16

Ireti sat on a wooden bench in front of a kiosk painted the cherry-red of Coca-Cola. There was a young girl on Ireti’s lap whose cheeks were rounded like she stored sweets in them. He and the girl appeared like effigies, facing the street. Desire walked towards him with a frown. Her muscles tightened as she drew closer to him. From that distance, she could not tell if noticing her facial expression was what caused him to jump from the seat and drop the girl on the bench, or something else. Ireti walked towards her smiling, with open arms.

‘The madam herself. Coming to see me in this hot sun,’ he laughed. It felt forced, and he suddenly turned sombre, ‘Thanks for coming to see me.’

Desire was angry. She walked ahead of him towards his house, stomping her feet on the ground. She wanted to turn to see what his eyes looked like as he inspected her walking before him. As she reached the main door of the house, she stopped and turned to face him, ‘Your friends are shadowing me all over the campus.’

He frowned, deep gullies forming on his forehead.

‘Can you imagine? The four of them just stood by the window of the classroom looking like people who want to steal a fish from the fishmonger?’

Desire couldn’t find the words to describe the intense choreographed look that had kept her neck stiff and straight all throughout class, while she fought to listen to the whispers passed around the classroom about who the boys were there to “shadow”. She felt some point at her with their quick glances—although she did not catch anyone looking directly at her.

The professor continued to teach. He behaved as if he was unaware of the situation, although everyone could see how he also stammered and fidgeted as the boys fiddled with their hands in their pockets and coughed to be noticed—either by her or by the lecturer, or perhaps as a warning to any boy who might be interested in her. At a time when cultism was rife across Nigerian universities, only a few university lecturers would have dared to play Superman when a performance like this was enacted.

As the class ended, and one of the boys came up to her, calling ‘Our wife’, she clenched her jaw. Quivering with rising rage, she hurried to the student union block to talk to Ireti and didn’t stop even when they called out to her. She felt irritated. The more she thought of the Ireti she was left alone with in the bedroom, the one whose penis followed the direction of his eyes, downwards, and the one whom these boys here were displaying machismo on behalf of, the more she felt a deep growl forming within her.

‘He’s at home,’ a teenage boy with a cackle for a voice told her at the student union building. She rushed off to see him, her anger boiling. She planned to attack him with a barrage of questions about what rights he had to monitor her around the school, but this went up in smoke.

Once they were in his room, Ireti leaned on her and his high-pitched cry had her stuttering, ‘Are you okay? What happened?’

The next few minutes were spent consoling him while she remained baffled, until he finally uttered the words that cleared the air, ‘I lost my mum this morning.’

‘Your mum?’

‘Yes. That’s why I was trying to reach you. I sent my boys. I only asked them to tell you I needed to see you.’ He unhinged his arms from around her neck and moved to sit on the mattress.

‘You could have sent a text message or called! Ireti, we have spoken almost every day since we met. You talk to me about your day and I tell you about mine.’ Then she paused to think, ‘Well, maybe not too well in the last two days because I have had to complete some course projects.’

Ireti attempted a smile.

Desire stared at him in annoyance. His swift change of mood from the carefree tenant sitting outside chit-chatting with the round-cheeked girl, to this whimpering man inside the room, irritated her. Desire’s throat bobbed as she swallowed. She was still irritated by “the boys” and their ways. She placed her hand on her waist and made sure their eyes met, before she asked, ‘Why didn’t any of them think of asking permission to speak to me outside and say something like, “I think Ireti needs to see you urgently”? Why would they act like idiots?’

‘I’m sorry, Desire. I have been so busy with this campaign thing and when I tried to call you these last two evenings your phone was off.’

‘I was busy!’ she snapped.

The more she thought of their actions, the more she concluded it was not her problem that his mother died. She raised her eyes to look at him. The sight of his head thrown forward with grief made her feel a touch of guilt at her coldness. She moved closer to him, lifted her hand and placed it on his shoulder, caressing it gently before tightening her hands around his shoulder blade.

‘I sometimes wonder if my mother wanted me to meet my father,’ he said.

Desire squirmed in the chair. She could feel his muscles stiffen under the surface of his skin.

‘Would I offend her spirit if I meet a man who I bet wouldn’t care about me? How do I even know where he is?’ he threw his head back and sighed, puffing his cheeks. ‘I mean, I know he’s out of prison, but where do I go looking for him? Does he even know I exist?’

It seemed rather strange at that point, that this boy she had met only a few weeks before could trust her with his pain. As she watched Ireti, and thoughts of Prof crossed her mind, her eyes watered and she let the tears run. She slipped her hand down from his neck and slowly stroked his back.

‘How long have you known about him?’ That didn’t sound quite right, so she asked again, ‘How did you know?’

Grief was not enough to make him less of a storyteller. Ireti varied his tone of voice to capture the different emotions that he felt at each phase of the life he described.

‘For a long time, I didn’t know who my father was because it was something that I learnt early never to discuss. As I grew, I observed that once the news came on, and Prof was on screen, my mum’s mood changed immediately, and she always walked out or switched off the TV. When she returned, I could tell she had been crying.’

As each word fell from his lips, he appeared to grow smaller: he was a boy, lost in the city, looking for direction. She listened to him, waiting for a time to come in, to intervene and help him find his way as he told her of how he moved from Benin to Lagos because his mum kept hoping that his father would find her.

‘Did she leave when she found out she was pregnant?’

‘I’m not sure. She only always said, she left because it was the best decision. And considering that many years since that day, he never married or fathered a child—at least from what we hear… She left, perhaps, when she realised she could be pregnant—I really don’t know.’

‘At least you are not an orphan. You still have a father.’

‘He fathered me. It’s better not to have a father, or to have one that disowned you, rather than a father who doesn’t know you exist. How do I go to a man fresh out of prison and ask him to claim paternity?’

‘Maybe, it’s not that hard. Maybe it is. One has to try,’ she bit her lower lip as she struggled not to tell him that the reason her phone was switched off every night was because she was with his father.

‘You know, the name on my birth certificate reads: Eniolorunda Iretioluwa. I was Eni all through my secondary school, I changed to Ireti when I was admitted into the university. Some people still comment about the resemblance, but I always shrug it off as happenstance.’

‘It is uncanny,’ Desire said. ‘Don’t you want to meet him now? At least you could use your mother as an excuse. You may want to break the news of her death—’

She looked at Ireti and seeing how he couldn’t meet her eyes as he spoke, she looked at the floor.

‘My mum always said my destiny was in my hands. Meeting or not meeting my father wouldn’t change the fact that I can be whatever I want to be. Instead, it can affect the course of my life.’

‘These things depend, you know,’ Desire said.

‘When I came out top in my exams, my mother woke me up in the early morning. She does—did—sorry.’ His lips shook, but he continued, ‘She always woke me up in the early morning when she wanted to tell me something important, or at least, she felt was important. She said, “Even when one doesn’t have an arm, he devises a way to put food into his mouth.” She told me that my father’s absence should never be an excuse for truancy or underachievement.’

Desire listened to him as he spoke of how Prof being in prison for the most part of his growing life, did not make it easy to even brag that he was his father, even if he wanted to do so. It was as though his mother’s death had given him permission to unearth his long-suppressed impulse to talk about his father.

‘That morning, as we sat in an embrace, she cried and told me that my father never wanted a baby. She didn’t let him know she was pregnant because he always said he didn’t want a child. I happened by mistake, Desire. I was a born-by-mistake,’ he laughed.

‘You know, I didn’t like the way she said it that day, but she’s my mum. She’s that kind of person. She always just spoke her mind like someone who had not given much thought to what she had to say. She’d say, “Eni, you’re a born-by-mistake, but it’s not the end of the world.”’

Ireti explained how it was a phrase his friends used in school for describing someone without a father, or whose mother was rumoured to be promiscuous. None of them called him a born-by-mistake to his face because of his popularity in school, but there were times he wondered if they talked about him behind his back. This was the reason that he did everything he could to uphold that place of likeability among his friends. He was the one who did things the others could not do. He asked them to dare him to go and pour shit on the principal’s doorstep. He did this for a couple of nights, praying to God that no one should catch or see him. He also asked his secondary school friends to dare him to have sex with the head teacher’s daughter and they did. He asked the girl out but never slept with her. She was one of those whose parents had told her repeatedly that if she so much as touched a man she would get pregnant. And each time they met, she sat a few inches from him smiling and hugging herself. On his part, he knew he was still trying to figure out what a real vagina looked like, outside of the ones he saw in X-rated movies. The day he took the bet on her with his friends, he explained to her, as he walked her to his house, that she must groan like someone in pain because some people wanted to hurt her, and he was trying to protect her from them. He would deal with them himself, and this was why she must cooperate with anything he said. For some reason, she believed him. She believed anything he said. He was the popular one who continued to have good grades despite his pranks. His friends came around to the house, it was all planned. They were outside, listening to their activities.

‘I told her to scream: “Haaaaaaaa. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me please. It hurts. Haaaaaaa!” And I said, “Just wait. Next time, you’ll know your daddy. Am I your mate?” I tried to say all the things I felt should be said when having sex.’

He stepped out of the house, with a bare chest, smiling at his friends, who gave him the thumbs up and left before the girl came out. The following day, he told his friends, ‘She was just crying like a baby. She is a vir-gin! She kept screaming as I was just going inside and out.’

His friends loved him more, except for one. He was the eldest and he just looked at him, laughed and said, ‘Fool!’

Desire laughed softly as he narrated the story of his escapades to her.

‘See, I’m in the university now. You know things are different. I stand up for students’ rights and I can walk into the Vice-Chancellor’s office and tell the man the “pain of being a Nigerian student”. Things are different now for me. But, I am still the born-by-mistake.’

‘So what if you’re born-by-mistake?’ Desire asked.

Ireti stayed quiet and didn’t respond to her question, instead he said, ‘Since I met you, I have woken up in the middle of the night playing our first meeting in my head.’

‘Why? Do I scare you?’ She felt she could see through him. ‘No. You give me courage. I’m afraid I may go looking for this father with my mum now dead, and no longer there to give me those long calls on why I should continue aiming high. You know, the last time, before the message came that she died in her sleep, I told her I was thinking of meeting my father. And she replied, “Have I been less than a mother and a father to you?” You know, she said it in that tone that required me to ask no further question.’

‘It’s the pain. The pain is the only thing she remembers. And, you know, we all turn towards imaginative questions, questions that empower us, so we can bury those stories that we won’t give words to because they’ve corrupted our memory,’ Desire said in a small voice.

Ireti raised his head, ‘Is that a quote from someone I can read?’

‘No. It’s me just thinking. I’ve always considered how some stories will never get told. It’s the way it is, Ireti. Silence is where we go to listen to those stories. Sit in silence and listen. Silence tells stories too, you know.’

‘I don’t want silence. I want those stories she did not think should be told. I really want them, Desire. I want them.’