My gaze reached the ceiling.
“Where is your father?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he say when he will be back?”
“No.”
She surveyed the rest of my room. “Clean this place up.”
“Yes, Mummy.”
“And come and help me in the kitchen afterward. I want to speak to you later on tonight. Make sure you wash your mouth before you come.”
I pretended to be preoccupied with the contents of my dressing table until she left. Using a pair of scissors, I scraped the red ink from my nails. What did she want to speak to me about? Baba couldn’t have told.
My mother never had a conversation with me; she talked and knew that I was listening. I always was. The mere sound of her footsteps made me breathe faster. She hardly raised a hand to me, unlike most mothers I knew, who beat their children with tree branches, but she didn’t have to. I’d been caned before, for daydreaming in class, with the side of a ruler, on my knuckles, and wondered if it wasn’t an easier punishment than having my mother look at me as if she’d caught me playing with my own poop. Her looks were hard to forget. At least caning welts eventually disappeared.
Holy people had to be unhappy or strict, or a mixture of both, I’d decided. My mother and her church friends, their priest with his expression as if he was sniffing something bad. There wasn’t a choir mistress I’d seen with a friendly face, and even in our old Anglican church people had generally looked miserable as they prayed. I’d come to terms with these people as I’d come to terms with my own natural sinfulness. How many mornings had I got up vowing to be holy, only to succumb to happiness by midday, laughing and running helter-skelter? I wanted to be holy; I just couldn’t remember.
I was frying plantains in the kitchen with my mother that evening, when oil popped from the frying pan and struck my wrist.
“Watch what you’re doing,” she said.
“Sorry,” Bisi said, peeping up from the pots she was washing.
Bisi often said sorry for no reason. I lifted the fried plantains from the pan and smacked them down with my spatula. Oil spitting, chopping knives. Onions. Kitchen work was ugly. When I was older I would starve myself so I wouldn’t have to cook. That was my main plan.
A noise outside startled me. It was my father coming through the back door.
“I knock on my front door these days and no one will answer,” he muttered.
The door creaked open and snapped shut behind him. Bisi rushed to take his briefcase and he shooed her away. I smiled at my father. He was always miserable after work, especially when he returned from court. He was skinny with a voice that cracked and I pitied him whenever he complained: “I’m working all day, to put clothes on your back, food in your stomach, pay your school fees. All I ask is for peace when I get home. Instead you give me wahala. Daddy can I buy ice-cream. Daddy can I buy Enid Blyton. Daddy my jeans are torn. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. You want me dead?”
He loosened his tie. “I see your mother is making you understudy her again.”
I took another plantain and sliced its belly open, hoping for more of his sympathy. My mother shook a pot of stew on the stove and lifted its lid to inspect the contents.
“It won’t harm her to be in here,” she said.
I eased the plantain out and began to slice it into circles. My father opened the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of beer. Again Bisi rushed to his aid, and this time he allowed her to open the bottle.
“You should tell her young girls don’t do this anymore,” he said.
“Who said?” my mother asked.
“And if she asks where you learned such nonsense, tell her from your father and he’s for the liberation of women.”
He stood at attention and saluted. My father was not a serious man, I thought.
“All women except your wife,” my mother said.
Bisi handed him his glass of beer. I thought he hadn’t heard because he began to drink. He lowered the glass. “I’ve never asked you to be in here cooking for me.”
“Ah, well,” she said, wiping her hands with a dish cloth. “But you never ask me not to either.”
He nodded in agreement. “It is hard to compete with your quest for martyrdom.”
My mother made a show of inspecting the fried plantains. She pointed to the pan and I emptied too many plantain pieces into it. The oil hissed and fumes filled the air.
Whenever my father spoke good English like that, I knew he was angry. I didn’t understand what he meant most times. This time, he placed his empty glass on the table and grabbed his briefcase.
“Don’t wait up for me.”
My mother followed him. As they left the kitchen, I crept to the door to spy on them. Bisi turned off the tap to hear their conversation and I rounded on her with all the rage a whisper could manage: “Stop listening to people’s private conversations! You’re always listening to people’s private conversations!”
She snapped her fingers at me, and I snapped mine back and edged toward the door hinge.
My parent’s quarrels were becoming more senseless; not more frequent or more loud. One wrong word from my father could bring on my mother’s rage. He was a wicked man. He had always been a wicked man. She would shout Bible passages at him. He would remain calm. At times like this, I could pity my mother, if only for my father’s expression. It was the same as the boys in school who lifted your skirt and ran. They looked just as confused once the teacher got hold of their ears.
My mother rapped the dining table. “Sunny, whatever you’re doing out there, God is watching you. You can walk out of that door, but you cannot escape His judgment.”
My father fixed his gaze on the table. “I can’t speak for Him, but I remember He will not be mocked. You want to use the Bible as a shield against everyone? Use it. One day we will both meet our maker. I will tell him all I have done. Then you can tell him what you have done.”
He walked away in the direction of their bedroom. My mother returned to the kitchen. I thought she might scold me after she found my plantains burning, but she didn’t. I hurried over and flipped them.
A frown may have chewed her face up, but one time my mother had smiled. I’d seen black and white photographs of her, her hair pressed and curled and her eyebrows penciled into arches. She was a chartered secretary and my father was in his final year of university when they met. Many men tried to chase her. Many, he said, until he wrote her one love letter. One, he boasted, and the rest didn’t stand a chance. “Your mother was the best dancer around. The best dressed girl ever. The tiniest waist, I’m telling you. The tiniest. I could get my hand around it, like this, before you came along and spoiled it.”
He would simulate how he struggled to hug her. My mother was not as big as he claimed. She was plump, in the way mothers were plump; her arms shook like jelly. My father no longer told the joke and I was left to imagine that it was true that she had once showed him affection. If she didn’t anymore it was because it was there in the Bible: God got jealous.
After dinner I went to their bedroom to wait. I still had no idea what my mother wanted to speak to me about. My father had left the air-conditioner on and it blew remnants of mosquito repellent and cologne into my face. Their mosquito net hung over me and I inspected my shin which had developed a bump since my collision with the sofa.