The sods from the dank bathroom were washing down. Someone else had just finished using the space and the strong perfume of the soap hanged in the air; white foam against the green mildew that painted the wall, one might think it was a dollop of the Nigerian flag here and there spread on the wall by an incoherent artist. Bisi stripped into undress, removing the towel and draping it across the plank that angled the wall to protect the nudity of the bather.
There was a splinter of a mirror on the wall that could barely reflect anything. It was covered in misty film of settled water. Bisi peered into it, searching for her face in the broken mirror as she ran her forefinger down her areola absentmindedly. Her face flickered like a flame resisting the wind and forming unsteady shadow on the wall. She scooped water from the metal pale, poured it over her cornrows and it coursed down gently like drops of water moving down the slant edge of a ceramic roof before plopping onto the ground.
There were thuds of feet moving here and there in the passage, mental clanging against one another in a arrhythmic pattern of early morning domestic chaos, water sloshing from Mama Faith who was laundering her wears at the base of the plank that covered her nudity, children buzzing like bees stridulating against one another because it was almost time for school and parents shouting at the top of their voices, yelling commands and curses.
It was a barracks. That house that contained a thousand faces was a complete face-me-I-face-you; it stood magnificently at the end of Crescent street, a bungalow with rusty brown roof and the paint peeling off like flakes of bread crust and had a patchy colour of blue and dull white of the cement.
Bisi washed everything, from head to toe and sighed deeply. It was another day at school to confront the world with guilt lurking in her heart and eating her insides like cancer, slowly but gradually until it finally consumed her like whooshing flames from an untamed fire. The scapula on her neck nested between her two breasts, she looked at it and then at them, the two corruptions that surrounded her piety. That scapula was the testament to her wholeness which reverend sister Regina had given her on the day she was inducted into the altar girls.
The first time she saw it, she was alarmed. Blood was coursing down her thighs as if tomato paste was squirted at her skirt. It was just nine months ago. Virginity is bound in blood that stands at the threshold into one’s inner self, isn’t it? Why was she losing hers without engaging in immoralities? She thought alarmed. Mother would definitely report her to the sister if she told her about this mystery and sister would condemn her to whoredom and an endless lifetime at the confessional, so it was not even an option. She thought naively because sex was a forbidden topic. Mary? That little angel-gone-rogue who adorned the immaculate whiteness of the altar-girl uniform like a newly ordained reverend sister but she had known the taste of the bodies of some boys, allegedly. She was being forced by her mother into the life of enforced holiness.
You are now a woman, a complete woman! was Mary’s ecstatic response. It echoed in her head every time she stood in the middle of that dingy bathroom about to clean her glowingly fair complexion but she could not get rid of the filth that tainted her heart. She felt like plucking out her mind but remembered that the demons that haunted her is on her head too
NTERTWINED SHADOWS.