Daddy

1.

A decade ago, I travelled from Warri to Lagos with 50 other students from my secondary school. On our way to the summer camp in Badagry, our teacher showed us the variations in the vegetation.

“Note how the trees become taller, the forest less dense as we go west,” she said, and I kept my 14-year-old eyes glued to the window pane, watching thick short palm trees sitting on dark soil make way for tall lean trees in red earth. I made a mental note to tell my daddy about it.

A decade later, I travel this road again and I have no mental notes made for my daddy, no imagined scenarios, no conversations, only anxiety and excitement that knot in my stomach. I got off the bus at PTI Park in Warri.

The air is cooler; the blue of taxis and commercial buses and tricycles calmer than the flashy yellow of Lagos commercial vehicles.

A middle aged man walked towards me and asked “Taxi?”

“Yes,” I replied.

He took my suitcase, and pointed towards his car parked in a line of ash-coloured Peugeot cars.

“Where you dey go?”

“DSC.”

“Where for DSC?”

He opened the boot of his taxi and dropped my suitcase. I blinked. I no longer knew where my family lived.

My parents moved houses while I was away, so I called my mum and listened as she gave me directions to the new apartment. I relayed the directions to the taxi driver as he navigated the streets of Delta Steel Company (DSC) housing estate. We were going to Suleja Street. The streets were named after major Nigerian towns and cities.

When we turned into Suleja, there was a long row of red-bricked one-storied flats, standing beside the road like soldiers at attention in a parade. I wasn’t sure which flat was ours. I was about to call my mum again when I saw my daddy down the road, head bent, walking slowly as if counting the stones on the broken tar. He was wearing one of his old shirts, which my mum disapproved of over the years, because they had holes, had lost their colours, or had become too loose.

I told the driver to slow down. The taxi was now beside him. I reached out and touched his hand. He jumped.

“Daddy!”

I got out of the taxi, and threw myself at him. I hadn’t seen him in two years. His hair was grey at the roots and brown on top. There were laugh lines on his cheeks and frown lines on his forehead. I spotted a hole at the neckline of his t-shirt and dipped a finger into it, “I will burn it,” I said, mimicking my mum. We laughed.

“Eguos,” he called me by my pet name. He said it as if he could not believe I was standing next to him. The dark chocolate of our skins blend, my face is his in the nose and eyes only. I am like him in the slight curve of my legs, the hesitation of my tongue to say consonants in one breath, and the way my ears peek out from the sides of my head. I draped one hand on his shoulder as he talked to the taxi driver, pointing out our flat to him.

We walked home, where the taxi was parked waiting. “How was your journey? How is Lagos? Work?”

To each question, I gave a nod, not trusting my tongue. I saw my baby sister, R, running towards me.

“Aunty Eguono. Aunty Eguono.”

I held her tight and soaked in her excitement. She was almost as tall as me, this little baby I held when she was less than a day old, who called me aunty, sometimes mummy. I met my other siblings, all three of them—only my elder brother, B, was away at work. They hugged and teased me: “You are still tiny?”

They opened my suitcase searching for gifts I bought with most of the year’s earnings. As my siblings ransacked my suitcase, my dad stood by the door, hands folded together across his abdomen. I watched him from the side of my eyes.

His shoulders were hunched. I knew he had sold his car. The new apartment is half the size of the former one, and he was unable to provide anything in the house. His eyes were hollowed. The bubbly man I had known as my father was a distant memory.

I looked away.

2.

In the 1970s, as oil flowed out of creeks in the Niger Delta, millions of dollars were remitted to Aso Rock in Abuja. When the government finally decided to spend some of its excess money, they bought thousands of hectares of lands off the indigenes of Ovwian-Aladja behind the Udu River in Delta state and built one of the biggest steel plants in Africa. They splurged: whole walls, doors and toilet seats were imported. Couches, clocks, curtains stamped with the company’s orange and ash-coloured S-shaped logo filled up apartments in the estate. The hospitals had new equipment, the finest doctors and nurses; the schools had the best teachers, and children of the company’s staff had free education and healthcare. The latest technology for steel production was imported and installed in the plant. Then they lured Nigerian professionals abroad to return home. The incentives were great; several people also resigned from oil companies to work in DSC. I remember the hospitals, the immaculate white of the doctors and nurses, the dark green of the examination rooms, the small squared white tiles that covered the bathroom walls and the smell of dry air, fumed with antiseptic. But by the time I was forming these memories, money had begun to leak out from the company coffers into unknown accounts so that when oil prices crashed, the government, to cut cost, shut down the company. The workers stayed on, hoping for the resuscitation of the company. What is steel compared to oil? The company, its estates and breathtaking amenities began to fade and rust, the way steel rusts when thrown in water. But oil remained afloat dragging the country along so that DSC and its steel and people were slowly forgotten like a wrecked ship.

By the mid-2000s, since most of the stateof-the-art equipment in the plant had become obsolete and the cost of running a huge corporation such as DSC became too heavy to bear, the government sold the company to an Indian team who under another five years ran it to the ground. Former staff, many of whom worked with the Indians, still await their pension and other benefits. The flats were the only reward they received after a lifetime spent working in one of the largest steel companies in West Africa. Many are dead. The living—engineers, accountants, teachers—have been reduced to beggars, taxi drivers, okada riders, carcases of their old selves.

3.

I was about five or six, seated on the porch in front of our house in my favourite dress, the red dress with white polka dots, one sunny afternoon. A light breeze lifted my dress and it twirled around my thighs.

I drew stick figures on the ground with a broomstick, directing my own episode of The Powerpuff Girls. Buttercup was about to smash Mojojojo when I saw his big black boots crushing gravel and sand, marching towards me. I dropped my broomstick, stepped on The Powerpuff Girls and Mojojojo and ran to him. He was wearing blue coverall and a yellow helmet. He told me to be careful so I wouldn’t fall. He rushed towards me instead and carried me. I was fat, he said, he could not carry me, what did I eat? I recounted everything I ate; he laughed and threw me up. Rice. I went up. Biscuits. I went even higher. He kept me at arm’s length and looked at my face. I wanted to ask what he bought for me, but my mum’s voice echoed in my head. “Greet him and ask about his day first.”

“Da-da-da-dy migwo, hoooow was your day?”

He smiled. His eyes became small when he smiled.

“Eguos, speak slowly when you talk.”

“Okay.”

“Oya try again.”

I swallowed and tried. “Daddy Migwo, how was your day.”

“Good!”

He threw me up again.

“Daddy what did you buy for me?”

He brought out rolls of gala.

“Gala!” I screamed. B must have heard this, because he ran out. He was wearing his blue shorts and Tom and Jerry t-shirt. He bent his knee towards the ground and greeted my daddy. “Daddy Migwo.” He stretched his hands towards my daddy, wanting to be carried.

“Eguos, come down let me carry your brother.”

“No.”

I wrapped my hands firmly around my daddy’s neck, and held the cellophane bag filled with gala up. He patted B on the head. With my hands still wrapped around daddy’s neck, we went into the house.

4.

Sundays were my favourite day of the week. On week days, Daddy stayed out late and sometimes he didn’t return for days. I badgered my mum to tell me where he was until she barked at me. “Leave me alone! I don’t know!”

But I didn’t believe her.

I marked off every day of the week on the glossy calendar that hung beside the framed photograph of Jesus bleeding from his hands and sides in our living room. On Sunday mornings, my brothers and I piled into his ash-coloured pick-up truck. After Mass, we would stand by him as he shook hands with his friends, ordering us to degwe for them, then we would go to a restaurant by the church to eat turkey, meat pies, and to drink Fanta. In the evening he’d buy us Jamil yoghurt or a pack of Nutri-C. After we ate our Sunday dinner of rice and stew, I sat on his back, rode imaginary cars, and picked out grey hair from his head. For each grey hair I picked he promised to give me one naira. His body was soft and smelt of a mixture of sweat and the scented oil he rubbed on his body.

Everybody called me Daddy’s girl and I loved it. I scribbled ‘Daddy’s girl’ on the sides of my school textbooks. It was a badge I wore and wanted everyone to see, even when he promised he would come to my school to pay my fees and didn’t come so that I got sent home from school, sometimes for weeks missing classes. I knew it was not his fault the company he worked for shut down. I read about it in his TELL magazines. I loved him even when I fell ill and was admitted to the hospital, but nobody knew where he was. As I lay on my bed in the Children’s Ward, watching the drip drop into the thin tube and flow into my body through the needle stuck in my arm I imagined he was on his way to see me, with gifts and Gala. Anytime someone walked into the ward, I looked up, hoping to see him dressed in his blue coverall to take me home. He didn’t show up. It was my mum who fed me, bathed me, and helped me sit up to take the drugs, but I ignored her and kept watch. “Don’t worry, he’ll soon come,” she reassured me each time someone walked into the ward and it wasn’t him.

What did it matter to me that they always fought? What did I care if he hit her once or twice or thrice? Or that she bought our books and school uniforms? What did I care if she made sure there was food in our stomachs when he disappeared, took us to the hospital when we fell ill, supervised our schoolwork? I looked forward to seeing my daddy, for the snacks, ice cream and toys. I stayed up at night to dance and play with him. My siblings and I had a special dance with him. My daddy who bought us VCD, connected us to cable TV, and later bought us DVDs when VCDs went out of fashion. He got us movies, cartoons, and musicals. He paid for school excursions to zoos and museums, and week-long summer camps against my mum’s wish, when she argued that there were more important things to do with the money. I didn’t care what their problems were, until I was too old not to see it, too old to be daddy’s girl.

5.

There was a knock on the door. My mum was home. I gave her a full hug, resting my head on her shoulder. It was the first time we hugged each other. She doesn’t know what to do with the hug; her hands hung idle by her side. I held on until she patted my back. The awkwardness stood between us.

“How was your journey? How is Lagos? How work?”

Again, I nodded. The knots in my stomach loosened, my tears fell freely. The house was now in full darkness. The smell of petrol filtered in as my brothers fumbled with the generator behind the house.

6.

My mum married my father fresh out of secondary school. I knew this because when we were children she told us the story on nights when there was no electricity and she sprayed insecticide in the house. She told us about her childhood in the village and her ambition of becoming a nurse, even though her father said he would not pay for her education because she was a woman, and women become properties of their husbands.

In the afternoon after school, she rushed through her portions of her father’s farm, and then went on to work on other people’s farms: cut grass, pull out tree stumps and prepare ridges for planting season, for a small pay. She saved all the money and enrolled for exams, but she failed mathematics. She prepared to enrol for the exams the next year: farm work during the day, study outside at night when the moon was very bright, or inside with bush lanterns. But before she could enrol the next year, my father and his people came to ask her father if they could marry her. Nobody asked what she wanted: if she liked him; if she wanted to get married. They fixed a date for the wedding ceremony and off she went to her husband’s house. The first time she told us the story, I asked her why her father had not sent her to school. Why did they not ask her if she wanted to be married? She laughed and said the moral of the story is that we should never give up. I liked her stories best on Sunday nights, after she had permed her hair and rolled them into small curls that stood around her head like a crown.

My mum left daddy many times, and we were glad every time she did. We ate what we wanted, we were free to leave our school uniforms unwashed, to leave our homework undone, stay out playing until dusk, but after two or three weeks she’d return deflating our balloon of happiness. Family members would gather on a Sunday evening, to break kola nuts, and laugh and the matter would be forgotten until the next time. Family intervened when she began to go to school: does she want to kill their brother with training her and her children? She dropped out. Even when lecturers came to the house to beg her to come back, that it has been a long while they had a student that intelligent, she never returned to school. Once, she met one of her former course mates after Mass. Her eyes filled up, but the tears never dropped.

7.

I love my daddy.

I started writing this in my small notebook after I turned 17 and the sight of my daddy repulsed me. “You must not allow the anger to eat you up, nobody owes you anything,” our parish priest had said after I told him I hated my father during confessions. So I wrote down I love my daddy, I love my daddy, I love my daddy until the budge moved from my throat. A few months to my seventeenth birthday I noticed my mother was pregnant, “Why are you pregnant? What is wrong with you? You have 5 children already.”

I raged on until she calmly told me to ask my father. I had been so engrossed with preparations for my final exams that I had missed the drama that went on in the house. My father had insisted he wanted another child. He made threats like a tyke throwing tantrums. The church advised my mum to have the child, not minding she was past 40. Relatives and friends encouraged her to save her marriage and have another child, conveniently forgetting she had five already. Her voice was drowned and she succumbed.

I stayed on my bed when he returned from work. I did not greet him. I pretended to be asleep when he called out my name. I walked past him in church like he was a stranger. It was my mum who saw all of it.

On the day I turned 13, I stayed up late waiting for him. It was a birthday ritual, he was supposed to return home early, we were supposed to go to the mall near our house where I took any gift I wanted. I waited. A few minutes after 1 a.m., the revving of his Volvo broke the silence of the night. I jumped down from my bed. I stood by the door waiting for him to knock, he didn’t come knocking. The stereo from his car remained on, the voice of Okpan Arhibo and his band played on like it was 7 pm and they were the headliners at a concert. I opened the door. It was dark outside. I met him asleep in his car, smelling as if dipped in a bottle of ogogoro. I turned off the stereo and tried to wake him up. He muttered. I pulled his hands, unable to lift him up. He emptied his stomach on my feet. Years later, I would let my friends take me to a dark club lit up by a glitter ball to celebrate my 22nd birthday and attempt to take my first cup of alcohol. The club was pulsing; the low tenor of Wizkid and the saxophone of Femi Kuti egged us on to Jaiye Jaiye. Across the table my friends were bobbing their heads, up down, up down, lip syncing with Wizkid, the strobe lights falling on their faces. I took a gulp of the cocktail that had been sitting untouched on my table all night and my table cheered, eyes in the bar turned to us, they clapped loudly congratulating me, “you see? It’s not that bad,” but in a split second I’ll remember the voice of Okpan Arhibo and his band and I emptied my stomach by my feet, I never drank alcohol again. Those years ago, my mum, who had heard me open the door, came out, lifted him up. One of his hands lay limp on her left shoulder; her right hand pulled him up by the waist. I walked behind them, his vomit on my feet, carrying his bag and bunch of keys, his huge body supported by my mum’s slender body as she took him inside the house. I wondered where she found the strength to carry him, and I was thankful for the darkness enveloping us. There were other times he came home staggering on his feet, his words slurred. There were days I woke him up by 2 a.m. when he fell asleep in the bathroom or on the cushion in the sitting room as his snores vibrated and bounced off the walls of our house.

I am not sure when, but the warmth I had felt towards him was replaced by liquid heat so that when his liver protested against the alcohol, and mum and other relatives ran around to save his life, I was unconcerned. I tuned off thoughts of him in the hospital.

During one of the numerous strikes by the Academic Senior Staff Union that marred my university education, he was admitted to the hospital again. I took some food to my mum in the hospital. Visitors, mostly members of my mother’s prayer group came in twos and threes, and with lips turned down I watched my mum fuss over him, adjusting his pillow, patting his head, smoothening the sheets on the bed.

“What do you want? Do you want oranges? Drink small pepper soup?”

Sometimes he would say yes, other times he shook his head. She spoon-fed him, helped him sit up in bed, and he would do more hmm hmmm, I didn’t hear any thank yous, just hmm and hmmms.

As I watched them, a strong rage consumed me. I wanted to scream and cry out, I wanted to shake him up, hit him, then hit him some more. But I stood by the door and tears slipped from my eyes. My aunty, his elder sister, saw the tears and came over to me. She wiped my face with the edge of her wrapper and said, “Don’t worry, keep praying, he will be alright.” I balled my fists and walked out of the room.

Outside, cars were in motion, an okada rider stopped to pick up a passenger, a woman carrying a baby strapped to her back with a faded ankara cloth. I imagined the baby falling off after the bike took off, smashing its head to smithereens and the mother wailing, but I also knew it would not happen, because mothers know better. Not fathers.

The anger that engulfed me inside the room vanished as sudden as it had come. It felt like water poured into a burning flame. When I went back to school, I filled up pages of my notebooks with I love my daddy. I wasn’t sure I was allowed to hate him; after all, he was just a man.

The year I graduated from University, DSC was finally shut down. I packed my bags and went home reluctantly, wanting to start life in another city, away from all the loud silence that had become a part of our home.

I wanted to be away from all the things we could not say, away from watching the house deteriorate, my daddy’s shoulders slinking together, seeing his clothes float on him and his cheeks sagging, the old laugh lines uselessly etched on his face but I was stuck at home and the more time I spent, the more the chasm between us grew. When I finally got a job in Lagos, I left without saying goodbye.

The first time I left home was for the university. Although I was hours away from my parents, they were never too far away. When I needed money I called home, when I fell sick I packed a few clothes and went home to recuperate. But this time, when I left for Lagos, I knew I couldn’t go back. Nothing prepared me for the shock of being totally dependent on myself. Nothing prepared me for days when I had nothing to eat and nobody to badger or blame; days when I fell so sick I spent hours laying on my own vomit; days I returned to the safety of my bed only to cry until 2 a.m. thinking, what would happen if I just kill myself? Those days the thoughts of suicide lived with me and became my Plan B, if this doesn’t work out, I could always kill myself. It was soothing. Ironically, it was the thoughts of dying, of having nothing to lose if I failed that kept me through those gruelling days. When my father called to check on me, his voice laced with so much sadness I couldn’t tell him about my own troubles, I said fine to everything he inquired about. Soon it became easy to ignore his calls. I convinced myself I’d call him back, but days ran into weeks, weeks ran into months and the sound of his voice, the shape of his face, and the feel of the velvety skin that wrapped his wrists became a blur.

8.

I gave him the adire shirt I bought for him. His eyes lit up, he broke into a smile and put it on. It was a perfect fit. “Thank you my beautiful daughter,” he said. I smiled. I wished I had bought more gifts for him. I made a mental note.

Love is difficult.

The light stayed dancing in his eyes as we ate dinner. I asked him about his relatives, he replied in a word or two; I kept asking to keep him talking. We retired to our rooms, but before he went into his, he held my hand, still so small in his, like I was five again. He squeezed, I squeezed back, and we smiled at each other.

9.

The night before I left, my sisters folded themselves around me, scrolling through photographs on my phone. During my stay, it dawned on me that they knew only one version of our father, that they were too young to know the bubbly person he was when I was a child. So I told them, about our Sundays, our birthday rituals, our dance. I got down from the bed to show them the dance. My two brothers joined me, but in the dance our dad was always in front. “Let’s wake him up,” J said. As we thought about it, the pros of rousing an old man from his sleep to dance, he joined us like an apparition. We formed a circle, moved three steps forward, three steps backward, wiggled our bodies and chorused “cheers.” My sisters squealed in delight. Mum stood apart as always, her mouth slightly turned down, amused. But this time she didn’t send us all to bed. Instead she sat on the bed. We stopped dancing and sat around her, and began to pull up old memories. We retold stories of happier times, and laughed until the saliva dried in our mouths and our eyelids could no longer stay open. My parents returned to their room. R asked, “Daddy was so cool, what happened?”

It was chilly the morning I left. Dew hung mid-air, and smudges of pink stained the azure sky giving it a hallowed tinge. My dad took my suitcase outside and dropped it into the boot of the waiting taxi. He readjusted the sides of my sweaters to cover my hands. “Drive carefully,” he told the taxi driver over and over, and to me, “Call me immediately you get home.”

I hugged them, my mum and my dad. As I opened my side of the taxi, dad placed his hand on my back and said, “Be careful, take care.” The taxi moved away, slowly. I kept my eyes on them through the side mirror, I caught my dad’s eyes and held his gaze. It was only for a fleeting moment but there, he said everything. I nodded as if I understood. The cab turned into Kano Crescent. Only then did I feel the tears on my face.