Blackass (15 page)
‘Good afternoon, sir,’ the guard replied, smiling in welcome. ‘Are you here to visit?’
‘Yes,’ Furo said.
‘I see, I see,’ said the guard, and ran his hands down the front of his epauletted shirt, smoothing it out. He ignored the cars entering the estate; he stared hard at Furo’s nose. ‘Who is the person you want to see?’
‘I don’t know her name … she’s the friend of my friend,’ Furo said. ‘Well, actually—’
‘I see, not a problem,’ the guard interrupted. He threw a suspicious look at the cornrowed man waiting behind Furo. ‘What is her house number?’
‘I don’t know,’ Furo said. ‘The thing is, I’m supposed to—’
‘Not a problem,’ the guard said and wrinkled his brow in contemplation. At that moment the cornrowed man made an impatient noise in his throat, and then he moved forwards, muttered ‘Sorry’ to Furo, and said to the guard, ‘I’m going to Mr Oyegun’s house.’
The guard aimed a furious stare at him. ‘Can’t you see I’m attending to somebody?’
‘I’m in a hurry,’ the cornrowed man said, his voice urgent. ‘Mr Oyegun is expecting me. I know his house, I’ve come here before.’
‘Respect yourself, mister man!’ the guard barked at him. ‘Or you think anyone can just walk in here anyhow? Who are you anyway? Move back, move back – can’t you hear me, I said move back!’ He flapped his hands in the chest of the cornrowed man, drove him back behind Furo. ‘That’s how we Nigerians behave, no respect at all,’ the guard said to Furo with a grimace of apology. Lowering his voice, he asked: ‘Do you have your, erm, friend’s phone number?’
‘I was trying to explain,’ Furo said. ‘I’m supposed to wait for someone to pick me up here. If you don’t mind I’ll just stand in that corner.’ He pointed to a spot inside the gate.
‘I see, I see,’ the guard said, nodding his head as he waved Furo in. ‘Not a problem at all, you can go inside. Should I bring a chair for you?’
‘I’m OK,’ Furo said. He passed through the gate, strode a few paces to the grass shoulder, and turned around to face the gate. The cornrowed man had moved forwards, he was speaking with the guard, who shook his head with vehemence and remained standing in the way. The cornrowed man flung up his hands and uttered a complaint, then reached into his pocket, pulled out his mobile phone, dialled a number. After repeated attempts at reaching someone on the phone, all seemingly unsuccessful, the cornrowed man again spoke to the guard. The guard ignored him, he stood with his chest puffed out and his fists clenched and his boots planted apart, glaring at passing cars. The cornrowed man gave up with a gesture of dismissal. Pocketing his phone, he whirled around and stalked off, and the guard glanced over at Furo. ‘Are you sure you’re OK, sir?’ he shouted across. ‘You’re sure you don’t want a chair?’
Syreeta drove through the gate barely five minutes later. Furo started to raise his hand, but let it fall when he realised she’d already seen him. She pulled up alongside, and he climbed into the Honda’s chill, which was spiced with a whiff of the traffic warden’s sweat. The skin over Syreeta’s cheekbones was stretched tight, a vein beat in her temple, and the car radio was off. Furo knew better than to ask about the traffic warden, how she had got rid of him so quickly. He held his gaze away from her face and stared through the windscreen. Road signs whizzed past.
No honking. No hawkers. No litter. No parking.
No okadas and danfos.
The quiet through which the car sailed was deeper-rooted than the fact of the silent radio. No crowds, no roadside garbage, no traffic jam, no noise. The Lagos he knew was far from this place.
The Honda cruised down avenues bordered by mansion after mansion. Furo looked out the window till his eyesight blurred from the monotony of affluence, and then he craned his neck around to stare back at a black stallion (wild-eyed, it reared its head and chomped at the bit, yet trotted smoothly on) ridden by a man wearing jodhpurs, a jockey hat, and a sleeveless dashiki. He faced forwards as the car swept past a chain-fenced tree park with children’s swings, slides, and sand-pits; and turning into a side street, it slowed to a stop in front of a townhouse with an immaculate white fence and Doric gateposts. Through the grilled gate Furo spied a fleet of sleek vehicles, their bodywork glinting and windows sparkling. He finished counting the high-priced playthings – seven in all, the least exotic a Jaguar coupé – before blurting out in astonishment: ‘Is this where your friend lives?’ Syreeta nodded yes while tapping her horn, and after the gate slid open of its own accord, she drove in and parked to the side of the broad driveway, which bordered a lawned garden flashing with wild colours in a backdrop of tamed greenery. From the tree boughs dangled wind chimes and birdhouses. Furo swung the car door open to the smell of wetted earth, which mingled in the breeze with the frail scents of flowers. The monastic quiet was deepened by the gurgle of water from a stone cupid endlessly pissing into a fishpond. He climbed down the car and gazed around him, up at the security cameras hanging in the eaves and down at the clam shells covering the driveway. At the crunch of feet, he spun away from this vision of fortified Eden and followed Syreeta towards the front door.
The housemaid who answered the door was dressed in a starched white gown. Her smile of welcome announced she knew Syreeta and was pleased to see her, but in greeting Furo the smile faltered and she dropped her eyes, then dipped her head and pressed her hands against her belly in a mannered gesture of respect, after which she said in response to Syreeta’s enquiry about her madam, ‘She dey for visitor’s parlour.’ Following a trail of children’s laughter, Syreeta and Furo passed through two doorways and a museum-piece hallway before reaching an air-conditioned, brightly lit lounge that whiffed of cedar polish. The window curtains were drawn, the outsized TV was on – it showed Johnny Bravo in swimming trunks on a HD-coloured beach – and from the high ceiling a silver chandelier shone golden light. The sitting area was a dais with three steps leading up. Two sides of it were closed off by an L-shaped couch, burgundy red like the curtains, and under the chandelier stood a malachite table with nude cherubs for legs. A bottle of Remy Martin VSOP was on the table, and on the couch five ladies lolled, all clutching cut-glass goblets in which cognac swirled. Near the TV several beanbags were scattered on the parquet floor. On these were sprawled six children – all of them woolly-headed, fair-skinned, half-white.
‘
Syreeta darling!
’ a lady sang as she bounced to her feet and skipped round the couch. She was younger than Syreeta; she seemed barely out of adolescence. Her hair was cut low and sprayed silver, her fingernails curved blackly around the bowl of her glass, and the thin fabric of her white miniskirt was stretched so tight that Furo saw the flower patterns on her underwear. Tearing away his eyes, he glanced at the other ladies staring at him over the low backrest, and then he looked back at the one who breezed past him in a cloud of perfume and woody liquor. She hooked her free arm round Syreeta’s neck, and they pressed cheeks, exchanged babbles of affection, then the lady whirled around to face Furo. Her smile looked dazed. ‘So this is you!’ she said huskily, and after handing her drink to Syreeta to hold, she spread her arms wide and leaned into Furo so abruptly he had to hug her to keep his balance. She snuggled into his arms, rested her head on his chest, and brushed her hips against him. ‘Yum-yum,’ she said in a whisper meant to be heard by all, and then, with a ribald laugh, she disentangled from him. ‘I’m Baby,’ she said. ‘Syreeta has told me everything about you.’ Her appraising gaze swept down his body and rose again to his face. ‘Almost everything,’ she added with a chuckle.
Furo and Syreeta took their seats with the rest of the company, all of whom knew Syreeta, Furo realised from their greetings. As Baby bent over the table to pour drinks for the newcomers, one of the ladies, Syreeta had called her Ivy, asked Syreeta, ‘Where is he from?’
‘He’s American,’ Syreeta said in a tone whose casualness did not hide her satisfaction. ‘But he’s lived in Nigeria for so long that he’s now one of us.’ Like a presiding queen, she raised her hand in the direction of Baby, who arrived at that moment and handed one drink to her and the other to Furo before flopping on to the couch.
‘I just got back from Atlanta,’ said a lady whose large feet were emphasised by her zebra-striped tights. She uncrossed one leg and immediately crossed the other. Balancing her glass on her knee, she shot a questioning look at Furo. ‘Lovely city. I attended a business conference with Gianni, my husband. He’s Italian.’
Furo raised his glass and drank. The alcohol landed a sucker punch to his throat, and struggling to keep his discomfort from showing, he raised his swimming eyes to find the ladies’ faces waiting. ‘Ever been?’ the Italian’s wife asked with a hint of impatience, and into the silence Furo gasped, ‘No,’ and then began to cough from the burn of the cognac. Syreeta placed a hand on his back and patted gently. ‘Breathe slowly,’ she whispered to him. In a tone of wry amusement she said to the ladies, ‘He likes milkshakes,’ and the wave of coos that rose at her words lightened the grip on Furo’s chest.
The ladies reminded Furo of his university days. They were a type he recognised but hadn’t gotten a chance to mingle with at close quarters, to sit beside and be addressed by. They were the very ones who had partied at the trendy nightclubs that ordinary students could only dream about, who had travelled three hundred miles every Friday from Ekpoma to Benin City in the chauffeured rides of their aristos and returned in flocks on Sunday with excess cash and branded clothes and stories of their carouses that were the grist of campus gossip and front-page news of local celebrity rags. In a school system where money, sexual favours, and sugar daddy’s influence had black-market value in the acquiring of grades, these campus queens were only a few points down from straight-A students. They graduated from university with little trouble, with few carried-over courses, and without any employable skills, and after serving their country during youth service by playing truant at those high-paying jobs they always landed in either Lagos or Abuja or Port Harcourt, they set aside their degrees and put their talent to work in turning the same tricks that had served them thus far. Within toddler years after graduation the most successful of them ended up as Baby and her friends: sipping cognac in the mansions of their moneyed husbands. These women were hustlers, plain and simple, and Furo, back in those days of neck-cramping study and eating beans five times a week because his allowance had to be managed, had despised them almost as much as he wanted to befriend them. But now, with Syreeta in his life, he admitted to himself that his view of them had softened.
In the time that followed his arrival in their midst, Furo learned that Baby was married to a Dutchman, Ivy to a Canadian, Chika to an Englishman, Ego to a German, and Joy to the Italian. Chika was a buxom lady with heavily ringed hands, which she waved around for emphasis while she spoke, and her accent was the least Nigerian in the room, the most accomplished in its transatlantic melding of Peckham twang and Harlem slang. Between Chika and Baby sat Ivy, and when she rose to pour herself a refill from the cognac bottle, Furo saw how much taller than him she was. She wore pink high heels, black pencil jeans and a white tube top. On her lower back the lanky, long-tailed figure of the Pink Panther was tattooed in black ink. Ego sat furthest from Furo, and yet his eyes kept returning to her bleached blonde hairpiece, which cascaded down her right shoulder and curled around in her lap. Her eyelashes were so long they threw shadows on her rouged cheeks.
From the topic of their husbands the ladies moved on to their children. They all had one each, except for Ego, whose boy and girl were three and five years old. The youngest child, a plump two-year-old named Romeo, was Joy’s. His attachment to mamma was almost umbilical, as he toddled up to her again and again to blub at a slight by the other tots or to point squealing at the cartoon antics showing on screen. Joy spoiled him with attention, the other mothers warned, she fed him too much pasta and not enough of the yams needed to build his muscles, and they spent laughing minutes offering her advice on how to man him up in time for kindergarten. ‘In Naija a man must be strong o, even if he’s oyibo,’ Baby declared, and turning to face Furo, she asked with an elfin smile if he didn’t agree.
Baby’s girl Saskia was nearly four. When her mother called to her to come and greet uncle, the child pranced over and climbed into Furo’s lap without a word. ‘What a cute girl,’ Furo said to the preening mother, though to call her cute was an injustice to her prettiness. Her soft curls smelled of baby shampoo, her ripe banana complexion glowed from rich feeding, and her full lips trembled with pinkness. Her large grey eyes shone with boredom at adult worship. Furo found her insufferable. Syreeta, however, couldn’t hide her fascination. ‘Oh yes she is!’ she exclaimed in response to Furo’s words, and leaning across him, she kissed the girl’s cheeks and dimpled chin, then set down her drink and lifted Saskia from Furo’s lap into hers. In a Teletubby tone of voice she asked the child simpering questions about school, her bedroom, her toys, about how she got that naughty-naughty scratch on her knee, all the while nodding encouragement as Saskia lisped her replies. Questions exhausted, with a magic flourish Syreeta pulled a shiny box of milk chocolates out of her handbag and pressed it into Saskia’s hands. The child’s delighted yelp drew smiles from all the mothers, and it was with reluctance that Syreeta released her to return with her prize to her waiting playmates.
The conversation among the ladies turned to past boyfriends. In the zeal to one-up each other, their affected accents skidded and crashed, and from this wreck of grammar the mangled sense was rescued by a reversion to pidgin – the shortest distance between two thoughts. The straight-talking bluntness of the vernacular caused their mingled voices to beat the air like wings of released doves. Higher the voices rose and quicker the glasses tipped liquor down throats. The nature of the conversation also influenced the language, as the ladies’ speech slipped further and further into the maze of slang, seeking those shaded places where meaning hid in plain sight.