Soulay enacts my mother’s terror for us, shivering and quivering as she backed away. We watch him with glassy eyes, breathing hotly through open mouths. No shuffling. No sniffing. No nose picking or scab scratching. And afterwards we ponder the information with delighted disgust and sated bloodlust.
She refused to call the man’s name.
Now she claims her confession was falsely given. The elders looked at each other and around. One peered through empty spectacle frames. Another swatted himself with an animal tail, encased at the anus point in an ivory handle. Together they looked down at her — this woman neck deep in woman trouble. How could it be so?
An afternoon, when the new house was nearly completed, my father called her and told her he wanted to bathe. She replied she would fetch water. But he shook his head. No, he said, down to the river. The two of them, together. Her husband never bathed in the stream. That was the place for children and unmarried men, men without wives and daughters.
It was the hour before darkness. The river was quiet. She agreed to his request. What else to do? In the water he stretched out, swimming off into the deep. He called to her to follow. She was nervous; reassured by his voice. A game, perhaps? His manner suggested playfulness and appealed to the part of her that was curious and eager as one who had never been favoured.
Imagine her:
Fingers pull at the sodden knot of her lappa, she lets it unwind and float on the surface of the water.
At first she thinks little of the firmness of his grip, the finger digging into the flesh of her arms. Her nervousness, the current. Together they swim to the other side, far from the houses. A tenth wife. Alone with this man, who is her husband. Confused. Growing less hopeful that this behaviour is the manifestation of a sudden ardour.
Can’t swim. Naked. And in deep water. Points her toes downwards like a dancer — and still can’t feel the bottom. Just reeds tickling her toes like a water spirit’s fingers. A leaping in her guts, panic straining to be freed. And only his grip — painful on her upper arm — keeps her from taking in gulps of water. Meanwhile darkness steals across the water.
Imagine him:
A husband who feels his age. Righteous, yes. Indignant, somewhat. He wishes he’d never been told the rumours. If she had been one of the more senior wives, and discreet, the other wives might have made arrangements. Now it was already too late. And there was the man himself to consider. It went beyond what was obvious.
And so he pulls her out of sight into the darkness under the mangroves. He confronts her with what he knows, repeats the talk. She had been seen. They had been overheard. And he demands a confession, there and then. And she, with her toes pointed down and her chin tilted up, grabbing breaths as fast as she can. She confesses.
The court imposed a fine for woman damage.
The elders of the court saw this was a time to be firm, to teach a lesson to those young men who could not afford wives of their own. But they were too quick to make an example of the Cement Man.
And my father — he overplayed his hand, he underestimated his tenth wife.
We went with her. At first we moved around. We stayed with my mother’s mother in her house in the town, a house built on stilts. The house of treats, where a pot of tea warmed on the sideboard all day long, where my grandmother let us play with her hair and sleep in her bed at night and gave us little sips of condensed milk. More than once our mother left us for a few days.
All the time I waited to go home. I have forgotten now the moment when the consciousness flowered. It happened out of sight, like a night bloom. Closed one day and open the next. We were never going home. I was a child. It was not for me to ask. No. You overhear a little thing here, another thing there. And some things you pick up when you are a child, you only really understand when you become an adult.
At some point I came to understand all of it: the travelling, the boarding, the buying and selling; all of this was so my mother could pay her bride price back. To free herself from our father.
A long time later I was standing underneath the cold neon light in a supermarket. Around me people were opening boxes of eggs, checking the shells for cracks. In my hand I held a box of half a dozen. A fat man with a beard dressed in blue one-piece overalls like a giant romper-suit swung into me. The carton spun upwards into the air, the eggs exited six ways. The fat man tried to catch them. He was surprisingly quick and snatched an egg out of the air. The shell broke in his hand. We were both left standing there. Bright yellow yolk and transparent mucous slid from his fingers. I found some tissues in my bag. We stared at the mess on the floor.
‘Leave it,’ he said. ‘They’ll get it.’ Waved his wiped-clean hand. Stepped around the mess.
We deliberately both walked away from it and from each other in opposing directions. And as I walked away I felt a shiver, a sensation of hot and cold, of some strange suppressed panic.
I travelled away, in a direction I didn’t want to go, backwards in time. For a long while the memory was gone. Only the feeling was left.
Back then we travelled east with a hot-metal smell in our nostrils, crouched on the floor of a mammy wagon, playing with tiny metal ball bearings, racing them up and down the floor. Yaya and I, we want to stand up and feel the hot, gummy wind in our faces, sit on the sides of the lorries like the young lorry boys lizardeyed in sunglasses, who perch with their backs to the cab, and sometimes crane over to talk to the driver through the open window. And never fall or have to steady themselves with undignified abruptness. Even when the truck drives over a pothole. Or lurches to a stop and the women all clutch at their leaping bosoms, and at the same time check the damp wads of cash strapped below their breasts. I want to stand up and reach up to catch the passing branches who nod their approval as we speed by.
I have never even seen a truck before, but I am fearless. In a very short time we two newly superior beings snigger at the foot travellers who drop their loads and flee into the bush at the approach of her stampeding wheels and roaring engine.
At the roadside a man is selling watermelons. The truck stops and people climb down. Some of the young men light cigarettes. The woman next to us asks me to mind her bundles and trots off into the bush, hitching up her skirt as she goes. The men wander beside the road, turn their backs, as though moved to contemplate the way we have just come. I walk over to look at the fruit stacked in a pyramid taller than I am. My mother comes up behind me and buys a melon from the vendor who breaks it open for us, pushing the point of his knife into the skin and forcing the flesh apart. And we eat slices of it with our faces turned to the wind, the pale pink juice drying sticky on our chins. And save the smooth black seeds and flick them out of the moving truck one by one.
Later we pass a bus with a broken axle, sliding sideways like a crab caught on the edge of the surf. We leave it far behind as we roll on past shanty towns of scrap metal and tin into the unknown. And there we arrive coated in dust, like we have been rolled in flour and readied for frying. And when I blow my nose the snot comes out red and thick.
At night the cockroaches drop from the ceiling of the rented room. And in the morning we find them lying upside down under the beds. And I sweep them out and wonder, do they fall from the ceiling already dead? Or do they faint trying to walk upside down and bash their brains out on the floor? Behind thin cotton curtains six other cots are partitioned off like separate states. They are empty. The town keeps nocturnal hours.
In the early hours of the morning the bursts of music, the shouts and the coarse laughter steal into my dreams. I lie wedged between my brother and my mother, our bodies stuck together with sweat.