Читать книгу Butter Honey Pig Bread - Francesca Ekwuyasi - Страница 18

Kehinde

TAIYE AND I USED TO BE ONE CELL, one zygote. Isn’t that wild? I sometimes wonder if we knew each other before birth, if we were sisters, or the same person who grew tired of herself and shed the parts she didn’t want. Perhaps I am the unwanted bits, the chaff, and Taiye the wheat.

She is sitting cross-legged on the floor by the fridge. She doesn’t see me yet, though I am just by the kitchen door. Farouq is leaning his back against the counter, his arms supporting him so that his elbows jut out behind him; he doesn’t see me either.

Their voices are low. I can’t properly hear what they’re saying, but Taiye has this look on her face as if she’s about to crack open and pour everywhere. She’s shaking her head slowly, and Farouq is nodding.

I’m curious, I feel left out, but I don’t want to interrupt, so I go back up to my room. I don’t understand this jealousy that has crept inside me; I am not usually possessive. Maybe it’s the heat.

I married Farouq at city hall with five friends as witnesses. Afterward we went dancing at this tiny Haitian bar I love in the Gay Village to celebrate. I was several tequila shots and a tab of Molly deep, dancing on a mirrored floor with strobing pink lights and a bass so intense I felt my insides vibrate in time to the music. I looked up from the bottom of another shot glass, and Taiye was dancing right in front of me, beckoning me to join her. She was wearing the same black halter dress as I was, had the same waist-length box braids. But I was sure it was her. Even in the dimly lit club, I could make out the scar on her chin. And the way she moved. Taiye moves differently from me. She’s not afraid to be seen.

I walked toward her on the dance floor, I tried to take her hand, but in an instant, she was gone, and I was left pawing at my reflection on a mirrored wall.

All this space between us now is dense, heavy. I know that it’s not normal for sisters. It hasn’t always been like this. Even though I was seething before, I don’t think it’s supposed to be like this, not anymore.

I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell you about the bad thing, the first thing that split us.

It started after our father’s death, with Aunty Funke and the man she brought, Uncle Ernest. Aunty Funke was one of our father’s distant cousins—it is only after many steps and ladders that their connection becomes clear. She came for our father’s funeral and stayed long after we’d put him in the ground at Ikoyi Cemetery. She claimed that she remained to “help with the children, because a mother should not be on her own at a time like this.” After many weeks of her ignoring us, hosting prayer meetings in the living room, and ordering Sister Bisi around, Uncle Ernest came to join her. He arrived with the rainy season, so we were confined to the three storeys of the house.

The day he arrived, Taiye stopped sleeping my bedroom with me; though we had separate rooms, we shared mine at night. She told me and Sister Bisi that she hated him, but she didn’t know why. She would climb into my bed and hold my hand until I fell asleep. Then she would tiptoe down the hallway and curl herself at the foot of our mother’s bed.

Aunty Funke and Uncle Ernest slept in one of the guest rooms on the ground floor. Every day after school, I saw Uncle Ernest sitting on a stool outside the black wrought-iron gates of our compound with the gateman. A big smile eating up half his broad face, he often asked, “Ibeji, you’ve come back already? Didn’t you just leave now now?”

I laughed, but Taiye never responded. She always struggled out of his attempts at hugs and ran inside, away from him, dragging me behind her. She said it was the way he looked at us. I didn’t see it, even after Taiye whispered into my ear one evening, “I don’t like the way he makes his eyes.”

It’s been almost eighteen years, yet I remember with frightening clarity the first night he came into my room. I still feel the warm breeze from the open glass louvres; I hear the pittering of rain, the whoosh whoosh of the wind through the palm trees, the way they bowed and made their shadows dance, cast in the light of the street lamps on the bedroom walls. I remember, and it still pains me. Sometimes rage threatens to tear itself out of my body in a sharp scream; sometimes fear freezes me to my bed for days. It still makes me nauseous, makes my skin crawl so that I want to slither out of it. Sometimes I nod at the memories and let them pass as quietly as I can stand it.

It was a Saturday night, and there was no light.

Sister Bisi and the gateman were outside with their torchlights refuelling the generator. I thought Aunty Funke was at night vigil. She usually went on Saturdays, but it turned out she was downstairs the whole time. I think my mother was in her room on the second floor, but I hadn’t seen her since Thursday. I was afraid of her then. Taiye and I were in my bedroom, the room we had shared at night since I can remember. She was lying under the bed with a torchlight, reading out loud a story from Goosebumps about a living ventriloquist doll. It was supposed to be frightening, and Taiye read it in a low, growling voice to scare me, but I think she was more afraid than I was.

The door was open. I saw Uncle Ernest stumble up the stairs, looking dazed. I felt like there was ice water running down my back, and I sat up quickly. He had never come up that early before.

“Ibeji,” he said softly.

Taiye stopped reading the moment she heard his voice.

“Only you on this whole floor?” he asked me from the stairs, looking around at the two rows of closed doors on either side of my open one. “Na wa o,” he muttered, and curved his lips down in an exaggerated frown. “Am I talking to myself?” he shouted toward me, quite suddenly very annoyed.

“Sister Bisi sleeps here with us,” I lied.

My body was a block of cement when he leaned against the door frame.

“Ehen? Where is she now?”

“Downstairs on-ing the generator.”

“Why is your torchlight on the ground?” he asked, apparently unable to see Taiye beneath the bed.

I felt bile rising hot from my stomach when Uncle Ernest came into the room and shut the door behind him. I started to shiver when I smelled that nausea-inducing drunkard smell coming off his damp, wide body.

“You’re not allowed to come inside our room.” I meant to shout it, but my voice came out small.

It paralyzed me when his face changed, contorted hideously with rage, his eyes widened, his nostrils flared, his mouth twisted into a sneer.

“So this is what happens when your mother is a madwoman, and there is nobody to train you, abi?” His voice was a low growl. “Talking to me as if I’m your mate.”

He put his face close to mine, and when I recoiled, he grabbed my shoulders and pushed me down on the bed. I felt his damp palms on my skin. Bile dribbled down my chin, but I couldn’t move.

“Please stop,” I squeaked.

“Shut up.”

He clamped a callused hand over my mouth and shoved his other hand under my nightie. He jammed his fingers inside me, and I bit hard against the sharp pain that shot up through my body. He withdrew his hands and threw a blinding slap against the side of my head.

“Useless girl,” he muttered.

I screamed, and he covered my mouth and nose with his big palm so that I couldn’t breathe. He pushed my nightie up until it was bunched under my chin.

I remembered my arms, and I flailed them, scratching his face until he removed his hand from over my face. I threw myself onto the floor and screamed. I cried for Taiye, but she didn’t come out from under the bed. Her eyes were wide-open circles, both hands covering her mouth, as if to keep her terror from pouring out. She started to move toward me, she reached her hand toward mine, but we weren’t close enough to touch. I screamed her name like a question, a plea.

The roar of the generator poured into the room, followed by a flood of light. Uncle Ernest backed away, his bloodshot eyes darting around.

Suddenly, Sister Bisi was there, her breath heavy from running up three flights of stairs. She snatched me from the floor with a strength I didn’t know such a soft body could contain. She held me against her, backed away from him. I clung to her while she dragged a sobbing Taiye out from under the bed and took us downstairs to her room. She locked the door and propped a chair under the handle so it wouldn’t budge, even when Aunty Funke banged and rattled it, shouting, “What is all this? What are you crying for?”

But Aunty Funke, she must have figured it out, because by morning she was sobbing quietly at the door. She knocked and said, “Abeg make I follow them talk.”

“Him don go?” Sister Bisi asked through the door, opening it only when she heard an arrested “Yes” from Aunty Funke.

Sister Bisi said to Aunty Funke, her voice soft but possessing unmistakable undercurrents of rage, “If I see am near this compound again, I go call police. E go better if you sef comot.”

Everything moved in molasses that day. I sat on Sister Bisi’s bed for several eternities. Aunty Funke left with Uncle Ernest. Taiye stopped shivering and fell asleep. I wailed in the bathtub while Sister Bisi poured warm water from an orange plastic bucket over my head, soaking my braids. I was engulfed in a pitch-black hollowness; it swallowed me whole. Ever since before our father died, since before our mother retreated far from us, I knew without a doubt that I would never be alone. My Taiye was my quiet partner, closer than my shadow, than my own skin. But on that day, I called her, and she hid.

“Taiye didn’t come out.”

I had nothing else to say.