Everything Good Will Come (6 page)

“A pen?”

“Yours.”

It was a fat navy pen. I pulled the cap off.

“Thank you, Daddy.”

My father reached into his pocket again. He pulled a
watch out and dangled it. I collapsed. It was a Timex. My
father promised he would never buy me another watch again,
after I broke the first and lost the second. This one had a
round face the width of my wrist. Red straps. I rocked it.

“Thank you,” I said, strapping it on.

He was sitting on my bed. Both feet were on it, and he
still had his socks on. I sat on the floor by them. He rubbed
my shoulder.

“Looking forward to going to school?”

“Yes.”

“You won't be sad when you get there.”

“I'll make friends.”

“Friends who make you laugh.”

I thought of Sheri. I would have to avoid girls like her in
school, otherwise I might end up expelled.

“Anyone who bullies you, beat them up,” my father said.

I rolled my eyes. Who could I fight?

“And join the debating society, not the girl guides. Girl
guides are nothing but kitchen martyrs in the making.”

“What is that?”

“What you don't want to be. You want to be a lawyer?”

Going to work was too remote to contemplate.

He laughed. “Tell me now, so I can take back my gifts.”

“I'm too young to know.”

“Too young indeed. Who will run my practice when I'm
gone. And another thing, these romance books you're
reading. No chasing boys when you get there.”

“I don't like boys.”

“Good,” he said. “Because you're not going there to study
boy-ology.”

“Daddy,” I said.

He was the one I would miss. The one I would write to. I
settled to write a poem after he left, using words that rhymed
with sad: bad, dad, glad, had. I was on my third verse when I
heard raps on my window. I peeped outside to find Sheri
standing with a sheet of paper in her hand. Her face appeared
like a tiny moon. She was crouching.

“Open up,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” I whispered.

“I came to get your school address.”

Wasn't she afraid? It was as dark as indigo outside.

“On your own?”

“With Akanni. He's in your quarters, with his girlfriend.”

She pulled a pencil from her pocket. She was like an imp
who had come to tempt me. I couldn't get rid of her.

“Eni-Tan,” she spelled.

“Yes,” I said.

“Your school address,” she said. “Or are you deaf?”

H
ad I listened to my mother, that would have been the end of Sheri and I, and the misfortune that would bind us. But my mother had more hope of squeezing me up her womb than stopping our friendship. Sheri had led me to the gap between parental consent and disapproval. I would learn how to bridge it with deception, wearing a face as pious as a church sister before my mother and altering steadily behind her. There was a name my mother had for children like Sheri. They were
omo-ita
, street children. If they had homes, they didn't like staying in them. What they liked, instead, was to go around fighting and cursing, and getting up to mischief.

Away from my own home, my days in boarding school were like a balm. I lived with five hundred other girls and shared a dormitory with about twenty. At night we let down our mosquito nets and during the day we patched them up if they got ripped. If a girl had malaria, we covered her with blankets to sweat out her fever. I held girls through asthma attacks, shoved a teaspoon down the mouth of a girl who was convulsing, burst boils. It was a wonder we survived the spirit of samaritanism, or communal living. The toilets stunk like sewers and sometimes excrement piled up days high. I had to cover my nose to use them and when girls were menstruating, they flung their soiled sanitary towels into open buckets. Still, I preferred boarding school to home.

Royal College girls came from mixed backgrounds. In our dormitory alone we had a farmer's daughter and a diplomat's daughter. The farmer's daughter had never been to a city before she came to Lagos; the diplomat's daughter had been to garden parties at Kensington palace. There were girls from homes like mine, girls from less privileged homes, so a boarder might come back from class to find her locker had been broken into. Since she knew she'd never see her missing belongings again, the next step was to put a hex on the thief by shouting out curses like, “May you have everlasting diarrhea.” “May you menstruate forever.” If the thief were caught, she would be jostled down the hallways.

I met Moslem girls: Zeinat, Alima, Aisha who rose early to salute Mecca. Some covered their heads with scarves after school, and during Ramadan, they shunned food and water from dawn till dusk. I met Catholic girls: Grace, Agnes, Mary, who sported gray crosses on their foreheads on Ash Wednesday. There were Anglican girls, Methodist girls. One girl, Sangita, was Hindu and we loved to tug on her long plait. The daughter of our math teacher and the only foreign student in our school, she had such a resounding, “Leave me alone!” she sent the best of us running.

I met girls born with sickle cell anemia like my brother. Some were sick almost every other month, others hardly ever. We called them sicklers. They called themselves sicklers. One thought it excused her from all ills: untidiness, lateness, rudeness. I learned from her that I carried the sickle cell trait, which meant I would never be sick, but my child could be, if my husband also carried the trait.

I learned also about women in my country, from Zaria, Katsina, Kaduna who decorated their skin with henna dye and lived in
purdah
; women from Calabar who were fed and anointed in fattening houses before their weddings; women who were circumcised. I heard about towns in western Nigeria where every family had twins because the women ate a lot of yams, and other towns in northern Nigeria, where every other family had a crippled child because women married their first cousins. None of the women seemed real. They were like mammy-water, sirens of the Niger Delta who rose from the creeks to lure unsuspecting men to death by drowning.

Uncle Alex had always said our country was not meant to be one. The British had drawn a circle on the map of West Africa and called it a country. Now I understood what he meant. The girls I met at Royal College were so different. I could tell a girl's ethnicity even before she opened her mouth. Hausa girls had softer hair because of their Arab heritage. Yoruba girls like me usually had heart-shaped faces and many Igbo girls were fair-skinned; we called them Igbo Yellow. We spoke English, but our native tongues were as different as French and Chinese. So, we mispronounced names and spoke English with different accents. Some Hausa girls could not “fronounce” the letter P. Some Yoruba girls might call these girls “Ausas,” and eggs might be “heggs.” Then there was that business with the middle-belters who mixed up their L's and R's. If they said a word like lorry, there was no telling what my bowels would release, from laughing.

It all provided jokes. So did the stereotypes. Yoruba girls were considered quarrelsome; Hausa girls, pretty but dumb; Igbo girls, intelligent, but well, they were muscular. Most girls had parents of the same origin, but there was some intermingling and we had a few girls, like Sheri, who had one parent from a foreign country. Half-castes we called them, without malice or implications. Half because they claimed both sides of their heritage. There was no caste system in our country.

Often at Royal College, we shared family stories while fetching water from a tap in the yard. I learned that my mother's behavior wasn't typical. I also learned that every other girl had an odd family story to tell: Afi's grandmother was killed when a bicycle knocked her down in the village; Yemisi's mother worked till her water broke; Mfon's cousin smoked hemp and brought shame on the family; Ibinabo's father stripped her down, whipped her, and made her say “thank-you” afterward.

In the mornings, we congregated in the assembly hall to sing our national anthem and took a few minutes to appreciate Beethoven or some other European composer. At meal-times we packed into our dining hall and sang:

After school, we drummed on our desks and sang. We sang a lot, through the transformations in our country; when we began to drive on the right side of the road; when we switched from pounds, shillings, and pence to naira and kobo. Outside our school walls, oil leaked from the drilling fields of the Niger Delta into people's Swiss bank accounts. There was bribery and corruption, but none of it concerned me, particularly in June 1975. It was as vague as the end of Vietnam. I was just glad our fourth-year exams were over. For those sleepless weeks, I joined my classmates, studying through the night and spreading bitter coffee granules on my tongue. In a class of thirty odd girls, I was neither a bright star Booker T. Washington or dim-wit Dundee United. I enjoyed history, English literature, Bible studies because of the parables. I enjoyed music lessons because of the songs our black American teacher taught us, spirituals and jazz melodies that haunted me until I began to dream about churches and smoky clubs I'd never seen. I was captain of our junior debating society, though I longed to be one of those girls chosen for our annual beauty pageants instead. But my arms were like twisted vines and my forehead like sandpaper. Those cranky nodules behind my nipples didn't amount to breasts and my calf muscles had refused to develop. The girls in my class called me
Panla
, after a dry, stinky fish imported from Norway. Girls overseas could starve themselves on leaves and salad oil if they wanted. In our country, women were hailed for having huge buttocks. I wanted to be fatter, fatter, fatter, with a pretty face, and I wanted boys to like me.

Damola Ajayi had spoken like an orator, as good as any I'd heard. He was skinny with big hands that punched the air as he spoke. Warm hands. We almost collided on the stairs leading to the stage and I held his hands to steady myself. I turned to the Concord Academy debating team as he joined them. Their entire bench sat upright with the same serious expression. They were dressed, like him, in white jackets and blue striped ties. On the bench, next to them, our team slumped forward in green pinafores and checked blouses. Behind them were Saint Catherine girls in their red skirts and white blouses. The hall was a show of uniforms from all the schools in Lagos.

Here, we played net ball and badminton games; staged plays and hosted beauty pageants. Sometimes we had films shows and school dances. We never used the gymnastic equipment because no one had explained what it was for. By the back wall, a few boys draped themselves over two pommel horses, studying girls. Debating was the only way to socialize during school terms and if students had strict parents, it was the only way to socialize all year. We came together for tournaments, bearing our different school identities. Concord was gentlemanly but boring. Saint Catherine's was snobbish and loose. Owen Memorial boys and girls belonged in juvenile detention homes and their worst students smoked hemp. We at Royal, we were smart, but our school was crowded and filthy.

“Thanks to our co-hosts,” I said. “And thanks to everyone else for participating.”

Few people clapped. The crowd was getting restless. Yawns spread across the rows and students keeled over. Our own team looked as if their mouths had dried up from talking. It was time to end my speech.

“I would like to invite questions, comments from the audience?”

A Saint Patrick's boy raised his hand.

“Yes sir, at the back?”

The boy stood up, and pulled his brown khaki jacket down. There was a low rumble from the crowd as he strained forward: “Mr. Chairman, s-s-sir. W-when c-can we start the social acker-acker-acker-tivities?”

The crowd roared as he took bows. I raised my arm to silence them, but no one paid attention. Soon the noise trickled to a few laughs. Someone switched on the stereo. I came down from the stage and people began to clear their chairs for the dance.

Our final debate had lasted longer than I expected. We lost to Concord's team because of their captain. Damola was one of the best in the league, and he delivered his “with all due respects” to cheers. I couldn't compete. He was also the lead singer of a band called the Stingrays, who had caused a stir by appearing on television one Christmas. Parents said they wouldn't pass their school certificate exams carrying on that way. We wondered how they could dare form a band, in this place, where parents only ever thought about passing exams. What kind of homes did they come from? A girl on our debating team had answers, at least about Damola: “Cousin lives on the same street as him. Parents allow him to do what he wants. Drives a car. Smokes.”