Page 32 of Cursed Daughters
Ebun turned and walked out of her room. It was either that or say something she would regret.
And then, one day, just when Ebun thought the only way to get her baby back from her aunt would be to wrench her from her arms, Bunmi learnt that three prefects in her school had been caught cheating on an exam. Punishments would need to be meted out, new prefects selected, parents soothed—the school needed its headmistress. And though she would never admit it, theheadmistress needed her school. The crisis pulled her away from her niece and the baby she insisted on calling Motitunde.
So Ebun and Eniiyi were finally left to their own devices. If one didn’t count Sango (and she preferred not to count him), who had made a habit of following her around. There was no love lost between Ebun and the massive canine; he was always looking at her with those beady eyes, as though he knew her secrets and judged her accordingly. She told him to shoo, to get lost, to go, but he was deaf to her commands. There was no separating him from Eniiyi. Still, disregarding Sango, she was free to mother her child as she chose.
Only there was so very little choosing involved. She moved from task to task as if in a haze—lifting the baby to her breast, praying there was enough milk, changing nappy after nappy, reminding herself to eat and then dozing off with the child in her arms. She wondered why she had thought she could do this alone. The weight of the responsibility she had given herself began to feel crippling. She needed sleep. She was so very tired. Monife would have mothered with ease—loving had come so naturally to her. Not so Ebun, who had always weighed what a person gave her, offered to her, before offering anything of herself. Her nipples were sore, her body unfamiliar and the tears of her child set her on edge. Sango nudged her. She needed to pick up the howling infant; her cries were beginning to sound desperate.
She lifted the baby, baffled by how loud the sound was that rose from the tiny body. She rocked her back and forth, up and down, until the screaming quietened to little mewls. She and Eniiyi (and Sango) made their way to the kitchen. She was hungry. It was possible she had had some bread earlier, but it was also possible that “earlier” was yesterday.
The kitchen tiles were hot under her bare feet. She opened a cupboard, dragging out a pan with one hand as she cradled the baby with the other. With one hand she diced the plantain, poured oil ina pan and lit the stove. She let the oil heat up and then began to drop the plantain slices into the pan. If she hadn’t been sleep-deprived, she would have anticipated what happened next—the hot oil spitting from the pan, the scalding glob flying through the air and landing on Eniiyi’s thigh, the subsequent heart-wrenching cry.
For a moment, time stilled. Then she shook herself and rushed to the sink, turning on the tap and holding Eniiyi’s leg under the flow of cold water. She stared at the layers of skin peeling off to reveal raw flesh underneath. Was she doing the wrong thing? If anything, her baby’s cries had increased.
“Kí ló dé?” Kemi appeared, back from a date, and Eniiyi was scooped out of her arms. “Bring Vaseline, and a bandage from that kit in my room.”
Ebun followed her mother’s instructions. When she had gotten the items, she found Kemi and Eniiyi in the living room.
“Oya, breastfeed her.”
She hesitated. Was the newborn even safe with her? But she wasn’t given a chance to protest; the baby was already in her arms. Eniiyi latched on greedily, as though her mother’s nipple was a pain-reliever; and Kemi was free to attend to the leg. Ebun watched as her mother crouched and began to paste Vaseline on Eniiyi’s thigh, so it was hard to miss when she stilled, with a finger resting on the burn mark.
“What’s the matter?” Ebun asked as Kemi scanned the wound, a sense of dread creeping onto her shoulders like a cat, digging its claws into her skin. “What is it?”
“This burn, the shape of it…”
The shape…pampas grass. She gritted her teeth. She had seen the shape before. She had seen it so many times before. Monife had harboured no shame when it came to being naked. Ebun had seen her cousin’s body far more than she desired. She let out small breaths through her teeth.
“It looks like—”
“Mo’s was bigger,” she pointed out, but the words sounded far away. She cleared her throat.
“Still, you have to admit—”
“Mum. The scars are different.” And that was that. She would not entertain anything more on the subject.
II
Work felt like an out-of-body experience. Ebun sat in meetings but struggled to focus on the financial reports. Auditing the reports that came to her, checking for errors, getting the numbers to match the company’s expectations; it could be monotonous, but she had never considered it difficult. These days, though, she had to read through a document three times before she could make sense of it. The lack of sleep was turning her brain to mush. Four months was all they had been willing to spare for her maternity leave, and just as she and Eniiyi had found some sort of rhythm, she was forced to rely on either her mother’s unpredictable schedule or her aunt’s flexibility at work. Bunmi would take Eniiyi to the school, where she would be passed from teacher to teacher in the staff room; even the students were happy to hold on to her.
Ebun’s day should have ended at five p.m., but her boss had no sense of a work–life balance, and there was Lagos traffic to contend with; so she didn’t get home till ten each night. Eniiyi would be asleep, her mother would be watching the wrestling content on Channel 8 and her aunt would either be looking through résumés in the hope of hiring a new physics teacher, or lighting a bowl of incense to commune with the spirits.
Tonight, the house was quiet as she walked through it. Even now, she avoided looking at the photographs on the walls—she had not retrieved Monife’s in the end, and no one had put up new photos where her cousin’s had been. Instead, pale rectangular gaps reminded you that something, someone was missing. In the end, it was more traumatic than looking up to see Mo’s smiling face.
She rubbed her forehead with her fingers. She would get something to eat, greet her mother and aunt, check on the baby and go to bed. She grabbed a slice of bread from the kitchen, found the east living room empty and so headed to the west living room. Her mother and aunt were there, but so was Mama G. She tried to quietly back out, but it was too late, she’d been spotted.
“Ebun! Kúl?´.”
“Mama G. Mummy. Aunty. ? káal?´.” They were seated in a semicircle and their expressions were grim. She assumed she had disturbed some kind of weird ritual. She wanted no part of it. “I just came to say goodnight. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Ebun, wait,” said her mother. “You will want to hear this.”
“I doubt it, Mum.”
“Just come. It is about Eniiyi.”
Ebun was reluctant to join them, but her mother and aunt were watching her with worried eyes, and Mama G, who was now sporting a gold tooth, was fiddling with her gele. She seemed nervous. Ebun had never seen the woman anything less than cocky. The first time she had met her, Mama G had told her the G stood for Greatness. Then she had overheard her tell Mo that the G stood for Genius. But according to her mother, Mama G’s first son was named Gbenga. She was simply Mama Gbenga.
She sighed and sat down on the arm of the couch, somehow closing up the semicircle. Mo would have laughed if she could see her.
