Allow Me to Introduce Myself, page 14
Aṅụrị tried to ignore the twinge in her stomach when Simi rolled her eyes and said into the phone, “Honestly, Dad, I love you, too. I’m at Loki’s not Sodom and Gomorrah.” But it returned when Loki told his mother she was the most beautiful woman on earth and laughed when her eyes glittered and she called him ridiculous. That her friends were loved by parents who were not shy about showing it was a wonderful thing to behold. But it unpicked the stitching at the corner of her happiness until it completely unraveled. Witnessing familial love was always a poignant reminder that things did not have to be as they were. Aṅụrị woke before the sun rose, her chest tight with the knowledge that she could not remember the last time Nkem had told her he loved her. She pressed a hand to Simi’s head and sighed with relief—Simi’s temperature was almost back to normal. Then she flipped the throw back over Loki’s toes where he had kicked it off in sleep and, with a cup of hot lemon water at her side, sat in Céleste’s kitchen and opened her laptop.
LowlyWorm17 is now online
Ijele_Rising is now online
LowlyWorm17: Goddess, I’ve been waiting for you. I have a proposition
Ijele_Rising: Kneel first. Speak later
LowlyWorm17: I’m sorry. I’m sorry
Ijele_Rising: Are you kneeling?
LowlyWorm17: I am
Ijele_Rising: You think I’ll just take the word of worthless filth like you?
LowlyWorm17 is sending a tribute: accept? Yes/No
Ijele_Rising: Passable
LowlyWorm17: Permission to speak, Goddess?
Ijele_Rising: Not yet
LowlyWorm17 is sending a tribute: accept? Yes/No
Ijele_Rising: Go ahead
LowlyWorm17: I want to give you £20,000
Ijele_Rising: What?
LowlyWorm17: £20,000. To let me worship you indefinitely. To take care of you. It would be my honor
* * *
“And you didn’t say no?”
“I didn’t say no.” Aṅụrị, in Ammah’s office, drove the toe of her shoe into the oak flooring.
“What did you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I logged out. But for like, half a second, I wanted to say yes. I sort of wanted to do it. Like, ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’ That’s the scary part.”
Ammah wrote something in her notebook. “At the risk of igniting the rage in you this phrase elicits, how does that make you feel?”
But there was no rage. Aṅụrị willed it, but all that escaped from her was a breath that made it sound like she was struggling to breathe. “I hate it. I hate that I considered allowing some faceless guy to give me a bunch of money to ‘take care’ of me. No matter how briefly. I hate that ‘yes’ even existed as a feasible option to me.”
“Do you have any thoughts on why it was an option to you?”
Ammah left the blinds and the window open that day. Outside in the courtyard below, a child was laughing. Already, Noelle’s laughter was splintering in her memory. Did it pitch like this one? Was it softer? Aṅụrị sat on her hands. The window was not hers to close. The sound was not hers to block out.
“I dunno. I guess for a second I wanted to like, tap out of all of this. Not in that way, but I wanted to not be Aṅụrị, Child of Ophelia, and just be Aṅụrị living a regular life where I can see my sister when I want and not have to inform her parents that it’s weird for a five-year-old to have hang-ups about what she looks like. I guess I thought money might make some of that easier. Money not linked to relinquishing my life to Ophelia.” Aṅụrị laughed a laugh utterly devoid of mirth. “Who knew I was even dealing with the kind of paypigs who can drop £20K on someone without blinking?”
For Aṅụrị, revisiting a terrible thing was ill-advised, but the more you doubled back, the less terrible you could convince yourself the thing was. Following his offer, she was reasonably sure she should disengage with LowlyWorm altogether. His proposition had muddied what were already cloudy waters, and when she did, LowlyWorm was so grateful that he upped his offer by ten thousand. She fought past the shame, embedded in her like shrapnel.
Telling herself she needed a distraction from Gloria’s continued silence, Aṅụrị clarified LowlyWorm’s position. The “arrangement” would be one where he was elevated above the others, that the “looking after” portion of the deal would come as a monthly stipend in addition to the lump sum. In return, Aṅụrị’s availability would have to increase. Mr. Worm also “needed” to meet his goddess in person once a month and, for her comfort, never in private. Aṅụrị screenshotted the chat exchange, wondering if this person offering her cash like it was Skittles had a wife or kids. She logged off without giving him an answer. With the tributes he sent during the fifteen minutes of correspondence, she paid for a block of six sessions with Ammah.
Aṅụrị told herself that The LowlyWorm Proposal, as she was now calling it in her head, lending it a gravitas that was unwarranted and disquieting, could possibly be a means to an end. Her pursuit of freedom seemed a little more attainable with money behind her. A healthy bank balance would make taking care of Noelle a little less daunting. Despite knowing she would not agree to the proposal, she’d still wondered under what circumstances she might change her mind. As she showered, as she ate a bowl of cold gnocchi, she told herself that this might not be who she was right now, but the you of today is not the you of yesterday and will not be the you of tomorrow. You are an ever evolving or devolving entity.
Now Ammah softly “ahem’d” and brought Aṅụrị back from her reverie. “We’ve spoken about your perceived lack of choice before. Are you feeling less in control than previously?”
“This is the first—” Aṅụrị felt the lump form in her throat and forced herself to speak around it. “They’ve never regulated my time with Nell like this before. And I guess the separation means that when I do see her, it’s pretty clear something is going on with her. I feel like a shit sister for not clocking it way before now. And now with it looking like I’ll be going to court, chances are I’ll see her even less. Maybe not at all. Then she’ll be all alone. Ammah, you have to let me bring her here to talk to you while there’s still time.”
Ammah laid her notebook aside. “Aṅụrị, my answer to that is no. It’s still no and will remain no. I need your parents’ consent. Please stop asking me. We should discuss what your end goal is here. You’ve spoken about lack of access to Noelle and how that may become absolute in the event of a drawn-out court-focused litigation. Are you prepared for that? What do you hope will happen?”
Hope was such a dangerous and exasperating thing. To hope was to court the existence of better which in itself was nebulous and frightening. Aṅụrị thought of herself as someone who was not naive enough to hope, but even as she prepared to scoff, she realized that straining against Ophelia and arguing with Nkem were just tools she was using to achieve her own version of better. Hope did not have to present itself as such to be real. It just was.
“I hope... I want Noelle to have a normal life. The type of life I didn’t get to have. I don’t think it’s too late. Am I being ridiculous? Maybe. But I really don’t think it’s too late. She can’t have that life with them though, so I want to give it to her.”
“You want to become Noelle’s full-time guardian?”
“You think I can’t do it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Who better to help her through this kind of situation than me? I’ve been there. I am there. I’m perfect for the job.” Yet even as she said it, Aṅụrị recalled the look Loki and Simi exchanged when she had mentioned it to them, and she could see it now in Ammah, trained as she was to quash any outward emotion, any telltale signs of disapproval, the thing in faces that said you have to be kidding.
“If this is something you plan to pursue, we can talk more about what it would mean and how that may impact you and your recovery.”
“I hate that word. Recovery.”
“You’re allowed to hate it.”
“Are you mothering me right now, Ammah?” She despised how facetious she sounded, how sarcasm crept in and blighted decorum. More than that, she despised how Ammah knew her enough not to react. “I know what it would mean for me. I’d be happy and Nell would be happy and we’d both be free of them and all of this online bullshit.”
“Aṅụrị—” Ammah smoothed out an invisible wrinkle in her sensible jersey dress “—whatever you might think becoming Noelle’s guardian might do for you, there are consequences and realities to ripping a five-year-old from her parents. No matter how noble the intention. We’re out of time but—”
“You’re seriously not giving me homework now? When I’m pissed at you.”
Ammah smiled. “I find the homework works best when you are pissed at me. All I was going to say is that it would be wise to look into the practicalities of becoming a sudden parent. Maybe Google fostering.”
“I refuse.”
“On what grounds?”
“I’m tired of you being right.”
“See you soon, Aṅụrị.”
* * *
She resisted the urge for as long as it took her to walk to Turnham Green which was about fifteen minutes, annoyance propelling her forward. The application for fostering a child took between three and six months to complete. There were the requisite forms to fill, home visits to endure and numerous assessments which culminated in a panel of experts determining whether you were fit to welcome a child into both your home and your life. Aṅụrị knew she already had a number of factors working against her, her age being one, her lack of a second bedroom not requisitioned by candle-making paraphernalia being another. There was her near constant desire to be inebriated and if that were not enough to make the panel of experts lose bowel control as a result of laughter, there was also her fraught relationship with her own body and how she lived inside it. She might have been astute enough to understand that a child had no business worrying about what she looked like, but did it make it any better if it was a twenty-five year-old doing the worrying? She was an adult, was she not, and yet she still looked in the mirror and lamented her own appearance at times. That millions and possibly billions of other adults did the same did nothing to lessen the sting of what she considered so palpable a defect she felt she could nail it to a wall. Then there was the fact that Nkem and Ophelia would likely not melt into the shadows and leave them to live their lives unencumbered. There would be more courts, more tears and still, still, Aṅụrị knew that if she did not try, she would be consumed by remorse, that she would become guilt personified, held together with guilt and unuttered repentance.
Gorged as she had on the impossibility of the situation, Aṅụrị kept walking if only to try to burn off the heaviness of the mounting setbacks. Noelle needed to be saved and the obstacles in Aṅụrị’s way did nothing to diminish that fact. This was a kid already going viral on a semiregular basis because she was small, cute and marketable, and as a veteran viral baby, Aṅụrị had been given the gift of foresight. She had found herself the main character many times, the discomfort of the same growing and intensifying over the years. But that was nothing compared to the stardom of Noelle, who exited the womb already lauded, whose arrival into the world was marked on calendars that did not belong to any of her immediate family, public countdowns and timers on her birth. Ophelia’s pregnancy had been packaged up and presented to her fans for maximum impact. There is no real way to explain to a child what that means, and the fact of Ophelia’s popularity, of Aṅụrị’s before Noelle could even grasp the concept of “content,” meant that the girl was growing up in a gilded cage—unable to fathom privacy because none had ever existed for her. What Aṅụrị wanted for Noelle was a future where she would know the possibility of the undetected do-over, to experience a lifetime of pristine choices she had the ability to mar or beautify with her messiness, her brightness, her humanness.
Aṅụrị’s reaction to Ophelia’s viral chasing was visceral for reasons Aṅụrị thought obvious; she couldn’t understand how Ophelia’s fans remained blissfully oblivious. It also reminded her of the other main characters that had stuck with her over the years. One in particular, a young boy whose parents eschewed asinine gender rules and allowed, nay encouraged, his self-expression via the wearing of dresses and the experimentation with makeup came to mind. There was nothing sinister taking place—he was a nine-year-old who liked the swish of a skirt against his ankles and hadn’t yet decided that lip gloss was beautiful yet impractical. He was a kid learning about himself as kids should. It was the showcasing that was problematic. What should have been a series of touching private moments between parents and child now became the subject of mass debate on social media. Should the parents have indulged his request to have eyeshadow and a dab of blusher applied? Why were the parents intent on the feminization of their boy? And with this came the inevitable and maddening influx of bigotry: the slurs, the death threats, the irrational anger because humans as a species, evolved as we are meant to be, still give in to the animalistic irrationalities that drive them to hurl abuse at a child they do not know and will never meet. And feel justified in doing so.
Similarly, Ophelia had been struck by the desperation to provide “feel good” or “wholesome” content for the masses, and at the heart of it was another child chosen to be that week or month’s main character all the while wholly unprepared or unenlightened about what it truly meant to be the object of anonymous attention both good and bad. Aṅụrị knew what it was to have responsibility leveled at her before she was strong enough to hold it. She knew what it was to be asked, “Don’t you think it’s important to show other little girls like you that they’re beautiful?” And she remembered what it was to wonder why that fell to her. To sacrifice a child on the faux altar of progressiveness was still a sacrifice. Safeguarding could not just be set aside in favor of the intoxicant that was attention.
Aṅụrị didn’t see herself as the protagonist, but too many others did. The fact of her upbringing made it so. The fact of her notoriety compounded it. Noelle could not become the accosted and perhaps it was arrogant for Aṅụrị to think she could be the one to stop this from happening, but arrogance is just another form of confidence and confidence is yet another form of hope, and hope, Aṅụrị was finding, could not be easily outstripped.
Her feet took her to her aunt’s door. She ran the last half mile, stumbling more than once but pressing on, not allowing embarrassment to take root because it couldn’t without an audience, and she kept running until she reached and fell gasping against Nneoma’s door, which her aunt opened and said, “Who is chasing you?” and Aṅụrị said, “Time.”
NKEM
I used to wake every morning and touch Ophelia’s shoulder. There was something sacred about the second it took for her to sigh in her sleep and roll over into me. I would inhale the powdered scent of her hair and over the years, it became easier to stop myself comparing it to that of Kainene’s: earth and honey and the faintest tang of palm oil. Now I usually wake to an empty bed or a wife already scanning through emails or schedules; one who fights a moment of irritation before accepting my kiss or returning my “good morning.” On those mornings, Noelle’s room is a solace to me. A face that still brightens before my eyes, still warms me with a smile. Over time, I have learned that there will be no traces of Kainene here. Noelle is in no part hers. It doesn’t seem like it should be true. How can it be when Kainene was so much a part of me? A person that flowed through my veins? I can still bask in the way Noelle reaches for me and presses her head to my own. Like this, we are still father and daughter and we are the only ones in the world. Then, as always, she asks for Aṅụrị.
NINE
A brunette with a temperature-controlled room in her apartment, dedicated to the display and storage of her handbag collection, logged onto Instagram every morning approximately twelve seconds after she opened her eyes. She scrolled her feed, rendered almost unnavigable by a series of algorithms designed to expose her to new people and products, then clicked over to her favorites tab. There she found one Ophelia Chinasa, who on this particular day, had posted a reel of herself and her daughter as they tested different hairstyles on the little girl. By the fifth style, the girl had stamped her foot, crossed her little arms and exclaimed, “No more, Mummy!” and the brunette felt the familiar desire to opine, to add her voice to the litany, and this even before Ophelia turned to the camera smiling, shrugged and said, “Alright, guys, let us know which style you like on Noelle.” The brunette commented that style number three was clearly the right choice; it framed the child’s face perfectly. She also added that it appeared the girl had grown—and signed off with three heart emojis. The brunette lived in New York. She liked looking at Ophelia’s photos and trying to figure out precisely where they were taken or where the Chinasas might be at that moment. She and her friends had become quite good at this game, recognizing a signature restaurant tablecloth or the shape of a doorway in a well-known spa. The skill might prove handy in the future since meeting Ophelia and her cute kid sat a few entries down on a bucket list. The brunette would celebrate her fortieth birthday the next month and had been following Ophelia since she began documenting her pregnancy with the girl who was now old enough to reject hairstyles. She often wondered what happened to the other girl, the darker one with soulful eyes.
In London, Aṅụrị watched the same reel and scrolled through the comments, her fingernails pressed into her arm, her gut roiling as she reported one user and then another. There was nothing conspicuous about them. The comments they left were of the mild variety (She’s such a cutie! More Noelle videos please!) but spending as much time as Aṅụrị did in the comment sections of Ophelia’s posts meant that there were things she learned by a combination of osmosis, experience, morbid curiosity and the natural pessimism and mistrust that comes from being a misanthrope. A lack of avatar usually meant one of four things: newbie, bot, spy or pervert, and all it took was a brief perusal of the profile to ascertain which. The day’s winners of Aṅụrị’s sleuthing were made after she discovered their entire follow lists consisted of nothing but pages dedicated to children. She watched the reel again, scrolled the comments until her vision blurred, stopping only because there were candles to send and others to create, and because she had bitten the inside of her cheek so hard her mouth filled with blood. Might there be a world where children could be posted online safely? Indeed there might, but it was not the one they lived in and it did nothing to address the issues of consent which too many were happy to flout in the case of kids, simply because they had not yet developed the faculties with which to protest. Aṅụrị was resolute and that resoluteness was repulsive to too many, which served only to spur her on.
