We Were Girls Once
By Aiwanose Odafen
I unlocked the door to my apartment and turned on the lights haltingly, listening for the click of the echo of the switches, acknowledging the emotion at the pith of my insides. Chilli oil and spices wafted from the takeaway and attacked my nostrils.
‘Please make it spicy,’ I’d said to the woman at the end of my order, reminding her I wasn’t one of her paler customers.
‘Spicy,’ she’d repeated with a thumbs up and a familiar smile.
But now I was wondering where my appetite had gone. I felt it again, that gnawing feeling, malignant and rife: loneliness.
It wasn’t the usual sort of loneliness, the type you grew accustomed to when living in a city like London, intimidated into inconsequentiality by overpopulation, the monumental structures and infinite bustle. It was a different kind; the kind that steadily worked a path through your consciousness, obliterating your peace and stability. It was devastating, humbling. I had no solution to it.
‘You should get a boyfriend,’ Zina had said the last time we’d spoken on the phone, her tone reprimanding like my mother’s. We’d been discussing a new movie role of hers. ‘You spend all your time working, before you know it, you’ll be 40, then 50. Don’t waste your best years o.’
‘I’m not wasting my best years, Zina,’ I’d said with a laugh.
‘You’re laughing? I’m serious. You’ve been there for almost ten years and I’ve never heard you mention a boyfriend, even a foreigner.’
‘That’s a lie!’ I protested.
‘Well, if you’ve mentioned anyone before, I can’t remember, so it means you didn’t date him for very long. You’re tall, you’re fine. Tell me, what’s your excuse?’
I rolled my eyes.
‘You’re sounding like my mother.’
‘Oho! So I’m not the only one that has noticed. Thank God. For Aunty Uju to say it, it means your case is critical.’
I laughed again, not the polite haha I used at the office, but an actual laugh that ricocheted off the walls, a Nigerian laugh.
‘Get out! My case is not critical. Look who’s talking! Are you married? Are we not the same age? Madam big-time actress. When is your next movie coming out? Make sure to mail me the DVD. When will Nigerian films come to Netflix sef?’
‘Don’t change the subject, at least I’m trying, I’m not like you please. Heaven helps those who help themselves,’ she said. I could see her, stretched out on a sofa, shaking her head vigorously like she did when she disagreed with something that was said.
‘Who said I’m not helping myself? I’ve just not found what I’m looking for.’
‘What are you looking for? Do you even know?’
‘Well, I know what I don’t want.’
Dating in London was a dance, you were either a maestro or a novice, and I was a certified postulant, banging at the gates to be let in. I was ignorant of the basics: choosing where to hang out, creating the right vibes, dressing to be desired. In part, it was due to my Nigerianness. I was not like the born and bred Nigerian Brits, aware of social references and innuendos, and I refused to act like some other Nigerians, pretending they’d sung ‘God Save the Queen’ all their lives and never taken a plane from Lagos to Heathrow.
My phone rang as I bent in front of my refrigerator with the dan dan mian I no longer felt like eating.
‘Nwakaego!’ Eriife screamed from the other end.
The desolation dissipated for the time being.
‘This woman, why are you screaming? You think we’re still in university ehn?’ I said, automatically slipping off the veneer I wore at work and donning ehns, ahs and ohs of Nigerian speak. ‘Soye must not be at home for you to be shouting like this.’
‘Ah. He is o. In fact, I’m tired of him,’ she joked.
‘How can you be tired of what others are praying for?’
We fell into easy conversation, even though it had been years since we were face to face. Her politician husband had received a promotion within his party and was getting ever closer to his dreams of one day becoming president. I burrowed into the warmth of my sofa, the dan dan mian forgotten by my side.
‘I saw your boyfriend today o. In fact, that is why I called,’ Eriife said after we’d spoken for a while.
I stiffened. ‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ I retorted.
She hissed. ‘Well, have you had another one since you abandoned him?’
‘I’m sure he’s a pastor now like his father,’ I said, avoiding the question.
She pretended not to notice. ‘No, he’s into fintech now, and it looks like he’s doing well. He came to the conference in a jeep.’
‘That’s nice,’ I mumbled.
She laughed a knowing laugh. ‘I know you won’t ask, but he didn’t have a ring on his finger. Maybe he’s still waiting for you – you know you broke his heart, Nwakaego.’
‘Why are you calling my full name? Call me Ego,’ I deflected.
‘You’ve been over there for too long. See how you’re pronouncing your own name. Ego, like those British people. In fact, come home, come and marry him. How long are you planning to stay there?’
I rolled my eyes. ‘See your mouth like “come home”. What will I do there? I have a job here, a life.’
‘You can always practise your law; you can just renew your licence or whatever you people do. You’ll be like an expatriate with your London experience, you can get a big position at one of these international firms.’
I chuckled. ‘You think it’s that easy? I read the news o. Nigeria is not that straightforward.’
‘Yes, yes, I know. But things can only get better. You know elections are coming in a few months, Nigerians are angry, we’re ready to change this government.’ Eriife lowered her tone. I imagined her looking over her shoulder to make sure no one was listening. ‘Don’t say I told you, but my husband’s party has a lot of plans, if everything goes well . . .’ She let the promise hang.
‘Madam president!’ I hailed. ‘I’m loyal to your government.’
She chuckled. ‘When will you ever be serious? Anyways, you get my message. Come back. There’s no place like home.’
The call ended an hour later with promises on my end to send the shoes she’d ordered online, and to consider her words seriously.
But in my sleep, there were no wistful images of home, nor of friends and family left behind, not even of him. There was only my father.
Excerpt from “We Were Girls Once” copyright © 2024 by Aiwanose Odafen. Published by Viking Books.
About the book: From Aiwanose Odafen, the author of Tomorrow I Become a Woman, an ambitious, moving novel that charts three women's shifting relationships against a modernising, volatile Nigeria in the 1990s and beyond.
‘We were three: complete, as we were meant to be…’
Ego, Zina and Eriife were always destined to be best friends, ever since their grandmothers sat next to each other on a dusty bus to Lagos in the late 1940s, forging a bond that would last generations. But over half a century later, Nigeria is a new and modern country. As the three young women navigate the incessant strikes and political turmoil that surrounds them, their connection is shattered by a terrible assault. In the aftermath, nothing will remain the same as life takes them down separate paths.
For Ego, now a high-powered London lawyer, success can’t mask her loneliness and feelings of being an outsider. Desperate to feel connected to Nigeria, she escapes into a secret life online. Zina’s ambition is to be anyone but herself; acting proves the ultimate catharsis, but it comes at the cost of her family. And Eriife surprises everyone by morphing from a practising doctor to a ruthless politician’s perfect wife.
When Ego returns home, the three women’s lives become entwined once more, as Nigeria’s political landscape fractures. Their shared past will always connect them, but can they – and their country – overcome it?
***
Aiwanose Odafen spent a better part of her life wanting to become an economist, an accountant, then an entrepreneur before she discovered her love for writing. She has contributed to published non-fiction works and participated in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Purple Hibiscus Trust Writing Workshop. She was longlisted for the 2020 Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize and holds a postgraduate degree from the University of Oxford. When she's not writing, she's cheering for Manchester United or watching dramas. Her debut novel Tomorrow I Become a Woman will be published in 2022.
