Farouq. He says he loves me, he marries me, he travels to Lagos with me, and I’m terrified. The first time we touched it was innocent enough; his arm brushed my bare shoulder when he reached past me to collect a salted caramel cone from the ice cream man. It was a hot day; it was our first date. His arm brushed my shoulder, and it seared. I felt a swell and a rush inside my belly. I grabbed the hem of his T-shirt to keep him close to me, and I thought fiercely: Kiss me, kiss me. The way he looked at me eh, the way he looked at me. He didn’t kiss me then.
On our second date, in response to a dry joke I made about godlessness becoming his undoing, he said, “I’m petrified of God. I just don’t know that religion will save me from Her inevitable wrath.” He identified as a “spiritually open agnostic.” At this, all my years of Catholic indoctrination rushed to the surface. I had to stop short of shouting, “Lake of fire!”
Perhaps it’s God’s wrath that comes down in harsh rays to burn us now. I’m grateful for the air conditioning in the car. I am also thankful not to be alone with Taiye yet.
“I like your hair like that,” she says. “It suits you.”
Instinctively, I reach my hand to touch my hair, the only feature of mine in which I fail to find fault. It is dyed a light brown that is almost orange, and I have it in loose twists that frame my face and graze my shoulders.
“Thank you.” I smile.
“How was the flight?” she asks, looking at Farouq, who has been staring out the window and trying to make sense of the voracious beast that is Lagos.
“It was good, thanks,” he says, lifting his round wire-rimmed glasses to rub his eyes, bloodshot with exhaustion. “We had a long layover in Frankfurt, but it wasn’t too bad. Well, except for the shitty company.” He jerks his head in my direction, and I flick his arm.
“He thought the cabin crew were especially rude on the flight to Lagos.” Taiye’s eyes widen and her eyebrows shoot up. “Right? So you noticed, yeah?”
Her voice is my voice, husky and dulcet at once. But hers has a sweeter lilt, and when she speaks to Farouq, she enunciates her words and clips them like our cousins in London.
They go on about the shitty treatment that Nigerians receive on international flights, and I close my eyes and let myself sink into the cold leather seat.
WE’VE JUST GONE OVER THIRD MAINLAND BRIDGE and are on the Island. The driver takes us into the neighbourhood that is so familiar; the fences are still as high as ever and topped with razor-edged rolls of barbed wire or taut strands of electrical cords. Here, the road is conspicuously void of hawkers, thin children with meticulously piled pyramids of guguru and epa or Agege bread or glass boxes of fist-sized puff-puff balanced on their heads; they’d swarmed the car in the standstill traffic on the mainland. Their sweaty, sun-battered faces and dirty clothes slapped me with shame at how easy my life has been, despite my many woes. In Lagos, there is no bubble thick enough to protect you from the truth of your privilege or your disadvantage; you see it everywhere, every day. Culture is a way of life. I learned that in social studies in primary four, when Taiye and I sat beside each other and would scream and thrash if the teachers tried to separate us. What’s our culture? I feel far removed. Untethered. Alone in my head. Alone in a way that is separate from Farouq. I think what I’m trying to say is that I’m embarrassed at how affected I feel by the children selling snacks on the road, mortified that I’ve been privileged enough to forget.
We drive into the compound, with its towering fences, just as high as everyone else’s. I am foolishly surprised that I do not recognize the gateman who drags the heavy metal gates open.
“Where is Mr Suleiman?” I ask Taiye.
“He left a while ago.” She shrugs. “I’m not really sure. This guy’s name is Hassan.”
The house stands three storeys tall. There is a wide balcony jutting out from the master bedroom on the second floor and two narrow ones on the third floor, like bulging square eyes and a straight line for a contemptuous mouth. The house rises above a bungalow used for storage and the security post. Swaying palm trees surround it, so many of them. And mango and pawpaw trees and plantain palms cluster behind it. It’s a large compound, a large house; I expected that being back as an adult, everything would seem smaller and less enchanting. The thrumming in my chest proves me wrong.
Our mother is waiting at the doorway, dwarfed by the comically oversized door frame that eats up most of the front wall of the first floor. Her hands are clasped in front of her. She’s beaming, rounder than I’ve ever seen her, round in her cheeks and her belly, and I think it is good because she is glowing. She is wearing an adire bubu with a wide neckline that slips off her shoulder.
We are in each other’s arms before I can decide how I feel. We are holding each other tightly, and I don’t realize it at first, but I am sobbing into the warmth of her perfumed neck.
“What’s going on with your hair?” she asks, as she pulls away from me.
I laugh and say, “Mami, this is Farouq.”
“Ehen, so this is the reason you haven’t come home since abi?” She clasps his face between her small palms, studying him after he plants kisses on both her cheeks.
“I hope the heat doesn’t kill you with this bush on your face,” she says to him, and to me, she teases, “He’s handsome sha, even though he is oyimbo.”
Farouq laughs and says, “It is a pleasure to finally meet you, ma.”
“Oya, you people, go and settle. Your sister and I will finish cooking.”
I am relieved that she seems lucid, and I choose not to be alarmed by the desperate thing flickering in her eyes. It is so subtle, but I recognize it well.
TAIYE AND ME, our bedrooms are next to each other on the third floor. Mine is a large room with a twin bed covered in brightly coloured tie-dye linens tucked in the corner farthest from the door. The polished wood vanity with an ornately framed four-foot mirror sits across the room from the bed exactly how I left it. On it are my old things: tubes of sticky fruit-flavoured lip gloss, stacks of Vogue and Time, half-empty bottles of nail polish—their shimmering contents long dried—and a tattered French-English dictionary, my initials written on its spine in thick black marker. On the floor, against the wooden base of the vanity, are stacks and stacks of books: novels and poetry collections; a mixture of secondary school–assigned literature by Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ama Ata Aidoo, Chinua Achebe, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Wole Soyinka; and books that sixteen-year-old me read voluntarily, like Harry Potter and Purple Hibiscus and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They are covered in a uniformly thin layer of dust. I devoured these books; every single one of them drew me in with its words until I was so deep in each world that any ending seemed too abrupt, and I would just sit with the closed book on my lap, the characters like old friends to whom I had just said good night. I would have to wait a while for the lingering aroma of one story to fade from my mind before diving into another.
I don’t think my things have been touched at all since I left. The floors have been swept, the bed made, and the worn red rugs that used to cover the white tile floors replaced with these woven multicoloured square ones, but aside from that nothing has changed. The framed posters of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti still hang above the headboard, and they rattle against the wall when Farouq throws himself onto the bed and moans into the pillow.
“Finally, finally,” he says. Then he looks at me with heavy-lidded eyes and asks, “Sleep or food?”
I laugh because I know that he will fall asleep before he chooses, but I suppose that is a choice. I open the windows and the sliding glass door leading out to the narrow balcony, and by the time I turn around he is asleep, with his hands tucked under the pillow and his feet hanging off the side of the bed. When I slip off his shoes and remove his socks, he stirs and mumbles something about being ticklish.
WHEN HE WAS FOURTEEN, Farouq left his mother’s tired one-bedroom