Two days later, Kejie again saw her aunty in the same place at dawn. This time, her face wasn’t tense; it was angry. And she did not wait for Kejie to ask. As soon as she felt the shadow cross over her, she hissed, “I am not a harlot.”
Kejie was taken aback, thoroughly confused. A harlot. Monica? Haha. She held her peace.
Her aunt stared at a spot in the distance for what seemed like hours but was mere seconds, then she started talking.
“Ya uncle wan me to be coming to the bed without my knicker.”
Obviously, the knickers were getting in the way of the urgent business of boy-making.
Her aunty seemed near tears and to Kejie’s horror, she felt laughter bubbling up from just beneath the surface and threatening to erupt. She struggled to control it.
“. . . I am a woman that respect herself. How can I come with just my yansh let him fuck like I am ashawo? I cants do it.”
She took to the living room couch in protest, and Kejie rearranged her face to look blank when her uncle asked her what was wrong with her aunty.
***
Kejie had taken the children to the stream to give them a bath and bring back some water. They chattered wildly and ran circles around her as they drew near the house, each with a bucket of varying sizes in their hands except the youngest, and the water sloshed as they played, and they fetched handfuls in their cupped palms and sprayed each other. On getting home, they met with a most unusual silence. On a Saturday, and especially in the evening, the yard always bustled with activity – many cooking fires going in the quadrangle, women screaming gossip at each other, children playing in the sand and the men nowhere to be seen.
Now, the yard was just the way it would look on a weekday with every one gone on their various endeavours – work, school, visiting. Kejie asked to children to go inside and stay there, and she went from apartment to apartment, listening at doors until she came to the one at the furthest left corner of the yard. She wondered that she had not see the pile of flip flops and ragged skull slippers littering the doorway.
The house belonged to Jenny Jenny, a woman of thirty who traded in dry fish and kept to herself. She had moved into the yard a few months before, with little more than a small Ghana-must-go bag that contained all she had, and a baby strapped to her back. The baby was about a year old, had the lightest skin and pale grey eyes. Everybody knew the child was half-caste; rumour had it that she had lured one of the Expats who worked on the road construction project linking Atimbo to Akpabuyo, and had gone about having the child with a singleness of purpose that she did not deign to apply to any other aspect of her life.
She kept the child close to her side at all times and treated him like a National Treasure, and the other women snickered loud enough for her to hear, wondering aloud to each other if the child would ever be allowed to go to school. She ignored them.
The reason was obvious soon enough. The mbaakara man had returned to his country but he sent dollars to her every few weeks for the upkeep of the child and the money was more than enough to keep her, the child and her elderly parents. She had come to Monica’s house once to enquire of her husband what the present rate of exchange of the Dollar to the Naira was. He had passed the information on to his wife and before long, everybody knew why the child was so precious.
Kejie’s aunty lamented many times to her hearing, and sometimes, deliberately to her husband’s how nice it would be to have a white man, somebody, anybody who sent you dollars.
Now, Kejie stood in the doorway of the house and stared at Jenny Jenny as she sat in shocked, dry-eyed grief, surrounded by the women of the yard. On a small cot off the side of the tiny room lay the baby, Compu, short for Computer (she believed naming him Computer would make him very smart), already starting to turn a pale ashy colour and obviously dead.
All these women had envied Jenny Jenny her dollar-making baby – it didn’t help that he was the sweetest child. He never cried, never threw a tantrum, he seemed so perfect. Now they rallied, supposedly to comfort her, but a certain glimmer could be glimpsed deep in their eyes, an unnameable emotion, like they had employed death, the great leveller to put them all on an equal footing again, of mutual striving for livelihood.
When Monica saw Kejie, she jumped over several of the assembled feet, jerked Kejie out of the room by the hand in a vicious grip and hissed, “Where are my children?” as though death was communicable.
When Kejie led her to the living room where the children, oblivious to the tragedy, huddled over the game of bricks she had bought them, Monica swept them into her arms in a fierce embrace, hugged them so tight it must have hurt, and shook with tears.
“I am okay,” she sobbed. “I am fine. I am happy with my fine fine children.”
That night, she abandoned her campaign and went to bed. Without her shorts.
