WE ARRIVE AT A PLACE BEATRICE CALLS PALMGROVE, a quieter, saner area with clean streets and tall lampposts and fine cars cruising. We make our way along an avenue edged with trees. The sun has gone down and the streetlamps are on. They create soft shadows. I remember my father’s words, You are going to a place that’s illuminated from heights. Back home the poultry would be roosting about now. My mother’s long shadow would darken our compound as she waits to make sure all her roosters and chickens are in.
“Evil bird,” she would swear at a fowl that has gone feral, preferring to roost in treetops. “You are nothing to me but waste after losing whatever little flesh you had to flight.”
She’d ask my siblings to go after the fowl. Once they caught it, she’d take it to Ogige market and sell it for nothing because it had lost its weight and value. Alternatively, she’d slaughter it and cook her favourite ogbono soup with its meat, suck her fingers with a loud smack, and beat off flies with a straw fan while relaxing under the umbrella tree in the middle of our compound. My father always gets the gizzard because he is the man of the house.
We stop in front of a large, beautiful house and ring a bell beside a huge black gate. Tall plants with drooping leaves line the walls of the gate, drawing level with the fence, some growing even taller.
“They look like Wonder masquerades.” I draw Beatrice’s attention to the plants.
She smiles. Tightly. At least I have been able to make her laugh even if in a stifled way. “They are mast trees, village boy,” she says.
A tall, gawky man in a shabby grey caftan and an embroidered cap opens the gate for us.
“Sanu kyakkyawar mace.” He shows a set of brown teeth on a ruined face to Beatrice in greeting as we walk into the compound.
The ground is shining like the breakable plates Beatrice eats with in her house back in the village. I walk on my toes so as not to stain the ground with my rubber shoes. Beatrice is walking ahead with measured steps, her hips swinging right then left. I can feel the gawky gateman’s eyes following her. Trees with blossoms like bulbs that I would like to pluck and suck on are bordering the long paved drive. I want to ask Beatrice the name of the trees, but then I change my mind.
“They are cherry trees,” Ejiro will later tell me, in a voice that lets me know how “bush” he thinks I am.
The balcony is shaped like a new moon. It hangs dangerously as if it might crash down anytime on the fine motorcars parked in the garage below it. A large tomb glitters white under the floodlights before we get swallowed up in the house, a tinkling sensation washing over me. A dog begins to bark, though I can’t see it, so loudly the ground seems to shake as we climb the stairs. I can hear the hard, pointed heels of Beatrice’s shoes echoing through the house koi koi koi.
A boy my age opens the door and greets Beatrice familiarly. I feel him sizing me up as he closes the door behind us. I don’t know why, but I have the feeling that he doesn’t like me. We enter a big, shining room where a large fair-skinned woman is seated. She is half-dressed. As we enter, she hitches her wrappa up around her chest to cover herself with her left hand, the right one holding a mobile phone to her ear. She talks loudly into the mobile phone as she waves us over to one of the deep green cushions.
Beatrice walks into an open doorway while the woman is still talking. She returns with two soft drinks, keeps one for herself, and places the other on the glass table before me. While I drink the cold Coke, I look around the wide, voluptuous room. My feet rest on a thick milk-white carpet. The seats are even bigger and softer than the ones in Beatrice’s house back home. Every other piece of furniture or electronic device, from table to shelf to curtains to television set, is twice the size of those in her house in the village.
The family photos catch my eye. A boy and a girl look down at me from pictures taken at different times in their lives, starting from their first birthdays to when they have become adolescents who wear tight clothes and shining makeup. The boy, older, has thin eyebrows and brown eyes like his mother. Their father appears in some of the photos, a thick-looking man in heavily starched clothes. In one of the photos taken at a much earlier time in their lives, he is standing shoulder to shoulder with the woman, who looks slender and very pretty in a brown wig and two rows of red beads.
“Sorry, Beatrice o jare,” the woman says as she ends the call, laughing more than I have ever heard anyone laugh, her body shaking like cassava paste, her eyes all over me. “That boy can talk forever if I allow him, my son in America. He’s such a mummy’s boy and never gets off the phone.”
Beatrice laughs, too, her eyes full of admiration for the woman.
“Is he the boy, Beatrice?” She pronounces the name Bee-triss.
Back home the villagers pronounce her name B-e-e-a-trice. Most villagers call her Be-e-a-tie. I squirm each time I catch the woman’s stare.
“Yes, Mummy,” Beatrice says.
In the big television set standing at the head of the room, two boxers bathed in their own sweat—one in blue trunks and the other in red trunks—are hammering each other. The one in the red trunks already has a ruined face. His left eye is closed, the skin covering the eye swollen and shiny, folded into each other like thick lips.
“What is your name?” the woman says to me.
I am startled. “Dimkpa Gbaghalu,” I manage to say.
“Olodumare!” she cries. “Dim . . . what?”
I repeat the name more slowly.
“I will call you Dim and forget the other name that sounds like a thunderbolt.” She waves away her frustration.
Beatrice chuckles.
The woman rises and turns, her eyes lingering on the fighters. She is heavier at the hips, the skin of her back paler than the rest of her body, her wrappa slack behind, showing deep furrows that ridge her hips. While she is in the other room, Beatrice tells me to be a good and dedicated houseboy. Like a stubborn creditor who refuses to go away until he is settled, she reminds me of the poverty waiting at home.
The woman returns with a wad of crisp banknotes and sinks back into her seat. “Your boy is in safe hands.” She hands the money to Beatrice and throws me another brown eye.
“Thank you, Mummy.” Beatrice stuffs the money into her jeans, hissing her drink down. Watching her, I have a feeling of being sold. “Dimkpa. I will be coming to see you from time to time,” she says to me, and begins to walk out of the room, the house resounding with the koi koi koi of her heels hitting the staircase.
The boxers are still battling it out inside the television. A hollow feeling washes over me with Beatrice suddenly gone. I stare at the boxers, the rawness of the brutality, my feeling of hollowness turning into cold fear. My skin is pricked with goose pimples. It is obvious the one in the blue trunks is headed for a win. He is giving his opponent the beating of his life. The woman of the house is engrossed in the match now. She is all taken up, body and soul, her eyes alight and glistening with pleasure. I find this strange. Most women I know in my village dread violence. My mother cannot stand the sight of such a bloody fight. She once passed out in the heat of a fight between me and Machebe.
The boy who opened the door for us, who I will later learn is called Ejiro, enters, looking grumpy. He beckons to me to follow him, leads me into a room, and says it is mine. In the room there is a big rainbow-striped bed, a table and a chair, milk-white walls and windowsills. Everything is calm. I am still standing in the centre of the room long after he has left. It seems like a dream.
Later there are footsteps along the corridor. The door opens a crack to reveal the boy’s meagre face again.
“Go to the dining room for your food,” he says in a cold voice.
The door bangs closed, giving me a big start. I listen to his footfalls as he retreats. I can feel his irritation burning the soles of his feet. I imagine it catching fire, like petrol from a match flame, and the whole house going up in flames. I climb out of bed after the footfalls have faded and walk quietly to the empty dining room, where eba and soup are waiting on breakable plates. The dining table is made of beautiful square-patterned tiles in white and black, brown and grey. My image is reflected on its shining surface. I uncover the plates. The eba is the colour of the tall plants I saw outside in the garden. The egusi soup is tasty, filled with dried fish and stockfish, and other little things that keep my mouth busy. There is also a big dish of chicken. It is a king’s dinner.
I finish the whole eba with a big belch, convinced I have never eaten anything so tasty, not even during Egba Nwachukwu or Ogonna festival, when women visit their birthplace with their children, bringing food prepared with washed hands. My mother would take us to her village, Amadim. My grandfather was an old man with shriveled arms and stiff long hairs pointing out of his nostrils like bristles. He would allow us a few sips of his palm wine. My grandmother was the kindest and gentlest woman ever, light-skinned and delicate. She would fight to protect us from bullies with all her energy. They are both gone now, my grandfather with his height and wisdom and hair sticking out of his nostrils, and my grandmother with her light skin and goiter.
I retreat into my room to lie on my bed and ponder what I consider my good fortune. I feel the bed’s softness on my back and inhale its clean smell. My village will be asleep by this time of the night. Sometimes the voice of a drunken man will rise above the darkness as he staggers on his way home. If there is a moon, families will sit outside in their compounds and enjoy stories after dinner. Ogbom will sit alone chanting dirges in front of her hut. I don’t like listening to her. Sometimes I keep her company, but her voice makes me sad, her lamentations piercing me like an arrow. A cock wakes me up every morning with its long crow.
I go to sleep without the background music of chirping crickets and droning cicadas, and wake up early the next morning to the sound of motorway traffic, vigorous clapping, and a voice chanting a slow dirge from a microphone. I didn’t know that Lagos people also chant dirges, but it seems Lagos has no cockcrows. When I look through the window, I see men in long garments crossing the road into a round white house with a dome shaped like the black chieftaincy cap titled men wear in my village. The voice is coming from a big horn speaker on the roof of the house, but the clapping seems to be coming from neighbours praying in their flats.
From my window, the tomb shines. It is made of white marble, the same type as the floor of Beatrice’s sitting room in her house in the village. The top of the tomb is rimmed with gold. It looks more beautiful in daylight. I climb out of bed and rummage through the wardrobe. There are clothes and shoes. There are a few books, too. They must belong to the houseboy who lived here before me, I think. I pick up one of the books, drawn to its unusual title, Black Moses, wondering if the former houseboy had read them, intrigued that a houseboy could read novels.
I return the book and go downstairs to take a closer look at the tomb, sidling close to the wall and stepping lightly so as not to attract attention. The house is so quiet that I wonder if I am the only one awake. I stop beside the tomb and try to read the name engraved on it, but I am only able to understand the year the occupant was born, which was 1934, and the year he died, 1999. The tomb must have cost a lot of money, I muse. I imagine that my aunt Okike is the one lying inside the grave, with her name written on it, and the tomb is lying in my father’s compound.
I walk on towards the swimming pool, passing the garden, the two connected by well-trimmed hedgerows. The garden is blazing with rose, hibiscus, and sunflower bushes. They look like the ones from my primary school science textbook. I don’t know the names of the rest of the flowers, but they are very beautiful, too. The garden is a feast of colours. Three cars are parked in the garage. I am not able to read their names, but they are coloured black, ash, and red. The name of my new madam is Bola Folashade, but I eventually learn that everyone calls her Mummy. I have a hard time pronouncing her name. I also learn that she is widowed and sits on a large estate left to her by her husband, the man lying in the marble tomb. She has a married daughter who lives overseas. Her son lives in America. She lives and cooks her meals all by herself, and maintains two male live-in servants about my age, and an older gatekeeper. She swims in the pool, naps on the lawn, watches men fight on TV, and sometimes goes for a drive. She has a paid gardener who comes weekly to tend to her flowers.The gleam that I saw in her eyes as she watched the boxers and the sheer brutality of the fight leaves a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.