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Nothing the eye can see will make it bleed. -Igbo Proverb
The other nurses hated me.
I wanted to believe it was not malicious but stemmed from mystery because they found me impossible to read. A year ago, when I was posted to this hospital, Jos General Health and Medical Centre, they had been curious to know more about me. Apart from the hallowed tales of my matron who introduced me as “the brilliant nurse Nye who saved numerous patients in the Army hospital in Kaduna,” there was nothing else they knew about my life, because right after that introduction, I said a stoic “Hello everyone,” and that was it. That afternoon at lunchtime, when they came to the waiting room where I was putting away new medical supplies, they asked me to join them for lunch, and I declined. The next day, they tried again and got the same response. By the second week, they stopped asking, perhaps stunned by how brazenly I had told them no. People do not expect you to say no to their requests outright. They expect excuses, hurriedly made-up and almost pitiable, and as they accept your excuse they would smile because they would know you were lying. You really did not have anything to do at home. Your child was not sick. You were just trying to be polite, to make the requester feel at ease, to not hate you. For me, this was the opposite. My default answer was a flat no, devoid of emotion or further explanation. I would make sure I was staring the requester in the eye as I rejected their request, and I would watch as their eagerness fluttered from confidence to confusion and finally, bewilderment. Then they would be the one scurrying to reply, to tell me they understood I was busy, and it was alright if I did not want to do what they wanted me to do. It was an amusing thing to see human arrogance crumble in the face of defiance. This act did not make me feel bigger or better than them. It was just my way of living. I was quick to say no than yes to anything. I felt no way about it, neither triumphant nor apologetic.
As the year passed, the nurses shifted from sharing pleasantries and salutary greetings to not speaking to me at all. The only time I would interact with them would be chaotic situations at work, like when a patient was dying or at Code Red, or when victims from the Emergency and Triage were sent to our Surgical Unit. We were located north of the hospital wing, annexed to the Fire and Burns Unit and the Intensive Care Unit. The mortuaries were right across because in the medical field it is almost expected that surgeries can lead to sudden death. When I got posted here, I was first sent to the Emergency Surgical. We conducted minor surgeries like giving stitches to a torn ligament or to a gash, sewn up hurriedly with minimal anaesthesia, the patient sent home an hour later. The work was quick and easy, but I loathed it anyway; it never ended. More often than you’d expect, humans got into stupid accidents that sent them into the Emergency Surgical Unit. But I did the job well, especially when it involved children. Nobody, not even the nurses who detested me, could argue that I was not good with children. Within months of arriving at the Emergency Surgical Unit, everyone referred to me as The Sweet Nurse. Word had gotten around that I always gave the child patients a bag of sweets after the surgical procedure, so the children loved me, and their parents loved me more. But for any other adult, my co-workers included, this was a deceptive moniker, as I instantly went back to being reclusive after sharing smiles and sweet packets with the patients and their families.
This was why the nurses hated me—they could not understand me. And maybe because I was a chronic smoker, too.
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Today, I was doing just that. It was a Tuesday, and I was standing alone under a black plum tree, smoking a cigarette. It was my third cigarette that afternoon on an empty stomach, and I was determined for it to be this way until I left the hospital. Over the years I had trained my appetite to allow for three essentials: cigarettes, fruits, and alcohol. Anything else, I could do without. Most days when I did eat, it would be things like soil, calabash chalk, and paper. These I enjoyed, for they branched so far in tastes. The grainy earthiness of soil, the sandy texture of calabash chalk that scratched my throat when I swallowed, the nothingness of paper, undignified and bland. I knew this was a condition, pica—as a nurse it was expected I would know. Whenever I willed myself to feel guilty, I would go through files of pregnant women who had experienced pica at some point in their pregnancies, and this made it seem…natural. I was not pregnant (and was never hoping to be, thanks to the IUD wedged at the entrance of my uterus), but when I indulged in pica, it made me feel alive. It gave me a sense of fullness that food did not bring, so I chose to believe it was healing. No one knew, and I had succeeded keeping it that way. Back when I resided in Umuahia, the people in my life would try to guilt-trip or force-feed me, an act enveloped in faux affection because I lost so much weight and looked anaemic. The pica, no one picked up—except the time Mrs. Adindu had wondered aloud why the mulch in her plant pots was dug through. I convinced her it was the work of a rat. However, this frightened me enough to start thinking of leaving Umuahia, which I did two months later. December 2007. I had left and never returned or contacted anyone in Umuahia in seven years.
With the cigarette burning in my left hand, I scrolled the trackball of my Blackberry Bold. For years I had lived without a mobile phone, but by the end of 2012, after the craze of my country’s petrol subsidy removal, and the collective, world-wide craze of people believing the world was coming to an end, technology and peer pressure won me over. I got a Blackberry from a German woman who I had treated for malaria while she was on, according to her, a “safari trip across Africa.” I found her irritating but homely, and all through the time I visited her home to give her injections she would tell me stories about Europe which I did not care about. It took me two weeks with her to know she was incredibly lonely, perhaps even frightened, for she had been convinced she would die from the illness before I was contracted to treat her as a homecare nurse. After she got better and prepared to leave for her country, she begged me to ask for anything I wanted aside from my payment. I refused her request, but she nagged me enough to come up with something, so I asked for a Blackberry. Blackberries were the rage amongst the youth, and even though I did not care for them and was very content with my battered old NOKIA, I figured having a phone to chat with friends would not be bad. And I would get it for free.
As I scrolled through, the screen gleamed. I was currently on a new app I had downloaded, an American app called Twitter. I had no full understanding of it, but it was unlike Facebook, which I did not have and severely hated. Ene, a laboratory assistant and the only person I sometimes had a conversation with because just like me, she minded her business, had recently told me that one way to save my Blackberry battery from dying was to use another app called Ubersocial to access Twitter instead. She told me this a few hours ago, when I had gone to submit a patient’s bloodwork for examination. Now I stood outside during my cigarette break, downloading the app with the hospital’s free Wi-Fi.
Occasionally, my phone would buzz with a ping, indicating a new BBM message, but I was ignoring it on purpose. As my cigarette burnt out, the phone rang. I let it buzz through until a Missed Call flashed across the screen, then I opened the BBM chat messages.
Nye, pls call me. Thnx, the first message read.
I scrolled to read the second.
Nye o, abeg I knw say u no dey work now. Ping me bck.
The third text had a sense of urgency with a tinge of annoyance.
Nye! Dis girl. Y u get BB if u no go ping person back, eh??? No vex me o!
Chuckling, I began to text back.
What’s up?
I waited, raising my cigarette to my lips. It was burnt to the filter. I sucked the ash out, then tossed the cigarette into my mouth and chewed. The sharp taste of tobacco hit me like a slap.
Ping! The phone buzzed.
Ah! She haff answer! Finally.
Croth, I dey work…what’s going on?
She don start. Y u dey always speak big-big grammar 4 me, eh?
But I’m at work. What’s up?
KK, calm ur bobbi.
A yellow emoji laughing with tears followed the text. I laughed.
Ok I dey calm…wetin dey?
I wan ask 4 u 2 bring medicine 4 us today.
Okay. Must it be today?
Yes o…d matter dey kriti—how una wey knw book dey spell am?
Critical.
Ehen! Critical.
Okay. What’s the problem.
Na Jane. She carry infection 4rm one stupid man wey sleep wit am last week. Na she no get sense…d mumu man tell am him go pay her extra if she do without condom, she come believe am. I no blame her sha, she dey new 2 dis work
I sighed. Someone walked out of one of the alcoves by the quadrangle garden where I stood. It was Matron Zang, the matron who had introduced me on my first day. Her eyes were focused on me, and I knew she was headed in my direction.
I hurriedly typed. Ok, no wahala. I’ll bring some antibiotics back home. No qualm.
Nye of d Most High! After u, na u! Thanx
Ok, I have to go now, we’ll talk later
Kk ttyl
I put my Blackberry away and popped in two Tom-Tom sweets. I turned just in time—the matron stopped close to the flower hedges a few feet from me. Though Matron Zang was kind and quiet, she was also known to be strict and overly religious. I inhaled, hoping that the smell of cigarette smoke was no longer in the air. So far, I had been able to hide my smoking from the head nurses and Matrons by smoking outside and licking Tom-Toms. It seemed to work, but one could never tell.
Matron Zang nodded at me. “Nurse Nye, what are you doing here?”
“I’m on break Matron, so I decided to chat with my…” I paused, thinking of how to define Croth. “…my cousin for some time. Do you need me at the wards?”
“In a way. Those transfers from Usman Dan Fodio Medical Hospital at Sokoto have arrived. You know what I am talking about, right?”
I nodded. Last week, we had been notified of a bombing in Yobe. It had been on the local news. Not that I cared about the news anyway, but in the waiting rooms at the emergency lobbies, televisions had been mounted up at wall corners to distract the patients from the anxieties of their ailments. All the TVs were perpetually tuned to news channels, and sometimes when I was bored, I would glance, too.
“I had not expected they will bring any of the casualties here,” I said. “What about the Army hospital in Kaduna?”
“You know there is an ongoing conflict in Kaduna. Besides, they told us the Army hospital is full.”
We had begun walking back to hospital, me behind her at a respectable pace, as Matron Zang continued. “I know your shift is almost over, that’s why I did not assign much for you to do. Five soldiers were sent to us, four of them have life-threatening injuries. Two have shrapnel embedded in their abdomen, one is shell-shocked. He is in a coma; he and the fourth one are in the ICU.”
I was taking notes in my jotter, which I had pulled from my side pocket. We walked briskly down the hall, passing by the nurses who gave me side stares of either contempt or envy. As usual, I ignored them.
“And the fifth?” I asked.
Matron Zang stopped at the door of a private surgical unit. “That’s who I am assigning you to. He lost his right eye.”
“Oh dear,” I tutted.
“He had a bit of shrapnel in it, and honestly if they had brought them to us earlier, I am sure he would not have lost that eye. It’s quite unfortunate.” Matron Zang sighed. She suddenly looked small, and for a moment reminded me of Mrs. Adindu.
I squared my shoulders. “What would you like me to do?”
“Well, the surgeons have already operated on the eye, but I want you to finish stitching it up and to get him to sleep. He had his first surgery in Sokoto to remove most of the shrapnel. Our surgeons just removed the rest, but they had to get to work on the other soldiers and could not finish up the final stitching.” She tapped at the door. “He’s in there now.”
“Okay, Matron.”
She turned to leave, then remembered something. “You can talk to him through the process. He must be awake, sadly, but he is under anaesthesia, so he won’t feel any pain. But try to keep him calm by conversing with him.” She smiled. “I have seen you work with our child patients, that was the reason I recommended you for this job. I want to trust that you will do it well.”
“No problem, Matron. I will. Thank you.”
I waited until she walked away, then turned and entered the room.
The patient was on the bed, his right eye taped with a thick gauze. He was taller than the bed, his arms patched around with bandages, little cuts around his skin dotted blue with iodine. For someone who had survived a bombing, he looked eerily at ease; slouched over the pillows, his eye (or at least the functioning one) lowered to a phone. He looked up as I walked in, and for the first time, I realized how abstract an eye looked when isolated from its pairing. Like an earring forgotten on the side of the road or a shoe lost in a field, lonely and deprived of what made it unique—the other. But even in isolation it still had its beauty, just not its uniqueness nor its entire usefulness. This was how the patient’s eye was: a lone beauty of chestnut brown iris and black pupil, centred in an inflamed sclera. The look from it was piercing, reflecting the bits of sunlight that trickled in from a sliding window. For a moment I felt a great disappointment that the other eye was never saved, for it would have been interesting to see the other eye give his stare a completeness that it deserved but now lacked. It was almost like when I had been scarred in the fire, wishing for my skin that was lost, and wondering how different I would have looked in my future without being patched with skin grafts to make me whole again.
I nodded at the nurse’s assistant, who was setting up a tray of surgical instruments in the corner of the room, then pointed at the phone as I approached the bed. “Please sir, you can’t be looking at that. You just came out of surgery…it is not advisable to strain the eye.”
He placed the phone on the bedside cabinet. “Yes, Nurse. Sorry.”
His voice was low and calming, like a friend’s. I suddenly wondered if his family were out in the waiting room, if they knew their son was presently on a bedtable in the Surgical Unit, devoid of an eye. My best guess was no, but I quietly asked the assistant, who was standing beside me, anyway.
“No,” she said.
The patient laughed wryly, drawing my attention back to him. I noticed then how beautiful he was. It was a beauty you had to look twice to catch; dark skin, a chestnut eye, a defined curve of his lips, cherry-pink at the bottom, a long nose with broad nostrils. Perhaps not someone people would call handsome, but he was beautiful in a way that made him endearing, the kind that gained people’s trust.
“My family know already, but they are not here yet,” he said. “Well, my sisters know. Not my mother…this could kill her.”
I went over to the tap to wash my hands with saline and soap. Though I was not eager to engage in small talk, especially with adult patients, I recalled the promise I had made to Matron Zang. “Where is your family?”
“Here in Jos.”
“Oh?”
He chuckled. “Yes. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I am back to the home I left just six months ago. This time, without an eye. Makes one wonder if this is God’s way of telling me home is where I have to be.”
I snapped on surgical gloves and approached the bedtable. “I’m very sorry, sir…”
He waved my apology off. “No…none of that. My fellow soldiers died in that blast. I am lucky to be alive.”
I nodded, then picked up the suture needle. “Okay, this may be uncomfortable, but you will feel no pain.”
He laughed again, but this time the laughter was sad, short, heavy like a cough.
“On the contrary, I wish I could feel the pain,” he said.
◆
We talked through the suturing. He was born in Jos in 1985, in Bek, a town in the hinterlands known for its mountains. His father was originally from upper North, Taraba, but had moved to Jos as a young man in the ‘60s, just after the Nigerian Civil War. Uneducated and docile, he had been quick to find work as a houseboy for a British couple from the Consulate in Lagos. They had a ranch in Jos, up in the mountains where his father lived, and only vacationed there during the rainy seasons. For the eight years of their stay in the country, his father dutifully served them. The day before they left permanently for England, they handed him the keys and deed to the ranch. They had transferred title to him, it was now his.
“Just like that?” I asked as I cut a thread and tied it over the first suture on the patient’s eyelid.
“Yes. This was the 70’s…back then people rarely fought for land here, especially if it was given to a white man. My father was stunned about Mr. Harrison’s graciousness, but a part of him had expected it, too. I mean…he had given the man and his wife eight years of his life. Working to the bone, safeguarding the ranch when they were not there, cleaning and cooking for them when they were. He later said it was an unexpected gift, but a deserved one.”
“That’s…something.” I nodded at the assistant for a fresh pair of gauze. The one I had over his eye socket was sticky with blood. “So, this ranch…was that where you were born?”
“Yes. My father married my mother two years after owning the ranch. I came after four sisters, of which the first are triplets. I had a younger sister, but she died of colic when she was a baby. Five children, and I am the last.”
“And the only male child,” I said knowingly.
He recognized my tone and laughed. “No, I wasn’t spoiled o. My mother made me do housework, which at this age, I am grateful for. My sisters also made me work with them.”
“That is good. Does the ranch still exist?”
“Yes. It was my father’s pride, and he made farms out of most of the land. For years he planted legumes, grain and vegetables, then finally fruit trees, then in the late ‘90s, he realized by accident that strawberries could grow on the land, so he started a strawberry farm. My mother also had a saffron garden and bee farm, and she grew saffron, harvested honey and beeswax and sold them in wholesale to the markets. She also found by accident that she could make lipstick with saffron and beeswax, and began a business selling lipstick to Muslim women during Sallah and Christian women during Christmas.”
I knotted the second suture. “You have quite the picture-book life. Now hold still…. this is the last one…”
Two hours later, I had learned enough of my patient’s life to write his autobiography; his childhood in the mountains of Jos where he ate strawberries from the branches, milked goats, and bottled honey. His teenage rebel years when his parents suddenly separated, the separation leading him to decide, to his father’s bewilderment, to join the Army. His mother leaving with his sisters and filing for divorce, and him, frustrated and angry at his family’s dissolution, joining the Military and moving to Kaduna. For years he stayed there, until news of his father’s death reached him in 2008. Then a young cadet, he returned to Jos to take ownership of the farm but found the life too rustic for him, so he returned to Kaduna in 2010 and was assigned to the new Operation Defeat Boko Haram Unit, then posted to Yobe where he had remained until the bombing and the eye loss. By the time I tied the last suture, I could see his face slackened with remorse. It seemed more possible now that he realized his life had been upturned; him losing his eye possibly meant he would not be able to return to the Army anymore. Now he was a liability, a person with less. I could see the wheels of his brain turning, trying to process this new life, this new strangeness, the demotion to a world of minorities.
Snapping off the bloody gloves and placing them in the aluminium pan, I asked the assistant to step out for more gauzes. I did not need them…in fact I did not need anything. I just wanted her out. When she left, I went over to the tap and washed my hands. The room smelled raw; the overpowering scent of iodine chocked my throat. Stifling a cough, I broke open the seal of the morphine and pierced the needle into the bottle. When I returned to the bedtable, the patient’s one eye met my glance, and I saw the glistening before the tear fell.
Gently, I placed a palm on his shoulder. “It will be alright,” I said, surprised that I meant it.
He swallowed as another tear fell. “Do you really think so?”
I smiled. “Look at me. Who best would know, if not me?”
His cherry-pink lower lip trembled. “How long have you…”
“Since I was a child. Six. I’ve known no other skin.”
“Do you mind me asking what happened?”
“Kerosene explosion. My mother died from it.”
“I’m very sorry.”
“I am too.”
The room was silent. I waited for him to speak. When he did, his voice sounded weaker.
“I guess I’d be returning home to the ranch. My father had said I would have been a great farmer if I had not been stupid enough to join the Army. Maybe this time, I can prove him right.”
I smiled wanly, then held up the needle. It was way past my closing time, and I was already exhausted and yearning to leave. He got the message and laid back, just as the assistant returned with the gauze and a file in her hand.
“Nurse Nye, Matron Zang asked me to give this to you. It is the patient’s file,” she said, stretching out the pale blue folder.
“Thank you. Place it on the table there.”
The shot was quick. As he began to drift, he looked at me again. “Thank you.”
“Perhaps I’ll see you again, Corporal….”
His eyelid trembled as he battled sleep. “It’s Solo,” he said. “Just Solo. My name is…”
“That’s a nice name. Like solo of a song?”
But then his eye shut close. The assistant, who was clearing out the workstation, said, “It’s Solomon. His name is Solo, short for Solomon.”
I nodded, my mind wandering. Solo, like a song. I had wished that was it, just solo. It fit him more. I looked at the patient, asleep on his bed now, then left the room.
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At nighttime, the city of Jos was like a painted canvas, paused in time and soaked with colours. I followed the moon home, the whirring of my Vespa bike trailing through the asphalt road with the exhaust smoke behind it, my bag filled with medical supplies I had pilfered from the hospital strapped to the metal panel behind my seat. The air smelt of burning wood, grass fields, and dead things. The stars were reluctantly out, but the moon glowed with the intensity of the sun. Jos City reminded me of a pleasant discovery that came to the people who founded it as it was tucked in a valley between the mountains. Unlike the Southeast, the trees here were short but grew dense. The mountains were always green, stencilled against a blank spread of baby blue skies. Tonight, the skies were indigo, camouflaged by the moonlight, a necessary blessing, because most of the two-way highway had no functioning streetlights, and the bushes and trees by the roadside formed dark foreboding shadows that would make even the brave uneasy.
The hospital I worked at was in Lamingo, close to Shere Hills. It was one of the coldest places in Jos, so whenever I went into work, I wore sweaters and windbreakers with socks and trainers. The wind stung my face as I headed towards Terminus, the city centre. Occasionally the phone in my purse buzzed with pings, but I ignored it, knowing it was Croth. When I arrived at Terminus, I was showered with lights from still open shops, the few fluorescent traffic lights stationed at the roundabout, and the sporadic flashes of headlights from cars, motorbikes, and rickshaws driving by. Terminus was dusty, thick with fumes, chaotic. The city centre never slept, except maybe on Sundays. As I manoeuvred through traffic, I sought an exit to the less busy streets, which would lead me to Whitter Close, where I lived. I finally found an exit near a mai-shai shop, a Northern name for tea sellers who had kiosks by the side of the road, making sellable mugs of milk teas, omelettes, and toast—all from scratch at the roadside. Smoke and the delicious smell of fried eggs from the mai-shai’s coal stove enveloped my face as I made a turn, and some of the men seated on the bench with hot mugs of tea waved at me. I recognized one of them: Musa, a man who sold scrap metal from wheelbarrows, known in the neighbourhood as Musa Condemn. Six months ago, I had treated him for syphilis, and whenever he saw me in town, he would praise me with the rigor of a man saved from drowning, telling his friends how I had “saved his life.” I was grateful for his gestures but also embarrassed.
“Nurse, sannu! Ina hini?” He yelled his greeting to me in Hausa.
“Musa, Yaa gayji-ya!” I yelled back, smiling.
As I drove past, I could hear him once again tell the other men on the bench how I had saved his life, until their excited voices were out of my earshot. I chuckled. There was no escaping Musa Condemn’s praises, I had to come to terms with that.
Home was in the Red Light District, a rowdy, rustic neighbourhood where the old houses had been repainted in bright colours, an unsuccessful attempt to hide the cracks that ran across the cemented walls. Some houses had entire murals, from impressive arts of indigenous heroes like Queen Amina, international ones like Bob Marley and Winnie Mandela, down to threats like “Post No Bill Here if U No Wan Die” or “Don’t Urinate Here unless Thunder will fire your penis!” The threats still did not seem to faze the pissers, because occasionally, as I rode by, the air still stank of urine. But posted bills were torn, especially posters of politicians. The streets were untarred, the sand was fine red-brown and stained the shoes. Irrigation gutters ran through most make-shift streets, letting storm drains and gutter water run through. Due to no waste management, refuses were religiously burned every first Saturday of the month during Sanitation Week to stop the spread of rats. Almost all houses had a stall in front of them selling something, from occasional local snacks and food restaurants to full-blown provision stores selling beverages and cookware. There was only one church in the neighbourhood, an open hall with bamboo sticks as pillars over a zinc roof, with the name JESUS’S DISCIPLES MINISTRIES INTL splashed in white hand-painted letters on a crocked plywood signpost beside it. In the open space were multi-coloured plastic chairs, and overhead shone a fluorescent light that attracted crickets. Today the church seemed to be having an evening service. I could see them now as I rode past, the members all chanting, the pastor with a blare horn, incessantly praying away poverty which seemed ironic given where they were.
The nearest mosque was strategically far from the church, three kilometres away, near the market. From afar I could hear the muezzin calling for prayers over a microphone, his Arabic sweet and enthralling. The air was a cocktail of smells, from the stench of raw fish and dry crawfish sitting in basins outside stores, to the smoking of cow and goat hide on grill pads over burning firewood near the meat stalls. Children ran around, some on errands by the parents, others playing and laughing with friends. Adults ambled, some aimlessly, some with purpose, most with expressionless looks on their faces. Some sat on mats and benches at the balconies of their houses, taking in the rowdiness of the evening, the rickshaws and motorcycles as they passed by. Some sat in clusters and ate their dinners with their hands, others drank tea or fura de nunu from calabash bowls, the popular Fulani cold meal made from fermented curdled milk and ground millet. Some smoked cigarettes and listened to BBC Hausa, others conversed and admired the moon, while others yet lay on mats on cemented thresholds, dozing off. It was a lovely chaos I enjoyed seeing every day and it was home because it gave me a place to lay my head—for next to nothing.
I veered off the street to a quieter neighbourhood with low-rises and less people milling around, then arrived at the house with the black gates and lime-coloured fence and honked. The gates opened and I rode in. The ground inside the compound was old terrazzo, patched with slabs of cement because the landlord was too lazy to redo the flooring. The house was a bungalow with a grey brass door and sliding French windows. A generator roared from the backyard, and yellow bulbs glowed on the porch, despite NEPA restoring the power just as I rode in. I parked my Vespa in the little shade with two other lady bikes and numerous flowerpots of cactus and aloe vera, just as Josephina, the young girl who had opened the gates, skipped towards me with excitement. She was petite and dark, her hair braided in startling pink attachments, and her face riddled with cystic acne. She was Croth’s younger sister.
“Welcome, Aunty Nurse,” she greeted me, squatting halfway down with respect.
“Josephina, how are you?” I replied as I untied the black bag of medical supplies and handed it to her. “Is Croth in?”
“Yes, sister Croth dey inside. We’ve been waiting for you,” she said as we headed into the house.
We called the house Girls’ Church, a sarcastic moniker to redefine a religious communal dwelling. Josephina had come up with the name, and it seemed fitting because she was the youngest of all eleven of us who resided here—and the least belligerent. We were all between nineteen and twenty-nine, Croth being the oldest, and the longest tenant. She had rented the house from a local man who loved money more than gossip, and he never questioned why a group of ladies were living together in a bungalow so long as we paid rent. This was because Nigerian property owners barely rented houses to single women. Croth usually paid him two years in advance when business was good for the girls, so the landlord took the money and asked no questions. For more of his silence, we did the renovating and kept up the house ourselves. The house was old, built in the late 70’s, and had no running water, so we pooled resources and got a water tank, a borehole to run water through, and a generator for when NEPA took the power. The landlord asked us to leave his ixora hedges at the porch growing, so occasionally Josephina trimmed them. On warm evenings we gathered at the veranda, drinking beer and laughing while plucking off the ixoras stems and sucking the sweet nectar.
Eleven women, nine of which were sex workers, and me, the nurse who took care of their health.
I had come to live here the night I arrived in Jos when I met Croth at a bus stop. It was very late, close to 11 p.m. I had taken the morning bus from Kaduna, but it broke down on the road, eating hours off my trip. By the time it pulled into the Terminus bus stop, the streets were scant with humans and motor traffic. My phone battery dead, I had no way of contacting the hospital. I stood there, getting slightly alarmed at the possibility of getting mugged, when I noticed someone else standing at the bus-stop, a woman. I looked over at her. She took one good look at my suitcase and asked in the raspy voice I would come to recognize even in a crowded room. “Your first time in Jos?”
“Yes.”
“Wetin bring you here?”
I swallowed, confused as to why this slim woman in a bright red leotard mini skirt, white halter top, and platform heels was talking to me. People tended to keep their distance when they saw the scars on my face, even though now they were barely visible, fading with age and covered under makeup.
“I’m a nurse,” I replied.
Her pencilled eyebrows went up and she smacked her gum.
“Eh-heh. You be nurse like this? That’s good o. Well done. My sister wants to go to nursing school.” She sucked her teeth, then opened her purse and pulled out a cigarette. “You know say you no go find taxi this night so?”
I was dying for her to offer me a cigarette, if not for anything but to calm my nerves, so I nodded and said, “Yes, I know. Can you help me?”
She scoffed. “Eh? You dey smoke loud? Why I go help person wey I no know?”
“Okay. Oya, abeg give me one cigarette please, make I smoke.”
Croth would later tell me that before I had asked her for the cigarette, she had taken me for a Goody-Two-Shoes and had intended to leave me there at the bus stop. But when I asked for the cigarette, her assumptions were thrown to the wind, and she became very curious, eager to know me better. That was why she brought out her phone, called a taxi she was familiar with, and in minutes we arrived at Girls’ Church, where I was ushered into a room and had never left since.
The living room was minimally decorated, as we spent less time there. A brown couch with yellow tapestry flowers occupied almost half of the room, and a dusty TV hung from the left wall between two audio speakers. There was no middle table but a ruffled grey rug, and on it, some cushions whose decorations varied from animal print to Disney cartoon characters. Croth was standing in front of the TV, holding a remote control and switching through channels as we walked in. She was wearing denim cut-offs and a bra. Her hair was stiff with dried hair-gel, held up in a braided ponytail, and her face was devoid of makeup. She looked relaxed and younger without makeup but hated being told this.
She grinned. “Guy! You don finally land. How was work?”
I sank into the couch and kicked off my shoes. “Work is the same. Where’s everybody?”
Croth came over and sat beside me. “We dey wait you since make you bring the medicine. Jane dey inside, but she dey sleep. Calista and Ene don go Red-Light. Annette and Rampa went to relax their hair. Izien go buy suya and whiskey, and Loretta dey help me cook for kitchen. You know Charcoal travelled to Lagos last week.” She looked at me, her eyes wide with a questioning look. “What’s up? You bring am?”
I nodded, looking over at Josephina, who was standing nearby, the bag still in her hands. On cue, she came forward and opened it, and Croth grinned as she began picking out the medical supplies, from packs of tablets and antibiotics to cottonwool, iodine, female condoms, pregnancy tests strips, and Postino. My duty was simple: to provide medication and supplies for protection while the girls went out to work.
“These was what I could get…I had a long workday. I was even lucky I got these,” I said as I unbuttoned my windbreaker and removed my socks. The welcoming breeze of the ceiling fan cooled my sweat-dampened neck and back, and I stretched with a yawn.
“No wahala, Nye. You try well-well.” Croth said, smiling as she looked up at Josephina. “Oya, Jo…go and put these in that medicine cabinet in my room.”
I closed my eyes for a second, felt Croth’s eyes on me, and opened them back up. She was standing over me, smiling. I smiled back as I stood up. “Don’t mention,” I said jokingly.
“You did well for us. Thank you.”
Croth rarely said complete sentences in English. Her words were always spiced with broken English, or Pidgin, as we called it here. She had once told me it was a personal resistance of hers because she detested the Queen of Britain, so I always took her English compliments like a warm hug on a cold night because they rarely occurred.
I came closer and hugged her, then placed a kiss on her cheek. It was cold, powdery, and smelt like roses.
“Anytime. Goodnight, babes,” I said and headed towards the stairs to my room.
◆
My room was small and minimalist. It contained a queen-sized bed, an oak table filled with books that ranged from scorched-earth poetry to dystopian novels, a suede ottoman that held within it most of my knickknacks, and a cupboard with my clothes and personal possessions. I had intentionally made the room devoid of a personality.
One notable exception were the numerous pots of plants I had arranged on the desk by the window. They ranged from ferns to eucalyptus, and the air around them smelt crisp. I had a green thumb, but this was not why I had collected the ore vases. As I undressed, my right hand dug into one of the pots and took out a handful of mulch which I threw into my mouth. The other hand curled behind, seeking to unclasp my bra. I smiled as the dirt softened in my mouth, but as I swallowed, I felt a sudden mixture of satisfaction and grief.
Not now.
As I wrapped a towel around my body and headed towards the bathroom, I let my mind wander. It returned to the patient in the hospital, the soldier with the lost eye. In the steamed room with the droplets of water from the shower coursing down my face and body, I wondered if what I was feeling were the first strings of sexual infatuation—a liking—but I quickly realized it was not. I had felt nothing but nostalgia and familiarity in his presence. Back then, at the hospital, as I left the surgical room, I had felt empathetic of the person he would become, this new version of himself with a lost eye, learning to navigate the world from a linear perspective. The feeling had been so great that I even gambled with the thought of bringing him back here with me, to Girls’ Church. But even if, in my quest for a friendship, I desired to bring someone home, I was forbidden to, especially if it was a man. It was Croth’s rule to bring no man to Girls’ Church, no matter how ‘special’ the job was or how much ‘in love’ we felt with our boyfriends, if we decided to have any. The rule, written in ominous red Sharpie ink over a cardboard plaque, hung at the entrance to the house: NO MEN ALLOWED, INCLUDING BOYFRIENDS, MANFRIENDS, BROTHERS AND FATHERS.
“Men disrupt things,” Croth said to me once in the kitchen while we shelled boiled eggs for a lunch of jollof spaghetti. “Bring a man into this house and see how all of us go craze. Abeg, no. I rather we give affections to ourselves. We barely get affection from these men, anyway.” I agreed with her. Before coming to Jos, I had had relationships with both men and women, and invariably the men had been more difficult to break up with. All my past relationships were strictly sexual, as I had sworn to have no romantic attachments.
I stepped out of the shower and got dressed in my pyjamas. As I applied lotion to my hands and face, I contemplated having a smoke before bed when a knock came.
“Sorry to bother you, aunty Nye,” Josephina said. “My sister is asking if you would come down to eat with us?”
Croth always wanted me to eat with everyone when I brought medication home. It was her way of showing gratitude, where she would serve me obnoxious helpings of food while jokingly calling me the ‘Confam Madam of Thieving Medicine.’
“Yes,” I said. “Tell her I’m coming.”
I rubbed my hands until the greasy lotion softened the creases in my skin, then dropped the bottle on the bed. I could hear the women’s voices coming from the living room downstairs, the tinkling of chinaware, the clanking of serving spoons against the stainless-steel pots. Nye, you do not know that man. You do not have to know that man. And like the acidic trauma of my past, I willed myself to forget the soldier with the lost eye.