The Son of the House

by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

‘Do you steal?

  ‘Can you read?

  ‘Can you tell time?’

  The answer to these last questions was, ‘No, sir.’ Daddy shook his head at this and turned to his wife, saying, ‘At least she has the good sense not to lie.’

  She nodded approvingly. Her tall frame looked more menacing than my last madam’s small but chubby build.

  ‘We will take care of you. We do not mistreat people. You will eat exactly what we eat. In return, you must do what you are told. Laziness is a disease not allowed room in this house.’ With this, it looked like I had passed the interview.

  I tried not to worry. I wondered where I would sleep. Daddy looked little like Oga, but that did not stop the racing of my heart as I remembered what Oga had done to me.

  As they told Hyacinth that they would take care of me, I tried not to let my fear show. He thanked them and admonished me to behave well, not to take anything that did not belong to me, and to keep my eyes on my work and my schooling. He did not tell me how I could contact him if anything went wrong. In my trepidation, I did not ask.

  Later, I was given a list of chores to do: some were to be done twice or more times a day, like bathing Ikenna, their young son (twice a day, morning and night), cleaning the sitting room (twice a day, before breakfast and after dinner), and the kitchen (as many times a day as I had nothing else to do). I was sent to a room towards the back of the house. I was shown my toilet, which was in the house, and told that I must keep it clean. Everything looked luxurious and tidy, not a speck of sand or the brown colour of dust to be seen anywhere.

  Later still, Mummy came into my room where I had come to drop my bag of clothes and change from the clothes in which I had arrived, my church clothes.

  ‘Here,’ she said, holding out a small blue polythene bag. I took it in my hands. It had something inside that wasn’t quite soft, but it was not hard either. I wanted to ask what it was but I was too shy.

  ‘Have you had your period?’ She began the sentence in Igbo, which I could understand perfectly and which was the language I spoke and thought in. But she said ‘period’ in English, and this confused me: ‘I fubago period gi?’ My confusion probably showed itself because she immediately tried to explain: ‘The blood that comes at the end of the month.’

  I was relieved that I knew what she spoke about. I had just begun my period three months before I’d arrived in Enugu. The day it started, I was on my way to the market with some of Mama Nkemdilim’s okpa on my head. I had felt pain in my belly all morning but I did not want to complain so that Mama Nkemdilim would not shout at me. But the pain kept growing and gnawing in my belly, especially the lower part. As I walked, I felt something running down my thighs. Curious, I looked down but saw nothing. I walked until I got to the market. It was there that Mama Okechukwu saw what was happening to me. Mama Okechukwu was my rival in the okpa business. She was often irritated that I managed to sell all of Mama Nkemdilim’s okpa while she waited for customers to look her way. She must have seen the red spot on my faded wrapper, because she immediately took off one of her own wrappers and wrapped it around me. She insisted that I go home at once. I told her that Mama Nkemdilim would kill me if I came home with no okpa sold. She said that Mama Nkemdilim would understand. When she saw that I would not budge – so great was my fear of my stepmother’s wrath – she said she would accompany me home. She packed up her unsold okpa and we walked home together.

  When we got there, she drew Mama Nkemdilim aside and spoke to her, pointing at me and gesturing at her own buttocks. Mama Nkemdilim was not pleased to see me with the okpa unsold. But, to my surprise, she did not accuse Mama Okechukwu of meddling.

  ‘You know the tradition,’ I heard Mama Okechukwu say to my stepmother as she was leaving, ‘kill a chicken and welcome her into womanhood.’ The she smiled at me, said jisike, and left.

  Mama Nkemdilim told me to put the okpa away. She went into the room and brought some pieces of cloth. She explained to me that I needed to put this in my underwear and, when it was soaked through, wash it and use another. She said that I would get the blood every month, for three, maybe four days. She also said that I was no longer allowed to go near a man, otherwise I would get pregnant right away and the shame would kill my father in his grave all over again. She said that she had no cock to kill to welcome anyone to womanhood. It was all she could do to take care of all of us with no help from anywhere, the earth or the sky.

  I knew about the blood that came every month, I assured my new employer. She nodded with something that looked like relief and said, ‘This is what you will use. Do not use my tissue paper. The last maid I had used up a month’s supply of tissue each time. This,’ she said, gesturing at what I had in my hand, ‘is what you will use. It is called a sanitary pad.’

  ‘Yes, Ma,’ I said.

  ‘When you’ve used it, you tie it up in a polythene bag and throw it in the dustbin. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘Make sure you do not try to flush it down the toilet, do you hear?’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  ‘You throw it in the garbage.’

  ‘Yes, Ma.’

  When she left, I opened it and touched it. It was so white and so soft. Maybe this new town, this new home would be all right. Maybe Enugu would treat me well.

  …

  I need not have worried about Daddy. He barely threw me a glance when I saw him. After I had lived with them a few weeks, I found it almost laughable – that frisson of fear that had shaken my heart on the first day. It was clear that I would never be clean enough for Daddy.

  Daddy insisted that I go to school. It was not merely kindness. He said he did not want me to act like a goat in the house. I would be around their young son, Ikenna, and he did not want me infecting him with dullness. Plus, I needed to know basic things such as how to tell time, read a list if I needed to be sent to the market, and read signposts if I was sent on an errand outside.

  So, at twelve years old, I started primary one at St Mary’s Primary School. I went to school in the afternoon, after Mummy came back from work in the Secretariat. Mummy was a civil servant and often complained that moving up the ladder from administrative officer was like pushing a rock up the Miliken Hill. Her boss sent her on errands that his secretary or messenger should run, refusing to recognise her seniority. She often talked about going back to get a different degree, as if she was making a threat. Daddy ignored her complaints, and I acted the way I was supposed to – listen silently.

  Living with Daddy and Mummy was hard work. Not because the chores were too many, though they were almost as many as Mama Nkemdilim had given me to do. It was because Daddy suffered from an obsession with perfection that kept me on my toes, unable to relax. I had to do everything twice, I was warned. Sweep, sweep again. Dust, dust again. Flush, flush again. Wash, wash again. We lived on a dusty street, with roads that had seen some tarring once but had now been abandoned, letting dust pile up on pictures, side tables, wall dividers, every minute of the day.

  I had to scrub the veranda every morning, dust the bookshelves in the sitting room and library, and sweep the entire house, three or four times bigger than our house in the village or even the house I lived in in Lagos. And I had to do it twice, morning and night, making sure that I had left nothing behind. I had to scrub the three toilets with Harpic, three times each, Mummy emphasised, and then take a tissue paper and wipe just below the wide mouth of the toilet. I had to wash my hands four times after I was done with the toilets, which were the last chores. When I was done, I could not touch anything in the house for at least thirty minutes to be sure that the disinfectant with which I washed my hands had done its work.

  Unlike where I had worked in Lagos, our neighbourhood in Independence Layout was clean, a neighbourhood of top civil servants and businessmen, Catholic priests and bishops, some of them European. The houses looked different, but they all had rows and hedges of flowers. Hibiscus, morning glory, and neatly cut rows of Iora were
the most popular. Our neighbour at number 9 had pink flowers overflowing her fence; Daddy thought she needed to trim them. When I have my own house, I will have flowers everywhere, inside and out, I told myself. All the houses had outside lights at night, long fluorescent tubes. Mama Nkemdilim would say that the city was a place where light bulbs shone in the sky. All families had a housemaid. Except number 21: the husband there insisted that he could not live with one. Strangely, I heard, he helped his wife with the cooking, bathed the kids and took them to school. Many families also had a driver. We did not; Daddy preferred to drive himself – he could not stand the unwashed odour of drivers in such a small space, he told his wife.

  My village ways were constantly being smoothed out of me, as with a sharp knife that was rubbed against another to sharpen it. For example, drinking glasses had to be clean and dry. The first time I served Daddy water, I rinsed the glass to make sure it was clean, just like I had done in Lagos, then took the glass and a bottle of cold water to him on a tray. He stared at me coldly as I stood before him with the tray in my hands.

  ‘Why have you brought me a filthy glass to drink from?’ he asked at last. ‘Get out of here.’

  I walked back into the kitchen, my legs trembling so much I thought they would give out on me.

  Later, I heard him telling Mummy that it was hard to be married to a woman who could not even take a little time to teach a housemaid how to do things in the house. When she came into the kitchen, she shouted at me.

  ‘Did you not learn a single thing at all in your stupid village? Did they not say you have done this work before?’

  I was puzzled. What had I done wrong?

  ‘Has no one, no one at all, taught you that you do not serve anybody, anybody at all, water in a wet glass? That even if you serve God Himself water in a wet glass, you cannot serve my husband water in a wet glass?’

  Frozen by her anger, I did not reply; I was not required to.

  Thus, I learnt to wash glasses, make sure I laid them out on a tray to dry, and, no matter what, have at least two dry glasses ready for whenever Daddy needed water. I began to understand that the temperature inside the house rose gradually as the day wore on, approaching evening, and only dipped when Daddy left for work the next day. When he entered the house, the first thing Daddy did before he answered his wife’s greetings was point out that he had seen a broomstick, a speck of dust, or a strand of hair on the veranda, or that the flowers were dying. Then he would proceed to complain about dinner: too salty, too spicy, too bland, not enough salt, too much meat, which meant his money was being recklessly spent, too little meat, which meant that he was being fed like a pauper.

  He nit-picked until he made his wife scream like a child who had been tickled too long. I often thought that living inside his skin must be so prickly that he had to reach out and make others uncomfortable too. He would lash out at his wife, though hardly ever at me. But I was the endpoint of all that itchiness, because no sooner would their shouting match end than his wife would take it all out on me.

  Mummy was not a mean woman, not in the active, bitter-leaf way of my stepmother. I ate all I needed. She left me to my own devices when there was no work to be done. I learnt to understand her body clock – she was happiest when Daddy left for work and right after she returned from her own work between three and four. Between five and six, she became anxious, finicky, panicky. Coming in from school, I ran around making sure all was well with every part of the house – no dust, no cobweb, no spider in sight, food perfect, and the house not smelling of said food. By ten past seven, she could be her most cruel or her most pleased, depending on her husband’s mood. She was really only cruel when her husband pushed her buttons. Which was often. Just like when Ikenna switched on the light on the wall and then ran to his bed and switched off the light with the rope switch and ran back and did the same thing over and over. On, off, on, off.

  I did my chores as well as I could not only because I was required to, but out of pity for Mummy, because her husband looked for dust underneath the bookshelves, and specks of hair on their combs, and scraps of food between her teeth. And then he would turn on her once he found something.

  Still, Mummy tried hard to please her husband. Sometimes she would come into the kitchen and cry quietly after a particularly bitter argument.

  ‘I am sorry, Ma,’ I said, the first time this happened.

  She lifted up her head and stared at me with so much contempt that I knew I had stepped out of line. Afterwards, I would keep quiet and avert my eyes, just like other housemaids who saw husbands beat their wives or bring home women while their wives were away at work.

  I could have told her that her husband loved a clean house more than he would ever love any woman but it was not my place. I often thought that worry would age her faster than anything else, worry at not being good enough or at least as good as her husband expected her to be. She would shout back at him, but he had perfected the art of needling far better than she ever would. When she turned on me, I knew she only needed an outlet for her frustration. I was willing to be that vent. They sent me to school, they fed me well, Mummy spoke kindly to me when her husband was not pricking her with pins, and Ikenna was a delightful child.

  Ikenna was five when I came to live with them, and, in caring for him, my experience with my half-sister and brother came in handy. I was the one he called for when he had nightmares. Mummy would come running to my room at the back of the house. I was also the only one who could feed him when he was feverish with malaria. His exhausted mother would hand him over gladly and then proceed to hover over me. Perhaps she did not want to seem useless.

  I potty-trained Ikenna. Years after, I would think that it may have been the reason why Daddy kept me on: for the singular act of potty-training his child. It was well known up and down the street: Daddy’s penchant for sacking the help – a seemingly uncontrollable habit of getting six, some said ten housemaids each year, finding them incapable of meeting his impossible standards, and then proceeding to send them home, sometimes after only a day. It was rumoured that he once sent one home within hours: she was fat, she sweated too much, and she smelt.

  When I arrived, Ikenna had refused all efforts to potty-train him. At the age of five he preferred the convenience of his underwear over any toilet, no matter where that toilet was or how clean it was. Once, when his father noticed that Ikenna needed to relieve himself, he sent the boy to his room. There, Ikenna stood by the toilet and quietly pooped on himself. Later, I came upon Daddy cleaning the toilet in his son’s room. He looked up at me and then went on washing the toilet I had washed that morning, the brush going vigorously, punishingly, against the white bowl. I looked away, my heart trembling. I had cleaned it myself that morning, I wanted to say. But Mummy said that Daddy wanted to be sure that Ikenna was not avoiding the toilet because it was dirty.

  Nothing else had worked – not flogging with the cane, not treats, not threats. Even his teachers had given up, requiring his parents to put a diaper on him, an act which many parents of children of that age would have considered evidence that their child was abnormal, or that they had failed in the school of parenting. That is, until I came, and we began to exchange fairy tales for every pee that found its way into the toilet bowl.

  When his father was in one of his perfectionist moods and began to look for ants under flowerpots, Ikenna would come to me in the kitchen, where I would tell him fairy tales – of the goat and the tortoise, of the squirrel whose wise mother stored food in heaven in preparation for a famine, and his favourite, in which the tortoise found a way to eat a large pot of spicy peppers without stopping once by cunningly getting his hosts to allow him to sing while eating. When I discovered how much Ikenna loved my stories, I began to insist that he relieve himself in order to get a story. Where treats, floggings with the cane, and cajoling had not worked, our story-for-pee exchange did.

  His parents were grateful. And Daddy let me stay.

  Ikenna seemed the only who
le person in that house, not letting the tension between his parents bother him. He often said what was on his mind, in the way that only children could.

  ‘How come you are only one class ahead of me when you are so much older?’ he asked me once.

  I explained that I had had interruptions in my studies and why.

  ‘But why would your stepmother not send you to school?’

  We had no money, I explained.

  ‘Why do you not have money?’

  His questions were endless. He asked them with an open heart, with no preconceptions, just curiosity. Why was my world different from his, was all he wanted to know. I could not give him really good answers when I did not know myself.

  He was a precocious, smart child who was reading before he turned four. It was to keep up with his constant reading, and to read the books he placed in my hands every spare minute, that I became a more fluent reader myself. He went to a good school, a better school than mine, and often came home with books that he made me read to him when his mother got tired of his pestering.

  My reading improved, exponentially it seemed, and I came top of my class at my school every term. Being an afternoon school, my class was full of houseboys and housemaids, many of them going to primary school late in life, like me. Even so, Mummy was impressed by my report card and my consistency. She suggested to Daddy that I should be sent to the commercial school close by to continue my studies.

  Daddy, I think, was less impressed by my report card than my ability to withhold tears as I cleaned the sitting room as many times as he wanted me to on any given day. He agreed.

  I was happy. I was not going to be a nurse or a teacher like my father had wished, but I was sure he would be happy that I would be going to school, and perhaps become a typist, even a secretary, as I heard Mummy tell her husband. My path was becoming clear.

  I was content with my lot, my potential. Nobody in the household died, as Mama Nkemdilim had predicted when I left for Enugu. I cleaned and scrubbed and mopped and dusted and potty-trained, and all seemed to go well. Except that Mummy had been unable to give birth to another child, and had gone from hospital to hospital with no result. Daddy blamed his wife. I thought that if he would stop his nitpicking even for two months, she might stand a better chance. Even I knew that stress was no helper to fertility.