Someday, Maybe
By Onyi Nwabineli
You don’t grow up the daughter of two high-achieving Nigerians without learning a few things about perseverance and the art of long-suffering. My parents packed up and shipped out from Benin and landed in London ready to live out their Igbo dreams and give us the best British life had to offer. This meant academy schooling. Gloria and I in the girls’ chapter of St. Jude’s and our brother, Nate, in the boys’ down the road. You know the sort: pleated checked skirts, Latin lessons, stiff blazers and a coterie of rich white people who think they are better than you and laugh at your Jheri curl because you look like Lionel Richie as you trudge dejectedly through the polished halls. School life was a study in abject misery. I was one of ten Black kids at St. Jude’s, a school of over eight hundred. Gloria was another. The others were in the years above me and we locked eyes as we passed one another in the halls, our expressions conveying our shared abhorrence at being shut up in such an establishment every day.
Our parents thought they were doing the right thing. Nigerian parents don’t leave much room for failure. Your options as a Nigerian child are success or greater success. Mediocrity is to be cut out like a cancer, your pliable loin fruit molded into world-class surgeons and lawyers through discipline, a diet high in roughage and the best education a combination of government funding and extortionate school fees can buy.
I was already something of a shrinking violet, doing my best to remain anonymous and invisible, unlike Gloria, who commandeered the captainship of both the lacrosse and hockey teams and braided her hair, meaning she did not leave smears of Afro Sheen on every surface she encountered. But St. Jude’s made me fold into myself like an intricate piece of origami.
“It’s like you want me to be miserable,” I complained to Ma from the kitchen floor, where I had thrown myself after failing once again to convince her to pull me out of St. Jude’s and allow me to attend the local comprehensive. Ma, who was waking up at 4:00 a.m. every day to hustle to a lab on the other side of London to analyze samples for her PhD thesis, eyed me in a way that made my blood freeze in my veins.
“First of all, am I your mate?” she asked. “Oya, pua n’ebe à! I said get up! You don’t lie on the floor in a uniform your dad and I paid for and tell me I want you to be miserable. What is making you miserable?”
The thing is you can’t just tell African parents about your school troubles. Ma and Dad were breaking their backs to give us the best and to disparage St. Jude’s would be to pour scorn on their efforts, to demonstrate your position as ungrateful offspring. They assumed St. Jude’s to be free from the problems plaguing state schools. They were wrong—it only meant I got bullied by kids with tighter accents and double-barreled surnames. I also knew how these things worked. Parent-teacher meetings would be called and would do nothing but leave Dad grave and Ma shrill, readying herself to rain down the righteous fury of every indignant mother who has ever had to go to bat for her kids. So, I kept my mouth shut.
“Go and face your books and don’t let me hear your mouth again this night.” Ma would frown, but she’d still pat my Jheri curl as I trailed despondently out of the kitchen.
Gloria tried to teach me how to fight, but my attempts were pathetic in a way that infuriated her and exhausted me, so I spent my time either with my limited circle of friends or hiding out in the library with Ms. Collins, the fuck-free librarian who gave me books I was technically too young to read. Around the time I discovered books and computers were enough, puberty discovered me, bringing with it a pair of hips and a six-inch growth spurt to balance them out. Suddenly I had a pair of boobs nestling underneath my school shirt, a set that may not have been of Gloria proportions but still moved liberally enough for my sister to haul me before our mother and demand I be taken shopping for a reinforced bra.
“It’s almost pornographic, Ma,” she’d hissed, gesturing at my chest. “Do something.”
It was unfair. It was more body than I knew what to do with. I was unused to the male gaze, comfortable in the shadows, sneaking through life unnoticed and unbothered. I had, like Gloria, discovered books on Black feminism, much to my sister’s delight, who thought I ought to use my blossoming ass to torment boyfolk of all kinds.
“You should join the hockey team,” Gloria said at the behest of her coach, who had also clocked my new height and the thickening of my thighs.
“What? No.” The thought of spectators watching my behind bouncing up and down on the hockey pitch was enough to push me toward cardiac arrest.
“It’s fun. You get to hurt people without getting into any real trouble,” Gloria said, excellently impersonating a psychopath.
“No.”
“Marcus Raines has rugby training at the same time.” This piqued my interest. Marcus Raines was the hazel-eyed object of adolescent female lust from ages eleven to seventeen. Gloria registered my interest with disgust. “I was kidding. Leave that boy alone,” she warned as we waited outside the school gates for an aunty-but-not-really to swoop by with Nate and pick us up. But these, like so many of Gloria’s sage words, fell from her lips onto my newly braided hair, rolled off and plopped into the dust by our feet as we climbed into the car.
In the end, the only thing that kept me from Marcus was my own shyness compounded with a crippling awkwardness I hid behind the autobiographies of great women Ms. Collins recommended.
*
The point is this: I was unprepared for Quentin when I met him at nineteen. I took a place at King’s College to study English and digital media (I could do this without guilt as Gloria had dipped and twirled off to Oxford to study law) and combined my love of books with an aptitude for Adobe Creative Suite. Until Quentin, university for me could be summarized as a series of questionable outfits, evenings spent reading Dostoyevsky by lamplight (because I was an idiot who thought it romantic when what it was was the catalyst for my now diminished eyesight) and realizing I could stay out until four in the morning without any ramifications more serious than weathering the inevitable battle to stay awake during lectures. Limits were hazy and could be traversed with the right amount of gumption and liquid courage. I was still shy, still self-conscious of what I looked like from behind, but I had an expansive vocabulary and access to cheap shots at the student union. Anything seemed possible.
I had clumsy sex for the first time with a boy named Dane, who had large hands and pawed at my chest like he was trying to commit the swell of my cleavage to memory. I dated him half-heartedly because for me, wallflower extraordinaire, nothing about sex was casual. I even grew fond of the way he would arrive at my campus room every Friday and pretend to care as I cut his hair and told him about my week. On campus I did as much reinvention as I could. I wore butt-length braids, I swore a lot. I tried but failed to become the hard drinker university students are expected to be. I started bandying about the phrase patriarchal stultification and befriended a group of radical feminists who signed me up to a debate team.
I wasn’t ready for Q. He was not someone that was supposed to happen to me.
On the day I met him, I left Dane sleeping in my room and headed to Tesco for the obligatory replenishing of cheesecake and cheap lasagna—my staples once the food Ma forced into my arms whenever I visited home ran out.
That he approached me at all instantly made me curious. The few boys brave enough to spit whatever lackluster approximation of game they thought they had were met with laughter or a hail of verbal missiles from my friends. I was an introverted girl, easily tongue-tied, but I imagine I came across as standoffish and I intimidated the majority of boys, cowed as they were by the sight of me striding across campus, braids swinging.
Quentin materialized at my side as I scrutinized the frozen dessert selection. I didn’t notice him right away. I tossed a New York–style cheesecake into my basket and moved along and it was only then I realized he had been standing there barely breathing and staring at me with an intensity I had heretofore only associated with those on campus who had discovered hard drugs.
I moved to fresh produce.
Moments later, there he was.
Look, I’ll just say it. He was gorgeous. Not just gorgeous, beautiful. Almost painfully so. I dug deep for a scathing comment but was rendered speechless by his eyes—the color of an unsullied ocean, the kind you see in travel brochures advertising islands you have never heard of.
“Hi,” he offered and matched the word with a hint of a smile so beatific it actually made me angry.
“You’re following me,” I snapped.
“I am,” he agreed amiably.
“White men don’t follow Black girls around supermarkets unless they suspect they’re being robbed.”
“Interesting theory.”
He was familiar. Of course he was. People who look like Quentin looked don’t roam the earth unnoticed. However, he was not a plainclothes security guard but a fellow student.
I sighed. “What do you want?”
“Um. Well, I was hoping you could help me choose the right kind of pepper for—”
I cut him off. “What makes you think I know anything about food shopping?” I indicated my basket. “Or is your assumption that because I’m a woman, I should know about groceries?” This was the person I was back then. That I hadn’t once again been ostracized by my peers was nothing but God at work.
Q took great pains to assure me that wasn’t it. “I’m going to attempt jollof rice and—”
“You what? You’re making jollof? For what exactly?”
“My Visual Culture class is having a potluck and we have to choose a dish from someone else’s—”
I could not stop interrupting him. Me, a person who went to school in a place that made me swallow my own voice. “So it’s not only that I’m a woman but because you assume I can cook jollof?”
He scratched the back of his head and my heart hiccupped. “I think it’s more because in your last debate, you said that just because you can make the best jollof rice this side of London doesn’t mean you, under patriarchy, should be compelled to do so. I’m not compelling you to do so. Just so you know.”
I had said that. In an impassioned diatribe to my debate teammates in a half-darkened lecture hall we had been fairly certain was occupied by no more than six people, most of whom had come to ogle Cynthia, our stunning ringleader.
I helped Q locate the Scotch bonnets.
He said he had “noticed” me on campus because he thought “my cheekbones would photograph well” and he wanted to be the one to take that photograph. I remember laughing at him even as I snatched glimpses of his ocean eyes. His game was a limping, struggling thing, but I liked the way he looked at my face, like it was the only thing he could see. We made a second circuit of the supermarket, and even though I hated how intrigued I was, I was riding the wave of lust he rode in on and now there was intrigue in my sails.
“So, you should let me,” he said when we were outside.
“Let you what?”
“Take the photograph. Of you.”
I searched his face for signs of bravado, but he was swinging his backpack onto his shoulders, looking more nervous than I felt.
“Alright,” I said.
Excerpt from “Someday, Maybe” copyright © 2022 by Onyi Nwabineli. Published by Oneworld (UK)
About the book: Eve is left heartbroken by her husband’s unexpected death, but everyone around her – her friends, her boisterous British-Nigerian family, her toxic mother-in-law – seems to be pushing her to move on. Unable to face the future, Eve begins looking back, delving through the history of her marriage in an attempt to understand where it went wrong. So begins an unconventional love story about loss, resilience, and a heroine bursting with rage and unexpected joy.
***
Onyi Nwabineli (@OnyiWrites) is a Nigerian-British writer and headwrap aficionado. Born in Benin, Nigeria, she grew up in Glasgow, the Isle of Man and Newcastle, and now lives in London. Onyi is the co-founder of Surviving Out Loud, a fund that provides fiscal support for survivors of sexual assault, and the founder of Black Pens, a writing retreat for Black women. Someday, Maybe is her debut novel. More information can be found on her website: onyi-nwabineli.com.
