Everything Good Will Come (20 page)

It wasn't improbable, he with a younger woman; Sheri with an older man. There were men in Lagos who chased their daughter's friends. You called them Uncle and curtseyed before them. There were women in Lagos who would chase their best friend's father for money.

Sheri smiled. “Why else would he do that for us?”

“He alone knows what he does,” I said, “and why.”

As a child, I knew that he strayed. I chose not to think about it. These days, when he brought women home, I treated them like any of his friends. It was hard to discern if he was interested in one or the other. I did not care to know. I discovered that after one of his clients, a married woman, started visiting him regularly. I thought her visits were work-related, until I met him at the airport after a trip abroad and saw her there. My father was a tricky man, I thought. Tricky enough to warrant an ambush. One afternoon, I arrived home early hoping to catch him. I found him in the living room with Peter Mukoro.

“Hello,” I said, deliberately fixing my gaze on my father alone.

I couldn't bear my finger nails scratching a blackboard, the tips of my teeth running along cotton cloth. Peter Mukoro's mocking looks, I couldn't bear them either. He was stroking his mustache and watching me.

“You're back?” my father said.

“Yes,” I said, heading straight for my room.

“Enitan,” my father called after me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You can't see Mr. Mukoro sitting here?”

“I can see him.”

I knew I was in trouble. I almost welcomed it. My father came to my room after Peter Mukoro left.

“I've been watching you,” he said. “Frowning all over the place and I've been very patient with you. Whatever you think is bothering you, never, ever again do that in my presence.”

“I don't like him,” I said.

“I don't care if you like him.”

“Why won't you sign the transfer letter?” I said. “One minute you're helping someone else. Sheri, this... awful man.”

“What has he ever done to you?”

“Sign the letter.”

“When I am ready.”

“Do it. Now.”

My father stepped back. “You think we're equals? You think we're equals now? I treat you like an adult and you repay me this way? Your mother always said I was lax with you. But that will change. If you can't respect me in my house, you're 25 now, go wherever you want.”

“Sign the letter.”

“I won't tell you again. This has nothing to do with you. I've given you a choice. You either do as I say, or you leave this house.”

He left me staring at my door. Leave my friend alone! I wanted to shout.

It was there; an old anxiety. But I was too old to be playing child and he was too old to be playing parent. If we forced the old ways upon ourselves now, we were liable to come to blows.

Sheri was counting old naira notes into separate piles on the desk in her office when I arrived. She licked her thumb and dealt them like cards. “One minute,” she said.

“Take your time,” I said.

It had taken me most of my lunch break to drive, but the anxiety was out of control. It was keeping me up at night. I wanted it to stop.

There were two stacks of boxes in the corner of the room: Peak milk, Titus sardines, Tate and Lyle sugar. A portrait of her stepmothers and another of her father alone. A pile of old mustard colored curtains were folded under the window. The green mosquito screen had ripped in two places. Dust. Everywhere. Sheri could not bear the mess, I was sure. She finished and flopped back in her chair.

“How come you're here today?”

“I came to see you,” I said.

“Did you see the people outside? Did you see them?”

“I saw them.”

“We're making money.”

“I know.”

There was a large lunch time crowd. They would have to wait for seats and their cutlery would not be clean or dry. Some would cut fried meat with spoons. If they complained, the cooks would ignore them. They had the same expression as cooks in the best food spots in Harlem, Bahia, Kingston: Do not bother me. The people came regardless. The food was good: black-eye peas, fresh fish, rice, vegetable stews with cow foot, intestines, lungs, and all manners of innards because in this part of the world we wasted no meat.

Sheri's nails galloped over the table.

“I'd better get back to work,” I said.

“But you've just come,” she said.

“Lunch-break over.”

She laughed. “Why did you bother?”

“I was passing. I wanted to see your face.”

If we didn't share our childhood, would I like her? Sheri was rude and vain. Sheri had always been rude and vain, except that as a child it was endearing. And whatever she said, it was clear that she did not think much of herself. She liked rich men. Yes, she did. In Lagos we used the word “like” this way. You liked to stare, you liked to criticize, you liked to make appointments and not keep them. There was an assumption, bad English aside, that if you did something often, you liked it.

If you do that, I thought, chase my father, I will have nothing to say to you. It would be sufficient, more than sufficient, to know that you think so little of yourself.

“You've seen my face,” she said in Yoruba.

“It's the same face,” I said.

We walked together to my car. Outside, the lunch-time traffic blocked the road. Someone leaned on a car horn. The sun was fierce. I shielded my eyes.

“Has my father been here?” I asked.

“No.”

“Did he say he was coming?”

We faced each other. Sheri looked beyond me at the road.

“I hope he doesn't come,” she murmured. “This place is a mess. Look, this man is going to... ”

A Peugeot had moved too quickly on the road and rammed into the back of a Daewoo. The Daewoo driver got out and smacked the Peugeot driver through his open window. Mr. Peugeot jumped out and grabbed Mr. Daewoo's shirt. Mr. Daewoo was bigger. He slammed Mr. Peugeot against his car, held him by the scruff of his neck.

“Are you mad?”

“You're crazy!”

“Bang my car?”

“Slap my face?”

“I'll kill you!”

“Bastard!”

People came from the surrounding buildings to watch: men, women and children, elders so old their backs had given way. On a Lagos street, justice happened straight away. You knocked someone's car and they beat you up. The people would come out to watch. You knocked someone, and the people themselves would beat you up. You stole anything, and the people could beat you until they killed you.

The drivers on the road blasted their horns in frustration. They were as gridlocked as my mind; tight and going nowhere. The horns were never about this, two men beating themselves senseless over a dent in a bumper, and after a while, the horns had nothing to do with the delay, at all.

It was like pressing on a painful bump. I could not stop. The phone in my father's office rang one afternoon. Peace was out for lunch so I answered it. It was the receptionist from his travel agency. I told her he was in court.

She dragged her words. “His tickets are ready for collection.”

“I'll tell him when he gets back,” I said.

I knew my father was traveling, but I'd dropped the phone before I realized she said he was traveling with someone. I found the number of the travel agency, and waited for a dial tone. My father still had not updated our phone system. We waited up to two minutes for a dial tone and every month when we received telephone bills with phantom charges to Alaska, Qatar, places we were not even aware of, he threatened to have our phones disconnected.

The line was busy. I slammed the phone and tried again.

“Star Travel, good afternoon?”

“You called Mr. Taiwo's office?”

“Yes.”

“His tickets. Whose names are they in?”

My heart was hammering. She put me on hold, consulted someone who asked who I was. I said I was his secretary.

“One is for Mr. Taiwo,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Second one is for em, Mr. Taiwo.”

I frowned. “Who?”

“Sorry, Dr. Taiwo,” she said.

No such person, I thought.

“Dr. O. A.,” she said. “Initials Oscar Alpha?”

“There's no such person,” I said.

“Hold on,” she said.

A man's voice.

“Hello, Peace? Why these questions?”

I wasn't Peace, I explained.

“Who are you?” he asked, brusquely.

“I work here,” I said.

“Oh,” he said. “Well the tickets are for Mr. Taiwo. And his son Debayo. Are you new?”

No such person, no such person, I thought.

“Peace will know. Tell her. Mr. Taiwo and his son are traveling. Their tickets are ready. She knows about it.”

I dropped the phone. It was like shrapnel, being pulled out, I was sure.

Guilt never did show in my father's face. I'd seen. It was how he won cases. It was how he'd driven my mother to distraction. I'd seen that also.

My parent's mothers were both in polygamous marriages. My mother's mother was a trader. She saved money for her children's education under her mattress. One day my grandfather took the money she'd been saving and used it to pay the dowry for a second wife. My grandmother died broken-hearted for her money. My mother herself had never gotten over the shock. A pampered child, she disguised her embarrassment with snobbishness from then on. My father's mother was a junior wife. The two senior wives would deny my father food, hoping that if he were skinny enough, he would amount to nothing. That was why he didn't eat much; that was why he never gave in to my mother's food threats; that was why, years later, he still preferred to have an old man in his kitchen.

I waited for him that afternoon. My head felt like a shaken jar. Each time I opened it up, I didn't know which emotion to pull out. It wasn't uncommon for married men, especially of his generation, to have children outside. But this? Lying for years? I recalled how he punished me for lying as a child, how he would not forgive me for sneaking out with Sheri. It wasn't her—it was him I couldn't trust.