I turned on my iPad and placed it in its stand on the table. I took a sip of the coffee I’d just made and adjusted my blanket so it covered me properly. It was 2°C in Vancouver, and after three years of being here, I still hadn’t gotten used to these low temperatures. In the words of conservatives that flooded the news cycle every day, “an immigrant will always be an immigrant.” I smiled inwardly at the truth and also the lie that this statement held. I decided to focus on the reason I was up at 1 a.m. I turned back to my iPad and an empty canvas greeted me. I had been using Procreate for a little over seven years and it was my favourite app for making erotica—what I was now known for— and it delivered in ways other software didn’t.
I picked up my pencil and began to draw. What I was drawing, I didn’t know, but my client had requested something unique. How much more unique could erotica be? I wondered. But I was strapped for cash, so I gave them a resounding yes. At least I had creative freedom this time—a luxury in this line of work, especially when the highest-paying clients usually demanded bestiality and other things I’d rather not think about.
I decided to draw a woman. I didn’t know who she was. But she would be a woman.
I only looked forward to seeing my best friend after church. Her name was Marie. She said she was named after the French queen Marie Antoinette, and she carried herself with the kind of beauty and poise that made it believable. One thing that constantly got on her nerves, something which I cannot say I am innocent of but which I did make amends to when she told me in Primary 3, was how many people wrongly pronounced her name as Mary. MAH-ree not MAY-ree, she would go around telling everyone who wished to hear.
Her voice was velvety and magnetising. It made the noise go quiet, especially the ones in my head, with its contralto richness. She was striking and conspicuous, beautiful in a way that made heads turn. And heads did turn, especially the ones that should have stayed facing home.
The most interesting of such heads was Mr. Peter. He was our Sunday school teacher. Eloquent and magnetic, he drew the attention of people of all kinds, women especially, but men also, something we would later realise was not unusual for him but was treated as hearsay in the grown conversations.
But Mr. Peter had a special attachment to little children. He would gather us, the special children he would say, after church had closed and regale us with tales of his youth and save biscuits and sweets for us particularly. And Marie was his favourite in ways even children noticed.
“…You are hereby given 30 days from the date of this letter to settle the outstanding balance in full. Should payment not be received by 2025/12/27, I will have no choice but to commence formal eviction proceedings…”
I had taken a break from drawing to look at the email again. Two days after Christmas. Or rather tomorrow. That was how much time I had left to gather the money. “Money will take you only so far,” my father used to say. But that was all I ever seemed to need. Maybe the xenophobes were right. Maybe I should go back to Nigeria and get a banking job like my mother wanted. That was what I got a degree in after all. A shame.
I went back to my canvas and looking back at me now was a pair of legs. I stayed with them longer than I needed to. Drew the left one repeatedly because every attempt left it a little too much or too little. These legs were ones to be fitted in lingerie, the type that walked in only places of dangerous desire. The type only worn by a woman who could kill.
My mind drifted back to the first time numbers had ever truly felt like a matter of survival, long before bank statements and rent balances.
I was dressed in mufti. I hadn’t gotten a uniform in my size and it was already the third day of the second week of the new term. Staying at home was no longer an option.
“They’ve started teaching us algebra,” Marie told me after church the week before. I wasn’t excited about the maths. Numbers had never come easily to me. But her happiness was my happiness, and her smile did something to my stomach I didn’t have a name for yet, but I would describe as geysers today. “If not me, then who?” I concluded subconsciously and signed this agreement.
“Cut a sheet of paper and write your names on it. We’re going to do a test now.” What was I going to write?, I wondered. I begrudgingly brought out the piece of paper and wrote my name on it. I looked up. Two questions on the board. Droplets of sweat had gathered on my forehead.
Fifteen minutes had passed, and fifteen minutes were left to go. I had not written an answer and I didn’t know what to do. So I tapped Marie and asked her—with my eyes—to show me her answers. She slid the sheet across and smiled. I almost forgot I was sweating. I would have lost without her. We were disobeying the rules but we didn’t care because we cared for each other. Oh Marie.
I had her figure. She was curvaceous with nipples visible through the dress. Her skin was dark enough to return sunlight. Her arms were slender but not brittle. In one of her arms she held a whip. A dominatrix I planned her to be. But I hadn’t drawn a face for her. I had only conceived clouds that resembled eyes in my mind and strands that were not like any hair style I knew how to draw. I set the pencil down for a moment. Not because I didn’t know what came next, but because something in me wasn’t ready to continue.
The blue glare of the canvas was broken by a sudden ping on my phone. It was some girl I hooked up with three weeks ago trying to get me to meet up with her. At 4 a.m. of all times. I swiped the message away. I was not into U-Haul culture and I made this explicit on my Bumble bio—my reality was already crowded enough with displacement. Still, looking at the clock, I was beginning to doubt that I would be able to get this done by the morning. I went into the kitchen to get another cup of coffee. I might resort to energy drinks at this rate, I thought, as it poured.
I went back and stared at the incomplete painting.
I hadn’t seen Mr. Peter for a long while but I attributed that to the camping event that the church planned. What made me worry however was Marie’s absence. I had assumed she went with the others for the camping trip as well. I was even angry at my parents for not letting me go. “Maybe she’ll be back next Sunday” I told myself, the way children manufacture explanations they can survive.
That afternoon, I coloured the picture I had drawn. It was of a family, one that resembled mine, but not quite. My father came into the room.
“Get ready, we’re going to Marie’s house,” he informed me.
“We’re going to her house today?” I asked my father.
“Yes,” he responded but he couldn’t look at me. Marie hadn’t been in school or church for two weeks now and I felt elated that we were going to her house. I had asked my parents to ask hers if she was sick or injured but they never gave me a response. This visitation came to me as a surprise. I ran to wear my clothes and followed my dad as we trekked down the street before boarding a keke to her estate. I had only seen gates like this in the films I watched at the barbing salon. This was hers. My father knocked on the gate and a man in a blue uniform came out.
“Daddy, it’s a police officer,” I shouted as I held him tighter.
“Don’t be scared my darling, it’s just the gateman.” I didn’t know what a gateman was but I trusted him because my father told me to. He ushered us into the waiting lounge.
A man with light-chocolate skin and a protruding belly came out to meet us. He was dressed in lace, the kind men wear to occasions that matter. He gave my father a handshake and came forward to give me a high five. I stared at my father before executing it.
“Are you Marie’s friend?” he asked me. He pronounced it exactly how she had told us all to.
“Yes, I’m her best friend!” I said gleefully. He smiled back at me warmly and walked us into the sitting room.
I took a look around and there were women all dressed in black, some I could recognise from church, others who I had just met. I spotted my mother and exclaimed as I ran towards her. She was holding a woman who I could see was visibly distressed, eyes red and weary.
“Mummy, why is she crying?” and there was still no response, just silence. I recognised her before I meant to. I had seen her in church with Marie from time to time. “Are you Marie’s mummy? Where is she?” I asked her and what followed was an intense outburst accompanied with wailing. I had asked the wrong thing.
I went back home with my father and I knew. We didn’t speak on the keke. He looked out at the road and I looked at my hands. Marie was not coming back. I cried until my throat tasted metallic.
I went to church the next Sunday. Mr. Peter’s absence, Marie’s disappearance, the emptiness all made sense now.
I stared at the painting now. Her almond-coloured eyes, sharp nose and full lips. Her hair spilling outward in thick restless curls. Her nose was sharp, her lips full, the kind that drew the eye before the mind caught up. Her cheeks were round and high and her skin was almost flawless — almost, because the flaws were the kind that made the rest of it more believable. I looked at her for a long time the way you look at someone you feel you owe something to. The way you look at beauty that arrived too late. And now I understood who I had been drawing. She was the Marie I thought would exist. The Marie I never got to love properly. What I believed she would look like today.
This was my Marie.
