Ms. Tia nods her head, real slow. “It doesn’t matter,” she says as she turns around and walks far into her compound. I follow her until we reach her kitchen back door. She didn’t make to enter, so I stand there, the early-morning grass like a carpet of crushed ice under my feet.
“You haven’t got shoes on,” Ms. Tia says. “It’s chilly.”
“Your face,” I say. “Is it paining you?”
“I will be fine,” she says.
“Rub palm oil on your face every day. In no time, it will vanish. Then your skin be like a baby’s own again.”
She pulls me and gives me embrace so quick, I shock. “Thank you,” she says. “You are one brave girl.”
“What did the doctor say?” I ask, whispering. “When he saw your face, what did he say?”
Ms. Tia put her hands on her face and scrape her cheeks up and down as if to scrape away the stain of the memory. “He and his mother had a big fight. He accused her of hurting me. She said she was only trying to help. He told her she can’t help, and he asked her to leave our home. When she left, he told me that the bath is useless, and that he—” She draws a breath, her chest climbing high. Then she begins to talk real fast, and her words are running inside theirselfs and almost confusing me.
“He cannot get me pregnant,” she says. “His mother didn’t know. He didn’t tell anyone. Ken is infertile, unable to— That’s why his ex, Molara, left him, why he started to help other families, I think, because he knows what they are going through. He said because we’d briefly discussed not having kids, he didn’t think he needed to tell me he . . . Shit. Shit!” She kicks the back of the door, it shoots out, makes a bang on the wall. “Shit!” she says again, and when she starts to cry, I know she is not really needing the toilet.
“He didn’t tell you this before you married him?” I say when she slows her cry and presses her finger to her eyes again.
“I had no idea,” she says, her voice sounding like she put her throat in a blender, grind it with sand. “If I had known, we could have sought alternatives right from when we decided to start trying. At first he didn’t tell me because he didn’t think I needed to know, and then when we discussed having kids, he was afraid I would leave him if he told me, and I honestly don’t know how I feel about that.
“And as if I hadn’t had a crappy enough day, I got a call at midnight. My mum’s infection is back. I’m going away for a few days. I leave first thing tomorrow.” She sighs. “Maybe that’s a good thing. It’ll give me a chance to process everything.”
“Tomorrow will be better than today,” I say with a soft smile. “Not so?”
She coughs out a dry laugh. “I wish I could get those women arrested,” she says. “That barbaric act must stop. It’s bullshit.”
“Very bullshit,” I say, even though I am only knowing of cowshit and goatshit.
Ms. Tia laughs again, dips her hand inside her pocket, and brings out tissue. She blows her nose as if she wants to uproot it, then smash up the tissue and throws it into one white dustbin behind me. “I will try and stop by at Ocean Oil office as soon as I get back, to check the list, to see if the results have been published.”
I feel the words escape from Ms. Tia’s mouth, feel them hang like a cloud over my head, feel them drop down, cover my spirit, and drag me to somewhere far, somewhere like a dream. “And what if I enter?” I whisper. “How, what will I tell Big Madam?”
She focus her eyes on the space behind my head. “I will do the talking. I will tell her you got a scholarship and that you have to go.”
“And what if . . .” I am afraid to say it, but I try: “What if I don’t enter?”
“Adunni?”
“Yes, Ms. Tia?”
“Yesterday I tasted your normal,” she says, picking up my hand.
“My normal?” I ask. “How it taste?”
“I read your essay, Adunni,” she says. “You’ve been through so much, so bloody much, and yet you always have a smile, you cheeky thing, you always have a damn smile on your face. When I got flogged in that church, I felt a fraction of—” She drops my hand, drawing another breath to steady herself before she picks my hand again. “I felt a fraction of what you have had to endure for months. I tasted your normal, Adunni, and I have to say, you are the bravest girl in the world. And all this bullshit happening to me, that’s nothing compared to what you’ve been through. Nothing.”
My throat is a rock, a rock filled with water, with something else that I don’t know what it is.
“My own bloody marital issues aside, I’ll be back in about a week, and when I do, I will go and find out if you got it. If you did, I will get you enrolled. We will go shopping and buy every single thing you need to make you comfortable. And when you do get in, I will come visit you every time I get a chance. I will stand by you and support you in every way I can. I know it will be tough to get your madam to agree, but I will fight her with everything I have, every single resource. I will get her bloody arrested if I have to. This is your chance. You worked hard for it. Nothing will take it away. And to answer your question: If”—she hold my hand tight—“if, God forbid, you don’t get selected, I will figure out something for you. You cannot continue to stay with Florence. No way. I just need time to figure something out, but let’s wait and see what happens with the scholarship first, okay?”
I nod my head yes, and I am wanting to say thank you, but the tears are coming from my eyes and I am wanting to catch it with my hands, but she is gripping my hands so tight, the tears are sliding down my cheeks and down my neck and inside my dress.
CHAPTER 49
Fact: Despite the creation in 2003 of the National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons, to tackle human trafficking and related crimes, a 2006 UNICEF report showed that approximately 15 million children under the age of 14, mostly girls, were working across Nigeria.
Kofi is catching sleep in the backyard when I get back to Big Madam’s house.
He is lying on a bench, his white chef-cap folded on his eyes to block the early-morning sun, and with his two hands across itself on his chest, he is resembling a dead person that is waiting to enter mortuary.
“Kofi?” I say and clap my hand two times. “Are you sleeping?”
“No, I am swimming,” he says. “In the ocean.”
He slaps the cap to the bench, pushes himself up. “Abu has been looking for you. He’s getting frantic. Says he has to see you about something. What is it? And where did you run off to?”