Lucky was a loud man, the kind of man that didn"t have much and would brag about a thing that wasn"t his with such exaggeration of voice and gestures that a listener would be sufficiently convinced that he did not own the object of his boast. So when he said he had "arranged" the girl for me I didn"t believe him until she showed up at the door of my hotel room. "Lucky send me," she said emptily.

She was a fine girl, as Lucky had preached; but this her beauty, if one could call it that, was ordinary, muted by the dim sullenness that owned her face and gave it the permanent flat expression of an empty page.

I wondered why Lucky had sent me an unhappy piece of wood, probably as punishment for not believing his roaring tales of veteran pimps.h.i.+p. I had told him I didn"t want just a body, a chunk of flesh, but a woman with a mouth and a mind. And he had sent me a plank.

Looking at the solemn girl at the door, my initial anger was quickly replaced with pity, then with a determination to make something out of the sad zipped-up face. I began to pick the good things off the face, the interesting things – a neat symmetrical nose, a tight mouth whose lips you wanted to prise open with bare fingers, lips whose sourness you didn"t want to desecrate with something as vulgar as a kiss. The lips were bleeding, dripping with garish redness. Her skin was yellow, a bright egg-yolk yellow, her hair gold and purple. The piece of cloth that was her skirt was only enough to provide for her vast hips and an inch of thighs, so when she sat down on the edge of the bed there was a flash of bright red between her legs as she closed her crotch, placing one mammoth thigh over the other.

Sitting like that, with legs loosely crossed, she began to peel her top from her skin, over her head; the blouse, after it had come off her body, was not more than a mere sock. She stuffed it in her purse. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, liberated, were now all over the place. They made one nervous with their jolly size and the brazenness with which she pointed them at me like accusations.

I averted my eyes, and asked the floor what she would like to drink. Nothing, she said.

And she said nothing after that, letting the silence grow wider between us, and colder. She recrossed the bulk of her thighs the other way and proceeded to glare at her dangling left foot, while I, with nothing else more interesting to rest my eyes on, stared upon her sombre b.r.e.a.s.t.s, not with fascination or desire, just bare curiosity – how many hands must have crossed the mammary landscape, how many hands laid upon them, blessing, cursing, travelling over them with abandon, or disinterest, hands from all walks of life. . .

She suddenly looked up, with a look of irritation twisting her mouth to grotesqueness – "You go f.u.c.k abi you go watch?"

f.u.c.k. The word jarred my ears, sucked all the intended tenderness out of the moment. And I returned to my earlier anger – Lucky had sent me a common prost.i.tute, a woman of the street with a foul mouth! For all that money I paid him. The noisy b.a.s.t.a.r.d. I had a good mind to call him up and ask him to come and pick up his trash and refund my money.

I was angry at Lucky probably because I didn"t want the girl to be a direct recipient of my wrath; there was something delicate about her, beneath that hard veneer of glum apathy.

I decided to make another stab at a decent chat. "So, what is your name? Or what should I call you?"

I knew girls like this usually had a name and what they were called by.

"Grace," she said, with the brusqueness of a person not used to using their mouth much; typical of flesh merchants.

"Grace," I mouthed, trying it out on my tongue. "Grace. So, Grace what do you do?"

She looked up at me, at my eyes, to be sure there was no hint of madness in them. I smiled. "Are you a student? A nurse? A secretary? What exactly do you do?"

"Oga," she spat, like a warning, "I dey f.u.c.k."

The way she said that word, it felt like a slap each time; your cheek felt raw, your tongue heavy, wordless.

"Is that all you do?"

I felt defeated. Perhaps, I had secretly hoped she was not what she was, a mere hooker.

"Yes," she answered, and added, with a high exasperation that took too much of an effort to be genuine, "and if you go do, come. If you no do make I dey go."

From my millisecond hesitation she a.s.sumed the latter and pulled her blouse from her purse. I watched her enter the flimsy piece of cloth, the glorious yellowness of her torso disappearing underneath that blue sheerness. She arranged her b.r.e.a.s.t.s with the unbashfulness of a street-worn wh.o.r.e, ignoring my pointed stare, and didn"t make any attempt to tug the hem of her skirt down as she rose, picked up her bag and walked to the door.

Everything had happened so fast that I didn"t have enough time to decide what to do – Stop her? Beg her to stay? Kiss her goodbye? Give her money for a taxi? Call Lucky to come and talk her down? Cry?

At the door, everything slowed down and stopped. She stopped. With her back to me I noticed how attractively broad her bottom was, and how creamy smooth the back of her thighs were, free of the cellulite scrawls that were the trademark in this industry; also the yellow of her seemed natural, not the suspicious, ersatz lightness of many of her colleagues created by anonymous "creams".

Perhaps she was waiting for cab money and was ashamed to ask.

"Grace," I called, peeling a few notes out of my wallet.

She wheeled around, her eyes burning with liquid fury and pain. She was crying. Even her voice was drenched when she spoke, "I no want your money! I no want anytin"!"

"Then why are you crying?" I was already on my feet, but I

didn"t approach her. "I didn"t hurt you, did I?"

Her tears made me feel like a teenage boyfriend, helpless; the flood ruined her make-up and rendered her beauty useless. She wept shamelessly, openly, like a widow, not hiding the tears, pointing them at me, as if I was responsible for them.

I should call Lucky.

"Lucky, does he hurt you?" I had heard of pimps beating their girls. She didn"t seem to understand. "Does he touch you? Beat you?" What if he did; what business of mine was it. She was his girl, not mine. She was his business.

"Lucky?"

"Yes."

"Lucky na my broda. . . na good persin."

"Your brother? Lucky?"

I couldn"t imagine Lucky related to her, to anybody. He seemed like a man that wouldn"t have any family; that wouldn"t want to be related to anyone. A man of the world, of the streets. A man of big boasts that would not be restricted by the smallness of a family unit.

She nodded, "Yes," surprised by the size of my surprise.

"You people have the same parents?" She did not answer.

"Then why does he make you do this?"

"Money."

I had paid Lucky and he had a.s.sured me that I wouldn"t have to pay the girl, since she wasn"t a prost.i.tute, as he had claimed; she was just a girl he had arranged for me. I had asked him, out of casual curiosity in the business arrangement, how they would share the money. "Fifty-fifty," he said.

"So you people share the money equally," I said.

She shook her head, almost like a reflex, then flinched, guilt and regret registering on her face; the guilt and regret of a person that has revealed too much of their joint business" trade secret. I noticed the reticence begin to steal across her mouth, tightening it. I tried one final question on her.

"So what does he do with all the money?"

Fresh tears erupted from her, from her throat, from the depths of her heart, consuming her face, rocking her b.r.e.a.s.t.s under the straining blouse.

"E dey send di money go village give papa and mama. Dem no

well . . ."

It could have been the sincere intensity of her tears or the tragic force of her story tugging at my heart that drew me into her; I just realized I had closed the gap between us, and my body was now upon hers in a funereal embrace, and I could smell the Pink Lady in her hair and the strawberry on her lips. Within such bodily proximity I was soon drawn into the field of her grief, sipping her tears as her face was now laid on my cheek, and her hair in my eyes, the gurgles and moans of her throat in my ear.

"Na you be di only man wey no do me anyhow," she cried into my neck, her tears wetting my collar. "Di only man wey no just . . . just do comot, wey ask my name, wey follow me talk like say I be persin . . ." I felt like a thief, as if I was stealing somebody"s compliments.

* * *

I"m not sure at what point during the crying and mourning our clothes fell off and we fell into each other with a savagery neither of us thought we possessed.

But it all soon petered out into nothing, just sweat and regrets.

* * *

Driving home I wondered what Lili would say. I had stormed out of the house early in the morning in full fury; I"d driven off to a faraway bar, met a loud pimp who had arranged a girl for me, and it had all ended in nothing, emptiness; all the fury spent and limp.

Now here I was going back home with a total stranger, a sad hooker. What would I tell Lili. I didn"t even know what I wanted to do with the girl yet. I just felt I had to show her to Lili; it was like a child taking a prize home to its mother. This strange sense of n.o.blesse oblige had just settled upon me as the gravity of Grace"s misery sank in, and I felt I had to share it with my wife; a kind of doleful joy that comes with a hard-won prize.
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I couldn"t even remember why we had been fighting; we usually just fought as a habit now. The morning"s fight had been so fiery I"d had to duck out of the house to avoid an explosion, a conflagration that would have consumed the remnants of the matrimony and its occupants.

I just wanted to get away and drown in the alcoholic reprieve of a few beers; but when Lucky came with his mouth I became interested; the idea of talking to another woman, a total stranger, was appealing. Instead, I had been the one receiving the load of Grace"s laments.

As I waited for the gate to be opened, I took my wedding band out of the glove box and slipped it on.

Grace"s eyes bulged, then narrowed. "You get wife?"

"Yes?" I nodded, my voice small, as if I wasn"t sure I had, or I didn"t want to have.

Her eyes bulged again, this time with the weight of great hurt. She had the look of someone hugely betrayed; as if she had been offered hope on the end of a string and had it s.n.a.t.c.hed from her just as she reached out to take it.

She opened the door and stepped out of the car.

My eyes followed her retreating behind down the street, until it rounded the corner with the rest of her and disappeared.

When my gaze returned to the gate it was open and Lili was standing by it, her own eyes on me. She came to the car. "Did you f.u.c.k that thing?"

I winced, not at the thought, at the swear word – Lili never used it; it didn"t suit her mouth the way it did Grace"s. And Grace never used it to spite, to hurt sensibilities; she used it honestly.

Did I f.u.c.k that thing?

The way she said it I wished I had.

She was dressed to go out. She didn"t wait for an answer; she went on her way, as if she had not left a question stinking in the air between us.

I cleared the air, "No," I answered. No, Grace was not that thing, an inanimate object men used to please themselves, which their wives turned self-righteous noses up at and looked down upon; she was human too, like them, all of them, all the people that called her a thing; she had blood, a heart, emotions, troubles, desires, strengths and weaknesses, sorrows, family. . .

It was our marriage that was that thing – a lifeless sc.r.a.p of discarded metal, cold, untouched for years, cast aside in a corner of our daily routines, gathering dust and rust. It was that thing.

I turned around and drove away from it.

Far away.