BIBIKE
2002
THERE WAS A black leather portmanteau filled with Mother’s things sitting under the bed our grandmother slept in. The first time my twin sister, Ariyike, saw it, she pulled it out by its patchy leather handle and it snagged on a loose nail, making a small rip along its side. She was in the middle of cleaning up Grandmother’s room and so she was sitting there in the center of the floor, her broom and dustpan at her side, staring at old photographs, when Grandmother and I came back from working at the hospital.
Ariyike had examined the portmanteau’s contents, memorizing them without trying—one wedding dress, two ankle-length dinner dresses, two pairs of boot-cut jeans, one pair of black kitten heels, one shoebox filled with jewelry, forty-five photographs with Father in them.
“Did you know Mother and Father honeymooned in Spain?” she’d asked me that first time.
“They did not. They went to Tel Aviv,” I said.
She did not argue with me, but she should have, because she was half right; they had gone to the Spanish border, had taken pictures standing at the foot of the Rock of Gibraltar.
“We should sell her jewelry,” she said instead. “We should sell everything, even the portmanteau.”
I laughed because surely she intended it as a joke. The portmanteau was old, torn and falling apart, no one wanted it. Besides, it once belonged to Justice Silver, Mother’s granduncle. He gave it to her when she was about our age and traveling to Lancaster for A levels.
“You should not laugh,” she’d said. “Let us take this stuff to Tejuosho market. We can sell it to those Mallams, get some money for new clothes.”
She was sitting there, holding out the shoebox, a silver necklace tangled in the middle hanging from the end. I took the shoebox from her, pushed the tangled necklace inside a heart-shaped emerald pendant, and shoved the shoebox back in the portmanteau.
“It is not ours to sell,” I had said.
My sister did not like that I said this. And she was right. She should have insisted. We needed money. We always needed money. Grandmother was still getting used to having four children depending on her. She still went on complaining about how much food we ate, how much soap was left after we showered, how much noise we made. Sometimes she forgot how she spent her money, so she accused us of stealing it, then made us empty our luggage and purses searching for it. Once, a few months after we arrived to live with her here, after she had searched us and found none of her missing things, she made us walk with her around the neighborhood, from the man who sold chewing gum and candy in a tuck shop, to the woman hawking bread and beans, to the old man mending plastic buckets with pieces of scrap plastic. She made us stop at every shop, showing our faces to them, telling all the owners to never sell us anything because if we ever had any money, it was money we must have stolen from her. We walked past Uche, the jollof rice seller, and even though my belly was filled with water and tumbling with anger, I wanted the jollof rice so much in that moment that I would have stolen to buy it. By the time we had walked to the houses nearest the canal, houses so close together that you could stand at any point on the street and tell which mothers had started dinner and which ones hadn’t, I realized that we were to blame for the shame we had experienced. It was indeed my own legs walking behind her, wasn’t it? My own head, bowing shamefaced.
Ariyike and I decided that day to start earning our own money. First, we started to sell sachet water we had kept in plastic buckets filled with ice overnight, but too many kids here already did that. We had to walk as far as the tollgate and wait until there was serious traffic to make good sales. We did this together, my sister and I, for a few months until one of grandmother’s co-workers at the hospital died and I decided to take the job. Ariyike continued to sell water in traffic.
I worked mostly in the children’s wing of the orthopedic department. Most of the time, all I did was empty trash bins and wastebaskets in doctors’ offices. The favorite part of my day was running errands for doctors and nurses. Most of them were nice; they let me keep the change.
Sometimes the older cleaners did not show up and it fell on me to clean the toilets. It was on one of these days that I met and befriended Aminat. The supervisor had found me sitting beneath the stairs in radiology and said, “This girl again. Don’t you have something to do?”
I had just come back from walking thirty minutes to and fro, buying lunch for some doctors. I could have told him that, but then he would have laughed, telling me that was “extracurricular.” Instead I said nothing, pointing in the direction of the nearest toilets, and walked away.
The men’s toilet smelled like boiling hot piss mixed with something superconcentrated, like hair dye or shoe polish. The cleaning bucket was in a corner by the washbasin but there was no mop or scrubbing brush. I made a makeshift bowl by breaking the top half off a plastic bottle I found in the trash. Afterward, I mixed some cleaning detergent with disinfectant and water then took to sprinkling it over and over around the bathroom. I sprinkled all around the steel pipes jutting out of the wall where the urinals were once erect. I sprinkled inside the doorless stalls, on the mirrorless walls. Unlike in the women’s bathrooms, there was running water. I walked into every stall, flushing toilets repeatedly. I had spent what I considered enough time in there and was getting ready to leave when a woman walked in and shut the door behind her. I watched her lean against the door, sighing loudly as she pulled out a sanitary pad from a large red purse shaped like an envelope. It was the cheap kind of pad, not the flat type with wings, but one of the thicker ones, the ones that look like a long lump of cotton wool. She was a tiny woman. Her long box braids were waist length. They made slow, somber movements across her face as she pulled down her skirt to tuck the pad in. She was wearing one of those tight Lycra skirts with mid-thigh slits, so I had to wonder why a young lady would use such older-woman pads. She looked like the kind of person who would choose Always every day.
She did not care that I was watching her. I was not even pretending to be cleaning at this point. She stuck the pad onto her underwear then took out a Wet n Wild lipstick from her purse. She pressed it onto the pad, making a bold red stain. She drew a couple more poorly structured stains then pulled up her underwear. It was then she looked up at me and asked with that inventive mix of Yoruba and pidgin that took me months to get accustomed to, “Watch me like TV. You no get work to do?”
I realized then that there was no real way she was as old as I had assumed she was. She was only a little older than Ariyike and me, probably—eighteen, maybe twenty. It was the way she carried herself upright in the world that had thrown me off, like she knew things no one else did, like she had plans and she was thoroughly convinced of their brilliance. Her makeup of course contributed to it: she had shaved off her eyebrows and drawn thin straight lines with red pencil, and her lips shone with bright red lipstick. Her eyes were lined with the darkest shade of black possible and contrasted with her light brown skin; she looked like she had been punched several times.
The door opened and, once she was satisfied with who it was, Aminat moved out of the way to let him in. It was one of the technicians who handled X-rays. His colleagues called him Four Fiber because he held on to copies of X-rays until patients gave him at least four twenty-naira notes.
He motioned to leave as soon as he saw me, but Aminat caught him by the arm, pulling him to her. I was so happy to have spent enough time pretending to clean the toilets that I left immediately, kicking my cleaning bucket back into the corner. I walked into the nearest office and picked up their trash bin, waiting for a full minute before walking back to the toilet door, stopping to listen. I heard the sound of struggling, her braided twists smacking the small of her back as she tried to wriggle out of his grasp.
“I do not believe you,” he was saying to her.
“Why will I lie about this. I have been looking forward to spending the weekend with you. Don’t you believe me?” she asked.
“Show me, then, show me,” he said.
“Someone might be coming. Calm down.”
He pulled down her underwear, not listening to her protest. When he found the stained pad, he said he was sorry he did not believe her. He watched her as she pulled on her underwear and adjusted her skirt, then put his hand in the inner pockets of his coat, giving her all the money he could pull out.
He was sorry that he had given the girl a real reason to end the relationship with him. A relationship that had cost him a lot of money to begin and maintain. He was ashamed of how excited he became after those few moments of struggle, deflated by the possibility that all that potential had gone to waste.
He would be sad for a few weeks because Aminat will no longer have anything to do with him, then he would learn to accept it. One day, six months later, a tiny light-skinned girl who had been in the hospital for days taking care of a little brother in a hit-and-run would take the lab technician up on his offer for a hot lunch and a cold shower in his apartment. He would wait until she was fed and clean and initiate a struggle. It would be everything he imagined, then he would find another girl and do it again and again and again.
AFTER HE WALKED out of the toilets, Aminat waited a few seconds. Then she walked out after him. I was outside, right by the door, making a show of taking a broom to the cobwebs on the hallway ceilings when Aminat walked up to me.
“Here, take your share,” she said, tapping me on my shoulder. She had two twenty-naira notes in her hand. She was trying to shove them down my bra.
“Stop it. I don’t want that,” I said.
“Why? Are you planning to broadcast on me?” she asked.
“Yes, I am. That is exactly my job here. Administrator of periods, chief commissioner of sanitary pads.”
She laughed a loud hearty laugh and walked away from me, taking her money with her. I watched her go, wondering if she was walking home with the lipstick-stained pad still between her legs.
The next time I saw her, she was standing by herself in the sidelines watching our neighborhood boys play Saturday soccer. It was then I realized that I had probably seen her so many times before, but that there had been nothing about her that interested me back then. She was several inches shorter than we were. Ariyike and I tended to befriend tall girls because we do not enjoy towering over people, like their mothers. Aminat had her hair in two braided buns that Saturday. The buns were inelegantly knotted, as though she was trying really hard to look like a messy little girl.
She looked in my direction but made no attempt to acknowledge me. There were a couple of other girls with her. Maimuna, who was newly pretty, was getting a lot of attention because Agbani Darego had won Miss World. Thanks to Agbani, every tall skinny girl with skin like a dusty blackboard would forever think they were better than everybody else. Thank you, Agbani. Then Adanna, who always told the most ridiculous stories, like the time she claimed she knew someone who ate boiled yams and palm oil that she found at the T junction and now coughed up naira notes at night. Why aren’t you rich, Adanna? Where the naira notes?
They all had on the same type of jeans, low waisted, light blue with horizontal white stripes around the hips. They were talking, waving to the boys and calling the referee names. I was about to walk away when one of the boys kicked the ball in my direction. It was rolling out of the area, so I stopped it with my feet. Another boy ran up to me to get it, his feet dusty and bare. He said thank you with a shy smile, then walked away. A few minutes later, another boy threw the ball, and another came to get it. By the third time it happened, I started to suspect it was deliberate. Aminat and her friends were leaving. None of the players had paid much attention to them.
As she walked away, she came close to me and whispered in my ear:
“Next time put on some jeans,” she said. “The boys have been making all kinds of excuses to look up your skirt.”
I ran home like I was seven and a boy kissed me at playtime, my ears warm from embarrassment. Andrew was home by himself building giant kites from old calendars. I ran into Grandmother’s room, pulling out the portmanteau.
My mother’s jeans were too short for me and too tight around the hip. They made my legs look as long as the road to Oyo. I hated them. But we had only two thousand naira saved—actually, it was a thousand six fifty because Ariyike had taken three hundred and fifty to buy us Vanilla Ice deodorant spray.
When she returned from selling water, her bucket still half full, she found me sitting outside in Mother’s jeans, watching the evening make way for nighttime.
“Why are you wearing that?” she asked.
And so I told her the whole story.
“You should keep away from those girls,” she said. “I have heard many bad things.”
“Do we have enough money for jeans?” I replied.
She sat on the floor next to me, taking off her top and then tucking it under both arms, covering her breasts.
“We can if we have to,” she said.
“Look at this, what do you think?” I laid our mother’s jeans on the floor between us. “I’m thinking of cutting it short right here, just under my knees.”
She leaned back into the wall, wiping her face with her shirt. “You do not need my permission to do anything” she said. “I am not your mother.”
A short distance away, Ibrahim the muezzin sang in his clear loud voice the call for evening prayers. There was no real mosque in the area, so the Muslims brought their mats from home and spread out in the corner of the football field that faced east.
Grandmother was making a soup dinner, but we called Andrew and Peter. Together we had bread and akara that Ariyike had bought on her way back from selling water. We sat there, the four of us, chewing and listening to the fading sounds of the neighborhood as it settled into nighttime.
In the morning, my sister woke me up before we headed out and gave me a list of all the things we needed money for, along with all the money we had saved. She did not have to. I knew what we needed and what we had. But I was thinking about more, I was thinking that most of the money was mine, anyway. Ariyike made barely sixty naira a day from water and always spent it before she got home.
We needed a new kerosene stove, lightbulbs for the living room lamp, sugar, rice, beans, smoked fish, dry okra, palm oil. Grandmother rarely did anything for us in those days, and we had learned to stop asking. She still accused us of stealing from her sometimes, and so we kept away, spending most of our time outdoors and in the bedroom that we all shared.
The next time I saw Aminat, she had a pimple the size of a bean on the side of her face. She spoke like her mouth was filled with warm water.
“Nice jeans, where you buy it?”
“A shop close by,” I said.
“Your boyfriend won’t like it?” She said it like a question. “You want many new toasters, showing off your hot legs—”
That was the way she acted. If the last time, she had made me feel like a toddler, now she was making me feel older, sophisticated, the kind of girl who had a jealous boyfriend.
“Who cares what anyone thinks.” I laughed.
We had started off at the hospital and were walking toward her house. Her father was crippled in both legs and moved about on a wheelchair that had an exposed battery attached to it. She was telling me about her ex who was so jealous, and I could not tell if it was the technician or some other fellow, but I had never known another girl our age with an ex, so I listened to her stories about the time he ripped her blouse open in a restaurant because she was talking to some other man. By the time we got to her house, I felt like a stranger in my body. I spent a lot of time thinking about Aminat, how she was just a girl like me, we lived in the same neighborhood, but she was from another world. She made me think I could create a world for myself, but I was hesitant. I did not know how many worlds could fit into ours and not explode when they came in contact.
I had planned to stop at the entrance of her house, but by the time we arrived I just had to go inside. There are two types of ambitious families, I think. Some are so enamored with connections, they can live in the dingiest house in a nice neighborhood; others are more concerned with being considered wealthy, so they build the nicest house in a poor neighborhood.
Aminat’s father was the second type. His house, a four-bedroom bungalow, had a white Mercedes 300 class in the driveway. There were numerous, similar-sized posters of Indian actresses on the walls of the hallway that ran from the front of the house to the back. Alongside them, in a strange kinship with them, was a wood-framed black-and-white photograph of a woman who had to be Aminat’s mom. She was sitting, back straight, both hands clasped before her and resting on her thighs, looking into the camera with Aminat’s same resolve. Her headscarf was loose around her neck, both ends falling forward in front of her chest, as though it had been a last-minute addition to her self-assured pose.
Their television stood over a sturdy bookcase overflowing with old books. From my position in the hallway, I could see those unmistakable James Hadley Chase covers.
“Those are all my father’s,” she said, “please don’t touch anything.”
In her room, she had several suitcases around her bed. The wall was bare and without character, and her mattress was on the floor like she was resident in a dorm room, just moved in and already waiting for the end of the semester. She rummaged through a couple of suitcases and brought out baggy T-shirts with no sleeves, the kind all of us had been crazy about the year before, and long khakis with several pockets.
“You can have these if you want,” she said.
I had laughed when she said that, thinking it was a joke, but she was serious. In a quick moment, I pretended my laughter was joy at the unexpected largesse of it. Andrew was already almost as tall as we were at this time, and because I knew he would be glad for those clothes, I laughed again and smiled with real gratitude for the unisex style of American rappers of the nineties.
It was harder to be her friend after that, for in that moment I had seen what she had, the bounty of it, all types of clothes slipping out of boxes, her bedroom untidy in the way only the rooms of girls with too many things could be. We had stood there laughing, sister-friends, with the same concerns and goals, and then she had looked at me and handed me clothes that she would never wear again. This was the summary of her estimation of me, I concluded, Poor Bibike, she is desperate enough to be grateful for anything. After, we remained friends for the sake of habit. There was no easy way to begin to avoid her in the neighborhood, no polite way to ignore the carefree persistence with which she ingratiated herself into my life.
My sister, Ariyike, hated that the “corrupting” influence of this friendship. My brothers did not mind, all they cared was that Aminat’s house had cable and someday they could visit with me—they really wanted to watch episodes of Captain Planet. I always said no to them tagging along.
They did not understand that being Aminat’s friend was like taking a bus to a different part of town. She showed me a different Lagos, a happy Lagos. Aminat had grown up the richest girl in a poor neighborhood. She was used to a certain type of authority, her own brand of soft worship. I did not want to fawn over her, not over her beauty and not over the nice stuff she had access to. When she got CK One perfume as her birthday gift from her father a few weeks after we became friendly, even though I was impressed about the reach of her father’s influence—a friend of the family had brought it all the way from New York just in time for her nineteenth—I still did not fawn. For her birthday party, I again reached inside Mother’s portmanteau, modifying one of her old dinner dresses into a minidress, to my sister’s chagrin. I told anyone who asked that it was vintage, and therefore priceless. They all laughed at my lack of shame. At the party, the red looked fluorescent on my skin in the dark lights of a nightclub. When two different boys tried to touch my thighs, I knew there was something about the dress. I was beautiful in my mother’s dress, and sometimes beauty was just as powerful as wealth.
I met Alhaji Sule, Aminat’s father, months after we became friends. It was after I had already gone to her house several times, attended her birthday party, taught her how to make moimoi to impress a new boyfriend. On this first day, her father rolled up in his wheelchair, sitting beside us as we watched dancehall music videos on Channel O. Aminat changed the channel to CNN immediately and motioned, her fingers slow, wary, pointing to her bedroom, asking me to leave the room with her.
“You girls should spend more time reading than watching all that junk,” he said as he pulled himself out of the wheelchair to sit next to us on the sofa. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man; even beneath his jalabia, you could see the dips and curves of defined biceps.
He spoke with the cultured precision of the educated northerner, his vowel sounds not exaggerated, his ths smooth, his rs elucidated. As soon as began to explain the severity of America’s actions in Afghanistan, Aminat walked away with the dismissive rudeness only children could exhibit to parents regardless of who was watching. I sat there polite and smiling, listening until the news report ended and he lifted himself back into his chair and rolled over to the bookshelf/TV stand, picking up three books.
After he had set himself as close as possible to me on the sofa, he handed me the three books, one Danielle Steele, one John Grisham, one James Hadley Chase.
“One for passion, one for wit, and one for cunning, I will leave you to figure out what is what,” he said, and I laughed with him in spite of myself.
He was emboldened, it appeared, by my unforced laugh and the quiet of Aminat’s room. He moved closer to me, cupping my chin and whispering, his breath warming my face. He smelled like dabino and sugarcane.
“You have a pure smile,” he said. “It’s golden.”
I did not feel the disgust I would have expected to feel, but instead, a sense of relief, of superiority, that continued to accrete as he slid his hands down my dress, tugging on a nipple.
It was the way he spoke and looked at me, both shy and hopeful like a boy but also like a medicated puppy, the way he was polishing his words and making an effort to sustain a loud conversation when all I was saying was yes sir that stripped me of every kind of envy I had felt for Aminat. Instead, I realized how tenuous her position was, how vulnerable her life really was. Her Lagos was just as sad as mine.
“I have many Nigerian paperbacks as well,” he was saying. “Do you know Anezi Okoro? He writes the best stories about what it means to be around your age.”
I was wearing my mother’s dress, the one I wore to Aminat’s party, that neck-too-wide dress, that hand-stitched-hem dress. Aminat’s father moved from one nipple to the next, watching my face for a reaction. His fingers were dry and cold, and if I had been as present in that afternoon as I should have been, his grip on my nipples would have hurt.
“I suppose you may not like Okoro as much as I do. He writes about teenage boys. But perhaps you will enjoy Nengi Koin’s Time Changes Yesterday?”
He was slower and gentler and warming my belly, so I pulled his hand out in one deft move.
Aminat was on her bed, both ears covered with headphones, hands holding a bright yellow Discman. It was a recent purchase, and I performed, for the first time with delight, the friendly responsibility of admiring it and congratulating her.
My world had shifted and collided with Aminat’s, and I could not tell my sister what had happened. I spent way too long thinking about how to frame it, so as to understand my reaction to it. Why did Alhaji Sule touch me like me that? He wanted to. Why did I sit there quiet like nothing was happening?
I was a parentless teenage girl living with my grandmother in the slums of Lagos. Beauty was a gift, but what was I to do with it? It was fortunate to be beautiful and desired. It made people smile at me. I was used to strangers wishing me well. But what is a girl’s beauty, but a man’s promise of reward? What was my beauty but a proclamation of potential, an illusion of choice?
All women are owned by someone, some are owned by many; a beautiful girl’s only advantage is that she may get to choose her owner. If beauty was a gift, it was not a gift to me, I could not eat my own beauty, I could not improve my life by beauty alone. I was born beautiful, I was a beautiful baby. It did not change my life. I was a beautiful girl. Still, my life was ordinary. But a beautiful woman was another type of thing. I had waited too long to choose my owner, dillydallying in my ignorance, and so someone chose me. What was I to do about that?
THE LAST TIME I saw Alhaji Sule, Aminat’s father, I was standing on a bed in a hotel in Sabo. He was sitting in his wheelchair, his head beneath my dress. The hotel building stood adjacent to the All Saints Girls Secondary School. Every time his beard tickled my outer lips, instead of laughing, I looked outside my upstairs window and watched girls in blue checkered dresses, worn with matching blue berets, playing, reading, and writing.
It was like any other ordinary day in Lagos. My sister, Ariyike, thinking I was on my way to work, had tucked in my purse a short list of things to buy. My brothers, also not caring where the money was coming from, asked me to buy the two Westlife audio CDs everyone had been talking about.
“I promise to take care of you, my little angel,” Alhaji Sule had said that day, reaching up under my dress and pulling down my underwear. “You are too beautiful to be walking around in your mom’s jeans.”
Alhaji Sule kissed the back of my neck as he wrapped his arms around me, and his body was like mine, pudgy and soft, his skin unlike mine, wrinkly, tough and warm like a fake leather bag left in the sun too long.
I searched inside me for something to stop me, for a reason to say no. I found nothing. There was nothing to stop me.