switched on the radio my father had given me when I went to university. It was now broken in several places but I’d put it back together with duct tape. I fiddled with the dial until I found a station that was playing music I did not recognise. Then I started setting out shampoos and pomades, styling gels and curling irons, bowls of relaxers and bottles of hair spray.
I did not bother to check if walking in the rain had ruined my braids in spite of the umbrella. If I looked in the mirror, I would have had to examine the shape of my face, my small eyes, my big nose; the things that could have been wrong with the dip of my chin or my lips, all the different ways in which any man, Akin specifically, might find Funmi more attractive. I did not have time to indulge in self-pity, so I kept on working because handling the equipment focused my thoughts on hair.
After the rain stopped, the girls trickled in one after the other. The last one came in just before our first customer showed up. I grabbed a wooden comb, parted the woman’s hair in the middle, dipped two fingers into the sticky pomade and started my day. Her hair was thick and full, the tresses crackled softly as I wove them in tiny rows that gathered at the nape of her neck. There were four people waiting when I was through with her. I moved from head to head, sectioning hair, weaving strands into patterns, snipping off split ends and dispensing advice to the girls in training. It was bliss; time slipped by and soon it was well past noon. By the time I took a break for lunch, my wrists were hurting – almost everyone wanted weaving and braiding that morning and few easy wash-and-sets were coming our way.
That afternoon I went for rice cooked in eeran leaves and topped with palm-oil stew. There was a woman on that street who cooked it so well that after enjoying the bits of smoked fish and cow hide in the stew, I always had to fight the urge to lick the leaves clean. It was the kind of food that demanded a moment’s pause after the plate was empty and induced a level of contentment that had me staring into space while the salon buzzed around me. Outside, the sky was still a threatening indigo although the rain had finally stopped. Cold air swept into the salon in draughts and battled the hairdryers to set the room temperature.
I thought she was a customer when she came in. She stood in the doorway for a moment, the overcast sky hanging behind her like a bad omen. She looked around the room with a frown on her face until she saw me. Then she smiled and came to kneel beside me. She was so beautiful. She had the kind of face that would complement any hairstyle, a face that would have other women looking longingly after her in the market, a face that would have some of them asking who her hairdresser was.
‘Good morning, our mother,’ Funmi said.
Her words pierced me. I was not her mother. I was not anybody’s mother. People still called me Yejide. I was not Iya This or Iya That. I was still merely Yejide. That thought tied my tongue and made me want to pull hers out of her mouth. Years before, nothing would have stopped me from punching her teeth down her throat. When I was a student at Ife Girls’ High School, I was known as Yejide Terror. I got into fights every other day. In those days, we would wait until school was over before starting a fight. We would leave the vicinity of the school compound and find a path that none of the teachers passed through on their way home. And I always won – not once, not one single time did I lose. I lost a few buttons, broke a tooth, got a bloody nose many times, but I never lost. I never got one single grain of sand in my mouth.
Whenever I arrived home late and bloodied up from another fight, my stepmothers would scold me loudly and promise to punish me for my disgraceful behaviour. At night they whispered, with washed-out wrappers tied around their shrunken breasts, they whispered instructions to their children not to be like me. After all, their children had mothers, living women who cursed and cooked, had businesses and bushy armpits. Only motherless children, children like me, could misbehave like that. And it was not just that I did not have a mother, but the one I once had, the one who died seconds after she had pushed me out into the world, was a woman without lineage! And who impregnates a woman with no lineage? Only a stupid man who happened to be, well, her husband. But that was not the point; the point was that when there was no identifiable lineage for a child, that child could be descended from anything – even dogs, witches or strange tribes with bad blood. The third wife’s children obviously had bad blood since insanity occurred frequently in her family. But at least that was known bad blood – my (possible) bad blood was of unknown origin and that was worse, as evidenced by the way I was disgracing my father by fighting like a street dog.
The whispered discussions in the rooms that each wife shared with her children were eventually reported to me in detail by my half-siblings. The words did not bother me; it was a game the wives played, trying to prove which woman had produced a superior stock of children. It was the threats that were never carried out, even when my fighting became a daily event, that bothered me. It was the whips that were not unleashed, the extra chores that were not assigned, the dinners that were not withheld that reminded me that none of them really cared.
‘Our mother?’ Funmi said. She was still on her knees.
I swallowed my memories like an oversized bitter pill. Funmi had placed her hands on my lap; her manicure was perfect. The nails were painted hibiscus red, like the matching mugs Akin and I had used to drink coffee that morning.
‘Our mother?’
I never painted my fingernails any more. I used to paint them when I was at university. Was it the nails that made her attractive to him? How did he feel when she raked those beautiful nails across his chest? Did his nipples tighten? Did he moan? I wanted . . . no . . . I needed to know immediately, in detail. What did she have of him that had always been just mine? What would she have that I had never had? His child?
‘Our mother?’
‘Who is your mother? You better get up now,’ I said.
There was an empty chair next to me, but she chose to sit on the arm of my chair.
‘Why are you here? Who showed you this place?’ I whispered because the background chatter between customers and stylists had stopped. Somebody had turned off the radio and the salon had gone quiet.
‘I just thought I should come to greet you.’
‘At this time of the day? Are you jobless?’ It was an insult, but she took it as a question.
‘No-o. I don’t have a job since our husband is taking good care of me.’ Her voice rose as she said ‘our husband’, and it was obvious that everyone in the room had heard her. Chairs creaked as customers shifted in their seats and leaned back as much as possible in their attempts to listen in on the conversation.
‘What?’
‘Our husband is a very caring man. He has been taking good care of me. We thank God that he has enough money for all of us.’ She smiled at the top of my head.
I glared at her reflection in the mirror opposite us. ‘Enough money for what?’
‘For us, our mother. That is why a man works, abi? For his wives and children.’
‘Some of us have jobs,’ I said, keeping my clenched fists firmly by my side. ‘You have to leave so that I can do mine.’
She smiled into the mirror. ‘I will visit tomorrow afternoon, Ma. Maybe you will be less busy then.’
Did she expect me to smile back? ‘Funmi, don’t let me see your broomstick legs in this place ever again.’
‘Our mother, there is no need for all this-o; we have to be friends. At least for the sake of the children we will have.’ She went on her knees again. ‘I know people
