1

When my father tells me that my mother’s Corolla has collided with a truck carrying a consignment of wood on Badagry Expressway, I say, “Oh.”

He asks when I can come and I say, “Tomorrow. Or maybe Thursday.” I am sitting at my desk as I say this; I am looking at the Atlantic Ocean beyond the plexiglass. My boss, Mr. Dele Afolabi, strolls in and crosses his arms over his belly.  It is this pose that my mind conjures up whenever I imagine him, him in this mint green shirt, beige chinos, and faded brown oxfords.

He glares at me. He wants me dead and I do not blame him for it. “I am sorry,” I say, placing my phone on the table. “I’ll work on the revision immediately.” I pause. “My mother has died.”

His eyes soften. “I am sorry. Do you…do you need the rest of the day off?”

“Yes, sure.”

“You can have it. Just be fine, okay? Send what you’ve done already to me.”

I nod and say thank you. I grab my phone, my laptop, and my bag.

“Don’t forget to send us the official obituary and the details of the…funeral.”

Mr. Afolabi’s eyes cannot meet mine. Perhaps he has considered that this might be a ruse to escape doing the revision of a six-page agreement. Again, I do not blame him.

“Sure,” I say, and walk past him. 

I notice that my father is still on the line and put my phone to my ear. “Hello? Dad? Did you hear me? I said tomorrow or Thursday.”

“Could you make it today, please, Ebube? Your boss has given you the day off.”

“No,” I say. “I’m defrosting egusi soup. I left it out on the kitchen counter. I don’t want it to go bad.”

He says nothing. I hang up.

When I get home, the egusi has not thawed completely. I warm it and have lunch in the kitchen. The clock strikes one and a ten-second strain of Edvard Grieg’s Morning Mood plays. With every hour, the clock plays a ten-second snip of a classical piece. The clockmakers had no concern for nuance or suitability: at midnight it is Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. The clock drove my last boyfriend crazy, but I would not disable the music option or throw it away. When he broke up with me via a WhatsApp voice note, the clock was the last reason he gave (others were the formidable band of fat that had attached itself to my middle, my unwillingness to go on top once in a while, my boredom with the relationship, and my aversion for ‘anything even slightly resembling a meaningful life’). My response to the VN was, “It’s not a trash clock. It cost 32k. And, okay, sure.”

I click on a notification from Facebook. It’s the incontinent grandfather of social networks, but I haven’t gotten around to uninstalling it. My Uncle Bartholomew just commented on a mutual friend’s post.

RIP.

For a moment, I think it is a post about my mother. It is not. The poster is Moriah Ilesanmi. We met in my grandmother’s house about twenty years ago. She sent me a friend request when I was fourteen. She was already Facebook friends with my uncle. I accepted only because everyone seemed to be racing to 1000 in friend strength. The person in the post’s picture is Rashida, Moriah’s sister. Moriah has posted about Rashida before. Because of her, I know that Rashida has—had—three children and a husband with an anvil-shaped scar on his right cheek. It’s an old picture. In it, Rashida is rail thin, in ripped jeans and a white T-shirt. Her toes are climbing out of her imitation Birkenstocks. Her smile is the sun.

2

After my father threw a TV at my mother, my sister Lulu and I stayed two months at my grandmother’s house. The TV had missed my mother by mere inches. She’d packed our things into her traveling box. It was plastic and gray, lined with the kind of pillowy satin that lines caskets. She took us to my grandmother’s house and stayed at her friend’s. 

My grandmother received us nicely enough. She and my mother talked about how my mother and my father should never have gotten married. “I tell you, Bring Ebube come. I go raise am. You for go hustle, go find correct husband. E get plenty mama wey for tell you, You don get belle. You must to marry am. Na so I talk?” she asked my mother.

“No, ma.”

“Ehen. But you still marry am, come born another pikin for am on top. You say TV? If I curse am, im go follow im generation.”

“But we’re his generation,” I remember saying, and both women turned to me. They had forgotten that Lulu and I were there. 

“Shut up,” my grandmother said. “Two of you, go outside, go play.”

She lived in a face-me-I-face-you apartment. ‘Outside’ could mean four things: the front, where three mesh-encased mini shops that sold hot drinks and cigarettes, small provisions, and confectionary respectively almost blended into each other; the right, whose sole attraction was the rabbit house owned by Rashida and Moriah’s father; the back, which always smelled like the soakaway; and the Sunshine Villa side. When there was no music coming from the hotel (which was very rare), you could hear  the sounds of  the bus park nearby. 

That day, Rashida and her younger brother were at the Sunshine Villa side, sitting on two low stools that their father had made. Rashida was picking beans and her brother was hunting baby lizards. She was perhaps eight, Rashida, very thin, with ashy, knobby knees, and teeth that were too big for her mouth. Her eyes were always lined with tiro.  

“Bubeh,” she said, “is like you people will stay long this time. I see your big bag.” She motioned to a sack brimming with corn-coloured paper. “They want to throw it away. But we fit play with it first.” We played Office: a manager who had a ton of paper on her desk would stamp through them (with either of the two stamps that we found in the sack) while talking to her bumbling secretary: “Have you submitted those documents to the government like I asked you to? Have you called Sunshine Villa Office to ask them for the contract? Where are the documents that I signed last week? If you cannot find them, then I will sack you.”

Lulu and I had the broader vocabulary, the shinier creativity. Theirs was limited by the underfunded public school that they attended. Lulu and I attended a good private school. It was in session while my family’s familyness floated in uncertainty. The Ilesanmi children sometimes got their tenses and pronunciations mixed up, and they mixed Yoruba in with English, and when I tried to correct them, they called me and Lulu Omo Igbo and made fun of us in Yoruba. But they were all we had. Moriah, who was perhaps 10, came to drag Rashida and her brother away from our play sometimes. Her voice was phlegmy. She always peeled at the scabs on her elbows as she spoke. She had Rashida’s teeth. Unlike Rashida, she wore a hijab. Rashida sometimes called her Aunty Ode.

Once, when we bought lemon sweets from the kiosk out front and the woman gave us two extra, Rashida suggested that we take them, being the older siblings, and I said No, let’s give them to our younger ones and her tiroed eyes flashed as she hissed, “Aje Butter! Ehn, see your own sweet, see your sister, give it nau, give it!” 

‘It’ referred to my sister, not the sweets. Moriah, who had come to fetch Rashida as usual, snickered and said, “Olodo! It’s not give it, it’s give him.”

3

I dream of Rashida and my mother. They are in my living room. My mother is seated on my only sofa and Rashida is trying to make herself comfortable on my aquamarine beanbag. I walk in, look around, and sit on the floor, my legs a capital letter M in front of me. My mother is wearing her favourite boubou. Rashida is wearing the jeans and t-shirt and Birkenstocks. Ride of the Valkyries plays. Rashida and my mother jump.

“I have a no-shoes policy,” I say to Rashida and point at my feet. “See? Bare.”

“Sorry,” she says. She shuffles out of the Birkenstocks and looks at my mother’s feet. They are bare. I know this without looking.

“The clock is a menace, Ebube,” my mother says. When she uses English words that have simpler synonyms, she lingers on them, lets them dangle in the air and fall to the ground. The last time she ever hit me, it was because I told her, “You really don’t need to talk like that. Like bad theatre. At least not to me.”

I say nothing. Rashida looks at me, and then my mother. “The clock is not too bad,” she says, her tone conciliatory. 

“Do you have anything else to say to me?” I ask her. She shakes her head.

I get up and begin to walk away. But then I turn. “Moriah insinuated that it was your husband that killed you. I couldn’t really understand what she was saying.”

“English and Omo Igbo, one and two.” Rashida laughs. I do not join her. She clears her throat and smiles apologetically. “Moriah’s English is still bad. Bad more than my own. Sorry.”

“Is it true, then?” 

“We should go,” my mother says to Rashida and gets up. I shrug and walk away.

4

I get to work the earliest I have been this year. News has gone round. My coworkers look at me with pity. When I answer Mr. Afolabi’s summons, he looks at my face as though there is something he is looking for but cannot find.

“We are giving you two days off,” he says. “To settle, recalibrate. As soon as you are sure of the date of the funeral, you’ll get that time off, as well. My deepest condolences.”

“Thank you.”

The HR Manager, Mrs. Fasakin, emails me a condolence message and then sends a mail informing everyone that I am bereaved. I am staring at the mail on my laptop when my colleagues, Bimpe, Deji, and Perpetua, enter my office. Their condolences are theatrical, performative things that know that they are theatrical, performative things. Perpetua offers to carry my bag on my way out. Deji says he will put me in his prayers; I am a beautiful soul; I do not deserve this. Four days ago, when they thought they were alone in the kitchen, Deji told Perpetua that I had to be very good on my knees for all the slack I was getting. Perpetua said, ‘Haq haq haq, her knees and her back. Can’t you see how fat she’s gotten? Obviously birth control.” The joke is on them; I never give head kneeling down. 

I get the calls that I expect, first from Mr. Ajibade and then from Mr. Bosah. Both partners of the firm. They say almost the same thing. I heard about your mother. So sorry. How are you feeling? Has Dele given you some time off? I am sending something to you now. Two hundred thousand naira. Two hundred and eighty thousand naira. 

I go to my father’s house. It is two hours away from my office, a small bungalow between a Catholic church and a bread factory.  I have not been here in a while. The guava and soursop trees have been trimmed to baldness. The house has sunk deeper into the earth. The porch, which was once elevated, is now on the same level with the front yard. A new shade of blue paint is on the front wall.

There are two pairs of shoes and one pair of slippers beside the foot mat. I know, instinctively, who is inside. My father answers on the second knock. He hesitates only a moment before he hugs me. He leads me inside and motions me to the chair that was exclusively his when I was growing up. He looks exhausted. There are more wrinkles on his face than I remember. His hair is peppered with white.  

My uncle and aunt are seated across from me. “Good afternoon, Aunty, Uncle.”

“Ebube, how are you?” my aunt says. She is a plump woman in her sixties. Her cheeks are round, like there are small tangerines under them. I can feel my uncle watching me as I nod and say, “I am fine, Aunty.” 

“Come, come.”

I walk to her and bend, and she holds on to me tightly for several seconds. It is comforting. Her perfume is a subtle lavender-y thing. I want to ask her what it is called.

“Take heart, o?” she says, when she lets me go.

“Yes, Aunty.” I walk back to my seat.

“It has not been easy for us at all. To lose both of our parents in one year and our sister the very next year.” She looks at my uncle. He nods. She turns back to me. “But God knows best, o? I want you to know that God knows best.”

“Yes, Aunty.”

“Your father has not slept at all,” she continues. “We just came back from the mortuary. And before then we were at the police station. I flew in from Asaba yesterday. The very first flight. Death respects no one, no one.” 

Her grief is a graceful, dignified thing. Her eyes are not teary, but there is pain in their depths. I never really knew her. She was married before I was born, and she has lived in Asaba for all of my life. I have seen her in person only twice before: when she brought my grandfather back from the village and at Lulu’s funeral.

“We were hoping that you would be the one to pack up her things,” my father says. “And I need help, Ebube. With the planning of the funeral. We want to make it as soon as possible.”

I nod. “I will do anything you ask of me but pack up her things,” I say.

“Ebube, please,” my father says. “She is gone now. Please.”

“I will do anything you ask of me but pack up her things.”

“Ebube,” my uncle says, and I turn to him. He used to have an afro that blended seamlessly into sideburns, a mustache and a goatee. His face is an egg now. “This is unacceptable. What is it? What did your mother do to deserve this? Why is everyone ignoring it as if it is normal for a child to behave like a bastard?”

I look at him squarely. “I hope you die a terrible death. May no one see even a finger to pick. Ise.” 

5

“It is me that you wanted to say that to,” my mother says in my dream that night. Her back is turned to me. She is in my kitchen, turning garri in my favorite bowl, the one I never turn garri in. “Thankfully, my body was intact, for the most part.”

“Yes,” Rashida says. She is seated on the floor, her legs spread, the plastic container that holds my seasoning cubes in front of her, empty. The seasoning cubes are on the floor, and she is sorting them out by type. Knorr Chicken. Knorr Beef Cubes. Maggi Naija Pot. Royco Cubes. “Yes, is my husband that killed me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say to her. She waves it away. She puts the Maggi Naija Pot cubes in, followed by Knorr Chicken. “Actually,” I say to her, “I would prefer it how it was. Scattered. So I don’t have to go through a lot of stress to reach the ones down.” Rashida nods. And yet she puts the Royco Cubes next.

“Ebube?” my mother says. 

“The way you are doing it, that works too,” I tell Rashida. I turn off the kitchen light and turn away and wake up.

6

Rashida’s father’s carpentry shop was in the next house. In the evenings, while he and his eldest son, Lawal, worked, they would play Yoruba songs from their battered sound system. One of these songs is burned in my memory. I fumble through the lyrics but I know the tune. I told the first person I slept with of my own accord to listen to it and tell me if he could recognize it. He shook his head, his lips in a taut smile around his cigarette. “You’re just humming and saying non-words. Get up. My girlfriend will be here in an hour.”

It was Lawal that began to peep into Sunshine Villa first. He was 13 or 14 then. In my strongest memory of him, he is screaming for water and trying to run around in circles. One of his father’s hands is grasping his arm. The other is flogging Lawal’s back with a fat piece of sandpapered wood. There is ground pepper in Lawal’s eyes, grinded with his mother’s grinding stone. Other tenants are saying, Papa Lawal, stop nau! Stop nau! but they are not doing anything. Lawal has stolen N50.

Rashida suggested we climb and look over the wall, too. Uncle Bartholomew caught us. He was in his early twenties, waiting for his UME results. He was tall and handsome and cooked delicious jollof spaghetti and thick ogbono with large okra seeds floating in it and when he made eba he smoothened the top in the bowl so that it looked like a large, frosting-less cupcake.

He told my grandmother. He knew not to. She was not a bad grandmother, just an acerbic-tongued one. She once called me a fat fool for losing Lulu on an errand one day. She often called Lulu a loud mosquito, because she was always asking questions. But it was she who showed up before my father got the job that made him afford the TV that he threw at my mother, who brought coolers and coolers of home-cooked food and pressed mint notes in my mother’s hands.

She did not beat us over the Sunshine Villa episode; she called us our father’s children and told us that if we’d never been born, her daughter would have been a doctor now and that it was a woman like the women we were watching that put us in this mess in the first place because my father was a dog and did I understand, did my fat head understand. I sulked for days and Uncle Bartholomew bought me a secondhand purple teddy bear that was Lulu’s height and a lot of Goody-Goody and I hugged his legs and did not let go.

I gave the teddy to Lulu and her eyes lit up. She was buried with it one year later. I begged my mother to allow it and, perhaps because it was the most I had spoken to her in a  year, she blinked back her tears and agreed. 

7

Lulu died on a Sunday. We had just gotten back from Mass and Lulu was still wearing her blue Cinderella dress when my mother asked her to go across the street to buy akara three hundred and pap hundred naira. It is stuck in my head; it is a core memory. The car that knocked her down couldn’t have been driving that fast. The road was rough. And yet when I flew outside the gate, behind my father and my mother, Lulu was on the ground, red on her blue dress, her head at an angle that heads were not supposed to be in. 

Since our return from my grandmother’s house, I had built myself a box and climbed into it. Except for the barest things, I did not speak to anyone except Lulu. I did not smile in family pictures. My mother never sent me on errands outside the house because I would not run them well. I could not articulate specifications: soft white fresh bread, green pepper the tiny ones, Peak Milk Holland. 

And so I knew what she was thinking every time she looked at me after Lulu was gone: that death had picked the wrong daughter.

8

Not long after the Sunshine Villa episode, my grandfather returned from the village. He had been sick for a prolonged while and my grandmother had spent months taking care of him. Once it appeared that he was convalescing, she returned to her house in Lagos, leaving him in the care of my Aunty Cecelia in Asaba. The convalescence took months, but my grandfather was finally well enough to die. He wanted to spend his last days with his wife and lastborn. There were conversations about him that Lulu and I were not allowed to listen to. I did, anyway, by pretending I was asleep or engrossed in watching TV. What I heard did not make sense to me. Why would my grandmother let him return if he had made babies with two of Aunty Cecelia’s maids?

He was significantly shorter than my grandmother. He looked like a koala: hirsute and huggable, simple and slow. He was unobtrusive and gracious. Once, when my grandmother said I had the belly of a woman close to delivery,  he told me that it was not true: I was beautiful,  a replica of my grandmother when she was my age, hunting for mangoes with him. 

When my mother came to fetch us, bearing secondhand Dr. Seuss books and sugarcane, my grandfather protested. He said we could not return until he was sure my father truly was sorry, and that he felt that Lulu and I should stay and start schooling here. My heart skipped a beat.  My eyes begged my mother not to agree. She didn’t. Not because of me, but because my father had tired of the woman that had made him throw a TV at my mother and now he wanted my mother back and sleeping on her friend’s floor for these past few months had given her a constant backache. 

We packed our things into the box with the casket lining and returned home. Rashida stood in front of my grandmother’s apartment, waving at us with one hand, clutching the storybook my mother had gifted her in the other. It was the last time I ever saw her.

I struggled to tell my mother about the Thing for weeks. She asked if I was alright several times, but she was too ensconced in the happiness of being reinstated for it to bother her a lot. She and my father aggressively made up for lost time. Once, Lulu and I returned from school to find them in the bathroom, which had a door that was only three-fourths a door. We saw only their feet, my mother’s plump, my father’s thin and long. My mother’s sounds were shrill, and my father sounded the same as when he drank water after he returned from work exhausted. Sigh sigh sigh. Then there was that time, in their room, when they forgot to lock the door. And that time in the car when they forgot to roll up the windows.

It was Sade, my classmate, that made me say the Thing. She walked to our class teacher one day and said that two of our classmates had stuck pencils in her bum the day before and now she was bleeding. A PTA meeting was called. My mother came back from it livid. How could the teachers have allowed such a thing happen? 

I told her that the same thing had happened to me, but not with pencils. And not with my classmates.

9

The funeral date has been fixed. It is in one month. In the picture that my father chose for the obituary, my mother is smiling brightly. Her hair is impossibly black. I stare at it for the longest time before I send it to Mrs. Fasakin and tell her that it will be a private affair and I would prefer it if my colleagues did not attend. She calls me into her office and tells me that my productivity since I got back from my two days away is through the roof. She knows it is only a coping mechanism; once again she is sorry for my loss.

“Now imagine what would happen if my father passed, too,” I say. Mrs. Fasakin’s eyes widen. She swallows. She swallows again. I tell her I would like to go and she says, “Yes, yes, thank you.”

I take sleeping pills as soon as I get home. In a few minutes, my mother is seated on my living room sofa, only, the sofa is now in my bedroom. 

I sit up. “First,” I say to her, “you are not real. You are in a mortuary, under piles of other bodies. And that is what you are, a body.”

She nods. “That is true.”

“I cannot grieve you,” I say. “You know this.”

“I wish you would,” she says. “Ebube, I am your mother. Of all the mistakes that I have ever made, the one I made with you is my greatest. I was young and stupid. I was desperate to have a normal home. When I woke up to what I had done, you had gone so far, so very far, away from me. There was no bringing you back. You treated me like I did not exist. And so, I tried to do anything to get a response from you. If you could only talk to me. If you felt hate for me, at least you felt something. I wanted to work my way up from there. The only thing I ever achieved was the first.”

She lowers herself to the ground and places her elbows on my bed. The descent is slow and graceless. She has always had bad knees. “Ebube, they say it is a taboo to kneel before your child, but I am doing it. Please. You did not forgive me in life. Forgive me in death. And forgive your uncle.”

“No,” I say.

I spot Rashida out of the corner of my eye. She is by my bedroom door, awkwardly standing there, a cup of my chocolate ice-cream in her hand. “Get out, Rashida,” I say to her, and she nods and disappears.

“He too did not know how to handle it,” my mother continues. “He was much younger than I was, and if I could be stupid, he could be stupid, too. Please, please, Ebube.”

“No.”

She gets up and walks to me. “If I could change the past, I would. Close your eyes.” I stare at her for several moments. And then I close my eyes. All of a sudden, we are in me and Lulu’s room, in my parents’ house. My mother is seated on the bed. Uncle Bartholomew and I are standing before her. He is saying, “No. Nothing like that. How could she even think up something like that? God forbid!”

And instead of looking at me like something vomited from hellfire and telling him Bartho sorry for wasting your time let’s forget this ever happened please and reaching in her purse to give him transport fare back to my grandmother’s place, she grabs me and hugs me and I see my eyes widen and I see my arms wrap around her as much as they can and I see her burst into tears and I see myself burst into tears too. She says to my uncle, “She is your niece, Bartho! Your niece! Are you a demon?” She is standing up and she is slapping him across the face and on his back and everywhere that her hands can hit and he is ducking and running out of the room. She turns to me, little me, eight-year-old me, and carries me in her lap like I am a baby. “I am sorry, my princess. I am so, very sorry. I will fix this.” 

“That’s not good enough,” I say, and she wipes her nose on her sleeve and says, “I know.”

And now we are in my grandmother’s apartment. I know what day this is. Rashida is teaching Lulu how to braid her doll’s hair outside. My grandmother is at her shop at Mile 2. My grandfather is seated on the bed. I am seated right beside him. He is telling me about how my grandmother’s breasts sprouted and my great-grandmother would not let her play with him anymore. He is pulling his trousers down and reaching for me and I am looking at him with stunned eyes and squirming away. There are gray tufts of hair on his upper body. Koala, koala, koala.

My uncle is at the door, watching through the mosquito netting, his eyes as stunned as mine. My mother barrels into the room, the boubou that does not even exist yet billowing around her. She grabs my grandmother’s kerosene lamp and crashes it down on my grandfather’s head. He howls and rolls off me. She follows him down, the lamp swinging. My grandfather groans every time it hits him. When my mother looks up at me my grandfather is unmoving. There is blood on my grandmother’s linoleum and blood on my mother’s hands and blood on my mother’s boubou. She is breathing hard. There are tears in her eyes. She reaches for me.

I run to her, but I am not fast enough.

I wake.

My throat is tight and my pillow is wet with tears.

About the Author:

Chantelle Chiwetalu’s works have appeared or are forthcoming in Smokelong Quarterly, After the Pause, Overheard Lit, Kalahari Review and elsewhere. She won the 2023 Wakini Kuria Prize for Literature.

*Feature image by Kevin Escate on Unsplash