placed the mirror between my legs. It looked like a big, fat slug. I squealed as Sheri began to laugh. We heard loud knocks on the door and I almost dropped the mirror. “Who’s that?” I whispered.
“Me,” she said.
I hobbled to her bed. “You horrible... ”
She rocked back and forth. “You’re so funny, aburo!”
“You horrible girl,” I hissed.
She stopped laughing. “Why?”
“I don’t think it’s funny. What did you do that for?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well, sorry is not enough.”
I pulled my panties up, wondering whether I was angry with her, or what I’d seen between my legs. Sheri barricaded the door. “You’re not going anywhere.”
At first I thought I’d push her aside and walk out, but the sight of her standing there like a star tickled me.
“All right,” I said. “But this is your last chance, Sherifat, I’m warning you.”
“Am not fat,” she yelled.
I laughed until I thought my heart would pop. That was her insecurity: her full name, and her big ears.
“Don’t go,” she said. “I like you. You’re very English. You know, high faluting.”
The woman in the photograph by her bedside table was her grandmother.
“Alhaja,” Sheri said. “She’s beautiful.”
Alhaja had an enormous gap between her front teeth and her cheeks were so plump her eyes were barely visible. There were many Alhajas in Lagos. This one wasn’t the first woman to go on hajj to Mecca, but for women like her, who were powerful within their families and communities, the title became their name
Sheri did not know her own mother. She died when Sheri was a baby and Alhaja raised her from then on, even after her father remarried. She pressed the picture to her chest and told me of her life in downtown Lagos. She lived in a house opposite her Alhaja’s fabric store. She went to a school where children didn’t care to speak English. After school, she helped Alhaja in her store and knew how to measure cloth. I listened, mindful that my life didn’t extend beyond Ikoyi Park. What would it be like to know downtown as Sheri did, haggle with customers, buy fried yams and roasted plantains from street hawkers, curse Area Boys and taxi cabs who drove too close to the curb.
My only trips downtown were to visit the large foreign-owned stores, like Kelwarams and Leventis, or the crowded markets with my mother. The streets were crammed with vehicles, and there were too many people: people buying food from street hawkers, bumping shoulders, quarreling and crossing streets. Sometimes masqueraders came out for Christmas or for some other festival, dancing in their raffia gowns and ghoulish masks. Sheri knew them all: the ones who stood on stilts, the ones who looked like stretched out accordions and flattened to pancakes. It was juju, she said, but she was not scared. Not even of the eyo who dressed in white sheets like spirits of the day and whipped women who didn’t cover their heads.
Sheri was a Moslem and she didn’t know much about Christianity, except that there was a book in the Bible and if you read it, you could go mad. I asked why Moslems didn’t eat pork. “It’s a filthy beast,” she said, scratching her hair. I told her about my own life, how my brother died and my mother was strict.
“That church sounds scary,” she said.
“I’m telling you, if my mother ever catches you in our house, she’ll send you home.”
“Why?”
I pointed at her pink mouth. “It’s bad, you know.”
She sucked her teeth. “It’s not bad. Anyway, you think my father allows me to wear lipstick? I wait until he’s gone out and put it on.”
“What happens when he comes back?”
“I rub it off. Simple. You want some?”
I didn’t hesitate. As I rubbed the lipstick on my lips I mumbled, “Your stepmothers, won’t they tell?”
“I kneel for them, help them in the kitchen. They won’t tell.”
“What about the one with the gold tooth?”
“She’s wicked, but she’s nice.”
I showed her my lips. “Does it fit?”
“It fits,” she said. “And guess what?”
“What?”
“You’ve just kissed me.”
I slapped my forehead. She was forward, this girl, and the way she acted with the other children. She really didn’t do much, except to make sure she was noticed. I was impressed by the way she’d conned Akanni into staying up late for her uncle’s party. Sheri got away with whatever she did and said. Even when she insulted someone, her stepmothers would barely scold her. “Ah, this one. She’s such a terrible one.”
They summoned her to act as a disc jockey. She changed the records as if she was handling dirty plates: The Beatles, Sunny Adé, Jackson Five, James Brown. Most of the records were scratched. Akanni arrived during, “Say it loud, I’m black and proud.” He skidded from one end of the room to the other and fell on the floor overcome as the real James Brown. We placed a hand towel on his back and coaxed him up. By the time “If I had the wings of a dove” came on, I was singing out loud myself, and was almost tearful from the words.
As a parting gift Sheri gave me a romance novel titled Jacaranda Cove. The picture was barely visible and most of the pages were dog-eared. “Take this and read,” she said. I slipped it under my arm and wiped my lips clean. My one thought was to return home before my mother arrived. I’d disobeyed her too much. If she found out, I would be punished for life.
Our house seemed darker when I arrived, though the curtains in the living room were not drawn. My father once explained the darkness was due to the position of the windows to the sun. Our living room reminded me of an empty hotel lounge. The curtains were made of a gold damask, and the chairs were a deep red velvet. A piano stood by the sliding doors to the veranda.
The house was designed by two Englishmen with the help of an architect my father knew. They lived together for years, and everyone knew about them, he said. Then they moved to Nairobi and he bought the house from them. The two men living together; the Bakare house full of children; grandparents, parents, teachers, now Akanni, and of all people, Bisi. The whole world was full of sex, I thought, running away from my footsteps. In my bedroom, I read the first page of Sheri’s book, then the last. It described a man and woman kissing and how their hearts beat faster. I read it again and searched the book for more passages like that, then I marked each of them to read later.
My father arrived soon afterward and challenged me to a game of ayo.
