The Girl with the Louding Voice(99)

“I saw the waist beads,” I say, “on her window.”

She took them off because her stomach was turning with so much pain.

Big Madam shrugs. “She might have left them there as we got ready to leave the house. I ended up dragging her to the car myself because no one was home. I had sent Abu to deliver an urgent fabric order on the mainland, and I don’t know where Chief went. I suspect he gave her a drug to cause a miscarriage and took a stroll, left her to bleed out the baby. His baby.”

She stops a moment, sway on her feet a little, then still herself. “I drove her to hospital. On the way, Rebecca started to bleed. Turns out she was nearly four months pregnant—I don’t know how I missed her growing bulge—and that she was losing the baby. She told me my husband was responsible. And that the bastard had promised her marriage.

“Immediately the doctor was able to control the bleeding, I got her discharged, took her mobile phone off her, deleted all the messages she and Chief had been exchanging, and drove her to the nearest motor-park. I gave her some money, told her to get out of Lagos and never return. She never returned to her village, because Mr. Kola would have found that out and told me, but she has stayed away from my life. And me, in my foolishness, I asked Mr. Kola to get me a much younger girl as my next maid. I didn’t know I was married to an animal. A beast. Age matters not to him. Nothing, absolutely nothing, matters to him.” She sigh. “Go and get your things, Adunni.”

I look at the scatter of paper on the floor, not moving from where I am standing. “How do I know, ma, that you are not lying?” I ask, but I think she is saying the truth. I think too that Rebecca took the letter with her to the car and hid it there, maybe by mistake or because she had hope that somebody would see it.

“Our conversation is over,” Big Madam says. “Go now and get your things and leave my home.” And then, raising her voice, she says, “Mrs. Dada, you can come back in. Adunni and I are done.”

Ms. Tia returns inside, sees the scatter of paper on the floor, says, “What the hell?”

“Adunni and I are done,” Big Madam says again. “She can go and get her things.”



* * *





I run all the way to my room, and when I reach it, I take off my shoes and arrange them under the bed. I peel off my uniform, fold it, keep it on the bed. I wear my dress, put on my sandal-shoes from Ikati.

I look around slowly, at the bed, the cupboard in the corner, Rebecca’s shoes on the floor, the folded uniform on the bed.

I set at packing my belongings into my nylon bag: my mama’s Bible, the nine hundred naira I brought with me from Ikati, my pencils and notepad, my Better English and grammar books. I pick up Rebecca’s waist beads, look at them for a long time, and, with shaking hands, drop it into my bag too. If she is from Agan, maybe one day I will see her and give it to her.

I feel a strong pull of sadness as my mind drags me back to Ikati, back to when I was about five or six years of age and playing in the village stream with Enitan, splashing water on our faces, laughing with no sense of what life will bring for all of us. My mind rolls again, like a tire set down from the top of a mountain, as I think of Mama and her laugh, which was the sound of ten quiet sneezes; of Khadija, my friend, and the many nights we lay together on the mat in her room, sharing stories into the far deep of the night. I think of Rebecca, and I say a prayer that wherever she is, she will find peace.

It is when I think of Kayus—who I had been locking up in my mind for so long, for fear of running mad with the pain of missing him—that my knees make a sudden bend.

I fall to the floor and start to cry: for Mama, who spent all her days—sick and well—to gather school fees money, sometimes frying one hundred puff-puffs to sell under the hot Ikati sun, and many times, returning home at night with tears in her eyes because she didn’t sell even one. I cry for Papa, who thinks that a girl-child is a wasted waste, a thing with no voice, no dreams, no brain.

I cry for Big Madam, with her big house, the big cage of sadness around her soul. For Iya, who was kind to me because my mama was kind to her. For Khadija, who lived and died for the love of a man that left her to die. And for myself, for the loss of everything good and happy, for the pain of the past and the promise of the future.

My cry is a soft wail, both a whipping and healing to my heart . . . until someone calls my name from afar, a sound that stops the wail so sudden, as if something snap off a rushing stream from the source of it.

I wipe my face, push myself up, and pick up the cloth-hanger inside the cupboard. Kneeling on the bed, I pull and twist and stretch out the hanger until it is a thin line, a metal pen with no ink. Slowly, I begin to scratch the wall with the tip of it. I scratch and scratch, blowing away the chippings from the white paint, curving and carving letters deep into the wall until my neck and fingers are paining from too much bending and scratching.

When I finish, I climb down from the bed, pick up the nylon bag of my belongings. At the door, I look at the wall, at what I scratched into it. The C is one half of a square and the A is almost a triangle, but I can read the words:

ADUNNI & REBECCA

I leave the room, closing the door on the memory of the sad and the bitter and the happy of it all, knowing that even if everybody forgets about Rebecca, or about me, the wall in the room we shared will remind them that we were here. That we are human. Of value. Important.