I wanted to explain that it was not him. It was me. No, it was not me. It was Papa Emma in Lagos. I was getting confused. I shook my head and said, ‘I have to go.’
‘Wow, right away? We barely spent any time together. Okay. Don’t worry. We will see each other again soon. Maybe in two days?’
I nodded. Anything he wanted. He told me to leave first and he would come later. I glided through the air, giddy with excitement until I stood in front of our gate at number 9. Then I came down to earth, rehearsed my lies, and went in.
Flirting with fire, that was what I was doing. Chidinma warned me. She reminded me about the warnings of our madams. When Mummy gave me my regular sanitary towels, she would say, almost in an aggressive way, ‘This is Enugu. Men here say sweeter things than sugar. If you open your legs for any man and come back here with a big belly, I will put pepper between those legs and pack you home like fish in a carton.
‘I have never had a girl become pregnant in my house, do you hear?’ she would assert, her hands pulling on both her ears for emphasis, her version of birth control. I lay on my mattress at night and prayed to the Virgin Mary that I would not get into trouble, but I knew that I had no power to say no to Urenna, and that I did not want that power.
…
It took two weeks before I succumbed. And when I did, it did not quench my infatuation. Instead, it grew like wildfire in the harmattan season.
‘You will be all right,’ he said, after he had made me lie on the floor. It was uncomfortable, but I hardly felt it. Urenna was gentle. He was persuasive.
‘You will be all right,’ he repeated as he took off my underwear.
‘You will be all right. I promise I won’t come inside you,’ he said, as he plunged himself into my moist yet unprepared insides.
And I was all right. I was better than all right. Chidinma complained that I was giddy. Mummy grumbled that I was becoming lax. Daddy said that Mummy needed to keep an eye on me, as my cleaning skills were no longer what they used to be.
In those short, furtive meetings, I basked in Urenna’s beauty. In my village, only women were described as beautiful in the way that I thought of Urenna, women with round, smooth cheeks and curvy figures that could keep a man from going to work, enenebe eje olu. But this was how my eyes saw Urenna, as beautiful, with his slender smallness, his assiduously groomed and oiled afro. His nose stood straight, not like my round one which had made only a half-hearted attempt to rise up and then fallen back to the floor of my face. His eyes were dense and enticing, his lips generous and perfectly shaped, as if their maker spent hours drawing the perfect outline for them. When they nibbled my ears, I forgot all my sorrows, all the outstanding chores – indeed anything besides the nameless pleasure they offered. He was short, shorter than me. I was a tall girl. Yet he seemed confident of his place in the world. And this comforted me.
In that dark, uncompleted building, we talked about everything. I told him about my mother and father and their love. He spoke about the burden of being an only son and his father’s outsized expectations of him. I told him about my stepmother and her cruelty. He told me about his desire to paint, to be an artist, and how he was forced by his father to study law at the university. I told him about my plans to be a typist or a secretary in the civil service, how my father had wanted me to be a nurse or a teacher.
Sometimes, his face went blank when I told him stories about the village, about my wild dreams, dreams that I did not know how or even if they would come true, dreams like having a big house here in Independence Layout and a family like his.
We made no long-term plans for our lives together. We did not need to. Today, this very minute, was enough for us. When he drew me into his arms, I went from being just a housemaid to a girl experiencing a man’s love.
At first, I was scared. It was wrong, I said. But he reassured me. He was being careful, he said. Nothing would happen, he told me, because he was careful to pull out in time. The spilling of his seed outside, sometimes on my lap, made me love him even more. I felt my heart expand with love, I told Chidinma, growing so large I could hardly keep it within my chest. She worried about my silliness and melodrama, and asked where I had left my head. Still, she wanted to hear every detail. I told her what I could tell, but kept some for myself to savour at night after my chores.
After the holidays, Urenna went back to the university. Luckily, it was in Enugu, so he came home often. If his parents wondered at this or spoke to him about it, he did not say. Sometimes, he came straight from the university mid-day to our house. Sometimes, we would go to their house if he was sure that no one except Chidinma was home. We took risks. There were times I was sure we would be caught. Once, I had come into the kitchen to get some water, when I heard his mother’s voice. She had come home unexpectedly. She was walking from the sitting room to the kitchen. I darted behind the electric cooker and crouched there, my heart beating fast. She must have heard my heart running like Mama Nkemdilim’s female goat when chased by the male, I thought – frantic, anxious, loud. But she merely opened the fridge, took something out and left.
Another time, Urenna was at our house when Mummy had come home from work with a headache. I was frantically sending him away, but not before Mummy came to the gate to see who it was. He made up a story about his mother thinking of setting up a meeting of all the women on the street and wanting to find out who might be interested.
‘That arrogant woman, carrying around her big buttocks as if shit does not come out of it,’ said Mummy, when he left. ‘She should have come here herself, but no, Madam High and Mighty is too busy to bother,’ she hissed, while I hoped that my heart would quiet its dance of fright.
I wished I had Urenna’s freedom to come and go as I pleased. But my excuses for leaving the house had begun to make Mummy irritable and suspicious. Sometimes I skipped classes and left school earlier than closing time. Chidinma covered for me as much as she could to the class teacher, but it put a strain on her and on our relationship. I suspected that there was a little jealousy mixed in too, especially now that it seemed I was getting away with the impossible.
In the evenings, Ikenna would read stories from books to me, while I told him folktales I had heard in the village. ‘And they lived happily ever after,’ he would say of Sleeping Beauty and the prince. My own stories had realistic endings: the tortoise got his due – a cracked shell and a sealed throat – for trying to deceive the other animals and eat all the food meant for them; the beautiful girl who spurned all the good men seeking her hand ended up marrying a spirit with seven heads. But in Ikenna’s story, Cinderella, an orphan with a cruel stepmother, dared to go to the party and was rewarded with marrying the prince.
I could not tell how my story, of the housemaid and the heir to number 16 Trinity Avenue, Independence Layout, Enugu, would end, but with hope in my heart I tried not to think too far ahead.
CHAPTER FOUR
The morning came to Enugu bright and sunny and cheerful. Except in our household. I was watering the izoras when Daddy came storming out of the house, briefcase in hand. He walked briskly, his angry words punctuated with spit sprayed into the air. If anybody else had sprayed spit like that, Daddy would have run to find some disinfectant. I ducked my head, hoping this would prevent him from seeing me and issuing one of his impossible commands. But luck was not my friend this morning.
‘Nwabulu,’ Mummy shouted, ‘come here, osiso,’ indicating that I was to hurry. I imagined that even the neighbours who lived at the end of the street could hear her.
I dropped the water hose and ran in before Daddy – who was now looking at me, no doubt thinking up hidden dusty windows, non-existent weeds at the back of the yard, imaginary rubbish in the gutters in front of the house – could say a word. But he ignored me, and went to the car. When I heard the car door slam, I turned around and ran to open the gate.
‘Why is this not working?’ Mummy stood in the middle of the kitchen holding up the top of a blender. She was sweating pr
ofusely, even though the morning had not yet met the full wrath of the sun. The wind was drying out everything in its path but Mummy’s face.
‘I don’t know, Ma,’ I said quietly.
‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’ she shrieked. Anger did not look good on Mummy. The veins in her fair face stood out, her new braids looked like snakes crawling slowly in different directions, and her lips, painted with the bright red lipstick reserved for work and church, seemed out of place, as if screwed on by force. She looked a little like the witch Ikenna had been reading to me about from his storybook the night before. It could be – and this was not the first time the thought had occurred to me – that this was the reason why her husband could not control his cursing when they quarrelled. But, when she was happy, she was a pretty woman, elegant in her svelte tallness, inclined to be at peace with the world, including me. Until her husband came home.
‘When I used it the other day, it was working, Ma.’ What kind of trouble was looking for me this morning? Was it not time that Madam went to work?
‘Stop turning your head this way and that like tolotolo,’ she shouted at me as I peered behind her, trying to see if I had left the bucket of water with which I had been mopping the floor.
I did not take offence at being called a turkey so early in the morning. Nor did I say that she already knew that the blender had stopped working because she had tried to grind some tomatoes in it the day before. She was merely searching for relief from her quarrel with her husband.
‘Why did you not clean up the room this morning?’ she asked.
This was not unusual. When she was agitated, Mummy would jump from one complaint to the other like Atuocha, the schizophrenic at Abakpa market.
I patiently explained that I did.
‘He said it did not look clean.’
He said? What was new? I wanted to ask her. But my father had not raised me to be stupid, so I was mute.
‘Go and scrub it again and don’t let me catch you being lazy in this house.’
Any laziness I had ever cultivated in my idyllic childhood before my father died had long since been swept, scrubbed, dusted, and cooked out of me. So had any backchatting or sassiness, except when I was gossiping with my fellow housemaids.
I was looking forward to some of that gossip as soon as Mummy left the house. Chidinma would come, and together we would chat about the wicked madams on the streets who made their housemaids do chores from sunup to sundown with no breaks, while they, the madams, slept all day. Like Mrs Udeh, who would order her housemaid, Ebele, to pick up and hand her things that were right by her feet. Or the madams who would not send their maids to school or to learn a trade like they had promised the maids’ parents. Like Mama Odinaka, who kept her housemaid at home doing chores all day after promising the housemaid’s parents that she would be apprenticed to a tailor. We would talk about fat Mama Nkolika, whose specialty – besides eating – was employing young gardeners and gatemen who did service that went beyond the remit her husband had assigned them. But we would also marvel over Papa Obinna, who lived in the last house on the street, number 22, the one with the Gmelina trees, who checked the homework of their houseboy, Ogechukwu, every day. Then we would switch to the maids who beat the children of their madams without mercy, and somehow got the children not to talk, the maids who wore their madams’ clothes when their madams were out and were never found out, and Theresa, who served Madam Beer Parlour, and who managed to shut down her madam’s business by selling all the cartons of beer in the woman’s store. There was so much to exclaim and clap hands over in excitement. But mostly, I looked forward to talking about Urenna.
A smile came to my face automatically, as it always did, when I thought about him.
‘Why are you smiling?’ Mummy shouted.
I’d brought that one on myself.
‘You think I am a joke, eh?’ She smacked me on the head before I could step back. Even I agreed that there was no reasonable explanation for my smile.
‘I have told you this before and I will say it once more – if you are tired of living here, of getting good food and education, you pack your things and go back to your mother. You will not destroy all the things in my house. None of these things walked in here on their feet; they were bought with money obtained with sweat. Before you leave for school this afternoon, make sure you scrub this house and wash the toilets. I did not bring you to the township to laze about and make me poor.’
And with that, she stomped off to her room, presumably to get her car keys and drive off in a huff. I sighed and hoped that her red Volkswagen would start this morning, otherwise pushing the car and begging passers-by to help us would be added to my list of chores.
I stood in the kitchen waiting for my day to begin. Waiting to meet Urenna.
Later, Chidinma came to stand beside me at school. She listened to me talk, but did not laugh at me as she was wont to do when I spoke about Urenna. Instead, she bent to scratch her legs. She had not put any oil on them and the harmattan made the scratches turn nearly white on her dark, dry skin. She did not have a message from Urenna. There was something else on her mind beyond our budding, foolish romance.
She was silent for a while – a very unlikely behaviour. Usually her mouth would be working overtime trying to give me all the gossip, the word on the street, and what Urenna’s parents were discussing in their bedroom while she was cleaning their toilets. Her round face was solemn, and her eyes were worried. Was she about to be dismissed? I would not have thought so. She took really good care of the children and they were very fond of her. There was something motherly, nurturing, comforting, about Chidinma. She had been with Daddy and Mummy for a long time, six, seven years – a lifetime in housemaid years. She had told me that they would have loved to send her to secondary school, but Chidinma had no head for books. Like me, at seventeen she was too old for elementary six. Unlike me, who had had several interruptions in my school years, she had already repeated many classes and would often joke that she had only managed to get to the last year in elementary school because the teachers had grown tired of seeing her face. When we finished, she would go and learn the sewing trade, while I study shorthand and typing, hoping for that job with the government. I told her often that she would make my clothes for free when she became a tailor. She laughed, but I knew she would do it for me, as I would do anything for her.
I knew Chidinma’s ambitions were more realistic then mine. She was the fourth child in her family; there were seven of them. Her brother, the first child, her sister, another brother, and Chidinma had all been sent out by their parents to work as help in homes from the time they were ten. Chidinma often told me in those days how she and her elder siblings were working hard to make sure that they could be ‘settled’. That way, the younger children would not have to work as help. Her sister, Uzoma, had succeeded. She was the first to be settled. She had lived with her madam in Enugu for eight years. During that time, there had been no complaints. She did not steal; she was respectful; she did her work well; she did not complain about the Christmas holidays when she could not see her parents. And she had been rewarded at the end of it with a year of sewing apprenticeship and then a sewing machine. She had started her shop, and, in no time, she married.
Even if she was dismissed, Chidinma had somewhere to go, a place to start from. I had no one.
‘What is the matter?’ I asked at last, when I could no longer contain myself.
‘Someone touched Ugomma.’ It was an outburst; it had been sitting on the edge of her tongue and it came tumbling out with no adornment or explanation.
‘How do you mean?’ I asked, sensing immediately what this was about, but a little confused as to how it could be. ‘Who?’ I continued when she was silent. ‘Was it Okechukwu?’ Okechukwu was the new houseboy whom Urenna’s parents got to do the cleaning, sweep the compound, trim the flowers and those sorts of chores, so that Chidinma could focus on taking care of Njide and Ugomma. Unlike Chidinma, he came and wen
t and did not live in the house. Why would he touch Ugomma?
‘No, Mr Nzom, the lesson teacher.’ Mr Nzom had been hired to give the children private lessons at home.
‘Ehn?’ I screamed. ‘What exactly did he do?’
She stared at me for a second. ‘You know, like this.’ She made a gesture with her finger. ‘She said he also asked her to touch him.’
‘What? Has he gone mad? When was this? Did she tell Mummy?’
She looked around to make sure no one had heard me. We were standing at the end of the corridor; the other students did not seem to be paying any attention to us.
‘No, she has not told her mother. She only told me. She said it has happened twice. I was at school on those occasions. She feels that she has done something wrong.’
‘Nonsense,’ I said. ‘It is the idiot, the goat, the onukwu, who does not know how good he has it; it is he that deserves to be stripped naked and walked through the streets like they do to thieves in my village.’
I thought of the lanky, hungry-looking Mr Nzom, whom I had seen on a couple of occasions in Chidinma’s house. Once, I had taken the risk of going to Urenna’s room; we had come out together, and there sat Mr Nzom, perhaps waiting to teach the children. He said hello to Urenna and smiled at me. There was speculation in his hungry, Uriah Heep-like smile. Creepy, I remembered thinking.
I thought now of him telling that little girl of seven – or was it six? – to touch him, and something came up in my throat.
‘What will you do?’ I asked my friend.
‘I don’t know how to tell Mummy Urenna,’ Chidinma said.
‘What do you mean? Will you let him continue this?’ I fumed. How did these rich people raise children who could not tell them anything?
‘What mouth would I employ in the service of passing across that information?’
I knew her – she could be shy and timid when you did not expect her to be. Like when a teacher called on her to answer a question in her class, her brash all-knowingness would disappear like a rat that met the house owner.
The Son of the House Page 5
