by Sefi Atta
“They can’t stop traveling overseas to shop,” he said. “Their clothes, their homes, their mannerisms. They are influenced. Look at their clubs. You can’t join, but oyinbos can join. What does that tell you?”
His father had friends who had worked as chefs in most clubs nearby—Ikoyi Club, Golf Club, Polo Club,Yacht Club, and the Motor Boat Club. As soon as the nouveau riche joined these clubs, the elite checked out. They couldn’t handle the competition, not even from foreigners as dark as they were. They stopped going to Ikoyi Club in the nineties when Indians took over the place.
“They are snobbish and yet they have no class. Overseas, they would call them bourgeois. Here, they are elite, but only in a useless place like Lagos can they be. Don’t let them keep you down psychologically. That is what they want, to preserve the order and keep themselves on top.”
Bourgeois. More French. We walked for almost half an hour and got to the Motor Boat Club. It was still a safe haven for the elite, he said, because the nouveau riche wouldn’t know what to do with a boat.
The clubhouse stood there white and firm, like some establishment that was never ever going to budge. How many times had I passed the place and seen the car park packed with jeeps? I loved jeeps. Sometimes when I was stuck in traffic, I imagined myself driving the biggest jeep on the road and banging other vehicles out of my way. The boats were tucked away in sheds.
“On the weekends,” Augustine said, “they go to the beach to get away: Tarkwa Bay, Ibeshe, Ilasha. They eat lobsters in there, you know, as big as chickens.”
They also dressed better than oyinbos, he said, who sometimes wore torn T-shirts, even though they owned beach homes.
“But why?” I asked.
“That is what is called reverse snobbery,” he explained. “Stepping up by dressing down. But the elite will never go that far to prove they have class. They are too insecure and vain.” A silver Benz poked its nose out of the exit gate. The driver lowered his window.
“Oga, sir,” he hailed the gateman.
The gateman bowed in response. The driver raised his window. No tip. He was wearing sunshades and a light-blue T- shirt, one of those with the logo of a man charging on a horse. He was definitely an elite. That horse T-shirt was their uniform and the Benz was their official car.
Why call the gateman “oga,” then? Was that also reverse snobbery? And why did they have to pretend anyway?
I remembered a couple of girls who came to the barracks to get dresses made in the time of Princess Diana. Their car had a flat tire in the compound and, as they waited for their driver to fix it, one said to the other, “Bloody hell, this place is a dump.” Then she added, “I mean Lagos in general,” when she caught me staring. When I wouldn’t stop eyeing her, she turned her back on me and whispered to her friend, “What’s that one looking at?”
I was looking at the woman in the passenger seat of the Benz, now. She, too, was wearing sunshades. Hers were so large they covered half her face. Her bare feet were on the dashboard. I was sure she was cool in the air conditioning. You couldn’t get close to a woman like her. The nearest you could get to her was by sewing her clothes or cooking for her.
“They always look clean,” I murmured.
Augustine nodded. “Yes, but their shit still stinks, which is what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
The road was clear. The bobo in the Benz didn’t even look at us as he drove off.
In a way, I thought I was privileged, at least within the police barracks. I had a room of my own. Everyone else I knew had to double up, if not triple and quadruple up. We even had a spare bedroom, into which Momsi sometimes moved because of Popsi’s snoring. At night, he sounded like the broken-down engine of a kabukabu.
Our block was one of two in the barracks that were painted. It was the color of curry, with a red roof and green shutters—perhaps because we were right across the road from Sterling Bank and the bank customers might complain about the view. The other blocks in the barracks were cement gray. Their roofs and mosquito netting were rusty. Their balconies were cluttered with pans, boxes and tires. We had only laundry hanging on ours.
“Do you want to go back to school?” Augustine asked.
“No.”
For what?
“You want to come to Victoria Island?”
Why not? If my teachers noticed my absence, they would just assume I was becoming one of the bad boys in school, one of the slackers, NFAs—students with no future ambition— and that wouldn’t be a surprise.
We hopped on a danfo bus. I was so close to Augustine I could smell the starch on his uniform. Popsi had once told me criminals picked their victims. They could smell the vulnerability in people. I asked if a criminal would be able to smell mine. I didn’t know what “vulnerability” meant at the time, but I had been the target of bullies in primary school. One classmate just used to headbutt me; another, a girl, used to trip me up. Popsi had tried in vain to teach me how to fight back. I had inherited Momsi’s stature, he said, but not her character.
Augustine was the insecure one from the beginning: his father’s occupation, his virginity at the age of seventeen, eighteen, or however old he was, and his reputation for being a liar. But I allowed him to carry on thinking he was in charge and initiating me, and impressing me, because of the money. Long before he came along, I’d wanted more of that in my life. I had my reasons—our school, for one. Why else would I have ended up in such a useless school, unless Popsi didn’t have enough money? I was smart enough to get into a private school.
On our way to Victoria Island, I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else in Lagos or having to move to a place like Jungle City. I knew this section of Awolowo Road so well, from the Boat Club to the federal fire station—which was abandoned, but for an old red Mercedes truck—to Bacchus nightclub, Jazz Hole and the YMCA with flats that I suspected were not occupied by any youths. To escape the traffic, I sometimes took the back roads, which could be just as jammed, but once in a while I might bump into the artists who hung out at the Bogobiri guesthouse or the born-again Christians of Mountain of Fire and Miracles, arriving for their spiritual clinics and revivals. They revived until after midnight, apparently, and kept people in the neighborhood up with their clapping. At Falomo, of course, there was the Church of the Assumption and Mammy Market. If I wasn’t in the mood to go home, I could head up Kingsway Road, past Golden Gate Restaurant and the national petroleum building, which had closed down since a suspicious fire, to Fantasyland. This was my area in Lagos, my hood.
On Awolowo Road I’d seen a Honda driver run over an okada. Luckily, the okada didn’t have a passenger, but he fell off his motorcycle and lay there wailing. There wasn’t a drop of blood in sight, but within minutes his fellow okadas began to arrive like rats. They rode around the Honda, shouted insults and threatened to beat up the driver. Passersby gathered around to watch, including me. The driver had locked his doors and was staying put until the road was clear and he could speed off. The okadas got off their motorcycles and began to bang on his windows.
Okadas were serious about instant street justice, but none of them helped their fellow okada, who now was curled up on the road and still wailing. They would have beaten the shit out of that Honda driver, had he not escaped by reversing down the pedestrian part of the road. He knocked down all the hawkers’ stands and they scampered.
I’d seen worse. One day, a man fell out of a danfo. He was wearing a white skullcap. He just fell off, picked himself up, ran after the danfo and hopped back in with his skullcap stained with blood. Another day, I passed a man with a cheek as big as a pawpaw. He had a malignant growth. Two men behind him carried a poster stating this. One of them called out through a loudspeaker, “Support this man! Give in the name of Jesus!”
I thought of Momsi as our danfo bus passed over the bridge to Victoria Island. She was a major obstacle. My juju beads were never able to protect me from her. My legs did, when they eventually grew and I became too tall for her to rea
ch, but before that, I used to run, or “miss,” as Brother would say. I would miss to the kitchen, miss to my bedroom, or miss outside to the compound and sit on the cement surface of the septic tank until she cooled down. I knew exactly what she was capable of. I had seen how she dealt with Brother when he was at CMS Grammar School and associating with a group of boys she suspected were Indian-hemp smokers.
I remembered how these boys loitered around the gates of our barracks, with their red eyes and school shirts unbuttoned almost to their navels, when they were supposed to be studying for their matriculation exams. They were “doing guy” as she would say. She had this friend, Auntie Florence, who had a provisions store in Mammy Market. Brother used to call her “Babylon.” She was like a satellite dish in orbit and she disturbed me. She was bulky all over, yet from her nose to her chin she was gorgeous. She had these lips, these teeth, and the cleanest mouth I’d ever seen, which was always filled with Bazooka Joe gum. Whenever I saw her and smelled that Bazooka Joe, I had an overwhelming urge to kiss her, just slip my tongue into her mouth and lick her teeth for a moment, but I couldn’t stand the sight of her. Her neck was so plump her gold chain had disappeared within the folds of her flesh. She wore so much makeup she resembled a clown. Momsi thought the makeup made her skin fresh. “You look fresh, Florence,” she would say, and Auntie Florence would answer, “It’s my Posner.”
She perspired because of her Posner. I was also drawn to her toes. I couldn’t help looking at them, even though they were unsightly. They stuck out of her sandal straps and her nails were thick and painted a shiny pink.
Whenever Brother missed school, she would be at home with Momsi, both of them waiting for him like two detectives.
“He-eh, you’ve been playing with your education and deceiving this woman who carried you in her womb for nine months?” Auntie Florence would ask him, stamping her foot and waving her arms.
“My children are crazy,” Momsi would say. “Crazy children I have. They become teenagers and their heads turn.”
Auntie Florence’s children had all attended good schools and they had graduated from Lagos State University. They were decent and well-behaved of course.
Through her, Momsi got to hear that Brother was going to Bar Beach with the boys, to smoke what he claimed were Popsi’s Gitanes cigarettes, and to Shrine to see Fela perform at Sunday Jump, instead of attending his exam-preparation lessons. The boys were Shrine boys, and Popsi didn’t care to hear Fela’s name mentioned, after Fela released that record Zombie mocking policemen. In fact, the police hated Fela so much at the time that Popsi could have arrested the boys for no reason and thrown them in jail, and no one would have queried or reprimanded him. But it was Momsi who locked Brother up in our toilet and made him swear he would never go to Shrine again. It was Momsi who took off her slippers and chased the boys from the barracks gates when next they came around. She flung one of the slippers and it spun like a boomerang and bounced off one of them. I witnessed that. The bobo’s eyes were shut tight when the slipper struck him, ko! Then he caught sight of her advancing and he looked as if he might piss on himself.
“Nonsense,” she said, as they ran. “You think I’m playing? You haven’t heard of me yet. You don’t know who I am.”
Brother, who was teaching me how to act like a real man, was howling away in the toilet and Popsi was begging for his release. She didn’t let him out for a whole day. From then on, Brother began to face his studies squarely. Then Sister started to adjust her pinafores. At first, I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but that was how Momsi put it when I asked what Sister had done wrong. She said, “Hm.Your sister is adjusting her pinafores.”
Sister was at New Era, prettyish and sort of plump. What she was doing was sneaking into the sitting room when Momsi wasn’t there and shortening her school uniforms, stealing Popsi’s shaving blades and using them to scrape her eyebrows. As far as Momsi was concerned, that could lead to a pregnancy. In fact, in her mind, the pregnancy had already occurred, because she took Sister to General Hospital for a test. They got there and the doctor asked Sister when last she had seen her period. Sister said she was menstruating right then and there. Momsi told him, “Don’t listen to her. She’s miscarrying.”
I don’t know what the doctor did, but Sister was sobbing when they came back home, quivering like a wet chicken. Her hands could barely hold Popsi’s blade straight (one of those she had stolen) as she let down the hems of her uniforms. Momsi was threatening that next time she wouldn’t spare her from the speculum. Popsi said to her, “Come on, remember what happened to you,” and she started going on about how she wasn’t an illiterate when he met her, and he kept insisting that that wasn’t the point he was trying to make.
I was not looking forward to growing older. Maturity seemed to cause friction in our family, with Momsi in particular. She couldn’t stand adolescents, and Brother and Sister warned me that she would show me pepper when I got into secondary school. “She is too wicked for words,” Sister said. Brother said, “I swear, that woman is a demon” A beast of no gender was the description he later used, and it was confusing because Popsi was the policeman. He was meant to be the inhuman zombie, not her, but he was not at home as much as she was. Never present. He was either at work or at the palm-wine parlor.
To be honest, I secretly pitied Momsi: first of all, for losing the twins; secondly, for always sewing in that sitting room; and thirdly, Popsi’s salary was never paid on time. Brother and Sister eventually graduated from university and completed their national-service years. They got jobs and sent money home once in a while. Brother at first worked as a cash and teller’s clerk in a bank up North, until God called him to train as a Pentecostal pastor. He married a deaconess in his church and she was yet to give birth. Sister got a PR job in the capital with a non-governmental office dedicated to the empowerment of rural women. Their patron was an American actress. She visited the capital and met with the president. That made headline news, so Sister was promoted. Then Brother was posted to Ghana, to minister to at-risk youths, and Sister got pregnant by one of her wealthy sponsors who was in the House of Reps.
She had promised us she wouldn’t Monica Lewinsky herself. He was a married man, but she agreed to marry him anyway, by native law and custom. Popsi was against a polygamous union. He thought Sister was selling herself short and would be mistreated as a junior wife. Brother thought it was probably best for her child, so long as Sister could squeeze in a church blessing. Momsi was busy trying to find the right shade of white polyester for the wedding gown. “At last,” she said, “one rich person in the family.”
There was a time she could easily slap my head. Now, I was getting too tall for her to reach. She used to inspect my schoolbooks. She could no longer follow the subjects I was studying. All she did in the evenings was sew. She was making a replica of a wedding gown for Sister,Vera Wank or something. Sister had sent her a picture of the gown, ripped out of a bridal magazine, with her latest measurements. Momsi thought she could adjust the design to hide Sister’s pregnancy and leave enough space to accommodate her belly.
One day she and Popsi actually fought over that dress. I came back from school and there was netting all over the sitting room floor. She was crouched over and laying it down as if it were a sleeping baby. She was humming away.
Her hair was threaded and she had not dyed it in a while, so it was partly gray and partly jet black.
“What is this?” I asked, after greeting her.
I tiptoed on the narrow space leading to my bedroom door. Sweeping the floor was my worst chore at home, closely followed by ironing. The broom picked up dust I didn’t notice, loose threads and sheared cloth. I was used to seeing them and I automatically looked out for stray pins. The corners of the room were blocked with cardboard boxes. Clutter just accumulated in our flat and piled up each time I cleared it up.
“Tulle,” she murmured.
I had long stopped helping her in her sewing business, but I knew that
whenever she used a highfaluting name to describe a fabric, the fabric was of a lesser quality. The same way she had called the polyester cloth she was using to make Sister’s wedding dress “duchess satin.” The same way she described herself as “petite” and not “short.” Her tulle was as coarse as a mosquito net. The roll of white polyester was leaning against the wall by the poster of Jesus.
I carried my books into my bedroom, as she continued to hum. Momsi couldn’t sing or hum in tune and she did both in high trembling tones. I recognized the song: “I Believe I Can Fly.” She sounded miserable. The netting across my doorway reminded me of my dream. The smell of our neighbor’s okra stew had drifted through my window and seeped into my mattress.
Popsi came back while I was doing my homework. I got up to greet him and, as I expected, he took one look at the netting and asked, “What is this?”
Momsi was at her table now, sewing pieces of the white polyester together. She had a pin in her mouth.
“I beg,” Popsi said to me. “Gather up this rubbish from my floor.”
“Just leave it,” Momsi said, removing the pin. “I will take care of it. I spent a whole hour pinning it together.”
Popsi unbuttoned his uniform. Unlike me, he didn’t tiptoe. He trod on her net and I was sure he would leave footprints, but he didn’t.
“If you like you can spend twenty-four hours pinning it together,” he said. “I’ve told you my position. There will be no wedding until that man sends his family here to ask for my daughter’s hand in marriage.”
“See,” Momsi said. “My whole body is paining me. I don’t want trouble. Let it not be said that I am a difficult woman. All I have ever asked is that you do what is best for this family, but what else can one do when someone keeps throwing his salary away in a palm-wine parlor?”
