Everything Good Will Come Read online

  Sheri caught sight of him and screamed. We ran round the side of the house and hobbled over the gravel on the front drive.

  “Who was that?” Sheri asked, rubbing her chest.

  I took short breaths. “Our gardener.”

  “I’m afraid of him.”

  “Baba can’t do anything. He likes to scare people.”

  She sucked her teeth. “Look at his legs crooked as crab’s, his lips red as a monkey’s bottom.”

  We rolled around the gravel. The hibiscus toppled out of Sheri’s afro and she kicked her legs about, relishing her laughter and prolonging mine. She recovered first and wiped her eyes with her fingers.

  “Do you have a best friend?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then, I will be your best friend.” She patted her chest. “Every day, until we go to school.”

  “I can only play on Sundays,” I said.

  My mother would drive her out if she ever saw her.

  She shrugged. “Next Sunday then. Come to my house if you like.”

  “All right,” I said.

  Who would know? She was funny, and she was also rude, but that was probably because she had no home training.

  She yelled from our gates. “I’ll call you aburo, little sister, from now on. And I’ll beat you at ten-ten, wait and see.”

  It’s a stupid game, I was about to say, but she’d disappeared behind the cement column. Didn’t anyone tell her she couldn’t wear high heels? Lipstick? Any of that? Where was her respect for an old man like Baba? She was the spoiled one. Sharp mouth and all.

  Baba was raking the grass when I returned to the back yard.

  “I’m going to tell your mother about her,” he said.

  I stamped my foot in frustration. “But she’s my friend.”

  “How can she be your friend? You’ve just met her, and your mother does not know her.”

  “She doesn’t have to know her.”

  I’d known him all my life. How could he tell? He made a face as if the memory of Sheri had left a bad taste in his mouth. “Your mother will not like that one.”

  “Please, don’t tell. Please.”

  I knelt and pressed my palms together. It was my best trick ever to wear him out.

  “All right,” he said. “But I must not see you or her anywhere near those flowers again.”

  “Never,” I said, scrambling to my feet. “See? I’m going inside. You won’t find me near them.”

  I walked backward into the house. Baba’s legs really were like crab’s, I thought, scurrying through the living room. Then I bumped my shin on the corner of a chair and hopped the rest of the way to my bedroom. God was already punishing me.

  My suitcase was under my bed. It was a fake leather one, large enough to accommodate me if I curled up tight, but now it was full. I dragged it out. I had two weeks to go before leaving home, and had started packing the contents a month early: a mosquito net, bed sheets, flip-flops, a flashlight. The props for my make-believe television adverts: bathing soap, toothpaste, a bag of sanitary towels. I wondered what I would do with those.

  As I stood before my mirror, I traced the grooves around my plaits. Sheri’s afro was so fluffy, it moved as she talked. I grabbed a comb from my table and began to undo my plaits. My arms ached by the time I finished and my hair flopped over my face. From my top drawer, I took a red marker and painted my lips. At least my cheeks were smooth, unlike hers. She had a spray of rashes and was so fair-skinned. People her color got called “Yellow Pawpaw” or “Yellow Banana” in school.

  In school you were teased for being yellow or fat; for being Moslem or for being dumb; for stuttering or wearing a bra and for being Igbo, because it meant that you were Biafran or knew people who were. I was painting my finger nails with the marker pen, recalling other teasable offenses, when my mother walked in. She was wearing her white church gown.

  “You’re here?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  In her church gowns I always thought my mother resembled a column. She stood tall and squared her shoulders, even as a child, she said. She would not play rough, or slump around, so why did I? Her question often prompted me to walk with my back straight until I forgot.

  “I thought you would be outside,” she said.

  I patted my hair down. Her own hair was in two neat cornrows and she narrowed her eyes as if there were sunlight in my room.

  “Ah-ah? What is this? You’re wearing lipstick?”

  I placed my pen down, more embarrassed than scared.

  She beckoned. “Let me see.”

  Her voice softened when she saw the red ink. “You shouldn’t be coloring your mouth at your age. I see you’re also packing your suitcase again. Maybe you’re ready to leave this house.”

  My gaze reached the ceiling.

  “Where is your father?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did he say when he will be back?”

  “No.”

  She surveyed the rest of my room. “Clean this place up.”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “And come and help me in the kitchen afterward. I want to speak to you later on tonight. Make sure you wash your mouth before you come.”

  I pretended to be preoccupied with the contents of my dressing table until she left. Using a pair of scissors, I scraped the red ink from my nails. What did she want to speak to me about? Baba couldn’t have told.

  My mother never had a conversation with me; she talked and knew that I was listening. I always was. The mere sound of her footsteps made me breathe faster. She hardly raised a hand to me, unlike most mothers I knew, who beat their children with tree branches, but she didn’t have to. I’d been caned before, for daydreaming in class, with the side of a ruler, on my knuckles, and wondered if it wasn’t an easier punishment than having my mother look at me as if she’d caught me playing with my own poop. Her looks were hard to forget. At least caning welts eventually disappeared.

  Holy people had to be unhappy or strict, or a mixture of both, I’d decided. My mother and her church friends, their priest with his expression as if he was sniffing something bad. There wasn’t a choir mistress I’d seen with a friendly face, and even in our old Anglican church people had generally looked miserable as they prayed. I’d come to terms with these people as I’d come to terms with my own natural sinfulness. How many mornings had I got up vowing to be holy, only to succumb to happiness by midday, laughing and running helter-skelter? I wanted to be holy; I just couldn’t remember.

  I was frying plantains in the kitchen with my mother that evening, when oil popped from the frying pan and struck my wrist.

  “Watch what you’re doing,” she said.

  “Sorry,” Bisi said, peeping up from the pots she was washing.

  Bisi often said sorry for no reason. I lifted the fried plantains from the pan and smacked them down with my spatula. Oil spitting, chopping knives. Onions. Kitchen work was ugly. When I was older I would starve myself so I wouldn’t have to cook. That was my main plan.

  A noise outside startled me. It was my father coming through the back door.

  “I knock on my front door these days and no one will answer,” he muttered.

  The door creaked open and snapped shut behind him. Bisi rushed to take his briefcase and he shooed her away. I smiled at my father. He was always miserable after work, especially when he returned from court. He was skinny with a voice that cracked and I pitied him whenever he complained: “I’m working all day, to put clothes on your back, food in your stomach, pay your school fees. All I ask is for peace when I get home. Instead you give me wahala. Daddy can I buy ice-cream. Daddy can I buy Enid Blyton. Daddy my jeans are torn. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. You want me dead?”

  He loosened his tie. “I see your mother is making you understudy her again.”

  I took another plantain and sliced its belly open, hoping for more of his sympathy. My mother shook a pot of stew on the stove and lifted its lid to inspect the contents.r />
  “It won’t harm her to be in here,” she said.

  I eased the plantain out and began to slice it into circles. My father opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer. Again Bisi rushed to his aid, and this time he allowed her to open the bottle.

  “You should tell her young girls don’t do this anymore,” he said.

  “Who said?” my mother asked.

  “And if she asks where you learned such nonsense, tell her from your father and he’s for the liberation of women.”

  He stood at attention and saluted. My father was not a serious man, I thought.

  “All women except your wife,” my mother said.

  Bisi handed him his glass of beer. I thought he hadn’t heard because he began to drink. He lowered the glass. “I’ve never asked you to be in here cooking for me.”

  “Ah, well,” she said, wiping her hands with a dish cloth. “But you never ask me not to either.”

  He nodded in agreement. “It is hard to compete with your quest for martyrdom.”

  My mother made a show of inspecting the fried plantains. She pointed to the pan and I emptied too many plantain pieces into it. The oil hissed and fumes filled the air.

  Whenever my father spoke good English like that, I knew he was angry. I didn’t understand what he meant most times. This time, he placed his empty glass on the table and grabbed his briefcase.

  “Don’t wait up for me.”

  My mother followed him. As they left the kitchen, I crept to the door to spy on them. Bisi turned off the tap to hear their conversation and I rounded on her with all the rage a whisper could manage: “Stop listening to people’s private conversations! You’re always listening to people’s private conversations!”

  She snapped her fingers at me, and I snapped mine back and edged toward the door hinge.

  My parent’s quarrels were becoming more senseless; not more frequent or more loud. One wrong word from my father could bring on my mother’s rage. He was a wicked man. He had always been a wicked man. She would shout Bible passages at him. He would remain calm. At times like this, I could pity my mother, if only for my father’s expression. It was the same as the boys in school who lifted your skirt and ran. They looked just as confused once the teacher got hold of their ears.

  My mother rapped the dining table. “Sunny, whatever you’re doing out there, God is watching you. You can walk out of that door, but you cannot escape His judgment.”

  My father fixed his gaze on the table. “I can’t speak for Him, but I remember He will not be mocked. You want to use the Bible as a shield against everyone? Use it. One day we will both meet our maker. I will tell him all I have done. Then you can tell him what you have done.”

  He walked away in the direction of their bedroom. My mother returned to the kitchen. I thought she might scold me after she found my plantains burning, but she didn’t. I hurried over and flipped them.

  A frown may have chewed her face up, but one time my mother had smiled. I’d seen black and white photographs of her, her hair pressed and curled and her eyebrows penciled into arches. She was a chartered secretary and my father was in his final year of university when they met. Many men tried to chase her. Many, he said, until he wrote her one love letter. One, he boasted, and the rest didn’t stand a chance. “Your mother was the best dancer around. The best dressed girl ever. The tiniest waist, I’m telling you. The tiniest. I could get my hand around it, like this, before you came along and spoiled it.”

  He would simulate how he struggled to hug her. My mother was not as big as he claimed. She was plump, in the way mothers were plump; her arms shook like jelly. My father no longer told the joke and I was left to imagine that it was true that she had once showed him affection. If she didn’t anymore it was because it was there in the Bible: God got jealous.

  After dinner I went to their bedroom to wait. I still had no idea what my mother wanted to speak to me about. My father had left the air-conditioner on and it blew remnants of mosquito repellent and cologne into my face. Their mosquito net hung over me and I inspected my shin which had developed a bump since my collision with the sofa.

  My mother walked in. Already I felt like crying. Could Baba have told? If so, he was responsible for the trouble I was in.

  My mother sat opposite me. “Do you remember, when you used to come to church with me, that some of the sisters would miss church for a week?”

  “Yes, Mummy.”

  “Do you know why they missed church?”

  “No.”

  “Because they were unclean,” she said.

  Immediately I looked at the air-conditioner. My mother began to speak in Yoruba. She told me the most awful thing about blood and babies and why it was a secret.

  “I will not marry,” I said

  “You will,” she said.

  “I will not have children.”

  “Yes, you will. All women want children.”

  Sex was a filthy act, she said, and I must always wash myself afterward. Tears filled my eyes. The prospect of dying young seemed better now.

  “Why are you crying?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Come here,” she said. “I have prayed for you and nothing bad will come your way.”

  She patted my back. I wanted to ask, what if the bleeding started during morning assembly? What if I needed to pee during sex? Before this, I’d had blurred images of a man lying on top of a woman. Now that the images had been brought into focus, I was no longer sure of what came in and went out of where. My mother grabbed my shoulders and stood me up.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Go and wash your face,” she said tapping me toward the door.

  In the bathroom mirror I checked my face for changes. I tugged at the skin below my eyes, stretched my lips, stuck my tongue out. Nothing.

  There was a time I couldn’t wait to be grown because of my mother’s wardrobe. She had buckled, strapped, and beaded shoes. I would slip my feet into them, hoping for the gap behind my heels to close, and run my hands through her dresses and wrappers of silver and gold embroidery. Caftans were fashionable, though they really were a slimmer version of the agbadas women in our country had been wearing for years. I liked one red velvet caftan she had in particular, with small circular mirrors that sparkled like chandeliers. The first time my mother wore it was on my father’s birthday. I was heady that night from the smell of tobacco, whiskey, perfume, and curry. I carried a small silver tray of meat balls on sticks and served it to guests. I was wearing a pink polyester babushka. Uncle Alex had just shown me how to light a pipe. My mother was late getting changed because she was busy cooking. When she walked into the living room, everyone cheered. My father accepted congratulations for spoiling his wife. “My money goes to her,” he said.

  On nights like this I watched my mother style her hair from start to finish. She straightened it with a hot comb that crackled through her hair and sent up pomade fumes. She complained about the process. It took too long and hurt her arms. Sometimes, the hot comb burnt her scalp. She preferred to wear her hair in two cornrows, and on the days my brother fell ill, her hair could be just as it was when she woke up. “It’s my house,” she would say. “If anybody doesn’t like it they can leave.”

  It was easy to tell she wanted to embarrass my father. People thought a child couldn’t understand, but I’d quarreled with friends in school before, and I wouldn’t speak to them until they apologized, or at least until I’d forgotten that they hadn’t. I understood, well enough to protect my parent’s vision of my innocence. My mother needed quiet, my father would say. “I know,” I would say. My father was always out, my mother would complain. I wouldn’t say a word.

  All week I looked forward to going to Sheri’s house. Sometimes I went to the hibiscus patch, hoping she would appear. I never stayed there long enough. I’d forgotten about sex, even about the bump on my shin which had flattened to a purple br
uise. This week, my parents were arguing about particulars.

  My father had lost his driver’s license and car insurance certificate. He said my mother had hidden them. “I did not hide your particulars,” she said. He asked if I’d seen them. I had not seen his particulars, I said. I finally joined in his search for the lost particulars and was beginning to imagine I was responsible for them when he found them. “Where I already looked,” he said. “See?”

  I was tired of them. Sunday morning, after my parents left, I visited the house next door for the first time—against my mother’s orders, but it was worth knowing a girl my age in the neighborhood. The place was full of boys, four who lived across the road. They laughed whenever they saw me and pretended to vomit. Next to them was an English boy who played fetch games with his Alsatian, Ranger. Sometimes he had rowdy bicycle races with the four across the road; other times he sent Ranger after them when they teased him for being white and unable to stomach hot peppers: “Oyinbo pepper, if you eat-ee pepper, you go yellow more-more!” Two boys lived further down the road and their mother had filled half the teeth of my classmates. They were much older.

  With boys there always had to be noise and trouble. They caught frogs and grasshoppers, threw stones at windows, set off fireworks. There was Bisi at home, who really was a girl, because she was not old enough to be married, but she was just as rough. She watched whenever Baba beheaded chickens for cooking, flattened the daddy-long-legs in my bathtub with slaps. She threatened me most days, with snapped fingers. Then she pretended in front of my mother, shaking and speaking in a high voice. I kicked a stone thinking of her. She was a pretender.

  Most houses on our quiet residential road were similar to ours, with servants’ quarters and lawns. We didn’t have the uniformity of nearby government neighborhoods, built by the Public Works Department. Our house was a bungalow covered in golden trumpets and bougainvillea. The Bakare’s was an enormous one-story with aquamarine glass shutters, so square-shaped, I thought it resembled a castle. Except for a low hedge of dried up pitanga cherries lining the driveway and a mango tree by the house, the entire yard was cement.