SOUR SUGAR #projectnigeria

Chapter One

                         Efa sleeps so quietly beside me on the hammock in my mother's compound underneath the mango tree. It is a warm afternoon, the kind that reminds me of my childhood by the beach. I had been reading a book, but his snoring distracted me. So now, I am watching my fiancé sleep, huddled against my neck like a baby. He had always told me how warm my body felt, how he always felt at peace next to me. But I know Efa, once his head touches something soft, he sleeps. He has no sleepless nights, no reason to be anxious. Even with the noise going on in my mother's house, the hectic preparation for Memunah's baby shower, he still sleeps.

My thoughts trail to other things. Like the wedding ring on my finger. It rests there perfectly like it should, and suddenly I am thinking of the many long years I plan to spend with Efa. They will be happy years. Years filled with love, watching our children grow, years of happiness.

The thought of the possibility of Efa suddenly growing cold as one of our children is old enough to speak comes much later when Mama calls me to ask where the salad cream is. I tell her it is in the cupboard, but before she leaves she stares at Efa and I with a warm smile.

She had always loved Efa. She knew him before I did, at church, always having something nice to say after service which seemed too good to be normal to me, until I had come to realize he was genuinely a nice person.

What if this man who shows affection to me as though he was born to do so becomes bored of me? I remind myself that not every marriage ends in shreds, but even at that, not every marriage is rosy. My parents are perfect examples. Something happens, and the love dies. It fades away like dust and you sit there and wonder...what happened? I look at Efa and I cannot bring myself to see the love I have for him ever fading away. My feelings grow stronger since the first time we met at my mother's church.

For the longest time, I had always wondered what happened to my parents. Even though I had never seen them proclaim love between themselves, I could never understand why they never worked. I pray every day that the families my sisters and I would form in the future never end up like theirs.

The day things began to go south in my family could not easily be pinpointed.

There had been instances, times in the past in which it seemed things couldn't possibly get worse – from my father's drinking habits that would resort to him beating my mother, so much that the neighbours intervened, to my mother moving away and leaving us her three children with papa in the city to live with Gran'ma on the island.

Those days without mama, I could remember how they were as though it was yesterday, like a painting still fresh in my mind. Papa would complain bitterly to us about what mama has done and how she has left him with three children to fend for on his own when he could not contain his anger within himself any longer. He would be the only one to talk about the situation. All we had to do was listen and never complain, or say that we missed our mother. If we did, he would threaten to throw us out with her. When he was not complaining about mama's waywardness, he would try to be a better father, but in his own thinking, being better meant he needed to spoil us with the nicest of toys and increase the amount of lunch money we were usually given because mama was not around to make breakfast, or lunch or dinner.

Life without mama meant papa had to cut down on his drinking and come home earlier than usual. Instead of 11pm, an hour before the watchdog in our compound is released; papa would make the outstanding effort to pick us up from school at 1pm, drop us at the house without getting out of the car after a trip to Mr.biggs, then come by 7pm, which surprised my siblings and I.

At that age, I did not think it was possible for my father to come home early. I had always assumed wherever the office my father worked in closed at midnight. I imagine the neighbours were surprised, too. I imagine them pulling their curtains to see my father in his black suit, slamming the car door of his Honda close. Their hands would be covering their mouths in shock when the briefcase in his hand was held firmly and not dangling sluggishly with his feet moving in a drunken haze.