Everything Good Will Come (40 page)

My mother's first thought was that he had come to do me harm. “What's he coming for?” she asked. “Suddenly he wants to see you? Don't take anything from him, you hear me? Whatever he gives you, straight into the bin. It's all well and good. If he wants to find out about his father, let him go to Uncle Fatai and find out what he needs to know there.”

I was sitting next to her at her dining table. She slumped over it.

“No water no light,” she said. “Now this. Ah, I'm tired.”

“At least Sumbo is here to help,” I said.

“Sumbo?” she said. “She's gone.”

“Where?”

“She ran away. Two weeks, now.”

“Back to her parents?”

“Those parents who sent her away in the first place? Who knows? I had to send word to them that she's disappeared. I woke up one morning and she wasn't there. I went everywhere searching for her. I even went to the police for that girl. Not a thing. These people, it's always something or the other with them. ”

It was easy to distract her. My mother had bought a few baby rompers. She spread them on her dining table and held a yellow one up.

“I'll get some more,” she promised.

“I've never seen you like this before, ” I said. “Don't finish your money.”

“Why not?” she said. “I spent money on my church and what thanks did I get? For the first time in how many years last month my tithes were low. They were complaining. I told them I had other obligations. They said I must put God first. I told them I am putting God first. He gave me a grandchild, and I must thank Him by preparing.”

I smiled. “Why do you stay in that church?”

She raised her hand. “I didn't ask for your opinion.”

I raised my hand, too, in surrender. I was tearful. The rompers, the light in my mother's eyes. I worried about her as if she were a teetotaler with a glass of wine in her hand. It would have to be good this time. If not for me, for her.

As we talked and folded the rompers, my mother told me the story of a faith healing gone wrong. A man in her church, deaf from birth, claimed he could hear after going through cleansing. My mother spoke to the man afterward to congratulate him. “Couldn't hear one word,” she said. “And I've asked Reverend Father before, ‘You say that only those who love God will be healed from cleansing. Shouldn't a person who loves God be eager to die as quickly as possible in order to be with Him? Why would they want healing?' He couldn't give me a straight answer to that. ‘As for me,' I told him, ‘when my God calls, I'm ready to go.'”

My mother's analysis surprised me. No one satirized the people in her church as she did. Half of them were sinners, she said, and fault-finders, and they gave cheap gifts at Christmas. I couldn't fold from laughing. She was a total gossip. She asked me to return an aluminum bowl to her new tenant, Mrs. Williams, so that I could meet her. Mrs. Williams was a divorced woman who worked for a large fishing company. “She is high, high up in the company,” my mother confided. “They say her husband drove her out because she was always going out: parties, Lioness meetings, this and that. You should see her, pretty thing and slim. Now they say she's found herself a boyfriend.”

“That's good,” I said, wiping tears from my eyes.

“Quick-quick, like that? It's not good.”

“You should try it yourself.”

She eyed me. “Don't be rude.”

“Why not? It will keep you looking fresh. Just make sure he's young and... ”

“Will you stop?”

Fresh, fresh, I kept saying to tease her. She eventually smacked my arm.

“Leave this house, Enitan.”

As I walked to Mrs. Williams's house, I was thinking that I was due for another sex talk and this time I would be just as shy. At what age was a woman content to be celibate? No one ever said. If they caressed themselves, the pleasure they got, they would never say. The thought made me wince. I was twenty when I first saw my father kiss a woman. He did it properly, the way they did in films. He circled her waist with one hand, bent his knees, straightened up. I covered my eyes with my hands and screamed silently. Then I avoided him for the rest of the day, in case I smelled perfume on him or something. I had never seen my mother kiss a man; not even my father.

“You must be Enitan,” Mrs. Williams said, unlocking her gate.

Her hair was weaved in intricate patterns that ended in a miniature crown of plaits on top of her head. She was wearing one of those up-and-downs, which dipped in at the waist and flared like a tutu. It made her look as slight as a teenager, but I was certain she was in her late forties. Her eyes were that composed.

“You're so pretty,” I said.

“You,” she said.

Her gate opened.

“I've heard a lot about you,” she said.

“Good or bad?” I asked, walking in.

“Your mother and I are friends,” she said, knowingly.

“She says thank you for the fish.”

I placed the bowl over my stomach like a tortoise shell. She glanced at it.

“Would you like some? Come in and get some.”

We walked to the back door that led into her kitchen.

“I'm with Universal Fisheries,” she explained. “I'm sure your mother told you. They give us senior officers frozen fish every holiday. But we've had light on and off for two days now and it will spoil if I don't give it away.” She kicked a toy car by the kitchen door. “Watch out for that. I keep telling my children to put their toys away before they go out.”

“They are not in?”

“They're with their father.”

There was a collapsible iron table in Mrs. Williams' kitchen that took up most of the space. Behind it was a large freezer like mine. She removed a slab of frozen fish.

“See?” she said. “Melting already.”

I stood back as she wrapped the slab in several sheets of newspaper and placed it in the bowl.

“Here,” she said, handing it to me.

It was heavier than expected.

“This is your first?” she asked.

“Yes!”

“You should put that down,” she said. “The fish. You should put it down if you're not ready to leave.”

I placed it on the table next to her. “I saw your children. Your little girl, Shalewa, told me off for not calling her by her name. I think she was upset the boys were not playing with her.”

“Don't be fooled. She bullies her brothers. The minute they touch her, she's going to tell her father. Even me she reports.”

“She's so cute. Forgive her.”

“Her? It's not her I have to forgive. But, you know, the day you've had enough, your legs just carry you... ”

She was explaining her own circumstance, but I didn't mind listening. It was good to be reminded that everyone, smiling or not, had overcome adversity.

“I'm sorry to hear about your father,” she said. “I hear you're the one running his practice.”

“Yes.”

“That must be hard.”

“I try.”

“It's all you can do,” she said. “In this place. Look around you. Not one of us asked to be in the situation we're in. My children, they keep complaining, oh they want to go to their father's house, oh they want to play video games and watch cable. I told them, ‘The children without video games and cable, you think they're from a different planet?' Before we moved here, they were always indoors, staring at a screen from morning till night. Now they're outside playing. They're getting fresh air.”

“They won't want to hear that.”

“I know, but sometimes I think the sooner they learn the better. The disappointment is less. There are no more ivory towers in Lagos. The waves just keep coming one after the other. When they do, you raise your head higher. If you don't, then what? I was used to my comforts. I'm used to being without them now.”

I smiled. Yes, we were the city of broken survivors, children included.

“Condition,” she said.

“Hm?”

“Condition make back of crawfish bend,” she said.

During the week the government announced they'd uncovered a coup plot. The details in the press were sketchy and the latest issue of the Oracle barely dedicated a column to the story. I wondered why. Then the rumors started coming in, this really wasn't a coup; this was an excuse to arrest more government opponents. A former military ruler and his deputy were detained. There would be more.

The government had warned the newspaper editors not to speculate about the coup. People began to joke in that senseless way that a beaten people might: “You're speculating? Why are you speculating? You've been warned not to speculate. I'm not speculating with you.”

I buried my head in token stories and editorials meanwhile. A woman had been murdered by her house boy. He left her body indoors and used her car for taxi services. I couldn't get that image out of my mind. A cannibal was out on the loose, another story said. Was this a modern Dahmer- style murderer or a throwback to paganism, the editor speculated, since he could speculate on nothing else. Someone had accepted radioactive waste from overseas for a tidy sum and dumped it in his village. The villagers were placing their radios on trees, hoping that the radioactivity would recharge their batteries. More jokes about that.

I read the most disturbing stories to escape from my own life, and two visits surprised me at the office later that week. The first was from Uncle Fatai, who came in after lunch, just at the time I'd kicked my shoes off, because my feet were beginning to swell. When he walked in, I stood up. He waved me down and squeezed into the visitor's seat. For the first time, I noticed how much he wheezed as he talked.

“I'm traveling to London,” he said. “For a check up.”

“I hope... ”

He waved. “Annual. It's nothing to worry about. Half my problems would go, if I wasn't so fat. Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

Nigerians still made pilgrimages to London like no man's business. Over there, only our money was welcome.

“Any developments about your father?” he asked.

“No.”

Dimples appeared in his knuckles as he placed his palms together. “He will be out soon, Old Sunny... em, staff paid?”

“Yes,” I said.

“That's very good,” he said.

“What about his clients?”

“They don't call anymore.”

“That is to be expected.”

“Debayo came here, Uncle,” I said.

I watched for a reaction. There was none.

“Yes,” he said. “I saw him myself. And how is your husband?”

“He's fine,” I said.

“Your mother too. I have not had time to visit.”

“She's fine, thank you.”

“That's good,” he said.

Uncle Fatai was not used to extending more than the usual courtesies to me. He ran out of questions and ended up asking after my mother again and again. When he finally heaved himself up, I could easily have rushed to his rescue the way he was tottering. He brought out a handkerchief and wiped his forehead.

“You know, em, you're not a child anymore, Enitan. Your father, he em, always felt bad about your brother... that he wasn't there when your mother took him to church like that.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sunny always treasured you. He never stopped seeing you as a child. That was his mistake. But you know, an African man cannot die without leaving a son.”

I could hear my colleagues talking behind the door. I wanted to say that I didn't know how to think like an African woman. I only knew how to think for myself.

“Yes, Uncle,” I said.

“It is time you met your brother,” he said. “I always told Sunny to bring you two together from the start, but Sunny makes his own mind up.”

“Yes, Uncle.”