Better Never Than Late Read online

  Prosperous watched Gwachi fuss over Hilde, holding her hands and kissing her repeatedly on the back of one hand, and she wondered if his exaggerated kindness was him loving her or compensation for the fact that he would soon be leaving her. He no longer spent Sunday evenings with Rapu. He had to be on hand, Rapu told Prosperous, to help out with the baby.

  ‘He-hee-he says once the baby is three… three months old, he’ll leave her.’ Rapu sounded like she no longer cared.

  One Friday morning in July, Rapu came to visit Prosperous. It was the first time she had come on a weekday. Agu was out and Rapu looked relieved to hear that.

  ‘My sister. I don’t want you to hear… to-to-to hear this from someone else. So I’ll tell you. My baby’s father is not my husband.’

  Her baby’s father? What was she talking about? Prosperous thought of Shylock’s untarnished reputation. She thought of how everyone respected his sense of integrity. ‘Shylock?’

  ‘Shylock? No!’ Rapu shuddered as if the thought itself repulsed her, and then laughed with her entire body, her merriment pouring forth into the room. ‘I met someone. I loh… love him. So now Gwachi can keep his oyibo wife.’

  ‘Does Gwachi know?’

  Rapu shook her head. ‘I’m not a bad person, you know? But I’m only hu… human. I tried. Every time I asked Gwachi how-how much lon-lon-longer it w-would be, he-he would tell me, “Soon. I don’t want to be cruel to her. She ha-ha-has been very good, very good to-very good to me.”’

  Prosperous said nothing and so Rapu said, ‘I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him and then I’ll lee… lee… leave him. He won’t be too sad my sister. He does not loo-loo-look too unhappy with Hee… Hilde.’

  Telling Prosperous must have been her trial run for telling Gwachi. ‘Today, I’ll tell him,’ she said, running out as if she feared she would lose her resolve if she stayed any longer.

  Rapu was already out the door before Prosperous, stunned into silence, got her voice back to ask who the father was, to ask who Rapu was leaving Gwachi for. She worried for Rapu. What would people say? How brave, though, she thought. How freeing it must be not to care what anybody thought, not to mind losing the close-knit community she had built up here, because who would still be seen with Rapu once the story became public?

  ‘I’ve got news,’ Agu shouted jubilantly, coming in almost as soon as Rapu left. If he were a dog, Prosperous thought, his tail would be wagging. Her own news could wait. ‘Gwachi has asked Hilde for a divorce. Today! He’s on his way now, as we speak, to give Rapu the good news!’

  Finding Faith

  This was one of the reasons Oge did not like to shop at this time of year: too many people, too much noise. Her hands were full, and she wondered at how very difficult it had been for her to make her selections; the tyranny of choice, she thought wryly. Many more hands would be useful. She struggled to hang onto the huge racing car with one hand while she picked up the plastic bag containing the Transformer, which had somehow slipped from her grasp.

  She had thought it would be fun to have a baby born close to Christmas, and used to tell Jordi what a lucky boy he was: three celebrations (and therefore three sets of presents) in one month: Sinterklaas on the sixth of December, birthday on the seventeenth, and Christmas on the twenty-fifth. Who’s the luckiest kid alive? she’d ask. Me! Me! Me! Jordi would reply. But shopping for presents was always a chore. The shops were full of people. The year Jordi turned two, she had tried to shop earlier to beat the holiday traffic but realised that many toyshops held off discounts until the beginning of December. At the prices they charged, Oge preferred to wait for the sales.

  Jordi had been planned, wanted and excitedly expected. All over the flat, signs of that expectation sprouted like mushrooms. Oge would go to bed and wake up to a new pram that Gunter had bought. Or Gunter would come in from a walk around the neighbourhood and find a teddy bear Oge had picked up. There was no concern then about the astronomical prices. Only the best for the baby who had already been named in utero by Gunter. Oge had preferred to wait until he was out to give him his middle name. An Igbo name, which her parents called him. Okwukwe. Trust. Faith. She could not name a child while it was still on its journey to the world, she told Gunter. You had to wait for that journey to end, to hold the baby in your arms and then find a name that summed up the totality of the experience from the pregnancy to the birth. A name that would suit, rather than burden a child. She told him of the friend of a friend of a friend in Enugu who named her daughter Beauty. But no one could call that baby Beauty with a straight face!

  Jordi had asked for a Transformer last year for his fifth birthday, and she had said no. Put her foot down. Been a strict parent. There’s no way I am paying that much for such a fragile thing! And all for what? Now she wished she had given in, given him the one toy he swore was going to make him the happiest boy ever in the whole wide world, Mommy! She remembered dragging him out of this same shop, telling him off for crying because she had said no. You are so spoilt, Jordi! And for that I swear to you, I’ll never ever buy you a Transformer. How proud she was of herself then, of how she had refused to give in to a five-year-old’s tantrum in a shop full of other shoppers watching. When she recounted the story to Gunter—who often accused her of being the more easily manipulated parent—she was again filled with pride. She thought of herself then as a parent who could be both firm and fun. One day, when you’re all grown, you’ll thank me for this, she had told Jordi.

  She almost abandoned her haul at the counter—a racing car with lights that blinked, a police car with a plastic cop inside it, a set of finger puppets, a Lego train set—when she saw running around in the shop, the way Jordi had once, a child of about the same age, curls like tendrils falling over his eyes the way Jordi’s tended to. At the beginning, she had seen Jordi everywhere she looked. Children whose features dissolved through her tears when she took a closer look and saw that they could not possibly be her son, there was no resemblance at all! She could not stand to be in the shop, watching the child who looked like Jordi appear and disappear through the aisles like a magic trick, but her resolve to get something for him won. Faith wins over fear, her pastor was fond of saying. Faith is steadfast. She had believed him.

  The weather was starting to grow cold. Outside, Christmas decorations hung above the street. How Jordi had enjoyed being out at this time of year, enthralled by the sparkles and the lights. His first Christmas, she and Gunter had taken him to the town square to witness the installation of a Christmas tree as high as a house. The cold air brushed her cheeks but she felt a sharp pain in her throat, burning like an open wound with pepper rubbed in it; an ulcer of the throat.

  If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, Move! And it shall move. The mountain will pick up and run! How many times had the pastor said this? Ministering to her over and over again. Faith is free. All you have to do is accept it. Accept faith and be healed.

  Back in Nigeria, and even here in Belgium before her life fell apart, she had had faith. It had come easily to her. In her first months in Belgium, when she suffered panic attacks and worried that she would never learn enough of the language to get a good job, this language with its aspirated g’s and solid r’s, her faith had seen her through. When, in her fourth month of pregnancy, she began to spot and feared she was losing her baby, her faith had seen her through. When Jordi appeared, healthy and beautiful after a long labour, filling the delivery room with his enthusiastic cries, his name had come to her. This, she thought, was the fruit of her faith. But when she needed it most—after Jordi’s accident, when she and Gunter began to argue and bicker and sleep in different rooms—her faith had been nowhere to be seen.

  Bereft. Jordi’s accident had hollowed her out. It had scooped out her insides like the flesh of an avocado. When the phone call came from his school, she had been getting ready to pick him up. She still had her lipstick in her hand when the phone rang and the school nurse, whose voice she recognised (Jordi ha
d his share of scrapes at school), said, Sorry, there has been an accident, Jordi is in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. He had never needed an ambulance before, so that fact in itself had panicked Oge. She had jumped into her car and driven to Sint-Elisabeth Ziekenhuis, not even thinking to send a a message to Gunter.

  Jordi will like what I have chosen, his presents from Sinterklaas, but only now did she remember that she also wanted to get him a pack of cards. No way was she going to return to the store. She was still shaken by the image of the boy who could have passed for Jordi. The cards would have been a good addition. A reminder of happier times. In the old days, she, Gunter and Jordi would sit around every evening playing cards, laughing at the faces they pulled at each other, everything as it should be. One happy family. She felt the burning in her throat again. She should have made a list. She was always forgetting things. Gunter used to find it endearing. My forgetful wife he used to say, laughing. My forgetful wife. One day you’ll forget your head. And then where will we all be? And she had laughed with him too. If anyone had asked her then to describe her marriage, she would have said it was one endless laugh. There were times in that previous life when she thought that she should have named her son Songoli. An excess of joy. For everything their life was.

  She had bought too many presents. Gunter always scolded her for spoiling Jordi. In their one-long-laugh marriage, this was the only point on which they disagreed. Children don’t need expensive presents, Gunter would say. You know how many mouths that can feed in Africa? She used to argue with him, tell him the only people with a social conscience were those who were brought up on plenty. I want my son to have everything I never had.

  But it doesn’t have to be expensive. Think about how much that is in naira.

  No. I won’t do that conversion because it doesn’t make sense. Are you going to stop buying beer because, whenever you convert how much you pay for it, it comes to lots of naira? Or your fancy wine?

  But today, if he were around, she would have no strength to argue with him. There were more important things on her mind. She still had to bake Jordi’s cake. Carefully mould the fondant stars and moon to go on it. Last year, Jordi wanted to help, getting under her feet as she baked. She shouted at him, said if he did not leave the kitchen, she would not bake his cake at all. Of course she had not meant it. Bereft and regret. Two words that complement each other. She was bereft, hollowed out, and where her flesh should be were regrets. Where her Okwukwe should be was empty. What has happened has happened, her father had said to her only days ago. What is important is what happens now.

  She had arrived too late at the hospital. A nurse had taken her to a room, flooded in light and the stench of antiseptic, and asked if there was anyone they could call. Oge had given Gunter’s number and asked if the nurse could take her to see her son. She had not understood the look on the nurse’s round face, nor had she understood when she said kindly, Let’s wait for his father to come. The doctor will be with you soon. Would you like some tea, some water?

  Six months it had been now. Six months to the day since first Gunter and then the doctor had come into the room, and the doctor said, We did all we could. It was really a freak accident. She did not understand, not immediately, but Gunter held his head in his hands and bawled like a child, and Oge rubbed his back, trying to get him to stop.

  It was later, much later—after the doctor and the police and the school headmaster had spoken to her and gone—that her brain was able to reassemble all their words into some sort of terrifying coherence. Jordi had been playing on the monkey bars in the school playground when his body became wedged between the bars. His ribcage was pressed tight and his lungs couldn’t fill with oxygen. How was it that she remembered these details? When she slept, she often had nightmares where she saw his feet dangling. She woke up every day and it still seemed impossible that Jordi was dead. That he would not grow to be the pimply hormonal boy who would break hearts.

  Gunter used to joke in the beginning that he was jealous of Jordi. My son has taken over and now you have eyes only for him. To prove that this was not true, she would make love to him and later they would both stand over Jordi’s crib and marvel at the beautiful creature they had made. They delighted in sharing titbits of what he had done, what he had said. His smile.

  Did you see that? He just smiled at me!

  I don’t think so. I think that was gas.

  No, it was definitely a smile. You’re just jealous. Jordi said Dada today!

  No, he said Mama!

  No way. Dada. I heard him loud and clear. Da! Da!

  There had been delight in their conversation, before. In the four long days leading up to the funeral, Oge stayed in bed, too numb to deal with the details. But that was no excuse, she told her father later when she could speak of it, for Gunter to have him cremated. I am Igbo. We don’t do cremations!

  He doesn’t know that, her father said, coming to Gunter’s defence. I am sure he did not mean to hurt you. You should talk to him, Oge.

  Just before Jordi was born, Gunter was on a train that derailed, killing two passengers. He escaped without even a scratch. Yet Oge had spent days afterwards crying, not from relief, but for the tragedy that might have been. I could never imagine being without you, she would often say and he would respond, And neither could I. She thought then that the worst thing that could happen to her would be losing him. That had been her biggest fear. That Gunter would die. In an accident. From an illness. From age (way in the future). And she would be left alone. Jordi would be both her comfort and the child she would have to console. The one who would be left behind when she went too. Faith outlives everything, she had believed.

  At the coffee table after the funeral service, when mourners filed into the restaurant of the crematorium, murmuring in low tones, filling the tables piled with ham and sandwiches and liver pâté and jugs of orange juice and shiny pots of tea and coffee, all she could think of was the impossibility of Jordi being dead and the cruel coldness of this send-off. She had watched the crematorium waiters in black, looking like undertakers, walking silently among the guests, asking Would you like water? and Shall I pour you some tea?

  At Gunter’s grandfather’s funeral years ago—her introduction to a Belgian funeral—the whole thing had seemed odd to her. Nobody cried, at least not loudly, in church. It did not matter that the man was almost ninety; in Nigeria, there would have been loud wails for him. Here, tears were contained by handkerchiefs dabbing at eyes. At the coffee table, a practice that in itself bemused her, Oge had been shocked to see Gunter’s mother and her siblings, whose father they had just buried, smiling, going from table to table asking their guests if they had enough to eat, to drink, as if the guests were the ones needing consolation and not they. They, the recently bereaved, would burst into laughter occasionally at something someone said. When I die, you’d better tell our children to cry for me the Nigerian way and to send me off the Nigerian way, she had told Gunter later. Or I’ll come back and haunt them all. She had only been half joking.

  And yet, when Jordi died, she discovered that she could not cry. Instead she watched as Nonkel Gust, Gunter’s great-uncle who everyone had thought would die two years earlier when he fell for the second time and broke a hip, gingerly lifted a croissant to his mouth. She watched him wipe off the flakes that stuck to his lips. He said, What a perfect croissant. Why was he alive, Oge wondered, and not Jordi? Why were all these people, old enough to be Jordi’s parents and grandparents (and great-grandparents even), still alive while her son was gone?

  The Belgian pastor, the same one who had only an hour before stood in the pulpit and talked of death not being final where people of faith are concerned, had given her a little encouraging smile. She scowled at him. She wanted them out. All of them. She wanted to shout and scream and ask for Jordi until Death itself heard and released him. She could no longer see through the tears that clouded her eyes but, as if in compensation, her hearing sharpened and all the voices assault
ed her. Such a pity… Poor kid… Lovely sandwiches… Try the chicken spread, it really is delicious… And the eclairs? Some bakers plaster on too much chocolate but this is just right!

  Oge could not bear it any more: these people, friends and family who had gathered to mourn with them, eating and talking with terrible normalcy. And Gunter! Gunter, who ought to hurt as much as she did, was at that moment bringing a sandwich to his mouth in the same relaxed way he did at the breakfast table. Jordi had only been dead four days. Her throat burned. She stood up, almost upending the table she was sitting at, said words she no longer remembered, and stormed out. Gunter ran after her, and managed to catch her by the wrist. Please, come back inside, darling. He knelt on one knee as if he were asking her to marry him all over again. She wrenched her wrist from his hand. You’ve got breadcrumbs all over your mouth, she said. Go back to your people. I hate all of you!

  That evening, she locked Gunter out of the bedroom. He slept on the couch. In the days and weeks that followed, Oge continued to refuse to sleep in the same room as him. She moved into Jordi’s room, curling herself into a ball to fit into his bed, screaming into the bedsheets that still smelled of him, trying to shut out Gunter’s voice pleading with her, asking her to get help, finding fault with her.

  Why don’t you get dressed? It’s afternoon already. You can’t be walking around in your dressing gown.

  Oge, wake up. You’ve been in bed the whole day.

  Oge, you shouldn’t be drinking alone. It’s dangerous.

  She hated the ease with which he had thrown himself back into life. Eating and drinking and seeing colleagues after work as if nothing had happened. She could not bear to go back to work. And could he stop with the damn talk about seeing a therapist? She did not need a fucking therapist to tell her how to deal with… with… She was unable to get the words out, but she felt them coalesce and form a fire that threatened to incinerate her. What does your therapist know about being a mother to a child who goes to school one day and never returns? I’ll drink as much as I fucking want to drink.