Better Never Than Late Read online

  She remembers being outraged when she discovered that a friend’s maid slept on the cold marble floor of her kitchen, and told her friend off. And yet when they left Nigeria, she and Agu simply sent the two girls who lived with them back to their families in Osumenyi without a thought as to how they would continue their education. But what could they have done? Brought the girls to Belgium with them? She treated them kindly, more kindly than most, so why this nagging? She wonders now, if they’d finished their education, would they be better off back home than she was here?

  The quiz show is over and the news is on. Here and there, she picks out a few words of Dutch but not enough to get a sense of what the journalist is saying. This frustrates her, especially today. The Prosperous of Nigeria would be ashamed of her. That other Prosperous would have mastered the language, made something of herself. It was a different life. She and Agu were equals. Here, surrounded by the odour of their losses, he feels the need to assert himself as a ‘man’. Now he orders her around in a voice that is also new. He tells her he wants babies. He is getting old. They should have children. Maybe four. A sensible, even number. ‘And where would we put the babies?’ she asks. In the closet? Their flat has a sitting room, one bedroom, one small bathroom and an even smaller kitchen, like a doll’s house. The hallway is narrow and will not hold a pram. Where would all their children play? Where would they learn to walk and run around?

  In their small bedroom, Agu holds her tight and empties himself in her. She does not always want to but she does not resist him because her body needs the comfort. And there are times when they make love and the old Prosperous and the old Agu slip out of their new skins and she imagines that they are back in Jos, and nothing has changed. ‘Are you on the pill?’ he asks. Each time she says no. The only response he wants to hear. The room is not big enough, the space is too limited, for any other answer. This place has not only shrunk her but has made her a convincing liar. In that way she has changed, too.

  She ladles soup into a huge bowl, careful not to be stingy with the gizzards (special discount from Gbolahan, who works in an abattoir) and stockfish (special discount from John, who helps out at the Oriental Shop when he is not working at a factory as an electrician on call). It helps to have friends in useful places, she thinks, dishing out the too-white pounded yam into a wide platter edged in a trellis pattern (bought second-hand from the thrift shop).

  When she was in secondary school, her form mistress began the term once by talking to the class about “intentional relationships”. ‘Learn to keep friends that can be as useful to you as you are to them,’ she told the class of thirteen-year-olds. Prosperous thinks of it now, how useful it would be if they were friends with Ali and Abdul who work at the thrift shop and could keep choice items aside for her. But even here, where it no longer matters, where it should not matter, they still keep away from Ali and Abdul. Nigerians too, but the wrong religion. ‘The Muslims,’ Agu would say when asked. ‘I keep away from the Muslims.’ As if the Muslims were a highly contagious disease.

  ‘You can’t blame Ali and Abdul for what happened in Jos,’ she tells him, trying to convince him to make an effort to return their friendship, the hellos thrown at him, hoping to elicit more than a tart response.

  ‘I can’t forget what they did to me.’

  Agu used to have a supermarket. On a street full of supermarkets, it was a testimony to his business acumen that his supermarket stood out above the rest. He said it was all down to strategic planning. It wasn’t anything he had picked up while studying for his accounting degree (although the degree helped); it was just that he knew how to place his products so that they caught the eye. The men’s deodorants with the chocolate bars so that a man who came in with his girlfriend for some chocolate was confronted with the deodorant he might need. At Eid-al-Fitr he presented his Muslim customers with clear plastic bags of ram’s meat dripping blood, for which they thanked him effusively. Yet when the riots started, that did not save him. Did not save his shop. The name marked him out as Southerner: Agu and Sons (there were no sons yet but surely those would come?). The supermarket was razed and he lost everything in one night. His investment. His will to live. There was no question of his wife continuing her job at the bank. She was marked too.

  They cleared their joint bank account to buy a passage out. No choice. The man who said he could help them out had only one country he could get them into. Belgium. ‘They don’t even speak English there,’ she complained, but for Agu it was enough that it was far away from Nigeria. ‘I don’t care if they speak cat. I need to get out of here,’ he said, eager to seek a new beginning. He has never been one to look back.

  She does not want to think of the charred corpses she saw the day after the riot. She does not want to think of the way human bodies sizzled like pork when they burned. She does not want to think of the trouble it took to get them here. Or of the lies they had to tell, the new identities they had to wear. Their passports say they are from Liberia and it occurs to her that, should she die, the authorities would probably contact the Liberian embassy. In all her years here, she has never even met a Liberian!

  She lifts the moin moin from the pot and places them in a round dish, a present from one of her employers. A lonely woman who tells her often, ‘No one gets my toilets as clean as you do. You are a treasure’. She knows how to scrub toilet bowls until they gleam. She exerts pressure on the brush and wipes the seat so clean that not a spot of dirt is to be found. She lifts the seat and wipes under it where trails of urine tend to hide. Her boss in Nigeria used to say that she was his most dedicated member of staff, nothing escaped her attention. And now, how easily she has transferred that dedication to toilet bowls and wooden floors. How she has adapted to this life she would never have imagined she would live. Cleaning and cooking and never asking for (or anticipating) help.

  She puts the food on a tray and carefully carries it out to the sitting room where the men are now playing a game of Whot. The men hardly look up from their game. When she returns with plates and spoons, all four drop their cards as if on cue and Emmanuel says, ‘At last. Smells delicious, nwunye anyi.’ Nwunye anyi, our wife. That is what she has become. “Wife” to whichever guest her husband invites home: cooking, cleaning.

  Her parents suggested that they move in with them while they looked for new jobs. ‘I am a broken man,’ Agu told her. ‘I cannot begin to pick up my pieces here.’ She would have liked to stay back, to try to find a job in another bank in the east—she had experience after all—but she imagined Agu, a bag of rattling bones unable to become whole again. Was her love for him not enough to start afresh somewhere else with him? Who was to say she could not make a career in the new country? He would just work long enough to regain everything he had lost in the north and then they could move back. It did not have to be permanent. ‘Darling, please,’ he said. ‘I can’t stay here. I’d die.’ What was love, after all, if not sacrifice? Prosperous thought and agreed to the move. If anyone asked her now if that sacrifice had been worth it, she would say no. That love that had brought her here, where was it now? The Agu for whom she moved to Belgium, where was he now? There were days when she felt as if someone had stuck a knife in her back and any sudden movement might kill her, and so she moved slowly and quietly like a ghost through her own home, building up the courage to pull that knife out once and for all.

  Since coming here three years ago, they have stopped talking about their work to each other. Agu working in the bread factory, transferring hot loaves from one machine to the other (at least that is what she thinks he does, she is not entirely sure), not making nearly enough to replace what he has lost. She says nothing about vacuuming floors and wiping windows, in light tones as if it did not matter, as if she found satisfaction in those menial jobs, as she had done at the beginning.

  The words they do not say fill the distance they keep from each other, except when there is fault to be found in this new world where roles are demarcated. When the food is not rea
dy on time. When the flat is not tidy enough. Or her voice is not “wifely” enough. Then Agu unleashes his frustrations on her. His hand connects to thump sense into her. And her hands find their way to thump him back. In this way too, they have changed. Afterwards he cries and says he is sorry but when a man works all night in a bread factory it changes him. He feels like his life is careening away from him, he says, and he has to find a way to regain control. ‘I am sorry, I am sorry,’ he says. She never says anything. She never says she is sorry for hitting back. She never absolves him. When the old Agu returns and he rubs her back and kisses her neck and moonwalks out of the kitchen and holds her tight while they dance at parties in Antwerp and Brussels and Bruges, she does not feel the smug satisfaction she used to of someone in love. Today, especially, she feels an impatience to begin another journey.

  ‘Our wife!’ someone shouts. ‘Our wife! Bring us another glass, please.’ Prosperous pretends not to hear although the flat is so small there is no way she could not have heard.

  The phone call with her parents earlier in the day is playing on a loop in her head. ‘How is work?’ her father asked.

  ‘Fine. Doing well.’ Her parents have never asked her what she does but she knows that they assume that both she and Agu are doing the sort of jobs where they sit behind desks.

  ‘I saw Ifeatu,’ her father said. Prosperous could hear the excitement in his voice before he said, ‘She’s running for governor of Enugu State! Your friend could be our governor!’

  Prosperous’s mother shouted in the background, ‘Hasn’t she called you yet?’

  Suddenly, the phone grew so heavy in Prosperous’s hand that she could no longer hold it up. She was happy for Ifeatu, her roommate and friend at university, who had spent many weekends with her family. Ifeatu would spend the evenings after dinner discussing politics with Prosperous’s parents with a passion that Prosperous herself did not share. It was not that she was not interested in politics, but she thought that Ifeatu was too interested. Back then, Ifeatu used to tell anyone who would listen that she would become the president of Nigeria one day and she would make Prosperous the Accountant General of the Federation.

  ‘From all indications, her party is going to win!’ her father said and the pride in his voice was a dagger in Prosperous’s heart.

  She is happy for her friend but she knows that if Ifeatu called her now, she would not answer. She would not say that she is jealous but she needs time to get over how far apart their lives have drifted. If Ifeatu could chase her dreams, why can she not? They were both ambitious as undergraduates.

  ‘Prosperous! Another glass, please.’ It is Agu this time. Prosperous ignores him. You can walk to the kitchen and get it yourself! You have legs.

  It’s decided. Tomorrow, she will register for Dutch lessons. She does not care how long it takes, she will master this language. I have sacrificed enough! She knows from Joke that the VDAB runs courses at little or no cost for the unemployed. Once Prosperous has enough proficiency in Dutch, she will register for one of those. Maybe a course in graphic design? Develop that artistic side of hers that she has not yet had a chance to explore. Maybe a course in bookkeeping? Something closer to her original degree. Maybe try something completely new, do something radical: study to be a printer. Or a mechanic. Why not? She has always liked cars. How she used to enjoy it when her father let her tinker with his car engine, how much pride she took in being asked, at the age of nine, to help change the car oil. The possibilities are endless.

  ‘Nwunye anyi?’ a voice yells from the sitting room.

  ‘Prosperous!’ Agu yells at the same time.

  ‘Fuck off!’ Prosperous shouts back.

  Everyone Deserves Grace

  Agu met Prosperous on a Friday night. By Tuesday, he’d called his father and told him he’d found the woman he would marry. He had only been half joking, after all, he didn’t know her well enough. But on the Sunday after they met, they had gone out for a meal together. He had felt relaxed around her, as if he had known her since birth. At the end of the evening, when his car wouldn’t start, she had asked to take a look at it for him. ‘Don’t call a mechanic yet, let me.’ He had thought that she was joking and had burst out laughing. She asked him to switch on his headlights. He humoured her. The lights came on strong and bright. She opened the bonnet, asked him to get a stone. ‘I probably need to dislodge the kick-starter,’ she said. When next she asked him to turn the ignition, he did with little expectation—even though he had been impressed that she knew what a kick-starter was—and so the engine revving disarmed him. He sat in the car like one hypnotized even after she’d closed the bonnet. ‘Told you!’ she said, when she came round to his side of the car, giving him a boastful wink, smiling the easy smile of conquest. He thought he understood now what was meant by being swept off one’s feet. She was an undertow, pulling at him. Everything about her, from the fire in her eyes to the mole between her eyebrows thrilled him.

  ‘Thanks, that was… incredible.’ She was incredible. Extraordinary. Magical. He couldn’t stop the thoughts invading his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking how lucky he was to have been introduced to her by a mutual friend. He came out of the car and stood in front of her.

  ‘I’d like to do this again,’ she said.

  ‘You’d like to peer into the engine of my car?’ he asked and they both laughed. When he leaned in to kiss her on the cheek, she took his face in his hands and kissed him on his lips.

  He was thinking of that now as he pushed pallets of bread to the Lidl vans waiting outside. The remembrance made him smile. His nine-hour shift at the bread factory was almost ending. The city was stirring but his night began in the morning. He wanted nothing more at that moment than to go home, sneak into bed and make love to his wife, love her back into the woman she had been in Jos who had told him that his hands were magic. When they made love these days, she lay unpliable underneath him, immune to his hands. It broke his heart each time, and he wished then, that he could love her a little less. If he did not love her, if he still did not find her attractive, if she did not still pull at him, he could have given up on the lovemaking completely. But he could not live with her and not have her. It felt to him, more than ever, that she had already checked out and he was playing catch up. And after yesterday, after what he had done to her, how could he ever, ever hope to bridge the gap?

  He had felt like that—playing catch up—when they first started dating. He wouldn’t say that he had found her intimidating; he loved her confidence, the way she walked into a room and owned it, but it bothered him more than just a little that they came from opposite worlds. The first time they visited her parents in Enugu, and he had seen how she grew up, his old insecurities had come flooding back. He saw Prosperous’s old room with its own desk and chair (‘I remember going to choose those,’ she told him), sat in Prosperous’s parents’ sitting room with an old colour TV (‘They’ve had that TV since I was a child!’) and felt again like the 8-year-old child in Okpoko, Onitsha whose father was too poor to buy a television. No, not that 8-year-old, he corrected himself, because at that age, he had been surrounded by people who lived like him and hadn’t realized that they were poor. He remembered days with the other TV-deprived neighbourhood boys his age outside, “driving” by rolling discarded tyres with sticks. Agu remembered his father telling him about his mother, with whom he had been so in love that after she died giving birth to Agu, he never remarried.

  ‘No woman will ever come close to your mother. She was an angel,’ he always said, so that Agu imagined his mother dressed in the boubou she wore in the photograph of her on the wall of their living room (which was also where he and his father slept) with huge wings fanning out each side of her.

  At 12, Agu had earned a scholarship to CKC, Onitsha, one of the nation’s top schools. And it was there that it dawned on him that there were others, young people like himself, who led lives he could never have conjured up. There were the Lagos boys, students whose families lived
in the megacity and who always stuck together. The way they walked, the way they talked, the way they spoke about the city evoked reverence in the rest of the students. Those Lagos boys were easy to spot: Obi, Kayode, Kanene in his year. Kayode’s father was the pastor of First Baptist Church where US President, Jimmy Carter, visited in March 1978 on his trip to Nigeria, just five months before Agu began his first year at CKC. Kayode had a picture with Carter, which earned him the nickname, Carter Keteke. They talked about horse riding at the bar beach, swimming at Eko Club, watching cricket at Kings College (where Carter Keteke said he’d tried to get into but didn’t score high enough for and CKC was the next best thing). Obi’s father was someone high in Obasanjo’s government and was a member of Lagos Yacht Club. He’d tell anyone willing to listen about sailing on the Yacht with his family to Sea School Island and Tarkwa Bay and having parties in his house where young boys like them drank “33” Export Lager beer. They talked of Fanti carnival and dancing to live bands. It seemed like a different world, not even in the same country that Agu lived in. Agu and his fellow Onitsha boys were mesmerized by those tales. Or perhaps, it was truer to say that he was, because there were levels to the local boys. There were people like Enoch, Ndubisi, Eloka and Obidigbo who lived in GRA and for whom Lagos did not hold the allure it did for him. Eloka’s mother was American and for that, even the Lagos boys respected him. When Carter Keteke sighed and said ‘Ah, Lagos never sleeps! Onitsha is just too tame!’ Eloka shut him up promptly by asking if Lagos’s restlessness could be compared to that of New York. Carter Keteke might have taken a picture with Jimmy Carter but Eloka had walked the streets of the US capital and of New York. But America was too far away to dream of, too abstract to make sense of, and so Agu seized on Carter Keteke’s words, tailed him and his mates, took their jabs at his “Onitsha bush ways”, laughed with them when they called him Okoro Feeling Funky and swore that one day, he too would visit Lagos, he too would be rich and have adventures worth talking about. His children would be pampered. What his father could not give him, he would give his children.