A Life Elsewhere Read online

  I was thinking of a time when I was seven. We lived in a large house, my parents and I. A house with too many rooms, places to lose yourself. It felt cold, it had no soul to it, and parts of it frightened me. My mother had travelled to be with her eldest sister in Minna who was ill. I can’t remember for how long she was away. It could not have been more than two weeks.

  I was on my own for much of the time. My father worked long hours, and the period between the end of school and the time he returned from the city was hard for me. He allowed no one to enter the house when he was away, so often I played with our neighbour’s children across the fence. Sometimes they were out, or one of them was in a poor mood. Often they bored me or I quarrelled with them, so I remained at home, idled the time away. My mother’s absence seemed like an eternity.

  My parents had a house girl called Jumoke. She was young, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and she cleaned the large house, washed our clothes. She helped to prepare the dinner sometimes even though there was someone else who did that.

  My father never spoke to her. It was as though she were not there. As though dust vanished from the cool tiled floor, soiled clothes were miraculously cleaned, curtains drew themselves at the beginning and at the end of the day. He stepped around her, rarely mentioned her name. To him, it seemed, she was invisible. She was my mother’s responsibility.

  My father was a businessman. He loved finance and figures. That’s what moved him. He loved making deals. Multiplication and addition. Never the other way round; division, anything that deducted from life. He hated money, though. The sight of it repulsed him. All that cold metal, those grim paper bills. It was my mother who paid Jumoke at the end of the month. She paid the cook, bought the groceries, reached into her bag whenever I glimpsed something that pleased me, that I thought I ought to have. He was not a cold man, but rather there was something ruthless about him. There were certain things he was unable to tolerate: indolence, indecisiveness. Stupidity was high on the list. To him they were all one and the same. I think he looked at Jumoke the way some people look at vagrants; they do not exist if you do not focus on them. Blur your vision. To my father, Jumoke was without thought or substance, past or future, and her presence was ignored. She was like something in the road – huddled and shivering – you had to step around.

  Jumoke was my closest ally. It wasn’t her choice; we simply moved in the same vicinity for much of the day. Sometimes I would not leave her alone.

  She hated my father. She never came right out and said so. Her thoughts arrived by way of innuendo, point of reference, code. How his clothes were always the dirtiest, how she loathed to clean his bath, shine his sweat-soiled shoes. Her tirade was never-ending. She despised him to such an extent I was constantly afraid something would happen. She might poison his food, smuggle a snake into his shoe. She might practise juju in the dead of night. By morning he would be dead, or dying. But that never happened; it was my job to protect him and to pacify her.

  She left of her own accord one day before we moved to another country. She gave no indication of this. She simply went and never came back. What did happen, though, I do not think I have ever attempted to understand. I was thinking about it that time Alicia and I made love. I am thinking about it now.

  The man two or three seats away from us is still talking. It’s a disconcerting experience to listen in on a conversation going on in someone else’s head. People are throwing him furtive glances, but he is totally absorbed in his own world. ‘Stop telling me to calm down,’ he is blustering. There are flecks of saliva on the edge of his lips. Perhaps he is somewhere else, not on this train, and he can see someone he used to know. He might not realise he is on the London Underground. Could that happen to a person? Could he lose himself like that?

  I give Alicia’s hand a soft pump. I turn to her and smile. She smiles too. Two more stops, she says. I want her to notice the jabbering young man, the way everyone else has. But she is quiet again. She is by herself. It is not important to her now.

  ‘Don’t let the bureaucrats get you!’ the young man is raving.

  I think, No one is going to get you from the place you are in.

  My father took me to his office one morning when there was no school. We cruised through the quiet neighbourhood and then within minutes everything changed. Cars crawled across the horizon. There was the sound of hooting everywhere. I thought this would have angered my father, not being able to travel unhindered. But he seemed relaxed, resigned. I guessed he was used to it. We wound the windows down, but still there was no breeze. Every so often a vendor would approach, push his or her wares through the window, insistent. I was too languid to react. My father paid them no attention. The vendor would eventually move on.

  We crept forward a few metres and stopped. A vendor selling newspapers ambled between the cars. I concentrated on his approach. I could tell he was making his way towards us. He chose to come to my window. Perspiration gathered down the sides of his face, his chest, his stomach, into the cavity of his belly button. He was glistening. I felt his presence, his bulk push through the window even though he did not lean inside. I was afraid to move.

  ‘Daily Times!’ he clamoured. And then to my father, ‘Oga, Daily Times.’ He stood there for a moment, then my father made a movement and the vendor was separating a newspaper from his stack, handing it to me. My father passed me some coins from the glove compartment. I gave them to the vendor, concentrating on not letting them fall. Then he moved off, resumed his chanting. ‘Daily Times!’ Over and over again.

  When we reached the intersection, everything began to loosen up, cars separated in all directions. We sailed across the flyover, the sparkling lagoon serene on one side, the steaming confusion of the city on the other.

  It was cool in my father’s office, but dull. After I had finished my homework, I searched for something else to do. I did not know the other people in the building. I had never been there before. Occasionally someone brushed a hand over my head. A woman took me to sit by her desk for a long stretch in the afternoon. I don’t know why she did that. Perhaps my father asked her to. I much preferred his office. I could look out at the lagoon from there. But I do not think he wanted me there. Perhaps I disturbed his concentration, his focus. It would probably have been that. I wondered when my mother would return, why she was taking so long at my aunt’s. I wanted life to resume its familiar pattern.

  During that period Jumoke would sometimes come out with a startling phrase. ‘Aunty is dead!’ or ‘There was moto accident!’ she would exclaim, referring to my mother. ‘She neva coming back. Baba getting a new wife. She black, black from jujuland!’

  No, I would howl, half believing her. After a moment her face would crack into a terrible grin and I would know everything was all right.

  After school several days a week my father would assist me with my homework. He would invent additional work himself. I grew not to appreciate this. He liked to sit me down. Tell me one and one is two. Two and two is four, and then leap to some unknowable figures, complex equations. He would wait expectantly. I would feel myself begin to panic. I would seldom get the answer right. Things would persist in this vein for a long while. I think it was something he must have enjoyed. Perhaps he was thinking of other things at the time. Reaching into his mind for figures he had used during the day in the office. Perhaps it gave him a kind of thrill to retrieve them back at home. He may have been trying to instil in me the values of his own craft. He never asked the simple questions and it was always a struggle for me. He wore a hard face then.

  People think that about me sometimes, that I am a hard man. I have a way about me that some might describe as cold, insensitive. I don’t mind though, what people think.

  At the hospital, the nurse, the doctor seemed more upset than I was. I comforted Alicia. I tried, but I did not show pain. Perhaps I was not tender. The nurse, the way she looked at me, I could tell what was galloping through her mind. She must have been thinking that I was elsewhere, dr
eaming of currency and figures, of work. That what was happening in the hospital, that smothering room, had very little to do with me, my life. She must have thought I would have made a bad father, that I was a poor husband. Her narrowed eyes, her frugal expression, her gait, all told me that.

  I have never understood how people live their lives, as though it were all by instinct. The formula for tenderness, the desire to move from here to there, the will to go on day after day. Where does that come from? I have never understood the instinctual drive. Life must always have confounded me. I do not think I have ever really learned from the past: the last year, the last month, the last minute. Each day has seemed like a new beginning in which to learn everything all over again. Like feeling one’s way in the dark in an unfamiliar house. The chairs, the tables, the ornaments all lying in wait, in ambush. One learns where everything is. And then the next day, there is a different house, in a different location. Everything has changed. That’s the way life sometimes appears to be. To me. An unfamiliar house.

  One day, during the period my mother was away attending to her sister, my father and I were at the long table in the dining room. There were school books neatly arranged. My father was at the head of the table while I sat to one side, my face a maze of creases. He was watching me then. The figures made no sense. He must have known I was getting it all wrong, but even so, he sat there. Mute. At the end of the exercise he slid the sheet of paper away from me. Very quickly, almost indifferently, he ran his ink pen down the page as if drawing a line, making small delicate crosses. Very rarely did he decelerate in order to make a tick. It was elegant, though, the way he did this. It was almost a pleasure to watch. I thought, one day I too would like to snake my hand down another person’s page making random tiny crosses, making that person feel inept. All wrong, he said, pushing the paper towards me. I did not mention the few that had been correct. Again, he said quietly. Do it all again.

  The way he was then, with his quiet voice, did not fool me for an instant. I knew that underneath the elegant strokes, the calm, there was a controlled anger. I would even call it rage. I could feel this as acutely as if he had actually been shouting, beating his fists on the table, making his eyes stream in frustration. So when he said his ‘agains’ I did not hesitate. I made no sound, no complaint. I applied myself to the task.

  On this particular day something happened. In the middle of an exercise, I looked up to find Jumoke standing there. She wore a look of urgency. She was trying to convey some news to my father.

  ‘Sah,’ she said. She shifted her weight from one leg to the other.

  My father was staring at me. He was waiting for the correct figures. He did not look up. There was a silence and then a tension because he had still not acknowledged her. I glanced at Jumoke, then lowered my eyes to the page. I could not concentrate. I could feel all the wrong numbers seeping painfully onto the paper. Then, quite suddenly, without looking up, he said to her, ‘Leave us!’ I could hear the sheer force of the sibilant, the sting and smart of it, singing in the air.

  The next day Jumoke went about her duties quickly, methodically, ignoring me. I knew better than to pester her. I realised she had been wronged. When I returned from school the day after that she was in another mood entirely. She smiled at me for no reason. She skipped about the house. For a moment I was terrified she might have ‘fixed’ my father. As the day wore on I could not get the idea out of my head. I stole into my parents’ room and peeled the sheets from the bed, pinching a corner, dragging the cloth across the room. There was no snake, no toad’s heart skewered like a pincushion, no scorpions trapped and enraged in his shoes. Even so, everything felt awkward.

  In the afternoon Jumoke sought me out at our neighbour’s house.

  ‘Come and help me!’ she shouted. She turned and walked away.

  I didn’t ask what help she needed, I simply followed her back home. There was a pile of dried clothes in a basket underneath the washing line. She separated them into two lots of equal size. I thought she might have made a smaller bundle for me, but she did not. ‘Follow me!’ she ordered.

  As I stumbled across the compound I dropped my father’s agbada trousers, his aerated undershirt. I did not know how I was going to retrieve them with my hands full. I called out to Jumoke. ‘Leave it!’ she spat. She did not turn around.

  The room where she lived in the boys’ quarters was dark and bleak. The floor was of bare concrete. The windows somehow failed to catch the light. I had never been inside this room before. It was an unwritten rule of my parents and somehow it never piqued my curiosity to discover how Jumoke lived. This was her private place. She shared the building only with the cook, although he was seldom there. So, in effect, it was Jumoke’s building, her house. All the four rooms were hers to explore. I never saw her enter the other rooms, though.

  She did not turn on the naked light bulb. I could make out the dresser with the broken mirror, the striped market bags stuffed into a corner, the single wooden chair, the narrow bed. I thought perhaps she kept things in other rooms. Belongings. More than this. I hoped so, but I could not be sure.

  She dropped her bundle of clothes, suddenly. I thought my father, my mother would not be pleased. She looked me straight in the eye. I thought perhaps I should leave. But instead, I stood there, rooted, my arms full. She made some movements, quick and rough: my bundle of clothes, my own clothes, the attachments to her dress. I did not have the presence of mind to resist. Perhaps there was a corner in my brain that registered excitement. All I remember is that she was not smiling inanely any more.

  Every time I remember that incident I think of the word ‘foist’; reminiscences of ‘fuck’ and ‘moist’. Because, after all, some semblance of that occurred. There was a combination of both in that scenario. I do not like the word.

  In a moment she was moaning. Her face was contorted, but she would not release me. She held me tight against her sweating, febrile body.

  I don’t remember how I left that room, what happened to the heap of clothes. Everything about the aftermath is cloudy. Everything is very still. My father returned, we must have eaten. We may have spread my papers out on the table again, drawn figures in the tiny squares. My mind would have been unfocused, but he probably would not have noticed that. I kept thinking of how she had cried out, how her face writhed. How I must have injured her. I kept far away from her after that. I felt sure she would inform my parents, that something terrible would be inflicted upon me.

  One day, a short while after my mother returned from my aunt’s house and things had resumed their ordinary pattern, I caught Jumoke’s eye. I hadn’t dared look at her for many days, perhaps weeks. I was in the car with my father in the driveway, waiting for my mother.

  Jumoke walked into the compound, her hands full of market shopping. She swayed slowly towards the car. I shifted imperceptibly towards my father. I tried not to look in her direction, but I could not help it. From a distance it was easier. Twenty metres, then I would look away. Fifteen, then ten. I could not resist. And then she was almost beside the bonnet. I stole a glance. She beamed at me. She winked.

  I don’t know whether my father saw this. At that moment something in me gave way. Everything I’d thought, everything I’d known seemed to turn upon its head. Things appeared very unfamiliar then. It occurred to me that I did not understand the world one bit, that I would never really understand it. At that moment, I realised Jumoke hated me. That she had always hated me the same way she hated my father. There was no difference in the way she loathed us. We were one and the same in her eyes. All the time I had fooled myself into thinking she liked me – it was only my father she despised. It seemed like a slap. It was startling to realise I was the object of such rage.

  Some of the people in the carriage are chuckling and for a moment I don’t know why. I am always wary of this kind of situation, not knowing. As if I am one step behind everyone else. Then I see it is because the young man in the shabby coat is talking to an old man two se
ats away from me. For some reason the coat doesn’t seem so shabby now. He is still complaining about bureaucrats. ‘And them with their bloody council tax bills. For one thing, Dad … ,’ he says, then shakes his head and carries on. The old man hardly says a word. He looks away for a long while as if he does not know the younger one, then he turns back. ‘We’ll talk about it when we get home,’ he says gruffly. He closes his eyes suddenly, like a narcoleptic, drops his chin against his chest.

  I’m not so sure how I feel about that. It is comical on the one hand, but what’s the point of having children if you behave as if they’re not there?

  I would have liked to have had children. I sometimes imagine three or four of them playing noisily in the back of our car. I would have loved to have had children with Alicia. We cannot have them now. There will be no gain, no addition. There will not be that to look forward to. I realise it is not so important. We have each other, there will be other things to accomplish in life. Perhaps there will come a time when I will feel relief, unburdened. I cannot know just yet. I do know I will never leave her. I do not think she will ever leave me. I would like to be sure about that, but there isn’t that certainty in life. I couldn’t imagine living with anyone else. We’re one. No one ever told me that before I met Alicia – all those calculations, figure work, arithmetic – that one and one could equal one. Anything else would be multiplication, complication, the endless sums of another existence.

  I have been unfaithful, long ago, that’s true, although I don’t believe Alicia knows or cares. I have ventured into other people’s houses, not slyly. Boldly, and with curiosity. I have glimpsed their fussy cottages, their overblown palaces, run my hands blindly into their rooms. There was guilt in it, but it was easy enough to override. It seemed important to me then.

  Guilt is something I feel acutely now. After the first time, the lost baby, I felt it. That it was something to do with me. That it might all have been my fault. But I soon got over that; there would be other opportunities. But the opportunities came and went. Now, I feel it is something I have done. That I have managed to damage in some way, cause pain, some violence inflicted. I see Jumoke’s twisted face.