She was an easy compromise. She accepted a separate flat, miles away from Yejide and me. Didn’t ask for more than a weekend every month and a reasonable allowance. She agreed that she would never be the one to go with me to parties and public engagements.
I didn’t see Funmi for months after I agreed to marry her. I told her I had a lot going on at work and wouldn’t be able to see her for a while. Someone must have sold the ‘a patient wife wins the husband’s heart in the end’ line to her. She didn’t argue with me; she just waited until I came to terms with the fact that she was now a part of my life.
It had been more immediate with Yejide. I spent the first month after I met her driving two hours every day to be with her. I’d leave the office at five and spend about thirty minutes driving down to Ife. It took another fifteen minutes to get through the city to the university gates. Usually, I would enter F101 in Moremi Hall about an hour after leaving Ilesa.
I did this every day until one evening Yejide came out into the corridor and shut the door behind her instead of letting me in. She told me never to come back. Said she did not want to see me again. But I didn’t stop. I was at F101 every day for eleven days, smiling at her room-mates, trying to convince them to let me in.
On the twelfth day, she answered the door. Came out to stand with me in the corridor. We stood side by side as I begged her to tell me what I had done wrong. A mix of odours from the kitchenette and toilets wafted in our direction.
It turned out that the girl I’d been dating before I met her had been to Yejide’s room to threaten her. The girl had claimed that we had had a traditional wedding.
‘I don’t do polygamy,’ Yejide said on the evening she finally told me what was going on.
Another girl would have found a roundabout way of saying she wanted to be an only wife. Not Yejide, she was direct, up-front.
‘I don’t either,’ I said.
‘Look, Akin. Just let us forget it. This thing – us. This thing.’
‘I’m not married. Look at me. Come on – look at me. If you want to, we can go to that girl’s room right now and I’ll confront her, ask her to produce the wedding pictures.’
‘Her name is Bisade.’
‘I don’t care.’
Yejide didn’t say anything for a while. She leaned against the door, watching people come and go in the corridor.
I touched her shoulder; she didn’t pull away.
‘So, I was being silly,’ she said.
‘You owe me an apology,’ I said. I didn’t mean it. Our relationship was still at the point where it didn’t matter who was wrong or right. We hadn’t arrived at the place where deciding who needed to apologise started another fight.
‘Sorry, but you know people have all sorts of . . . sorry.’ She leaned into me.
‘All right.’ I grinned as her thumb drew invisible circles along my arm.
‘So, Akin. You can confess all your secrets to me now, dirty or clean. Maybe a woman who has children for you somewhere . . .’
There were things I could have told her. Should have said to her. I smiled. ‘I’ve got a few dirty socks and underwear. How about you? Any dirty panties?’
She shook her head.
Finally, I spoke the words that had been dancing on my tongue since the beginning – or a version of them. I said to her, ‘Yejide Makinde, I am going to marry you.’
4
For a while, I did not accept the fact that I had become a first wife, an iyale. Iya Martha was my father’s first wife. When I was a child, I believed she was the unhappiest wife in the family. My opinion did not change as I grew older. At my father’s funeral, she stood beside the freshly dug grave with her narrow eyes narrowed even further and showered curses on every woman my father had made his wife after he had married her. She had begun as always with my long-dead mother, since she was the second woman he had married, the one who had made Iya Martha a first amongst not-so-equals.
I refused to think of myself as first wife.
It was easy to pretend that Funmi did not even exist. I continued to wake up with my husband lying on his back beside me in bed, his legs spread-eagled, a pillow over his face to shut out the light from my bedside lamp. I would pinch his neck until he got up and headed for the bathroom, responding to my greetings with a nod or a wave. He was incoherent in the mornings, incapable of putting words together before a cup of coffee or a cold shower.
A couple of weeks after Funmi came into our home for the first time, our phone rang shortly before midnight. By the time I sat up in bed, Akin was halfway across the room. I pulled my bedside lamp’s cord twice, and all its four bulbs came on, flooding the room with light. Akin had picked up the phone and was frowning as he listened to the person on the other end of the line.
After he returned the phone to its cradle, he came to sit beside me in bed. ‘That was Aliyu, he’s head of operations at the head office in Lagos. He called me to say we shouldn’t open the bank to customers tomorrow.’ He sighed. ‘There has been a coup.’
‘Oh my God,’ I said.
We sat in silence for a while. I wondered if anyone had been killed, if there would be chaos and violence in the following months. Though I had been too young to remember the events, I knew that the coups of 1966 had ultimately thrust the country into a civil war. I comforted myself by thinking about how the tension after the last coup, which had made General Buhari Head of State just twenty months before, had dissipated within a few days. The country had decided then that it was tired of the corrupt civilian government Buhari and his colleagues had ousted.
‘But is it certain that the coup plotters succeeded?’
‘Looks like it. Aliyu says they have already arrested Buhari.’
‘Let’s hope these ones don’t kill anybody.’ I pulled the bedside lamp’s cord once, switching off three of the bulbs.
‘This country!’ Akin sighed as he stood up. ‘I’m going to go downstairs and check the doors again.’
‘So who is in charge now?’ I lay back in bed, though I would not be able to go back to sleep.
‘He didn’t say anything about that. We should know in the morning.’
We did not know in the morning. There was a broadcast at 6 a.m. by an army officer who condemned the previous government and didn’t tell us anything about the new one. Akin left for the office after the broadcast so that he could arrive at work before any protests broke out. I stayed at home, knowing already that my stylists in training would not come to the salon after listening to the news that morning. I left the radio on and tried to call everyone I knew in Lagos to make sure they were safe, but the phone lines had been severed by then and I could not get through. I must have dozed off after listening to the news at noon. Akin was home by the time I woke up. He was the one who informed me that Ibrahim Babangida was the new Head of State.
The most unusual thing
