I touched her shoulder; she didn’t pull away.
‘So, I was being silly,’ she said.
‘You owe me an apology,’ I said. I didn’t mean it. Our relationship was still at the point where it didn’t matter who was wrong or right. We hadn’t arrived at the place where deciding who needed to apologise started another fight.
‘Sorry, but you know people have all sorts of . . . sorry.’ She leaned into me.
‘All right.’ I grinned as her thumb drew invisible circles along my arm.
‘So, Akin. You can confess all your secrets to me now, dirty or clean. Maybe a woman who has children for you somewhere . . .’
There were things I could have told her. Should have said to her. I smiled. ‘I’ve got a few dirty socks and underwear. How about you? Any dirty panties?’
She shook her head.
Finally, I spoke the words that had been dancing on my tongue since the beginning – or a version of them. I said to her, ‘Yejide Makinde, I am going to marry you.’
4
For a while, I did not accept the fact that I had become a first wife, an iyale. Iya Martha was my father’s first wife. When I was a child, I believed she was the unhappiest wife in the family. My opinion did not change as I grew older. At my father’s funeral, she stood beside the freshly dug grave with her narrow eyes narrowed even further and showered curses on every woman my father had made his wife after he had married her. She had begun as always with my long-dead mother, since she was the second woman he had married, the one who had made Iya Martha a first amongst not-so-equals.
I refused to think of myself as first wife.
It was easy to pretend that Funmi did not even exist. I continued to wake up with my husband lying on his back beside me in bed, his legs spread-eagled, a pillow over his face to shut out the light from my bedside lamp. I would pinch his neck until he got up and headed for the bathroom, responding to my greetings with a nod or a wave. He was incoherent in the mornings, incapable of putting words together before a cup of coffee or a cold shower.
A couple of weeks after Funmi came into our home for the first time, our phone rang shortly before midnight. By the time I sat up in bed, Akin was halfway across the room. I pulled my bedside lamp’s cord twice, and all its four bulbs came on, flooding the room with light. Akin had picked up the phone and was frowning as he listened to the person on the other end of the line.
After he returned the phone to its cradle, he came to sit beside me in bed. ‘That was Aliyu, he’s head of operations at the head office in Lagos. He called me to say we shouldn’t open the bank to customers tomorrow.’ He sighed. ‘There has been a coup.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a while. I wondered if anyone had been killed, if there would be chaos and violence in the following months. Though I had been too young to remember the events, I knew that the coups of 1966 had ultimately thrust the country into a civil war. I comforted myself by thinking about how the tension after the last coup, which had made General Buhari Head of State just twenty months before, had dissipated within a few days. The country had decided then that it was tired of the corrupt civilian government Buhari and his colleagues had ousted.
‘But is it certain that the coup plotters succeeded?’
‘Looks like it. Aliyu says they have already arrested Buhari.’
‘Let’s hope these ones don’t kill anybody.’ I pulled the bedside lamp’s cord once, switching off three of the bulbs.
‘This country!’ Akin sighed as he stood up. ‘I’m going to go downstairs and check the doors again.’
‘So who is in charge now?’ I lay back in bed, though I would not be able to go back to sleep.
‘He didn’t say anything about that. We should know in the morning.’
We did not know in the morning. There was a broadcast at 6 a.m. by an army officer who condemned the previous government and didn’t tell us anything about the new one. Akin left for the office after the broadcast so that he could arrive at work before any protests broke out. I stayed at home, knowing already that my stylists in training would not come to the salon after listening to the news that morning. I left the radio on and tried to call everyone I knew in Lagos to make sure they were safe, but the phone lines had been severed by then and I could not get through. I must have dozed off after listening to the news at noon. Akin was home by the time I woke up. He was the one who informed me that Ibrahim Babangida was the new Head of State.
The most unusual thing about the next few weeks was that Babangida referred to himself, and came to be referred to, not just as Head of State but as President, as if the coup counted as an election. On the whole, things appeared to go on as usual and, like the rest of the country, my husband and I went back to our usual routine.
Most weekdays, Akin and I ate breakfast together. It was usually boiled eggs, toast and lots of coffee. We liked our coffee the same way, in red mugs that matched the little flowers on the place mats, without milk and with two cubes of sugar each. At breakfast, we discussed our plans for the day ahead. We talked about getting someone to fix the leaking roof in the bathroom, discussed the men Babangida had appointed to the National Council of Ministers, considered assassinating the neighbour’s dog who would not quit yelping during the night, and debated whether the new margarine we were trying out was too oily. We did not discuss Funmi; we did not even mention her name by mistake. After the meal, we would carry the plates together to the kitchen and leave them in the sink to be cleaned later. Then we would wash our hands, share a kiss and go back into the sitting room. There, Akin would pick up his jacket, sling it over a shoulder and leave for work. I would go upstairs to shower and then head for my salon, and so we continued, days sliding into weeks, weeks into a month, as though it was still just the two of us in the marriage.
Then one day, after Akin had left for work, I went back upstairs to have my bath and discovered that a section of the roof had collapsed. It was raining that morning and the pressure of the gathering rainwater must have finally pushed through the already soggy asbestos and ripped the leaky square open in the middle so that water poured through it into the bathtub. I tried to find a way to bathe in that tub anyway because I had never used any of the other bathrooms in the house since we had got married. But the rain would not stop and the torn asbestos was located just so that I could not fit myself into any corner of my own bathtub without getting hit by the rainwater or bits of wood and scraps of metal that were making their way into the tub along with the water.
After I called Akin’s office and left a message with his secretary about the roof, for the very first time I had to have my bath in the guest bathroom down the hallway. And there, in a space that was unfamiliar, I considered the possibility that I might end up having to take many showers in that tiny shower stall if Funmi decided to start coming over and insisted on spending her nights in the master bedroom. I rinsed off the soapsuds and went back to the master bedroom – my bedroom – to get dressed for work. When I checked on the state of the bathroom before going downstairs, the damage had not got any worse and the water was still flowing directly into the tub.
By the time I unfurled my umbrella and dashed for the car, the downpour had become torrential; the wind was strong and it tried its best to wrestle the umbrella from me. My shoes were wet by the time I got into the car. I took them off and put on the flat slippers that I used for driving. When I turned my key in the ignition, I got nothing, just a useless click. I tried again and again without any luck.
I had never had a problem with my faithful blue Beetle since Akin gave it to me after we got married. He took it in for servicing regularly and checked the oil and whatever else every week. The rain was still pouring outside and there was no use walking to my salon, even though it wasn’t too far from the estate. The wind had already snapped several branches off the trees in our neighbour’s front yard and it would have wrecked my umbrella within minutes. So I sat in the