When I thought of home, I thought of Calabar, of No. 32 Ene Ndem, with its uneven stairwell, chipped at the sides and desperately in need of a second or third coat of mortar.

I thought of the walk up the stairs and the cautious steps you had to take at the sixth and tenth steps because they were half the size of the others, like someone had been distracted but figured they’d do. At the top of the stairs, if you strained high enough, you could see the rest of Ene Ndem, a sprawl of red corrugated roofs, punctuated by electric poles leaning at odd angles, naked wires sagging over dusty balconies and guava tree branches.

The front door creaked whenever opened, so that the entire street knew when we arrived and when we left. On many nights, I would hear my mother curse under her breath as she tried to hold the doorknob steady.

Our neighbour’s house leaned so close that both our roofs met overhead, forming an unyielding corridor that blocked out the sun from the rest of the house. The only light, a soft red hue, came from the coloured bulbs my grandmother liked. You could not tell, sitting in there, whether it was morning or evening, or whether it was sunny or cloudy outside. The corridor itself held broken chairs, rusted radios, blackened pots and pans, and everything else my grandmother swore she didn’t need any more but would not throw away.

The ceiling fan, brown from dirt and wear, whistled louder than it cooled. Four mismatched couches were pushed against the wall, faded and sunken from the weight of all the buttocks that had sat on them.

***

I thought of my grandmother, crouched over the fire under the passion fruit tree, frying garri after a long day selling sand at the beach market. Her wrapper tied tight across her chest — an act she wouldn’t let me copy, warning that my breasts would fall before I even started bearing children — while I stood there wondering when I’d ever said anything about children, or that I would ever have them.

In the kiosk behind our kitchen, she stocked everything from packets of Tom Tom sweets, ugwu leaves, cigarettes, Maggi cubes, sachets of Cowbell and Milo, and pure water, to Coca-Cola bottles filled with kerosene. These she sold to the people of Ene Ndem, mostly on credit, so that every month, it was a hassle to restock the kiosk. Strangely, it didn’t seem to matter much to her so long as Ette Okon — her late husband’s brother, who had been coming to the kiosk since before I was born — could smoke his Benson and lick his Tom Tom after. A forever dance where he pretended that Eka Okon couldn’t smell it on his breath and Eka Okon too pretended his teeth were browning from negligence.

The people of Ene Ndem did not like her, but they respected her. She gave them something they wanted, so they hid their disdain. They didn’t fool me, though. I could tell from the way they asked me about her, eager to hear that something was wrong. That perhaps her back or heart had given out. From their eyes, I could read the hope before the question and the disappointment after my answer.

It didn’t matter anyway because she did not care to be liked. Once, a woman I recognised from Kingdom Hall walked all the way from Diamond Hill to thank her for paying her son’s school fees. She offered the woman some water, listened to about half the speech, then excused herself to attend to a customer at the kiosk. She did not come back. The woman waited an hour before letting herself out. My grandmother did not miss a meeting at Kingdom Hall. She believed in hard work even when there was nothing to show for it. She believed in consequences, and that we would all answer for our sins if not now, then when the trumpet inevitably sounded.

***

My grandmother ruled the house. But the second room to the left was my mother’s turf. And that is where I was born. The same room where my mother fell asleep each night to the droning of my grandmother reminding her that she needed to move out and learn to be on her own. Every other week, in a show of defiance, she would pack her things, go quiet for a day or two, lips pressed even tighter than usual, but eventually would settle back into the clutter of half-zipped Ghana-must-go bags, sleeves and wrappers hanging over the edges, neither packed nor put away. I like to think that she stayed because she had no place to go. But I am convinced that she just did not want to let her mother win.

I grew up here, playing square and ten ten with the other children in the compound, clapping our hands and shuffling our feet until they were caked in dust or until we could no longer bear the pain from our scraped knees, or until someone’s mother shouted from inside.

This was also where I learned to speak English. Not from school, but from the poorly dubbed videotapes that my cousins sent from America. On some weekends, the compound children would crowd onto our couches, and we would watch them again and again — Coming to America, Sister Act, a bootleg Titanic that skipped all the way through — mouthing the lines back without even knowing what we were saying. I had already learned Efik by then, so my English came late and sideways. Today, my Ys and Js still cross over when I am not paying attention.

***

When I thought of home, I thought of Calabar, of No. 32 Ene Ndem, and of her. The girl in our backroom. She was not really a part of the house. Not like my mother and I were. Not like the kiosk, mfịọk, and esàng were. But she was there. And I had begun to notice her.

The thing with her didn’t start so much as come to be. Only now, looking back, can I call it a thing. Back then, it was almost as if she was Ekanem one day, and the very next day, she was not. Two of us, without ever discussing it, had become something. Ekanem was not even the kind of girl that you noticed. She wore the same handful of skirts and dresses, all in plain colours of dark blues and faded greens. Her eyes were close-set, a short distance from her brows, and when she smiled, which was not often, her eyelids disappeared.

She was my grandmother’s tenant, another project from the congregation on whom my grandmother could pour the tenderness that she believed was wasted on my mother. There had been others over the years. Young sisters with soft voices and their well-thumbed New World Translation Bibles; young sisters who had lost a parent, or both; young sisters who quoted scripture to my grandmother and agreed with her before she finished her sentences; young sisters who said “thank you” too much. All of whom my mother hated. With Ekanem, there were rumours, whispered through the congregation but never said out loud. My grandmother had taken her in anyway.

Ekanem was quiet where others were keen to please with their unnecessary chatter and offers of help; unrushed where others milled about doing things that did not need doing. There was a subtle defiance about her, and my mother hated her for this. But it was not about Ekanem as it had not been about the young sisters before her. We all could see how my grandmother leaned in when Ekanem spoke, how she saved her the bottom pot, crispy and charred, because she knew Ekanem liked it and the way she had started calling her Eka. Just Eka.

My grandmother made space for her, and so did the rest of us, whether or not we wanted to, and because we shared the kitchen in the house, she and I were often in there together. She at the stove, me at the sink, finding reasons not to leave.

The more I saw her, the more I started to wait around for her without meaning to. Soot had settled into the formica and the walls, but I stayed just so I could watch as she deftly chopped okra and ugwu leaves for her soup. When she bent over to scoop water from the black drum in the corner, her waist beads came into view and seemed to glint. I wondered if, like mine, they were meant to tell me when I had eaten my fill or if she only wore them to accentuate her already perfect waist. I wondered how it would feel to run my hands over them, and over her skin which looked like it had been rubbed with palm oil and ochre. I stared, even as I knew that her entire body would be soft beneath my fingers.

***

One day, she turned to me, half amused and asked if I was following her around. “No” formed in my throat, but I let out a grunt instead. She scoffed and turned, continuing to her room. But then, she turned around and asked if I wanted to come with her. I knew that everything about my life would change if I said yes. And that everything about my life would change if I said no.

I said yes.

Her room was spare, her curtains faded. Two worn paintings hung on the wall above a bed pushed against the far end of the room. I perched at the edge of the unmade bed, unsure of what to do with my hands, my breath, my body.

She didn’t say anything. Just moved around the room with the same assuredness I had come to admire about her. She opened a drawer, gathered her towel, pulled out her bathing bucket, and drew the curtains. I sat there, aware of myself; my charcoal-stained skirt, my calloused heels. I wanted to leave, I wanted to stay, I wanted something to happen, and I wanted nothing at all to happen.

She took off her clothes in front of me without ceremony as though my being there did not require her modesty. I tried to look away, at the wall, at the curtains, at my own knees, but my eyes kept finding her. The line of her shoulders, the slope of her spine. She tied the towel across her chest and stepped out of the room. By the time she came back, I could barely breathe. She sat beside me, and we said nothing for what felt like days.

My mind raced through a hundred questions about what I was feeling, why I was feeling it, and what that would say of me on the last day. I had sat through enough meetings at Kingdom Hall to know that the price for whatever was about to happen here was steep. But I shelved these thoughts away. The 144,000 could wait. Jehovah, if he was paying any attention, surely had bigger problems than two girls on a narrow bed in No. 32 Ene Ndem.

Ekanem, meanwhile, looked like she could sit there forever. She wasn’t tense. She didn’t fidget. She pressed her thighs against mine and rested her hands easily in her lap. Her face held steady, nothing in this moment surprising her. As far as I could see and tell, she was exactly where she and I were always going to end up. So, when she turned to me with one brow lifted in question, I held her eyes and nodded.

The taste of her lips on mine was like cold water at the end of a long thirst, and I drank of them as someone who had not let herself want for years. Her hands found my body and went to work on every cranny of it. We lay there after, breathing each other in as her legs tangled with my freshly shaven ones.

***

We soon slipped into something steady. On nights when the house was still and luck leaned our way, I would shave my legs and make my way, careful not to topple any broken chairs, rusted radios, blackened pots and pans as I headed to our backroom.

We never spoke of what we were doing, never asked for more than what was already there. But we soon learned each other’s rhythms. I found myself watching her in the small moments; the way a plait of her hair always fell across her forehead, just so she could flick it aside, or how she always sat with both her legs tucked neatly beneath her. Our stares lingered. Her hand rested on the small of my back, and her fingers found mine easily.

If my grandmother noticed us, she did not say. But she began opening doors louder in the mornings, clearing her throat just outside the kitchen before entering, as though she was giving us enough time to remember ourselves. Many evenings, we gathered to help her grate cassava for her garri. Ekanem and I sat on low stools under the passion fruit tree, bent over a wide basin, our fingers raw from the motion. My mother hovered nearby, pretending not to watch us. I would glance around — at Ekanem, my mother, her mother, and the old kitchen glowing faintly in the evening light — and find myself wishing this moment was real. That this life, this belonging, was something we were allowed.

***

One day, I got back to a battered red Passat parked under the passion fruit tree. It did not at once feel like my world had ended. Not until a forgettable man with a forgettable face came into the kitchen through the corridor with Ekanem behind him. He was older than us, in a short-sleeved shirt damp at the back. He walked straight past me to his car without looking up.

I didn’t ask who he was. I didn’t have to. Something in the way she avoided my eyes as she too walked past me, in the way her body did not reach for mine, told me what I needed to know.

“We can’t, Ufanima me. You know we can’t continue like this,” she said, as she caught up to me in the corridor. I shrugged her hands off as if I had forgotten what those hands were capable of doing to my body, and went off to settle back into my life before her.

Every night, I watched the battered Passat come and go. Every night, with raging resentment, I wished the passion fruit tree would lose a branch right when the man drove up under it. I exhausted myself imagining various scenarios that would leave him dead, or incapacitated, only taking breaks to think of Ekanem’s body straining under my touch.

***

After many harmattans and many rains had come and gone; after my grandmother had died and the affairs of No. 32 Ene Ndem had passed unto me; after my mother had found someone else to take care of her; and after many a man had come and gone from Ekanem’s bed, I went to tell her I was leaving for good. She ran her hands over my legs, as she did in the past, and with a smile on my lips, I watched her recoil from the stubs of hair that I had let grow.

Now, when I think of home, I do not think of No. 32 Ene Ndem. I think of nothing at all.

 

 

 

 

 

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