“Woman wey love you go cook for you,” Michael said. “She no go gree make hunger finish you.”
They stood rapt and expectant, Tule, Emeks and Segun, listening to him, a yellow sack of Premium Chinese Rice each at their feet. They had come to really enjoy and look forward to Michael’s stories—the drama in the telling, the startling filthy details, how they often ended with him the underrated phallic hero. They were familiar with the pause that followed his initial statements of fact, which he always delivered with a wise, arrogant air, gauging the audience, seeing if he had their attention, so, naturally, they waited for him to speak. And, satisfied with the eyes on him, he continued:
“And na another man wife food dey sweet pass, you go chop am come chop the wife join.”
They looked at him in quiet awe as if they had seen an angel. Away from them, facing the drizzling rain, stood a fourth man. Tule thought he heard movement behind him, but when he looked back there was no one. Their supervisor’s door remained shut in the distance, the lights off, the dust-brown louvers half-opened. He had arrived earlier that morning with Koala, the herbs girl, and entered his office and shut the door. They had all laughed and teased Koala when she stepped out not long after fanning between her legs with her gown and making a face like someone who had had too much pepper. She had ignored them and hurried along.
“He won’t be up for a while,” Emeks said to Tule, who turned and fixed his eyes again on Michael.
“I jam this woman one time for market when I go buy school bag for my pikin. Igbo woman. She fine like ten people. Amaka. She yellow like this, like pawpaw, come get this ikebe wey bad. She tell me say she don sight me from afar, say she like me, make we be friends. I tell am say I be person husband, married man; she say she no get business with my wife. I tell am say no wam, collect her number, give her serious close-marking for like one week.”
The fourth man looked into his watch.
“Her husband na contractor. Big man. He no dey ever dey around. She go dey cry give me like this for phone, say she dey lonely, say no be life be this.
“One day she invite me come her house, say make we dey. She give me Oha.” He paused and raised his head, eyes shut, smiling as if recalling a fond memory. “She say make I chop Oha, come chop wetin sweet pass Oha.
“Tule, when I handle am, she start to dey beg, dey shake like this like leaf. She say she no know say I carry like that, say she fear who no fear me o.”
Tule and Emeks doubled over laughing—a hearty laughter that concealed things darker: jealousy and envy and disbelief. Michael beamed. Briefly, he looked in the direction of the fourth man, whose black shirt was glued to his back.
“Na the first time I go chop Oha be that, e sweet die.”
“My babe made it for me one time like that,” Segun said.
“You too don get babe, Segun?”
“Don’t mind him,” said Emeks.
“My wife doesn’t even cook for me,” Tule said.
“Na English dey enjoy that one pass for here. Every day different different delicacy inside cooler. Na why e fresh be that. No be so, English?”
“English.”
“English.”
“English!”
John Thomas started, turned away from the rain, came back to himself. He had not been paying attention. He had, in fact, heard nothing of Michael’s story but the initial statement. His eyes were dull and pitiful as a cow’s. They bore a gloom, a sadness. “Wetin do you?” Michael asked, leaving his sack and walking up to John Thomas, who shook his head and said, “Nothing o. Nothing. It’s just this rain. The cold has finished me.” The others joined Michael and John Thomas, five of them forming a crooked circle.
“So na wetin do you be that?”
“Yes o.”
“You sure say no be say you miss Madam?”
The other guys laughed, and John Thomas, embarrassed, laughed too. Michael had seen through him. Since he arrived at work and it began drizzling, he had been thinking about his wife. The rain—the cold it brought, the sudden gusts of wind—had stirred such longings in his body that he was beside himself, sick with it. Earlier that morning as he laid out his clothes for work, his wife had called to him from where she lay in bed, unclothed and sleepy, tired from her night shift at the hospital where she worked as an auxiliary nurse for a stuck-up young doctor. “You should wear something warmer,” she had said, “this shirt is just inviting trouble. They said it might rain today on the radio.”
“This weather I’m looking at?” he had answered, approaching the only window in their bedroom, out of which he saw the grey spread of the street below, the still-closed shops, the injured brown dogs nosing the ground.
“If you fall sick I won’t look at you once.”
“You mean you won’t take your eyes off me once?”
His wife had rolled her eyes, got out of bed, and sat next to his clothes bare-chested, watching him dress. “Will you at least take the umbrella?”
It was this image of her bare-chested that kept returning to him: the rolls of her belly, the brown sheen of her skin, her breasts, the pointy nipples, her vivid brows, lips, eyes. He wanted to make love to her. He wanted to hold her to his chest. He wanted to feel her breath hot against his face. But closing time laid far off, unamused, time passing as if begrudged. As if reading his thoughts, Michael said, putting his arm around John Thomas, “We go soon commot. You go blink now and five don nack.”
“It’s just eleven, Michael. Commot as how?” said Tule.
“Keep shut.”
A voice broke them up as they teased John Thomas. It was their supervisor’s. He spoke unsteady English, but with a voice so forceful and loud and harsh that it sent them scampering. It was the voice of someone who knew he wielded power. Without even hearing the exact words he spoke, they sprang into action and resumed work, each man hastily raising the sack of rice to his head and making for the lorry.
*
AT lunch, seated in the dining area, barely touching his food, John Thomas called his wife, but she didn’t pick up. When he called again and she did, the rain, which had picked up and pattered loudly on the tin roofing of the dining room, made it impossible to hear her. Her voice kept going and coming, going and coming, drowned by rain and static, until, frustrated, he hung up and saw that his network bar was empty. He dropped the phone on the table before him. He picked up his spoon, dropped it, looked at his watch. Michael poked his side and laughed.
“I no know say e dey hook you like this o, English,” Michael said.
John Thomas picked his spoon and took a mouthful of the porridge his wife had dished for him. It tasted like heaven. After such long hours at work fighting off sleep in that mosquito-riddled hospital, she still came home and cooked for him before she went to sleep. His wife. The only woman he had ever loved, the woman of his few dreams. They had met at a party he didn’t want to go to, drinking beer he didn’t want to drink, surrounded by people he didn’t know, and she had been the only one who spoke to him and saw, not his bumbling awkwardness, or boring reticence, or how generally scrawny he was, but a man she could make a life with. He had asked her out less than a month later after two weeks of long phone calls. Even then, before he gathered the courage to ask her out, she had made him food and sent it to his house, teasing him that it was the least she could do for a struggling bachelor. He knew, when he saw her again seated across from him at Accord Pepper Soup Joint, that he wanted to marry her; he wanted to wake up every day to that face, those eyes. He was sure she’d have his children, all three of them, a boy and two girls, the boy before the girls, and that they’d all have her lovely brown eyes. They have tried and tried for a baby, but God was yet to answer them.
But making a baby was far from John Thomas’s mind that afternoon: more than anything, he wanted his wife. She’d probably be in bed now, he thought, covered up, with nothing on, or on her way to the fridge in the parlor for treats, or to the kitchen for food, the house quiet around her, missing him. He recalled when they last made love, how the day had started, everything that led up to the moment where they tore at each other in the parlor, against the wall that led to their room, in the shower, everywhere. He had returned home earlier than usual because the Chinese Factory was shut down for the day. Some government official wanted more than his usual remittance, and so placed thugs at the gate, who chased off anyone that came close. She was watching an American movie when he arrived. He settled down beside her, a sex scene came on after some time, and then they were both going at it, imitating what was happening in the movie, he thrilled by how fun and strangely satisfying the whole thing was, she happy to be living her fantasy, urging him on, laughing. He had never seen her like that.
John Thomas ate a little less than half of his food and returned to work, loading sack after sack of rice into the cavernous back of the lorry, the whole time thinking about his wife. Closing time, which he had desperately looked forward to, now that it was near, filled him with both naked delight and cold terror. Delight at what the evening held, the many possibilities, terror that his delight could be so easily thwarted, was very likely to be thwarted. If they were to do anything, he had a small window. His wife left for work punctually at 6:30, and with the rain still steadily drizzling, still threatening to flame into something bigger, he might never make it home in time to catch her. There was also the fact that she sometimes had to leave early to get ahead of the rain, which caused serious traffic and made her late and cost her a portion of her salary. He went from being excited about leaving work, to fretting that he had raised his hopes for nothing, to being mad at Michael for laughing and teasing him, and then impatiently clocking out when closing time came, too much in a hurry to wait for the others. He made his way out of the gate and walked down the tarred road to Ikeja Underbridge, skirting puddles, checking his watch as he walked, calculating. The walk to Underbridge took him ten minutes, five less than he usually spent walking with Michael and Tule. They called to him from afar, trying to tease him, but he pretended he didn’t hear.
There were no buses at the Berger Stop, where the Koropes usually parked, small yellow mice spotted with black neatly lined up, each drinking its fill and moving on to make its trip, then hurrying back to get back in line. Instead, a crowd had formed. An expectant crowd. John Thomas took his place in the crowd and craned his neck in the direction the Koropes came from. By his estimation, all things considered, he had less than an hour left to get home. The trip usually took much lesser than that, about thirty to forty minutes, but it had rained, and it was rush hour, and a crowd had formed at the park; he’d be lucky to even get a bus for another twenty minutes.
He looked at his watch. He had fifty minutes left. He sighted from a distance a Korope leaving Olowu Stop on the other side of the road, only a passenger in its back seat, and quickly crossed the road before it drove to his side. A car almost knocked him down. Its driver, a woman wearing a red bonnet, showed him her palm, five fingers splayed at him. He ignored her and rushed to the bus and settled in the front seat. Other people had, by then, noticed and done the same, so that the bus filled up before it even turned.
Forty-five minutes. They stopped at the traffic light at Allen, where the road divided into four directions of two sides each. Hawkers walked up to the Korope offering gala, water, plantain chips, and some kind of nut he couldn’t name. When no one showed interest, they melted away. John Thomas kept shifting in his seat. He kept looking at his watch, then at the road ahead. When the light turned green and they moved from Allen and air filled the bus again, he leaned back into his seat and distracted himself with thoughts of the rain, which had stopped drizzling, though the sky remained unflinchingly dark.
Forty minutes. They turned off Awolowo Road to Agidingbi and came to a standstill. A long Coca-Cola lorry had blocked the road. Its driver, distressed and confused at the steering wheel, struggled to drive into the depot. The lorry had stopped the flow of traffic on all sides. The FRSC officers sat napping in their cubicle. That way, another ten minutes passed. John Thomas hissed as they moved again. The rest of the way, past First Gate, Grammar School, and Omole, the driver, stopping only once at Phase 1, drove like a lunatic, and John Thomas was grateful. He got off the bus at the final stop and crossed to the other side of the road. Rather than walk the short distance to Berger Bus Stop to cut cost, he hopped on the nearest okada he found. It was 300 Naira over the normal price, but he didn’t mind. He just wanted to be home before his wife left for the night.
*
They had moved only a short distance when a policeman standing in the middle of the road, his companions busy with other okadas, motioned for them to stop. Wind fluttered lightly the collar of his shirt. He walked up to them after they had parked and said nothing.
“Oga mi, nothing dey o,” the okada man said.
“Do normal make you dey go,” the policeman answered. He had saliva at one edge of his mouth, and a wet toothpick in the other. The tag on his chest said he was Bello Yinusa. A thick, black scar ran from the side of his neck into his shirt. He reeked of alcohol and smoke.
“I just commot, oga mi.”
“No worry,” said Bello Yinusa, taking the toothpick out of his mouth, “when I seize your okada you go do normal.” He took the key out of the ignition. John Thomas looked at his watch again. He had less than twenty minutes left before his wife had to leave. They could be here for another thirty minutes; the okada man was unwilling to make concessions, and the policeman looked in a bad mood. He had come too far to be thwarted by this. He took a five hundred Naira note out of his wallet and handed it to Bello Yinusa, who took it and tucked it into his bulging trouser pocket and returned the key and waved them off.
“You no suppose give am,” the okada man said. John Thomas wanted to knock his head off his neck. Instead, shocking himself, he was curt: he said, “Oga, stop driving like a snail and go fast.”
As they turned onto the long road at the head of which was the area police station Aromire, the okada spluttered and coughed and stopped.
“What is it again?” said John Thomas. “What is this again? What has happened again?”
The okada man told him to be patient. He tried to get the okada going again, but it didn’t budge. After some minutes, he looked up in fake penitence, and said that he could not go any further. Something had broken the chain of his okada. John Thomas shook his head, hissed, and handed the man three hundred naira notes, half the agreed price, daring him to say something. The man said nothing. He tucked the notes into his breast pocket and John Thomas hailed another okada, which brought him, at 6:20, to the black gate of his house.
He fumbled for his keys in his bag, but could not find it. Tule had borrowed it to use the bottle-opener keychain and forgotten to return it. John Thomas knocked and knocked and knocked but no one answered. He called his wife; her number was unreachable. He knocked again, and, after some time, Amara, the downstairs neighbor’s help, opened the gate for him. As he thanked her, he saw, beyond her, stepping into the rain, a large yellow umbrella over her head, his wife. She had a wrapper around her body. From head to bust was bare, and he felt something stir in his groin when he saw her.
“Sorry,” she said, “I was sleeping, I didn’t hear my phone ring at all.”
“The call went through?” John Thomas answered. “You’re still at home?”
“My leave starts today now. Did you forget?”
“I was rushing home to you.”
“I slept off waiting for you.”
That evening, as the rain picked up and beat on the roof like the fat hands of an angry giant, as it thundered and shook the earth outside, as the gutters filled up and spilled over, John Thomas and his wife, in the half-darkness of their room, made a song. It was a song with lots of highs and lows, ebbs and flows, punctuated by rain, at once sultry and holy. If it had to be named, it’d have been called Rainy Weather.