Her daughter wasn't born on a full moon or under any stars which might explain the predicament she now found herself in. There were no premonitions, no strangeness to mark the entry into the world of what she now considered to be a child born of evil. Nothing to announce the birth of the anti-christ that was taking her life.
It was a quiet night, and the birth was easy; easier than most she was told. Ngozi was alone with a single nurse, the doctor had "stepped out." As he had reeked of alcohol when he stepped in earlier, she wasn't sure whether to be worried or relieved. She was certain she should scream. The stories of childbirth don't prepare you for a pain you have never known. How do you describe being forced open from the inside, the whole of your entire body squeezing to expel a part of you, relaxing just enough to allow you catch a breath before forcing another scream out of you, and eventually, the contractions not pausing at all.
The child was dark skinned and silent. She had greeted the firm smack to her bottom with a short wail, as though merely to confirm that she was indeed alive, and then fallen silent again. The nurse who administered the smack left the room nervously, she could have sworn that the baby had looked in her eyes, deliberately, after that short cry. She would have said also that she saw something in those eyes, a malice too old for a newborn. She told her tale to the other nurses on duty and, scratching the back of her neck as she went, left the hospital for the last time.
When Ngozi brought her daughter home, the neighbors crowded around the yellow and black taxi and peppered their greetings of ndo and pele with comments about how her baby tey well well for fire. Her husband was absent, he hadn't been at the hospital either. This time she knew to be relieved, when he was home she had no peace, loneliness was a better companion than fear.
She fed her daughter, and felt the sweet sorrow that marks the beginning of the joys of motherhood. The knowledge that you were now inexorably, inseparably bound to another soul, that your life was pledged through the spilling of maternal blood to the wellbeing of the child in your arms. Her daughter was beautiful, she thought, nothing like herself or her husband.
Chidi had been a beautiful man once, she had never had the privilege. He was the son of a rich man from Lagos come with his family for their annual pilgrimage to visit their country home. That Christmas, their family had come into the village in a three car convoy of Toyota Land Cruisers with tires that took up more space than her father's bicycle. She had watched him get out of the big black jeep, remove his earphones and take pictures of himself, then the convoy, then the landscape. What he thought worth capturing in the village skyline of Umudibia, populated by nothing more exciting than red dust and iroko trees, when he had come from Lagos with its shiny buildings she did not understand.
Chidi finally saw her and unlike her, he didn't choose to watch from afar. He didn't think her pretty, but he was utilitarian, his village distraction did not require a pretty face, and everything else seemed to be in working order.
Their first time together, Ngozi had asked him if he would marry her. Even she knew the answer to the question, but when he lied she had giggled and turned away. She let him whisper dreams to her before she allowed him reach under her dress and take what he really wanted. It wasn't a great loss, she had shared a bed with Okoro a few months ago for bushmeat and palmwine, and he hadn't promised a future in Lagos.
Two months later, laden with the byproduct of unprotected midnight trysts, she was dragged by her father, first to the motor park, and up to the front gate of a home that surpassed all her dreams of the riches one could find in the city. Chidi's father had been less restrained than hers had been when he found out about her pregnancy. Ngozi thought that her father perhaps nursed the same foolish hope she did, that this young boy would be her ticket out of a life of poverty. They were both wrong.
Chidi's father cast him out. Mazi Ndibe would lose a son rather than bring in a "village prostitute" and a "bastard baby." Chidi resented Ngozi. His family had not been entirely heartless. They were forced to marry, and given a roof over their heads. Their small flat in Yaba was a half hour or slightly more away from his parent's home in Ikoyi but far enough in his mind that he could never go home. Now he spent his days "hustling," his friends had supported them at first, but now he had to feed his family. It probably didn't help that on most days he drank what could have been their breakfast or lunch or dinner.
Ngozi suckled the child until he came home, she had fallen asleep but the child hadn't. She was staring into the darkness of their small living room when the man with whom she was conceived stumbled into the house. He was sober enough to comprehend that the child in his wife's arms was his. "Bastard," he muttered under his breath. The child's eyes followed him into the kitchen.
He was back in under a minute, and he didn't use his words. She woke up immediately his open palm connected to the back of her head. Her first instinct was to shield her child, she hunched over protectively while trying to understand where the attack had come from.
"Where is my food?"
"Ehn? Am I not talking to something?"
"Woman, where is my food?"
"One thing you're good for, one thing, and you cannot do."
She rushed to her feet, then to her knees, raising his child to meet his gaze, an apology and an explanation for her failures. He spat, not at the child, at her.
"What is this?"
He would have hit her again, but the child was staring at him. Her head was cocked to one side, and her gaze did not wander. It was unnerving. He backed away, and then went to the room. She was on her knees until he started snoring. She fell asleep again, still cradling her daughter.
The next day Chidi came home sober and sat by the door. He would repeatedly scratch the back of his neck, then just beneath his earlobe. He just sat there, scratching. Ngozi watched nervously, waiting for this powder keg to resolve itself into an explosion of drunken anger. It never came. When she offered him his food, provided by people who had come by to see baby and offer their best wishes to the new parents, he just let it sit there.
The next day, he didn't come home at all. When they found him, he was locked in the bathroom of his friend's house, bleeding from his ears, his fingers and neck were bloody from what seemed to be his incessant efforts to get beneath his own skin. His friends called his parents, and they came to get her. This time, their three car convoy was not ferrying the privileged to the less fortunate, it was carrying the weight of a mother's pain, a father's regret and a wife's confusion.
Ngozi turned and ran when she saw him, lifeless, still sitting on the floor, a small insect crawling down the side of his neck. That was the first time she saw it. His father stood there, looking at what used to be his child while his mother lost what little composure had managed to survive the drive over.
The second time Ngozi saw the insect, it had been six months and her baby was teething. Life was better than it used to be, his parents had decided to take care of his bastard and village prostitute after all. They had brought her to their home, and shown her to her living quarters.
Her 2 bedroom boys quarters, a home almost as big as the one she grew up in, was only part of a larger complex attached to her in-law's "palace." The other quarters were occupied by domestic staff.
They kept her fed with the food from their table, and entertained by their television, but if her standard of living was better, Ngozi was poorer than she had been. Her days were spent tending to her child, and "helping" with various things around the house, her evenings sitting in the compound and gossiping with the domestic staff. Life was better than it used to be.
She had left the child alone in the living room and when she came back, the insect was on the floor by her daughter's arm. She knew it was the same one, even though she didn't know why. It was black, its six legs stretched far out of its body, thin and spindly, framing the small red marking on its abdomen. She grew up surrounded by wildlife, insects were nothing to be feared but this one she knew to be afraid of. It sat there. Her child sat with it, looking at it, without squealing or screaming, or even moving away. It looked, in the moment that she opened the door, almost like she wanted it to be there.
Her child looked up and met her gaze. When she looked back down the spider was gone. At night she swept the living room, and mopped it, and even though she wouldn't have said it even to herself, she was hoping to find that spider and kill it. She didn't, and then it killed someone.
Akin, the cook who lived in the quarters next to hers, had three little boys. Their mother had died giving birth to the last one. Akin was in charge of making sure Ngozi and her baby were fed, he excelled at it. He waited two months out of respect for small oga before telling her the reason he was so diligent in his work. Ngozi waited four before she decided that she had needs and the man from her midnight adventures had died long before the brute who was forced to marry her.
This new relationship meant that, as she grew comfortable, she started to gingerly place her feet into the shoes his wife left behind. She now watched his children when they got back from school, and when he got back she left them to watch her child while they took care of each other.
One evening Ngozi and Akin were interrupted by his youngest son. The boy was a nuisance, and although his gap teeth made for an endearing smile, he was what they called, in her childhood, "Mbeku," a trickster.
"Hees scrashing me"
"Daddy"
"Small mummy"
"Hees scrashing me o"
Akin told her to wait, and she did but she could hear the exchange through the door. It itched, and whatever it was that itched, it was under his skin, in his head. She could hear his bitten nails scrape against his skin, and his feet stamping the floor as he hopped, one foot to the other, while he tried to explain to his father.
"Daddy don't mind him o, he was pinching baby, baby now slap him, he's now pretending"
"Shhhhhhh. Oya go to my room, there is rubb in the drawer, tell your brother to rub it for you, ehn? So gbo?"
"Small o. Don't play with it. If I come back and I see that you have used that Rubb to play, wo, o ma ri iran wo leni."
Ngozi felt a small fear creep into her chest but she pushed it aside. In the back of her head she had an image of her husband, sitting on the floor of their Yaba apartment, nervously scratching the back of his neck. Akin dismissed his sons and came back to bed, Ngozi dismissed her fear in the tide of pleasure that came, led by an onslaught of murmured Yoruba praises for the softness of her skin, and the fullness of her body. The boy died the next day.
The fear Ngozi felt had now settled in her chest. It would stretch and seize control of her limbs whenever her daughter looked at her. When she got home from the cemetery, the spider was there, on the window sill, in a ray of sunlight. She set her daughter down in the room and went to find a broom. When she returned, it was now in the bedroom on the window sill. She moved to kill it, slowly stalking it with an expertise born of decades spent assassinating mosquitos. She was almost there, her broom raised above her head, when she looked around and found her daughter, sitting up and silent, staring at her. She wasn't sure what it was in that moment, but she knew this thing was tied to her child.
She turned to it again and it had turned to face her. It didn't run. She put the broom down and left. That night, she told Akin. He told her it was foolishness, but to set her at ease, he "cleansed the house." Ngozi sat through the ceremony, watching him sprinkle palm oil around the house, muttering incantations under his breath but she didn't follow him into her daughter's room.
When Akin died, with the tell-tale scratches around his neck, the in-laws decided some force was at work, and that they were obviously the target of some diabolical plot that kept missing them and unfortunately struck those close to them who had less faith in God. Ngozi and her child were moved into the main house, the grandmother insisted the child be bathed and presented to her every morning, she had been filthy when she was brought in the first time.
Their first night in the main house, the spider was on the pillow next to her daughter. It was certainly bigger. Ngozi thought about her broom for a short second, then left and went to sleep in the kitchen.
She was bathing the child. The tub was half full of water, and the child was sitting in it, kicking slowly so the water splashed against the sides of the tub. The child didn't laugh at her own antics, she surveyed it with a silent contemplation.
Watching her daughter wade, and ignoring the black and red spider perched atop the sink, Ngozi contemplated her life. The past few weeks, after she had tried to kill the thing, the spider had stopped hiding. Until it did, she didn't realize that it had been. Now it was everywhere. In every room her daughter was, and clearly doing her daughter's bidding. Once she decided she was going to tell her father-in-law everything, the spider was waiting at the door to their room. She didn't want to feed the child, it was sitting by the plate. She snuck out to the kitchen to sleep and it was on the fridge, and eventually it would be waiting on the door preventing her from going out at all.
Every time Ngozi was turned away by the spider, she would find the child sitting up, staring at her in silence.
Now she thought about it, what if she killed the child. It would be easy to hold her under the water, the child wasn't even a year old yet. She could hold her under until she was dead and then she could kill the spider if it didn't die with the child.
Ngozi looked down to meet the child's gaze. It was steady, and it seemed almost sorrowful. Ngozi looked to the sink, and the spider was gone. The child raised her hands, to be lifted. Ngozi carried the child to the bed, laid her down and went to the kitchen to get food for them both. She knew that the child had known what she was thinking, but did the child know that she couldn't do it, couldn't kill her child? She would concentrate on positive thoughts so the child would know she meant no harm.
She was halfway up the stairs when the itch started, she swatted her own neck and pulled her hand away expecting to see what it was. The sight of her empty palm answered her question. She could picture the spider, crawling beneath her skin nesting at the base of her neck, and feeding itself on her blood and tissue. Ngozi opened the door and the child was sitting up, waiting for her. The child knew that she knew.
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Ngozi did not mourn her own death, or all the deaths before hers that had started with the birth of this child. She sat on the floor, by the door, and started to scratch the back of her neck.
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