Page 7 of Cursed Daughters
“I have a name!” Kemi announced.
“What is it?”
“Abidemi!” A female child born in the absence of her father. They were trying to torment her. Her mother passed her the bowl.
It was Ebun’s turn now. She paid her dues and told them the name she had chosen for her daughter.
She would be better and greater than the ones who had come before her.
She would be a woman of integrity.
Ebun named her:
“Eniiyi.”
PART II
Monife
(1994)
I
Monife returned to find her home clouded in fog. The incense was so thick she could barely see. She considered walking back out, returning to the university grounds and burying her head in her books. Nothing good would come of going deeper into the Falodun property, where delusion was surely waiting for her. For a couple of minutes she stood in the hallway and pretended she had a choice—go back to school or enter the house; go back to school or cross the threshold; go back to school or engage with crazy.
But in truth, she avoided staying on campus for longer than she had to. Growing up in London, she had taken for granted that she would pursue the arts in England; but fate and a philandering father had meant her life had not gone quite as she had planned. Instead, she was reading law in Lagos, with no real intention of becoming a lawyer, under the tutelage of uninspiring old men, commuting from the home her great-grandfather had built.
Great-Grandpa Kunle had claimed he didn’t believe in the curse, but still he had planned for it. There were exactly six rooms in the two-storey home, one for each of his daughters—Toke, Bimpe, Afoke, Fikayo, Sayo, Ronke—so that whatever happened to them, they would have somewhere to escape to. And at various points, they had all needed somewhere to escapeto.
The Falodun home was virtually a museum; no one here ever thought to throw things away, except perhaps her cousin. Ebun found the clutter oppressive, but Mo was charmed by the hair claw that may or may not have belonged to Grandma Afoke, the pearlearrings that purportedly belonged to Grand-Aunty Toke and the dusty bible owned by Grand-Aunty Bimpe—her name was inscribed on the first page.
The house was interesting and eccentric, with its creaky floors, flickering lights and doors that swung open of their own will at night. But this, the cloying smell of incense, made her eyes water and her heart sink.
She walked past the main living room, where she heard the faint roar of the crowd on the wrestling channel—so Aunty Kemi was in and pretending that all was well; fantastic. She marched towards the west wing of the house, where the fog was foggiest and the scent at its strongest. As she drew nearer, she could make out chanting. She arrived at her mother’s door and knocked. The chanting didn’t stop; apparently her mother had no intention of welcoming her in. She opened the door.
The room was dim—the lights were off, curtains drawn—all the better to welcome in some nefarious spirit. She managed to avoid tripping over the stool that belonged tucked in below the dressing table. As the fog cleared and her eyes adjusted, she saw that there was a void in the centre of the room, where her mother stood. Furniture had been pushed out of the way to make space for whatever shenanigans were taking place.
“Mummy,” she said. But no other words followed. Her eyes took in her mother’s body. Her breasts and stomach were beginning to sag, but her arms and thighs were toned, and the hair that Monife had inherited, though greying, was clearly still a force to be reckoned with. She wore it in her signature six cornrows. Mo noted the keloid on her mother’s arm, the skin tag on her neck and the beauty spot on her stomach. She could note all these things because her mother stood before her naked, but for the wrapper that was loosely tied around her waist.
The world saw a woman who was unflappable, a woman of God, a respected headmistress at the local school—but behind closed doors, her mother flirted with strange spirits and gods.
“Mummy.”
Her mother did not respond, so Mo strode over to the stereo, where the chanting was coming from, and pressed the stop button. Then she opened the curtains and a window. She took another look at her mother.
The older woman had a glazed look on her face; the whites of her eyes were tinted red. Mo could only imagine what substance she had ingested, and from where. Her mother squinted at the light, shielding her eyes with her palm.
“Close it. Close it,” she muttered as she waved her other hand at Mo. “You will disturb them.”
Monife looked around her. She could not tell whether there were spirits in the room with them, but what she could see was a pot with a strange-looking plant creeping out of it, a small bowl of herbs from which smoke was rising and some misshapen stones scattered about.
“What are you doing?” she asked, even though of course she knew. This was perhaps her mother’s seventy-fourth attempt to lead her ex-husband back to them—despite the fact that he had a new wife and two children under five, shacked up in what used to betheirLondon home. He had moved on. Mo and Tolu had moved on. But still, her mother used any free moment she had to try to pull off in the spirit world what she hadn’t been able to achieve in the physical.
“This,” Bunmi announced, pointing vigorously at the bowl of herbs, “will clear his eye. He will remember who his family is.”
Mo sighed. The fog was beginning to dissipate. “It’s been four years, Mummy. He is not coming back.”
“We can undo the things that could not previously be undone.”
