by TJ Benson
Sweet Pea told Shariff on the morning after the first dinner with them that she saw Sarai in a dream. ‘Is this normal? So soon?’
He laughed. ‘Maybe it is a sign that you two will become inseparable friends.’
They did become inseparable friends.
They gossiped and giggled in the kitchen over a steaming pot while Shariff showed Sweet Pea’s paintings to the professor. Shariff never knew what they talked about and he began to fear that Sarai would inspire Sweet Pea to leave him for the outside world. She kept suggesting they paint the walls white, replace the dreadful green-grey cushions, and taught them how to use the record player. Soon their house sang with the Otis Redding and Nina Simone and Frank Sinatra and Fela and Onyeka Onwenu LPs gifted to them. Their weekend visits became regular and Sweet Pea fried akara while Shariff made pap. Sundays were for jollof rice. Sarai was always carrying Max in her arms, couldn’t bear for him to crawl, and one Sunday Shariff penetrated their kitchen conversation to say, ‘If you don’t put him on the ground he will never learn how to walk.’
She apologised and said something about onions getting in her eyes and escaped to the bathroom.
Sweet Pea scolded him. ‘Haba, Shariff, they have been trying to have children for years!’
‘I am sorry. Let me go talk to her husband.’
‘Typical. Hurt a woman and you cannot go and apologise to her abi?’
Prof was admiring the paintings in the studio as usual.
Shariff sat down on her stool. ‘I might have said something wrong.’ And he told him, leaving his motives for entering the women’s conversation. Prof laughed at his politeness and said yes, they had been wanting babies for a year now and that she was his seventh wife.
‘What did you do with the others?’ Shariff asked, then caught himself when he saw the look on the man’s face. ‘I mean how—’
‘They all died.’
‘That’s impossible.’
Prof shrugged and raised his hands in the air. ‘Welcome to my life.’ And that was how he began telling stories of his London affairs. He was interupted when the voices of the women, now in the bathroom, became amplified.
‘My father didn’t allow such o; we never relaxed our hair. Kai, this thing is burning o!’
‘Don’t worry, my dear, I will soon wash it out now and set it. Everything is in my bag. I just pray your son will not finish eating all the rollers.’
‘But-but, how did you do it all over again?’ asked Shariff. ‘I don’t have the strength of mind. I would have been done with women after the first three. My heart would be too broken to fall for another woman.’
‘Ah, but what is a broken heart,’ Prof said loudly, hands above his head as if in blessing, ‘but fallow ground? It actually gets easier. Most people harden their hearts; they fear the pain that comes when it ends and their fear is valid because they know it.’ He beat his hands on his chest. ‘I know it.’ His voice became almost a whisper. ‘You know, I went to visit one of these Pentecostal churches once.’
Shariff couldn’t hide his surprize.
‘Don’t worry, your father never knew. They told me I had a spirit wife …’ Then he jerked up and dusted off his trousers. ‘Sorry, we have to go.’
‘Sir, I am sorry if—’
‘No, it is fine. I am just not well. Sarai,’ he called, ‘let’s go.’
A few hours later, just after it became pitch black in the world and the surrounding space had shrunk, their Peugeot roared up to the door outside.
‘And you’re back,’ smiled Shariff, welcoming him in. ‘You forgot something?’
‘They killed him.’
The parlour went dead.
‘They killed who?’ Sweet Pea asked softly. ‘Who did they kill?’
‘Giwa. They killed him. Sarai is in the Peugeot. I think she is in shock.’
Sweet Pea rushed out of the house to the car. Shariff turned back from the window where he could see her pulling Sarai out of the car into an embrace. ‘What happened?’ he asked, looking Prof in the eye.
‘They letter-bombed him, they killed him. He was going to expose them and they killed him. I knew something was wrong. I knew. But you people don’t have news in this house.’
The door creaked open. Sweet Pea came in cradling the silently weeping Sarai.
‘I am so sorry; I shouldn’t be crying in your house,’ said Sarai.
‘Nonsense.’
‘Look,’ said Prof, ‘we need your help. People are marching and blocking roads and all that. I need to make arrangements for us to leave the country. Please drive her to our hotel in Barnawa. I am going to see friends in Abuja. Don’t worry, she’ll know that to do.’
‘But Prof, why don’t you spend the night na? Like you said, it is dangerous out in this night.’
‘Have you not heard anything I’ve said? The country is in a hot mess. People will point fingers. Closed files will be reopened. I need to get her out of here. We need to get out of here!’
Shariff would drive Sarai to the hotel near where they lived, a building owned by their white father. He kissed Sweet Pea on the cheek and held her by her waist and told her he was going to be back and so she should wait up for him. He got into the car with Sarai and realised only when he turned the key in the ignition that he didn’t know how to drive. Sarai looked at him with her wet eyes widened in surprise.
‘I spent my upbringing reading books.’
She threw her head back and burst out laughing, so loud and high and true in the night that Prof had to open the door. ‘Is everything all right?’ he shouted.
‘Yes,’ Sarai shouted back.
The door was shut and they were left to the night and themselves. The night and the cold and the noise of insects.
‘It is not all right,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know how to drive.’
‘It is all right. I will teach you. Look under your feet: there are two levers. One is to move, the other is the brake. Can you guess which one is which?’
And soon they were pulling out of the Quarters, slowly. There were groups of people marching with torches, chanting things in the night as they jogged past, but there didn’t seem to be any danger.
Until Shariff ran them into a gutter. Sarai was too shocked to scream. He did the only thing he knew how to do in times of danger – pulled her into his arms as he would have done with Sweet Pea and whispered ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ as he would have whispered to Sweet Pea, soft and low, delicate and private. He had unknowingly, in his act of comfort and tenderness, taken them both to a certain place utterly strange and utterly familiar, so that when she lifted her head and looked up at him, he fell into her eyes.
There had been two fires in his life. He always thought of Sweet Pea not as the second fire, that destructive arson that had killed his first father and almost killed him, but as the first fire, the fire that had driven his people away from the colonial high road, the fire that began him, the fire in his loins. That night with Sarai in the Peugeot (a car shaped like a coffin as Sweet Pea liked to say when the couple wasn’t around), writhing in the car seat in spasms of bitter pleasure and feverish pain under her body as she claimed him, as groups of people with blazing torches protested the assassination of Dele Giwa by letter bomb in the night, Sarai brought back the memory of the second fire.
Since Sweet Pea would not have him the way she used to, since she would rather spend her nights out in the hammock, wrapped in a blanket of stars, than be with him, he spent those years in alcohol. Of course he couldn’t sleep in the bed alone; every notion of being alone in the world died that moment years ago when she had come in soaked from the rain and he had cut her hair. Some drunken nights when he slept on the chair she would come to unknot his wrapper but would leave as soon as she had taken what she came for. One night she forgot to leave and he buried his face in her bosom in half-sleep. The coldness of her nipples startled him fully awake and when he looked up at her face she was staring down at him. ‘Get off my areolas, go and get
a job, go!’
So he went and enlisted in the army. He had thought at first that he would be sanctioned and he was ready for whatever punishment was necessary to be absolved of the evil he had done to Sweet Pea, but soldiers were in demand for the peacekeeping. As he returned to his uniform and his gun, he thought of Prof and Sarai, and about his numb years of drinking. If he had been sober enough Shariff would have supported Sweet Pea to get custody of the girl, the only child the couple so desperate for children would ever have.
The truth was he was not ready to face the accusation sitting in Sweet Pea’s eyes, a vindictive sheen that never left, even when she rocked over or under him, a look that inspired terror, that said ‘You are the father of that child, that baby girl.’ And he couldn’t deny it because he was never asked, but if she were to ask he would have told her he hadn’t let things get so far with Sarai, for he could remember pushing her aside when he’d had enough of her mystique in the Peugeot that night, and Sweet Pea would have laughed her heartbreaking sad laugh and said ‘Men,’ before slipping away into an Emily Brontë collection of poetry or her paintings in the courtyard. How could he explain that his nonchalance was the purest form of denial? Besides, the baby girl had family; the mother’s brother who had been assumed dead at the hands of the military had not died. He lived in Minna. Why fight for a child that was not his?
But almost his, if not for the Miss World War, his for some years. Sweet Pea, in what he had first thought to be his punishment, had gone to bring the girl back from wherever she had been growing up. She was Sarai returned to life and each time he looked at her face he remembered what he had done to his wife.
The girl’s music was a butterfly trapped in her chest but André was determined to bring it out. The men who came to Taboo on Friday evenings came to experience the wonder of Ladidi: full afro in red lights, a short yellow dress, holding the mic like it was her saviour, begging it to let her lover who had gone to war come back home. Every man except one believed he was that lover. How could Max be so blind? But Shariff chided himself each time his thoughts went that way. He too should have been blind to Sarai that night Dele Giwa had died many years ago.
He seized the opportunity to inculcate in his son the use of the keyboard and to showcase some of Sweet Pea’s paintings. Within two months the already jam-packed bar was half-filled with foreigners: ambassadors, reporters and expatriates from Italy, France, New York and Barcelona on duty in Nigeria who left Lagos and Abuja to experience first the magnificence of Ladidi’s singing, the soul of André’s saxophone and the vibrancy of his wife’s watercolours. ‘This is an art-house,’ insisted a German half-drunk with burukutu as Shariff led him upstairs to a room to vomit. ‘This is a salon! An art movement!’
In the weeks after he had succeeded in defecting from the army to come back to the Madhouse they tried to bridge the distance of war. Sweet Pea would sleep beside him but he would be in the marshes of Liberia, watching with impotent rage as soldiers tried to determine the gender of an unborn child by disembowelling a pregnant woman. His sons seemed no different from the little boys who had been recruited to become child soldiers; Max or André would shoot him and he would wake up screaming. In this way Max and André took turns to shoot him out of his nightmares for the first few months after he returned. He befriended them during daytime, and tried to catch up with André, who was born while he was away fighting for peace. ‘André like the wine,’ Sweet Pea had explained over her shoulder, snatching the keys of the Peugeot when he’d asked, her smile touched with fondness and amusement. ‘I am going to do bookkeeping at the hotel. Cook something,’ and the door had snapped shut. He knew the work would keep her till some time close to midnight and he would have fallen asleep by then. He had succeeded in fleeing from war but it followed him back to his bedroom, where he relived the horrors during those endless nights.
He tried to cook for her and she tried to reach out to him. While he chopped waterleaf beside the sink one afternoon, she surprised him by sneaking into the house and covering his eyes from behind with her small palms. Before she could invent a baritone to ask him to guess who it was, he stepped on her feet and drove the vegetable knife into her side. Her screams and the blood dragged him out of Liberia to her in the kitchen and she saw the madness in his horrified eyes. She had to calm him down, try to be lucid with blood coming out of her mouth. ‘Go and get the doctor. Listen to me, go and call the doctor, I say. I will be fine.’
The doctor told Shariff that his wife wouldn’t have children again. When she made jokes about her barrenness on her recovery bed he understood there was no other woman on the entire earth for him. If he lost her that would be it, that would be all. So he promised her that he would finally tell her everything that had happened to him once she was discharged.
‘You don’t need to tell it to my face,’ she said after his four failed attempts at starting the sentence when they got home. ‘You can write letters to me. You said you had no time to write at the warfront shey? Oya, write to me.’
And so he began the letters he had written in his mind from his very first night in Sierra Leone. He worked feverishly from morning till night, sometimes at the hotel in Barnawa as a way to distance his family from the war. When he was done his letters filled a cabin biscuit carton. The evening he wrote his final letter he returned home and passed the carton to Sweet Pea without a word. She read from dusk till dawn. He woke up and found her reading the last words on the front veranda as the first light of morning turned up. Beside her was a molten splash of dead candles. When she looked up to him her eyes were wet the way they had been that afternoon years ago when she came in with the rain.
‘You didn’t need to do this to yourself,’ she said in a clear voice the colour of the morning. It made him want to cry. ‘If it cost you this much – you didn’t need to go. You didn’t even need to come back. I would have mourned you. I would rather have you peacefully dead than living with this for the rest of your life.’
‘I belong with you. I belong with my family, I didn’t know I had another son!’ he said, gesturing at the house.
‘We are publishing this,’ she said finally. ‘I will mail Macmillan publishers.’
‘But—’
‘People need to know.’ She stood up and went into the house and that was that.
They were unprepared for the frenzy the work would bring. The company was divided over what to do with the draft.
‘This is not a book; this is investigative journalism!’
‘But it is too big.’
‘And definitely not publishable in this country.’
‘Let’s sell parts of it to Punch.’
‘No, this is fiction; let’s sell it as fiction. You guys are forgetting which regime we are under.’
‘Let’s start with our friends at the UK tabloids with headlines, then we share it as a full book.’
‘Or the USA.’
‘You are all dunces – you think the West cares about us?’
‘You’ve forgotten that white boy who burnt himself in protest of the civil war.’
One thing they all agreed on was that the book would make tons of cash. So the publishers gave Shariff a lump sum and told him to flee the country with his wife. Sweet Pea accepted it wouldn’t be a good idea to disrupt their sons’ education like that.
‘So where are we going?’ he asked her. She had agreed to finally re-establish contact with her family and they had dropped their children with her parents. She shook her head behind the steering wheel, unable to believe any of this was happening. ‘Where can we go?’
‘The US?’
‘No, not the US. Everybody has been rushing there. Which other places?’
‘Indonesia.’
She nodded.
What they didn’t know was that the government was inspecting their mail, both sent and received. The publishing partners in the UK were expecting Dear Sweet Pea, so once they confirmed that Shariff was in the custody of the military government and that t
he Nigerian editors involved were killed, they caused mayhem in England.
But none of this happened while they were sailing in the air to Indonesia. The soldiers came after. After his real father had mysteriously found their house and plunged himself into housework without speaking to anyone, not even to his grandchildren, and had died in the kitchen after being forced to sleep. After André had started having his murderous nightmares and Max had stopped being part of the family. That was when the soldiers came. And Shariff doesn’t want to remember this. He doesn’t want to remember how everything went crazy during the Miss World War. The many years of poverty; how his son went missing; not even how he found him and what all this did to Sweet Pea. What he wants to remember is the last time he saw her.
They were in the new world, a democratic Nigeria, and they were reaping the benefits of not having moved or given up on Taboo, and on one of the nights in their hotel room bathtub she called his name in the throes of passion. Shariff. A cry that provoked him to heights he didn’t know he was capable of. At fifty-four. How he wanted her body, stubborn to change, her body which she resented, her almost sixty-year-old body, unconquerable by rumours of cancer. He wanted her in the water as much as he had wanted her in dark places, in foreign countries, in the destroyed fishnet hammock in those early years in the rain and in blazing sunlight. When the explosion was over, when the world settled back around them, she called it softly before falling asleep, a sigh. Shariff.
