continuum from left to right wing. Politics in our country was a scuffle between the military and politicians. Both were conservative and so were we. Now our greatest contribution to our society was that we were more traditional than the people who had given birth to us.

A boy loved a girl and he called her his wife. A girl loved a boy and she stayed at home on weekends to cook for him, while he went out with some other girl. We were going out and staying in. Any talk of political protest was the talk of mad English people, or Nigerians who were trying to be like them. We didn't spare a thought for those who were finding it difficult to pay their school fees, now that the oil boom in our country had become a recession. We rebelled and used our pocket money to buy leather jackets, or unusual shoes. That was what we did.

I looked at the small stack of books in my room long after I hung up on Stringfellow. I'd acquired them after I stopped reading stories I could predict, or stories that had nothing to do with my life. Stringfellow would say they were written by women who really ought to straighten their dreadlocks and stop complaining.

“Bloody wolly,” I said.

All lines to Lagos were busy. I didn't get through to my father until late the next evening and by then, had established my opinions. Our civilian government had begged for the coup. Never had there been a more debauched democracy: champagne parties, embezzlements. My father explained that our constitution had also been suspended, a development I couldn't fathom with my head full of English text-books. “Can they really do that?” I asked. “They can do whatever they want,” he explained. “The power of a constitution comes from the respect people give it. If they don't, then it is words on paper. Nothing else.”

He was wary of the new military government, and their promise to wage war against indiscipline. I thought that it wasn't such a bad idea, in a country where you still couldn't expect electricity for a full week. Then the reports started coming in: floggings for jumping bus queues; squats for government workers who came late to work; a compulsory sanitation day to stay home and dust; military tribunals for ex-politicians; Decree Two, under which persons suspected of acts prejudicial to state security could be detained without charge; Decree Four, under which journalists could be arrested and imprisoned for publishing any information about public officials. My father kept asking, but I told him I never wanted to go back.

I changed my mind one winter morning, while waiting for a double-decker bus to arrive. The wind popped my umbrella inside out, flipped my skirt almost to my waist. It ripped tears from my eyes and knocked my braids backward into my face. A braid scratched my eyeball. I stood there listening to the wind, whizzing in all directions, colliding with my thoughts, which were colliding with each other. I was thinking of men who were given to acts of cowardice, lying when they should be braver. I was thinking of a certain partner in my firm who stared at my braided hair as if it were a head full of serpents. I thought of partners who walked like they'd never passed wind. I remembered my phone bills. I was thinking that if I returned home, at least, at least I would be warm.

Summer of 1984, I returned home for law school. My father bought me a new car, a white Volkswagen Jetta, which I drove straight to my mother's house. “He spoils you,” she said, dusting her hands in disapproval. The Jetta was less attractive to armed robbers than other imported models. When my father bought it, it was selling for six times my salary working for him as a newly qualified lawyer. A year later, a second-hand model would sell for twice that amount. He paid for it in cash. There was no such thing as a car loan, and I couldn't drive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays because during weekdays in Lagos, odd and even number vehicle plates were assigned separate days to ease the traffic flow. And, I would have to continue living with my father because rents in Lagos were paid two, three years in advance.