Blackass (13 page)

Syreeta arrived in the rain. As was usual during a storm, the power had gone, and Furo was stretched out on the settee, not asleep but drifting there, lulled by the drumming on the roof and the wind whistling outside the windows. He started upright when he heard the key in the lock. The door banged open, Syreeta rushed in, turned around in the doorway to close her umbrella and shake water from it, then kicked the door closed and bent down to rest the umbrella against it. She was barefooted. The bottoms of her jeans were rolled up to her knees. Her braids were gathered in a shower cap, and when she came closer Furo saw she was shivering. Her face was angled with annoyance.

‘You came in the rain!’ Furo exclaimed in welcome, but Syreeta made no response as she strode into her bedroom and slammed the door.

Furo stood up from the settee and skulked off into his bedroom. He took off his clothes and hung them in the wardrobe to preserve their freshness, and then slipped into bed and pulled the blanket over his head. Syreeta’s mood had dampened his, and the excitement he’d nursed all day at the thought of their going out was now a fluff of fear in his belly. He felt like a chided child, driftwood in angry currents, at the mercy of whims as changeable as Mother Nature’s.

‘Furo?’

When he lifted his head from under the blanket, Syreeta was standing in the bedroom doorway. In the splash of rainwater he hadn’t heard her open the door. Beyond the doorway the shadows thickened, night was falling, but Syreeta was as clear as a spectral warning in the white towel that wrapped her from chest to thigh. She spoke in a voice adjusted for crashing thunder.

‘Thanks for closing the windows. The house would have flooded if you weren’t here. And thanks too for cleaning up. How was your weekend?’

Furo sat up in the bed. ‘It was quiet. I got some rest. And yours?’

Waving aside his question with her left hand, with the right she grabbed the fold of the towel just as it loosened, and tightened it again over her breasts as she said, ‘This nonsense rain has spoiled my plans for today. We can’t go out any more. The traffic out there is crazy.’

‘That’s OK,’ Furo said. As the silence that followed seemed awkward for him alone, he dropped his eyes from her face. But when she said with a sigh, ‘I’m going to lie down,’ quicker than thought he responded with, ‘Can I join you?’ His glance caught the flash of her smile. She waited long enough for him to suffer for ever, and then she turned around without replying and walked away without closing his door. Furo caught his breath at the creak of her bedroom door, and by the time he was convinced the door wasn’t closing, he was almost gasping for air.

No refusal and two open doors.

Furo stood up and went through, shutting both doors behind him.

‘How is your neck?’ They were lying on their sides under the bedcover, Furo with his back to Syreeta. Her breath warmed his shoulders. The hairs on his neck prickled from her stare.

‘There’s still some stiffness,’ Furo said, and turned around to face her. His arm brushed her breast as he settled. He added quickly, ‘The massage helped a lot though.’

Her eyes were half-closed, her face slack with drowsiness, but she reached out her hand and tapped his nose with a fingertip. ‘Your nose is peeling, it’s sunburn. I’ll give you some lotion later.’ She curled her tongue in a yawn before saying, ‘How long has it been paining you? Your neck,’ and as Furo replied, ‘About five years,’ her drooping eyelids flew open in surprise. ‘Five years! That’s a long time. What happened?’

Furo found her stare distracting, so he moved his gaze to the heave and fall of the bedcover over her chest. ‘I strained it in university. Too much study.’

She yawned again, her tongue trembling pinkly against the roof of her mouth, and then rubbed her wrist across her eyes. ‘Which university did you attend?’

‘Ambrose Alli.’

Again surprise lighted her features. With a breathy laugh, she said, ‘You? In Ekpoma? How the hell did that happen?’

‘It’s a long story,’ Furo said.

‘I’m sure it is,’ she said in a lowered tone, as if speaking to herself, and then her voice turned back to Furo. ‘And I’m sure it’s a strange one too. You’re very strange, you know that?’ At this question she pushed her hand along the pillow till her fingers touched Furo’s cheek, and then her hand slid upwards to his scalp and began stroking. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask: why do you cut your hair so short?’

‘No reason. I just like it.’

‘You’re not going bald, are you?’ Her fingers tightened on his scalp, her long nails digging in. Forcing his head down, she raised herself on her elbow to stare at his crown. ‘You’re not,’ she confirmed, and released her hold before sinking back on to the bed. ‘Your hair looks red and gold, sort of orange. Let it grow. I want to see it full.’

Confusion flooded Furo. ‘I don’t want to grow my hair,’ he said at last.

‘But why not? Or you want me to say please? OK,
please
, do it for me.’

At the seductive lilt in her voice, a notion entered Furo’s head, and in a split second it metastasized into a tumescent stirring in his groin. He pursed his lips, creased his brow, held his pensive look for several moments before saying, ‘OK, I’ll grow it,’ a pause, ‘if you kiss me.’

Syreeta coughed with laughter, her legs kicking under the bedcover. ‘Only because of hair?’ she finally said. ‘Keep gorimakpa if you like, see who cares!’ Her giggles seemed to hold an invitation, and surrendering to the propulsive bubbling of his instincts, Furo pushed his head forwards and pressed his lips to hers. He felt her laughter splutter against his teeth, but when he drew back his head, he was reassured by the look on her face. ‘You’re in trouble now,’ she said in a mock-serious voice. ‘You can’t cut your hair unless I give you permission.’ Then she raised her arms, hooked them around his neck, and pulled his face into hers.

Time slowed to the splash of raindrops, breaths quickened, the air warmed, and someone kicked away the bedcover. When Syreeta pulled back to catch her breath, her crinkled nipples caught Furo’s eyes. He felt cramped by his boxer shorts, and, rocking forwards on his knees, he tugged them off, all the while pinning Syreeta with his eyes until his mouth closed on her breast, the left one, then the right, her hand guiding his head. The bed dipped under the shifting of hips, the push of a knee, the spreading of thighs. Raising his head from her chest, Furo asked, ‘Can I kiss you there?’ and she widened her eyes at him before nodding once. He slid downwards and stuck his head between her thighs, and as his tongue flicked and tasted, his mind noted facts: too sensitive, more tongue less teeth. Her whimpers washed over him. And then: ‘I’m ready,’ she said. He, too, was ready, but she stopped him with her thighs. ‘No. Condom.’

Furo stared at her as if from a long distance. ‘I don’t have any.’

‘On my dressing table,’ she said and unlocked her legs.

Furo felt trapped. Despite his dislike for the rub of rubber, he would wear two if Syreeta wanted. He would stand on his head if she told him to. But nothing would convince him to turn his back to her, not after what happened the last time she saw his buttocks.

Syreeta raised her hands to cup her breasts. ‘What is it?’ she asked. Drawing hope from the quaver in her voice, he placed his hand on her belly and trailed a finger along the hairline leading down. ‘Can I?’ he said softly. ‘I want to feel you.’

She searched his face. ‘You want to fuck me without a condom?’ Then she sighed, shook her head. ‘Ah Furo, I’m not sure.’

‘Please,’ Furo said, and touched her where she was softest. She stiffened and sucked in air. ‘Please,’ he repeated and rubbed her again. Her knees slowly parted. Her hands fell away from her breasts. And moans later, she agreed.

Furo awoke to what felt like an old day in a new century. Sunlight bounced off the zinc roof of the house opposite, voices trilled in the street outside the window, and a car with a tired engine rumbled past, its tyres splashing through puddles. A footstep sounded in the doorway, and then Syreeta entered the bedroom with a swing in her hips. She held a juice carton in one hand, her toothbrush in the other. She wore a G-string, flesh-coloured. Her left breast shone wet.

‘You’re awake,’ she said brightly as she padded up to the bed. Climbing on and straddling Furo’s belly, she tipped the juice carton to his mouth. ‘Drink, sleepyhead. Get your energy back.’ Her braids tumbled over his face as chilled apple juice poured down his throat. After he’d drunk enough, he nudged aside the carton, then reached up and tweaked her nipple. For soundless seconds she glowered into his face with longing eyes; then she slapped away his hand. ‘Not now, when we come back.’ She jumped off the bed. ‘I’m taking you out. We’re going to visit my BFF.’ Halting in the doorway, she cast a mischievous look back at him. ‘Oya, come,’ she said and waved her toothbrush in his direction. ‘Let’s bathe together.’

He had swung his legs off the bed before he remembered. He remained seated at the bed’s edge, and said to Syreeta, ‘I just remembered I have to pick up my passport today. Let me get my clothes ready. You go ahead and bathe first.’

‘If that’s what you want,’ Syreeta said and blew him a kiss. He faked a dive to catch it, groaned under its weight, and flopped back on the bed. She strode off laughing.

His buttocks felt like a weight dragging him back to a place he wanted badly to forget. Syreeta had avoided the topic ever since she apologised for laughing at him, but he knew it had left an impression, he suspected she would bring it up in coming days, and he hoped to impede that conversation for as long as he could. He had answered her questions that day by telling her that he was born with it, the blackness an outsized birthmark, and yet what he told her was one thing and what he knew was another. He knew he had to efface the blackness from his buttocks, from all memory. Feeling dejected by the enormity of this conundrum, he stared across at Syreeta’s vanity table with its science lab-like collection of cosmetic bottles. In that moment, the sound of running water from the bathroom splashed into his mind and washed up the hull of an idea.

As Furo saw it, his black behind was a problem to be solved. The step he was about to take was better than doing nothing. Better than sitting around hoping. His failure or success would come through his own hands, and if he failed, at least he would know he tried. He had no choice in the decision that had got him where he was, but now that he was here, he would steer his own course. On this thought, he stood up from the bed, strode to the vanity table, sat on the stool before it, and picking up cosmetic bottles one at a time, he read their labels. He wasn’t sure what he was searching for, but he knew when he found it.

The cheapest-looking of the skin-whitening creams was a pink-and-green tube called Lovate Cream. Hydroquinone and octyl methoxycinnamate, and other exotic chemicals only meant that it burned when Furo squeezed out a smidgen and rubbed it on to his wrist. The other whitening creams he found, which were branded more overtly (in one plastic tube, Pale & Lovely Winter Fairness, and in the other ampoule-type bottle, Daudalie Radiance Serum Skin Correction), both left his skin with no sensation more unpleasant than a cool slickness. The descriptions on all three labels promised what he wanted, and he decided against using the facial scrubs and alcohol cleansers he had piled to one side during his search. These strong-smelling potions made no claims to bleaching skin, and the risk of discovery he ran using them seemed much greater than any rewards. He couldn’t imagine what explanation he would give Syreeta as to why his buttocks smelled like her face.

Pale & Lovely was the largest of the creams, the one that Syreeta was least likely to notice being depleted, and Furo decided he would apply that every morning after his bath, followed by Lovate in the afternoons, and then the smallest bottle, Daudalie, at night. He would be careful with everything, from the amounts of cream he applied to the replacement of the bottles on the vanity table, because he couldn’t let Syreeta find out he was using her whitening creams, as that would only end in the conversation he was avoiding. At the thought of her catching him with his finger in her jars, Furo quickly arranged the table as he had found it, then he took up the Pale & Lovely and squeezed the pinkish cream on to his palm. After he returned the tube, he stood up from the stool and hurried out of the bedroom. In the bathroom he could hear Syreeta singing.

At Ikoyi passport office, Syreeta waited in the Honda as Furo went in. When he returned with his new passport grasped in his hand, she reached out for it, and after reading the identification page, she handed it back and asked how come his surname was Nigerian. Furo’s answer:

‘I’ve already told you I’m Nigerian.’

‘But you’re white!’ exclaimed Syreeta.

‘So you mean I can’t be white
and
Nigerian?’

‘That’s not what I’m saying. I’m asking how it happened.’

This question had been expected by Furo for some time, and over the long weekend he had thought through his answer. He’d considered saying he was mixed race with a Nigerian father and a white American mother, but while that explained his name and his black buttocks, it raised other questions, the most irksome being a white extended family and his lack of ties to the US embassy in Nigeria. The second story he’d considered was that his white family had settled a long time ago in Nigeria and along the line had changed their name, but on further thought that idea seemed absurd and so he discarded it. Nigerians readily adopted European and Arab and Hebrew names. It never happened the other way around.

The story he settled on appeared to him the most plausible, the least open to rebuttal – it answered every question except that of his buttocks. But then, he told himself, nothing in life is perfect. To Syreeta he said:

‘I don’t like talking about it so I’ll just say this quickly. My parents are Nigerians. They lived in America for many years, my father was born there, and while they were over there they adopted me. My mother couldn’t have children. They returned to Lagos while I was still a baby, and they quarrelled when my father married a second wife. My mother took me away, we moved to Port Harcourt, and I haven’t heard from my father in nearly twenty years. My mother passed away last year. I came to Lagos and got stranded. Then I met you. That’s why I have this name. That’s why I have nobody. Now I’m hungry. Can we stop somewhere to eat?’