Against a faded signpost, Desire watched as young boys and girls sold bread, sachet yogurt, biscuits and other sweets about the streets, while men in suits and women in high-heels rushed everywhere. There were also streams of school students fooling around and chatting in twos and threes, while the lonesome ones dragged along looking lost. The electric poles had their cables twined like wire meshes; one pole had fallen onto the road and was causing heavy traffic. Car honks belted out a incongruous tune that travelled into her eardrums, beating the sanity from her head.
Desire jumped as an okada rider trying to wriggle his motorcycle from the traffic screamed at her. She leapt across the open gutter and struggled to keep her balance on the kerb. She tottered. All the exercise books she held to her bosom fell into the drain. As she raised her head to scream an insult at the man, he drove off laughing. Desire stooped lower, until her buttocks sat on her hind legs, and she stretched her hand to pick up the books from the dry drain.
On the other side of the kerb, a stray dog with ears half-eaten by fleas stood in the middle of the road, sniffing at a black polythene bag. She watched as the dog ran from motorcycles as they headed straight towards it. Each time, it howled, running away, only to return to nibble on what, on a closer look, she found to be a dead rat.
Her phone rang at the bus stop and she was thankful that it broke up her increasingly revolting observations.
‘I can’t sleep,’ Ireti started in that voice that sounded drowsy. There was a chuckle accompanying his words. ‘What happened?’
She laughed, as she continued to walk towards the bus stop, ignoring a few heads that turned towards her, ‘Be serious.’
‘I just want to know if I can come to your house this weekend. You are avoiding me—this idea of switching off your phone at night from 9pm. Why is your phone always off by this time?’ There was a long pause, which carried an anxiety she was eager to ease.
‘We need to talk. New things about my father.’
She felt her heart jump. The way he directed the statement at her, made her uneasy.
‘Why are you telling me this?’
He ignored her question. ‘Will you come and visit me?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Where are you? It’s noisy.’
‘I’m at the bus stop. Waiting for a bus to take me to the campus.’
He stopped talking, and then said with a note of finality, ‘Come, and let’s meet on campus. I have to see my father.’
‘Hehn?’ she asked. Her voice was lower and her heartbeat increased. She wondered if he knew that she met with Prof every night. Or maybe Prof had contacted him and they talked about her. There was nothing about Prof that indicated this when they met in the evenings, but since she had not visited in a while, she could not tell if something had happened within the days of her absence.
‘Desire, are you there?’
‘Yes. I just need to know why I have to see you.’
She waited and when he said nothing, she switched off the phone and joined the bus in front of her.
Desire walked through the giant arch at the gate which carried the inscription: Lagos State University. She turned to the right to face the temporary bus park where only three of the yellow and black striped danfo buses were parked.
‘Iyana-Ipaja, Iyana-Ipaja! One more yansh!’ each conductor shouted, coaxing the undecided students to join their different buses. A scar-faced conductor held Desire by the hand and she pulled herself out of his grip. She pushed away his hand when he tried to grab her again and walked away, as she considered buying pure water for her parched throat from one of the string of hawkers lined by the curb. She handed a five-naira note to a teenage girl whose eyes were almost as round as the tray of oranges which sat next to her bowl of pure water. The orange seller, a heavy breasted woman, squatting on a small wooden bench besides the girl gaped at Desire with a smile on her face. At first, the gawking seemed like one of those sudden moments of interest, but when it persisted, Desire returned the woman’s stare, eyeball for eyeball, ignoring the scar-faced bus conductor who returned to squall ‘Iyana-Ipajaaaaaaaaa’ close to her ears, like he was being pinched with a pincer, before turning towards other students strolling past the bus stop.
‘Hehn!’ The suddenness of the words were met by the spring of the orange seller who jumped from her squatting position to house her in a tight embrace, while beaming at Desire’s face with a Mr. Bean smile. Desire pulled back, until a rush of spittle bearing the words, ‘Desire. Na Basira,’ splattered across her face.
‘It is me now! Basira-oke,’ the orange seller said, holding her in a tight hug and dragging her in an embrace to the side of the road to escape colliding with students rushing out from the campus. All this time, Desire was racking her head to remember where she knew the podgy woman, with breasts that navigated northwards, from. Then she saw the rabbit ears. Desire remembered in an instant: the long hours of sitting together exchanging neighbourhood gossip, sharing knowledge of contraceptives and family planning while stroking those ears that she joked connected her to every titbit in the neighbourhood. Basira, who with the suffix ‘oke’, became the Mountain; because boys swore to voyage and conquer the world through her breasts. The one whose laughter sounded like thunder when she said she did not want to have ten children like her mother did. The disappointment in Basira’s eyes switched to pride as Desire greeted, responding with a laughter that wrinkled the corners of her eyes.
Basira turned Desire around, touching her cheeks and smiling,
‘Iwo re o! See your baby-face! You have not changed!’
Desire nodded at Basira’s inspection. She could not help but respond with, ‘You have changed-o—you’re like a balloon!’ She stood before her childhood friend, smiling until her cheeks were sore, watching Basira, the girl who started wearing a bra before any of the other girls. She was also the one who became a mother at 15.
There had been a group of six friends on the beach: Desire, Basira, Chioma, Sikira, Kemi and Funmi. Like all the girls there, their first admiration for boys fell on the teen bus conductors, who had been hand-picked as “forward-looking”, for renting half-lit one-room flats, as opposed to sleeping under the bridge drinking paraga or building their own shack on the beach. The boys with their own rooms invited teen girls to watch Indian and Yoruba films on video players, and perhaps, even enjoy meat pie and soft drink, usually Coca-Cola or Goldspot from an eat-out restaurant. Love, if that was what happened to them, seemed simple in those years. It was all about springing a breast, finding a boy who played films in the one-room flats and figuring out sex there if you were being pruned for wifehood; and if you weren’t, it was many days of sprightly fondling lemon-sized breasts behind make-shift stalls and on danfo buses.
It was Basira’s breasts that disrobed the five friends of their naivety, once they began showing under her T-shirts and she spent the first days walking with her chest withdrawn, like that could suck in what for her then, were lumps. Basira’s shoulders still took on that perpetual arch from trying to draw in her chest. Her shoulders adapted to this posture as those “lumps” grew bigger and manifested into breasts—much bigger than those of some of the women in the neighbourhood. Basira offered herself to her friends as an experience, the experiment, on how to live when their breasts began to form. First, she told them, for the ache the two painful swellings would cause, sleep facing up and wear loose blouses and dresses.
‘Wo! Let me tell you. It is painful, very painful when your cloth is touching the koko,’ she pointed to the small buds on her chest.
She also told them a fitted T-shirt would only increase attention from boys, because some would even touch them and run off. Secondly, as the steady growths formed, here is how to wear a bra—cup the breasts, hang the straps over your angled shoulders and strap right and tight. Or else, your breasts would fall off and become slippers like grandmama’s own. Lastly, when Desire’s breast failed to grow at 14, Basira advised her to put an antlion on it.
‘See, if you put the kuluso on the nipple to bite you, your breast will be big well-well. If you want even original, correct breast, just sing: Kuluso! Kuluso abiamo feyin so, seven times, after it bite you finish. O-girl, you will have correct breast.’
‘Why do I have to sing the song?’
‘Han-han, don’t you know the meaning of the song is the prayer for yourself? So as you are praising the kuluso for acting as good mother that carry baby, you too will born and carry baby when you have correct breast.’
‘I don’t want to have a baby now.’
‘Ha! You will have baby for future now. And your breast will call man. Big breast, correct man-o.’
Desire wasn’t worried about her flat chest. She was curious about the efficacy of the insect to grow breasts, so she tried it. She went around looking for sunken areas in dry sands, so she could find a kuluso that would bite her nipple. She eventually found one and scooped it up by the conic area into a milk tin.
She placed the antlion on her chest every night before she slept, singing in a low tone ‘Kuluso! Kuluso abiyamo feyin,’ and after two weeks of no results, she threw the can away with the insect.
‘How’s your mother?’ Desire said, observing how on a closer look, Basira was turning into her mother—the woman who handed them puff-puff, with a smile in her eyes, as they returned from school.
‘She has die-o. Last two years. She die in her sleep after coming from mosque. To die inside sleep is very good death.’ Desire nodded and Basira released her hold on her, laughing gaily while the other hawkers watched between smiles and awe. Basira’s smile was like a half-moon, as she talked, making sure her voice became louder each time she explained, ‘Those days we are—were young children playing in the sand until we old to born baby, then we go different part,’ so that the pure water girl and the other hawkers could hear. But they were only interested in dragging customers from the throng of students coming out of the campus.
‘Selling has closed, today,’ Basira said, huddling the oranges into a raffia basket, before lifting it onto her head. Once it was steadied, she held it with her left hand and dragged Desire with the right. In a few seconds, they were on the other side of the road, away from the hawkers lined by the school gate. Desire watched Basira’s eyes as they scanned her and rested on Funso Aiyejina’s A Letter to Lynda, and Other Poems and Odia Ofeimun’s The Poet Lied.
‘You still carry books. I am no surprised at all to see you here. You like book since we are a child. You like to read in that err—pubic library,’ Basira said, patting Desire’s face again and again, like she needed to assure herself she was not hallucinating.
‘Public library,’ Desire said with a smile. ‘Pubic means obo.’
‘Ha! I didn’t mean that one-o,’ Basira laughed. ‘How’s your mummy? How’s her body now?’ she asked, avoiding Desire’s eyes.
Desire nodded, staring into the stretch of road before she said, ‘She’s dead too,’ with a note of finality which Basira didn’t prod. Everyone in their neighbourhood had known her mother had mental issues, but never publicly discussed it. The interlude of noise from the traffic, blaring music, and background babble of the confluence of voices around them doused what could have been awkwardness.
‘God give her Al Jannah,’ Basira said, before she went on to explain that she was now a mother of three, living in the Idi-Oro area in Mushin. ‘The place is a very okay place,’ her eyes fluttered as she spoke. ‘The landlord didn’t have any wahala. The place is room-and-parlour self-contained house. My husband is a Benz mechanic. Everybody knows him in Mushin for car repairing,’ she said with pride. And with a smile still lingering on her face she added, ‘I have no surprised to see you inside LASU. You’re always used to be a book person.’ She laughed, ‘See now, you are even now speaking in English like the NTA people.’
‘How about Kemi, Sikira, Funmi and Chioma, how are they?’
‘Everybody waka. But Sikira die now—remember? She die before we begin to waka? That time you have start working inside market?’
‘Yes, yes. I remember. May her soul rest in peace,’ she said, although she didn’t remember.
Desire had been the smallest in the group, but she was the one they consulted as they laughed over boyfriends and their parents’ dated advice on how to handle sex and boys. She owed her love for reading to Prof—the same Prof she now visited every night, except for the last three. The Prof, who she knew would not remember the little girl he carried at a spontaneous rally.
She had kept Prof in her imagination as the father she wanted to have, after she dreamt of him telling her he would take care of her and never let her suffer. She owned the dream. She loved the kindness in his voice and how it calmed her. It became the voice that calmed her fears and anxieties. So, each day, she walked to the library, imagining one dream after another. One night, she dreamt she was walking on the beach alone at night. The whole seashore was littered with books of every kind but whenever she reached for a book, it disappeared and she was soon rushing about in a frenzy trying to grasp and hold on to one—any book. When all the books were gone, she fell to her knees, sobbing uncontrollably. After a while, she heard a voice, like it was calling unto her from the night sky—it was Prof’s! But this time, it wasn’t kind and calming, but angry and loud. She wanted to ask him, ‘Where have all the books gone?’ But before she could speak, Prof began to chide her for keeping late nights, hanging out with strange boys and not reading to change her future. And the longer he spoke, the angrier and louder he became. Angrier. Louder. Angrier. Louder… then, she woke up in a sweaty fright.
There were times she wondered if she did not first receive the words “Books would make a difference,” from the morning assembly mantra spoken by her headmaster whose beard was so bushy the pupils called him Father Christmas, who repeated the sentence ten times every morning at the assembly ground, or from Prof in that dream.
The following afternoon, after her strange dream, she walked around the garbage dumps in her area, picking up books and any printed materials to read—torn Physics textbook, newspaper cut-outs, family planning manuals, ledgers and invoices which became notebooks and many other bits and pieces. Later, when she discovered the library at Isale Eko, she learned to read fiction and history books. Each day, after school at 1pm, she walked from the beach where she lived with her mother to the USIS library on Broad Street on foot. She returned at night, to explain the ideas she read in the book to him, while imagining that her mother’s dysregulated speech was his response. There were times her mother would awaken to catch her replying to her imagined Prof, and Desire would offer the explanation of revising her school work. The Local Government Library was her refuge. She read all sorts of books there; from philosophy to religion to fiction to biology—where her special interest was reproduction, when her friends began to ask her to find out what the books said about preventing pregnancy. She left the five of them: Kemi, Sikira, Funmi, Chioma and Basira in different spheres of life, gaining unread experience – as a sex worker, a ghost, a thug, a traveller, and a young mother.
‘So, you are going to be a doctor, or lawyer, or engineer?’ Basira asked, intruding on her thoughts.
‘No. I’m studying Political Science,’ Desire said in Yoruba, too.
‘You want to do politician? Maybe even president…’ Basira switched to English.
‘I want—’ Desire started in Yoruba, and seeing the disappointment in her friend’s eyes, started to speak in English, ‘My sister, make God help us jare.’
They alighted from the bus as it stopped at Mushin Olosha and walked into the street, passing women who sold peppers arranged in layered boulders on plastic plates by the roadside, and moved into a street with shops displaying provisions for sale; between them were those selling eat-as-you-go foods like akara, buns, apples, dodo, fried yam and so forth. Basira mentioned how she was planning to own a stall in the market, which, like the rest of Lagos’ open markets, transformed into hope for traders, who waited for night dreamers; with their tin oil lamps and aso-ofi tightly wrapped to protect themselves from the chill that came in the evenings, while their young children, also covered, like small bundles on pieces of cardboard by their feet as the teenaged ones helped out.
‘I for don start, but I just dey recover from miscarry.’
‘I’m sorry about that, Basira.’ Desire was going to commiserate further when Basira stopped walking.
‘This is the house,’ Basira said. They crossed a wooden bridge placed over the gutter, greeting an old woman shelling melon seeds in front of a bungalow bullied into physical irrelevance by the two multi-storeys on its sides. The walls of the house, with its flaked off paint, carried a roof which was lowered to cover the main door. Anyone taller than five foot eight would have to bend to enter, before straightening up to behold the stretch of wood that supported a dotted hip roof which covered a number of face-to-face rooms. In front of every room was a bench with a kerosene stove on it.
Basira’s room was a square box that accommodated a standard double bed and a cupboard as its major furniture. There were extras like a 14-inch television and a video recorder that were placed on a sideboard. Focusing on the map-like water mark on the near-white ceiling, Desire listened to Basira as she pointed to three children smiling in a photograph, two of them open-mouthed, with their two incisors missing, to the camera: ‘Jadesola, Jenrola, Jokotola.’ They were on a sofa with a brown pattern, the same as everything else in the room. ‘This is the three children I have born now. They are in school; one girl, one boy, one girl. God is good.’
She looked up to see Desire’s face, and she smiled, ‘I hav’ tell ma’guy from the beginning, say we go do family planning, and he agree.’ She raised her eyebrow, ‘You remember him? He is the same boy that im-pregnant me that time.’
‘Oh! You’re still together?’ Desire asked, sincerely glad for her friend, but unable to resist goading Basira. ‘You didn’t forget all those my talks about having children one can cater for, abi?’
‘Yes-o! Na only me and my husband get children in private school for this compound. We have cut our coat inside the size?’
‘Cut your coat according to your size,’ Desire said shaking her head and laughing. ‘Wo, don’t break my head with this your English-o, speak Yoruba,’ she added with a long ring of laughter that sounded like a duplicate of a childhood with Basira.
She thought of their years together. Those years they left for school from the shelter of rusted corrugated sheets and tarpaulin banners, dressed in school uniform with holes akin to polka-dotted fabrics and no sandals on their feet. She was in touch with Basira who dropped out of school for a while, until she left the area to start work as a porter in Isale Eko.
‘Oshisko, Professor and Dr Madam, I will talk the English I can talk-o,’ Basira sneered.
‘You seem happy,’ she said.
Basira shrugged, avoiding Desire’s gaze and said, ‘Happiness is from God. He gives you a good man that allows you to stay, abi?’
Desire took a deep breath, stood up and hugged Basira, who held her close and squeezed her shoulder.
‘I need to go,’ she said.
‘I no even offer you anything,’ Basira said releasing her grasp on Desire.
‘Ma binu, time has gone. I will come back to visit,’ she said, turning to see that there was now a strain of tears on Basira’s eyelids.
‘Desire. Please, come back. I no get original true friend again.’