THE CALL

PART 1

SYLVIA

Sylvia got the call in the middle of a meeting with one of her clients and at first, irritated and staying committed to her rule of no phone calls when discussing with clients, she had ignored the call until the incessant ringing annoyed both her and the client and then she stepped out of the boardroom to pick up.

Sylvia did not return to her client after the call. Instead, she went to her office, packed her bags and without any excuses, walked out of her office and into the damp rainy outside. How fitting it was, she thought, when she stretched out her hand and felt little rain droplets pool into her palm. Her mother had died, and even the heavens wailed for her.

Two cabs took her back to her house on Norwich Street and upon opening her door, her cat, Benedict, or Benny (no, not Ben) welcomed her into the dark gloomy house that reflected the weather, her situation and mood.

Sylvia didn’t know how to feel just yet. Of course, she knew of grief and the many tears and the probable breakdown she should have been having now, or perhaps at the office so she could garner sympathy in exchange for her unruly behaviour at work; all signs to show that she was not okay, that she was not okay because she had just gotten a call all the way from Nigeria that her mother was dead.

But now, at this very moment, it felt like there was something hollow inside her, a void that was blocking her from feeling the sorrow she was meant to feel and dread filled the pit of her stomach with the idea of prolonged grieving. She would have rather bawled her eyes out at work and come back home calm, like in a dreamscape where she had never gotten that call and all was fine, and the most of her worries were whether or not her clients were buying whatever craftily manufactured stories she was telling them. But now here she was, impatiently waiting for a grief that would not come.

In the meantime, she decided to busy herself with other things. Like first, who had called her? She opened her phone to check the number—it was a Nigerian number of course, but it wasn’t her mother’s number or the number of any of her friends back home. It wasn’t even a saved number and she shivered at the thought of just what had happened to her mother.

Had her mother been in a public place and she had slumped and died and some good Samaritan saw it fit to call the first number that popped up in her emergency contacts? Or had she been in a hospital with some illness she had refused to disclose to everyone because she didn’t want anyone to worry like they had for their father? Well, if that was the case, then wouldn’t she have taken a page from their father’s notebook to see how terribly that had ended up for him?

Endless possibilities formed in her head until she started feeling heavy, like the ground was slowly lifting her up. Her eyes turned from vertigo and a small but sharp pain stung somewhere at the back of her head. She strutted to the kitchen for a glass of water to ease the pain, and she wondered too, if something like this had happened to her mother.

Had her mother being lying down on the couch, watching television or gazing into the nowheres she usually disappeared into when she felt a sharp pain in her head and then she stood up to get water? Then just at the fridge, she had a stroke, fell down and died in the kitchen with no one around to say goodbye to her just like they had always promised? Sylvia wondered if she too, was dying. Could deaths be connected as so, she wondered. If her and her mother were two spirits cut from the same cloth, one sent to begat the other, could it be possible that even after years of estrangement, one of the souls could reach out to the other on the day its host died, calling for the other to follow them out of this horrible world?

Would she follow her mother if she asked?

Sylvia shook her head and thought not to think of that. It was foolish, and if her mother was here, she would kiss her teeth and tell her to stop thinking about juju. She smiled at a fabricated memory of her mother doing just that, and she seized herself in that memory, imagining the skin of her mother’s face folding into a frown, then into a relaxed nothing. Then her eyes closing, her fists unclenching, and the blood coursing through her, making its last rounds before saying goodbye forever, and then Sylvia broke down.

She collapsed to the floor and screamed. A scream so loud, Benny jumped from his position beside her and ran into another room. Then she screamed again, and again, until her tears fell warm from her eyes down to her cheeks and then the floor. Her chest clenched inwards and she screamed some more, lying flat on the ground and clenching her bags for support as her grief broke out in waves of anger, sadness, denial and betrayal.

Letters tumbled in her head, waiting for her brain to string them into words, then sentences she was not yet ready to utter. Those letters in her head spelt out ‘Mama Ogidi was dead’. ‘Francisca Christiana Ogidi was dead’. And then a broken, child-like voice inside her head, shier than the letters that boldly announced themselves in her head whispered;

Mummy was dead.

But how?

Francisa Christiana Ogidi was not a woman that died. Francisca was many things; a secondary school Mathematics teacher in her early years, a Mathematics lecturer and a Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Port Harcourt. A deacon at Christ’s Anglican Church and a very strict disciplinarian, but “dead”, that scrawny adjective that was used to describe the state of something not being alive, was too little, too ill-fitting, an adjective for somebody like Mama Ogidi.

Mama Ogidi simply could not be dead. Maybe gone from this world to a better one because she had had enough with the useless bureaucracy and senselessness of this world and needed a holiday—preferably one with the ancestors, but not dead. It definitely couldn’t be death. Death was too finite for a person like Mama Ogidi who changed as the way the wind blew.

When she was old enough to notice, Sylvia had thought of her mother as the moon; a woman with different faces that she showed to different people, or sometimes to none at all. Like she had spent the greater half of the life unknown to her family, polishing and perfecting the different parts of herself she chose to show the world so she could be viewed by nothing else than under her own terms.

Sylvia always thought she lucked out and got the “mother face” out of Francisca Ogidi. The woman who sacrificed so much out of her life just to see her children make something good out of themselves.

Not that it had all worked out so smoothly, Sylvia thought, thinking of her siblings and their different selves scattered around the corners of the earth. But what mattered had been her sacrifice. Her sacrifice before and most especially after their father, Chike Ogidi, had died.

Not many women, Sylvia always thought, could boast of all they had done for their children when their husbands had died and the family’s income was on the low.

Chike Ogidi had died in a plane accident, leaving his family of five in a little more than poverty and his wife’s chicken change of a secondary school teacher salary to take care of all of them. But Francisca Ogidi only saw his death as a momentary call for her to step up, to rise up from whatever ashes she had been laying in at her mediocre job and to get her shit together for her family and herself.

After eight hours of jumping from JSS1A to SS3B, shouting up and down about quadratic equations and circle geometry, the community secondary school she taught at would close and she would park her car just outside the school gate and bring out the provisions, snacks and juices she had made or bought the day before to sell to the children just before they rushed back home.

On weekends, she turned her husband’s emptied out workshop into a sewing school for the girls in their neighbourhood whose parents didn’t want them running around and getting pregnant by the neighborhood boys.

Then sometimes, with Sylvia’s help, she catered at weddings, cleaned houses or washed and ironed clothes. And of course, Sylvia had, even at such a young age, understood that her mother’s hustle was all for them. For no one else except them, and the better lives she dreamed they would have. So, happily, she helped her mother in whatever chores she needed assistance in until her days at her primary school finished and her mother decided she would go to the fancy secondary school that cost more money than her 11-year-old self could conceptualise.

Sylvia had begged her mother, telling her she would be perfectly fine going to the community secondary school where she worked. That after classes, she could help her mother sell her provisions and snacks which the school had allowed her develop into a little tuck shop just outside the school.

But Francisca would not hear of it. None of her children were going to suffer in the sort of schools that she taught in, to sit in classrooms with rude children who didn’t know how to greet their elders or say their complete times-table. No, the Ogidi children, she decided, would all finish their studies in private schools. The kind where governor’s children went to and spoke spri spri English and talked about vacationing to countries she didn’t even know existed. And when Francisca Ogidi had decided something, there was no turning back from that.

So, it was settled. Sylvia had written the entrance exam to Our Lord and Ladies’ Secondary School and then the scholarship exam and had passed with flying colours. She remembered her mother boasted about the feat all through out the weeks leading to her enrollment at the school. On the day the results came out, she had taken just Sylvia to Mr. Biggs to celebrate and had bought a huge cake just for her to eat, far away from the pesky hands of her younger siblings.

Then as the holiday eased away, Sylvia started easing into the life of a secondary school beginner. They went shopping for new school shoes, new nighties and pyjamas, prayer books, textbooks and all the other things that were on the endless list of the school’s dormitory requirements. Then, Sylvia had never stopped to wonder just how they had gotten the money for everything. As usual, she chalked it up to the magic she thought her mother possessed, and gratefully collected all that she was given without asking questions that might have irritated her mother.

Soon, Sylvia traded her assistance at the sewing shop and tuck shop for endless nights of studying with her mother for mathematics coaching as days bled into weeks until it was time for her to go to her new school. Then, with a borrowed Volvo from their neighbour, both of them drove down to the school where after several minutes of crying and her mother inspecting her room and helping her set up her mattress and mosquito net did they finally tear apart from each other and Sylvia’s life as a JSS1 student at private school started.

Sylvia came home a completely different person from the thin and scrawny eleven-year-old girl her mother had sent to private school. She went in and came out a caricature of a posh woman. An oyinbo person, her siblings commented, as she ate every meal with a fork and knife, tucked a napkin into her shirt and kept one across her thighs and chastised them for talking at the table or eating too fast, or too slow or simply anything that didn’t align with her posh private school behaviour. Of course, this delighted her mother who couldn’t have been prouder to see her first daughter blossoming into a young lady.

Her siblings of course, were not proud of her so-called blossoming and deep down, always resented her for it, most especially her immediate younger sister, Erika, whom till now, well into adulthood, had an estranged relationship with her.

But Sylvia never minded. When they were younger, she had always thought Erika’s jealousy of her funny, or some innate quality second-borns had for first-borns. But it had lost its novelty and quirk and had blackened into bitterness over time. Sylvia hated that, and couldn’t possibly imagine why anyone would be bitter over their own sibling, but that was Erika for her.

As for her brothers, Munachi and Ovid, well… Munachi had always been strange and alone, and had furthered that assumption by running away from home at such a young age, while Ovid— Ovid she could say, at least just to herself was her favourite sibling.

He came uncomplicated and unproblematic in ways his older siblings could not, and she admired that about him; his normalcy that mirrored hers. He had been a good child. Always had, save for the stupid mistake he had made at 16 that got him wrapped around one of those rubbish ajepako girls from their old neighborhood and got her pregnant. Asides that, Ovid was normal, and she liked that about him.

Exhausted from all her screaming and crying, she stood up and picked up her phone to try to dial the Nigerian number again, wondering who would pick and what more they could tell her about her mother’s death.

What had the voice even said in the beginning? She racked her head trying to remember. She hadn’t been able to decipher if the voice belonged to a man or woman, but she remembered it being calm, oddly calm for the news that dripped out from their words.

“Good morning, is this Sylvia Ogidi…” the voice had begun, and she hadn’t even wondered to ask how the person knew who she was before replying yes, that it was she, then the message came out softly, almost like a whisper, like a bomb falling slowly from the sky before causing destruction.

“Your mother is dead, Sylvia. She just died today. We need to start making preparations for the burial. When will you be flying in?”

When she didn’t respond for a few minutes, the person cut the call and moved on with their lives. Sylvia tried calling again, but the phone kept on saying ‘user busy’. What was the user busy doing? What could they possibly be doing after they had just told her that her mother was dead? Were they telling her siblings?

Her siblings! Gods! Sylvia had almost forgotten about them. She scrolled to the bottom of her recently called lists and tapped on the number saved as ‘Erika (sister)” and the phone rung twice before she picked up.

“Hello?” Erika’s voice came through, sounding surprised.

“Erika. This is Sylvia. Can you hear me?” She sucked in a breath, wondering how she was going to announce it to her sister, how she was going to announce it to all three of them—two of them if she couldn’t reach Munachi, but still. She decided she would play it cool, calm and collected like the voice that had told her about it first.

Cool, calm, collected and detached, like it was some random man on the news that got shot and not their mother.

“Erika—Erika mummy is dead. Did you hear that?” she sniffed so she wouldn’t break into another round of tears, she knew Erika would not appreciate that and hang up on her immediately.

There was no reply for a long while, then in an equally cool, calm and collected way, Erika replied.

“I know. I just found out. When are you going to Nigeria?”

Quick and simple, so devoid of any emotion, Sylvia thought. She wondered if Erika would even be sad about their mother’s death. After all, their relationship when she was alive wasn’t exactly the best of relationships.

She sighed. She didn’t want to get into any wahala with Erika just yet, at least before they had even met.

“I’ll start booking my flight.”

“Okay, then.” Erika replied, and hung up before Sylvia could say one more word.

See… Sylvia thought, proving to herself that Erika hadn’t changed from the horrible twelve-year-old girl who had stolen her pads from her bag when she had been invited to one of her friend’s house. The horrible child she had always been, despite all Sylvia’s attempts to befriend her. Now, she was just older and more subtle about it, and of course, there was no more mummy to berate her about it.

She swiped her phone and opened Google, hoping she’d find a cheap flight to Nigeria sometime within the week.