It is not as if I haven’t tried. I offered to teach the wives to read. Iya Tope was keen to learn but then I found Iya Femi tearing up sheets from the exercise books to line the kitchen cupboards. When I reminded her why I’d bought them, she said I could crawl into the cabinets and teach the insects if I still wanted them to serve that purpose. I have tried to help the children too. I told them to assemble in the dining room so I could read to them. Only Iya Tope’s daughters turned up the first day. The next morning, Iya Segi told me not to be in a hurry, that I should wait until I have my own children if I was so eager to become a teacher. Such is the extent to which they conceal their yearning for enlightenment. They try to throw me off by making as if their coarseness is a thing of pride but I see through the subterfuge. I will not give up on them. I will bring light to their darkness.
The children follow the examples that their mothers set them. Iya Femi’s sons will not sit on a chair I have vacated. When I walk past them in the corridor, they turn to the wall and flatten themselves against it. No matter how many times I offer them sweets, they still treat me as if I have a contagious disease. I can only wonder what their mother has filled their young ears with. Iya Tope’s girls are polite but distant. Sometimes, they bring my meals to my bedroom door. I know their footsteps. They shuffle around the house together, arm in arm like conjoined triplets.
Iya Segi has two children. The eldest, Segi, is fifteen. She is a dutiful sister to her siblings but I think she is afraid that I have come to take her place. I see her anger when I offer to help the other children with homework. She does not speak to me but I often see her shadow by the door. It is a wonder that she has not told Iya Segi that Akin, her brother, comes to my room when he needs help with his homework. Akin is my favorite. He knocks before he enters my room. He comes to help me if I have heavy bags. As he does with all the other wives, he greets me before I greet him. I have told him he was born with decorum. When he asks what decorum means, I tell him to look it up in the dictionary. He does and thanks me the next day.
One day, they will all love me. I will buy their affection with the money Baba Segi gives me if I have to! I will bring sweets home for the little ones. I will buy Akin a brand-new satchel and get Segi one of those new velvet hair bands to harness that wild mane of hers. I will be a big sister to her. I will tell her everything I know about the world outside so she doesn’t make the mistakes I made.
One day, they will all accept me as a member of this family. One day, I will have a child of my own and everything will fall into place. My husband will delight in me again, the way he did before my barrenness ate away at his affection.
CHAPTER THREE
HEAVY PERIOD
BABA SEGI YELLED FRANTICALLY as he scrambled down the corridor to Bolanle’s room. “Iya Segi! Help me! I can’t find Bolanle! We were supposed to go to the hospital today! Where is she?”
“What have you lost, Baba Segi?” Iya Segi flung her room door open.
“It’s Bolanle! She’s gone! She must have run away in the middle of the night. All the money I have spent on her is wasted. My graduate is gone!” One leg was in his trousers; the other was caught in the waistband, so he was hopping along, sweat dripping from his bare chest.
“Have you looked in her bedroom?” Iya Segi tried to join in the panic but her words came out too slowly, too comfortably.
“I have looked everywhere!”
“These educated girls. They take your money and they abandon you. After all you have done for her. What a wretch! She has run off with another man, no doubt!”
“Baba, she’s here, asleep in the living room.” Segi leaned into the corridor with soap suds all the way up to her elbows.
“Where? Let me see for myself! Bolanle! Bolanle!” Baba Segi hopped into the living room and his eyes fell on Bolanle, who was lying in Iya Tope’s armchair with her eyes closed.
By now, the other wives too had gathered at the mouth of the corridor and were trying to make sense of the furor. They watched Baba Segi grab Bolanle by the shoulders and shake her. “She is here! Alive! Thank the gods,” he exclaimed.
Iya Segi retraced her steps to her room without making a sound.
“I am awake now,” Bolanle gasped, so Baba Segi wouldn’t crease the pink stripes on her shoulder pads.
Iya Femi flicked on the lights and for the first time Baba Segi caught a glimpse of Bolanle’s face. She had clearly been extra careful in applying her makeup. Her eyebrows were penciled in so they were symmetrical, not like the slapdash jagged lines Iya Femi sketched on her face. She had lined her lips with burgundy and used the tip of her pinkie to apply a sheer coat of gold to their fullness. Her skirt suit was well cut but two years without soft-scoop ice cream had made the waistband a little roomy. Her toes were edged into a pair of fuchsia slip-ons. Baba’s hands shot upward as if the pink stripes were hot iron rods. Without another word, he stood up straight and marched to his bedroom. Iya Tope too returned to her bedroom. Iya Femi rushed after Segi; she wanted to know every detail. Bolanle just smoothed back her hair and smiled.
At six o’clock, Taju rapped on the metal door frame. Bolanle had fallen asleep again. The rapping grew louder until Iya Femi barged in from the kitchen making as much noise as she could with the keys. “I don’t know how some people sleep like they are dead!” She tightened her wrapper over her bosom. “Let me open the door for you, Mr. Taju. Some people do not know that you are a baale-ile, head of your own household.”
“Thank you, Iya Femi. Good morning. I hope you woke well.”
“Let us just say that we woke and leave it at that.” She shot a sweeping side glance in Bolanle’s direction. “What about you?” The padlock came off and then the chain.
“Who would see your face and not wake well anyway?” Taju lowered his voice to a whisper and hummed his appreciation of her bare skin, glistening from the morning humidity.
“Mr. Taju, one would think you had not just prised your body from your wife’s embrace. Anyway, it is good that you have come on time. I think Baba Segi wants to leave early this morning.” They both laughed and Iya Femi walked back into the sitting room with Taju close behind her.
Taju had only ever been late once, about a year before, when he’d arrived with his shirt slung over his left shoulder and nail marks across his forehead. Ejecting a toothpick from between his teeth and pushing it into his Afro, he claimed that he’d beaten his wife senseless for letting his only son suck on a coin. This happened about a week after a male senator slapped a female colleague. The slap had resonated through all the quiet meeting rooms of the senate building and into the heart of every man on the street. It seemed to awaken a loosely fettered beast. Of course, the male senator blamed the devil for his actions and the two senators were soon seen embracing on national television. The same could not be said for the man on the street. Men were slapping their womenfolk as if it had become a national sport. At every street corner, disgruntled wives swung suitcases onto their heads, hoping to be persuaded to return home. At the marketplace, the Igbo fabric merchants tugged women roughly by the sleeve. Peeved taxi drivers prodded the heads of mothers who bargained with them; young girls were assaulted and stripped naked in the streets. Even in the labor wards baby girls were frowned upon by their fathers. Taju too was inspired to throw his best punch.
When Baba Segi finally summoned Bolanle, she was fast asleep, dreaming of Segun, a boy from her past. It was the same dream she always had. He was standing in the middle of a busy dance floor beckoning to her. She’d start making her way toward him but then he’d reach into his breast pocket and throw a fist full of small golden nuggets high into the air. Suddenly, all the women in the disco would abandon their partners for Segun’s side and Bolanle would then be left standing there, unable to make out his physique underneath the mountain of miniskirts and low-cut tops.
“We must be there by six fifty!” Baba Segi opened the door slightly, rammed his words in and disappeared.
Before Bolanle could
finish fastening the buckles on her sandals, she heard the front door slam shut. Baba Segi was talking to Taju through the open window of the pickup when she finally caught up with him.
“Get in,” he ordered, barely giving her enough room to press through.
“Next to Mr. Taju?”
“If you don’t want to sit next to me, you can sit in the back. Only the wind is uncomfortably cool at this time of the morning,” Taju retorted.
Baba Segi looked at Taju and grinned. Bolanle might have been going to the hospital dressed like a graduate, but his driver could still put her in her place. As Bolanle squeezed between the two men, Baba Segi plotted ways in which he could keep her in the shadows, ways to keep her made-up face out of the daylight. He was determined to render her efforts useless.
As they approached the end of their street, the night guard saluted. He ordered them to wait and reached beyond the front tires to remove a plank that was riddled with long rusty nails. He raised the metal bar meant as a deterrent to the armed robbers who used to terrorize the neighborhood. Baba Segi took a fifty-naira note from a black leather pouch and thrust it into the night guard’s hand. The guard took off his hat and waved.
They made their way toward Sango Road with the metal rails attached to the pickup rattling behind them. Taju knew the road well and navigated with the precision of a wasp. He skimmed the rims of the large potholes, throwing his passengers within an inch of their seats.
The minute they turned into Sango Road, they spotted policemen. One of them was putting out the flames on the kerosene-filled cans that had lit up their makeshift checkpoints. Two more policemen were emptying out the night’s takings from their pockets and exchanging swigs from a portable bottle of Napoleon Chevalier. Their guns lay on the ground swaddled by black raincoats. When the policeman blowing out flames saw them approaching, he put down the lamp he was holding and raised his baton. “Hol’ it!” he yelled. He didn’t lower his baton or open his eyes until the pickup’s hood was within half a yard of his worn black trousers. “Where are you going this early morning? Are you crimina’s?” He peered at them through the passenger window. His eyes softened briefly when they fell on Bolanle but when she didn’t engage his gaze, he resumed his interrogation. “Who are you? Identify yourse’fs!”
“Sergeant, I am Mr. Atanda Alao. We are going to UCH.” Baba Segi smiled sheepishly as his hand crept toward his black pouch.
“Who is sick?” the policeman inquired, feigning interest. He too had spotted the bulging pouch and the tentative journey Baba Segi’s hand was making toward it.
Both Baba Segi and Taju looked at Bolanle. The policeman’s eyes were squarely fixed on the blue fifty-naira note edging toward his open palm. He looked in the direction of his colleagues. When he was certain they were still bent over the raincoats, he shoved his crotch into the passenger window and stuffed the note into it. His zip was within two inches of Baba Segi’s face. Bolanle stared at the man’s midsection, interested to see if he would top his own crudeness.
“Drive!” The policeman commanded, swooping on the taxi behind them.
When the policemen were out of sight, Baba Segi leaned out of the car and spat into a large pothole. There was no food in his belly but he still had to empty himself. Bolanle glanced at him but he rejected her concern and wiped his lips with the back of his hand.
Baba Segi could never keep things in. He was open-ended. His senses were directly connected to his gut and what didn’t agree with him had a way of accelerating his digestive system. Bad smells, bad news and the sight of anything vaguely repulsive had an expulsive effect: what went in through his mouth recently shot out through his mouth, and what was already settled in his belly sped through his intestines and out of his rear end. Only after clearing his digestive system could Baba Segi regain calm.
Once when his shop assistants came to tell him that his shop had been burgled, he listened attentively while they read out the list of what had been stolen. Then, tensing his buttocks, he strode to the toilet. Within minutes, he reappeared with all tension gone from his face.
“All I can say is that what has happened has happened.” This was not the philosophical response the perplexed employees expected; they looked at each other and wondered if Baba Segi was still suffering from shock.
BOLANLE HUGGED HER ELBOWS. TAJU had discovered a new method of rankling her. Every time he changed gears, he leaned his arm close to her breast. In the distance, an old train snorted and let out a gasp before it commenced its daily chugging. Sango Road was waking up. Minibus drivers were starting up their vehicles and spilling out of the overcrowded motor parks. Women with sleeping babies on their backs swept out their marketplace stalls and tut-tutted at the sight of cigarette butts and broken bottles: leftovers of the night’s revelry.
The University College Hospital had a horrible reputation. Patients being taken there would bid their loved ones farewell. The lack of government funding, coupled with the misappropriation of the little the hospital generated, had left the buildings dilapidated. Crucial medical tests were rationed and the doctors refused patients who hadn’t brought their own medicine. The only reason people went there rather than the thousands of back-alley clinics was they could be sure the doctors had proper medical degrees.
Bolanle knew they were close as soon as she saw the palm trees that lined the main entrance and shielded early-morning mourners from the sun’s unyielding rays. There were always tears at the gate because it was here that the news of death was passed on to brokenhearted family members: here, there was no risk of them throwing themselves over the hospital’s many balconies. Besides this, the main gate was an awkward place for mourners to make a scene. There were too many people wrapped up in their own problems. So the mourners sat on big round boulders and wept silently.
“Where can I park?” Taju asked one of the security guards positioned around the gates to enforce organized grieving.
“Do I look like a parking attendant?” barked the man as he walked away.
“Sorry. I thought you were here to work. I didn’t realize this was your father’s living room,” Taju hissed as he drove off, tires screeching. Before the guard could turn and wag a finger, they were negotiating the roundabout in front of the main building.
They must have driven around for ten minutes in search of a parking space before Baba Segi finally suggested that Taju let them out.
“There is a space there, sir,” Taju said, pointing at an empty spot under a sign that said MORTUARY.
“Are you sure you want to park there?”
“No problem, sir. I will stay here in the car. Nothing will happen.” Taju reassuringly beat his chest like he had dominion over the ghosts that lay beyond the big gray door and whatever mischief they might have in mind.
“Well, at least we know where to find you. We shouldn’t be too long.”
“Go well, sir.” Taju ignored Bolanle. He ruffled his hair for a toothpick and inserted it between his teeth.
When Bolanle and Baba Segi reached the top of the first flight of stairs, the landing opened up into a long corridor that stretched out in both directions. Baba Segi glimpsed a figure in a white coat and ran to him. “Doctor! Doctor! I need somebody to help me. It is my wife’s womb—” he panted.
The medic surveyed Bolanle’s waistline and inquired if she was in labor.
“No,” Bolanle replied. Before Baba Segi could further humiliate her, she added calmly, “We are here to seek medical advice.”
“I see,” the doctor said, nodding. “Is this your first time at UCH?”
“I have never had reason to come here before. Ogun bears witness,” Baba Segi blurted.
Addressing Bolanle, the doctor gave them directions. “You’ll need to go to the general outpatients department. Go to the end of this corridor and turn left, down the stairs, go to the end of that corridor and you should see a big sign that says ‘General Outpatients.’ It’s written in blue. You can’t miss it.”
Furious at the wa
y the doctor stared at his wife, Baba Segi grabbed Bolanle by the elbow. “Go your way! We’ll find it ourselves!”
The astonished doctor watched as he dragged Bolanle off in the wrong direction. Bolanle snatched her arm from his grip and led the way. Each time they walked past a hospital clock, Baba Segi would tap the face of his watch and frown in bewilderment. Bolanle shook her head as they approached the sign that read GENERAL OUTPATIENTS DEPT. (GOD).
“The clocks have stopped, Baba Segi. It is not a miracle. Neither is it magic. The clocks have simply stopped.”
Baba Segi looked at his watch one last time and lowered his arms to his sides.
A doctor was perched on the edge of a table in front. He turned linked fingers out above his head and yawned. Opposite him, a nurse sat upright on a plastic chair. The doctor yawned again and only made to cover his mouth as his lips were closing. One arm of his glasses was held in place with a Band-Aid and his beard was disheveled.
“So you are going home to sleep all by yourself?” The nurse placed her arms underneath her breasts so they jutted out. Her uniform was crisp and angelic.
They both turned when a well-dressed young woman approached, trailed by a huffing middle-aged man. The doctor scratched his head and headed back to his consultation cubicle.
“Can I help you?” The nurse’s tone was friendly despite her small frown.
There were voices in the background—other doctors holding consultations with their patients.
“Sister, it is this wife of mine who needs your help,” Baba Segi said.
“What is your name?” The nurse brought out a fresh pink folder from the desk she rested on.
“Bolanle Alao,” Baba Segi replied.
“Date of birth?” The nurse looked at Bolanle strangely.
The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives Page 3
