by Toni Kan
‘Defy your father and marry me,’ Seun begged me one Saturday night, when I had defied my father’s warning to stop seeing him.
We had just finished making feverish love, our first time in over a month, and were basking in the heady afterglow. ‘You know I can’t,’ I said.
‘Why can’t you?’ he asked, getting up and sitting cross- legged on the bed, his flaccid manhood dangling between his feet.
‘My father will kill me,’ I said, reaching out to touch his manhood, but he slapped my hand off.
‘This is serious,’ he said with a stern look as he covered his nakedness with a pillow.
‘So you really think he will kill you?’ Seun asked and I nodded.
‘You don’t know my father. He can be loving and playful, but you don’t want to know what he can do when you cross him.’
‘Well, what if he can’t find you?’ Seun asked, favouring me with a funny look.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What if you defy your father, then still go on with your life because he can’t touch you?’ Seun asked, staring intently now and leaving me with a strange feeling.
‘I don’t understand. How can I go on with my life without my father touching me?’ I asked, and then he said the scariest thing you could tell a young girl who was not even twenty yet:
‘Let’s elope. You know, run so far away they will never find us. We can start a new life.’ But I was shaking my head and muttering ‘No, no, no’ under my breath. But the more I shook my head, the faster he spoke as if we were in a heated competition to see who would win.
‘We can go to America or the UK. I told you I was planning to leave this country before I met you. We can go there. I have friends and brothers. We won’t lack where to stay. I can get you a visa. Please, let’s get so far away they won’t see us. Your father will miss you but after a few years, by the time you send back pictures of our children, his grandchildren, the man will come round. Please, let’s go,’ he begged, taking my hands and looking up into my tear-filled eyes.
‘I can’t run away, Seun. I just can’t. I will die. Please, think of something else. Something that will make sense, something I can do and not go mad. Please.’
I cried so hard that when I got home, I had a blinding headache that turned into a migraine and then blasted malaria that led to a four night stay at the hospital. It was on the third day that I realised what was ailing me. It wasn’t malaria and it wasn’t migraine. It was heartache. The words Seun spoke as I stepped out of his house had reverberated so loudly they left me sick.
‘I love you Sylvia but I can’t wait. I am leaving Nigeria for good.’
Those words were like sharp knives digging into my heart and making it bleed and, if I thought I had suffered while I was in the hospital, nothing prepared me for what I would get into when I left the hospital and came home.
As soon as my father, who brought me home, retired to his bedroom, I stole out of the house through the back door and ran all the way to the bus stop before getting on a bus that took me to Seun’s house.
He wasn’t home. The house was locked and there was no sign of his car. After waiting until it was dark, I resolved to go and see him at his office on Monday. I got to the office and was told that Seun was on leave and wouldn’t be back for two more weeks.
To say that I was devastated would be to put it mildly. I didn’t have a clue what to do. I still don’t know how I managed to rise and walk out of that office and find my way home.
Back home, I moped, my mind full of desperate thoughts. I remembered how we met, his tentative questions, how he kept staring at me in the rear view mirror and the way he always managed to change the conversation so that he could dwell on me. I remembered his deep laughter and the jokes he told. I remembered my screams and the tears of joy and pleasure I shed after I climaxed that first time.
When Seun didn’t show up at work after two weeks, I realised with certainty that I had lost him and that my life would never be the same again.
They say time heals but what they never say is that time is a bad healer. It leaves hideous scars. I had those scars, and the thing most people don’t know about scars is that they are masks. They disguise things, covering up things that bleed and fester.
‘Sylvia?’
The voice was low, deep and tentative and I almost did not turn. It sounded like a young man calling out a woman’s name and not being sure whether the lady is who he thinks she is. I had known such timid, unsure men as a young woman and I couldn’t think of who could be calling me. So, I kept walking, but the caller must have noticed my slight hesitation, the pause that was no longer than a heartbeat and so he followed me outside and called me again.
This time, I stopped and turned. A man was standing about two metres away from me. He was tall, dark and handsome in a greying, mature way. He was dressed casually, in brown chinos and a blue tee shirt.
‘Sylvia,’ he said again and this time there was no question mark behind the name. His voice was saying, ‘So, it’s really you!’ and I stared, unsure of who he was or what he expected me to say.
Then, as he approached, something clicked in my brain and I began to peel off the cloak the years had garbed him in: the grey hairs, the wrinkles, the crows’ feet around the smiling eyes. The man standing before me with a smile crinkling his eyes, was no other than my darling Seun, the first man I had ever loved and whom, I realised with a jolt as I dropped my bag and rushed into his arms, I had never stopped loving.
He hugged me tightly until my ribs ached. Then he was holding me away from his body, his eyes probing my face, trying to see what the years had done to me.
‘My God, you’re still an incredibly beautiful woman,’ he said.
‘The years have been kind to you, too,’ I said, appraising him with my eyes. Then, as his gaze dropped to my wedding finger, I said conversationally, ‘I thought you were abroad.’
‘I thought you were waiting for me,’ he countered and I laughed, suddenly overwhelmed by a ripple of joy.
‘Wait for you for twenty years? Do you know what you did to me when you disappeared without warning?’ I said, remembering my heartache, yet surprised at how easily I warmed towards him, as if it hadn’t been twenty years but a mere twenty days.
‘I went to America,’ he said and then paused. ‘This is a long story and I think I should tell it sitting down. Come, I know a quiet place.’
Still not sure whether I was dreaming or actually awake, I walked beside Seun as he led me to a Discovery Jeep that smelled new. He pulled the door open for me, then walked round to the other side.
We drove out of The Palms and turned left towards the British International School. We made a right turn and then drove a short distance to the VI extension. Seun stopped in front of a huge gate and beeped the horn. The gate swung open and we drove in.
The house was a breathtaking one-storey affair. It sat alone in the middle of large grounds with paving stones. The landscaping was lush and the flowers were already in bloom.
‘Welcome to Casa Seun.’
‘This is your house?’
‘Yes. I saw it two years ago on a visit and it took the owner nine months to agree to sell. It cost an arm and a leg but it is worth every penny. Let me give you the grand tour.’ He led me from the foyer into the living room; then we passed through his study and exited into the kitchen which had been done up in black.
‘It was white, but I changed it to black. Black has more character, don’t you think?’ he asked as he pulled open the refrigerator.
‘More masculine, you mean?’ I asked and he turned to me and smiled.
‘You haven’t changed. What shall it be? White wine or red?’
‘Red,’ I said, suddenly feeling exuberant and almost decadent.
Seun uncorked the bottle, poured, then handed me a glass.
‘To love,’ he said and I echoed him.
After he had shown me the guest room, which was almost a full house on its own, we continued the t
our upstairs. There were four rooms upstairs and we entered the master bedroom through a well-equipped home gym.
‘This is my retreat,’ he said, waving his hand to take in the tastefully furnished bedroom and spilling some wine in the process.
‘Easy,’ I said, wondering whether he had been drinking before we met at The Palms.
‘I’m drunk on joy,’ he said, laughing as if he had read my thoughts. Then he set the glass and bottle down, reached out and took my glass and put it down, and then pulled me to him and kissed me.
I would be lying if I say I didn’t expect it, if I say I didn’t want it or that I hadn’t been looking forward to him kissing me. I was curious to see whether it would be the same, whether his body would still melt into mine like it did twenty years before, whether my heart would still beat and flutter like it used to.
It did. My body tingled and caught fire as he kissed me and his hands went to my breast. I moaned as he found my nipple and tweaked. Then I let him carry me to his bed and kissed him back, hungrily, unashamedly, as he divested me and his finger found my wetness and stroked.
Seun and I made love that afternoon and once again I was a young woman, a virgin touched for the very first time and I was crying and screaming when he brought me to a shattering climax.
I fell asleep, lying in the crook of his arms. Time had ceased to matter, to make sense. I lay there, naked and without shame as if it was the most natural thing to do, sniffing his masculine scent, feeling his returning hardness against the soft flesh of my buttocks and feeling so incredibly alive all over.
And I would have lain there forever, waking up to make love to him like a desperately thirsty woman drinking from the cup of love he held up, if my phone had not begun to ring.
I reached into my handbag and dug it out. It was my husband.
I am forty-one years old. I am the wife of a kind, loving and gentle man. I am the mother of two children, a boy and a girl. I have a good job, live in a good home and I would say that I am happy and content.
So, why I am doing the crazy things I have been doing for weeks now? Why am I feeling deliriously happy and deliciously naughty? Why am I tingling all over and feeling wet in strange places? Why am I feeling so delinquent, like an eighteen-year-old who has just lost her virginity?
‘Maybe it’s a mid-life crisis,’ I said to Auntie Bibi, trying to effect a serious demeanour but failing woefully as that smile, the kind my dead mother used to describe as the “I-know-something-you-don’t-know smile,” kept colouring my face bright.
‘Mid-life what?’ she asked and then launched into rapid fire Igbo. ‘My people say ‘why should I pity a big head when I have no plans of buying him or her a cap?’ I don’t know why I am still talking to you, but I’m sure it must be that fried rice I ate in your house two months ago. You’ve been such a naughty woman that I should be reaching for a whip to flog some sense into you.’ Auntie Bibi started pacing around her office.
I watched her: her small, sure steps, the solid calves that appeared and disappeared as she moved, the serious black shoes she had on. I trailed her with my eyes: her regal bearing, her straight back, the black, polka-dotted silk dress, and I wondered how people could go through life so seriously, without a thought for the happiness that was possible if only they dared to look outside the shuttered windows of their lives, if only they tried to jump out of the constricting box of conformity fate had placed them inside. I looked from Auntie Bibi to the family portrait on her neat desk. She was seated with her husband and four children, two boys and two girls and wondered how people could live with such ordinariness, such strict compliance with things, such quotidian contentment with lives lacking in excitement.
Her husband’s face was serious, the face of a barely literate but forward-looking Igbo man who had let his wife reach the pinnacle of educational excellence. I looked at her children, the boys with the fixed and determined stares of men who knew their purpose in life and the path to tread. I looked at her daughters, women who knew that a woman’s life is one of duty and commitment to husband and family.
Auntie Bibi’s face was the face of an intelligent woman who could let herself fly as high as she wanted to but who had, nevertheless, decided to clip her wings to make her husband and children happy.
My life had been trundling down the same path. I had been content to be a housewife, to go to work and return home to cook and clean and care for my family. I was happy to make love – no, have sex– once or twice a month, happy to just get by in that way of life until my time came. Until I met Seun again.
‘You say your husband doesn’t beat you, he doesn’t womanise, and he doesn’t have children outside. He provides well. Yet, you have been having sex with a stranger on a daily basis for the past how many days?’ she said, her serious face bearing down on mine.
‘Aunt Bibi, he is not a stranger. I’ve known him since…’
‘Excuse me, my dear. A man you haven’t seen for over thirty years is a stranger,’ she snapped.
‘I saw him last twenty years ago, not thir..’ I began but she raised a hand and silenced me.
‘Twenty or thirty. What is the difference, eh? What is the difference between where the baby comes from and where the shit comes from, eh? When a woman begins to behave the way you have done, people always ask how the husband treats her at home. Maybe he drove her into another man’s arms because he didn’t care for her enough. But you, there’s no reason. Other than that you needed to scratch and keep scratching a stupid itch every woman learns to ignore.
‘You think we don’t want to do the same thing, too, to step out of our marriage and go wild? You think I don’t want to do or haven’t thought about doing that so many times I have lost count? But you think about your family, about what you have, what God has blessed you with and you say “Is this madness, this hunger, this lust” - because that’s what it really is - “enough to make me jeopardise what I already have?” It is that thought that helps us keep our legs together, that makes us avert our eyes when other men ogle us, and go back home to our staid and boring husbands when men with fire in their loins are making us sweat with their wanton stares,’ she said, then continued her pacing.
Sitting there watching her pace around the room, I was suddenly thankful and relieved. I was not a loose and useless woman, after all. I was actually normal, just like every other woman walking on the street, sitting at their boring desks in their dreary offices, lying inert under their hard-breathing husbands and feeling nothing where it matters.
All I had done differently was, instead of banishing the thoughts that had turned to cobwebs in my head the moment I hugged Seun that Saturday, I had let them bud. I had taken action. I had done something with them. That was all I had done.
And that evening as I went home, I was thanking Auntie Bibi in my heart. When Seun had asked me to leave my husband and children and follow him to America I had been too deliriously happy not to say yes. But when I got home and thought about it, it felt all wrong. They had done nothing to make me want to abandon them. So why should I deliberately hurt them?
‘We lost a chance to be happy once. Let’s not lose it again,’ Seun had said. ‘Let’s go. Tell them you are travelling for another seminar or something. You went last year so no- one will raise eyebrows. Then tell them you won’t come back when you get to the US.’ He was bending to tickle my erect nipple with the tip of his tongue.
‘They will be mad for a while, but they will get over it. But if you don’t, they will be happy and you will be sad for ever.’ ‘You sound so American. Africans don’t do such things,’ I said with eyes clouded with tears.
‘And that’s because Africans pretend a lot. We never say what we mean, nor mean what we say.’
Seun leaves in a month’s time. I have been seeing him and having sex with him almost every day since we met. My husband and kids do not suspect a thing. And why should they? I have been a dutiful wife and doting mother all these years. The evening my husband called, I told hi
m I was having car problems, and now I have taken leave at work so I can spend my days with Seun while my husband thinks I am carrying out research at The British Council.
Last night, Seun gave me back my international passport and there was a return ticket inside.
‘Tell me you will come with me and I will confirm a seat for you immediately. I lost you once and I don’t want to lose you again.’
I have my passport in my bag and I can picture life in America as Seun’s wife in a big house where we’ll make love every day. I can see long, languorous days at the beach and nights at the cinema or theatre. But I can also picture my husband, sad and grieving and my children cursing me in their hearts in a house that no longer knows laughter.
I have made my choice. The sound of my own laughter sounds better to my own ears.
The Harbinger
No one remembers now what he did before our fathers went to war.
All we remember is that he was the one who brought bad news. When his black, beat-up 504 trundled into a street in the barracks, all the children and women whose fathers and husbands had gone to war would shut their eyes and pray that his car did not sputter to a stop in front of their house.
He was the Harbinger.
I remember when he first arrived in the barracks. It was the day after I turned sixteen, two days after Meredith had let me deflower her as an early birthday present because she was set to go home for her grandfather’s burial.
I remember because I’d gone to see Rita, who lived two houses away from Meredith. She had also promised to sleep with me as a belated birthday present. Her family would be at church, she said, and she had feigned malaria in order to stay at home.
I had just taken off my clothes and was fooling with Rita’s bra strap when we heard the knock and froze.
‘Jesus!’ I said. ‘You told me they went to Kingdom Hall.’
