by Sefi Atta
After a while Prof asks Jaiye, “May I have more apple juice?”
He pauses as if he has asked an in-depth question. Jaiye goes to the kitchen to get him some as Lulu dances to another hymn blaring from the church.
Higher, higher, higher,
Lifting Jesus higher.
Higher, higher, higher,
Lifting Jesus higher.
z
As they eat lunch, they talk about the arrangements for the memorial. Her father’s burial was overwhelming in comparison, from publishing the obituaries to organizing the wake-keeping and funeral. There were hundreds of guests to feed. Jaiye couldn’t stop crying and Lanre, who confused his sadness for a foul temper, threatened to beat up a distant cousin who was bossing everyone around. Aunty Bisi was busy distributing the aso ebi and collecting payments. Another aunt accused her of having a profit motive. Someone else complained about the quality of the aso ebi. Deola didn’t want to wear aso ebi, just as she didn’t want to dance at her father’s funeral reception. His funeral was communal, well beyond their control.
“None of that fuss,” her mother insists. “We are remembering your father, not trying to bury him again.”
What Deola remembers are road trips to the house in her father’s hometown and singing songs like “Mama Look-a Boo Boo” on the way. The harmattan mists in the mornings and the smell of boiled corn in the afternoons. She also remembers family holidays in their flat in Cádiz, which they have since sold. Lanre was always chatting up local chicks and Jaiye once peed in the swimming pool. Jaiye was a cute girl, but she had a bladder problem, and she was lousy at Marco Polo. Her father was a glamorous man with a cigar in one hand and a crystal decanter of whiskey in the other. Her mother wore big round sunglasses and wrapped silk scarves around her head. People in remote villages mistook her for an actress. They came out and stared as she spoke awful Spanish: “Done-day-ester…”
The Señora. All she ever wanted was to find the nearest butcher where she could buy an ethnic cut of meat. On one holiday, she went as far as La Línea de la Concepción to buy pigs’ feet and tripe.
Today, her eba and efo stew is delicious. After lunch, Lulu and Prof go upstairs to watch a DVD and she calls the housegirl, Comfort, to get more water.
“Comfort, will you get yourself in here?” she says.
Whenever Comfort falls asleep in the kitchen, her mother calls Comfort lazy. Comfort wakes up at six-thirty in the morning to sweep the floor and she doesn’t stop working until nine at night.
Comfort walks in pouting. “Yes, ma?”
She wears rubber flip-flops and her navy gingham uniform is too tight. She circles the table looking for a space where she can lean over and retrieve the empty bottle. Lanre hands it to her.
“Why are you staying in a hotel?” he asks Deola.
“I’m here on business,” she says.
“So?”
“I have to keep things official. No one at work knows I’m here for a memorial.”
“You can’t tell them?”
“I’ve just started working there. I can’t take time off.” “England is too strict, man.”
“I swear,” Jaiye says.
“Bring a cold bottle this time,” Lanre says to Comfort.
Comfort returns to the kitchen. Deola recalls being that dependent on house help and quarreling with truant drivers, who were nearly always rude to her. “I’ll tell your daddy,” they would say, snapping their fingers. She would snap her fingers back and say, “You’d better respect me.”
Now she would be embarrassed to order anyone around, but she won’t put up with the everyday inconveniences her family is accustomed to. She discovered the hotel online. It is a boutique hotel on Victoria Island, converted from a house. At night, her mother turns off the electricity generator. The hotel has two generators—or so its website claims. It has 24hour Internet access and a restaurant, which means she won’t have to wait for food to defrost. Her mother freezes everything to prevent rot during power cuts, sugar included. The hotel also has a car-hire service for guests, with drivers. She would find it impossible to get any work done otherwise, and if she stays at home, her mother might see that as an opportunity to nag her about settling down.
“I need to check in and have a good look at the place in daylight,” she says.
“I’ll take you there,” Jaiye offers. “You can see the new car Funsho bought me.”
“Is it nice?”
Jaiye pulls a face. “Wait and see.”
Her mother calls Comfort to clear the table and goes to the sitting room to stretch her legs. Lanre says he has “a meeting” to attend and reads his text messages.
“We all know it’s your wife checking up on you,” Jaiye says.
“While the cat’s away,” he says.
He is less serious than he appears. This is his playboy routine, which he should have outgrown, but he comes back to it whenever he needs to fool himself into thinking that he is still a bachelor.
“See your brother?” Jaiye says. “This is what he does, then he disappears.”
Deola laughs. In her teens, she would have been the one at loggerheads with Lanre. She was forever confronting someone at the dining table: Lanre, for not helping in the kitchen; her mother, for letting Lanre get away with that; her father for being in favor of the IMF loan or some other government policy. She would call him a capitalist and he would completely ignore her. Her mother would ask why she was getting upset and Lanre, who had a knack for slicing through a person’s tender parts, right between the ribs, would answer, “Because she is a lepin,” a loser.
“Worry about your own husband’s whereabouts,” he says to Jaiye.
His comebacks are more expedient than malicious. He forgets what he says within minutes.
“Jaiye,” her mother asks. “Did you submit the memorial to The Guardian?”
“Yes.”
“Full page?”
“Half.”
“Why half?”
“Half is big enough,” Jaiye says.
“What did you write?” Deola asks.
“In loving memory and all that,” Jaiye says.
“What?” her mother asks.
“In loving memory and all that,” Jaiye snaps.
Deola shakes her head. She is back home.
“Did she e-mail it to you?” Lanre asks.
“No,” she says.
“Why didn’t you e-mail it to her?”Lanre asks.
Jaiye frowns. “Who has time for e-mail?”
“What do you mean you don’t have time for e-mail?” her mother asks.
“Don’t worry about it,” Deola says.
“I would have e-mailed it to you,” Lanre says.
“You should have e-mailed it to her,” her mother says.
Jaiye slaps the table. “Lanre could have e-mailed it to her!”
“You people,” Deola says. “It doesn’t matter.”
The singing stops, which means the church service has ended. Deola goes to the shelf of leather-bound books before she and Jaiye leave. They are English literature classics her father bought in the early seventies. She chooses Pride and Prejudice over Sense and Sensibility. She was an Austen fan in her teens. She considered herself the sensible sister, but Jaiye was the pragmatic one in the end. Jaiye was able to settle. She, Deola, has been capricious in her relationships as well as her career. The moment she is not happy, she leaves. For her, there are worse situations, but none more preventable than being stuck in a job or marriage.
z
Lanre does not go to his meeting after all. He follows her and Jaiye to the hotel in his aged Volvo station wagon. Jaiye’s new car is a Mercedes, which Deola suspects is meant to appease Jaiye for another affair. Inside, Jaiye turns the CD player on and begins to nod to 50 Cent’s “P. I. M. P.”
“You listen to this when the kids are in here?” Deola asks.
“Of course.”
“Why?”
“Why not? They love it.”
“Who?”
“Dára, the rapper.”
“Oh, him! He was a student at LASU, wasn’t he?”
“So I hear. He’s on tour in America.”
“Is he?”
“Yes. They’re really promoting him over there.”
Jaiye hisses. “He’s not a rapper. He can’t rap like the Americans. He can only sing hooks and not even well. He’s not the best Afro hip-hop singer around. The bobo sounds like an intoxicated mullah.”
She slips on her sunshades and begins to sing, “I don’t know what you heard about me.”
Deola has trouble figuring out what 50 Cent is saying, but she no longer tries to impose her views on Jaiye. And Jaiye can be a tyrant these days, especially when she is at odds with her husband. Still, she doesn’t see how Jaiye, who might cradle her children’s heads to carry them into her car, can play music like this when they are around.
“I’m a motherfuckin’ P-I-M-P,” Jaiye sings.
“When is Funsho coming back?” Deola asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Will he make it for the memorial?”
“He says he will.”
“What’s he doing in Johannesburg anyway?”
“Ask him.”
Jaiye steers away from potholes on the road. For as long as they have driven on it, the road has not been repaired. It is a measure of the decay and ruin in Ikoyi.
Deola thinks of her generation that was raised here, oil boomers, as she calls them, because they came of age during the oil boom and benefited from it. Does she have any remorse about dancing throughout dictatorships, taking orders like “shake it but don’t break it” and “throw your hands in the air and wave them like you just don’t care”? No, just a longing for the good old days when she had no responsibilities and didn’t spare a thought for the future.
At LSE, one lecturer or the other would approach her and say, “Shame about the coup in Nigeria.” She always got the impression they were snickering behind her back. After all, how had Nigeria governed itself since Independence? Two failed attempts at civilian governments, a four-year civil war and God knows how many military regimes in between. She would say, “Yes, it is a shame,” wondering what their reaction would be if she revealed that “Ain’t No Stopping Us Now” (the extended version) almost brought their little section of Lagos to a standstill and “One Nation Under a Groove” ruled for years. Kurtis Blow came along with “The Breaks” just as the economy took a turn and slide, slide, slippity slide they did into a recession, yet oil boomers continued to rock throughout the eighties, chanting, “The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.”
They were the Ikoyi crowd and those who were in school abroad were “Aways.” There was some resentment and contempt for them, but she never thought they should be held in awe as they sometimes were. She still doesn’t because she has seen their ineptitude rather than elitism. They have access to the best Nigeria can offer, the best education and professional training the world over. Yet they can’t get the country to function, or even preserve their little havens, like Ikoyi, which keeps on deteriorating.
Of the Ikoyi crowd, she is one of the few living abroad. The rest fly in and out and educate their children overseas. In the summer, they go on family holidays to get away from the rain. Dubai is the latest destination because Nigerians love to shop. They say things are bad in Nigeria, but there is money in the oil industry despite the grand larceny that goes on. There is money in the telecommunications and banking industries. There is money in the churches and non-governmental organizations. There is money for those who own their own professional practices. And for those who do not care to go through the normal apprenticeships or be burdened with public accountability, there are political positions in the Third Republic.
z
The hotel is a guesthouse. Its sense of intimacy remains intact despite its conversion into separate suites. It has modern stone walls and hardwood floors, a gym, a bar and an outside swimming pool. She can visualize a family living here, walking up and down the stairs and sitting at the dining table to eat. The other guests she sees in the lounge are diverse: there is a couple, Belgian most likely, who have adopted a Nigerian girl. The girl could pass for a boy. She wears denim shorts and her hair is shaved. There is an elderly black American woman who looks like an artist. She is dressed in a tie-dyed boubou and her hands are stained with paint. A young Nigerian guy, probably on a business trip, talks on his cell phone while keeping an eye on his laptop. At the reception, a Hausa man checks out. An oyinbo woman with bleached hair accompanies him. She is dressed in a short, tight dress. Jaiye says she is a call girl.
After Deola checks in, Jaiye says she has to go back and pick up her children before returning home. She doesn’t want to get caught in the traffic to the mainland. Deola sits with Lanre in the lounge and they get into a childish argument when he comments on his wife’s weight.
“Eno’s just getting fatter and fatter.”
“What is wrong with you?”
“But she is.”
“Why are you so wicked to the woman?”
“She’s not taking care of herself.”
“Isn’t she taking care of your children?”
“Wait until you see how fat she is.”
“Look at your stomach!”
“It’s the fish and chips she keeps feeding me!”
“Isn’t fish and chips what you wanted?”
Lanre denies it, but Deola remembers how he and Seyi went crazy for the girls with foreign blood: half English, half Jamaican, half bloody Cameroonian.
Eno’s mother is English. Her father, a pediatrician, died when Eno was young and her mother remained in Nigeria. Eno was raised on fish and chips.
“She can’t cook, man,” Lanre says. “And she never uses enough pepper.”
Deola sighs. “Let’s change the topic. I don’t want to hear any more of this.”
These clashes with her brother are inevitable. So also is his way of calling her “man,” as if she is an honorary one and ought to side with him. It is discomforting to be in a hotel with a man. The staff avert their eyes as if she is guilty of impropriety.
Lanre says Trust Bank is planning another share offer and advises Deola to buy more shares. The value keeps rising and the bank declares a dividend every year. She asks about Summit Bank, Nigeria, which has recently collapsed.
“Their directors were using the bank vault as their personal stash of cash,” Lanre says.
“Their auditors must have known.”
“Auditors,” he says dismissively.
He tells her Summit Bank was heavy with unsecured loans and buckling under bad debts as its directors misappropriated funds. Deola’s threshold of morality drops. You cannot complain about corruption in Nigeria, she thinks. You dare not. Members of your family are corrupt, some of your best friends are corrupt. The only people who claim they are not corrupt have not had an opportunity to be corrupt, which is why they complain. They feel cheated in the midst of all the corruption around them.
When she worked for Trust Bank, she would get anxious about some of the bank’s clients, which included corrupt politicians and dictators. She would ask her father, “But isn’t he…?” unable to finish her question, “one of the biggest thieves in Nigeria?” And her father would answer, “This is business. There is no such thing as clean money.”
It is incredible to her that anyone bothers to follow laws in Nigeria. They are optional. Lanre says the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission is cracking down on corruption, but the Summit Bank directors have not been charged and their depositors and investors are still trying to recover their funds. He then drifts into the usual about how difficult life in Nigeria is and soon he, too, says he has to leave.
“Why are you running away?” she asks.
“Armed robbers,” he says.
“Is it that bad?”
“Are you joking? My colleague at wor
k, they woke him and his wife up with machetes. Just last week, they were shooting down the road from me.”
“You’d better go,” she says.
z
She was partial to Lanre when she was a ten-year-old. His games were a change from “Red Rover” and “Not Last Night but the Night Before.” She shared his interest in superhuman heroes who battled evil and saved the world. He was Batman and she was Robin. He always had to be the one who jumped out of hiding places, shouting “achtung,” but she didn’t mind falling down and playing dead for him. He thought she was tough for a girl— until she developed breasts. Then she became Triple Six and Moaner Lisa.
Lanre knew things: why planes flew longer in one direction and how fast piranhas could devour a human body. If he didn’t feel like answering her questions, he would curve his arm and say, “Ask-ology is the science of asking questions.”
The summer after Seyi died in the car crash, Lanre began to surround himself with boys who were notorious for smoking marijuana. He was sixteen. Her parents had no clue. Lanre was smoking at home in his bedroom, out of the window and using towels to block the draft under his door. He was also sleeping and eating more than usual. Her father was at work for most of the day and if ever Lanre got into trouble, he would say, “Leave the boy alone. He’s been through a lot.”
Lanre got suspended before the Christmas holiday, for sneaking out of school with friends, then during the following Easter break one of his friends ran down a motorcyclist. There was a court case, which was covered in the newspapers. Her father found out that the defendant in question was the same boy who kept showing up at their house, as if he had no parents to answer to, secretly bearing videos like Emmanuelle and I Spit on Your Grave because he couldn’t watch them on the Betamax in his house. He could recite every line of Dr. Fritz Fassbender’s in What’s New Pussycat? and of Popeye Doyle’s in The French Connection.
Her father chased Lanre around the sitting room with a cane, warning him with each stroke, “I, must, not, see, any of those louts in this house again. I have given you a long rope and you will not hang me with it.”
“I’m depressed,” Lanre yelled.
