have said no. She wouldn’t have gone without me. One word. I should have said no. Damola and his friends, they would suffer for what they did. They would remember us, our faces. They would never forget us.
I reached the veranda and she stood up.
“I’ll do it,” I said.
She shut her eyes. “Maybe I should go home.”
“Yes,” I said.
She’d eaten the last donut.
She didn’t come back to my house, and I didn’t visit her either because I hoped that if we pretended long enough the whole incident might vanish. As if the picnic hadn’t done enough damage that summer, as if the rains hadn’t added to our misery, there was a military coup. Our head of state was overthrown. I watched as our new ruler made his first announcement on television. “I, Brigadier... ”
The rest of his words marched away. I was trying to imagine the vacation starting over, Sheri coming to my window. I would order her to go home.
My father fumed throughout the announcement. “What is happening? These army boys think they can pass us from one hand to the other. How long will this regime last before there’s another?”
“Let us hear what the man is saying,” my mother said.
The brigadier was retiring government officials with immediate effect. He was setting up councils to investigate corruption in the civil service. My father talked as if he were carrying on a personal argument with him.
“What qualification do you have to reorganize the government?”
“I beg you,” my mother said. “Let us hear what he is saying.”
I noticed how she smirked. My mother was always pleased when my father was angry.
“You fought on a battle front doesn’t make you an administrator,” he said. “What do you know about reorganizing the government?”
“Let us give him a chance,” she said. “He might improve things.”
My father turned to her. “They fight their wars and they retire to their barracks. That is what they do. The army have no place in government.”
“Ah, well,” she said. “Still let us hear.”
They followed the latest news about the coup; I imagined the summer as I wished it had started. That was how it was in our house over the next few days. There was a dusk to dawn curfew in Lagos and I wanted it to end so I could have the house to myself. I was not interested in the political overhaul in our country. Any voices, most of all my parents’ animated voices, jarred on my ears, so when Uncle Fatai came by a week later, I went to my bedroom to avoid hearing about the coup again.
I thought they would all talk for a while. Instead, my father knocked on my door moments later. “Enitan, will you come out?”
I’d been lying on my bed, staring at my ceiling. I dragged myself out. My mother was sitting in the living room. Uncle Fatai had gone.
“Yes, Daddy?”
“I want you to tell me the truth,” my father said.
He touched my shoulder and I forgot how to breathe again.
“Yes, Daddy... ”
“Uncle Fatai tells us a friend of yours is in trouble.”
My mother stood up. “Stop protecting her. You’re always protecting her. Don’t take her to church, don’t do this, don’t do that. Now look.”
“Your friend is in hospital,” my father said.
“Your friend is pregnant,” my mother said. “She stuck a hanger up herself and nearly killed herself. Now she’s telling everyone she was raped. Telling everyone my daughter was involved in this.” She patted her chest.
“Let me handle this,” my father said. “Were you there?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, stepping back.
“Enitan, were you there?”
I fled to my room. My father followed me to the doorway and watched my shifting feet. “You were there, weren’t you,” he said.
I kept moving. If I stopped, I would confess.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“You knew this happened and yet you stayed in this house, saying nothing.”
“I told her not to go.”
“Look at you,” he said, “involved in a mess like this. I won’t punish you this time. It’s your mother that will punish you. I guarantee.”
He left. I shut my door quietly and climbed into bed.
She was at my window. It was night outside.
“Let’s go.”
Our yard was water. The water had no end.
“Let’s go.”
I struggled to pull her through my window. She was slipping into the water. I knew she was going to drown.
“They’re waiting for you,” I said. “At the bottom.”
Three slaps aroused me. My mother was standing over me.
“Out of bed,” she said. “And get yourself ready. We’re going to church.”
It was morning. I scrambled out of my bed. I had not been to my mother’s church in years, but my memory of the place was clear: a white building with a dome. Behind it, there were banana and palm trees; behind them a stream. In the front yard there was red soil, and the walls of the building seemed to suck it up. People buried curses in that soil, tied their children to the palm trees and prayed for their spirits. They brought them in for cleansing. More than anything else, I was embarrassed my mother would belong to such a church— incense, white gowns, bare feet and drumming. People dipping themselves in a stream and drinking from it.
Along the way, road blocks had been set up, as they always were after a military coup. Cars slowed as they approached them and pedestrians moved quietly. A truck load of soldiers drove past, sounding a siren. The soldiers jeered and lashed at cars with horsewhips. We pulled over to let them pass. A driver pulled over too late. Half the soldiers jumped down from the truck and dragged him out of his car. They started slapping him. The driver’s hands went up to plead for mercy. They flogged him with horsewhips and left him there, whimpering by the door of his car.
At first the shouting scared me. I flinched from the first few slaps to the driver’s head, heard my mother whisper, “They’re going to kill him.” Then, I watched the beating feeling some assurance that our world was uniformly terrible. I remembered my
