Black Sunday

by Tola Rotimi Abraham

  “If you sell water on the streets,” I continued, ignoring her, “young men wait until the bus is driving off. They do this so you can run after them. They love to watch breasts bounce.”

  ON THE DAY of the scheduled interview, when I finally made it to the little flat at the back of the Karamorose restaurant on Victoria Island, I was aghast to find at least thirty other girls auditioning for the same role.

  It was easy to feel immediately drained and defeated and, in that moment, I did, especially after I noticed that most of the girls auditioning spoke English with accents polished, it seemed to me, by international travel and private schools. Their sentences, as they spoke in loud whispers to one another, were cheery and bright, their diphthongs cleaner, glossier than mine.

  I did not know anyone at the radio station, Chill FM. My referral had been DJ Angro, a friend of a friend, one of the few boys who in recent times had made it out of our neighborhood. He was trying to give a fellow ghetto girl a leg up in this world. I had met him only once at this time. He was short and stocky, loud and enthusiastic, with prominent round eyes always red with wine or something stronger. He wore his “hair” in a hairless shine, a clean skin cut that aged him and contrasted with the baggy jeans and baseball jerseys he always wore to affect a well-traveled-young-person aesthetic.

  I liked the Chill FM offices. I liked the idea that I had made it to such an opportunity. DJ Angro had been calm and reassuring when he told me what to do at the audition.

  “Dress sexy, be confident, smell nice, and if you are offered something to drink, ask for water first,” he said. “If they insist, ask for something foreign and healthy, like green tea.”

  The job entailed everything I dreamed, a chance for the restoration of all we had lost. A sufficient salary working four shifts a week on air, four shifts off air. A furnished apartment in the gated Victoria Island neighborhood, for me to arrive early or sleep off late shifts. The job also included an allowance for clothes, for hair, for makeup. A glamour crew to help with celebrity interviews and public appearances, a driver to take me around the city.

  DJ Angro had said his bosses were Lebanese and so they were more interested in natural talent, unlike other owners of FM stations around Lagos who had become somewhat notorious for being more impressed by pedigree. I laughed as he told me many stories about talentless kids from wealthy families—offspring of diplomats and politicians, who, eager for jobs on the radio, had been humiliated during Chill FM auditions. Many people wanted to be on radio: it required less skill than movies or music, with about the same access to celebrity.

  I wanted the job so badly that it made me physically ill with longing. Not just because I wanted to make people laugh, but because radio stations were one of the few places in Lagos that did not care that I had dropped out of school at fourteen and barely made five credits in the GCE Bibike and I had written the year before. They were interested only in talent. The only other available profession with such lax entry-level requirements was stripping.

  As I waited to be interviewed, I sat on a chaise in the waiting area, watching a girl in a bright yellow midriff top sip water so delicately that it looked as if she was taking invisible sips, and I felt like I was about to scream. Whoever these women were, they were born to be stars. They were confident. They smelled like mothers who baked meat pies and made the sign of the cross over them when they sneezed, and fathers who had other kids’ fathers drive them around.

  A girl in a TM Lewin shirt with a boy’s haircut, her hair wet and slick like she had just showered, sat next to me. She smelled like old cigarette smoke and hair gel. She reached into a side pocket of her jeans and pulled out a new pack of Orbit gum, offering me one. I smiled gratefully at the kindness of her gesture; I was beginning to worry about how my mouth smelled after sitting quietly for over an hour.

  “The wrapping is still on,” I said.

  “I know. I was not really offering. You were just to say no thank you,” she said, laughing. She unwrapped the pack, took two sticks of gum out of the first row, and tucked the pack back into her pocket.

  As she chewed the gum with her mouth closed, her mouth twitching only a little at the corner, I wondered if the humming I could hear was coming from her or someone else. I was upset but smiling to keep from crying. For the purposes of this job, I was pretending to be twenty-one instead of my actual eighteen years, but next to this girl, I felt fourteen. I felt both alien and plain. It was as though I had accidentally sat at a T junction with my knees spread apart and everyone could see my lies and inexperience.

  She was doing nothing but sit there, chewing gum soundlessly, and I was unraveling.

  “You have the widest face I have ever seen on a not fat person,” I said to her suddenly, without thinking. My voice carried above the whispers; three other girls turned in our direction then immediately looked away.

  “Your cheeks are huge, you look like you have whole lemons stuck under there,” I continued.

  She stared at me, still calm, with only her widened eyes revealing that she had been surprised. But I was not even sure whether she was amused or annoyed.

  “Well, not everyone needs to be pretty, being cultured is often enough,” she replied.

  There were other girls in that room, but it seemed in that moment that it was just the two of us. I knew then that I did not mind not getting the job, as long as she, this girl with the boy’s haircut, was not the one to take it from me. I did not understand the rage I was feeling nor the discomfort I felt watching her get out of the chair to work the room, flamboyantly on display, a magician, mesmerizing anyone watching.

  She introduced herself over and over as Erica. She gave everyone rich, wordy, flattering compliments.

  “Your hair is so beautiful. It looks like it smells like fresh oranges,” she said to one.

  “Your eyebrows! Such a perfect arc. I am coming home with you for makeup classes,” she said to another.

  She acted like she was the hostess and all of us were guests at her home, like that wide waiting room with the leather bar stools and earthen sculptures of Yoruba goddesses and antique mirrors was hers, like she had seen the world, made her money, and gathered us here together to bask in her joy.

  I immediately made it my business to be outside every small group she was in, to work the room in the opposite direction to her, from the girls gathered closest to the elevator to the girls gathered nearest the director’s office.

  What I’d really wanted was to run away, to go home, to tell my sister that of course she was right, jobs like that were reserved for a certain type of girl, to admit that the false courage I had conjured to get me to the interview had evaporated and I was without cover.

  Instead, I steadied my heart, told myself that it was as good a time as any to become someone else. No one knows me here, I’d thought, no one knows I am a nobody.

  The girl Erica was a somebody, she had lived in Senegal, then France, then had gone to college in Florida. Her degree was in art appreciation and history. The person I decided to become temporarily, as a perfect counter to her cultured charm, was Keke, former child model and aspiring actress.

  It rained that day. I remember because some of the girls who came in later had water in their weave and Keke was there to console them with loud exaggerated sighs.

  “Your hair, your makeup, you must have spent so much time getting dressed,” I said.

  All my life until that day, I thought the effort it took to be mean without reason could poison me, that I would never be happy or comfortable with myself acting that way. What I discovered instead was how empowered I felt, talking to the other girls like that. A well-calculated snide remark said with a smile, a small laugh that made another uncomfortable. I even tried something I had seen on a TV show, saying darling at the end of every sentence, rolling that middle r, caressing it like a long-lost friend. All I could think of, apart from the desire to not lose to Erica, was my sister, Bibike, waiting at home for me to come back with good news.r />
  When it was my turn to interview, I went in as Keke. I walked into that interview room pulling my stomach in, all the way into my belly button, and pushing my chest out. I was smiling so wide I could taste the humid air.

  In the middle of rendering a highly edited version of my education and work history, the lead interviewer, a large man sitting at the center of the group, interrupted me.

  “Tell me something interesting. If you could change something about your life, what’d it be?” he asked.

  His voice, one I had heard too many times over the airwaves, startled me. It was difficult to imagine that this large, dimpled man, beautiful in a way that was almost feminine, was the possessor of the sexy baritone of nighttime radio. I had expected that Dexter, the British Nigerian who had revolutionized Nigerian radio, would be on the interview panel, but I had not expected my physical reaction to his dimpled smile.

  “To be clear,” he continued, “I am not talking about physical attributes, especially because they are outside your control.”

  “Dexter, is it okay I call you Dexter?” I asked.

  “Yes. Shoot,” Dexter said.

  “If I could change anything, I’d choose to not be a twin. Even though I love being a twin, and appreciate the intense connection I have with her, sometimes I wish I wasn’t a twin. It’s been difficult learning independence.” I said of all these things without thinking, still smiling.

  I had resisted by instinct the urge to talk about our parents leaving, about the unending challenges we had faced raising our brothers in a cesspit of a neighborhood, raising ourselves. I had been honest yet circumspect; if Bibike had known what I’d said, it’s possible she might have laughed. She also would have insisted that it was a great way to be evasive, introducing new information.

  But no, I had not been trying to evade. I was realizing for the first time my tendency to think always in terms of “us” instead of “me.” The shoes I wore were ours, the clothes ours, the parents who left without saying goodbye, ours.

  When we finally ended the interview and I freed my face from the burden of a smile, the sun was setting in the street below. To avoid the other girls milling around the elevators, exchanging numbers to keep up with who gets called back, I took the stairs to the floor below, then stopped to stare at a Ben Enwonwu painting in the hallway.

  I FELT A man’s shadow fall over the painting like the shade of a tree. He reached over and touched the painting’s edges, wiping off a speck of dust I had not noticed until he touched it.

  “We keep our replicas clean around here,” he said.

  The woman in the portrait was bare chested, her breasts, rendered without nipples, were lopsided and uneven, her eyebrows thin and shaped like a half moon, like Beyoncé in her “Check On It” video.

  “In the original, the woman is wearing a long-sleeved cardigan or something,” he said. “The original is called Portrait of a Girl.”

  “Are the eyes in both pictures the same?”

  I frowned as I listened to him. His deeper dimple broadened when he talked, making his face look lopsided, his smile artificial and forced. Perhaps it was just to me, I thought. Maybe to most other people, he was just a good-looking man with the face of a baby.

  “I don’t usually do this,” he said, interrupting me. “I promise you. Do you mind coming with me? I’d very much like to show you something.”

  “I guess I can spare a few minutes,” I said.

  I walked behind him down the hall, toward a narrow stairwell. On this new floor, we walked past three locked doors, stopping at the fourth. He opened it with a key card. It was the first time I had seen one used, and I immediately felt smaller and more vulnerable. The room was a similar size to the type the interview had been held in; this one, however, had been furnished like a studio efficiency. Through a balcony overlooking the busy street below, I watched several of the girls just ending their interviews get into their cars and drive themselves away.

  “What do you think about this?” Dexter said. He pointed at a sculpted head in the corner of the room. “I had this made as soon as I could afford it.”

  “Oh, that’s you,” I said, laughing at the absurdity of it.

  Dexter was no longer smiling. He was watching me, his eyes squinting with either concern for my sanity or anger at my effrontery.

  “It is very accurate,” I said.

  DEXTER EXCUSED HIMSELF, disappearing behind a closed door. I had not realized until then that the room had a smaller connected room. Outside, I saw Erica wave to someone before taking a sip from a bottle of water in her hand. Another girl stopped beside her and they began to talk.

  When Dexter reemerged, he saw what I was looking at. “One of those two girls is our new OAP,” he said.

  In the street below, a third girl walked up to them. I watched as Erica hugged each girl and then walked away.

  “Which of them is it?” I asked.

  “The one who walked away,” Dexter said.

  When I said nothing, he continued.

  “It was an easy decision really, she was head and shoulders better, the most qualified.”

  In that moment, I remembered the chapter in the Bible, the one the night before Jesus was crucified, when Judas walked up to kiss him right at the time that the soldiers came to get him.

  JESUS, WHO HAD always known who would betray him, seemed to me strangely hurt by the fact that Judas kissed him. I had always found that part of the story hard to believe. It seemed to me an exaggeration, included for dramatic effect, something to be easily memorized and repeated by children all over the world in Easter plays.

  Judas, are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss?

  I stepped away from the window and sat on the armchair by the side of the bed. Dexter sat next to me and helped take my shoes off.

  “Is there anything you can do about that?” I asked him, surprised by how shaky my voice sounded.

  I HAD OVERESTIMATED this invitation to Dexter’s privacy. Maybe it was an underestimation of how male desire worked, maybe none of it was true, maybe Dexter had choreographed several moments like this in the past. There had once been another girl, it seemed to me easily possible, and she had wanted a job almost as much as Dexter had wanted her.

  “There is nothing I can do, Keke,” he said. And as he spoke, my heartbeat sped up like a car losing control on a racetrack. “I do not want to lie to you. It is done.”

  Dexter reached down to my lap and stroked the top of my thigh, right above my knee. It was a slow, oddly calming motion, and we sat there in quiet for a few minutes.

  “Are you really sure?” I asked. “Is this what you brought me down here to tell me?”

  I WAS CRYING freely, crying ugly, the tears and snot and shoulders shuddering type of crying.

  Dexter continued stroking my thigh, murmuring in what he assumed were calming whispers.

  “Don’t cry, baby girl. I promise you things will work out just fine,” he said. “I’m here for you. Let me help you. Everyone starts from somewhere, this is just the intermission, not the end.”

  The room had gotten quiet and uncomfortable. The street sounds had lessened and the dark of night was beginning to cover us all.

  “Do you know that all three Gospels report the kiss of Judas but give different versions of how Jesus dealt with it?” I asked him, even though I knew he did not understand the parallels my mind was drawing or my tendency to exaggerate my hurts.

  “Well, I am not sure I ever paid attention to that,” he said.

  “Only Luke records, ‘Are you betraying the Son of Man with a kiss,’” I said.

  “What do the others write?” he asked.

  “Matthew says something that can be read as completely opposite to Luke. According to Matthew’s gospel, Jesus said to Judas, ‘Friend, why have you come?’ It may seem that in Luke’s version Jesus was surprised about the kiss, but in Matthew, he was surprised that Judas actually went through with the betrayal,” I continued.

  Dexter was
patient, if still a little stunned by the direction our conversation had taken.

  “Maybe both recordings are accurate. Maybe each disciple just wrote what they were absolutely certain happened. Maybe we are to read them all to get the full picture instead of looking for inconsistencies,” he said.

  “I guess so.”

  “Are you going to be all right?” he asked.

  “I just don’t understand all of this, why I am here, why you told me Erica got the job,” I said.

  “I was hoping to spend some more time with you,” he said. “Getting to know you, figuring you out. Your interview was an act, it seemed. I was curious about the real you.”

  I do not remember exactly why, but I started laughing at this point. Maybe it was the audacity of it all. Maybe it was my inner mind confronting the utter folly of my permutations. Of course, Dexter wanted me, that part was obvious. I had imagined some negotiation, a quid pro quo, while he had planned to rely solely on seduction.

  “Keke, are you okay?” he asked.

  “I am fine. I promise you I am not losing my mind right now.”

  Dexter shuffled around the room. I wondered if it was strange that I was still sitting in the chair I had been in since I followed him up the stairwell into this room. I shut my eyes and listened to what he was up to. He seemed to be walking the length and breadth of the room without direction, like someone in one those Nollywood movies, demonstrating their mulling over an idea.

  “Have you ever listened to my Sunday morning show?” he asked eventually.

  “How to Receive from God? Yes, I have,” I said.

  “Do you know it has been sponsored by Pastor David of New Citizens’ Church for the past year?” he asked.

  There was no way for Dexter to know of my history with Pastor David or my family’s experiences with his church.

  “I did not know that,” I said instead.

  “Would you like to take over that show?” he asked.

  “Really? How would that work?”

  “Well, I will have to convince the station to hire you as off-air staff,” he said. “You can help set up the studio, edit interviews, follow up with advertisers, but on Sundays, you would do the church show.”