Olanna got up. As if it mattered what the woman looked like. As if ‘old and ugly’ did not describe her father as well. What troubled her mother was not the mistress, she knew, but the significance of what her father had done: buying the mistress a house in a neighbourhood where Lagos socialites lived.
‘Maybe we should wait for Kainene to visit so she can talk to your father instead, nne?’ her mother said, dabbing at her eyes again.
‘I said I would talk to him, Mum,’ Olanna said.
But that evening, as she walked into her father’s room, she realized that her mother was right. Kainene was the best person for this. Kainene would know exactly what to say and would not feel the awkward ineptness that she did now, Kainene with her sharp edges and her bitter tongue and her supreme confidence.
‘Dad,’ she said, closing the door behind her. He was at his desk, sitting on the straight-backed chair made of dark wood. She couldn’t ask him if it was true, because he had to know that her mother knew it to be true and so did she. She wondered, for a moment, about this other woman, what she looked like, what she and her father talked about.
‘Dad,’ she said again. She would speak mostly in English. It was easy to be formal and cold in English. ‘I wish you had some respect for my mother.’ That was not what she had intended to say. My mother, instead of Mum, made it seem as if she had decided to exclude him, as if he had become a stranger who could not possibly be addressed on the same terms, could not be my father.
He leaned back in his chair.
‘It’s disrespectful that you have a relationship with this woman and that you have bought her a house where my mother’s friends live,’ Olanna said. ‘You go there from work and your driver parks outside and you don’t seem to care that people see you. It’s a slap to my mother’s face.’
Her father’s eyes were downcast now, the eyes of a man groping in his mind.
‘I am not going to tell you what to do about it, but you have to do something. My mother isn’t happy.’ Olanna stressed the have, placed an exaggerated emphasis on it. She had never talked to her father like this before; she rarely talked to him anyway. She stood there staring at him, and he at her, and the silence between them was empty.
‘Anugo m, I have heard you,’ he said. His Igbo was low, conspiratorial, as if she had asked him to go ahead and cheat on her mother but to do it considerately. It angered her. Perhaps it was, in effect, what she had asked him to do but still she was annoyed. She looked around his room and thought how unfamiliar his large bed was; she had never seen that lustrous shade of gold on a blanket before or noticed how intricately convoluted the metal handles of his chest of drawers were. He even looked like a stranger, a fat man she didn’t know.
‘Is that all you have to say, that you’ve heard me?’ Olanna asked, raising her voice.
‘What do you want me to say?’
Olanna felt a sudden pity for him, for her mother, for herself and Kainene. She wanted to ask him why they were all strangers who shared the same last name.
‘I will do something about it,’ he added. He stood up and came towards her. ‘Thank you, ola m,’ he said.
She was not sure what to make of his thanking her, or of his calling her my gold, something he had not done since she was a child and which now had a contrived solemnity to it. She turned and left the room.
When Olanna heard her mother’s raised voice the next morning – ’Good-for-nothing! Stupid man!’ – she hurried downstairs. She imagined them fighting, her mother grasping the front of her father’s shirt in a tight knot as women often did to cheating husbands. The sounds came from the kitchen. Olanna stopped at the door. A man was kneeling in front of her mother with his hands raised high, palms upward in supplication.
‘Madam, please; madam, please.’
Her mother turned to the steward, Maxwell, who stood aside watching. ‘I fugo? Does he think we employed him to steal us blind, Maxwell?’
‘No, mah,’ Maxwell said.
Her mother turned back to the man kneeling on the floor. ‘So this is what you have been doing since you came here, you useless man? You came here to steal from me?’
‘Madam, please; madam, please. I am using God to beg you.’
‘Mum, what is it?’ Olanna asked.
Her mother turned. ‘Oh, nne, I didn’t know you were up.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s this wild animal here. We employed him only last month, and he already wants to steal everything in my house.’ She turned back to the kneeling man. ‘This is how you repay people for giving you a job? Stupid man!’
‘What did he do?’ Olanna asked.
‘Come and see.’ Her mother led her out to the backyard where a bicycle leaned against the mango tree. A woven bag had fallen from the backseat, spilling rice onto the ground.
‘He stole my rice and was about to go home. It was only by God’s grace that the bag fell. Who knows what else he has stolen from me in the past? No wonder I have been looking for some of my necklaces.’ Her mother was breathing quickly.
Olanna stared at the rice grains on the ground and wondered how her mother could have worked herself up like this over them and if her mother really believed her own outrage.
‘Aunty, please beg Madam. It is the devil that made me do it.’ The driver’s pleading hands faced Olanna now. ‘Please beg madam.’
Olanna looked away from the man’s lined face and yellowed eyes; he was older than she had first thought, certainly above sixty. ‘Get up,’ she said.
He looked uncertain, glancing at her mother.
‘I said get up!’ Olanna had not intended to raise her voice, but it had come out sharp. The man stood up awkwardly, eyes downcast.
‘Mum, if you’re going to sack him, then sack him and have him go right away,’ Olanna said.
The man gasped, as if he had not expected her to say that. Her mother looked surprised too and glanced at Olanna, at the man, at Maxwell, before she put down the hand placed on her hip. ‘I will give you one more chance, but don’t ever touch anything in this house unless you are permitted. Do you hear me?’
‘Yes, madam. Thank you, madam. God bless you, madam.’
The man was still singing his thanks as Olanna took a banana from the table and left the kitchen.
She told Odenigbo about it on the phone, how it repulsed her to see that elderly man abase himself so, how she was certain her mother would have fired him but only after an hour of revelling in his grovelling and in her own self-righteous outrage. ‘It could not have been more than four cups of rice,’ she said.
‘It was still stealing, nkem.’
‘My father and his politician friends steal money with their contracts, but nobody makes them kneel to beg for forgiveness. And they build houses with their stolen money and rent them out to people like this man and charge inflated rents that make it impossible to buy food.’
‘You can’t right theft with theft.’ Odenigbo sounded strangely sombre; she had expected an outburst from him about the injustice of it all.
‘Does inequality have to mean indignity?’ she asked.
‘It often does.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘My mother is here. I had no idea she was coming.’
No wonder he sounded that way. ‘Will she be gone before Tuesday?’
‘I