Something to Hide (2 page)

The sun was setting by the time Ernestine got home. Normally it was her favourite time of day. Up in the trees the bats detached themselves from their clumps that hung down like heavy bundles of fruit; they flew off, one by one, into the suffused sky. Today they looked sinister with their leather wings and sharp little teeth. Everything had turned upside down; it was as if Ernestine had plunged into the lake of her childhood, plunged beneath the placid surface, and found herself in an alien world, a warped reflection of the one that she had so foolishly taken for granted.

It was still stiflingly hot. She watched Kwomi as he washed himself in a bowl of water. His chest was bare, his hair dripping. He wasn't a handsome man, his nose was too big and his ears stuck out, but he was hers, they had been man and wife for half her lifetime. Beside him, the unsuspecting Grace was stirring banku over the fire. She looked so pure, so innocent. Kwomi's mother was chopping onions. Old and frail, she doted on her son. What was going to happen to their family, that a few hours ago had seemed so contented?

Night fell. Nobody noticed Ernestine's silence; she had never been a chatty woman. She moved around in a daze, the voices of her family echoing far away. She was more hurt than angry – hurt, and deeply humiliated, that her husband had revealed himself to be no better than all those fornicators whose wives she used to pity. How blind she had been! In bed she lay rigid beside him, and when he put his hand on her breast she muttered that she was tired and pushed him away.

Soon he fell asleep but for many hours she lay awake, her mind racing. What was she going to do – tell him she knew about his trysts with Adwoa? Kick him out of their home? The prospect made her heart hammer against her ribs. Beside her slept her youngest boys, the twins. What would they do without a father? And what would Grace do, a budding young woman, filled with such purity and fervour, when she discovered that her father was an adulterer?

The next day Ernestine went to the monthly meeting of the women's savings group. In normal times she looked forward to this. The twelve of them had formed a close bond based on mutual trust and a shared stake in each other's financial matters; besides, it was a chance to catch up on each other's news. Ernestine was proud, that she had saved up her money each month to start her own business, that as a respected member of the community she now held one of the keys to the money box. Today, however, she was filled with dread. As they sat under the trees, she looked at the faces around her. Did any of them know? Did the whole village know, and had been whispering behind her back? Would she soon be like Dede, the widowed mother of little Mustafa the water-seller, who lived in such abject poverty that she could only contribute one ledi a month and had frequently been bailed out by the other women, much to her shame?

Adwoa didn't belong to the group; she was a stranger to thrift and female get-up-and-go, she let her husband do the work while she sat at home on her big bottom, leaving voice messages to Ernestine's husband. Ernestine wondered what Adwoa was doing – primping herself up for a tryst with Kwomi? Rubbing Imam Shea Butter onto her skin and anointing her lips with the Yana Luxury Lip Shimmer she had bought the week before, the better to kiss him with? Ernestine felt sick. Kwomi's patch of land was not far from Adwoa's house; was it there that they met, hidden amongst the cassava bushes? Ernestine hadn't heard the message, Asaf had deleted it to save her blushes, but the gist of it seemed to be how much Adwoa was longing to see her Kwomi again, she could hardly wait.
Her
Kwomi.

Now Ernestine thought of it, Adwoa's youngest baby had a big nose, just like Kwomi's.

‘Are you ready?'

Ernestine jumped. The other key-holders were waiting. Ernestine rallied and the three women opened the padlocks. They all sang a song together, gathered round the tin box, and got down to business. Dede, whose husband had died of AIDS, was saving up for a piece of land to grow maize. Humu was supporting herself through school by running a food stall. Lydia was setting up a biscuit bakery. Ernestine gazed at the scene – the dappled shadows, the chickens scratching in the dust, the kids walking from one woman to another, selling sweets and plantain chips. Her secret weighed her down; she had a strong urge to confide in somebody.

There was a burst of laughter. Nancy and Irene sat together, sharing a joke. They also shared a husband, Yawo. Two years earlier, when Yawo had taken the young Irene as his second wife, all hell had broken loose. The savings club, however, had brought them together. Previously both women had made a meagre living selling cassava, which they chopped laboriously by hand, paying a middle-man for the milling. But with the help of the tin box they had clubbed together to buy a milling machine and now they worked it together, joking about Yawo's sexual prowess and his pitiful boasts as the machine whirred away. Could Ernestine ever imagine sharing her husband with another woman?

The idea was disgusting. She would rather die.

Later, back home, she inspected her face in the mirror. It gazed back at her, naked, square-jawed. She had never worn make-up. Perhaps she should use some of her own products to woo Kwomi back. She could pluck her eyebrows and lighten her skin with Dimples Skin Lightener. She could perfume herself with jasmine and use her Cote D'Azur make-up kit, complete with brushes, to shadow her eyes and paint her lips. Maybe then she could win back his love.

Or she could visit Giti, the witch. Everyone feared Giti. She lived alone behind the mosque, she was known to have the evil eye. Only the other week a headless chicken had been found outside her front door. Giti could put a curse on one of Ernestine's skin creams. When Adwoa bought it, her face would erupt in boils and Kwomi would recoil in horror.

What else could Ernestine do? She could go to church and pray. She could storm into Adwoa's house and tell her to lay off her husband. She could have a showdown with Kwomi.

Or she could do nothing and hope it would pass.

Ernestine was a coward; she did nothing. The sun sank behind the trees. The bats detached themselves and flew away. She swept the floor and washed her mother-in-law's hair. She separated her squabbling sons. Her older children came home from
school. She cooked them jollof rice and red-pepper sauce. Her husband came home from the fields and put his mobile on the shelf, where it always sat. Grace came home, her books under her arm. She didn't say a word. Ernestine caught Grace looking at her and Kwomi with an odd expression on her face. Did she know something was up?

The days passed. Ernestine went out selling her wares but she avoided Adwoa's house, she couldn't bear to see the woman. On Wednesday the girls' football team played a match and Ernestine, working the crowd, made a number of sales. Grace had backed out of the match, saying she didn't feel well. She was nowhere to be seen, and wasn't at home when Ernestine returned. At the time Ernestine thought nothing of it, presuming Grace was menstruating. She had too many other things on her mind.

The next morning, needing to replenish her stock, she rose early to travel into Oreya with her husband. It was hard to believe that only a week had passed since her last visit.

The sun was rising as they climbed into the bus. It was just pulling into the road when someone yelled, ‘Wait!'

Ernestine looked out of the window. Adwoa hobbled towards them, one hand clutching her long, tight skirt, the other hand waving the bus to stop.

Adwoa squeezed herself into the seat behind them. She was dressed in an orange and green batik outfit; her hair was embellished with one of Ernestine's gardenia clips, and she was perspiring from the unaccustomed exercise.

Ernestine froze. The harlot greeted Kwomi politely, as if she hardly knew him – she nodded to him as she nodded to the other passengers from the village. Her mascara was smudged and she was breathing heavily.

She leaned forward to Ernestine. ‘My dear, I'm spitting mad,' she muttered. ‘I've got a bone to pick with my brother, the good-for-nothing drunk.'

Ernestine's head span. She glanced at her husband but now the bus was moving he appeared to have dozed off. It was all a pretence, of course.

Adwoa was jabbering away. It seemed to be a family quarrel about a will: ‘… left him some land but he can't farm it, the rascal's a cripple!' The words seemed to come from far off. Ernestine's mind was busy. Was this a prearranged tryst between her husband and Adwoa? After all, it was unusual for her, Ernestine, to go to Oreya two weeks running. The two fornicators were certainly playing a clever game, Kwomi feigning sleep and his mistress engaging Ernestine in some incomprehensible story about a drunken cripple.

When they arrived in town Adwoa pushed her way to the front of the bus. Ernestine watched her big, gaudy body work its way through the crowd. She was heading for the phone-charging booth.

And now Adwoa was standing there, shouting at Asaf, the man with the mobiles, the man who never moved. The man who, it turned out, happened to be her brother.

People said it was God's will that Asaf was born a cripple. People said it was an ancestral curse. People said it was just bad luck. Some people had shown him kindness; some had bullied him. Mostly, however, people had ignored him. When he was a child he had begged at the crossroads outside Oreya, where the traffic streamed between Assenonga, the big city, and the north. Every day one of his brothers or sisters would push him along the central reservation and leave him at the traffic lights. He sat on his little cart, his withered legs tucked beneath him. This was a prime spot for the afflicted and fights would break out between them as they jostled for the best position.

But the worst fights were with his sister, Adwoa.

Adwoa, who throughout his childhood bullied and teased him. Who stole his sweets and ran away on her strong, healthy legs. Who ridiculed him to the girls. Who left him on his cart, in the rain, while she disappeared into the bushes with her fancy men. Who stole his money and taunted him to come and get it. And who now was trying to steal back a cassava patch their father had left to him in his will.

A cripple has to develop alternative methods of survival. Over the years, Asaf had learnt to be wily. Of course he was bitter – how could he not be? But he had his wits. Each day, at his stall, he watched people come and go, busy with their day, blessed with their children, people who took it for granted that they could move from one place to another, dance, have sexual intercourse.

All Asaf had were his mobile phones. They sat there on his table, rows of them, plugged in and silently charging. When they came alive they beeped and twittered and sang. Within them lay the only power he had – the power to settle old feuds, to pay back his tormenters … and to make mischief.

It was weeks later that Ernestine discovered the truth – that Asaf had lied, that there was no message on her husband's phone, that the man had simply wanted to take revenge on his sister. Why had he chosen Ernestine and her husband, a respectable, hard-working couple who loved each other? What had they ever done to him?

She never understood, because she was a woman without vanity. It never crossed her mind that her strong, unadorned beauty had inflamed him, and that he was bitterly jealous of her marriage. For her, beauty was something she sold, rather than possessed herself.

And soon the whole episode was forgotten. For a few days later Ernestine's daughter Grace, who had been acting so strangely, drew her mother aside and told her that she was pregnant. The father was a taxi-driver who used to stop at her auntie's stall to eat her fried fish. He had promised to marry Grace but he was never seen again.

Poor Grace, so rigid and intransigent … and who, it transpired, didn't practise what she preached.