BROWN 3

Baby is now four years old and Lade attends the government secondary school close to Baby’s school. Lade is in JS2 and is the oldest in her class. She doesn’t really have many friends because she doesn’t know how to communicate with them. They always laugh at her bad English and her thick Yoruba accent. So she mostly keeps to herself. She really hates it when the teachers pick on her. She understands what they are saying; she just doesn’t know how to tell them the answer. So she is going to repeat JS2 this year and after getting caned in school for her failure, she knows that she still has Edet and Madam to face at home.

She gets tempted to run away sometimes, to just steal Madam’s precious jewellery and go back to her mother whom she hasn’t seen since she came to Lagos, but every time she works up the courage to ask Madam if she can go home for a brief period, Madam scolds her for her self–centeredness in putting her needs before her parents’.
“Don’t you know they are about to move into a bigger house? How will they get the money if you don’t work for it? And who will take care of Baby when you are not around. Please, stop upsetting me. I have no time for this rubbish. Go and do something abeg.” And she would feel terribly guilty for not being properly grateful to these hands that were putting food into her parents’ mouths.

There are times that she wishes it were just she, Oga and Baby. If only Madam were not in the picture. She is staring at the calendar and praying and promising God that she would learn to speak English fluently and scrub the house every day and never lose her patience with Baby and say no to Oga at least on Sundays if only someone would come and tell them that Madam is dead. Because if Madam doesn’t die, she knows she will. She has missed her period for two months and she cannot tell Oga. He wouldn’t know what to do. Oga is a good man, but he is weak.

She spends the next month going through her usual 3am to 11pm routine, and when her hands are busy, she fantasizes about the different ways the news of Madam’s death would come, and how she would have to act to make it convincing. Then Oga would come and propose to her like men proposed to the women in the Pacesetters novels Oga sometimes gave her.
But Madam doesn’t die. Instead Madam kills her baby.