Sitting outside his
front yard, choking from the air saturated with generator exhaust
fumes. Legs itched from sand fly bites. It was night, the moon was out
and his arms around me. Watching the moon as it sat immaculately above
the sterile air of the estate, homes stretched identically across long
terraces, forming lanes of what had been labelled peculiar street
names. His was Turbine Close. Each house stood tall and painted with a
cream emulsion lacking even more character than its residents. Everyone
here was an oil giant and investment magnate. So they felt no inkling
to know their neighbours.
The roads were bare
by day and even drearier at night. There were no sounds of children,
chuckling of babies or laughter of lovers. A darkness that spread like
melting butter or at times dead souls trapped and searching for a
heaven or a hell. That was the taste and smell of turbine close.
Still bound together by the asphyxiation of the black smoke, in a light whisper he uttered in my left ear, “I love you.”
He told me he
always remembered every event in his life with a song. I asked him what
my song was. With his toothy grin and his brown pupils permeating into
mine, he said “Roxanne”. It was the song we danced to the day we met.
Tonye’s birthday party. My body was draped in a blue silk dress and my
lips coated in a scarlet red. That night I danced like a whore.
Gyrating my hips and bottom as though it has been disjointed from the
top half of my body, sweat made the silk stick to my skin and I felt
almost naked. That same nakedness I would later feel every time his
eyes skimmed all over me. In our almost bare living room, when he would
hold my waist in a tender grip and sing the cadence of the song into my
ear as the hairy stubble on his cheek rubbed and scraped mine. Again he
would whisper “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red
light…Roxanne…”
While the song
played, he would roam his fingers through my back and then cusp my
breasts in his gritty palms. He would rub and squeeze lightly as I let
out a moan and would start to breath heavy. It was as though I didn’t
intend to make the noises but his palms, fingers and lips instilled a
kind of pleasure that I had no right to refuse. He let himself inside
of me with an air of experience. Gently, but thrusting with life and
vigour. As I closed my eyes, I would feel his breath meander all over
me. And the warmth was telling me that I would be taken care of.
We would lay on the
large brown velvet sofa as the magnolia walls stared audaciously
without blinking while Sting’s voice and reggae rhythm guitar would
reverberate around the room saying, “You don’t have to sell your body
to the night, Roxannnnne.”
I had a little too
much to drink that night and somehow the sound that blared from the
speakers seemed even more elevated. As the thump echoed through the
room, I hoped he would save me from all the lecherous men that wanted a
dance but instead he watched delightfully at my predicament. He would
rescue me from the corner outside the rest room where a young man in a
navy suit flicking the ash of a Dunhill stick was trying so desperately
to chat me up. He walked over towards me and the suited gentleman,
pretending we had known each other for a while and I quickly excused
myself from my smoke puffing admirer. As we walked towards the bar he
revealed a cheeky smirk, saying, “You are quite interesting to watch”.
Then I turned towards him crippled with a culmination of embarrassment
and shyness, I replied hesitatingly, “You really took your time to come
to my rescue”.
We stood at the bar
and we talked for a time. He was fifty-four and I had just turned
thirty. Throwing complements at his intelligence and well roundedness
he would claim he was old so his intellectual competence was a thing of
default. He was an architect and used to teach Space Management and
Sustainable Design at a University in Chicago. It had been ten years
since he had moved back to Lagos, running an architectural consultancy
firm which he named Sebastian Cole Limited after his grandfather who
moved from Freetown to Lagos in the 30’s to run a textile mill.
He was tall and his
cheeks sagged a little. You knew he must have looked cute and those
cheeks must have been pulled so much as a child. His eyes were round
with a little bulge. They seemed like they would turn red at the
slightest irritation. That same little bulge extended to his stomach.
He was old enough so it was permitted. His skin had a dark caramel
tinge to it and wisps of grey seemed to be sheltered within the mass of
hair covering his head and jaw line.
He said he would
like to see me again and asked if I wanted to go out for a drive. We
drove around in his glistening black Megan, then we settled on going
back to his place in Lekki.
His house had
windows the size of walls and there was no ceiling in the living room.
There was a sunroof that gave way for the moon shine. He said there was
an automatic makeshift cover for when it rained. And the open plan
kitchen was covered in a shiny stainless steel. I roamed my fingers
across the steel table top and the coldness felt inviting. Somehow, I
knew I would like it there.
A spiral stairwell
at the side of the dining area led to three bedrooms on the next floor.
It reminded me of a house I once saw watching Grand Designs, and the
space seemed to engulf us both. I gulped the glass of water he offered
as my throat was parched from thirst while he topped up his thick
rimmed short tumbler with whisky and oddly shaped ice cubes. As I
looked intently at the contents of his oak bookshelf, I knew I would
spend the rest of my life with this man twenty-something years more
advanced than I was. Stacks of compact disks looked at me seductively
from the fourth row. Miles Davis, Cassandra Wilson, Herbie Hancock,
Wynton Marsalis, Bradford Marsalis and Lena Horne. “I’m sure you are
wondering why I don’t have any Charlie Parker, I find his sound a bit
cacophonic,” he said. I loved Charlie though, the mutinous sound of his
trumpet, and his composition that made me feel that jazz was allowed to
be as exhilarating as it could be angry. The first row was filled with
history. East Timor, The Partition, The Third Reich, Mussolini,
Livingston, Rhodesia, The Berlin Wall, Biafra, Madam Tinubu, Castro,
Chairman Mao, Mein Kampf, Nagasaki and Pinochet.
He would teach me about the world I was in and the one I would inhabit.
That night we
didn’t go to sleep. He told me about Rome and Vienna, Vermeer and
Gaudi, the Aztecs and the Medici. He told me how the Anglican cathedral
in Marina started to shape his world at the age of twelve. He was
mesmerised by its high ceilings and Grecian columns and when the
organist played during the church services on Sundays, it seemed as
though the buildings had a strange kind of life to it.
Somewhere
in-between his Diego Riviera and Onobrakpeya pieces hanging on the
spaces of magnolia walls, whatever it was I thought I knew was to
become obsolete.
Twelve months from
that day, we would invite a few of our friends and family to that
living room on Turbine Close. I was draped in a cream silk dress that
was held up with flowery rushing from my left arm across my right
shoulder to the back of the dress. The chest area would be stiffened
with hidden corset bones as my skin glared iridescently from the sun
coming through our windows and roof. The silk of this dress was loose
and billowy. My hair was curled in loose ringlets as it caressed the
nape of my back and the parting on the right side was covered in
hibiscus flowers. My lips had been dipped into the same scarlet red of
the day that he met me and the lids on my eyes thinly lined with liquid
coal. He leaned towards my cheek as he slid the ring down my finger and
in his staccato whisper he said, “Now I have my own Aphrodite”
Two years later,
our daughter would be born. We would call her Hera because her father
had a preoccupation with Greek and Roman mythology. He had told me our
next child if a boy would be Eros or perhaps Odysseus or even Orpheus.
He still seemed undecided but if a girl, then Rhea or Juno. Hera had
her father’s slightly bulging eyes and my full, heart-shaped lips. She
had a dimple on her left cheek and her skin wasn’t as densely
caramelised as her father’s, but neither was it as fair as mine. She
was born with a full head of thick, black, coarse hair and the
umbilical cord was wrapped around her neck, almost suffocating her. It
was why her father’s mother had named her Aina.
She was a solemn
baby but grew to be a precocious child. Pulling out worms from our
backyard then moving on to torturing caterpillars and hibiscus flowers.
She read stories to her teddy bears in the shed her father had built in
the same backyard. She often went on trips with him to Uguta and Ogoja
to watch him around some of the windmill and solar panel projects he
was working on. Some of the state governments had been put under
pressure by international bodies to attain some kind of progress with
the Millennium Development Goals, especially the environment. That
year, just after the elections, the federal government had approved a
billion dollar budget spread across certain states and catchment areas
for the sole purpose of sustainable energy projects. His firm had been
contracted to be project managers.
Hera took a lot after her father and always liked him to take her to school most days.
They would have conversations like adults negotiating and most times she spoke like she was the madam of our manor.
I remember when he
used to watch her chuckle till she fell asleep in her cot and then
place a dictaphone to record the grunts and noises she made in her
sleep. When she had a cold he would slick her chest in camwood oil and
when she had a fever it was palm kernel oil. She hated the smell of
both, and couldn’t understand why palm kernel oil had to have that ugly
dark colour.
She only liked the
smell eucalyptus oil when I squeezed drops onto her pillow if she
looked worn out from playing or had a headache.
He would cuddle her when in one of her moods or when she had to take injections at the hospital in Victoria Island.
During the school
holidays, he would watch her run around the house because he was
getting older and his legs were beginning to fail him. Hera was as
attentive as her father and as intense as me. They would sit on our
brown sofa watching DVD box sets of Dexter and Peanuts. On Sundays,
they would watch The Simpsons. It was their own tradition.
She would squint
and contort her lips as she concentrated, the same way she did when she
watched wildlife programmes narrated by David Attenborough on cable
television. “Daddy, why is this… daddy, why is that…” she would
ask, barraging him with question after question. But patiently with
intermediate pauses in his sentences, he would answer every single one.
Twelve months, two years and another twelve years after he took his
last breath laying next to me on our living room floor gazing at the
moonlit sky, though our glassy roof, I hear Odysseus rummaging for some
juice in the fridge, Hera taps away at her computer on the dining table
and I am hearing Roxanne playing in my head as a hairy cheek caresses
mine in that staccato whisper, “I love you.”
