Memorial Service
BY UCHEOMA ONWUTUEBE
Remember Philo? My auntie, who smells of wild nights and bubble gum? You won’t believe what she told me this morning. “Dress each day like you’re about to meet a new lover.”
It didn’t seem strange that she chose today, my father’s one-year memorial service, to bestow her sage counsel. Philo has always been this way–wild as a cheetah, reckless as a drunk driver. Hard to forget how she made the women on our streets shield the eyes of their gawking husbands whenever she walked by. Whatever the occasion—naming ceremonies, birthdays, weddings, burials— she persisted in her flamboyance, adorning herself like she just stepped out of the cover of ThisDay Style.
Yet had I dallied longer in front of the mirror to impress this non-existent beau my auntie spoke of, I’d be late for church, invoking my mother’s wrath. Not that my father would have minded anyone decking out for him. Between my parents, he took his appearance more seriously. In my favorite picture of him, now leaning on the railings of the balcony outside, he posed in a red chieftaincy cap, white agbada, and crocodile leather shoes, holding on to his walking staff: the portrait of a man certain of his empire.
Philo had walked in on me in my dishevelled room which still held the deodorant smell of my teenage years, heaving with my school paraphernalia, and fast becoming a dumping site for items my mother claimed she would one day giveaway. Ghana-must-go bags bearing shoes too small for her feet, clothes worn only once, no longer in her taste, cartons of documents from her workplace, and cheap souvenirs from parties. On my dressing table, a makeup purse spilled its scant contents: congealed mascara, a fake MAC powder from the Hausa traders at Umuahia Main Market, coloured pencils and a pigmented eyeshadow palette that served as bronzer, blush and highlighter. But Philo was more interested in my outfit than the room. She found me battling with the sleeves of the blouse, basted together last minute by Sister Glory, my mother’s seamstress. The ambitious puffs on the sleeves curved like rabbit ears, and the hastily sewn hem proved Sister Glory ran out of both thread and inspiration. Even safety pins weren’t helping.
“What type of puff-puff dress is this one, eh?” she asked, standing behind me. She held the blouse and pinned the strap of my bra in place. “Who made this for you?”
“Sister Glory.” I said.
“That woman? Is she still alive?” Philo tugged harder at my blouse. The thread on the side gave way and revealed a pinch of skin. “You should have your own tailor by now, someone from your generation. Those Instagram designers.”
“This was a last-minute arrangement.”
“You had more than two months to prepare for this, Ure. Even the guests who were told last month found the time to sit down with their tailors and come out with great outfits.”
I shrugged. “This dress is only for today. It’s not like I’d wear it afterwards.”
“You just wasted an expensive fabric. Do you know how long I and your mother combed through Ariaria market, searching for quality ankara, the right fabric that wouldn’t run after the first wash? Look at me–” she stepped aside as I observed her gown, made from the same ankara print as mine, the uniform of the bereaved. Hers was tailored in a chic, flowy style that clung to her hips, and revealed half her back and its unblemished skin that resisted the sag of age. Her hands, though devoid of bangles, were full of rings. Each finger except the thumbs wore fine gold, capped with enormous stones, some the length of thimbles and some thin and wiry. “I would wear this again and again until it’s time to hand it down to someone. It’s called sustainable fashion, in case you don’t know. Why do you want to look like you fought a madman at the market square on your own father’s memorial?”
She turned me to face her and clamped safety pins on her lips, taking them one after the other as she secured more loose fabric around the bust. “Who in their right senses makes this kind of dress for a young girl, eh?” Philo’s skin was pebble-smooth, and her brows were pencilled with delicateness. Her mates still clung to the flair of their youth, drawing thin black lines on their shaved brows, which gave them a severe look, but Philo used a brown pencil for a more youthful effect, exactly the way YouTube makeup gurus advised. She no longer dotted her upper lip with kohl, her signature style in her younger days. Here was a woman who kept in touch with today’s tides.
With a final pull at the blouse, she reeled the mantra. “You never know who you’ll run into. Dress each day like you’re about to meet a new lover. How old are you sef?”
“I’ll be twenty-one next week.”
“You’re old enough to start looking like a correct human being.”
Pleased with her attempt at redeeming my failing outfit, she patted my back and made for the door.
If I say that her comment did not slight me, I’d be lying. Yet for some reason, her counsel felt like lore, the kind of wisdom passed down from one generation to the next. It came from a woman who wedded at fifty for the first time after she tired of her Jagua Nana ways. The legend of Philo would be incomplete if I didn’t mention the freshly minted man she brought home three years ago, a younger man who still dotes on her like she’s the last copy of some holy book. Philo was the icon of all my teenage ambitions. The way she wore skinny jeans and flaming red lipsticks, her jewellery merchandise that made her travel far and wide, collecting adventures along the way. From the moment I became aware of her, I always wanted her kind of life. I always wanted the world to look at me the way it looked at my auntie.
Outside, the mango trees shook their last drops of water after the midnight deluge, and I watched the breeze ripple the puddles in front of the bungalow. This house was my father’s last accomplishment. He had more dreams, bigger aspirations, such as the furtherance of my studies, the acquisition of properties to will me when I come of age. He spoke of grandchildren often, of witnessing me arrive at my prime, walking me down the aisle. But death also possessed its own aspirations, starting off as a nagging pain in his chest that showed up in the middle of the night or behind the wheel on a sunny afternoon. He didn’t think it was a big deal, never having enough time to see a doctor. But on that Thursday evening, while he ate semovita and ukazi soup, he laughed too hard at something my mother said and slumped over.
Our fortune changed quickly. Most of my mother’s savings went into the funeral. How atrocious not to give a titled man a befitting funeral. My father’s own savings went into building this house and there was little left afterwards. A career in lower-tier politics, we discovered, is quicksand. It offered no substantial ground to build upon. No gratuities, no pension. No plans for your immediate family if something happened to you. Thankfully I was done with university, and my needs weren’t too heavy for my mother to shoulder. If my father’s death happened earlier, my mother’s paltry salary at the local government— salary that was often withheld for months– would have been insufficient to get me through school.
This time last year, at his funeral, we arrived in our village flushed with funeral frenzy. Villagers flanked my mother and in their usual manner, they peddled one request after the other, ignoring her recent grief. They cried brief tears to show that they shared in our sorrow but soon wiped their eyes and began clamouring after anything they could pilfer. Chances like this came sparingly. A big man does not die twice.
“Give us money for more kola nuts,” they asked my mother.
She sighed and gave them.
“Give us money for more Schnapps.”
Again, she dipped her hands in her purse and released. And this carried on, request upon frivolous request, marching hard on the heel of the other: soft drinks, funeral programs, souvenirs, jollof rice, chicken, kpomo, snuff. Until one scrawny fellow ambled towards her and said, “Our wife, the rainmakers are agitating oh. Give us money to settle them or else they will pull down a storm and ruin your husband’s funeral.”
My mother looked him up and down, looked him up and down again. “Who is your wife?” she asked. There had to be a limit to these things. It was true she was mourning, but that didn’t mean she had suddenly gone stupid. “Go back and tell the people that sent you that they can bring down tsunamis, they can bring hurricanes. Whenever the cloud gets tired, I will bury my husband.”
No one asked her for anything else the rest of the day.
Now in church, Philo sat beside me and my mother and she squeezed my mother’s shoulder from time to time, comforting her. Although they looked alike, their life paths set them apart. Where Philo bore the sharpness that came with a life whetted against the stones of adventure, unencumbered by domestic attachments, my mother latched onto the sturdiness that came with childbirth, the alertness preinstalled in motherhood, the gait of one hefting burdens that were not hers alone. Philo was vain. My mother was serious. One sister was freshly widowed and the other still glowed with the sheen of recent matrimony.
Years ago when Philo visited us, she brought her boxes of jewellery along, and as they sat in the kitchen lost in conversation, she would try to convince my mother to buy some. “Try this one Schola,” she’d say. “Swarovski crystal. Very original.”
“Where would I wear crystals to in this small Umuahia?”
“Weddings, church, even work. I’ve seen women wear more expensive crystals in this town.”
“And you want my colleagues to accuse me of embezzlement? Where would I say I got the money from? Please I’m just a lowly civil servant.”
“You can pay me in instalments.” Philo urged. “You need to start investing in jewellery so you can pass them down to Ure. That’s what other women do.”
“Philomena, leave me alone. I have a child to raise. Silver and gold will not send her to school.”
Other times their discussions revolved around my father.
“Your brother-in-law is so stubborn,’ my mother complained. “Do you know he refused to go to the hospital?”
“You have to make him go. Stop going soft on him.”
“How do I force him? He doesn’t listen to me.”
“Scholastica, good men are scarce. The one you have, you need to do your best to help him stay alive.”
“Will I bind the hands and feet of a grown man like a goat and drag him to the doctor’s?”
“If that’s your only option, you better do it.”
Listening to their conversations, I was more interested in Philo’s shinier dilemmas, her many relationship palavers. “My millionaire client, the one that took me to Dubai in June? He wants me to give up my business and become his third wife.”
“And I hope you are not considering that?” my mother asked.
“With the way business is going these days, I might just take up the offer. A time comes when you just want to be taken care of and spare yourself the headache of profit and loss.”
“If only you said yes to Obum back then. He was so mad over you.”
“Obum with eczema scattered all over his neck?” Philo asked. “God forbid bad thing.”
“That was then. I saw him recently, no eczemas. He’s become a clean man now. He will be made director in the ministry of education in the next 15 years.”
“Can you hear yourself?” Philo scolded. “15 solid years? And how much is the salary of a director? I’d earn his annual income by selling one tiny piece of necklace.”
“Money is not everything, Philo.”
“Oh please, tell me something else. If suffering was so cute, why isn’t it a category in the Olympics?”
If one of them spotted me hovering by the door: “Don’t you have something to do, little girl? Why are you enjoying senior jokes?” When they weren’t looking, I’d slip my little feet into Philo’s high-heeled sandals, sashaying and mimicking her talk and loose laughter. I ransacked her bag, smeared her lipstick on my face, and doused myself in her perfume.
“Schola, keep an eye on this your girl,” my auntie would warn my mother amidst laughter. “She is going to do worse than me.”
The crowd at today’s memorial was not impressive. The knot of villagers who arrived on a bus, some distant relatives, and a few friends who knew my father more intimately, were only a fraction of the people who thronged into the church last year. I remember people pressing against one another, unable to find a space to sit, the church pews so cramped that some stood under the sun and waited for the next processional stop at our family compound. They fought for food and drinks, tucking extras in their bags and still asked for more. My father would have been impressed. Our people often measured the importance of a man in his lifetime by the population of mourners at his funeral.
Mr. Makanju, my father’s friend from his days at the University of Ibadan, delivered today’s speech.
“It feels like only yesterday I and Nwachukwu wrote our entrance exams to college. Only yesterday we thought of the schools to send our children to. A year has gone by since we laid him to rest and I still find his demise unbelievable.”
Word around town says Makanju broke it off with his girlfriend, Cordelia, the customer service woman at GTbank; he settled her with a two-year rent and then mended things with his wife. With my father’s death, he was reminded of his mortality and the need to set his own house in order.
The ceiling fans did a fair job keeping the church cool, but then we heard the generator at the back of the church sputter before dying. Ushers ran out gingerly to fix the problem. Mr. Makanju set the microphone aside and strained his voice so the people at the back could hear. They could not hear him. Congregants dabbed handkerchiefs on their foreheads. Pamphlets turned into hand fans.
The ushers argued loudly at the back of the church.
Why did you not buy a full gallon of diesel?
Did you give me enough money?
One day, we would find out the spirit that guzzles diesel in this church.
Stop looking at me. I didn’t steal church diesel.
I scanned the congregation and my eyes met Chief O.C Emmanuel. He nodded. He was the PDP party chairman and played table tennis with my father at Ridge Club. I spotted Ifeanyi, my father’s tailor who winked at me. I shook my head. The answer was still no. Men like him were the reason I itched to leave this town.
Through the window, I saw a bus full of choristers in crumpled gowns and lopsided caps arrive at the parking lot, possibly from the village church but an usher by the door refused to let them in, signalling at his wristwatch. Dede Bart arrived and I watched him offload his entire family from his old motorcycle, dropping the little children like they were crates of eggs. He was my father’s distant cousin, marked for life by penury. No amount of money he borrowed from my father could set him up. One moment his plan was photography, so he needed a camera. The next, a laundry house in need of top-notch washing machines. I suspected his relief at my father’s death since he didn’t have to pay what he owed.
There were no pretentious mourners this time. No one wept disconsolately or threatened to hop into the freshly dug grave to join the dead.
After the service, we headed home. Madam Taste-and-See, was setting up the buffet, and I drew closer to her just at the moment she opened a cooler of uninspiring jollof rice.
“Auntie, but why? I asked. “This rice looks sad.”
“Good afternoon to you too,” she hissed. “And what is wrong with the rice? Won’t you taste and see before you judge?”
She dished me a plate. The tang reminded me of food from my boarding school days. She opened a cooler of meat and gave me a tiny piece the size of seasoning cubes.
“Auntie, this is not fair. How are we going to serve these to the guests?”
“See me, see trouble!” It was her usual manner to deflect. “Were you not there when I told your mother that the money she gave me would not do? You want me to turn myself into a bag of rice?”
“But you promised her you would deliver this time around, that the food would rival all the caterers’ in this town.”
“Look, I made the promise before I went to the market.” She clanked pots and pans, moving in determined haste. “Everything is expensive these days. The price for a bag of rice and a basket of tomatoes doubled in the space of two days.”
I needed to find my mother fast. Not that she would be surprised at Taste-and-See’s antics, but this was the height of the caterer’s thievery.
Someone grabbed my hand. “Young lady, where are you running off to?”
It was Mr Makanju. He was sitting under the canopy in the company of Ifeanyi, the tailor. His hands were clammy against my skin.
“This is his only child,” he said to Ifeanyi.
“I know her very well.” Ifeanyi winked again. “Such a sweet gal.”
“My dear, you must take care of your mother, you hear?” Mr Makanju said. “I know it is not easy, but you must try. Don’t ever make her wish she’d join her husband.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, itching to leave.
“Work hard, be responsible. Make us proud. You hear me?”
“I trust this one, ” Ifeanyi said. “Very innocent girl. She won’t disappoint us.”
Makanju’s hands were now on my waist and he looked me in the eye, smiling his lewd smile. His bed was a rite of passage for the girls who lived on our street. Though he never approached me, considering his closeness to my father, he didn’t spare me the feel of his hands when he got the chance.
The drinks flowed as the DJ pulsed a medley of songs from Agape Love Band and Gozie Okeke. No one embarrassed themselves for food since there was enough to go around, even though unpalatable. At the sound of the loud music, the gathering swelled. People who walked by heard, and because the gates were thrown open, they strolled in and sat under the canopy, waiting to be served food.
*
I’m trying hard not to mention Chinedu. I had seen him sitting between his parents in church, looking like something God took his time to mould on a Sunday morning. The moment I made him out in the crowd, Philo’s words hit me right in the chest. My disaster of an outfit left me feeling like a vulnerable mgbeke. I dodged and pretended he wasn’t there for me, that he was a dutiful son accompanying his parents to a family friend’s memorial. His father, Eze Ralph, was blank-faced as usual, refusing to eat anything, and his mother Lolo Ralph, remained unchanging in her contempt, looking at the world from under her glasses.
You may endure a town even when all your dreams begin and end with you pulling your Echolac box out of it, out of the house you share with your mother, and walking away forever. You may still endure it when your late father’s tailor believes you will elope with him, or when within every hundred meters on Azikiwe road, the street of your childhood, you accost your primary school teachers who took delight in flogging you with the edge of a ruler; endure it when you arrive at a shop to buy provisions and the owner happens to be your secondary school bully, who now has a child strapped on her back, and as she attends to you, she pretends not to recognize you. But when the boy who you believed, in the juvenility of your adolescence, was the love of your life, returns, you need to get out of that town fast.
Chinedu remains an embarrassing memory, the reason I was nicknamed Traffic Warden on our street. The first of many nights his friends heckled me, I was on my way back from fetching water and they sat on the pavement of the provision shop in Number 13.
“Traffic Warden, Traffic Warden!” I wasn’t sure it was me, so I kept walking, swatting the drops of water that dripped on me from where my jerrican leaked.
“Ure, are you not a traffic warden?” I eyed them and walked on. Those were the nights we schemed teenage romances, the era of brute boys pinning curious, adventuresome girls against the crates of soft drinks. Those boys wooed girls and the girls hiked their skirts higher under the mango tree against their mother’s command. That first night I was heckled, I wondered what I did this time to deserve a nickname. It happened that my boyfriend, Chinedu, told his friends of our under-the-staircase trysts. The name was quite befitting. Making out with a girl who doesn’t want to go all the way is like trying to park your car in a tight spot while a warden looks out for you: “Stop, don’t go too far. Stop. I said STOP. Take it easy. Don’t go close to the wall. Move your hand a bit. Stop.”
And here he was, after all those years and I couldn’t hide from him any longer. Chinedu cornered me while I went to get more drinks from the cooling van.
“You act like you’d rather have all of us disappear,” he said, hands in his pockets.
“I wish I was the one who could disappear,” I said, trying to sound normal. “Hi, Chinedu.”
He chuckled. He’d fixed his buck teeth and gained some muscle, grown a moustache that added a layer of masculinity to his frame. The young man before me was different from the boy hailed ‘Edu-Brazil’ who was a constant pain in his father’s back after he joined The Notorious, a gang of boys who committed misdemeanours on our streets. He studied medicine now, much to his parents’ delight, though far from his. His mother often asked the women in her church group about their children for the slight chance to list the accomplishments of her son: a medical student in Ukraine, soon to take over his father’s practice.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you last year,” he said. “The funeral clashed with my exams.”
“I’m glad you weren’t here.”
“I sent my condolences on Facebook, but I think you blocked me. Did you?”
I handed him some of the soft drinks. He might as well be useful if he was going to keep interrogating me. I locked the boot of the van. “You sound shocked.”
“Come on, it’s not like I committed the unpardonable sin.”
I refused to acknowledge the glint in his smile, that crisp in his agbada. I refused to hear the snarl in his newly acquired accent.
“Ure, won’t you forgive and forget?”
We walked to the house now, our steps deliberately slow as we cradled the bottles.
“No,” I said. “I won’t forget. Would you force me to?”
“We were small children. I don’t even remember the details.” He waited for a reply and none came, he added. “I read your poems on Tumblr. They were pretty cool, especially the one you wrote about me.”
“You must think highly of yourself. I never wrote about you.”
“The love poems weren’t about me? The one about counting my teeth with your tongue?”
“Chinedu, is it not too early in the day to be high?”
“I’m just messing with you,” he laughed. “The poems read better when I saw myself in them. But why did you stop? I binged them when I got tired of my fat, boring textbooks.”
“I think everyone goes through a phase of bad poetry.”
“So what phase are you in now?”
I shrugged. “You can only name a phase when it’s passed.”
He reached for my shoulders, but I recoiled from his touch.
“Relax,” he said. “You still think the mere touch of my hands can get you pregnant? I was only trying to fix your blouse.” As he adjusted the bra straps, his smile was condescending in its concern. “And who made this dress for you by the way? I haven’t seen this style before.”
“I have to go. People are waiting for me.”
He handed me the drinks. “I’ll be in town for two months. Please let’s hang out. Let’s start over.”
