Free Everything Good Will Come by Sefi Atta Page B

him there, whimpering by the door of his car.
    At first the shouting scared me. I flinched from the first few slaps to the driver’s head, heard my mother whisper, “They’re going to kill him.” Then, I watched the beating feeling some assurance that our world was uniformly terrible. I remembered my own fate again, and Sheri’s, and became cross-eyed from that moment on. The driver blended in with the rest of the landscape: a row of rusty-roofed houses; old people with sparrow-like eyes; barefooted children; mothers with flaccid breasts; a bill board saying “Keep Lagos clean.” A breadfruit tree; a public tap; its base was embedded in a cement square.
    I had no idea what part of the city we were in.
    My mother’s priest was quiet as she explained what had happened. He had the same expression I remembered, his nose turned up as though he was sniffing something bad. She was to give me holy water to drink, since my father would not allow me to stay for cleansing. Then he produced a bottle of it, green and slimy. I recognized the spirogyra I’d seen in biology classes. I had to drink the water in the churchyard, and make myself sick afterward. None of it was to remain in me. Outside my mother handed the bottle to me. I gagged on every drop.
    â€œStick your finger down your throat,” she said, when I finished.
    Two attempts brought the entire contents of my stomach onto the ground, but I continued to retch. My eyes filled with tears. Some of the water had come through my nose.
    â€œGood,” my mother said.
    I thought of stamping on her feet, squeezing her hand to regain my sense of balance.
    â€œYou should never have followed that girl,” she said. “Look at me. If anything had happened to you, what would I have done? Look at me.”
    My gaze slipped from hers.
    â€œThe bottle,” she said. “Give me the bottle, Enitan.”
    I handed it to her. It could have been a baton. My mother was hollow, I thought. There was nothing in her. Like a drum, she could seize my heart beat, but that was all. I would not say another word to her, only when I had to, and even then I would speak without feeling: “Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Good night.”
    We arrived home and I walked to the back yard, by the fence where the scarlet hibiscus grew. Sheri had gotten pregnant from the rape. Didn’t a womb know which baby to reject? And now that the baby had been forced out, how did it look? The color of the hibiscus? I placed one by my ear and listened.

1985

    M uffled rage stalks like the wind, sudden and invisible. People don’t fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it’s too much.
    The first person to tell me my virginity belonged to me was the boy who took it. Before this, I’d thought my virginity belonged to Jesus Christ, my mother, society at large. Anyone but me. My boyfriend, a first-year pharmacy student at London University, assured me that it was mine, to give to him. In those brief seconds between owning and giving up my virginity, he licked the walls of my mouth clean. After I thought he pierced my bowels, I burst into tears.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with you?” he asked.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I said. “I have to wash.”
    It was his semen. I couldn’t bear the thought of it leaking out of me and rolling down my thighs. But each time I opened my mouth to tell him, about Sheri and me that awful summer, I thought my voice would blast my ribs apart, flatten him, flatten the bed, toss my sheets around like the wind, so I said nothing.
    The next time around my boyfriend strummed me like a guitar. “I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Maybe you’re frigid.” Frigidity was a form of mental illness, he said. We would eventually separate one night, when he complained that I was just like other Nigerian women in bed. “You just lie there,” he said. “Like