26a Read online

  She ran and the crickets screamed. “Stop at the pump,” Uncle Aka had said, “wait by the pump and he will come.” The bushes twisted in the breeze and the bush rats scuttled as she stood there with liquid knees. The stones on the road rolled toward her by themselves. Darkness had always been her friend, something to walk in feeling safe, wrapped up in mystery, the speckled silver of the universe the only light she needed. But tonight the sky was against her. Bats and devils. A skinny moon. Moths and mosquitoes and tumble-fly sifting about her ankles. A half hour passed and no one came. No bicycle, no Sami. “He is very tall and very black,” Aka had said, “about nineteen. And he makes plenty cash from the bicycle.” Sami, who was from the next village, was well known for riding women back from Ighetu Market with melons and bunches of plantain, the old and crippled to engagements at their relatives’ houses, and occasionally, for a higher fee, he colluded in great nocturnal escapes such as Ida’s. Always at two in the morning at the same pickup point, by the water pump at the edge of Aruwa.

  She heard no one. She stood in the middle of the road, turning, panicked, her bag swaying, and searched through her choices.

  Nne-Nne and Baba would still be asleep, Baba on his back with his royal mouth open and Nne-Nne in the space left over. She could go back now, creep back past the clay pots along the mud-pressed wall and the tiny doorless room where they slept and pretend she had never been as brave as this. Unpack her shabby things and lie down in the dark. The night would pass by and as she slept she would lodge her dreams back into the corner where they were dreamed, on a three-legged stool in a web of shade with the wooden shutters closed. In the morning she would start preparing to marry the man with the puckered face. There were things to do. Baba, Aruwa’s chief tailor, the first person in the village to own a sewing machine, had to start on the dress. She’d stand by the crooked coffee table with her arms raised and stare out of the window while he took her measurements. Nne-Nne Nne-Nne, under the baseball cap she wore every day that stole from the world her cheekbones, would scribble it all down with her quick, diligent hand while giving Ida the occasional acquiescent nod. And then there’d be the long walk to Ighetu for the shopping, the visits, the meetings for the final negotiations and the exchange of capital. The day would come and never go, like bitterness. She would disappear into Thomas Afegba and join the chickens, goats and tomato shoots in his colony of property.

  Or she could walk. If Ida was the true worthy grandchild of Cecelia Remi Ogeri Tokhokho, buried next to her husband under the washboard in the backyard, the only woman in Aruwa history to shrink the world, to have made it alone to Lagos and come back twenty-three years later rich and self-made, smoking a cigar, wearing scarlet lip gloss and cackling, she would walk. And walk for all the days it took.

  Cecelia had left designs on Ida’s future. When Ida was thirteen she had asked her parents if she could stay on at school with her brother so that she could become “a big businesswoman like Granny.” Nne-Nne had chuckled, looking up from her weaving in front of the house, and said, “Ida, we are not in city.” “I don care!” Ida shouted. “I wan to learn.” Nne-Nne was taken aback. The cheek, she thought, the backchat of this child. Ida stood over her in front of the sun with one hand on a skinny hip, glaring, and it struck Nne-Nne, as it often did, how much she was like Baba, with her temper and her fire, and like Baba’s mother before him. Nne-Nne imagined that Cecelia was just the same when she was a young girl. The stubbornness, the big ideas; things that only sons could use. Nne-Nne had lived in Aruwa all her life. She was married at sixteen, children quickly followed, she had never questioned what God had given her. If there was a slither of curiosity about the things she had never seen or done, Ida dramatized this for her, with her tantrums and her foolish dreams, and Nne-Nne had a special affection for her because of it. Eventually, she was sure, Ida would come to understand that here, in Aruwa, life was only as wide as the village and in the end women always became their mothers. That was how it was.

  Nne-Nne had tried to sound sympathetic. She’d said, “Ida, my child. There is only one Cecelia.”

  Baba had also refused, his belly falling over his drawstring, fiddling with the aerial on the radio he’d recently acquired as part of his eldest daughter Marion’s dowry. “For wha?” he grunted. “Your motha can teach you anyting you ave to kno.” The radio scratched across the airwaves unable to latch onto anything coherent and Baba seemed to forget she was there, standing aching in a trail of light that fell across the room. Ida begged. “Two years more,” she pleaded, raising her voice, and Baba shot back with, “Child! You wan to mek trouble!”

  Since then Ida had lain in dreaded wait for the Thomas moment.

  While the shifty radio crackled across Nigeria and the rest of the world, she cooked, sewed and cleaned, walked the roads to the fields and picked vegetables after the rain. She ate little and developed a frown. Daydreamed on the three-legged stool about Cecelia, and lip gloss, and taking giant steps across whole countries. She washed clothes and killed chickens, she learned from Nne-Nne how to cook moi-moi and egusi stew the way they were meant to be cooked, with acceptance, conviction and instinctive amounts of crayfish and cayenne pepper.

  When Thomas Afegba came for her she was in the kitchen strangling a chicken. He was talking to Nne-Nne and she noticed, through the curtain of beads, that he was big and stout with a large mouth, wearing an expensive agbada that was tight around his chest. He lacked youth, grace, beauty and tenderness—all of them. Nne-Nne had one of her best wrappers on and no baseball cap, which was not a good sign. She only wore her best wrappers and no baseball cap at weddings, initiations, village meetings, funerals and preliminary negotiations with suitors for her daughters. As the sun lay down and stroked Baba’s sewing machine, Thomas Afegba whispered with Nne-Nne while Ida squeezed the chicken’s neck. It squawked and flapped and Ida wondered, seething, what Baba would take for her. Would it be another radio, with a clearer sound? A goat or even a bull? Was she worth Aruwa’s first television? The chicken, hysterical now in its final struggle, battled with Ida’s hand. Its feathers were taking flight. She slammed it down on the table and brought the knife down, sending blood splattering up onto her face.

  A week later Baba came to an arrangement with Thomas, whom Ida had not yet been introduced to. Two goats. Four hundred niara. And a portable television from England.

  Up close Thomas was dented, she could see, in the cheeks, but this was not the central problem. Neither was he entirely lacking in charm, of a gruff and aging kind. The problem was that as he leaned into her she discovered that he smelled of peanuts and tobacco like Baba, which couldn’t be right, your husband to smell like your father. When she looked up into his stranger’s face she felt the weight of his shadow, and she knew that underneath that shadow no businesswoman and no new Cecelia would be nurtured.

  She refused him. With a fever in her gut and a stare past his temple, she refused him, and told the hand he held in his to be cold.

  After Thomas and Baba had shaken hands and Thomas had strolled away, Baba sat down and went back to his sewing as if there was nothing wrong with buying a television with your daughter. “Don worry,” he said with his back to her, “Thomas will look afta you very well.”

  The rage made her run and she landed on bony Uncle Aka. He was emerging from his house in a topless straw hat and a thin white shirt, slightly drunk from palm wine, light rain on his roof, and an empty afternoon. Ida came hurtling toward him and it was hard to make her out. She looked like a lunatic, or a hurricane. He said, “Child! You no look fine-o,” and Ida gabbled, her face soaking wet from tears and rain and refusal. “Oncle!” she cried, “I no go marry him, I run away, I run away dis night!” Aka hugged her and took her in. He sat her down and gave her wine. “Thomas Afegba?” he asked. “You mean de big Thomas from Inone? Your fatha kno im at all?” Because there were also the rumors (which Aka was always privy to) of the occasional beating which, although this was not unheard of, would not sit well with a gi
rl who carried fire inside her like Ida did. It called for action, something severe and immediate.

  “You bin to Lagos city befo?” Aka asked, looking sly.

  Ida stopped sobbing. “No, Oncle. Neva.”

  Her choices. Thomas and puckers, or Lagos and hope and maybe love. It was not so far from Aruwa to a dream and Ida’s legs were strong. She started walking and in the dark trees Cecelia’s ghost blew her onward. Cecelia sang, “Go and find it, child, your dreams are down that way, go and find them, child.” The water pump became a fresh memory. She bounced over the potholes and cracks and puddles of the only road she’d ever known and thought about the bright heaving city at the end of it. Big sturdy houses, music everywhere, a college. A cinema where a man in a canvas suit and hair the same color would buy her a Fanta and she would sip it slowly, through slick, saxophoned love scenes, while he looked sideways at the sepia glow on the high curve of her cheek.

  Sami saw the solitary figure in the road with the swish in her skirt. The way she walked could only be the walk of a woman traveling alone to Lagos in the middle of the night. He pedaled toward her, the tires growling through the stones, the bicycle wheezing with age, and when she heard him she turned and flashed a smile and her hand flew to her chest. “Sista, you are brave-o,” said Sami. “Get on.” Ida sat down on a wooden slab over the back wheel and stuffed her skirt behind her knees. Twice it got caught in the spokes, much to his irritation. She held his waist as lightly as she could and they didn’t speak much. Ida thought about Nne-Nne, lying asleep in that small space. She wished she could have told her she was going and said good-bye properly. She briefly touched the beads around her wrist. The bicycle dipped and lumbered, Sami’s long thighs like spider’s legs walking through the fading night, all the way to Ighetu, where the bus picked her up at dawn.

  AUBREY DREAMED OF another kind of escape, not from a future but from a past. He and Ida met somewhere in the middle, in Lagos, a hundred miles from Aruwa and three thousand miles from Bakewell (because the past was a lot farther to run from). Dean Baxter, his mother, his father, his shame—all of it had left Aubrey with a fascination with movement. He loved airports, train stations, bus stops, highways, even car parks (multistory, the top floor) for their eternal promise of departure. The silver men on the mantelpiece who never actually went anywhere, that silver horse galloping, the swinging and spinning and rocking, they kept him aware of the comfort of journeys and their power of erasure. A new place, a new face.

  When Aubrey was a boy, too young to pack a suitcase and board a train from Bakewell to anywhere, he’d find a spot by the river Wye and seek a new reflection in the rippling gray water. He’d change his name to Paul or David or Anthony and call Dean Baxter exactly one hundred indecent names. Beggar, for stealing his lunch. Lazy sod, for making him do his math homework or else he’d knock his teeth out. Filthy flaming thug for knocking his teeth out, one at the front, one back right, when Aubrey, in a moment of recklessness, had returned to Dean two pages of grossly incorrect sums so that he failed the monthly math test. Bastard, oh yes, you pilching pickled bastard, for tripping him up so that he fell flat on his face, a great palm-grazing, satchel-hurling crash, in front of Miss Jacqueline Flynn, the only girl in school that Aubrey had ever dared to fancy—she was flame-haired and perfumed and well-to-do, way out of his league, but she was new; and anything was possible when things were new.

  Stinking louse. Fat-faced dimwit. Pig-breath, dog-muck and bound for hell. One hundred was a nice round number. When he’d finished, Aubrey would stand up a foot taller with a gentler nose and hair that was not the same color as condensed milk, stride back home with a stranger he liked and start again. He became so multiplied he forgot himself. His thoughts were crowds of figures, perfect algebra, subtractions and divisions and multiplications and conversions from inches to centimeters, yards to meters, miles to kilometers, bombing his senses and never leaving space for the true naked feel of inadequacy. He avoided mirrors and they avoided him.

  If it wasn’t for his mother, who never failed to remind him, with unconditional devotion, with a dangerous love, of what he lacked, he might forever have escaped himself. When Judith Hunter let out one of her throatless, quivering laughs and said, “My Aubrey might not be much to look at but he’s my Einstein all right,” he’d wince and count the potatoes and pretend he wasn’t there. Auntie Mave and Uncle Cyril would be over for Sunday lunch, and Wallace Hunter, the strapping hulk at the head of the table whose brawn had bypassed Aubrey to such an extent that Wallace sometimes wondered about his wife’s fidelity around the time of Aubrey’s conception, would be sawing into his Yorkshire beef, sleeves rolled up, the table legs trembling, and chew like a starved rhinoceros, pausing sometimes to breathe or ridicule his wife. “Einstein?” he’d shout. “Einstein? I bet Einstein’s as poor as muck and impotent to boot!” He’d shake the house with laughter, Harold and William, Aubrey’s older brothers, joining in with their biceps and triceps bulging, their mouths stuffed with roast potatoes, while Aubrey sat sweating next to his mother. “Now, dear,” she’d say, “you know that’s not true, don’t make fun.” Then she’d pat Aubrey’s hand under the table and wobble her head, dabbing at her mouth with a serviette and sliding a humble look toward her sister.

  But Wallace liked to push things. He liked to drag a joke, a dig, a lifelong humiliation to the very end of possibility (WE ARE HUNTERS, went the family motto on the wall, WE HUNT). “You know him, then, do you? Been to Bakewell, has he, then, eh?” Wallace boomed, throwing a wink at Harold and William, a gotta-keep-’em-in-check-son wink that Aubrey both despised and admired for its effortless domination. “Is there something you’re not telling me, Jude?”

  The chairs cried out. Three burly men clutched their burly bellies and Cyril and Mave lowered their eyes hoping Judith hadn’t bothered with dessert.

  “Harold…Willy,” Judith tried, kneading them with howling eyes. She had a lilac cardigan that she wore on these occasions with an old pair of pearl earrings her grandmother (in sepia on the sideboard) had given her the night before her wedding, and by now the lilac and the sore blush in her cheeks and her seaweed eyes made her look like a fresh bruise. “No, dear, of course I don’t know Einstein personally, silly!”—the quivering laugh toward Mave—“Oh, isn’t he silly! No, what I meant was that, well”—a pat on Aubrey’s knee—“I’m sure that my Aubrey is perfectly capable of…well…you know…”

  Wallace is not helpful. “No, dear, I have no idea what you’re on about.”

  “Well…you know…”

  “Well, well, bloody well what, then, come on, woman!”

  “Performing, dear, performing, you know! Honestly, Wallace.” And Aubrey would cough suddenly and feel his insides drooping. Seven potatoes left and thirteen sprouts. “Auntie Mave,” he’d say over the noise, their best china jug and saucer rattling in his hands, “more spuds?”

  Judith meant well and he loved her. She was the only other human being he felt he resembled. From each other they received comfort and a certificate of being. At 9:20 on winter nights Judith slid a hot-water bottle under Aubrey’s blankets, for his bones and the aches of isolation. On Saturday afternoons his drawer was stocked carefully, prettily, with clean socks, vests and Y-fronts. And on Sundays, fresh pink tulips from the stall by the cemetery adorned his windowsill.

  Aubrey was the daughter Judith never had.

  He was fragile and needful, oh, he was practically a baby, her boy. “A child’s mother is his only safe shelter,” Judith often quoted from Hilda Beaty’s A Mother Knows to anyone who’d listen. It was she who sat with him through the stretching evenings sipping sherry and knitting in front of the telly while Harold and William were out “making romance,” she put it, with Linda and Jean from number fourteen; who stroked his milky head and said “They don’t deserve you, dear” when Aubrey complained (once, never again) of the girls not being interested in him and having no other option on Saturday nights when the world demanded it was time to party but t
o trot along with loud, spitty Arthur to a bosomy place where mad old men slumped in corners. “But you will find a lovely girl one day,” she assured him. “Be patient. We must face these things with fortitude, and”—she giggled—“a little tiny glass of sherry.”

  How he needed her. How she obliged. And then one day he left.

  She called out from his Ovaltine, “You’ll never get it, dear,” when he applied for the job that would get him out of Bakewell, out of his mother’s clutches, out from under his father’s big toe, and away, as far away as a stamp could get him from the teddy bears on the walls, the pink tulips on Sundays, and the sweet-smelling pants in the drawers. “They’d never take on a timid little thing like you in London, now, would they, silly,” the word London sounding too heavy for her tongue. Because cities, capital cities in particular, were no place to live, no, not for her Aubrey. They’d eat him alive with HP sauce and chips and then what would she do? Cities were full of animals. They were rude, rude, they were colder than a Derbyshire winter. Once in her life she’d been to London, with Wallace on her honeymoon, and she got knocked down at Victoria Station in the pedestrian zone, by the pedestrians, flat on her back with her stockings out.

  “Anyway”—she’s stirring three spoons of sugar into the Ovaltine—“what’s wrong with the post office? It’s perfect for you. They’ll always need a good head for figures there, won’t they, dear. My best boy! Now come and get your nightcap.”

  Aubrey was twenty-nine. He was losing hair. It was an age when despair either took the mind or changed into determination. The latter was where these words came from: I am a precise and proficient worker with a keen eye for detail and a good head for figures. I approach all my duties with loyal intentions and am eager to acquire new skills leading to greater responsibility. The stamp was licked. The Ovaltine had gone cold. Judith Hunter sat downstairs alone in a half-light, the ends of her knitting needles flicking with an unusual speed.