The Other Woman

The Other Woman
by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

I felt like a stranger again in our house, the way I always felt when my mother-in-law visited. Each time she came to visit, she simply took over the house. She monopolized my husband. She had long conversations with him from which I was frequently excluded. She dictated what I should cook and sometimes did the cooking herself. You would think I was the most stupid woman in the world even though I had a Master’s degree in business. With every look, she reminded me of my great failure as a wife. Next June would be our tenth anniversary and there was still no sign of a baby. I wondered if this was the reason for her second visit to Abuja from the east this month.

As I prepared supper, they were closeted in the sitting room talking about family and village matters. They usually did not start talking about “my problem” until after supper and then only in the privacy of her room. I have often wondered if every mother-in-law has a room of her own in her son’s house. Well, mine did. On arrival, she would say, “Nkechi, take these to my bedroom” pointing at her bags. I would take the bags to her room door and wait for her to unlock it, in my own home. My own mother did not enjoy the same privilege. She slept in whatever room was available when she came for a visit. Given my childless state, where she slept when she came to visit, usually to discuss the newest miracle worker in town, was my mother’s least concern. With my mother it was always about “chasing the black goat while it was still daylight,” the goat being the baby that was yet to come, and the fading daylight, my age.

I caught myself as I nearly put in too much pepper in the Nsala soup. That would have guaranteed some cutting remarks from my mother-in-law, who did not really appreciate spicy food, and worse still, did not think too highly of my culinary skills, or any of my skills for that matter. My husband would also be sure to beg her to do the cooking the next day as if he had been starving before she came.

At first, I found his attachment to his mother surprising. He had certainly not shown any signs of being a mama’s boy when we were dating. As far as I know, he did not consult his mother before he proposed to me. That may well have been the only time he did not consult her. Perhaps that was what she had against me. I knew that she did not like me from the first day, but I had hoped that would pass. I did not worry about it too much at the time, particularly as we were not going to live with her in the village. Whatever influence she had on her son, the last of her seven children, it could surely not extend beyond the village. At least, so I thought. Time, however, had changed that opinion. He was the apple of his mother’s eyes. Although she had six other children, she doted on him as if he was her only child. As for him, his affections for his mother far exceeded the affections he had for anyone else. Frequently they had made me feel like the outsider in the house, the interloper who came in to disrupt the family peace. My infertility problems had only worsened matters for me. Now, she could justifiably find fault with me to her heart’s content.

As I stirred the soup, all the bitterness of the past few years swelled up in me. Not that Nduka was a bad man. He was very hardworking. He was a manager at his bank and earned good money. He was generous when he wanted to be. He could be kind, and he was nice to my people. He was still handsome although he had put on weight and was beginning to develop a potbelly. If he cheated on me, he was careful not to let on. Really, his major fault was allowing his mother to insult me constantly and this was a deep thorn in my side.

As for the infertility issue, we hardly ever talked about it these days. In the early days, two, three years after our marriage, he was optimistic, consoling me, waxing philosophical at every turn, ‘It will happen in God’s time, there is no point fretting.’ These days, nearly ten years after, whenever I brought it up, he switched off. He did not want to talk about it. When I complained about this, he would ask what I wanted him to do. His attitude said it all. It was not his fault; the problem lay with me.

‘Whatever you are cooking is certainly taking time,’ my mother-in-law said.

I looked up startled. I hadn’t realized she had come into the kitchen.

‘If I had not eaten some bananas on the way to this place, I probably would have died of hunger waiting for whatever you are making.’

I looked at her. Short fat woman, it was hard to see her starving. She may have been pretty once, but now her dry cheeks were fat and sagging, so were the folds on her neck. My husband got his height from his late father, but he and his mother shared the same fair complexion.

‘I am sorry, ma, I had to stop to buy some fish on my way back from work,’ I replied with all the sweetness I could muster.

‘Nkechi, how come you are cooking so late?’ queried my husband who had come to join the conversation.

As usual, no sign of wanting to take my part, I thought. Before I had time to respond, my mother-in-law said, ‘I would have thought that you would be doing bulk shopping, instead of buying one thing or the other everyday. You have a deep freezer after all.’

I did not make any response to this criticism deeming it wiser to shut up even though I was virtually choking with anger.

‘What are you making?’

‘Nsala soup.’

‘Ndu,’ she said, ‘does not really like Nsala.’

‘Ndu,’ of course, had nothing to say for himself.

‘Make sure it is not too hot,’ she instructed.

‘Yes ma.’ There was a small silence, and then she went back to the sitting room with my husband following close behind, as if drawn by a magnet. I sighed.

Naturally, my husband went into her room after the meal to continue the chat they had begun when he came home from work. He had become his mother’s property until she left, I thought bitterly. I had learnt to be patient during such times, but it was never easy. Sometimes, my feelings towards her were very similar to that of a co-wife in a polygamous family; a feeling of competition between wives. Feelings that probably made them wonder whose food would he eat today, in whose bed would he sleep. The only difference was that, in this case, I could not afford to show my resentment more openly, however justified. For not only did she who gave birth to him have, some would say, a stronger claim on him than I, a stranger who met her son only eleven years before, I had no serious hold on him without a child.

My infertility was certainly a problem. In a society where having children was still the most important reason for marriage and love was secondary, where religion was pushed to the background and young women encouraged to get pregnant before the wedding to prove that they were fertile and would thus perform the most important function of brides, and where no level of education or career achievement could veil the gross disadvantage of barrenness, I dared not show any hostility to my mother-in-law.

Nor could I really blame her for her animosity to me on this account. Did I not desperately desire a child? Had I not wondered why God would make me wait this long for something that other women took for granted? I had seen many doctors and specialists. They all said the same thing; I had polycystic ovaries and though it may take time, I could eventually conceive with treatment. But time was running out on me. At 38, I was no longer a young woman.
More importantly, I could sense Nduka’s mounting impatience. His mother had brought it home to me on her last visit. ‘Both you and my son are not getting any younger. When do you plan to give us this child?’ she asked. ‘You must start thinking of alternatives.’ Now what did she mean by that? Adoption? Perhaps Nduka marrying a second wife? I knew he would never consider marrying anyone else. He was very outspoken against polygamous families. Complications, he called them.

As usual, my bout with self-pity brought the beginnings of tears to my eyes. I sobbed quietly so that they would not hear me. I put on my nightie and tried to go to sleep and forget my sorrows. But sleep wouldn’t come. Nduka remained with his mother for a long time. Was he planning to spend the rest of the night with her?

He looked surprised when I said his name as he came into the bedroom.

‘You are still awake?’ he asked as he took off his clothes.

‘Were you able to take the car to the mechanic?’ I asked trying to start a conversation. We had not really talked since he came back from work. He had been taken up with his mother’s visit.

“Hmmm,” he murmured.

I sensed he did not want to talk to me. Perhaps he was too tired. No wonder, it was nearly two o’clock in the morning. I went to sleep. Maybe if I had known what the next few days would bring, I would not have slept as well as I did that night. Barren women, after all, should cry out to God at all hours of the night like Hannah of the Bible, especially when they had mothers-in-law like mine.

For the next one week, my life was uncomfortable with my mother-in-law making barbed comments about everything from my cooking, my housekeeping to the fact that I seemed to be living in the church rather than in my home. My husband ignored these comments with a deafness that would surprise anyone, striking up a new conversation as soon as she was done berating me. He spent his evenings in his mother’s room. I always wondered what, apart from ‘my problem,’ they could possibly have to talk about every single evening. This time though, I imagined that Nduka was avoiding my eyes everytime I looked at him. I was becoming paranoid. I couldn’t wait for her departure.

At the weekend, Nduka informed me that he was going to the village with his mother. This was hardly surprising. He usually took her home when she visited as if she could not find her way home the same way she had come from the village.

I was relieved when they left. I could breathe freely again. A cloud had lifted from the sky and the sun was shining again. At least until the next time she came to make my life miserable again.

On Monday, I left the office earlier than usual hoping that he would be back and that we could become a couple again. He came back. His mother came back with him. I was puzzled but I tried to hide my surprise.

‘Mama, good evening. You came back?’

‘Good evening,’ she replied. She gave no reply to my question. I did not ask again even though I could not fathom why she would come back after she had apparently gone back to the village just last weekend.

The minute Nduka went into the bedroom to change, I followed him. ‘Is Mama ill?’ I asked him.

‘No,’ he replied without elaboration.

‘Then why did she come back with you?’ I asked when I saw no explanation was forthcoming.

‘Is my mum no longer free to come to my house?’ he asked with sudden ferocity.

What was the problem? Could I no longer ask a simple question? I wanted to say, ‘Free to come to your house? She is practically living with us!’ I decided not to argue. I did not want Mama to overhear us.

I said quietly, ‘I thought she wanted to go home?’

‘She has gone home and she has returned.’ Just like that, no reason. I stood looking at him, waiting to see if he anything more to add. He turned away and began undressing. When I saw that no explanation was coming, I left the room.

I could not control my whirling thoughts as I put some rice to boil. Why had she come back? She had not said anything about returning when she left. Was she planning to live with us permanently?

Over dinner, we ate in silence. This was strange. The two of them always talked over my head at the dining table. Nduka did not eat much. There was some kind of tension in the air but I could not make out the cause.

I tidied up after the dinner and was about to enter the bedroom, assuming that they would retire as usual to her room when she called out to me, ‘Nkechi.’

‘Ma?’ What did she want now?

‘Come and sit down,’ she said. It was an order, not a request. I looked at Nduka, what was going on? He turned away from me rather woodenly. I concluded that we were probably going to get some words of wisdom on ‘my problem.’

His mother said, ‘Nduka,’ as if prompting him.

‘Ehn, Nkechi, you see I have decided to marry another wife,’ he blurted.

At first, I couldn’t absorb what he had just said. I stared at him. What did he just say?

Before I could respond, his mother said smoothly as if she had rehearsed this scene, ‘You see, you are not getting any younger. Ndu too is getting older. He needs a child.’

She paused, then continued, her eyes boring into my face, ‘We paid the bride price of Nduka’s new wife over the weekend. I hope you will understand that Nduka has exercised sufficient patience. Ten years is a long time to be married without a child.’ She stopped. She had said it all.
I looked at my husband. He was staring down at the carpet. In that moment I hated him. For humiliating me like this, telling me this horrible thing in front of his mother, allowing me to hear the worst news of my life from this woman who took pleasure in my misery. It would not have been wonderful news in any case, but to tell me right there with his mother sitting there, prompting and helping him was worse than any nightmare that I had ever had.

I did not shout or cry. I simply stood up and left them. They did not call me back. My husband sat there and did not follow me. My husband, who had promised before God to love and cherish me till death did us part, who had promised my parents he would take care of me. Had I not forfeited these promises when I had failed to bear a child? I sat down on the bed and I still could not cry.

When my numbed feelings finally awoke anger was my first reaction. How could Nduka do this? In this day and age, he was going to marry a second wife? He, a Christian? He who had always considered it to be uncivilized, a complication of one’s life? Nduka was educated, but where was the education in allowing his mother to make him marry another wife?

I wanted to call my mother on the phone and cry. But I was no longer a child; I had to take care of my own problems. In any case, what would she say? I knew she would say that I should stay and fight. She would ask how could I leave my husband with all the things we had struggled for over the past ten years for someone else to enjoy. But would I not remain the stranger in my home, with not only my mother-in- law but also another woman sharing it?

I wiped the tears that I did not know had started coming, and quietly got up and went to the wardrobe, pulled out suitcases and began to pack. Tomorrow morning, I would leave. I had a good job. I earned good money and I could take care of myself. I was not sure what the future held, but I could not live with one more woman in my marriage. It dawned on me that, whereas the other woman was usually a secret from the wife, I had lived with the other woman right in my home. If I were to be honest to myself, I had been sharing my husband with another woman for the last ten years. I had covered my eyes with the cloak of my own victimization - the self-blaming of a barren woman. It was not a pleasant experience. Another woman would be too much for me to handle. And I was not sure Nduka was worth that kind of soul-destroying heartache. It was time to go.

First published in Open Wide Magazine, Issue 20. A longer, slightly different version published in Farafina Online Magazine, Issue 4 as "A Barren Woman's Dilemma."

© Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, 2007

Living Precariously

Living Precariously
By Cheluchi Onyemelukwe

(First published in Conte: A Journal of Narrative Writing, Fall/Winter, 2007: Issue 3:2)


Mama Nneoma woke up slowly, the bad dreams seemingly reluctant to let go of their tenuous hold on her. A sharp feeling of dread made itself felt even before her eyes opened. The details of her dreams were blurred, blending into each other without resolution. They left a taste of fear in her mouth, and she found that she was trembling slightly, her heart beating fast as if she had run to Afor – Udo, the village market several kilometers from her house. She had been lying on her left side with her arm in an awkward position that now made it ache. Still somewhat disoriented, she sat up unhurriedly in the dark room, the old wrapper with which she had covered herself falling partially to the bed. Unconsciously, she reached over to the other side of the bed as if reaching for someone, but no one was there. Tears welled up in her eyes and she shook her head, a little angry at herself for forgetting the unforgettable, always present in her thoughts in daytime, but sometimes forgotten when she woke up in the middle of night: there was no one to reach for in the middle of the night anymore. She reached for her rosary under her pillow and began to pray, her thoughts on her children, particularly the first two who now lived in Lagos.

Her prayers calmed her spirits. She commenced, with deliberation, to reduce her dreams to reason. They were nothing - who would not be shaken after attending that sad funeral yesterday, she asked herself. A family had lost three of their children in a gully erosion incident. The house had apparently collapsed during the night and the parents were only able to escape with one child, a baby, and the clothes on their backs. The gully erosion incidents that bedeviled Nanka were nothing new, but the people always had cause to mourn when, mbize, the huge python under the earth, moved and made the land cave in obeisance. Very sad, she thought with the distant and proper concern of people who did not suffer direct loss.

Her rationalizations failed to distract her, however, and her fear stayed with her. She had promised Papa Nneoma, as he lay dying of swollen legs a little over a year before on this same bed after he had come back from the disinfectant-smelling hospital in Enugu, that she would take care of their children and protect them from their enemies. She had kept her word. Both Nneoma and Okechukwu were safe in Lagos. Nneoma was a married woman living with her husband, a Nanka man, in Lagos. She had married at a younger age than Mama Nneoma would have liked. Not that eighteen was too young an age; she herself had married at younger. But she had hoped that her pretty daughter who loved books would go to university, perhaps become a doctor or marry a doctor. She could not afford to send her to university however. Not as a widow, not with selling only kolanuts in Afor-Udo, not with two other children. And so went that dream. Iloanusi, the land grabber, the thief, the evil one, had ended that hope when he sent her husband to an early grave with his witchcraft. God would pay him, she vowed. Okechukwu - the son whom she loved with that special love which mothers sometimes had for their first sons, but who had shown tendencies of becoming an ofogoli, a prodigal, especially after his father died - was now, thankfully, learning a trade in Lagos, and thus away from danger. The two younger children, Ozioma and Uzoechina were still too young to leave, and she kept her eyes on them. She could not do otherwise. Her husband’s death was proof that their enemies’ evil witchcraft was potent. She prayed again reminding God that He was the husband of the widow and the father of the fatherless. She got up and began to take matter-of-fact steps into the day, reaching first for the box of matches on the floor by the bed to light the lamp which she had placed beside the door. Her thoughts, however, stayed on their journey to Lagos and to her children there.

**************

The day began like every other day in Lagos, nothing out of the ordinary. The sun hid itself until past six that morning. People who had to go to work woke up early to join the morning traffic; nobody in Lagos waited for the cocks to crow.

For Ugochukwu, the day started out quite normally. He woke up early and went into the small, dark bathroom to take a bath. He dipped his hand into the cold water in the bucket and grimaced as he splashed some on his face: the water from the well had begun to smell bad again. As he splashed the smelly water on his body, his thoughts were occupied by his bad luck in choosing this house to move into. The landlord said there was nothing he could do about it; he was not the one who made water smell bad, nor was he the government who refused to make sure the water was treated properly. For all the man cared, Ugochukwu thought bitterly, they might as well be bathing in sewage so long as they paid their rent. Even the Unachukwus on the ground floor had complained that cracks had appeared in their walls and that they had noticed water seeping into the floors of their rooms. He knew the house was not built strongly enough. Their landlord, an Igbo man like Ugochukwu, was one of the people who gave Igbo people a bad name, defining them as people hungrily and greedily in pursuit of money at any cost, Ugochukwu mused angrily. But his friend, Nnamdi, who lived in Ilasa and had a Yoruba landlord, had told him that Yoruba landlords were worse because they really liked juju too much and if you didn’t pay your rent in time, strange things began to happen to you.

He sniffed at himself then told himself to be quick. He swiped at the soap with the local twine sponge he got from the village; the modern sponge sold in Lagos did not scrub properly. He scrubbed himself vigorously, as if scrubbing a pot to which cooking grime was stubbornly stuck. He wiped the water off his body with his old, worn, faded blue, hole-filled towel and pulled on his shirt hurriedly in the dark small room lit dimly by a lamp, and wondered if he smelled as bad as the water he had just showered in. Ugochukwu sighed; life was too difficult. He tugged on his trousers and belted his narrow waist. He could feel his stomach grumble and hoped that he was not about to have diarrhea; he knew he should not have had that moi-moi last night. Moi-moi always sent him to the toilet. He had told his wife this before but she never listened.

When he finished dressing, he reached for his work bag lying against one corner of the bed. His wife was still sleeping, and he looked at her for a moment, a scowl on his face. The net on her permed hair had slipped off, and her hair, thinned by recent relaxer treatment, was tousled, her mouth was slack open, drooling saliva. He shook his head and heaved a sigh of resignation; he had married a lazy woman. Other women in Lagos were up by this time and rushing around to prepare breakfast for their husbands, go to work or set up their shops. But his wife was sleeping at past six o’clock in the morning as if money grew on trees. He called her name. She did not answer. He bent down and shook her.

“Nneoma, Nneoma.”

It took a few shakes to wake Nneoma up and she sat up groggily and rubbed her eyes.

“Why do you wait for me to wake you up everyday?” her husband asked her irritably. “Get up and let us pray.”

“Good morning,” his wife said in a voice, slurring and still full of sleep.

“Good morning,” her husband replied in the voice of one who fully expected to be greeted first.

They knelt down side by side, their hands on the sleep-jumbled bed. “In Jesus’ name, in Jesus’ mighty name, in the mighty name of Jesus,” Ugochukwu began. He went on to thank God for the day, to ask His protection, and to bind all the blood-sucking demons on the roads.

After the prayers, he said, “Make sure the house is cleaned up. That is the least you can do, since you sit at home all day and do not go to work. Don’t spend valuable time talking with Mama Onyeka. She is a lazy woman who wastes time gossiping and doing little else.”

He picked up his work bag and went out. It was still dark outside although if you looked closely you could see the day slowly trying to take over from the night, the streaks of the dawn seemingly shaking hands with the dark as they said ‘goodbye’ and ‘welcome.’ Ugochukwu walked from one side of the road to the other, trying to avoid the mud and the dirty rain water on the untarred street. He turned into Fasehun Street at the end of which was the bus stop. He noticed that there were no okada, the motorbikes that took people to the bus stop. No wonder, where would they find petrol? Ugochukwu wondered again why the NLC was threatening to embark on a new nationwide strike. Had they not yet discovered that it solved nothing? Apparently not, he answered himself as he stood at the bus stop, wiping with his bare hands the sweat that was already pouring out of him from the ten minute brisk walk. The leaders of the labour union thought that it would frighten the government into reducing the increased fuel prices that they had thrown at the Nigerian people. Of course, they would reduce it somewhat and increase it again by the end of the year or next year perhaps. In the meantime, fuel prices would increase by twice the price and people would have to sit at home or, like him, be forced to go to work. He knew that no matter how high the cost of petrol became, he would have to go to work even during the strike because his boss Chief Akhigbe insisted that they must work, after all, Chief would say, private organizations like his had nothing to do with whatever nonsense the NLC cooked up. He did not care that transportation prices were up by nearly two hundred percent. Ugochukwu did not enjoy his job as a law clerk; it paid little, nothing to survive by in Lagos, but he could not afford to lose it. He shook his head slightly. This country was crazy, but crazier still was the conductor who was shouting at people.

“Lagos, one fifty,” the conductor shouted. “I no fit argue, if you no carry the money, make you come down now o. Fuel don cos,” he said, holding up his dirty jeans from falling off his hips with one hand and pounding on top of the bus with the other.

Ugochukwu entered the nearly full bus and sat beside a fat woman who was sitting by the window and muttering that hundred and fifty naira was too much for a bus that cost only one hundred and twenty naira only yesterday. He said nothing to her, but silently thought that the small seats would be too tight on the journey because of her large buttocks and thought also how he did not want his wife to become fat; she was already getting heavier since she came to Lagos, with nothing to do except sit and spend his money. He continued to nurse his general dissatisfaction with the hand that life had dealt him as the bus filled up and then headed towards Lagos.

***********

As soon as she was sure that Ugochukwu had left the house, Nneoma went back to bed and slept for the next hour. When she woke up, she blew out the lantern, went to the bathroom, washed her face and thought how good it was to have the house all to herself. Her husband complained about everything, from how she kept house to her cooking and her inability to find work. Only yesterday she had made him delicious moi-moi, going to the trouble of washing the beans and walking down the street to grind it, and then spending time to wrap it in plantain leaves to add a delicious leafy tang that tin-cooked moi-moi lacked. He did not appreciate her efforts. All he did instead was complain that he did not like to eat moi-moi at night, and that she had used kerosene which was becoming scarce to cook moi-moi which took a lot of time and therefore consumed a lot of kerosene. He had even gone on to warn her not to cook beans and yam, another time-consuming meal, until the price of kerosene went down. Ugochukwu was too thrifty, even stingy, she told herself. But he was right about the kerosene; the price had gone through the roof.

She had come to Lagos from their village in the East six months ago for the first time. She had heard many tales of this big city called Lagos. People who lived in Lagos - ‘abroad’ as it was called - were looked upon with awe when they came home at Christmas. They always seemed to have more money than everyone else. It was one of the reasons she had allowed herself to be persuaded by her mother to marry Ugochukwu, a much older, dour man. He had asked for her hand when her dreams of going to a university died with her father just after she finished secondary school. He lived and worked in that big city. He could also provide money to take care of her family. But, disappointment gripped her when she eventually came to live with Ugochukwu. He did not have much money, and what little he had, he preferred to keep to himself. Lagos itself was nothing like the village; at least the village was nowhere near as dirty. The city seemed to be bursting at the seams with people. The air in many places stank like sewage and rotten garbage packed together in an airless container. The gutters were full of dirty, dark smelly water and debris. The roads were a nightmare when it rained, full of mud water in pot-holes and causing terrible bumper-to-bumper traffic jams that could last hours. There was an ever-present alertness and vigilance in the eyes of people and in their movements - possessing or lacking these attributes could mean life and money, or death and emptiness in the pocket. Still, she had learned a lot of things since she came to Lagos, from shouting ‘o wa o’ to get one of the sardine-packed buses to let her out, to holding her onto bag tightly when she went to Cele bus stop.

She looked around the room. She would have to sweep it and make the bed. The sheet on the bed needed to be washed. She was not sure if there was still bar soap or whether Ugochukwu had used the last bit that was left to wash his shirt last night. She decided she would eat first; there was still some of the moi-moi left and she could warm that up for breakfast. Afterwards she would clean the house and go down to Mama Onyeka’s shop. Although Ugochukwu did not like Mama Onyeka, Nneoma told herself that she was the only friend she had in Lagos and what Ugochukwu did not know could not hurt him. She really would have liked to go down to visit her elder brother Okechukwu at their shop in Abule-Egba, but she did not have money for transport: she had not had any opportunity this past week to go through her husband’s pockets.

As she left the room for the kitchen, a rat so big that it looked pregnant darted across the room. There were too many rats in Lagos, and many of them looked bloated and overfed, Nneoma thought. She remembered that Mama Onyeka had told her that some of them were not natural rats; they were amusu: witches who came into homes to cause trouble and destroy them. Mama Onyeka, repeating the stereotypes that were the stuff of fantastical stories, told her that she was sure that their other neighbour, Mama Calabar, was a witch and that Calabar was a centre for witches. Remembering this, she began to cast and bind all demons masquerading as rats into the Sahara desert in the name of Jesus. Now that she had missed two periods, she had to be extra careful. She rubbed her still-flat stomach proudly, and wondered how she would tell her husband and how he would react to the news. Perhaps, he would become warmer and more loving like her father had been to her mother, she thought. Her father, who even on his deathbed with his legs swollen to terrible proportions and with little breath left, called her mother Obidiya: her husband’s heart. Did she want to be Ugochukwu’s ‘heart’? His potbelly, dour manner, and perfunctory lovemaking, did not encourage such thoughts.

**************

In a different part of Lagos, Emeka turned over on the bed and yawned widely, mouth open, cheeks stretching. It was only about four in the morning, his usual waking time. He did not have an alarm clock but his inner alarm, honed since his apprenticeship days, had gone off as usual. Emeka did not really feel rested, but survival did not really call for respite, and survival was what life was all about. He rubbed his eyes and struggled to sit up. He wiped his face with his arm and looked over at Okechukwu on the other side of the mattress whose face was blank in sleep and who was snoring gently, his mouth open. He sighed. The boy did not realize that Lagos was hard. He reached over and shook Okechukwu’s shoulder. Okechukwu groaned as if in disappointment and turned over the other side.

“It is morning,” Emeka told him. And then without waiting for a response, he pulled himself up, went outside to the yard picked up a bucket and went to the bathroom, knowing that as usual he would be one of the first legs to go for a wash.

“Are you ready?” Emeka asked Okechukwu. He had had his wash, dressed up in the room, and was ready to go. Okechukwu was just coming back from the bathroom and he did not look like he had showered. Emeka knew that the lineup at the only bathroom in the compound must have been quite long and Okechukwu would have been unable to get in. Emeka was angry that his cousin overslept every morning. Then he would wait in line to use the only bathroom in the compound. Okechukwu disorganizes my life, Emeka thought. Still, he pitied Okechukwu whose father had died recently of swollen legs caused by the witchcraft of a clansman. The two men had fought over a piece of land. After the funeral, Okechukwu’s mother gave out her bright first daughter, who everyone had thought would go to university, in marriage to a townsman who lived in Lagos. She then begged Emeka to take her son, Okechukwu who had no brain for academic work or any other trade, to Lagos and teach him the mechanic trade. She pleaded with him not to let their enemies kill her only son. Emeka could not refuse such a desperate plea.

“You are not having your bath today,” Emeka told him.

“Please…” Okechukwu began drowsily.

“No,” Emeka said sternly. “It is already six o’clock. I woke you up at five when I went to bathe and you went back to sleep.” Repairing cars was a dirty job. Emeka could not understand Okechukwu’s insistence on his morning bath. Perhaps this was because one could almost drown in night-sweat in the tiny room they shared in Badagry. There was usually no electricity to use the fan.

Okechukwu dressed reluctantly and soon they were on a bus to Abule-Egba.

“Abule-Egba hundred naira. Make you hold correct change o. I no get change,” the conductor warned.

At the shop, Emeka said, “I am going to buy some motor parts.”

Okechukwu nodded, his mouth full of his breakfast of Agege bread.

“Do not leave the shop,” Emeka ordered.

Okechukwu nodded again. He was glad that Emeka was leaving the shop, even for a short while. When he left, he would go and talk to the other apprentices. He did not like mechanic work: it was dirty and not respectable. He had never wanted to be a mechanic and still resented his mother for pushing him into this trade. Even though he did not like school like his younger sister Nneoma, if his mother had waited a while, perhaps he would have been lucky to become an apprentice to Mathew Nwankwo, another distant relative who had a medicines business in Onitsha. But maybe even that would not have been such a good idea - Emeka had mentioned the other day that he heard NAFDAC, the drug regulatory agency, had had Okechukwu arrested for selling fake medicines.

Emeka went out thinking to himself that it was a pity that Okechukwu was the first son of his father and that the boy would never make a good mechanic. He was not bright and he was lazy. But, he had promised to teach him the trade.

“Okey,” Tunde, another apprentice, shouted later. “Where is your oga?”

“He went to buy spare parts,” Okechukwu said. “Who is looking for him?”

“No one,” Tunde replied. “I just wanted to be sure the coast was clear. Do you have a bucket in your shed?”

“No,” Okechukwu said. “Why do you need a bucket?”

“Haven’t you heard fuel is pouring out on the road? They say a pipe burst. I want to collect my own share. People have been scooping since last night.”

“Are you sure?” Okechukwu asked. “How did the pipe burst? What about the police? Are they there?”

“There is no police,” Tunde assured him confidently. “They say that some big boys came with a truck yesterday and drilled the pipe open. The petrol has been pouring out since last night. Do you want to sit here and waste time asking useless questions or are you coming?” he asked impatiently, making as if to leave.

Okechukwu thought it was a good idea. He could buy some new shirts and maybe even send some money to his mother. Hopefully, Emeka would not come back before he collected some of the petrol gushing from the pipe. He would not spend too much time anyway, he told himself. He would be back in the shop before Emeka came back; Emeka would not be happy that he left the shop.

“Let’s find buckets,” he said to Tunde. “We can make money from this. The price of petrol has gone up.”

When they got there, they saw many of their fellow mechanics already pushing through the growing throng of people to dig in their buckets or jerry cans into the dark red, nearly black liquid, flowing like blood from a cut artery.

************

Nneoma walked down the street to the junction where Mama Onyeka had her ‘shop.’ Mama Onyeka was attending to a couple of customers when she arrived, so she sat down on the bench below Mama Onyeka’s table and hoped that she would not accidentally fall over into the smelly wide gutter behind the bench. On the table Mama Onyeka had laid out pieces of coconuts on a plate, fried groundnuts wrapped in cellophane, a couple of roasted corncobs, and some fresh corn still encased in their husks. A crude furnace stood on the other side of the table. Mama Onyeka stood before it roasting some corn and the local pears for the customers waiting for her.

When the customers left with their corn and local pear wrapped in a sheet of old newspapers, Mama Onyeka sat beside Nneoma and they began to tell stories, Mama Onyeka doing more of the talking and Nneoma, the younger woman, the johnny-just-come, listening intently. Mama Onyeka told her of the fight she had had with Papa Onyeka before he left this morning because he would not give her enough housekeeping money. She admonished Nneoma not to let Ugochukwu get away with his stingy ways. Otherwise, she said, he would give the money he earned to another woman because that was the way God had made men; they had to give their money to a woman. She told Nneoma how she had got up to rebuke and bind Mama Calabar when she had appeared in their room the previous night. Lagos was full of witches and one had to keep ones eyes open and one’s wits about her. She told her how the woman who had tried to open a similar corn business close to her and bring unwanted competition had been thoroughly beaten by her husband because, according to Mama Onyeka, she did not look after their children properly and had been disrespectful to him. What else was expected from a woman who lacked any home training, she asked Nneoma? Nneoma did not say that she did not think there was any good reason to beat your wife; perhaps this was how people acted in Lagos. Instead she turned round and spat into the gutter; she had learned that such questions raised in the middle of a story were rhetorical. The spit landed on a purewater wrapping, floating with other rubbish in the gutter. She tried to suppress a nauseous urge to vomit that had now begun to attack her every now and then and thought Mama Onyeka could be unduly critical of people. But she was the only one who had befriended her after she moved to Lagos, and her ‘shop,’ consisting of table and a furnace by the gutter on a busy road, was the only place Nneoma could go to apart from Cele market when she needed to get out of the house.

In between her stories, Mama Onyeka was suddenly silent. Nneoma had turned round to spit into the drainage yet again and looked up to see if any customers had approached the table, but there was none. Mama Onyeka was looking at her quizzically.

“So, you don’t want to tell me,” she said. “I thought that seeing as I had taken you as my daughter that you could tell me.”

Nneoma looked at her in puzzlement.

“I am not a child you know, I was not born today.” Mama Onyeka’s mouth turned up in a slight sneer.

Nneoma suddenly realized that she must be talking about her pregnancy.

“I was not trying to hide it from you,” she assured Mama Onyeka. She had really not been trying to keep the news from Mama Onyeka, but she would have preferred to tell her mother first. But Mama Nneoma did not have a mobile phone, though mobile phones had now become ubiquitous since their recent introduction in the country. Neither did Nneoma, even though Ugochukwu had promised her one during his early visits to marry her. He had also promised to send her to a college in Lagos. That, too, had not yet happened. She had passed the senior secondary school exams, but had not taken the university entrance exams. Not for the first time, Nneoma wondered what implications her pregnancy would have on her prospective education. Her mother had assured her that if she was a good wife to Ugochukwu, he might even send her to university. With the way Ugochukwu quarreled over money for crayfish and pepper, she was losing any confidence she had in that assurance. Now that she was pregnant, she was becoming even less sure that a university education was in her destiny. But she did not tell Mama Onyeka this; she would have been surprised to hear about such lofty dreams.

She stayed a little while longer with Mama Onyeka, listening to advice about not eating nchi meat, it would prolong the labour as the nchi, a bush-rat, had long labour, and to refuse sex this early in the pregnancy, it could cause a miscarriage. She walked back to the house a little tired. She was getting more tired these days, she thought. She decided she would have a little nap before preparing supper for Ugochukwu.

**************

It was Papa Onyeka who told Ugochukwu. He did not give him any details. He only told Ugochukwu that he needed to get home as soon as he could. You did not give a man the kind of bad news that Papa Onyeka had on the phone. You did not tell him that his home had collapsed. You did not say that his wife was in the house when it collapsed.

Everybody knew that the four-story house was bad, the walls had cracks, and some had said that they noticed that the house, which was less than four years old, seemed to be tilting to one side. Still, the crumbling surprised the people who lived nearby, all of whom rushed out to see what had happened. Some said it was fortunate most people had not come back from work; the few people who were trapped in the building were just unlucky. Others did not talk; they were busy digging with spades, sticks and whatever else was handy, in attempts to dig out people. One lucky woman had been dug out alive and with only minor injuries. Lifting equipment provided by one of the construction companies was also working, but no other living person had been extricated from the house. No one knew for sure how many more were trapped. Five bodies had been found thus far, four of them children, one of them a young woman.

Ugochukwu came home in a taxi, something he never did because it cost too much. But Papa Onyeka had indicated it was an emergency. He sat in a traffic jam regretting that he had not bought Nneoma a mobile phone; she, at least, could have told him what had happened. Perhaps, there had been a fire in their apartment. That woman was careless. He had warned her time and again about paying attention to details. Or maybe she had gone out to gossip with Mama Onyeka and a thief had broken into the apartment. How many times would he tell her that this was not the village where people trusted others blindly? How many times would he have to say that this was Lagos where people kept their eyes open? His mind was roiling with these thoughts when he got home. He saw the crumbled house, the people gathered round it, and knew what had happened. But he refused to make the connections.

He was taken aside by Papa Onyeka who luckily had not lost anyone - his wife was at her table and his four children had gone to after-school lessons in another house in the neighbourhood - and given the news. Ugochukwu insisted on seeing the body, as if without this evidence what he had just been told would be untrue. His wail on seeing his wife’s broken body filled the air like a big burst of noisy, unexpected tropical rain and thunder in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Someone said later that it raised the hair his arms to hear a man cry like that.

*******************
Emeka finished shopping. If he worked fast, he thought, he might finish work on the Mercedes before the owner came. As he walked to the shop from the bus stop, he saw a crowd at the pipelines area. Perhaps the pipe was broken again. That would explain the busy noises emanating from there.

Suddenly, there was an explosion. Boom! the deafening sound went and Lagos trembled. Later, people said it sounded like an earthquake, others said it sounded like the rapture trumpet. Nobody was sure what had caused the fire; the newspapers which appeared the following day said it was someone starting up a motorbike.

Terrified screams and the smell of burning flesh filled the air.

Something told Emeka to look for Okechukwu in the shop. He was not there. He asked the other mechanics and one told him that Okechukwu had come to ask for a bucket. He must have been collecting petrol. “Stupid boy,” Emeka thought, his heart pounding. Emeka searched frantically for Okechukwu, going as close as he could to the still burning fire. Soon the police came, pushing people away from looking for survivors amidst charred remains. Few had survived, the rest were skulls and seared flesh.

Emeka stood, shocked, numbed. What would he tell Okechukwu’s mother?

“Chineke me!” my God, he screamed, his hands on his head, his heart thumping.

He did not remember walking back to the shed. A fellow mechanic asked him if he had seen Okechukwu.

Emeka replied woodenly, “He did not have his bath this morning.”

“What?” the mechanic asked confusedly.

“I refused him a bath this morning.”

**************

Nobody knew how to tell Mama Nneoma even though the news had traveled the very next day to the village via mobile phones, the latest news-bearing media. The poor woman had lost her husband only the previous year. It was dreadful news - even the body of the son, it appeared, had not been found.

Not many people in the village bought newspapers; not everyone could read and they were just too expensive. But in Lagos, people read about both incidents which appeared on different pages in the papers the following day - the pipe explosion disaster in Abule Egba appearing as breaking news on the first page, and the house collapse in Okota buried somewhere in the middle. People read about these events a little indifferently. Some blamed the greedy people who went to scoop fuel, others blamed the government for failing to provide for the people and for not providing good firefighting equipment. Some cursed the landlord; others pointed fingers at the ‘thieving’ contractor who built the house with inferior materials. But things did not change very much and life lost none of its tempo. Life in Lagos could be precarious, more so than in most places; that was nothing new. It could be an aircraft crashing with ‘important’ people on it, a politician getting assassinated, armed robbers killing a man who had just handed over the keys to his car without resistance. Or it could be a car on top speed hitting a pedestrian running across a highway in Lagos instead of using the pedestrian bridge. Then again it could be a stupid newcomer entering a one-chance bus and thus into the embrace of kidnappers supposedly hunting for human blood or human parts for money witchcraft. It was mildly interesting to listen to on the national network news, if it made it there, or to gossip about in offices and marketplaces. The pain of loss belonged only to those connected with them.

Ah, there was lots of money in that Lagos, but it was also a really dangerous place, people in the village said. It had a big mouth and it swallowed many things and many people. Everyone agreed that it would be best for her dead daughter’s husband - the one who had married her not quite six months before - to tell her.

If Mama Nneoma noticed how solicitous her neighbours and relatives were being to her, she did not show it. She was her usual, smiling, contained, quiet self, carrying in public the sorrow of her recent widowhood with dignity. Only the sadness in her eyes and the lines which had become more deeply etched into her forehead and the corners of her mouth told of her private suffering. Her husband’s brother came early the following day to ask how she was doing and to clear some of the grass growing in the compound. She sent her younger children to the village primary school, and went as usual to her shop in Afor-Udo to sell kolanuts. She chatted amiably with her neighbours, tying and retying her top wrapper frequently as she was in the habit of doing. But nobody talked to her about how short her hair remained even though it had been at least a year since it was shaved off at her husband’s death, or about that big elephant in the marketplace: the death of her children.

Mama Nneoma dreamt again that night. Again, the details were hazy, but she thought she saw her children in Lagos coming home. And she longed to tell them to stay; she needed them in Lagos to stay safe, to help take care of their younger siblings. But the words seemed to stick in her throat and would not come out.


© Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, 2007.