Madam F I C T I O N
&Me
W
hen madam is not in, I like to pretend that I am her and prance in front of the mirror. You should see me then. Me in her favourite Superman-blue dress. Chiffon. Then I hold my nose between my thumb and index finger and speak like a European the way she doth speak through the nose, “Nanjero this… Nanjero that.” Then, I imagine I am Naomi Campbell or Lupita Nyong’o – boarding planes, doing catwalks, Glamour is my name. Madam is not a bad person, rather, she is impatient. When she wants you to do things, she wants now. Not after ten minutes or five minutes, no. Not after I finish peeling the potatoes or I take the boiling milk off the stove, she wants now. I guess when you are an impatient person, you must be a very important person, so they made her president of TechBankFinancing Your Online Start-Up. Madam has two angels. Nana and Nina. Twins. Alike as peas in a pod, at
48
least in resemblance. She has raised them right, Madam has. They say ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ and ‘good morning’. They call me Auntie- as in like I am their real aunt, not the obsequious other aunt with sneers of plasticity. Nana is the older twinboisterous, confident, infectious laughter- she knows everyone and everyone knows her. Nina is a bit reserved and likes her booksstorybooks with nice drawings of beautiful people and beautiful places. They are five years old. So Nana got me my current boyfriend. It happened this way. Madam’s house is big- a mansion it is, Nina says. All our neighbours have houses as big as ours, with spaces for cars and three big swimming pools which we share. A gated community, Nina tells me. Usually, Madam does the monthly shopping, but should I need anything she overlooked, she says to send Mulu. Well, Mulu was not in that day. In the house, were the two of us- Nana and me. Nina was at
PROSE MAGAZINE | DECEMBER 2016 - JANUARY 2017
school while Nana had decided to be sick. I am no doctor, so I told her to stay home. I called Madam. She was in a meeting, said the officious sounding voice at the other end. Meanwhile, Nana had gotten up from her bed and was all over the house vexing my spirit. Nana said that she would stop being sick if we made banana waffles. As I said, I am no doctor, so waffles it was. This meant that we now had to walk to the grocery kiosk outside the main gate of the estate for bananas. Sweet bananas, Nana was emphatic. I locked the house and off we went with Nana. She skipped along happily, asking a thousand and one questions as we went along. Where were my parents? Was my mother beautiful as hers? In which country was the overhead plane going to; that sort of thing. Then we had to go bump into Denda. This Denda, he worked in one of the other houses in our big estate. We had bumped into each other