By Ayobami Adebayo Download pdf epub html
After my mother deserted him, my father worked hard to become the man she wanted him to be. He learnt how to drive a bus, somehow managed within a month to overcome what he had often told my mother was a paralysing fear of the steering wheel. Before she left, he did odd jobs at the motor park. He collected and calculated bus fares. He arranged travelling bags in the boots and on the roofs. The vehicles then swayed out of the park and headed to Lagos, leaving him behind to scream at the top of his voice for passengers to fill the next bus. Lagos! Lagos straight! Eko Akete! One more chance! E remain one person! There was always just one more seat left to be filled at the motor park even if the bus was empty.
When she was still my father’s wife, mother had a table in the corner of the park. She sold cheap rum, gin and cigarettes to drivers, passengers and men like Baba who wandered around doing odd jobs or nothing. By noon, she left the park to start her afternoon business. She sat in the sun and sprinkled fishes with yam flour before frying them in hot oil. She used the cheapest fish available, the ones that left a bad aftertaste and could give you diarrhoea if your stomach was weak.
Mother never complained about her work, the stinky fish, and the drunkards who tried to fondle her breasts. She was proud of all her businesses, of the fact that no one could ever call her lazy. But she griped constantly about the afternoon sun. She said that her beauty was melting away because of all that sun, and because my useful-for-nothing father did not provide money for good food, or body cream, or powder.
My father started out by driving a bus that was not his own. It was painted white in front, green at the sides, and pink at the back. On all sides, the faded paint was peeling off to reveal rusty metal and tiny holes. Whenever I rode alone with him, it rattled like something about to unravel. It didn’t rattle so much when it was filled with passengers, with five bodies cramped into a space meant for three cushioned by each other’s sweaty flesh, for then that feeling of being tossed about in a tin jar was not so strong. A couple of times, the sliding door fell off when the bus was about to leave for Lagos. This happened whenever my father didn’t secure the door with a rope so that it couldn’t be opened without someone loosening the rope from the outside. Some passengers complained about being sealed off into the bus without an escape route in case of an emergency. At least, my father would tell them, at least the bus has a door.
Every morning, father wiped the windscreen with a towel, he often paused to smile at his reflection in the cracked screen. It was a good thing that my mother had left him before he got the bus, this display of affection would have irritated her . Her scorn would have spilled over and swallowed his smile. At night, he returned the keys to the Alhaji who owned the bus and gave him seventy percent of his proceeds. Thirty percent of that was part payment for the bus. By my father’s calculations, it would take him about two years to make full payments. He talked a lot about all that he would be able to do once he owned the bus. He became loquacious after my mother left, for then there was enough room for his words. He would talk till he fell asleep in the only chair in our room, his mouth still open. It would be a year before he slept on the tattered mattress he once shared with her.
The proceeds from mother’s Saturday business could have cut the time needed to pay for the bus by a year. On Saturdays, we washed clothes and bathrooms in the university staff quarters. There were many people there who could not bear to scrub their bathroom floors or wash their own clothes. My mother and I went every Saturday and made more money on our knees than she made from all other businesses combined. This was how my mother met Dr., the man she left my father for, and Dr. Mrs, the woman whose husband our neighbours said she snatched.
I did not see my mother for a month after she went to live with Dr. Mrs’s husband. In that time, I thought about Dr. Mrs. Her left hand and the way her wedding ring, a golden band embedded with tiny stones, sparkled when she pointed to a corner of her living room that I needed to clean. I wondered if it slid off her finger as the plane snapped in two and passengers already ablaze crashed to the earth like falling stars. Could it be lying somewhere in the forest, still sparkling, safe? Or was it also found two days later when the emergency response team located the plane. Two days later because they could not search at night, their helicopters were bad, did not have night lights, there were no helicopters at all or something like that. Two days later when the few people who might have survived were already dead and those who died instantly were charred and bloated beyond recognition. The president’s spokesman assured the nation of the president’s dismay at the turn of events. Mr Spokesman informed us, again and again as if we did not know, that the president even shed tears at the crash site. And to those who complained about how long the search and rescue took, he reminded us that at least, the bodies were found. He sounded as though he expected some form of gratitude for the president’s tears. It was impossible to tell who he expected to be grateful, the dead or their relatives.
When my mother learnt that Dr. Mrs. had been in the plane that fell from the skies, she removed the oil she was heating for her afternoon business from the three stones that served as our stove and doused the fire with a full bucket of water. She went to have her bath, screamed my name when she was halfway through and asked me to bring her some salt. I took the bowl of salt to the wooden shed that was our bathroom and handed it to her through the hole in the door. Through the hole, I watched her scrub her body with the salt. When she was done bathing, she slathered her body with Vaseline. She rubbed it into every inch of skin that her hands could reach and when she was done with those parts, she asked me to rub it into her back. She did not put on mourning clothes, she did not wear the only black dress she owned. Instead, she put on a floral print dress she had bought second hand. It was made of chiffon and when she stood in the sun, you could see the curves of her thighs. She did not have shoes, and when she was done powdering her face and rubbing Vaseline on her lips till they shone like something dipped in oil, she stood barefoot on the dirt floor of our room, staring at the only footwear she owned, a pair of rubber slippers that were worn thin at the heels. She muttered something to herself and a single tear slid down her cheek. It was the only time I saw her shed tears.
“See my life.” She pointed at the worn slippers. “See my life, that man has spoilt it.”
That man was my father, the man who had impregnated her when she was sixteen. She always put it that way; he impregnated me, as though she had nothing to do with it. As if it was something that happened while she had travelled and somehow left her body behind for my seventeen year old father to impregnate. She made it clear that she could have had a much better life if she had never met my father, if she had never gotten pregnant and dropped out of school. That day as she shed tears over a pair of worn slippers, I felt responsible for her misery. So I offered her my school sandals. They were not pretty but they were newer than her slippers.
She hugged me before she left. “Tell that man that I have gone to console Dr. over his wife’s death.” She touched my cheeks but did not look into my eyes. In spite of the salt, her hands still smelt like rotten fish.
“When will you be back?”
“Soon,” she said.
Soon was a month later. She came back unannounced one Sunday afternoon. My father was at home, he did not work on Sundays, because it was God’s day. My mother did not believe in God or His days, she carried on with her businesses every day of the week. That Sunday, I hissed when Dr.’s car parked in front of our building. He was not in the car. He had sent his driver to bring her down. The driver rushed out to open the door for my mother and followed her into the house like a bodyguard. From the moment her feet, encased in red stilettos, touched the floor, her mouth did not stop moving. She started with a song of thanksgiving to her head which had delivered her from hell and set her feet in heaven. She sounded hoarse. Her voice was made to hawk, not to sing.
She continued to sing as she packed a few items into a small travelling bag. She threw most of her things out of the door into the front yard where our neighbours had gathered with their children. She sang something by Ebenezer Obey, something about her enemies having their eyes plucked out by a big fish. There was a strange expression on my father’s face. It looked like a deformed smile. He sat like a fool on his tattered bed, his eyes shut, his hands balled into fists as she continued to sing. He held himself perfectly still as if he was glass and would shatter if he moved at all.
“I forgot to bring your sandals,” she said to me. “What have you been wearing to school?” It was all she cared about where I was concerned, school, my education, my grades, the university, the potential I had to become the woman she could have been. It was all that mattered.
I did not answer because she was not listening, she was about to ask the important questions.
“How are your studies?”
“They are fine Ma.”
“What did you score on your last test?”
“Twenty five out of twenty five Ma.”
“Are you still first position in your class?”
“Yes Ma.”
She always spoke to me in English, warned me never to get used to speaking Yoruba like my father who acted like a man who had never been to school. Once, she made me hold my lips together with my thumb and index finger for five hours because I had spoken to her in Yoruba.
“Face your books and buy new sandals,” she said as she pressed a thousand naira note into my palm.
After she left, I ran out of the room, past the neighbours who had gathered in the front yard. I did not stop when I stepped into puddles of water in the street. I did not stop till I got to Ola’s house. When I was with Ola, I tried to judge him through my mother’s eyes, see if she would approve. She had told me to be smart and not open my legs to useless men. I never asked if it meant that I could open them to a man who was not useless, a man like Ola, an Engineer, a youth corper who already had enough money to rent a fine room and buy a television and a fan, men who could never be poor like my father.
It was hard to press my knees together when Ola played with my hair, twisting the braid at the end of each cornrow, it was hard to breathe then, it was hard to do anything but feel. Feel things that tingled like love. My mother never spoke to me about love. I don’t think she ever believed in it. She believed only in the stupidity that made her lay on her back for that useless man also known as my father. Ola did not make me feel stupid. With him, I felt sated, as though I would never need to eat again.
After my mother left us, I visited Ola’s place every day. I had a copy of his keys and let myself in if he was not home, sometimes I took my school books and studied them. He owned a lot of news magazines, and when I got tired of studying, I would read one of them or sleep in his bed. I spent most of the time sleeping if he wasn’t in. It was the only time I got to sleep in a bed.
Ola was home that Sunday afternoon, his door slightly ajar. He lay in bed, asleep. I bolted the door before climbing to lie behind him. I pressed my body against his back and whispered in his ear. He did not stir. It was easier to talk to him while he slept and could not hear the terrible things I said about my parents. I spoke for almost an hour, then I shut my eyes and willed myself to sleep. Baba had already left for the motor park when I returned home the next morning. He never asked me where I had spent that night.
About a week later, my mother sent Dr. Mrs’s former driver who was now her driver to our house. It was a Saturday afternoon and my father was away in Lagos. The driver informed me that my mother had sent him to pick me up for a visit. I sat in the front seat beside him as the car glided through the streets and there was no rattling even when the car hit potholes. We drove into the university through Road One. There was always something strange, something abnormal about going into the campus. The long stretches of tarred road totally uninterrupted by a single pothole; the rows of trees that lined the sides of the streets made me feel as though I had stepped into a dream. There were traffic lights that worked and zebra crossings where drivers actually stopped for pedestrians to cross. In all the years my mother and I went there to clean, scrub and iron, I could count the number of times when there was a power outage. Power was usually restored almost immediately. Yet, Dr. would complain about the heat if the power went out for more than ten minutes in his house. It was as though he did not know that outside the university gate, people went without power for weeks and months.
My mother was one of them now, the people who could not bear to scrub toilets or live without light. She was standing on the lawn when we arrived at the house. She wore a pair of blue jeans and a sleeveless green blouse. I did not join her on the lawn when I alighted from the car. She smiled as she approached me as though we shared some secret joy. Her cheeks were rounder, her smile wider than I had ever seen. Her laughter too had put on weight. I followed her into the house and was surprised to see that there were still pictures of Dr. Mrs on the wall. There was a new picture though, it was a picture of Dr. and my mother dressed in outfits sown from the same lace material.
She offered me food, amala and ila alasepo. The ila alasepo filled the soup bowl to the brim, two chunks of meat swam in the stew.
“I will never cook fish again in my life,” she said as we sat down at the dining table to eat. She dipped her fingers into her soup bowl and let them stay in the ila alasepo for a while. The stew in her bowl was more than the quantity she used to cook for us in one week when she was still my father’s wife.
She asked me how I was doing. “Se you are not following any foolish boy about?”
I wrapped my fingers around the glass of cold water she had placed beside my plate and wondered why boys always had to be foolish. My mother had warned me to never allow a boy to sit too close to me, never to let them touch my arms, or my breasts. She had assured me that they would want to, she had prepared me for Ola’s lust. But she had said nothing about my own desires and her silence made me believe I was incapable of having them. I did not know that I would want Ola to kiss my belly button and was surprised when I asked him to. I was not prepared for the fierceness of my desires.
“I have a boyfriend,” I said. The glass cup was sweating; cold water trickled down my palm. “He wants me to get pregnant so that he can marry me.”
She choked on her food, held her throat with both hands and started coughing. Clumps of amala coated with her spittle fell onto the blue tablecloth. She breathed through her mouth for a while after she stopped coughing. “What did you say?”
“I may be pregnant already.”
In her moment of distress, she reverted to Yoruba. “Ori e yi ni? You have been staying out in the sun? Is that why your brain is melting and you are talking rubbish?”
I pushed some amala into my mouth.
She slapped her thigh. “How did this happen? How?”
How? That Sunday afternoon, with my breasts pressed against Ola’s back and my eyes shut, I couldn’t will myself to sleep. I was restless. I couldn’t stop thinking about that afternoon, my mother with her shiny red shoes. My father’s deformed smile, the smile of a man who had started trying to late to catch up, a man who would never have been enough anyway. He had been the dullest in their class, my mother reminded him of that all the time. She said he would have had no future even if he had finished secondary school. She on the other hand could have been anything; she was at the top of the class. She was going to be a doctor, a Dr. Mrs. I couldn’t sleep thinking about all that. So I woke Ola up. He was a deep sleeper. I had to sprinkle cold water on his face. That was how it happened. I straddled him. I unbuttoned my blouse slowly, watched his eyes dilate as he realised that this time I wouldn’t push his head away from my breast. That is how it happened.
“Have you lost your brain?”My mother screamed. She was on her feet, quivering with rage. “You want to spend your life frying fish in a foolish boy’s back yard?”
I drank some water. “He is not a boy. He is a man.”
She slapped me, “Don’t talk when I am talking. So you want to get pregnant with a useless child? You want to stop school? Omo osi. Stupid stupid child. Omo osi.”
I rubbed my cheek and drank more water.
She slapped me again. The glass cup fell to the floor and shattered at our feet.
I stood up and walked away from her, stood in front of the new picture, the one where she and Dr. held hands and grinned at the camera.
She came to stand beside me, still quivering. “You are ruined. No university? You are ruined.”
I studied the picture, surprised that they looked so happy. My father had once said my mother was not a woman who could be happy.
I turned to face her. “You now have a driver,” I said. “Did you go to the university? You also have a garden. Did you go to the university?”
Then I slapped her face. Twice.
I ran to the door before she could react. I staggered when I pushed it open, but I did not fall. I raced through the garden, trampled on her flowerbeds. She called my name as I neared the road. She called me again and again. I kept running, away from her.
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Ayobami Adebayo was born in 1988 . Her work was highly commended in the 2009 Commonwealth short story competition. In 2012, she was a writer in residence at Writers Omi International (Ledig House), New York. Her first novel, Stay With Me was shortlisted for the Kwani? Manuscript prize.
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