I’m still working on my dissertation and creative project story fans (as of writing only 2000 words and lots of edits to go). Next month normal service resumes but until then please enjoy this guest post by the very talented Sue Oke. She blogs over at susanmayoke.com. Pop over and say hello!

North to South

It’s the voice I hear first, a baritone with the unmistakable soft edges of a Yoruba accent. We turn at the same time, tentative smiles of recognition blossoming as our eyes meet. And then he’s grinning, wrapping me in bear hug, his enthusiasm temporarily infectious.

‘How are you? How are the children?’

I grab a breath, the rote , ‘We’re fine,’ slips out of my mouth.

He barrels on, ‘And what of Oga?’

Oga… chief… boss… master… he’s using a title to refer to the man who, twenty years ago, used to be my husband.

My hesitation is brushed aside as he launches into a recital of his son’s recent graduation from Yale. I watch as pride squares his shoulders, his eyes focussed on images cradled by memory. I feel isolated from the crowd clumped in front of the departure boards of Kings Cross station, shifted back in time to hot dry days. My heart kicks against the snare of old patterns. He breaks off to frown at the hollow echo of times and destinations, turning to track flashing platform numbers across the departure boards.

‘That’s my train,’ he says with an apologetic shrug. ‘Here,’ he fishes in an inside pocket and presses a card into my hand, ‘keep in touch.‘ Three steps away he turns and shouts back over his shoulder, ‘send my regards to Oga.’ And with that he’s gone, sucked into the jostle and hum of commuters, my half-smile and uncertain nod chasing his shadow.

The past shoulders its way into the now and I sink onto one of the grey metal seats edging the concourse. I take a deep breath. Diesel tainted air is transmuted into a warm buzz in nose and throat: the dry promise of another sub-Saharan day. I can see the first house we lived in, one of three in a large compound on the outskirts of Bauchi, a small town in the north of Nigeria. I can feel the crunch of gravel as I walk from the house to the compound gate.

#

I think my girls were happy there. Aged seven and four, everything was one big adventure. The cashew tree was a magnet; they would poke at the braches with long sticks trying to dislodge the fruit, wandering into the house with their t-shirts stained with brown sticky juice. They would spend hours digging around in the bamboo stand behind the house, the dog stretched out in the sweaty shade, ears constantly twitching against the barrage of flies.

Oga was a southerner working in the north at a time when Europeans had a higher standing with the locals. Children had to learn Hausa at school and were punished if caught speaking any of the other tribal languages. It didn’t make any difference to my girls as their father had denied them his language. In a culture where everyone had two, three, even four (if you count pidgin) languages, it was like having a disability to only speak one.

I was raising my children in a place where life was a fragile thing, there were no paramedics on the end of the ‘phone, there was no ‘phone. If you needed any medication, outside of chloroquine, you were faced with a fifty-mile road trip to Jos. Four years of trying not to think about ‘what ifs’ can wear you down.

A sudden heat flushes through my body; the memory rises up and swallows me whole. Her skin is hot, her eyes glassy, looking over my shoulder at something only she can see. She’s trying to tell me something; her words carry a desperate insistence, but no meaning. I scoop her up into my arms, she’s so light, her four year old body fragile, burning with fever. Five o’clock in the morning and the sun is already bright, but it hasn’t started to burn, not yet.

At the clinic the doctor asks a few questions, touches her forehead with the back of his hand; he doesn’t bother to take her temperature. It’s too high and we all know why. Malaria. Again. She is the youngest and the most susceptible; the eldest falls ill maybe three times in a year, just like me. But with this one it’s every couple of months.

On the bed my daughter is sobbing, reaching her arms out to me. I take hold of one small hand and try to comfort her; she clings tight, pulls me towards her and tries to fight her way into my arms. She has to lie still so that the nurse can fix the drip into the back of her hand. I have to push her away, force her back onto the bed. She starts screaming. The needle looks too big against her hand, gripped tight by the nurse, lips pressed together as she tries to find a vein. My heart is pounding. For God’s sake just do it, get it over with.

There, it’s done. But the needle isn’t straight and the drip isn’t working. The nurse has to start again. Stay calm, I tell myself. I plead with my frantic daughter to stay still. Please. But something inside me is shivering and I have to clasp my hands together to hold on. The doctor takes hold of my elbow; he’s trying to lead me out of the treatment room. I resist for a long moment, and then I turn my back on my daughter and walk away, while she screams mammy, mammy, the words raw and abandoned.

I scrabble for the name of this man whose appearance has left me ambushed by time. I can see him and his wife as they were: young, smiling, serving cold beer and Fanta in the shade of their veranda, but the names… Tunde, yes, that’s it, Tunde and Sukhi with their sullen faced son and wisp of a daughter. The body of my past stirs, restless images escape, dragged forth by the sinew of association: the Federal Polytechnic of Bauchi with its sprawl of a campus littered with heat-baked buildings where Tunde and I both taught so many years ago.

I remember the first time I stood on that dusty stage, faced with a lecture hall crammed full of murmuring expectant faces, shuffling my notes and wondering what on earth I’d let myself in for. I remember the way students used to perch on windowsills because there were never enough seats, and how NEPA used to take the light halfway through a lecture. But my students were a joy, dedicated, hard working, grabbing the opportunity to learn with both hands. In Bauchi my students used to carry my books.

#

I have this image of my daughters standing in the back of a pick-up truck in their blue-checked gingham school uniforms, hanging onto the bar behind the cab, laughing as it bumps and jolts over the crater pocked road. Too soon they are lost in a roil of kicked up dust, voices buried in the guttural grump of an engine too stubborn to recognise that it should have ground to a halt years ago. They’re happy, I can see that, and that fact keeps my mouth shut. I strive for that sense of acceptance, to look beyond the hard edges and uncover the simple beauty around me. And in many ways I succeed. It’s the absences that torment; I know what my children are missing.

Their school is a breezeblock building squatting in a dust bowl at one end of the campus: concrete floors, wooden benches, unglazed windows. It shouts its inadequacies at me. The Staff School: a perk of the job.

Our children were envied for their coffee skin: light = beautiful. The roadside traders used to laugh and barter, offering cattle and trucks as a bride price for the girls sat playing in the back of our car. I would watch as my ‘Oga’ laughed back and demanded an outrageous price to hand over our daughters. I wondered if one day the price offered would be high enough.

My two girls made the journey north to south, UK to Nigeria. They tasted the wind from the desert, soaked up the harsh vibrant colours of life, a four-year sojourn that marked them in invisible ways. You have to know where to look.

The child conceived in that unforgiving place chose not to stay. Perhaps he knew life would be too hard, perhaps he sensed the absence of joy in the mother who carried him, who never got to see his face.

I say ‘he’ because in that place I can only imagine male life growing within me. The masculine pervaded every aspect of life. ‘Women are strong’, a truth that offered some consolation, but it was a strength tethered to the will of men.

I say ‘he’ because the thought of losing a daughter to that place is unbearable.

But what of Oga? He seems to have been edited out, or perhaps he just isn’t important enough, not anymore.