Suburban Lagos.

This story was, more than anything, a labour of love. Enjoy.

Suburban Lagos lives on TV screens in houses with curved entryways littered with happy family memorabilia, portraits of people with pleasant smiles and peaceful looking dispositions; the glistening middle class of low budget, moralistic flicks. Perfectly pleasant, peaceful, church-going folk and their obedient children.

Life imitates art poorly, so, in real life, the children live in fear of displeasing their parents and the parents do not recognise the autonomy of their children. Sometimes they blend, like families somehow do, unique individuals who come to love, accept and respect each other, but sometimes they do not. Sometimes, one family member is faulty, maybe even more than one. They branch out in ways that displease. Sometimes there’s love for them regardless; sometimes, they're not so lucky. 

On displeasure, Mermaid knew she was going to live a 'godless life' even when she was a titular Christian. She was too fascinated by everything, unable to change and control things that they said needed to be changed and controlled and desperate to live a life full of enjoyment. When she vocally renounced it, to the horror of her family, everything fell even further apart. You really don’t see how much hinges on the silent wheels of religion turning in your life until those wheels stop turning. All her branching out ultimately came down to one thing with family, godlessness. They could not understand it and she was too angry, too damaged by years of silent rebellion, to explain it. Dialogue had never done her much good anyway. 

So, instead of talking, Mermaid writes, mostly about heartbreak. She doesn’t realise it but every heartbreak changes the texture of her writing, darkens her tone, and colours her language. Mermaid is very driven by elaborate notions of love. She’s been in love with many people; maybe even you. Year-long relationships that end in tragedy, at-first-sight love, scandalous romance and so on. Elaborate stories with intricate plots, characters, scenes, flashbacks and so on. Sometimes, when the story is not going her way, Mermaid remembers that it’s *her* story and changes it.

Mermaid knows she will write when the rain starts. It’s almost all she can do when the weather is cool and skies sag day in and day out. She knows she will write then, and so she does not write until then. Her pen won’t move until the view outside her window is coloured by fat droplets of rain; until the trees are swaying more violently than usual and she has cause to believe that the palm kernel tree that tilts towards the house a little bit more every year will finally collapse on their house. Then, when she sits overwhelmed by the beauty of the trees, the dark skies, the cool breeze and the delicious smell of rain, the words come, her pen is fluid again and her many stories take shape.

Like me, and maybe even you, Mermaid does something small and then pats herself vigorously on the back for a job well done. When the rain got too heavy and parts of the house started to collect water, she shovelled water into buckets and squeezed the mop with her hands so Grandma would approve. Grandma would sit tut-tutting if she did not see Mermaid on hands and knees vigorously mopping and squeezing and sweating like an "omoluabi". The mop bucket just doesn’t do it properly, she’d say. 

In Grandma’s opinion and defence, Mermaid was spoiled, lazy and unmotivated. The girl would sit all day in her room doing God knows what and when you'd summon her, she’d appear 15 minutes later with dead eyes and a hollow demeanour. Her father never scolded her to grandma’s annoyance and so, whenever her father travelled, and he often did, grandma would take it upon herself to discipline the girl.

Mermaid had learned early on that the best way to survive grandma was compliance. The woman was a tyrant. Tongue lashings and actual lashings at signs of disobedience. When she stayed in line, in her free time, she was mostly left alone to do the things she liked; writing, staring at trees, sleeping, reading books, thinking, feeling; so she mostly stayed in line. Mostly.

She had known it was going to be a shit day when her grandmother came to wake her up by 6 am to pray. It had been a stormy night; the violent kind, with lightning that brightly lights up the 2 am sky and thunder that shakes walls. Mermaid had stayed up to enjoy the storm as she often did when she could and so, she didn’t get much sleep. 

Grandma had dreamt about Mermaid again. She was always having dreams about Mermaid, each one more horrifying and gruesome than the last. There was always something. They’d spent an hour at it, grandma prompting her to pray and looking at her lips to be sure they were moving, Mermaid mouthing rap song lyrics. Mermaid had long fought against the requirement that she pray to her grandmother’s hearing. She’d said her prayers were between her and God. It worked. 

After prayer, Grandma had discovered the flood and had summoned Mermaid to deal with it. She’d also asked Mermaid to bring a chair for her to sit and watch, so, Mermaid did it as grandma liked because even though it wasn’t even 8 am yet, she’d had a long day. Grandma appeared to also be in a mood that day. Even though Mermaid was being by all means, compliant, Grandma was still upset. She complained that Mermaid was too slow, too messy, too something. By the time she was done cleaning, she’d had it. 

Mermaid did not hide her scowl, in fact, even if she had been the sort of person to conceal her true feelings on a thing, the murderous waves of frustration rolling off her back were almost palpable. Grandma, not one to ignore presumed disrespect, was displeased that Mermaid was not in a peachy, grateful-to-be alive mood and made it known in a thousand words, maybe less, who’s counting? 

Mermaid was done. Sick, tired, fed up. You see, Mermaid had numerous problems, many, many more worthy of priority than this here problem. She was over it. So, she stood there and took it all and when Grandma went out that day, she set grandma’s favourite lace on fire right there in the front yard. The blackened spot on the grass she’d burnt was still very visible when Mermaid’s father returned from his crusade, as visible as it was the day it came to be when Grandma came home to find the charred remains of her clothes in their front yard. 

Mermaid was 8 when her mother was called by God. That was how her father had put it when he finally decided to broach the subject one year later. He had done everything with his wife while she was alive. They were actually in love and that’s rare. 

Suburban Lagos is full of people loving one another, sure, but being *in love* is different. You understand what I mean, living with the knowledge that your parents will stay together forever even if they don’t much care for themselves. Well, Mermaid’s parents were *in love* and inseparable and even after she was born, their love did not change. It expanded to fit her and, for the first eight years of her life, she knew peace and joy that not many know in childhood. Her parents almost mirrored one another sometimes, people even said they started to look alike. Maybe that was why when God called her, he called him too. 

Her father had grown up uber-religious but once he left home, well, he moved on from it. Grandma, of course, was not pleased. There had been some trouble with her mother from before Mermaid was born and so, in her eight years of bliss, she’d barely seen Grandma. 

When they’d gone to visit her grandmother when she was maybe 5, her mother had instructed her to say she was not hungry if offered anything and her mother had never said that about anyone before. She used to sing “all food is a gift” to coax food into her daughter’s mouth and she even let strangers hand her food when she was a screaming toddler constituting a nuisance in public places. 

When her mother died, her father suddenly realised that God was where it was at for him. In the years after, he quit his job and became a travelling minister, a missionary and Grandma came to live in their house. When he was at home, which was hardly ever, he was kind to her. Distant, absent, but always kind. He inquired about her well-being in a way that came across more like polite concern than parental care. He provided for them well, he’d had a good job before, and the work of the lord seemed to pay well. Well enough that luckily, money was not one of Mermaid’s many woes. 

How did Mermaid feel about her father’s new line of work? Generally, after much learning in her branching out, she had some reservations. He was a travelling preacher and his band specifically went to places where people were in need, places where a dissident religion was prominent, war-torn countries and such. When you’re at your lowest, they stretch their arms to you in comfort and then they feed you spoonfuls of their doctrine alongside the food you so desperately need. It’s not surprising that many people come to conflate one for the other and to depend on both for sustenance. 

When she was younger and the space her once loving father had left in her life desperately needed filling, she thought God had taken her father away from her. And according to her father, he had taken her mother too. As she grew, her motivations changed, trauma blended with reasoning and a newfound sense of self.

The lace-burning fiasco was the beginning of the end. The planning and then the eventual doing filled Mermaid with a heady feeling, one that she will come to experience throughout her life when she channels all her willpower to do something that is entirely self-serving; the wrongness or rightness of which is inconsequential (and subjective) because of how satisfying and fulfilling it is to simply be oneself and do as one pleases. So, even when her father came back home, summoned by her hysterical grandmother, livid, she was content. She had done well, pat pat.

Not only had she done what she wanted and found great pleasure in it, but she had also elicited a reaction out of her father. Mermaid thought it fascinating that after years of casual indifference and polite courtesy, the vein on his forehead that used to protrude when he laughed heartily was visible again. Sure, he wasn’t laughing, but the vein was popping regardless. So, she supplied the laughter. She laughed so hard that at first, she drowned out his angry shouting until it stopped altogether and he merely stared at her in disbelief. 

He left the next day after praying for her in the morning. His clear-eyed detachment had resumed. 

In the years after that, she saw him three times; the fourth was at her banishment. You see, after that incident, Mermaid was emboldened. While Grandma did not stop being Grandma; Mermaid became Mermaid. Her list of favourite things to do extended in ways that, of course, displeased. She did what she wanted and lived as she pleased; it was her story and the side characters were inconsequential. She finally felt like a person and the way she saw it was that if she had to keep on living, she might as well grab the reins of her life. 

One day after her grandmother had a dream, the goriest of them all, Mermaid simply refused to pray. She’d told her grandmother that she did not care if truly, evil forces were after her. She also refused to go to the local branch of the church that her father ministered for. She used to attend three services a week with her grandmother up until then and had even continued to go for the Sunday service for a few years after the burning incident. 

Grandma was in constant flux between trying to fulfil her god-given duty to train this insolent child and the certain helplessness that comes with losing power where you used to lord it over a person. Mermaid had come to the ultimate conclusion that nothing else mattered as long as she kept choosing herself and living as authentically as she could until her last breath and ultimately, her grandmother could and would not draw that last breath (especially as Mermaid grew bigger and Grandma, smaller). 

Soon enough, Mermaid’s love stories come to exist in reality and not just in the stories that she now writes far less frequently. She finds that reality sucks because of how out of her control it is. Unlike in her head, her many loves, well, three, brought disappointment and pain that would be otherwise have been edited away if it was solely her story to tell. There's no misery like the darkness that comes with losing love, especially when it was your sole source of light. 

Grandma found out about Sol, not like there was much finding to be done, they hadn’t been very discreet. She had never cared much for the girl, Mermaid’s new friends generally, but her especially. “Does she not have her own house?”

When she’d found them wrapped around each other, she’d fainted. When she came to, she told everyone Mermaid tried to kill her. She also told them what she saw. Mermaid’s father and his church were scandalised. 

Once they returned from the hospital, Mermaid’s father said he wished to speak to her. His voice was calm and soothing; he had always been soft spoken. Mermaid relished the moment. They were in the upstairs study they never used anymore, not since her mother died. It had been her mother’s favourite spot in the house and as Mermaid closed her eyes to truly take it all in, the final moments before what was unsaid became said, she could almost smell the blend of her mother’s morning coffee and her clean, citrusy scent. 

He told her he’d heard of her sinful ways and that as punishment and maybe redemption, she would accompany him on a mission to Northern Nigeria. She, quite frankly, would rather die. She told him that much. 

His expression was deadpan when he asked her to get out of his house. 

Mermaid had been expelled from suburbia.

Mermaid could not believe her ears when nearly a decade after her banishment, she got a call that her father had passed and had left her the house. Her grandmother had passed years before, and she’d seen her father at the funeral. He did not acknowledge her and when she and her partner who’d come with for support had gone close to the casket to pay their respects, as is expected, he, who had been stationed next to it all day, vacated his spot immediately. 

The news of his death unearthed a mix of emotions that Mermaid did not even know she was capable of feeling. She wanted to ask him why he’d abandoned her all those years ago, now that he was dead. She thought she was over it, after all, she had properly come into herself now. She was a grown woman doing grown woman things. She was devastated. 

Looking past her devastation, Mermaid loved that house. She had no problem with the old building that had predated even her father’s existence, passed down to him by his uncle. Her mother had decorated it after they were married and until her last day there, the house had a feel that was distinctively hers. It was a good house and though a lot of her trauma took place in that compound, it had served her well enough. She had the trees to look at while she contemplated the purpose of her existence and the constant birdsong broke her reverie now and again and now, it had the potential to serve her even more. 

On another rainy day after the house has become Mermaid’s through and through, she sits down to write again after copious amounts of wine and months of willing herself to but writing nothing. She does not write about heartbreak.

“In this life of constant chaos, hold yourself, soothe yourself, choose yourself. You’re all you’ve got; the centre.”