by Abi Daré
“Your madam must not find it, okay?”
“Even if you don’t teach me that, common sense is telling me that one. Is it having Facebook on it?” I ask, looking at the phone again, like it is something that just fall from heaven and land in my hand.
“No,” she say. “I cannot let you get on the internet until you know exactly what you are doing. And”—she bite her lip like she thinking deep for a moment—“if your madam’s husband ever tries to touch you, you fight, okay? You fight with everything in you. And scream. Fight and scream. Remember those two words, okay? Promise me that you will do that?”
I nod my head yes. “He did not come near me again since that time.” I know I am telling a small lie, but I don’t want Ms. Tia to come to Big Madam and be causing fight. I am fearing of what will happen to me if she cause a fight.
“And if it ever happens again—God forbid—but if that bastard comes near you again, I will have him bloody arrested and damn the consequences.” She blow out air with her nose and mouth, blinking her eyes fast. I feel something move inside my chest. Why is this woman so kind to me? What can she see in me when even me, I am not seeing anything in myself sometimes? I fight the stubborn, foolish tears pinching my eyes, but it come out anyway.
“Aww, I didn’t mean to make you cry,” Ms. Tia say, wiping her finger under my left eye.
“What you see in me, Ms. Tia?”
She shake her head, hold my two hand up, make it like two bars so she can peep my face, the real me behind the bars. It feel like she is climbing out of herself and entering my own soul, my heart.
“Tell me, what do you want most in life?” she ask.
“For my mama to not be dead,” I say, my voice breaking. “For her to come back and make everything better.”
“I know,” she say with a soft, sad smile. “I know, but can you think of something else you want?”
“To go to school,” I say. “And now, to win the scholarship.”
“Why is this so important to you, Adunni?”
“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping. Think it, Ms. Tia. If I can go to school and become a teacher, then I can collect my salary and maybe even build my own school in Ikati and be teaching the girls. The girls in my village don’t have much chance for school. I want to change that, Ms. Tia, because those girls, they will grow up and born many more great people to make Nigeria even more better than now.”
Ms. Tia is nodding her head yes as I am talking. “You can do it,” she say. “God has given you all you need to be great, and it sits right there inside of you.” She drop my hands, point a finger to my chest. “Right inside your mind, in your heart. You believe it, I know you do. You just need to hold on to that belief and never let go. When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important. You must believe this, regardless of what happens with the scholarship. Okay?”
I look deep into Ms. Tia’s eyes, at the spot of something gold in the brown of her eyesballs, and my heart sort of melt. I know she is saying all this from the good of her soul, but it is not so easy when you are born into a life of no money and plenty suffering, a life you didn’t choose for yourself. Sometimes I wish I can just believe for a good life and it will magic and happen for me, just like that. But maybe, to believe it in my mind is the start, so I nod my head, drag it real slow up and down as I am saying: “Tomorrow will be better than today. I am a somebody of value.”
“Beautiful, Adunni. Just beautiful.” Ms. Tia sort of cry-laugh. “Come on now,” she says, picking my hand. “The car is outside. Let’s head to the market.”
* * *
A black Toyota car, Ms. Tia call it a Uber, pick us up from the front of her gate.
The man driving, Michael, he nod his head and pull the collar of his shirt to his jaw when he see Ms. Tia. Then he tilt his neck to one side, and I am thinking maybe he ate small poison before leaving his house this morning because of how he is doing like a sickness is worrying him. Before he start the car, he look up in the mirror and lick his lips.
“Yo, miss,” he say, “you’re kinda hot, you know?”
I look at Ms. Tia. Is she feeling hot?
But she roll her eyes and say, “Can you please put on Wizkid or turn it to Cool FM?” because she “is not in the mood to chat today.”
“Aiight,” the man say. “No need to be rolling those brown eyes at me.”
Then he turn on the music and start to drive. We drive in traffic for a whole hour, climbing the up-road and down it, through lines and lines of cars horning every minute, until the man turn into a street that is full of million-millions of people. Michael stop his car in front of a red food shop—Frankie’s—with picture of three pink cakes and a child eating ice cream in front of it.
“Aiight, ladies,” Michael say. “This is as far as I can go.”
We climb out of the car, and with another nod, Michael drive off.
“Why was he nodding and bending his neck? Is he okay?” I ask Ms. Tia as she grab my hand and we begin to squeeze ourselves between the too many human beings in the market.
“I am sure he is fine,” Ms. Tia say, looking around. “Now, where on earth do we start from?”
I look around too, feel something dizzy.
The Balogun market is one long stretch of street, full of so many people and noise. I think that maybe God pack a whole city inside a suitcase, travel to this street, open the suitcase, and let the whole city out. Every single noise in the world must be sounding right here, right now, at the same time: I hear the peen, peen from cars, the meh of goats, “Allah hu Akbar” and “Praise the Lord” from the loudspeakers hanging from a building of a mosque and a church side by side of each other.
The bells of food sellers, their shining balls of akara and puff-puff inside a glass box on the heads of the sellers, the voices of men and women and children selling everything they are seeing to sell: pants and bras and shoes and ice cream and pure water in a bag and dried shrimps inside a roll of bread and hair wigs and everything. From where we are standing, the people look like a carpet of heads sailing on water, like tiny ants, millions of them, moving along a path.
I try to look my feet, but all I see is darkness, there is no space between me and Ms. Tia, and the person beside me, who is pressing into me, is speaking loud on his phone about a “container from China” and how it must not lost.
“Hold on tight,” I think Ms. Tia is trying to say, but a loudspeaker from above my head is swallowing her words with the noise-making announcement in Yoruba about a strong herb medicine to cure manhood problem. There are cars in the middle of the street too, the yellow-and-black taxi of Lagos state, not moving, just staying there, pressing their horn. A man is banging on the windscreen of a car, shouting at the driver to “move this thing, bastard!”
The rest of us keep going straight, slowly, pressing into people, smelling different odors from different people: women’s stale monthly bleeding, stinking sweat, strong flower perfume, incense, fried bread, siga smoke, and dirty feet. Some women are sitting under colorful umbrellas—pink, red, yellow, white—on the side of the street, shouting at the people passing to come and buy “fresh fish and coconut candy” and “one hundred percent human hair.” Others keep walking with us, their tray of things on their heads.
“Where are we going?” I shout to Ms. Tia as one man from nowhere just pull my hand out from her own and shout into my ears, “Fine girl, follow me, come and buy gold leggings, original.” I snatch my hand from him, and another man, wearing a pink singlet with holes and dark sunglasses on his face,
push a small white fan to my chest. “Buy fresh breeze. Original breeze to blow away your troubles. Hundred naira for five minutes?” I shake my head no, keep holding Ms. Tia tight, my heart beating at everything and everybody.
As we pass a stall selling shoes leather and rubber and all sorts of shoes, all climbing up, up to the top of the shop, a woman with a small bowl full of bottles on her head press an ice-cold block to my cheeks and shock me with it and say, “Cold water. Very freeze, very pure.” She put up one hand, pull out a Coke from the bowl on her head, press the bottle to my chest. “Or you want Coke? We have Mirinda, 7UP. Which one?”
There are buildings to our left and right, but all the buildings are covered with things hanging from the windows: trousers and shirts and suits, gray telephone wires crossing the top of our heads from one building to the second building, tangling up with all the signboards for church and mosque and herb medicine.
Ms. Tia keeps walking, gripping my hands. “We will take a turn by the left of the fish seller’s stall,” she shout. “It’s a crazy world out here!”
It doesn’t feel like we are moving.
I feel as if the crowd is a moving machine, floating me along with the people, until we turn left and then the crowd is not as much as the first street. This road is a long stretch of people selling beads and ankara fabric, and before I can ask Ms. Tia if this is the right place to stop, a man wearing a black t-shirt with the word “PRANDA” on it smile at Ms. Tia, pull the giant red beads on his neck, and say, “Madam, we have everything you want. Which one?”
“For goodness’ sake!” Ms. Tia say, swiping a hand on her forehead. “I’m just after some fabric.”
“We have designer t-shirt too,” the man say and bend to a bowl by his feet, pick up a white t-shirt. “Very original. Brand-new.” He spread out the shirt, and Ms. Tia eye the word on it—“Guccshi”—before she shake her head no and start to walk away.
“I need authentic ankara,” she say. “That’s all I am here for.”
“But we have Channel bag inside,” he say, pulling my hand with his own hot, sweaty hands.
“Why don’t you go to Big Madam’s shop?” I say to Ms. Tia as I snatch my hand back from the man. “I have never seen anything like this in my life. Is this Lagos?”
In Ikati, the market is like a quarter of this, and everybody is quiet, and everybody is knowing each other, talking peaceful.
“It is Lagos,” Ms. Tia say with a tired laugh. “Florence’s fabrics are bloody expensive. This way.”
We jump over a stinking gutter in the road, full of black water with little frog-fishes swimming through the wet siga and tissue and newspaper inside it. We cross to the other side of the street, where there is another line of shops full of fabrics.
“Finally,” Ms. Tia say as we turn to a stall the size of a toilet, with a wall of colorful folded ankara hanging from the ceiling to the floor. The woman in front of the shop, round like a rolling drum, was singing a Yoruba song and folding a fabric into two, but when she sees us, she drop the cloth, point to the wall of fabric behind her.
“Welcome, mummy,” she say to Ms. Tia. “We have Woodin, ABC Wax, New Satin, anyone you want. Everything here is original. Wash it and wash it, but it will not change. See this one. Latest.” She pull out a folded yellow and green pattern of ankara and press it into Ms. Tia’s hand.
“This is stunning,” Ms. Tia say, speaking in her clear, clean English. “So soft to touch. Simply exquisite. Can I have like three of these? Six yards each? I want to make bedsheets and pillow cases out of them for the guest rooms.”
“London mummy,” the woman say to Ms. Tia, “for you, six yards is six thousand naira. You want three? I have three. Sit down, sit down, let me pack it in a London nylon bag for you.”
Watching the way Ms. Tia’s eyes are lighting up at the fabric is making me long so sudden for my friend Enitan. She was always having a light in her eyes too when she see a new color of a eye pencil or a lipstick in the market. Only thing is, most times, Enitan will not have money to buy anything, so we will just look at the makeups, laugh, and keep walking. Ms. Tia has all the money and can buy things that she doesn’t even need, and sometimes, like today, I wonder about Enitan, and about Ms. Tia, at how different two of them are, how Ms. Tia and I are friends, but not like me and Enitan.
“Adunni!” Ms. Tia wink at me, and I nod, bring back all the memory of how my mama was teaching me to be arguing price with the market women in Ikati.
“No way,” I say in Yoruba to the seller. “Six thousand naira for six yards? God forbid. It is too costly. Sell it to us for three thousand.”
“Four thousand five. Last price,” the woman say, snatching the fabric from Ms. Tia as if she vex her. “This is original. Latest.”
I smile at the seller, say, “Mama, I am your daughter-o. If you sell it for us for three thousand, I will come back here next week with her. We will buy plenty from you. We have come from very far in this hot sun. Collect three thousand from us. Please.”
The woman sigh, say, “Bring your money.”
I turn to Ms. Tia. “She will collect three thousand. Pay her.”
Ms. Tia laugh, say, “Adunni, this is exactly why I brought you here with me.”
* * *
Two hours later and my two legs are swollen.
My head feel like a hot, burning football. My throat is dry, tongue clipped. Ms. Tia keep shopping like something curse her, buying this and that, making me low the price until my mouth is too dry to keep talking. She is so excited, too happy with how I am saving her money, and every time we finish with a seller, she will clap her hands and say, “You are a genius! We must do this again!”
We leave the market just as the sun is going down, as the sky is turning orange. We walk slow, Ms. Tia dragging her feet and her nylon bags full of shopping (she refuse me to carry anything for her, she says her own two hands are working well), until we find ourselves in front of Frankie’s Fast Food, where Michael dropped us off in the early afternoon.
“Would you like something to eat?” Ms. Tia ask.
“Yes, ma,” I say, licking my lips. “I am too-too hungry.”
“‘Starving’ is the word you need, Adunni. ‘STAR-VING.’”
How can she even think sense to be correcting my English in this hot sun and after all the walking?
We enter the cool, air-con shop, and I pick the third seat by the door, slide into a red leather cushion chair that look like a rich man’s bench, with a high wood table in the middle of it and pictures of giant meat pies and sausage rolls and sliced boiled eggs on the walls to my left.
“I will order something for us,” Ms. Tia say, dropping her bags of shopping and walking away.
She return a moment later, set a tray full of meat pies, sausage rolls, small yellow cakes, and orange juice on the table.
“That was crazy fun,” she say, sliding in with me. “We should do this again. One more time, maybe after the bath. I will ask Ken to speak to Florence. Go on, eat something.”
I look at the food, swallow spit. I don’t think I have eaten anything like this in my whole life, and I wish that I can have Kayus and Enitan here with me, eating this plenty food, laughing and talking. The feeling come quick, drag down my spirit.
“This is so much,” I say, forcing a smile to pick up my spirit. “So much food.”
“Well, you are starving. Go on, eat.”
I taste the meat pie, close my eyes as my teeth sink deep into the bread of the pie and break it, as the thick, warm soup of meat and potato flow out of the bread and melt on my tongue.
When I open my eyes, Ms. Tia is watching me, smiling.
“You really shone today,” she say. “Confidently haggling with those women.”
I shrug, pick a sausage roll, bite it.
“My mum’s unwell, again,” she say as she pick up a fork and knife and begin
to slice the cake into small cubes. She pinch one with a fork, eat it. “I’ll be going to Port Harcourt next week. I will be there over Christmas and the new year. We’ve completed the application form, and I have written your reference and printed out the supporting documentation as a guarantor. All we need now is the essay. Adunni, you need to write it very soon. Can you work on it over the next two days, and bring it to my house?”
“I will try,” I say. True thing is, I have been waiting for the right time to pick up my biro and write it, pushing the day forward, afraid of what I will say, how to make it the best.
“Make sure your handwriting is clear, and that you use a good pen. When you are done, fold it and slide it under my front gate. I will take it to the Ocean Oil office myself to make sure it gets delivered before I leave for Port Harcourt. Can you bring it in two days?”
When I don’t answer, she pick up my hand, hold it tight. “Are you scared?”
“A little bit,” I say, wiping the crumbs from my mouth. “I am afraid of what to write.”
“Write from your soul,” she say. “Write your truth. From a place—” She drop my hand, stop talking. Her eyes are on the swinging front door, her face looking shock. I follow her eyes, see what she is seeing: the Thin Woman from the WRWA meeting. She is wearing a black English suit, but with a skirt, the collar of her jacket like she about to fly up in the air.
“Shit,” Ms. Tia say, whisper. “It’s Titi Benson. She’s coming this way. Duck, Adunni. Now. Duck.”
“A duck?” I say, looking around. “Inside this restaurant?”
“Get under the table,” she say, talking through her teeth. “Now.”
I climb under the table, hide behind the bags of shopping, my heart beating fast.
The Thin Woman, her legs like thread, is walking to our table, and I am not understanding how her legs is not breaking into two with how she is strolling so fast on her high-heel shoe.
“Tia Dada,” she say, stopping at our table, her smell of costly perfume swallowing up the smell of my meat pie and sausage.
