Ннеди Окорафор - Lagos Noir

“She’s a hardworking girl,” Mama Lateef later said. “Ọmọ to da ni. You’ll see, everybody lo ma n like ẹ.” And before she left, Joy rose from where she had been kneeling, repacking her things, and embraced Mama Lateef. “Face your work, ṣ’o gbọ?” Mama Lateef said, holding her by her shoulders. She turned to you, smiling: “Sometimes, ẹ mọ, these girls forget.”

Mama Lateef didn’t exaggerate — Joy was extremely likable. Were she still alive, ọmọ to fa iṣe mọ’ra, your mother would have called her. She reminded you of Mercy, the girl who served your mother for years. A girl so loyal that when your mother tried to poison her husband, the girl swallowed both accusation and punishment without regret. And you hoped to make such a girl out of Joy. Once she got past her shyness, Joy aimed to please. She kneeled when she spoke and buried her eyes when she was spoken to. She smiled when you complimented her, and had a way of laughing into herself whenever she became the object of attention. She reminded you of a mimosa; quiet, delicate, she moved like a secret.

Yinka thought Joy was awesome (all men have a go-to adjective and that was his) and sharp. Her maths, he used to say, was on point. It was strangely entertaining the effect adding currency to random numbers had on her mental acuity; how, for Joy, the difference between genius and stupidity was the naira. She couldn’t tell you twenty times five, but ask Joy N1,520 times fifteen and it was like NEPA had brought light behind her eyes — from her mouth, the girl churned numbers. So when you brought it up that Joy should attend a primary school in the area, Yinka agreed. More so, he offered to fund it.

The women in your book club liked Joy too. They made no comments about her and that was enough. The club met on the last Wednesday of every month, late in the afternoon, and rotated living rooms as venues. By the time they met Joy, it was your third meeting, and all five members including you were discussing The Bluest Eye . You hated it — not the book, which you had suggested at the previous meeting, but the book club. You had only joined because Yinka thought it would be good for you to be around other women. Plus, reading with them, he swore, would be a bonus since you had always wanted to get back into what used to be your favorite pastime. He thought, also, that the book club would get you some friends, the two of you being new in the neighborhood, and you being at home most of the time. But Yinka didn’t know these women like you did, much less like you had come to know them after having read with them.

He didn’t know how Bola, forty-two with Eucharia Anunobi eyebrows, openly gushed about Yinka’s photographs and would always steer the conversation toward his role in your sex life. Yinka couldn’t imagine a woman like Nneka, thirty-eight, who treated her house help like garbage, and once, when the club met at her house, she asked the girl to kneel down and fly her arms (for making me repeat myself, Nneka had explained). And women like Ibukun and Jumoke, both your age, thirty-six, sickened you for how often they spoke about their pastor, Daddy this and Daddy that. But Yinka couldn’t know that; after all, both women reminded you of his mother, whose company you enjoyed, as far as he was concerned. These women knew nothing about books. They were, after all, the kind who concluded that Toni Morrison had tried with The Bluest Eye (though Bola thought the punctuation could have been better), and meant it as a compliment.

It was September and the women were seated in your living room that Wednesday when it occurred to them that the next book should be Joys of Motherhood by Buchi Emecheta. Bola, who suggested it, claimed the idea just popped into her head. Moments later, Joy walked in with a tray of iced tea and Bola squealed that it must be more than coincidence: Joy. Joys of ... If you rolled your eyes any farther back, they’d have thought you were Liz Benson in Diamond Ring . None of the other women had read Joys of Motherhood but Bola claimed her oldest daughter, who was in secondary school, had brought it home once.

“I haven’t read it yet but it’s a good book, well-written,” she said. “Not like that last book — who even suggested it? Nneka, I’m sure it was you.”

Nneka responded, “What do you mean by that?”

And Bola: “Nothing-o, don’t mind me.”

Nneka: “Before, nko? You see, it wasn’t even me. But I don’t blame you, we kuku know your memory is one-kind.”

Everybody knew what Nneka meant. One way or another, Nneka, a classic eke, had gotten around to telling everyone in the book club how she suspected that Bola’s husband wasn’t the one responsible for Bola’s children — everyone except Bola.

“Women, please!” cried Ibukun.

“We didn’t come here to fight!” Jumoke added.

You left the women in the living room for your bedroom, where you had sent Joy to fetch your phone — the girl was taking too long.

The truth was, since you moved to Surulere you had been beset with melancholy. Sure, living there had its advantages, including the area’s organic electricity, which compensated for the absence of actual electricity. For you especially, Surulere provided a unique proximity to Nigerian films and to your favorite actors and actresses, whom you ran into randomly at restaurants, salons, and supermarkets. Once, at a supermarket, a man you swore was Fred Amata had asked if you would like to star in a film he was producing, but you declined. Still, living in Surulere was nothing like living in Ikoyi had been, and Yinka would often remind you that deciding to sell the house in Dolphin Estate was the third-best decision the two of you had ever made, the first being to get married and the second being to have a child together. The book club only made things worse but, really, you preferred when the women fought to when they discussed books. The former was something they were actually good at.

You found yourself just as drawn to as you were repulsed by Jumoke. Jumoke, who described herself as pregnant-pregnant (because she had been pregnant for more than six months), and had mentioned to you that by the next meeting she would have delivered her fourth child. “How many months is it now?” she had once asked you, and you had replied that you would be three months pregnant in a week. Then she asked why you looked so tired already when you had two more trimesters to complete. She went on to tell you to eat more vegetables, fresh vegetables-o, and it didn’t matter that you hadn’t asked. The novelty of being pregnant — the effusive attention from onlookers, the platitudes, how you had become the American Embassy for unsolicited advice, the nausea — set you apart from the other women, far enough to recognize how so quickly you had become a Nollywood wife.

But there was Joy, who took your mind away from these things. Joy, who at night rubbed your feet with Chinese balm and in the mornings massaged your joints with hot, moist towels; Joy, whose fingers were nimble and deft; who, even as you swelled, looked at your naked body through a combination of zeal, envy, and adoration, your skin the color of salmon and hers, peat. Joy, who took to learning the mechanics of your body with steadfastness, and lotioned your back as though the skin around it was of silk tapestry and hers to keep. And you wondered: Would she do anything for me? Could she be my own Mercy?

The same Joy, you had observed, was growing into a remarkable girl. She had gained some weight, some light around her cheeks, plump to her breasts, and wore confidence like an ipele of emeralds around her shoulders. It would make you laugh if it didn’t terrify you a little. They were always girls, never women, your mother had cautioned you — about the Joys of the world. There can only be one woman in any household, even your father with his four wives ensured each had hers. “So jẹ ki o ye ẹ dada,” she always told you. “Such girls don’t need your pity or friendship.” And how — for she had told you this when you were at that age where daughters believe themselves to be the Euodia to their mothers’ Syntyche and challenge them — you pitied and befriended those girls still.