‘What did you cook?’ Odenigbo asked.
‘Rice.’ She rinsed the sponge and put it away. ‘Aren’t you going to play tennis?’
‘I thought you would come.’
‘I don’t feel up to it.’ Olanna turned around. ‘Why is your mother’s behaviour acceptable because she’s a village woman? I know village women who do not behave this way.’
‘Nkem, my mother’s entire life is in Abba. Do you know what a small bush village that is? Of course she will feel threatened by an educated woman living with her son. Of course you have to be a witch. That is the only way she can understand it. The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to negotiate this new world.’
‘Did you talk to her about this?’
‘I didn’t see the point. Look, I want to catch Dr Okoro at the club. Let’s discuss this when I get back. I’ll stay here tonight.’
She paused as she washed her hands. She wanted him to ask her to come back with him to the house, wanted him to say he would tell his mother off in front of her, for her. But here he was deciding to stay at her flat, like a frightened little boy hiding from his mother.
‘No,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘I said no.’ She walked into the living room without drying her hands. The flat seemed too small.
‘What is wrong with you, Olanna?’
She shook her head. She would not let him make her feel that there was something wrong with her. It was her right to be upset, her right to choose not to brush her humiliation aside in the name of an overexalted intellectualism, and she would claim that right. ‘Go.’ She gestured towards the door. ‘Go and play your tennis and don’t come back here.’
She watched him get up and leave. He banged the door. They had never had a quarrel; he had never been impatient with dissent from her as he was with others. Or it may simply be that he humoured her and did not think much of her opinions in the first place. She felt dizzy. She sat alone at her bare dining table – even her table mats were in his house – and ate the rice. It tasted bland, nothing like Ugwu’s. She turned the radio on. She thought she heard rustles in the ceiling. She got up to go visit her neighbour Edna Whaler; she had always wanted to get to know the pretty black American woman who sometimes brought her cloth-covered plates of American biscuits. But she changed her mind at the door and didn’t step out. After she left the half-eaten rice in the kitchen, she walked around the flat, picking up old newspapers and then putting them down. Finally, she went to the phone and waited for the operator.
‘Give me the number quick, I have other things to do,’ the lazy, nasal voice said.
Olanna was used to unprofessional and inept operators, but this was the rudest she had experienced.
‘Haba, I will cut this line if you keep wasting my time,’ the operator said.
Olanna sighed and slowly recited Kainene’s number.
Kainene sounded sleepy when she picked up the phone. ‘Olanna? Did something happen?’
Olanna felt a rush of melancholy; her twin sister thought something had to have happened for her to call. ‘Nothing happened. I just wanted to say kedu, to find out how you are.’
‘How shocking.’ Kainene yawned. ‘How’s Nsukka? How’s your revolutionary lover?’
‘Odenigbo is fine. Nsukka is fine.’
‘Richard seems taken by it. He even seems taken by your revolutionary.’
‘You should come and visit.’
‘Richard and I prefer to meet here in Port Harcourt. That tiny box they gave him for a house is not exactly suitable.’
Olanna wanted to tell Kainene that she meant visit her, her and Odenigbo. But of course Kainene understood what she meant and had simply chosen to misunderstand.
‘I’m going to London next month,’ she said instead. ‘Maybe we could go together.’
‘I have too much to do here. No holiday for me yet.’
‘Why don’t we talk any more, Kainene?’
‘What a question.’ Kainene sounded amused and Olanna imagined that mocking smile pulling up one side of her mouth.
‘I just want to know why we don’t talk any more,’ Olanna said. Kainene did not respond. A static whining came over the telephone line. They were silent for so long that Olanna felt she had to apologize. ‘I shouldn’t keep you,’ she said.
‘Are you coming to Daddy’s dinner party next week?’ Kainene asked.
‘No.’
‘I should have guessed. Too opulent for your abstemious revolutionary and yourself, I take it?’
‘I shouldn’t keep you,’ Olanna repeated, and placed the phone down. She picked it up again, and was about to give the operator her mother’s number before she dropped it back. She wished there was somebody she could lean against; then she wished she was different, the sort of person who did not need to lean on others, like Kainene. She pulled at the phone wire to untangle it. Her parents had insisted on installing a phone in her flat, as if they did not hear her say that she would practically be living with Odenigbo. She had protested, but only mildly, the same limp no with which she greeted the frequent deposits to her bank account and the new Impala with the soft upholstery.
Although she knew Mohammed was abroad, she gave the operator his number in Kano; the nasal voice said, ‘You are phoning too much today!’ before connecting her. She held on to the receiver long after there was no response. Rustling sounds came from the ceiling again. She sat on the cold floor and leaned her head against the wall to see if it would feel less light, less unmoored. Odenigbo’s mother’s visit had ripped a hole in her safe mesh of feathers, startled her, snatched something away from her. She felt one step away from where she should be. She felt as if she had left her pearls lying loose for too long and it was time to gather them and guard them more carefully. The thought came to her slowly: She wanted to have Odenigbo’s child. They had never really discussed children. She once told him that she did not have that fabled female longing to give birth, and her mother had called her abnormal until Kainene said she didn’t have it either. He laughed and said that to bring a child into this unjust world was an act of a blasé bourgeoisie anyway. She had never forgotten that expression: childbirth as an act of blasé bourgeoisie – how funny, how untrue it was. Just as she had never seriously thought of having a child until now; the longing in the lower part of her belly was sudden and searing and new. She wanted the solid weight of a child, his child, in her body.
When the doorbell rang that evening as she climbed out of the bathtub, she went to the door wrapped in a towel. Odenigbo was holding a newspaper-wrapped package of suya; she could smell the smoky spiciness from where she stood.
‘Are you still angry?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Get dressed and we’ll go back together. I will talk to my mother.’
He smelt of brandy. He came inside and placed the suya on the table, and in his bloodshot eyes she glimpsed the vulnerability that hid itself so well underneath his voluble confidence. He could be afraid, after all. She rested her face against his neck as he hugged her and said to him, quietly, ‘No, you don’t have to do that. Stay here.’
After his mother left, Olanna went back to Odenigbo’s house. Ugwu said, ‘Sorry, mah,’ as if he were somehow responsible for Mama’s behaviour. Then he fiddled with his apron pocket and said, ‘I saw a black cat yesterday night, after Mama and Amala left.’