When Lamide first suggested coming home with me to keep me company till Ejike came home, what came to my mind was ‘why’. Visiting her had been a civil gesture. She didn’t have to return the call, at least not so soon. Besides, it wasn’t much of a visit, what I did. I had come in intending to stay the barest time with them, only to end up feeling like an intruder. All the while I was there, her sons and daughter were running in and out from under her skirt and Debo was yelping at his video game. I wanted to be gone from the house sooner than I had in mind. Then, to see Lamide closing the door behind herself and announcing that she’d be hanging out with me for a while. I was truly alarmed. What if the little ones insisted on coming with her? How would I handle it? Smile and lie that they were all welcomed? I was so relieved beyond measure when Lamide shooed them back into the apartment, and announced to Debo that they were now his headache till she was back.

            “Children can drive you insane, take it from me,” Lamide muttered under her breath. But, she was loud enough for me to hear. Was she addressing me? Was I expected to make a comment in support of that? Or against? I tittered instead.

            “This is marvellous!” She exclaimed as I ushered her into the sitting room. “I am so impressed right now. So very impressed, I tell you. My God, look at this! Did I just walk into Celebrity Homes?”

She was walking from one corner of the room to the other, admiring everything, touching everything, and making me exceeding nervous and self-conscious in the process. It wasn’t the first time someone was gushing over our home. Many of Ejike’s clients and staff made it a duty to gasp at our decor when they called on us. But, those were people who wanted something from Ejike or those he wanted something from. Of course there admirations would be exaggerated. They would have to make it so. It was written all over Ejike’s face, as clear as daylight: his home was his price trophy. I hated that. Most of all, I hated that attention.

            “Thank you,” I responded, thinking of ways to distract her. “What can I get you?”

            “Nothing, please. All I want now is peace and a clean house. Being here is making me miss the days when I lived for scrubbing and polishing. Today, I can’t be bothered. Not when there’s a child all too ready to turn the entire house on its head the second I’m done. When you’ve boys, I swear, you get sore tempted to rent them out. They’ve indoctrinated Rissy now. She thinks she’s a boy. I give her one day, just one day. That’s the day I’ll flog the devil out of her if she breaks any more glassware. I’ve had it up to here with her, with all of them in short. Ah ah, what is it?”

I was horrified. Why was this semi-stranger lamenting to me for? I didn’t want to hear what her brood got up to. Besides, how should I respond to her even if I did? Tell her they’d grow out of it? And if they don’t? For starters, what did I know about children? I had pretty much steered clear of my dad’s offspring. I didn’t participate in their bathing, diaper duties or cheering them during their school’s inter-house sports. I was the sour-faced half-sister who was cordial with them once in a while; when she wasn’t shut up in her bedroom, that is. Emem’s kids I’d seen only once, the time she came to Lagos for a job interview and Akan was offshore at Eket. Even then, they had two nannies stationed just for their care. All I had to do was make funny faces with the girls from a distance. It wasn’t that I dislike children; I just haven’t had much close encounter with them in a really long, long time.

          “How old are they?” I asked Lamide, for want of what to say.

          “Lawan is eleven, Ayeni is ten, and Rissy is five. The boys are really the ones that give me the most headaches. They have too much energy in them, too much. Maybe because there isn’t other kids their own age around, they’ve adopted Rissy into their fold, and turned the house into their playground. And Debo indulges them too much, way too much. I don’t get it, whatever for?”

          “Pele,” I was furiously thinking of what to say to get her to stop her tirade. “Are you sure you don’t want anything? I have chocolates. And ice-cream, I think.”

          Jackpot! “Chocolates! Please.”

Maybe not so much, because the kitchen provided her to more reasons to oh and ah afresh. I hoped she didn’t carry on like this all the time. I’d have to find ways to avoid her in that case, which would be regrettable. She rather seemed like such a nice, intelligent person that first evening we were at theirs. So what was different today? Maybe the kids had fazed her, and she was trying to get it together.

          “Nice photos,” She said again, when we returned to the sitting room, of the photos of Ejike and I hung at uneven places on the wall.

          “Thanks. My husband loves to gaze at himself.” I aimed to pass it off as a joke.

          “He’s good with cameras too. You both are. It’s so sweet how in love you two look too.”

          I burst out laughing. Some of those pictures had been taken right after very heated arguments, times when I felt least in love with Ejike. “Yeah, it is sweet.”

          “Also the way you guys hold hands. It’s a beautiful thing seeing couples still very much in their honeymoon stage.” She continued dreamily, taking a seat next to me on the sofa.

Now, I really cracked up. I was clearly dealing with a romantic! Holding hands was Ejike’s idea of keeping me glued to his side. Half of the times, I found it suffocating, especially in the beginning which was soon after the stint with Amoge. The other half, I was indifferent to it. Looking at it the way Lamide was, I guess it would be a nice thing to see. It gave the illusion of ‘happily ever after’.

          “Sister, listen to me: cherish this time in your marriage. I missed out on the honeymoon stage of my own and I still feel bad about it,” said Lamide, gearing up to launch into a lengthy unsolicited narration of her life. “Lack of knowledge, that’s what destroys us. Some certain things we do, if we could only see the future, we won’t do them. That’s what happened to me and Debo our first year of marriage. Everything happened so fast, it knocked the wind out of me. Dating him, getting pregnant, losing the baby, and getting married. All these happening under a year! I didn’t really know who I was marrying. To me, he was merely a friend to my eldest brother. Of course we interacted several times, but with very limited one on one meeting because my brother was very protective. Then out of the blues, he proposed to me. I was shocked. I didn’t even know he liked me.

          “I was twenty, just graduated from the university, and with the whole world ahead of me. Marriage was the last thing on my agenda. I wanted to live my life, away from my parents and brothers who had hounded me all my life. I was like, ‘what on earth was he talking about’? I told he we could be friends, nothing else. He agreed, next thing I knew, I’m pregnant and he started going on and on about not wanting an illegitimate child. Before you can say Jack, my brothers all knew I’m in the family way and they too were insisting on a wedding. I was irked, and accused Debo of tricking me into getting pregnant. But my brothers, they all were on his side. My dad couldn’t understand why I didn’t want to marry Debo; he didn’t know about the baby. My father was always paranoid about pregnancy outside wedlock, which was why we didn’t want to let him know. So, to him I had no concrete reason for refusing Debo, and he couldn’t get why I wouldn’t reconsider my stance. For my mother, the news of my condition was all she needed to hear to join forces with Debo. I was on my own, fighting the entire family. In the end, I gave in. About fortnight later, I miscarried. I told Debo to call off the wedding. He cried, he begged, he showered me with gifts, he did everything to stop me from breaking up with him. I really really wasn’t ready for marriage, why couldn’t he understand that? My mother said I was being silly. She and her friend organised a prayer vigil to pray against the spiritual husband that had closed my eyes to see what a perfect mate Debo would make. For one week, they were praying, fasting and sprinkling anointed oil on me.”

            I started laughing. True, I hadn’t wanted to hear her story, but it was getting too intriguing to resist. “I can imagine.”

           “Ha! You can’t oh. It was terrible. Everyone made me feel like I was crazy for rejecting Debo. He was a young man with great potentials, from a good family, and he loved me. It was like, ‘what more does she want?’ I wanted to do my Masters. For years all I dreamt of was going abroad for my Masters. The way I saw it, if I married Debo, he won’t let me go somewhere so far. I couldn’t afford it, I’d rather give Debo up. Besides, I was infuriated that he was manipulating everybody to get what he wanted. Like, he was the good guy, and I was the bad one. After all said and done sha, I was persuaded to marry him, when he promised he wouldn’t interfere in my education.”

           “And did he?” I had to know, counting the age difference between Lawan and Ayeni.

           “Straight! He wanted babies first and foremost. That was what he said on our wedding night when I once more demanded  from him a reassurance about my Masters. Mind you oh, just a week earlier, he had been signing ‘anything you want, babe’. That was how I lost my cool. I called him a liar, and said I wanted a divorce right away. That he had married me under fraudulent circumstances. I was screaming. We were in a hotel, and the security came to bang on the door for him to open up. When he did, I ran out and checked into another room. Sister, the things we did when we were twenty, God knows! The next morning sha, my parents and brothers came to the hotel to sit us down for a serious talk. They heard about the uproar of the previous night, and wanted to make peace between Debo and I. Rather, they came to order me to ‘go home with my husband and be a good wife to him. What was my problem sef?’. I went oh, but with the determination to make him pay for marrying me. I wouldn’t cook, I wouldn’t talk to him, and I banned him from coming close to me. I was sleeping in the guest room, and every night I’d check the locks over and over to make sure he couldn’t sneak in on me in my sleep. I did this for six months oh!”

           “Are you kidding me?” Six months without sex!!!!! Ejike would have had her long gone by the second month. What!!!!!! As far as Ejike was concerned, it was a mortal sin for a wife to deny her husband. He can’t last a week without it and not get cranky. “You are one tough cookie.”

           “Youth exuberance! That’s what it was, nothing else. I can’t do that now oh. Haba! I no fit oh. I’d be too worried my husband would leave me for another woman. But then, all I wished was for him to do so, and free me. My dear, the man said no way oh. But he wasn’t Mr. Nice Guy about it though.  He wasn’t speaking to me too. When he cooked, he did for one. Not once did he come knocking on my door, for all he cared I didn’t exist either. Little by little, I started feeling the weight of what I was doing.

           “When you’ve been at war for six months, you are drained of everything. Time was passing by. Worse was that I was broke. I was still waiting for Youth Service, so I wasn’t working. Meanwhile my family had blanked me. Their own was that until I learnt to be ‘reasonable’, I should cater for myself. See me oh. From where now? Debo wouldn’t give me a dime for upkeep. I didn’t dare go to other men for fear of what my mother would do to me. To this day, I say that it’s hunger that forced me into making peace with Debo. We made a pact: I was to have two kids, and I was free to fly to the ends of the earth. Lawan was seven months old when I went to Aberdeen. Would you believe that I even left him here, him and Ayeni? But, they joined me in the second year. When I came back, I thanked Debo for keeping to his word by taking in with Rissy. It’s not been very easy over the years, but I can categorically tell you that that period is our worst. Yet we survived it!”

Lamide ended her tale with a bite of the cold liver, a sip of juice and a puff of air, like one who had got something off her chest. Why was that? Had she been spinning me a story, I wondered. It wasn’t everyday I heard someone with whom I was newly acquainted recount her unhappy family chronicle. Those I knew let a couple of months go by before they got up-close and personal with their past. The time lapse, understandably, was to allow for trust to build so they didn’t end up spilling their guts to someone who’d twist their words for their amusement. Even with all the time I’d known Cheta, her folks didn’t feature in our regular conversation, though that could be because I was so tight-lipped about mine. The question then was what was Lamide aiming to achieve by telling me so much so soon? I didn’t want to be edged into a friendship, like with Cheta back in Uni. There was all the likelihood that exactly would be happening all over again, if Lamide was going to be so open. Aargh!

           “What time are you expecting your husband?” Lamide asked, seemingly unaware of my deliberate lack of comment at the crowning of her very engaging history.

           “Any minute from now. It was him who sent the text message I got while we were in the kitchen. He said he’s just left the office. The traffic should be light by now.”

           “Yes, it should. I’d better leave you to get his dinner ready then.” She started to rise up.

           I stood up too, but to clear the side-stool. “I won’t need to. He eats out days that he works this late.” The second I said that I remembered Cheta’s caustic reaction the day she became privy to this information. “I know how it sounds, but Ejike’s not that way at all.”

           Lamide frowned. “I’m not sure I understand what you just said.”

           “Oh. Sorry. I was talking to myself. Never mind.” I left her and went to the kitchen. When I returned, however, she had once more seated. Perched on the sofa, more like.

           “Forgive me for asking, but are you having troubles with your husband?” Lamide asked, blunt, straight to the point. Guess with her there was no mincing of words. No minding of your business.

           “Not at all. I only recalled what a friend said when I mentioned to her that Ejike eats out when he works late. She said I was making it convenient for him to cheat.”

           “And is that her area of expertise?” asked Lamide, matter-of-factly.

I don’t know why i found the question funny, but I very much did. The thought of Cheta’s reaction if I told her what Lamide said was hilarious. She would hit the roof, for sure. There and then, I decided I was going to like this new friend I was unwilling to have. Until Ejike turned the door knob.