‘Your mother is sick,’ his aunty repeated. ‘She is asking for you. I will tell Master that you will be back tomorrow, so he will not think we are asking for too much. Many houseboys do not even get to go home in years, you know that.’
Ugwu did not move, rolling the edge of the apron around his finger. He wanted to ask his aunt to tell him the truth, to say so if his mother was dead. But his mouth would not form the words. Remembering his mother’s last illness, when she had coughed and coughed until his father left before dawn to get the dibia while the junior wife, Chioke, rubbed her back, frightened him.
‘Master is not in,’ he said finally. ‘But he will be back soon.’
‘I will wait and plead with him to let you come home.’
He led the way to the kitchen, where his aunty sat down and watched him slice a yam and then cut the slices into cubes. He worked fast, feverishly. The sunlight that came in through the window seemed too bright for late afternoon, too full of an ominous radiance.
‘Is my father well?’ Ugwu asked.
‘He is well.’ His aunty’s face was opaque, her tone flat: the demeanour of a person who carried more bad news than she had delivered. She must be hiding something. Perhaps his mother really was dead; perhaps both his parents had fallen down dead that morning. Ugwu continued to slice, in a turgid silence, until Master came home, tennis whites plastered to his back with sweat. He was alone. Ugwu wished that Olanna had come home as well so that he could look at her face as he spoke.
‘Welcome, sah.’
‘Yes, my good man.’ Master placed his racket down on the kitchen table. ‘Some water, please. I lost all my games today.’
Ugwu had the water ready, ice cold in a glass placed on a saucer.
‘Good evening, sah,’ his aunty greeted.
‘Good evening,’ Master said, looking slightly perplexed, as if he was not certain who she was. ‘Oh, yes. How are you?’
Before she could say more, Ugwu said, ‘My mother is sick, sah. Please, sah, if I go to see her I will return tomorrow.’
‘What?’
Ugwu repeated himself. Master stared at him and then at the pot on the stove. ‘Have you finished cooking?’
‘No, sah. I will finish fast-fast, before I go. I will set the table and arrange everything.’
Master turned to Ugwu’s aunty. ‘Gini me? What is wrong with his mother?’
‘Sah?’
‘Are you deaf?’ Master jabbed at his ear as if Ugwu’s aunty did not know what it meant to be deaf. ‘What is wrong with his mother?’
‘Sah, her chest is on fire.’
‘Chest on fire?’ Master snorted. He drank all his water and then turned to Ugwu and spoke English. ‘Put on a shirt and get in the car. Your village isn’t far away, really. We should be back in good time.’
‘Sah?’
‘Put on a shirt and get in the car!’ Master scribbled a note on the back of a flyer and left it on the table. ‘We’ll bring your mother here and have Patel take a look at her.’
‘Yes, sah.’ Ugwu felt breakable as he walked to the car, beside his aunty and Master. He felt as though his bones were broomsticks, the kind that snapped easily during the harmattan. The ride to his village was mostly silent. As they drove past some farms with rows and rows of corn and cassava like a neatly plaited hairstyle, Master said, ‘See? This is what our government should focus on. If we learn irrigation technology, we can feed this country easily. We can overcome this colonial dependence on imports.’
‘Yes, sah.’
‘But instead, all the ignoramuses in government do is lie and steal. A number of my students joined the group that went to Lagos this morning to demonstrate, you know.’
‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu said. ‘Why are they demonstrating, sah?’
‘The census,’ Master said. ‘The census was a mess, everybody forged figures. Not that Balewa will do anything about it, because he is as complicit as they all are. But we must speak out!’
‘Yes, sah,’ Ugwu replied, and in the midst of his worry about his mother, he felt a twinge of pride because he knew his aunty would have her eyes wide in wonder at the deep conversations he had with Master. And in English, too. They stopped a little way before the family hut.
‘Get your mother’s things, quickly,’ Master said. ‘I have friends visiting from Ibadan tonight.’
‘Yes, sah!’ Ugwu and his aunty spoke at the same time.
Ugwu climbed out of the car and stood there. His aunty dashed into the hut, and soon his father came out, eyes red-rimmed, looking more stooped than Ugwu remembered. He knelt in the dirt and clutched Master’s legs. ‘Thank, sah. Thank, sah. May another person do for you.’
Master stepped back and Ugwu watched his father sway, almost falling over backwards. ‘Get up, kunie,’ Master said.
Chioke came out of the hut. ‘This is my other wife, sah,’ his father said, standing up.
Chioke shook Master’s hands with both of hers. ‘Thank you, master. Deje!’ She ran back inside and emerged with a small pineapple that she pressed into Master’s hand.
‘No, no,’ Master said, pushing the pineapple back. ‘Local pineapples are too acidic, they burn my mouth.’
The village children were gathering around the car to peer inside and run awed fingers over the blue body. Ugwu shooed them away. He wished Anulika were home, so she would go with him into their mother’s hut. He wished Nnesinachi would drop by now and take his hand in hers and tell him soothingly that his mother’s illness was not serious at all, and then lead him to the grove by the stream and untie her wrapper and offer him her breasts, lifting them up and forward towards him. The children were chattering loudly. Some women stood by and spoke in lower tones, their arms folded. His father kept asking Master to have some kola nut, palm wine, a stool to sit down, some water, and Master kept saying no, no, no. Ugwu wanted his father to shut up. He moved closer to the hut and looked in. His eyes met his mother’s in the dim light. She looked shrivelled.
‘Ugwu,’ she said. ‘Nno, welcome.’
‘Deje,’ he greeted, and then remained silent, watching, while his aunty helped her tie her wrapper around her waist and led her out.
Ugwu was about to help his mother into the car when Master said, ‘Step aside, my good man.’ Master helped her into the car, asked her to lie down on the backseat, to stretch out as much as she could.
Ugwu suddenly wished that Master would not touch his mother because her clothes smelled of age and must, and because Master did not know that her back ached and her cocoyam patch always yielded a poor harvest and her chest was indeed on fire when she coughed. What did Master know about anything anyway, since all he did was shout with his friends and drink brandy at night?
‘Stay well, we will send you word after a doctor has looked at her,’ Master said to Ugwu’s father and aunty before they drove off.
Ugwu kept himself from glancing back at his mother; he rolled his window down so the air would rush loudly past his ears and distract him. When he finally turned to look at her, just before they got to the campus, his heart stopped at the sight of her shut eyes, her lax lips. But her chest was rising and falling. She was breathing. He exhaled slowly and thought about those cold evenings when she would