Sky Don Fall [Part IV]

Part I

Part II

Part III

That was how our friendship began. He came by the flat a few times a week; in the afternoons, when my mother and his uncle were at work. I found myself looking forward to his visits; found myself making sure I wasn’t wearing soup-soiled blouses or bleach-stained jeans or my hairnet on the days he might show up. And there were no fixed days or times for his visits; he would come by whenever and that was what excited me, him showing up unannounced, me waiting for that loud knock on the door.

          I would cook us Indomie or concoction rice with sardines and eggs and we would sit in the living room watching television; he always told me to change the channel to Africa Magic Urban, saying he wanted to improve his English. He told me about being raised by his grandmother in Oyo, where she was able to send him to school up to primary 3 through her akara and ogi business before she had a stroke and could no longer work. After that he had been passed from one relative to the other, each promising to send him to school but instead using him as a houseboy or a shopkeeper or a farmhand, and his uncle in Lagos was no different. He had never known his parents; his mother had died when he was a few weeks old from a complication relating to his birth, and his father had never taken responsibility for the pregnancy.

          When Femi wasn’t in the flat, we spoke on the phone while he was in the market or late at night after he returned home. I sent him a text message one evening to ask if he was back, and my phone chimed a few minutes later with a call from him; his voice was playful when he told me he could barely read and could not understand what I had sent in the message, but there was a tragedy I could hear in his voice.

          Sometimes he came to the flat bearing gifts; an orange or two, an apple, a bottle of Pepsi. There were times he would glance at me and I could feel the desire dripping out of his body, but would keep my eyes on the television or on my phone. And the times I looked at him with that same desire in my eyes, he found something funny to say, something comic with which to derail the oncoming train.

          When he asked if I had siblings and asked why I didn’t have a job, I cut neatly around the questions as best as I could; either not answering or pretending that I had not heard him. And then one day he put his half-eaten plate of noodles down on a stool and turned to face me.

          “Woman with brain like your own no suppose just dey sit for house,” he said. “Why you no want find work?”

          I wanted to tell him about my father; that my brain had stopped working about the time he abandoned me, that after all these years, I still did not know where he was or what had happened to him, that the not knowing was driving me crazy, that I had messed my chances up at school, slept with a lecturer to make up for it, got a third class and it felt like I was too dumb to have a real future.

           Instead, when I opened my mouth, I told him my school was on strike and I was waiting till it reopened so that I could collect my call-up letter for service. He bought it, because he looked at me smiled a deep smile, picked his plate up and told me that God always had his ways.