On Black Sisters Street Read Online Free Page B

walls. The table. The mantelpiece above the fake fireplace with logs that never burned.
    Efe says, “Stop. It’s not dusty.”
    Joyce continues dusting. Frantically. Her rag performing a crazed dance, like one possessed. The same way she dusts her bedposts in the Vingerlingstraat every morning, after the men have gone.
    Ama has a bottle of Leffe on the floor between her legs. She picks it up and starts to drink. The sound of her gulping the beer takes over the silence for a while.
Glup. Glup. Glup
. Until it’s finished. She flings the bottle onto the floor. Efe eyes it as it rolls, slows down, and finally stops.
    “Isn’t it too early to be drinking, Ama? Day never even break finish!” Efe tells her.
    “It’s early, and so fucking what?” Ama burps. Tugs at her crucifix. “You dey always get ant for your arse. Every day na so so annoyance you dey carry around.”
    “Fuck off.”
    Another burp.
    Joyce keeps dusting. Maniacally.
    The women are not sure what they are to one another. Thrown together by a conspiracy of fate and a loud man called Dele, they are bound in a sort of unobtrusive friendship, comfortable with whateverlittle they know of one another, asking no questions unless they are prompted to, sharing deep laughter and music in their sitting room, making light of the life that has taught them to make the most of the trump card that God has wedged in between their legs, dissecting the men who come to them (men who spend nights lying on top of them or under them, shoving and fiddling and clenching their brown buttocks and finally [mostly] using their fingers to shove their own pale meat in) in voices loud and deprecating. And now, with the news that they have just received, they have become bound by something so surreal that they are afraid of talking about it. It is as if, by skirting around it, by avoiding it, they can pretend it never happened.
    Yet Sisi is on their minds.

SISI
    “THERE IS NO ROOM TO BREATHE HERE!” CHISOM DROPPED THE MIRROR and turned to Peter, her boyfriend of three years. She had left her parents in the middle of an argument and gone to Peter’s flat, not too far from theirs. Peter with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. The framed certificate had pride of place in his cluttered sitting room, on top of his small black-and-white television. Since the television faced the door, the certificate was usually the first thing a guest saw. Above it on the wall, another framed certificate announced that Peter was teacher of the year. Beside that, a framed photograph of Peter with stars in his eyes, shaking the hand of a bored-looking man in a stiff black coat. Under the photograph, the inscription TEACHER OF THE YEAR , with the commissioner for education, Chief Dr. R. C. Munonye. There were identically framed photographs in Peter’s bedroom. Peter with eyes that sparkled, shaking the hands of men (and occasionally women) in flamboyant suits who always looked bored. Or busy. And very often both. Peter’s flat was a shrine to an accumulation of incremental successes that did not camouflage, as far as Chisom was concerned, the fallacies of those successes. Peter’s life was a cul-de-sac. He did not have the passion to dream like Chisom did, did not aspire to break down the walls that kept him in.
    And this made her think that she was outgrowing him.
    “I’ll marry you one day, and I shall take you away from here,” Peter swore, his voice firm like a schoolteacher’s, as he wet his right index finger and pointed it up to the ceiling to accompany his oath. He walked toward her and held her around her waist, nuzzled the side of her face with the side of his. “I promise you. I’ll take you away from all this, baby!” Another nuzzle.
    In Europe, when she would no longer be Chisom and before Luc, this was what she would miss most about him. His hands around her waist. His breath warm against her face. His stubble scratching her cheek. She would believe that she would never find that