The Son of the House

by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

  Chidinma was my friend from down the street, at number 16. She was a housemaid too. We walked to school together – me, tall, lanky, with hardly any spare flesh on me; she, chubby, small and round. At school, we did everything together – we sat in class in adjoining chairs, gossiped together during break, inseparable as the two blades of a pair of scissors joined by a screw. She was about my age, but carried herself with greater self-assurance. She had been in the neighbourhood longer and, because of that, thought she knew more than me. I let her think so – it was easier that way.

  ‘Please come to the back,’ I pleaded with Chidinma. She was fiddling with the knobs on the big television in the sitting room, trying to get it on.

  ‘Did you not say Daddy was travelling?’ she asked, paying no heed to my plea. She watched television in their house and often wondered why I was not allowed to do the same. Nobody had said I could not, but I knew better than to try. My fingerprints on the big dials of the TV might make Daddy go a little crazy.

  I managed to draw Chidinma to the kitchen. ‘Give me a dry glass,’ Chidinma ordered in the best male tone she could muster. We both laughed.

  Daddy was travelling overseas. Mummy had said he had gone to London. She smiled as she said this, a strange glitter in her eyes. And for the past two days Mummy had been happier than in all of the four years I had lived in their house. She asked me more questions about Mama Nkemdilim and Nwokenta than she had since my first interview. I had smelt freedom in the air as I did my chores, almost stopping to sniff it to make sure it was there.

  When Chidinma had had a drink of water in a dry cup, we ate some of the yam and vegetables I had made the previous night, digging in with our fingers and polishing the plate. Then, at my insistence, we got to work on our homework for school. I sat on the kitchen floor, pulling up a small stool for a table. Chidinma sat silently by, not working, not hindering. Just quiet. She was waiting for me to finish so that she could copy it in her workbook. Her writing was like the dance of a hen as it scattered the ground in search of food.

  The homework was multiplication. Ten times, eleven times, twelve times. I thought we could chant it and maybe that would help.

  I started with the ten times table; it was the easiest. ‘Ten times one, ten; ten times two, twenty; ten times three, thirty.’ Chidinma got stuck at eleven and refused to try further.

  Chidinma’s head was blocked – that was the way she described it. ‘Like a cement block coming down, every time I try to understand this book thing,’ she laughed, unabashed. Academic knowledge could not find a smooth path into her head. I could learn from the books that Ikenna brought home, but Chidinma could not learn. It was no use, she would say, when I tried to explain things to her as simply as I could: her mind was a slab of cement. ‘My head,’ she would say, ‘is too full of common sense, ako na uche, to take in book knowledge.’ She did not bemoan her lack of academic ability or envy my endowments. She looked forward to finishing school and going to learn the tailoring trade.

  ‘Hmm, I don’t know how you will be a tailor if you cannot measure o. Ehn, or how you will calculate your money,’ I said to her, trying to goad her into trying.

  I should have left well enough alone. Chidinma did not care. She laughed, a hearty generous laugh that came from deep within her gut, dimples sinking into both sides of her cheeks.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry, you will calculate my money for me and I will pay.’

  ‘No,’ I told her, standing up for emphasis, ‘I will be a secretary in a big office, and wear ready-made. You will see.’

  ‘Ah, secretary? Okay, after you have won Miss Nigeria. Black beauty. You will walk around half-naked in that thing they wear,’ she said, referring to the one-piece swimsuit. She stood up to demonstrate, walking like she was on high heels. Her chubby frame with buttocks stuck out comically was the funniest thing to watch.

  Unlike my friend, I had retained my slenderness, not out of hunger, for I was fed well, if often worked to the bone. I was going to be tall like both my father and mother.

  When I was done laughing, I said, ‘Do you know that Urenna heard you call me that once? Now he too calls me “black beauty”.’

  ‘Eeehn,’ she said, her tone noticeably cooler.

  ‘Yes,’ I plunged on, heedlessly, seeking every possible chance to speak about her bosses’ son. Chidinma thought my crush on Urenna – the only son of his father, a university student and two years older than me – was foolish. She could not see him as I saw him, I mused. To her, he was a chore; to me, he was the world.

  ‘And do you answer when he calls you that?’ Her eyes were now on the books that we had abandoned on the floor.

  ‘Ee nu,’ I said, emphasising my yes in answer to her question and poking her arm a little, trying to get back to the light-hearted mood of a few moments before. But it was gone and not planning on returning.

  ‘It is getting late,’ she said, gathering her books. ‘The children will soon be back. Let me go and get lunch ready for them.’ The children were Ugomma and Njide, Urenna’s younger sisters.

  I walked with her to the gate and said goodbye. She smiled at me but the easiness was gone; it was a forced smile. ‘Come and get me when you are ready for school,’ she said, as she walked away.

  I often finished my chores and got ready for our afternoon school before she did. Then I would go down the street to her house to wait for her before heading out for school. She had to fix lunch for the children, then wait for their lesson teacher before heading out to school. Ikenna, my ward, stayed on at the house of his headmistress until his mother picked him up in the evening, leaving my afternoons freer than Chidinma’s.

  I watched her back as she walked back to number 16, buttocks swinging a little, and I thought that it would be sad if I were to lose my friendship with her. It was, after all, our friendship that had led me to Urenna.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I met Urenna in the month of September. I had started primary six. I was sixteen, on the way to seventeen.

  That evening, I checked in to see Chidinma. She had not come to school that day and I thought I would stop by their house on my way back. I hoped that Mummy would not be irate if I was a few minutes late, but I was ready to risk it. It was not like Chidinma to miss school even if she understood little of what the teacher taught. She loved to play oga at break time and tease all the boys in class. Unlike me, she was not shy. She was friends with almost everyone.

  Urenna answered the bell at the gate. Chidinma had spoken of him and I had seen him in the photographs his parents placed prominently in their sitting room. He had been in boarding school, and now he was a student at university and came home infrequently. A compact, fair-skinned, not very tall boy with eyes that seemed to caress you when he placed them on you. He wore an afro and a blue shirt, with slim long sleeves, the buttons too far down from the neck, the type that the man who sang that song ‘Zombie’ wore. His name was Fela Kuti and Daddy did not like him, but his music sounded good. Mummy had bought the record but only played it on the turntable when Daddy was not around because Daddy said he was a ‘rebel’ and a ‘radical’. And whatever a rebel or a radical was, Daddy did not like it.

  Urenna’s voice was deep yet soft when he said ‘Kedu?’ to my tentative ‘Good afternoon.’ My mind registered his politeness and his deep voice. I saw him incline his head to me in questioning. I shook myself from the pleasant assault on my senses and reminded myself why I was there.

  ‘I am looking for Chidinma. We go to school together.’ I wanted to see if she was all right, I was hoping to explain, but my tongue suddenly lost its ability to move in obedience to my thoughts.

  ‘Chidinma has not been feeling well. But I can give her a message. Who do I say is looking for her?’ He looked at me quizzically.

  I wanted to tell him that he did not know me but that I knew him – Chidinma mentioned him in our conversations. I wanted to say that I had never seen him before but I felt like my insides had known
him since I was born.

  My tongue was smarter than my beating heart. It simply said my name.

  ‘Nwabulu,’ he repeated, as if to be sure he could it say it right. ‘She is not very well,’ he repeated. ‘But I will tell her you came.’

  That night as I lay on my bed at home, I thought about our meeting again. I liked the sound of my name on his tongue. I wondered at my silliness and shook myself a little; fantasies and daydreams were journeys that led nowhere. Still, I envied Chidinma, who got to see him often.

  Two days later, Chidinma was at school. The malaria, she said, was the worst she had ever had, the fever was like the heat in the Sahara desert that Mr Ibe, our Social Studies teacher had taught us about. Although my friend liked to be dramatic and exaggerate, she had lost a lot of weight in only four days and looked almost as lean as me. While I was feeling her head and neck with my hands, she added in a low voice that Urenna had told her to say hello to me. He had remembered me, I thought wonderingly. Something must have shown on my face, for Chidinma looked at me with a question on hers. Then she laughed. She teased me about my interest in her employers’ son.

  ‘Lekwanu love o,’ she laughed, hitting the top of my blue-pinafored shoulders.

  At first, I pretended not to know what she was talking about. Then I laughed. We both knew that it was a cul-de-sac, like the street on which our school stood, our teacher once explained.

  Things would have gone on as they always did – do chores, go to school, gossip, sleep, wake up, do it all over – if I had not run into Urenna at the market a couple of months later. I had gone to Abakpa to buy some food for Mummy. I was struggling with the squawking chicken who was flapping its wings as if it knew that its parts were going to decorate a fragrant pot of tomato stew that evening. It was not the best position in which to meet a boy that one liked.

  Someone tapped me on the shoulder. I thought it might be a trader trying to sell something else to me. I prepared the sharp end of my tongue. Could they not see that this hen was trying to make its escape from my grip?

  I looked back and it was Urenna. Urenna! my mind screamed.

  ‘Are you going home?’ he asked.

  I looked on like a fool, my mind emptied of words for a moment.

  ‘Would you like a ride?’ he said, peering into my face when I did not say anything.

  I found my voice. ‘Yes.’

  My mind was struggling to organise its contents, otherwise, I asked myself later that night, how could I have said yes? How could I have said yes without thinking that Mummy might see me in his car and ask if she had not given me money for the bus?

  I got into the car.

  ‘I came to pick up some gallons of oil for my mother,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. I could think of nothing else to say.

  ‘I saw the chicken trying to run away from you, so I thought I should offer you a ride before it got away.’ He smiled. I could not tell if he was teasing me.

  What else we spoke about I could not remember. So many things were happening to my senses all at once. I was not often in a nice car. Sometimes I went to church with Daddy, Mummy, and Ikenna, but that was not very often, as they were Anglicans and I was Catholic. More often I went to the market on foot or by bus, hardly ever in an almost brand-new Volvo.

  The nearness of him, the musky smell of something that he had put on his skin crowded out reason and memory. I must have answered his questions automatically. But I must have said something that made an impression, I thought later. He began to send me notes in sealed brown envelopes with Chidinma. Books also. I must have said something about liking books.

  The notes said nothing too serious. At first. I told Chidinma, but she wanted to see, so I showed her. The first read:

  How are you? I hope school was good today. It was nice meeting you at the market. Urenna

  That was it. Short. Not really saying anything much. His writing sloped in one direction, as if the wind were trying hard to blow the words to the ground. Yet it made me almost delirious with joy.

  I always wrote back in my careful cursive with the letters joining each other at the right places – my ‘a’s reaching out to my ‘m’s with a hand of friendship. I slipped my own note back in the envelope in which he sent his. My first note said:

  I am fine. I hope you are fine too. School was fine. Thank you.

  ‘What are you thanking him for?’ Chidinma asked. She was irritable about being an emissary. She said that I was being foolish. I agreed, but I was happy being foolish.

  ‘Wait until Mummy finds one of those notes, then you will see what will happen,’ she warned. I took her warning seriously and hid the notes under my mattress. Another note said:

  I miss you. Can we meet again? Affectionately, Urenna

  ‘What does “affectionately” mean?’ Chidinma asked, struggling to read the word. She did not look impressed. I thought it meant something like ‘like’. I told her this, and she curled her mouth in a sneer. The next day, when everyone had left the house, I looked up the word ‘affectionately’ in the dictionary, one of the hardcover books in the sitting room. I walked on clouds after that. But only my friend Chidinma noticed. And she did not think it was a good thing.

  ‘What does he want to meet you for?’ she asked.

  I did not listen to her suspicion. I was busy formulating ideas about how I could get away.

  At first, we would meet for very brief periods after school. The first time this happened, my tongue felt stuck to the roof of my mouth and I could only answer his questions about school, about my teachers. But he did not ask about the people I worked for, Daddy and Mummy, and I did not say much about them.

  He would meet me outside the school in the evening after our classes. It was awkward, me walking with him, Chidinma walking on the other side of the road. Both of them acting like they did not sleep and wake up in the same house.

  ‘What does he talk to you about?’ Chidinma would ask.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I would reply. ‘He asks about school and teachers and the subjects we are taking.’

  ‘You know that others,’ she said, referring to our fellow students, ‘will soon take notice. Hmm, take the monkey’s hands away from the soup before it comes to look like that of a human,’ she quoted an Igbo proverb. With her nostrils flared in disgust, she asked if I had looked at my face in the mirror lately. As if I did anything else. I wanted to see what he saw when he looked at me. Suddenly, I was unsure of my beauty, the beauty that my mother had bequeathed to me. I saw only my head, which my slim body was growing into, and my breasts, smaller than they should be at sixteen, smaller than Chidinma’s. I wondered if I looked like a boy.

  But Urenna must not have thought so because, one day, he sent me a note suggesting that we meet in a more private place. I went about my activities with my heart beating, my lips and hands trembling in anticipation.

  That day, I left school early. We met at an unfinished building, whose owner had died the previous year, just after he had begun serious work on the house. It was rumoured that he belonged to a cult which had given him wealth on the condition that he would die as soon as the building was complete. Even though my stepmother called me amosu, a witch, I was afraid of ghosts, of witchcraft, of fetishes of any stripe or colour. But with Urenna, none of that mattered. It was the perfect meeting place because fear drove people away from the building. And it was not far from our street, so I could get home quickly.

  That first day, he spread a sheet on a dusty window sill, and asked me to sit. He stood in front of me and smiled at me. In shyness, I turned my face down. He lifted it up with a finger under my chin.

  ‘At last,’ he said, ‘it is just me and you.’

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could whisper.

  He kissed me, his tongue gently parting my unresisting lips. His mouth tasted of cigarettes. I had never been kissed before. I was not sure what to do, and I let him show me.

  We did not go far on that day. He pulled away from me and began to
ask about my work.

  ‘Do you like it in Mrs Obidiegwu’s house?’

  ‘It is all right,’ I said, smiling and looking away. I was a housemaid. He was the son of the house. He would not really know what it was like to work in a place and live and sleep there but still know that it was not home. He would not know, and I could not put it into words. Chidinma said he was spoiled and left his clothes all over the floor in his room. He did not seem spoiled to me. He seemed very mature. But there was really no way he could know what it felt like to serve in a home.

  ‘And do you go back to your village sometimes?’ he asked.

  This was not a comfortable subject for me – Mama Nkemdilim and the rest of my family. I had not gone to the village in the four years I’d lived with Daddy and Mummy. This was my choice, since they said I could go home at Easter, though never at Christmas. I chose to stay and they seemed pleased. I heard Daddy once say to Mummy: ‘It is better she does not go. They often forget every good thing they learn in the township after only a few days in the village.’

  ‘No,’ I said, hoping Urenna would not pursue it.

  He did not. Instead, he spoke about university and how he was happy being away from his parents’ scrutiny, though he was also happy to be home for some holiday and to spend time with me. He kissed me a little more, pressing himself against me. As his hands began to seek my blouse, I became frightened. I remembered Papa Emma in Lagos, his big body falling on top of me, doing painful things to me. I pushed at Urenna’s chest a little. He stopped. He seemed puzzled. I prayed he would not be angry with me. But he did not seem to be. He smiled at me.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We will have more time.’