Better Never Than Late Read online

  One night, they threw accusations at each other, flinging them with careless abandon, and she screamed at him to go, to take his clothes and leave. Fuck off and never come back! I’m done with you. I hate you! Go! Go! And he went. He packed a small suitcase and walked out, locking the door behind him.

  Oge had wanted to spend the rest of her life in bed, thought that she would, because what was there to do? CM, the health insurance company she worked for, was generous with her time off, and with a doctor’s note she could get as much time as she needed. I think you might find it useful to throw yourself into work, the doctor said, writing her a prescription for antidepressants. She binned the prescription. No amount of pills would take her pain away. And as for throwing herself into work, she did not know if she would ever be ready to walk back into CM. She had no desire to sit behind a desk sorting out claims. She could not stand the thought of seeing her colleagues, not even Sofie with whom she was friendly, and who had left her many messages asking if she could do anything, if she could help with anything. Oge did not call her back because what was the point? She avoided her friends. She did not want to hear the platitudes. What did any of them know about losing a child? On the day of Jordi’s funeral, a woman she knew from church had actually told her, I know how you feel.

  No, you don’t, Oge had snapped, turning her back on the woman.

  Sometimes at night, she wished for the comfort of something familiar, her old bed in Enugu, her mother’s jollof rice, her father’s hand in hers. One morning, she got up, dressed and walked to the travel agency on Gasthuisstraat and bought a ticket to Nigeria before she could change her mind. On the long plane journey from Brussels to Lagos, Oge tried not to think of an earlier visit, when Jordi was one. She and Gunter had taken him to Nigeria to visit her parents, bringing with them his favourite teddy bear at the time, a brown bear in a velvet waistcoat. They flew home without the bear and, in the years that followed, it had been forgotten, long replaced by other favourites.

  When Oge walked into her old room, the same room she had shared with Jordi and Gunter that holiday, the bear was on her bed. I wasn’t sure whether to—her mother began to say, but Oge shook her head to cut her off. This unexpected piece of Jordi was a sign that she had done the right thing coming here. She held the bear to her chest and kissed it as she would a child. And then she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried since Jordi died.

  As she walked home from the shop, she decided that, after baking Jordi’s birthday cake, she would take his presents and his teddy bear to the cemetery and come back home, turn the heating to the max, and get drunk. She would not think of Gunter, who had not returned her call. She would get through today by herself. But the thought of Gunter slithered in. She missed him. What was it her mother had said, two days ago? You and Gunter should be doing this together. You both lost a son. Whatever it is he’s done, forgive him. Her mother’s parting words at the airport. But what was there to forgive? She was no longer appalled by the fact that Jordi was cremated. So what if Igbo people do not cremate? her father had asked. Jordi was hers and Gunter’s alone. Her grief was hers and not that of the entire Igbo people. Do you still love him? She did.

  What if it’s already too late? What if he never comes back? she whispered to her father.

  Then you go to him, Oge. You ask him to come home.

  But why was Gunter so compliant? Why did he not resist? Why did he not put up a fight when she asked him to leave? What if it was because he was fed up with her? Maybe he had already met someone else? Her father calmed her fears. He left to give you room, he said. Faith as small as a mustard seed, Oge thought.

  She called Gunter yesterday as soon as she got in from Zaventem, tired from the overnight flight, and left a message asking him to call her back, please. We need to talk, she said. But he had not called back. What if he never did? What if he did only to say he was sorry but he’d moved on? In that case, she told herself, opening the door to the building, she would learn to live without him. Bereft. Hollow. Regrets. If her visit in Enugu had taught her anything, it was that time makes it possible to pick up and carry on. She, who never imagined returning to work, had her clothes ironed and was ready to go back in a few days. By the time she climbed the thirty steps to their front door Oge was worn out. She should have taken the lift but she had always had a fear of enclosed spaces.

  Gunter was in the house when she got in, as if her thinking of him had conjured him up. He was in the kitchen, doing the dishes she left behind this morning. She stood and watched him for a moment, and a part of her that was cold began to thaw. She thought of all the ways in which she loved him.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be silly, it’s your house too,’ she replied. As if it had not been three months since she kicked him out, since she was with him last, as if it were just another day. Her heart was racing and she tried to still it. She held out the shopping bag and the racing car she was still carrying. ‘For Jordi.’ She said it for something to say. She knew she did not have to tell him who the presents were for. Jordi, with his voice high and questioning: Mama, why are you brown? Papa, what does this word mean?

  With that mind, Jordi will surely be a scientist, Gunter said once. Jordi, with that mass of curls inviting you to bury your nose in it.

  With that hair, he’ll drive every woman crazy, Oge replied.

  She held the racing car out to Gunter like a peace offering. ‘Here, see? It’s remote controlled. Lights blink. Doors open. Everything.’

  Becoming Prosperous

  ‘So Yar’Adua goes to Israel on an official trip. He gets sick there and dies. His entourage is told, “Well, you’ve got two options. Your president was a Muslim and so must be buried quickly. We can bury him here at no cost to you since he was our guest or you can take his corpse home but that would cost a lot. Thousands and thousands of dollars.” Yar’Adua’s men beg for a few hours to think about it. Five hours later they come back to the Israelis. “Well?” The Israeli president asks. The head of the entourage clears his throat and says, “Your offer is very generous but we’ll turn it down. Thing is we all know the story of the famous someone, the son of a carpenter, who was buried here and who rose after three days. We don’t want to take that risk!”’

  The laughter bursts into the kitchen and Prosperous shakes more salt than she intends to into the simmering pot. It must be John telling jokes again. A raised voice says over the laughter, ‘This is an old joke. Yar’Adua’s been dead two years already. In any case, you’ve got it wrong. Muslims are not buried. They are cremated. For their sins, they are burnt. You’ve not told that story well.’

  John shouts the voice down: ‘You’re the one who is wrong! Cremation is forbidden in Islam.’ A shout breaks out in the room.

  Prosperous has had enough. She turns up the volume of the radio beside her so that the music playing fades their voices into the background. It is a cover of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, in a language she doesn’t understand, but soon she is humming along, tapping her feet to the beat, transported to another place. She is startled when she feels a hand travel down her neck. Agu.

  ‘Food almost ready?’ he yells above the music.

  She yells back, ‘Soon.’

  He rubs her back, plants a kiss on her forehead and moonwalks theatrically out of the kitchen. In the old days, they would have been doing this together: the cooking and the dancing and the kissing in between. Now, even when she asks, he says he’s too tired to help.

  In their second year of marriage, Agu had driven over six hundred kilometres from Onitsha (where he had been on business) to Jos, only to find Prosperous in bed with a fever. He had not been too tired then to help her, to nurse her, undressing her and carrying her to the tub to sponge her down. He had not been too tired to fry plantain for her, dismissing the maids because he wanted to look after his wife himself. ‘I am not delegating my duty as your husband to someone else,’ he had said, encouraging her to eat even though t
he fever coated her tongue with bitterness and snatched her appetite. When she threw up all over the tiled floor, not making it to the bathroom on time, he had gone outside and scooped sand from their front yard to soak up the vomit. He had cleaned it up and cleaned her up, all the time muttering, ‘My poor baby.’

  But things have changed and she misses those days, when nothing seemed impossible. What plans they had had when they first arrived. Prosperous laughs when she recounts—as she often does to her friends—the heady expectations of their early days. I thought they’d take one look at our degrees and offer us jobs on the spot. Company cars, a company house with a massive lawn, a butler and a chef. Agu never talks of those days. It is as if the weight of remembering is too much for him to bear, but Prosperous doesn’t want to forget. Remembering keeps her on her toes.

  ‘If I forget, if I cannot talk about it, I’ll think that this is all there has ever been, that I never imagined the possibility of something better,’ she told Agu when he scolded her for telling the story to a group of new friends.

  She exaggerates of course when she tells the story, mocking their expectations to remove the sting of their reality. We weren’t even offered a pot to piss in! At one of the job centres, the young man they saw asked them, Do you speak any Nederlands? Nee? Frans? Nee? They could not hope to get the kind of jobs they were after, working in a bank or teaching, if they spoke neither Dutch nor French. Ideally, he said, they would need both. Some German and some English would be useful too.

  Whenever she retells the story, Prosperous always ends with the same line: ‘Haba! All those languages and a teaching degree to be able to teach mathematics to a bunch of kids!’

  There are times, mostly at the end of the day, when Prosperous regrets that she did not rise to the challenge. Today, since the phone call with her parents, that thought has not left her head, so that even as she is washing the spinach to go in the egusi soup, she is having a conversation with herself. Look at Oge! I should have taken language lessons, gone for that teaching degree, refused to settle for this. She takes the spinach out of the sink and begins to chop. Instead, we let ourselves be defeated by the thought of going back to school, sitting through lessons to learn not one but at least two new languages. Which is perfectly understandable. No. It’s not. In fact, why can’t I do it now? She unwraps two bouillon cubes, drops them in a cup of hot water and begins to stir. Maybe not the teaching degree but… I could take language lessons at the night school.

  She stops stirring and a small smile begins to spread on her face. The way out has been there all along, why has it taken her hearing about Ifeatu to figure it out? Of course, the language lessons at the Athenaeum. She sees the reklame for them all the time. Affordable lessons at convenient hours. Why has it taken this call to make her see that this could be her way out? After all, she knows other success stories: the cousin who moved to Canada in the 90s with nothing but a BA degree in English and no work experience, for one. Now, that cousin is a professor in one of Canada’s top universities. Maybe they should have gone to Canada too. Once she said this to Agu and he reminded her that they had had no choice. Belgium had been foisted on them. But her working as a cleaner and Agu at a bread factory was not forced on them, she reminded him. ‘Go find me that office job that I refused to take and I’ll start today!’ he responded angrily. We shouldn’t have given in so easily. We should never have left. We would have been better off in Nigeria.

  And yet they—like many of their friends who visit every weekend—cannot return until they have made enough money, acquired enough material possessions, to be seen as successful. What would be the point of going back to Nigeria with nothing but the clothes on your back?

  Prosperous cannot remember now who told the story of some relatives who returned from somewhere in Europe after many years abroad with not even a car to their name. ‘They could not even afford to build a house! They were booed each time they showed their face at any family gathering, so they stayed away!’ Prosperous felt sorry for this couple she did not know but Agu said they should have known better. ‘Who goes overseas and returns with just the spittle in their mouth? I’d rather die!’

  The men will do anything but clean. ‘That’s a woman’s job,’ Agu said once when they saw a vacancy for a cleaner. It would kill him to do that and how could she have thought that he would? ‘Abi you want to turn me into a woman?’ In Nigeria, Prosperous reminded him, he had cleaned. Before they got maids, they had shared the chores. ‘But that was different,’ Agu said. ‘Remember the pinny game?’ he asked, smiling, cupping her buttocks. Prosperous did. On weekends, they cleaned together, naked save a cleaning apron. In their life in Nigeria, where they both earned enough to be independent, there had been no demarcation of chores, no women’s jobs or men’s. He would not have thought it insulting to be asked to do “a woman’s job”.

  The music has stopped and the radio is playing something else, a quiz show from the sound of it. She turns it down and is confronted once more by the voices of the men arguing. John is insisting that he is right but gets shouted down. ‘Why do you want to spoil a good joke?’ Agu asks. He has a beautiful voice. No. She corrects herself. He had a beautiful voice. Deep. Like Barry White’s. Meant for serenading (and indeed he had done a bit of singing before all this) but, these days, his smooth, deep voice has become gravelly and rough. It is, Prosperous thinks, like sandpaper rubbing against her ears. He always sounds angry even when he is not. When his tenderness slips through, the voice remains angry. But she has suffered too. They have all known better times. He must not forget that. She has suffered as much as he has. Gave up as much as he did.

  Why do they have to be so loud? she wonders, not for the first time today. Everything about them feels wrong here. Even the laughter, which is too expansive for the narrow flat; it might crack the walls and seep into the other flats and then what trouble they would have. Neighbours complaining of raucous laughter.

  And this talk about Muslims and burials. The joke does not amuse her. It feels inappropriate after what she and Agu have been through, these jokes about death. Have they not seen enough of it?

  The kitchen is hot and she wishes there were a window she could open. She feels like she is being slowly steamed like the moin moin she is cooking on the bigger burner.

  The men are laughing at another joke, but she has not been paying attention. She is thinking of Ifeatu and of language lessons and muting the voice in her head telling her that it is too late. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks! She heaves the bag of powdered yam out of the cupboard under the sink. In the beginning, she was unable to eat it, firm in her belief that the powder was not yam, could not possibly be yam, but was a combination of chemicals not fit for human consumption. She has no recollection of the precise moment she stopped noticing the taste. Or stopped noticing that the bananas lacked the sweet, rich taste of the bananas of her homeland. Or that her clothes are mostly polyester affairs from the Wibra on Gasthuisstraat.

  Her life has come to this. Her years of study have come to this. She has a degree in banking and finance from one of Nigeria’s finest universities and five years of experience working in a bank in Jos, going to work in power suits and climbing steadily up the corporate ladder. Sometimes, in her dreams, she revisits that life, but once awake she cannot recall it in detail. Her new life has superimposed itself on the old so that any clear memory of the former is impossible. It frustrates her that she cannot even recall with certainty, for instance, the exact colour of her office desk. Was it burgundy or black?

  It does no good to think like this, she chides herself, finally gathering enough courage to taste the soup she oversalted. Hmm, not bad. She stirs in the spinach and lowers the flame of the burner. She lifts the pot of moin moin off the burner and almost drops it from the heat. She wipes sweat off her forehead and makes a mental note to start defrosting the fish stew to go with the moin moin for those who might prefer it to the meat stew she has ready. She has also made soup and pounded yam for
those of them who, like John, cannot stand moin moin. This is her job: to anticipate the needs of Agu and his friends. How has she allowed her life to boil down to this: the anticipation of the needs of these men, as if they were her children?

  She remembers a story she and Agu listened to once on the BBC. A man comes home from work tired and hungry. He asks his wife for food, but there is none in the house—there’s a famine or something—she has forgotten the details. Not wanting to see her husband hungry, she cuts off a breast and feeds it to him. The next day the same thing happens. And while she’s clearing the table, the husband asks her why her shirt is all bloody. She tells him what she’s done and he says, ‘Great! Now we have to start on the children!’ Agu had laughed and said, ‘What a silly tale. Anyway, we do not have any children for me to eat!’

  In that blurry former life, Agu respected her job, her need to rest after work. She never felt that she was sacrificing her life for his. Weekends were spent in bed, talking about colleagues and dreams and whether or not to go Saturday-night dancing, and should they start having babies? They had maids. She did not need to do any cooking or any housework. Now, he invites people over every weekend, and she has to do all the work.

  Sometimes, she wonders what Joke would say if she told her that she, Prosperous, who now cleaned for her, had lived a life where she had people waiting on her hand and foot. Sometimes she thought of those maids and felt guilty at how she had taken their hard work for granted. But she shoudn’t feel guilty, should she? She treated her maids well. They ate the same meals that she did. She knew people who fed their domestic help gari and soup every day, who denied them meat and milk. So what if on many evenings, she came home, exhausted from work, and asked the two young girls to massage her feet. She was kind to them. She never beat them. She did not keep a special whip for them like their neighbours in Jos did for theirs. She bought them clothes at Christmas. She bought them shoes from boutiques, the same kind of shoes her friends with children bought their own flesh and blood. So what if the girls (how old had they been by the time they left, surely not older than fourteen?) had not been paid. The arrangement with their parents when the cousins were brought to Prosperous’s house in Jos was that she would put them through school, lodge them and feed them, and she had. She had nothing to be ashamed of, surely. Twice a year, when they drove back to the east for Christmas and the New Yam Festival in August, they took the girls along so they could visit their families. She gave them money then for their parents, and presents of sacks of rice and loaves of bread for their families back home. Yet, now, she often catches herself wondering why she could not also have paid them. She and Agu could have afforded it. It did not matter that many of their friends did the same thing. That it was normal. But it wasn’t really, was it? It was unfair.