Everything Good Will Come (11 page)

I was almost tempted to board a British Airways back. Then, one day, a lecturer stopped me along the corridors at law school.

“Yes sir?” I said, startled that he knew my last name.

“Is your father Sunny Taiwo?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“He is in the papers a lot these days.”

He was.

“How is he?”

“Fine, sir.”

“You were studying in England?”

Yes, I said.

“Welcome back,” he said. “And give my regards to your father. We were at Baptist High together.”

I realized I was glad to be back. There were partners in my old firm who may have been to Cambridge with my father. Heaven forbid they admitted that to me, or to themselves. Some of my law school peers from overseas would continue to complain about Lagos: the surly clerks, lazy air-conditioners, power cuts, traffic we called go-slow, water shortages, armed robbers, bribery. But I would embrace the nuisances of Lagos from then on; all of them, to be acknowledged at last.

My father had recently gained publicity for a case he won. His client, a newspaper columnist, Peter Mukoro, was arrested at a police check point earlier in the year. Peter Mukoro wrote articles criticizing the police. He claimed that they targeted him because of this, but they claimed he was indisciplined at the time of his arrest. My father argued that his arrest was unlawful anyhow and won the case.

Peter Mukoro had initially approached my father over a land dispute. He was nothing like my father's usual clients, wealthy property owners who wished to maintain a low profile. He was a man in his early forties, an unabashed dissident who courted publicity. I met him once and thought he drank too much and talked too loud. I suspected he was driven more by vanity than anything else, but my father was enjoying the publicity, holding press conferences with him, making statements about police harassment. I called him an old rebel, but secretly I was proud. As a child, this was how I'd envisioned a lawyer's work to be. Now all I could foresee was paper-work.

Law school ended the summer of 1985. Within a week of my graduation, there was another military coup and our constitution was further suspended. Days later, I registered for national service. My first month would be spent in military training; the remainder of the year, I would work for my father who had no obligation to pay me since, technically, I was employed by the government. Initially posted to a rural district, I begged the registration clerk to send me to another camp, when I saw signs warning campers not to walk around at night, because they might be abducted and used for human sacrifice. The alternative camp was based in a busier district, on the campus of a technical college that was closed for the summer vacation. I drove there hoping that the new camp would be better than I was predicting, hoping even, that I might finally meet someone nice and honest.

An early morning mist hung over the race tracks of the College of Technology. Fifty odd platoons were lined up on the grass patch within it, awaiting roll call. The grass was heavily beaded with dew. I slid my combat boots along and pulled my cap down. It was too early for roll call, and too chilly for warm blood.

“Enitan Taiwo,” our platoon leader called out.

“Yeah,” I answered.

My platoon mates laughed as he checked my name on the rota.

“Mike Obi?”

“Yes,” said the man in front of me. His voice was deep. I'd noticed him as I joined the platoon for roll call. He was standing with his hands in his pockets: wide back, uniform looking like it had been pressed over him. I would be taller than him if I wore heels. He dug his combat boots into the grass and lifted his cap and I saw that his head was shaved.

Our platoon leader blew his whistle. “Round the tracks!”

There were complaints all around. “See me, see trouble,” the woman behind me said. “All this
wahala
,” my neighbor said.

Mike Obi turned to me. “That's why they're calling us the pregnant platoon.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because we're the laziest, fattest platoon around.”

“None of the above,” I said.

He dimpled like side pockets. We began to jog along the race tracks.

“Are you one of the lawyers?” he asked, as we rounded the bend. I nodded in response. I was beginning to feel the stretch in my legs.

“How come you start camp later than everyone else?” he asked.

“Because we are better than everyone else.”

He laughed. “I'm not so sure about that.”

“Law school graduation ceremony,” I said.

A group of joggers passed us, chanting an army song.

“You must have been here during the coup a week ago,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What was that like?”

“No one really cared. Soldiers go. Soldiers come. We had morning drill, went out during the curfew.”

“That's a pity.”

He stretched out his hand. “I'm Mike.”

“Enitan,” I said.

His hand felt coarse. I slowed and he slowed, too.

“What do you do, Mike?” I asked.

“Me? I'm an artist.”

“I've never met an artist before.”

He pulled his cap down. “Actually, I'm an architect, but I studied fine art for a year.”

“Liar... ”

“At Nsukka university.”

“Liar,” I said.

“I
am
an artist,” he said. “You should see my mosaics.”

“Mosaics? Talk true. What kind?”

“With beads. Very beautiful.”

“I'm sure.”

“And you?” he asked.

“I've just finished law school.”

“You don't look that young to me.”

I swiped his shoulder. It felt like wood.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “But some of the graduates here look twenty-one. You and I don't.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“You should be proud of your age.”

I smiled. “I am. I'm not a new graduate. I worked for three years after my degree.”

“Where?”

“England.”

“What made you come home?”

“It was cold. It was time. What made you give up on your art?”

“You know our people. Everyone told me I would starve and I believed them.”

“Hm. Maybe you didn't believe in yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“You don't regret giving up?”

“I don't regret anything.”

“And yet you still call yourself an artist.”

“If necessary,” he said.

“To do what?” I asked.

Impress, he said. We strolled back like old friends. Mike was wrong. Most women I knew would sprint from an artist. It meant that they might have to dabble with poverty and poverty always cleared people's eyes in Lagos. After morning drill, where I learned how to march and about-turn, we parted ways. He didn't know it, but I was ready to reach into his dimples and pluck out a gold coin.

I walked back to the women's halls located five minutes away from the race tracks. A poorly-lit building normally inhabited by the college's students during the academic year, the halls housed national service participants during military training. At the entrance, a group of women were arguing with the caretaker. “Why can't we have men inside?” one woman asked. “After all, we're not students, and some of us are married.”

“Is not allowed,” the caretaker said.

“Who said?” she asked.

“Jesus,” he said.

The old man wasn't letting any men in. He sat by the entrance, flicking his horsewhip and waiting for those who dared. The day before he had lashed out at one graduate who had studied in the US, and still held his rights dear. “You have no rat!” this graduate screamed at him in a Nigerian- American accent. “You have no rat to whip me like that! Nobady has the rat to whip me like that!” The old man looked him up and down. “You want your rights, you go back to the country where you learned how to shout at an elder,” he said. “Now, clear out of here, Johnny jus' come.”

Baba, they called him. Every old man in my country was Baba, or Papa. This one was keeper of graduate vaginas.

Walking up the stairs, I smelled urine from the toilets and remembered my old school in Lagos. I was almost tempted to laugh: ten years later and still living in similar lodgings. My fear of inhaling the foul odor prevented me. I placed my palm over my nose and hurried past.

Inside the dormitory, I removed my T-shirt and lay on the bed. The shutters were open, but the air was flat and dry. The dormitory was like a prison cell: two iron spring beds and four walls sullied by the hand prints and head smears of previous inmates. My roommate, a graduate from the university of Lagos, refused to sleep in it. She shuttled from home, but home was far away for me and I wasn't sure I could wake up early enough to make roll call.

I rested a little, decided to buy mosquito coils from the hawker who sat under an almond tree by the parking lot. A few campers were there, chatting in groups. Visitors drove in all day to see friends and family, and sometimes camp felt like an everlasting party. At the hawkers stall, I selected a box of mosquito coils, a packet of Trebor mints and paid for them. Contemplating another packet, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Mike. He bent to pick a box of mosquito coils.

“You, too?” he said.

“They're eating me alive,” I said.

He paid the hawker and we began to walk toward the halls.

“What are you doing now?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Come and talk to me.”

He pointed to the spectator stand by the race tracks. We walked there and sat on the bottom row. Mike removed one of the coils from the box and lit it. I was lulled by the sounds: crickets chattering and laughter from the parking lot. The mosquito coil turned a fluorescent amber and gray smoke rose from it. Mike caught me watching him.

“I'm afraid,” he said. “The way you look at me, like I've stolen your money. Are you one of those women who can't trust somebody?”

“I'm one of those women who wants to trust somebody.”

He lifted the mosquito coil and placed it between us.

“That's good,” he said.

He spoke softly between pauses. I talked till I almost bit my tongue and delayed swallowing to slip in punch lines.

“You this girl,” he kept saying. He rarely laughed.

Mike grew up near Enugu, a city in eastern Nigeria that was the heart of Biafra. His parents were lecturers at the state university. His mother taught drama, and his father, history. During the Civil War, he was sent to a foster home in England and I teased him because years later, he still had traces of an English accent in addition to his Igbo one.

“Eni-ton,” I corrected him, when I'd had enough of him mispronouncing my name.

“Eni-tan,” he said.

“On! on! Do your mouth like this... on... on.”

“An.”

“For heaven's sake.”

It was terrible that we'd had different experiences of the Civil War. In university, I finally acknowledged the holocaust that was Biafra, through memoirs and history books, and pictures of limbless people; children with their stomachs bloated from kwashiorkor and their rib cages as thin as leaf veins. Their parents were mostly dead. Executed. Macheted. Blown up. Beheaded. There were accounts of blood-drinking, flesh-eating, atrocities of the human spirit that only a civil war could generate, while in Lagos we had carried on as though it were happening in a different country. Our Head of State got married even. The timing of the truce, Mike said, came about because the warring troops wanted to watch Péle play football. Péle. Civil war. I hoped that he was joking.