I fingered the beads around my waist…blue. My naked body stared
back at me from the full length mirror on the wall. My beads used
to be white. Kaniene. My love. I don’t have the minshinii
you gave me anymore. A man touched me and they broke. Right then
when he touched me, they broke away from my body and the white beads
spilled onto the red carpet in my room. When he left I swept them
away, to the edge of the carpet and then under. So now I wear blue
beads. I know, Kane, we both had white. You picked out white for
me that day at the market, and I picked the same for you. The only
difference was that you chose tiny, discrete beads strung on thin
thread for me. I knew you wouldn’t be afraid to wear the big,
bold ones I gave you. You would glare at anyone who pointed out
that they could see them through your skirt. Sometimes you even
wore them on top of your jeans.
‘Those things are meant to be
hidden!’ my mother said to you once in that stricken tone
of hers.
‘You can’t just let people
see your minshinii like that,’ you said in a high-pitched voice when we were
alone, right hand fanning your face in an affected way. You mimicked
her a lot. ‘She sounds like the world will come to an end
if I let people see.’ That day at the market, the old woman
at the bead stall didn’t see our shared smile. Even if she
did, she didn’t know what it said,
‘You are my virgin.’
But I wear blue now, and when we join
them, hip to hip like we used to, it will be a kpogiemo,
blue on white, an ‘outdooring’; women who just gave
birth…blue and white.
*
You liked to say that I made you. And
every time I would shake my head a little and whisper, ‘I
only named you.’ But it was true. I made you.
‘Kanee ne.’ This
is the light. And we came to be, you and I. That was the night we
loved each other for the first time. We lay there in the dark of
your room. Your father’s drunken snores reached us from the
living room where he had passed out on the couch. There was no mother
for you. You touched me there and I wanted to cry. Would you touch
me always? My light, touch me always. I cried out and you called
my name,
‘Serena.’ You pronounced
it ‘She-ree-nah,’ hushing me with that short ‘shh’
of the first syllable.
‘Why do you call me that?’
‘It’s a Rivers State name.
The girls there are very fair, light skin like yours.’ And
from then, the names our parents had given us became taboo.
‘What are these new names you
girls are calling yourselves?’ my mother asked us one day
in the kitchen.
‘Ah don’t mind them,’
my aunt said. ‘It’s just a phase. You know how these
teenagers are.’ And no one paid any more attention. Slowly,
unconsciously, they began to call us those names too, without knowing
why, without knowing what they were doing. And our old names faded
away.
But one night your old name came back.
Do you remember, Kaniene? Your father beat you and beat you until
I thought you would die. It was during one of our many sleepovers
at your house. We chose your house because we usually had it all
to ourselves. But this night your father came home and he was not
drunk. When he came to your room, you locked me in the bathroom,
and I could hear him beating you. And once, only once he shouted
that name that we hated,
‘Adannaya!’ We hated it
because it reduced you to only one thing, your father’s daughter.
And we hated him. I couldn’t just stay in the bathroom that
night. I crept out, hoping he wouldn’t see me, hoping I could
call the police from my cell phone when I was safe outside. What
I saw made me stop and scream. Oh Kane, you are many things. But
that bloody little mess on the floor couldn’t have been you.
I ran. I was shaking so much that I couldn’t dial the numbers
on my phone. I ran to the neighbour’s house and banged on
the gate. We never had another sleepover at your house. My perfect
little Ghanaian family, father, mother and older brother, would
not allow it.
‘Hmm, those Nigerians,’
I heard my mother say to my aunt once, ‘my daughter is never
going there again. Next thing you know, that crazy man will be beating
her too. Did you hear, even his wife left him.’
‘But why would she leave the
daughter behind?’ My aunt wanted to know. I walked away. I
didn’t want to know.
Do you remember how we frustrated the
teachers at school with all the different spellings of your name?
We couldn’t fill out Kanee ne in the column for nickname
on the secondary school application forms. There were no bubbles
to shade in that strange letter ‘e,’ which was pronounced
like the ‘e’ in egg. So we wrote Kaniene, but when I
wrote you notes, I wrote Kane for short. Light. I told you that
even though I named you Kane, I thought of you more as a torch than
a boring, naked bulb. You burned. I didn’t tell you that you
burned me. We had a quiet love because I said I wanted it that way.
It was a love that did not fight and did not scream. It was. But
deep where I had hidden it, it was a flame that was clawing at my
insides, wanting freedom. I was raw, I bled, but above all I burned.
Only when you touched me did the pain subside to a dull ache, only
to awaken the next morning with the rest of the world, spears ready
to condemn us to death. I never told you these things because you
said I was the broody one. Perhaps these were broody thoughts. I
didn’t tell you also because we were preoccupied. Life was
happening to us. We had both been accepted at St. Catherine’s
Secondary School. We were going to boarding school.
At first, no one knew about us at St.
Catherine’s. We were just those two girls who were always
together. KanieneandSerena. But we were other things too. We were
fifteen. We were growing, and we were learning things about our
bodies that we were not supposed to know. KanieneandSerena. Sacred
things that people should not have access to. Our names…like
our memories and our bodies. Painful memories. KanieneandSerena.
When did we name each other? When we realized we were in love. It
was a quiet love. That is what I wanted….
Mr. Asomaning wanted me. I was bad
at math. He made me stay after class everyday and he played with
my breasts. I hated him. He made me think of your father but he
hurt me in a different way. He kept pestering me to come to his
house after school for ‘extra classes.’ And then one
afternoon he told me that he would fail me all the way till my final
year if I didn’t come to his house.
‘Oburoni, you know what I want. We can both be happy
if you come to my house just once.’ When I told you, you were
angry that I hadn’t told you about him earlier.
‘We can have him dismissed for
sexual harassment Serena.’ You said only this, and through
gritted teeth. You weren’t angry at me. You were angry at
Mr. Asomaning. ‘What does that word mean anyway?’
‘Oburoni?’ I asked
you. You nodded. ‘It means white person. Sometimes he calls
me bright beauty or yellow flower.’ You didn’t speak
to anyone for the rest of the day. You stopped playing with my breasts
because of Mr. Asomaning and it hurt me. Can you hear me Kane? Do
you know how the flame in my chest became angry? Now you only touched
me there. That is how he found us. One of the girls in the dorm
must have seen us and told him. He claimed he was going round on
‘dorm inspection.’ Now there was no way I could avoid
going to his house. If I didn’t, he would report us to the
headmistress, our parents, everyone would know the dirty little
girls we were.
‘Especially you, Oburoni,’
he pointed to me the afternoon he called us to his office. ‘You’re
from a good family. Do you know what this will do to them?’
‘I will come to your house,’
you told Mr. Asomaning and he cringed visibly. Like our names, our
memories have stayed with us. KanieneandSerena. I remember the terrible
names he called you. The things he said about your body, that dark,
smooth, beautiful body that I loved.
That night we cried together. You had offered your body in place
of mine, but he didn’t want you. You cried tears of rage until
you were shaking so hard and you couldn’t breathe. I cried
because of one word. Puncture. He said he could cure me. He would
poke me, puncture me and let out all of this bad thing that was
inside me. And then he laughed at his own sickness. You told me
there was only one way.
‘Kill him.’
*
You said kill him and our love
changed. It was no longer a quiet love that did not fight and did
not scream. Kill him. And my heart burned. You stole the
knife from the pantry. You promised you would be there and I willed
my mind’s eye to see you crouching at the window in the dark.
Immediately behind you would be the mango tree that some of the
Form 3 girls sent us to steal juicy mangoes from. I hate climbing
trees Kaniene, and the smell of mangoes always makes me nauseous.
A few paces behind the mango tree will be the short wall that you
have just climbed to be here with me, and there will be bougainvillea
vines snaking all along the wall. I cannot deal with today. Tonight.
Tomorrow we might come back here Kane, and pick pink flowers for
our hair.
He lay heavy and sweaty on top of me.
And I killed him. Knife buried in the fleshy folds of the side of
his neck. And now you come, Kaniene, dragging me out from underneath
the body, wiping the blood from my face and saying only one thing,
‘I love you.’ In our hearts we scream and fight. They
knew it was us because we ran away. They found us at my aunt’s
house in Kumasi. We had told her we were on holiday. But too many
things were at stake for us to be exposed. My memories, like our
names come in a rush now. KanieneandSerena. St. Catherine’s
reputation had to be preserved. No one could know about dirty teachers
and dirtier girls who did things they were not supposed to do. People
were paid. We had to leave. And then you left me. I heard your father
had taken you back to Nigeria and then I heard you were in university
in England. We did not speak. We did not write. I did not love.
My family hated me. They let me know,
everyday, by calling me ‘Ama.’ It was simple and cold,
the name they had given me all those years ago. The name they had
called me before you named me. Or made me. I was back to being a
girl born on Saturday and that was all. There was no affection anymore.
Our memories, like our names, are love. And you are coming back
to me Kaniene. You wrote and you even called me. Your voice is the
same but I do not like this new accent. Will you be angry with me
Kane? Will you be angry that a man touched me and my minshinii
broke? I hope you will understand when I see you tomorrow that I
cannot be what my family wants me to be, but I can’t be what
I want to be either. Will you tell me what I can be?
*
I fingered the beads around my waist…blue.
‘We can meet at Sappho, the
Greek restaurant downtown,’ I had told her. I dressed slowly
and looked in the mirror one last time. I could see the outline
of the big blue beads through my skirt. I turned out the light and
as I walked out of the room, the flame inside me turned on. Kanee
ne.
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