by Jennifer Juo
Thomas tried to play the drum, making a loud, chaotic sound.
Winston frowned and abruptly said, “That’s enough. Time to go bed, children. It’s late.”
Thomas looked dejected, craving a kind word or hug. When he had been a baby, Winston had been so affectionate toward his son. Sylvia knew Winston had deliberately pulled himself away from his son. Why did he have to do this? He was becoming an absentee father who was never around, and even when he was home, he hardly spent any time with his son, holing up in his study. She had given him a son as a gift, and it felt like he was returning it, regretting it.
Sylvia took the children down the hallway to their bedrooms.
“Thomas, you played the drum so well,” she said, tucking him in bed. She hugged him tightly, showering his face with kisses to compensate for the lack of love from his father.
Then she went to Lila’s room to say good night. Lila was waiting for her, still sitting up in her bed.
“Why is my hair brown and not black like Thomas?” Lila said, point blank. “Is that why Baba likes him better?”
Her daughter had already made the connection between her looks and her father. Lila was four years old now and precociously becoming self-aware of her different looks. Sylvia didn’t know what to say. She was torn. She didn’t want to keep secrets from her daughter. But then again, could Lila keep a secret? Children were known to blurt out things in public.
So she told her daughter a bedtime story instead. She sat down next to her on the bed and held her close. She told her that her mother’s family had Portuguese blood, an ancestor on a long-forgotten line, some clandestine love between a Chinese concubine and a Portuguese sea-faring merchant. That’s why she looked different because she was not entirely Chinese, which was the truth to some extent.
Lila sat there listening to Sylvia’s story, hugging her favorite, yellow stuffed elephant. Her large brown eyes widened as she took in the information. Sylvia looked at her sweet face, her little girl. Why had she lied to her? She would find out the truth one day and hate her for it, wouldn’t she?
Lila accepted Sylvia’s explanation for now. She was at the age when children were blank slates, sponges soaking up whatever their parents said. Sylvia’s explanation was further reinforced by the fact Lila was growing up in an international expat compound, surrounded by a shifting kaleidoscope of races. This helped blur the edges of her differences. Spicy Indian curries and somosas were served side by side with English roasts and potatoes; the lilting language of Hindi sang harmonies with the dissonant tones of German. People were different, she saw it all around her. She believed Sylvia’s lie because it made sense given the diverse children around her.
***
In October 1977, after about nine months volunteering at Ayo’s clinic, he invited her to a small birthday gathering at his father’s house in town. They had become friends, colleagues now. It only seemed natural he would invite her. She didn’t think twice about whether it was appropriate for her to go.
She drove to the old part of town where the wealthy used to live during colonial times. Ayo’s father’s house had a wall around it lined with broken glass and a watchman asleep at the gate. It was a traditional cement house with a corrugated tin roof, intricate verandahs, and sun-bleached wooden shutters. The front door was made of ornately carved wood depicting scenes of fishermen and farmers. She walked through a small reception area that opened up onto a dirt courtyard with mango trees, scarlet bougainvillea, and an old African gray parrot. The house was rectangular, the rooms and verandahs overlooking a central courtyard. Ayo led her across to the main living room. She followed him, watching his broad shoulders, his arms swinging by his side. When he turned to look at her, she saw his profile, his long eyelashes, square jaw. She resisted the urge to reach out and touch the side of his face.
“Right, come sit in here. This is the only room that’s air-conditioned, I’m afraid,” he said awkwardly, running his hand through his short, curly hair. “Looks like the others haven’t arrived yet.”
She sat on the sofa, embarrassed. Even though they worked together at the clinic, somehow alone in his house, she felt oddly out of place like she shouldn’t be here. She shifted her bare legs self-consciously, feeling Ayo watching her. An old male servant came in and brought a Bitter Lemon soda for her, a cold beer for Ayo, and a bowl of plantain chips on a worn silver tray, blackened and dull from lack of polishing.
“My present,” she said, producing a bottle of scotch tied with red ribbon from her bag. As she handed him the bottle, their hands touched.
“Thanks,” he choked and stood up abruptly. He went over to the liquor glass cabinet at the side of the room.
He stayed standing by the glass cabinet as if keeping his distance for protection. “I wonder what the others are up to?” he said. “They should have been here by now.”
The others were the Scottish couple and another single Englishman, his close friends on the compound. Did he include her as a “close friend” now, she wondered?
“I like your house…it’s…like the traditional houses we used to have back in China,” she said, trying to break the uncomfortable silence.
“I love this house. I grew up in it,” Ayo paused, fidgeting as well. “My parents divorced when I was fifteen, and I had to move to the UK with my mum. I came back for the holidays, but I missed this place. The cold and gray of the UK was such a contrast with the heat and color here.”
They sat in the sparsely furnished living room, simple chairs with velvet cushions still in their plastic, but not because they were new. The plastic was ripped in places. It had become part of the furniture over the years. She looked around the room, trying to find a distraction to slow her heart down. The floor was a dark green terrazzo tile. On the bare white wall hung the larger-than-life smile of the current president, General Obasanjo, the picture updated constantly due to the rapid succession of generals and presidents. This particular picture had been replaced after the assassination of General Murtala Mohammed the previous year. The room had the customary television set even though most nights the local station only broadcast multi-colored stripes to the tune of the national anthem. There was nothing particularly African in the room. It was not like the European houses on the compound, crammed full of Nigerian wood carvings, paintings, and tapestries.
Ayo seemed to study her, the way she kept flipping her long hair back. At his clinic, he didn’t have that kind of luxury. He was always busy, running around saving lives. But here at his house, he allowed himself to observe her. Her bare legs stuck to the plastic on the sofa. With just the two of them together in this room, an image of him touching her on the sofa flashed through her mind. As if he sensed what she was thinking, he came closer to her, but he didn’t sit next to her. He sat on another chair near her, still keeping his distance.
Then he continued, trying to dispel the tension between them. Without the medical machines, the white uniform, the smell of the sick and dying—their attraction seemed to escalate, isolated now from the white noise of the clinic.
“When I was child, I used to think this house was a bit old and decrepit. But now I hold on to it, I don’t know, for sentimental reasons. When my Dad built his new house, he gave this one to me. He knew how much I loved it, I suppose.”
“Do you come here often then?” She knew he lived most of the time on an apartment in the compound.
“Sometimes. To get away,” he said, looking straight at her.
Looking into his eyes, she felt that connection again. Only this time, they were alone without witnesses. Where were the others, she wondered? Would they come and save them or did she not really want them to come?
As if he were thinking the same thing, he got up, frustrated. “I can’t imagine why the others aren’t here yet.”
“Maybe their car broke down.” She said this because she wanted that to be the case. She wanted to be alone with him in this house.
“Right, well…let’s just start our lunch
without them. You must be hungry.” He leaned out of the room into the courtyard and shouted something in Yoruba to his servant.
“By the way, I hope you like the local fare.”
“Love it. I was worried your steward was going to serve that bland English food to us instead.”
He laughed, and the tension seemed to ease a little. They sat down at the formally set dining table in the room and the steward came to serve lunch. The table between them and the constant coming and going of the steward helped reset the mood in the room.
“Why did you come back to Africa?” Sylvia asked, attempting some semblance of a normal conversation. “I mean why didn’t you just stay in England? The locals all seem anxious to get out of the country and move to the UK. You’re doing the opposite.”
“That’s exactly it. If all of us educated people left for the comforts of the UK or America, who would be left to build our country? Nigeria needs people like me. That’s why I studied medicine and why I came back.”
“Another hero,” she said, falling for him all over again. “I am surrounded by them. Everyone is here for some selfless reason.”
“Not really heroic,” he laughed. “There’s some selfishness in it too. You see, in England, I never really felt like I fit in, me being brown and my mother blonde and white. We lived in a small flat in London. We were not well-off. I felt like I lived on the fringe of society. But here, in my father’s large house, I always felt rich compared to everyone else. People here looked up to me, wanted to be me. Whereas in the UK, it was the opposite. So you see it’s a bit of ego too.” She could see the real person in him, not some façade put up to impress or, in Winston’s case, to protect.
“Not ego. Self-esteem,” she said, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. A place you fit in better. Makes sense.”
“I don’t know if I fit in better, I suppose I sort of feel torn in half. I’m from two worlds. I can live in two different worlds. Do I prefer one over the other? Or do I feel odd in both?” Ayo shrugged. “Honestly, now that I’m actually living here, I can’t say I fit in here either.” His voice trailed off, and he just gazed at her face, taking her in.
Is that why he was drawn to her? Because she was neither black nor white? With her, he wouldn’t have to choose alliances. He looked melancholy for a brief moment, but then said, “Do you want to see the house?”
He showed her the blackened walls of the kitchen with its kerosene stove, large wooden mortar and pestle for pounding yam. He showed her the multiple bedrooms that had belonged to his father’s three wives and their children. Then he showed her his father’s room. They stood next to the heavy, mahogany, four-poster colonial bed with a gauzy mosquito net twisted above it. The half-closed, green shutters cast thin lines of light across the neatly made up white bed. A trapped moth fluttered against the shutters, trying to get out. She saw all these things as if in slow motion. Then, he was so close to her. He leaned her against the bedpost and kissed her. It was a desperate kiss, both of them wanting to act out what had been playing in their minds the whole afternoon. She pressed her body closer to him, but he abruptly moved away. “I’m sorry. You’d better go.”
***
The next week, Sylvia went to his clinic, but now everything was different—the smell no longer bothered her, the endless sick children, the nurses, what had been white noise, was now in the background, insignificant, as if someone had turned down the volume.
Ayo looked at her awkwardly in the hallway, but he spoke as if nothing had happened between them, his tone professional and urgent.
“Go quickly and help Nurse Agnes in there,” he pointed at a room down the hall. “Some children were just brought in, badly injured. One girl had a nail hammered into her head.”
“A nail? Who would do that to a child?”
“I’m trying to get to the bottom of that.”
She went into the room where the nurse was dressing the children’s wounds. The clinic’s volume had been turned up again, and Sylvia was thrust into another crisis, forcing her to relegate thoughts of him to the back of her mind.
While Nurse Agnes attended to the girl with the nail in her head, Sylvia cleaned the raw wounds around the other girl’s ankles. There was no skin around her ankles, just raw, bleeding flesh.
“What happened?” she asked the girl, who she guessed was roughly ten or eleven years old.
The girl stayed silent, staring off into space.
The man who had brought the girls spoke up. “I go found her like dis, tied to a tree with a rope. Left in de forest to die.”
“Who would do this to her?” Sylvia asked as she put iodine on the open wounds. The girl grimaced in pain, jumping off the table as if trying to escape from more torture and abuse.
“Her parents,” the man said.
“Why would they do something like this to their own child?” Sylvia was shocked. She brought the girl back to the examination table, speaking kind words to her, putting her arm around her. The girl shrunk from her touch.
“Dey tink she is witch.”
Sylvia felt herself jump at the mention of the word. “Why would they think such a thing?”
“Everyone in our village go be afraid. De pastor he go tell de village, dese girls are witches. He go ask dem parents to pay him, and he will do deliverance to take de witch away. I tink he go speak rubbish. He just take de money to get rich. But dese parents have no money, dey go be afraid of dere girls, so dey try to hurt dem. Other villagers try to hurt dem, dey all go be afraid.”
“The pastor said this? What church?”
“The Savior’s Miracle Evangelical Church.”
“Have you reported this to the police?”
“What de police going to do?”
“Arrest the parents. The pastor.”
“De pastor is rich. He go be big man now. He make so much money from doing deliverances for dese parents. He pay de police.”
“I can’t take dese children back to de village,” he continued. “Dey will be killed. Can you keep dem safe here?”
“Of course they can’t go back. I will find them a safe place to go.”
Sylvia finished dressing the girl’s ankles and went to find Ayo. He was performing a brain scan of the girl with the nail in her head. Sylvia waited outside the x-ray room for him. When he came out, he saw Sylvia standing there. For a moment, he looked disoriented as if wondering what she was doing here.
“How is she?” Sylvia asked.
“Luckily, the scan shows that the nail just penetrated her skull, not her brain. It wasn’t that long a nail. But I’ll still need to take it out. Then there’s the worry of fractured bone getting into her brain.”
“I found out what happened to these girls. The village thinks they’re witches. Apparently, a crazy pastor told them this. They can’t go back to their village. It’s not safe.”
“I suspected something like this. There’s a good orphanage in town. I’ll have a nurse take them there once they can be released from the clinic.”
“I can take them to the orphanage. I’d like to.”
“Are you sure? This is more than you signed up for.”
“I signed up to help.”
“You’ll soon discover there’s no end to helping around here.”
“Shouldn’t we do something? I mean, about the pastor. There may be more children at risk.”
Ayo paused. “You’re learning that for every child that walks in these doors, there’s a story with a problem that needs to be solved. You’ll run yourself ragged trying to solve every problem.”
“Still seems like we should report this.”
“I’ll talk to a NGO that focuses on children’s welfare about looking into it.”
***
Sylvia waited in the staff room as Ayo performed surgery on the girl with the nail in her head. It was late, night had fallen, and most of day shift staff had gone home. Sylvia sat at the table, waiting to find out the girl’s fate, waiting for him. She sat alone in the dark staff
room, not bothering to turn on the lights as night fell.
He came into the room, and she stood up. The light from the hallway fell across her face. She knew her expression revealed far too much. He closed the door, enveloping them in darkness. He pushed her body onto the table and kissed her, running his hands under her white nurse’s dress.
Someone walked up the hallway and opened the door to the staff room. They quickly separated. A nurse came into the room to get her things. She looked startled to see them in the dark. Sylvia walked quickly out of the room, and Ayo followed.
In the dark parking lot, they stood under the feathery tamarind trees, the spreading branches providing shade during the daytime for the parked cars. The wailing sound of the nocturnal insects suddenly seemed like a warning to her.
“I have to go,” she said even though she wanted to stay. She felt a confusion of emotions—worry about her children at home, wanting him in that dark staff room. She remembered his hands touching her under her dress.
“I know. Forgive me,” he said quietly.
She said nothing because she didn’t want to forgive him. What would have happened if the nurse hadn’t shown up?
“You would have to be the one woman I fall for. One that I can’t have,” he muttered under his breath. But she heard it.
It felt good to hear those words even though they were not good words. But she sensed the frustration, resentment even, at the edge of his voice. A mosquito landed on her bare arm. Ayo hit her arm, killing the mosquito, the blood staining her skin.
WINSTON
Chapter 17
Two months later, as Winston was driving home, his jeep got mired in the usual go-slow just as he approached Ibadan. It was Christmas Eve 1977. He wanted to return home on time for the annual Christmas Eve party on the compound at the ADA Director’s house. But the cars slowed to a complete halt. Winston turned off his engine, not wanting it to idle for hours on end in this heat. He rolled down his window. The usual crowd, mostly vendors, swarmed his jeep, shoving their wares through his window. He thought he saw the juju doctor with the yellowed eyes, his nemesis, approaching. But when he scanned the crowd again, he wasn’t there.
